“Mi-ills,” Guillalume said one evening when they had tucked in in one of the barns where the farmers permitted them to stay.
“M’lud, m’lord?”
“I was just thinking…Have you noticed how no one will shake hands with us anymore or return our salutes?”
“No class, guv. They’re a bolshy lot.”
“Well perhaps, Mills, but it occurs to me that they haven’t the custom.”
“Just what I was sayin’, your lordship.”
“Well, but don’t you see, Mills? If they haven’t the custom, then it’s very likely no one’s shown it to them.”
“I ’ave.”
“Yes, certainly, but if real knights had been by, campaigners — well, it’s just that one would have thought they’d have seen it by now. They’re not a stupid people. Look at the stores in this barn, think of the delicious produce we’ve seen them grow, the delightful cuts of meat they’ve shared with us, all the fine stews.”
“Yar?”
“Butter. And, what do they call it, cheese? Yes, cheese. I’ve kept my eyes open, Mills. That butter and cheese are made from ordinary cow’s milk. We don’t do butter, we don’t do cheese. This is an advanced technological civilization we’ve come upon here. And wine. They do that out of fruit.”
“They never.”
“Oh they do, Mills, yes. Out of fruit.”
“Bleedin’ Jesus.”
“But they haven’t the handshake, they haven’t the salute.”
“No manners.”
“Quite right. One suspects one is off the beaten track, rather. I don’t think our fellows have been by. I think we’re lost.”
But what could they do? If they were lost and had left it to the horses — as both now openly confessed — and the horses had taken them deeper and deeper into ever more amicable country, what could they do but leave it entirely to the horses? Mills articulating that if horses knew anything — hadn’t he seen them return to the stables riderless? — it was the main chance, their own steedly interests. They had done pretty well by them thus far. Why shouldn’t they do even better? Take them into even finer country? Guillalume’s fright seemed tuned by the moonlight.
“What?” asked Mills.
“They’ll take us to Horseland.”
“To Horseland, sir?”
“Someplace where there are no riders, where the hay grows wild as meadowgrass. Carrying us through the better weather as if we ambled along the Gulf Stream or the tradewinds of earth.”
And a few days later — still high summer — someone twisted Mills’s fingers when he extended his hand.
“Here you!” Mills shouted at him, pulling his hand back. “Fuckin’ barbarian!”
They had come — or Mills thought they had — to the Duchy of Barbaria. Guillalume, once the sense of Mills’s word forcibly struck him, could not conceive of where they now were as a place given over to any sort of organization at all. He intuited, and spoke of this in whispers to Mills, that there would be no kings, no barons or dukes here, no knights allegiant, no sheriffs, no treasury to exact taxes or a yield of the crop, no astrologer or priest and, if there were armies, no officers to lead them.
“No law,” Guillalume said, “only custom. No rule, only exception. No consanguinity, only self. No agriculture, only Nature; no industry, only repair; no landmark; no—”
“Shh,” Mills cautioned, and pointed fearfully toward the man who had pulled his fingers. The barbarian had turned and, making some shrill signal, whistled his horse from the dark forest where it had been foraging. It was eighteen hands at the very least and its upper lip had been torn from it violently, leaving a visible picket of filed, pointed teeth. Its flanks were scored with a crust of wounds, a black coping of punishment, its entire body studded, random as stars, with war wart, bruise. The man placed his shoe deep in a ledge of whittled horseflesh and pulled himself up on its back where he sat in a bare saddle of calloused lesion and looked down on Mills and Guillalume, shook his finger at them and laughed, baring teeth which perfectly matched the horse’s own. He lashed viciously and wheeled.
“We’ll double back,” Guillalume said.
“How?”
They had in fact left the last roads behind them weeks before and since then had traveled cross country through fields, along stubbly verge, vague property. They had come to rivers — not for the first time; they had been coming to rivers since crossing the Channel; always, so north were they, the current had been gentle, little more than oblique pull, the minor tug and Kentucky windage of a just now bending inertia — shallow enough — leave it to the horses — to wade across. But it was not even Europe now, not even the world. They were no place cultivated, months away from the frontier, beyond all obedient landscape, behind the lines, surrounded by a leaning, forbidding stockade of trees, so stripped of direction they quibbled left and worried right and troubled up from down. Bereft of stance, they indiscriminately mounted each other’s horses and hot-potato’d the simplest decisions.
“Shall we try the blue fruit?”
“The blue? I should have thought the silver.”
“Maybe the primrose.” But there was little sweetness in any of them, or in the flesh of fish or hares. There was a saline quality in everything they ate now, an essence not so much of condiment or seasoning as of additive, long-haul provision, the taste of protected stores, the oils that preserved and kept machinery supple, the soils and salts that extended meat. They were always thirsty.
Then one morning Mills refused to mount, refused to advance further. “They’ve betrayed us,” he said. He meant the horses. And he laughed bitterly. “So this is Horseland!”
“There is no Horseland!” his superior said. “Get on your beast, Mills.”
“Why should I? You said yourself there’s no law here, no kings or treasury. We ride each other’s horses, share and share alike. We discuss lunch, decide dinner, choose the blue fruit or the primrose. Why should I? You said yourself—”
“Exactly! I said. I did. Listen to me, my Mills. I’m your superior, just as that barbarian we saw was mine. Learn this, Mills. There are distinctions between men, humanity is dealt out like cards. There is natural suzereignty like the face value on coins. Men have their place. Even here, where we are now, at large, outside of place, beyond it, out of bounds and offside, loosened from the territorial limits, they do. It’s no accident that Guillalume is the youngest son for all it appears so, no more accident than that you are the Horseshit Man. It isn’t luck of the draw but the brick walls of some secret, sovereign Architecture that makes us so. It’s as simple as the scorn in my voice when I talk to you like this, as natural as the italics my kind use and your kind don’t. Now do as I tell you, get on your horse. No, wait.”
“Sir?”
“Have I hurt your feelings? Have I saddened you? Because I didn’t mean — There can be respect, you know; there can be affection, noblesse oblige. So come on, Mills, bear up, carry on. We’ll get back on our horses and — What is it?”
“You’ve doomed me,” Mills said. “You’ve cursed my race.”
It was so. Mills apologized silently to the sons he was yet to have — if they ever got out of this mess — for the heritage he was yet to give them, grieved for the Millsness he was doomed to pass on, for the frayed, flawed genes — he thought blood — of the second-rate, backseat, low-down life, foreseeing — if he ever got out of this mess — a continuum of the less than average, of the small-time, poached Horseshit Man life, prophesying right there in what Guillalume himself had told him could not have been Horseland all the consequences to others in the burdened bestiality of his blackballed loins.