George Mills Read online

  And a few days later—still high summer—someone twisted Mills’s fingers when he extended his hand.

  “Here you!” Mills shouted at him, pulling his hand back. “Fuckin’ barbarian!”

  They had come—or Mills thought they had—to the Duchy of Barbaria. Guillalume, once the sense of Mills’s word forcibly struck him, could not conceive of where they now were as a place given over to any sort of organization at all. He intuited, and spoke of this in whispers to Mills, that there would be no kings, no barons or dukes here, no knights allegiant, no sheriffs, no treasury to exact taxes or a yield of the crop, no astrologer or priest and, if there were armies, no officers to lead them.

  “No law,” Guillalume said, “only custom. No rule, only exception. No consanguinity, only self. No agriculture, only Nature; no industry, only repair; no landmark; no——”

  “Shh,” Mills cautioned, and pointed fearfully toward the man who had pulled his fingers. The barbarian had turned and, making some shrill signal, whistled his horse from the dark forest where it had been foraging. It was eighteen hands at the very least and its upper lip had been torn from it violently, leaving a visible picket of filed, pointed teeth. Its flanks were scored with a crust of wounds, a black coping of punishment, its entire body studded, random as stars, with war wart, bruise. The man placed his shoe deep in a ledge of whittled horseflesh and pulled himself up on its back where he sat in a bare saddle of calloused lesion and looked down on Mills and Guillalume, shook his finger at them and laughed, baring teeth which perfectly matched the horse’s own. He lashed viciously and wheeled.

  “We’ll double back,” Guillalume said.

  “How?”

  They had in fact left the last roads behind them weeks before and since then had traveled cross country through fields, along stubbly verge, vague property. They had come to rivers—not for the first time; they had been coming to rivers since crossing the Channel; always, so north were they, the current had been gentle, little more than oblique pull, the minor tug and Kentucky windage of a just now bending inertia—shallow enough—leave it to the horses—to wade across. But it was not even Europe now, not even the world. They were no place cultivated, months away from the frontier, beyond all obedient landscape, behind the lines, surrounded by a leaning, forbidding stockade of trees, so stripped of direction they quibbled left and worried right and troubled up from down. Bereft of stance, they indiscriminately mounted each other’s horses and hot-potato’d the simplest decisions.

  “Shall we try the blue fruit?”

  “The blue? I should have thought the silver.”

  “Maybe the primrose.” But there was little sweetness in any of them, or in the flesh of fish or hares. There was a saline quality in everything they ate now, an essence not so much of condiment or seasoning as of additive, long-haul provision, the taste of protected stores, the oils that preserved and kept machinery supple, the soils and salts that extended meat. They were always thirsty.

  Then one morning Mills refused to mount, refused to advance further. “They’ve betrayed us,” he said. He meant the horses. And he laughed bitterly. “So this is Horseland!”

  “There is no Horseland!” his superior said. “Get on your beast, Mills.”

  “Why should I? You said yourself there’s no law here, no kings or treasury. We ride each other’s horses, share and share alike. We discuss lunch, decide dinner, choose the blue fruit or the primrose. Why should I? You said yourself——”

  “Exactly! I said. I did. Listen to me, my Mills. I’m your superior, just as that barbarian we saw was mine. Learn this, Mills. There are distinctions between men, humanity is dealt out like cards. There is natural suzereignty like the face value on coins. Men have their place. Even here, where we are now, at large, outside of place, beyond it, out of bounds and offside, loosened from the territorial limits, they do. It’s no accident that Guillalume is the youngest son for all it appears so, no more accident than that you are the Horseshit Man. It isn’t luck of the draw but the brick walls of some secret, sovereign Architecture that makes us so. It’s as simple as the scorn in my voice when I talk to you like this, as natural as the italics my kind use and your kind don’t. Now do as I tell you, get on your horse. No, wait.”

  “Sir?”

  “Have I hurt your feelings? Have I saddened you? Because I didn’t mean——There can be respect, you know; there can be affection, noblesse oblige. So come on, Mills, bear up, carry on. We’ll get back on our horses and——What is it?”

  “You’ve doomed me,” Mills said. “You’ve cursed my race.”

  It was so. Mills apologized silently to the sons he was yet to have—if they ever got out of this mess—for the heritage he was yet to give them, grieved for the Millsness he was doomed to pass on, for the frayed, flawed genes—he thought blood—of the second-rate, backseat, low-down life, foreseeing—if he ever got out of this mess—a continuum of the less than average, of the small-time, poached Horseshit Man life, prophesying right there in what Guillalume himself had told him could not have been Horseland all the consequences to others in the burdened bestiality of his blackballed loins.

  “Come on, let’s go then,” Guillalume said.

  “I’m staying,” Mills said.

  “What? Here?”

  “I don’t wish on no one the injury of my life.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Mills explained, sulking, and Guillalume laughed. “Well, that’s a good one all right,” he said, “but it comes a little late after what you told me on the journey. Unless you were lying of course——or boasting.”

  “What I told you?”

  “In the ripe times, when we cruised geography, when we lay in our sweet, wine-stained straw and listened to the music and watched the girls dance. Not one as pretty as your own, you said. The damage is done. Your son will have been born by now. The generations are unleashed. Get back on your horse.”

  But he didn’t. He simply walked off deeper into the forest. He could hear Guillalume call, “Mills? Mills! I’m still your master.”

  “I don’t think you’ve jurisdiction in Horseland,” he shouted back.

  “Mills? Mills? I have something to tell you. Mills? We’re not lost!” The stableboy turned around. All he could see was the green armor of the woods. And then Guillalume appeared in a green archway he’d made by pushing back two thin saplings. “We’re not lost,” he said again.

  “I am.”

  “Oh, I don’t know where we are, I don’t claim that, but we’re not lost. Being lost is the inability to find the place you want to be. I’m going to tell you something. I knew the turn-off.”

  “What?”

  “I knew the turn-off. You were in the lead. I didn’t signal. I let you miss it.”

  “But why?”

  “You must promise never to tell anyone.”

  “Who would I tell?”

  “Promise.”

  “There’s no one to tell. There’s only barbarians around and I don’t speak Asshole.” Guillalume looked at him. “All right. I promise.”

  “They sent us to fight in a holy war. We would both probably have been killed. That’s why I let you go on when we came to the turn-off. Let’s be barbarians, Mills. They don’t have younger sons. Perhaps they don’t even have stableboys.”

  This was ten centuries ago. Greatest Grandfather Mills wasn’t born yesterday. His master may well not have had jurisdiction in the—to them—lawless land not to which they’d come but to which they’d been translated by the footloose, fancy-free horses. There were no typewriters then, no room at which an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards in infinite time might have knocked out Hamlet, but, in a way, the just two horses in the just seven months had done just that——not Hamlet, of course, but Adventure, Adventure itself, bringing them through the random, compassless, ever swerving obliquity of tenuously joined place and across the stumbled, almost drunken vaulting of nameless—to them nameless—duchies and
borders and diminishing jurisdictions to this——the at last ragged, corey chaos of alien earth. What else was Adventure if it was not only not knowing where one was but where one could be, not only not knowing where one’s next meal was coming from but even what color it was likely to be?

  Mills understood this, as he’d understood, was way ahead of, Guillalume’s heartbreaking explanation of fixed men, of the mysteriously gravid and landlocked quality in them that forbade all yeasty rise and usurpation and that put even self-improvement perhaps and the transmigration of privilege certainly—he was not convinced so much that Guillalume was his master as that someone was—out of the question. It was only this—that someone was—that kept him from slicing Guillalume’s throat. Let him rave in his precious italics. (Let’s be barbarians, Mills! Oh do let’s!) He had Guillalume’s younger son number. And even understood what was behind the let’s-be-barbarians crap: the principle of bought time——the sly, unspoken notion that at any moment death could elevate him, like the man who wins the pools, the death of brothers, Guillalume’s long-shot hope. Whereas for him, for his lot, death would merely hammer him—them—more deeply into place, delivering as it would mere heirloom, his father’s—got from his father who got them from his—nasty tools of the Horseshit trade.

  Of course he would go with him. It was only for a bit of a sulk that he’d wandered off into the woods within woods where Guillalume had found him.

  So he knew his life and, dimly, the lives of his progeny, knew that all men are the founders of their lines, was reconciled, however uneasily, to what seemed to him his excellent educated guess about his fate——to be first among little guys, little men: God’s blue collar worker. To serve, to travel for others; to see much of the world without in the least knowing what stood behind whatever had been left outside, up front, there for all his furlough’d, shore-leave’d fellows—the waterfront bars and strange hoosegows and chief points of interest, all its—the world’s—Tours Eiffel and Empire State Buildings, all its Chinatowns and interesting cathedrals, the capital sights of the capital cities, the velvet ropes around rooms open to the public in palaces, congresses, parliaments in session, a subliminal taste of the foreign for Mills and his kind who would, as Mills had just missed doing, be sent off to fight in foreign lands, serve overseas, living for years at a time perhaps in the trenches and foxholes of French or Indo-Chinese or Korean earth itself, or cooped up in Japanese and German and Holy Roman Empire and Hanseatic prison camps, internment a certainty, and some even to be buried there or, missing in action, never found, but never, no matter the duration, to learn the language or the customs——not even a gawker race of unwelcome men, history’s not even peeping Toms.

  But Guillalume had blown it, finessed an entire crusade simply because he wanted to be alive if a brother should die. And of course he would go with him, play the fellow, be for him Guillalume’s very own my Mills, obeying all the reasonable orders, and if there was to be affection why it would probably be Mills himself who would mete it out, serving it up as he might Guillalume’s dinner. No harm done. It was adventure he was after—he’d only just learned this—and Guillalume was the key, holding as he did all the credentials, for Guillalume was the founder of his race, too, though, unlike Mills, he didn’t know that yet. And what a race it would be! Generation after generation of subalterns, of second lieutenants, ROTC boys whose gleaming bars and Brasso’d buttons and shining boots would make them, for all they knew the languages, superior targets. Guillalume’s rod and his staff, they comforted him. Better, they shielded him. For Mills instinctively understood the percentages, blood’s and politics’ unfavorable odds, advantage to the house. He pitied his master and followed the damn fool out of the woods, even taking the saplings from him and pushing them still further apart, allowing the younger son—he could have been Mills’s younger son—to pass through first.

  He stepped through himself and the saplings sprang back into place, the woods immediately disappearing behind them. But the horses were gone. They could just make out the tail of Guillalume’s horse closing like a curtain over its own asshole exactly as the Chinese fan of forest closed behind the horses themselves.

  This was almost a thousand years ago. Horses did not have names. Guillalume and Mills brayed fatuously after them into the brackish air.

  “Guillalume’s horse,” Mills shouted.

  “Mills’s steed,” cried Guillalume. “Guillalume’s and Mills’s animals!”

  But they were gone. Mills and Guillalume ran toward the hole in the forest into which the horses had disappeared. “You, horses! Come back!” Guillalume commanded. “Return to your riders!”

  “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 decoratio
n. 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!”