Davy

18

The January rains fall more steadily here on the island Neonarcheos than any we remember. For two weeks we have been unable to work at clearing new ground. Nickie is uncomfortable in pregnancy and so is Dion — I mean that like me he is trying to give birth to a book, setting down what he can recall of the history of Nuin before it fades or becomes distorted in his mind. We do have paper now: the brookside reeds yield a course product to our primitive methods that takes our lamp-black ink reasonably well.

From lamp-black my mind jumps to lamps and lamp-oil. When the casks of seal oil we brought in the Morning Star have been exhausted we’ll have no more. We can worry away at native vegetable oils and waxes, and when our sheep have increased there will be tallow to renew the sup.ply of candles. Lambing time in a couple of months wifi be a major event. Of course, Nickie and I seldom object to going to bed early.

Lamps, candles, animal husbandry — we have enough problems on that level to keep our people busy a hundred years, if there’s that much time. There may not be. We needn’t suppose that because we were the first in centuries to sail the great sea, our enemies won’t follow — soon, perhaps. They have as much courage of the simple kind as we have, or they couldn’t have won the war of the rebellion in spite of their superior numbers. True, it called for the imagination of Sir Andrew Barr, the knowledge in old books forbidden, the orders and protection of Dion as Regent of the richest and strongest of the nations, and the labor of many hands, to create the schooner Hawk and later the Morning Star. Salter’s victorious army had no such vessels to send in pursuit of us, no men capable of handling them. However, given the spark, they might build something capable of venturing out, if the Church would relax her prohibitions.

We carried with us all designs and working drawings made by our own people. The lower grade workmen had at first only a dim idea of what sort of ship they were engaged in building, but some of them will remember details, and all of them will talk if Salter wants them to. The Holy Murcan Church, up to now, has hogtied itself in this matter, committed to the doctrine that it is morally wrong, offensive to God, to sail out of sight of the land except by what fishermen call the relay system — one vessel holding in sight another which keeps the land within view. Even Dion could not have safely ordered such a ship as the Hawk without explaining to the churchmen that it was needed to overawe the Cod Islands pirates, and would never sail beyond those islands. And the Morning Star, he told them, was needed as a replacement — well — hm-ha — an insurance against a possible regrouping by those Satanic men.

It’s not merely that it would a

Our military intelligence learned beyond a doubt that ex-pirates from the Cod Islands were scattered through Salter’s army. They don’t know big ships but they know the sea; in the old days before 327, when we had to knock them apart as a nation, their lateen-rigged skimmers may have ventured farther than we suppose. They could handle a large vessel for Salter if he ever managed to build one.

The Cod Islands people-the pirates and their women and slaves and followers — worshiped Satan, the old dark horned god of witchcraft ancient and modern. I’m sure they still do secretly. Likely they considered Old Horny a logical opponent of the existing order of things which they had no reason to love — besides, orgies are fun. The fact that Dion as Regent refused to permit wholesale burning of the Cod Islands people after the pirates’ surrender was one of the most serious grievances the hostile section of the Nuin public, as well as the Church, held against him. The islands were taken over by respectable fishermen’s guilds and added to the province of Ha

Incidentally I think Dion’s insistence on amnesty instead of vengeance was the first occasion in modem times when a secular ruler has held out against Church pressure and got away with it for as long as four years. In the days of Morgan the Great the question didn’t arise. Morgan was all for the Church, which was new then itself as a definite organization; he was an enthusiast, a warrior for God who could be just as happy converting a human brain as smashing it with a broadax, depending I guess on whether it showed any tendency to talk back.

And after a while, the Church may not find itself altogether happy with the Morgan dynasty ended and Erinan Salter President. Salter will cancel the preliminary work we did toward getting rid of slavery; he will destroy our small begi

Nay, fair enough — some morning a few years from now we may see on the western ocean the approach of a small clumsy sail…

Yesterday afternoon Dion wandered in out of the rain with Nora Severn and told us he didn’t want to be Governor. We’ve heard this before, and it makes certain kinds of sense, yet most of us hope he can be talked out of his reluctance. We’ve been kicking around a number of political ideas since at our last general assembly five were chosen to write a tentative constitution as it was done in Old Time, looking toward a day when these islands may hold a population large enough to need the larger formalities.