“The old gentleman, a Mister Bileyg, had a white beard that reached to his navel, and a patch over his right eye. And he was the biggest boned man she had ever seen.”
Caliban frowned and said, “What are you talking about, Grandrith?”
“That man was our grandfather,” I said. “The evidence may be peculiar, to say the least. It wouldn’t stand up in court. But it tells the truth. Our grandfather was one of the Nine! The man we knew as
XauXaz! Which, if you know your Primitive Germanic, means the High One!
“And the name he used when he visited Grandrith was Bileyg. That’s Old Norse for One-Whose-Eye-
Deceives-Him. Which is to say, One-Eyed!”
“What?” he said. Apparently, his reputedly wide and deep knowledge did not encompass Germanic linguistics. Or Germanic mythology.
“The man we knew as one of the Nine, XauXaz, must have been born in the Old Stone Age,” I said.
“I don’t know how old he was. Perhaps 30,000. Perhaps 20,000. Who knows what his history was? At one time, he and two others, perhaps his brothers, who were also part of the Nine that then existed, went to lower Sweden. They were present when the Ursprache, the parent language of the Indo-Europeans, changed to what we call Common Germanic. The dialect that became the ancestor of all the Germanic tongues of today, English, High and Low German, Norse.
“In some way, perhaps because they had lived so long and knew so much, they became gods. Not actual gods, you know, but they were worshipped as such.
“What I’m saying is that XauXaz, and Ebnaz XauXaz and Thrithjaz—who died before we came along—High, Equally High, and the Third, were the old Germanic male trinity, later accounted as brothers. And, by the way, Iwaldi, that dwarf, gnome, or whatever, was contemporary with them. And he ruled his people, who dug deep into the earth and lived underground.
“Common Germanic died out, of course, but the three continued to speak it among themselves as a sort of code. Sometime in man’s history, they ceased to appear among men as gods. They shucked their role and retired to whatever identity the Nine required of them.”
Caliban shook his head as if he were wondering about my sanity.
I said, “Our father got the elixir from the Nine. He was a Servant, as we are. As I was,” I amended.
“And then the same thing happened to him that happened later to us. The side effect of the elixir is to make the user mad, if only for a short time. Its effect is psychic, as well as physical. Something deeply disturbing, no matter how repressed, ruptures the surface, thrusts up from under. The particular form of the psychosis depends upon the character of the particular individual, of course.
“Take me, Caliban, or should I call you Doc, since I’m your brother? Take me. I had always thought my attitudes towards killing was very healthy. And I’d always thought my attitude towards sex was extremely healthy. But somewhere in me was a linkage between the two. Something in me equated the act of coitus with killing, the thrust of the penis with the thrust of the knife, orgasm with the bliss of the knife, as Nietzsche called it.
“And take you, Doc. Brother. You have always, up until now, with one fatal exception, avoided killing. You never did it even to those most deserving being killed, if you could possibly avoid it. But you wanted to kill, Doc. And you equated coitus with killing. Down there, deep down there.
“And take our father, Doc. He went mad and was locked up in the castle. And he got loose and fled to London to hide in the big city. There his psychosis took the form of the grisly murders of prostitutes.
Why, I don’t know.
“He raped my mother. Which is why I was born. Later, he went to America. Something happened, the tide of evil reversed, siphoned off, as it were. He took the name of Caliban and devoted his life to good. Trying to make up in some measure for what he’d done in England, I presume.
“Note the name Caliban. Another name for a savage. Shakespeare’s monster in The Tempest, and a literary archetype of the savage. An anagram of cannibal. It was to remind our father of what he had been.
“He raised you to devote your life to good. You were trained to become a superman of good. You were taught to hate evil and to fight it. But you were to love the evil-doer, not hate him. Hate the sin, not the sinner. Which is an extremely difficult, perhaps almost impossible, thing to do. This attitude has to lead to all sorts of conflict.
“You took a super-Boy Scout oath. You were reared by our father to be a physical and mental
Ubermensch, though the development would not have been so successful if you had not been genetically superior. You have the bones and muscle of an Old Stone Age man because your grandfather was an Old
Stone Age man.
“I suspect that our family is rather inbred, or at least has had more than a number of Paleolithic fathers and mothers. How do we know how many times Grandfather XauXaz, or his brothers, dropped in to resupply the archaic genes? Castle Grandrith may have been the Three’s breeding farm.
“And you, Doc, like me and a number of others, were approached by the Nine. And you sold your soul, as we all did, for immortality.”
“What soul?” Caliban said. The sneer was in his voice; his face had adopted its customary expressionlessness. But his green, gold-flecked eyes looked peculiar. I could not tell whether they were doubtful or murderous.
“A manner of speaking,” I said. “You know well what I mean.”
“You really think, then, that our grandfather, who may also be our great-great-grand-father and greatgreat-
great-ancestor a number of times over, was the man-god known to the primitive Germanics as
Wothenjaz and to later Germanics as Woden or Othinn or a dozen other names?”
“Yes,” I said. “And I believe that the Nine are keeping the seat of our dead grandfather in the family.
They made sure we would be trained to be what we are. Perhaps, I am their Wild Man of the Jungle candidate and you are their Man of the Metropolis candidate. It pleases them to pit us against each other.
Perhaps, in the Old Stone Age, it was brother against brother in the ceremonial battle to the death for the chieftainship. Who knows? But they don’t care who gets killed.”
“I think you’re trying to talk me to death,” Caliban said.
Trish called, “Doc! Listen to him! He makes sense!”
“Not to me he doesn’t,” Caliban said in a low voice. “And even if he did, one of us has to die.”
“I’m not fighting for a seat at the table of the Nine,” I said.
He grinned slightly and said, “You’re giving up?”
“I’ve eaten their shit long enough,” I said. “I think our father decided that, too, and they killed him.”
“I tracked down his murderers,” Caliban said. The green-and-gold eyes seemed to pulse. “I did not kill them but I turned their traps for me against them, and they died. If I had to do it again today, I would kill them with my bare hands.”
“How do you know they weren’t agents of the Nine?” I said.
He had been inching forward now. He halted, and he shuddered. His bronze face, where it wasn’t splashed with blood, had darkened with fury. His face twisted as if it were metal under great heat.