Edgar Pangborn - Davy

The skin of my belly hurt. I found a patch of red and a puncture mark. I’d blundered through an orb-spider’s web and only now would my body admit the pain. I’d been bitten before and knew what to expect. Hot needles were doing a jerky jig over my middle; my head ached, I’d soon have a fever, and then by tomorrow it wouldn’t bother me much. I was enough of a child and a savage to marvel at God’s letting me off so lightly.

I unwrapped the horn and raised it to my lips. How naturally it rested against me, my right hand at the valves! I imagined the ancient makers putting a guiding magic in it. They simply took thought for the shape of human body and arm, like a knife-maker providing for the human hand. Partly by accident, I must have firmed my lips and cheeks in almost the right way. It spoke for me. I thought of sunlight transformed to sound.

I returned it to the sack, scared. Not of the mue three miles away with the mountain between us, but of his demon father. Fevered already, I said aloud: “Well, fuck him, he don’t exist no-way.” Know what? — nothing happened.

Maybe that was the moment I began to understand what most grown people never learn, and did not even in the Golden Age, namely that words are not magic.

I said (silently this time) that it didn’t matter. The horn was mine . I’d never see the mue again. I’d run away to Levannon, yes, but not by way of North Mountain.

The spider-bite set me vomiting, and I recalled some wiseacre saying the best treatment for orb-spider’s bite was a plaster of mud and boy’s urine. Loosening my loin-rag, I muttered: “A’n’t no use account I a’n’t a hejasus boy no more.” And laughed some, and piddled on bare earth to make the plaster anyhow. I’m sure it was as good as anything the medicine priests do for the faithful — didn’t kill me and made the pain no worse. I went on downhill to the edge of the forest near the stockade, to wait for dark and the change of guards.

A wide avenue, Stockade Street, ran all around the city just inside the palings; after the change the new guard would march a hundred paces down that street, and I would hear him go. That spring they were more alert than usual because of a rising buzz of war talk between Moha and Katskil; border towns take a beating in those affairs. At the end of his section he’d meet the next guard and bat the breeze if the corporal or sergeant wasn’t around, and that would leave my favorite spot unwatched. Later on the guards would take longer breaks in safe corners, smoking tobacco or marawan and trading stiffeners, [9] Moha idiom. Davy means the type of anecdote known in Nuin as a “tickler” or, for some undecipherable reason, “smut.” — Dion M. M. but the first break would suit my needs. Meanwhile I had an hour to wait and spent it unwisely thinking too much about the mue, which made me wonder what sort of creature I was.

I knew of brain-mues, the most dreaded of all, who have a natural human form so that no one can guess their nature till their actions reveal it. Sooner or later they behave in a way folk call the mue-frenzy, or insanity. They may bark, fume, rush about like beasts, see what others do not, lapse (like Morgan III) into the behavior of an idiot child, or sit speechless and motionless for days on end. Or they may with the most reasonable manner speak and obviously believe outrageous nonsense, usually suspecting others of wickedness or conspiracy or supposing themselves to be famous important people — even Abraham, or God himself. When brain-mues reveal themselves this way they are given over to the priests for disposal, like people who develop mysterious discolorations or lumps under the skin, since these are also considered to be the working-out of a mue-evil.

An Old-Time book we have on board describes “insane” people very differently, as sick people who may be treated and sometimes healed. This book uses the word “psychopathic” and mentions “insanity” or “craziness” as unsuitable popular terms. Ayah, and nowadays if you call a jo “crazy” you only mean he’s odd, weird, full of mahooha, a long-john-in-summer, a quackpot. Our Old-Time book speaks of these people with no horror but with a kind of compassion that in the modern spook-ridden world human beings seldom show except to those who very closely resemble themselves.

Well, hunkered in the thicket outside the palisade, I knew nothing of books except as a dusty bewilderment of my schooltime, now past. I thought, with none to console me: Do brain-mues act as I’ve done? No! I said. But the idea lurked in shadow, a black wolf waiting.

Behind the palings a man with a fair tenor and a mandolin was singing “Swallow in the Chimbley,” approaching down a side-street. Skoar folk had been humming that ever since a Rambler gang introduced it a few years before. It made me think of Emmia, less about my troubles.

Swallow in the chimbley,

Oop hi derry O!

Swallow in the chimbley,

Sally on my knee.

Swallow flying high,

Sally, don’t you cry!

Tumble up and tumble down and lie with me.

The evening was hot, heavy with the smell of wild hyacinth, so still I could hear that man hawk and spit after goofing the high note the way you expect a tenor to do if he’s got more sass than education. I liked that.

You can’t live thinking you’re a brain-mue.

Swallow in the chimbley,

Oop hi derry O!

Swallow in the chimbley,

Sally jump free—

Left her smock behind,

Sally, don’t you mind!

Tumble up and tumble down and lie with me.

The singer was evidently the stockade guard’s relief, for now I heard the ceremony of the change of guards. First the old guard hollered at the new to quit making like a Goddamn likkered-up tomcat and get the lead out of his butt. After that, the solemn clash of gear, and a brisk discussion of music, the rightness of the town clock, what the corporal would say, where the corporal could shove it, and a suggestion that the musical new guard do something in the way of sexual self-ministration which I don’t think is possible, to which the singer replied that he couldn’t account he was built like a bugle. I sneaked over to the base of the stockade, waiting out the ceremony. At last the new guard stomped off down the street on his first round — without his mandolin since he had to carry a javelin.

Swallow in the chimbley,

Oop hi derry O!

Swallow in the chimbley,

Sally cry “Eee!”

Catch her by the tail,

Happy little quail!

Tumble up and tumble down and lie with me.

The spider-bite hampered me climbing the stockade, but I made it, the burden in my sack unharmed. I sneaked down Kurin Street to the Bull-and-Iron. Emmia’s window was lit, though it wasn’t yet her bedtime. When I reached the stable, damned if she wasn’t there doing my work for me. She had finished watering the mules, and turned with a finger at her lips. “They think I’m in my room. Said I seen you at work and they took my word for it. I swear, Davy, this is the last time I cover up for you. Shame on you!”

“You didn’t have to, Miss Emmia. I—”

“’Didn’t have to’ — and me trying to save your backside a tanning! Moving away, Mister Independent?”

I squirmed my sack to the floor; my sh!rt sprung open and she saw the smeary bite. “Davy darling, whatever? And here she comes in a warm rush, no more mad at all. “Oh dear, you got a fever too!”

“Orb-spider.”

“Dumb crazy love, going off where them awful things be, if you was small enough to turn over my lap I’d give you a fever where you’d remember it.” She went on so, sugary scolding that means only kindness and female bossiness.

When she stopped for breath I said: “I didn’t goof off, Miss Emmia — thought it was my free day.” Her soft hands fussing at my shirt and the bitten place were rousing me up so that I wondered if my loin-rag would hide the evidence.