Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“No more today,” the merchant told the women. “All over now. Good night. Good night.”

When they were alone it was Guillalume who apologized. “Sorry,” he murmured, “didn’t mean to wake the dander. It’s just our adventure has gone boring and uncomfortable. Father’s fault. Adventure should never take place more than a day’s journey from the castle.” Mills stared at the rough wooden ceiling. “Forgive me? Give us a smile?” Mills smiled dutifully in the darkened long house. Mills heard the rattle of the shucks as Guillalume turned on his pallet. When he spoke again his voice was still conciliatory. “What are you thinking, Mills? What are you thinking, George?”

“I’m wondering what I’m going to tell the horse tomorrow.”

“You take that part too seriously.”

“If it stops they’ll kill me.”

“You think too much in terms of punishments,” said the man who had just threatened him.

It was true. Once Mills knew that they — he still thought “they”—would need the merchant he wondered what they would do to him — he thought “him”—if he was caught. They could stone him, flay him, hang him, cut away his features as you’d peel a potato. There were hundreds of punishments on the books, for the other end of the tapestry condition was the conditional condition, the notion that he held his life by sufferance, the moody good will of his unpastoral superiors. (The chain of command was unclear: there could be women in the long house who had authority over him. He did not even know if he was a slave, if Guillalume was.) Men of his station lived ringed by deterrent and each time he thought of a way to use the merchant to make good their escape — he thought “their”; Guillalume, though his master, was his charge, too; and there were also the horses — he thought of the terrible retribution which would come with capture, and constantly modified each violent plan with a gloss of extenuation. (He had invented a sort of Mexican bandit, a fellow who joked with a hostage, who plied him with drink and cigarettes and sent out for hamburgers, who offered him extra blankets, and shared jokes, all the while sleeping with pulled pin grenades and a cover-story smile on his lips. It may even be that he invented the Robin Hood legend itself, bringing hospitality and class and a light heart to violence, all the forced, hypocritical courtesies and jolly rogering that come with bright ends and hardened means.) It made no difference. A month later he was still tampering with his plans, ballasting action with all that was incompatible with it.

Then one day Guillalume appeared in the salt chamber where Mills, on duty and alone during a rest period, was entertaining Mills’s horse with supposition.

“Say this: say we bring him the months’ journey back with us, letting him ride while I walk, stumble, my feet bloody and my body bruised. And say we set him on the lee side of the clearing at our evening debouch with yourself and Guillalume’s horse and me to keep the wind off. Say we do all the hunting and fishing while he dozes, and cook the meat the way he likes, never mind that I favor mine rare and can’t chew gray food. Say I strip myself to put additional cloth on his body and always let him have the last of the fresh water. Say I do all his heavy lifting and learn his favorite songs and call him by honorifics, upping the ante of his natural caste, so as to say, ‘Yes, Merchant Minister,’ or ‘Indeed, Money Grower,’ ‘Aye, ’tis so reported, Your Mercantileship.’ Suppose I did all this and said all this and only begged of him — always deferentially, always with respect — the right turn from the wrong, petitioning him not even for information but just for hints, as children look to the Master of the Revels for clues in games. ‘Cold, cold, ’ he could say, or hearten us by a cheerful ‘Warm and warmer.’ And let’s say that there’s ransom on Guillalume and that it goes to the merchant with an income on a portion of Guillalume’s lands for he and his heirs in perpetuity? Would not all this mitigate the original offense and cause him to soften his denunciation? Suppose we—”

“Cut inches from his throat and scatter his nostrils, slice his kneecaps and knot his veins,” Guillalume said. “Come, old son, when you unhitch tonight bring Mills’s horse up through last week’s channel. We’re going to scarper. I’ve got the old bastard. He’ll see us home or I’ll feed him his bones for breakfast.”

Mills grimaced. “He’s in pain?”

“Like a horse talker’s throat.”

“You threatened him?”

“Like a widow in arrears.”

“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!”