George Mills (7 page)
“Now—now—we’re for it,” Mills complained. “We were better—better off—in—in the farm.” His horse moved in front of Guillalume’s.
“What—what—do you mean? Are you blaming—blaming—
me
—for this? You wanted to—to—get back home as much—as I did,” Guillalume said, and the horses were abreast of each other again.
“It’s—a—tr—
trap.
” Mills’s horse edged forward.
“What—
what
is?” They were neck and neck.
“Th—this.” He indicated the altitude, the four or five inches of snow through which they plodded. “It’s—it’s a—trap and now—you’ll—you’ll have—to kill him.—Like you, you said.” Mills’s horse took the lead. “Have to—to—to—kill—kill him.” Mills started to laugh. He laughed giddily in the high air, unable to stop. “Only—hee hee—where—where—
is
—hee hee—he?” He looked around. Guillalume had disappeared behind him in the white heights, in the heavily falling snow.
“Where—air—where—air—are yooo?—Where are you, Mill—Mill—
Mills
?”
Mills was helpless to answer. He turned and saw Guillalume’s horse emerge from a cloudbank. It’s the talking, he realized. That’s what engines them, fuels them.
“Damn—
damn
you, Mills——Wait
up.
” (Though Greatest Grandfather said Guillalume had no breath for italics, that it was not class now or affectation which punched up his words so much as the actual explosions of his pressured lungs.)
So they had a horserace. Talking to each other while the horses overheard, seeming actual interested parties, cantering eavesdroppers. And this was when Mills got to say things to his master, and his master to Mills, which otherwise neither would have said to the other.
“The reason,” Guillalume said, his breath easier now, “some men command and others obey, has nothing to do with fitness, nor law, nor even custom. God does not sanction nor Nature compel fatality.” They believed—the snow had stopped falling and the mountains glistened like great bright boulders—that they rode in the sky, that their horses brisked along a ledge of cloud. The broad valleys beneath them seemed domesticate, lulled, standing pat as potted earth, quiescent as houseplant. “Only man needs men. I require a valet because I cannot dress myself, an upstairs maid because I can’t make beds. My doorman knows better than I the ins and outs of my house. You should be flattered, Mills. The drudge, the erk, the groom and porter——the help, Mills. The char and babysitter, the footman, lackey, cook and page. The turnspit and amah, the housecarl and equerry. Seneschals and cellarers. All my menial men, Mills, fixed more by skills than bayonets, talent than circumstance. You brood too much on blood, boy.”
“I lug your bathwater,” Mills called after him. “It’s my finger scalds to test the temperature. There’s no talent there, only patience and torpor. You got the guns. Your lot does. Where you got them or who gave them I don’t know. The devil, I think, because only the devil wouldn’t know better or wouldn’t care than to trust somebody with a gun who can’t make a bed.”
Guillalume’s long list had put him in the lead but Mills’s shouting had narrowed the gap and they were almost abreast of each other again, Mills a length or so behind. They had been descending and were now in the valley they had seen from the sky. The trail had ended, beaching them in abrupt wilderness. Mills looked round from where his mount had just nosed out Guillalume’s and recognized with some surprise that it was fall. It was the first time he’d been conscious of season since coming to Wieliczka. The mines had been landlocked in time, and his shift, from just before daybreak till the sun had gone down, and his exhaustion, had kept him thoughtless of the calendar. Neither of them had any idea where they were. They were lost and did not even know in what country they were lost, or even if it were a country, if it was still the planet, still earth. All they could see were, behind them, the mountains, and everywhere else, save the small apron of clearing on which they stood, the high, blond grasses of a giant, endless steppe.
“Where’d he go?” Mills said.
“He gave us the slip,” said Guillalume.
“We couldn’t have passed him.”
“In the snowstorm. We might have missed him in the snowstorm.”
“That trail was too narrow.”
“He isn’t out there.”
“He give us the slip.”
Then they heard a noise coming toward them through the tall, brittle grass. The next moment the merchant materialized before them as the grasses parted and a hundred wild horsemen followed after.
(“These were the Cossacks,” Greatest Grandfather Mills would explain afterward, “and all they wanted was the Word. It was all any of them wanted.”)
“The word?” Mills said.
“Messages,” the merchant said, having taken the two of them aside. “What the entrails said, what the Tablets. Afflatus, avatar, vatic talebearing, godgossip, gospel.”
“They’re infidels,” Mills said, eyeing their weapons, their pikes ready to their hands as their reins, the whips which lay like embroidered quoit over their saddlehoms.
“No one is infidel,” the merchant said. “Show them death and they whistle hymns. Speak to them.”
“Me?”
“They watched you come down the mountain. They saw you bring up the rear, they watched you pass.”
“I don’t——”
“They saw your sacking, Guillalume’s linen.”
“I don’t——”
“They know their textiles. ‘The last shall be first.’ Strangers rare here. No concept of travel. Someone just passing through beyond them. They think you come to tell them things.”
“Me?”
“You speak now.”
“What will I say?”
“Make it good.”
“I don’t even talk their language.”
“I translate.” The merchant yanked his horse about, turned away from him. “Make it good,” he warned again, his back to him. He joined the warriors.
The merchant said something to them and the wild men looked at Mills as if through a single pair of eyes. Guillalume separated himself from Mills and went toward the merchant while the warriors waited for Mills to begin. “Make it good,” he mouthed before riding off.
“I have come,” Mills said, “I have come——” The merchant translated and the warriors watched Mills closely. Mills cleared his throat. “I have come,” he began again. They watched him impatiently and one drew a pike from where it rested in its sheath. “I’ve come, I say,” said Mills and looked helplessly at the merchant. The merchant translated. One of the warriors clutched his whip. The man drew his arm back slowly. “No, wait,” Mills shouted, clambering down from his horse. The merchant translated. “I’ve come to tell you,” Mills said nervously, “that——that——” The Cossack with the whip gently rolled the hard, thin, braided leather within inches of Mills’s feet. Mills looked down gloomily at the dangerous plaited rawhide. “
Not,
” he exclaimed forcefully, “to hit. Not to hit. I have come to tell you not to hit!”
“He’s come to tell you not to hit,” the merchant translated. The wild Cossacks looked at Mills questioningly.
“Right,” Mills said. “Hitting’s bad,” he said hopelessly as the merchant translated. “God hates hitters,” he said. “He thinks they stink.” Tentatively the Cossack withdrew his whip. “Oh yes,” the encouraged Mills went on, warming to his subject, “hitting isn’t good. Yes, Lord. Thank you, Jesus. He told me to tell you you mustn’t hit. If you have to hit you mustn’t hit hard. And killing. Killing isn’t nice. Neither shouldst thou maim. Maiming’s a sin. It’s bad to hurt. It’s wicked to make bleed. God can’t stand the sight of blood. It makes Him sick to His stomach. Thank you, oh
thank
you, Jesus!” Mills said. He had spoken these last few sentences with his eyes shut tight and now, cautiously, he opened first one eye, then the other. The pike was back in its sheathing, the whip wound tightly round the saddlehorn. The warriors were gazing at him transfixed, wilder somehow in their concentrate attention than they had been in their hostility just moments before. They seemed to have broken or at least relaxed their formal formation, listening now as a crowd might rather than a trained phalanx. “This lot’s easy,” Mills remarked offhandedly to the merchant. “I needn’t tell you not to translate.” He advanced toward them, wanting to work them closer up, but they pulled back on their reins and opened up additional space between themselves and the speaker.
“Oh yes,” Mills continued, feeling his immense power and beginning to enjoy himself. “Here’s more stuff God told me. He wants you to lay down your pikestaffs.” Mills stepped back out of range as first one wild man then another lobbed his weapon into the clearing. “Throw them down, throw them down,” he said, and was astonished to see a rain of wood gentle as pop flies come floating down with an impotent clatter not two dozen feet from where they sat on their horses. “Now the bullwhips. Yes, Lord. Thank you, Jesus.” The merchant translated and the bullwhips made a harmless leather pile next to the staffs, intricately interlocked now as collapsed fence.
“It’s how they make war,” the merchant whispered.
“Ain’t gonna
study
war no more,” Mills said.
“They need their weapons to hunt,” the merchant said.
Mills shrugged. “God wants them to eat berries,” he said. “Tell them.” The merchant looked at Mills with interest. “Go on,” Mills said, “tell them.” The merchant translated. “That’s right,” Mills said. “He wants you to eat nuts and boil your grasses for soup. Soup is holy. Fruit and nuts are a blessing to the Lord, praise His Holy Name.”
He stared at his auditors but they looked away from him, fearfully avoiding his gaze. So this is what it was like to be Guillalume, Mills thought, or no, Guillalume’s eldest brother, even Guillalume’s father himself. He sized them up, their rough, thick clothing, their sharp teeth and solid bodies, their tough skin the color of hide, the sinister vision which slanted from their peculiar eyes. A rough bunch. He could do some real good here. “God wants you,” he told them earnestly, “to take the stableboys who shovel your horseshit for you and make them princes. Just after not hitting that’s what He wants most.”
“Oh, Mills,” the merchant said.
“Tell them,” Mills commanded. He folded his arms across his chest.
And that’s when he saw it.
“Jesus!” he said.
“Jesus!” the merchant translated.
“No,” Greatest Grandfather said fearfully. “Have them dismount. Tell them good-by.” Not taking his eyes off them—they wouldn’t have seen anyway, they weren’t looking, they were watching Mills’s horse—he backed slowly away. “Stand still, Mills’s horse”—because he knew nothing about horses, not even enough to say “Whoa”—”stop while I mount you.” But the horse continued to go round him, turning circles which were identical in circumference to the circles he had turned in the mine. Mills ceased talking and Mills’s horse stopped in its orbit and Mills got on. “Let’s go,” he said. “Straight lines only, Mills’s horse. Follow the merchant, fellow. Follow Guillalume’s horse.” And guided him with the reins, pulling the bit roughly whenever the animal started into one of its turns. To keep him moving Mills chatted amiably, mindlessly. “Well, that’s it, folks,” he said, “bye-bye. God’s instrument tells you ‘so long.’ God’s instrument’s instrument—tell them, merchant—asks you to abide here and pray a while. Pray and fast four days. Amen and thank you, Jesus.”
“You mean you didn’t
know?
” Guillalume asked him later.
“I didn’t,” Mills said, “I didn’t truly. Bloody goddamn horse worshippers. And that one says there’s no infidels.”
So he gave them the Word. (And, indirectly, ultimately, invented dressage too who knew nothing about horses, inventing
haute école
for them and the principle of the pony ride.) The Word changing as they worked their way backward across not only geography but culture as well. Telling them not only and not even always out of self-defense, but for hospitality, three squares and a kip for himself and his companions, spouting Jesus for their entertainment as he might, if he’d had a good voice, sung them songs. In Russia he told them, in Romania, in Bulgaria. In Greece and in Turkey. And doing them miracles out of their small store of salt. Changing fresh water to sea water in jugs which he permitted them to dip into their own sweet lakes and running rivers, elsewhere pressing the salt onto their very tongues, a mumbo-jumbo of condimental transubstantiation.
Saying “I shall make you the salt of the earth.” Or demonstrating its emetic properties, swallowing any poison they wished to give him and coming back to life before their eyes. Telling sailors along the Aegean and on the Ionian and Adriatic and Mediterranean and ports of call up and down the Atlantic.
And
that
was the First Crusade.
And then they were in England again, and then in Northumbria, and the other crusade was over too now, ended, the one Guillalume’s brothers, who had gone to Palestine after all, had gone on, to be killed by the infidels the merchant did not believe in, and now Guillalume was the eldest brother and, in another year, would be the lord of the manor himself, and Mills was back in the stables because it would not do for one so high placed to have as a retainer a man who knew nothing of horses.
L
ouise lay beside him, her flannel nightshirt bunched beneath her chin. The nightshirt was baby blue with tiny clusters of gray flowers and smelled of caked Vicks and cold steam from the dehumidifier. Her fingers probed her breasts, stroking, handling boluses of flesh, sifting tit like a cancer miner or a broad in pornography.
“All clear?” George asked as she lowered the nightshirt, yanking it down under her backside and consecutively rolled hips.
“When you bite me,” she asked, “do you ever feel anything hard?”
“When I bite?”
“When you take them in your mouth. Do you feel anything hard?”
“I spit it out.”
“Someday I’m going to find something.”
“Well,” he said, “you’ll be catching it early.”
“I spotted again. It wasn’t much. A little pink on the toilet paper.”
Louise got out of bed and put on her house slippers. She smiled and raised the nightshirt. She pulled it over her head. She drew the shades and turned on all the lights, even the one in the closet.