Davy Read online

  As I passed the baiting-pit I heard the moan of a bear who’d soon be used up in the Spring Festival — odd how human beings often celebrate the good weather by hurting something. I could do the beai no good but I think he did me some, reminding me to taper off a mite on my encompassing love for all mankind, who if they caught me would clobber me as thoroughly as they’d clobbered him. I went on, alert again, to a black alley that would bring me out near the spot where I’d left the dead guard lying.

  I felt unseen doorways. A lifeless thing slithered under my feet. Dog, pigling, cat — the Scavengers’ Guild would dispose of whatever it was as soon as it annoyed the policers. In later years, when I was living with Nickie in Old City of Nuin where the poorest streets are kept clean, it would have made me angry. But I was Skoar bred and born: in Moha people below the aristocracy took scant pride in their way of living, claiming that dirt and decay held down the taxes — though I don’t think the tax collector ever lived who couldn’t see through a six-foot pile of rubble to the tender gleam of a hidden dime. When my foot slipped I merely grumbled: “Ah, call the Mourners!”

  In Skoar that remark was so routine it hardly rated as a joke. The Mourners’ Guild is a Moha specialty, a gang of professional singers and wailers who close in on a family that’s had a mue-birth to create an uproar of the sacred type. The slave woman old Judd was required to live with bore a mue, a blotched eyeless thing — I saw it carried away wrapped in a rag. The caterwauling demanded by law went on two days. It would have been five for a freeman family, eight to ten for the upper nobility — and no one no matter how blue his blood could break away from the festivities more than just long enough to go to the backhouse and return. The object is to appease the spirit of the mue after the priest has disposed of the body, and to remind the survivors that we are all miserable sinners totally corrupt in the sight of God. It’s called planned reverence.

  The Guild could be hired for a normal funeral, but charged custom rates for that. At the burial of a mue in Moha, the family was obliged to pay the Guild only a nominal fee, hardly more than a seventh of a year’s earnings, plus about the same amount for a casket the neighbors would consider adequate. For slaves like Judd the town itself met the expense of the Guild’s fee and a nice basswood box, charging it off to community good will, one of the generous things that made a Moha citizen point with pride.

  At the end of the alley I saw a flicker of torchlight by the stockade, distorted in the fog, and heard voices. They’d found him.

  Policers, talking softly. I assumed they’d found my luck-charm too — luck, hell. I sneaked off the other way till the curve of Stockade Street blocked out their light; then I crossed to the palings and wriggled over. Unfamiliar with this section of the palisade, I tumbled into crackling brush. Dogs would have caught the noise, but the policers had none with them, yet.

  A homed owl in the mountain woods was crying his noises of death and hunger. I heard a bull alligator roar, in a swamp that covered a few acres east of the city — old Thundergut was useful like the bear, reminding me I’d do well to pass through water and confuse the policer dogs. By daylight they’d have them around outside the stockade near where the guard had died, to cast for a scent, and they might follow mine as far as my cave. I must recover my horn and be long gone before then.

  One brook ran between Skoar and my cave, a quick trivial stream. It would not kill the scent — on the way down I had merely stepped across it. To confuse the dogs I must find something better beyond the cave, in the morning. But tonight the brook might help me part way. It flowed under the stockade near where I was now, and out again into the alligator’s swamp. I might follow it a mile upstream to a willow I knew I could identify in the dark, so I’d be that much further along at first-light.

  I inched out of the brush and across a grassy area. The fog enforced a dismal slowness: in ten minutes I walked a thousand years, and heard the wet monotone of water when I had given up hope of it. A big frog ploshed from blackness to blackness unseen.

  Struggling upstream, I imagined every danger crowding me. No alligators in shallow upland water, but there could be moccasin snakes. I could lose footing and brain myself. If black wolf caught my smell he could take me before I freed my knife. A swarm of mosquitos did find me.

  In time the owl stopped hooting, and the alligator back there in the swamp must have caught up with what he wanted, for I ceased to hear him. When at last I no longer saw any milkiness of moonlight in the fog above me I knew I was under forest cover, where moonlight was always a some-time thing. Fog was still dense; I smelled it and felt the dampness on my flesh. My fingers constantly out exploring touched willow-leaves after another long while. I groped up the twigs to small branches, to larger, finally encountering one whose shape I remembered. Then I could climb, knowing the tree for a friend. High up, I took off my loin-rag, passed it around the trunk and knotted it at my midriff, the hell with comfort. Brown tiger is too heavy to climb.

  I have seen him few times in my life, but I can observe the image behind closed eyes at any time, the vast tawny body cloudily striped with darker gold, fifteen feet from nose to tail-tip, paws broad as a chair-seat and eyes that send back firelight not green but red.

  A passage in the Book of John Barth mentions a certain wild-eyed crank who, when the last Old-Time war was in the last phases of threatening, visited the zoos in several cities and turned loose some of the beasts at night, choosing only the most dangerous: cobras, African buffalo, Manchurian tigers. He sometimes murdered the night watchman or other attendant to steal the keys, and was finally killed himself, Barth says, by a gorilla he was releasing. He must have felt he was paying back the human race for this and that. Probably no beast ever disliked us as hotly as disgruntled members of our own breed.

  Men hate and loathe black wolf, who in spite of his fearsome strength and shrewdness has some taint of the sneak and coward. I never heard anyone mention hating or loathing brown tiger, though when I was with Runiley’s Ramblers I heard of a secret cult that worships him. Pa Rumley introduced me to one of them in Conicut, a friendly quackpot who let me listen in on one of their minor celebrations. They dabble in alchemy but apparently not witchcraft, and cook up a type of love potion for their own orgies that’s said to work, though I never saw it proved. Mighty is he — so began their invocation — who walks like the mist at night, mighty indeed is the golden and well-intentioned one, the merciful and all-forgiving Eye of Fire! It was damned impressive, hearing people pray to a creature that actually existed: I enjoyed it, and was willing to overlook a few turns of expression that I felt to be slightly on the inaccurate side.

  In my willow tree the mosquitos chewed me all to hell—

  Do you mind a little more brain-scratching? The thought of mosquitos just now woke up the memory of a golden hot day in the pine-woods park outside Old City, a few years ago, when Nickie and I had an argument. She said mosquitos are brave, or they wouldn’t return under slaps for a mere gulp of gore. I said they’re stupid, because when the slap is clearly on the way they linger for one more swallow, and then they’re too flat to enjoy it. They linger so’s to gamble for glory, S’s she. Stupid, s’s I, or they’d wear armor over the soft spots like beetles, but they don’t wear anything, and to show her what I meant by a soft spot I chewed her here and there. Flinging me down and pounding my head on the pine needles, she asked me did I mean those mosquitos were atchilly lewd and nude? I rolled her over. Look at ’em, s’s I. Then she felt I should take her clothes off for the mor’l purpose of showing ’em how dreadful it is to be nude as a bug, and I thought she’d better do the same for me because we didn’t want her being dreadful all alone if the going got tough. She also undertook to slap the ones that bit me whenever I was preoccupied with helping her to be dreadful, and I undertook vice versa which is interesting in itself. We agreed further to keep count of slaps, thus determining who the bugs thought had the richest flavor. In order to get undressed we’d been absentmindedly chasing each other
around trees and over rocks and rolling about considerably, which takes time, and so had forgotten what the original argument was, but we thought the flavor thing might be it or anyhow just as good. When we were lying face to face engaged in some operation or other, I remembered the first argument, and what happened then proved that mosquitos are stupid: they felt that the time was favorable for unpunished biting, and this in itself was lucid thinking, but they never saw we each had a hand free to slap with.

  Nickie of course is impossible to beat in any learned discussion on a high plane. She said, the little twirp, that those mosquitos were dying out of heroic generosity and devotion, because they saw how much we enjoyed slapping each other, and so yielded up their lives in altruism. This kind of good Will, S’s she, is a sign of the vast courage that goes with towering intellect. Look at Charlemagne, S’s she, or some of those other Old-Time ninety-day wonders like St. George and his everloving cherry tree, or poor Julius Caesar dividing his gall in three parts so as not to offend his friends, Romans, countrymen and other types of etcetera.

  Before I fell asleep in that willow my mind was troubled in another way, as it might have been by a glimpse of fire seen as redness on distant cloud. War. It was the knowledge, intruding on me now that I could rest with a trace of safety, that the Katskil war had become a fact, a thing darkly and truly happening.

  People said there would always be war; they didn’t say why. Of course as a child I could see what a grand thing it would be to perish gloriously, and first to rush about cracking the heads and spilling the guts of wicked joes who happened to be the Enemy. The army as represented by the garrison soldiers of Skoar wasn’t exactly glorious, which may have given me some early doubts. The men were let out on pass in small groups; even the orphanage priests with all the power and authority of the Church behind them used to wince and fret when a knot of soldiers went roaring by in the street, skunk-drunk, howling dirt talk, pissing where they pleased, spoiling for rape or a free fight. The policers tried to keep up with them, steering them as quickly as possible into the cheap bars and cat-houses and then herding them back to their barracks… I had heard of navies too, but never had seen anything to reduce their glory. Outrigger fleets, I heard tell, carrying built-in crossbows, fire-throwers, and captains who had a habit of dying on deck with words of immortal bravery. The fleets had born the brunt of the effort in a war sixty years earlier when, as our Moha teacher-priests put it, Moha reluctantly allowed Levannon her independence. Reluctantly allowed, my celebrated hinder parts! — Moha got the holy godelpus beaten out of her, and hanging on to the Levannon country would have been like a farmer in the west forty trying to keep in touch with an eastbound bull.

  It was over my head in those years; now I realize how hard and patiently the Holy Murcan Church worked as an umpire in wartime. Being committed to a policy of lovingkindness (within reason of course) the Church took no part in war except to provide chaplains for the armed forces and facilities for the military type of prayer — which putS a slight Strain on monotheism at times. Behind the scenes, however, the top brass of Church and State would be watching for a suitable moment when both sides were wearied out enough to negotiate. When that time came the Church would supervise, examine any treaty proposed, and approve it so long as it wasn’t too openly hoggish. For the nations after all are not merely great democracies but Murcan democracies — that is, united in the faith though not in politics. The Church is fond of calling herself Mother Church, enjoying the role of skirted arbiter in the smeary bloody squabbles of her children (whom she didn’t beget, but never mind that) and I guess she can truly claim to be the savior and protectress of modern civilization, such as it is.[13]

  Since those days I have learned so much — from good stern Mam Laura of Rumley’s Ramblers who made me solid with reading and writing, from Nickie above all, and from the years when Nickie and I were Dion’s aides in his effort as Regent of Nuin to bring some enlightenment into the mental murk of his times — so much more than I ever learned in childhood that it is difficult to sort out what I knew then from later knowledge. It was in my boyhood, at the tavern, that I heard an old man, a traveler, describe the sack of Nassa in Levannon, a city notoriously sinful and a hatcher of heresies, in a war Levannon fought against Bershar soon after winning her independence from Moha. The Bershar hill-men laid siege to the city for fifty days. According to the teller of the tale, this was a case where the Church took sides almost openly, encouraging devout communities in other lands to send Bershar material support. It caused some angry heretical mutterings here and there. When Nassa surrendered at last, the survivors were disarmed, turned loose and hunted down like woodchucks or rats, and then the whole city was set to the torch — “for the glory of God,” as the Bershar commander put it. His remark was unpopular, especially in the Low Countries, where aid to Bershar had upped the taxes. Church dignitaries were greatly shocked at this “misinterpretation” of the ecclesiastical position, and the Prince Cardinal of Lomeda was obliged to come out on the steps of the Cathedral and be shocked in public before a grumbling crowd would quit and disperse.

  When the war itself ended, the treaty specified that Nassa must never be rebuilt, and Levannon had to agree; it never had been. Our traveler could not recall what year the war was, but he said the pines where Nassa used to stand had grown better than twenty feet tall. And he said that the city of New Nassa, a few miles from the simple war memorial among the pines, was a much stronger town in the military as well as the economic sense — better command of the eastern road… Joking of course, Old Jon asked him: “Was you, sir, one of them terr’ble Nassa heretics, sir?” The traveler looked at him too long and unwinking, like an ancient turtle, and then laughed barely enough for politeness, without answering.

  A regiment was coming to defend Skoar, Emmia had said. They’d use the Northeast Road — no other available except the West, and that must be busy if there had already been fighting in the Seneca region. It shouldn’t matter to me, I thought, since I meant to avoid roads anyway until I was a long way from Skoar. My uneasiness subsided for lack of fuel and I drifted into a sort of sleep.

  I woke in slowly lightening darkness, pulled from a warm riot with a girl who was not Caron but only a trifle bigger and older. I can’t bring back much of her now except a red flower in the back of her dark hair that tickled my nose. She was singing; I kept whispering to her she better not, we better not do anything until Father Milsom fell back out of sight on the other side of the stockade. I was awake, my thighs gripping nothing but a branch. I ached, and I’ll never see her again. They don’t come back. Dion remarks it’s just as well they don’t, for if we hoped to find our unfinished dreams we’d be forever sleeping, and who’d cook breakfast?

  Skoar, in fact everything of my fourteen years — (even Caron, even Sister Carnation) — seemed to me in that time of waking to have become like a mixed sound of voices behind me, farther and farther behind me on a road where I could do nothing but go forward.

  The fog became swirls of gray replacing the night; I saw the shape of willow branches near my eyes. I wriggled down the tree in the milk-soft confusion and pushed on up the mountain, hungry, not much rested but clear in the head. The policers wouldn’t like the fog, so I tried to, though it slowed me down. I arrived at my cave in half an hour, famished. I could spare no time to hunt. The fog was thinning away under the pressure of an invisible sun.

  I dug up my money first — fifteen dollars altogether, it ought to help as soon as I came to any place where money mattered. At a moment when sunlight broke through the fog and edged the leaves with wet trembling gold, I had in my palm the shiny dollar Emmia had given me: it seemed not so very bright. After dropping it among my other coins I could hardly tell it from the rest. Then I recovered my sack, with the golden horn — and my luckcharm of course. Could I have known all the time that it was there, but needed some compelling reason for running away? — from Emmia? Skoar? From my boyhood self because I must have done with it?

/>   A slim-witted wild hen came searching her breakfast of bugs barely ten yards off. My arrow lifted her head from her neck — she’d never miss it. I couldn’t stop to make a cooking fire, but drank the blood and dressed her off, and ate the heart, liver and gizzard raw, wrapping the rest in burdock leaves for lunchtime. I recall I gave the luckcharm no credit, although in many ways I was still quite religious.

  The nearest stream began at a spring on the mountain’s northeast slope beyond my cave, a small loud brook with alders and brambles along the banks. I knew it ran two miles or so through the woods and then across the Northeast Road at a little ford. I could follow it almost to the road and then use the road as a guide, glimpsing it now and then to check my position as I traveled east — toward Levannon.

  The brook covered the bottom of a scratchy tunnel, a narrow green hell. Thinking of policer dogs, I had to try it. I stuffed my moccasins in the sack again, to save them. My bare feet winced at the thought of snakes, and took a beating on the stones.

  Of course when the dogs lost the scent the men would use some brains, following the brook with the dogs searching both banks. At a break where the brambles gave way to common weeds, I stepped out and walked away, to make it look as if I had given up and started back toward Skoar. I passed within grabbing reach of a big oak but went beyond it, to a thicket where I messed around a little and peed on the leaves to keep the dogs amused. Then I backtracked and swung into the oak with care to leave no damaged twigs. From the oak, by risking one leap far above ground, I passed to another tree, and then from branch to branch all the way back to the brook.

  They’d at least lose time beating their gums over it, maybe decide I was a demon and sit down and wait for a priest to come help them louse it up. But I stayed with the stream another half-mile, and when I left it I did so by the way of the trees again, proceeding through the branches to another great oak. There I climbed high, to study the land.