Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  The wolves sharpnosed in close that winter. Mostly grays but a pack of blacks wiped out an entire farm family in Wilton Village near Skoar. Old Jon Robson would tell every new guest the particulars of the massacre, and he’s probably doing it yet, along with tales about a crazy redheaded yardboy he had once. Well, Old Jon had connections in Wilton Village, knew the family the wolves killed and had to make a thing of it, clickety-yak. I never knew him to keep his mouth shut more than two minutes—one day when he was sick with a sore throat. He wouldn’t shut it when he slept, either. He and Mam Robson had their bedroom across the wagonyard from my loft, and in midwinter with the windows shut tight I could still hear him sleep, like an ungreased wagonwheel.

  Before sunup that March day I fed the mules and horses. I reasoned that somebody else ought to get his character strengthened by doing the shoveling. It was a Friday anyhow, so all work was sinful, unless you want to claim that shoveling is a work of necessity or piety, and I disagree. I crept into the main kitchen of the inn, where a yardboy wasn’t supposed to appear. Safe enough. Everybody would be fasting before church—the comfortable way, in bed. The slave-man Judd who was boss of the kitchen wasn’t up yet, and the worst he’d have done would have been to flap a rag and chase me ten steps on his gimp leg. I found a peach pie and surrounded it for breakfast. You see, I’d skipped fasting and church a good deal already—easy because who cares about a yardboy?—and the lightning hadn’t located me yet. In the store room I collected a chunk of bacon and a loaf of oat bread, and started thinking. Why not run away for good?

  Who’d be bothered? Maybe Jon Robson’s daughter Emmia would, a little. Cry, and wish she’d been nicer to me. I worked on that as I stole out of the inn and down the long emptiness of Kurin Street, dawn still half an hour away. I worked on it hard. I had myself killed by black wolf, changed that to bandits, because black wolf wouldn’t leave any bones. There ought to be bones for somebody to bring back. Somebody who’d say to Emmia: “Here’s all that’s left of poor redheaded Davy, except his Katskil knife. He did say he wanted for you to have that if anything happened to him.” But bandits wouldn’t have left the knife, rot them. I had a problem there.

  Emmia was older than me, sixteen, big and soft like her papa only on her it looked good. How I did cherish and play with that rosy softness in the night—all in my fancy, dumb-virgin as a baby cockerel, alone in my loft.

  I was gulping by the time I passed the town green, but as I neared the Corn Market, in North District and not far from the place where I knew I could climb the city stockade with no guard seeing me, most of that flapdoodle drained out of my head. I was thinking sharp and practical about running away for real, not just goofing off the way I’d done other times.

  A bondservant, one grade better than a slave, I’d be breaking the law if I ran, and could be made a true slave for it, likely with a ten-year term. I told myself that morning what they could do with the law. I had the bacon and bread in a sack strapped across my shoulder. My Katskil knife hung in a sheath under my shirt, and all the money I’d saved during the winter, five dollars in silver, was knotted into my loin rag. Up in the woods on North Mountain where I’d found a cave in my lone wanderings the year before, other things lay hidden—ten dollars safely buried, an ash bow I’d made myself, brass-tipped arrows, fishlines with a couple of real steel hooks. Maybe I’d really do it, I thought. Maybe today.

  I shinnied over the stockade without trouble and started up the mountain. I was being pulled two ways then. The Emmia who talked in my heart wasn’t whimpering over bones. I was thinking about the real soft-lipped girl who’d probably want me to turn back, stick it out through my bond-period, get civilized, make something of myself. Who might not mind, might even like it, if I told her or showed her what I felt about her instead of just mooning at her through doorways like a stunned calf. The forest pulled the other way.

  Climbing the steep ground from the city in the morning hush, I decided I’d merely stay lost a day or two as I’d done before. Other times it had usually been my proper monthly day off, not always. I’d risked trouble before and talked my way out of it. I’d stay this time, say until the bacon was gone, and spend that time polishing the fresh whopmagullion I’d have to tell, to celebrate my return and soften the action of Old Jon’s leather strap on my rump. The decision itself perked me up. When I was well under cover of the woods and the time was right, I climbed a maple to watch the sunrise.

  It was already beyond first-light, the fire not yet over the rim. I’d missed the earliest bird-calls, now their voices were rippling back and forth across the world. I heard a white-throat sparrow in a bush; robin and wood thrush, loveliest of all bird singers, were busy everywhere. A cardinal flew by me, a streak of flame, and a pair of smoky-white parrots broke out of a sycamore to skim over the tree-tops. In a sweet-gum nearby I caught sight of a pair of white-face monkeys who didn’t mind me at all. When I looked away from them I saw the golden blaze begin.

  For the first time that I can remember, I wanted to know, Where does it come from, the sun? What happens over there when it’s set afire every morning? Why should God go to all that trouble to keep us warm?

  Understand, at that time I had no learning at all. I’d scarcely heard of books except to know they were forbidden to all but the priests because they’d had something to do with the Sin of Man. I figured Old Jon was the smartest man in the world because he could keep accounts with the bead-board that hung in the taproom. I believed, as the Amran Church teaches everyone to believe, that the earth is a body of land three thousand miles square, once a garden and perfect, with God and the angels walking freely among men, until the time almost four hundred years ago when men sinned and spoiled everything; so now we’re working out the penance until Abraham, the Spokesman of God, who died on the Wheel at Nuber in the year 37, returns to judge His people, saving the few elect and sending the rest to fry forever in the caverns of Hell. And on all sides of that lump of land spread the everlasting seas all the way to the rim of the world. The Book of Abraham, said the teacher-priests, doesn’t tell how far away the rim is, because that’s one of the things God does not wish men to know.

  Doubts I did have. I thought it remarkable how the lightning never did arrive no matter how I sinned, even on Fridays. The doubts were small; young grass trying to work up through the brown old trash of winter.

  I understood of course—all children far younger than fourteen understood it—that while you might get away with a lot of sinning on the sly, you agreed out loud with whatever the Church taught or else you didn’t stay alive. I saw my first heretic-burning when I was nine, after I’d gone to work at the Bull and Iron. In Moha they were always conducted along with the Spring Festival. Children under nine weren’t required to attend.

  I watched the dawn from my maple, the birth and growing of the light.

  Surely I was not watching what happened in my mind, for the thought was living in me, and I not knowing how it could have come; the thought, What if someone traveled all the way to watch the firing of the sun?

  Nowadays I understood that thoughts do not come to you. You make them, they grow in you until the time arrives when you must recognize them.

  Down out of my maple then, up the long rise of the mountain in deep forest, where the heat of the day is always mild. I walked and climbed slowly, not wishing to raise a sweat, for the smell of it can drift a surprising distance, and black wolf and brown tiger may get interested. Against black wolf I had my knife. He dislikes steel. Brown tiger cares nothing for knives—a flip of his paw is sufficient—though he’s said to respect arrows, thrown spears and fire, usually. I’ve heard tell of brown tiger leaping a fire-circle to make a meal of hunters. It could be true, for his hunger must be immense and compelling in a bad season when moose and deer and bison have gone scarce. I was not thinking much about those ancient enemies when I climbed North Mountain that morning. The question-thought was in me, saying, What if I were to go beyond the rim, where the sun is set afi
re…?

  My cave was a crack in a cliff, broadening inside to a room four feet wide, twenty deep. The cleft ran up into darkness, and must have broken through to the outside, for a small draft like the pull of a chimney kept the air fresh. Sometimes I wished the entrance was narrower—black wolf could have got in, maybe even tiger. I’d cleared out a few copperheads when I first found the cave, and had to be watchful against them too, or rattlers, slithering back to reclaim it. The approach was a ledge that widened in front of the cave, with enough earth to support a patch of grass, and the cave was located well around the east shoulder of the mountain, so that the city was shut away. I could safely build a fire at night behind the rocks at the cave entrance, and I always did. You need a sleep-fire for safety, and the knack of waking at the right moments to refresh it. I’d long ago lifted a flint-and-steel from the Bull and Iron kitchen where it didn’t seem real decorative. I usually doused my fire before dawn. No sense painting smoke on bright sky to stir up the curious.

  That morning I first made sure about my bow and arrows and fishing gear. They hadn’t been disturbed. And yet I felt a strangeness. Not snakes and not intruders. Some eastern sunlight was entering; I could see as well as I needed to for safety but something nagged me. I stood a long time moving only my eyes. I moistened my nose, but caught no wrong scent.

  When I found the trouble at last, far at the back on one of the cave walls where sunlight didn’t reach, and where my glance must have touched it unknowingly while I was looking at my gear, I was no wiser. It was simply a small drawing made by the point of some softer, reddish rock. I goggled at it, trying to imagine it had been there always. No such thing. That cave was mine, the only place on earth I’d ever felt I owned, and I knew it like the skin of my body. This had been done since my last visit, in December before winter set in.

  Two stick figures, circles for heads with no faces, single lines for legs and arms and bodies, both with male parts indicated. I’d heard of hunters’ sign-messages. But what did this say that a hunter could want to know? The figures held nothing, did nothing, just stood there.

  The one on my right was in human proportion, with slightly bent elbows and knees in the right places, all his fingers and toes. The other stood to the same height, but his legs were far too short without a knee-crook, and his arms too long, dangling below his crotch. He had only three toes for each foot, a big one and two squeezed-up little ones. His fingers were blunt stubs, though the artist had gone to a lot of trouble drawing good human fingers for the other jo.

  No tracks in the cave or on the ledge. Nothing left behind.

  I gave it up—nothing else to do. Somebody’d been here since December, and he was honest because he never touched my gear, and likely meant me no harm. Last year I’d brought a horse-shoe and slipped it into the jumble of rocks before the cave. Now I made certain it was still in place—it was; anyway I’d never heard of a trick like this being pulled by witches or spooks.

  I worked awhile, gathering fresh balsam to sleep on, and a supply of firewood against the night. Then I shrugged off shirt and loin rag but not my knife, naturally—and lay out naked in the sunny grass, drowsing, daydreaming, not wondering much now about my visitor because I supposed he was long gone. I let other thoughts range wide, into the open sky and beyond the limits of the day.

  * * * *

  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 la
ter 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?”