The Best of Gene Wolfe

Straw

Yes, I remember killing my first man very well; I was just seventeen. A flock of snow geese flew under us that day about noon. I remember looking over the side of the basket and seeing them, and thinking that they looked like a pike head. That was an omen, of course, but I did not pay any attention.

It was clear, fall weather—a trifle chilly. I remember that. It must have been about the midpart of October. Good weather for the balloon. Clow would reach up every quarter hour or so with a few double handfuls of straw for the brazier, and that was all it required. We cruised, usually, at about twice the height of a steeple.

You have never been in one? Well, that shows how things have changed. Before the Fire-wights came, there was hardly any fighting at all, and free swords had to travel all over the continent looking for what there was. A balloon was better than walking, believe me. Miles—he was our captain in those days—said that where there were three soldiers together, one was certain to put a shaft through a balloon; it was too big a target to resist, and that would show you where the armies were.

No, we would not have been killed. You would have had to slit the thing wide open before it would fall fast, and a little hole like the business end of a pike would make would just barely let you know it was there. The baskets do not swing either, as people think. Why should they? They feel no wind—they are traveling with it. A man just seems to hang there, when he is up in one of them, and the world turns under him. He can hear everything—pigs and chickens, and the squeak the windlass makes drawing water from a well.

“Good flying weather,” Clow said to me.

I nodded. Solemnly, I suppose.

“All the lift you want, in weather like this. The colder it is, the better she pulls. The heat from the fire doesn’t like the chill, and tries to escape from it. That’s what they say.”

Blond Bracata spit over the side. “Nothing in our bellies,” she said, “that’s what makes it lift. If we don’t eat today you won’t have to light the fire tomorrow—I’ll take us up myself.”

She was taller than any of us except Miles, and the heaviest of us all, but Miles would not allow for size when the food was passed out, so I suppose she was the hungriest too.

Derek said, “We should have stretched one of that last bunch over the fire. That would have fetched a pot of stew, at the least.”

Miles shook his head. “There were too many.”

“They would have run like rabbits.”

“And if they hadn’t?”

“They had no armor.”

Unexpectantly, Bracata came in for the captain. “They had twenty-two men, and fourteen women. I counted them.”

“The women wouldn’t fight.”

“I used to be one of them. I would have fought.”

Clow’s soft voice added: “Nearly any woman will fight if she can get behind you.”

Bracata stared at him, not sure whether he was supporting her or not. She had her mitts on—she was as good with them as anyone I have ever seen—and I remember that I thought for an instant that she would go for Clow right there in the basket. We were packed in like fledglings in the nest, and fighting, it would have taken at least three of us to throw her out—by which time she would have killed us all, I suppose. But she was afraid of Clow. I found out why later. She respected Miles, I think, for his judgment and courage, without being afraid of him. She did not care much for Derek either way, and of course I was hardly there at all as far as she was concerned. But she was just a little frightened by Clow.

Clow was the only one I was not frightened by—but that is another story too.

“Give it more straw,” Miles said.

“We’re nearly out.”

“We can’t land in this forest.”

Clow shook his head and added straw to the fire in the brazier—about half as much as he usually did. We were sinking toward what looked like a red and gold carpet.

“We got straw out of them anyway,” I said, just to let the others know I was there.

“You can always get straw,” Clow told me. He had drawn a throwing spike and was feigning to clean his nails with it. “Even from swineherds, who you’d think wouldn’t have it. They’ll get it to be rid of us.”

“Bracata’s right,” Miles said. He gave the impression that he had not heard Clow and me. “We have to have food today.”

Derek snorted. “What if there are twenty?”

“We stretch one over the fire. Isn’t that what you suggested? And if it takes fighting, we fight. But we have to eat today.” He looked at me. “What did I tell you when you joined us, Jerr? High pay or nothing? This is the nothing. Want to quit?”

I said, “Not if you don’t want me to.”

Clow was scraping the last of the straw from the bag. It was hardly a handful. As he threw it in the brazier Bracata asked, “Are we going to set down in the trees?”

Clow shook his head and pointed. Away in the distance I could see a speck of white on a hill. It looked too far, but the wind was taking us there, and it grew and grew until we could see that it was a big house, all built of white brick with gardens and outbuildings, and a road that ran up to the door. There are none like that now, I suppose.

Landings are the most exciting part of traveling by balloon, and sometimes the most unpleasant. If you are lucky, the basket stays upright. We were not. Our basket snagged and tipped over and was dragged along by the envelope, which fought the wind and did not want to go down, cold though it was by then. If there had been a fire in the brazier still, I suppose we would have set the meadow ablaze. As it was, we were tumbled about like toys. Bracata fell on top of me, as heavy as stone, and she had the claws of her mitts out, trying to dig them into the turf to stop herself, so that for a moment I thought I was going to be killed. Derek’s pike had been charged, and the ratchet released in the confusion; the head went flying across the field, just missing a cow.

By the time I recovered my breath and got to my feet, Clow had the envelope under control and was treading it down. Miles was up too, straightening his hauberk and sword belt. “Look like a soldier,” he called to me. “Where are your weapons?”

A pincer-mace and my pike were all I had, and the pincer-mace had fallen out of the basket. After five minutes of looking, I found it in the tall grass, and went over to help Clow fold the envelope.

When we were finished, we stuffed it in the basket and put our pikes through the rings on each side so we could carry it. By that time we could see men on horseback coming down from the big house. Derek said, “We won’t be able to stand against horsemen in this field.”

For an instant I saw Miles smile. Then he looked very serious. “We’ll have one of those fellows over a fire in half an hour.”

Derek was counting, and so was I. Eight horsemen, with a cart following them. Several of the horsemen had lances, and I could see the sunlight winking on helmets and breastplates. Derek began pounding the butt of his pike on the ground to charge it.

I suggested to Clow that it might look more friendly if we picked up the balloon and went to meet the horsemen, but he shook his head. “Why bother?”

The first of them had reached the fence around the field. He was sitting a roan stallion that took it at a clean jump and came thundering up to us looking as big as a donjon on wheels.

“Greetings,” Miles called. “If this be your land, Lord, we give thanks for your hospitality. We’d not have intruded, but our conveyance has exhausted its fuel.”

“You are welcome,” the horseman called. He was as tall as Miles or taller, as well as I could judge, and as wide as Bracata. “Needs must, as they say, and no harm done.” Three of the others had jumped their mounts over the fence behind him. The rest were taking down the rails so the cart could get through.

“Have you straw, Lord?” Miles asked. I thought it would have been better if he had asked for food. “If we could have a few bundles of straw, we’d not trouble you more.”

“None here,” the horseman said, waving a mail-clad arm at the fields around us, “yet I feel sure my bailiff could find you some. Come up to the hall for a taste of meat and a glass of wine, and you can make your ascension from the terrace; the ladies would be delighted to see it, I’m certain. You’re floating swords, I take it?”

“We are that,” our captain affirmed, “but persons of good character nonetheless. We’re called the Faithful Five—perhaps you’ve heard of us? High-hearted, fierce-fighting wind-warriors all, as it says on the balloon.”

A younger man, who had reined up next to the one Miles called Lord, snorted. “If that boy is high hearted, or a fierce fighter either, I’ll eat his breeks.”

Of course, I should not have done it. I have been too mettlesome all my life, and it has gotten me in more trouble than I could tell you of if I talked till sunset, though it has been good to me too—I would have spent my days following the plow, I suppose, if I had not knocked down Derek for what he called our goose. But you see how it was. Here I had been thinking of myself as a hard-bitten balloon soldier, and then to hear something like that. Anyway, I swung the pincermace overhand once I had a good grip on his stirrup. I had been afraid the extension spring was a bit weak, never having used one before, but it worked well; the pliers got him under the left arm and between the ear and the right shoulder, and would have cracked his neck for him properly if he had not been wearing a gorget. As it was, I jerked him off his horse pretty handily and got out the little dagger that screwed into the mace handle. A couple of the other horsemen couched their lances, and Derek had a finger on the dog-catch of his pike, so all in all it looked as if there could be a proper fight, but “Lord” (I learned afterward that he was the Baron Ascolot) yelled at the young man I had pulled out of his saddle, and Miles yelled at me and grabbed my left wrist, and thus it all blew over. When we had tripped the release and gotten the mace open and retracted again, Miles said, “He will be punished, Lord. Leave him to me. It will be severe. I assure you.”

“No, upon my oath,” the baron declared. “It will teach my son to be less free with his tongue in the company of armed men. He has been raised at the hall, Captain, where everyone bends the knee to him. He must learn not to expect that of strangers.”

The cart rolled up just then, drawn by two fine mules—either of them would have been worth my father’s holding, I judged—and at the baron’s urging we loaded our balloon into it and climbed in after it ourselves, sitting on the fabric. The horsemen galloped off, and the cart driver cracked his lash over the mules’ backs.

“Quite a place,” Miles remarked. He was looking up at the big house toward which we were making.

I whispered to Clow, “A palace, I should say,” and Miles overheard me, and said, “It’s a villa, Jerr—the unfortified country property of a gentleman. If there were a wall and a tower, it would be a castle, or at least a castellett.”

There were gardens in front, very beautiful as I remember, and a fountain. The road looped up before the door, and we got out and trooped into the hall, while the baron’s man—he was richer dressed than anybody I had ever seen up till then, a fat man with white hair—set two of the hostlers to watch our balloon while it was taken back to the stable yard.

Venison and beef were on the table, and even a pheasant with all his feathers put back, and the baron and his sons sat with us and drank some wine and ate a bit of bread each for hospitality’s sake. Then the baron said, “Surely you don’t fly in the dark, Captain?”

“Not unless we must, Lord.”

“Then with the day drawing to a close, it’s just as well for you that we’ve no straw. You can pass the night with us, and in the morning I’ll send my bailiff to the village with the cart. You’ll be able to ascend at midmorning, when the ladies can have a clear view of you as you go up.”

“No straw?” our captain asked.

“None, I fear, here. But they’ll have aplenty in the village, never doubt it. They lay it in the road to silence the horses’ hoofs when a woman’s with child, as I’ve seen many a time. You’ll have a cartload as a gift from me, if you can use that much.” The baron smiled as he said that; he had a friendly face, round and red as an apple. “Now tell me” (he went on) “how it is to be a floating sword. I always find other men’s trades of interest, and it seems to me you follow one of the most fascinating of all. For example, how do you gauge the charge you will make your employer?”

“We have two scales, Lord,” Miles began.

I had heard all of that before, so I stopped listening. Bracata was next to me at table, so I had all I could do to get something to eat for myself, and I doubt I ever got a taste of the pheasant. By good luck, a couple of lasses—the baron’s daughters—had come in, and one of them started curling a lock of Derek’s hair around her finger, so that distracted him while he was helping himself to the venison, and Bracata put an arm around the other and warned her of Men. If it had not been for that I would not have had a thing; as it was, I stuffed myself on deer’s meat until I had to loose my waistband. Flesh of any sort had been a rarity where I came from.

I had thought that the baron might give us beds in the house, but when we had eaten and drunk all we could hold, the white-haired fat man led us out a side door and over to a wattle-walled building full of bunks—I suppose it was kept for the extra laborers needed at harvest. It was not the palace bedroom I had been dreaming of, but it was cleaner than home, and there was a big fireplace down at one end with logs stacked ready by, so it was probably more comfortable for me than a bed in the big house itself would have been.

Clow took out a piece of cherrywood, and started carving a woman in it, and Bracata and Derek lay down to sleep. I made shift to talk to Miles, but he was full of thoughts, sitting on a bench near the hearth and chinking the purse ( just like this one, it was) he had gotten from the baron, so I tried to sleep too. But I had had too much to eat to sleep so soon, and since it was still light out, I decided to walk around the villa and try to find somebody to chat with. The front looked too grand for me; I went to the back, thinking to make sure our balloon had suffered no hurt, and perhaps have another look at those mules.

There were three barns behind the house, built of stone up to the height of my waist, and wood above that, and whitewashed. I walked into the nearest of them, not thinking about anything much besides my full belly until a big warhorse with a white star on his forehead reached his head out of his stall and nuzzled at my cheek. I reached out and stroked his neck for him the way they like. He nickered, and I turned to have a better look at him. That was when I saw what was in his stall. He was standing on a span or more of the cleanest, yellowest straw I had ever seen. I looked up over my head then, and there was a loft full of it up there.

In a minute or so, I suppose it was, I was back in the building where we were to sleep, shaking Miles by the shoulder and telling him I had found all the straw anyone could ask for.

He did not seem to understand, at first. “Wagonloads of straw, Captain,” I told him. “Why, every horse in the place has as much to lay him on as would carry us a hundred leagues.”

“All right,” Miles told me.

“Captain—”

“There’s no straw here, Jerr. Not for us. Now be a sensible lad and get some rest.”

“But there is, Captain. I saw it. I can bring you back a helmetful.”

“Come here, Jerr,” he said, and got up and led me outside. I thought he was going to ask me to show him the straw, but instead of going back to where the barns were, he took me away from the house to the top of a grassy knoll. “Look out there, Jerr. Far off. What do you see?”

“Trees,” I said. “There might be a river at the bottom of the valley; then more trees on the other side.”

“Beyond that.”

I looked to the horizon, where he seemed to be pointing. There were little threads of black smoke rising there, looking as thin as spiderweb at that distance.

“What do you see?”

“Smoke.”

“That’s straw burning, Jerr. House thatch. That’s why there’s no straw here. Gold, but no straw, because a soldier gets straw only where he isn’t welcome. They’ll reach the river there by sundown, and I’m told it can be forded at this season. Now do you understand?”

They came that night at moonrise.

Inventions and scientific discoveries seem to occur almost at random. The people who disagree with that statement say that when technology (or science) reaches a certain point, the same idea will occur to a dozen people. The shorthand for this is steam-engine time, the idea being that when it’s time for the steam engine to be invented, a bunch of people will start working on one.

It ain’t so.

They had indoor plumbing in Ancient Crete. It was lost with the fall of that civilization, and did not reappear until long after it was needed. A model airplane, carved from wood, has been found in an Egyptian tomb. (Don’t get me started on the Egyptian girl wearing sunglasses.) Electroplating seems to have been invented at least twice.

And so on. I decided to put the hot-air balloon in the Dark Ages, and I threw in a few other things too. Thus the story you have just read. Was there ever a time like that? No. Could there have been? Certainly.