Stanley Elkin - George Mills

So each leaving it to the other in mutual unconditional surrender and deputation. Guillalume leaving it to Mills and Mills to Guillalume and the horses. Even Guillalume’s horse, as much a stranger to Europe as either of the men, involved in the delegation of responsibility, it devolving at last upon the lead horse — Mills’s — to get them to that fabled cusp where the Waal channel of the Meuse met the lower Rhine.

Thus missing their turn-off entirely. Failing to hang a right in the Netherlands, sticking to the flat country, the topography of least resistance, a good green graze across northern Europe, Mills’s horse out for a pleasant month-of-Sundays stroll — it was high summer now — and taking the rest along with him. And pleasant enough for Guillalume and Mills, too. So many new sights to see, so many strange new fruits and raw vegetables to eat and queer tongues to hear. And that year — it was 1097—the weather absolutely beautiful, a mild winter, a fresh and pleasant spring, a cool and perfect summer, the delightful climate prelapsarian and Nature never more generous. As though the biblical seven fat years had been squeezed into one delicious obese season. Bumper crops all over Europe that time, so lush the barbarous landowners and peasants thought the gods Wodin, Odin, Thor and Christ had been placated forever, and flashing their hospitality like fathers of brides, shining it on whomever they saw, our friends, the strangers, now so irrevocably lost that Guillalume himself, by-passing Mills, had begun to leave it to the horses.

They spoke of it. Why not leave it to the horses? Look how well they had served them so far. Taking them from the rough, chunky dissolution of the Northumbrian winter through the evolving spring and developing summer of western Europe fifteen miles a day closer to whatever pitch-perfect paradise lay at the end of their journey. As if they possessed some tropism for grace which sifted them through danger and past all pitfall’s parlous, aleatory, dicey circumstance, a daily accretion of joy, incremental as snow rolled downhill. Horse-sensing the continent’s gravitational pull and advancing along the ebb tides of earth so that — though they were actually climbing longitudes and latitudes and grazing a very orbit of the tonsured globe — they seemed to be proceeding in that rich alluvial trough between beach and sea, skirting not only danger but even ordinary difficult country.

There was no sea of course, only the flat and fertile plains, pastures, arbors, and orchards — a green garden of agriculture in which the peasants and farmers seemed engaged in some perpetual in-gathering, a harvest like a parable, as astonishing to themselves as to Guillalume and Mills who, in what was not then even England, had, in that wet and misty bronchial climate, seen bumper crops merely of grass, measly grains, skinny fruit. Here it was the actual skins and juices of fruit staining the farmers’ flesh and beards, all their up-shirtsleeved bucolic condition, their breechclouts puddle-muddied at the knees with a liquid loam of opulent fermentation, a liquor of citrics, a sour mash of rotting — because there was too much to in-gather, vegetables discarded half eaten — potato and cabbage, squashed squash, cucumber and carrot, a visible strata of vegetable artifact, a landscape of the overripe like a squishy gravel of flora. The horses leading them through all this, grazing at sweet-toothed will, chewing in surfeited content from the broad green groaning board of earth. And so satiated finally that they — the horses — seemed to bloom beneath them — Guillalume reminded of his father’s quilted cavalry — the former nags filling to Clydesdale dimension (Guillalume and Mills, too, heavier now), and gradually reducing their pace, the fifteen miles a day diminishing to thirteen, to a dozen, to nine, to a sluggish seven, so that they seemed at last barely to progress at all, managing, even as they moved, merely to keep abreast of the countryside, to pace the farmers and landlords and peasants on foot, appearing to convoy them, cordon them off in some National Guard relation to their fields, creating — they (all of them: the horses, Guillalume, Mills, the in-gatherers) wouldn’t know this — the illusion of some governmental sanction to strikebreakers, say. So slow and easy that it would have been embarrassing to all of them had conversation not been struck up. Guillalume leaving this to Mills, too. (It wasn’t the old confidence — Gill reeked of horse too now and knew better — but laze, all avuncular, subruminative, long Christmas dinner sloth.)

“Ask after them, Mills.”

“I haven’t their language, m’lud.”

“Smile. Offer fruit.”

“They’ve fruit enough, sire. It’s a nation of flatulence here. Did not the breezes quicken the air as soon as it’s fouled we should die of the farting sickness, sir.”

“Well do something, man. It’s too nuisance-making to ride beside them on this cushion of silence.”

So he asked directions. Speaking in the universal tongue of petition, greenhorning himself and his master. “Moose?” he said. “Wall channel of the lower Rhine? Moose? Godfrey of Boolone? Wall?” The words making no more sense to him — they were in Friesland, they were in Angria, in the Duchy of Billungs, in Pomerainz — than they did to them, but the sound of distress clear enough. Even if Mills knew that the distress was feigned, who had begun to suspect — though not yet acknowledge aloud to Guillalume — that the horses were no Christians, that the horses had betrayed them, gotten them lost, and that long since, and who asked for directions — might even have asked for them even if Guillalume had not instructed him to speak — merely to be polite, to demonstrate with each rise in the pitch of his voice that he and his companion were foreigners, that they came as friends to kill the Islamic hordes for them. (Having absorbed at least this much of their mission from Guillalume.) “Moose? Wall? Killee killee smash balls son bitchee pagan mothers? Killee killee bang chop for Jeezy? Which way Moslem bastards?”

And everyone smiling, offering food, sharing lunches from wicker baskets spread out on white cloths in the open fields— picnics. (It was Mills who introduced the concept of picnics to England, bringing this foreign way of dining back to Blighty like Marco Polo fetching spaghetti from China.) Slaps on the back all round and the wine passed. And always during those idyllic seven fat months well met, hospitalitied as candidates and, when they had run out of toasts — always before they ran out of wine: the bumper crops, the vintage year — they were returned the mile or couple of kilometers or verst and a third to where they’d met, where Mills had first spoken his gibberish of good intention, always careful, though they did not travel in armor, to lean down from their mounts to shake hands in the trendy new symbol of emptyhandedness and unarmedness that they’d picked up on their travels. Or, though they wore no visor, to try out the rather rakish novelty salute which was just then coming in among the better class of knights. Although more and more of late some did not seem to know what to make of their toney salutes, but smiled anyway, enjoying the sight of grown men banging themselves on the forehead with the flats of their hands.

And then, often as not, the salutes were unreturned and the proffered hand ignored. And after a while it was taken again, but turned over, examined as carefully as if it were about to be read, and later as gingerly as if it were a rope or a chain, and once or twice it was actually bitten.

“Bleedin’ wogs,” Mills would say, turning in his saddle to wink at Guillalume.

Which was how they ultimately discovered that they were lost.