“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.
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.