Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (299 page)

(1909–1976)

Edgar Pangborn’s place in the field is probably more for the writers who he influenced than by his continuing readership. Never a prolific science fiction writer, his work largely fell out of print after his death and has only recently become widely available again with new editions published by Old Earth Books.

A child of two literary parents (his father was an attorney and dictionary editor while his mother had written supernatural fiction) Pangborn studied music at Harvard (starting at age fifteen) and the New England Conservatory of Music, but did not graduate from either. Shifting his focus to writing, he sold his first novel at age twenty-one and spent the next twenty years writing for pulp mystery and detective magazines under various pen names. He worked at various other trades during the same period, including several years spent farming in Maine and World War II service as an Army medic in the Pacific.

He turned to science fiction in the early 1950s when he was in his forties (writing under his own name for the first time), and showed a touch for depicting emotionally evocative characters. Pangborn’s 1954 novel
A Mirror for Observers
won the International Fantasy Award, but his best-known work is the post-apocalyptic novel
Davy
(1964), of which “The Golden Horn” became a part.

Pangborn left everything to his older sister, and she in turn passed his estate on to writer Peter S. Beagle (who Pangborn had been close with) when she died in 2003. One of the themes that plays through “The Golden Horn” is the power of music and the pain of its loss. In 2003, all of the music Pangborn had written in his early years and then abandoned (except for references in stories like this one) was discovered in the attic of the house where he died.

First published in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, February 1962

Moha, where I was born, is mainly a nation of farms, grouped around their stockade village throughout the hill and lake and forest country. I grew up in Skoar, one of Moha’s three cities, which lies in a cup of the hills near the Katskil border. Even there things moved with the seasons and the Corn Market trade; wilderness whispers at the city’s borders, except where the two roads, the Northwest and the East, carry their double stream of men, mule-wagons, soldiers, tinkers, wanderers.

Farming’s heartbreak work in Moha, same as everywhere. The stock give birth to as many mues as anywhere else, the labor’s long sweat and toil and disappointment wearing a man down to old age in the thirties, few farmers ever able to afford a slave. But the people scrape along, as I’ve seen human beings do in places worse than Moha. I’m older, I’ve traveled, I’ve learned to write and read in spite of that mystery’s being reserved to the priests. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if Moha wasn’t the happiest land I ever knew.

The other cities—I’ve never visited them—are Moha City and Kanhar, both in the northwest on Moha Water. Their harbors can take big vessels up to thirty tons, the ships that trade with Levannon and the Katskil ports on the Hudson Sea. Moha City is the capital and Kanhar is the largest, twenty thousand population not counting slaves. Fifty miles south of Kanhar is Skoar, and there I was born squalling and redheaded in one of those houses that are licensed but still supposed not to exist. In such places they don’t have time for kids, but since I was a well-formed chunk of humanity and not a mue, the policers took me from my mother, whoever she was, when I was weaned, and dumped me in the Skoar orphanage, where I stayed until I was nine, old enough to earn a living.

I’m thinking now of a day in middle March when I was past fourteen, and slipped away before dawn from the Bull and Iron where I worked as yardboy, bondservant of course, two dollars a week and board. I was merely goofing off. We’d gone through a tough winter with smallpox and flu, near-about everything except the lumpy plague, and a real snow in January almost an inch deep—I’ve never seen such a heavy fall of it before or since. There was even a frost in February; people called it unusual. In the stable loft where I slept I just thought it was damn cold. I remember looking out the loft window one January morning and seeing icicles on the sign over the inn door—a noble sign, painted for Old Jon Robson by some journeyman artist who likely got bed and a meal out of it along with the poverty talk that Old Jon saved for such occasions. A fine red bull with tremendous horns, tremendous everything, and for the iron there was a long spear sticking out of his neck and he not minding it a bit.

The wolves sharpnosed in close that winter. Mostly grays but a pack of blacks wiped out an entire farm family in Wilton Village near Skoar. Old Jon Robson would tell every new guest the particulars of the massacre, and he’s probably doing it yet, along with tales about a crazy redheaded yardboy he had once. Well, Old Jon had connections in Wilton Village, knew the family the wolves killed and had to make a thing of it, clickety-yak. I never knew him to keep his mouth shut more than two minutes—one day when he was sick with a sore throat. He wouldn’t shut it when he slept, either. He and Mam Robson had their bedroom across the wagonyard from my loft, and in midwinter with the windows shut tight I could still hear him sleep, like an ungreased wagonwheel.

Before sunup that March day I fed the mules and horses. I reasoned that somebody else ought to get his character strengthened by doing the shoveling. It was a Friday anyhow, so all work was sinful, unless you want to claim that shoveling is a work of necessity or piety, and I disagree. I crept into the main kitchen of the inn, where a yardboy wasn’t supposed to appear. Safe enough. Everybody would be fasting before church—the comfortable way, in bed. The slave-man Judd who was boss of the kitchen wasn’t up yet, and the worst he’d have done would have been to flap a rag and chase me ten steps on his gimp leg. I found a peach pie and surrounded it for breakfast. You see, I’d skipped fasting and church a good deal already—easy because who cares about a yardboy?—and the lightning hadn’t located me yet. In the store room I collected a chunk of bacon and a loaf of oat bread, and started thinking. Why not run away for good?

Who’d be bothered? Maybe Jon Robson’s daughter Emmia would, a little. Cry, and wish she’d been nicer to me. I worked on that as I stole out of the inn and down the long emptiness of Kurin Street, dawn still half an hour away. I worked on it hard. I had myself killed by black wolf, changed that to bandits, because black wolf wouldn’t leave any bones. There ought to be bones for somebody to bring back. Somebody who’d say to Emmia: “Here’s all that’s left of poor redheaded Davy, except his Katskil knife. He did say he wanted for you to have that if anything happened to him.” But bandits wouldn’t have left the knife, rot them. I had a problem there.

Emmia was older than me, sixteen, big and soft like her papa only on her it looked good. How I did cherish and play with that rosy softness in the night—all in my fancy, dumb-virgin as a baby cockerel, alone in my loft.

I was gulping by the time I passed the town green, but as I neared the Corn Market, in North District and not far from the place where I knew I could climb the city stockade with no guard seeing me, most of that flapdoodle drained out of my head. I was thinking sharp and practical about running away for real, not just goofing off the way I’d done other times.

A bondservant, one grade better than a slave, I’d be breaking the law if I ran, and could be made a true slave for it, likely with a ten-year term. I told myself that morning what they could do with the law. I had the bacon and bread in a sack strapped across my shoulder. My Katskil knife hung in a sheath under my shirt, and all the money I’d saved during the winter, five dollars in silver, was knotted into my loin rag. Up in the woods on North Mountain where I’d found a cave in my lone wanderings the year before, other things lay hidden—ten dollars safely buried, an ash bow I’d made myself, brass-tipped arrows, fishlines with a couple of real steel hooks. Maybe I’d really do it, I thought. Maybe today.

I shinnied over the stockade without trouble and started up the mountain. I was being pulled two ways then. The Emmia who talked in my heart wasn’t whimpering over bones. I was thinking about the real soft-lipped girl who’d probably want me to turn back, stick it out through my bond-period, get civilized, make something of myself. Who might not mind, might even like it, if I told her or showed her what I felt about her instead of just mooning at her through doorways like a stunned calf. The forest pulled the other way.

Climbing the steep ground from the city in the morning hush, I decided I’d merely stay lost a day or two as I’d done before. Other times it had usually been my proper monthly day off, not always. I’d risked trouble before and talked my way out of it. I’d stay this time, say until the bacon was gone, and spend that time polishing the fresh whopmagullion I’d have to tell, to celebrate my return and soften the action of Old Jon’s leather strap on my rump. The decision itself perked me up. When I was well under cover of the woods and the time was right, I climbed a maple to watch the sunrise.

It was already beyond first-light, the fire not yet over the rim. I’d missed the earliest bird-calls, now their voices were rippling back and forth across the world. I heard a white-throat sparrow in a bush; robin and wood thrush, loveliest of all bird singers, were busy everywhere. A cardinal flew by me, a streak of flame, and a pair of smoky-white parrots broke out of a sycamore to skim over the tree-tops. In a sweet-gum nearby I caught sight of a pair of white-face monkeys who didn’t mind me at all. When I looked away from them I saw the golden blaze begin.

For the first time that I can remember, I wanted to know, Where does it come from, the sun? What happens over there when it’s set afire every morning? Why should God go to all that trouble to keep us warm?

Understand, at that time I had no learning at all. I’d scarcely heard of books except to know they were forbidden to all but the priests because they’d had something to do with the Sin of Man. I figured Old Jon was the smartest man in the world because he could keep accounts with the bead-board that hung in the taproom. I believed, as the Amran Church teaches everyone to believe, that the earth is a body of land three thousand miles square, once a garden and perfect, with God and the angels walking freely among men, until the time almost four hundred years ago when men sinned and spoiled everything; so now we’re working out the penance until Abraham, the Spokesman of God, who died on the Wheel at Nuber in the year 37, returns to judge His people, saving the few elect and sending the rest to fry forever in the caverns of Hell. And on all sides of that lump of land spread the everlasting seas all the way to the rim of the world. The Book of Abraham, said the teacher-priests, doesn’t tell how far away the rim is, because that’s one of the things God does not wish men to know.

Doubts I did have. I thought it remarkable how the lightning never did arrive no matter how I sinned, even on Fridays. The doubts were small; young grass trying to work up through the brown old trash of winter.

I understood of course—all children far younger than fourteen understood it—that while you might get away with a lot of sinning on the sly, you agreed out loud with whatever the Church taught or else you didn’t stay alive. I saw my first heretic-burning when I was nine, after I’d gone to work at the Bull and Iron. In Moha they were always conducted along with the Spring Festival. Children under nine weren’t required to attend.

I watched the dawn from my maple, the birth and growing of the light.

Surely I was not watching what happened in my mind, for the thought was living in me, and I not knowing how it could have come; the thought, What if someone traveled all the way to watch the firing of the sun?

Nowadays I understood that thoughts do not come to you. You make them, they grow in you until the time arrives when you must recognize them.

Down out of my maple then, up the long rise of the mountain in deep forest, where the heat of the day is always mild. I walked and climbed slowly, not wishing to raise a sweat, for the smell of it can drift a surprising distance, and black wolf and brown tiger may get interested. Against black wolf I had my knife. He dislikes steel. Brown tiger cares nothing for knives—a flip of his paw is sufficient—though he’s said to respect arrows, thrown spears and fire, usually. I’ve heard tell of brown tiger leaping a fire-circle to make a meal of hunters. It could be true, for his hunger must be immense and compelling in a bad season when moose and deer and bison have gone scarce. I was not thinking much about those ancient enemies when I climbed North Mountain that morning. The question-thought was in me, saying, What if
I
were to go beyond the rim, where the sun is set afire…?

My cave was a crack in a cliff, broadening inside to a room four feet wide, twenty deep. The cleft ran up into darkness, and must have broken through to the outside, for a small draft like the pull of a chimney kept the air fresh. Sometimes I wished the entrance was narrower—black wolf could have got in, maybe even tiger. I’d cleared out a few copperheads when I first found the cave, and had to be watchful against them too, or rattlers, slithering back to reclaim it. The approach was a ledge that widened in front of the cave, with enough earth to support a patch of grass, and the cave was located well around the east shoulder of the mountain, so that the city was shut away. I could safely build a fire at night behind the rocks at the cave entrance, and I always did. You need a sleep-fire for safety, and the knack of waking at the right moments to refresh it. I’d long ago lifted a flint-and-steel from the Bull and Iron kitchen where it didn’t seem real decorative. I usually doused my fire before dawn. No sense painting smoke on bright sky to stir up the curious.

That morning I first made sure about my bow and arrows and fishing gear. They hadn’t been disturbed. And yet I felt a strangeness. Not snakes and not intruders. Some eastern sunlight was entering; I could see as well as I needed to for safety but something nagged me. I stood a long time moving only my eyes. I moistened my nose, but caught no wrong scent.

When I found the trouble at last, far at the back on one of the cave walls where sunlight didn’t reach, and where my glance must have touched it unknowingly while I was looking at my gear, I was no wiser. It was simply a small drawing made by the point of some softer, reddish rock. I goggled at it, trying to imagine it had been there always. No such thing. That cave was mine, the only place on earth I’d ever felt I owned, and I knew it like the skin of my body. This had been done since my last visit, in December before winter set in.

Two stick figures, circles for heads with no faces, single lines for legs and arms and bodies, both with male parts indicated. I’d heard of hunters’ sign-messages. But what did this say that a hunter could want to know? The figures held nothing, did nothing, just stood there.

The one on my right was in human proportion, with slightly bent elbows and knees in the right places, all his fingers and toes. The other stood to the same height, but his legs were far too short without a knee-crook, and his arms too long, dangling below his crotch. He had only three toes for each foot, a big one and two squeezed-up little ones. His fingers were blunt stubs, though the artist had gone to a lot of trouble drawing good human fingers for the other jo.

No tracks in the cave or on the ledge. Nothing left behind.

I gave it up—nothing else to do. Somebody’d been here since December, and he was honest because he never touched my gear, and likely meant me no harm. Last year I’d brought a horse-shoe and slipped it into the jumble of rocks before the cave. Now I made certain it was still in place—it was; anyway I’d never heard of a trick like this being pulled by witches or spooks.

I worked awhile, gathering fresh balsam to sleep on, and a supply of firewood against the night. Then I shrugged off shirt and loin rag but not my knife, naturally—and lay out naked in the sunny grass, drowsing, daydreaming, not wondering much now about my visitor because I supposed he was long gone. I let other thoughts range wide, into the open sky and beyond the limits of the day.