Davy

18

The January rains fall more steadily here on the island Neonarcheos than any we remember. For two weeks we have been unable to work at clearing new ground. Nickie is uncomfortable in pregnancy and so is Dion — I mean that like me he is trying to give birth to a book, setting down what he can recall of the history of Nuin before it fades or becomes distorted in his mind. We do have paper now: the brookside reeds yield a course product to our primitive methods that takes our lamp-black ink reasonably well.

From lamp-black my mind jumps to lamps and lamp-oil. When the casks of seal oil we brought in the Morning Star have been exhausted we’ll have no more. We can worry away at native vegetable oils and waxes, and when our sheep have increased there will be tallow to renew the sup.ply of candles. Lambing time in a couple of months wifi be a major event. Of course, Nickie and I seldom object to going to bed early.

Lamps, candles, animal husbandry — we have enough problems on that level to keep our people busy a hundred years, if there’s that much time. There may not be. We needn’t suppose that because we were the first in centuries to sail the great sea, our enemies won’t follow — soon, perhaps. They have as much courage of the simple kind as we have, or they couldn’t have won the war of the rebellion in spite of their superior numbers. True, it called for the imagination of Sir Andrew Barr, the knowledge in old books forbidden, the orders and protection of Dion as Regent of the richest and strongest of the nations, and the labor of many hands, to create the schooner Hawk and later the Morning Star. Salter’s victorious army had no such vessels to send in pursuit of us, no men capable of handling them. However, given the spark, they might build something capable of venturing out, if the Church would relax her prohibitions.

We carried with us all designs and working drawings made by our own people. The lower grade workmen had at first only a dim idea of what sort of ship they were engaged in building, but some of them will remember details, and all of them will talk if Salter wants them to. The Holy Murcan Church, up to now, has hogtied itself in this matter, committed to the doctrine that it is morally wrong, offensive to God, to sail out of sight of the land except by what fishermen call the relay system — one vessel holding in sight another which keeps the land within view. Even Dion could not have safely ordered such a ship as the Hawk without explaining to the churchmen that it was needed to overawe the Cod Islands pirates, and would never sail beyond those islands. And the Morning Star, he told them, was needed as a replacement — well — hm-ha — an insurance against a possible regrouping by those Satanic men.

It’s not merely that it would annoy the Almighty to see a man damn-fool enough to fall off the edge of a flat earth; there’s the larger doctrine, that any important kind of curiosity is wrong, a doctrine all religions of the past have been obliged to uphold as the only practical defense against skepticism. Still, theological obstacles are notoriously movable: if the Church knew we were safely ashore out here, a handful of escaped Heretics living in hard work and happiness on islands that could be valuable, I am certain that God’s blessing on a punitive expedition could be almost instantly arranged.

Our military intelligence learned beyond a doubt that ex-pirates from the Cod Islands were scattered through Salter’s army. They don’t know big ships but they know the sea; in the old days before 327, when we had to knock them apart as a nation, their lateen-rigged skimmers may have ventured farther than we suppose. They could handle a large vessel for Salter if he ever managed to build one.

The Cod Islands people-the pirates and their women and slaves and followers — worshiped Satan, the old dark horned god of witchcraft ancient and modern. I’m sure they still do secretly. Likely they considered Old Horny a logical opponent of the existing order of things which they had no reason to love — besides, orgies are fun. The fact that Dion as Regent refused to permit wholesale burning of the Cod Islands people after the pirates’ surrender was one of the most serious grievances the hostile section of the Nuin public, as well as the Church, held against him. The islands were taken over by respectable fishermen’s guilds and added to the province of Hannis; the rank and file of outlaws and exiles and their women and children were allowed to disperse under a general amnesty. Since we hoped to abolish slavery altogether in Nuin and weren’t inclined to set up a mess of new jails, I don’t know what else in logic we could have done. I remember warning Dion that most of the pirates were not going to be grateful more than five minutes, and that the Church wasn’t about to recognize any kind of mercy except its own. He knew that, but went ahead anyhow — and I suppose Niche and I would have given him hell if he had changed his mind as a result of our cautions. Four years later, there the jolly pirates were, in Salter’s army of the rebellion, ready and eager to fight on the Church’s side against the man who had saved them from broiling by that same Church.

Incidentally I think Dion’s insistence on amnesty instead of vengeance was the first occasion in modem times when a secular ruler has held out against Church pressure and got away with it for as long as four years. In the days of Morgan the Great the question didn’t arise. Morgan was all for the Church, which was new then itself as a definite organization; he was an enthusiast, a warrior for God who could be just as happy converting a human brain as smashing it with a broadax, depending I guess on whether it showed any tendency to talk back.

And after a while, the Church may not find itself altogether happy with the Morgan dynasty ended and Erinan Salter President. Salter will cancel the preliminary work we did toward getting rid of slavery; he will destroy our small beginning in the development of secular schools, and there’ll be no more sacrilegious talk of relaxing the prohibitions on Old-Time books and learning. But after those matters are dealt with, the honeymoon between Salter and the Church is likely to peter out. Salter is powerhungry, and that is a disease which grows to a climax of disaster as certainly as a cancer. He respects the Church only for the material strength it derives from its power over men’s minds, not for religious reasons and assuredly not for any temporal good the Church may do — (I as one of its sincerest enemies will admit that it does quite a lot). Salter is a practical man in the saddest sense of that term: a man to whom all art is nonsense, all beauty irrelevant, all charity weakness, all love an illusion to be exploited, and all philosophical questions bushwa. I know these things about him, because the fellow tried to get at Dion through me, quite soon after a humorous chance had swept Niche and me into the presidential orbit and made us important. Salter was quite frank about the quality of his mind while he still believed I had a price. He has no convictions, religious, agnostic, atheist or any other — the religious mask is simply one of many to be worn at convenience. When his kind rules, as it sometimes did in Old Time also — sleep on your knife!

Nay, fair enough — some morning a few years from now we may see on the western ocean the approach of a small clumsy sail…

Yesterday afternoon Dion wandered in out of the rain with Nora Severn and told us he didn’t want to be Governor. We’ve heard this before, and it makes certain kinds of sense, yet most of us hope he can be talked out of his reluctance. We’ve been kicking around a number of political ideas since at our last general assembly five were chosen to write a tentative constitution as it was done in Old Time, looking toward a day when these islands may hold a population large enough to need the larger formalities.

“I’m disqualified,” Dion said, “by the very fact that I did govern in Nuin. Autocrat over maybe a million people — absurd, isn’t it, that any man could be in a position like that? I would try, here, and be afraid all the time of old habits rising inside me. Davy, that day eight years ago — when you and Funny-face were sort of swept into office-I think it’s eight years, isn’t it?—”

“May Day, 323,” said Nickie, and laughed a little.

“Yes. That day, why do you suppose I was so eager to hang on to you after the Festival of Fools was over? Oh, Nickie turning up when I hadn’t seen her for two years and I’d even thought she was dead — of course. The little twirp was always my favorite cousin. But there was something else in it. I’d begun to distrust myself already, though I’d been Regent less than a year…”

I remembered the day. I often do; there’s a brightness in remembering. Nickie and I were twenty, then. We had been living in Old City for two years — obscurely, because Nickie had run away from her family and couldn’t bear the thought of being recognized, knowing the attempts that would be made to draw her back, and how such fuss and uproar would interfere with the work to which she was giving herself body and spirit. Her work was underground, with the Heretics, important and dangerous. Mine, for money-making, was in a furniture factory — Sam Loomis had taught me all he could of joinery when we were with Rumley’s Ramblers — and my other work was to learn, to read the forbidden books under the guidance of Nickie and the Heretics who accepted me because of her, to grow up with a wider understanding of the world I had to live in. She took over, my sweet pepperpot wife, where my substitute mother Mam Laura of the Ramblers had to leave off. Well, but that day, the 29th of April, eve of the Festival of Fools which makes a joyous twenty-four hours of madness for Nuin folk before the gentler delights of May Day — that day Nickie and I were careless. It was the gaiety throughout the city, the reckless delicious urgency of a clear evening of spring, when the sky was piled high with violet-tinted clouds, and there were the street singers, and the flower-girls carried everywhere the scent of lilac.

We said we’d only go for a short walk, and keep away from the celebration and foolishness. But straying, pausing at a tavern where the beer was rather too good — oh, before long we were asking each other what harm it could do if we merely went for a few minutes to the Palace Square to hear the singing, and maybe watch from a safe place when the King and Queen of the Fools were chosen. And yet Niche has told me since then that all along she had a premonition we were going to be much more scatterbrained than that. I remember how as we drifted toward that part of town, Nickie was trying to determine how accurately she could steer my walking by bumping me with her hip, neither of us using hands or arms, and we arrived at Palace Square in that style — honestly not drunk, just happy.

The custom is perhaps a hundred years old, that at some time on the eve of the Festival of Fools — nobody knows the moment exactly, but it comes between sundown and ten o’clock — a boy on a white horse will ride through Palace Square with a jingly cap on his head and carrying a long whip that has a soft silken tassel at the end. He cavorts around the square sassing the crowd and being pelted with flowers; at last he flicks his whip at one man and one woman, choosing them to be King and Queen of the Fools for the next twenty-four hours. They’re hustled up to a throne that stands waiting on the steps of the presidential palace, and the President himself comes out to crown them. He kneels to them, with considerable ritual, not all of it comic. The custom of washing the feet of the King and Queen had gone obsolete in Dion’s time, but-

It happened to Nickie and me. I ought to have foreseen it. The crowd was large, the light failing, nevertheless my lady’s face must have stood out among the other pretty girls in the crowd like a diamond among glass ornaments; I was obviously her companion, and I have red hair. The boy on his white horse bore down on us, making the crowd give way so that his whip could reach us. Then the people were closing in, laughing, kind, noisy-drunk and heavyhanded, carrying us up to the throne on their shoulders. And the Regent, Dion Morgan Morganson of Nuin, appeared in his fancy dress, and seeing Niche — frightened I know she was, rumpled by the crowd’s well-meant horseplay, staring straight in front of her — Dion went pale to the lips. Presently he was ordering one of the attendants to bring the silver basin that had formerly been used in this ceremony — I too ignorant to know this was unexpected — and he washed our feet although it had not been part of the ritual for thirty years.

“And distrusting myself,” said Dion — speaking here in our airy shelter on the island Neonarcheos, his arm around his lovely bedmate Nora Severn, and hearing as I did how a sea wind was wavering through the warm rain — “distrusting myself, I needed you, Miranda. Later on—” he said this with something more than courtesy — “I found out I needed Davy too, and the cockeyed useful way the little devil has of looking at things and speaking out.”

I was aware, on that eve of the Festival of Fools, that Dion had loved my woman before ever I knew her. It was years before, actually, for he was fifteen when she was born. Her mother Serena St. Clair-Levison was Dion’s first cousin. He was often with the family, and used to carry the baby around before she could walk. Her first clear word, spoken when he was swinging her up to the ceiling, was Di-yon… I could not have avoided knowing it, hearing him speak her name in a helpless, explosive way, there on the steps of the presidential palace when he was holding her little brown foot in his hands. It is not, today, the love of a very young man for a child, since Nickie is not a child. It is the love of friends, and on his side, more than that. We have been able to speak of it a little, the three of us; we do not when Nora Severn is with us, though she knows of it. It is not something that could be solved by a three-marriage, as Adna-Lee Jason and her lovers have done. Dion and I are are both too possessive, and Nickie is certain that for us it would not be the answer. Nay then, how much of our human complexity is our own fault!

“I think,” said Nora Severn, “that a man who knows the old dangers of autocracy, watches for them in himself — why isn’t such a man better as a governor than one who might have less self-knowledge? Not that I’m urging it — you’re more fun as a private citizen.”

She was wearing nothing but a little skirt, like most of our girls. Blonde and delicious, you wouldn’t think to look at Nora almost naked that she’s an expert weaver and spinner, so deft and imaginative that some of the older women have asked her for instruction. At work, she never spends a second of waste motion, though every thin steady finger seems to possess an independent life. She is trying sculpture too, claiming to be no good at it, and has searched the island for usable clay.

“Some of the time back yonder,” Dion said, “I’m afraid I liked being His Excellency by grace of God and the Senate Regent in Our Very Present Emergency — hoo boy! The emergency was good for eight years and would still be perking if we hadn’t been kicked out. I thmk the term ‘emergency’ originally meant ‘until His Excellency Morgan the Third by grace of God and the Senate President of the Commonwealth shall have the gracious goodness to cork off.’ But then time spun on and on, and it came to mean ‘that period extending from the time your Excellency got away with it until such time as your Excellency can by grace of God and the Senate be safely booted the hell out…’”

We were obliged to stay in East Perkunsvil until after Jed’s funeral. But for Vilet we’d have been forced to do a sneakout, for Sam and I between us hadn’t anything like the money needed for the expected religious performances, yet we were thought to be aristocrats and loaded with it — dear Jed, he would have explained it was a punishment on us for lying to the guard that evening. No doubt religion had to be invented for such gentle and simple minds, and perhaps they can’t get along without it any more than I can get along with it. Vilet had enough salted away in her sack to meet the expenses, and now — why, now Vilet was a pilgrim and didn’t want money.

She rejoined us that frightful morning after a long private session with Father Fay, and gave Sam what Father Delune had told her would be the cost of a good ceremony, our humble way of showing God that we understood and loved Jed for the martyr he was. She told us then how Father Fay had accepted her as a pilgrim, with the prospect that she might some day become sufficiently purified to take the veil. Maybe only Father Fay could have given Vilet that much comfort and saved her, as I hope he did, for the human race. In the same degree, maybe no one but Father Delune could have helped me so nicely along the path of heresy. I wanted to suggest to him that if God was all-knowing he might be able to catch on without our blowing everything on a church performance, and, if he was really all-knowing, how about asking him what the hell good Jed’s martyrdom did to anyone, beginning with Jerry? I said nothing at all of course, mindful of Sam’s neck as well as my own, but my religious feeling ended just about then. I have never missed it.

I felt Vilet’s quiet when she talked to us after that time with Father Fay: quiet and distance, yet she didn’t seem a stranger. I had never understood the hidden existence of a nun in her, cool dim sister to the warm lovable wrestlingpartner who’d opened her good flesh to me many times. The nun was in charge now, staring somewhat blindly out of the face of a woman who had in the last few hours aged twenty years. I don’t think she asked Sam and me what we meant to do. She lost track of her words now and then, as if following sonic discourse in another room. Father Fay max’ have given her a penance — shirt to wear — her smock looked ridgv and she moved carefully like one in physical pain. Her left eye was blinking in a tic i’d never seen before. The pilgrims were conducting a private prayer-meeting of initiation for her soon — after which, she told us, she must not so much as speak to any male except Father Fay until the penitential part of her pilgrimage was done. Leaving us, she kissed me on both cheeks and told me to be a good boy.

I saw her once again, dressed in white with the other pilgrims, at the funeral two days later. If she knew where we were sitting she thought best not to look our way… It seems to me now that I loved her a great deal, maybe as much as I loved Caron who is probably dead.

I remember now a decree I pronounced from that throne on the steps of the presidential palace. The evening was wearing on; they’d brought us a musky wine that went to our heads. I decreed that everyone without exception must immediately live happily ever afterward; somehow I could think of no more fitting decree from a King of the Fools.