Hiero's Journey, Chapter Five:
(For the previous entry in this series,
feast your eyes on this.)
After introducing the newest member of
his motley group to Gorm the Bear, who startled Luchare when he
unexpectedly rejoined his companions at the end of chapter four, Hiero
condescends to hear the comely young princess's story. Luchare is at
best a two-dimensional character, so rather than tell us anything
about her, Lanier uses her introductory story to tell the reader
about her homeland, D'alwah (presumably a post-apocalypse version of
That Most Evil of States). Luchare confirms that, like her, everyone
in D'alwah is black, as was the man, the “Elevener,” who rescued
her from her initial captivity. The small kingdom is one of
quasi-medieval walled cities, though its population is slightly more
heterogeneous than that of Hiero's Metz Republic, including small
resident communities of Muslims and “Davids” - presumably Jews,
presumably also black. This is probably the only aspect of Lanier's
75th-century apocalyptic wasteland that Sammy Davis, Jr., would have
found familiar.
These new captors took Luchare
and other slaves to a busy “harbor town” on the Inland Sea,
Neeyana, whose name apparently derives from the ancient province of
Indiana. Like modern Hoosier cities, it is a place of “battered
looking churches” and “sullen” people, suffused with a thin
aura of evil (107). There the slavers took ship, intending to sell
Luchare at another port as a concubine, but they were shipwrecked on
the north shore of the Inland Sea. The blonde barbarians we met in
Chapter Four rescued the slavers in exchange for Luchare, whom they
intended to sacrifice to giant birds, like you do.
After telling her story and putting
together a new traveling outfit, Luchare joins Mssr. Desteen and his
increasingly motley group as they traveled along the north shore of
the Inland Sea, a place of scrub and sandbars. Hiero is somewhat
distracted by faint mental voices, and rather than ignoring them or
trying to shield himself from them, our Hero instead exercises a bit
of selective idiocy and tries to amplify the voices with the late
S'nerg's psychic antenna. Immediately the Evil Mutant Operator on
the other end tries to enslave Hiero, then, failing in the attempt,
tries to stroke his ego by telling him how deadly he is and offering
him membership in the Evil Unclean Mutant Conspiracy. Hiero, who
considers this club a “sick, twisted” one (112), declines the
Evil Mutant's kind offer, and instead breaks off contact and starts
teaching Luchare how to build her own mental shield against the EUMC.
Lanier then has Hiero haul out that
useful foreshadowing device, the seer stones. Per Desteen draws the
Spear, the Fish, Clasped Hands, Lightning, and Boots, which indicate
he will soon travel to Spearfish, South Dakota, to buy footwear and
batteries and meet with his Allstate agent. Just kidding. He
interprets the casting as “journey, battle, friendship, and storm,”
which is only partially correct. At the very end of the
chapter, Hiero and his companions are indeed attacked by an enemy
force, specifically, a gang of 200-pound giant mutant monkeys, their
minds full of “intelligence and malice” (127). The “Hairy
Howlers,” as Hiero descriptively but reductively calls them, would
normally be no match for Hiero and Klootz, but this time they have
backup: a motorized boat operated by Evil Unclean Mutants, who knock
down Per Desteen with some sort of deck-mounted lightning gun. Pow!
