Stanley Elkin: George Mills

“I’ve seen this happen a hundred times back at your father’s,” Mills said. “They don’t like the work, ’orses. They’ll go out for a morning’s canter with a knight errant and they’re always so anxious to get back to the stables where it’s warm and they can laze about chewing their hay or muck around with their sweethearts, they just pick up and come back riderless. They do that.”

“My father’s stables, Mills, are half a million miles, versts, hectares and rods from here. They’re nothing but dastardly traitors and deserters. Afraid of a little holy war, that’s all.” Then he giggled. Then he stopped. “Mills,” he said thoughtfully, “do you suppose they sense the proximity of stables? They haven’t had hay or proper water in weeks. Do you think—?”

“And they ain’t ’ad no quiff neither they ’aven’t.” He looked at Guillalume.

“We’ll give chase, follow their spoor. We’ll run them to earth. Pick up our gear and come. We’ll harry and tally-ho them.”

“We’ll assist the police in their inquiries,” Mills muttered and stepped in their spoor — a loose, damp signature of ropey horseshit. And it was then that they discovered what they should have noticed a week before — that the animals’ crap (as well as their own) was finely studded with a sort of silverish jewelry, a crystalline dust that didn’t so much refract light as expel it.

“El Dorado!” Guillalume exclaimed.

“Wieliczka,” said a voice.

The Englishmen — it wasn’t England then; Guillalume hadn’t said El Dorado but some other fabled name — looked up. They glanced all around. There was no one. Had a bird spoken? Guillalume actually asked the question.

“Some bird,” Mills said softly. “Sounded more like Asshole to me.”

“Barbarians, you mean?”

Both remembered the enormous man they had seen and fell silent. Turning in a tight circle where they stood they looked about cautiously. Everywhere there was the immense expanse of forest. They had entered a medium of wood, as the ocean was a medium of water. The thick, ancient trunks black as charred flesh, the low branches with their strange burden of woolly leaves that all but hid the sky. Though they had been awake less than an hour it might have been late afternoon, though they were dry it might have been raining. It was autumn now, the queer leaves had begun to turn, and even in the dim light they could perceive that their colors were like nothing they had ever seen. And at their feet the sparkling dung of their faithless horses.

“An enchanted forest?” Guillalume said tentatively.

“Wieliczka,” said the voice.

“Who’s there?” Mills’s master demanded, his hand grasping the sharp snickersnee at his side. “Who? Barbarian? Infidel? Muslim? Jew?”

“Merchant,” said the voice, and a man less tall than themselves materialized from within the feathery camouflage of forest. Mills stared first at the stranger, then at Guillalume. It was as if his master’s questions had invoked a sort of ecumenical man, some magical creature of compromise. The fellow was adorned with all sorts of symbolic jewelry — the crescents of Islam like tiny portions of honeydew, an alphabet of assorted crosses, from the lower case t of the Latin cross to the x of St. Andrew. There were patriarchal crosses like telegraph poles and papal crosses like railroad ties. There was the Cross of Lorraine like a stumpy ladder and a Maltese cross like Baltic decoration. There was a Celtic cross with its double nimbus and the puffed sleeves and booties of the botonee. There were the petaled uprights and transverses of the Moline cross.

He wore a skullcap and a Mogen David, Solomon’s Seal and something which looked like the pyramid and radiant eye on the back of what was to become the dollar bill. These — though neither Mills nor Guillalume recognized them, as they failed to distinguish between the odd Christian clefs of the crosses — along with diminutive cabalistic awls, trammels and calipers, were the symbols and signs of what perhaps even the man himself did not know were the heraldic tonics and staves of Freemasonry. There was Thoth’s beaked being. There were the rounded, interlocking palettes of Yin and Yang, and even, carried in a pouch at his waist, the fierce horned helmet of the Viking, the brutal mace, like an unlit torch, of the Vandal. He looked — they could not know this, though the man, understanding at least something of the semaphoric implications of his semiological, talismanic chevronicals and tokens, must have had some sense of their powers — like the doors and sides of a transcontinental rig studded with license plate, certificate, seal, registration.

“Merchant,” he said again, and smiled and threw them a highball and extended his hand for them to shake.

“English?” Mills said, accepting his hand and returning the salute.

“English sure. Merchant sure,” said the badged being, and fumbling among his various necklaces and pins selected a vaguely British device, a sort of arrowhead which the two recognized as a hallmark stamped upon the equipment of archers and yeomen back home.

“You speak English?” Guillalume said. “You know who we are? You know the way back?”

“Come sure,” said the panoplied person. Mills hefted his and Guillalume’s gear and together they followed the strangely burdened man who jingled as he walked like an immense keyring.

It was a sort of underground cavern.

[Though Mills and Guillalume didn’t know this either. They had followed the merchant, an oddly surefooted man as seemingly certain of direction in the closed and mazey woods as a compass. Tracing no, to them, visible trail, he walked past several trees, turned right, proceeded some yards, cut a defiant leftward perpendicular, proceeded further, tacking, zagging, zigging, making casual doglegs, then an abrupt circumscription, as sharply defined as close-order drill, around what did not even seem to Mills or Guillalume a particular grouping of trees, and then as suddenly as they had been plunged into woods they were out of them again. Seeing mountains in the distance. And not knowing what these strange growths were either, since they’d never seen mountains before, thinking the hulls and loaves and peaks individual, gigantic trees, awed, wondering at the massive rains which must have grown them, Noah weather, tidal waves from the sky, and dreading the intense sunlight which must have shined on them, actual fire perhaps — yes, Mills at least, thinking themselves closer to the sky, the sun, observing the empirical evidence of the upward slope of the land like an actual ramp between themselves and the distant what they did not know were mountains, and looked upon their guide with a new fear and respect, suddenly inferring the meaning of the various crucifixes and holy medals he wore: why, he’s a messenger from Heaven! from all the Heavens! the godly, factioned principalities of death — a country — Guillalume thinking — of intermittent flood and drought, understanding, he suddenly felt, the queer saline quality of everything they had drunk and eaten recently: heat did that, sacrificially lifting the sugary remnant in substance just as certainly as fire burned upward and smoke rose, sucking sweetness in columns of riven temperature and tilting the delicate alchemical balance that moderated the warring atoms of taste (who had bitten into the dry salted sticks of bleached driftwood exposed on the summer beaches of his homeland), and leapt to a different conclusion than Mills, fearing the stranger as much even as he respected him less, thinking their curiously bedight leader a parched and salt-maddened man. “Beasts be there. Come,” said the merchant, pointing toward the mountains rising from the gently elevating plain. And both thought: Yes! Beasts would be there where single trees — they counted at least a dozen — could grow so high. They looked at each other and both had suddenly the same memory, the same awful thought. Guillalume shuddered and Mills nodded gravely. When the messenger spoke, Mills thought, when the man from the skies spoke who had not uttered a sound during the entire time he had been guiding them through the undifferentiated scaffolding of the forest, not one word said during all the — to them — arbitrary shifts and turns and mute drill-sergeant rights and forwards and lefts and obliques of their close-order, parade-ground negotiations; when the sandy, dehydrated madman spoke, Guillalume thought, when the thirsty shipwrecked man spoke and raised his arm to point out the now dozen arid, wrung-out, flame-cured, behemoth gorbelly trees, when the salt-addled lunatic spoke who had not made a sound during all his crazy follow-the-leader hairpin squiggle tactics in the wildwood, Guillalume suddenly remembered, and saw from his expression that Mills did too, the gross, huge, almost leather-headed, spike-skinned, scale-nailed barbarian they had seen previously. And knew his — their — mistake. Why, he had not been a barbarian at all, simply — simply? — one of the beasts their crazed companion had referred to. Probably his clan was somewhere bivouacked in the copse of immense trees. He was certain he was right. Not a barbarian at all, but a baby beast indigenous to the place, wandered off probably from his parents and as lost as themselves — himself and Mills — in the normal-scale world. That’s why he’d laughed. It was at the — to him — teensy saplings and weeny toy grass and at Mills and himself too. So not only not a barbarian but not even a beast yet, only a child of beasts and giants, his great steed only a beast kid’s pony! And he halted where he stood, catching Mills up with a warning glance. The merchant, no longer hearing them behind him, turned. “Come,” he said. “Come.” And there was no question in either of their minds but that they’d have to, Guillalume fearing what the madman, small as he was, might yet do to them with his Vandal’s weapons if they balked, and Mills understanding that you did not wrestle with angels. They started walking again, Guillalume thinking, and thinking Mills thought: If we could only find the beast child and bring him — though perhaps she was a girl beastess not yet started in her monthlies — with us, that might placate the distraught parents, show our — mine, Mills’s — good will. But on the vacant plain the child was nowhere to be seen and Guillalume walked closer to Mills. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked in a low voice. “I think so,” Mills whispered. “I have a plan,” Guillalume said. “We need one.” “When we get there—” “Yes?” “Be quiet.” “Sir?” “I mean no talking. Coo. Smile and dribble. Wet your breeches. Shit them.” “Smile and dribble? Wet my breeches? Shit them? Coo? This is your plan?” “Don’t you see?” “I’m only a stable-hand, I ’aven’t ’ad your advantages, sire.” “They’ll think what that oaf brat thought when he laughed at you. That we’re babies from a different tribe!”