We Went on making plans. It seems to be a human necessity, a way of writing your name on a blank wall that may not be there. I can’t very well condemn it, for even nowadays I’m always after doing it myself. We planned we’d go a few miles beyond that village and then strike out boldly on the Northeast Road. I with my real Moha accent would do most of the talking, we planned, but we’d all need to be rehearsed in a good story.
Jed and Vilet, we decided, had better be man and wife — they would be truly anyhow when they got to Vairmant. We four were all quite different in looks, but Vilet claimed she could see a kind of resemblance between Sam’s face and mine, and was so positive about it I began to see it myself in spite of the obvious differences — Sam stringy and tall with a thin nose, I stocky and short with a puggy one. “It’s mouth and forehead,” Vilet said, “and the eyes, some. Davy is blue-eyed but it’s a darkish blue, and yourn mightn’t look too different, Sam, if you was redheaded.”
“Got called Sandy when I was young,” he said. “It wa’n’t never a real red. If I was a real red-top like young Jackson, likely I could’ve busted my head through stone walls some better’n I have, last thirty-odd yeahs.”
“Now, Sam,” said Jed, “it don’t seem to me, honest it don’t, that God’d give a man the power to put his head through a stone wall except in a manner of speaking, like. Unless of course the wall was crumbly, or—”
“It was a manner of speaking,” said Sam.
After kicking it around a good deal, we worked it out that Sam would be my uncle and Vilet’s cousin. Jed had a brother in Vairmant who’d just recently died — born in Vairmant himself but moved away when young to Chengo off in western Moha. This brother bequeathed Jed the family farm and we were all going there to work it together. As for me, my parents died of smallpox when I was a baby, and my dear uncle took me in, being a bachelor himself, in fact a loner by trade. When my Pa and Ma died we were living in Katskil, although originally a Moba family, from Kanhar, an important family, damn it.
“I dunno,” said Jed. “It don’t seem just right.”
“A manner of speaking, Jackson. Besides, I didn’t mean them hightoned Loomises from Kanhar was aristocrats — just a solid freeman family with a few Misters. Like my own Uncle Jeshurun — Kanhar Town Council give him a Mister, and why? Account the taxes he paid on the old brewery is why, the way it was in the family couple-three generations—”
“Wine is a mocker,” said Jed. “I don’t want you should go imagining things like breweries.”
“Damn-gabble it, man,” Sam said, “I’m merely telling you what they done, no use telling a story like this’n if it don’t sound like facts. I didn’t start the durn brewery, more b’ token if you ever hear tell of making wine in a brewery I want to know. It was great-gran’ther sta’ted it, understand, and she run along like a beaut till my Uncle Jeshurun, him with the wooden leg, took to drinking up the profits.”
Jed studied away at it, not happy.
“You mean he done that too in a manner of speaking?”
“He sure as hell did.”
“I mean, it just don’t seem to me, Sam, that people are going to believe it. About drinking up a whole brewery. He couldn’t do it.”
“I can see you didn’t know my Uncle Jeshurun. Leg was hollow, Jackson. Old sumbitch’d fill it up at the brewery after a long drunken work-day, take it home and get plastered, carry on like crazy all night long. He didn’t just die neither, not my Uncle Jeshurun. He blowed. Leanin’ over to blow out a candle, forgot whichaway to blow being drunk at the time, or rather he was never sober. Breathed in ’stead of out, all that alcohol in him went whoom — Jesus and Abraham, Mister, not enough left of the old pot-walloper to swear by. Piece of his old wooden leg come down into a cow pasture a mile away. Killed a calf. My Aunt Clotilda said it was a judgment — onto my uncle, I mean. Still, if it hadn’t happened he znight’ve had to leave town.”
15
We started the day after the clothes were finished; we may all have been afraid of coming to like that cave too much. At least Sam and I felt — without ever saying so — that we would always be in some way on the move; and for Jed and Vilet the farm in Vairmant colored the future with the warmth of a lamp.
It’s odd how little thought we gave the war, after being out of touch with the world more than three months. We wondered, and made some idle talk of it, but until we were on the move again, and the days were flowing out of June into the golden immensity of midsummer, we felt no urgent need to learn what the armies had done while we were so much at peace. They could have passed and repassed on the Northeast Road, Skoar could have fallen, we’d never have known it.
The border wars of that time and place were a far cry from what I saw and experienced of war later on in Nuin. In the Moha-Katskil war of 317 I don’t suppose there were ever more than two thousand men involved in a battle: mostly feinting and maneuvering, armies shoving for position along the few important roads, avoiding the wilderness as much as they could; the forest ambush those Katskil men tried outside Skoar was unusual. As it happened, I saw no more of that particular war. It was settled by negotiation in September. Katskil ceded a trilling port and a few square miles of ground on the Hudson Sea in return for the town of Seneca and a thirty-mile strip of territory that gave them a long-desired access to the Ontara Sea. Brian VI of Katskil had other smart reasons for demanding those treaty terms — I didn’t appreciate this until long later, when I was with Dion in Nuin and getting my own inside view of high-level politics. That thirty-mile strip cut off Moha from any land approach to the western wilderness; so if that unknown, probably rich region is ever tapped by land routes it will be a matter between Katskil and Penn — Moha needn’t bother.
When we left our cave I was concerned with the more ancient war of human beings against other creatures who desire to hold a place on earth. I felt, superstitiously, that we had been having it too easy. In our hunting and fishing while we stayed at the cave we’d encountered nothing more dangerous than a few snakes. Once a puma started out of the brush ahead of Vilet and me and took off in almost comic terror. One night we smelled a bear, who might have got troublesome if he could have climbed after our supplies. It was only a black of course, as we knew from the prints we found in the morning. The great red bear is so scarce in southern Moha one never really expects to see him. North of Moha Water he is plentiful enough, one of the chief reasons why that great triangle of mountain country bounded by Moha Water and the Lorenta Sea remains mostly unexplored.
I find it strange, in reading Old-Time books, to notice what unconcern the people of that age felt about wild beasts, who were scarce and timid then, overwhelmed by human power and crowding and incredible weapons. Man in that time truly seemed to be master of the earth. In our day, a few hundred years later, I suppose he’s still the most intelligent animal at large, even still likely to succeed if he ever learns how to quit cutting his brother’s throat, but he is under a slight cloud. We might become masters of the world again, but perhaps we ought to watch out for a certain cleverness I’ve noticed in the forepaws of rats and mice and squirrels. If they’d develop speech and start using a few easy tools, say knives and clubs, it wouldn’t be long before they were explaining the will of God and rigging elections.
Gunpowder is forbidden by law and religion,[16] and this may be just as well, since guns to make use of it are forbidden also by lack of steel, lack of a technology capable of designing and making them, and nowadays by a lack of belief that such instruments ever existed. Since a vast amount of fiction was produced in Old Time, it is wonderful how the Church today can explain away anything unwelcome in the surviving fragments of the old literature by calling it fiction.
16
The prohibition appears thus in the Book of Universal Law, 19th edition (the latest I believe) published at Nuber in 322: “It is and shall be utterly and forever forbidden on pain of death by whatever method the Ecclesiastical Court of the district shall decide, to manufacture, describe, discuss, create any written reference to, or in any manner whatsoever make use of the substance vulgarly known as Gunpowder, or any other substance that may by competent authorities of the Church be reasonably suspected of containing atoms.”