“See you before,” the mue said. So he must have watched me on other visits to North Mountain — me with my keen eyes and ears, studied by a monster and never guessing it! He would not have passed the human kind of judgment on the monkey tricks of a boy who thought himself alone; that consoling thought came to me after a while.
He told me of his life. Mere fragments of language to help him, worn down by years of speaking to no one but himself — I won’t record much of the actual talk. He waved toward the northeast, where from our height the world was a green sea under the gold of afternooon — he had been born somewhere off that way, if I understood him. He spoke of a journey of “ten sleeps,” but I don’t know what distance he might have covered in a day’s travel. His mother, evidently a farm woman, had raised him in the woods. To him birth was a vagueness — “Began there,” he said, and fumblingly tried to repeat what his mother had told him of birth, giving it up as soon as I showed I understood. Death he grasped, as an ending. “Mother’s man stop live” — before he was born, I think he meant. Describing his mother, all he could say was “big, good.” I guessed she would have been some stout farm woman who managed to hide her pregnancy in the first months, and perhaps her husband’s death made matters simpler.
By law, every pregnancy must be reported immediately to civil and church authorities, no pregnant woman may be left alone after the fifth month, and a priest must be present at every birth to decide whether the child is normal and dispose of it if he considers it a mue. There are occasional breaches in the law — the Ramblers for instance, always on the go, could evade it much more often than they do — but the law is there, carrying a heavy charge of religious as well as secular command.
This mue’s mother had no help in raising him to some age between eight and ten except that of a big dog. It would have been one of the tall wolfhounds a farm family needs if it is to risk dwelling outside a stockade. The dog guarded the baby when the mother could not be with him, and grew old as he grew up.
We have two wolfhounds aboard the Morning Star, Dion’s Roland and Roma. They are friendly enough now, but while Dion’s mood was black with misery over what had happened in Nuin — our loss of the war, forced flight, certain destruction of nearly all the reforms begun while he was Regent and Nickie and I his unofficial counselors — no one dared go near them except Dion himself; not even Nickie nor Dion’s bedmates Nora Severn and Greta Shawn. The dogs dislike the motion of the ship — Roland was seasick for two days — but keep alive on smoked meat and biscuit that nobody grudges them.
Yesterday evening at sundown Nickie was at the rail, for once looking behind us to that part of the horizon beyond which lie Nuin and the other lands, and Roland came to lean sentimentally against her hip. She touched his head; not with them, I watched the westerly breeze rumple his gray pelt and Nickie’s luminous brown hair. It is cut short like a man’s, but she’s all woman these days, dressing in the few simple garments she has made for herself from the ship’s store of cloth — necessity, since most of us came aboard with nothing but what we were wearing, that ugly day. Yesterday in the red-gold light she wore a blouse and skirt of the plainest brown Nuin linsey — all woman but in a mood not to be touched,[5] I thought, and so I did not go to her in spite of a hunger to take hold of her small waist and kiss her brown throat and shoulders. Roland, after winning her hand’s casual recognition, stepped away and lay down on the deck not too near, adoring but keeping it to himself, waiting for her to look at him again if she would. He could be aware, as I am, how in spite of all pressures of male and female vanity, male and female foolishness, women are still people.
The mue’s mother had taught him speech, now distorted by the years when he had small chance to make use of it. She taught him to win a living from the wilderness — hunting, snaring, brook-fishing with his hands, finding edible plants; how to stalk and, most important, how to hide. She taught him he must avoid all human beings, who would kill him on sight. I can’t guess what sort of existence she imagined for his future; maybe she was able to avoid thinking of it. Nor can I guess what made him risk his life by approaching me, unless it was an overwhelming hunger for any sort of contact with what he knew to be his own breed.
At some time between his eighth and tenth years — “she come no more.” He waited long. The dog was killed by a woods buffalo-little hellions they are, no more than half the size of tame cattle but frightfully strong and intelligent; we lost a man to one of them when I was with Rumley’s Ramblers. The mue gave me most of that story in sign language, crying freely when he spoke of the dog’s death and casually urinating through the floor of his nest.
When he felt that his mother must have died too, he made his journey of ten sleeps. I asked about years; he didn’t understand. He had no way of telling me how often the world had cooled into the winter rains. He may have been twenty-five years old, when I saw him. During that journey a hunter sighted him and shot an arrow into him. “Come me sharp-stick man-beautiful.” His fingers squeezed a remembered throat, he cried and belched and made a wet howling noise, his mouth spread open like a little wound. Then he studied me calmly to see if I understood, while a worm of fear stumbled down my back.
“Show now,” he said, and lifted himself abruptly to descend the tree, all the way to the ground.
Inside the catbriers a floor of rocks surrounded the tree, making a circle six feet out from the base. It created a fortress for him; only a snake could penetrate those thorns. The rocks overlapped so neatly the brier did not force its way through; many layers must have been fitted together — yes, and painfully searched out, painfully brought along the grapevine path. He had a stone hammer here, a rock shaped into a chopper, a few other gidgets. He showed me these, not so trustingly, and indicated I should stand where I was while he got something from the other side of the tree-trunk.
I heard rocks cautiously moved. His hands appeared beyond the trunk, setting down a rose-colored slab; I knew it would be the marker-stone of some poor hideaway. He returned to me, carrying a thing whose like I have never seen elsewhere.
I thought at first it might be some oddly shaped trumpet such as hunters and the cavalry use, or a comet like those I’d heard when Rambler gangs visited Skoar and set up their shows in the green. But this golden horn resembled those things only as a racing stallion resembles a plowhorse — both honorable creatures, but one is a devil-angel with the rainbow on his shoulders.
The large flared end, the two round coils and the straight sections of the pipe between bell and mouthpiece — oh, supposing we could cast such metal nowadays we’d still have no way of working it so perfectly into shape. I knew at once the instrument was of Old Time — it could not have been designed in ours — and I was afraid.
Ancient coins, knives, spoons, kitchenware that won’t rust — such objects of the perished world are often turned up in plowing or found at the edge of ruins that wilderness has not quite covered, like those on the Moha shore of the Hudson Sea near the village of Albany that lead down into the water like a stairway abandoned by gods. If the Old-Time thing has a clear harmless function the rule is finders-keepers, if you can pay a priest to exorcise the evil and stamp the object with the holy wheel. Mam Robson owned a skillet of gray metal that never rusted, found by her grandfather in turning over a cornfield, handed on to her at her marriage. She never used it but liked to show it to the inn guests for an oh-ah, telling how her mother did cook with it and took no harm. Then 0ld Jon would snort in with the tale of its discovery as if he’d been there, while her sad face, unlike Emmia’s round pretty one but rather like a Vairmant mule’s, would be saying he was no Jo to ever find her such a thing, not him, blessed miracle if he got up off his ass long enough to scratch… If the ancient thing is too weird the priest buries it,[6] where it can do no harm.
5
Matter of fact, dear, I was merely wondering if supper would stay down.
6
Or if smart he marks it with the wheel-sign and sends it to one of the shops in the large cities that specialize in dudaddery for the sophisticated — that is, the suckers. One in Old City is famous for selling nothing the owner can’t guarantee to be totally useless — Carrie’s Auntie Shoppy, well I remember it. Because the Regent was expected to encourage commerce, I bought an Old-Time thingamy there, a small cylinder of pale gray metal with a tapered end. That end has a tiny hole, out of which pops a wee metal whichit if you push the other end; push it again and the thing pops back. One of my philosophic advisers suggests it may have been used in the phallic worship that we assume was practised privately along with the public breast-belly-thigh cult of ancient America: I don’t find this convincing. I believe you could use the gidget for goosing a donkey, but why wouldn’t any Goddamn pointed stick do just as well? There is need for more research.