In Skoar that remark was so routine it hardly rated as a joke. The Mourners’ Guild is a Moha specialty, a gang of professional singers and wailers who close in on a family that’s had a mue-birth to create an uproar of the sacred type. The slave woman old Judd was required to live with bore a mue, a blotched eyeless thing — I saw it carried away wrapped in a rag. The caterwauling demanded by law went on two days. It would have been five for a freeman family, eight to ten for the upper nobility — and no one no matter how blue his blood could break away from the festivities more than just long enough to go to the backhouse and return. The object is to appease the spirit of the mue after the priest has disposed of the body, and to remind the survivors that we are all miserable sinners totally corrupt in the sight of God. It’s called planned reverence.
The Guild could be hired for a normal funeral, but charged custom rates for that. At the burial of a mue in Moha, the family was obliged to pay the Guild only a nominal fee, hardly more than a seventh of a year’s earnings, plus about the same amount for a casket the neighbors would consider adequate. For slaves like Judd the town itself met the expense of the Guild’s fee and a nice basswood box, charging it off to community good will, one of the generous things that made a Moha citizen point with pride.
At the end of the alley I saw a flicker of torchlight by the stockade, distorted in the fog, and heard voices. They’d found him.
Policers, talking softly. I assumed they’d found my luck-charm too — luck, hell. I sneaked off the other way till the curve of Stockade Street blocked out their light; then I crossed to the palings and wriggled over. Unfamiliar with this section of the palisade, I tumbled into crackling brush. Dogs would have caught the noise, but the policers had none with them, yet.
A homed owl in the mountain woods was crying his noises of death and hunger. I heard a bull alligator roar, in a swamp that covered a few acres east of the city — old Thundergut was useful like the bear, reminding me I’d do well to pass through water and confuse the policer dogs. By daylight they’d have them around outside the stockade near where the guard had died, to cast for a scent, and they might follow mine as far as my cave. I must recover my horn and be long gone before then.
One brook ran between Skoar and my cave, a quick trivial stream. It would not kill the scent — on the way down I had merely stepped across it. To confuse the dogs I must find something better beyond the cave, in the morning. But tonight the brook might help me part way. It flowed under the stockade near where I was now, and out again into the alligator’s swamp. I might follow it a mile upstream to a willow I knew I could identify in the dark, so I’d be that much further along at first-light.
I inched out of the brush and across a grassy area. The fog enforced a dismal slowness: in ten minutes I walked a thousand years, and heard the wet monotone of water when I had given up hope of it. A big frog ploshed from blackness to blackness unseen.
Struggling upstream, I imagined every danger crowding me. No alligators in shallow upland water, but there could be moccasin snakes. I could lose footing and brain myself. If black wolf caught my smell he could take me before I freed my knife. A swarm of mosquitos did find me.
In time the owl stopped hooting, and the alligator back there in the swamp must have caught up with what he wanted, for I ceased to hear him. When at last I no longer saw any milkiness of moonlight in the fog above me I knew I was under forest cover, where moonlight was always a some-time thing. Fog was still dense; I smelled it and felt the dampness on my flesh. My fingers constantly out exploring touched willow-leaves after another long while. I groped up the twigs to small branches, to larger, finally encountering one whose shape I remembered. Then I could climb, knowing the tree for a friend. High up, I took off my loin-rag, passed it around the trunk and knotted it at my midriff, the hell with comfort. Brown tiger is too heavy to climb.
I have seen him few times in my life, but I can observe the image behind closed eyes at any time, the vast tawny body cloudily striped with darker gold, fifteen feet from nose to tail-tip, paws broad as a chair-seat and eyes that send back firelight not green but red.
A passage in the Book of John Barth mentions a certain wild-eyed crank who, when the last Old-Time war was in the last phases of threatening, visited the zoos in several cities and turned loose some of the beasts at night, choosing only the most dangerous: cobras, African buffalo, Manchurian tigers. He sometimes murdered the night watchman or other attendant to steal the keys, and was finally killed himself, Barth says, by a gorilla he was releasing. He must have felt he was paying back the human race for this and that. Probably no beast ever disliked us as hotly as disgruntled members of our own breed.
Men hate and loathe black wolf, who in spite of his fearsome strength and shrewdness has some taint of the sneak and coward. I never heard anyone mention hating or loathing brown tiger, though when I was with Runiley’s Ramblers I heard of a secret cult that worships him. Pa Rumley introduced me to one of them in Conicut, a friendly quackpot who let me listen in on one of their minor celebrations. They dabble in alchemy but apparently not witchcraft, and cook up a type of love potion for their own orgies that’s said to work, though I never saw it proved. Mighty is he — so began their invocation — who walks like the mist at night, mighty indeed is the golden and well-intentioned one, the merciful and all-forgiving Eye of Fire! It was damned impressive, hearing people pray to a creature that actually existed: I enjoyed it, and was willing to overlook a few turns of expression that I felt to be slightly on the inaccurate side.
In my willow tree the mosquitos chewed me all to hell—
Do you mind a little more brain-scratching? The thought of mosquitos just now woke up the memory of a golden hot day in the pine-woods park outside Old City, a few years ago, when Nickie and I had an argument. She said mosquitos are brave, or they wouldn’t return under slaps for a mere gulp of gore. I said they’re stupid, because when the slap is clearly on the way they linger for one more swallow, and then they’re too flat to enjoy it. They linger so’s to gamble for glory, S’s she. Stupid, s’s I, or they’d wear armor over the soft spots like beetles, but they don’t wear anything, and to show her what I meant by a soft spot I chewed her here and there. Flinging me down and pounding my head on the pine needles, she asked me did I mean those mosquitos were atchilly lewd and nude? I rolled her over. Look at ’em, s’s I. Then she felt I should take her clothes off for the mor’l purpose of showing ’em how dreadful it is to be nude as a bug, and I thought she’d better do the same for me because we didn’t want her being dreadful all alone if the going got tough. She also undertook to slap the ones that bit me whenever I was preoccupied with helping her to be dreadful, and I undertook vice versa which is interesting in itself. We agreed further to keep count of slaps, thus determining who the bugs thought had the richest flavor. In order to get undressed we’d been absentmindedly chasing each other around trees and over rocks and rolling about considerably, which takes time, and so had forgotten what the original argument was, but we thought the flavor thing might be it or anyhow just as good. When we were lying face to face engaged in some operation or other, I remembered the first argument, and what happened then proved that mosquitos are stupid: they felt that the time was favorable for unpunished biting, and this in itself was lucid thinking, but they never saw we each had a hand free to slap with.