The Return of Nathan Brazil

you’d have gone to the Well World and done him in long ago.”

“Obie wouldn’t permit it,” she responded. “Obie had no power over the Well World and wasn’t about to put me back on it just to settle an old score. I have the funny feeling he always liked Ortega for some reason. I don’t know. Ortega and I were bound up together for years yet I never once met him. Strange.”

Clearly old wounds were being reopened; half-forgotten experiences were creeping out from the dimly lit back halls of her brain.

“And we’ll all be going there,” Yua breathed. “It sounds incredible. Exciting. I can hardly wait.”

“Enjoy it while you can,” Mavra said sharply. “The Well World is anything but romantic. It’s dangerous and deadly. I never missed it.”

“Well, even so, I—” Yua started to respond, but at that moment there was a sharp crackling noise as if a great bolt of lightning had struck near them. They all jumped, startled, and turned.

White-faced and shaking Nathan Brazil stood on the pedestal. He stared straight ahead, looking at empty space. They didn’t move for a moment, just watched him apprehensively.

He tottered slightly, still looking vacantly ahead. Finally he said, “I need a drink. No, check that. I need to get very, very drunk.”

And then he collapsed into an unconscious heap.

Nautilus—Topside

They waited two days for Nathan Brazil to come out of it. His pulse rate was very weak, at times dropping so low it could barely be detected; he ran serious fevers, but never lapsed into delirium. He just lay there, almost dead, making the medical people wonder if he’d ever rise again. They brought him Topside, placed him in a luxury suite under guard, and summoned the medical staff. The diagnosis was simple: He was suffering from extreme shock, and little could be done for him except to see that he was kept warm, regularly massaged, and fed intravenously.

In the meantime, to forestall half the planet coming to the Nautilus, Yua and Gypsy visited Olympus. They returned a day later to report that Obie had worked some major magic—including the removal of tails from all but Yua. Still, the change unsettled Yua a little since Olympian history now clearly showed that no one on Olympus ever had a tail; the now-tailless women were called Pallas. All sight that there had ever been two varieties, the Athene and the Aphrodite, had vanished. They never were.

There were men, too, on Olympus—out in the open. They ran nothing and were still regarded as sex objects, but they were part of the society—and always had been.

More, the Fellowship of the Well had changed course—in this case by simultaneous “divine revelation” to all High Priestesses so there would be no mistake. In order to create universal Paradise, they had been told, Nathan Brazil must first go to the Well World itself, pass into the Well, and eradicate the old Universe. The forces of evil would try to stop him. For Olympus to share in the Heaven to come, they and their followers must form an army to help Brazil attain his goal. As reward they would be a part of the new, Holy Universe, for though the powers of evil held sway in this Universe they, too, would be swept away in the re-creation, leaving a Universe without evil. Even to die in this holy crusade would guarantee a place in the next, great Universe.

And Brazil’s own disciples—Yua of Olympus, Marquoz of Chugach, Gypsy of the Place Between Stars, and Mavra Chang herself, the legend brought back from the dead by the hand of Brazil—would lead and instruct and command in the final battle to come. The Fellowship had a most holy mission, it was now clear, and it was already preparing for it.

After hearing the report, Marquoz marveled at Obie’s skill. “It is so much easier to lead a holy crusade backed by divine intervention,” he noted.

Mavra Chang just smiled and shrugged. “It’s the same old story. You don’t get something for nothing, ever. They were offered a Heaven we can’t deliver and life beyond the destruction of the Universe which, in exchange for their services, we can perhaps, deliver to some. They’re going to fight and die for a lie.”

“As usual,” Marquoz added.

Their conversation was interrupted by a buzz on Mavra’s communicator. She removed it from her belt clip and said, “Yes?”

“I think he’s coming out of it,” a medic said.

They all rushed to Brazil’s suite.

Nathan Brazil had been floating in a nice, dark, quiet place of his own. Thought hadn’t been required; it was warm and comfortable and it felt so very good. The quiet place was slipping away now, and memories were flooding his conscious brain. At first he could make no sense of them, and didn’t try; still they came, rushing into his mind like soldiers rushing to battle, struggling to assemble themselves into some sort of order.

A small grove of palm trees around a clear blue waterhole; dry, hot country even then, but green, not as it was to become. A slight breeze blew from the southeast, a dry, dreadful, hot caress that carried no relief. Two young women, one rather comely, two small children. The pretty one’s? An older man, beard graying and face weatherbeaten and tough. Hard to tell. You didn’t talk much or attempt to strike up new acquaintances in these troubled times.

Hoofbeats. Men on horses. Barely a chance to look up. Romans! Only five of them, but nasty types. Looking for trouble. He hid in the bush and lay still. Odd, though, a corner of his mind told him. Sounded like more horses than that. Different directions, perhaps? Were others cowering like him in the bushes?

The Romans have dismounted now. The two young children, both boys, wade naked at the edge of the pool, splashing and playing. The Romans look around at them, at the old man and the two women, critically with an air of complete command. One calls in Latin to the others and points critically to the two small boys. He catches a word, blown to him on the hot wind. “Circumcized.” There will be trouble; Antiochus has outlawed the practice for now. One Rome, one set of beliefs, one set of customs. Cultural assimilation, they called it. The world under one and as one.

The old man is defiant. He yells at the centurion, who yells back, then laughs and grabs at the younger woman. The old man is upon him now, screaming and cursing. Two Romans run to assist the centurion, swords drawn, and hack the old man almost to pieces. The women are screaming now. The Romans are around them. The younger one is grabbed and is partially disrobed by two of the Romans. The older woman rushes them with a dagger in her hand, but a blow from the flat of a Roman sword crushes her skull; she falls and is still.

He is still in the bushes and he is angry and ashamed at himself. He has spear and sword and suddenly he finds himself leaping out at the men in a blind rage.

A Roman is slitting the throats of the two young boys; he turns, startled, then looks amazed as a spear is thrust through his armor and into his gut.

The two men now have the woman down; they turn in surprise, but their comrades have already drawn their own weapons and are moving toward him.

He was good, particularly when so angry. He just about tore off the sword arm of the nearest Roman with a strong inside blow, but the other was not to be taken so easily. A good swordsman himself, the Roman forced the man into the arms of the other two Romans who had stopped messing with the girl and come up behind him.

“I’ll kill the bastard now!” the swordsman snarled, advancing on the captive.

“No! Hold!” cried one of his captors. “The bitch means something to him, otherwise why would he fight so? Tie him to the tree. Let him watch us, and die before his death!”

“Ai! Let’s cut off his limbs and leave him there alive, to bleed to death or live a limbless cripple!” snarled the man whose arm he’d cut to the bone, still lying in agony on the sand. They laughed at that, and bandaged the other as best they could.

And it was done. He was tied to a tree with ropes too strong to break and forced to watch the rape, after which they killed her, not mercifully swift but slowly.

He wept, as much for the way of the world as for these people who had been tortured and slain. He’d known good, brave, fair-minded men of the Legions, men who’d have acted as he had in the face of such barbarism. Not now. Rome was expanding, extending her influence to the edges of the world, and that expansion