“O Davy! But maybe he—”

“Sumbitch is dead as shoe-leather.” I must have been thinking till now that I could run or not as I pleased; now I felt sure it was run or be hanged. Sooner or later the policers would find out whose neck the charm belonged to… “Emmia, does your Pa know I took off today?”

“O Davy, I couldn’t cover for you today — I didn’t know you was gone. Ayah, Judd wanted you should take the mules out for to turn the vegetable patch — and found you gone — went and told my Da, and he said — my Da said you better have a real fine entertaining pile of — well — I mean, he said—”

“Just tell me.”

“I can’t. He didn’t mean it, he was just running off at the mouth.”

“Just say it, Emmia.”

“Said he’d turn in your name to the City Council.”

“Ayah. To be slaved.”

“Davy, love, he was just running off at the mouth.”

“He meant it.”

“No!” But I knew he’d meant it; I’d tried his patience too far at last. Having a bond-servant declared a slave for misconduct was too serious for even Old Jon to make flaptalk about it. “Look, Davy — they wouldn’t know the charm was yourn, would they?”

“They’ll find out.” I was out of bed and hustling on my clothes. She came to me, distracted now and crying. “Emmia, is it a fact the war’s started?”

“Why, I told you that last night!”

“Must have been while I was light-headed.”

“You stupid thing, don’t you ever listen to me?”

“Tell me again — no, don’t. I got to go.”

“Oh, it was that town off west — Seneca — Katskils went and occupied it and then declared war, a’n’t that awful? There’s a regiment of ourn coming to Skoar to see they don’t try no such here — but I told you all that.”

Maybe she had. “Emmia, I got to go.”

“O Davy, all this time we been — don’t go!” She clung to me, tears streaming. “I’ll hide you.” She wasn’t thinking. “See, they’d never look for you here.”

“Search the whole inn, every room.”

“Then take me with you. Oh, you got to! I hate it here, Davy. It stinks.”

“Abraham’s mercy, keep your voice down!”

“I hate it. Home!” She was trembling all over. Her head swung away and she spat on the floor, a furious little girl. “That for home! Take me with you, Davy!”

“I can’t. The wilderness—”

“Davy, look at me!” She stepped into moonlight, her hair wild and breasts heaving. “Look! A’n’t I all yourn? — all this, and this! Didn’t I give you everything?” Nay, I’ll never understand how people can speak of love as if it were a thing, and given — cut, sliced, measured. “Davy, don’t leave me behind! I’ll do anything you want — hunt — steal—”

She couldn’t even have climbed the stockade.

“Emmia, I’ll be sleeping in trees. Bandits — how could I fight off a bunch of them buggers? They’d have you spreadeagled in nothing flat. Tiger. Black wolf. Mues.”

“M-m—”

“In the wilderness, yes, and don’t ask me how I know, but those stories are true. I couldn’t take care of you out there, Emniia.”

“You mean you don’t want me.” I hitched on my knife-belt. “You wouldn’t care if you’ve give’ me a baby — men’re all alike — Ma says — don’t never want nothin’ but put it in and then walk off. I despise you, Davy, I do despise you.”

“Hush!”

“I won’t, I hate you — screw you, did you think you was first or something? All right, now call me a whore!”

“Hush, darling, hush! They’ll hear.”

“I hate the whole mis’ble horny lot of you — you dirty lech, you boy — so proud of that stupid ugly thing and then all’s you do is run off, damn you—”

I closed her mouth with mine, feeling her need of that, and pushed her back against the wall. Her fingers were tight in my hair, my knife annoying where it hung between us, but we were locked in the love-seizure again, I deep in her and not much caring if I hurt her a little. She responded as if she wanted to swallow me alive. By good fortune my mouth still held hers closed when she needed to scream. Exhausted afterward, and desperate to be gone, I said: “I’ll come back for you when I can. I love you, Emmia.”

“Yes, Davy, Spice, yes, when you can, when it’s safe for you, dearest.” And what I heard in her voice was mostly relief. In both our voices. “I’ll wait for you,” she said, believing it. “Always I’ll love you,” she said, believing it, which made it true at the time.

“I’ll come back.”

I’ve wondered how soon she understood we’d both been lying, mostly for decent reasons. Maybe she knew it as soon as I was climbing down the vine. Her face, like a faded moon, vanished from the window before I turned away down the street. Nothing in life had ever drawn me with such wondrous power as the unknown road ahead of me in the dark.

9

A thickening fog was turning moonlight to milkiness. As I passed the pillory in the green I said under my breath: “I had her twice, once in bed and once against the wall.” Wonderful, as if no one had ever laid a woman before. True, the small sound of my own voice scared me, and I continued along the empty street in a more slinky style, like a cat retiring from a creamery under trimmed sail with a cargo in the hold. But I still felt proud, and knew also an unfamiliar charity toward the whole big fat world and everyone in it except maybe Father Clance.

As I passed the baiting-pit I heard the moan of a bear who’d soon be used up in the Spring Festival — odd how human beings often celebrate the good weather by hurting something. I could do the beai no good but I think he did me some, reminding me to taper off a mite on my encompassing love for all mankind, who if they caught me would clobber me as thoroughly as they’d clobbered him. I went on, alert again, to a black alley that would bring me out near the spot where I’d left the dead guard lying.

I felt unseen doorways. A lifeless thing slithered under my feet. Dog, pigling, cat — the Scavengers’ Guild would dispose of whatever it was as soon as it annoyed the policers. In later years, when I was living with Nickie in Old City of Nuin where the poorest streets are kept clean, it would have made me angry. But I was Skoar bred and born: in Moha people below the aristocracy took scant pride in their way of living, claiming that dirt and decay held down the taxes — though I don’t think the tax collector ever lived who couldn’t see through a six-foot pile of rubble to the tender gleam of a hidden dime. When my foot slipped I merely grumbled: “Ah, call the Mourners!”

In Skoar that remark was so routine it hardly rated as a joke. The Mourners’ Guild is a Moha specialty, a gang of professional singers and wailers who close in on a family that’s had a mue-birth to create an uproar of the sacred type. The slave woman old Judd was required to live with bore a mue, a blotched eyeless thing — I saw it carried away wrapped in a rag. The caterwauling demanded by law went on two days. It would have been five for a freeman family, eight to ten for the upper nobility — and no one no matter how blue his blood could break away from the festivities more than just long enough to go to the backhouse and return. The object is to appease the spirit of the mue after the priest has disposed of the body, and to remind the survivors that we are all miserable sinners totally corrupt in the sight of God. It’s called planned reverence.

The Guild could be hired for a normal funeral, but charged custom rates for that. At the burial of a mue in Moha, the family was obliged to pay the Guild only a nominal fee, hardly more than a seventh of a year’s earnings, plus about the same amount for a casket the neighbors would consider adequate. For slaves like Judd the town itself met the expense of the Guild’s fee and a nice basswood box, charging it off to community good will, one of the generous things that made a Moha citizen point with pride.