To Your Scattered Bodies Go

26

And light was full in his eyes, from the just-risen sun. He had time for one quick look around, saw his grail, his pile of neatly folded towels — and Hermann Göring.

Then Burton and the German were seized by small dark men with large heads and bandy legs. These carried spears and flint headed axes. They wore towels but only as capes secured around their thick short necks. Strips of leather, undoubtedly human skin, ran across their disproportionately large foreheads and around their heads to bind their long, coarse black hair. They looked semi Mongolian and spoke a tongue unknown to him An empty grail was placed upside down over his head; his hands were tied behind him with a leather thong. Blind and helpless, stonetipped spears digging into his back, he was urged across the plain. Somewhere near, drums thundered, and female voices wailed a chant.

He had walked three hundred paces when he was halted. The drums quit beating, and the women stopped their singsong. He could hear nothing except for the blood beating in his ears. What the hell was going on? Was he part of a religious ceremony which required that the victim be blinded? Why not? There had been many cultures on Earth, which did not want the ritually slain to view those who shed his blood. The dead man’s ghost might want to take revenge on his killers.

But these people must know by now that there were no such things as ghosts. Or did they regard lazari as just that, as ghosts that could be dispatched back to their land of origin by simply killing them again? Göring! He, too, had been translated here. At the same grailstone. The first time could have been coincidence, although the probabilities against it were high. But three times in succession? No, it was…

The first blow drove the side of the grail against his head, made him half-unconscious, sent a vast ringing through him, sparks of light before his eyes, and knocked him to his knees. He never felt the second blow, and so awoke once more in another place…