I cut my loaf of oat bread in half. I had some notion of taming him like a beast by feeding him. I wanted my luckcharm. Its cord had broken and I was keeping it in my sack till I could contrive another. I took up the sack — was I for Abraham’s sake going somewhere? — and the hard lump of the charm through the cloth did comfort me.

They carve such junk for tourists in Penn, as I found out later in my travels. My mother — anyhow someone at the house where I was born — gave me this, for I was told it hung at my neck when I arrived at the orphanage and they let me keep it. I probably cut my first teeth on it. It is a body with two fronts, male and female; the two-faced head has a brass loop embedded so you can wear it on a string. The folded arms and sex parts are sketched in flat and unreal. No legs: the thighs run together in a blob flattened on the bottom so you can set it upright. How the little gods get by without a rump I don’t know — maybe that’s how you know they are gods. It used to fascinate Caron. She liked to hold it under our blanket, and said it meant we would always be together.

I took the half-loaf of oat bread to the mue. He didn’t grab. His flat nostrils flared; like a dog’s his gaze followed my fingers as I broke off a piece and ate it myself. Then he accepted the rest, and gnawed, slobbering with eagerness, though with his fat he could hardly have been going hungry, and it was soon finished. He said: “Come me?” He walked up the path and looked back. Like a smart dog.

I followed him.

Those stub legs pumped along pretty well. On a level he waddled; on rising slopes his hands pressed the ground for a speedy four-legged scramble. Downgrades bothered him; he followed a long slant where he could. He moved quietly as I’d learned to do in the woods, knew the country and must have been getting a living from it. He doubtless had no name.

A state ward, I had no last name. Just Davy.

Don’t imagine that thing with the bread came from any grown-up goodness in me. At fourteen whatever goodness I had was growing in the dark, obscured by shabby and cruel confusions that were inside of me as well as m my world: ignorance and fear; contempt of others for my class, which I was expected to pass on down to the slave class while all concerned made big talk of democratic equality; the cheating and conniving I daily saw people do, and their excuses for it — hi-ho, can’t be so wrong because look, even the nobility are bootlickers, pimps, swindlers, thieves, don’t you know? That’s ancient, I believe, that game of supposing you make yourself clean by pointing at the dirt on somebody else. No, I wasn’t good or kind.

Since human beings make and choose their own ends, goodness can be an end in itself without supernatural gimmicks, but that idea never came into words for me until I heard the words in Nickie’s voice. Yet I think that I did dimly understand, at fourteen, how if you want to be a good human being you have to work at it.

There was that early protest in my mind, that recognition of the mue’s humanity. But as I walked on through the forest with him I was governed mainly by fear and a dirty kind of planning. Schooling and the tavern-tales had told me mues weren’t like witches or spooks. Although the offspring of demons they couldn’t vanish, float through walls, use spells or the evil eye. God, said the authorities, may not be thought of as allowing such powers to a miserable mue. A mue died when you stuck a knife in him,, and it needn’t have a silver point.

The law said when, not if. You must if you could; if not you must save yourself and bring word, so the mue can be hunted down by professionals with aid of a priest.

The leather of my knife-sheath brushed my skin at every step. I began to resent the mue, imagining his hellish father behind every tree, building up the resentment like a fool searching after an excuse for a quarrel.

We reached one of the mountain’s flanking ridges, where old trees stood enormous, casting deep shade from their interlacing tops. They were mostly pine, that through the years had built up a carpet of silence. The mue disliked this region — on clear and level ground anything could overtake him. He padded on with worried side-glances, nothing about him to suggest a demon’s protection.

They didn’t say a demon always attended a mue…

I decided it would be best to kill him on flat ground, and watched a spot below his last rib on the left side. After the stab I could be instantly clear of his long reach while the blood drained out of him. I drew my knife, and lowered it in my sack, afraid he might turn before I was ready. He cleared his throat, and that angered me — what right could he have to do things the human way? Still, I felt there was no hurry. This level area stretched on far ahead; I’d better wait till I was steadier.

At the tavern I wouldn’t brag. I’d maintain a noble calm, the Yard-Boy Who Killed A Mue.

They’d send me out with an escort to find the remains and verify my story. The skeleton would do, considering the leg-bones, and that’s all we’d find, for in the time it took the mission to settle arguments and get going the carrion-ants, crows, vultures, small wild scavenger dogs would have done their wilderness housecleaning. Maybe I’d drop something near the body. My luck-charm — that would fix anyone who set out snickering at me behind his hand.

It came to me, as I caught the mue’s foul smell, that this was no daydream. I might be questioned by the Mayor, even the Bishop of Skoar. The Kurin family, tops in the Skoar aristocracy, would hear of it. They could make me the same as rich, a bond-servant no more. Why, I would ride to Levannon on a bright roan that none but I dared handle, and with two attendants — well, three, one to dash ahead and make sure of a room for me at the next inn, where a maid-servant would undress me and bathe me, wait on me in bed if I wished. In Levannon I would buy a thirty-ton outrigger, and look at that green hat with a hawk’s feather, and that shirt too, a marvel of Penn silk, green or maybe gold! As an adopted son of the nobility I could wear a loin-rag of what color I chose, but I’d be modest, I’d settle for freeman’s white, so long as it was silk. I didn’t think I wanted britches with a codpiece, a style just then coming into favor. Those I’d seen looked clumsy, and the codpiece an unnecessary brag. Moosehide moccasins I’d have, purtied up with ornaments of brass. I might start smoking, with a rich man’s fancy for nicely cured marawan and the best pale tobacco from Conicut or Lomeda.

I fancied Old Jon Robson ashamed of all unkindness and anxious to crowd in on the glory. I would permit it. Clickety-clackety, he knew all along the boy had it in him.

Mam Robson might have a go at supplying me with a few ancestors. Already, when slightly pleased with me, she’d remarked that I sort of resembled a relative of hers who rose through the ranks to be a Captain in the Second Kanhar Regiment and married a baron’s daughter — which showed, said she, that people with square chins and plenty of ear-lobe were the ones that got ahead in the world — this was one for Old Jon, who had several chins but none of them too clearly connected with his jawbone.

Who can say what man might have visited the house where I was born?

I’m concerned about varieties of time: one reason why I stepped in here a moment behind the asterisks. You’d best get used to the idea that my brain-scratching — digression is the word some people would prefer — is not a suspension of action but a different kind of action, on a rather different time scale. Your much-abused amiable mind, all of a doodah over women and children and taxes and a certain almost needless worry of yours about whether you exist, may dislike the suggestion that more than one kind of time is allowable, but give it a go, will you? Meanwhile, on what we might call the asterisk time scale, you can’t very well stop me if I choose to claim that Pappy was a grandee, some hightoned panjandrum traveling incognito through Skoar and planting me in an idle moment when he had a hasty hard on and a smidgin of loose change — why not? Well, later in the book I’ll tell you why not, or why probably not. Don’t rush me.