Davy

17

The pilgrims were already at breakfast, bacon and eggs no less, and thanks to the savings Vilet carried in her shouldersack, we were able to afford the same. She insisted on it too, with Jed in mind, for she subscribed to a theory very popular among the female sect, that ninety per cent of male grief originates in an empty stomach.

The dining-room at the Black Prince was so small you could have spat across it, and by the look of the walls many former guests had. There were only five tables. The doddery innkeeper had a couple-three slaves for kitchen help but evidently didn’t trust them to wait on table, and did it himself. Recalling the good-smelling, orderly, spacious Bull-and-Iron made it easy for me to despise this tavern, just like an aristocrat.

The Bull-and-Iron, now, was a fine brick building at least a hundred years old. The story was there’d been a lot more clear land around it when it was built, and Old Jon’s father had sold off most of it for a big profit after the new stockade went up to accommodate the city’s expansion, and land values rose. The Bull-and-Iron had fifteen guest bedrooms upstairs, no less, not counting the one for Old Jon and the Mam, nor Emmia’s where I’d left my childhood. Downstairs, there was that grand kitchen with two store-rooms and a fine cellar, and the taproom, and the big dining-room with oak ceiling-beams fourteen inches wide and charcoal-black, and tables to seat thirty people without crowding. Maybe I remember the cool taproom best of all, and the artwork above the bar, a real hand-painted picture just full of people in weird clothes, some riding astraddle of railroad trains and others herding automobiles or shooting off bombs, but all sort of gathered around in worship of a thundering great nude with huge eyes and the most tremendous boobs, like a shelf under her chin. She sat there with her legs crossed showing all her immense white teeth and being adored, so you knew it was a representation of the Old-Time pagan festival of St. Bra. The painting carried the Church’s wheel-mark of approval, or Old Jon couldn’t have displayed it. The Church doesn’t object to art-work of that type in the proper place, so long as it’s decent and reverent and shows up Old Time as a seething sink of scabrous iniquity.

But the Black Prince at East Perkunsvil — hell, the only mural was a spot in the dining-room wall the size of my head where plaster had fallen and nobody’d ever possessed enough alimentary tubing to replace it. The only respectable mural, I mean. They had the other kind of course in the privy out back. One of our Old-Time books mentions some of that kind found in the excavated ruins of Pompeii: the style hasn’t changed a bit.

There were seven of the pilgrims, the usual number because it’s thought to be lucky — Abraham had seven disciples — there are seven days in the week — and so forth. East of the Hudson Sea, pilgrim bands often head for places less sacred than Nuber, usually shrines that mark where Abraham is said to have visited and preached, and those groups, especially in Nuin, are larger, often lively and full of fun. Itinerant students join them for mischief and company, and a crowd like that can stir up a really joyous commotion on the roads. The band at the Black Prince was different — unmistakably a religion-first company, all except Jerry, and from the look of his parents you got the impression that he would take some holiness aboard when they got to Nuber, or else. The other pilgrims of the group have become almost faceless for me in memory — three women and one man. One of the women was young and quite pretty, but all that comes back is an impression of timidity and a very white face; I think one of the two older women was her mother, or aunt.

“The ruins belonging to the Old-Time city named Albany, which we saw a few days ago, near the modern village of that name,” said Father Fay, “are the last we shall behold on our way to Nuber.” He was doing all right with the bacon too, for such a gentle man. “This region we are now traversing is said to have been mostly farm-land in ancient pagan times, so no great monuments are to be expected.” Father Fay’s baritone was rich, smooth, surprisingly strong; it made me think of warm honey dripping on a muffin, and when I looked again, bugger me blind if they didn’t have muffins, real corn muffins, and fresh out of the oven, for I saw the vapor rise when Jerry opened one up and slapped the butter to it. “The truly mountainous territory of Katskil was left in ancient days, as now, more or less in its natural state.”

“I’ve often wondefed, sir,” said Jerry’s father, “what is the source of Katskil’s prosperity. One doesn’t expect to see wealth in a mountain country.”

Sam murmured to me: “Levannon — tell by his accent.”

“It’s their southern provinces,” said Father Fay. “Rich farming land south of the mountains, all the way to the mouth of the great Delaware River, which I believe marks the entire boundary between Katskil and Penn… My conscience troubles me. I fear I may have neglected to point out some of the more instructive features of the Albany ruins, for I am always deeply moved by the sad splendor—” Jerry was full of squirm, and watching me in a weird warm pop-eyed way — “and also the dignity to be sure, of the antique ruined architecture seen at low tide — ah, and by moonlight too!”

“Ma,” said Jerry.

“We were fortunate to have moonlight. One feels often the guidance of a heavenly power, on these pilgrimages.”

“Ma!”

“That door over there — you know perfectly well—”

“Naw, I don’t have to. I want—”

“Jerry, the Father was speaking.”

“It’s all right, Mam Jonas,” said Father Fay with practiced patience. “What does the boy want?”

“Ma, I don’t want my muffin.” (Why would he? — he’d already had two, one when nobody was looking except me.) “Can I give it to him over there?”

Damned if he didn’t mean me. 1 felt my face get as red as my hair, but that subsided. I half-understood the little devil wasn’t just being a gracious prince favoring a humble subject: he actually liked my looks, and was drawn to me in one of those fantastic surges of childhood feeling.

“Why,” said Father Fay, “Mam Jonas, this is the beginning I spoke of, blossoming of a truly Murcan spirit.” And Father Pay sent me a wink in a helpless manner, an open request to play along while Jerry got it out of his system.

The introduction of official sanctity embarrassed Jerry and cramped his style, but he brought over the muffin very prettily anyhow, as the whole gathering blinked at us. Ever wake up in a cow pasture and discover that the critters have formed a ring around you and stand there gazing and gazing, chewing and chewing, as if you’d put them in mind of something, they can’t think what but it’ll come to ’em in a minute? I took the muffin and did my best thank-you, and Jerry ietired, face blazing, speechless. The pilgrim lady who I’m certain was somebody’s aunt said: “Aw, isn’t that sweet!” Jerry and I could then exchange glances of genuine sympathy because it wasn’t practical to murder her.

“In viewing such ruins,” said Father Fay, “and especially by moonlight, one feels always, one says to oneself, ah, had it only been God’s will that they should be a little wiser, a little readier to heed the warnings. Such marvelous structures, such godless, evil beings!”

“Father Fay,” said the pretty white-faced young woman, “is it true they made those great buildings with the flat tops out there in the water for — uh — human sacrifices?”

“Well, Claudia, of course you must understand the buildings were not then submerged.”

“Oh yes, I know, but — nh — did they—”

“One is unhappily forced to that conclusion, my dear Claudia. Often indeed—” I think he sighed there and had another muffin; I’d finished mine under Sam’s stern and reverent eye — “often those buildings are no mere squares or oblongs but have the definite shape of the cross, which we know to have been the symbol for human sacrifice in ancient times. It is saddening, yes, but we can find reassurance in the thought that there is now a Church—” he made the sign of the wheel on his breast, so we all did — “which can undertake the true study of history in the light of God’s word and modern historical science, so that its communicants need not bear the burden of old sins and tragedies and the dreadful follies of the past…

Out in the hazy hot morning, perhaps still within the forest shadows but certainly very near our weak man-made stockade, the tiger roared.

Everyone in the dining-room — except Jed, I think — looked first at Sam Loomis when that shattering voice outside struck at our marrow. They were probably not even aware of doing it, and surely had no conscious idea that he could protect them; they simply turned like children to the strongest adult present in the emergency. Even Vilet; even Father Fay.

Sam stood up and finished his breakfast tea. “If’n it’s all right with you,” he said, to a spot of air between Father Fay and the doddery inn-keeper, “I’ll step out for a lookaround.” I don’t suppose they were asking even that much of him, so far as they knew. He strolled to the door and stepped outside.

I said — to whom I don’t know, maybe Vilet — “My bow’s upstairs.” Jed was standing then, ponderously, and he shook his head at me. I don’t think he had once spoken since we came down to breakfast. I couldn’t wait to understand him but darted up to our room. When I returned with my bow and arrow-quiver, they were all milling around a little. I saw Jed talking to Father Fay in an undertone, the priest listening in a distracted, unbelieving way, watching his pilgrim flock also and shaking his head. I couldn’t hear what Jed was saying. Jerry was at the front window, his mother hanging on to him or he would have been outdoors. Father Fay frowned at my bow as I slipped past him and Jed, but did not speak nor try to stop me when I ducked out after Sam.

Sam was just standing out there in the sunny and dusty street with a few others. I saw occasional wind-devils rise and whirl and die as a sultry breeze hurried by on no good errand.

The elderly village priest — I heard one of the villagers call him Father Delune — had come out of the rectory by his little church, and was in the street craning his neck to look up at the bell-tower. He called — to us, I guess, since we were nearest — “Yan Vigo’s going up for a look-out. We don’t want too many in the street. It may be illusion.” His voice was good, windy and amiable and edged with fear under control. “They should stay within and pray it be illusion.” Sam nodded, but he was watching me. At that moment a weedy boy climbed out through a louvered window of the bell-tower and hauled himself up astraddle of the wheel-symbol, a good ten feet in diameter, out of which the spire rose. He would have been some thirty feet above ground, and could probably see over the stockade on all sides of the village. I remember thinking Yan had it pretty good.

When I reached Sam I knew he wanted to send me back inside. But I had brought my bow; he would not wound me that way. He just said: “Hear what I do, Jackson ?”

I did hear it, from near the gate, where the guard who had admitted us the day before was again posted. He was in light military armor today, helmet, bronze breastplate, leather guards on thighs and crotch — all no particular use against tiger except to the extent that it made him feel better. He was carrying a heavy spear instead of a javelin — that did make sense-and his honest hands transmitted to the spear-head a tremor as if he were in the peak hours of a malaria; but he was staying at his post. The sound Sam meant was a light clicking or chopping noise, combined with blasts of soft snuffling breath like a giant’s bellows working on invisible fire. You’ve probably noticed some little house-cat quivering her jaws on nothing when she sees a bird fly overhead out of reach or light on a high branch and scold her; along with the jaw motion there’s a small hoarse cry, a kind of exasperated explosion not quite spitting or snarling, simple frustration, tension of the thing she would do if the bird could be grasped. But this noise outside the stockade gate was more than fifty feet away from Sam and me, and I heard it plainly.

The gate guard called: “I can see the shadow of him through the cracks!”

Sam said: “Jackson, you — suppose you go tell them people to stay inside.”

I moved back uncertainly toward the inn doorway as Father Delune walked soberly by us to the gate. I had to stop, look back, learn what the priest meant to do. He stood right against the logs, praying, his arms spread out as if to protect the whole village with his dumpy old body, and his voice rang musically in the hot street. The breeze that clearly brought me the words also brought the smell of tiger. “If therefore thou art a servant of Satan, whether beast or witch or wizard in beastly form, we conjure thee depart in the name of Abraham, of the Holy Virgin Mother Cara, in the name of Saint Andrew of the West whose village this is, in the name of all the saints and powers that inhabit the daylight, depart, depart, depart! But if a servant of God, if thou art sent to exact a penance and all but one of us unknowing, then grant us a sign, servant of God, that we may know the sinner. Or if it must be, then come among us, servant of God, and his will be done! Amen!”

Yan Vigo’s voice floated down with a break in it: “He goin’ awayl — maybe.” His pointing arm followed the motion of the tiger who had evidently come from near the palings into the range of Yan’s vision. “Standing out in the road. Father! It’s a male, an old male.”

“Depart! In the name of Abraham, depart!”

“Got a dark spot on the left, Father, like the one come Onto Hannaburg last year… Just standing there.”

Then — so much for my errand — Jed came out of the inn, and Father Fay with him, and though I mumbled something neither seemed aware of me. Vilet was back in the entrance staring after Jed, and the white clothes of the pilgrims made a shifting cloud behind her. Father Fay spoke plainly then: “No, my son, I cannot consent, cannot bless such a thing, and you must not interfere with the duty of my flock, which is to pray.” Then all the pilgrims — Jerry and his father and mother, and the white-faced girl, and the old people, were coming out in the street, and rather than be stopped by me I think they would have walked through me if I hadn’t stepped aside.

“Father,” said Jed, “if you will not, then I must ask this other man of God.” And he walked up to the gate, to Father Delune, passing Sam as if he didn’t know him.

Vilet called to me: “Davy, he don’t hear a thing I say. Don’t let him do it, Davy!” Do what? — I didn’t know. I felt as if we were all moving about in a fog, no one hearing the others — if little Jerry over there in his white robe quit his vague grinning and said something to me, I’d only see his mouth open, I’d hear nothing except the echo of the tiger’s roar and that wet chopping of teeth.

Yan Vigo shouted down again: “He goin’ west side. Can’t see — Caton’s house cuts me off.” For that boy up there on the church tower it was probably the biggest day in a dull life; you could hear the fun in him like dance music the other side of a door. I was near enough myself to childish thinking to read the envy in Jerry too as he looked up at the tower.

Father Delune came away from the gate, listening to Jed. For a few minutes we made an aimless huddle there in the street — Father Delune, Sam, fed, myself, and a nameless man from down the street. I saw no one who suggested an active hunter, let alone a Guide. I could look down the entire length of Main Street to its far end, where a smaller gate faced the wilderness. The Guide’s house should be outside that.

Jed was suddenly on his knees to Father Delune. “It must be so, Father! Give me your blessing to go out theah and bring him onto me, so to spare the village, and take away my own burden of sin. I won’t be afeared no-way if I can go with your blessing.”

Sam said harshly: “You be no more a sinner than any other man hereabouts.”

But Father Delune checked him with a crinkled hand, raised to ask the rest of us to be still and let him think. “It’s not fitting,” he said. “I never heard of such an action, it’s not in reason. There may be sinful pride in it — my dear son, who art thou?”

“Jed Sever’s my name, a grievous sinner all my life, and who’s to say I a’n’t bnmg the tiger onto the village account of me? Father, bless my going out to him. I want to die in the hope of forgiveness at the throne of Abraham.”

“Nay, but — why, we all sin, from the moment of birth, but I can’t think thou’st been so — so—” and Father Delune looked curiously, anxiously at Sam, even at me, wanting some kind of support from us I think, but hardly knowing what we could give nor how to ask for it. “Sin, fed Sever — it writes itself in the face, one may say. You strangers, you be friends of this man?”

“My cousin by marriage,” said Sam, “and a good heart, the best, Father, but over-zealous. His conscience—”

“You don’t understand,” said Jed. “Don’t heed him, Father. He can’t see the sin in my heart. The beast won’t go tifi I do. I know that, I feel it.”

“Why,” said Father Delune — “he may have gone a’ready, and no need of all this.”

“Where’s your Guide, sir?” Sam asked.

“Away. Three-day hunt with our best men.”

The tiger roared, somewhere beyond the jumble of old houses on the west side of the vifiage. I heard a rattling, a dull vibration, a crunch of cracking wood. Sam shouted up to the church tower: “Is he in, boy?”

“Nah.” Yan Vigo’s voice had gone high as a girl’s. “Think he caught a claw in the bindings and something bust, but it a’n’t down.” Vigo meant the fastenings that held the stockade logs; they were leather thongs that had been bound there wet and allowed to dry, shrinking to a tight fastening. Only prosperous cities can afford iron bolts or wire. “He’s circling around to the back gate.”

“Father, bless me and let me go!”

I screwed up my own courage to speak: “Father, I’m a dead shot with this bow. May I try from one of the roofs?”

“No, son, no. Wound him and he’ll destroy the village entirely.”

That wasn’t true and I knew it. A tiger is only a great cat. A cat suddenly hurt will run and not fight at all unless cornered or unable to use his legs. But I also knew it was useless to instruct a priest. I saw Father Fay’s pilgrims kneeling together in the street, in front of the church. In spite of common sense I made one more try: “Father, I promise you, I could place one of these in his eye, I’ve practiced on knotholes at fifty yards—”

It only annoyed him. “Impossible. And what if the tiger is a messenger of God? I’ll hear no more of that.” He asked Sam: “Is this your son?”

“My nephew, and like a son. It’s no empty brag, Father. I’ve seen him nail a—”

“I said I’d hear no more of that! Take the boy’s arrows, sir, and keep them till this is over.”

Sam had to take them, I had to yield them, both of us with blank faces. The pilgrims were singing.

The hymn was “Rock of Ages,” which is from Old Time, a commonplace hymn that has survived the centuries when a limitless literature of better music perished. Jerry’s voice amazed me, incredibly clear and sweet — well, I had never heard a trained boy soprano, and never did again until 1 came to Old City of Nuin, where the Cathedral trains them. At the second verse 1 heard someone behind me singing too — Vilet, my good warm Vilet still crying but singing through the sick snuffies and more or less on pitch. I couldn’t sing, nor did Sam, who stood near me holding the arrows loosely in the hand nearest me.

Down at the far end of the street, above the rear gate which stood as high as the rest of the palisade, about eight feet, down there in the shimmering heat of summer morning we understood there was a face watching our human uncertainties, tawny-pale, terrible and splendid. Across the light gold there were streaks of darker gold, as though between him and ourselves some defensive obstruction still cast the shadow of its bars — and to his eyes, some shadow on our faces too?

We had known it would come; maybe we had all known it would find us, in our various ways, unready. The pilgrims were all aware of that face at the end of the street, I think, but their music did not falter. Vilet stopped singing, however; I saw Jed lift her hand gently away from his arm, and then he was moving a step or two down the long street. At that moment the tiger’s face dropped out of view.

“He’s gone,” ViJet said. “See, Jed — he’s gone, I tell you.” She must have known as we all did that the tiger had not gone. Jed did not look now like a man crazily determined to rush into danger. He was smiling, with some sort of pleasure. He had gone only a little way beyond the kneeling, singing pilgrims. Father Delune was praying silently, his old hands laced together below his chin; I think he was watching Jed, but did nothing to detain him.

Nor could I, nor Sam. We were all in a way paralyzed, alone, not hearing each other, watching the empty spot at the end of the street, the blind gray-brown of weathered logs and tropic green of forest beyond. Jed’s face was pouring sweat as it had done the day before on the road. A tremor shook his hands and legs as if the earth were vibrating under him, yet he was going on, slowly, as one sometimes journeys in the sorrowful or terrifying or seeming-ludicrous adventures of a dream.

The tiger soared in an arc like the flight of an arrow, over the gate and into the village.

The tiger paused for a second, his eyes surveying, calculating lines of attack and retreat, measuring with a cat’s wonderful swift cleverness. Jed made no pause but walked on clumsy and brave, disregarding or not hearing the two priests who now called after him in horror to come back. Jed was holding his arms spread wide, as Father Delune had done when praying at the front gate, but Jed seemed more like a man groping for direction in the dark.

The tiger ran flowingly toward us along the hot street, not in a charge at first, but a rapid trotting run with head high, like a kitten advancing in sheer play, mimic attack. I suppose he could not have expected to see a human being walk toward him with those queer forbidding outspread arms. He rose on his hind legs in front of Ted and tapped at him with one paw. The motion seemed light, playful, downright absurd. It sent Jed’s massive body twisting and plunging across the street to crash against the gatepost of a house and lie there at the foot of it disembowelled, in a gush of blood.

The tiger did charge then, a tearing rush so swift that there was time to hear a woman scream only once; then I saw the green fire of his eyes blazing full on us while his teeth fumbled an instant and closed in Jerry’s back. Jerry’s mother screamed again and lunged at the beast with little helpless hands. A swing of his head evaded her without effort. He was trotting off down the street the way he had come, head high again, Jerry’s body in his jaws seeming no bigger than a sparrow’s. He was over the gate and into the wilderness, the woman silent but tearing her pilgrim’s gown to slash at her breasts and then beat her fists in the dust of the road.

I had snatched one of the arrows from Sam’s hand. I remember having it on the string when the tiger was running away down the street, and a black thing crashing against me which was Father Delune snatching my ann so that the arrow flew useless over the rooftops. He may have been right to do it.

Moments later Sam and Father Fay and I were with Vilet, who was fumbling at fed’s body as if there were some way she could make it live. “Mam Sever,” Father Fay said, and shook her shoulder, and glanced back at the other woman who needed him — but Father Delune and the older pilgrim women were helping Jerry’s mother into the church. “Mam Sever, you must think of yourself.”

She crouched on her heels glaring up at us. “You could’ve stopped him, the lot of you. You, Davy, I told you to stop him! Oh, what am I saying?”

“Likely we are all to blame,” said Father Fay. “But come away now. Let me talk to you.”

Sam’s hand on my shoulder was taking me away too. We were in some partly enclosed place, the doorway of a shop I think, and Sam was talking to me, bewildering me more than ever, for it was something about Skoar. He shook me to get me out of my daze. “Davy, will you listen once? I’m saying it was just near-about fifteen years past, and one of them so’t of average places—”

“You said ‘Davy.’ ”

“Ayah, one of them medium places, not fancy but I mean, not so bad neither, can’t fetch back the name of the street — Grain — no—”

Part of me must have been understanding him, for I know I said: “Mill Street?”

“Why, that was it. A redhead, sweet and — nice, someway, nothing like them beat-up—”

“So God damn you, you flang her a little something for your piece and walked out, that what you mean?”

“Davy, a man at such a place — I mean, you don’t anyhow get acquainted before you’re obliged to go, nor the girl she don’t want to know you, come to that. And still and all, maybe you get to know as much as you do in some marriages, I wouldn’t wonder.” He would not either let go my shoulders or look at me, only staring over my head, waiting for me. “I been married — still am, come to that. Wife down Katskil way that damn-nigh talked me to death. But the little redhead at that Skoar place-I mean, half an hour of one night and then it’s ‘On your way, fella!’ — and me with never a notion I could’ve left a package behind. Which maybe I didn’t, Davy, we wouldn’t ever know for sure. But I was thinking, I’d like for it to be so.”

“I dunno why I spoke to you like that.”

“Still sore?”

“No.” I have never cried since that morning, but I’m inclined to think that, once in a great while, tears are useful to the young. “No. I a’n’t sore.”

“So supposing I am your Da — is it all right?”

“Yes.”