Davy Read online

  I wasn’t too concerned about those ancient enemies that morning. My perilous thought was generating others: Suppose I went to the rim, and saw the sun catch fire?…

  In heavy woods at any time of day there’s an uncertainty of twilight. Objects seemg more and less than real, when the light reaches them in a downflowing through the leaves. Part of night lingers. The question what is behind you may hold something more than fear. A good or desired being might walk there instead of danger, who’s to know?

  My cave on North Mountain was a crack in a cliff broadening inside to make a room four feet wide and twenty deep. The crack ran up into darkness but must have reached the outside, since a draft like the pull of a chimney kept the air fresh. Black wolf could have entered, even tiger though he would have found scant room to maneuver. I’d driven out copperheads when I found the cave, and had to watch against their return; sweeping with a branch for scorpions was another housekeeping routine. The approach was a narrow ledge that widened in front of the cave with enough earth to support some grass and then led on more steeply to the other end of the cliff. The cave was on the east face of the mountain, Skoar in the south shut away. I could build small fires at night, searching the glow for a boy’s visions of places unexplored, faraway times and other selves.

  That morning I first made sure of my bow and other gear. All there, but I felt a strangeness. I wet my nose to sharpen the scents; nothing wrong. When I found the cause, on the back wall where my glance must have gone at first unseeingly, I was not much wiser. A picture had been drawn by a point of soft red rock. It must have been done since my last visit, in November. It showed two faceless stick figures, with male parts. I’d heard of hunters’ sign messages, but this said nothing of that sort. The figures merely stood there. One was in good human proportion, elbows and knees bent, fingers and toes carefully indicated. The other reached the same height but his arms were too long and his legs too short with no knee-crook. I found no tracks, nothing left behind in the cave and nothing stolen.

  I gave it up. Someone had passed by since November, and left my gear untouched; no reason to think he meant me any harm. I made sure a horse-shoe hidden under a rock in the front of the cave was still in place, though I’d never heard of pictures being left around by witches or any other supernaturals. I gathered fresh boughs to sleep on, and a mess of firewood, and lay out in the sun for daydreaming, naked except for my knife-belt. Without such free time now and then, how would we ever find new methods of protecting the moon from the grasshoppers? I didn’t forget the picture, but I supposed the visitor was long gone. My thoughts sailed beyond the limits of day.

  I thought of journeying.

  The Hudson Sea , Moha Water, the Lorenta and Ontara Seas — I knew all those were branches of the great sea that divides the known world into islands. I knew that the Hudson Sea in many places is barely a mile wide, easy for small craft. And I knew that thirty-ton outriggers of Levannon sailed through Moha Water to the Ontara Sea , and then to Seal Harbor , on the Lorenta Sea , where most of our lamp-oil comes from. Seal Harbor is still Levannon soil, the ultimate tip of that great snaky-long country and the largest source of its wealth, the northernmost spot of civilization, if you can call a hell-hole like Seal Harbor civilized. (I was with Rumley’s Ramblers, fifteen years old, when I saw it. Shag Donovan’s bully-boys tried to grab one of our girls, something that wouldn’t be attempted on a Rambler gang anywhere else in the world. We left three of his men dead and the rest thoughtful.) Beyond Seal Harbor those Levannon ships proceed down the Lorenta to the great sea, and south along lonely coasts to trade with the city-states of Main and then with the famous ports of Nuin — Newbury, Old City , Hannis, Land’s End . That northern passage is long and bad, travelers said at the Bull-and-Iron. Fog may hide both shores, and they’re the shores of red bear and brown tiger country not fit for man. All the same, that route was thought safer than the southern course down the Hudson Sea and along the Conicut coast, and Levannon ships laden with the manufactured goods of Nuin usually returned the northern way too, beating against contrary wind and current rather than risking a clash with the Cod Islands pirates. We’ve cleaned the pirates out now, but at that time their war canoes and lateen-rigged skimmers had the nations by the balls, and twisted.

  Lazing on my ledge that morning, I thought: If the Levannon thirty-tonners make the north passage for trade, why can’t they sail much further for curiosity? Sure I was ignorant. I’d never beheld even the Hudson Sea . I didn’t know that curiosity is not common but sadly rare, and without experience how could I imagine the loneliness of open sea when land has become a memory and there’s no mark to steer by unless someone aboard knows the mystery of guessing position by the stars? So I asked the morning sky: If nobody dares to sail out of sight of land, and if the Book of Abraham won’t tell how far is the rim or what’s beyond it, how can the priests claim to know?

  Why can’t there be other lands this side of the rim? How do they know there is a rim? Maybe the Book of Abraham did explain that much, if one were allowed to read it, but then what about the far side? There had to be one. And something beyond the far side. So what if I were to sail — east—

  Nay, I thought — nay, Mudhead! But suppose I did travel to Levannon — that wasn’t far — where a young man could sign on aboard a thirty-tonner?

  Suppose for instance I started this morning, or at least tomorrow?

  3

  I thought of Emmia.

  Once from the street I had glimpsed her at her window naked for bedtime. A thick old jinny-creeper grew to the second story of the inn where her bedroom was. Behind the leaves I saw her let down her red-brown hair to tumble over her shoulders, and she combed it watching herself in a mirror, then stood gazing out at the night a while. The next building had a blind wall where I stood. No moonlight, or she would have seen me. Some impulse made her cup her left breast in her hand, blue eyes lowered, and I was bewitched to learn of the broad circle around the nipple, of her deep-curved waist, and the dark triangle just visible.

  Naked women weren’t news to me, though I’d never been close to one. Skoar had the peep-shows called movies, including penny-a-squint ones I could afford.[3] But that rosy marvel in the window was Emmia, not a picture nor a puppet nor a worn-out peep-show actress with an idiot dab of G-string and a face like a spilled laundry bag, but Emmia whom I saw each day at tasks around the tavern in her smock or slack-pants — mending, dusting, overseeing the slaves, candle-making, waiting on table, coming out to my territory to collect eggs or help feed the stock and milk the goats. Emmia was careful with her skirt, the Emmia I knew — once when the old slave Judd, not thinking, asked if she’d be so gracious to use the ladder and reach something down so to spare his gimp leg, she told her mother and had him whipped for bawdy insolence. This was Emmia, and in me, like stormy music, desire was awake.

  Love? Oh, I called it so. I was a boy.

  She drifted out of sight and her candle died. I remember I fell asleep that night exhausted, after the imaginary Emmia on my pallet had opened her thighs. It became a canopy bed: I was inheriting the inn and Old John’s fortune for saving Emmia from a mad dog or runaway horse or whatever. His dying speech of blessing on our marriage would have made a skunk get religion.

  I had not seen Emmia naked again, but the picture of her at her window remained warm in me — (it still is). It was with me on my mountain ledge that morning as the time glided toward noon

  Ears and nose gave me the first warning. My hand shot to my knife before my eyes found my outrageous visitor on the upward slant of the cliffside path.

  He smiled, or tried to.

  His mouth was miserably small, in a broad flat hairless face. Dirty, grossly fat, reeking. His vast long arms and stub legs told me he must be the subject of that drawing. He did have knees: drooping fat-rolls concealed them; his lower legs were nearly as thick as his ugly short thighs. Almost no hair, and he wore nothing; a male, but what he had to prove it appeared against his fat no la
rger than what you’d see on a small boy. In spite of the short legs he stood as tall as I, around five feet five. His facial features — button nose, small mouth, little dark eyes in puffy fat-pockets — were merely ugly, not inhuman. He said in a gargling man’s voice: “I go?”

  I couldn’t speak. Whatever appeared in my face made him no more terrified than he was already. He simply waited there, misery standing in the sun. A mue.

  Everywhere the law of church and state says plainly: A mue born of woman or beast shall not live.

  You hear tales. A woman, or even a father, may bribe a priest to conceal a mue — birth, hoping the mue wifi outgrow its evil. The penalty is death, but it happens.

  Conicut is the only country where the civil law requires that the mother of a mue must also be destroyed. The Church is apt to give her the benefit of the doubt. Tradition says that demons bent on planting mue-seed may enter women in their sleep, or magic them into unnatural drowsiness; thus women may be assumed not guilty unless witnesses prove they copulated with the demon knowingly. A female animal bearing a mue is usually put out of the way mercifully, and the carcass exorcised and burned. The tolerant law also reminds us that demons can take the form of men in broad daylight, with such damnable skill that only priests can discover the fraud… Stories buzzed at the Bull-and-Iron about mues born in secret — singleeyed, tailed, purple-skinnned, legless, two-headed, hermaphrodite, furred — that grow to maturity in hiding and haunt the wilderness.

  Everywhere, it is the duty of a citizen to kill a mue on sight if possible, but to proceed with caution, because the monster’s demon father may be lurking near.

  He asked again: “I go?” Immense, well-formed on his soggy body, his arms could have torn a bull apart.

  “No.” That was my voice. Pure chicken — if I told him to go he might be angry.

  “Boy-man-beautiful.”

  He meant me, damn it. For politeness I said: “I like the picture.” He was bewildered. “Lines,” I said, and pointed into my cave. “Good.”

  He understood — smiled anyway, drooling, wiping away the slop across his chest. “Come me. Show things.”

  I was to go with him and maybe meet his father?

  I remembered hearing of a recent witch-scare over at Chengo, a town rather far west of Skoar. Children saw demons, they said. A ten-year-old girl said she had been coaxed into the woods by a bad woman and hidden where she was obliged to watch that woman and others of the town rushing around and playing push-push with manshaped devils that had animal heads. She was about to be dragged out of hiding and presented to the coven when a cock crew and the revels ended. The girl would not swear the demons had flown off into the clouds, and folk got cross with her about that, since everyone knows it’s what demons do, but she did name the women so that they could be burned.

  I slipped on my clothes and said: “Wait!” I entered my cave motioning the mue to remain outside. I was shaking; he was too, out there in the sun. I thought he might run away, but he stayed, scared of his own courage like a human being — and that thought once lodged in my head would not leave it. What after all was wrong with him except his hideous short legs? Fatness — but that didn’t make a mue, nor the ugly squinched-up features, nor even the hairlessness. I recalled seeing, at the public bathhouse in Skoar, a dark-skinned man who had almost no pubic hair and only a trace of fuzz under his arms — no one thought anything of it. I thought: What if some of the mue-tales are lies? Did a being as human as this have to live as a monster in the wilderness just because his legs were too short? And hadn’t I heard a thousand yarns on other subjects at the Bull-and-Iron that I knew to be bushwa, the tellers not expecting belief?

  I cut my loaf of oat bread in half. I had some notion of taming him like a beast by feeding him. I wanted my luckcharm. Its cord had broken and I was keeping it in my sack till I could contrive another. I took up the sack — was I for Abraham’s sake going somewhere? — and the hard lump of the charm through the cloth did comfort me.

  They carve such junk for tourists in Penn, as I found out later in my travels. My mother — anyhow someone at the house where I was born — gave me this, for I was told it hung at my neck when I arrived at the orphanage and they let me keep it. I probably cut my first teeth on it. It is a body with two fronts, male and female; the two-faced head has a brass loop embedded so you can wear it on a string. The folded arms and sex parts are sketched in flat and unreal. No legs: the thighs run together in a blob flattened on the bottom so you can set it upright. How the little gods get by without a rump I don’t know — maybe that’s how you know they are gods. It used to fascinate Caron. She liked to hold it under our blanket, and said it meant we would always be together.

  I took the half-loaf of oat bread to the mue. He didn’t grab. His flat nostrils flared; like a dog’s his gaze followed my fingers as I broke off a piece and ate it myself. Then he accepted the rest, and gnawed, slobbering with eagerness, though with his fat he could hardly have been going hungry, and it was soon finished. He said: “Come me?” He walked up the path and looked back. Like a smart dog.

  I followed him.

  Those stub legs pumped along pretty well. On a level he waddled; on rising slopes his hands pressed the ground for a speedy four-legged scramble. Downgrades bothered him; he followed a long slant where he could. He moved quietly as I’d learned to do in the woods, knew the country and must have been getting a living from it. He doubtless had no name.

  A state ward, I had no last name. Just Davy.

  Don’t imagine that thing with the bread came from any grown-up goodness in me. At fourteen whatever goodness I had was growing in the dark, obscured by shabby and cruel confusions that were inside of me as well as m my world: ignorance and fear; contempt of others for my class, which I was expected to pass on down to the slave class while all concerned made big talk of democratic equality; the cheating and conniving I daily saw people do, and their excuses for it — hi-ho, can’t be so wrong because look, even the nobility are bootlickers, pimps, swindlers, thieves, don’t you know? That’s ancient, I believe, that game of supposing you make yourself clean by pointing at the dirt on somebody else. No, I wasn’t good or kind.

  Since human beings make and choose their own ends, goodness can be an end in itself without supernatural gimmicks, but that idea never came into words for me until I heard the words in Nickie’s voice. Yet I think that I did dimly understand, at fourteen, how if you want to be a good human being you have to work at it.

  There was that early protest in my mind, that recognition of the mue’s humanity. But as I walked on through the forest with him I was governed mainly by fear and a dirty kind of planning. Schooling and the tavern-tales had told me mues weren’t like witches or spooks. Although the offspring of demons they couldn’t vanish, float through walls, use spells or the evil eye. God, said the authorities, may not be thought of as allowing such powers to a miserable mue. A mue died when you stuck a knife in him,, and it needn’t have a silver point.

  The law said when, not if. You must if you could; if not you must save yourself and bring word, so the mue can be hunted down by professionals with aid of a priest.

  The leather of my knife-sheath brushed my skin at every step. I began to resent the mue, imagining his hellish father behind every tree, building up the resentment like a fool searching after an excuse for a quarrel.

  We reached one of the mountain’s flanking ridges, where old trees stood enormous, casting deep shade from their interlacing tops. They were mostly pine, that through the years had built up a carpet of silence. The mue disliked this region — on clear and level ground anything could overtake him. He padded on with worried side-glances, nothing about him to suggest a demon’s protection.

  They didn’t say a demon always attended a mue…

  I decided it would be best to kill him on flat ground, and watched a spot below his last rib on the left side. After the stab I could be instantly clear of his long reach while the blood drained out of him. I drew m
y knife, and lowered it in my sack, afraid he might turn before I was ready. He cleared his throat, and that angered me — what right could he have to do things the human way? Still, I felt there was no hurry. This level area stretched on far ahead; I’d better wait till I was steadier.

  At the tavern I wouldn’t brag. I’d maintain a noble calm, the Yard-Boy Who Killed A Mue.

  They’d send me out with an escort to find the remains and verify my story. The skeleton would do, considering the leg-bones, and that’s all we’d find, for in the time it took the mission to settle arguments and get going the carrion-ants, crows, vultures, small wild scavenger dogs would have done their wilderness housecleaning. Maybe I’d drop something near the body. My luck-charm — that would fix anyone who set out snickering at me behind his hand.

  It came to me, as I caught the mue’s foul smell, that this was no daydream. I might be questioned by the Mayor, even the Bishop of Skoar. The Kurin family, tops in the Skoar aristocracy, would hear of it. They could make me the same as rich, a bond-servant no more. Why, I would ride to Levannon on a bright roan that none but I dared handle, and with two attendants — well, three, one to dash ahead and make sure of a room for me at the next inn, where a maid-servant would undress me and bathe me, wait on me in bed if I wished. In Levannon I would buy a thirty-ton outrigger, and look at that green hat with a hawk’s feather, and that shirt too, a marvel of Penn silk, green or maybe gold! As an adopted son of the nobility I could wear a loin-rag of what color I chose, but I’d be modest, I’d settle for freeman’s white, so long as it was silk. I didn’t think I wanted britches with a codpiece, a style just then coming into favor. Those I’d seen looked clumsy, and the codpiece an unnecessary brag. Moosehide moccasins I’d have, purtied up with ornaments of brass. I might start smoking, with a rich man’s fancy for nicely cured marawan and the best pale tobacco from Conicut or Lomeda.