“Honored,” I said — an item of social jazz that I happened to remember from Mam Laura’s coaching. “Honored and delighted to drink anyone under the table or else join him there.”
“Nay, we’re a soberish crowd,” he said. “Everything in moderation. Including, I insist, moderation — but that’s a point I can seldom get across to my elders.” He was watching me with uncanny sharpness. “I’m Michael Summers of Old City. Forgive the impudent curiosity — who are you, sir, and where from?”
“Davy — that is, David — of — well, of Moha — I mean—”
“David de Moha?”
“Oh lordy no!” I said, and noticed that everyone in the taproom had shut up, the better to enjoy our private conversation. “I just meant I come from Moha, back along. My last name’s — uh — Loomis.”
I’m sure he believed, for a while at least, that I was giving a false name, and he wanted to help me with it. He took me over to the others, introduced me as David Loomis with the nicest casualness, pushed me into a comfortable chair, called for fresh drinks — all as if I were somehow important, I couldn’t think why.
From scraps I heard before they went quiet, I knew Father Mordan, the thin dry one, had been instructing the company concerning original sin, a regular duty which he’d pretty well wound up for the day — anyway he was ready to acknowledge Michael’s presentation of me with a smile. The smile would have quickly hardened the grease on a flaming plum pudding, but he meant it kindly; some people just happen to be born with vinegar for blood and lemons for balls, that’s all it is.
“Rest yourself,” Michael said to me, “and look us over, man, the way you might care to travel wid us a little distance, or all the way to Old City if you’re a-mind. We start for there tomorrow, last part of the Loop Journey, back home to our own honest beds and beans and bosoms.”
I couldn’t have said no to Michael, and anyway it was what I wished. I loafed there while we talked and sang the day into night. There were two or three fair singers, and a girl with a lively guitar; with my horn, it made an evefling of music, and I drank enough to help me avoid noticing how far it was from Rambler standards. Nay, it was only the drinks and Michael that kept me from going mad with homesickness — no other word; homesickness for a cubby-hole on wheels with no destination except the next village down the road.
Except for Michael and the two priests and one other, those pilgrims have become dim in my memory, and I’ve forgotten the name of the one other. He was a fine old gray gandyshank drink of water with droopy four inch whiskers on his upper lip that made you want to ring him like a bell, but he seemed to be a good deal of a scholar, so you let the impulse slide. When Michael introduced us he said on a soft sigh: “Mmmd.” Michael told me later that this is how you say “Charmed!” in Oxfoot English, which is what the gandyshank spoke. I don’t know why they call it that — there’s very little real bull in it, and hardly any English.
Of course I’ll always remember Michael’s face winking at me, late in the evening, when we had to tear off a Murcan hymn to please Father Bland, for the wink gave me a feverish need to talk to him privately and learn whether I had met another loner of my own kind, even a heretic. Once the thought entered my head, it seemed to me that Michael had been feeling me out along that line, as subtly as a wild creature tasting the breeze, ever since we’d met.
He gave me the opportunity that night, late, slipping into my room with a candle he didn’t light until he had closed the door. “May we talk, David Loomis? Something on my mind, but send me away if you’re too beat and want to sleep.” He was still fully dressed, I noticed, including the rapier.
I wasn’t sleepy. He pulled a chair near my bed and sat straddling it, relaxed as a little cat. I was afraid of him in several ways along with a powerful affection, thinking also how slight be looked, as if a high wind would blow him away. His voice seemed more like a contralto than a tenor; he had not sung with us, claiming to be tone-deaf, and that wasn’t true, but he had his reasons. “David Loomis, when I turn my face toward you I smell heresy. Nay, don’t be alarmed, please. I’m hunting for it, but from the heretics’ side, do you understand? — not the other.” Nobody ever watched me as penetratingly as Michael did then, before he rapped out a small sharp question: “No impulse to run tell Father Mordan?”
“None,” I said — “what do you take me for?”
“I had to ask,” Michael said. “I’ve as good as told you Fm a heretic, the dangerous kind, and I had to watch for any such impulse in you. If I had seen it, I’d have had some decision to make.”
I looked at the rapier. “With that?”
It seemed to distress him. He shook his head, turning his exploring gaze away. “Nay, I don’t think I could do that to you. If there’d been danger of your betraying me, I suppose I’d have faded — taking you along until we’d made a safe distance. But I see no such danger. I think you’re a heretic yourself. Do you believe God made the world for man?”
“For a long time,” I said, “I haven’t believed in God at all.”
“It doesn’t scare you?”
“No.”
“I like you, Davy…” We must have talked two hours that night. My life tumbled out in words because he convinced me he wanted to know of it, convinced me it mattered to him — as a personal thing, not solely because we were like-minded and traveling the same road. In the past, only Sam and Mam Laura (and very far in the past, on a different level, little Caron who is probably dead) had made me feel what I said mattered and what I had done was m its own fashion a bit of history. Now the warmth, the reaching out and the recognition, came from one of my own age who clearly had a history of learning and manners equalling or surpassing Mam Laura’s; one who was also an adventurer engaged in dangerous work that set my own ambition glowing.
I told Michael what I had dreamed about journeying, thinking long ago that I would see the sun set afire for the day. “There are other fires to be lit,” Michael said, “smaller than the sun in certain ways but not others. Fires in human minds and hearts.” Yes, he was concerned with revolution in those days. Here on the island Neonarcheos I am of course never so sure of anything as I suppose we have to be sure at eighteen.
The reaching out and the recognition — why, growing up is partly a succession of recognitions. I have heard that growing old will turn out to be a series of good-byes. I think it was Captain Barr who made that remark to me, not very long ago.
Michael, that first night while the rest of the inn was snoring, did not tell me as much of his own story in return. Some things he was not ready to tell until he knew me better, others he could not have told without violating his oath to the membership of the Society of Heretics. But he was free to tell me that such a society existed in Nuin and was beginning to have a trifle of following beyond Nuin’s borders. He could tell me his conviction that the Church would not rule forever, perhaps not even much longer — optimism of his own youth there, I think. And he said just before he left me that if I wished, he could very soon put me in touch with someone who would admit me to tentative membership. Probation, they called it — was I interested?
Does a fish swim? I wanted to hop Out of bed and hug him, but before I could he produced a little flask from inside his shirt and handed it to me. “Virgin’s milk,” he said, “sometimes called cawn-squeezings — hey, go easy, you sumbitch, it’s got to last us all the way to Wuster. Sleep on the talk, Davy, and come along with our gaggle of pilgrims in the morning and we’ll talk again. But another time, if a heretic winks at you, don’t wink back if there’s a priest where he can catch the wind of your eyelashes.”
“Oh!—”
“Nay, no sweat, they didn’t notice anything. But be careful, friend. That’s how joes like you and me stay alive.”