Davy

1

I’m Davy, who was king for a time. King of the Fools, and that calls for wisdom.

It happened in 323, in Nuin, whose eastern boundary is a coastline on the great sea that in Old Time was called the Atlantic — the sea where now this ship winds her passage through gray or golden days and across the shoreless latitudes of night. It was in my native country Moha, and I no more than a boy, that I acquired my golden horn and began to learn its music. Then followed my years with Rumley’s Ramblers into Katskil, Levannon, Bershar, Vairmant, Conicut and the Low Countries — years of growing, with some tasty girls and good friends and enough work. And when, no longer with the Ramblers, I came into Nuin, I must have been nearly a man, or the woman I met there, my brown-eyed Nickie with the elf-pointed ears, would not have desired me.

I learned my letters, or they called it learning them, at the school in Skoar, but actually I knew nothing of reading and writing until my time with the Ramblers, when Mam Laura Shaw lost patience with my ignorance and gave me the beginning of light. Being now twenty-eight and far advanced in heresy, and familiar with the fragments of Old-Time literature, I say to hell with the laws that forbid most Old-Time books or reserve them to the priests!

Somewhere I have picked up the impudence to attempt writing a book for you, conceiving you out of nothing as I must because of the ocean between us and the centuries that you people, if you exist, have known nothing of my part of the round world. I am convinced it is round.

My way of writing must follow an Old-Time style, I think, not the speech or writing of the present day. The few books made nowadays, barbarously printed on miserable paper and deserving no better, are a Church product, dreary beyond belief — sermons, proverb, moral tales. There is some ginger in the common speech, it’s true, but it is restricted to a simplicity that renders it, on the whole, hellishly dull — let any man not a priest use a term that cannot be grasped by a drooling chowderhead, and eyes slip sidelong in suspicion, fingers make ready for the flung stone that has always been a fool’s favorite means of putting himself on a level with the wise. And finally, English in the pattern of Old Time is the only language I could have in common with you who may exist and one day read this.

We are free men and women aboard this vessel, carrying no burden of cherished ignorance. In the country that drove us out they preen themselves on freedom of religion, which meant in practise, as it evidently did throughout Old Time, merely freedom for a little variety within the majority’s religion — no true heretics wanted, although in the last century or so of Old Time they were not persecuted as they are today, because the dominant religion of that time, on that continent, was thinned down to a pallid reminiscence of its one-time hellfire glory. The Holy Murcan Church, and the small quackpot sects that it allows to exist, were certainly latent in Old Time, but so far as one can tell at this distance, Christianity in the America of what they called the 20th Century was hardly capable of scaring even the children. On this schooner there is freedom from religion, and in writing this book for you I shall require that freedom; if the thought offends you, take warning at this point and read some other book.

Our ship, our Morning Star, follows a design of Old Time, resembling no other vessel of our day except one experimental predecessor, the Hawk, burnt at her moorings four years ago in the war of 327 against the Cod Islands pirates. When the Hawk was built, men watched the placing of her timbers, saw the tall pine masts brought from Nuin’s northern province of Hampsher, and they said she would sink on launching. She sailed bravely for months, before fire destroyed her off Provintown Island . Something in us remembers her, where her blackened bones must lie in the dark making a home for octopus or the great sea snakes. And we heard the same prophecy about the Morning Star. They saw her launched, the masts were stepped, the sails took hold of the sky, she went through her trials in Plimoth Bay like a lady walking on a lawn — they said she’d capsize at the first gale. Well, we have weathered more than one storm since we began our journey toward the sun’s rising.

The world is round. I don’t think you walk upsydown carrying your heads under your shoulders. If you do I’m wasting my time, for to understand the book I mean to write a man would need to have a head fastened on at the upper end of his neck, and use it now and then.

Our captain Sir Andrew Barr would also be damn surprised to find you walking upsydown, and so would my two best-loved, Nickie my wife and Dion Morgan Morganson lately Regent of Nuin — who are partly responsible for this book, by the way: they urged me into writing it and now watch me sweat. Captain Barr suggests further that anyone who seriously entertained that upsydown mahooha would almost certainly piss to windward.

There were enough maps and other items of scientific information at the secret library of the Heretics in Old City of Nuin to give us a fair picture of the world as it was some four hundred years ago and as it must be now. The rise in sea level, which seems to have been catastrophically rapid during the period when Old-Time civilization went phut, makes a liar out of any Old-Time map so far as coastlines are concerned. The wrath of the world’s waters would have been responsible for many inland changes too — earthquake, landslip, erosion of high ground in the prolonged torrential rains that John Barth describes in his (forbidden) journal.

Well, of course it’s the truth, the many kinds of truth in the old books that causes the Church to forbid most of them, and to describe all the Old-Time knowledge as ‘primitive legend.’ It won’t do to have a picture of this earth so jarringly different from the one the Holy Murcan Church provides — not even in a society where hardly one man in two dozen is literate enough to recognize his own name in writing. Too much truth, and too much ginger to suit the timid or the godly or the practical joes who make a good living helping the Church run the governments.

The earth is a sphere within empty space, and while the moon and the Midnight Star circle around it, it circles the sun. The sun also journeys — so the Old-Time learning tells me and I believe it — and the stars are faraway suns resembling our own, and the bright bodies we see to move are planets something like ours — except the Midnight Star. I think that swift-coursing gleam was one of the satellites sent aloft in Old Time, and this I find more wonderful than the Holy Murcan legend which makes it a star that fell from heaven as a reproach to man when Abraham died on the wheel. And I think the earth, moon, planets, sun and all the stars may be journeying, for a while or for eternity, but not, I dare say, with any consideration for our convenience — for we can if we like invent God and then explain his will for the guidance of humanity, but I would rather not.

Until I began it I never dreamed what a labor it is to write a book. (“Just write,” says Dion, for the sake of seeing me sputter — he knows better. Nickie is more helpful: when I’m fed up with rhetoric I can catch her tawny-gold body and wrestle its darling warmth.) I try to keep in mind how much you don’t know, how men can’t often see beyond the woods and fields of their homelands, nor beyond the lies and true-tales they learned in growing, the moments of pain or delight that may seem to make a truetale out of a lie, a vision, a fancy, or an error out of a truth as stubborn as a granite hill.

Whenever I get stung by an idea I’ve got to go on scratching as long as it smarts. My education, as I’ve already hinted, was delayed. At twenty-eight I believe my ignorance is expanding in a promising sort of way, but forgive me if at times I tell you less than I might or more than you wish. I reached fourteen as empty of learning as a mud-turkie though slightly less homely, being red-haired, small but limber with a natural-born goofy look, and wellhung.

The republic of Moha , where I was born in a whorehouse that was not one of the best, is a nation of small lonely farms and stockaded villages in the lake and forest and grassland country north of the Katskil Mountains and the rugged nation that bears the mountains’ name. One day Katskil may conquer all Moha, I suppose. I was born in one of Moha’s three cities, Skoar. It lies in a hollow of the hills almost on the line where the Katskil border ran at that time.

In Skoar life goes by the seasons and the Corn Market trade. Wilderness is a green flood washing up to the barrier of the city’s rather poor stockade, except where the brush has been cleared to make the West and the Northeast Roads a little safer for their double streams of men, mule-wagons, soldiers, pilgrims, tinkers, wanderers.

There’s a raw splendor to those roads, except when wartime makes folk more than ever afraid of travel and open places. In good times the roads reek of horse, ox-team, men, of the passage of chained bears and wolves brought for sale to the city baiting-pits; under sunshine and free winds the stink is nothing to trouble you. You may see anything on the go in the daytime. Maybe a great man, even a Governor, riding alone, or a holy character on a pilgrimage — you know it’s that, most likely a journey to the marketplace in Nuber, where Abraham is believed to have died on the wheel, because the man is stark naked except for his crown of briers and the silver wheel hung at his neck. He never looks to left or right when people edge up close shyly touching his head or hands or testicles to share his sanctity and heal themselves of private troubles. Or it may be some crowd of street-singers and tumblers, with whiteface monkeys chittering on their shoulders and caged parrots quarking horny talk.

Once in a while you’ll see the gay canvas-covered mulewagons of a Rambler gang with sexy pictures and odd designs all over the sides, and you know that wherever they stop there’ll be music, crazy entertainments, good balltickling sideshows, fortunetelling, fine honest swindling, and news from far places that a man can trust. Rumors come and go, and a Rambler considers it a duty to cheat you in a horsetrade or such-like slicker than a gyppo, but the Ramblers also take pride in bearing nothing but true — tales from the distant lands, and the people know it, and value them for it so highly that few governments dare clamp down on their impudence, randiness, free-living ways. I know; I never forget I was with Rumley’s Ramblers for the best years of my life before I found Nickie.

Another thing you might notice would be a fancy litter with drawn curtains, the bearers matched for height, moving in skillful broken step so that the expensive female stuff inside — might even be a Governor’s personal whore — needn’t stick her head out and blast the bearers for clumsy damned idle sumbitches. Or there might be a batch of slaves chained tandem being marched for sale at the Skoar market, or a drove of cattle for the slaughterhouse distracting the whole road with their loud stupidity and oneriness — those steers don’t want to go, not anywhere, but the road pushes them along its gut, a mindless earthworm swallowing, spilling out at the anal end and reaching for more.

The roads are quiet at night. Brown tiger and black wolf may use them then — who’s to say, unless it’s a night-caught traveler who’ll see nothing more afterward?

Farming is heartbreak work in Moha as everywhere. The stock gives birth to as many mues there as anywhere; the toll taken by the wild killers is high, the labor is sweat and disappointment grinding a man to old age in the forties, few farmers ever able to afford a slave. The people get along though, as I’ve seen human beings do in worse places than Moha. The climate is not as hot and malarial as Penn. There’s trade in timber and saddlehorses; manufacture too, though it can’t match the industry of Katskil or Nuin. A barrel-factory in Skoar turned out coffins as a sideline and prospered — Yankee ingenuity, they called it. They scrape along, the same poor snotty human race, all of a muddle and on the go, as they’ve always done and maybe always will until the sun sweats icicles, which won’t be next Wednesday.

A maybe. Now that I know the books, I can’t forget how this same human race must have survived the Years of Confusion by a narrow squeak, the merest happen-so.

The other two big centers of my homeland are Moha City and Kanhar, walled cities in the northwest on Moha Water, a narrow arm of the sea. Eighteen-foot earthwork walls — that’s enough to stop brown tiger’s leap, and it makes Skoar with its puny twelve-foot log palisade a very cheap third. The great Kanhar wharves can take outriggers up to thirty tons — the big vessels, mostly from Levanflon, that trade at all ports. Moha City is the capital, with the President’s palace, and Kanhar the largest — twenty thousand not counting the slaves, who might make it twenty-five. Moha law reasons that if you count them like human beings you may end by treating them the same way, exposing a great democracy to revolution and ruin.

Now I think of it, every nation I know of except Nuber is a great democracy. The exception, Nuber the Holy City, is not really a nation anyway, just a few square miles of sanctified topsoil facing the Hudson Sea, enclosed on its other three sides by some of Katskil’s mountains. It is the spiritual capital of the world, in other words the terrestrial site of that heavenly contraption the Holy Murcan Church . Nobody dwells there except important Church officials, most of them with living quarters in the mighty Nuber Cathedral, and about a thousand common folk to take care of their mundane needs, from sandal-thongs and toilet rags to fair wines and run-of-the-mill prosties. Katskil country doesn’t produce fine wines nor highly skilled bed-athletes — they have to be imported, often from Penn.

Katskil itself is a kingdom. Nuin is a Commonwealth, with a hereditary Presidency of absolute powers. Levannon is a kingdom, but governed by a Board of Trade. Lomeda and the other Low Countries are ecclesiastical states, the boss panjandrum being called a Prince Cardinal. Rhode, Vairmant and Penn are republics; Conicut’s a kingdom; Bershar is mostly a mess. But they’re all great democracies, and I hope this will grow clearer to you one day when the ocean is less wet. Oh, and far south or southwest of Penn is a nation named Misipa which is an empire, but they admit no visitors,[1] living behind an earthwork wall that is said to run hundreds of miles through tropical jungle, and destroying all northern coastal shipping — by the use of gunpowder no less, tossed on the decks by clever catapult devices. Since the manufacture of gunpowder is most strictly forbidden by the Holy Murcan Church as a part of the Original Sin of Man, these Misipans are manifest heathens, so nobody goes there except by accident, nobody knows whether this empire is also a democracy, and to the best of my information nobody cares to the extent of a fart in a hurricane.

Fifty miles south of Kanhar lies Skoar. There I was born, in a house that, while not high-class, was no mere crib either. I saw it later, when old enough to be observant. I remember the red door, red curtains, brass phallus-lamps, the V-mark over the front door that meant it was licensed by the city government in accordance with the Church’s famous Doctrine of Necessary Evils. What showed it wasn’t high-class was that the girls could lounge on the front steps with thighs spread or a breast bulging out of a blouse, or strip at the windows hollering invitations. A high-class house generally shows only the V-mark, the red door, and an uncommon degree of outward peace and quiet — the well-heeled customers prefer it that way. I’m not overfussy myself — so far as I’m concerned, sex can be rowdy or brimful of moonlight: so long as it’s sex, and nobody’s getting hurt, I like it.

In such houses, of whatever class, there’s no time for kids. But children are scarce in this world and therefore prized. I was well-formed, nothing about me to suggest a mue, but as a whorehouse product I was a ward of the State, not eligible for private adoption. The policers took me from my mother, whoever she was, and put me in the Skoar orphanage. She would have got the payment usual in such cases, and would then have had to change her name and move to some other city, for the State preferred that wards of my sort should know nothing of their origin — I learned mine only through the accident of overhearing a blabbermouth priest at the orphanage when I was thought to be asleep.

I grew up at the orphanage until I was nine, the usual age for bonding out. As a bond-servant I still belonged to the State, which took three-fourths of my pay until I should be eighteen. Then, if all had gone well, the State would consider itself reimbursed, and I would become a freeman. This was the Welfare System.

At the orphanage nearly everything got done with patient sighs or silence. It was not crowded. The nuns and priests wouldn’t stand for noise, but if we kept quiet there were few punishments. We were kept busy at easy tasks like sweeping, dusting, laundry, scrubbing floors, cutting and carrying firewood, washing dishes and pans, digging the vegetable patch, weeding and harvesting it, waiting on table which meant watching scum gather on the soup during Father Milsom’s prayers, and emptying the sacerdotal chamberpots.

In spite of considerable care and kindness we grew up familiar with sickness and death. I recall a year when there were only five boys and eight girls, and work got tough — the average population was around twenty children. Our guardians suffered for us, praying extra hours, burning candles of the large economy size that combines worship with fumigation, bleeding us and giving us what’s called vitamin soup which is catnip broth with powdered eggshell to stiffen the bones.

There was no schooling to speak of at the orphanage. In Moha schooling belonged to the years between the ninth and twelfth birthdays, except for the nobility and candidates for the priesthood, who had to sweat out a great deal more. Even slave children had to go through a bit of schooling: Moha was progressive that way. I well remember the district school on Cayuga Street , the weariness of effort that never found a real focus, and now and then a sense of something vital out of reach. And yet our school was very progressive. We had Projects. I made a birdhouse.

It wasn’t much like the ones I’d made for fun, off in the woods on my lone, out of bark and vines and whittled sticks. The birds themselves were uneducated enough to like those. The one I made at the school with real bronze tools was lots prettier. You wouldn’t want to hang it in a tree of course — you just don’t do such things with a Project.

My bond-servant pay wasn’t docked for school hours; a good law saw to that. All the same, compulsory progressive education is no joke, when it takes so much time out of your life that might have been spent at learning somethmg.

The only child friend I remember from the orphanage time is Caron, who was nine when I was seven. She didn’t grow up with me but was sent to the orphanage after her parents liquidated each other in a knife brawl. Only a few months and then she was bonded out, but in that time she loved me. She was quarrelsome with everyone else, constantly in trouble. Late at night, when the supervisor dozed off by the one candle, there’d be some flitting back and forth between the boys’ and girls’ sides of the dormitory, although the penalty for getting caught at sex games was twenty lashes and a day in the cellar. Caron came to me that way, slipping under my blanket bony and warm. We played our fumbling games, not very well; I remember better her talk, in a tiny voice that could not have been heard ten feet away. True-tales of the outer world, and make-believe, and often (this scared me) talk of what she meant to do to everyone in the institution except me — all the way from burning down the building to carving Father Milsom’s nuts, if he had any. She must have been bonded out away from Skoar, I think. When I was bonded myself, still lonely for her two years later, I never won a clue to what had happened to her. I learned only that the lost do not often return in life as they do in the kindly little romances we can hear from the story-teller beggars at the street-corners for a coin or two.

Caron would be thirty now, if she’s alive. Sometimes, even in bed with my Nickie, I recall our puppy squirming, the wild inconsequences of childhood thought, and imagine that if I saw her now I would know her.

I do remember one other, Sister Carnation, smelling of crude soap and sweat, who mothered me and sang to me when I was very small. She was mountainously fat with deep-sunk humorous eyes, a light true voice. I was four when Father Milsom checked my whines of inquiry by saying Sister Carnation had walked with Abraham. So I was sick-jealous of Abraham tifi someone explained it was only a holy way of saying she had died.

I was bonded out as a yard-boy at the Bull-and-Iron tavern on Kurin Street , and worked at it till a month after my fourteenth birthday, which is where I mean to begin my story. Board at half price; after that and the State’s three-fourths were taken out, I had two dollars a week left, and I supplemented the board unofficially too. Oat bread, stew, and whatever can be “uplifted” as Pa Rumley of Rumley’s Ramblers used to say — a boy can grow on that. And the stew at the Bull-and-Iron was thicker and better than anything at the orphanage — more goat and less religion.