I used to hate my shadowy father in my early years. I was six when, since I had accidentally overheard talk of my origin, Father Milsom told me what parents are, and said my Da was undoubtedly just a whore’s customer, and then added some dismally fit-for-six explanation of the word “whore” to complete the confusion. Yes, I hated my nameless father’s guts; and yet when Caron first slid under my blanket I told her the President of Moha had visited Skoar in disguise, stopping off at the Mill Street house to make a baby — me. After that I felt better about the whole deal. Who wouldn’t, with a President in the family? Caron — bless her — was quick to play along and devise generous plans full of arson and bloodshed for establishing my birthright.

A few nights later I learned that her mother, nine months before she was born, had a Passionate Affair with the Archbishop of Moha who also just happened to be passing by, and noticed her extreme beauty and sent litter-bearers after her so she could visit his residence in secret. Kay, so we had plans for Caron too, but were smart enough to keep all such enterprise under the blanket, where sometimes we called each other President and Presidentess, with frightful oaths never to speak of the matter in daytime.

If you find that anecdote funny, go to hell.

Walking on behind the mue, my overheated fancy also heard Emmia Robson: “Davy darling, what if you’d got hurt?” Maybe not “darling” but even “Spice,” the lovename girls in Moha don’t use unless they really mean come-try-something. “Nay, Spice,” s’s I, “it was nothing, and didn’t I have to destroy the brute for your sake?”

I decided the conversation had better take place in her bedroom. She had let down her hair to cover the front of her, so my hands — gentle but still the hands that had rid the world of a dread monster — parted the softness to find the pink flower-tips. And here and now, walking behind him in the woods, all I had to do—

The mue stopped and faced me. He may have wanted to reassure me, or transmit some message beyond his powers of speech. I took my hand out of the sack, without the knife. I couldn’t do it, I knew, if he was looking at me. He said: “We go not — not—”

“Not far?”

“Is word.” He was admiring — what a marvel to know all the words I did! “Bad thing come, I here, I here.” He tapped his ponderous arm. “You — I — you — I—”

“We’re all right,” I said.

“We. We.” He had used the word himself, but it appeared to disturb or puzzle him.

“We means you and I.”

He nodded in his patch of leaf-dappled sunlight. Puzzled and thoughtful. Human. He grunted and smiled dimly and went on ahead.

I sheathed my knife and did not draw it again that day.

4

The region of great trees ended. As if sliding into dark water we entered a place where the master growth was wild grape; here day would always be a kind of evening. The slow violence of the vine had overcome a stand of maple and oak. Many of these were dead, upholding their murderers; others lived, winning sunlight enough to continue an existence of slavery.

Still I found an infinity of color and change. Some of the gleams in the vagueness above me were orchids. I glimpsed a blue and crimson parrot, and a tanager who was first a motionless ember and then a shooting-star. I heard a wood-dove lamenting — so it sounds, though I believe he cries for love.

The mue glanced up at the interlocking tangle and then at my legs and arms. “You not,” he said, and showed what he meant by catching a grapevine loop and swarming up it until he was thirty feet above ground. He launched his bulk across a gap to grab another loop, and another. Many yards away, he shifted his grip with ease and returned. He was right, it wasn’t for me. I’m clever in the trees, and slept in them once or twice before I found my cave, but my arms are merely human. He called: “You go ground?”

I went ground. The walking became nasty. He traveled ahead above a vile thicket — fallen branches, hardhack, blackberry, poison ivy, rotten logs where fire-ants would be ready with their split-second fury. Snake and scorpion could be here. The puffy-bodied black-and-gold orbspiders, big as my big toe, had built many homes; their bite won’t kill but makes you wish it had.

The mue held down his pace to accommodate me. A quarter-mile of this struggle brought me up to a network of catbrier and there I was stopped: ten-foot elastic stems in a mad basket-weave, tough as moose-tendon and cruel as weasel-teeth. Beyond, I saw what may have been the tallest tree in Moha, a tulip tree at least twelve feet through at the base. The grape had found it long ago and gone rioting up into the sunshine, but might not have killed the giant after another hundred years. My mue was up there, pointing to a vine-stem that dangled on my side of the briers and connected with the loops around the tree. I shinnied up and worked over; he grasped my foot and set it gently on a branch.

As soon as he was sure of my safety he climbed, and I followed for maybe another sixty feet. It was easy as a ladder. The tree’s side-branches had become smaller, the vine-leaves thicker in the increase of sunlight, when we came to a mass of crossed wood and interwoven vine. Not an eagle’s nest as I foolishly thought at first — no bird ever lifted sticks of that size — but a nest certainly, six feet across, built on a double crotch, woven as shrewdly as any willow basket in the Corn Market and lined with gray moss. The mue let himself into it and made room for me.

He talked to me.

I felt no sense of dreaming. Did you in childhood, as I did now and then with Caron, play the game of imaginary countries? You might decree that if you stepped through the gap in a forked tree-trunk you’d be entering a different world. If then in the flesh you did step through you found you must continue to rely on make-believe, and I know that hurt. Suppose you had been met, in solid truth, on the other side of your tree-trunk, by a dragon, a blue chimera, a Cadillac,[4] an elf-girl all in greeen—?

“See you before,” the mue said. So he must have watched me on other visits to North Mountain — me with my keen eyes and ears, studied by a monster and never guessing it! He would not have passed the human kind of judgment on the monkey tricks of a boy who thought himself alone; that consoling thought came to me after a while.

He told me of his life. Mere fragments of language to help him, worn down by years of speaking to no one but himself — I won’t record much of the actual talk. He waved toward the northeast, where from our height the world was a green sea under the gold of afternooon — he had been born somewhere off that way, if I understood him. He spoke of a journey of “ten sleeps,” but I don’t know what distance he might have covered in a day’s travel. His mother, evidently a farm woman, had raised him in the woods. To him birth was a vagueness — “Began there,” he said, and fumblingly tried to repeat what his mother had told him of birth, giving it up as soon as I showed I understood. Death he grasped, as an ending. “Mother’s man stop live” — before he was born, I think he meant. Describing his mother, all he could say was “big, good.” I guessed she would have been some stout farm woman who managed to hide her pregnancy in the first months, and perhaps her husband’s death made matters simpler.

By law, every pregnancy must be reported immediately to civil and church authorities, no pregnant woman may be left alone after the fifth month, and a priest must be present at every birth to decide whether the child is normal and dispose of it if he considers it a mue. There are occasional breaches in the law — the Ramblers for instance, always on the go, could evade it much more often than they do — but the law is there, carrying a heavy charge of religious as well as secular command.