Davy

The bearing of Rambler children presents a continual problem to the Holy Murcan Church . How can the authorities be sure that all pregnancies are reported, no woman left alone after the fifth month, every birth attended by a priest, with a group that’s always on the go, in and out of the wilderness, over national boundaries without inspection, even excused from the taxes and other responsibilities that go along with settled residence and national citizenship? You’re right — they can’t. A Rambler is called — legally and with the consent of the Church because the Church can’t help it — a citizen of the world.

The Church has made sporadic efforts to take over the Ramblers, invariably catching its tail in the crack. Every now and then some enterprising prelate gives birth to an idea he thinks is new. The Archbishop of Conicut had a go at it in 318, not very long before we made a circuit of that country and then headed for southern Katskil and Pe

They were polite with all visitors, but in those encampments they put on no shows that would be visible from the Conicut side. No music, for music doesn’t recognize boundaries. No selling to Conicut customers, and no passing on of news. The gangs just sat there. A three-month block was enough to rouse every town and village in the land to a dither of exasperation and protest — nay, they were still grumbling about the “Rambler Strike” months later when we passed by, and I wished we’d been in on the fun, but we were away the hell up in northern Leva

They’d prepared for it. That was Bill (Lardpot) Shandy’s gang. Pa Rumley knew Lardpot; he said the man did everything the way he ate, never by halves. Before they set out with the priest, the big sexy pictures on the wagons were painted over with gray — drab and sad. Wherever they stopped, as if for the usual entertainments, no music was offered, just hymns. No plays, no peep-shows. Instead of the account of news from distant places that a Rambler boss customarily provides at the start of every visit, the priest was invited to deliver a sermon. This really hurt, for as I’ve said, the Ramblers are the one source of news that the people can trust: nothing else in our timid, poverty-ridden, illiterate world takes the place of the newspapers of Old Time. In much less than three months all Conicut was bubbling with rumors — earthquakes in Katskil, atheist uprisings in Nuin, Vairmant overrun with revolutionaries, prophets and three-headed calves. That priest, poor devil — Lardpot had purposely chosen a born i

A law that originates in the Church is, naturally, never going to be repealed.[22] But before Bill Shandy’s gang reached the border of Rhode, the Archbishop a

So, in practise, the Rambler citizens of the world live mostly by what the Church, like an uneasy schoolmistress, calls the “honor system.” This means that a Rambler boss must take over in his own person many of the functions of policer, priest and judge. He is expected to see to it that pregnancies are reported, even if the gang is likely to be a hundred miles away a few months later. He must make sure women are properly attended through the critical time. And if by chance a mue is born when the gang happens to be not within reach of a priest, the Rambler boss himself must take the knife in his own hand and be certain it penetrates the heart, and with his own eyes see the body buried under a sapling that has been bent over on itself to form the symbol of the wheel…

Rumley’s other three wagons, except the theater wagon, each had enough compartments for a maximum of twelve people without obliging anyone to sleep in the “front room,” which was thought to bring bad luck — Rambler people were full of small superstitions like that, singularly free from the large ones. Including the headquarters wagon, the top limit for the whole gang would have been forty-two. Some gangs have six wagons or even more; that’s too big. Thirty-six people, the number after Sam and I joined, was comfortable, not so big that Pa couldn’t keep track of all that went on, but big enough so that the toughest bandit outfit wouldn’t attack us — Shag Donovan’s boys weren’t bandits but town toughs, a far stupider breed.

That first day in Humber Town, after accepting us into membership Pa Rumley took off to look after this and that, and I recall Bo

Rambler life followed a rhythm like that, of swift and obvious shifts from tension to calm. Bo

22

Correction: the Universal Tithing Law, which took an a