They flung a party for me at Lomeda, Rambler style, stalling all work at the wharf and getting the ferry-sailer captain too joyously drunk to object to anything. I remember Minna telling him she’d remember him all her life, because sailors come and sailors go, but ever since she’d been old enough to belay a marlinspike she’d dreamed of seeing a live sailing captain with balls. I was well illuminated too when they bundled me aboard, all hollering and crying and giving good advice. I stopped singing when the ropes were cast off and I knew I was actually leaving my people, but I didn’t sober up even when the captain brought her in on the Nuin side. He did so with a slam that lifted a timber off the pier, and cussed everyone in sight for building the bald-assed cotton-pickmg pier so that it couldn’t hold up under the impact of a man with balls. That was fun.
To my fancy, even the air of Nuin tastes different from the air of other lands. Except for Penn, it is the oldest civilization of modern times, at least on that continent — nay, I can’t say that, either, for what do I know of the vague Misipan Empire in the far south, and who could deny the possibility of a great nation, or many of them, in the far western region that I know the continent does possess? Pity me, friends, only if I lose the awareness of my own ignorance.
Penn does not seem to have been much concerned with recording the events of its last two or three centuries — too good-natured, maybe. Nuin is loaded with history, bemused by it, sparkling with it; and shadowed by it. Dion, today still doggedly engaged in setting down whatever he can recall of that history, has never quite come out from under the shadow of it — how could he, and for that matter why should he? It was his world, until we sailed.
Oh, and sometimes I am — not weary of words, but beatout and a little foolish from the effort, the pleasure and torment of trying to preserve a fraction of my life in the continually moving medium of words. And I think of ask ing this poor prince — my equal and superior, whippingboy, cherished friend — to go on with this book if I should give up, stop short of what I set out to do and walk away from it. As I walked away from Rumley’s Ramblers when there was no honest need to do so. But he couldn’t do that, and with a grain of sense, I hold myself back from asking it.
When I came off the boat at Hamden, the Nuin ferry town across from Lomeda, what I first noticed was the statues. There were some modern ones, clumsy but really not too bad, of Morgan the Great and a few other wellnourished majesties, and these were shown up dreadfully by the fine sculpture of the Old-Time figures — including many bronzes that I’m certain would have been melted down for the metal anywhere except in Nuin. Hamden is proud of them — a fine, healthy, middle-sized town, clean and friendly, open to the river and neatly stockaded on the other three sides; proud of its white-painted houses too, and the pretty green, and the well-conducted market.
All the same, Old City has a flock of statues to make Hamden or any other town look sick. Most of them are of Old Time, which in Nuin is sometimes made to seem almost like yesterday, an illusion I never felt in any other place. I’m thinking at the moment of a fine seated bronze gentleman in Palace Square, who carries clear traces of ancient paint in the cracks and hollows of his patinaed garments. It’s Old-Time paint, they say. Some President — Morgan II, I think — had it covered over with thick modern varnish to preserve it. It appears in patches of crimson, green, and purple; no blue. Odd to think that this unknown religious ritual must have been going on in the very last days when the Old-Time world was passing away. The inscribed name of the subject of worship is John Harvard. Nobody seems quite clear about who he was, but he sits there modestly, rather stuffily, with timeless and splendid indifference.
I wore new clothes that day at Hamden, a new shouldersack for my horn that Minna had sewed for me, and there was money in my belt, for the Ramblers had taken up a collection and showered me with every sort of kindness. I had still no clear aim, no plan; at eighteen, no true decision what work I would do. I knew a little carpentry, a little music; I knew the wilderness and the ways of the roads. I knew I was a loner by trade.
In the inn at Hamden I found myself in the middle of a bunch of pilgrims who were finishing the last part of what Nuin people call the Loop Journey. It means a trip from Old City up into the wild glorious mountain land of the Province of Hampsher — more people live up there in the cool hills than you’d ever suppose-then south more or less following the great Conicut River as far as Hamden or Shopee Falls, and back to Old City by southern roads. It is a secular pilgrimage. The Church approves it, and stops are made at all the holy shrines and other foci of piety along the way, but there’s nothing specifically sacred about the junket itself. Anybody can play, and many do, including respectable sinners and card-sharps and musicians and prosties and all the other folk who keep life from getting dull.
Almost as soon as I entered the taproom after engaging a room for the night, a dark boy made friends with me, and I spotted him for a sinner right away because of his open kindliness and good nature. He was dressed in a Nuin style that was beginning to spread beyond that country but not enough so that I’d grown used to it — baggy knee-length britches and a loose shirt, belted in but allowed to flop out over the belt everywhere except at the knife-hilt, where it might interfere with a quick draw. About half the other pilgrims in the taproom were dressed in that style, but the boy who took it on himself to greet me and make me feel at ease was the only one who carried a rapier at his hip instead of the usual short knife. He had a knife too, I learned later, but wore it under his shirt as I used to wear mine before my Rambler days.
That rapier was a beautiful wicked thing, less than two feet long, light and delicate, scarcely half an inch at the widest point, of Penn steel so fine that it sang to a touch almost like dainty glassware. A rich man’s tool, I thought, but I had learned from Mam Laura that one didn’t ask about the price of such a thing unless one meant to buy, and often not then. The boy handled it like an extension of his arm. He liked to make it float almost noiselessly from the scabbard, and run his fingers airily up and down the side as if his mind weren’t with it at all, which made everyone in the room extremely nervous for some reason and of course anxious not to show it. Nothing indicated how much he enjoyed this except a very light crinkling of the skin at the corners of his brown eyes, and some instinct seemed to tell him when to put it away. Instinct, or a special tone in the throat-clearings of one of the priests in charge of the group.
There were two of these, Father Bland and Father Mordan, one fat and one thin, one greasy and the other a bit dry and scurfy. Father Bland himself remarked that they represented the good bacon of religion, and everyone obligingly laughed except Father Mordan the lean one who stayed in character, that is to say grumpy. I’d hardly have taken any of the crowd for pilgrims if the landlord hadn’t tipped me off, and I learned that some were really just travelers who had joined the group for safety or sociability.
“Compliments of Father Bland and Father Mordan,” said the boy in greeting me, “and will you drink wid us now or a little sooner?” I hadn’t heard much of the Nuin accent at that time. Nuin people don’t travel very often outside their own land — Nuin has everything, they say, so what would they gain by it? I guessed the boy to be near my own age, though he acted older. There was a slightness and a delicacy about him that suggested the femmme, but without weakness. I remember in the first half-hour I knew him I wondered if his little games with the rapier might not have a practical side, as a way of discouraging anyone who might misunderstand his nature.