"Well?" Göring said.

"What do we have to do if we join you?" Burton said.

"First, I… we… have to make sure that you are the caliber of man we want. In other words, a man who will unhesitatingly and immediately do anything that we order. We will give you a little test." He gave an order and a minute later, a group of men was brought forward. All were gaunt, and all were crippled.

"They were injured while quarrying stone or building our walls," Göring said. "Except for two caught while trying to escape. They will have to pay the penalty. All will be killed because they are now useless. So, you should not hesitate about killing them to show your determination to serve us." He added, "Besides, they are all Jews. Why worry about them?" Campbell, the redhead who had thrown Gwenafra into the River, held out to Burton a large club studded with chert blades. Two guards seized a slave and forced him to his knees.

He was a large blond with blue eyes and a Grecian profile; he glared at Göring and then spat at him.

Göring laughed. "He has all the arrogance of his race. I could reduce him to a quivering screaming mass begging for death if I wanted to. But I do not really care for torture. My compatriot would like to give him a taste of the fire, but I am essentially a humanitarian."

"I will kill in defense of my life or in defense of those who need protection," Burton said. "But I am not a murderer."

"Killing this Jew would be an act in defense of your life," Göring replied. "If you do not, you will die anyway. Only it will take you a long time."

"I will not," Burton said.

Göring sighed. "You English! Well, I would rather have you on my side. But if you don’t want to do the rational thing, so be it. What about you?" he said to Frigate.

Frigate, who was still in agony, said, "Your ashes ended in a trash heap in Dachau because of what you did and what you were. Are you going to repeat the same criminal acts on this world?" Göring laughed and said, "I know what happened to me. Enough of my Jewish slaves have told me." He pointed at Monat. "What kind of a freak is that?" Burton explained. Göring looked grave, then said, "I couldn’t trust him. He goes into the slave camp. You, there, apeman.

What do you say?"

Kazz, to Burton’s surprise, stepped forward. "I kill for you. I don’t want to be slave." He took the club while the guards held their spears poised to run him through if he had other ideas for using it. He glared at them from under his shelving brows, then raised the club. There was a crack, and the slave pitched forward on the dirt. Kazz returned the club to Campbell and stepped aside. He did not look at Burton.

Göring said, "All the slaves will be assembled tonight, and they will be shown what will happen to them if they try to get away. The escapees will be roasted for a while, then put out of their misery. My distinguished colleague will personally handle the club. He likes that sort of thing."

He pointed at Alice. "That one. I’ll take her." Tullius stood up. "No, no. I like her. You take de oilers; Hermann. I giw you bot" off dem. But sye, I want her wery muck. Sye look like, wat you say, aristocrat. A… queen?" Burton roared, snatched a club from Campbell’s hand, and leaped upon the table. Göring fell backward, the tip of the club narrowly missing his nose. At the same time, the Roman thrust a spear at Burton and wounded him in the shoulder. Burton kept hold of the club, whirled, and knocked the weapon out of Tullius" hand.

The slaves, shouting, threw themselves upon the guards. Frigate jerked a spear loose and brought the butt of it against Kazz’s head. Kazz crumpled. Monat kicked a guard in the groin and picked up his spear.

Burton did not remember anything after that. He awoke several hours before dusk. His head hurt worse than before. His ribs and both shoulders were stiff with pain. He was lying on grass in a pine log enclosure with a diameter of about fifty yards. Fifteen feet above the grass, circling the interior of the wall, was a wooden walk on which armed guards paced.

He groaned when he sat up. Frigate, squatting near him, said, "I was afraid you’d never come out of it"

"Where are the women?" Burton said.

Frigate began to weep.

Burton shook his head and said, "Quit blubbering. Where are they?"

"Where the hell do you think they are?" Frigate said. "Oh, my God!"

"Don’t think about the women. There’s nothing you can do for them. Not now, anyway. Why wasn’t I killed after I attacked Göring?"

Frigate wiped away the tears and said, "Beats me. Maybe they’re saving you, and me, for the fire. As an example. I wish they had killed us."

"What, so recently gained paradise and wish so soon to lose it?" Burton said. He began to laugh but quit because pains speared his head.

Burton talked to Robert Spruce, an Englishman born in 1945 in Kensington. Spruce said that it was less than a month since Göring and Tullius had seized power. For the time being, they were leaving their neighbors in peace. Eventually, of course, they would try to conquer the adjacent territories, including the Onondaga Indians across the River. So far, no slave had escaped to spread word about Göring’s intentions.

"But the people on the borders can see for themselves that the walls are being built by slaves," Burton said.

Spruce grinned wryly and said, "Göring has spread the word that these are all Jews. That he is only interested in enslaving Jews. So, what do they care? As you can see for yourself, that is not true. Half of the slaves are Gentile." At dusk, Burton, Frigate, Ruach, de Greystoke, and Monat were taken from she stockade and marched down to a grailrock. There were about two hundred slaves there, guarded by about seventy Göringites. Their grails were placed on the rock, and they waited. After the blue flames roared, the grails were taken down. Each slave opened his, and guards removed the tobacco, liquor, and half of the food.

Frigate had gashes in his head and in his shoulder, which needed sewing up, though the bleeding had stopped. His color had much improved, though his back and kidneys pained him.

"So now we’re slaves," Frigate said. "Dick, you thought quite a lot of the institution of slavery. What do you think of it now?"

"That was Oriental slavery," Burton said. "In this type of slavery, there’s no chance for a slave to gain his freedom. Nor is there any personal feeling, except hatred, between slave and owner. In the Orient, the situation was different. Of course, like any human institution, it had its abuses."

"You’re a stubborn man," Frigate said. "Have you noticed that at least half the slaves are Jews? Late twentieth-century Israeli, most of them. That girl over there told me that Göring managed to start grail-slavery by stirring up anti-Semitism in this area. Of course, it had to exist before it could be aroused. Then, after he had gotten into power with Tullius" aid, he enslaved many of his former supporters." He continued, "The hell of it is, Göring is not, relatively speaking, a genuine anti-Semite. He personally intervened with Himmler and others to save Jews. But he is something even worse than a genuine Jew-hater. He is an opportunist. Anti-Semitism was a tidal wave in Germany; to get any place, you had to ride the wave. So, Göring rode there, just as he rode here. An anti-Semite such as Goebbels or Frank believed in the principles they professed. Perverted and hateful principles, true, but still principles. Whereas big fat happy-go-lucky Göring did not really care one way or the other about the Jews. He just wanted to use them."

"All very well," Burton said, "but what has that got to do with me? Oh, I see! That look! You are getting ready to lecture me."

"Dick, I admire you as I have admired few men. I love you as one man loves another. I am as happy and delighted to have had the singular good luck to fall in with you as, say, Plutarch would be if he had met Alcibiades or Theseus. But I am not blind. I know your faults, which are many, and I regret them."