From Holy Oak we went on through the other little Low Countries into Conicut, where they were still feeling the reactions from the Rambler “strike” I told you about. Business had been very brisk, but we got there late, after too many other gangs had had the same idea. We passed on into Rhode, a dreamy small land hardly bigger than Lomeda, where coastal fishing is the main occupation and trial marriage the main entertainment — only nation where the Holy Murcan Church allows divorce by consent. The Church calls Rhode a “social testing ground”; they’ve been testing trial marriage there for fifty-some years now without learning anything except that almost everybody likes it. As I understand it, the Church considers this irrelevant, so they go on testing in the hope of more light. While we were there — most of the summer — I naturally did as much testing as possible: Bonnie was drifting then into her permanent attachment with Joe Dulin, and Minna (I don’t like to say it) could now and then be a bore. The testing was fine, and I reached no conclusions that I couldn’t duck.
Since it couldn’t be Nuin, we doubled back through Conicut, and over the border into the southern tip of Levannon, wintering at Norrock where the sound of the great sea is a quieter voice, most of the time, than the one I heard in later years at Old City — there at Old City, Nickie and I lived our private years within sound of the harbor and the big winds. At Norrock on clear days, we could look south from our hillside camp to a far-off blur of sandy shore, the Long Island that Jed Sever used to tell us about; and that seemed far in the past; and so did his death — and my hot-cool games with Vilet — and shafts of green-gold light remembered, slanting down into the warm stillness of Moha wilderness. Oh, the sound of ocean is the same voice wherever you hear it, and be you old or young — at Old City, or Norrock, or along the miles of achingly brilliant white sand in the loneliness of southern Katskil, or speaking of tranquillity on this beach at Neonarcheos.
The spring of 219 saw us traveling north again on the great Lowland Road of Levannon, but that time we stayed with it no further than Beckon, the Levannon harbor town across the Hudson Sea from Nuber the Holy City. Beckon is the first place where there’s a reliable ferry-sailer big enough for Rambler wagons. There’s another at Ryebeck, opposite Katskil’s capital city Kingstone, but that would not have done for us: at Kingstone someone might recognize Sam and pass on word to his wife, who would summon the policers and clobber him with every law in the book. Even the military might get snorty about him, though by this time the pisswilly Moha-Katskil war was in the fading past. At Nuber there wasn’t much risk, Sam thought. We put on a mor’l show there, pantaletted up for righteousness’ sweet sake, and we cleaned up nicely with undercover seffing of horny pictures to brighten the private lives of the brethren; elsewhere, selling them almost openly, we never took in half as much.
We drifted south from Nuber by slow stages. People of the Kingstone district seldom traveled in the south of Katskil. Anywhere in the country, however, there was some slight risk for Sam. He didn’t work with the medicine pitch, but just lent a hand at whatever was needed — muleskinning, scene-shifting, helping Grafton at his harnessmaking — and kept more or less out of sight of the public.
He particularly enjoyed being what Mam Laura called a “noise off” during her fortune-telling. She always had a small tent set up for it, with a canvas partition across the middle. In the front there’d be nothing but one little table and two chairs — no crystal or incense or such-like props. But she did love a good noise off. In the back half of the tent she kept a few gidgets — a cowbell, a drum with a crack in it that was no use to Stud Dabney any more but could still make a dismal sort of noise like a bull’s intestines rumbling somewhere on a misty night. At cue words, Sam would work these objects for her, or knock something over, or sometimes heave a long horrible sigh that Mam Laura warned him not to use too often because she could hardly stand it herself. He’d build up the racket little by little until Mam Laura would holler “Hoot-mon-salaam-aleikum!” or “Peace, troubled spirit!” or something else soothing, and then quit for a while. The yuck could never be quite sure that the canvas panel wouldn’t suddenly rise up and reveal some fearful apparition such as Asmodeus or a four-horned Giasticutus or his mother-in-law. Sam claimed that his job was good for him because it like kept him in touch with the arts but without any real Goddamn responsibility. He also said now and then that he was getting old.
It should not have been true, since he was only in the fifties. But in some ways I suppose it was true.
Southern Katskil is altogether unlike the bustling northern part. A ghostly, evasive land — the big rich farms are in the central part, not the real south. Small sandy roads twist through the pine barrens as if in blind pursuit of a goal you’ll never learn. If such a road comes to an apparent end, you feel sure that you must have missed some turnoff that was the road’s real continuation. In many places, inland as well as close to the fine white beaches, it is deep wilderness instead of the curious pines, wilderness as profound as the semitropical jungles of Penn, which I have also glimpsed. They say that bands of the flap-eared apes have sometimes been encountered in the jungle regions of southern Katskil — the same kind that are well known in Penn, shy, wild, a little dangerous.
There are no cities in southern Katskil, unless you want to give that name to the dull harbor of Vyland in the extreme south, on the immensity of Delaware Bay; it hardly deserves it, and is hardly worth the effort it takes to reach it on the long road through the barrens and jungle and enormous swamps. Vyland was once a pirate town, headquarters of a fleet that ravaged Penn’s coastal commerce with the northern nations. Katskil and Penn for once agreed on something, joining forces to clean out the raiders, as we had to do in Nuin with the Cod Islands lot. The Vyland pirates didn’t have the vinegar and cussedness of the Cod Islanders, however, nor any islands for refuge; it was a massacre. Today, Vyland has nothing to show but fisheries and monasteries, which smell alike.
No proper cities there in the south of Katskil, but a good many small vifiages, widely separated, heavily stockaded, their people often showing a dreary distrust of strangers. We seldom had a really good pitch. I have an impression there was a good deal of hookworm and malaria, possibly other sorry conditions that held the people down through no fault of their own.
One village in that region I am compelled to remember. We came to it in the fall of 319, when we were already moving northwest with the idea of crossing over into Penn near their fine city of Filadeffia. It was late afternoon; the front and rear gates of the village were shut but not locked. We rolled down the road with our customary joyous commotion, playing and singing “I’ll Go No More A-Roving,” a song that usually won us a better welcome than any other. When we were drawn up before the still closed and desolate gates, I blew my golden horn to make it plainer than ever that we came in way of friendship. But no one opened to us. It made Pa angry — well, the whole summer in southern Katskil had done that. “Why,” he said — “bugger me blind, we’ll be going in anyhow, and ask them nicely why they won’t open.”
Poor things, they couldn’t — the few who were there in the village were dead, and had been for months. The houses were starting to fall apart, just a little-holes in the thatched roofs where squirrels had gone through, here and there a door fallen off its hinges because the wind had banged it once too often. We went into all the twenty-odd dwellings, finding the skeletons picked clean by the carrion ants and scavenger beetles — only a few, about a dozen in all I guess; all perfectly inoffensive and dry. Most of them lay on the cord or wicker cots that they use for beds in that country; two had remnants of white hair. It was peaceful. Since the dead were all indoors, and the village gates closed against wolves and dogs, the ants and beetles had done nearly all the housekeeping; we were puzzled to notice how little the bones had been disturbed by mice and rats. Pa Rumley said that rats die from the lumpy plague, same as human beings, which I hadn’t known at that time. But I had a back-of-the-neck feeling — we all had it, I think — that this could be some other kind of plague.