An Exaltation of Stars (1973) Anthology

by Terry Carr (Ed. )

  I grew desperate. I thought Jon might like the chimera’s milk tooth; he was always for games that tested our company’s bravery, maybe from a need in himself to prove he was brave enough to meet the world head-on. Jon’s father was a captain of engineers in the 2nd Ulsta Regiment, a loud, urgent man. I would have done anything to please Sidney, but couldn’t imagine what he might like out of that jumble. Then I saw how my brother’s eyes yearned at one thing there, a thing the Gypsy hadn’t even mentioned.

  This was a lump of clay no longer than my thumb, a trifle stouter, so worn by time you needed a second look to understand it was sculpture, the stylized figure of a little human male with arms folded against his chest, hands flat to the body. And on the other side of the lump—the Gypsy turned it over for me—was a woman’s figure sharing the clay body, her face brooding like the man’s and mild. I glanced again at Leopold, touched the image, said: “That.”

  The Gypsy gave me the dingy thing and dribbled the other objects back into his bag. Oh, the glitter of them, the gleam of what I might have had! “You’ve made the strange choice,” he said. “Heaven knows what will come of it, or maybe Heaven doesn’t know.”

  “That’s heresy,” said Jon Rohan.

  “It’s heresy,” said the Gypsy, “or it’s an outlander’s way of talking, meaning no harm. Pipe’s out—back to work. Bless you and good morning to you, gentlemen.” He shambled off to his wagon, and we four straggled back home with our thoughts.

  Leopold asked: “Maybe I can keep it for you?” So I gave him the image, wishing it were any of a thousand better things.

  Many times since then I have held the image before me, and it has taken me into contemplation; then I am like one caught up to the arch of heaven with no company but the falling stars. In his own fashion my brother must have responded for a while to this same power of the clay. I remember how lovingly he first dropped it into the pocket of his blouse and held a protective hand over it, as another child might cherish a pet. It was only a little later that I began hearing about Leopold’s Companion, concerning whose existence the Church Examiners, I suppose, will wish more light.

  My brother shared the bed with me in our attic room, a dear fidgeting nuisance. Our mother loved him best: this I had always known as children do know it. But the years that brought him out of babyhood carried her into exhaustion and invalidism, no strength left for contending with small boys. Losing her in these dim ways, we found each other. By the time Leopold was five I think my jealousy had dissolved in fondness, answering his natural warmth. Whether darker feelings still smoldered I cannot say—it was long ago.

  The night after our meeting with the Gypsy, Leopold bounced under the covers holding the image, lost it during sleep, went frantic hunting for it in the morning. When we salvaged it from the bedclothes, he put it on a string to wear at his neck—not good, for the image was worn so smooth it had hardly a projection for the cord to hold. For Leopold’s eighth birthday, Jon and Sidney and I collaborated on a solution. Sidney, brilliant with his hands, carved a box of applewood with a secret fastening; Jon bought a delicate silver chain in an antiquity shop—it cost him two months’ allowance—and I joined the chain to the box in my father’s workshop. Leopold was speechless with joy, opening and shutting the mysterious catch forty times a day. I have the box still, and the image secure in its nest that Sidney made, his magic as good as ever after half a century.

  Our mother was going through a cruel pregnancy. Her time came on her not long after the day we met the Gypsy. For several weeks her illness had brought Leopold and me more than ever together; but there were times when he seemed utterly alone, in unchildlike contemplation of the image. Silent in a corner of the cobbler shop, he could have been on the other side of the stars.

  Our house was one of the many shabby-genteel ones that cluster along the Twenyet Road in Kingstone. The Old Time city of the same name stood southeast of there, now mostly underwater of course. We lived about three miles from Rondo’s Shrine, where the Old Time course of the Twenyet Road takes it under Lake Ashoka. The modern detour curves over higher ground to meet the old road emerging. In many places one still finds the gray rubbish, curious Old Time road material, frost-heaved, pried loose, dumped out of the way. This work of clearance and improvement was done, I believe, more than a hundred years ago in the era of construction after Katskil became an Empire.* Farther out in the country, much of the gray junk has been hauled off by farmers to add to their stone fences. A great deal more of the repulsive indestructible garbage of Old Time might be put to some use, if we would exercise more ingenuity.

  *Cf. Harker Sidon, Old—Time Survivals in Imperial Katskil, Filadelfia College Press, 748. But Professor Sidon is mainly concerned with the physical survivals; one must look elsewhere for discussion of the mental inheritance.

  Our section of the Twenyet Road was called The Crafts, because so many artisans lived there to catch the trade of travelers entering the city. Father was a shoemaker, dark-gloomy like the tanned hides he labored with, strict with Leopold and me in matters of decorum and truthtelling, but strict with justice and not unkind. He was one of those who fend off love with a grunt and then admit it anyway.

  Our mother was soft, no disciplinarian. She enjoyed those romances the Church approves for the common people, for unlike our father she had learned to read, at a wise woman’s school in her native village; sometimes housework waited while she dwelt in a storyteller’s daydream—who could begrudge it to her? Between my birth and Leo’s she had borne two mues. It was at her insistence that Father sent me to Mam Sola’s day school in Kingstone, where I met Sidney and learned my letters and arithmetic. I have always been grateful for it: a little reading may prove a key to great reading. I cannot help thinking, my Lord Abbot, that a fairly widespread literacy might usefully supplement our Imperial Program of Universal Education.

  I know nothing about those other two mues. This late pregnancy our mother was suffering was terminated by the birth of a monster, a twelve-pound hulk of flesh with four arms and, the priest told me later, no anus. He had quickly smothered the thing as the law requires, and it must have been buried quickly too, in the dark and without any ceremony, as is proper, in that sad tombless yard—Mues’ Acre—that every church must maintain beyond the limits of its natural cemetery. But while Fr. Colin disposed of it, the midwife could not prevent our mother from bleeding to death.

  During this ordeal I was in the attic room charged with keeping Leopold out of the way. He was beside himself when the screaming began, though he heard my explanations. I held him fast and said over and over: “They’re trying to help her.” His heart hammered and his eyes were blind. We heard a last scream, beyond bearing, a flurry of voices, quick footsteps, orders. I must have relaxed my grip, for Leopold tore free and rushed downstairs. I caught up with him in the kitchen. Fr. Colin, that sardonic old man who always befriended me, was wrapping the thing in a cloth, but did not get it out of sight swiftly enough. Leopold saw it, and collapsed.

  “Get him outside, Jermyn,” said Fr. Colin. “Fresh air will bring him back to this delightful world.” I carried him out into the moonlit splendor of a field behind our house. I kissed him and talked to him. He roused when I moved the locket with the clay image because it was making a hurting hardness between him and me. His eyes opened; he was back with me, gripping the amulet as if it were a bridge to life. “It’s all right,” I said. “It’s all right, Leo.” We both knew it was all wrong. Leo at eight understood how our human talk uses these flat reversals of reason. “Happens all the time—the priest says it’s the will of God because men were so wicked in Old Time.” I went on till I ran out of respectable words.

  His night eyes watched me. He took the image from its box and studied it in the white light, turning it from male to female side and back. “Jermyn, why can’t people make babies the way grapevines do?” Startled, I laughed. “You might’ve rested a part of you on the ground till I grew out of it and it was time to cut me free.” He
knew he was talking absurdly. He said: “I’ll preach when I grow up.”

  “Well, sure. Mother’s always wanted you to be a priest.”

  “No, I won’t be a priest. But I’ll preach. I’ll say it about the grapevines. It’s a—a—” Maybe he wanted to say “parable” and didn’t have the word. “And I’ll tell about the City of Light. The Companion will teach me how.”

  “The Companion?”

  “He came yesterday when I looked at Two—Face. He stands where light and dark come together.” He watched me as if he longed to explain further and could not. It was no playacting. We were too close for that, in spite of the seven years; when any playacting was to be done, we shared it.

  I said: “Tell me about him. Please. What does he look like?”

  “Not always the same. Only a voice sometimes.”

  I was frightened, and lacerated by jealousy. I saw this Companion taking Leopold away—as perhaps he did, even if we grant him existence only in my brother’s mind. I asked: “What is the City of Light?”

  “A place the Companion knows.” He said no more, but he was not trying to mystify me.

  In the house, Fr. Colin told us our mother was dead. “Try to be good boys to your father,” he said, fumbling at the unsayable. Leopold asked like a grown-up: “Is he with her now?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Take them in, Sister Alma.” The midwife was fluttering, poor-boying us, another of the well-meaning ones. She took us where our father sat stricken beside that little dark lady once so well known, now gone secret, the blanket pulled to her chin and she with no more regard for anyone, not even Father. Fr. Colin said: “Leo, you’ll understand better when you come to be a priest yourself. God has His reasons, child— it’s only that we can’t always know them.”

  But Leopold said: “I cannot be a priest.”

  Father lifted his head. “Leopold, what do you mean?”

  “I can’t be a priest.” He said this, standing by our mother’s body. I remember putting an arm around him because I feared the grown-up world was about to roar at him.

  But no. Fr. Colin mumbled about our mother’s wish that he might enter holy orders. I scarcely heard that, waiting for what Father would say. It was a gentle reply: “Of course, Leo, you can’t be a priest unless you wish it yourself. We’ll talk of it later.”

  But so far as I know it was never brought up again. From that time on, however—the Examiners may find this important— Leopold was intensely keen to share whatever knowledge I brought home from Mam Sola’s school. He took to reading like a baby fish to swimming. He gulped down all I could transmit, with impatience for its simplicity, begging for more difficult tasks. “Where are the big books?” he’d demand of me. “Where are the books?”

  I was not a bad student, indeed Mam Sola praised me, but beside Leo I was a stumbling mule. Two years after our mother’s death I resolved to work full time in Father’s shop, while Leo would attend the school in my place, but soon he reported that Mam Sola said he knew all she could teach him. She wanted him to go to the great Priests’ School at Nuber, and this she and Father arranged for him, beginning in the winter of 415-416, when he was ten. He was the baby of his class among yeasty adolescents; luckily, some of them made a pet of him, sheltering him from the mindless cruelties the majority would have visited on him if they had dared. The priests loved him too after their fashion, seeing maybe a future Patriarch, who knows?

  The years 412-418—being nearly my contemporary, my Lord Abbot, Your Beneficence will remember this fragment of time much as I do, and the gradual increase of hatred in our nation toward the Republic of Moha after the accession of the Emperor Mahonn. There was the Sortees Massacre, when Moha traders were set upon by a hysterical crowd—that might have brought war, but neither side was ready. There was the complaint that Moha was cutting us off from trade with Nuin—and nothing ever said about our monopoly of trade with the tropical wealth of Penn, the spices and tea and oranges. The Emperor Mahonn’s accession brought a relief from uncertainty: now at least we all knew there would be war, and only the timing was unpredictable.

  Those were also the six years when my brother grew from seven to thirteen, from jungle of childhood to river’s edge.

  Jon and Sidney and I found it natural that a small boy should believe in an invisible Companion: a common fantasy. I may have had such a dream myself before Leo was born. That it should continue beyond early childhood was not so natural— but we were credulous, ignorant boys, and in our different ways we too believed in the Companion’s existence. We’d catch Leopold with the clay image in his hand, sunlight on his closed eyelids, listening, and we believed.

  My lord, he spoke once of “my brother the sun.” Now, it was not till many years later, in my historical studies, that I learned of a saint in ancient Christian times who used these words, and certainly before he went to the Nuber school my little brother had never heard of him; yet he did so speak.

  We would keep watch for him, a sharp eye against intruders. Unless he himself was a-mind to discuss them, we never asked about those silent conversations. Had others learned of the mystery and bothered Leo, we would have gone after them like wildcats. Leopold had become to us an oracle, our mascot. After he began study at the Priests’ School we had him only in the summers, but schoolboys live for that time anyhow. He was ours and he could do no wrong.

  We fell into the habit of consulting him as if he possessed a magical insight; maybe he did. We would ask questions about whatever disturbed us—sex, making a living, religion, right and wrong conduct, superstitions—matters that lay far beyond the experience of his years (beyond ours too!). We would mull over his answers for nuggets of gold.

  At that time I was not well instructed in the faith. Fr. Colin was swamped in the busyness of a parish priest’s duties, his time for meditation and teaching chewed to bits by the million tiny mouths of everyday trivia. Our father was none too devout, and what early instruction we had from our mother had blended religion and romance in one blur of wishful dreaming. Father resented the tithes, the spending of time on devotion. During those six years, arthritis twisted his cobbler’s hands; at times I heard him growl heretical complaints.

  Jon Rohan, that chubby hero, was somewhat disciplined in religion. Sidney was agnostic, which frightened me, though he was always discreet—I would not say it now of my friend if he were not long dead, beyond reach of wounding. Later, deep in the humanitarian work of his choice, it seemed to me he was not concerning himself as much as he ought to have done with the safety of his soul; but good works, I am sure, have won him a place in Heaven, if Heaven exists.* It was not until after his death that I, adrift and wretched from the loss of him and of Leopold, took lay orders as a student of history, leading to my later work as a churchman. At the young time I am describing I had what I will call an undisciplined openness of mind. I found no heresy in believing my brother might converse with an angel.

  * In the margin, a note with the initials W.B.: “These are strange remarks for a precentor of your Abbey.”

  I will write of an afternoon in early September in Leopold’s thirteenth year when we had gone to a favorite clearing above the road to Maplestock. That forest belonged to the Ashoka family, long masters of the Maplestock region. Baron Ashoka’s game wardens could legally have lobbed arrows into us on suspicion of poaching—shooting, of course, to cripple and not to kill.

  I was twenty that September. Expert in my father’s trade, I supposed I would remain a shoemaker. I already managed our shop: pain in the joints was making it nearly impossible for our stubborn old father to go on working. My aunt Mam Lora had kept house for us about five years now, her conversation all sniff and glare, making a cult of our mother as a martyred saint.

  That afternoon was a Friday. In the morning we had gone to church, taking the rest of the day for a holiday as our customs then permitted. (My lord, I do dislike the modern trend toward a completely joyless Sabbath.) Sidney was returning soon to the University at Nuber for his
third year of medical study. On the journey he would be looking after Leopold, who was going back for his last year at the Priests’ School—then the University for him too, we assumed, since he was certain to be granted a scholarship. And Jon too was leaving, for the Military Academy at Nupal. I would stay home and make shoes.

  Jon had said goodbye to his sweetheart, Sara Jonas, in the grandeur of his Academy uniform; he told us about that parting, modestly. Sara owned a great share of him, a delicious girl pretty as a violet in the snow. We found that right for one of Jon’s temperament, but his humor and good nature appeared to be jelling into a kind of sentimentality that made him no longer quite one of us. He in turn felt, I think, that he had outgrown us and was at eighteen the only adult in a gaggle of starry-eyed goslings. He took a deep melancholy joy in the war talk. He was like a prince condescending: let us pursue our mundane plans; for him, the lonely glory of going forth to die in our defense, thinking of Sara in his last hour. Not that he ever spoke such corn as that, yet we felt something of the sort in him. My own discomfort at his swashbuckling may have been partly envy: what has a shoemaker to do with war? Well, he makes boots for soldiers to march in, for soldiers to die in.

  This was 418, eight years before the war actually began. When it did come, Jon was a captain of infantry, blooded during the Slaves’ Rebellion in the western provinces (fomented by Moha, some claimed) in 422. And when the last great struggle with Moha did begin, our Jon was in the thick of it. He was wounded in action, suffering the loss of his left leg from the infection of a spear wound, and the blinding of his right eye. He came back thus to goodwife Sara and his small children: halt, half-blind, the infection still burning in the stump of the thighbone and never quite healing, an old man in his middle twenties. This ruin came on him in our defeat at Brakabin Meadows, April 4, 427, which brought the Moha forces within a short march of Kingstone. No one then could have imagined our recovery, our victories of the following year; 427 was ebb tide, all Katskil breathing despair. For his bravery at Brakabin, Jon received a life’s pension and the Iron Wheel of the Order of St. Franklin.