Our ancient map shows shipping and air lines converging at this obvious way-station between Europe and the Americas. We know there had to be developed harbors, airports, towns.
No bomb would have fallen here in what John Barth calls the “one-day explosion.” Very few fell anywhere, he says, and those were later called “accidents” by the surviving governments — he adds that the obliteration of twenty-odd million New Yorkers and Muscovites could perhaps be considered a “fairly major accident.” Perhaps in these islands destruction came from the plagues that followed the war. John Barth wonders in his pages how many of the plagues were directly man-made and how many the result of viral or bacterial mutations, and comes to the reasonable conclusion that nobody can ever know. Or it may have been, here in the islands, the longer, quiet, almost orderly extinction of sterility, natural deaths exceeding the scanty births, in a population so long used to being taken care of by advanced technology that it could no longer look after itself, until eventually, somewhere, an old person died among the weeds with no one to scratch out a grave.
After all, in our own homelands, many non-human species died out from one cause or another. I have never seen a bluebird.
Those pilgrims were a pleasant crowd, in the care of a gentle willowy priest, He had long yellow hair that would be ready for a bath any day, and a homely mild face. His nose appeared to taper in the wrong direction because the tip was small and the space between his milky blue eyes quite wide, so the total effect was mousy. I liked him. When a man’s wearing a floor-length shapeless priest’s robe it’s hard to tell whether he’s tiptoeing, but Father Fay did seem to be, anyway there was a tittupy up-anddownness in his walk, and a flowing lift of his pretty white hands at each step, and most of the time a bright mousy deliberating smile. The pilgrims all respected him, even including the ten-year-old boy Jerry, who gave Father Fay a bad time not from any disrespect but just because ten-year-olds are like that.
I noticed Jerry even before we’d entered the Black Prince. The pilgrims were coming away from the church as we approached the inn, an orderly line with Father Fay doodle-diddling along at the head of it, and Jerry had somehow managed to get down at the tail without his Pa or Ma noticing. So what does he do but fall further back and cut monkeyshines in his pretty white Pilgrim’s robe, a wavy warplume sticking up at the back of his head that the angels themselves couldn’t comb flat. First he sticks out his rear and goes humping along imitating a poor old lady who’s one of the pilgrims; then he straightens, and hikes his robe all the way to his navel, and proceeds bare-ass in a fine rendering of Father Fay’s tiptoe, with a heavenly smile gleaming among the freckles and his little pecker flipping up at every step like a tiny flag in the wind. Terrible sacrilege, but I remember even Jed couldn’t help chuckling.
They were bound for Nuber the Holy City, like almost every pilgrim group you were likely to meet west of the Hudson Sea; their all-white garments along with Father Fay’s black would identify them as far off as you could see them, and no soldiers of either side would dare trouble them.
After Sam and I turned in and tried to settle ourselves for sleeping, as Jed and Vilet were doing in their room, I heard Jerry getting a bath. His Ma had evidently insisted on the inn help’s bringing up a tin tub and water, just for that purpose. He was enjoying it, and raising all kinds of hell, roaring and splashing and making damn-fool remarks — you’d have thought the poor lady was trying to wash a bandit king. Then Pa came up from downstairs; there was a moment’s fearful quiet, a fine solid whack on a wet backside, and from there on Jerry was being an awful good boy.
But as for Sam and me, after the first few attempts at sleep the cots were simply too war-torn and bloody for any use. We gave up and spread well-shaken blankets on the floor, hoping the hostile forces would lose enough time searching to give us a little rest.
The scent of tiger must have been thick in the air that night before we heard him roar. The heavy midsummer dark was trilling and jangling with the noise of insects and frogs, but I heard few other voices — no fox or wildcat was sending any messages abroad. At the inn, with other thick smells around me, I could not pick out the tiger’s reek, but I felt his presence. I saw him repeatedly as he had looked on his rock in the late sunlight, and I knew he was out there in the dark, perhaps not far away.
When he did speak at last, even the insect noises briefly hushed, as if each witless clamoring thing had winced in the shell of a tiny body feeling a What-was-that?
His roar is blunt, short, harsh. It does not seem very loud, but has intense carrying power. It is never prolonged and he does not soon repeat it. Maybe he roars in order to frighten the game into a betraying shudder. The roar is too all-penetrating, too deep in the bass, too much a pain and quivering in your own marrow, to give you a true knowledge of his location. When I heard him that night he could have been half a mile away, or in the village itself strolling down one of the black streets in massive calm and readiness to destroy. I stole to the window, silently as though even inside this building a noise of my own could endanger me. Sam’s voice came out of the dark: “Sounds like the old sumbitch a’n’t too far off.” I heard him shift and brace up on his elbow, listening to the night as I was.
The tiger did not speak again, but in the next room beyond the closed door I heard Vilet suddenly say: “Oh, Jed! Oh — oh—” and there was the rhythmic squeak of a cot, and a thumping as a wooden frame beat against the wail; for a moment or two I also heard Jed groan like a slave under the lash, and Sam said under his breath: “I’ll be damned.”
It was soon quiet again in there, at least no sound penetrated the doorway. Sam came over to the window and presently murmured: “Cur’ous — I didn’t think he could.”
“Just once, Vilet told me. Just once, with that Kingstone whore he talks about so often.”
“Ayah, told me the same.” I felt him watching me kindly and speculatively through the dark. Then he was leaning out the window, his dimly starlit face gazing down at the lightless village. “Little cunt been taking care of you, Jackson?”
“Ayah.” I suppose my dull embarrassment was a result of orphanage training, a mixture of sour prudery and piety, that sticky mess with which the human race so often tars and feathers its children.
Sam and I could hear a child crying, away off somewhere in the village, probably frightened by the tiger’s roar; it was a persistent helpless whimpering that a woman’s tired and kindly voice was trying to soothe. I heard her say — somewhere, bodiless, as if the words hung m the dark — “Ai-yah, now, he can’t get you, baby…”
Getting dressed in the morning, it occurred to me, as I had suspected during dinner the night before — fast-breaking Friday dinner after sundown — that it wasn’t all fluff and candy, being advanced from a bond-servant yard-boy, the lowest object above a slave, to the nephew of a longlegged Mister. I’d achieved this wonder myself, sure, but remembering that was small comfort. There are heavy penalties for impersonating an aristocrat, as heavy as the penalties on a bond-servant for wearing a freeman’s white loin-rag. I had to burble to Sam about the remarkable powers of a plain white rag, but he was more interested in the practical side than in the dad-gandered almighty philosophy of it. “It comes to me, Jackson, you got to watch some of the God-damn little things, like not picking your nose nor wiping it so loud on the back of your hand, at least not whiles you be eating. Occurred to me last night at supper, but I didn’t want to say anything with them pilgrims chomping away right at our elbows.”