And the rest? Three days after the Norseman left, Sibihd got back her wits and no one knew how, though I think I do! And as for Thorvald Einarsson, I have heard that after his wife died in Norway he went to England and ended his days there as a monk but whether this story be true or not I do not know.
I know this: they may call me Happy Radulf all they like, but there is much that troubles me. Was the Abbess Radegunde a demon, as the new priest says? I cannot believe this, although he called her sayings nonsense and the other half blasphemy when I asked him. Father Cairbre, before the Norse killed him, told us stories about the Sidhe, that is, the Irish fairy people, who leave changelings in human cradles; and for a while it seemed to me that Radegunde must be a woman of the Sidhe when I remembered that she could read Latin at the age of two and was such a marvel of learning when so young, for the changelings the fairies leave are not their own children, you understand, but one of the fairy folk themselves, who are hundreds upon hundreds of years old, and the other fairy folk always come back for their own in the end. And yet this could not have'been, for Father Cairbre said also that the Sidhe are wanton and cruel and without souls, and neither the Abbess Radegunde nor the people who came for her were one blessed bit like that, although she did break Thorfinn’s neck—but then it may be that Thorfinn broke his own neck by chance, just as we all thought at the time, and she told this to Thorvald afterwards, as if she had done it herself, only to frighten him. She had more of a soul with a soul’s griefs and joys than most of us, no matter what the new priest says. He never saw her or felt her sorrow and lonesomeness, or heard her talk of the blazing light all around us—and what can that be but God Himself? Even though she did call the crucifix a deaf thing and vain, she must have meant not Christ, you see, but only the piece of wood itself, for she was always telling the Sisters that Christ was in Heaven and not on the wall. And if she said the light was not good or evil, well, there is a traveling Irish scholar who told me of a holy Christian monk named Augustinus who tells us that all which is, is good, and evil is only a lack of the good, like an empty place not filled up. And if the Abbess truly said there was no God, I say it was the sin of despair, and even saints may sin, if only they repent, which I believe she did at the end.
So I tell myself, and yet I know the Abbess Radegunde was no saint, for are the saints few and weak, as she said? Surely not! And then there is a thing I held back in my telling, a small thing, and it will make you laugh and perhaps means nothing one way or the other, but it is this:
Are the saints bald?
These folk in white had young faces but they were like eggs; there was not a stitch of hair on their domes! Well, God may shave His saints if He pleases, I suppose.
But I know she was no saint. And then I believe that she did kill Thorfinn and the light was not God and she not even a Christian or maybe even human, and I remember how Radegunde was to her only a gown to step out of at will, and how she truly hated and scorned Thorvald until she was happy and safe with her own people. Or perhaps it was like her talk about living in a house with the rooms shut up; when she stopped being Radegunde, first one part of her came back and then the other—the joyful part that could not lie or plan and then the angry part—and then they were all together when she was back among her own folk. And then I give up trying to weigh this matter and go back to warm my soul at the little fire she lit in me, that one warm, bright place in the wide and windy dark.
But something troubles me even there and will not be put to rest by the memory of the Abbess’s touch on my hair. As I grow older it troubles me more and more. It was the very last thing she said to me, which I have not told you but will now. When she had given me the gift of contentment, I became so happy that I said, “Abbess, you said you would be revenged on Thorvald, but all you did was change him into a good man. That is no revenge!”
What this saying did to her astonished me, for all the color went out of her face and left it gray. She looked suddenly old, like a death’s-head, even standing there among her own true folk with love and joy coming from them so strongly that I myself might feel it. She said, “I did not change him. I lent him my eyes, that is all.” Then she looked beyond me, as if at our village, at the Norsemen loading their boats with weeping slaves, at all the villages of Germany and England and France where the poor folk sweat from dawn to dark so that the great lords may do battle with one another, at castles under siege with the starving folk within eating mice and rats and sometimes each other, at the women carried off or raped or beaten, at the mothers wailing for their little ones, and beyond this at the great wide world itself with all its battles which I had used to think so grand, and the misery and greediness and fear and jealousy and hatred of folk one for the other, save— perhaps—for a few small bands of savages, but they were so far from us that one could scarcely see them. She said: No revenge? Thinkest thou so, boy? And then she said as one who believes absolutely, as one who has seen all the folk at their living and dying, not for one year but for many, not in one place but in all places, as one who knows it all over the whole wide earth:
Think again. ...
(Excerpt from) No Enemy But Time - by Michael Bishop
Michael Bishop, born in Nebraska but for some years a resident of Georgia, is generally recognized as one of the finest writers to enter the science fiction world during the 1970s. A long list of Hugo and Nebula award nominations and a growing shelf of the awards themselves testify to the high regard in which he is held by readers and writers alike. His novelette, The Quickening, won a Nebula for 1981.
No Enemy But Time, the opening chapter of which is presented here, has been widely acclaimed for its dual portrayals, equally penetrating, of Pleistocene Africa and of the world of the late twentieth century.
For nearly eight months Joshua lived in a remote portion of Zarakals Lolitabu National Park, where an old man of the Wanderobo tribe taught him how to survive without tap water, telephones, or cans of imported tuna. Although hunting was illegal in the country’s national parks, President Tharaka granted a special dispensation, for the success of the White Sphinx Project would depend to an alarming extent on Joshua’s ability to take care of himself in the Early Pleistocene.
Despite having lived his entire life among the agricultural Kikembu people (Zarakals largest single ethnic group), Thomas Babington Mubia had never given up the hunting arts of the Wanderobo. In 1934 he had taught a callow Alistair
Winner, Nebula for Best Novel of 1982.
Patrick Blair (today a world-renowned paleoanthropologist) how to catch a duiker barehanded and to dress out its carcass with stone tools chipped into existence on the spot. Now, over half a century later, Blair wanted his old teacher to communicate these same skills to Joshua—for, although considerably slower and not quite so sharp-eyed, Babington had lost none of his basic skills as stalker, slayer, and flint-knapper.
Babington—as everyone who knew him well called him— was tall, sinewy, and grizzled. In polite company he wore khaki shorts, sandals, and any one of a number of different loud sports shirts that Blair had given him, but in the bush he frequently opted for near or total nudity. Welts, scars, wheals, and tubercules pebbled his flesh, in spite of which he appeared in excellent health for a man belonging to rika ria Ramsay, an age-grade group that had undergone circumcision during the ascension of Ramsay MacDonalds coalition cabinet in England. For Joshua the old mans incidental bumps and cuts were less troubling than a deliberate vestige of that long-ago circumcision rite.
Ngwati, the Kikembu called it. This was a piece of frayed-looking skin that hung beneath Babingtons penis like the pull tab on a Band-Aid wrapper. It hurt Joshua to look at this “small skin.” He tried not to let his eyes shift to Babingtons crotch, and, for reasons other than Western modesty, he did his darnedest not to shed his shorts or make water within the old mans sight. He was half afraid that to be looked upon naked by Babington would be to acquire Ngwati himself.
Until his circumcision Joshua’s mentor had
attended a mission school run by Blair’s Protestant Episcopal parents, and he knew by heart a score of psalms, several of Shakespeare’s soliloquies, and most of the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, a great favorite of the old Wanderobo’s. Sometimes, in fact, he disconcerted Joshua by standing naked in the night and booming out in a refined British accent whichever of these memory-fixed passages most suited his mood. In July, their first month in the bush, Babington most frequently declaimed the lesser known of two pieces by Poe entitled “To Helen”:
“But now, at length, dear Dian sank from sight Into a western couch of thunder-cloud;
And thou, a ghost, amid the entombing trees
Didst glide away. Only thine eyes remained.
They would not go—they never yet have gone.
Lighting my lonely pathway home that night,
They have not left me (as my hopes have) since”
Sitting in the tall acacia in which he and Babington had built a tree house with a stout door, Joshua looked down and asked his mentor if he had ever been married.
“Oh, yes. Four times all at once, but the loveliest and best was Helen Mithaga.”
“What happened?”
“During the war, the second one, I walked to Bravanumbi from Makoleni, my home village, and enlisted for service against the evil minions of Hitler in North Africa. I was accepted into a special unit and fought with it for two years. When I returned to Makoleni, three of my wives had divorced me by returning to their families. I was Wanderobo; they were Kikembu. Although Helen was also Kikembu, she had waited.
“We loved each other very much. Later, a year after the war, she was poisoned by a sorcerer who envied me the medals I had won and also my Helens Elysian beauty. I lost her to the world of spirits, which we call ngoma. On nights like this one, dry and clear, I know that she has fixed the eyes of her soul upon me. Therefore, I speak to her everlasting world with another mans poignant words.”
This story touched Joshua. He could not regard Babington as a ridiculous figure even when, during the arid month of August, he stood one-footed in the dark and recited,
“Hear the sledges with the bells—
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night! . .
Nights were never icy in Lolitabu, which was tucked away in Zarakals southwestern corner. Instead of bells-on-bobtails you heard elephants trumpeting, hyenas laughing, and maybe even poachers whispering to one another. Babington took pains to insure that Joshua and he never ran afoul of these men, for although some were woebegone amateurs, trying to earn enough money to eat, others were ruthless predators who would kill to avoid detection.
The big cats in the park worried Joshua far more than the poachers did. They did not worry Babington. He would walk the savannah as nonchalantly as a man crossing an empty parking lot. His goal was not to discomfit Joshua, but to school him in the differences among several species of gazelle and antelope, some of which had probably not even evolved by Early Pleistocene times. Joshua tried to listen, but found himself warily eying the lions sprawled under trees on the veldt.
“We do not have an appetizing smell in their nostrils,” Babington told Joshua. “The fetor of human beings is repugnant to lions.”
“So they will not attack us unless we provoke them?” Babington pushed a partial plate out of his mouth with his tongue, then drew it back in. “A toothless lion or one gradually losing its sense of smell might be tempted to attack. Who knows?”
“Then why do we come out here without weapons and walk the grasslands like two-legged gods?”
Said Babington pointedly, “That is not how I am walking.”
During this extended period in the Zarakali wilderness Joshua dreamed about the distant past no more than once or twice a month, and these dreams were similar in a hazy way to his daily tutorials with Babington. Why had his spirit-traveling episodes given way to more conventional dreaming? Well, in a sense, his survival training with Babington was a waking version of the dreamfaring he had done by himself his entire life. With his eyes wide open, he was isolated between the long-ago landscape of his dreams and the dreams themselves. He stood in the darkness separating the two realities.
One day Babington came upon Joshua urinating into a clump of grass not far from their tree house. Joshua was powerless to halt the process and too nonplused to direct it away from his mentors gaze. At last, the pressure fully discharged, he shook his cock dry, eased it back into his jockey shorts, buttoned up, and turned to go back to the tree house. “You are not yet a man,” the Wanderobo informed him. Joshuas embarrassment mutated into anger. “Its not the Eighth Wonder of the World, but it gets me by!”
“You have not been bitten by the knife.”
It struck Joshua that Babington was talking about circumcision. A young African man who had not undergone this rite was officially still a boy, whatever his age might be.
“But I’m an American, Babington.”
“In this enterprise you are an honorary Zarakali, and you are too old to live any longer in the nyuba.” '
The nyuba, Joshua knew, was the circular Kikembu house in which women and young children lived.
“Babington!”
But Babington was adamant. It was unthinkable that any adult male representing all the peoples of Zarakal should proceed with a mission of this consequence—the visiting of the ngoma of the spirit world—without first experiencing irua, the ' traditional rite of passage consecrating his arrival at manhood.
If Joshua chose not to submit to the knife (which Babington himself would be happy to wield), then Babington would go home to Makoleni and White Sphinx would have to carry on without his blessing.
On a visit to the park in early September, Blair learned of this ultimatum and of Joshuas decision to accede to it—so long as Joshua could impose a condition of his own.
“I don’t want a Band-Aid string like Babingtons,” he told the Great Man. “I think I can put up with the pain and the embarrassment, but you’ve got to spare me that goddamn little casing pull.”
Although less than six feet tall and possessed of a pair of watery blue eyes whose vision had recently begun to deteriorate (a circumstance insufficient to make him wear glasses), Blair was still an imposing figure. His white mustachios and the sun-baked dome of his forehead and pate gave him the appearance of a walrus that had somehow blustered into the tropics and then peremptorily decided to make the region its home. He seemed to be swaggering even when sitting on the sticky upholstery of a Land Rover’s front seat, and his voice had the mellow resonance of a bassoon. In the past ten years his appealing ugly-uncle mug had graced the covers of a dozen news magazines and popular scientific journals, and for a thirteen-week period three years ago he had been the host of a PBS program about human evolution entitled Beginnings, an effort that had rekindled the old controversy between paleoan-thropologists and the so-called scientific creationists and that had incidentally served to make Blairs name a household word in even the smallest hainlets in the United States. By now, though, Joshua was used to dealing with the Great Man, and he had no qualms about voicing his complaints about Babingtons plans for the circumcision rite.
Blair assured Joshua that educated Kikembu, especially Christians, also regarded Ngwati with distaste, and that Babington would not try to make him keep the “small skin” if Joshua were vigorously opposed to it.
“I am,” said Joshua, but he neatly parried the Great Mans many well-meaning proposals for sidestepping the circumcision rite altogether. He felt he owed Babington, and he wanted to earn the old mans respect.
Apprised of Joshuas intentions, Babington declared that the ceremony would take place two days hence, in the very grove where he and his protege had their tree house. Blair then informed Joshua that in order to prove himself he must not show any fear prior to the cutting or cry out in pain during it. Such behavior would result in disgrace for himsel
f and his sponsors. Moreover, to lend the rite legitimacy, Babington had sent messages to several village leaders and asked Blair to invite some of the Kikembu from the outpost village of Nyarati as onlookers. Once the knife glinted, they would applaud Joshuas steadfastness or, if he did not bear up, ridicule his public cowardice.
“Onlookers!”
“It’s traditional, I’m afraid. Of what point are the strength and beauty of a leopard if no one ever sees them?”
“Of considerable point, if you’re the leopard. Besides, we’re not talking about leopards. We’re talking about my one and only reproductive organ. Onlookers be damned!” “They’re for purposes of verification, Joshua.”
“Maybe Babington ought to circumcise a leopard, Dr. Blair. I’d love to see them verify that.’’
“Now, now,” said Alistair Patrick Blair. “Tsk-tsk.”
Joshua spent the night before his irua at the park’s sprawling Edwardian guest lodge with Blair. At dawn he bathed himself in a tub mounted on cast-iron lion’s paws, donned a white linen robe, and, in company with the paleoanthropologist, set ofiF for his rendezvous with Babington aboard a Land Rover driven by a uniformed park attendant.
They arrived in the acacia grove shortly after eight o’clock and found it teeming with young people from Nyarati, both men and women. The women were singing spiritedly, and the boisterous gaiety of the entire crowd seemed out of proportion to its cause, the trimming of an innocent foreskin. Blair pulled off Joshuas robe and pointed him to the spot where the old Wanderobo would perform the surgery.
“You’re not to look at Babington, Joshua. Don’t try to watch the cutting, either.”
“I thought that would be part of proving my manhood.” “No. Rather than being required, it’s prohibited.” “Thanks be to Ngai for small mercies.”
Nebula Award Stories - 1983 #18 Page 7