Davy Read online

  Well then, I did ought to feel just a smidgin of repentance about tonight, not because it was my fault, it wasn’t, it wasn’t, except maybe I shouldn’t ought to’ve kissed her just that way, because boys ought to be kind of careful and try to stay pure and like reverent by not thinking too much about you-know-what, anyhow after my apprentice time I’d prob’ly marry some nice woman and everything would be nice, and by the way I mustn’t feel bad about it not you-know standing up like, because she happened to know for a fact the same thing happened to lots of boys if they was just scared or not used to things, see, it didn’t necessarily mean they had some enemy doing nasty things with a wax image, although of course if I was a full-growed man it could be that and you had to be careful, anyhow it was all her fault like she’d said before. I said I was sorry.

  She said she knew I was and it did me credit, and nobody would ever know, and as for the laws, why, they’d ought to take them mis’ble laws out and drown them, because bond-servant or no I was as good as anybody and she’d say it again, as good as anybody, more b’ token she wouldn’t let anyone hurt one hair of my head, ever, only what she meant about proving myself, well, see, I ought to go and do something difficult, she didn’t mean anythmg wild or goofy, just something hard and well, like noble or something, so as to — so as to—

  “Miss Emmia, I mean Emmia, I will, I mean it, cross my heart I will, like what frinstance?”

  “Oh, you should choose it yourself, something you don’t want to do but know you should, like going to church regular, only it don’t have to be that, you ought to want to do that anyway. No, just something good and honest and difficult, the way I’ll be proud of you, I’ll be your inspiration like — no, you mustn’t kiss me again, not ever until you be freeman, mind now I mean it.”

  She stood up away from me, smoothing her skirt, her eyes downcast, maybe crying again a little, but in the weak lantern-light I couldn’t be sure. “I’ll try, Emmia.”

  “I mean I want us to be good, Davy, like — like respectable people, nice people that get ahead and get asked to go places and stuff. That’s what they mean, see, by fearing God and living in Abraham and like that, I mean there’s a right way and a wrong way, I mean I — well, I a’n’t always been too good, Davy, you wouldn’t know.” She was at the trap-door, setting down the lantern. She blew it out to leave for me at the head of the ladder. “You go to sleep now, Davy — little Spice.” She was gone.

  I could have run after her then, ready as ever I would be, no more sense than a jack-in-the-box, and no less. But I only went to the window, and saw her vague shape crossing the stable yard, and crawled back under the blankets into a dream-tormented sleep.

  I was running — rather, a mush-footed staggering on legs too heavy and too short — through a house dimly like the Bull-and-Iron. It possessed a thousand rooms, each containing something with a hint of memory: a three-legged stool the orphanage kids sat on when they were naughty; a ring Sister Carnation wore; a cloth doll; my luck-charm upright in one of the crimson slippers Caron wore when she first came to the orphanage — (they’d been swiftly taken away from her as a sinful vanity). In that house black wolf followed me, in no hurry — he could wait. His throat-noises resembled words: “Look at me! Look at me!” If I did, even once, he would have me. I went on — each room windowless, no sunrise place. The doors would not latch behind me. When I leaned against one, black wolf slobbered at the crack, and I said over my shoulder: “I’ll give Caron my Katskil knife and she will do you something good and difficult.” He shut up then, but I must still find Caron or my threat was empty, and it may be she went on ahead with one brown foot bare and my candle upright in the other crimson slipper, but I don’t know, for I tripped and went down, knowing black wolf was about to snuff at my neck, then knowing I was awake on my pallet in the stable loft, but for a while I wasn’t certain I was alone.

  I was alone. I smelled the dry hay, and Emmia’s scent — merely from her blanket. Late moonlight showed me the loft window. The spider-bite was a harmless itch and soreness. I found my sack and felt of the golden horn. It was not mine.

  I knew what that action must be, good and honest and difficult. My horn must go back to an ugly creature who could make no use of it. Was that good? Well, it was difficult and honest. I could never tell of it to Emmia — unless maybe I dressed up the story — changed the mue to a hermit perhaps? Nay, when had I ever told the girl anything but the simplest every-day matters? Why, in my day-dreams. Then, sure, she never failed to respond wonderfully.

  I would run away, scorned, abused, in danger of my life because Emmia had reported me to the authorities for not killing the mue. Then, let’s see-would I fall prey to the policer dogs? Facing them, I would say — nope. Well, climb a tree, talk from there? Balls.

  However, some far-off day I might revisit Skoar, a scarred and sad-faced man disinclined to mention heroic action in the far-off wars of — Nuin? Corncut? Why wouldn’t I captain an expedition that did away, with the Cod Islands pirates? So in gratitude a friendly nation made me Governor of them balmy isles—

  Kay, in those days how was I to know the Cods are a few lumps scattered through the waters off Nuin as if someone had flung gobs of wet sand out of a bucket?

  Emmia, having sorrowfully blamed herself all these years, might recognize me, but alas—

  A rat lolloping across an overhead beam scared the bejasus out of me. I slung on my clothes, and felt for the lump of my luck-charm in the sack. I must find another cord and wear it again the right way. I would cut a length of fishline for it when I got to my cave. I tried not to think of the horn. My moccasins went into the sack on top of it, and I settled my knife-belt.

  Emmia’s blanket mustn’t be found here by somebody who’d say it proved we spent the night together under it. I crammed it on top of the moccasins and went down the ladder. Going away for real, I thought.

  But Emmia mustn’t be harmed, as she might be if the blanket merely turned up missing. All permanent property of the Bull-and-Iron seemed to be attached to Mam Robson by a God-damn mystic cord. Food in moderation you could steal, but let a blanket or candlestick or such-like walk with Abraham, and something wounded the Mam deep in her soul; she couldn’t rest till she’d searched out the cause of the pain, all the better if she could drive Old Jon into a twittering frenzy while she did it.

  I stood under Emmia’s window studying the big jinny-creeper. The ancient stem was sturdy and should hold me. Old Jon and the Main slept on the other side of the building. The rooms nearest Emmia’s were for guests; below was a store-room. Only a reckless randy-john would climb up there. I climbed.

  The vine gripped the bricks with ten thousand toes, bent and whispered but did not break. I clung with an arm over the sill. I’d carried the blanket up in my teeth and left my sack in deep shadow. I dropped the blanket inside the room that was nch with Emmia’s fragrance. I heard a small puppy-moan that must mean sleep, maybe the nudging of a dream. She might wake, see my shadow and scream the house down. This was the shape my fear took that time. I was on the ground and jittering away down Kurin Street before I could stop trembling.

  Sick-angry too because I had not gone to her bed, but I could dream up plentiful reasons for not going back now. They drove me on — over the stockade, up the mountain. But I would return, I told myself, after I restored the horn. I’d try to please her. Hell, I’d even go to church if there was no way to weasel out of it. And (said another self) I would get it in.

  * * *

  Dion has offered the colonists a name for the island — Neonarcheos. I think I like it. It is from Greek, a language already ancient and unspoken in the Golden Age. Dion is one of the few among the Heretics who studied that, and Latin. (The Church forbids to the public anything at all in a language not English — it could be sorcery.) He introduced me to the Greek and Latin authors in translation; I note that they also looked backward toward a Golden Age preceding what they called the Age of Iron…

  Dion’s name for this pl
ace says something I wanted said — new-old. It connects us somehow with the age when this island — and the others that must lie close over the horizon, all of different shape and smaller than they were before the ocean rose — was a Portuguese possession, whatever that may have meant to it; yes, and with a time far more remote, when civilization capable of recording itself was a new thing on earth, and this island was a speck of green in the blue inhabited, as when we found it, only by the birds and other shy things who live their entire lifetimes without either wisdom or malice.

  * * *

  When I climbed North Mountain again to return the horn I did not see true sunrise, for by the time it arrived I was in that big-tree region where the day before I might so easily have killed my monster. I was not hurrying; reluctance made me feel as though the air itself had thickened to a barrier. I did not feel much afraid of the mue, though when I entered the tangle where his grapevine pathways ran I was looking upward too much, until certain timorous fancies were flooded out of me by a wrong smell — wolf smell.

  I drew my knife, exasperated — must I be halted, distracted by a danger not connected with my errand? The scent was coming from dead ahead, where I had to go in order not to lose the marks of my passage of the day before. I was not far from the tulip tree. Knife ready, I made no effort to be quiet — if the wolf was lurking anywhere within a hundred yards he knew exactly where I was.

  You can’t look quite straight at black wolf even from the rail above the baiting-pit. Something about him pushes your gaze off true. I spoke of that once to Dion, who remarked that maybe we glimpse a fraction of our selves in him. My dear friend Sam Loomis, a gentle heart if ever there was one, used to claim he was sired by an irritated black wolf onto the cunt of a hurricane; in such nonsense talk he may have been saying something not entirely nonsense.

  When a man hears black wolf’s cold long cry in the dark, his heart does strain at its human boundaries. You, I, anyone. You know you won’t go out there to hunt with him, quarrel with him over the bleeding meat, run down the glades of midnight with him and his diamond-eyed female, be a thing like him. But we are deep enough to contain the desire; it does not altogether sleep. All nights are resonant with the unspoken. Latent in our brains, our muscles, our sex, are all the harsh lusts that ever blazed. We are lightning and the avalanche, fire and the crushing storm.

  That morning I found my black wolf quickly. She was below the grapevine that hung down outside the catbriers, and she was dead. An old bitch wolf — my knife prodded the huge scrawny carcass, six feet long from her snout to the base of her mangy tail. Scarred, foul, hair once black gone rusty with festered spots. When alive, for all her decay she could still have hamstrung a wild boar. But her neck was broken.

  Lifting, poking with my knife — I could not have touched her with my hand and not puked — I proved to myself that her neck was broken. Doubt it if you like — you never saw my North Mountain mue and his arms. Her body was already losing stiffness, and a line of the midget yellow carrion ants had laid out their mysterious highway to her, so she must have been dead for several hours. The cover was too dense to admit the wings of crows or vultures, and it is said the small scavenger dogs of the wilderness will not touch black wolf’s body. I rubbed away a bit of the ants’ path and watched stupidly as they fiddled about restoring it. The dry blood on the rocks, the ground, the grape-stem, was not from the dead wolf, who had no wound but a broken neck.

  I read the signs. She had ambushed the mue when he was near the vine. Bushes were flattened and torn; a heavy boulder had been jerked out of its earth-pocket. It would have happened the day before, perhaps when he came back from the pooi. He could have been careless from distress, wondering why he had not changed to man-beautiful.

  Or he might have lifted the rose-colored rock to find his treasure gone, and come storming out ready to attack the first thing that moved.

  Either way, I was guilty.

  Her mouth was agape, the teeth dry. I noticed one of the great stabbers in the lower jaw had broken off long before, leaving a blackened stump in a pus-pocket that must have caused her agony. I believe it had never occurred to me before that a black wolf like any other sentient thing could suffer. The other long tooth of the lower jaw was brown with dry blood.

  I climbed the tulip tree. There were blood-smears all the way. I did not think the mue could have lost so much and still be living, but I called to him: “I’ve come back. I’m bringing it back to you. I took it but I’m bringing it back.” I mounted a thick branch above his nest and compelled myself to look down. The yellow ants must have formed their column on the opposite side of the trunk, or surely I would have seen them sooner.

  He was human. Knowing that, I was wondering for a while how much of my schooling had been lies on top of lies.

  I alone remember him. You may remember what I’ve written, a book-thing for leisure talk. But as I wnte this now I am the only one who even knows of him except Nickie and Dion, for I’ve never told any others, except one person who is dead, how it was that I won my golden horn.

  8

  I returned to my cliffside cave, and the day passed over me. Right or wrong, for good or evil, the golden horn was mine.

  I recall a half-hour blazing with the knowledge that I, myself, redhead Davy, was alive. I had to throw off my clothes, pinch, slap, stare at every astonishing part of my hundred and fifteen pounds of sensitive beef. I slapped my palm on a sun-hot rock for the mere joy of being able to. I rolled on the grass, I ran up the ledge into the woods so that I might make love to a tree-trunk and cry a little. I flung a stone high, and laughed to hear it tumble far in the leaves.

  I would not be going to Levannon on a spirited roan, with three attendants, and serving-maids spreading their knees for me at every inn. But I would go.

  With my horn, I dared that day to learn a little. Humility came later: when I play nowadays I know I can only touch the fringes of an Old-Time art beside which the best music of our day is the chirping of sparrows. But before my lips grew sore that first day I did learn by trial and error how to find a melody I’d known since I was a child. I think “Londonderry Air” was the first music I knew, sung to me by dear fat Sister Carnation. Curiosity drove me on past ordinary fatigue. I found the notes; my ear told me I was playing them true.

  Thanks to the great dictionary, I know that my horn is what was known in Old Time as a “French horn.” The valve mechanism can be kept in repair by modern workmen — I had a little work done on it at Old City; the horn itself we could never duplicate in this age. I have been playing it now for about fourteen years, and I sometimes wonder if a horn-player of Old Time would consider me a promising beginner.

  When I quit my studies that day in the woods, the afternoon was nearly spent. I made a belated meal from the left-over bacon and half-loaf of oat bread. Then I scooped a pocket in the earth rather far from my cave, and buried the sack there with my horn wrapped in the gray moss. Only memory marked the spot, for I knew I would be returning very soon. I was going away from Skoar; that, I felt now, was certain as sunrise. But this one night I must return to the city.

  I had cut a length of fishline for my luck-charm, but found the cord unpleasantly rough at my neck, so again I put the charm in the sack, along with the horn. And forgot I had done so — you might remember that. Later, when it was important to me, to save me I couldn’t recollect if I had put the charm in the sack or continued to wear it a while longer in spite of the chafing. If you exist, your memory has probably goofed you the same way. If you don’t exist, why don’t you give me a breakdown on that too?

  Everything looked simpler to me that evening, when I had buried my horn. I was not daydreaming nor building my fortunes on a chip of the moon. I just wanted Emmia.

  I hid again in the brush near the stockade, and after I heard the change of guards — they were late — I crept close to the palings and continued to wait, for I was sure I hadn’t heard the new guard march down the street in the usual way. And I must ha
ve been more exhausted than I knew, for I fell stupidly asleep.

  I’d never done it before in such a dangerous spot, and haven’t since. But I did then. When I came to myself it was night, with a pallor of early moonlight in the east. Now I had no way of guessing about the guard until I heard him, and waited another dreary while. A pig wandered along the avenue inside the stockade, passing private remarks to his gut about the low quality of the street garbage. Nobody shied a rock at him, as a guard would almost certainly have done to keep off dull times. Sick of waiting, I took a chance and climbed.

  The guard let me scramble over and down on the city side. Then I heard his quick step behind me and a bang on the head toppled me. As I rolled over his expensive cowhide boot was churning my belly. “Where you from, bond-servant?” My gray loin-rag told him that about me — we were required to wear them, as slaves wear black ones and freemen white; only the nobility is allowed to wear a loin-rag or britches of interesting color.

  “I work at the Bull-and-Iron. Lost my way.”

  “Likely tell. They never teach you to say ‘sir’?” Lamplight from down the street showed me a tight skinny face set in the sour look that means a man won’t heed anything you say because his mind was all made up about everything long ago when you weren’t around. He fingered his club; his boot was hurting me. “Kay, let’s see your pass.”

  Anyone entering or leaving Skoar at night had to have a pass with the stamp of the City Council, unless he was a uniformed soldier of the garrison, a priest, or a member of the upper nobility with a shoulder-tattoo to prove it. Of course freemen and the lower nobility — (Misters like Old Jon and such-like) — didn’t go off down the roads after dark except in large armed groups with torchlight and foofaraw to keep off wolf and tiger, but there were enough of those traveling groups — caravans they’re called — to keep the City Council happy stamping things. However — oh, in the spring after the weather settled to sweet starry nights, and hunting beasts were unlikely to come near human settlements because food was easy elsewhere, boys with their wenches would be slipping over the palisade all the time. Scare-screwing, the kids called it. I never heard of such parties getting killed and eaten, but maybe it does something for a girl if she can imagine that with a boy on top of her. And the guards were expected, almost officially, to look the other way, for as I wrote a while back, even the Church admits that breeding must be encouraged, especially among the working classes. On June mornings the grass just outside the stockade was apt to be squashed flat as a battlefield, which in a way it was.