Davy

24

A few weeks later, when we were on the move northward through Katskil, I told Pa Rumley and Mam Laura that I must go away alone. I found explanation was hardly needed. “Ai-yah,” Pa said — “I know it a’n’t as if you was a Rambler bred and born.” He didn’t seem annoyed, although my horn was a valued thing at the entertainments and I had become useful in other ways.

Mam Laura said: “You’re like my Sam — like your father — one of those who go where the heart leads, and they’re an often-wounded tribe, no help for it.”

I was thinking again, as I had done hardly at all during the Rambler years, about sailing. Not to the rim of the world: Mam Laura knew as well as Captain Barr that you can’t put a rim on a lump of stardust — but maybe I would sail around the world? Others (she taught me) had done it m ancient days. Thirty-ton outriggers had no share in the fantasy now; they’d been washed away when a poor scrannel pup lifted his leg in Renslar Harbor. I didn’t know how it was to be done, but Nuin, one heard, was a nation of brave enterprises. The fancy to sail around the world was certainly there in me at that time, a little while after Sam died, and is in me now, having come this far, this short way to the quiet island Neonarcheos.

“You go where the heart leads,” Mam Laura said. “And the heart changes in ways you don’t expect, and the vision changes, perhaps turning gray. But you go.”

Pa Rumley was stone-cold sober that day. “Laura, it’s a strange time for a man when his father dies.” He knew that, in ways she hardly could for all her wisdom. “He’s not quiet with himself for some time, Laura, no matter was his father a good man or not, no matter was he a good son to his father or a bad one.” Pa Rumley knew human beings; he also knew the God-damn yuman race — yumanity — which isn’t the same thing. He was already selling Mother Spinkton again, by the way, in these Katskil towns, and believing in her once more himself — or anyway expecting her to work miraculous cures, which she sometimes did. He may have guessed, out of the foggy backward regions of his own life, how I sometimes dreamed that Sam Loomis was still living. He may have guessed that in the dream I would often be wretched and confused instead of pleased, unable to greet my father in a natural way. I was impotent with Minna once or twice, and she grew bored with me. I doubt if Pa guessed that: whatever troubles he may have passed through in his rambling half-century, I can’t imagine him unable to get it up. “I’m figuring,” Pa said, “to cross the Hudson Sea from Kingstone, and then winter up somewheres in Bershar. Why’n’t you stay with us through the winter? Then if you still be a-mind for Nuin come spring, I’ll take you down as far as Lomeda and all you need do is cross the Conicut.”

“Kay.”

“The God-damned of it is, we’ll miss you.”

Maybe I said some of the right things then. I was eighteen, beginning to know what they were and why one said them.

Pa also couldn’t have known how often I wished I might at least have seen my mother; orphanage childhood was another thing outside his experience. His own mother was warm in his memory. She kept a dressmaking shop in Wuster, a big Nuin town. It was her death when Pa was fifteen that made him take to the roads. He wouldn’t have favored that wish of mine, for he was a sensible man. Wishing for the impossible in the future is a good exercise, I think, especially for children; wishing for it in the past is surely the emptiest and saddest of occupations.

The only thing I remember with real clearness about that winter in Bershar, my last with the Ramblers, is the drill that Mam Laura gave me in polite manners. I’d encounter them in Nuin, she said, in fact I ought to do so deliberately, seeking out people who knew how to manage themselves with grace and thoughtfulness. Manners mattered, Mam Laura said, and if I didn’t think so I was a danm fool. Which left me brash enough to ask why. She said: “Would you want to ride a wagon with no grease on the axles? But that isn’t all. If you’ve got an honest heart, the outward show may become something more than that. Be pleasant to someone for any reason and you may easily wind up liking the poor sod, which does no harm.”

They flung a party for me at Lomeda, Rambler style, stalling all work at the wharf and getting the ferry-sailer captain too joyously drunk to object to anything. I remember Minna telling him she’d remember him all her life, because sailors come and sailors go, but ever since she’d been old enough to belay a marlinspike she’d dreamed of seeing a live sailing captain with balls. I was well illuminated too when they bundled me aboard, all hollering and crying and giving good advice. I stopped singing when the ropes were cast off and I knew I was actually leaving my people, but I didn’t sober up even when the captain brought her in on the Nuin side. He did so with a slam that lifted a timber off the pier, and cussed everyone in sight for building the bald-assed cotton-pickmg pier so that it couldn’t hold up under the impact of a man with balls. That was fun.

To my fancy, even the air of Nuin tastes different from the air of other lands. Except for Penn, it is the oldest civilization of modern times, at least on that continent — nay, I can’t say that, either, for what do I know of the vague Misipan Empire in the far south, and who could deny the possibility of a great nation, or many of them, in the far western region that I know the continent does possess? Pity me, friends, only if I lose the awareness of my own ignorance.

Penn does not seem to have been much concerned with recording the events of its last two or three centuries — too good-natured, maybe. Nuin is loaded with history, bemused by it, sparkling with it; and shadowed by it. Dion, today still doggedly engaged in setting down whatever he can recall of that history, has never quite come out from under the shadow of it — how could he, and for that matter why should he? It was his world, until we sailed.

Oh, and sometimes I am — not weary of words, but beatout and a little foolish from the effort, the pleasure and torment of trying to preserve a fraction of my life in the continually moving medium of words. And I think of ask ing this poor prince — my equal and superior, whippingboy, cherished friend — to go on with this book if I should give up, stop short of what I set out to do and walk away from it. As I walked away from Rumley’s Ramblers when there was no honest need to do so. But he couldn’t do that, and with a grain of sense, I hold myself back from asking it.

When I came off the boat at Hamden, the Nuin ferry town across from Lomeda, what I first noticed was the statues. There were some modern ones, clumsy but really not too bad, of Morgan the Great and a few other wellnourished majesties, and these were shown up dreadfully by the fine sculpture of the Old-Time figures — including many bronzes that I’m certain would have been melted down for the metal anywhere except in Nuin. Hamden is proud of them — a fine, healthy, middle-sized town, clean and friendly, open to the river and neatly stockaded on the other three sides; proud of its white-painted houses too, and the pretty green, and the well-conducted market.

All the same, Old City has a flock of statues to make Hamden or any other town look sick. Most of them are of Old Time, which in Nuin is sometimes made to seem almost like yesterday, an illusion I never felt in any other place. I’m thinking at the moment of a fine seated bronze gentleman in Palace Square, who carries clear traces of ancient paint in the cracks and hollows of his patinaed garments. It’s Old-Time paint, they say. Some President — Morgan II, I think — had it covered over with thick modern varnish to preserve it. It appears in patches of crimson, green, and purple; no blue. Odd to think that this unknown religious ritual must have been going on in the very last days when the Old-Time world was passing away. The inscribed name of the subject of worship is John Harvard. Nobody seems quite clear about who he was, but he sits there modestly, rather stuffily, with timeless and splendid indifference.

I wore new clothes that day at Hamden, a new shouldersack for my horn that Minna had sewed for me, and there was money in my belt, for the Ramblers had taken up a collection and showered me with every sort of kindness. I had still no clear aim, no plan; at eighteen, no true decision what work I would do. I knew a little carpentry, a little music; I knew the wilderness and the ways of the roads. I knew I was a loner by trade.

In the inn at Hamden I found myself in the middle of a bunch of pilgrims who were finishing the last part of what Nuin people call the Loop Journey. It means a trip from Old City up into the wild glorious mountain land of the Province of Hampsher — more people live up there in the cool hills than you’d ever suppose-then south more or less following the great Conicut River as far as Hamden or Shopee Falls, and back to Old City by southern roads. It is a secular pilgrimage. The Church approves it, and stops are made at all the holy shrines and other foci of piety along the way, but there’s nothing specifically sacred about the junket itself. Anybody can play, and many do, including respectable sinners and card-sharps and musicians and prosties and all the other folk who keep life from getting dull.

Almost as soon as I entered the taproom after engaging a room for the night, a dark boy made friends with me, and I spotted him for a sinner right away because of his open kindliness and good nature. He was dressed in a Nuin style that was beginning to spread beyond that country but not enough so that I’d grown used to it — baggy knee-length britches and a loose shirt, belted in but allowed to flop out over the belt everywhere except at the knife-hilt, where it might interfere with a quick draw. About half the other pilgrims in the taproom were dressed in that style, but the boy who took it on himself to greet me and make me feel at ease was the only one who carried a rapier at his hip instead of the usual short knife. He had a knife too, I learned later, but wore it under his shirt as I used to wear mine before my Rambler days.

That rapier was a beautiful wicked thing, less than two feet long, light and delicate, scarcely half an inch at the widest point, of Penn steel so fine that it sang to a touch almost like dainty glassware. A rich man’s tool, I thought, but I had learned from Mam Laura that one didn’t ask about the price of such a thing unless one meant to buy, and often not then. The boy handled it like an extension of his arm. He liked to make it float almost noiselessly from the scabbard, and run his fingers airily up and down the side as if his mind weren’t with it at all, which made everyone in the room extremely nervous for some reason and of course anxious not to show it. Nothing indicated how much he enjoyed this except a very light crinkling of the skin at the corners of his brown eyes, and some instinct seemed to tell him when to put it away. Instinct, or a special tone in the throat-clearings of one of the priests in charge of the group.

There were two of these, Father Bland and Father Mordan, one fat and one thin, one greasy and the other a bit dry and scurfy. Father Bland himself remarked that they represented the good bacon of religion, and everyone obligingly laughed except Father Mordan the lean one who stayed in character, that is to say grumpy. I’d hardly have taken any of the crowd for pilgrims if the landlord hadn’t tipped me off, and I learned that some were really just travelers who had joined the group for safety or sociability.

“Compliments of Father Bland and Father Mordan,” said the boy in greeting me, “and will you drink wid us now or a little sooner?” I hadn’t heard much of the Nuin accent at that time. Nuin people don’t travel very often outside their own land — Nuin has everything, they say, so what would they gain by it? I guessed the boy to be near my own age, though he acted older. There was a slightness and a delicacy about him that suggested the femmme, but without weakness. I remember in the first half-hour I knew him I wondered if his little games with the rapier might not have a practical side, as a way of discouraging anyone who might misunderstand his nature.

“Honored,” I said — an item of social jazz that I happened to remember from Mam Laura’s coaching. “Honored and delighted to drink anyone under the table or else join him there.”

“Nay, we’re a soberish crowd,” he said. “Everything in moderation. Including, I insist, moderation — but that’s a point I can seldom get across to my elders.” He was watching me with uncanny sharpness. “I’m Michael Summers of Old City. Forgive the impudent curiosity — who are you, sir, and where from?”

“Davy — that is, David — of — well, of Moha — I mean—”

“David de Moha?”

“Oh lordy no!” I said, and noticed that everyone in the taproom had shut up, the better to enjoy our private conversation. “I just meant I come from Moha, back along. My last name’s — uh — Loomis.”

I’m sure he believed, for a while at least, that I was giving a false name, and he wanted to help me with it. He took me over to the others, introduced me as David Loomis with the nicest casualness, pushed me into a comfortable chair, called for fresh drinks — all as if I were somehow important, I couldn’t think why.

From scraps I heard before they went quiet, I knew Father Mordan, the thin dry one, had been instructing the company concerning original sin, a regular duty which he’d pretty well wound up for the day — anyway he was ready to acknowledge Michael’s presentation of me with a smile. The smile would have quickly hardened the grease on a flaming plum pudding, but he meant it kindly; some people just happen to be born with vinegar for blood and lemons for balls, that’s all it is.

“Rest yourself,” Michael said to me, “and look us over, man, the way you might care to travel wid us a little distance, or all the way to Old City if you’re a-mind. We start for there tomorrow, last part of the Loop Journey, back home to our own honest beds and beans and bosoms.”

I couldn’t have said no to Michael, and anyway it was what I wished. I loafed there while we talked and sang the day into night. There were two or three fair singers, and a girl with a lively guitar; with my horn, it made an evefling of music, and I drank enough to help me avoid noticing how far it was from Rambler standards. Nay, it was only the drinks and Michael that kept me from going mad with homesickness — no other word; homesickness for a cubby-hole on wheels with no destination except the next village down the road.

Except for Michael and the two priests and one other, those pilgrims have become dim in my memory, and I’ve forgotten the name of the one other. He was a fine old gray gandyshank drink of water with droopy four inch whiskers on his upper lip that made you want to ring him like a bell, but he seemed to be a good deal of a scholar, so you let the impulse slide. When Michael introduced us he said on a soft sigh: “Mmmd.” Michael told me later that this is how you say “Charmed!” in Oxfoot English, which is what the gandyshank spoke. I don’t know why they call it that — there’s very little real bull in it, and hardly any English.

Of course I’ll always remember Michael’s face winking at me, late in the evening, when we had to tear off a Murcan hymn to please Father Bland, for the wink gave me a feverish need to talk to him privately and learn whether I had met another loner of my own kind, even a heretic. Once the thought entered my head, it seemed to me that Michael had been feeling me out along that line, as subtly as a wild creature tasting the breeze, ever since we’d met.

He gave me the opportunity that night, late, slipping into my room with a candle he didn’t light until he had closed the door. “May we talk, David Loomis? Something on my mind, but send me away if you’re too beat and want to sleep.” He was still fully dressed, I noticed, including the rapier.

I wasn’t sleepy. He pulled a chair near my bed and sat straddling it, relaxed as a little cat. I was afraid of him in several ways along with a powerful affection, thinking also how slight be looked, as if a high wind would blow him away. His voice seemed more like a contralto than a tenor; he had not sung with us, claiming to be tone-deaf, and that wasn’t true, but he had his reasons. “David Loomis, when I turn my face toward you I smell heresy. Nay, don’t be alarmed, please. I’m hunting for it, but from the heretics’ side, do you understand? — not the other.” Nobody ever watched me as penetratingly as Michael did then, before he rapped out a small sharp question: “No impulse to run tell Father Mordan?”

“None,” I said — “what do you take me for?”

“I had to ask,” Michael said. “I’ve as good as told you Fm a heretic, the dangerous kind, and I had to watch for any such impulse in you. If I had seen it, I’d have had some decision to make.”

I looked at the rapier. “With that?”

It seemed to distress him. He shook his head, turning his exploring gaze away. “Nay, I don’t think I could do that to you. If there’d been danger of your betraying me, I suppose I’d have faded — taking you along until we’d made a safe distance. But I see no such danger. I think you’re a heretic yourself. Do you believe God made the world for man?”

“For a long time,” I said, “I haven’t believed in God at all.”

“It doesn’t scare you?”

“No.”

“I like you, Davy…” We must have talked two hours that night. My life tumbled out in words because he convinced me he wanted to know of it, convinced me it mattered to him — as a personal thing, not solely because we were like-minded and traveling the same road. In the past, only Sam and Mam Laura (and very far in the past, on a different level, little Caron who is probably dead) had made me feel what I said mattered and what I had done was m its own fashion a bit of history. Now the warmth, the reaching out and the recognition, came from one of my own age who clearly had a history of learning and manners equalling or surpassing Mam Laura’s; one who was also an adventurer engaged in dangerous work that set my own ambition glowing.

I told Michael what I had dreamed about journeying, thinking long ago that I would see the sun set afire for the day. “There are other fires to be lit,” Michael said, “smaller than the sun in certain ways but not others. Fires in human minds and hearts.” Yes, he was concerned with revolution in those days. Here on the island Neonarcheos I am of course never so sure of anything as I suppose we have to be sure at eighteen.

The reaching out and the recognition — why, growing up is partly a succession of recognitions. I have heard that growing old will turn out to be a series of good-byes. I think it was Captain Barr who made that remark to me, not very long ago.

Michael, that first night while the rest of the inn was snoring, did not tell me as much of his own story in return. Some things he was not ready to tell until he knew me better, others he could not have told without violating his oath to the membership of the Society of Heretics. But he was free to tell me that such a society existed in Nuin and was beginning to have a trifle of following beyond Nuin’s borders. He could tell me his conviction that the Church would not rule forever, perhaps not even much longer — optimism of his own youth there, I think. And he said just before he left me that if I wished, he could very soon put me in touch with someone who would admit me to tentative membership. Probation, they called it — was I interested?

Does a fish swim? I wanted to hop Out of bed and hug him, but before I could he produced a little flask from inside his shirt and handed it to me. “Virgin’s milk,” he said, “sometimes called cawn-squeezings — hey, go easy, you sumbitch, it’s got to last us all the way to Wuster. Sleep on the talk, Davy, and come along with our gaggle of pilgrims in the morning and we’ll talk again. But another time, if a heretic winks at you, don’t wink back if there’s a priest where he can catch the wind of your eyelashes.”

“Oh!—”

“Nay, no sweat, they didn’t notice anything. But be careful, friend. That’s how joes like you and me stay alive.”

In the morning, on the road, Father Mordan was still concerned with original sin, and it may have prevented his insides from dealing rightly with a very good breakfast, for his discourse along the first mile or two of a dusty highway was punctuated by the sudden, uncomfortable type of burp. Father Bland endured it as long as he could and then picked on a theological point — I’m sure God alone could have appreciated it — to give Father Mordan the father and mother of an argument. Under cover of this inspiring noise and heat, Michael and I fell behind out of earshot and continued our conversation of the night.

He seemed in a more speculative frame of mind, taking me for granted a little more too. Yet there were also more unspoken things between us, in spite of the agreements and discoveries of a sudden friendship. Most of that morning’s talk I remember only in bits and pieces, though all the feeling of it remains with me. “Davy — you might feel perhaps that Father Mordan is not in possession of absolute truth?”

“Well, after all—”

“Uhha. Father Bland, you know, would honestly like to see everybody safe in a comfortable heaven — no pain, no sin, just glory-glory all day long. It would bore the hell out of you or me, but he truly believes he’d like it, and so would everybody else. And that jo, Davy, gave up a rich man’s existence to serve the rest of his life as a small-time priest. And in case you think there’s anything trifling about him — well, a month ago he went with me into a smallpoxrotten village up in Hampsher, an escort for a wagon-load of food for any poor devils that might be still alive. The wagon-dnver wouldn’t go without a priest. Not a one of the other pilgrims would go, and Father Mordan felt it his duty to stay behind with them. Just Father Bland and a bond-servant driver and me — and no danger for me because I had the disease in childhood and happen to know it gives immunity, which most people won’t believe — but Father Bland never had it. Is Father Bland in possession of absolute truth?”

“No.”

“Why?”

In the night when he went away with his candle he had left me testing my own thoughts a while before I could sleep — testing, and grappling with them to the point of suffering; but then I did sleep, profoundly and restfully. Not that I was in any sense free of confusion or uncertainty — I am not today — but what Michael was doing with me that morning was a very gentle kind of wrestling after all, demanding only that I think for myself, as Main Laura had done in her different way. I said: “Why, Michael, I think it’s because absolute truth either doesn’t exist or can’t be reached. A man’s being brave and kindly doesn’t make him wise.”

We went on a time in silence, I remember, but it wasn’t long before Michael took hold of my arm and said without smiling: “You are now in touch with someone who can admit you to probationary membership in the Society of Heretics. Do you still want it?”

“You yourself? You have that authority?”

He grinned then, more like a boy. “For six months, but in all that time until now I haven’t found anyone who met the requirements. I didn’t want to mystify you, but had to sleep on it myself. Probation only — more I can’t do, but in Old City I’ll guarantee you a welcome, and you’ll meet others who can take you further. They’ll set you things to do, some of which you won’t understand right away.” All I could say was a stumbling thanks, which he brushed aside.

We had halted there in the sunny road, and I noticed I could no longer even hear the pilgrims who had gone on ahead. It was a tranquil open place, where a small stream crossed the road through a culvert and wandered away into a field. The Bland-Mordan argument was less than dust on the breeze, but I said: “Should we catch up with them?”

“For my part,” Michael said, “I’ve no more use for them. I enjoyed traveling with them, if only for the privilege of hearing ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ sung in Oxfoot English with guitar accompaniment, but now I’d sooner go on to Old City with no company but yourself — if you like the thought. I have money, and a skill with this little pigsticker that makes up for my lack of brawn. I don’t know the wilderness in the ways you were telling me about last night, but from here to Old City it’s all roads and safe inns. How about it?”

“That’s what I’d like.”

He was studying the stream, and its vanishing in taller growth some distance from the road. “Those willows,” he said — “away off the other side of that thicket — would they mean a pool, Davy? I’d like a dip, to wash off Mordan’s original sin.”

I think that was the first time I’d ever heard a priest mentioned without his title. It gave me a chill that was at first fright, then pleasure, then matter-of-fact amusement. “It should be a pool,” I said, “or they wouldn’t be clustered like that…”

I suppose there could have been some danger out in the grassland, but it seemed like safe country as we slipped through the grass, the pilgrims becoming long-ago things and then forgotten, and found the pool. I had begun to understand about Michael, but not entirely until I saw the shirt impatiently flung away from a ridiculous bandage that bound his upper chest. Then that was gone, the small woman’s breasts set free.

She took off the rapier with care, but not the clumsy trousers — those she dropped and sent flying with a kick. She stood by me then all gravity and abstracted sweetness, proud of her brown slimness, hiding nothing. Seeing I was too dazed and too much in love to move, she touched the bluish tattoo on her upper arm and said: “This doesn’t trouble you, does it, Davy? Aristocracy, caste-it means nothing among the Heretics.”

“It doesn’t trouble me. Nothing should trouble me much if I can be with you the rest of my life.”

I remember she put out her golden hand against my chest and pushed me lightly, glancing at the pool, smiling for the first time since she had bared herself. “Does it look deep enough?” Nickie asked me. “Deep enough for diving?”