Men hate and loathe black wolf, who in spite of his fearsome strength and shrewdness has some taint of the sneak and coward. I never heard anyone mention hating or loathing brown tiger, though when I was with Runiley’s Ramblers I heard of a secret cult that worships him. Pa Rumley introduced me to one of them in Conicut, a friendly quackpot who let me listen in on one of their minor celebrations. They dabble in alchemy but apparently not witchcraft, and cook up a type of love potion for their own orgies that’s said to work, though I never saw it proved. Mighty is he — so began their invocation — who walks like the mist at night, mighty indeed is the golden and well-intentioned one, the merciful and all-forgiving Eye of Fire! It was damned impressive, hearing people pray to a creature that actually existed: I enjoyed it, and was willing to overlook a few turns of expression that I felt to be slightly on the inaccurate side.
In my willow tree the mosquitos chewed me all to hell—
Do you mind a little more brain-scratching? The thought of mosquitos just now woke up the memory of a golden hot day in the pine-woods park outside Old City, a few years ago, when Nickie and I had an argument. She said mosquitos are brave, or they wouldn’t return under slaps for a mere gulp of gore. I said they’re stupid, because when the slap is clearly on the way they linger for one more swallow, and then they’re too flat to enjoy it. They linger so’s to gamble for glory, S’s she. Stupid, s’s I, or they’d wear armor over the soft spots like beetles, but they don’t wear anything, and to show her what I meant by a soft spot I chewed her here and there. Flinging me down and pounding my head on the pine needles, she asked me did I mean those mosquitos were atchilly lewd and nude? I rolled her over. Look at ’em, s’s I. Then she felt I should take her clothes off for the mor’l purpose of showing ’em how dreadful it is to be nude as a bug, and I thought she’d better do the same for me because we didn’t want her being dreadful all alone if the going got tough. She also undertook to slap the ones that bit me whenever I was preoccupied with helping her to be dreadful, and I undertook vice versa which is interesting in itself. We agreed further to keep count of slaps, thus determining who the bugs thought had the richest flavor. In order to get undressed we’d been absentmindedly chasing each other around trees and over rocks and rolling about considerably, which takes time, and so had forgotten what the original argument was, but we thought the flavor thing might be it or anyhow just as good. When we were lying face to face engaged in some operation or other, I remembered the first argument, and what happened then proved that mosquitos are stupid: they felt that the time was favorable for unpunished biting, and this in itself was lucid thinking, but they never saw we each had a hand free to slap with.
Nickie of course is impossible to beat in any learned discussion on a high plane. She said, the little twirp, that those mosquitos were dying out of heroic generosity and devotion, because they saw how much we enjoyed slapping each other, and so yielded up their lives in altruism. This kind of good Will, S’s she, is a sign of the vast courage that goes with towering intellect. Look at Charlemagne, S’s she, or some of those other Old-Time ninety-day wonders like St. George and his everloving cherry tree, or poor Julius Caesar dividing his gall in three parts so as not to offend his friends, Romans, countrymen and other types of etcetera.
Before I fell asleep in that willow my mind was troubled in another way, as it might have been by a glimpse of fire seen as redness on distant cloud. War. It was the knowledge, intruding on me now that I could rest with a trace of safety, that the Katskil war had become a fact, a thing darkly and truly happening.
People said there would always be war; they didn’t say why. Of course as a child I could see what a grand thing it would be to perish gloriously, and first to rush about cracking the heads and spilling the guts of wicked joes who happened to be the Enemy. The army as represented by the garrison soldiers of Skoar wasn’t exactly glorious, which may have given me some early doubts. The men were let out on pass in small groups; even the orphanage priests with all the power and authority of the Church behind them used to wince and fret when a knot of soldiers went roaring by in the street, skunk-drunk, howling dirt talk, pissing where they pleased, spoiling for rape or a free fight. The policers tried to keep up with them, steering them as quickly as possible into the cheap bars and cat-houses and then herding them back to their barracks… I had heard of navies too, but never had seen anything to reduce their glory. Outrigger fleets, I heard tell, carrying built-in crossbows, fire-throwers, and captains who had a habit of dying on deck with words of immortal bravery. The fleets had born the brunt of the effort in a war sixty years earlier when, as our Moha teacher-priests put it, Moha reluctantly allowed Levannon her independence. Reluctantly allowed, my celebrated hinder parts! — Moha got the holy godelpus beaten out of her, and hanging on to the Levannon country would have been like a farmer in the west forty trying to keep in touch with an eastbound bull.
It was over my head in those years; now I realize how hard and patiently the Holy Murcan Church worked as an umpire in wartime. Being committed to a policy of lovingkindness (within reason of course) the Church took no part in war except to provide chaplains for the armed forces and facilities for the military type of prayer — which putS a slight Strain on monotheism at times. Behind the scenes, however, the top brass of Church and State would be watching for a suitable moment when both sides were wearied out enough to negotiate. When that time came the Church would supervise, examine any treaty proposed, and approve it so long as it wasn’t too openly hoggish. For the nations after all are not merely great democracies but Murcan democracies — that is, united in the faith though not in politics. The Church is fond of calling herself Mother Church, enjoying the role of skirted arbiter in the smeary bloody squabbles of her children (whom she didn’t beget, but never mind that) and I guess she can truly claim to be the savior and protectress of modern civilization, such as it is.[13]
Since those days I have learned so much — from good stern Mam Laura of Rumley’s Ramblers who made me solid with reading and writing, from Nickie above all, and from the years when Nickie and I were Dion’s aides in his effort as Regent of Nuin to bring some enlightenment into the mental murk of his times — so much more than I ever learned in childhood that it is difficult to sort out what I knew then from later knowledge. It was in my boyhood, at the tavern, that I heard an old man, a traveler, describe the sack of Nassa in Levannon, a city notoriously sinful and a hatcher of heresies, in a war Levannon fought against Bershar soon after winning her independence from Moha. The Bershar hill-men laid siege to the city for fifty days. According to the teller of the tale, this was a case where the Church took sides almost openly, encouraging devout communities in other lands to send Bershar material support. It caused some angry heretical mutterings here and there. When Nassa surrendered at last, the survivors were disarmed, turned loose and hunted down like woodchucks or rats, and then the whole city was set to the torch — “for the glory of God,” as the Bershar commander put it. His remark was unpopular, especially in the Low Countries, where aid to Bershar had upped the taxes. Church dignitaries were greatly shocked at this “misinterpretation” of the ecclesiastical position, and the Prince Cardinal of Lomeda was obliged to come out on the steps of the Cathedral and be shocked in public before a grumbling crowd would quit and disperse.
13
According to a famous paragraph in the Doctrine of Necessary Evils, war is a periodic outlet for man’s “natural” violence, unavoidable till the second coming of Abraham; thus it is a duty of the Church to allow a “limited amount” of violence, under proper control. It is interesting to note that this idea of the inevitability of violence was old in Old Time — not to say moldy — and the proponents of it were as well able then as now to overlook the history of some nations that had passed through many generations without war, to say nothing of the multitude of private lives that reject violence in favor of reason and charity.