Davy Read online

  I find it strange, in reading Old-Time books, to notice what unconcern the people of that age felt about wild beasts, who were scarce and timid then, overwhelmed by human power and crowding and incredible weapons. Man in that time truly seemed to be master of the earth. In our day, a few hundred years later, I suppose he’s still the most intelligent animal at large, even still likely to succeed if he ever learns how to quit cutting his brother’s throat, but he is under a slight cloud. We might become masters of the world again, but perhaps we ought to watch out for a certain cleverness I’ve noticed in the forepaws of rats and mice and squirrels. If they’d develop speech and start using a few easy tools, say knives and clubs, it wouldn’t be long before they were explaining the will of God and rigging elections.

  Gunpowder is forbidden by law and religion,[16] and this may be just as well, since guns to make use of it are forbidden also by lack of steel, lack of a technology capable of designing and making them, and nowadays by a lack of belief that such instruments ever existed. Since a vast amount of fiction was produced in Old Time, it is wonderful how the Church today can explain away anything unwelcome in the surviving fragments of the old literature by calling it fiction.

  We had to remember that some bandit gangs were said to roam the wilderness, though eastern Moha did not have too bad a reputation that way — southern Katskil is lousy with them. Such outlaw gangs care nothing for laws or national boundaries; they live off the wilderness, and now and then take a toll from the villagers. Hardy souls — they kill off their old people, rumor says, and admit new members only after savage ordeals. The gangs are small — in Moha or Nuin you never hear of one attacking a town of any importance, or a large caravan,[17] even for hit-and-run raids. The Cod Islands pirates are popularly supposed to have started from a bandit gang that got clever with small war vessels and then almost grew into a nation. In Conicut I heard the tale of a whole army battalion routed by a couple of dozen bandits who decided the soldiers were encroaching. The story was set in the rather distant past; the begging street-corner storytellers preferred a version in which the bandits had trained teams of black wolves to help them, under the command of a most unusual character named Robin or Robert Hoode.

  I knew some unhappy moments when we went away from the cave for good that morning. For one thing I saw few opportunities ahead for playing with Vilet; with the feeling of losing her, I even imagined a little that I was in love with her — her common sense would have taken care of that if I had spoken of it; since I didn’t, my own brains were obliged to handle it, and did so moderately well. Leaving the cave was in many other ways a good-bye—

  I know: so is any moment. What happened to the jo who was breathing with your lungs five minutes ago? — or don’t you care?

  We spent most of the day in cautious travel through the woods, until we could be sure we were well beyond the village that had been so good as to furnish us with respectable clothes. I did wish I might have learned what happened there when Lurette crashed in shrieking about rape and fire, but I never shall know, so what the hell, write that story yourself if you’re man enough. Then we altered our course, and came out on the Northeast Road at a place where it was climbing a considerable rise, the longer and steeper part still ahead of us. The sun stood behind us in the west; everything lay in a hot bright hush. We saw a few lines of smoke here and there in the south, distant villages. Nothing was moving on the road as we stepped out there in our good clothes — white freeman’s loin-rags, decent brown shirts, Vilet in the remodeled yellow smock. And we heard nothing — no voice, no creak of cart-wheels, no sound of cattle or horse or man. On the other side of the rise ahead of us there could be anything.

  Jed asked: “What day is it?”

  Bedam if we knew. I said Thursday, but Jed wasn’t sure, and started fretting that he might have let a Friday morning go by without special prayers. He was for having them then and there by the roadside, but I said: “Wait, and hush the clack a minute — I want to listen.”

  I wanted something more than listening. I motioned them to stay where they were, and stepped a short way up the road to get clear of the human smell and study the breeze. Even then I wasn’t sure.

  I wished something human might join us, but the hot afternoon was quiet as a sleep. It happens Jed was right — the day was a Friday, the day God is said to have rested from the labors of creation, when all but the most necessary travel is forbidden or at least frowned on. And the war was still a fact, discouraging travel, though nothing in the summer air could make you think of it. Finally, it was late enough in the day so that any sensible traveler would be thinking of supper-time behind stockade walls.

  When I rejoined the others Sam asked me carefully: “Did you catch it?”

  “I think so.” I saw Jed didn’t understand. “We best move right on, keep close together till we come to a settlement. I think I smell tiger.”

  How steep was that sunny slope, how very long! I wanted us to climb it quietly, and Sam urged that too, but Jed thought best to pray, and when Sam asked him to avoid making noise and save his breath, Jed merely looked forgiving and went on praying, no help for it.

  The road approached the illusion of an ending at open sky. You may see that, wherever a road mounts a hill, and you think of a drop into nothing or of sudden dying. If I could return to that strip of road today and travel it without alarm, without the faint ammoniac reek of the thing that was somewhere near us unheard, I suppose it would seem an ordinary climb. It was not so steep that a single ox couldn’t have hauled a heavy cart to the summit — I dare say that was the standard of adequate road-building in most parts of Moha. Yet whenever the smell seemed to strengthen, or I imagined some hint of tawny motion among the trees at my left, I felt like a wingless bug climbing a wall.

  Nor was that piece of road so very long, really — a quarter-mile perhaps, or less. The sun was not noticeably lower when we reached the crest of the rise-we did reach it, all four of us alive-and looked down, and saw a thing that might save us from the tiger, or might not.

  We saw a stockaded village, the walls fairly well made, and it stood boldly at the edge of the road, no hideaway wilderness thing but civilized, respectable, important in its own right. It lay far enough below us in the valley so that we could see all but the north end of it, which was hidden by forest growth coming close to the stockade. We saw behind the palings a graceful church spire, the usual design of an upright bar rising from the wheel, and an orderly array of rooftops, including those of quite a few two-story dwellings. Next to the road, on our side, was a generous area of cleared land, with corn-patches, and black spots that showed where they maintained guard-fires at night to keep the deer, bison, woods buffalo and small creatures from ruining their plantings. Far down, yes, nearly half a mile, and for much of that distance, until we reached the corn planting, there would still be trees and brush creating a mystery at our left.

  As we began the descent, Jed Sever would not look to either side of the road, not into the trees nor away into the lovely sunshine and green slopes of the southern side. He trusted instinct to place his feet for him, and looked upward toward his God, asking forgiveness for the sins of all of us. He was asking also that if the beast should strike it might take him first and not one of his friends — for he, though an even more wretched sinner perhaps beyond hope of salvation, was nevertheless more prepared in his mind for judgment and the wrath to come. “And if it be thy will,” he said, “let their sins be upon me, Abraham chosen of God, Spokesman, Redeemer, and not upon them, but let ’em be washed clean in my blood[18] forever and ever amen.”

  Jed also tried to motion poor Vilet away from him to the other, probably safer side of the road, walking himself nearest to the forest cover, the sweat pouring from his forehead like tears. His big hands swung idle with no look of readiness for sword-work.

  I can remember the distress his prayer gave me, in spite of my own fear and alertness. It seemed to me, especially in my new and bewildering acquaintanc
e with heresy, that if there was one thing above all I could let no one else carry for me, it was my sins. Today I can discover no sin in anything except cruelty and its variations, and this for reasons that have nothing to do with religion, but on that day I was yet a long way from such opinions.

  As we continued down the other side of that hill, the tiger scent diminished. I think it was some shift in the barely perceptible currents of the air. He was present but he did not strike. We moved on down the road — passing the forest cover at our left, reaching the corn plantings, passing them, approaching the open region and the village gate, and he did not strike.

  From within the village came the sweet jangling of triple bells. Often they are made of the best bronze from Katskll or Penn — the Church can afford it — and the makers try to cast each group so that it will sound a major triad with the fifth in the bass. The third, struck last, floats in the high treble toward a tranquillity resembling peace, and the overtones play with a hundred rainbows. These village bells were announcing five o’clock: “Time to quit work and pray and have supper.”

  Jed’s prayers ended rather flatly. I still glanced behind me as often as I had done when we had the trees at our left, but the tiger did not strike, not then. I did not see him, not then.

  The main gate of such a village is usually open during daylight hours so long as a guard is present, but not on Fridays, when it’s considered best to keep folk within God’s easy reach. So that day the ponderous log gate was shut, but I looked through a chink in the log slabs and saw the guard in his grass-thatched shelter, not asleep but mighty restful, sprawled on his cot with a leg hooked over a raised knee and his policer cap let down over his eyes. He bounced up fast enough when I hollered:

  Well, there are some things you do and say when approaching a strange village, and some you don’t. I’d goofed in my usual rapid way, too rapid for Sam or Vilet to stop me, as I knew when the guard came swaggering with his javelin up and ready. I whispered to Sam: “Make like a Mister, think you could?”

  He nodded, and was in front of me by the time the guard got the gate open and started bawling me out for disturbing the Friday peace-no manners — what ailed me anyhow?

  Sam said: “My man, I apologize for my nephew’s hasty speech. I am Mister Samuel Loomis of Kanhar, more recently of Chengo, and the lady is my cousin. This is her husband, Mister Jedro Sever, also late of Chengo but a legal resident of Manster, Vairmant — you may address her as Mam Sever when apologizing for your own bad manners.” Sam had hitched his shirt slightly so that the hilt of his sheathed knife was visible, and he was rubbing a horny old thumb back and forth across the end of the bone knifehilt, and looking down at that thumb along his thin nose, not as if he gave a damn, just sad and patient and thoughtful.

  “Mam, I — Mam Sever, I — Mam, I—”

  That could have gone on a long time. Sam cut it short by asking delicately: “Is the apology satisfactory, Cousin? And Jackson ?”

  “Oh, quait,” says Vilet, hamming it some but not too much, and I mumbled my own snooty graciousness, and

  Sam flipped him a two-bit to quiet the pain. Sam had startled me as badly as he had the guard — I’d never guessed he knew how to talk in that hightoned way. Maybe Dion could have found fault with it, but not I. He put me in mind of what I’d imagined about some of the fine old historical characters I’d learned of in school, in what they called a Summary of Old-Time History. Honest, Sam was just as cool and grand and you-be-damned as the best of them — Socrates, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, or that splendid short-tempered sumbitch, I’ll think of his name in a minute, who r’ared up and whipped the Barons and Danes and Romans and things out of merry England and clear across the Delaware before he was satisfied to let them go — Magnum Carter, that’s who it was.

  “Well, man,” said Sam, “can we find anything in this village in the nature of decent accommodations?”

  “Oh yes, sir, the Black Prince tavern will have nice rooms, I know the people and—”

  “How far is Humber Town from here?”

  “About ten miles, sir. Oughta be a coach from Skoar going through to Humber Town tomorrow — once a week, Saturdays, and always stops here of course, though with the war and all—”

  “Ayah, the rest of our caravan is waiting on that coach at the last village where we stopped, some piddlepot hole in the ground, I didn’t trouble to learn its name.”

  “Perkunsvil,” said the guard with solemn pleasure. In a jerkwater village you can hardly go wrong by blackening the reputation of neighboring dumps.

  “I guess. We got tired waiting for it. What town is this?”

  “This is East Perkunsvil.”

  “Nice location. There’s tiger up yonder, by the way — see many hereabout as a rule?”

  “What! No, sir, that can’t hardly be.”

  Jed spoke for the first time, and reprovingly: “Why not, man? Brown tiger’s like unto the flame of God that burneth where it will.”

  The guard bowed, the way you’d better do at hearing anything with a holy sound, but he was stubborn. “Sir, I can tell you, brown tiger never comes anear this town. We don’t ask God’s reasons for the special mercy, it’s just so.”

  I’ve noticed every village needs a unique source of pride. It may be a claim that nobody in the village ever had smallpox, or all babies are born with dark hair, or the local wise woman’s aphrodisiacs are the aphrodizziest within forty miles — no matter what, so long as it provides a mark of distinction. In East Perkunsvil I suppose tiger hadn’t come over the stockade within the memory of the oldest inhabitant, so the village was sure God had arranged that he never would. Sam bowed nicely and said: “You be rema’kably favored, doubtless a manifestation.”

  “Yes, sir, it may well be.” He was downright friendly now as well as respectful. “Yes, sir, lived here all my life, and that’s twenty-six years, never even seen the beast.”

  Vilet said: “Look up yonder then!”

  Now chance never plays into my hands that way. If I’d said that, the brute would have been well out of sight before any head turned. And I guess Vilet had never got many breaks of that kind either, for later when we four were settled in our rooms at the Black Prince she had to go over it three or four times, and each time it put her in a warm sweet glow: “’Lookit up yonder then!’ I says, right smackdab on the very second I says it, and wasn’t his o’ face just like a fish and you a-squeezin’ it to get the hook out? — oh snummy!” And she’d bounce and slap her leg and tell it again.

  I must have turned when she spoke as quickly as the others, yet I felt as if my head were moving against a resistance, unready to behold a thing that all my life I had feared and in some way desired to behold. Smelling the beast on the road, I had known him from catching that smell once before in the hill country west of Skoar. It’s ranker than puma smell, seems to hang heavier in the air. At that earlier time it had seemed just not quite right for puma, and I had climbed a tree and spent a long night there shivering, smelling him and thinking I did but not once hearing or seeing him. In the morning I’d wobbled down and found his enormous pugs in a bare spot of earth, deep, as if he might have stood there some time observing me through the dark, old Eye-of-Fire, and maybe thinking: Well, let’s wait till Red gets a mite bigger and fatter…

  Now, I saw him.

  A short way down from the crest of the hill we had descended lay a high flat-topped rock, thirty feet from the road on the open side, across from the forest. The top was slightly tilted, away from the road, so that when we walked past, it had looked like a simple edge, nothing to tell of the slanting platform. Had he watched us go by, or only just now arrived there? Maybe he had been not hungry, or restrained by the fact there were four of us. Maybe he knew my bow meant danger. I imagined him amusing himself with false starts, quivering his hindquarters, playing and enjoying the cat-game of delayed decision and finally for his own reasons allowing us to proceed. Now, following his immediate whim, he stood tall, and I saw him in rem
ote dark gold against the deepening midsummer sky.

  He gazed down toward us, or more likely beyond us. He must have known or sensed that the distance was too great for the flight of an arrow from my bow, if he was experienced in such things. He turned on his high rock with no haste at all, flowingly, to stare in another direction, off to the south across the valley, perhaps indifferently observing the smoke of other human places.

  He sat down and raised a curled paw to his mouth to lick it and rub it comfortably over the top of his head. Then he washed his flank, and up went a hind leg catstyle so he could lean down and nuzzle his privates. He lost balance comically because of the slope of the rock, righted himself with a comedian’s ease, and lay down and rolled with his feet in the air. And when he tired of that he yawned, and jumped down, and strolled across the road into the woods, and for a while he was gone.

  16

  That was the first time I had seen the inside of a village. Since then I’ve seen more than I can plainly remember, for when I was with Rumley’s Ramblers we visited one after another throughout Levannon, Bershar, Conicut, Katskil, more than a year in Penn; the atmosphere and the people may vary a great deal, but the general pattern is much the same in all the nations. Wherever you find them, such villages are designed for one fundamental purpose, to give a small human community a bit of safety in a world where our breed is no longer numerous, not rich and sleek as in Old Time, not wise, and not very brave.