George Mills (2 page)

“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.

“Mi-ills,” Guillalume said one evening when they had tucked in in one of the barns where the farmers permitted them to stay.

“M’lud, m’lord?”

“I was just thinking…Have you noticed how no one will shake hands with us anymore or return our salutes?”

“No class, guv. They’re a bolshy lot.”

“Well perhaps, Mills, but it occurs to me that they haven’t the custom.”

“Just what I was sayin’, your lordship.”

“Well, but don’t you
see,
Mills? If they haven’t the custom, then it’s very likely no one’s
shown
it to them.”

“I ’ave.”

“Yes, certainly, but if
real
knights had been by, cam
paign
ers——well, it’s just that one would have thought they’d have seen it by now. They’re not a
stupid
people. Look at the stores in this barn, think of the delicious produce we’ve seen them grow, the delightful cuts of meat they’ve shared with us, all the fine stews.”

“Yar?”

“Butter. And, what do they call it,
cheese?
Yes, cheese. I’ve kept my eyes open, Mills. That butter and cheese are made from ordinary cow’s milk.
We
don’t do butter,
we
don’t do cheese. This is an advanced technological civilization we’ve come upon here. And
wine.
They do that out of fruit.”

“They never.”

“Oh they do, Mills, yes. Out of fruit.”

“Bleedin’ Jesus.”

“But they haven’t the handshake, they haven’t the salute.”

“No manners.”

“Quite right. One suspects one is off the beaten track, rather. I don’t think
our
fellows have been by. I think we’re lost.”

But what could they do? If they were lost and had left it to the horses—as both now openly confessed—and the horses had taken them deeper and deeper into ever more amicable country, what could they do but leave it
entirely
to the horses? Mills articulating that if horses knew anything—hadn’t he seen them return to the stables riderless?—it was the main chance, their own steedly interests. They had done pretty well by them thus far. Why shouldn’t they do even better? Take them into even finer country? Guillalume’s fright seemed tuned by the moonlight.

“What?” asked Mills.

“They’ll take us to Horseland.”

“To Horseland, sir?”

“Someplace where there are
no
riders, where the hay grows wild as meadowgrass. Carrying us through the better weather as if we ambled along the Gulf Stream or the tradewinds of earth.”

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.