Collected Short Fiction, page 806
SO REWARDING was that knowledge and the altered sense of self it brought me, that my stay in the mountains ceased to seem like an exile, became more like a vocation. My dreams of fleeing to a soft life in Manneran left me and, even after I had saved more than enough to pay my passage to that land, I found myself with no impulse to move onward. It was not fear of arrest that kept me among the loggers, but rather a love of the crisp clear cold Huishtor air and of my arduous new craft and of the rough but genuine men among whom I dwelled. Therefore I stayed on, through summer and into autumn, and welcomed the coming of a new winter and gave no thought to going.
I might be there yet, only I was forced into flight. One woeful winter afternoon, with the sky like iron and the threat of a blizzard over us like a fist, they brought the whores up from town for our regularly appointed night of frolic and this time there was among them a newcomer whose voice announced her place of birth to be Salla. I heard her instantly as the women came cavorting into our hall of sport, and would have crept away, but she spied me and gasped and cried out on the spot: “Look you there! For sure that is our vanished prince!”
I laughed and tried to persuade everyone that she was drunk or mad, but my scarlet cheeks gave me the lie and the loggers peered at me in a new way. A prince? A prince? Was it so? They whispered to one another, nudging and winking. Recognizing my peril, I claimed the woman for my own use and drew her aside, and when we were alone I insisted to her she was mistaken: I am no prince, I said, but only a common logger.
She would not have it.
“The Lord Kinnall marched in the septarch’s funeral procession,” she said, “and this one beheld him with these eyes. And you are he!”
The more I protested, the more convinced she was. There was no shifting her mind.
Late that night, when the revelry had ended, my employer came to me, solemn and uneasy. “One of the girls has made strange talk about you this evening,” he said. “If the talk is true you are endangered, for when she returns to her village she’ll spread the news and the police will be here soon enough.”
“Must one flee, then?” I asked.
“The choice is yours. Alarms still are out for this prince; if you are he no one here can protect you against the authorities.”
“Then one must flee. At daybreak—”
“Now,” he said. “While the girl still lies here asleep.”
He pressed money of Glin into my hand, over and beyond what he owed me in current wages; I gathered my few belongings and we went outside together.
The night was moonless and the winter wind was savage. By starlight I saw the glitter of lightly falling snow. My employer silently drove me down the slope, past the foothills village from which the whores came and out along a back-country road, which we followed for some hours. When dawn met us we were in south-central Glin, not overly far from the River Huish. He halted at last in a village that proclaimed itself to be Klaek, a winterbound place of small stone cottages bordering on broad snowly fields. Leaving me in the truck, he entered the first of the cottages, emerging after a moment, accompanied by a wizened man who poured forth a torrent of instructions and gesticulations; with the aid of this guidance we found our way to the place my employer was seeking, the cottage of a certain farmer named Stumwil.
This Stumwil was a fair-haired man of about my own height, with washed-out blue eyes and an apologetic smile. Maybe he was some kinsman of my employer’s, or, more probably, he owed him a debt—I never asked. In any case the farmer readily agreed to my employer’s request and accepted me as a lodger. My employer embraced me and drove off into the gathering snow; I saw him never again. I hope the gods were as kind to him as he was to me.
THE cottage was one large room, divided by flimsy curtains into areas. Stumwil put up a new curtain, gave me straw for my mattress and I had my living quarters. There were seven of us under that roof: Stumwil, myself and Stumwil’s wife, a weary wench whom I could have been persuaded to believe to be his mother, and three of their children—two boys some years short of manhood and a girl in midadolescence—and the bondsister of the girl, who was lodging with them that year. They were sunny, innocent, trusting folk. Though they knew nothing about me, they all instantly adopted me as a member of the family, some unknown uncle unexpectedly returned from far voyaging. I was not prepared for the easy way they accepted me and credited it at first to some net of obligation in which my former employer had bound them to me, but no: they were kindly by nature, unquestioning, unsuspicious. I took my meals at their table; I sat among them by their fire; I joined in their games. Every fifth night Stumwil filled a huge dented tub with hot water for the entire family and I bathed with them, two or three of us in the tub at once, though it disturbed me inwardly to rub up against the plump bare bodies of Stumwil’s daughter and her friend.
I paid a fee for my lodging and helped with the chores, though in winter there was little to do except shovel snow and feed the fire. None of them showed curiosity about my identity or history. They asked no questions and I believe that no questions ever passed through their minds. Nor did the other townspeople pry, though they gave me the scrutiny any stranger would receive.
Some newspapers occasionally reached this village and those that did went from hand to hand until all had read them, when they were placed on deposit at the wineshop at the head of the main village thoroughfare. I consulted them there, a file of stained and tattered scraps, and learned what I could of the events of the past year. I found that my brother Stirron’s wedding had taken place on schedule, with appropriate regal pomp; his lean troubled face looked up out of a blurry, grease-splotched bit of old paper. Beside him was his radiant bride, but I could not make out her features. There was tension between Glin and Krell over fishing rights in a disputed coastal area and men had died in border skirmishes. I pitied General Condorit, whose patrol sector was at the opposite end of the boundary, almost, from the Krell-Glin line and who, therefore, must have missed the fun of somehow involving Salla in the shooting. A sea monster, golden-scaled and sinuous, more than ten times the length of a man’s body, had been sighted in the Gulf of Sumar by a party of Mannerangi fishermen, who had sworn a mighty oath in the Stone Chapel as to the authenticity of their vision. The prime septarch of Threish, a bloody old brigand if the tales they tell of him are true, had abdicated and was dwelling in a godhouse in the western mountains not far from Stroin Gap, serving as a drainer for pilgrims bound to Manneran. Such was the news. I found no mention of myself. Perhaps Stirron had lost interest in having me seized and returned to Salla.
It might therefore be safe for me to try to leave Glin.
Eager as I was to get out of that frosty province, where my own kin rebuffed me and only strangers showed me love, two things held me back. For one, I meant to stay with Stumwil until I could help him with his spring planting, in return for his kindness to me. For another, I would not set forth undrained on so dangerous a journey, lest in some mishap my spirit go to the gods still full of poisons. This village of Klaek had no drainer of its own, but depended for its solace on itinerant drainers who passed now and then through the countryside. In the winter these wanderers rarely came by and I had gone undrained since the late summer, when a member of that profession had visited the logging camp.
I fell the need.
A LATE-WINTER snow came, a storm of wonders that coated every branch with a fiery skin of ice and immediately thereafter came a thaw. The world melted. Klaek was surrounded by oceans of mud. A drainer driving a battered and ancient groundcar came to us through this slippery sea and set up shop in an old shack, doing fine business among the villagers.
I went to him on the fifth day of his visit and unburdened myself for two hours, sparing him nothing, neither the truth about my identity nor my subversive new philosophy of kingship nor the usual grimy little repressed lusts and prides. It was more of a dose, evidently, than a country drainer expected to receive and he seemed to puff and swell as I poured out my words; at the end he was shaking as much as I and could barely speak. I wondered where it was that drainers went to unload all the sins and sorrows they absorbed from their clients. They are forbidden to talk to ordinary men of anything they have learned in the confessional; did they therefore have drainer-drainers, servants of the servants, to whom they might deliver that which they could not mention to anyone else? I did not see how a drainer, unaided, could long carry such bundles of sadnesses as he got from any dozen of his customers in a day’s listening.
With my soul cleansed, I had only to wait for planting time, and it was not long in coming. The growing season in Glin is short; they get their seeds into the ground before winter’s grip has fully slipped, so that they can catch every ray of spring sunlight. Stumwil waited until he felt certain that the thaw would not be followed by one last tumult of snow and then, with the land still a sucking quagmire, he and his family went out into the fields to plant breadseed and spiceflower and blueglobe.
The custom was to go naked to the planting. On the first morning I looked out of Stumwil’s cottage and beheld the neighbors on all sides walking bare toward the furrows, children and parents and grandparents stripped to the skin with sacks of seed slung over their shoulders—a procession of knobby knees, sagging bellies, dried-out breasts, wrinkled buttocks, illuminated here and there by the smooth firm bodies of the young. Thinking I was in some waking dream, I looked around and saw Stumwil and his wife and their daughter already disrobed and beckoning to me to do the same. They took their sacks and left the cottage. The two young sons scampered after them, leaving me with the bondsister of Stumwil’s daughter, who had overslept and had just appeared. She shucked her garments too; a supple saucy body she had, with small high dark-nippled breasts and slender well-muscled thighs.
I asked her, “Why is the planting done naked in such a cold time?”
“The mud gives cause for slipping,” she explained, “and it is easier to wash raw skin than garments.”
There was truth enough in that, for the planting was a comic show, with peasants skidding in the tricky muck every tenth step they took. Down they went, landing on hip or haunch and coming up smeared with brown; it was a matter of skill to grasp the neck of one’s seed-sack as one toppled, so that no precious seeds would be scattered. I fell like the rest, learning the knack of it quickly, and indeed there was pleasure in slipping, for the mud had a voluptuous oozy feel to it. So we marched on, staggering and lurching, slapping flesh to mud again and again, laughing, singing, pressing our seeds into the cold soft soil, and not one of us but was covered from scalp to tail with muck within minutes. I shivered miserably at the outset, but soon I was warmed by laughter and tripping, and when the day’s work was done we stood around shamelessly naked in front of Stumwil’s cottage and doused one another with buckets of water to clean ourselves. By then it seemed reasonable to me that they should prefer to expose their skins rather than their clothing to such a day’s labor, but in fact the girl’s explanation was incorrect: I learned from Stumwil later that week that the nakedness was a religious matter, a sign of humility before the gods of the crops and nothing else.
Eight days it took to finish the planting. On the ninth, wishing Stumwil and his people a hearty harvest, I took my leave of the village of Klaek and began my journey to the coast.
A NEIGHBOR of Stumwil’s took me eastward the first day in his cart. I walked most of the second, begged a ride on the third and fourth and walked again on the fifth and sixth. The air was cool but the crackle of spring was in it, as buds unfolded and birds returned.
I bypassed the city of Glain, which might have been dangerous for me, and without any events that I can clearly recall I made my way swiftly to Biumar, Glin’s main seaport and second most populous city.
It was a handsomer place than Glain, though hardly beautiful: a greasy gray sprawl of an oversized town, backed up against a gray and menacing ocean. On my first day there I learned that all passenger service between Glin and the southern provinces had been suspended three moontimes before, owing to the dangerous activities of pirates operating out of Krell, for Glin and Krell were now engaged in an undeclared war. The only way I could reach Manneran, it seemed, was overland via Salla, and I hardly wished to do that. I was resourceful, though. I found myself a room in a tavern near the docks and spent a few days picking up maritime gossip. Passenger service might be suspended, but commercial seafaring, I discovered, was not, since the prosperity of Glin depended upon it; convoys of merchant vessels, heavily armed, went forth on regular schedules. A limping seaman who stayed in the same tavern told me, when blue wine of Salla had oiled him sufficiently, that a merchant convoy of this sort would leave in a week’s time and that he had a berth aboard one of the ships. I considered drugging him on the eve of sailing and borrowing his identity, as is done in pirate tales for children, but a less dramatic method suggested itself to me: I bought his shipping-papers. The sum I offered him was more than he would have earned by shipping out to Manneran and back, so he was happy to take my money and let me go in his place. We spent a long drunken night conferring about his duties on the ship, for I knew nothing of seamanship. At the coming of dawn I still knew nothing, but I saw ways I could bluff a minimal sort of competence.
I went unchallenged on board the vessel, a low-slung air-powered craft heavily laden with Glinish goods. The checking of papers was perfunctory. I picked up my cabin assignment, installed myself, reported for duty. About half the jobs they asked me to do over the first few days I managed to carry out reasonably well by imitation and experiment; the other things I merely muddled with and soon my fellow sailors recognized me for a bungler, but they kept knowledge of that from the officers. A kind of loyalty prevailed in the lower ranks. They did for me the jobs I could not do myself; I relieved them of dull work that was within my narrow skills and all went well. I swabbed decks, cleaned filters and spent endless hours manning the guns against pirate attacks. But we got past Krell’s dreaded pirate coast without incident and slipped easily down the coast of Salla, which already was green with spring.
Our first port of call was Cofalon, Salla’s chief seaport, for five days of selling and buying. I was alarmed at this, for I had not known we planned to halt anywhere in my homeland. I thought at first to announce myself ill and hide belowdecks all our lime in Cofalon; but then I rejected the scheme as cowardly, telling myself that a man must test himself frequently against risk, if he would keep his manhood. So I boldly went wenching and wining in town with my shipmates, trusting that time had sufficiently changed my face, and that no one would expect to find Lord Stirron’s missing brother in a sailor’s rough clothes in such a town as this. My gamble succeeded: I went unvexed the full five days. From newspapers and careful overhearing I learned all I could about events in Salla in the year and a half since my leaving.
Stirron, I gathered, was popularly held to be a good ruler. He had brought the province through its winter of famine by purchasing surplus food from Manneran on favorable terms and our farms had since then had better fortune. Taxes had been cut. The people were content. Stirron’s wife had been delivered of a son, the Lord Dariv, who now was heir to the prime septarchy, and another son was on the way. As for the Lord Kinnall, brother to the septarch, nothing was said of him; he was forgotten as though he had never been.
We made other stops here and there down the coast, several in southern Salla, several in northern Manneran. And in good time we came to that great seaport at the southeastern corner of our continent, the holy city of Manneran, capital of the province that bears the same name. It was in Manneran that my life would begin anew.
TO BE CONTINUED
Good News from the Vatican
If you read the cover blurbs on a book before you look inside, you probably noticed that this story is about the election of the first robot Pope: did you snort that that was ridiculous, or did you think, well, another clever little science fiction parable? Or did you, perhaps, look again at Bob Silverberg’s byline, and remember the seriousness and ingenuity that have become his hallmarks? Good News from the Vatican is indeed a silly story, but silliness has a legitimate function in art; and it’s also a clever story, but that’s putting it mildly. I think this is my own favorite story in this book.
This is the morning everyone has waited for, when at last the robot cardinal is to be elected pope. There can no longer be any doubt of the outcome. The conclave has been deadlocked for many days between the obstinate advocates of Cardinal Asciuga of Milan and Cardinal Carciofo of Genoa, and word has gone out that a compromise is in the making. All factions now are agreed on the selection of the robot. This morning I read in Osservatore Romano that the Vatican computer itself has taken a hand in the delibera tions. The computer has been strongly urging the candidacy of the robot. I suppose we should not be surprised by this loyalty among machines. Nor should we let it distress us. We absolutely must not let it distress us.
“Every era gets the pope it deserves,” Bishop FitzPatrick observed somewhat gloomily today at breakfast. “The proper pope for our times is a robot, certainly. At some future date it may be desirable for the pope to be a whale, an automobile, a cat, a mountain.” Bishop FitzPatrick stands well over two meters in height and his normal facial expression is a morbid, mournful one. Thus it is impossible for us to determine whether any particular pronouncement of his reflects existential despair or placid acceptance. Many years ago he was a star player for the Holy Cross championship basketball team. He has come to Rome to do research for a biography of St. Marcellus the Righteous.
