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own way. I warn you now not to follow me: my next trap may not be so pleasant."
He turned and started walking off.
"Wait!" cried Caligula.
Selous stopped and turned to face the Roman. "What is it?"
"I am tired, and my leg pains me. I shall permit you to carry me until I regain my
strength."
Selous chuckled. "That's very generous of you, but it's an honor I think I can do
without."
He turned to leave, and the Roman hurled himself on his back, clawing at his eyes
and biting his shoulder.
Selous dropped to the ground, rolled over once, then managed to grab one of
Caligula's hands and twist it
EVERY MAN A GOD
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sharply. The Roman screamed and released his hold, and Selous scrambled to his
feet.
"If you touch me again, I'll kill you!" he snapped.
"You hurt me!" said Caligula. Suddenly he began crying like a baby. "Why would
anyone want to hurt me?"
Selous stared at him and said nothing.
"Don't you know that you are not permitted to touch the person of a god?" wept
Caligula. Suddenly the tears vanished, to be replaced by a smile. "Still, I admire
your courage, Frederick Courtney Selous. Perhaps I shall let you be my general.
We shall cut a bloody path through my enemies."
"That's a generous offer," said Selous sardonically, "but right now I'm the only
enemy you've got."
"Nonsense," said Caligula. "Is not the forest our enemy? Does it not hide the path
we seek?" He ripped a small dead branch from a nearby tree. "I shall take this
plunder to prove we have conquered it!"
"I think Gibbon understated the problem," murmured Selous, staring at the
Roman as he went around gathering up more tokens of victory.
"Well?" demanded Caligula, his arms filled. "Don't just stand there! We've got a
city to find and a world to conquer!"
"I think we'll find the city much faster if we split up," said Selous.
"An excellent suggestion," said Caligula. "But then who would draw my bath for
me and bring me my meals?"
"I thought I was a general."
"You are whatever I want you to be," said Caligula.
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EVERY MAN A GOD
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"Otherwise, what's the purpose of being a god in the first place?"
"You have a very short memory," said Selous.
"My memory is perfect."
"But you have already forgotten what happened the last time you tried to give me
an order."
"That was different," said Caligula. "That was before I made you my general and
we brought the forest to its knees." He paused. "Tomorrow morning I shall create
some women for us to enjoy, and perhaps some birds to sing of our coming, and
we shall march off to find the city."
Selous shook his head. "I'm leaving now."
"Then I will follow you."
"I might not wait by my next trap. You could spend all eternity hanging upside
down, or impaled on sharp sticks at the bottom of a pit."
"I allowed you to catch me," answered Caligula. "I was tired of chasing you, and it
seemed the easiest way to meet you."
"Sure you did," said Selous.
"Be not clever with me, mortal, or you risk bringing down my godly wrath upon
you."
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"It's a chance I'll have to take," said Selous, unimpressed.
"At the very least, I will have the members of my guard run you through."
"First find them, and then I'll worry about it."
"Then I shall do it myself," said Caligula, picking out the longest, sharpest branch
he could find and brandishing it like a sword.
"You take one step closer and I'll wrap that thing around your neck," said Selous.
"You are but a mortal," said Caligula with a maniacal laugh.
"I didn't give in to the whims of madmen the first time around," answered Selous.
"I don't propose, to change my ways in this life."
Caligula stared at him, puzzled. "Why didn't it all end when I died?"
"The Empire?"
"The world. How could it go on without me?"
"It managed quite well without you," answered Selous.
"Who succeeded me? Did Jupiter himself descend to sit on the throne?"
"You were succeeded by Claudius."
"That crippled old fool?" yelled Caligula. "Now I know you lie! He could barely
speak his own name!"
"But he didn't go to war with a bunch of trees," noted Selous.
"I always knew he was a coward." Caligula paused, trying to remember the thread
of the conversation. Finally he shrugged. "Well, don't just stand there. We've got
a city to find!"
Selous stared at him for a long moment, and decided that he'd probably be better
off knowing where this lunatic was every second than having him pop out of the
bush at the most inopportune moment. Finally he shrugged.
"Follow me," he said.
"Do you hear them?" repeated Beethoven.
Huey Long swayed to a halt and looked over Beethoven's shoulder, far past the
composer into the smoke and haze of the fading Riverworld.
"Hear whatT' he said. "I don't hear anything. Just
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the gulls, maybe the bird calls. That's all. Nothing exceptional."
"Horses," said Beethoven. "Napoleon's troops. They're coming after us."
"I don't hear horses," said Huey.
"They are sending the troops on horseback with spears and muskets," said
Beethoven with total conviction. "They know where we are. That was their plan
all the time. We're going to be killed here like pigs." He turned to Huey. "I warned
you," he continued, "we should have gotten out of there days ago. I said, let's go,
let's leave, but you wanted to stay."
"Wait a minute, now," said Huey. "You're wrong. There are no troops, no horses,
no muskets. Just the usual sounds." Agitato, that was one of Beethoven's words.
Excited, frenzied. That was what was happening before him. "Just stay calm,
son," said Huey Long. "Ain't nothing happening that we can't control."
But Beethoven was a trembling, palsied mess before him now, tears leaking from
his astonished eyes, that huge forehead clotted with sweat. The musician gasped,
grabbed a big towel that he used as a cloak, then fell gracelessly to the mud and
rocked there, grasping his knees.
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It's an epileptic fit of some sort, decided Huey. I should have stumbled off, kept to
myself, tried to understand this place before things began to happen. But when I
came to myself on the banks of this crazy place, he was the first I saw; he helped
me and guided me to some kind of consciousness. How could I have left him?
Still, it was confusing. One moment surrounded by your bodyguards, striding
through the lobby of the capi-tol into history, the future and your destiny ahead
like a
EVERY MAN A GOD
119
dream, the next minute crushed to the ground, astonished, surely dead and
quaking with this German musician.
How much could a man take? How much could a man truly understand? It was
all too much for him. You did the best you could, after all, and you tried to make
sense of the senseless, but this was really too much.
Beethoven began to cough, shudder, and shake.
I should never have done this, thought Huey. I should have stayed at fish fries,
stayed in the back woods, aimed for the legislature. All right, maybe that wasn't
enough for me, maybe I had to be governor. But that was enough, surely. I could
have taken steamboats up and down the river and played with honeyed tits and
taken casual graft forever.... But instead what did I do? I went to Washington and
drove FOR crazy and then came back to the capitol to meet the bullet they had
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