Of Myths and Monsters Read online

  "I wonder," thought Bass, as he began to drift off into a state of pre-sleep, sunk into the soft warmth of the feather bed, "I wonder just what in the seven hells did happen to those poor folks? None of them had learned much of the language here, yet, and God knows the lingo they speak in this England is a far cry from the American dialect of my time and world. Besides, there was no earthly way that eleven people could've been spirited out of that suite and that hall and across the grounds of that huge estate without somebody seeing them at some point and time."

  "Well, wherever, whenever they are, I sincerely wish them luck. I have a feeling they're going to need that and a whole lot more."

  Dr. Lisa Peters found Arsen Ademian stomping up and down the length of the crypt, back into which he and she had moved as soon as a habitation had been built and approved by the overly picky Bedros Yacubian as home for him and his wife, Rose. Arsen was half-shouting obscenities in English, Armenian, and what she assumed was either Japanese or Vietnamese. In a corner, Simon Delahaye squatted quietly, watching Arsen and listening to him while skillfully mending a rent in the sleeve of a fatigue shirt.

  "What's the problem now?" the tall, slender, blonde physician asked of no one in particular.

  Simon answered her. "The noble Captain Arsen be most wroth at the continued lack of resolve of the old sachem, Squash Woman, and the council that sitteth with her, here. I much fear me that if Captain Arsen rage so for much longer he must assuredly burst his skull and his veins—all, my lady."

  Only the touch of her cool hand, however, was required to stop Arsen's tantrum and start him explaining the outrages that had precipitated it. "Aw, goddammit, Lisa, that fucking slimy old cunt, she and those so-called councilors, old farts, the whole damn bunch of the fuckers, they can't make up their goddam so-called minds on anything; they ain't done it yet, leastways, and I'm beginning to believe they won't ever. All they can ever, and her in particular, think about is gimme, gimme, gimme, bad as a bunch of welfare bums in our own world ever was."

  Lisa sighed. It was an old story and long since become a most unfunny one. "What are the desires of her Shawnee majesty now?"

  Arsen shrugged disgustedly. "Oh, the usual shit, honey: more sides of beef and frozen turkeys, more fresh vegetables, more pots and pans and utensils, more salt and sugar, more dried fruits, more of damned near everything the cow-cunted old scab-sucking bitch can think of . . . plus one other thing. She wants a silver sky boat and she says there will be no agreement to go west of the mountains until she has one of her own."

  "A carrier?" demanded Lisa. "Squash Woman wants us to give her one of the carriers as her price for letting us help her get her and her people out of reach of the Spanish slavers, out of harm's way? Arsen, you know that I've bent over backwards in months past trying to make excuses for that old woman and her actions and lack of same, but enough is enough. Her demands have by now become nothing less than extortionate. We can't work with a woman like her, so why don't we all just move over to that place beyond the mountains and leave her and her people to stew in their own juice until either they wise up and decide to follow us on their own or the Spanish come back and make those they don't kill wish they had taken us up on our offer while they still had the chance?"

  But Arsen shook his head, slowly. "Naw, honey, I couldn't do nothing like that to these folks. They need us and they know it. Lots of them can't hardly wait to get over to this rich land in the west they've heard about; you've heard them asking about it, some have probably even asked you. It ain't their fault. Squash Woman and the rest of the sachems."

  "Why the hell don't they just get rid of her and them, Arsen?" Lisa snapped. "Choose some leaders that will do more than eat and sleep and talk and make demands of us, that's what they need to do, you know. If they'd do that, I might start having some faith in them."

  Arsen sighed. "You just don't know them, honey. They're a people bound by custom. They think that age makes people smarter, so the older they are, the smarter they're bound to be, see. Squash Woman is the oldest person in this place, so that makes her the top dog, see. They'd never even think of taking and putting anybody younger and dumber in her place, honey, and was we to suggest it to them, they'd wonder when we started using shit for brains, is all, they wouldn't get rid of her."

  She made a face. "So, we just sit here while she thinks up more demands to make of us and you build your castle or whatever that thing is intended to someday be and we all wait for the damned Spanish to march or sail up here in force and we have to kill a lot more of them with terrible weapons that have never even been dreamed of yet, thank God, in this world, and you keep going off to rob our world—segments of it, anyway—blind just to feed the whims of a senile and greedy old woman, huh?"

  Arsen looked just then a bit like a kicked puppy. "Honey, look, I can't really explain it all too clearly, but I feel like God or somebody put me down here, in this place and time, for a purpose. I think that purpose was to save these poor folks, and I mean to keep on trying to do it, no matter what I have to do to do it, no matter what it takes. I wish you could understand, honey, I really do."

  It was her turn to sigh. "I do understand, in a way, Arsen. I understand that you are deeply motivated, and I respect you, love you for your obvious altruism. You've managed to live and function normally despite the hellish amounts of frustration that old woman has shoveled on you daily for a lot longer than the horny caveman that I thought you were when we were in the other world could ever have done. But, Arsen, even a stone saint can bear just so much weight before it cracks and crumbles, and I don't want to see you reach that stage. I . . . Oh, damn, with all this. I forgot."

  "Arsen, I took the river patrol for Mike, today, so that he could go hunting. The Spanish are still running around their town and fort like somebody had overturned an anthill, but they don't look ready to move out anytime soon. The only ship I could see down there was an oceangoing ship, far too deep-draught to make it this far upriver without coming to grief."

  "But on the way back up here, I swung inland—don't ask me why, I don't know why—and I spotted a whole hell of a lot of Indians. They're on that trail back about a mile and a half west of the river. It looks like men, women, and children, plus dogs, donkeys, and even a few horses. I'd guesstimate that they're one or two days from here and headed this way. Some of the men wore turbans, so I'd guess that they're Creeks."

  Arsen beamed the first full smile that she had seen light up his face in some time. "Well, that took less time than I could've dreamed it would."

  "Simon, go find Soaring Eagle and a couple of the faster-running braves, tell them what they're looking for and about where to expect to find it, and send them out to guide those folks here, pronto."

  After shrugging into the mended shirt, Simon tugged at his forelock, picked up the ornate Spanish broadsword without which he had never gone anywhere since the night he had prized it off a dead man, and ascended the stone steps to the outside, fitting sword case to belt as he went.

  "Simon," Arsen shouted after the man, "give the runners a rifle, a pistol, and the accessories for them to give to the sachem as a gift from me. Tell them to tell him that I'll give a rifle to each of his braves and teach them how to use it if he and they join with us in our anti-Spanish confederation here."

  He grinned at Lisa, saying, "God bless you, honey, I'm starting to get good vibes, really great vibes, again. Everything still might work out, you know, Squash Woman or no Squash Woman, damn her stinking old ass."

  Bedros Yacubian, holding doctorates in both pathology and paleontology, had not been one of the group of dancers and band members accidentally projected into this world, though his wife had been. Arsen had gone back—after mastering the uses of the carrier that he had found in the crypt when they had landed with said crypt in the wilderness when some something had snatched them from out the comfortable suite in the country hall of the Archbishop of York, months back—to their old world and used one of the projectors that the carrier
had explained to him how to fabricate to bring the erudite man to this world at the instigations of Greek John and Lisa.

  The safe, pleasant-looking, game-filled, and fertile land that Arsen had found beyond the western mountains was abrim with beasts the like of many of which he had never before either seen or heard described—shaggy elephantine creatures, long-horned buffalo, huge elk, leonine cats bigger by far than any lion or tiger in his own world and time, a shaggy canine as big as a Great Dane. Greek John, who in addition to being a member of the ill-fated band had been a practicing dentist in the other world, with one of his hobbies being the study of paleontology, had been taken over to see the singular beasts, and after the trip he had urged Arsen to bring in Bedros. Lisa had wanted the man brought in in order to assuage Rose's hunger to be again with her recently married husband.

  But in the flesh, Bedros had proved to be arrogant, supercilious, patronizing, insulting, and the sort of person who found fault with everyone and everything he chanced to encounter. Moreover, he was extremely impressed with himself and knew himself to be far above doing any work not directly connected to his profession. So very difficult had it proved to get any sort of physical labor out of Bedros that Greg Sinclair, one of the band members, had made the remark that if the academic could find someone else to eat for him, urinate for him, and defecate for him, he would certainly give over those functions into that person's keeping. Of course, Greg had couched his words in basic, four-letter terms. At that point, Bedros had committed the cardinal error of slapping Greg's face, whereupon Greg had punched the man out.

  Had not Rose been so obviously happy reunited with her husband, Arsen would long since have taken the man back to where he had been brought from. He would have taken them both back, except that Lisa frequently needed the help of a skilled nurse, and that was Rose. Therefore, he just managed to put up with Bedros and bade everyone else try to so do.

  But Bedros was getting harder and harder to stomach. Arsen did not like him and, therefore, did not trust him. Had it been up to Bedros, he would have spent all of his waking hours in that land west of the mountains, trailing and studying the fauna, examining their tracks and droppings, taking stacks of Polaroid photographs and making ream on ream of illegible notes.

  However, there were only three carriers, each holding no more than a single human being at the time, and on most days one was aloft patrolling the river and the surroundings, one was being used by the timber detail felling trees, trimming them and projecting the fruits of the labor back to the environs of the fort Arsen and his men were constructing, while the third was being used by Arsen himself to transport him to that land of strange beasts and an ancient granite quarry he had found and was using to provide stone for the fort.

  On occasion, after several of the band members and dancers had been forced to endure a particularly petulant, childish-sounding outburst from the academic, Arsen had been asked by more than one of them why he did not just provide the demanding man with a tent, a sleeping bag, a rifle, supplies, and whatever else he claimed to need, then project him over into the new land, going over for a short time now and again to check on him and be certain that one of the super-lions hadn't snacked on him.

  But although he did it himself, almost every day, to quarry and project granite slabs, Arsen was leery of sending anyone over alone. Not only could more than a few of the seen and known beasts be deadly dangerous to a careless or unthinking human being, there also was a possible, lurking, hidden danger.

  Squash Woman had told him and Lisa, shortly after he had first discovered the western land, that the ancestors of her people had come east from that land long ago, had lived there for time without counting. They had been protected from the huge beasts by an enigmatic race of bearded white-skinned men she had called the Old Ones—men who could, she averred, talk to almost all the animals and make them friendly toward mankind and his endeavors.

  She had gone on to say that these Old Ones had hunted down, slain, and tried to exterminate a species of creature she had described as shaped very much like a man but much bigger, much toothier, and covered in hair. Her descriptions had put Arsen much in mind of descriptions he had read of Sasquatches. Squash Woman had said that, there in the west, these creatures had lived in caves, in burrows in the earth, and behind waterfalls, never coming out in full sunlight, but only after nightfall or on dark, overcast days.

  The old Indian woman had said that these creatures were all inveterate man-eaters. So long as the Old Ones' hunting had kept the things in check, there had been very few losses to their bestial appetites, but after the Old Ones had departed, had put out upon the northern river in the strange boats they had built, never to be seen again by Squash Woman's forebears, the creatures had begun to breed up, become more numerous and ferocious. At last, rather than continue to live in constant fear of assaults by the hard-to-kill predators, the Indians had left that otherwise blessed land and come east across the mountains to their present homes.

  This was the thing that troubled Arsen, that made him reluctant to put even the insufferable Bedros Yacubian down in the place alone and with no means of quickly leaving should he be attacked. Arsen had never seen one of the things, nor had anyone else who had visited, not even any really odd tracks, but as these were said to be nocturnal hunters and as all of his and the others' trips had been diurnal, lack of a sighting really proved nothing, and he still had a gut feeling that such horrors might truly exist in the land of odd beasts.

  CHAPTER THE THIRD

  Impressed by a returning Creek runner's expressed awe of the approaching sachem who had led his people all the way from what Arsen figured would have been northern Florida or southern Georgia in his own world and a not inconsiderable journey to be undertaken on foot in anybody's world, especially through an uncharted wilderness, Arsen and Mike Sikeena got into carriers and flew out to meet the oncoming people.

  Arsen took along the Class Five projector, his personal weapons and equipment, and a flashy Spanish dirk as gift for the sachem, while Mike bore the sachem a GI canteen with cup and cover, an unbreakable hand mirror, and a pair of steel tweezers.

  The returned runner, a young buck called Swift Wolf, had said in part, "Arsen Silver Hat, he who leads is even older than the old Shawnee woman who rules here. He is called Snake-burnt-at-both-ends and he is very famous. He has fought the Spanish in the south many times and celebrated three great victories over them, and so they fear him, but still they shower gifts upon him because they seek to hire on his fierce young warriors to help them fight other whites and help them catch slaves among other tribes. He it was who sent Soaring Eagle and the rest of us to serve the Spanish, and so it was directly to him that Swimming Elk went when your mighty medicine put him back in the land from which we came, two moons and more ago."

  To Arsen, the magic words had been "Older than the old Shawnee woman." That meant that, once arrived, the sachem would assuredly be considered by the Indians to be wiser than Squash Woman and, therefore, would become automatically the head of the council of sachems, and Arsen meant to get cozy with him before Squash Woman and her cronies could get him set into their intransigent mold of total non-cooperation and endless demands for foods and gifts.

  Mike Sikeena and Greek John having learned—independently one from the other and quite accidentally in both their cases—that the carriers would operate on some functions with the lids fully opened, Arsen and Mike on this day took along as passengers seated in the gaped lids Simon Delahaye—who, it seemed, owned an inborn linguistic ability and had learned to speak both the Creek of his warriors and the Shawnee of his women—and the Creek brave called Two-hand-killer—who was ambidextrous to a marked degree and very devoted to Simon, acting in the capacity of an aide-de-camp.

  In the lids with them, Simon insisted that each carry not only his own weapons but a half-dozen of the Confederate States Armaments company's flintlock hunting rifles, explaining this to Arsen by saying, "Captain, you gifted the Micco, true, but .
. ."

  "The what?" demanded Arsen. "You mean the sachem, Simon?"

  The brawny Englishman shook his shaggy head. "No, Captain, sachem be what these Shawnees call their leaders; the Creeks call a person such as this one we go to meet Micco. While a sachem be an adviser, a micco be much more, almost a king, and he hath a council of advisers—the war-chief, the peace-chief, the chiefs of the clans, the medicine man, and such others as he may feel need of and name to his council. These fine, light gonnes be for that council, that they may feel kindly towards us."

  Arsen shrugged. "Okay, Simon. You sure as hell understand these fuckers better than me, so we'll do it your way." To himself, he thought. "Hell, the more Indians have got guns, the quicker the fucking Spanish are going to get a fucking comeuppance, and it ain't as if we're going to run out of them anytime soon. All I got to do is get in the carrier and make another fucking midnight requisition on Uncle Bagrat's place. Shit, I'd like to give the Indians real guns, modern pieces, but where the fuck would they get ammo for the fuckers? That's the fucking problem. This way, they got all kinds of flint and, if nothing else, they can steal gunpowder and lead and cloth for patches from the fucking Spanish, or better yet ambush and kill a bunch of the fuckers and take what they need off of the bodies. But even as it sits, I'm giving them better guns than the Spanish have got, anyway—some those damn slavers was still using matchlocks, for chrissakes!"

  The carriers and those who traveled in them had been described to the southern indigenes by those braves Arsen had projected back down to a place near their homelands and, more recently, by Soaring Eagle and his runners, so the arrival of Arsen, Mike, Simon, and Two-hand-killer was not openly remarked upon by the gathered elders and warriors, though Arsen was willing to bet that every one of them was curious as old hell.