In the morning, on the road, Father Mordan was still concerned with original sin, and it may have prevented his insides from dealing rightly with a very good breakfast, for his discourse along the first mile or two of a dusty highway was punctuated by the sudden, uncomfortable type of burp. Father Bland endured it as long as he could and then picked on a theological point — I’m sure God alone could have appreciated it — to give Father Mordan the father and mother of an argument. Under cover of this inspiring noise and heat, Michael and I fell behind out of earshot and continued our conversation of the night.
He seemed in a more speculative frame of mind, taking me for granted a little more too. Yet there were also more unspoken things between us, in spite of the agreements and discoveries of a sudden friendship. Most of that morning’s talk I remember only in bits and pieces, though all the feeling of it remains with me. “Davy — you might feel perhaps that Father Mordan is not in possession of absolute truth?”
“Well, after all—”
“Uhha. Father Bland, you know, would honestly like to see everybody safe in a comfortable heaven — no pain, no sin, just glory-glory all day long. It would bore the hell out of you or me, but he truly believes he’d like it, and so would everybody else. And that jo, Davy, gave up a rich man’s existence to serve the rest of his life as a small-time priest. And in case you think there’s anything trifling about him — well, a month ago he went with me into a smallpoxrotten village up in Hampsher, an escort for a wagon-load of food for any poor devils that might be still alive. The wagon-dnver wouldn’t go without a priest. Not a one of the other pilgrims would go, and Father Mordan felt it his duty to stay behind with them. Just Father Bland and a bond-servant driver and me — and no danger for me because I had the disease in childhood and happen to know it gives immunity, which most people won’t believe — but Father Bland never had it. Is Father Bland in possession of absolute truth?”
“No.”
“Why?”
In the night when he went away with his candle he had left me testing my own thoughts a while before I could sleep — testing, and grappling with them to the point of suffering; but then I did sleep, profoundly and restfully. Not that I was in any sense free of confusion or uncertainty — I am not today — but what Michael was doing with me that morning was a very gentle kind of wrestling after all, demanding only that I think for myself, as Main Laura had done in her different way. I said: “Why, Michael, I think it’s because absolute truth either doesn’t exist or can’t be reached. A man’s being brave and kindly doesn’t make him wise.”
We went on a time in silence, I remember, but it wasn’t long before Michael took hold of my arm and said without smiling: “You are now in touch with someone who can admit you to probationary membership in the Society of Heretics. Do you still want it?”
“You yourself? You have that authority?”
He grinned then, more like a boy. “For six months, but in all that time until now I haven’t found anyone who met the requirements. I didn’t want to mystify you, but had to sleep on it myself. Probation only — more I can’t do, but in Old City I’ll guarantee you a welcome, and you’ll meet others who can take you further. They’ll set you things to do, some of which you won’t understand right away.” All I could say was a stumbling thanks, which he brushed aside.
We had halted there in the sunny road, and I noticed I could no longer even hear the pilgrims who had gone on ahead. It was a tranquil open place, where a small stream crossed the road through a culvert and wandered away into a field. The Bland-Mordan argument was less than dust on the breeze, but I said: “Should we catch up with them?”
“For my part,” Michael said, “I’ve no more use for them. I enjoyed traveling with them, if only for the privilege of hearing ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ sung in Oxfoot English with guitar accompaniment, but now I’d sooner go on to Old City with no company but yourself — if you like the thought. I have money, and a skill with this little pigsticker that makes up for my lack of brawn. I don’t know the wilderness in the ways you were telling me about last night, but from here to Old City it’s all roads and safe inns. How about it?”
“That’s what I’d like.”
He was studying the stream, and its vanishing in taller growth some distance from the road. “Those willows,” he said — “away off the other side of that thicket — would they mean a pool, Davy? I’d like a dip, to wash off Mordan’s original sin.”
I think that was the first time I’d ever heard a priest mentioned without his title. It gave me a chill that was at first fright, then pleasure, then matter-of-fact amusement. “It should be a pool,” I said, “or they wouldn’t be clustered like that…”
I suppose there could have been some danger out in the grassland, but it seemed like safe country as we slipped through the grass, the pilgrims becoming long-ago things and then forgotten, and found the pool. I had begun to understand about Michael, but not entirely until I saw the shirt impatiently flung away from a ridiculous bandage that bound his upper chest. Then that was gone, the small woman’s breasts set free.
She took off the rapier with care, but not the clumsy trousers — those she dropped and sent flying with a kick. She stood by me then all gravity and abstracted sweetness, proud of her brown slimness, hiding nothing. Seeing I was too dazed and too much in love to move, she touched the bluish tattoo on her upper arm and said: “This doesn’t trouble you, does it, Davy? Aristocracy, caste-it means nothing among the Heretics.”
“It doesn’t trouble me. Nothing should trouble me much if I can be with you the rest of my life.”
I remember she put out her golden hand against my chest and pushed me lightly, glancing at the pool, smiling for the first time since she had bared herself. “Does it look deep enough?” Nickie asked me. “Deep enough for diving?”
25
Six years ago I wrote that last episode, and laid down my pen to yawn and stretch with pleasure, remembering the pool and the hushed morning and the love we had on the sunny grass. I supposed that in a day or so I would go on writing, probably for several chapters, in spite of my feeling that I had already ended the principal part of the story I set out to tell. I thought I would go on, residing simultaneously here at Neonarcheos and at this imaginary inn of ours on the blind side of eternity or wherever you would prefer it to be-whoever you are-with many events belonging to a later time.
Particularly I had it in mind to tell of the two years that Nickie and I spent in Old City before what happened to us at that Festival of Fools. It is another book. I think I shall try to write it, after the Morning Star sails again and I with her, but I may not be able to. I don’t know. I am thirtyfive, therefore obviously not the same person who wrote you those twenty-four chapters when Nickie was no further away than a footnote and a kiss. I shall leave what I have written behind me, with Dion, when I sail.
The years in Old City after the Festival of Fools, the work with Dion in the heady, exciting, half-repellent atmosphere of high politics, the laws and councils and attempted reforms, the war we won against a pack of thieves and the war we lost against a horde of the self-righteous — all that is certainly another book, and I have a suspicion that Dion himself may be writing it, shielding himself by a dignified reticence from possible footnotes.[23] If I attempt that, it will not be for a long time.
I laid down my pen that evening six years ago, and a few moments later I heard Nickie call me. Her voice brought me out of a hazy brown study: I think I had wandered back to the time of my father’s death, and I was reflecting unoriginally how grief is likely to translate itself into philosophy, if you can wait for it, because it must.
23
No, that wasn’t the reason for keeping it to myself. The reason is that I have not Davy’s open nature. He was able somehow to struggle for truth in autobiography even while “pursued by foot-notes” and with Miranda and me looking over his shoulder most of the time. I could never attempt that. For me the struggle must he in the dark, intensely private, doubtful of outcome. This note is written in May of 339, a full year after Davy’s departure with the