Critical Mass

Mute Inglorious Tam

Cyril left a fragment about medieval England; it had no story attached to it, only a few pages of description and character. It lay in my files for fifteen years, until I happened to be sitting in a panel discussion with two or three other s-f writers (Ben Bova, Katherine Mac-Lean and Gordon Dickson, I think they were) and we fell to talking about what made a science-fiction writer what he is. What, I asked, might any of us have been if we had been born in another place and time? If we could not possibly have been science-fiction writers, perhaps because there was no science yet, maybe because we were illiterate? And then it occurred to me that it would be fun to write a story about that; and sometime later it struck me that Cyril’s fragment might fit in well with such a notion; and I dug it out, and it did.

ON A LATE SATURDAY afternoon in summer, just before the ringing of Angelus, Tam of the Wealdway straightened from the furrows in his plowed strip of Oldfield and stretched his cracking joints.

He was a small and dark man, of almost pure Saxon blood. Properly speaking, his name was only Tam. There was no need for further identification. He would never go a mile from a neighbor who had known him from birth. But sometimes he called himself by a surname-it was one of many small conceits that complicated his proper and straightforward life-and he would be soundly whipped for it if his Norman masters ever caught him at it.

He had been breaking clods in the field for fifteen hours, interrupted only by the ringing of the canonical hours from the squat, tiny church, and a mouthful of bread and soft cheese at noon. It was not easy for him to stand straight. It was also not particularly wise. A man could lose his strip for poor tilth, and Tarn had come close enough, often enough. But there were times when the thoughts that chased themselves around his head made him forget the steady chop of the wooden hoe, and he would stand entranced, staring toward Lymeford Castle, or the river, or toward nothing at all, while he invented fanciful encounters and impossible prosperings. It was another of Tarn’s conceits, and a most dangerous one, if it were known. The least it might get him was a cuff from a man-at-arms. The most was a particularly unpleasing death.

Since Salisbury, in Sussex, was flat ground, its great houses were not perched dramatically on crags, like the keeps of robber barons along the Rhine or the grim fortresses of the Scottish lairds. They were the least they could be to do the job they had to do, in an age which had not yet imagined the palace or the cathedral.

In the year 1303 Lymeford Castle was a dingy pile of stone. It housed Sir and Lady Robert Bowen (sometimes they spelled it Bohun, or Beauhun, or Beauhaunt) and their household servants and men-at-arms in very great discomfort. It did not seem so to them particularly. They had before them the housing of their Saxon subjects to show what misery could be. The castle was intended to guard a bridge across the Lyme River: a key point on the high road from Portsmouth to London. It did this most effectively. William of Normandy, who had taken England by storm a couple of centuries earlier, did not mean for himself or his descendants to be taken in the same way on another day. So Lymeford Castle had been awarded to Sir Robert’s great-great-great-grandfather on the condition that he defend it and thereby defend London as well against invasion on that particular route from the sea.

That first Bowen had owned more than stones. A castle must be fed. The castellan and his lady, their household servants and their armed men could not be expected to till the field and milk the cows. The founder of Sir Robert’s line had solved the problem of feeding the castle by rounding up a hundred of the defeated Saxon soldiers, clamping iron rings around their necks and setting them to work at the great task of clearing the untidy woods which surrounded the castle. After cleaning and plowing from sunup to sunset the slaves were free to gather twigs and mud, with which they made themselves kennels to sleep in. And in that first year, to celebrate the harvest and to insure a continuing supply of slaves, the castellan led his men-at-arms on a raid into Salisbury town itself. They drove back to Lymeford, with whips, about a hundred Saxon girls and women. After taking their pick, they gave the rest to the slaves, and the chaplain read a single perfunctory marriage service over the filthy, ring-necked slaves and the weeping Salisbury women. Since the male slaves happened to be from Northumbria, while the women were Sussex bred, they could not understand each other’s dialects. It did not matter. The huts were enlarged, and next midsummer there was another crop, this time of babies.

The passage of two centuries had changed things remarkably little. A Bowen (or Beauhaunt) still guarded the Portsmouth-London high road. He still took pride in his Norman blood. Saxons still tilled the soil for him and if they no longer had the iron collar, or the name of slaves, they still would dangle from the gallows in the castle courtyard for any of a very large number of possible offenses against his authority. -At Runnymede, many years before, King John had signed the Great Charter conferring some sort of rule of law to protect his barons against arbitrary acts, but no one had thought of extending those rights to the serfs. They could die for almost anything or for nothing at all: for trying to quit their master’s soil for greener fields; for failing to deliver to the castle their bushels of grain, as well as their choicest lambs, calves and girl-children; for daring in any way to flout the divine law that made one kind of man ruler and another kind ruled. It was this offense to which Tarn was prone, and one day, as his father had told him the day before he died, it would cost him the price that no man can afford to pay, though all do.

Though Tarn had never even heard of the Magna Carta, he sometimes thought that a world might sometime come to be in which a man like himself might own the things he owned as a matter of right and not because a man with a sword had not decided to take them from him. Take Alys his wife. He did not mind in any real sense that the men-at-arms had bedded her before he had. She was none the worse for it in any way that Tarn could measure; but he had slept badly that night, pondering why it was that no one needed to consult him about the woman the priest had sworn to him that day, and whether it might not be more-more-he grappled for a word (“fair” did not occur to him) and caught at “right”-more right that he should say whose pleasures his property served.

Mostly he thought of sweeter and more fanciful things. When the falconers were by, he sometimes stole a look at the hawk stooping on a pigeon and thought that a man might fly if only he had the wings and the wit to move them. Pressed into driving the castellan’s crops into the granary, he swore at the dumb oxen and imagined a cart that could turn its wheels by itself. If the Lyme in flood could carry a tree bigger than a house faster than a man could run, why could that power not pull a plow? Why did a man have to plant five kernels of corn to see one come up? Why could not all five come up and make him five times as fat?

He even looked at the village that was his home, and wondered why it had to be so poor, so filthy and so small; and that thought had hardly occurred even to Sir Robert himself.

In the year 1303 Lymeford looked like this: The Lyme River, crossed by the new stone structure that was the fourth Lymeford Bridge, ran south to the English Channel. Its west bank was overgrown with the old English oak forest. Its right bank was the edge of the great clearing. Lymeford Castle, hard by the bridge, covered the road and curved northeast to London. For the length of the clearing, the road was not only the king’s highway, it was also the Lymeford village street. At a discreet distance from the castle it began to be edged with huts, larger or smaller as their tenants were rich or fecund. The road widened a bit halfway to the edge of the clearing, and there on its right side sat the village church.

The church was made of stone, but that was about all you could say for it. All the wealth it owned it had to draw from the village, and there was not much wealth there to draw. Still, silver pennies had to be sent regularly to the bishop, who in turn would send them on to Rome. The parish priest of Lymeford was an Italian who had never seen the bishop, to whom it had never occurred to try to speak the language and who had been awarded the living of Lymeford by a cardinal who was likewise Italian and likewise could not have described its location within fifty miles. There was nothing unusual in that, and the Italian collected the silver pennies while his largely Norman, but Saxon speaking, locum tenens scraped along on donations of beer, dried fish and the odd occasional calf. He was a dour man who would have been a dreadful one if he had had a field of action that was larger than Lymeford.

Across the street from the church was The Green, a cheerless trampled field where the compulsory archery practice and pike drill were undergone by every physically able male of Lymeford, each four weeks, except in the worst of winter and when plowing or harvest was larger in Sir Robert’s mind than the defense of his castle. His serfs would fight when he told them to, and he would squander their lives with the joy a man feels in exercising the one extravagance he permits himself on occasion. But that was only at need, and the fields and the crops were forever. He saw to the crops with some considerable skill.

A three-field system prevailed in Lymeford. There was Oldfield, east of the road, and the first land brought under cultivation by the slaves two hundred years ago. There was Newfield, straddling the road and marked off from Oldfield by a path into the woods called the Wealdway, running southeast from The Green info the oak forest at the edge of the clearing. There was Fallowfield, last to be cleared and planted, which for the most part lay south of the road and the castle. From the left side of the road to the river, The Mead spread its green acres. The Mead was held in common by all the villagers. Any man might turn his cows or sheep to graze on it anywhere. The farmed fields, however, were divided into long, narrow strips, each held by a villager who would defend it with his fists or his sickle against the encroachment of a single inch. In the year 1303 Oldfield and Newfield were under cultivation, and Fallowfield was being rested. Next year it would be Newfield and Fallowfield farmed, and Oldfield would rest.

While Angelus clanged on the cracked church bell, Tarn stood with his head downcast. He was supposed to be praying. In a way he was, the impenetrable rote-learned Latin slipping through his brain like the reiteration of a mantra, but he was also pleasantly occupied in speculating how plump his daughter might become if they could farm all three fields each year without destroying the soil, and at the same time thinking of the pot of fennel-spiced beer that should be waiting in his hut.

As the Angelus ceased to ring, his neighbor’s hail dispelled both dreams.

Irritated, Tarn shouldered his wooden-bladed hoe and trudged along the Wealdway, worn deep by two hundred years of bare peasant feet.

His neighbor, Hud, fell in with him. In the bastard MidlandSussex hybrid that was the Lymeford dialect, Hud said, “Man, that was a long day.”

“All the days are long in the summer.”

“You were dreaming again, man. Saw you.”

Tarn did not reply. He was careful of Hud. Hud was as small and dark as himself, but thin and nervous rather than blocky. Tarn knew he got that from his father Robin, who had got it from his mother Joan -who had got it from some man-at-arms on her wedding night spent in the castle. Hud was always asking, always talking, always seeking new things. But when Tarn, years younger, had dared to try to open his untamable thoughts to him, Hud had run straight to the priest.

“Won’t the players be coming by this time of year, man?” he pestered.

“They might”

“Ah, wouldn’t it be a great thing if they came by tomorrow? And then after Mass they’d make their pitch in The Green, and out would come the King of England and Captain Slasher and the Turkish Champion in their clothes colored like the sunset, and St. George in his silver armor!”

Tarn grunted. “ ‘Tisn’t silver. Couldn’t be. If it was silver the robbers in the Weald would never let them get this far.”

The nervous little man said, “I didn’t mean it was silver. I meant it looked like silver.”

Tarn could feel anger welling up in him, drowning the good aftertaste of his reverie and the foretaste of his fennel beer. He said angrily, You talk like a fool.”

“Like a fool, is it? And who is always dreaming the sun away, man?”

“God’s guts, leave off!” shouted Tarn, and clamped his teeth on Ms words too late. He seldom swore. He could have bitten his tongue out after he uttered the words. Now there would be confession of blasphemy to make, and Father Bloughram, who had been looking lean and starved of late, would demand a penance in grain instead of any beggarly saying of prayers. Hud cowered back, staring. Tarn snarled something at him, he could not himself have said what, and turned off the deep-trodden path into his own hut.

The hut was cramped and murky with wood smoke from its open hearth. There was a smoke hole in the roof that let some of it out. Tarn leaned his hoe against the wattled wall, flopped down onto the bundle of rags in the corner that was the bed for all three of the members of his family and growled at Alys his wife: “Beer.” His mind was full of Hud and anger, but slowly the rage cooled and the good thoughts crept back in: Why not a softer bed, a larger hut? Why not a fire that did not smoke, as his returning grandfather, who wore a scar from the Holy Land to his grave, had told him the Saracens had? And with the thought of a different kind of life came the thought of beer; he could taste the stuff now, sluicing the dust from his throat; the bitterness of the roasted barley; the sweetness of the fennel. “Beer,” he called again, and became aware that his wife had been tiptoeing about the hut.

“Tarn,” she said apprehensively, “Joanie Brewer’s got the flux.”

His brows drew together like thunderclouds. “No beer?” he asked.

“She’s got the flux, and not for all the barley in Oldfield could she brew beer. I tried to borrow from Hud’s wife, and she had only enough for him, she showed me-“

Tarn got up and knocked her spinning into a corner with one backhanded blow. “Was there no beer yesterday?” he shouted. “God forgive you for being the useless slut you are! May the Horned Man and all his brood fly away with a miserable wretch that won’t brew beer for the husband that sweats his guts out from sunup to sunset!”

She got up cringing, and he knocked her into the corner again.

The next moment that was a solid crack across his back, and he crashed to the dirt floor. Another blow took him on the legs as he rolled over, and he looked up and saw the raging face of his daughter Kate and the wooden-bladed hoe upraised in her hands.

She did not strike him a third time, but stood there menacingly. “Will you leave her alone?” she demanded.

“Yes, you devil’s get!” Tarn shouted from the floor, and then, “You’d like me to say no, wouldn’t you? And then you’d beat in the brains of the old fool that gave you a name and a home.”

Weeping, Alys protested, “Don’t say that, husband. She’s your child, I’m a good woman, I have nothing black on my soul.”

Tarn got to his feet and brushed dirt from hs leather breeches and shirt. “We’ll say no more about it,” he said. “But it’s hard when a man can’t have his beer.”

“You wild boar,” said Kate, not lowering the hoe. “If I hadn’t come back from The Mead with the cow, you might have killed her.”

“No, child,” Tarn said uneasily. He knew his temper. “Let’s talk of other things.” Contemptuously she put down the hoe, while Alys got up, sniffling, and began to stir the peaseporridge on the hearth. Suddenly the smoke and heat inside the hut was more than Tarn could bear, and muttering something, he stumbled outside and breathed in the cool air of the night.

It was full dark now and, for a wonder, stars were out. Tarn’s Crusader grandfather had told him of the great bright nights in the mountains beyond Acre, with such stars that a man could spy friend’s face from foe’s at a bowshot. England had nothing like that, but Tarn could make out the Plow, fading toward the sunset, and Cassiopeia pursuing it from the east. His grandfather had tried to teach him the Arabic names for some of the brighter stars, but the man had died when Tarn was ten and the memories were gone. What were those two, now, so bright and so close together? Something about twin peacocks? Twins at least, thought Tarn, staring at Gemini, but a thought of peacocks lingered. He wished he had paid closer attention to the old man, who had been a Saracen’s slave for nine years until a lucky raid had captured his caravan and set him free.

A distant sound of yelping caught his ear. Tarn read the sound easily enough; a vixen and her half-grown young, by the shrillness. The birds came into the plowed fields at night to steal the seed, and the foxes came to catch the birds, and this night they had found something big enough to try to catch them- wolf, perhaps, Tarn thought, though it was not like them to come so near to men’s huts in good weather. There were a plenty of them in Sir Robert’s forest, with fat deer and birds and fish beyond counting in the streams; but it was what a man’s life was worth to take them. He stood there, musing on the curious chance that put venison on Sir Robert’s table and peaseporridge on his, and on the lights in the sky, until he realized Alys had progressed from abject to angry and must by now be eating without him.

After the evening meal Alys scurried over to Hud’s wife with her tale of beastly husbands, and Kate sat on a billet of wood, picking knots out of her hair.

Tarn squatted on the rags and studied her. At fifteen years, or whatever she was, she was a wild one. How had it happened that the babe who cooed and grasped at the grass whistle her father made her had turned into this stranger? She was not biddable.

Edwy’s strip adjoined Tarn’s in Fallowfield, and Edwy had a marriageable son. What was more reasonable than that Kate should marry him? But she had talked about bis looks. True, the boy was no beauty. What did that matter? When, as a father should, he had brushed that aside, she had threatened plainly to run away, bringing ruin and the rope on all of them. Nor would she let herself be beaten into good sense, but instead kicked-with painful accuracy-and bit and scratched like a fiend from hell’s pit.

He felt a pang at that thought. Oh, Alys was an honest woman. But there were other ways the child of another could be fobbed off on you. A moment of carelessness when you didn’t watch the cradle-it was too awful to think of, but sometimes you had to think of it. Everybody knew that Old People liked nothing better than to steal somebody’s baby and slip one of their own into the cradle. He and Alys had duly left bowls of milk out during the child’s infancy, and on feast days bowls of beer. They had always kept a bit of iron by Kate, because the Old People hated iron. But still....

Tam lighted a rushlight soaked in mutton fat at what was left of the fire. Alys would have something to say about his extravagance, but a mood for talking was on him, and he wanted to see Kate’s face. “Child,” he said, “one Sunday now the players will come by and pitch on The Green. And we’ll all go after Mass and see them play. Why, St. George looks as if he wears armor all of silver!”

She tugged at her hair and would not speak or look at him.

He squirmed uncomfortably on the ragged bed. “Ill tell you a story, child,” he offered.

Contemptuously, “Tell your drunken friend. I’ve heard the two of you, Hud and yourself, lying away at each other with the beer working in you.”

“Not that sort of story, Kate. A story no one has ever told.”

No answer, but at least her face was turned toward him. Emboldened, he began:

“ Tis a story of a man who owned a great strong wain that could move without oxen, and in it he-“

“What pulled it, then? Goats?”

“Nothing pulled it, child. It moved by itself. It-“ he fumbled, and found inspiration-“it was a gift from the Old People, and the man put on it meal and dried fish and casks of water, and he rode in it to one of those bright stars you see just over church. Many days he traveled, child. When he got there-“

“What road goes to a star, man?”

“No road, Kate. This wain rode in the air, like a cloud. And then-“

“Clouds can’t carry casks of water,” she announced. “You talk like Edwy’s mad son that thinks he saw the Devil in a turnip.”

“Listen now, Kate!” he snapped. “It is only a story. When the man came to-“

“Story! It’s a great silly lie.”

“Neither lie nor truth,” he roared. “It is a story I am telling you.”

“Stories should be sense,” she said positively. “Leave off your dreaming, father. All Lymeford talks of it, man. Even in the castle they speak of mad Tarn the dreamer.”

“Mad, I am?” he shouted, reaching for the hoe. But she was too quick for him. She had it in her hands; he tried to take it from her, and they wrestled, rock against flame, until he heard his wife’s caterwauling from the entrance, where she’d come running, called by the noise; and when he looked round, Kate had the hoe from him and space to use it and this time she got him firmly atop the skull-and he knew no more that night.

In the morning he was well enough, and Kate was wisely nowhere in sight. By the time the long day was through he had lost the anger.

Alys made sure there was beer that night, and the nights that followed. The dreams that came from the brew were not the same as the dreams he had tried so hard to put into words. For the rest of his life, sometimes he dreamed those dreams again, immense dreams, dreams that-had he had the words, and the skill, and above all the audience-a hundred generations might have remembered. But he didn’t have any of those things. Only the beer.