I had to hug Nickie awake this morning and tell her about varieties of time. She listened briefly, slid her hand over my mouth, and remarked: “One moment, my faun, my unusual chowderhead, my peculiar sweet-stuff so named because time is far, far too pressing to employ any such dad-gandered and long-syllabled and so deplorably erotic word as beloved, my singular and highly valued long-horned trouble-shooter, before we discuss anything that difficult we ought to wrestle (and don’t worry about the baby) to decide who has to go to the galley and fetch us breakfast in b — “I won. Only woman I ever heard of who’s just as wonderful at it in the morning. So eventually she had to go fetch breakfast, and returned to our cabin with Dion trailing.
Not that she needed help in carrying the jerk meat and poor-jo biscuits, but I was pleased to see she’d loaded Dion down with a teapot and a jug of cranberry juice — we have to drink it, by his orders and Captain Barr’s. We have other antiscorbutics, salt cabbage for instance and sauerkraut; these we face at mid-day and suppertime with what courage we can summon. I remained respectfully in bed, Nickie slid back under the blanket with me, so the late Regent of Nuin had no place for his highborn rump except the floor, or my built-in desk seat which was obscured by some of Nickie’s clothes — anyhow the seat is too low for Dion’s long legs. He said: “Mis’ble lazy crumbs. I’ve been fishing since dawn, working-type jo.”
“That’s nothing,” I said. “I’ve been thinking.”
“Catch anything, either of you?”
“Nay, Miranda — tied down the line and went back to sleep. Besides, Mr. Wilbraham was watching and it threw me off. Hate to have a donkey look over my shoulder.”
I out with it, about varieties of time and story.
“Direct narrative’s the main thing,” Dion said.
“Why,” said Nickie, “the story of the voyage is clearly the best, because I’m in it already. Won’t be in the mainstream till he’s struggled up to his eighteenth year.”
Dion grunted, in one of his lost, abstracted moods. He is forty-three; our tested and satisfying friendship can bridge the gap of totally different birth and upbringing more easily than the gap of age — how could I ever quite know how the world looks to a man who’s been in it fifteen years longer than I?… The darkness of his skin was a mark of distinction in Nuin. Morgan I, Morgan the Great who stirred up such a king-size gob of history two hundred years ago, is said to have been dark as a walnut. Nickie’s a deep tan with a rosy flush. I never met any of the Nuin nobility as blond as I am, though some approach it — the Princess of Hannis was a blazing redhead. If I understood the old books a little better or if more of them had survived the holy burnings, I suppose I could find the characteristics of the varied races of Old Time in modern people — an idle occupation, I’d say…
“You’re both spooking up the wrong tree,” I said, “because all the different kinds of time are important. My problem is how to go from one to another with that utter perfection of grace which my wife finds so characteristic of me.” Captain Barr’s cat, Mam Humphrey, walked in just then, tail up, very pregnant, and looking for a soft place to sleep out the morning; she jumped on our bunk, knowing a good thing. “Historical time for instance. You must admit there’s a case to be made for history in moderation.”
“Oh,” Dion said, “I suppose it’s useful material for stuffing textbooks. Lately we’ve lived rather more than a bellyful of it.”
Nickie was getting maudlin, kissing Mam Humphrey’s black and white head and mumbling something Dion didn’t catch about two girls in the same fix. As it happened we didn’t tell Dion of the pregnancy till later in the day.
“Still are,” I suggested. “This voyage is history.”
“And the fog still deep,” Nickie said. “Oh — when I was getting the grub Jim Loman told me he saw a goldfinch skim by just when it was getting light. Do they migrate?”
“Some.” I was remembering Moha. “Most stay the winter, anyway September’s too early for migration.”
“When the fog is gone,” she said, “and the sun discovers us, let it be an island with none there but the birds and a few furry harmless things, the goldflnches no one could want to kill, the way they dip and rise, dip and rise — isn’t that the rhythm of living by the way? A drop and then a lightness and a soaring? Nay, don’t speak a word of my fancy unless you be liking it.”
Dion said: “It could be the mainland of a nation with no kindness for strangers.”
“Damn that prince,” she said. “I set free a small thing too large for my own head, whang goes the arrow of his common sense and down comes my bird in flight that was all the time na’ but an ambitious chicken.”
“Why, I’m liking that goldfinch as much as thou, Miranda, but I’m a thousand years older, the way I used to be the simulacrum of a ruler, and that means to contend with folly — compromise with it — after a while the heart sickens as thou knowest. Nothing strange about my uncle going mad. A good weak man, I think, gone into hiding, into a shell his mind built for him. What we saw — the fat thing on the floor drooling and masturbating with dolls, that was the shell. I suppose the good weak man died inside it after a while, the shell continuing to exist.”
The thing had to be gelded, before the Church would allow it to go on existing in secret and agree to the polite fiction of “ifi health” to spare the presidential family the disgrace of having produced a brain-mue — which could have caused a dangerous public uproar. The priest who castrated him told Dion that after the first shock, Morgan III seemed to recover a moment of clarity and said plainly: “Happy the man who can no longer beget rulers!”
“Hiding,” Nickie asked, “from the follies he feared he might himself commit?”
“Something like that. As for me, I suppose I shall be something to frighten good Nuin children for centuries, as the Christians of Old Time used to rattle the bones of the Emperor Julian miscalled the Apostate.”
“Write Nuin’s history thyself,” said Nickie, “outside of Nuin. How else could it be done anyway? — certainly not in the shadow of the Church.”
“Why,” said Dion, thinking it over — “why, I might do that…”
“We’ve thought we wanted to find mainland,” I said, “but I can go along with Nick — why not an island? Does the Captain still say we’re near what the map calls the Azores?”
“Yes. Of course our calculation of longitude is off — the best clocks already three minutes in disagreement. Made by the Timekeepers’ Guild of Old City, best in the known world, and by Old-Time standards what are those craftsmen? Moderately fair beginners, gifted clodhoppers.”
I began clacking then, instructing Dion for a while on the political management of an island colony of intelligent Heretics. I have that fault. In a different world — and if I didn’t spend so much time more profitably, making music and tumbling my rose-lipped girl, I think I might have become a respectable teacher of snotnoses.
Later this morning we were busy. Captain Barr ordered out the longboat to try towing the Morning Star clear of the fog, and we went on a snailpace for some hours. He quit the attempt when the men were tired, though the lead was still finding no bottom. He was sure he smelled land through the fog-damp, and I smelled it too. That land could rise sheer and sudden out of deep water. Tomorrow, if the fog gives us fifty yards or better of visibility, he may try the towing again.
The stillness troubles us. We listen for breakers or the slap of water against stone.
Nickie sleeps; I am suspended in my own mist of memory and reflection and ignorance. How truly is a man the master of his own course?
The unknown drives us. We could not know we were to lose the war in Nuin. How should I have known I would find and covet the golden horn? But within my small range of knowledge and understanding, driven by chance but still human, still brainy and passionate and stubborn and no more of a coward than my brothers, it’s for me to say where I go.