“You’ve got him tied up?”
“Like his catalogued salt sacks.”
And since Mills had spent more time in his salty underground confessional talking to his horse than he had in the long house with his mates and master, he turned now almost involuntarily to the beast.
“Oh now, now we’re for it, old fourfoot. Now we’re outlaws in this outlandish land where the customs of the country are more vicious than the circumstances, more obdurate than the very earth the men perforce work beneath.” All the strange rules and punishments he had heard of in the months he’d been there came to mind — taboos against using unproductive tones to one’s horse; prohibitions against using more than one’s small salt allowance; all the salt ordeals: the stuff forced up nostrils and down throats and into cuts carefully barbered into one’s flesh like the shapely sound holes in violins. Law proscribed his life like those, to him, mysterious rules of curteisie — the knight’s complex code, the squire’s. One had almost to be a very musician of citizenship. It was safest to sleep (though one could not oversleep), safest to take one’s meals silently in the mess, safest to crap (though one’s bowels were subject to salt inspections), to pee (encouraged as an evidence that one was not pilfering salt), safest finally to be about the merely physical business of one’s person, all else, save actual work, the careless free time of dangerous carouse.
“I learned my body here,” he told Mills’s horse, “and it learned me, accommodate to the inflexible laws of my necessity as the fixed stars. It could not dance on Sundays or during office hours if it tried.”
Guillalume stepped in front of him and did a jig.
“They’ll soon be back,” Mills warned, “they’ll see.”
“Don’t be cowardly. You’re still my father’s subject, you know. Mine, too, for that matter.”
“I’m everybody’s subject,” Mills groaned. “I have more law than a company of solicitors.”
It was true. If before he had felt slandered by their notion of him — the tapestry condition — now he knew himself crushed and circumscribed by the jurisdictional one: state, sultanate, realm, duchy, palatinate, empire, dominion, kingdom, and bog — all suzerainty’s pie slice say-so.
“Through last week’s channel,” Guillalume said, a finger to his lips. “And don’t tell the nag, for God’s sake. I’ve been teaching the farmers pieces of our language. They might overhear.”
Guillalume left.
“Taught them our language,” Mills said admiringly to the horse. “Our fortunes are mete in this world, coarse Mills’s coarse courser. We’re graduate as staircase. Only see what power’s in the blood. Mine all red and sticky gunk, his a potion. Well-a-day. Hey nonny nonny.”
The merchant had been stashed in a salt pile, buried to his neck, and Guillalume was digging him out.
“Grab a shovel,” Guillalume told Mills, “take a spade.”
“Give us a drink then, luv,” the man pleaded when they had extricated him. Salt clung everywhere, in the folds of his clothes, inside his boots, all along the fine filigree of his hundred ornaments. There was salt in the lashes of his eyes, in the ledges of his lined face. It was a capital offense of salt hoarding. “I’ve got to have water. Please!”
“It’s all right,” Guillalume said, “slake him. Use the bucket.”
Mills obeyed, watering the man as he would a horse.
“He doesn’t know what we want yet. He thinks it’s some mutiny of my own.”
“It is,” Mills said. He turned to the merchant. “It is,” he said. “I never knew, your honor.”
Guillalume frowned. “Do you know Northumbria?” he demanded suddenly of the merchant. “Could you take us there?”
“Northumbria?”
“Aye.”
The man squinted. “Scept’red isle,” he asked after a few moments, “other Eden, demi-paradise?”
“That’s it,” Guillalume said.
“Fortress built by Nature for herself? Happy breed of men? Precious stone set in the silver sea?”
“Aye. Aye.”
“Earth of majesty, seat of Mars, blessed plot? That the place?”
“Aye! You’ve struck her off!”
“Rains almost daily? Cold scuzzy climate? Bleak economic outlook, nothing worth trading. You boys better off in Wieliczka.”
“Take us to Northumbria!” Guillalume commanded.
(Oh yes, commanded. Certainty in the tone of his voice, according to Greatest Grandfather Mills, like a flourish of syntax. High rage on him like the shakes, the easygoing youngest son suddenly recalled to himself and his heritage as if aristocratic mood were transudate and collateral with entirely personal states of emergency. All leaves were canceled according to Greatest Grandfather Mills, all priorities magically shifted, and authority itself suddenly transubstantiate with the worn, work-tattered, salt-torn rags Guillalume wore for clothing. There was no mistaking Guillalume’s purpose, the determined, dangerous set of his jawline that seemed to grow at the bottom of his face like a beard. Mills had never seen him like this, had never seen anyone like this, and for the first time in his life he envied purpose, lusted for will. Then there were suddenly knives in Guillalume’s hands, hangers, dirks, claymores, a blinding, whirling brace of the sharp. He drew the merchant’s blood at a dozen points, the wounds spectacular but superficial as paper cuts. He buttered them with salt with the flats of his arsenal. The merchant howled. Guillalume howled louder. “Compass! Card! Binnacle! Plumb bob! Fix thy course for Northumbria!” “But the crops,” the merchant whined, “the harvest—” “Geography!” Guillalume hissed. “For Northumbria, Map!” “But the caravan,” the merchant pleaded, “the camels—” “We don’t need the salt.” “We do. For barter. We do. We’d never get past the tribes, we’d never—” “The tribes?” “The tribes, Your Majesty, the clans. The bands and companies. All affined agnate generation.” “All affined agnate—” “Men,” the merchant said, “knots of the kindred between here and there, cousin clusters ’twixt hither and yon. Who guard the passes and bar the borders. Frontiers of men, sir, horizons of flesh. The landscape is toll’d, m’lud. This is no civil world, Master. It’s filled with patriots to place. There are holy hectares, restricted rivers. Even the wilderness is posted. They kill trespassers.” “Maybe there’s some other way of going,” Mills suggested. “Liar,” Guillalume boomed, “I’ve seen the maps you show. Firelands, Giantlands, Dragonlands! Continents of monster, terra terror! How do you make your journeys? You bring no salt with you. How do you make your journeys?”)
The merchant watched him, then answered coolly, “I’m impunity,” he said, “vaccinate ’gainst xenophobia. The token interloper I am, the consanguinitic vagrant totem. I come from the far. From distance itself I come.” He shook himself, shedding even the damp salt which clung to his clothes and flesh, showing them the refractive shine of his person, the odd insignia they had seen in the forest almost blinding in the open sunlight and making, as the merchant shook himself, a mysterious preen of jewelry. His pins and pendants made a sensible bell-like music.
“He’s God,” Mills muttered. “He’s God,” Mills told Guillalume.
“He never is,” Guillalume said uncertainly.
“No, no,” the man said, “not God, only a traveler, a man of mileage just, a courier along the vault and arch of landscape is all.” He paused and looked at them. “ ‘Follow me,’ He said.” “But I go further, outdistancing atlas.”