The republic of Moha , where I was born in a whorehouse that was not one of the best, is a nation of small lonely farms and stockaded villages in the lake and forest and grassland country north of the Katskil Mountains and the rugged nation that bears the mountains’ name. One day Katskil may conquer all Moha, I suppose. I was born in one of Moha’s three cities, Skoar. It lies in a hollow of the hills almost on the line where the Katskil border ran at that time.
In Skoar life goes by the seasons and the Corn Market trade. Wilderness is a green flood washing up to the barrier of the city’s rather poor stockade, except where the brush has been cleared to make the West and the Northeast Roads a little safer for their double streams of men, mule-wagons, soldiers, pilgrims, tinkers, wanderers.
There’s a raw splendor to those roads, except when wartime makes folk more than ever afraid of travel and open places. In good times the roads reek of horse, ox-team, men, of the passage of chained bears and wolves brought for sale to the city baiting-pits; under sunshine and free winds the stink is nothing to trouble you. You may see anything on the go in the daytime. Maybe a great man, even a Governor, riding alone, or a holy character on a pilgrimage — you know it’s that, most likely a journey to the marketplace in Nuber, where Abraham is believed to have died on the wheel, because the man is stark naked except for his crown of briers and the silver wheel hung at his neck. He never looks to left or right when people edge up close shyly touching his head or hands or testicles to share his sanctity and heal themselves of private troubles. Or it may be some crowd of street-singers and tumblers, with whiteface monkeys chittering on their shoulders and caged parrots quarking horny talk.
Once in a while you’ll see the gay canvas-covered mulewagons of a Rambler gang with sexy pictures and odd designs all over the sides, and you know that wherever they stop there’ll be music, crazy entertainments, good balltickling sideshows, fortunetelling, fine honest swindling, and news from far places that a man can trust. Rumors come and go, and a Rambler considers it a duty to cheat you in a horsetrade or such-like slicker than a gyppo, but the Ramblers also take pride in bearing nothing but true — tales from the distant lands, and the people know it, and value them for it so highly that few governments dare clamp down on their impudence, randiness, free-living ways. I know; I never forget I was with Rumley’s Ramblers for the best years of my life before I found Nickie.
Another thing you might notice would be a fancy litter with drawn curtains, the bearers matched for height, moving in skillful broken step so that the expensive female stuff inside — might even be a Governor’s personal whore — needn’t stick her head out and blast the bearers for clumsy damned idle sumbitches. Or there might be a batch of slaves chained tandem being marched for sale at the Skoar market, or a drove of cattle for the slaughterhouse distracting the whole road with their loud stupidity and oneriness — those steers don’t want to go, not anywhere, but the road pushes them along its gut, a mindless earthworm swallowing, spilling out at the anal end and reaching for more.
The roads are quiet at night. Brown tiger and black wolf may use them then — who’s to say, unless it’s a night-caught traveler who’ll see nothing more afterward?
Farming is heartbreak work in Moha as everywhere. The stock gives birth to as many mues there as anywhere; the toll taken by the wild killers is high, the labor is sweat and disappointment grinding a man to old age in the forties, few farmers ever able to afford a slave. The people get along though, as I’ve seen human beings do in worse places than Moha. The climate is not as hot and malarial as Penn. There’s trade in timber and saddlehorses; manufacture too, though it can’t match the industry of Katskil or Nuin. A barrel-factory in Skoar turned out coffins as a sideline and prospered — Yankee ingenuity, they called it. They scrape along, the same poor snotty human race, all of a muddle and on the go, as they’ve always done and maybe always will until the sun sweats icicles, which won’t be next Wednesday.
A maybe. Now that I know the books, I can’t forget how this same human race must have survived the Years of Confusion by a narrow squeak, the merest happen-so.
The other two big centers of my homeland are Moha City and Kanhar, walled cities in the northwest on Moha Water, a narrow arm of the sea. Eighteen-foot earthwork walls — that’s enough to stop brown tiger’s leap, and it makes Skoar with its puny twelve-foot log palisade a very cheap third. The great Kanhar wharves can take outriggers up to thirty tons — the big vessels, mostly from Levanflon, that trade at all ports. Moha City is the capital, with the President’s palace, and Kanhar the largest — twenty thousand not counting the slaves, who might make it twenty-five. Moha law reasons that if you count them like human beings you may end by treating them the same way, exposing a great democracy to revolution and ruin.
Now I think of it, every nation I know of except Nuber is a great democracy. The exception, Nuber the Holy City, is not really a nation anyway, just a few square miles of sanctified topsoil facing the Hudson Sea, enclosed on its other three sides by some of Katskil’s mountains. It is the spiritual capital of the world, in other words the terrestrial site of that heavenly contraption the Holy Murcan Church . Nobody dwells there except important Church officials, most of them with living quarters in the mighty Nuber Cathedral, and about a thousand common folk to take care of their mundane needs, from sandal-thongs and toilet rags to fair wines and run-of-the-mill prosties. Katskil country doesn’t produce fine wines nor highly skilled bed-athletes — they have to be imported, often from Penn.
Katskil itself is a kingdom. Nuin is a Commonwealth, with a hereditary Presidency of absolute powers. Levannon is a kingdom, but governed by a Board of Trade. Lomeda and the other Low Countries are ecclesiastical states, the boss panjandrum being called a Prince Cardinal. Rhode, Vairmant and Penn are republics; Conicut’s a kingdom; Bershar is mostly a mess. But they’re all great democracies, and I hope this will grow clearer to you one day when the ocean is less wet. Oh, and far south or southwest of Penn is a nation named Misipa which is an empire, but they admit no visitors,[1] living behind an earthwork wall that is said to run hundreds of miles through tropical jungle, and destroying all northern coastal shipping — by the use of gunpowder no less, tossed on the decks by clever catapult devices. Since the manufacture of gunpowder is most strictly forbidden by the Holy Murcan Church as a part of the Original Sin of Man, these Misipans are manifest heathens, so nobody goes there except by accident, nobody knows whether this empire is also a democracy, and to the best of my information nobody cares to the extent of a fart in a hurricane.
Fifty miles south of Kanhar lies Skoar. There I was born, in a house that, while not high-class, was no mere crib either. I saw it later, when old enough to be observant. I remember the red door, red curtains, brass phallus-lamps, the V-mark over the front door that meant it was licensed by the city government in accordance with the Church’s famous Doctrine of Necessary Evils. What showed it wasn’t high-class was that the girls could lounge on the front steps with thighs spread or a breast bulging out of a blouse, or strip at the windows hollering invitations. A high-class house generally shows only the V-mark, the red door, and an uncommon degree of outward peace and quiet — the well-heeled customers prefer it that way. I’m not overfussy myself — so far as I’m concerned, sex can be rowdy or brimful of moonlight: so long as it’s sex, and nobody’s getting hurt, I like it.
1
Davy means, no northern visitors. They have some commerce with the region known in Old Time as South America . In 296 a handful of refugees from some Misipan political tempest reached Penn overland, and gave this and other information before they died of malaria, infected wounds and dysentery. They spoke an English so barbarous that there has been argument ever since over much that they tried to say. I learned of this by listening in as a small boy on semi-formal conversations between my grandfather President Dion II and the Penn ambassador Wilam Skoonmaker. My poor uncle, later Morgan III, held me in his lap while he took notes on Skoonmaker’s stately talk and I admired his embroidered pants.