Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (300 page)

* * * *

I thought of journeying.

A patch of land three thousand miles square, and the everlasting seas. Hudson Sea, Moha Water, the Lorenta Sea, even the great Ontara Sea in the northwest—all of those, said the teacher-priests, are mere

branches of the great sea, dividing the known world into islands. From travelers’ talk—oh, I think all the best of my education up to fourteen came from evenings at the Bull and Iron when I was minding the fireplace in the taproom or lending a hand serving drinks with my ears flapping—I knew that in some places the Hudson Sea is only a few miles wide; small craft cross it readily in good weather. And I knew that some thirty-ton ships of Levannon sail coastwise through Moha Water to the Lorenta Sea, then south for trade with Nuin—Old City and Land’s End, the easternmost part of the known world, except for a few of the outlying Cod Islands. Long, dangerous, roundabout, that northern passage, especially bad in the Lorenta Sea, where winds can be hellish or at other times fog may lie thick for days, hiding both shores—and as for the shores, wilderness on both sides, red bear and brown tiger country not meant for man. Yet that route was safer, travelers said, than the southern course down the Hudson Sea and along the Conicut coast, for at the end of that course the Cod Islands pirates with their devilish little scoon-rigged fighter craft were somehow able to smell out every third vessel worth the taking, and they couldn’t be bothered with prisoners unless there were women abroad.

I thought, If thirty-tonners of Levannon make that northern passage for the sake of trade, why can’t they sail farther, much farther? What’s stopping them? Sure, I was ignorant. I’d never seen even the Hudson Sea, and couldn’t picture it. Likely I’d never heard the word “navigation” at that time. I had no notion of the terror and the vastness of open sea when the land’s gone and there’s no mark to steer by unless someone aboard knows the mystery of guessing position from the pattern of the stars. But an ignorant boy can think. And I thought, if nobody dares sail beyond sight of land, and if the Book of Abraham doesn’t say, how can anyone, even the priests, claim to
know
what’s out there? Can’t there be other lands before you come to the rim?

I thought, How do they even know there is a rim? If it goes on forever—

And I thought, If
I
were to sail east toward the place of sunrise—

Nay, but suppose I traveled at least to Levannon, where a young man might sign aboard one of those thirty-tonners. Suppose I started this morning…

I thought of Emmia.

I’d glimpsed her once at her window, birth-naked for bed-time, prettier than any flower. That was the year before. I’d sneaked out of my loft sore and angry from a licking Old Jon gave me—a mule got loose in the vegetable patch, not my fault but he wouldn’t hear of it. That night I swore I’d run away and the hell with all of them. But from the street my eye caught the glow of candlelight at a window at the side of the inn on the second floor, that I knew was Emmia’s. A thick-stemmed jinny-creeper vine ran up that side of the building, spreading leaf patterns over many of the windows, and hers was one, and behind the ghostly dark patches of the pointed leaves her sweet body was moving. I saw her let free red-brown hair to tumble over her shoulders, and she combed it, watching herself no doubt in a mirror I couldn’t see. Then she must have suddenly noticed the curtain was still open, for she came to close it. Not in any hurry. She couldn’t have seen me, my skinny carcass squinched into the shadow of the next building. She stood gazing out into the dark a short while, long enough to bewitch me as if I’d never seen her before, the slow grace of her motion, her round lifted arm, deep-curved waist and the warm triangle and the division between her big breasts a line of tender darkness.

Naked women weren’t news to me, though I’d never had one. Skoar had peep-shows like any civilized city, including penny-a-look ones that I could afford. But this was Emmia, whom I saw every day in her smock or slack-pants, busy at a hundred tasks around the inn and scolded by her ma for laziness half the time, candle-making, mending, dusting, overseeing the slave help when Mam Robson was sick, waiting on table, coming out to the barn and stable sometimes to help me collect hens’ eggs, even lend a hand feeding the critters and milking the goats. This was Emmia, and like sudden music I loved her.

I couldn’t run away then, nor think of it. She drew the curtain, her candle died, I stole back to my loft forgetting Old Jon’s beating and all my wrath. I fell asleep that night imagining the pressure and savor of her beside me on my pallet in the hay-well and part of the time I had myself inheriting the inn and Old Jon’s fortune, and Old Jon’s dying speech with a blessing on the marriage would have made a skunk weep and forgive all his enemies. Though many times later I risked going out to stare at that window after dark, it never happened again. But the image lived in me, was with me on my ledge before the cave as morning glided toward noon.

My ears must have caught the knowledge first, then my right hand firming on my knife while my mind was still beclouded by love and fancy. Then everything in me said, Look out! Wake up! I opened my eyes and turned my head slowly enough like a creature rousing in the natural way.

My visitor was there, a short way up the ledge, and he smiled.

* * * *

Anyway I think he smiled, or wanted to. His mouth was a poor gash no longer than the mid-joint of my forefinger, in a broad flat hairless face. Monstrously dirty he was, and fat, with a heavy swaying paunch. Seeing his huge long arms and little stub legs, I thought I knew who he was.

He did have knees but they scarcely showed, for his lower legs were as big around as his thighs, blocky columns with fat-rolls drooping from the thigh sections. Baldheaded as a pink snake, hairless to the middle, but there at his navel a great thatch of twisty black hair began and ran all the way down his legs to his stubby three-toed feet. He wore nothing at all, poor jo, and it didn’t matter. So thick was that frowsy hair I had to look twice before I was sure he was male. He had no ears, just small openings where they should have been. And he had no nose—none at all, you understand? Simply a pair of slits below the little sorrowful black eyes that were meeting my stare bravely enough. He said: “I go away?”

I’d been about to draw my knife and shriek at him to go away. I didn’t. I tried to move slowly, getting on my feet. Whatever my face was doing, it made him no more frightened than he was already.

In spite of those legs he stood tall as I, maybe five feet five. He was grief and loneliness standing in the sun, ugly as unwanted death.

A mue. In Moha, and all countries I’ve since known, the law of church and state says flat and plain: A
mue born of woman or beast shall not live.

Well, law is what men make it, and you heard tales. A woman with a devil’s aid might bribe a priest to help conceal a mue-birth, hoping (always a vain hope according to the tales) that the mue might outgrow its evil and appear human instead of devil-begotten. I think, by the way, that Nuin and Katskil are the only countries which require that the mother of a mue must be killed. In Moha, I know, the law explains that a demon bent on planting mue-seed is well known to enter women in their sleep and without their knowledge, therefore they aren’t to blame unless witnesses can prove the contrary, that they performed the act with the demon awake and knowingly. At the Bull and Iron I’d heard plenty of such tales about mues born in secret—single-eyed, tailed, purple-skinned, monkey-sized, four-armed, or anything else the storyteller cared to imagine, I guess—growing up in secret and finally taking to the wilderness, where it was the duty of any decent citizen to kill them on sight—a dangerous undertaking even if they seemed defenseless, for the stories claimed that the demon who fathered the mue was likely enough to be watching over his offspring, perhaps in the shape of an animal, a snake or wolf or tiger.

He said again: “I go away?”

His voice was deep, slow, blurred, hard to understand. He didn’t move except for an idle swinging of his arms. Sprouting huge out of his soggy body—why, those arms could have torn a bull in quarters.

“No, don’t go.”

“Man,” he said. “Boy-man. Beautiful.”

I’m not, of course. I’m puggy-nosed, freckled, knotty-muscled, small but limber. It didn’t occur to me at first that he meant me, but he was studying me sharply with those sad little pouch eyes, as I stood there with nothing on but my knife-belt, and there was nothing else he could have meant. I suppose I understand now that anything in the natural human shape would have looked beautiful to him. I knew he could see the bumpy racing of my heart; glancing down, I could see it myself, a crazy bird’s-wing flutter below the flare of my bottom ribs. Out of the uproar in my head I could find nothing to say except: “Thanks for the picture. I like it.” I saw he didn’t know the word “picture”. “Lines,” I said, and pointed to the cave. “Good.”

He understood then; smiled and chuckled and gobbled. “You come me,” he said. “I show you good things, I.”

Go with him? Father Abraham, no! And maybe meet his father? I should—but I couldn’t think. I pulled on my shirt and loin rag, trying to watch not only the mue but the ledge behind him, and the region behind my back too. I said: “W-w-wait!” and I stepped into my cave.

Out of his sight, I was taken with a fit of trembling, sick and silly. Then I had my knife out and was hacking away a good half of that loaf of oat bread. I know I had some notion of buying him off. I recall thinking that if his father was in wolf-shape, maybe the bacon would do some good. But I didn’t take it; I set it, and the rest of the loaf, back on the rock ledge with my bow and arrows, and my fingers were reaching for the luck charm at my neck. It wasn’t there. I remembered I’d dropped it in my sack because the string had broken the day before and I couldn’t find another. Now I slid the sack over my shoulder, and took some comfort from feeling the charm, the little male-female god-thing, lumpy through the cloth of the sack.

A clay trifle. I’ve learned since then that they carve such trash down in Penn, to sell to travelers for souvenirs, and likely it came from there. It was given me by my mother, or by somebody in the house where I was born, for I’m told it was on a string around my neck when I was taken to the orphanage, and there they laughed at it some but let me keep it. Emmia was often curious about it—such things aren’t common in Moha. Once, when we were looking for hens’ eggs in the barn loft, she caught hold of it and asked me, a bit red-faced and whispery, if I knew what it meant. I was thirteen; it was before I’d seen her in her window. I knew and didn’t know what she meant, was scared of the difference in her face and of the queer sweet-smelling warmth that reached me from her nearness, and so nothing came of what might have been a lively hour if my thoughts had grown a little closer toward those of a man. Oh, I don’t believe in luck-charms nowadays. Luck, good or bad, simply happens; you can’t make it, or push it around with charms and words and all that jibberty-mumble. But in those days I more than half believed in it. And since I did, it helped to stop my trembling, as I carried out that half-loaf to—him. Carried it out, knowing with not a trace of doubt what I ought to do, meant to do, what the law said I must do.

He didn’t reach for it. Those nostril-slits flared, though, and his gaze followed my fingers like a dog’s when I broke off a small piece of the bread and ate it myself. I held out the rest to him and he accepted it, carried it to his pitiful mouth. I got a glimpse of his teeth, brownish, small, close-set, weak-looking. He gnawed awkwardly. His eyes never left me as he munched, and snuffled, and slobbered. He kept grunting, “Good, good!” and trying to smile with his mouth full. Merciful winds, it was nothing but common oat bread! And with all that fat, he couldn’t have been going hungry.

At fourteen I couldn’t understand that it wasn’t bread he was starved for. I know it now.

The bread gone, he gave his wet mouth a swipe and said: “You come me now? Good things. Show good things, I.” He walked a few steps up the ledge, looking back. Like a dog.

* * * *

Yes, I followed him.

He walked better than I expected. His knees could bend only a few inches, but the stub legs were powerful to hold up all that weight, and they could pump along at surprising speed. On the level, it was a stiff-legged waddle. But on the steep ground, as we climbed around toward the northern side of the mountain, his arms would swing forward touching the earth, a four-legged scramble that carried him up the rises about as fast as I cared to walk. And he was quiet, in the same way I’d learned to go quiet in the woods. He knew this country, got his living out of it, must have known it a good while. I couldn’t guess his age, however, and hardly tried to.

North Mountain mue, I’ve got no other name for him. He would never have owned one. What the hell, like other orphanage kids I never had a last name myself, and don’t miss it. I’m just Davy.

Don’t think my kindness—if it was kindness, that business with the bread—came from anything good in me. It didn’t. It came partly from fear, partly from an ugly sort of planning. From the year of teaching by the priests that every child in Moha is required to sweat out before he’s twelve, and from the Bull and Iron tales, I knew that mues weren’t in the same class with demons or ghosts or elves, but solid flesh in spite of being the get of devils. They couldn’t vanish or float through walls; they didn’t have the evil eye. If you got near one you’d see and smell him, he couldn’t use spells or witch-signs (though his father might) because God wouldn’t allow that to a miserable mue, and he would die for good when you put a knife in him. The law said when, not if. It said you must if you could; if you couldn’t, you must notify the Church at once, so that he could be hunted down by men properly equipped and with the protection of a priest.

I walked on behind him, up through the deeper forest on the north side of the mountain, and more and more I hated and resented him, cursing the luck that made me the one to find him, imagining his demon father behind every tree, and sickened the way anyone might be sickened by ugliness, terror, strangeness and a foul smell.