Edgar Pangborn - Davy

We went on a time in silence, I remember, but it wasn’t long before Michael took hold of my arm and said without smiling: “You are now in touch with someone who can admit you to probationary membership in the Society of Heretics. Do you still want it?”

“You yourself? You have that authority?”

He grinned then, more like a boy. “For six months, but in all that time until now I haven’t found anyone who met the requirements. I didn’t want to mystify you, but had to sleep on it myself. Probation only — more I can’t do, but in Old City I’ll guarantee you a welcome, and you’ll meet others who can take you further. They’ll set you things to do, some of which you won’t understand right away.” All I could say was a stumbling thanks, which he brushed aside.

We had halted there in the sunny road, and I noticed I could no longer even hear the pilgrims who had gone on ahead. It was a tranquil open place, where a small stream crossed the road through a culvert and wandered away into a field. The Bland-Mordan argument was less than dust on the breeze, but I said: “Should we catch up with them?”

“For my part,” Michael said, “I’ve no more use for them. I enjoyed traveling with them, if only for the privilege of hearing ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ sung in Oxfoot English with guitar accompaniment, but now I’d sooner go on to Old City with no company but yourself — if you like the thought. I have money, and a skill with this little pigsticker that makes up for my lack of brawn. I don’t know the wilderness in the ways you were telling me about last night, but from here to Old City it’s all roads and safe inns. How about it?”

“That’s what I’d like.”

He was studying the stream, and its vanishing in taller growth some distance from the road. “Those willows,” he said — “away off the other side of that thicket — would they mean a pool, Davy? I’d like a dip, to wash off Mordan’s original sin.”

I think that was the first time I’d ever heard a priest mentioned without his title. It gave me a chill that was at first fright, then pleasure, then matter-of-fact amusement. “It should be a pool,” I said, “or they wouldn’t be clustered like that…”

I suppose there could have been some danger out in the grassland, but it seemed like safe country as we slipped through the grass, the pilgrims becoming long-ago things and then forgotten, and found the pool. I had begun to understand about Michael, but not entirely until I saw the shirt impatiently flung away from a ridiculous bandage that bound his upper chest. Then that was gone, the small woman’s breasts set free.

She took off the rapier with care, but not the clumsy trousers — those she dropped and sent flying with a kick. She stood by me then all gravity and abstracted sweetness, proud of her brown slimness, hiding nothing. Seeing I was too dazed and too much in love to move, she touched the bluish tattoo on her upper arm and said: “This doesn’t trouble you, does it, Davy? Aristocracy, caste-it means nothing among the Heretics.”

“It doesn’t trouble me. Nothing should trouble me much if I can be with you the rest of my life.”

I remember she put out her golden hand against my chest and pushed me lightly, glancing at the pool, smiling for the first time since she had bared herself. “Does it look deep enough?” Nickie asked me. “Deep enough for diving?”

Six years ago I wrote that last episode, and laid down my pen to yawn and stretch with pleasure, remembering the pool and the hushed morning and the love we had on the sunny grass. I supposed that in a day or so I would go on writing, probably for several chapters, in spite of my feeling that I had already ended the principal part of the story I set out to tell. I thought I would go on, residing simultaneously here at Neonarcheos and at this imaginary inn of ours on the blind side of eternity or wherever you would prefer it to be-whoever you are-with many events belonging to a later time.

Particularly I had it in mind to tell of the two years that Nickie and I spent in Old City before what happened to us at that Festival of Fools. It is another book. I think I shall try to write it, after the Morning Star sails again and I with her, but I may not be able to. I don’t know. I am thirtyfive, therefore obviously not the same person who wrote you those twenty-four chapters when Nickie was no further away than a footnote and a kiss. I shall leave what I have written behind me, with Dion, when I sail.

The years in Old City after the Festival of Fools, the work with Dion in the heady, exciting, half-repellent atmosphere of high politics, the laws and councils and attempted reforms, the war we won against a pack of thieves and the war we lost against a horde of the self-righteous — all that is certainly another book, and I have a suspicion that Dion himself may be writing it, shielding himself by a dignified reticence from possible footnotes. [23] No, that wasn’t the reason for keeping it to myself. The reason is that I have not Davy’s open nature. He was able somehow to struggle for truth in autobiography even while “pursued by foot-notes” and with Miranda and me looking over his shoulder most of the time. I could never attempt that. For me the struggle must he in the dark, intensely private, doubtful of outcome. This note is written in May of 339, a full year after Davy’s departure with the Morning Star — (Barr intended to bring her back in four months). If Davy returns — (we still hope, but don’t talk about it any more) — I could perhaps show him what I have written about the years of the Regency, and maybe we could talk more frankly than we ever did in the old days. I would now, of course, give anything I possess for the corniest of his footnotes. — D.M.M. If I attempt that, it will not be for a long time.

I laid down my pen that evening six years ago, and a few moments later I heard Nickie call me. Her voice brought me out of a hazy brown study: I think I had wandered back to the time of my father’s death, and I was reflecting unoriginally how grief is likely to translate itself into philosophy, if you can wait for it, because it must.

As I see it today, my father’s death appears to be a true part of the story I was first compelled to write. That story ended, not as I thought at first, when the tiger entered the village and I learned who Sam was, but with the death of Sam Loomis, a loner by trade. For that was surely the occasion when the subject of this book, less homely than a mud-turkle and well-hung, got turned loose on the world (which still turns, I think) — oh, but why now should I bother my head over what did or didn’t belong in that story? There were so many stories I could never be certain which I was telling, and it doesn’t matter as much as I thought it did when I was bothering you and your Aunt Cassandra about varieties of time. It may be well enough to look at the enigma, the crazy glory and murk of our living-and-dying with a pen in your hand, but try it yourself — you’ll find more stories than you knew, and you’ll find mirth, tragedy, dirt, splendor, ecstasy, weariness, laughter and rage and tears all so intricately dependent on each other, intertwined like copulating snakes or the busy branches of a jinny-creeper — why, don’t be troubling yourself about opposites and balances but never mind, take hold of one branch and you touch them all.

I heard Nickie call me. Her pains had begun. It was the same time of evening that it is now — but this is May 20, 338 — in the same tropic shelter which has held up well for six years, same chair and desk, same view of the quiet beach. But since everything has crept forward six long years in time, nothing at all is the same, not even the flesh of my fingers curved against a different pen. The light appears the same, a luminous red flush receding from the pallor of the sand, and a few high white clouds drifting on the eastward course that the old Morning Star will be taking in a few days.