Davy

7

“Be you warm enough now?” I made some kind of noise. “You know, Davy, them fancies you get in a fever a’n’t real dreams like, I mean not like the ones that tell your fortune if you go to sleep with a corncob under the pillow. You sure you be warm enough?”

“I wish you was always with me.”

“What?”

“Wish you was with me. In my bed.”

She didn’t slap my face. I couldn’t look at hers, but of a sudden she was lying on the pallet warm and close, her breath fluttering my hair. The blankets bunched thick between us. She was on my right arm so it couldn’t slip around her. She held my left hand away. I had at least three times her strength and couldn’t dream of using any of it. “Davy dear, mustn’t — I mean we better not, only—” I kissed her to stop the talk. “You’re being bad now, Davy.” I kissed her ear and the silken hollow of her shoulder. I hadn’t known it, but that was blowing on a fire. Her thigh slid over me and she was trembling, pushing against me through the blankets and presently whimpering: “It’s a sin — Mother of Abraham, don’t let me be so bad!” She thrust herself free and rolled away. I thought she would get up and leave me, but instead she lay on the bare floor rumpled and careless, her knees drawn up, her skirt fallen, hands pressed at her face.

For just that moment, her eyes not watching me, her secret place uncovered wanton and helpless for me, I was all man responding and could have taken her, never mind whether she was crying. Then my mind went idiot and yelped: If Mam Robson comes looking for her, or Old Jon? I heard her fainting voice. “Why’n’t you do it to me?”

I flung the blankets away. The final cold killing thought arrived, not in words but a picture: a wooden frame on a tall column; holes in the frame for the offending bondservant’s neck, wrists and ankles; a clear space on the earth so that rocks and garbage could be readily cleared away after the thing in the pillory had become a mere lesson in morality too motionless to be entertaining.

Emmia’s suffering face was turned to me. She knew I had been ready for her and now was not. She embraced me clumsily, trying to restore me with shaking ineffectual fingers. Maybe that was when she too remembered the law, for she suddenly dragged the blankets over me and stumbled away. I thought: It’s all up with me — can I run?

But she was returning. Her wet face was not angry. She sat by me again, not too near, her smock tucked in at her knees. She groped for a handkerchief, found none, mopped her face on the blanket. “I wouldn’t hurt you, Miss Emmia.”

She stared dumbfounded, then laughed breathlessly. “Oh you poor sweet cloth-head! It’s my fault, and now I suppose you think I’m one of these girls’ll do it for anybody, not a mor’l to their name, honest I’m not like that, Davy, and when it’s just you and me and us such good friends you don’t have to call me Miss Emmia heavensake! Aw Davy, things sort of go to my head, I can’t explain, you wouldn’t know—”

At least she was talking again. My panic faded. The brook ran on, growing more restful by the minute.

Speaking of brooks—

I stopped writing a week ago, and resumed it this afternoon within sound of a tropic brook. The day has been filled with tasks of settlement on our island. We mean to stay at least until those now in the womb are born, maybe longer. Maybe some will stay and others go on — I can’t imagine Captain Barr letting the schooner ride too long at anchor… The brook runs by a shelter Nickie and I are sharing with Dion and three others while we work at more permanent buildings for the colony.

The island is small, roughly oval, its greatest length along the north-south axis, about ten miles. It must be within the region where the old map gives us a few dots named the Azores . We sailed around it that first day, then seeing no other land on the horizon we inched into the one harbor, a bay on the eastern shore. We anchored in five fathoms near a clean strand where a band of gray monkeys were picking over shells and finding something to eat — hermit crabs. We waited that day and night on board to learn of the tides — they are moderate — and watch for signs of human or other dangerous life.

No one slept much that night at the anchorage — a deep warm night, rest from the long strain and fears of voyaging, a full moon for lovers — high time for a night of music and drink and cheerful riot. There are forty of us — sixteen women, twenty-four men — and nearly all of us are young. We came ashore in the morning not too hung over, all eager except Mr. Wilbrahani who never is.

The only wild things we’ve seen are the monkeys, a few goats, short-eared rabbits, a host of birds. On a walk around the island yesterday Jim Loman and I found tracks of pig, fox and wildcat, and we saw flying squirrels much like the gentle things I used to glimpse in the Moha woods. It must be that human beings haven’t lived here since Old Time. We may find ruins in the interior.

On a knoll near the beach we’ve cleared away vegetation to make room for houses. The brook flowing by the base of the knoll originates a mile inland from the island’s highest hill, about a thousand feet above sea level, we guess. Along the brook a tough reed-like grass grows in abundance; it might be good for paper-making as well as thatch. Our houses will be lightly constructed — thatched roofs on tall supports, the thatched walls coming only half-way to the line of the eaves, the kind of airy buildings I saw in Penn when I went there with Rumley’s Ramblers in 320. They keep a kind of freshness even on the hottest day, and if hurricane comes — well, you haven’t lost too much; you build again.

We wonder of course what snake is in this Eden.

Speaking of brooks—

Look, said Emmia’s personal brook, what we almost did was a terrible sin because I was a Mere Boy and an awful sin anyhow, only we hadn’t done anything so there wasn’t any sin and all her fault too, but she’d just take it to God in prayer without having to confess it, and never would tell on me, wild horses wouldn’t drag one word out of her, because mostly I was a good dear boy that couldn’t help being born without no advantages, except for wildness and goofing off and like that, but when I corrected that I’d be a good man who everybody’d respect, see, only I must prove myself and remember that like her Ma said life wasn’t all beer and skittles whatever skittles were, she’d always thought it was a funny word, well, life was hard work and responsibility and minding what wiser folk said, not only the priests but everybody who lived respectable because there was a right way and a wrong way just like her Ma said, and you must not be all the time goofing off the way other people had to cover up and so on because they kind of loved you and feed the plague-take-it old mules. I said I was sorry.

Well then, I did ought to feel just a smidgin of repentance about tonight, not because it was my fault, it wasn’t, it wasn’t, except maybe I shouldn’t ought to’ve kissed her just that way, because boys ought to be kind of careful and try to stay pure and like reverent by not thinking too much about you-know-what, anyhow after my apprentice time I’d prob’ly marry some nice woman and everything would be nice, and by the way I mustn’t feel bad about it not you-know standing up like, because she happened to know for a fact the same thing happened to lots of boys if they was just scared or not used to things, see, it didn’t necessarily mean they had some enemy doing nasty things with a wax image, although of course if I was a full-growed man it could be that and you had to be careful, anyhow it was all her fault like she’d said before. I said I was sorry.

She said she knew I was and it did me credit, and nobody would ever know, and as for the laws, why, they’d ought to take them mis’ble laws out and drown them, because bond-servant or no I was as good as anybody and she’d say it again, as good as anybody, more b’ token she wouldn’t let anyone hurt one hair of my head, ever, only what she meant about proving myself, well, see, I ought to go and do something difficult, she didn’t mean anythmg wild or goofy, just something hard and well, like noble or something, so as to — so as to—

“Miss Emmia, I mean Emmia, I will, I mean it, cross my heart I will, like what frinstance?”

“Oh, you should choose it yourself, something you don’t want to do but know you should, like going to church regular, only it don’t have to be that, you ought to want to do that anyway. No, just something good and honest and difficult, the way I’ll be proud of you, I’ll be your inspiration like — no, you mustn’t kiss me again, not ever until you be freeman, mind now I mean it.”

She stood up away from me, smoothing her skirt, her eyes downcast, maybe crying again a little, but in the weak lantern-light I couldn’t be sure. “I’ll try, Emmia.”

“I mean I want us to be good, Davy, like — like respectable people, nice people that get ahead and get asked to go places and stuff. That’s what they mean, see, by fearing God and living in Abraham and like that, I mean there’s a right way and a wrong way, I mean I — well, I a’n’t always been too good, Davy, you wouldn’t know.” She was at the trap-door, setting down the lantern. She blew it out to leave for me at the head of the ladder. “You go to sleep now, Davy — little Spice.” She was gone.

I could have run after her then, ready as ever I would be, no more sense than a jack-in-the-box, and no less. But I only went to the window, and saw her vague shape crossing the stable yard, and crawled back under the blankets into a dream-tormented sleep.

I was running — rather, a mush-footed staggering on legs too heavy and too short — through a house dimly like the Bull-and-Iron. It possessed a thousand rooms, each containing something with a hint of memory: a three-legged stool the orphanage kids sat on when they were naughty; a ring Sister Carnation wore; a cloth doll; my luck-charm upright in one of the crimson slippers Caron wore when she first came to the orphanage — (they’d been swiftly taken away from her as a sinful vanity). In that house black wolf followed me, in no hurry — he could wait. His throat-noises resembled words: “Look at me! Look at me!” If I did, even once, he would have me. I went on — each room windowless, no sunrise place. The doors would not latch behind me. When I leaned against one, black wolf slobbered at the crack, and I said over my shoulder: “I’ll give Caron my Katskil knife and she will do you something good and difficult.” He shut up then, but I must still find Caron or my threat was empty, and it may be she went on ahead with one brown foot bare and my candle upright in the other crimson slipper, but I don’t know, for I tripped and went down, knowing black wolf was about to snuff at my neck, then knowing I was awake on my pallet in the stable loft, but for a while I wasn’t certain I was alone.

I was alone. I smelled the dry hay, and Emmia’s scent — merely from her blanket. Late moonlight showed me the loft window. The spider-bite was a harmless itch and soreness. I found my sack and felt of the golden horn. It was not mine.

I knew what that action must be, good and honest and difficult. My horn must go back to an ugly creature who could make no use of it. Was that good? Well, it was difficult and honest. I could never tell of it to Emmia — unless maybe I dressed up the story — changed the mue to a hermit perhaps? Nay, when had I ever told the girl anything but the simplest every-day matters? Why, in my day-dreams. Then, sure, she never failed to respond wonderfully.

I would run away, scorned, abused, in danger of my life because Emmia had reported me to the authorities for not killing the mue. Then, let’s see-would I fall prey to the policer dogs? Facing them, I would say — nope. Well, climb a tree, talk from there? Balls.

However, some far-off day I might revisit Skoar, a scarred and sad-faced man disinclined to mention heroic action in the far-off wars of — Nuin? Corncut? Why wouldn’t I captain an expedition that did away, with the Cod Islands pirates? So in gratitude a friendly nation made me Governor of them balmy isles—

Kay, in those days how was I to know the Cods are a few lumps scattered through the waters off Nuin as if someone had flung gobs of wet sand out of a bucket?

Emmia, having sorrowfully blamed herself all these years, might recognize me, but alas—

A rat lolloping across an overhead beam scared the bejasus out of me. I slung on my clothes, and felt for the lump of my luck-charm in the sack. I must find another cord and wear it again the right way. I would cut a length of fishline for it when I got to my cave. I tried not to think of the horn. My moccasins went into the sack on top of it, and I settled my knife-belt.

Emmia’s blanket mustn’t be found here by somebody who’d say it proved we spent the night together under it. I crammed it on top of the moccasins and went down the ladder. Going away for real, I thought.

But Emmia mustn’t be harmed, as she might be if the blanket merely turned up missing. All permanent property of the Bull-and-Iron seemed to be attached to Mam Robson by a God-damn mystic cord. Food in moderation you could steal, but let a blanket or candlestick or such-like walk with Abraham, and something wounded the Mam deep in her soul; she couldn’t rest till she’d searched out the cause of the pain, all the better if she could drive Old Jon into a twittering frenzy while she did it.

I stood under Emmia’s window studying the big jinny-creeper. The ancient stem was sturdy and should hold me. Old Jon and the Main slept on the other side of the building. The rooms nearest Emmia’s were for guests; below was a store-room. Only a reckless randy-john would climb up there. I climbed.

The vine gripped the bricks with ten thousand toes, bent and whispered but did not break. I clung with an arm over the sill. I’d carried the blanket up in my teeth and left my sack in deep shadow. I dropped the blanket inside the room that was nch with Emmia’s fragrance. I heard a small puppy-moan that must mean sleep, maybe the nudging of a dream. She might wake, see my shadow and scream the house down. This was the shape my fear took that time. I was on the ground and jittering away down Kurin Street before I could stop trembling.

Sick-angry too because I had not gone to her bed, but I could dream up plentiful reasons for not going back now. They drove me on — over the stockade, up the mountain. But I would return, I told myself, after I restored the horn. I’d try to please her. Hell, I’d even go to church if there was no way to weasel out of it. And (said another self) I would get it in.

Dion has offered the colonists a name for the island — Neonarcheos. I think I like it. It is from Greek, a language already ancient and unspoken in the Golden Age. Dion is one of the few among the Heretics who studied that, and Latin. (The Church forbids to the public anything at all in a language not English — it could be sorcery.) He introduced me to the Greek and Latin authors in translation; I note that they also looked backward toward a Golden Age preceding what they called the Age of Iron…

Dion’s name for this place says something I wanted said — new-old. It connects us somehow with the age when this island — and the others that must lie close over the horizon, all of different shape and smaller than they were before the ocean rose — was a Portuguese possession, whatever that may have meant to it; yes, and with a time far more remote, when civilization capable of recording itself was a new thing on earth, and this island was a speck of green in the blue inhabited, as when we found it, only by the birds and other shy things who live their entire lifetimes without either wisdom or malice.

When I climbed North Mountain again to return the horn I did not see true sunrise, for by the time it arrived I was in that big-tree region where the day before I might so easily have killed my monster. I was not hurrying; reluctance made me feel as though the air itself had thickened to a barrier. I did not feel much afraid of the mue, though when I entered the tangle where his grapevine pathways ran I was looking upward too much, until certain timorous fancies were flooded out of me by a wrong smell — wolf smell.

I drew my knife, exasperated — must I be halted, distracted by a danger not connected with my errand? The scent was coming from dead ahead, where I had to go in order not to lose the marks of my passage of the day before. I was not far from the tulip tree. Knife ready, I made no effort to be quiet — if the wolf was lurking anywhere within a hundred yards he knew exactly where I was.

You can’t look quite straight at black wolf even from the rail above the baiting-pit. Something about him pushes your gaze off true. I spoke of that once to Dion, who remarked that maybe we glimpse a fraction of our selves in him. My dear friend Sam Loomis, a gentle heart if ever there was one, used to claim he was sired by an irritated black wolf onto the cunt of a hurricane; in such nonsense talk he may have been saying something not entirely nonsense.

When a man hears black wolf’s cold long cry in the dark, his heart does strain at its human boundaries. You, I, anyone. You know you won’t go out there to hunt with him, quarrel with him over the bleeding meat, run down the glades of midnight with him and his diamond-eyed female, be a thing like him. But we are deep enough to contain the desire; it does not altogether sleep. All nights are resonant with the unspoken. Latent in our brains, our muscles, our sex, are all the harsh lusts that ever blazed. We are lightning and the avalanche, fire and the crushing storm.

That morning I found my black wolf quickly. She was below the grapevine that hung down outside the catbriers, and she was dead. An old bitch wolf — my knife prodded the huge scrawny carcass, six feet long from her snout to the base of her mangy tail. Scarred, foul, hair once black gone rusty with festered spots. When alive, for all her decay she could still have hamstrung a wild boar. But her neck was broken.

Lifting, poking with my knife — I could not have touched her with my hand and not puked — I proved to myself that her neck was broken. Doubt it if you like — you never saw my North Mountain mue and his arms. Her body was already losing stiffness, and a line of the midget yellow carrion ants had laid out their mysterious highway to her, so she must have been dead for several hours. The cover was too dense to admit the wings of crows or vultures, and it is said the small scavenger dogs of the wilderness will not touch black wolf’s body. I rubbed away a bit of the ants’ path and watched stupidly as they fiddled about restoring it. The dry blood on the rocks, the ground, the grape-stem, was not from the dead wolf, who had no wound but a broken neck.

I read the signs. She had ambushed the mue when he was near the vine. Bushes were flattened and torn; a heavy boulder had been jerked out of its earth-pocket. It would have happened the day before, perhaps when he came back from the pooi. He could have been careless from distress, wondering why he had not changed to man-beautiful.

Or he might have lifted the rose-colored rock to find his treasure gone, and come storming out ready to attack the first thing that moved.

Either way, I was guilty.

Her mouth was agape, the teeth dry. I noticed one of the great stabbers in the lower jaw had broken off long before, leaving a blackened stump in a pus-pocket that must have caused her agony. I believe it had never occurred to me before that a black wolf like any other sentient thing could suffer. The other long tooth of the lower jaw was brown with dry blood.

I climbed the tulip tree. There were blood-smears all the way. I did not think the mue could have lost so much and still be living, but I called to him: “I’ve come back. I’m bringing it back to you. I took it but I’m bringing it back.” I mounted a thick branch above his nest and compelled myself to look down. The yellow ants must have formed their column on the opposite side of the trunk, or surely I would have seen them sooner.

He was human. Knowing that, I was wondering for a while how much of my schooling had been lies on top of lies.

I alone remember him. You may remember what I’ve written, a book-thing for leisure talk. But as I wnte this now I am the only one who even knows of him except Nickie and Dion, for I’ve never told any others, except one person who is dead, how it was that I won my golden horn.