Davy Read online

  I fancied Old Jon Robson ashamed of all unkindness and anxious to crowd in on the glory. I would permit it. Clickety-clackety, he knew all along the boy had it in him.

  Mam Robson might have a go at supplying me with a few ancestors. Already, when slightly pleased with me, she’d remarked that I sort of resembled a relative of hers who rose through the ranks to be a Captain in the Second Kanhar Regiment and married a baron’s daughter — which showed, said she, that people with square chins and plenty of ear-lobe were the ones that got ahead in the world — this was one for Old Jon, who had several chins but none of them too clearly connected with his jawbone.

  * * *

  Who can say what man might have visited the house where I was born?

  I’m concerned about varieties of time: one reason why I stepped in here a moment behind the asterisks. You’d best get used to the idea that my brain-scratching — digression is the word some people would prefer — is not a suspension of action but a different kind of action, on a rather different time scale. Your much-abused amiable mind, all of a doodah over women and children and taxes and a certain almost needless worry of yours about whether you exist, may dislike the suggestion that more than one kind of time is allowable, but give it a go, will you? Meanwhile, on what we might call the asterisk time scale, you can’t very well stop me if I choose to claim that Pappy was a grandee, some hightoned panjandrum traveling incognito through Skoar and planting me in an idle moment when he had a hasty hard on and a smidgin of loose change — why not? Well, later in the book I’ll tell you why not, or why probably not. Don’t rush me.

  I used to hate my shadowy father in my early years. I was six when, since I had accidentally overheard talk of my origin, Father Milsom told me what parents are, and said my Da was undoubtedly just a whore’s customer, and then added some dismally fit-for-six explanation of the word “whore” to complete the confusion. Yes, I hated my nameless father’s guts; and yet when Caron first slid under my blanket I told her the President of Moha had visited Skoar in disguise, stopping off at the Mill Street house to make a baby — me. After that I felt better about the whole deal. Who wouldn’t, with a President in the family? Caron — bless her — was quick to play along and devise generous plans full of arson and bloodshed for establishing my birthright.

  A few nights later I learned that her mother, nine months before she was born, had a Passionate Affair with the Archbishop of Moha who also just happened to be passing by, and noticed her extreme beauty and sent litter-bearers after her so she could visit his residence in secret. Kay, so we had plans for Caron too, but were smart enough to keep all such enterprise under the blanket, where sometimes we called each other President and Presidentess, with frightful oaths never to speak of the matter in daytime.

  If you find that anecdote funny, go to hell.

  * * *

  Walking on behind the mue, my overheated fancy also heard Emmia Robson: “Davy darling, what if you’d got hurt?” Maybe not “darling” but even “Spice,” the lovename girls in Moha don’t use unless they really mean come-try-something. “Nay, Spice,” s’s I, “it was nothing, and didn’t I have to destroy the brute for your sake?”

  I decided the conversation had better take place in her bedroom. She had let down her hair to cover the front of her, so my hands — gentle but still the hands that had rid the world of a dread monster — parted the softness to find the pink flower-tips. And here and now, walking behind him in the woods, all I had to do—

  The mue stopped and faced me. He may have wanted to reassure me, or transmit some message beyond his powers of speech. I took my hand out of the sack, without the knife. I couldn’t do it, I knew, if he was looking at me. He said: “We go not — not—”

  “Not far?”

  “Is word.” He was admiring — what a marvel to know all the words I did! “Bad thing come, I here, I here.” He tapped his ponderous arm. “You — I — you — I—”

  “We’re all right,” I said.

  “We. We.” He had used the word himself, but it appeared to disturb or puzzle him.

  “We means you and I.”

  He nodded in his patch of leaf-dappled sunlight. Puzzled and thoughtful. Human. He grunted and smiled dimly and went on ahead.

  I sheathed my knife and did not draw it again that day.

  4

  The region of great trees ended. As if sliding into dark water we entered a place where the master growth was wild grape; here day would always be a kind of evening. The slow violence of the vine had overcome a stand of maple and oak. Many of these were dead, upholding their murderers; others lived, winning sunlight enough to continue an existence of slavery.

  Still I found an infinity of color and change. Some of the gleams in the vagueness above me were orchids. I glimpsed a blue and crimson parrot, and a tanager who was first a motionless ember and then a shooting-star. I heard a wood-dove lamenting — so it sounds, though I believe he cries for love.

  The mue glanced up at the interlocking tangle and then at my legs and arms. “You not,” he said, and showed what he meant by catching a grapevine loop and swarming up it until he was thirty feet above ground. He launched his bulk across a gap to grab another loop, and another. Many yards away, he shifted his grip with ease and returned. He was right, it wasn’t for me. I’m clever in the trees, and slept in them once or twice before I found my cave, but my arms are merely human. He called: “You go ground?”

  I went ground. The walking became nasty. He traveled ahead above a vile thicket — fallen branches, hardhack, blackberry, poison ivy, rotten logs where fire-ants would be ready with their split-second fury. Snake and scorpion could be here. The puffy-bodied black-and-gold orbspiders, big as my big toe, had built many homes; their bite won’t kill but makes you wish it had.

  The mue held down his pace to accommodate me. A quarter-mile of this struggle brought me up to a network of catbrier and there I was stopped: ten-foot elastic stems in a mad basket-weave, tough as moose-tendon and cruel as weasel-teeth. Beyond, I saw what may have been the tallest tree in Moha, a tulip tree at least twelve feet through at the base. The grape had found it long ago and gone rioting up into the sunshine, but might not have killed the giant after another hundred years. My mue was up there, pointing to a vine-stem that dangled on my side of the briers and connected with the loops around the tree. I shinnied up and worked over; he grasped my foot and set it gently on a branch.

  As soon as he was sure of my safety he climbed, and I followed for maybe another sixty feet. It was easy as a ladder. The tree’s side-branches had become smaller, the vine-leaves thicker in the increase of sunlight, when we came to a mass of crossed wood and interwoven vine. Not an eagle’s nest as I foolishly thought at first — no bird ever lifted sticks of that size — but a nest certainly, six feet across, built on a double crotch, woven as shrewdly as any willow basket in the Corn Market and lined with gray moss. The mue let himself into it and made room for me.

  He talked to me.

  I felt no sense of dreaming. Did you in childhood, as I did now and then with Caron, play the game of imaginary countries? You might decree that if you stepped through the gap in a forked tree-trunk you’d be entering a different world. If then in the flesh you did step through you found you must continue to rely on make-believe, and I know that hurt. Suppose you had been met, in solid truth, on the other side of your tree-trunk, by a dragon, a blue chimera, a Cadillac,[4] an elf-girl all in greeen—?

  “See you before,” the mue said. So he must have watched me on other visits to North Mountain — me with my keen eyes and ears, studied by a monster and never guessing it! He would not have passed the human kind of judgment on the monkey tricks of a boy who thought himself alone; that consoling thought came to me after a while.

  He told me of his life. Mere fragments of language to help him, worn down by years of speaking to no one but himself — I won’t record much of the actual talk. He waved toward the northeast, where from our height the world was a green
sea under the gold of afternooon — he had been born somewhere off that way, if I understood him. He spoke of a journey of “ten sleeps,” but I don’t know what distance he might have covered in a day’s travel. His mother, evidently a farm woman, had raised him in the woods. To him birth was a vagueness — “Began there,” he said, and fumblingly tried to repeat what his mother had told him of birth, giving it up as soon as I showed I understood. Death he grasped, as an ending. “Mother’s man stop live” — before he was born, I think he meant. Describing his mother, all he could say was “big, good.” I guessed she would have been some stout farm woman who managed to hide her pregnancy in the first months, and perhaps her husband’s death made matters simpler.

  By law, every pregnancy must be reported immediately to civil and church authorities, no pregnant woman may be left alone after the fifth month, and a priest must be present at every birth to decide whether the child is normal and dispose of it if he considers it a mue. There are occasional breaches in the law — the Ramblers for instance, always on the go, could evade it much more often than they do — but the law is there, carrying a heavy charge of religious as well as secular command.

  This mue’s mother had no help in raising him to some age between eight and ten except that of a big dog. It would have been one of the tall wolfhounds a farm family needs if it is to risk dwelling outside a stockade. The dog guarded the baby when the mother could not be with him, and grew old as he grew up.

  * * *

  We have two wolfhounds aboard the Morning Star, Dion’s Roland and Roma. They are friendly enough now, but while Dion’s mood was black with misery over what had happened in Nuin — our loss of the war, forced flight, certain destruction of nearly all the reforms begun while he was Regent and Nickie and I his unofficial counselors — no one dared go near them except Dion himself; not even Nickie nor Dion’s bedmates Nora Severn and Greta Shawn. The dogs dislike the motion of the ship — Roland was seasick for two days — but keep alive on smoked meat and biscuit that nobody grudges them.

  Yesterday evening at sundown Nickie was at the rail, for once looking behind us to that part of the horizon beyond which lie Nuin and the other lands, and Roland came to lean sentimentally against her hip. She touched his head; not with them, I watched the westerly breeze rumple his gray pelt and Nickie’s luminous brown hair. It is cut short like a man’s, but she’s all woman these days, dressing in the few simple garments she has made for herself from the ship’s store of cloth — necessity, since most of us came aboard with nothing but what we were wearing, that ugly day. Yesterday in the red-gold light she wore a blouse and skirt of the plainest brown Nuin linsey — all woman but in a mood not to be touched,[5] I thought, and so I did not go to her in spite of a hunger to take hold of her small waist and kiss her brown throat and shoulders. Roland, after winning her hand’s casual recognition, stepped away and lay down on the deck not too near, adoring but keeping it to himself, waiting for her to look at him again if she would. He could be aware, as I am, how in spite of all pressures of male and female vanity, male and female foolishness, women are still people.

  * * *

  The mue’s mother had taught him speech, now distorted by the years when he had small chance to make use of it. She taught him to win a living from the wilderness — hunting, snaring, brook-fishing with his hands, finding edible plants; how to stalk and, most important, how to hide. She taught him he must avoid all human beings, who would kill him on sight. I can’t guess what sort of existence she imagined for his future; maybe she was able to avoid thinking of it. Nor can I guess what made him risk his life by approaching me, unless it was an overwhelming hunger for any sort of contact with what he knew to be his own breed.

  At some time between his eighth and tenth years — “she come no more.” He waited long. The dog was killed by a woods buffalo-little hellions they are, no more than half the size of tame cattle but frightfully strong and intelligent; we lost a man to one of them when I was with Rumley’s Ramblers. The mue gave me most of that story in sign language, crying freely when he spoke of the dog’s death and casually urinating through the floor of his nest.

  When he felt that his mother must have died too, he made his journey of ten sleeps. I asked about years; he didn’t understand. He had no way of telling me how often the world had cooled into the winter rains. He may have been twenty-five years old, when I saw him. During that journey a hunter sighted him and shot an arrow into him. “Come me sharp-stick man-beautiful.” His fingers squeezed a remembered throat, he cried and belched and made a wet howling noise, his mouth spread open like a little wound. Then he studied me calmly to see if I understood, while a worm of fear stumbled down my back.

  “Show now,” he said, and lifted himself abruptly to descend the tree, all the way to the ground.

  Inside the catbriers a floor of rocks surrounded the tree, making a circle six feet out from the base. It created a fortress for him; only a snake could penetrate those thorns. The rocks overlapped so neatly the brier did not force its way through; many layers must have been fitted together — yes, and painfully searched out, painfully brought along the grapevine path. He had a stone hammer here, a rock shaped into a chopper, a few other gidgets. He showed me these, not so trustingly, and indicated I should stand where I was while he got something from the other side of the tree-trunk.

  I heard rocks cautiously moved. His hands appeared beyond the trunk, setting down a rose-colored slab; I knew it would be the marker-stone of some poor hideaway. He returned to me, carrying a thing whose like I have never seen elsewhere.

  I thought at first it might be some oddly shaped trumpet such as hunters and the cavalry use, or a comet like those I’d heard when Rambler gangs visited Skoar and set up their shows in the green. But this golden horn resembled those things only as a racing stallion resembles a plowhorse — both honorable creatures, but one is a devil-angel with the rainbow on his shoulders.

  The large flared end, the two round coils and the straight sections of the pipe between bell and mouthpiece — oh, supposing we could cast such metal nowadays we’d still have no way of working it so perfectly into shape. I knew at once the instrument was of Old Time — it could not have been designed in ours — and I was afraid.

  Ancient coins, knives, spoons, kitchenware that won’t rust — such objects of the perished world are often turned up in plowing or found at the edge of ruins that wilderness has not quite covered, like those on the Moha shore of the Hudson Sea near the village of Albany that lead down into the water like a stairway abandoned by gods. If the Old-Time thing has a clear harmless function the rule is finders-keepers, if you can pay a priest to exorcise the evil and stamp the object with the holy wheel. Mam Robson owned a skillet of gray metal that never rusted, found by her grandfather in turning over a cornfield, handed on to her at her marriage. She never used it but liked to show it to the inn guests for an oh-ah, telling how her mother did cook with it and took no harm. Then 0ld Jon would snort in with the tale of its discovery as if he’d been there, while her sad face, unlike Emmia’s round pretty one but rather like a Vairmant mule’s, would be saying he was no Jo to ever find her such a thing, not him, blessed miracle if he got up off his ass long enough to scratch… If the ancient thing is too weird the priest buries it,[6] where it can do no harm.

  In the mue’s hands the horn was a golden shining. I’ve seen true gold since then; it is much heavier, with a different feel. But I call this a golden horn because I did think of it so for a long time, and the name still suggests a kind of truth. If you’re sure there’s only one kind of truth, go on, shove, read some other book, get out of my hair.

  Uneasily the mue let me take it. “Mother’s man’s thing she say.” I felt better when I found the wheel-sign — some priest, some time, had prayed away the spooks. The horn gathered light out of that shady place, itself a sun. “She bring, say I to keep… You blow?” So at least he knew it was a thing for music.

  I puffed my cheeks and tried — breath
-noise and a mutter. The mue laughed and took it back hastily. “I show.” His wretched mouth almost vanished in the cup, his cheeks firmed instead of puffing. I heard it speak.

  I wonder if you know that voice in your part of the world? I will not try to describe it — I would not try to describe an icicle breaking sunshine into colored magic, nor to draw a picture of the wind. I know of only one place where words and music belong together, and that is song.

  The mue pressed one of the valves and blew a different note, and then another. He blew a single note to each breath with no thought of combining them, no idea of rhythm or melody. Why, at the first sound my mind had overflowed with songs heard at the tavern, on the streets, at Rambler shows, and far back in the time when fat sweet Sister Carnation sang for me. To the poor mue, music was just notes indefinitely prolonged, unrelated. He could have blown that way all day and learned no more.

  I tried to ask where it had come from; he shook his head. “Was it kept hidden?” Another headshake — how should he know? Questions from a world not his, that allowed him no gift but the cruel one of birth. “Did you use it to call your mother?” He looked empty-faced, as if there might be some such memory, none of my business, and he carried the horn back into hiding without answering.

  I again saw his hands on that reddish rock, heard it setback in its former place, and knew 1 could find that place in ten seconds, and knew the golden horn must be mine.

  It must be mine.

  He returned smiling, comfortable now that his treasure was safe… I do claim one trace of honor: I did not again plan to kill him, nor even think of it except for one or two random moments. That’s my scrap of virtue.