Davy

by Edgar Pangborn

  * * *

  The lantern in our cabin is sputtering and my fingers are cramped. I need a fresh nib in my pen — we have plenty of bronze nibs, but I can’t be extravagant. And I’d like a breath of air topside. Maybe I’ll bother Captain Barr or Dion, or remind Nickie we haven’t yet tried it in the crow’s-nest. The night is uneasy; northwest gusts are warm but appear to have a power behind them. The morning came in with an explosion of crimson, and all day long my ears have been tight with a promise of storm. The other colonists — we’ve lately been calling ourselves that — are edgy with it. At the noon meal Adna-Lee Jason broke out crying from no clear cause, explaining it with a mutter about homesickness and then said she didn’t mean that. Maybe I’ll just loaf at the bow, taste the weather my own way, and try to decide whether I mean to go on with this book…

  I’m going on with it, anyway Nickie says I am. (It was fine in the crows’-nest. She got dizzy and bit my shoulder harder than she meant to, but a few minutes later she was daring me to try it up there again some time with a real wind blowing. Ayah, she can cook too.) I’m going on with my book but I dread the next few pages.

  I could lie about what happened with the mue and me. We all lie about ourselves, trying to diddle the world with an image that’s had all the warts rubbed off. But wouldn’t it be the cruddy trick to begin a true-tale and back off into white-wash lying at the first tough spot? By writing at all I’ve made the warts your business — of course it’s not quite fair, since I’ll never know much about you or your Aunt Cassandra and her yellow tomcat with the bent ear. But hi-ho, or as I remember my Nickie saying on another occasion: “Better spare the mahooha, my love, my carroty monkey, my all, my this and that, my blue-eyed comforting long-handled bedwarmer, spare the mahooha and then we’ll never run short of it.”

  * * *

  When the mue and I were climbing up away from that rock floor, seeing the dirt on his back gave me my idea. I asked him: “Where is water?”

  He pointed into the jungle. “I show drink.”

  “Wash too.”

  “Whash?” It wasn’t his specialty. He might have known the word in childhood. You see my cleverness — start him really washing and he’d be away from home a long time.

  “Water take off dirt,” I said.

  “Dirt?”

  I rubbed a speck off my wrist, and indicated some of his personal topsoil. “Water-take-off is wash. Wash is good, make look good.”

  The great idea broke like a seal-oil lamp afire — a great idea, not quite mine. “Whash, be like you!”

  I swung out along the grapevine, sick, not just from fear he’d kiss me in his delight. He followed, gobbling words I couldn’t listen to, believing I could work a magic with water to make him man-beautiful. I never did, I never could have intended he should think that.

  We traveled downhill, out of the ugly thicket and into clearer ground. I kept track of landmarks. When we reached the bank of a brook I made him understand we needed a pool; he led me through alders to a lovely stillness of water under sun. I shed my clothes and slipped in. The mue watched in amazement — how could anyone do that?

  I was sick with knowing what I was about to do; the with grins and simple words and a show of washing myself to explain how it was done. He ventured in at last, beauty of the pool was wasted on me. But I beckoned him the big baby. It was nowhere deeper than three feet, but I dared not swim, thinking he might imitate me and be drowned. I now hated the thought of his coming to any harm through me except the one loss that, I kept telling myself, couldn’t matter — what could he want of a golden horn? I helped him, guiding him to move in the water and keep his balance. I even started the scrubbing job on him myself.

  Scared but willing, he went to work, snorting and splashing, getting the feel of it. Presently I let him see me look as if startled at the sun, to tell him I was thinking of time and the approach of evening dark. I said: “I must go back. You finish wash.” I got out and dressed, waving him back, pointing to the dirt stifi on him. “Finish wash. I go but come back.”

  “Finish, I be—”

  “Finish wash!” I said, and took off. He probably watched me out of sight. When the bushes hid me I was running and my sickness ran with me. Up the easy ground, into grapevine shadows and straight to his tree, up the vine, down behind the briers. I found the red rock at once and lifted it aside. The horn lay in a bed of gray-green moss. I took that too, as a wrapping for the horn inside my sack. I was up over the briers, and gone.

  In no danger from the mue if I ever had been, I ran as fast as before, but now like an animal crazed by pursuit. A black wolf could have closed in on me with no effort.

  Once or twice since then I have wished one had — before I knew Dion and the other friends I have today, the dearest being the wisest, my wife, my brown-eyed Nickie of the delicate hands.

  5

  Three nights ago — I was off watch — a hell of a gale swooped out of the northwest, and up went some of these pages like a mob of goosed goblins. Nickie grabbed the ones fluttering near the port-hole, and I grabbed Nickie. Then the cabin tilted steep as a barn roof, the lantern smoked viciously and went out, and we were piled up against our bunk hearing the sea beaten to frenzy. But our Morning Star bore down against the goaded waters; she righted herself and rushed away with arrogant steadiness into the dark.

  Captain Barr had smelled danger and got us reefed down just enough, ready as a race-horse; he didn’t bother calling up the off watch.

  I remember that square dark block of man at Provintown Island in 327, for I was there when the Hawk burned at her moorings. We’d gone ashore to accept the pirates’ surrender and take formal possession of all the Cod Islands in Nuin’s name. The fire may have been started by a spark from the galley stove. Sir Andrew’s face hardly shifted a muscle when the red horror rose out there and roared across her decks. Dying inside, he turned to us and remarked: “I think, gentlemen, we’d be well advised not to exaggerate our difficulties.” When Sir Andrew Barr dies for the last time it will be with some stately comment like that, pronounced so cleanly you can hear each punctuation mark click into the right place. If the pirate boss, old B ally-John Doon, had nourished any notion of taking advantage of the fire it must have perished at those words; after the Hawk’s survivors swam ashore and were cared for the ceremony proceeded just as planned.

  In 322, the first year of the Regency, Barr was already dreaming of a strong ship rigged entirely fore-and-aft. The dream grew out of a diagram in a magnificent book at the underground library of the secret society of the Heretics — an Old-Time dictionary. We have it on board. The front cover and some of the introductory pages are missing; the borders carry the scars of fire, and on the brittle sheet that now begins the book there’s a brown stain. I think someone bled after rescuing it from a holy bonfire, but make up your own story. Sparked by the diagram, Barr searched out more information on Old-Time shipbuilding — all he could get — until through the Heretics he made contact with Dion and his conception was embodied in the building of the Hawk, and later the Morning Star.

  When it was clear, in the last days of General Salter’s rebellion, that we would probably lose the final battle for Old City , we divided the books with the brave handful of Heretics who elected to remain. And we did lose the battle, and fled aboard the Morning Star — suburbs ablaze, stench of hatred and terror in all the streets — a hard decision, I suppose harder for Dion than for the rest of us. The dictionary was almost necessary for us; I can’t think of any one book that would give us more.

  Those Heretics who remained were not all of them older people. A good number of the young stayed on, having some love and hope for Nuin in spite of everything. Theirs was the greater risk. We are only venturing on the unexplored; they dared to stay in a country that will again be governed by men who believe themselves possessed of absolute truth.

  Captain Barr trusts our spread of eager canvas as no landsman could, and knows the sea in something like the way I knew the w
ilderness when I was a boy. A relentless perfectionist, he calls the Morning Star a beginner’s effort. It doesn’t conceal his love for her, which I think exceeds any he ever felt for a woman. He never married, and won’t bed with a girl who might demand permanence.

  That evening when the storm cut loose Nickie and I weren’t expecting the universe to turn upsydown, so we got caught bare-ass innocent. I don’t think she minded, after prying my elbows loose from her knees.[7] Of course now that she’s taken to signing her full name and title of nobility I can see there’ll be no dull times ahead. (Dma. stands for “Domina”, which is what you call a lady of the Nuin aristocracy, married or single.) Already I’ve learned that when I come back to this manuscript after any absence it’s best to examine it, the way a dog searches himself after associating with mutts who may have a difterent entomological environment. I got “entomological” out of the Old-Time dictionary and I find it beautiful. It means buggy.

  That wind blew until the following afternoon, shrill continuous wrath. On my watch I had the wheel. I’m happy then in any weather, overcoming the impulse of the wheel toward chaos, my own strength and its demand for order enough but only just enough, and under me a hundred tons of human creation straining forward against space and time. You may have your horses; I say there’s no poem like a two-masted schooner, and I’ll hope to ride a ship now and then until I am too old to grip the spokes, too dull of sight to read the impersonal assurance of a star.

  That day of wind, Second Mate Ted Marsh had to transmit orders by waving his hands or bringing his mouth next to my ear. Few orders needed, though. We could do no more than run before it under jib and storm-sail, and so we did, taking no harm. Next morning the uproar was spent: we were creeping, and a few hours later becalmed. We still are. The wind had spat us out into a quiet, and fog claimed us. It lies around us now, the ocean hushed as if we had come to a cessation of all endeavor, motion, seeking, a defeat of urgency by silence. The sea level is not what it was when our Old-Time maps were made. The earth has changed, and those who live on it. There’s been no man sailing here since before the Years of Confusion.

  Tonight our deck lanterns probe a few yards. From our cabin I hear fog-damp dripping off limp canvas. The animals are all quiet — chickens and sheep and cattle aslumber I suppose, and never a bray from Mr. Wilbraham penned aft with his two jennies who are expected to love him if anyone can; even the pigs have apparently knit up the ravell’d squeal of care. Nickie too has gone sweetly to sleep — truly asleep: she can’t prevent a quiver of the black eyelashes when she’s shamming.[8] She said a few hours ago that she doesn’t feel oppressed by the fog but has a notion it might conceal something pleasant, an island for instance.

  I intended when I began this book to tell events in the order they happened. But when I woke this morning in the fogbound hush I fell to brooding over the different varieties of time. My story belongs in four or five of them.

  So does any story, but it seems to be a literary custom that one kind should dominate, the others being suppressed or taken for granted. I could do that, and you who may exist might be too cloth-headed or stubborn or to busy keeping the baby out of the molasses to feel anything missing, but I’d feel it.

  There’s the stream of happenings I picked up a little after my fourteenth birthday. Call that the mainstream if you like; and by the way, I shall have to make it flow a little faster soon, since I haven’t the patience for a book seven or eight million words long. Besides, while it’s possible you exist, if I confronted you with a book like that, you might weasel out of it by claiming you don’t.

  There’s the story I live (pursued by footnotes) as this ship journeys toward you — unless the journey’s already ended: I saw no hint of a wake when I was on deck, the sails hang spiritless, a chunk of driftwood lies in polished stillness only a trifle nearer the ship than it was an hour ago… You could hardly read that mainstream story without knowing something of this other: whatever I write is colored by living aboard the Morning Star — glimpse of a whale a week ago — the gull who followed us until he discovered with comic suddenness that he was the only one of his kind, and wheeled, and sped away westward — why, I wouldn’t have begun this chapter here and now, in this way, if Nickie had not spoken a casual word or two night before last about the different kinds of tempest. She wasn’t thinking of my book, only loafing with me in the aftermath of a love-storm, when she had been mirthful and sweetly savage (one of many aspects) — grabbing the skin of my chest with sharp nails as she rode astride of me, a spark-eyed devil-angel moaning, writhing, laughing, crying, proud of her love and her sex and her dancing brown breasts, all muscle and spice and tenderness. Quiet in the afterglow, her dark arm idle across me, she only said that no storm is like any other, no storm of wind and rain, or of war, or of the open sea, or of love. This book is part of my life, and so to me it matters that Nickie’s drowsy words started a course of thought leading to Chapter Five in this place, at this time.

  A third sort of time — well, I’m obliged to write some history, for if you exist you have only guesswork to tell you what’s happened to my part of the world since the period we call the Years of Confusion. I think there must have been a similar period for you — my guesswork. Your nations were stricken by the same abortive idiotic nuclear war and probably by the same plagues. Your culture showed the same symptoms of a possible moral collapse, the same basic weariness of over-stimulation, the same decline of education and rise of illiteracy, above all the same dithering refusal to let ethics catch up with science. After the plagues, your people may not have turned against the very memory of their civilization in a sort of religious frenzy as ours apparently did, determined like spoiled brats to bring down in the wreckage every bit of good along with the bad. They may not have, but I suspect they did. The best aspects of what some of us now call the “Golden Age” were clearly incomprehensible to the multitudes who lived then: they demanded of the age of reason that it give them more and more gimmicks or be damned to it. And they kept their religions alive as substitutes for thought, ready and eager to take over the moment reason should perish. I can’t suppose you did much better on your side of the world, or you would possess ships that would have made contact with us already.

  I keep wondering whether, over there, the spooky religion of Communism may not have slugged it out with its older brother Christianity in the ruins. Whichever won, the human individual would be the loser.

  Ever notice that only individuals think?…

  After the collapse, human beings evidently existed for some time in frightened dangerous bands while weeds prepared the way for the return of forest. Those bands were interested in nothing but survival, not always in that — so we’re told by John Barth who saw the beginning of the Years of Confusion. He gives them that name in his fragment of a journal, which ends with an unfinished sentence in the year the Old-Time calendar called 1993. The Book of John Barth is of course totally forbidden in the nations we have left behind, possession of it meaning death “by special order” — that is, directly under supervision of the Church. We must make more copies as soon as we can set up our little press somewhere on land with a chance of renewing the paper supply.

  Book-voices of Old Time tell me also of the vastly older ages, the millions of centuries extending back of the short flare which is human history to the beginning of the world. When I speak of even a small interval like a thousand years I can hardly grasp what I mean — but for that matter do I know what I mean by a minute? Yes — that is the part of eternity in which Nickie’s heart asleep will beat sixty-five times, give or take a few, unless I touch her, and her pulse hastens perhaps because in sleep she remembers me.

  By starting after my fourteenth birthday I made myself responsible for yet another time, the deep-hidden years before then, the age no one quite recalls. Once improperly straying I looked up at the underside of a dark long table, myself surrounded by a forest of black-robed legs and big sandaled feet, by the unwashed smell — an
d there in a corner shadow a gray spider hung and twitched her web, disturbed by me or by the clash of plates, rumble and twitter of empty talk overhead.

  Nickie is my age, twenty-eight, pregnant for the first time in our years of pleasure with each other. (What is time for a being in the womb who lives in time but can’t yet know it?) She told me about it last night, when she was sure. Across the cabin from me, staring into the flame of a candle she held, Nickie said: “Davy, if it’s a mue—?”

  Touched with anger, I said: “We didn’t bring the priestwritten laws of that country with us.” She watched me, Miranda Nicoletta lately a lady of Nuin, and I afraid — I shouldn’t have said “that country” in the unthinking way I did, for Nickie has a natural remembering love of her homeland, and used to share her cousin Dion’s visions for it. But then she smiled and set down the candle and came to me, and we were as near as we ever have been — considering the inveterate loneliness of the human self, that is very near. Love is a region where recognition is possible. Her way of moving when she is drowsy makes me think of the motion of full-grown grass under the fondling of wind, the bending with no brittleness, yielding without defeat, rising back to upright grace and selfhood after the passage of the unconquering air.

  Captain Barr always calls her “Domina” because it sounds natural to him even out here where old formalities hold no force. Back in Nuin after he got his knighthood he could have addressed her as “Miranda,” or “Nickie” for that matter, but he was born a freeman and recognition came late — not until Dion was Regent and searching for men of brains and character to replace the hordes of seventh cousins, prQfessional brown-nosers and what not who swarmed into the state jobs under Dion’s mentally incompetent uncle Morgan III. A respect for the older nobility is ingrained in Captain Barr, and in this instance it’s not extravagant, considering the amount of dignity that Funny-puss can pile on at will. Let’s clear up that St. Clair-Levison thing, by the way. It merely means her pop’s name was St. Clair and her mama’s Levison, both being of the nobility or, as she is inclined to say, “nobs with knobs on”, a peculiar expression. If Senator Jon Amadeus Lawson Marchette St. Clair, Tribune of the Commonwealth and Knight of the Order of the Massasoit, had married a commoner, which I can’t imagine Buster doing under any circs, Nickie’s last name would be just St. Clair.