An Exaltation of Stars (1973) Anthology

by Terry Carr (Ed. )

  I have digressed again, my lord—forgive me.

  A September afternoon of 418, and Leopold had not sung for us that day. At thirteen his voice had cracked; the Cathedral choirmaster warned him not to sing again for two years. We missed it. Entertainments were few. We had the huge sermons of Fridays and Lecture Days; the street-corner storytellers, the peep shows, visits from Rambler caravans that ignored national boundaries and carried amusement, news, messages everywhere; that was about all. We found it hard to lose the pleasure of Leopold’s singing and know it would never happen again as it had been, since Leo singing with a man’s voice would be another happening in another world.

  We bathed in a pool and dried ourselves in the sun. Leopold was not used to the new curly hair on him or the breaking of his voice, but didn’t mind our jokes and bawdy counsel. We found it strange to watch the Mascot enter adolescence as we were emerging from it. His body was becoming like ours; his mind occupied other dimensions.

  Jon asked: “Leo, what does the Companion say about the war?”

  Leopold had lately spoken of the Companion only enough to let us know the conversations had not ended. He said: “Not much, Jon. A war will come sometime, and make an end of— many things.”

  “Why,” said Jon, “everybody knows that.”

  Sidney inquired: “Because there always has been war?”

  “It’s a reason,” said Jon. “You can’t change human nature.”

  “But it does change,” I asserted. “The history books—”

  Jon wanted to argue with Sidney, not to hear about history. “It’s the cause, Sid. The future belongs to Katskil. How can we make progress with Moha like a log across the road?”

  (And since then I have read much history of Old Time, and of ancient time, and how often have I stumbled over these same worn words! Including my own protests, and Sidney’s.)

  “The future doesn’t exist,” Sidney said.

  I put in: “Only in the mind of God.”

  “Progress by smashing skulls,” said Sidney. “Destiny. Shit.” And Leopold: “Mue-births are bad enough, without war.” Perhaps the Examiners ought to know that from our mother’s death to the time I lost him, Leopold was obsessed with the tragedy of mue-births. Moments came now and then when his fresh and healthy child’s face incredibly foreshadowed maturity, even old age—I don’t think I imagined this; and when I saw it I could be almost certain what trouble it was that darkened him. “No use being a bleeding-heart,” Jon said. “Face facts!” Sidney wouldn’t get angry, even at that noise. “The facts stare me in the face, Jon, and I say there isn’t one stupid thing between us and Moha that couldn’t be settled at a conference table.”

  “But how can you trust ’em?”

  Leopold said: “You’re not hearing each other…

  Later Jon asked about the Companion. “Do you still—see him?”

  “As if my eyes were shut, and I knowing the shape in memory. He speaks, and it’s like a memory of hearing.”

  “Then it’s only thinking? Imagining?”

  “Maybe. He startles me, and then later I understand.” Leopold frowned. “He described the City of Light like—a real place.”

  Sidney asked: “Do you believe in his separate existence, Leo, the way you believe I’m sitting here bare-ass and beautiful?”

  “Not that way. But I think there is a City of Light.”

  That day was forty-seven years ago. After he left with Sidney for Nuber, I did not see my brother Leopold again for eight years.

  We had a letter from him in November. I recall our heady excitement when the Imperial Post rider banged on our door. Letters came rarely to poor districts like Twenyet Road; Leo was being extravagant, undertaking such an expense just to send us greetings. We shut out the urchins who had gathered to stare at the rider, and then my father was beside himself with impatience till I could read him the message. However, that letter was one any schoolboy might have written to content his family: he was well, studying hard, sorry he couldn’t be home for Thanksgiving but looked forward to seeing us in the Week of Abraham,* love to everybody.

  * All nations of eastern Murca in the Fifth Century professed Brownism, celebrating the supposed birth of Abraham Brown on December 24 and making the whole week a festival: an obvious superimposition on the Old Time Christmas. Brownism preferred mild methods of substitution and engulfment in its suppression of Christianity—one could almost speak of syncretism rather than suppression. The modern scholar is often puzzled to distinguish the newcomer from the ghost.

  In early December came a letter from Sidney: Leopold was gone.

  On the night of December 7, Leopold had gone to bed as usual in the Senior Dormitory—thirty-six boys in a long room where all-night candles burned and a priest sat wakeful to suppress giggling and other unseemliness. In the morning, Leopold was not there.

  The monitor priest admitted he could have dozed off. The other boys under severest questioning confessed no knowledge, and I think they had none. Leopold must simply have dressed himself silently and walked out. The night watchman spent his hours mostly at the gatehouse; Leo must have climbed the Pine Street wall, hidden by evergreens.

  Sidney had not seen Leopold for two weeks before the disappearance; nothing then had seemed to Sidney unusual.

  When I read this letter to my father, he gasped and fell—his first stroke. I got word of this to Sidney and Jon. Jon was not given leave of absence; Sidney left Nuber at once and reached our house by evening on a fast horse. In his embrace I found the relief of tears, till then denied. And Sidney gave me the clay image with its apple wood box and silver chain. “He left it behind, Jermyn. Under his pillow.” This we never did understand; nor do I, altogether, in later years. But so the amulet did return to me, my lord, and it has not since left my possession.

  Sidney helped me untiringly in caring for my father, who was always asking for news of Leopold, we understood, with his eyes and the one finger he could move. Then soon, mercifully, he had another stroke, and died. We watched the difficult life recede, leaving the shell of our good cobbler Louis Graz, my father, and Sidney closed his eyes for me with his steadfast kindness.

  For eight years, no word. Soon after my father’s death my Aunt Lora entered the nunnery of St. Ellen at Nupal, where she is now in her ninety-fifth year. Sidney returned to the University, was graduated with high honors, finished his licentiate in 422, and started practice in Kingstone. That was also the year of the Slaves’ Rebellion in which Jon Rohan rose to the rank of captain. I sold our house and cobbler shop—another of the gray milestones that emerge in anyone’s life story. The buyer was well known to me; he would have notified me if Leopold had ever returned to that house. With a donkey and my cobbler’s equipment, I took to the roads.

  I had not lost my passion for reading and history. But it was in some manner reinforcing my grief at the loss of Leopold. There can be a weariness, even acedia, in too much history. I wished to escape it for a while. History repeats much of its sorrow, error, lost opportunity. Though I had learned a great deal about the folly and corruption of Old Time, I found small consolation in comparing past with present—I can’t see that we have learned much from that dark story. In my monastic years I have collected, edited, sometimes rewritten legends and true tales of our region, past and present. This labor also, though congenial, has done little to alter my view. Hope is a lost child stumbling across a battlefield.

  I had stronger reasons for a wanderer’s life. An artisan may follow the roads: people must have shoes in a country of thorns and serpents. A peddler-artisan may listen. (Our Gypsy by the roadside was listening.) If careful not to startle or offend, he may ask some questions. I would not believe my brother Leopold was dead.

  Sidney never discouraged my search. Jon thought Leo must be dead or carried off by slavers, and scolded me for wasting myself. Sidney aided me, his fine house at Kingstone my home whenever I wished. We knew Leopold, thirteen, harmless, could have had no enemies, and he had no wealt
h to steal. Slavers would hardly have approached a well-guarded place like the Priests’ School; besides, at that time the Nuber polis were said to be keeping those vermin clear out of the Holy City.

  I searched—into Penn, Conicut, Levannon, down to the southern extremity of our Empire, that pine-barren country. The clay image went with me, on the silver chain, in the box Sidney had made.

  Sometimes, my lord, I dreamed the image might bring the Companion to me, even with word of Leopold. This was superstition, I admit. I cannot guess who made the image or with what ancient purpose, but when I contemplate either of the faces of enduring clay, the present drops from me, time is a murmur behind a curtain, I see my own breed as a blurred commotion in a stream wider and deeper than we suppose. A face of the image may say to me: Why trouble with those who must soon be gone from the earth altogether in total sterility, or another plague year, or another thousand years of good intentions? To this I find doubtful answers, and I dare to ask in return: Why then has God made them? Or is God the Creator only one more fancy of this apelike nobody1 Then the image returns me stare for stare.

  I am admitting, my Lord Abbot, that the image carried so long in boyhood by Leopold Graz can indeed stimulate heresy. But remember, I pray Your Beneficence will urge the Examiners to remember, Leopold was not carrying it when he went about as Brother Francis—I was. And though I have exposed my spirit to the clay, Your Beneficence knows I have lived in what we agree to call virtue. I think no one would whisper that I am in the grip of the Devil.

  In 426 came the first rumor of an itinerant preacher calling himself Brother Francis. I was in Penn and southern Katskil early that year. Everyone expected some clash that would at last fire up the war against Moha. Emperor Mahonn was occupying his pinnacle of majesty at the Summer Palace of Lakurs, far from the Mohan border, uttering ambiguities. Diplomats, those well-fed errand boys, bounced from insult to insult, but Mohan travelers came to our country no more. And under this tension began those religious revivals, opening with prayer and shifting into orgies of hate. There might be a choir; the people would sing the fine hymns from the Third Century religious renascence—In pace gaudeo or Exultate gentes. Then preaching and praying, and soon enough the frenzied roaring: “Down Moha! Destroy! Destroy!”

  According to the story rumor brought me, a slim man, very young, in a robe that some thought marked him as a lay brother of the Silvan Order, appeared at a meeting in the Stadium at Monsella and asked permission to speak, saying he was one Brother Francis, a messenger. When the Bishop of Solvan asked his place of origin, he replied: “My lord, who among us knows that?” The Bishop, moved by the power of his presence, permitted him to address the gathering. The voice of Brother Francis, rumor said, was not loud but so pure and moving that the people stood rock-quiet to hear him. Yet he was only describing a thing they knew intimately: the countryside between Nupal and the Mohan border city of Skoar.

  He spoke of farms and villages they knew, of the Maypole dances, the churches where on Friday mornings they heard the words of Abraham explained. He talked of gardens, orchards, common things—the town greens and their pavilions; pastures near woods where the deer showed their proud heads in morning mist. He did not deny what they all knew, that poverty, cruelty, greed, and ignorance devour us; that human beings die from incomprehensible sickness or Old Time poison from the ground; that men are not altogether masters in the country of brown tiger and black wolf; that if our women escape sterility, at least one birth in every four is a mue. He denied no darkness, but he showed them their world as still a lovely thing. Then he told them in that same quiet voice: “If you follow the present direction of your lusts, the legions will walk here.”

  I suppose it was the voice and manner that moved them, for this argument has never yet deterred man from fouling his own nest. Some grumbled. One or two called, “God bless you!” Most were silent. When the Bishop sought their attention it was as though they could not quite catch the noise of him. They drifted away tranced, abandoning the Stadium to the Bishop and a few twittering officials. And Brother Francis—at this point rumor whispered excitedly—vanished. I suppose he stepped down to walk anonymously with the crowd.

  Another tale reached me in May when I was returning to Kingstone. I discussed it with Sidney as we sat in his garden in the cloudy evening. “Miracles!” he said. “It was to be expected.” Brother Francis had spoken at Grangorge, near the Moha border, and a man with a bent disordered spine, a cripple for years, tossed away his crutches and knelt to kiss the holy man’s robe. Others were then and there healed of old afflictions. Sidney said: “The times are in a steamy state, Jermyn—it’s this damned war, bound to come any minute. People have the need to believe. You notice the dear fella’s preaching has no effect on the politicos. They hear only the noises of power.”

  “But here’s power, if Brother Francis can sway a multitude.”

  “Yes, if.” Sidney went on to speak of cures that baffled medical reason until one recognized the limited but amazing power of the mind over states of flesh. “I’d want to know how well that man walked the following day,” he said, “but that’s the part of the story we never get to hear…I see you still wear Leo’s amulet.” We talked on about my brother, remembering loved qualities at random—his occasional stammer, his yen for fresh bread, his shyness with girls.

  Leaving Kingstone in June, I fell in with some Ramblers whose Boss I knew. He told me of a meeting at Brakabin, where Brother Francis had said: “I speak of the City of Light.”

  Tlius I knew. My Rambler friend could tell me nothing more. I hurried to Nuber, inquiring at the Abbey of the Silvan Order. They had been pestered by similar questions and were short with me: the man’s robe was not that of a Silvan lay brother— it lacked the symbols; they knew and wished to know nothing of any Brother Francis. I went on to—never mind all that. Though frustrated for several more months, I did find him.

  When the war began in September, 426, with the smashing of our garrison at the border town of Milburg, Katskil shivered at a prospect of Mohan columns driving south—down the Skoar River, through the hill passes, along the coast of the Hudson Sea. Had Moha tried this they might have won the war, but like our Empire, I daresay, they were ruled by the opaque stupidity of the military mind.

  In those days of anxiety I caught word of a band of pilgrims who were marching up along the Delaware, intending to place themselves between the opposing armies in the no-man’s-land that extended from Lake Skoar to the Hudson Sea, and these mad saints were led by Brother Francis. I hurried to Gilba, on the north shore of the lake, where they would pass if the story was true. I reached the town on a gleaming October afternoon, when the hills were purple under sunlight and rolling cloud shadows; but a section of the northern horizon was sullen with smoke—not forest fire, God knows, for the woods were soaked from recent rains. The pilgrims had arrived before me and were camped in a meadow at the edge of the town.

  They were not saints but simple folk, some perhaps not even very religious, drawn by wonder at a truth-speaker. I have blamed Leopold for bringing them together in so vulnerable a crowd. Certainly his intention was to lead them between the opposing forces, armed only in their goodwill. And their innocent blood drenching the earth would have taught men what they have been taught through the millennia by the blood of other martyrs: namely, nothing.* In this I find the cruelty of the saint, who would have the devoted follow the dream—his dream, never understanding that it cannot be theirs for longer than the moment of enthusiasm. Since this particular massacre did not occur in the manner he may have foreseen, I suppose the question of Leopold’s blame will be tossed about to the end of time, and no profit in it.

  * W.B. writes: “Can he expect the Church to condone this utterance?”

  I asked a black-haired girl at the pilgrims’ camp whether I might speak with Brother Francis. She said he was resting in his tent, but then she read my face, and in her kindness took me to him. My brother was asleep. Across eight years I knew him
as though I had just then waked beside him in our old house on the Twenyet Road. At the girl’s touch on his shoulder he came awake quickly—he always had—and asked: “Beata, my dear—is it time for prayers?”

  “Not yet,” she said, and I saw she loved him, not only as a believer loves a saint, but as a woman loves a man. “There’s one here in need of you.” Then she stared amazed from his face to mine, and presently left us.

  I knelt by his cot, spoke his name, lost in the puzzled gaze of his so-familiar eyes. He said: “I’m sorry, sir—are you in trouble? What can I do for you? Why do you call me Leo?”

  “Leopold, has your memory thrown me away?” For an instant I thought he was shaken, that he really knew me; then I could see in him only confusion. I recalled how once he had gashed his left arm in falling from a tree. “Here,” I said, and shoved back the sleeve of his robe and found the scar, a jagged whiteness. “The oak near Rondo’s Shrine—a hot August morning—I carried you to the shrine, where the priest bandaged and scolded you.”