Davy

I dropped the sack and tightened my arms, learning her elastic softness. Her eyes opened wide in astonishment as if no such thought had ever touched her so far as I was concerned, and maybe it hadn’t till she felt my hands growing a little courageous at her waist and hips.[11] “Why, Davy!” My hands relaxed too soon and she collected her wits. “You go up to bed now like I said, and I’ll bring the poultice soon as I can sneak back out here.”

I toiled up to the loft, the memory of her flesh printed on mine, reached my pallet without dropping the lantern, and hid my sack in the hay. I flung off my loin-rag but kept my shirt on because of a fever-chill. Under the blanket limp and shivering, I watched fantastic nothings ebb and flow in the darkness around the rafters of the loft, so far above my puddle of lantern-light. I smelled the lantern’s rancid seal-oil, the dry hay, the sweat and manure of horses and mules below. I wished I dared show the golden horn to someone and tell my story. Who but Emmia? At that time she was my one friend.

The bond-servant caste is a sorry thing in Moha, squeezed from above and below. Slaves hated us for being slightly better off, the lifers not so sharply as the shortterm slaves, who probably felt they weren’t too different from us, a mere matter of conviction for minor crime instead of our accident of birth or bad fortune. Freemen despised us for the sake of looking down on someone-no real satisfaction in looking down on a slave. Emmia could have got into bad trouble by showing affection for me when any third person was present; I never expected her to, and that she should do so when we were alone was still a puzzle to me that night, in spite of all the lush daydreams I was in the habit of building on the fact — it just hadn’t occurred to me yet (outside of daydreams) that there was anything about me a woman would actually love.

I must have heard the whole run of popular sayings: “All bond-servants steal a little” — “Give a b.s. an inch and he’ll take a yard” — “A bond-wench may be a good lay but remember your whip!” All the old crud-talk that people seem to need to shore up their vanity and avoid the risk of looking honestly at themselves. In the same way, people said: “All slaves stink.” They never asked: Who lets them have a basin to wash in or time to use it?

And in Moha you heard that no Katskil man should be trusted alone even with a sow. Conicut people tell you every other man in Lomeda is a fairy and the rest backscuttlers. In Nuin I have heard: “It takes three Pe

At school I heard the teacher-priests explain how race prejudice was one of the sins that persuaded God to destroy the world of Old Time and make men pass through the Years of Confusion so there would be only one race with traces of all the old ones in it, and my opinion of God went up several notches. Inside, though, a somehow older boy who wasn’t quite ready to show his head went on muttering that it was too nice and simple: if God was going to take that much trouble why couldn’t he make modern people decent and kind in other ways?

Today I know it’s a mere historical accident that has made us all fairly close to the same physical pattern in that part of the world. We are the descendants of a small handful of survivors, and they happened to include most of the races of Old Time. Anyone who deviates too far is still treated outrageously, if he escapes early destruction as a mue. In Conicut, with Rumley’s Ramblers, I would have been uneasy about my red hair, if it hadn’t been a strong gang that took care of its own.

Freeman boys, many from poor families living no better than I did, ran in street-gangs and wanted no part of a b.s., unless they could catch one alone, for fun. I could have made friends with a freeman boy, meeting him by himself, but the herd pattern is death on friendship. If the pack must come first — its rituals, cruelties, group make-believes and sham brotherhood — you have no time left for the individual spirit of another; no time, no courage, no recognition.

Against the danger of the street-gangs I had my Katskil knife, but I was so sharp at nipping out of sight whenever I saw more than three boys in a group that I’d never been obliged to use the steel in self-defense. Good thing too, for getting hanged would have interfered seriously with writing this book, and even if you don’t exist I’d hate to see you suffer a deprivation like that.[12]

But even in fever common sense told me I could not show Emmia my golden horn and tell the story. She would never understand why I hadn’t killed the mue. She would be demoralized by the mere thought of a mue existing near the city. Like most women she could scarcely bear the sound of the word “mue” — she’d sooner have had a rat run up her leg.

Then for a while I think the fever sent my wits wandering out of the world.

While I wrote this morning the fog dissolved. Nickie called me on deck an hour ago — her face was wet — and pointed to the blur of green two or three miles southeast. As I was watching, a white bird circled down to the island. No smoke rises from it; the day is a quiet of blue and gold.

I’ll make only this note of it for the present. We have a light westerly, and Captain Barr intends to circumnavigate, tacking as near the island as he safely can. We shall watch for harbors, stream outlets, reefs, beaches, any sign of habitation. Major note: Miranda Nicoletta is happy.

I was pulled awake by feeling another blanket being spread over me. Wool-soft it was and sweet with the girlscent of Emmia — I mean her own, not the boughten perfume she sometimes used. She must have brought it from her own bed, and I a damned yard-boy not brave enough to kill a mue but low enough to steal from him.

Emmia was talking, of what I don’t know; in the middle of the pleasant sound I spoke her name. She said: “Hush, Davy! How you do run on! Be the good jo and let me put on this poultice — don’t squirm so!” Her voice was as kind as her hands that eased down the blankets and pressed a minty-smeiling pad where my skin still hurt, some. The pain was no longer serious; I was pretending to be worse off than I was, to prolong her soft attentions. “What was you yattering about just now, Davy? Where the sun rises, you said, only it’s night, you know it is, so maybe you was fevery the way I heard about a man had the smallpox and he thought he was tumbling off a hoss, so whoa he says, whoa, and falls out of bed for real and dead as anything the next day, the chill you know, come to think, that was Morton Sampson that married a co

I said: “If a man went far—”

“Ayah, that’s just the way you was ru

11

I du

12

Notice he never pauses to consider how it feels to be married to an Irish bull. However, courage! Am I cowed by such a brute? Why, yes, now I think of it. — Nickie.