Davy

5

Three nights ago — I was off watch — a hell of a gale swooped out of the northwest, and up went some of these pages like a mob of goosed goblins. Nickie grabbed the ones fluttering near the port-hole, and I grabbed Nickie. Then the cabin tilted steep as a barn roof, the lantern smoked viciously and went out, and we were piled up against our bunk hearing the sea beaten to frenzy. But our Morning Star bore down against the goaded waters; she righted herself and rushed away with arrogant steadiness into the dark.

Captain Barr had smelled danger and got us reefed down just enough, ready as a race-horse; he didn’t bother calling up the off watch.

I remember that square dark block of man at Provintown Island in 327, for I was there when the Hawk burned at her moorings. We’d gone ashore to accept the pirates’ surrender and take formal possession of all the Cod Islands in Nuin’s name. The fire may have been started by a spark from the galley stove. Sir Andrew’s face hardly shifted a muscle when the red horror rose out there and roared across her decks. Dying inside, he turned to us and remarked: “I think, gentlemen, we’d be well advised not to exaggerate our difficulties.” When Sir Andrew Barr dies for the last time it will be with some stately comment like that, pronounced so cleanly you can hear each punctuation mark click into the right place. If the pirate boss, old B ally-John Doon, had nourished any notion of taking advantage of the fire it must have perished at those words; after the Hawk’s survivors swam ashore and were cared for the ceremony proceeded just as planned.

In 322, the first year of the Regency, Barr was already dreaming of a strong ship rigged entirely fore-and-aft. The dream grew out of a diagram in a magnificent book at the underground library of the secret society of the Heretics — an Old-Time dictionary. We have it on board. The front cover and some of the introductory pages are missing; the borders carry the scars of fire, and on the brittle sheet that now begins the book there’s a brown stain. I think someone bled after rescuing it from a holy bonfire, but make up your own story. Sparked by the diagram, Barr searched out more information on Old-Time shipbuilding — all he could get — until through the Heretics he made contact with Dion and his conception was embodied in the building of the Hawk, and later the Morning Star.

When it was clear, in the last days of General Salter’s rebellion, that we would probably lose the final battle for Old City , we divided the books with the brave handful of Heretics who elected to remain. And we did lose the battle, and fled aboard the Morning Star — suburbs ablaze, stench of hatred and terror in all the streets — a hard decision, I suppose harder for Dion than for the rest of us. The dictionary was almost necessary for us; I can’t think of any one book that would give us more.

Those Heretics who remained were not all of them older people. A good number of the young stayed on, having some love and hope for Nuin in spite of everything. Theirs was the greater risk. We are only venturing on the unexplored; they dared to stay in a country that will again be governed by men who believe themselves possessed of absolute truth.

Captain Barr trusts our spread of eager canvas as no landsman could, and knows the sea in something like the way I knew the wilderness when I was a boy. A relentless perfectionist, he calls the Morning Star a beginner’s effort. It doesn’t conceal his love for her, which I think exceeds any he ever felt for a woman. He never married, and won’t bed with a girl who might demand permanence.

That evening when the storm cut loose Nickie and I weren’t expecting the universe to turn upsydown, so we got caught bare-ass innocent. I don’t think she minded, after prying my elbows loose from her knees.[7] Of course now that she’s taken to signing her full name and title of nobility I can see there’ll be no dull times ahead. (Dma. stands for “Domina”, which is what you call a lady of the Nuin aristocracy, married or single.) Already I’ve learned that when I come back to this manuscript after any absence it’s best to examine it, the way a dog searches himself after associating with mutts who may have a difterent entomological environment. I got “entomological” out of the Old-Time dictionary and I find it beautiful. It means buggy.

That wind blew until the following afternoon, shrill continuous wrath. On my watch I had the wheel. I’m happy then in any weather, overcoming the impulse of the wheel toward chaos, my own strength and its demand for order enough but only just enough, and under me a hundred tons of human creation straining forward against space and time. You may have your horses; I say there’s no poem like a two-masted schooner, and I’ll hope to ride a ship now and then until I am too old to grip the spokes, too dull of sight to read the impersonal assurance of a star.

That day of wind, Second Mate Ted Marsh had to transmit orders by waving his hands or bringing his mouth next to my ear. Few orders needed, though. We could do no more than run before it under jib and storm-sail, and so we did, taking no harm. Next morning the uproar was spent: we were creeping, and a few hours later becalmed. We still are. The wind had spat us out into a quiet, and fog claimed us. It lies around us now, the ocean hushed as if we had come to a cessation of all endeavor, motion, seeking, a defeat of urgency by silence. The sea level is not what it was when our Old-Time maps were made. The earth has changed, and those who live on it. There’s been no man sailing here since before the Years of Confusion.

Tonight our deck lanterns probe a few yards. From our cabin I hear fog-damp dripping off limp canvas. The animals are all quiet — chickens and sheep and cattle aslumber I suppose, and never a bray from Mr. Wilbraham penned aft with his two jennies who are expected to love him if anyone can; even the pigs have apparently knit up the ravell’d squeal of care. Nickie too has gone sweetly to sleep — truly asleep: she can’t prevent a quiver of the black eyelashes when she’s shamming.[8] She said a few hours ago that she doesn’t feel oppressed by the fog but has a notion it might conceal something pleasant, an island for instance.

I intended when I began this book to tell events in the order they happened. But when I woke this morning in the fogbound hush I fell to brooding over the different varieties of time. My story belongs in four or five of them.

So does any story, but it seems to be a literary custom that one kind should dominate, the others being suppressed or taken for granted. I could do that, and you who may exist might be too cloth-headed or stubborn or to busy keeping the baby out of the molasses to feel anything missing, but I’d feel it.

There’s the stream of happenings I picked up a little after my fourteenth birthday. Call that the mainstream if you like; and by the way, I shall have to make it flow a little faster soon, since I haven’t the patience for a book seven or eight million words long. Besides, while it’s possible you exist, if I confronted you with a book like that, you might weasel out of it by claiming you don’t.

There’s the story I live (pursued by footnotes) as this ship journeys toward you — unless the journey’s already ended: I saw no hint of a wake when I was on deck, the sails hang spiritless, a chunk of driftwood lies in polished stillness only a trifle nearer the ship than it was an hour ago… You could hardly read that mainstream story without knowing something of this other: whatever I write is colored by living aboard the Morning Star — glimpse of a whale a week ago — the gull who followed us until he discovered with comic suddenness that he was the only one of his kind, and wheeled, and sped away westward — why, I wouldn’t have begun this chapter here and now, in this way, if Nickie had not spoken a casual word or two night before last about the different kinds of tempest. She wasn’t thinking of my book, only loafing with me in the aftermath of a love-storm, when she had been mirthful and sweetly savage (one of many aspects) — grabbing the skin of my chest with sharp nails as she rode astride of me, a spark-eyed devil-angel moaning, writhing, laughing, crying, proud of her love and her sex and her dancing brown breasts, all muscle and spice and tenderness. Quiet in the afterglow, her dark arm idle across me, she only said that no storm is like any other, no storm of wind and rain, or of war, or of the open sea, or of love. This book is part of my life, and so to me it matters that Nickie’s drowsy words started a course of thought leading to Chapter Five in this place, at this time.

A third sort of time — well, I’m obliged to write some history, for if you exist you have only guesswork to tell you what’s happened to my part of the world since the period we call the Years of Confusion. I think there must have been a similar period for you — my guesswork. Your nations were stricken by the same abortive idiotic nuclear war and probably by the same plagues. Your culture showed the same symptoms of a possible moral collapse, the same basic weariness of over-stimulation, the same decline of education and rise of illiteracy, above all the same dithering refusal to let ethics catch up with science. After the plagues, your people may not have turned against the very memory of their civilization in a sort of religious frenzy as ours apparently did, determined like spoiled brats to bring down in the wreckage every bit of good along with the bad. They may not have, but I suspect they did. The best aspects of what some of us now call the “Golden Age” were clearly incomprehensible to the multitudes who lived then: they demanded of the age of reason that it give them more and more gimmicks or be damned to it. And they kept their religions alive as substitutes for thought, ready and eager to take over the moment reason should perish. I can’t suppose you did much better on your side of the world, or you would possess ships that would have made contact with us already.

I keep wondering whether, over there, the spooky religion of Communism may not have slugged it out with its older brother Christianity in the ruins. Whichever won, the human individual would be the loser.

Ever notice that only individuals think?…

After the collapse, human beings evidently existed for some time in frightened dangerous bands while weeds prepared the way for the return of forest. Those bands were interested in nothing but survival, not always in that — so we’re told by John Barth who saw the beginning of the Years of Confusion. He gives them that name in his fragment of a journal, which ends with an unfinished sentence in the year the Old-Time calendar called 1993. The Book of John Barth is of course totally forbidden in the nations we have left behind, possession of it meaning death “by special order” — that is, directly under supervision of the Church. We must make more copies as soon as we can set up our little press somewhere on land with a chance of renewing the paper supply.

Book-voices of Old Time tell me also of the vastly older ages, the millions of centuries extending back of the short flare which is human history to the beginning of the world. When I speak of even a small interval like a thousand years I can hardly grasp what I mean — but for that matter do I know what I mean by a minute? Yes — that is the part of eternity in which Nickie’s heart asleep will beat sixty-five times, give or take a few, unless I touch her, and her pulse hastens perhaps because in sleep she remembers me.

By starting after my fourteenth birthday I made myself responsible for yet another time, the deep-hidden years before then, the age no one quite recalls. Once improperly straying I looked up at the underside of a dark long table, myself surrounded by a forest of black-robed legs and big sandaled feet, by the unwashed smell — and there in a corner shadow a gray spider hung and twitched her web, disturbed by me or by the clash of plates, rumble and twitter of empty talk overhead.

Nickie is my age, twenty-eight, pregnant for the first time in our years of pleasure with each other. (What is time for a being in the womb who lives in time but can’t yet know it?) She told me about it last night, when she was sure. Across the cabin from me, staring into the flame of a candle she held, Nickie said: “Davy, if it’s a mue—?”

Touched with anger, I said: “We didn’t bring the priestwritten laws of that country with us.” She watched me, Miranda Nicoletta lately a lady of Nuin, and I afraid — I shouldn’t have said “that country” in the unthinking way I did, for Nickie has a natural remembering love of her homeland, and used to share her cousin Dion’s visions for it. But then she smiled and set down the candle and came to me, and we were as near as we ever have been — considering the inveterate loneliness of the human self, that is very near. Love is a region where recognition is possible. Her way of moving when she is drowsy makes me think of the motion of full-grown grass under the fondling of wind, the bending with no brittleness, yielding without defeat, rising back to upright grace and selfhood after the passage of the unconquering air.

Captain Barr always calls her “Domina” because it sounds natural to him even out here where old formalities hold no force. Back in Nuin after he got his knighthood he could have addressed her as “Miranda,” or “Nickie” for that matter, but he was born a freeman and recognition came late — not until Dion was Regent and searching for men of brains and character to replace the hordes of seventh cousins, prQfessional brown-nosers and what not who swarmed into the state jobs under Dion’s mentally incompetent uncle Morgan III. A respect for the older nobility is ingrained in Captain Barr, and in this instance it’s not extravagant, considering the amount of dignity that Funny-puss can pile on at will. Let’s clear up that St. Clair-Levison thing, by the way. It merely means her pop’s name was St. Clair and her mama’s Levison, both being of the nobility or, as she is inclined to say, “nobs with knobs on”, a peculiar expression. If Senator Jon Amadeus Lawson Marchette St. Clair, Tribune of the Commonwealth and Knight of the Order of the Massasoit, had married a commoner, which I can’t imagine Buster doing under any circs, Nickie’s last name would be just St. Clair.

The deMoha is largely imaginary, like a bridegroom’s seventh round. I mean, when I became slightly important in Nuin, Dion felt I should possess a more decorative handle, as a social convenience. After kicking my intellect around the bush and coming up with nothing better than Wilberforce, I asked his help and he suggested deMoha. With which I am stuck. You should have seen how relieved and happy the Lower Classes felt about washing my linen and so on after I got thus labeled but not before: for a top-flight snob, give me a poor man every time. And since according to our notions (but not those of Nuin) Nickie and I are most sincerely married, she calls herself deMoha and you can’t stop her. She claims I possess a natural nobility that remains in evidence with my clothes off, a rema’kable thing, and she has me so bewitched and bewattled that I naturally agree.

“Even with a light burning?” s’s I.

“Or widout,” s’s she. Nuin people can pronounce th perfectly well, but often they don’t bodda.

Now I suppose you want me to explain why Nuin is called a Commonwealth when it’s been governed by a monarchy known as a Presidency, and a Senate with two left feet, for going on two hundred years. I don’t know.

I had to hug Nickie awake this morning and tell her about varieties of time. She listened briefly, slid her hand over my mouth, and remarked: “One moment, my faun, my unusual chowderhead, my peculiar sweet-stuff so named because time is far, far too pressing to employ any such dad-gandered and long-syllabled and so deplorably erotic word as beloved, my singular and highly valued long-horned trouble-shooter, before we discuss anything that difficult we ought to wrestle (and don’t worry about the baby) to decide who has to go to the galley and fetch us breakfast in b — “I won. Only woman I ever heard of who’s just as wonderful at it in the morning. So eventually she had to go fetch breakfast, and returned to our cabin with Dion trailing.

Not that she needed help in carrying the jerk meat and poor-jo biscuits, but I was pleased to see she’d loaded Dion down with a teapot and a jug of cranberry juice — we have to drink it, by his orders and Captain Barr’s. We have other antiscorbutics, salt cabbage for instance and sauerkraut; these we face at mid-day and suppertime with what courage we can summon. I remained respectfully in bed, Nickie slid back under the blanket with me, so the late Regent of Nuin had no place for his highborn rump except the floor, or my built-in desk seat which was obscured by some of Nickie’s clothes — anyhow the seat is too low for Dion’s long legs. He said: “Mis’ble lazy crumbs. I’ve been fishing since dawn, working-type jo.”

“That’s nothing,” I said. “I’ve been thinking.”

“Catch anything, either of you?”

“Nay, Miranda — tied down the line and went back to sleep. Besides, Mr. Wilbraham was watching and it threw me off. Hate to have a donkey look over my shoulder.”

I out with it, about varieties of time and story.

“Direct narrative’s the main thing,” Dion said.

“Why,” said Nickie, “the story of the voyage is clearly the best, because I’m in it already. Won’t be in the mainstream till he’s struggled up to his eighteenth year.”

Dion grunted, in one of his lost, abstracted moods. He is forty-three; our tested and satisfying friendship can bridge the gap of totally different birth and upbringing more easily than the gap of age — how could I ever quite know how the world looks to a man who’s been in it fifteen years longer than I?… The darkness of his skin was a mark of distinction in Nuin. Morgan I, Morgan the Great who stirred up such a king-size gob of history two hundred years ago, is said to have been dark as a walnut. Nickie’s a deep tan with a rosy flush. I never met any of the Nuin nobility as blond as I am, though some approach it — the Princess of Hannis was a blazing redhead. If I understood the old books a little better or if more of them had survived the holy burnings, I suppose I could find the characteristics of the varied races of Old Time in modern people — an idle occupation, I’d say…

“You’re both spooking up the wrong tree,” I said, “because all the different kinds of time are important. My problem is how to go from one to another with that utter perfection of grace which my wife finds so characteristic of me.” Captain Barr’s cat, Mam Humphrey, walked in just then, tail up, very pregnant, and looking for a soft place to sleep out the morning; she jumped on our bunk, knowing a good thing. “Historical time for instance. You must admit there’s a case to be made for history in moderation.”

“Oh,” Dion said, “I suppose it’s useful material for stuffing textbooks. Lately we’ve lived rather more than a bellyful of it.”

Nickie was getting maudlin, kissing Mam Humphrey’s black and white head and mumbling something Dion didn’t catch about two girls in the same fix. As it happened we didn’t tell Dion of the pregnancy till later in the day.

“Still are,” I suggested. “This voyage is history.”

“And the fog still deep,” Nickie said. “Oh — when I was getting the grub Jim Loman told me he saw a goldfinch skim by just when it was getting light. Do they migrate?”

“Some.” I was remembering Moha. “Most stay the winter, anyway September’s too early for migration.”

“When the fog is gone,” she said, “and the sun discovers us, let it be an island with none there but the birds and a few furry harmless things, the goldflnches no one could want to kill, the way they dip and rise, dip and rise — isn’t that the rhythm of living by the way? A drop and then a lightness and a soaring? Nay, don’t speak a word of my fancy unless you be liking it.”

Dion said: “It could be the mainland of a nation with no kindness for strangers.”

“Damn that prince,” she said. “I set free a small thing too large for my own head, whang goes the arrow of his common sense and down comes my bird in flight that was all the time na’ but an ambitious chicken.”

“Why, I’m liking that goldfinch as much as thou, Miranda, but I’m a thousand years older, the way I used to be the simulacrum of a ruler, and that means to contend with folly — compromise with it — after a while the heart sickens as thou knowest. Nothing strange about my uncle going mad. A good weak man, I think, gone into hiding, into a shell his mind built for him. What we saw — the fat thing on the floor drooling and masturbating with dolls, that was the shell. I suppose the good weak man died inside it after a while, the shell continuing to exist.”

The thing had to be gelded, before the Church would allow it to go on existing in secret and agree to the polite fiction of “ifi health” to spare the presidential family the disgrace of having produced a brain-mue — which could have caused a dangerous public uproar. The priest who castrated him told Dion that after the first shock, Morgan III seemed to recover a moment of clarity and said plainly: “Happy the man who can no longer beget rulers!”

“Hiding,” Nickie asked, “from the follies he feared he might himself commit?”

“Something like that. As for me, I suppose I shall be something to frighten good Nuin children for centuries, as the Christians of Old Time used to rattle the bones of the Emperor Julian miscalled the Apostate.”

“Write Nuin’s history thyself,” said Nickie, “outside of Nuin. How else could it be done anyway? — certainly not in the shadow of the Church.”

“Why,” said Dion, thinking it over — “why, I might do that…”

“We’ve thought we wanted to find mainland,” I said, “but I can go along with Nick — why not an island? Does the Captain still say we’re near what the map calls the Azores?”

“Yes. Of course our calculation of longitude is off — the best clocks already three minutes in disagreement. Made by the Timekeepers’ Guild of Old City, best in the known world, and by Old-Time standards what are those craftsmen? Moderately fair beginners, gifted clodhoppers.”

I began clacking then, instructing Dion for a while on the political management of an island colony of intelligent Heretics. I have that fault. In a different world — and if I didn’t spend so much time more profitably, making music and tumbling my rose-lipped girl, I think I might have become a respectable teacher of snotnoses.

Later this morning we were busy. Captain Barr ordered out the longboat to try towing the Morning Star clear of the fog, and we went on a snailpace for some hours. He quit the attempt when the men were tired, though the lead was still finding no bottom. He was sure he smelled land through the fog-damp, and I smelled it too. That land could rise sheer and sudden out of deep water. Tomorrow, if the fog gives us fifty yards or better of visibility, he may try the towing again.

The stillness troubles us. We listen for breakers or the slap of water against stone.

Nickie sleeps; I am suspended in my own mist of memory and reflection and ignorance. How truly is a man the master of his own course?

The unknown drives us. We could not know we were to lose the war in Nuin. How should I have known I would find and covet the golden horn? But within my small range of knowledge and understanding, driven by chance but still human, still brainy and passionate and stubborn and no more of a coward than my brothers, it’s for me to say where I go.

Let others think for you and you throw away your opportunity of possessing your own life even within that limited range. You’re then no longer a man but an ox in human shape, who doesn’t understand that he might break the fence if he had the will. Early in our years together Nickie said to me: “Learn to love me by possessing thine own self, Davy, as I try to learn how to possess my own — I think there’s no other way.”

As men and not oxen, I suppose we are men with a candle in the dark. Close in the light with walls of certainty or authority, and it may seem brighter — look, friends, that’s a reflection from prison walls, your light is no larger. I’ll carry mine through the open night in my own hand.