Frank Among the Franks by Brian N. Pacula

* * * *

I am a lucky mortal, cause I am in tight with the Principate of Anthropology. Let me break that down for you: the angel in charge of studying and preserving human societies digs me so much that s/he/it made me the overseer of some endangered Salian Franks. Prince Anthro says there’s been a major surge in conquest and slaughter rates across the high-probability reality spectrum lately (and hey—who’s lucky enough to get born in the low-prob spec?), so there’s been a real push to isolate and preserve little pockets of culture that are in danger of being wiped out. Here’s how I got involved.

I’ve known Prince Anthro for about three years on account of I accidentally summoned her/him/it back when I was studying the black arts and buying grimoires from online bookstores. Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t actually believe in any of that garbage. At the time, I was scamming on this Wiccan girl (black lipstick, a dozen piercings per ear, Stevie Nicks-circa-1977 hair—a little on the chubby side, but oh man) and I thought she’d be impressed if I learned how to perform the rituals that enthused her so much. So I practiced one at home, and hey surprise, it worked. I ended up getting a nice long lecture about how there’s no such thing as “black” or “white” magic, or any meaningful distinction between “demons” and “angels,” merely a complicated and very busy organization of supernal entities who really don’t appreciate it when idiots with crystals and incense and deep-seated hang-ups about institutional religion go calling them forth into the boundaries of fixed space and linear time for no good reason whatsoever. S/he/it said all this while invisible, by the way, and standing on my chest. Apparently I had drawn a lousy Circle of Protection.

He (forget this P.C. “unlike mortals, we are omnigendered” crap—from now on, the Prince is a he) probably would have left it at that and warped right back to his home dimension if I hadn’t tried to fight back and kick him in his invisible groin. Not to brag or anything, but I don’t care if you’re a supernal entity or not—where I come from (Fresno), you don’t just let somebody stand on your chest and not fight back. So I kicked him in the nuts and we wrestled for a while.

As soon as he had me good and pinned, with my right arm all twisted up and hurting real bad and my neck shoved backwards, he let me go and told me we were friends now. Supposedly there’s some ancient law about angels being obligated to consort and conspire with any mortal bold enough to wrestle them—he said it’s in the Bible somewhere, but I wouldn’t know. Every time I try to read the Bible I fall asleep just after the Flood. Then the Prince told me his real name (Telmael Ouriel Atoimenpsephei Kaiochlabar, which is why I never use it, and just now when I was writing this I had to call him over to help me get the spelling right, and he was annoyed because—never mind), and I told him mine (Frank Mulligan), and I guess he had been waiting to make a friend for a long time, cause he proceeded to dump all his work-related stress on me. As Principate of Anthropology, he was in charge of taking representative samples of endangered societies and transplanting them to suitable empty worlds somewhere else in time and space, before war or plague or locusts or whatever killed them all on Earth (just last week, for instance, he had relocated four clans of Gittites to a temperate moon on the fringes of the Sombrero Galaxy). The trouble was that these preserve-groups tended to go bat-shit crazy once they were left to their own devices, and only so many angels could be assigned to babysit them, so the whole project was starting to go haywire (as of yesterday, only two and a quarter of the Gittite clans were still alive). I said, “Yeah, that’s too bad, but what can you do? People are mean and stupid, especially people from olden times.”

So then Prince Anthro looks at me (I guess—he was still invisible) and says: “That gives me an idea. What if someone from a more enlightened age were to act as a steward and guide to these communities, to lead them as would a wise and benevolent elder brother...”

And I was all over the idea, and I knew I’d be the perfect guy for the job, cause I mentored at my old high school a couple summers ago and the kids totally loved me (the school administrators didn’t, but to hell with them), and plus I had given the Prince the idea in the first place. He told me he would work up a proposal and take it to his supervisor, the Potentate of Mortal Concerns. That was the last I saw of him for about three months.

We met again when he unexpectedly materialized in my car, while I was driving, which was pretty messed up cause it startled the crap out of me, and I almost swerved off the road.

“Good news, Francis. My supervisor loved our idea and told me to go ahead and select ‘threescore mortals of temperate character and excellent virtue’ to start a trial run. I’ve already picked a few candidates—Martin Luther King, Mohandas Gandhi, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Kung Fu-Tzu—but of course, you being my special friend, and having provided the germ of the idea, I thought you should receive the first offer.”

And I said “Hell yes, I’ll do it.” What, like I wanted to stick around on Earth long enough to see if I’d get that promotion to assistant manager at Hollywood Video?

My hands started shaking, so I pulled over. “When do I start? Do I get to pick my subjects?”

“They won’t be your ‘subjects,’ Francis. You’re not going to be their king. You are simply to reside with them in an advisory capacity, providing them with—”

“Instruction and guidance. Right. I know. But I’m in charge, aren’t I? They have to do what I say, right?”

“Well, yes, technically speaking, but—”

“So, do I get to pick, or not?”

“Certainly. I felt it was only proper to give you first choice.”

“Okay, terrific. Man, this is going to be great. Got any Amazons? You know: lusty, uninhibited, all-female...”

“I’ll show you the list of peoples currently in need of supervision,” said Prince Anthro, and he pulled a copper tablet out from within the glowing folds of his robe. It was covered in writing.

“I can’t read this,” I said. “This is in Angel-ese.” So the Prince disappeared for about five minutes and came back with a copper tablet in English. I read all the names of the tribes they had stashed away on their save-the-wildlife planets and said, “Who the hell are these people? I’ve never heard of any of them.”

Prince Anthro pointed at the names and started explaining. “These are nomads from Turkmenistan ... these are hunter-gatherers from Lake Ngami ... these are icthyophagi from the Farasan islands...” When he got to “Salian Franks” I stopped him, cause I thought I knew Franks were French people, and I asked him if that was true, and he said it was, sort of. So I told him I wanted the Salian Franks, cause I had taken a couple years of French in high school, and I like French cuisine, and I went out with a girl from Montreal once, and hey, their name is my name too.

* * * *

I am no good at public speaking, so it kind of sucked that the first thing I had to do as overseer of the Salian Franks was give them a big speech explaining who I was and why they had to fear and obey me from now on. I gave my address from the hilltop grove where they had set up the wooden idols to whom they had already sacrificed two of their own (already, a problem requiring my intervention). Plus, I had to deliver it in their irritating garbledygook language, which is nothing at all like French, except that both require you to talk from the back of your throat so much you feel like you want to throw up after twenty syllables or so. Prince Anthro had given me speech notes written out fo-net-ick-lee.

I introduced myself. The Franks all stared at me, bug-eyed, like I was a jumbotron TV. They were grizzled and foul-smelling. I laid down the law: I told them they were still free to comport themselves however they wished, but that I was there to make sure they followed the Golden Rule and lived in harmony and shared their food and all that. I told them I would teach them how to live safer, healthier, cleaner, happier lives. I told them if they had any problems, to come to me, and I would take care of them. That’s what Prince Anthro told me the notes said, anyway.

There were about a hundred and twenty Franks. They all wore drab tunics and pants and hides. They looked dumpy, like Depression-era immigrants or something, and most of the women had hairier legs than mine. It was a sorry sight. I knew I would have my work cut out for me, getting them all smart and hygienic like myself; but before I could do anything, I had to learn their language. I read off the part of my notes where I was supposed to ask for a volunteer to be my live-in servant and help me learn Frankish. A lumpy old man with a wooly beard and a younger guy with half his nose missing stepped forward. I looked past them and pointed to the bosomy, ashen-haired teenager who closest resembled the Saint Pauli Girl I’d been imagining since Prince Anthro told me the Franks were a Germanic race. “You there,” I said, in English. She hadn’t volunteered, but everybody was afraid to disobey me, so the two guys backed off and she walked up to me after a little hissing and shoving from her father, a big meat-faced bulldozer of a man who apparently thought it a privilege to have his daughter employed in my household.

Only one thing was left for me to do before I could retire to my house, fifteen minutes upstream from the Franks’ village—I asked their king or chief or whatever, whose name the Prince said was “Chlogio,” which sounded like a brand of drain cleaner to me, to come forward and identify himself. If you have already guessed that the chief was none other than the hulking gorilla who sired my new chambermaid and language tutor, then good for you. I was not a happy camper. He was whopping huge and had an axe the size of a snow shovel hanging off his back. I shouldn’t have had any reason to be afraid of him, since technically I had the authority to summon transdimensional legions of numinous avengers to my aid, but I wasn’t sure how quickly or enthusiastically they would respond to my call, so I figured it’d be safest not to get the guy angry. In the interests of safety, I even considered exchanging his daughter for the daughter of some arthritic, malnourished peasant, but figured that would be impolite. Anyway, I had to look tough and cool and not let my stress show: I shook hands with Chlogio, let him embrace me, faced the crowd while he yelled something to his people, then got embraced again as they shouted back some reply, all the while thinking: this man smells like a urinal full of spoiled beef. I was so relieved when they finally let me go.

Walking to the house (a primitive one-story deal, Roman villa style, so it wouldn’t trip out the Franks by being all modern), I asked the girl her name, using one of the few Frankish phrases I had memorized. “Audofled,” she said, which I shortened to “Audi” right away. I made a mental priority list of things to teach her: number one, to bathe; number two, to shave; number three, to tell her people to knock off the human sacrifice. Reasonable requests, I thought.

Sure, it lacked electricity and indoor plumbing, but my house sure was pretty. When I heard it was going to be a Roman villa, I specifically requested erotic murals, like the ones they dug up in Pompeii. The walls were all painted bright colors and they even used real marble in places. I liked it a lot. The food was catered, too—the Franks had to forage and fish and farm and hunt; I got whatever I wanted delivered to me by angels (nice, eh?). I wanted a TV, but Prince Anthro said no way, not allowed.

First things first: I walked Audi to a stone tub in the courtyard and made bathing gestures, dipping my hand in the water and rubbing it on my arm. Audi marched up to the tub and started to wash my arms, which was cute, but I stopped her and mimed it again, pointing at her this time. She got the idea and started to loosen her clothes, when a voice at the front door started calling my name:

“Fraang Mooligun? Fraaaang Mooooligun?”

So I left Audi there and rushed to answer it, sweating bullets that it was Chlogio there to see how his daughter was being treated. But it wasn’t. It was the two guys who had volunteered to be my servants. The younger one was holding up the steaming, headless carcass of a wild pig.

Housewarming committee, I guess.

I took the pig, carried it into the kitchen, and set it down. The two Franks followed me inside. I walked back towards the front door, trying to lead them away from the interior of the villa, not wanting them to find out I had already ordered Audi out of her clothes. They said things I couldn’t understand. They didn’t want to leave. Lacking a better idea, I asked them their names.

The old one was Marcomer and the young one was Gundomer: Mark and Gunner (I felt it was an important step in the Franks’ cultural development to get them to use snappy nicknames for themselves). I sighed and stretched my arms; they stayed put. I walked outside and stood by the door, grinning stupidly at them, but they didn’t get the hint. Finally I figured they must have wanted a gift in return. I went back to the kitchen and looked through the icebox. Honestly, I didn’t have much to give: fun high-tech stuff like fireworks and espresso machines and Nintendo were forbidden by the Potentate of Mortal Concerns. I had some toiletries and personal effects, but I didn’t want to share them. Food for food seemed like a good idea. I gave them a bowl of shrimp chow mein and two Cokes, and they were very grateful. Satisfied, they left, and I was very grateful for that. I grabbed a bar of soap from my suitcase and hurried back to the courtyard to see how Audi was doing.

She had stripped to the altogether and was in the tub, dutifully smearing water on her arms. I handed her the soap and demonstrated its use. Though I did watch her, I kept my distance. Regardless of whether or not her father was an axe-swinging barbarian chief, I was not about to put any moves on her before I knew how they say “yes” and “no” and “more, please” in Frankish. There are certain gentlemanly standards to which I adhere.

That afternoon, Audi learned how to wash herself, her hair, and her clothes. But what could I learn from her? She didn’t have the slightest clue how to teach anyone to speak her language. We worked out a simple system where I would point to an object and she would tell me its name, so what I got that first day was a crash course in Frankish nouns. I knew words for house, water, door, pig, tub, mural, food, pants, tree, fire, bed, knife, and most of the human anatomy. For my part, I babbled stream-of-consciousness English at her almost nonstop, hoping the total immersion technique would make her a whiz at my native tongue in a matter of days.

* * * *

That didn’t happen. I pretty much stopped speaking English at all and practiced my Frankish whenever I had the chance, cause it was just too frustrating being misunderstood all the time. Slowly, I picked up verbs and pronouns. My attempts to civilize Audi continued, in the hopes that she would disseminate my teachings to her fellow Franks. I taught her how to shave her legs and armpits, which caused, believe me, no small degree of friction between us. She just did not like me coming at her with that razor, and I guess I can’t blame her. My hands tend to shake when I’m nervous, and by the fifth time I’d nicked her on the shin, she must have thought I trying to sacrifice her very, very slowly. I lacked the words to reassure her I meant no harm. In the end, I had to shave my own legs and armpits in order to get the idea across, and boy did I feel clammy and effeminate afterwards.

She cooked the wild pig Mark and Gunner had brought, and we ate it with potato chips, coleslaw, soda, and beer. To my happy surprise, I kept the pork down just fine, but Audi wasn’t so lucky. She spent all night throwing up. Modern food must take some getting used to, I guess. After that, I decided it would be best if I let her go home for a few hours every day, to catch up with her family and get properly fed.

If my food made Mark and Gunner sick they didn’t mention it (not that I would have understood them). They came back every other day with some strange offering that they would trade for whatever disposables I wanted to unload on them. From them, I got: a brooch made of shiny stones, a hatchet, a basket of onions, a wool blanket, and a human skull. From me, they got: mint chocolate chip ice cream, a five-dollar bill, toothpaste, a pepperoni-and-olive pizza, and a box of antibacterial hand-wipes.

On the seventh day, Audi came back from the village chattering like crazy. Something must have happened, but I couldn’t understand her. She looked worried, so I just started walking towards the village, and she followed.

The Frankish village is built right up alongside a wide river, and consists of over a dozen timber huts that encircle some sort of administrative building that serves as a temple, granary, courthouse, and who knows what else. The only thing special about Chlogio’s house is that it’s a bit larger than the other huts and there are more combat trophies (pieces of armor, broken weapons, dried-up heads and ribcages propped up on stakes) decorating his space like lawn ornaments. Everybody stayed indoors; only the chief came out to meet us.

Chlogio tried to tell me what was going on, and like a trooper Audi did her best to translate his Frankish words, but because she was new to the whole interpreter thing her translation was also in Frankish. I stood there like a dummy while the chief and his daughter ranted and raved at me in stereo. The commotion drew a few neighbors out of their homes, and they added themselves to the unhelpful symphony of voices.

“Prince Anthro,” I called, “get over here. We need your help. Repeat, Prince Anthro, do you read me? Come in.” Either he didn’t hear me, or he was too busy to answer.

I couldn’t take it anymore. “Stop,” I shouted. “One at a time!” But I might as well have been shouting “louder, please, and less coherent if you don’t mind!” for all they knew.

I won’t bore you with the details of how I finally got apprised of what was going on. Let’s just say it was like the most crowded, noisy, and rank-smelling game of charades in all of recorded history. The long and short of it was that there had been a small case of mutiny. Chlogio’s half-brother, Merobert, had fled into the night with his servants. I was mortified: this was exactly the kind of thing I’d been hired to prevent. They didn’t seem to need my advice, they were going ahead with plans to hunt down and kill the deserters. I didn’t know what to do, so I just walked back home with Audi.

Halfway there, Prince Anthro showed up. “Ahoy there. Did you call a few minutes ago?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The tribe just split. They’re going to war.”

The Prince frowned. “That’s no good. That’s exactly the kind of thing we were hoping you would prevent. What’s the problem, Francis? Dr. King has already brought his Scythians gender equality, democratic rule, Judeo-Christian ethics, and germ theory.”

I told him to go away and let me handle things. There’s nothing worse than trying to do your job while your boss is right there breathing down your neck.

* * * *

The next day, I hung out at the village with Audi while Chlogio and his men practiced fighting and the women practiced treating the injuries the men kept accidentally giving each other. During the night, twelve able-bodied men had escaped to Merobert’s camp across the river.

Late that morning, I had a linguistic breakthrough. I realized I could understand most of the words I was hearing around the village. Excited, I tried starting an actual conversation with Audi, asking her to tell me about her people. She seemed genuinely happy that I could choke my way through remedial Frankish at last.

“Marcomer is the uncle of my sister-in-law. He is deaf in one ear. He had seven sons, but they are all dead now. Once, we found beetles living in his hair.” I had asked about Mark and Gunner first. “Gundomer is slow-witted because his mother was a Breton. He lost that piece of his nose in a fight with his cousin Gunderic. A crow lighted on the roof of his father’s house on the day he was born, so everybody knew he would be unlucky.”

Audi had eight sisters that were still alive, as far as she knew. Some of them, married to the chiefs of neighboring tribes, hadn’t left Earth with them. She had no brothers: Chlogio had killed them all so they could never rival his claim to the throne of the Salian Franks, such as it was. On his deathbed, she said, he planned to father one son on a virgin concubine, and name that child his successor.

“How smart. You can never be too careful,” I said, trying to act polite. Prince Anthro had told me to be “culturally sensitive.” Just because something seemed cruel or twisted to me, he said, didn’t mean I had the right to judge it by my own 21st-century standards. Privately, though, I added “infanticidal” and “paranoiac” to the list of adjectives I had associated with the chief, right alongside “enormous” and “walrus-like.”

I learned about the other important Franks. Their spiritual advisor was one-armed Chlodin, who was incredibly old—at sixty, he had at least twenty years on any other Frank. He could speak the language of snakes and birds and knew all the best ways to propitiate the idols. Dagomer, their best fighter, kept his chops up by punching the bark off trees. Chonober, the carpenter, was hated by everyone cause he’d sold his wife to a Burgundian. Ascyla was the chief’s first wife, and all the Franks adored her. Audi’s mother was the chief’s fourth concubine, and she had been traded to a Thuringian chief as part of a deal to settle a dispute over fishing rights. It was fascinating stuff, and I could have listened to her all day.

Unfortunately for us, Mark, who wasn’t fit enough to practice fighting with the others, caught on to the fact that I’d finally gotten the hang of the local dialect, and interrupted my private time with Audi to come talk at me. Worse, all the other crippled and/or deranged noncombatants followed him over, and circled around me gawking like I was some kind of street performer.

Mark shooed Audi away, apologized a bunch of times that I’d been forced to converse with a female, and assured me that I would suffer no more, cause he and his toothless pals were here to regale me with good manly discourse. Mostly they asked me questions:

“Will you cure my palsy?”

“Was your father a god?”

“Where do the dead go to live when they die?”

“What should we sacrifice to the Winged One who brought us here?”

“Have you ever killed a Roman?”

“Why do you eat green snow with pieces of dung in it?”

Didn’t like the mint chocolate chip, I guess. To shut them up and avoid having to answer, I turned the tables on them and asked pointed, hardball questions about Merobert and his followers: Why were they leaving? What would they do? Why did we have to fight? Mark and a few others answered, but I didn’t recognize the words they used.

That evening, when the practice was over and everyone had gone home and all the wounds were bandaged and all the blood and puke was reeking on the village green, I waited while Audi had dinner at her father’s house. They were having milk curds and fish. I had a giant steak burrito waiting for me at home, and boy was I starving. I couldn’t wait to tear into that sucker.

* * * *

Walking home, I had the very unpleasant sense of being watched, but didn’t mention it to Audi. As we approached the house, something didn’t seem right. When we got there, it was obvious. My door was busted in. The place had been ransacked. Somebody raided my villa and stole every goddamn thing that wasn’t nailed down.

I called for Prince Anthro right away, but he didn’t answer (vindictive bastard). I sure didn’t want to alert the Potentate and have him find out how badly I had let the Franks get out of hand in only a week. Plan ‘C’ was to run back to the village, but Audi said it would be way too dangerous to go out after dark with bandits on the loose. She had a number of theories regarding the identity of the thieves: demons, cave-people, shapeshifters, Visigoths. I figured it could only be Merobert and his merry men.

My giant steak burrito was gone. The only food they’d left was the bag of onions Mark and Gunner gave me. Audi kindly offered to boil them for me, but I wasn’t that hungry.

We were too nervous to sleep, so I resumed the grilling I’d been giving her that afternoon. “Tell me why Merobert left the village.”

“He was driven to it, I think. Afraid for his life. Papa wanted to kill him. ‘A half-brother is a whole rival,’ that’s what Papa says.”

“What about the twelve who followed him?”

“Who knows what they are thinking? Not me,” she said. I could make a fair stab at a guess: they were rallying to Merobert to help him win the war against Chlogio’s men, hoping to come out on top, as members of Chief Merobert’s favored inner circle, once the carnage settled. I wondered how bad all this tribal-politics crap had been back on Earth, where there were all sorts of foreigners and invaders complicating things all the time. No wonder they were an endangered culture.

“Audi, do you like being a Frank? Do you enjoy your life?”

She had no idea what the hell kind of question I was asking. Enjoying life and liking oneself seemed to be a foreign concept to her people. I tried phrasing it differently: “Are you happy most of the time? Or not?”

What a stupid question! Of course she wasn’t happy! What did I expect, knowing what I did about her life so far? After we cleared that up, she threw me a bone: “I like staying here, teaching you words and washing in the water. At home I always have too much hard work to do.”

Well, I wasn’t doing so badly after all: I had taught one Frank to enjoy leisure. Surely that was a laudable thing.

* * * *

We made for the village as soon as the sun came up, and told everyone what happened. They all blamed Merobert, too. Chlogio got really mad. “Wrath of Wotan upon thee, cruel and inconstant Merobert!” he screamed at the sky. “How can you visit such treachery and ill-will upon us, who have shown you only friendship and loving-kindness? How can you desecrate the home of our guest and protector? You force yourself to become my blood-enemy!”

Then we heard that six more villagers had crossed the river overnight, so now Merobert had almost as many fighting men as we did. At the moment, the Franks were chopping down trees to make several large rafts, so they could cross the river fully armed, storm the bank, and cut Merobert and his followers to ribbons. That was the plan, anyway.

Since I’d been looted by his own half-brother, Chlogio made amends by way of appointing bodyguards to look after me. Gunner and Dagomer (henceforth Dag) laid their swords at my feet and pledged to guard my life with their own, or something like that—I wasn’t really listening, and they couldn’t enunciate worth a damn anyway. Unfortunately, having my own security detail meant I couldn’t get a single minute alone with Audi. These barbarians are so phony. Let’s you and me get out of here... Nothing doing. Gunner “entertained” me by recounting every single battle and skirmish he or one of his forefathers had ever participated in. Before long, I felt stupid just standing around on the sidelines, so I went to help lash wood together to make the rafts.

Pretty soon my fingers were all cut up by the ropes. The laboring Franks all had hands like sofa leather and one of them laughed at me for having “the soft hands of a girl-child.” Gunner cuffed him upside the head.

“Fool! Do not speak badly of our guest!”

Then everybody stood up and stopped working, cause something was happening downstream. Half of a four-man search party that had left in search of Merobert early in the morning was returning to the village. They were in bad shape, and one of them was leaning heavily on the other, like he couldn’t walk on his own.

“We were ambushed,” explained the upright guy. “The others were slain.”

Shock, horror, tears. Rage, rage, rage.

“I swear by my father’s shade,” snarled Chlogio, “that I shall neither eat nor sleep nor lay with a woman until I have split the criminal skull of Merobert with my own two hands.”

“Before you act, seek the favor of the gods,” Chlodin said. “If we forget to satisfy them, our undertakings will be doomed to fail.”

All of a sudden they were trying to decide who they should offer up to Wotan, and I remembered that I had planned to wean them off the whole human sacrifice business. I was just about to explain my feelings on the matter to Chlogio when Gunner jumped onto a boulder and shouted: “Here is your victim! This is the man whose blood shall be offered!”

He was pointing at the guy who said I had girly hands. Maybe if I’d been a little less anxious and sleep-deprived, I would have tried harder to intervene. But before I could think of anything to say, they were dragging the poor bastard up the hill, and what was I supposed to do? Anyway, I didn’t watch; I stayed behind and showed my raw, bleeding hands to Audi. She offered to fix them up, so we went down to the river, and she washed them clean and applied a stingy herb salve that was supposed to toughen up my palms. It was nice down there, by the water, just the two of us. We talked for what seemed like hours.

“So. Do you Franks go to war often?”

“How could we survive without war? We would be trampled.”

I wanted to talk about pacts, treaties, and the benefits of peace, but didn’t know the Frankish words for such things. I changed the subject. “What do you think of this land? Do you like it better than the place you came from?”

“I can’t decide. It’s almost the same. Here, the water is cleaner. There’s much more game for the hunters. But there aren’t very many people. There is only our tribe, and you, and no-one else.”

As far as I knew, back on Earth, anyone who wasn’t a Frank had been the Franks’ mortal enemy. Why did she sound like she missed them? I asked: “Do you wish there were others?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s better like this.” Maybe, but she didn’t sound too sure. Maybe those mystery tribes that lived beyond the frontiers of Frankdom represented freedom to her. Maybe she could take the idea of being kidnapped or sold to strangers and romanticize it into some kind of fantasy escape from the brutal day-to-day struggle of living in her native society. If she was a normal 21st-century female, this is where I would have started asking about her hopes, dreams, career goals, aspirations for the future, and so on, but I had the sense by now that “surviving childbirth” was about the highest goal any Frankish girl could set for herself, realistically speaking. Not that the men had it any better. Chlogio had made it to the absolute top rung of the Salian Franks’ social ladder, and what did he have to show for it but acute paranoia and a bunch of murdered relatives?

I decided then that my civilization was flat-out better than hers, and said so. “You’d probably like the United States. Everybody lives for a long time, and we don’t have to farm our own food cause there’s always plenty to eat. We don’t fight over borders, and women are free to do whatever they want.”

“Really? You don’t have famine, war, or marriage contracts?”

“Well—”

“Who is the king of the United States? What kind of man is he?”

“We don’t have a king, we have a—a—” How do you say “President” in Frankish? “—A king who only rules for a short time. Every four years, we can replace him.”

She gave me a look of understanding and nodded. “Just like our forefathers, the Sicambrii—whenever omens foretold the end of their king’s reign, the chief priest would cut his throat in the grove of the Moon Goddess.”

“It’s not quite like that, actually—”

She leaned in. “What gods do you worship in the United States?”

How to field this one? I wanted to give the American God a name, but I wasn’t sure what to call him, since I didn’t want to favor one religion over another (some of my best friends are Jewish). So I went with:

“Jehovah.”

Again, she made like she knew what I was talking about. “Oh, Jove—like the Romans.”

See, this is why you don’t talk politics or religion with people: it gets way too complicated, and you end up saying things you’re not really sure you mean. I tried to steer the conversation back to what I was interested in, which was her.

“I’d like to take you to America sometime, if I can,” I said, wondering if the Prince could maybe arrange a special field trip. “You’d be amazed. You’ve never seen anything like it.”

She glanced over my shoulder, then shifted her hips to move even closer. “I’d love to see your country. I hope, one day, we can go.” Her hair smelled pretty, thanks to the shampoo I’d taught her to use.

“Once you’ve stayed at a three-star hotel, you’ll never look at timber huts the same way again. They’ve got these things called ‘hot tubs’...” I trailed off because she started giving me the green light: hungry looks, parted lips, deep breaths, you know the drill. I’m no statue. I leaned in and kissed her, and she grabbed my hand and mashed it against her left breast.

“Audofled, my daughter! What are you doing!”

I leapt back like she was radioactive and looked up to see Chlogio and his entourage staring down at me.

“Oh! Father! I was just—”

“We weren’t doing anything—she was just putting salve on my hands—we were—” Reflexively, my denials came out in English. I looked back at Audi. The salve had left an oily print where my hand had been.

“You, Protector Frank Mulligan! You have deflowered my daughter!” Chlogio said, hefting his axe at me. “Because of what you have done, no Frank will take her to wife!”

I admit that I panicked here. “Prince! Prince Anthro—help! Please! I need you! Prince Anthro, get over here, now! Please!” Slipping back into Frankish, I stammered: “I didn’t do it, King, we didn’t—”

“This is our fault, merciless chief,” said Dag, fixing a steely grip on Gunner’s arm. “It was our duty to keep ceaseless watch over our noble guest, and we failed.”

“Enough! There is but one way to remedy this crime,” said Chlodin, holding up his gnarled hand. “Our protector must himself marry Audofled.”

Chlogio scratched his beard and grimaced. “Yes. Yes, you have spoken wisdom, ancient one. That is the only way.”

“She cannot be left in this defiled state,” said Chlodin. “They must be wed immediately.”

Audi was staring at me with a guilty look on her face, but I felt completely responsible for what had happened. Shouldn’t I have known better? Exactly how old was she, anyway? I didn’t know. What was I thinking, trying to debauch the chief’s daughter? I felt like a very, very bad and very, very stupid person right then, but at the same time, very, very happy that I wasn’t going to be summarily executed.

This awkward moment was interrupted by a voice from the opposite riverbank. “Ho there, men who once were Franks! I bring you a message from Merobert the Bold.” There was a brown-bearded man in a wolfskin standing at the water’s edge, shouting through cupped hands. “Join him and be free, or remain where you are and die!”

Chlogio didn’t waste any time coming up with a rebuttal. “My loathsome half-brother is a coward and a thief!” he yelled back. “I swear on the eye of Wotan that all you who betrayed us will die the death of traitors before this week is through!”

“You are the coward, Chlogio! You let us be taken from our homeland, removed to a place we have never known and can never leave. You let us be severed from our beloved Rhine, our bountiful sea, and the Gaulish settlements we used to plunder so joyously. You did nothing to save our way of life! Instead, you bow and scrape before this smooth-skinned foreigner and the evil gods he serves.” He was pointing at me during that last part. “To the rest of you, I say: join Merobert or perish by his hand!” The messenger turned and walked away. Everyone on our side jeered and swore at him as he left, and Chlogio was damn near insane with rage. Chlodin suggested that a wedding would be just the thing to calm him down.

* * * *

The wedding was held in the hilltop grove, where the afternoon sacrifice could still be seen and smelled. The ceremony was quick—we had a war to prepare for, after all. When it was over, Chlogio led us down to an empty house in the village, barked at servants to hastily fill it with a few armloads of dowry gifts, showed us in, and slammed the door behind us with an order to consummate. Well, I’m man enough to tell you that my nerves were so completely shot by this point that I couldn’t even think about doing that. I just sat against the wall and massaged my pounding temples while Audi neatly arranged our wedding presents. She still had that guilty look, like something was up.

“I must tell you something,” she finally said. “I tricked you. I led you into a trap.”

“What?”

“Papa meant to catch us together. He planned it. He told me to seduce you, so he could force us to marry.”

“Why’d he do that?”

“He thinks that if he makes you his son-in-law, you might help him become a god.”

“Oh, crap, I can’t do that. Why does he think I can do that?”

“Because you are in league with the Winged One who brought us to this land—the one you call ‘Prince.’ He thinks that if you aren’t a god yourself, then you can at least intercede with them on his behalf.”

Granted, I had some connections (well, one), but the gods didn’t exactly owe me any favors. I wondered how long I could expect to live once Chlogio figured out I couldn’t get him deified.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

* * * *

The next morning, we readied ourselves for the attack on Merobert’s camp. The rafts were lined up along the riverbank. The men girded themselves with sharp weapons and dull armor while the women and children gathered on the grassy ridge overlooking the water to see them off.

Because I was the chief’s son-in-law, I had the high honor of riding in his raft and receiving arms from his collection. I got a Saxon sword and a Gallo-Roman helmet, lucky me. While we all prepared, dallied, hugged our wives, and got blessed by Chlodin, Merobert and his men gathered at the other side of the river, waiting knee-deep in the water to meet us. Merobert himself had red hair, and just like his half-brother, was appallingly huge. He held six wicked-looking throwing hatchets in one hand. There were twenty-two men on his side, twenty-three on ours. Dag told me that if both sides annihilated each other, the advantage would belong to us, cause we had women, children, and invalids to declare victory for our side, and they didn’t. That did not console me.

Before shoving off, the Franks sang one of their traditional war songs, “We Will Go Forth And Slay Huns This Day,” which sounded too stiff and droning for my tastes, so I taught them a traditional American war song:

na na na na
na na na na
hey hey hey
goodbye

...Which they all sang with zeal. I was proud of them. One by one, we launched our rafts into the water. Merobert’s men yelled; we yelled back, louder. They raised their arms in the air and beat their weapons against their shields. Obscene, personalized insults started flying across the river. Our oarsmen paddled furiously. The enemy was so eager to fight that they waded till the water was up to their waists. My heartbeat was like an artillery range blasting in my ribcage, and I felt sure that I was going to either die painfully or achieve some kind of horrible bestial apotheosis in an orgy of blood and mayhem and slaughter.

But just then, a gap was torn in the heavens above us. We all stopped and looked up to see what it was. Two luminous beings descended from that eerie hole in the sky: one was Prince Anthro; the other was a strange shapeless thing with thousands of colorful wings and lidless eyes joined at impossible angles, shining with a migraine-inducing radiance that made the base of my spine tingle. This was, I correctly guessed, the Potentate of Mortal Concerns.

“We’re here for your ten-day inspection,” said Prince Anthro. “What’s going on?”

“These men are arrayed for war,” said the Potentate in a voice that sounded like ten thousand castrati screaming in an echo chamber. “What an unhappy sight.”

The Prince turned to me. “What is the meaning of this, Francis? Look at you—carrying a sword! You’re supposed to be helping the Franks get along. What have you done?”

“It wasn’t my fault,” I protested. On both sides, the Franks were shielding their eyes, terrified to look directly at the Potentate.

“We should not have chosen this man to counsel the Salian Franks,” said the Potentate. “He must be removed at once.”

I began to levitate.

“Stop! Stop, you can’t do that!” cried a voice from the near side of the river. It was Audi. “That’s my husband. You can’t take him away.”

The Prince turned to me, stunned. “Francis, don’t tell me you married into the tribe.”

“What, was I not supposed to?” Unseen hands continued to carry me upwards, towards that hideous crack in the sky.

“You were supposed to teach them, advise them, guide them—not encourage warfare! Not marry their daughters! Good grief, Francis...”

Chlogio lifted his head. “See here, ye lofty spirits—is this man not a god, as you are?” He quickly averted his gaze again.

“What? A god?” said Prince Anthro. “No, of course not—he’s just an ordinary mortal.” I made faces at the Prince and slashed my hand across my throat, but apparently he didn’t recognize the universal sign language for dude, shut up. Chlogio’s head slowly swiveled towards me.

“Just ... an ordinary ... mortal?”

“Yes, and he shall spend many aeons treading the wheel of rebirth for the lamentable things he has done here among you,” said the Potentate, who I was starting to vehemently dislike.

“Please, my lords, let him stay here,” said Audi. “He meant us no harm, and—he belongs here. He is one of us, now.”

I stopped rising. For a brief moment, the Potentate considered. “Very well,” it said. “Francis Mulligan shall stay here, henceforth to be regarded as a Frank by adoption.” I was abruptly released, and plunged into the water. When I surfaced, I did not climb onto the nearest raft. I swam all the way to the shore.

* * * *

That was two and a half years ago.

I live in a cave, with Audi, about thirty miles west of the village. The Potentate got Merobert and Chlogio to reconcile, and they have a new overseer, so everything is hunky-dory over there, last we heard. We’re in hiding, you see, cause Chlogio wants to kill me. I can certainly understand why: I’m his son-in-law, which by Frankish custom makes me a potential rival, and besides, I married his daughter under a false pretense of divinity. So we’ve got to lay low.

Prince Anthro comes by once a week to bring us food and do our laundry. He takes good care of us. He even let us have a television with a DVD player (cause we don’t get broadcast, cable, or satellite in whatever solar system this is), which Audi absolutely adores. She learned English by watching. The Prince also tells me what’s happening back on Earth. Go Sharks!

We have a promise from Gunner that he will come for us one day, when Chlogio is feeble or dead, and lead us back to the village in triumph, where we will assert my claim to the throne. It may be dangerous, and the new overseer probably won’t like it, but I’ve got a trump card to play: all the Franks remember me as the miracle-worker who brought down the divine intervention that prevented them from rashly slaughtering their own kin in a pointless civil war. They will greet me, Gunner swears, with songs of praise and garlands of flowers. They will prefer me to Merobert or any infant heir Chlogio can produce. Well, someday I’ll find out if that’s true. Audi and I both want to go back; it’s lonely out here, and the wilderness is no place to raise children. We can’t live in exile forever. Besides, I’m a Frank by adoption. I’m one of them. It’s my right.

* * * *

Brian N. Pacula was born in Berkeley, California in 1979 and currently lives in Sonoma County with his girlfriend and their daughter. His work has previously appeared in The Copperfield Review, Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, First Class, and elsewhere. He has a web site at www.brianpacula.com.