Lazing on my ledge that morning, I thought: If the Levannon thirty-tonners make the north passage for trade, why can’t they sail much further for curiosity? Sure I was ignorant. I’d never beheld even the Hudson Sea . I didn’t know that curiosity is not common but sadly rare, and without experience how could I imagine the loneliness of open sea when land has become a memory and there’s no mark to steer by unless someone aboard knows the mystery of guessing position by the stars? So I asked the morning sky: If nobody dares to sail out of sight of land, and if the Book of Abraham won’t tell how far is the rim or what’s beyond it, how can the priests claim to know?
Why can’t there be other lands this side of the rim? How do they know there is a rim? Maybe the Book of Abraham did explain that much, if one were allowed to read it, but then what about the far side? There had to be one. And something beyond the far side. So what if I were to sail — east—
Nay, I thought — nay, Mudhead! But suppose I did travel to Levannon — that wasn’t far — where a young man could sign on aboard a thirty-tonner?
Suppose for instance I started this morning, or at least tomorrow?
3
I thought of Emmia.
Once from the street I had glimpsed her at her window naked for bedtime. A thick old jinny-creeper grew to the second story of the inn where her bedroom was. Behind the leaves I saw her let down her red-brown hair to tumble over her shoulders, and she combed it watching herself in a mirror, then stood gazing out at the night a while. The next building had a blind wall where I stood. No moonlight, or she would have seen me. Some impulse made her cup her left breast in her hand, blue eyes lowered, and I was bewitched to learn of the broad circle around the nipple, of her deep-curved waist, and the dark triangle just visible.
Naked women weren’t news to me, though I’d never been close to one. Skoar had the peep-shows called movies, including penny-a-squint ones I could afford.[3] But that rosy marvel in the window was Emmia, not a picture nor a puppet nor a worn-out peep-show actress with an idiot dab of G-string and a face like a spilled laundry bag, but Emmia whom I saw each day at tasks around the tavern in her smock or slack-pants — mending, dusting, overseeing the slaves, candle-making, waiting on table, coming out to my territory to collect eggs or help feed the stock and milk the goats. Emmia was careful with her skirt, the Emmia I knew — once when the old slave Judd, not thinking, asked if she’d be so gracious to use the ladder and reach something down so to spare his gimp leg, she told her mother and had him whipped for bawdy insolence. This was Emmia, and in me, like stormy music, desire was awake.
Love? Oh, I called it so. I was a boy.
She drifted out of sight and her candle died. I remember I fell asleep that night exhausted, after the imaginary Emmia on my pallet had opened her thighs. It became a canopy bed: I was inheriting the inn and Old John’s fortune for saving Emmia from a mad dog or runaway horse or whatever. His dying speech of blessing on our marriage would have made a skunk get religion.
I had not seen Emmia naked again, but the picture of her at her window remained warm in me — (it still is). It was with me on my mountain ledge that morning as the time glided toward noon
Ears and nose gave me the first warning. My hand shot to my knife before my eyes found my outrageous visitor on the upward slant of the cliffside path.
He smiled, or tried to.
His mouth was miserably small, in a broad flat hairless face. Dirty, grossly fat, reeking. His vast long arms and stub legs told me he must be the subject of that drawing. He did have knees: drooping fat-rolls concealed them; his lower legs were nearly as thick as his ugly short thighs. Almost no hair, and he wore nothing; a male, but what he had to prove it appeared against his fat no larger than what you’d see on a small boy. In spite of the short legs he stood as tall as I, around five feet five. His facial features — button nose, small mouth, little dark eyes in puffy fat-pockets — were merely ugly, not inhuman. He said in a gargling man’s voice: “I go?”
I couldn’t speak. Whatever appeared in my face made him no more terrified than he was already. He simply waited there, misery standing in the sun. A mue.
Everywhere the law of church and state says plainly: A mue born of woman or beast shall not live.
You hear tales. A woman, or even a father, may bribe a priest to conceal a mue — birth, hoping the mue wifi outgrow its evil. The penalty is death, but it happens.
Conicut is the only country where the civil law requires that the mother of a mue must also be destroyed. The Church is apt to give her the benefit of the doubt. Tradition says that demons bent on planting mue-seed may enter women in their sleep, or magic them into unnatural drowsiness; thus women may be assumed not guilty unless witnesses prove they copulated with the demon knowingly. A female animal bearing a mue is usually put out of the way mercifully, and the carcass exorcised and burned. The tolerant law also reminds us that demons can take the form of men in broad daylight, with such damnable skill that only priests can discover the fraud… Stories buzzed at the Bull-and-Iron about mues born in secret — singleeyed, tailed, purple-skinnned, legless, two-headed, hermaphrodite, furred — that grow to maturity in hiding and haunt the wilderness.
Everywhere, it is the duty of a citizen to kill a mue on sight if possible, but to proceed with caution, because the monster’s demon father may be lurking near.
He asked again: “I go?” Immense, well-formed on his soggy body, his arms could have torn a bull apart.
“No.” That was my voice. Pure chicken — if I told him to go he might be angry.
“Boy-man-beautiful.”
He meant me, damn it. For politeness I said: “I like the picture.” He was bewildered. “Lines,” I said, and pointed into my cave. “Good.”
He understood — smiled anyway, drooling, wiping away the slop across his chest. “Come me. Show things.”
I was to go with him and maybe meet his father?
I remembered hearing of a recent witch-scare over at Chengo, a town rather far west of Skoar. Children saw demons, they said. A ten-year-old girl said she had been coaxed into the woods by a bad woman and hidden where she was obliged to watch that woman and others of the town rushing around and playing push-push with manshaped devils that had animal heads. She was about to be dragged out of hiding and presented to the coven when a cock crew and the revels ended. The girl would not swear the demons had flown off into the clouds, and folk got cross with her about that, since everyone knows it’s what demons do, but she did name the women so that they could be burned.
3
They have the Church’s grudging permission to exist, and rate a whole paragraph in the Church’s celebrated Doctrine of Necessary Evils. This monument of shrewd piety is believed by the public to have been devised by the disciple Simon at the supposed founding of the Church in 44. Actually the document they call the original is on a type of parchment that was developed in Nuin, not Katskil, and only about 50 years ago. I examined it myself on a visit to Nuber. No scholar can say exactly when the Holy Murcan Church began to exist, but it cannot have been a functioning institution for more than 200 years.