Davy Read online

  The deMoha is largely imaginary, like a bridegroom’s seventh round. I mean, when I became slightly important in Nuin, Dion felt I should possess a more decorative handle, as a social convenience. After kicking my intellect around the bush and coming up with nothing better than Wilberforce, I asked his help and he suggested deMoha. With which I am stuck. You should have seen how relieved and happy the Lower Classes felt about washing my linen and so on after I got thus labeled but not before: for a top-flight snob, give me a poor man every time. And since according to our notions (but not those of Nuin) Nickie and I are most sincerely married, she calls herself deMoha and you can’t stop her. She claims I possess a natural nobility that remains in evidence with my clothes off, a rema’kable thing, and she has me so bewitched and bewattled that I naturally agree.

  “Even with a light burning?” s’s I.

  “Or widout,” s’s she. Nuin people can pronounce th perfectly well, but often they don’t bodda.

  Now I suppose you want me to explain why Nuin is called a Commonwealth when it’s been governed by a monarchy known as a Presidency, and a Senate with two left feet, for going on two hundred years. I don’t know.

  I had to hug Nickie awake this morning and tell her about varieties of time. She listened briefly, slid her hand over my mouth, and remarked: “One moment, my faun, my unusual chowderhead, my peculiar sweet-stuff so named because time is far, far too pressing to employ any such dad-gandered and long-syllabled and so deplorably erotic word as beloved, my singular and highly valued long-horned trouble-shooter, before we discuss anything that difficult we ought to wrestle (and don’t worry about the baby) to decide who has to go to the galley and fetch us breakfast in b — “I won. Only woman I ever heard of who’s just as wonderful at it in the morning. So eventually she had to go fetch breakfast, and returned to our cabin with Dion trailing.

  Not that she needed help in carrying the jerk meat and poor-jo biscuits, but I was pleased to see she’d loaded Dion down with a teapot and a jug of cranberry juice — we have to drink it, by his orders and Captain Barr’s. We have other antiscorbutics, salt cabbage for instance and sauerkraut; these we face at mid-day and suppertime with what courage we can summon. I remained respectfully in bed, Nickie slid back under the blanket with me, so the late Regent of Nuin had no place for his highborn rump except the floor, or my built-in desk seat which was obscured by some of Nickie’s clothes — anyhow the seat is too low for Dion’s long legs. He said: “Mis’ble lazy crumbs. I’ve been fishing since dawn, working-type jo.”

  “That’s nothing,” I said. “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Catch anything, either of you?”

  “Nay, Miranda — tied down the line and went back to sleep. Besides, Mr. Wilbraham was watching and it threw me off. Hate to have a donkey look over my shoulder.”

  I out with it, about varieties of time and story.

  “Direct narrative’s the main thing,” Dion said.

  “Why,” said Nickie, “the story of the voyage is clearly the best, because I’m in it already. Won’t be in the mainstream till he’s struggled up to his eighteenth year.”

  Dion grunted, in one of his lost, abstracted moods. He is forty-three; our tested and satisfying friendship can bridge the gap of totally different birth and upbringing more easily than the gap of age — how could I ever quite know how the world looks to a man who’s been in it fifteen years longer than I?… The darkness of his skin was a mark of distinction in Nuin. Morgan I, Morgan the Great who stirred up such a king-size gob of history two hundred years ago, is said to have been dark as a walnut. Nickie’s a deep tan with a rosy flush. I never met any of the Nuin nobility as blond as I am, though some approach it — the Princess of Hannis was a blazing redhead. If I understood the old books a little better or if more of them had survived the holy burnings, I suppose I could find the characteristics of the varied races of Old Time in modern people — an idle occupation, I’d say…

  “You’re both spooking up the wrong tree,” I said, “because all the different kinds of time are important. My problem is how to go from one to another with that utter perfection of grace which my wife finds so characteristic of me.” Captain Barr’s cat, Mam Humphrey, walked in just then, tail up, very pregnant, and looking for a soft place to sleep out the morning; she jumped on our bunk, knowing a good thing. “Historical time for instance. You must admit there’s a case to be made for history in moderation.”

  “Oh,” Dion said, “I suppose it’s useful material for stuffing textbooks. Lately we’ve lived rather more than a bellyful of it.”

  Nickie was getting maudlin, kissing Mam Humphrey’s black and white head and mumbling something Dion didn’t catch about two girls in the same fix. As it happened we didn’t tell Dion of the pregnancy till later in the day.

  “Still are,” I suggested. “This voyage is history.”

  “And the fog still deep,” Nickie said. “Oh — when I was getting the grub Jim Loman told me he saw a goldfinch skim by just when it was getting light. Do they migrate?”

  “Some.” I was remembering Moha. “Most stay the winter, anyway September’s too early for migration.”

  “When the fog is gone,” she said, “and the sun discovers us, let it be an island with none there but the birds and a few furry harmless things, the goldflnches no one could want to kill, the way they dip and rise, dip and rise — isn’t that the rhythm of living by the way? A drop and then a lightness and a soaring? Nay, don’t speak a word of my fancy unless you be liking it.”

  Dion said: “It could be the mainland of a nation with no kindness for strangers.”

  “Damn that prince,” she said. “I set free a small thing too large for my own head, whang goes the arrow of his common sense and down comes my bird in flight that was all the time na’ but an ambitious chicken.”

  “Why, I’m liking that goldfinch as much as thou, Miranda, but I’m a thousand years older, the way I used to be the simulacrum of a ruler, and that means to contend with folly — compromise with it — after a while the heart sickens as thou knowest. Nothing strange about my uncle going mad. A good weak man, I think, gone into hiding, into a shell his mind built for him. What we saw — the fat thing on the floor drooling and masturbating with dolls, that was the shell. I suppose the good weak man died inside it after a while, the shell continuing to exist.”

  The thing had to be gelded, before the Church would allow it to go on existing in secret and agree to the polite fiction of “ifi health” to spare the presidential family the disgrace of having produced a brain-mue — which could have caused a dangerous public uproar. The priest who castrated him told Dion that after the first shock, Morgan III seemed to recover a moment of clarity and said plainly: “Happy the man who can no longer beget rulers!”

  “Hiding,” Nickie asked, “from the follies he feared he might himself commit?”

  “Something like that. As for me, I suppose I shall be something to frighten good Nuin children for centuries, as the Christians of Old Time used to rattle the bones of the Emperor Julian miscalled the Apostate.”

  “Write Nuin’s history thyself,” said Nickie, “outside of Nuin. How else could it be done anyway? — certainly not in the shadow of the Church.”

  “Why,” said Dion, thinking it over — “why, I might do that…”

  “We’ve thought we wanted to find mainland,” I said, “but I can go along with Nick — why not an island? Does the Captain still say we’re near what the map calls the Azores?”

  “Yes. Of course our calculation of longitude is off — the best clocks already three minutes in disagreement. Made by the Timekeepers’ Guild of Old City, best in the known world, and by Old-Time standards what are those craftsmen? Moderately fair beginners, gifted clodhoppers.”

  I began clacking then, instructing Dion for a while on the political management of an island colony of intelligent Heretics. I have that fault. In a different world — and if I didn’t spend so much time more profitably, making music an
d tumbling my rose-lipped girl, I think I might have become a respectable teacher of snotnoses.

  Later this morning we were busy. Captain Barr ordered out the longboat to try towing the Morning Star clear of the fog, and we went on a snailpace for some hours. He quit the attempt when the men were tired, though the lead was still finding no bottom. He was sure he smelled land through the fog-damp, and I smelled it too. That land could rise sheer and sudden out of deep water. Tomorrow, if the fog gives us fifty yards or better of visibility, he may try the towing again.

  The stillness troubles us. We listen for breakers or the slap of water against stone.

  Nickie sleeps; I am suspended in my own mist of memory and reflection and ignorance. How truly is a man the master of his own course?

  The unknown drives us. We could not know we were to lose the war in Nuin. How should I have known I would find and covet the golden horn? But within my small range of knowledge and understanding, driven by chance but still human, still brainy and passionate and stubborn and no more of a coward than my brothers, it’s for me to say where I go.

  Let others think for you and you throw away your opportunity of possessing your own life even within that limited range. You’re then no longer a man but an ox in human shape, who doesn’t understand that he might break the fence if he had the will. Early in our years together Nickie said to me: “Learn to love me by possessing thine own self, Davy, as I try to learn how to possess my own — I think there’s no other way.”

  As men and not oxen, I suppose we are men with a candle in the dark. Close in the light with walls of certainty or authority, and it may seem brighter — look, friends, that’s a reflection from prison walls, your light is no larger. I’ll carry mine through the open night in my own hand.

  6

  I couldn’t stop running with my golden horn till I’d rounded the east side of the mountain, passed the approach to my cave without thinking of it, and was looking down on the Skoar church spires. I collapsed on a log gulping for air.

  The skin of my belly hurt. I found a patch of red and a puncture mark. I’d blundered through an orb-spider’s web and only now would my body admit the pain. I’d been bitten before and knew what to expect. Hot needles were doing a jerky jig over my middle; my head ached, I’d soon have a fever, and then by tomorrow it wouldn’t bother me much. I was enough of a child and a savage to marvel at God’s letting me off so lightly.

  I unwrapped the horn and raised it to my lips. How naturally it rested against me, my right hand at the valves! I imagined the ancient makers putting a guiding magic in it. They simply took thought for the shape of human body and arm, like a knife-maker providing for the human hand. Partly by accident, I must have firmed my lips and cheeks in almost the right way. It spoke for me. I thought of sunlight transformed to sound.

  I returned it to the sack, scared. Not of the mue three miles away with the mountain between us, but of his demon father. Fevered already, I said aloud: “Well, fuck him, he don’t exist no-way.” Know what? — nothing happened.

  Maybe that was the moment I began to understand what most grown people never learn, and did not even in the Golden Age, namely that words are not magic.

  I said (silently this time) that it didn’t matter. The horn was mine. I’d never see the mue again. I’d run away to Levannon, yes, but not by way of North Mountain.

  The spider-bite set me vomiting, and I recalled some wiseacre saying the best treatment for orb-spider’s bite was a plaster of mud and boy’s urine. Loosening my loin-rag, I muttered: “A’n’t no use account I a’n’t a hejasus boy no more.” And laughed some, and piddled on bare earth to make the plaster anyhow. I’m sure it was as good as anything the medicine priests do for the faithful — didn’t kill me and made the pain no worse. I went on downhill to the edge of the forest near the stockade, to wait for dark and the change of guards.

  A wide avenue, Stockade Street, ran all around the city just inside the palings; after the change the new guard would march a hundred paces down that street, and I would hear him go. That spring they were more alert than usual because of a rising buzz of war talk between Moha and Katskil; border towns take a beating in those affairs. At the end of his section he’d meet the next guard and bat the breeze if the corporal or sergeant wasn’t around, and that would leave my favorite spot unwatched. Later on the guards would take longer breaks in safe corners, smoking tobacco or marawan and trading stiffeners,[9] but the first break would suit my needs. Meanwhile I had an hour to wait and spent it unwisely thinking too much about the mue, which made me wonder what sort of creature I was.

  I knew of brain-mues, the most dreaded of all, who have a natural human form so that no one can guess their nature till their actions reveal it. Sooner or later they behave in a way folk call the mue-frenzy, or insanity. They may bark, fume, rush about like beasts, see what others do not, lapse (like Morgan III) into the behavior of an idiot child, or sit speechless and motionless for days on end. Or they may with the most reasonable manner speak and obviously believe outrageous nonsense, usually suspecting others of wickedness or conspiracy or supposing themselves to be famous important people — even Abraham, or God himself. When brain-mues reveal themselves this way they are given over to the priests for disposal, like people who develop mysterious discolorations or lumps under the skin, since these are also considered to be the working-out of a mue-evil.

  An Old-Time book we have on board describes “insane” people very differently, as sick people who may be treated and sometimes healed. This book uses the word “psychopathic” and mentions “insanity” or “craziness” as unsuitable popular terms. Ayah, and nowadays if you call a jo “crazy” you only mean he’s odd, weird, full of mahooha, a long-john-in-summer, a quackpot. Our Old-Time book speaks of these people with no horror but with a kind of compassion that in the modern spook-ridden world human beings seldom show except to those who very closely resemble themselves.

  Well, hunkered in the thicket outside the palisade, I knew nothing of books except as a dusty bewilderment of my schooltime, now past. I thought, with none to console me: Do brain-mues act as I’ve done? No! I said. But the idea lurked in shadow, a black wolf waiting.

  Behind the palings a man with a fair tenor and a mandolin was singing “Swallow in the Chimbley,” approaching down a side-street. Skoar folk had been humming that ever since a Rambler gang introduced it a few years before. It made me think of Emmia, less about my troubles.

  Swallow in the chimbley,

  Oop hi derry O!

  Swallow in the chimbley,

  Sally on my knee.

  Swallow flying high,

  Sally, don’t you cry!

  Tumble up and tumble down and lie with me.

  The evening was hot, heavy with the smell of wild hyacinth, so still I could hear that man hawk and spit after goofing the high note the way you expect a tenor to do if he’s got more sass than education. I liked that.

  You can’t live thinking you’re a brain-mue.

  Swallow in the chimbley,

  Oop hi derry O!

  Swallow in the chimbley,

  Sally jump free—

  Left her smock behind,

  Sally, don’t you mind!

  Tumble up and tumble down and lie with me.

  The singer was evidently the stockade guard’s relief, for now I heard the ceremony of the change of guards. First the old guard hollered at the new to quit making like a Goddamn likkered-up tomcat and get the lead out of his butt. After that, the solemn clash of gear, and a brisk discussion of music, the rightness of the town clock, what the corporal would say, where the corporal could shove it, and a suggestion that the musical new guard do something in the way of sexual self-ministration which I don’t think is possible, to which the singer replied that he couldn’t account he was built like a bugle. I sneaked over to the base of the stockade, waiting out the ceremony. At last the new guard stomped off down the street on his first round — without his mandolin since he had to carry a ja
velin.

  Swallow in the chimbley,

  Oop hi derry O!

  Swallow in the chimbley,

  Sally cry “Eee!”

  Catch her by the tail,

  Happy little quail!

  Tumble up and tumble down and lie with me.

  The spider-bite hampered me climbing the stockade, but I made it, the burden in my sack unharmed. I sneaked down Kurin Street to the Bull-and-Iron. Emmia’s window was lit, though it wasn’t yet her bedtime. When I reached the stable, damned if she wasn’t there doing my work for me. She had finished watering the mules, and turned with a finger at her lips. “They think I’m in my room. Said I seen you at work and they took my word for it. I swear, Davy, this is the last time I cover up for you. Shame on you!”

  “You didn’t have to, Miss Emmia. I—”

  “’Didn’t have to’ — and me trying to save your backside a tanning! Moving away, Mister Independent?”

  I squirmed my sack to the floor; my sh!rt sprung open and she saw the smeary bite. “Davy darling, whatever? And here she comes in a warm rush, no more mad at all. “Oh dear, you got a fever too!”

  “Orb-spider.”

  “Dumb crazy love, going off where them awful things be, if you was small enough to turn over my lap I’d give you a fever where you’d remember it.” She went on so, sugary scolding that means only kindness and female bossiness.