“Hush, darling, hush! They’ll hear.”
“I hate the whole mis’ble horny lot of you — you dirty lech, you boy — so proud of that stupid ugly thing and then all’s you do is run off, damn you—”
I closed her mouth with mine, feeling her need of that, and pushed her back against the wall. Her fingers were tight in my hair, my knife annoying where it hung between us, but we were locked in the love-seizure again, I deep in her and not much caring if I hurt her a little. She responded as if she wanted to swallow me alive. By good fortune my mouth still held hers closed when she needed to scream. Exhausted afterward, and desperate to be gone, I said: “I’ll come back for you when I can. I love you, Emmia.”
“Yes, Davy, Spice, yes, when you can, when it’s safe for you, dearest.” And what I heard in her voice was mostly relief. In both our voices. “I’ll wait for you,” she said, believing it. “Always I’ll love you,” she said, believing it, which made it true at the time.
“I’ll come back.”
I’ve wondered how soon she understood we’d both been lying, mostly for decent reasons. Maybe she knew it as soon as I was climbing down the vine. Her face, like a faded moon, vanished from the window before I turned away down the street. Nothing in life had ever drawn me with such wondrous power as the unknown road ahead of me in the dark.
9
A thickening fog was turning moonlight to milkiness. As I passed the pillory in the green I said under my breath: “I had her twice, once in bed and once against the wall.” Wonderful, as if no one had ever laid a woman before. True, the small sound of my own voice scared me, and I continued along the empty street in a more slinky style, like a cat retiring from a creamery under trimmed sail with a cargo in the hold. But I still felt proud, and knew also an unfamiliar charity toward the whole big fat world and everyone in it except maybe Father Clance.
As I passed the baiting-pit I heard the moan of a bear who’d soon be used up in the Spring Festival — odd how human beings often celebrate the good weather by hurting something. I could do the beai no good but I think he did me some, reminding me to taper off a mite on my encompassing love for all mankind, who if they caught me would clobber me as thoroughly as they’d clobbered him. I went on, alert again, to a black alley that would bring me out near the spot where I’d left the dead guard lying.
I felt unseen doorways. A lifeless thing slithered under my feet. Dog, pigling, cat — the Scavengers’ Guild would dispose of whatever it was as soon as it annoyed the policers. In later years, when I was living with Nickie in Old City of Nuin where the poorest streets are kept clean, it would have made me angry. But I was Skoar bred and born: in Moha people below the aristocracy took scant pride in their way of living, claiming that dirt and decay held down the taxes — though I don’t think the tax collector ever lived who couldn’t see through a six-foot pile of rubble to the tender gleam of a hidden dime. When my foot slipped I merely grumbled: “Ah, call the Mourners!”
In Skoar that remark was so routine it hardly rated as a joke. The Mourners’ Guild is a Moha specialty, a gang of professional singers and wailers who close in on a family that’s had a mue-birth to create an uproar of the sacred type. The slave woman old Judd was required to live with bore a mue, a blotched eyeless thing — I saw it carried away wrapped in a rag. The caterwauling demanded by law went on two days. It would have been five for a freeman family, eight to ten for the upper nobility — and no one no matter how blue his blood could break away from the festivities more than just long enough to go to the backhouse and return. The object is to appease the spirit of the mue after the priest has disposed of the body, and to remind the survivors that we are all miserable sinners totally corrupt in the sight of God. It’s called planned reverence.
The Guild could be hired for a normal funeral, but charged custom rates for that. At the burial of a mue in Moha, the family was obliged to pay the Guild only a nominal fee, hardly more than a seventh of a year’s earnings, plus about the same amount for a casket the neighbors would consider adequate. For slaves like Judd the town itself met the expense of the Guild’s fee and a nice basswood box, charging it off to community good will, one of the generous things that made a Moha citizen point with pride.
At the end of the alley I saw a flicker of torchlight by the stockade, distorted in the fog, and heard voices. They’d found him.
Policers, talking softly. I assumed they’d found my luck-charm too — luck, hell. I sneaked off the other way till the curve of Stockade Street blocked out their light; then I crossed to the palings and wriggled over. Unfamiliar with this section of the palisade, I tumbled into crackling brush. Dogs would have caught the noise, but the policers had none with them, yet.
A homed owl in the mountain woods was crying his noises of death and hunger. I heard a bull alligator roar, in a swamp that covered a few acres east of the city — old Thundergut was useful like the bear, reminding me I’d do well to pass through water and confuse the policer dogs. By daylight they’d have them around outside the stockade near where the guard had died, to cast for a scent, and they might follow mine as far as my cave. I must recover my horn and be long gone before then.
One brook ran between Skoar and my cave, a quick trivial stream. It would not kill the scent — on the way down I had merely stepped across it. To confuse the dogs I must find something better beyond the cave, in the morning. But tonight the brook might help me part way. It flowed under the stockade near where I was now, and out again into the alligator’s swamp. I might follow it a mile upstream to a willow I knew I could identify in the dark, so I’d be that much further along at first-light.
I inched out of the brush and across a grassy area. The fog enforced a dismal slowness: in ten minutes I walked a thousand years, and heard the wet monotone of water when I had given up hope of it. A big frog ploshed from blackness to blackness unseen.
Struggling upstream, I imagined every danger crowding me. No alligators in shallow upland water, but there could be moccasin snakes. I could lose footing and brain myself. If black wolf caught my smell he could take me before I freed my knife. A swarm of mosquitos did find me.
In time the owl stopped hooting, and the alligator back there in the swamp must have caught up with what he wanted, for I ceased to hear him. When at last I no longer saw any milkiness of moonlight in the fog above me I knew I was under forest cover, where moonlight was always a some-time thing. Fog was still dense; I smelled it and felt the dampness on my flesh. My fingers constantly out exploring touched willow-leaves after another long while. I groped up the twigs to small branches, to larger, finally encountering one whose shape I remembered. Then I could climb, knowing the tree for a friend. High up, I took off my loin-rag, passed it around the trunk and knotted it at my midriff, the hell with comfort. Brown tiger is too heavy to climb.
I have seen him few times in my life, but I can observe the image behind closed eyes at any time, the vast tawny body cloudily striped with darker gold, fifteen feet from nose to tail-tip, paws broad as a chair-seat and eyes that send back firelight not green but red.
A passage in the Book of John Barth mentions a certain wild-eyed crank who, when the last Old-Time war was in the last phases of threatening, visited the zoos in several cities and turned loose some of the beasts at night, choosing only the most dangerous: cobras, African buffalo, Manchurian tigers. He sometimes murdered the night watchman or other attendant to steal the keys, and was finally killed himself, Barth says, by a gorilla he was releasing. He must have felt he was paying back the human race for this and that. Probably no beast ever disliked us as hotly as disgruntled members of our own breed.