Davy

6

I couldn’t stop running with my golden horn till I’d rounded the east side of the mountain, passed the approach to my cave without thinking of it, and was looking down on the Skoar church spires. I collapsed on a log gulping for air.

The skin of my belly hurt. I found a patch of red and a puncture mark. I’d blundered through an orb-spider’s web and only now would my body admit the pain. I’d been bitten before and knew what to expect. Hot needles were doing a jerky jig over my middle; my head ached, I’d soon have a fever, and then by tomorrow it wouldn’t bother me much. I was enough of a child and a savage to marvel at God’s letting me off so lightly.

I unwrapped the horn and raised it to my lips. How naturally it rested against me, my right hand at the valves! I imagined the ancient makers putting a guiding magic in it. They simply took thought for the shape of human body and arm, like a knife-maker providing for the human hand. Partly by accident, I must have firmed my lips and cheeks in almost the right way. It spoke for me. I thought of sunlight transformed to sound.

I returned it to the sack, scared. Not of the mue three miles away with the mountain between us, but of his demon father. Fevered already, I said aloud: “Well, fuck him, he don’t exist no-way.” Know what? — nothing happened.

Maybe that was the moment I began to understand what most grown people never learn, and did not even in the Golden Age, namely that words are not magic.

I said (silently this time) that it didn’t matter. The horn was mine. I’d never see the mue again. I’d run away to Levannon, yes, but not by way of North Mountain.

The spider-bite set me vomiting, and I recalled some wiseacre saying the best treatment for orb-spider’s bite was a plaster of mud and boy’s urine. Loosening my loin-rag, I muttered: “A’n’t no use account I a’n’t a hejasus boy no more.” And laughed some, and piddled on bare earth to make the plaster anyhow. I’m sure it was as good as anything the medicine priests do for the faithful — didn’t kill me and made the pain no worse. I went on downhill to the edge of the forest near the stockade, to wait for dark and the change of guards.

A wide avenue, Stockade Street, ran all around the city just inside the palings; after the change the new guard would march a hundred paces down that street, and I would hear him go. That spring they were more alert than usual because of a rising buzz of war talk between Moha and Katskil; border towns take a beating in those affairs. At the end of his section he’d meet the next guard and bat the breeze if the corporal or sergeant wasn’t around, and that would leave my favorite spot unwatched. Later on the guards would take longer breaks in safe corners, smoking tobacco or marawan and trading stiffeners,[9] but the first break would suit my needs. Meanwhile I had an hour to wait and spent it unwisely thinking too much about the mue, which made me wonder what sort of creature I was.

I knew of brain-mues, the most dreaded of all, who have a natural human form so that no one can guess their nature till their actions reveal it. Sooner or later they behave in a way folk call the mue-frenzy, or insanity. They may bark, fume, rush about like beasts, see what others do not, lapse (like Morgan III) into the behavior of an idiot child, or sit speechless and motionless for days on end. Or they may with the most reasonable manner speak and obviously believe outrageous nonsense, usually suspecting others of wickedness or conspiracy or supposing themselves to be famous important people — even Abraham, or God himself. When brain-mues reveal themselves this way they are given over to the priests for disposal, like people who develop mysterious discolorations or lumps under the skin, since these are also considered to be the working-out of a mue-evil.

An Old-Time book we have on board describes “insane” people very differently, as sick people who may be treated and sometimes healed. This book uses the word “psychopathic” and mentions “insanity” or “craziness” as unsuitable popular terms. Ayah, and nowadays if you call a jo “crazy” you only mean he’s odd, weird, full of mahooha, a long-john-in-summer, a quackpot. Our Old-Time book speaks of these people with no horror but with a kind of compassion that in the modern spook-ridden world human beings seldom show except to those who very closely resemble themselves.

Well, hunkered in the thicket outside the palisade, I knew nothing of books except as a dusty bewilderment of my schooltime, now past. I thought, with none to console me: Do brain-mues act as I’ve done? No! I said. But the idea lurked in shadow, a black wolf waiting.

Behind the palings a man with a fair tenor and a mandolin was singing “Swallow in the Chimbley,” approaching down a side-street. Skoar folk had been humming that ever since a Rambler gang introduced it a few years before. It made me think of Emmia, less about my troubles.

Swallow in the chimbley,

Oop hi derry O!

Swallow in the chimbley,

Sally on my knee.

Swallow flying high,

Sally, don’t you cry!

Tumble up and tumble down and lie with me.

The evening was hot, heavy with the smell of wild hyacinth, so still I could hear that man hawk and spit after goofing the high note the way you expect a tenor to do if he’s got more sass than education. I liked that.

You can’t live thinking you’re a brain-mue.

Swallow in the chimbley,

Oop hi derry O!

Swallow in the chimbley,

Sally jump free—

Left her smock behind,

Sally, don’t you mind!

Tumble up and tumble down and lie with me.

The singer was evidently the stockade guard’s relief, for now I heard the ceremony of the change of guards. First the old guard hollered at the new to quit making like a Goddamn likkered-up tomcat and get the lead out of his butt. After that, the solemn clash of gear, and a brisk discussion of music, the rightness of the town clock, what the corporal would say, where the corporal could shove it, and a suggestion that the musical new guard do something in the way of sexual self-ministration which I don’t think is possible, to which the singer replied that he couldn’t account he was built like a bugle. I sneaked over to the base of the stockade, waiting out the ceremony. At last the new guard stomped off down the street on his first round — without his mandolin since he had to carry a javelin.

Swallow in the chimbley,

Oop hi derry O!

Swallow in the chimbley,

Sally cry “Eee!”

Catch her by the tail,

Happy little quail!

Tumble up and tumble down and lie with me.

The spider-bite hampered me climbing the stockade, but I made it, the burden in my sack unharmed. I sneaked down Kurin Street to the Bull-and-Iron. Emmia’s window was lit, though it wasn’t yet her bedtime. When I reached the stable, damned if she wasn’t there doing my work for me. She had finished watering the mules, and turned with a finger at her lips. “They think I’m in my room. Said I seen you at work and they took my word for it. I swear, Davy, this is the last time I cover up for you. Shame on you!”

“You didn’t have to, Miss Emmia. I—”

“’Didn’t have to’ — and me trying to save your backside a tanning! Moving away, Mister Independent?”

I squirmed my sack to the floor; my sh!rt sprung open and she saw the smeary bite. “Davy darling, whatever? And here she comes in a warm rush, no more mad at all. “Oh dear, you got a fever too!”

“Orb-spider.”

“Dumb crazy love, going off where them awful things be, if you was small enough to turn over my lap I’d give you a fever where you’d remember it.” She went on so, sugary scolding that means only kindness and female bossiness.

When she stopped for breath I said: “I didn’t goof off, Miss Emmia — thought it was my free day.” Her soft hands fussing at my shirt and the bitten place were rousing me up so that I wondered if my loin-rag would hide the evidence.

“Now shed up, Davy, you didn’t think never no such of a thing, the way you lie to me and everybody it’s a caution to the saints, but I won’t tell, I said I’d covered for you, only more fool me if I ever do it again, and you’re lucky it’s a Friday so you wasn’t missed, and anyway—” There was this about Emmia: if you wished to say anything yourself you had to wait for the breath-pauses and work fast against the gentle stream that couldn’t stop because it must get to the bottom of the hill and there was always more coming. “Now you go right straight up to your bed and I’ll bring you a mint-leaf poultice for that ’ere because Ma says it’s the best thing in the world for any kind of bite, bug-bite I mean, a snake is different of course, for that you’ve got to have a jolt of likker and a beezer-stone[10] but anyway — oh, poo, what did you put on it?” But she didn’t wait to hear. “You take your lantern now, I won’t need it, and straight up to bed with you, don’t stand there fossicking around.”

“Kay,” I said, and tried to hoist my sack without her noticing it, but she could talky-talk and still be sharp.

“Merciful winds, what have you got there?”

“Nothin’.”

“Nothin’ he says and it pushing out the sack big as a house — Davy, listen, if you’ve latched onto something you shouldn’t I can’t cover that for you, it’s a sin—”

“It’s nothing!” I yelled that. “You gotta know everything, Miss Emmia, it’s a chunk of wood I found so to carve you something for your name-day, ’f you gotta know ever’ durn thing, if you gotta.”

“O Davy, little Spice!” She grabbed me again, her face one big rose. I barely swung the sack out of the line of operations before I got kissed.

No one had kissed me since Caron. True, “little Spice” doesn’t mean the same as just “Spice.” But Emmia was keeping hold of me, her fragrant heat pressing — lordy, I hadn’t even known a girl’s nipples could grow firm enough to be felt through the clothes! But something was wrong with me; I was growing limp and scared, stomach fluttering, the spiderbite jumping. “Aw Davy, and I was scolding you so, and you sick with a bite you got account you was doing something for me — O Davy, I feel awful.”

I dropped the sack and tightened my arms, learning her elastic softness. Her eyes opened wide in astonishment as if no such thought had ever touched her so far as I was concerned, and maybe it hadn’t till she felt my hands growing a little courageous at her waist and hips.[11] “Why, Davy!” My hands relaxed too soon and she collected her wits. “You go up to bed now like I said, and I’ll bring the poultice soon as I can sneak back out here.”

I toiled up to the loft, the memory of her flesh printed on mine, reached my pallet without dropping the lantern, and hid my sack in the hay. I flung off my loin-rag but kept my shirt on because of a fever-chill. Under the blanket limp and shivering, I watched fantastic nothings ebb and flow in the darkness around the rafters of the loft, so far above my puddle of lantern-light. I smelled the lantern’s rancid seal-oil, the dry hay, the sweat and manure of horses and mules below. I wished I dared show the golden horn to someone and tell my story. Who but Emmia? At that time she was my one friend.

The bond-servant caste is a sorry thing in Moha, squeezed from above and below. Slaves hated us for being slightly better off, the lifers not so sharply as the shortterm slaves, who probably felt they weren’t too different from us, a mere matter of conviction for minor crime instead of our accident of birth or bad fortune. Freemen despised us for the sake of looking down on someone-no real satisfaction in looking down on a slave. Emmia could have got into bad trouble by showing affection for me when any third person was present; I never expected her to, and that she should do so when we were alone was still a puzzle to me that night, in spite of all the lush daydreams I was in the habit of building on the fact — it just hadn’t occurred to me yet (outside of daydreams) that there was anything about me a woman would actually love.

I must have heard the whole run of popular sayings: “All bond-servants steal a little” — “Give a b.s. an inch and he’ll take a yard” — “A bond-wench may be a good lay but remember your whip!” All the old crud-talk that people seem to need to shore up their vanity and avoid the risk of looking honestly at themselves. In the same way, people said: “All slaves stink.” They never asked: Who lets them have a basin to wash in or time to use it?

And in Moha you heard that no Katskil man should be trusted alone even with a sow. Conicut people tell you every other man in Lomeda is a fairy and the rest backscuttlers. In Nuin I have heard: “It takes three Penn tradesmen to cheat a Levannon man, two Levannese to cheat a Vairmanter, and two Vairmanters have no trouble cheatmg the Devil.” And so on and on, everything your neighbor’s fault until some time maybe a mfflion years from now when the human race runs out of dirt.

At school I heard the teacher-priests explain how race prejudice was one of the sins that persuaded God to destroy the world of Old Time and make men pass through the Years of Confusion so there would be only one race with traces of all the old ones in it, and my opinion of God went up several notches. Inside, though, a somehow older boy who wasn’t quite ready to show his head went on muttering that it was too nice and simple: if God was going to take that much trouble why couldn’t he make modern people decent and kind in other ways?

Today I know it’s a mere historical accident that has made us all fairly close to the same physical pattern in that part of the world. We are the descendants of a small handful of survivors, and they happened to include most of the races of Old Time. Anyone who deviates too far is still treated outrageously, if he escapes early destruction as a mue. In Conicut, with Rumley’s Ramblers, I would have been uneasy about my red hair, if it hadn’t been a strong gang that took care of its own.

Freeman boys, many from poor families living no better than I did, ran in street-gangs and wanted no part of a b.s., unless they could catch one alone, for fun. I could have made friends with a freeman boy, meeting him by himself, but the herd pattern is death on friendship. If the pack must come first — its rituals, cruelties, group make-believes and sham brotherhood — you have no time left for the individual spirit of another; no time, no courage, no recognition.

Against the danger of the street-gangs I had my Katskil knife, but I was so sharp at nipping out of sight whenever I saw more than three boys in a group that I’d never been obliged to use the steel in self-defense. Good thing too, for getting hanged would have interfered seriously with writing this book, and even if you don’t exist I’d hate to see you suffer a deprivation like that.[12]

But even in fever common sense told me I could not show Emmia my golden horn and tell the story. She would never understand why I hadn’t killed the mue. She would be demoralized by the mere thought of a mue existing near the city. Like most women she could scarcely bear the sound of the word “mue” — she’d sooner have had a rat run up her leg.

Then for a while I think the fever sent my wits wandering out of the world.

While I wrote this morning the fog dissolved. Nickie called me on deck an hour ago — her face was wet — and pointed to the blur of green two or three miles southeast. As I was watching, a white bird circled down to the island. No smoke rises from it; the day is a quiet of blue and gold.

I’ll make only this note of it for the present. We have a light westerly, and Captain Barr intends to circumnavigate, tacking as near the island as he safely can. We shall watch for harbors, stream outlets, reefs, beaches, any sign of habitation. Major note: Miranda Nicoletta is happy.

I was pulled awake by feeling another blanket being spread over me. Wool-soft it was and sweet with the girlscent of Emmia — I mean her own, not the boughten perfume she sometimes used. She must have brought it from her own bed, and I a damned yard-boy not brave enough to kill a mue but low enough to steal from him.

Emmia was talking, of what I don’t know; in the middle of the pleasant sound I spoke her name. She said: “Hush, Davy! How you do run on! Be the good jo and let me put on this poultice — don’t squirm so!” Her voice was as kind as her hands that eased down the blankets and pressed a minty-smeiling pad where my skin still hurt, some. The pain was no longer serious; I was pretending to be worse off than I was, to prolong her soft attentions. “What was you yattering about just now, Davy? Where the sun rises, you said, only it’s night, you know it is, so maybe you was fevery the way I heard about a man had the smallpox and he thought he was tumbling off a hoss, so whoa he says, whoa, and falls out of bed for real and dead as anything the next day, the chill you know, come to think, that was Morton Sampson that married a connection of Ma’s and used to live on Cayuga Street catacorny from the old schoolhouse…” I wondered if I could have spoken in my fever about the golden horn. She was coaxing my arms under the blanket. “Yes, you went running on, about traveling, merciful winds, I guess you must like to talk, I couldn’t scarcely get a word in by the thin edge — oh, feel that sweat! Your fever’s busted, Davy, and that’s what they call a good sweat, you be all right now, only keep warm, boy, and you better get to sleep too.”

I said: “If a man went far—”

“Ayah, that’s just the way you was running on, only now you should get to sleep because like Ma says if a person don’t get enough sleep the next day is ruint, see?” Resting a hand on the blanket, she was watching me not quite so directly. Her conversational brook went on, but I think already we had some of the special awkwardness a man and woman feel when each knows the other is thinking of the intercourse not yet shared. “I do marvel — where the sun rises, think of having such fancies when you be fevered, still it must be nice to travel, I always wished I could, like that friend of Pa’s, I can’t think of his name, anyway he went all the way to Humber Town — oh, who was it? — Peckham — I’ll think of it in a minute, it wasn’t Peckham no-way — why, Hamlet Parsons was who it was, remember? — Ham Parsons of course with the one gone eye account of an ax handle in the one I mean, all the way to Huinber Town and come to think, that was just two summers ago because it was the same year we lost old White-Stocking from the bloat — what a nice old thing he was…”

It was restful, sleepy-making, like a brook, like a tree murmuring the wind, only bless her, Emmia wasn’t built like a tree and her bark wasn’t scratchy, not anywhere. In my half-sick drowsiness I wondered why I should feel afraid of Emmia when she was being so kind to me, bringing that blanket, sitting now so close that my right arm was cramped because it didn’t dare sprawl across her lap. I suppose I knew myself to be two or more people, that common trouble. The Davy who wanted to be a gentle, loving (and safely blameless) friend — that’s the only one who was afraid. The healthy jo who needed to grab her and lock her loins till he could spend himself was not afraid of Emmia but only, in a practical way, of the world: he didn’t want to be slammed into the pillory. What never occurred to me until years later was that all these inconsistent and troubling selves are real as soon as your mind has gone through the pain of giving them birth.