THE NIGHT WIND

by Edgar Pangborn

After some years away from the future world of his classic novel Davy, Edgar Pangborn has recently returned to it in stories such as “Tiger Boy” (Universe 2) and “The World Is a Sphere” (Universe 3). It’s a self-consistent background ranging over many centuries after the destruction of our present civilization and the slow growth of a new culture founded in superstitious fear of the holocaust that nearly annihilated humanity.

In that fear-ridden world Pangborn finds men and women who try to be as human as they can, and he tells their stories … such as the following warm and moving tale of a particular kind of monster, not really a mutant, and his coming of age.

At Mam Miriam’s house beyond

Trempa, Ottoba 20,402

I will do it somewhere down this road, not yet but after dark; it will be when the night wind is blowing.

Always I have welcomed the sound of the night wind moving, as the leaves are passing on their secrets and sometimes falling, but falling lightly, easily, because their time to fall is come. Dressed in high colors, they fall to the day winds too this time of year, this autumn season. The smell of earth mold is spice on the tongue. I catch scent of apples ripening, windfalls rich-rotten pleasuring the yellow hornets. Rams and he-goats are mounting and crazy for it—O this time of year! They fall to the day winds echoing the sunlight, the good bright leaves, and that’s no bad way to fall.

I know the dark of autumn too. The night wind hurts. Even now writing of it, only to think of it. Ottoba was in me when I said to my heart: I will do it somewhere down this road, I will end it, my life, for they believe it should never have begun. (I think there may be good spirits down that road. Perhaps the people I met were spirits, or they were human beings and spirits too, or we all are.) And I remembered how Father Horan also believes I ought never to have been born. I saw that in. him; he believes it as the town folk do, and what we believe is most of what we are.

For three days I felt their sidelong stares, their anger that I would dare to pass near their houses. They called in their children to safety from me, who never hurt anyone. Passing one of those gray-eyed houses, I heard a woman say, “He ought to be stoned, that Benvenuto.” I will not write her name.

Another said, “Only a mue would do what he did.”

They call me that; they place me among the sad distorted things—armless or mindless or eyeless, somehow inhuman and corrupted—that so many mothers bear, or have borne, folk say, since the end of Old Time. How could a mue be called beautiful?

When I confessed to Father Horan, he shoved his hands behind his back, afraid he might touch me. “Poor Benvenuto!” But he said it acidly, staring down as if he had tasted poison in his food.

So I will end it (I told the hidden self that is me)— I will end it now in my fifteenth year before the Eternal Corruption that Father Horan spoke of can altogether destroy my soul; and so the hidden self that is me, if that is my soul, may win God’s forgiveness for being born a monster.

But why did Father Horan love me once, taking something like a father’s place, or seem to love me? Why did he teach me the reading of words and writing too, first showing me how the great words flow in the Book of Abraham, and on to the spelling book and so to all the mystery? Why did he let me see the other books, some of them, the books of Old Time forbidden to common people, even the poets? He would run his fingers through my hair, saying I must never cut it, or rest his arm on my shoulder; and I felt a need, I thought it was loneliness or love, in the curving of his fingers. Why did he say I might rise in the Holy Amran Church, becoming greater than himself, a bishop—Bishop Benvenuto!—an archbishop!

If I am a monster now, was I not a monster then?

I could ask him no such questions when he was angry. I ran out of the church though I heard him calling after me, commanding me to return in God’s name. I will not return.

I ran through the graveyard, past the dead hollow oak where I saw and heard bees swarming in the hot autumn light, and I think he stood among the headstones lamenting for me, but I would not look back, no, I plowed through a thicket and ran down a long golden aisle of maple trees and into Wayland’s field (where it happened)—Wayland’s field all standing alive with the bound shocks of corn, and into the woods again on the far side, only to be away from him.

It was there in Wayland’s field that I first thought, I will do this to myself, I will end it, maybe in that wood I know of; but I was afraid of my knife. How can I cut and tear the body someone called beautiful? And so I looked at the thought of hiding in a shock of corn, the same one where I found Eden idle that day, and staying in it till I starved. But they say starving is a terrible death, and I might not have the courage or the patience to wait for it. I thought too, They will look for me when they know I’m gone, because they want to punish me, stone me, even my mother will want to punish me, and they would think of the cornfield where it happened and came searching like the flail of God.

How bright they stand, the bound stalks in the sun, like little wigwams for the field spirits, like people too, like old women with rustling skirts of yellow-gray; their hair is blowing! Now I know I will remember this when I go on—for I am going on without death, never doubt it, I promise you I shall not die by my own hand.

I saw two hawks circling and circling in the upper wind above Wayland’s field. I thought up to them: You are like me, but you have all the world’s air to fly away in.

The hawks are bound to the earth as I am, they must hunt food in the grass and branches, men shoot arrows from the earth to tear their hearts. Still they enter regions unknown to us, and maybe they and the wild geese have found an easy way to heaven.

Into the woods again on the far side of Wayland’s field I hurried, and down and up the ravine that borders it, shadowed ground with alder and gray birch and a cool place of ferns I know of where sunlight comes late in the morning and mild. The brook in tine ravine bottom was running scant from the dry weather, leaves collecting on the bodies of smooth shining stones. I did not go downstream to the pool but climbed the other side of the ravine and took the path—hardly that, merely a known place where my feet have passed before— to the break in the trees that lets you out on this road, and I thought: Here I will do it, somewhere farther on in the shadows.

It is wider than a wood-road and better kept, for wagons use it now and then, and it is supposed to wind through back ways southeast as far as Nupal, ten miles they say or even more—I never believed much of what I hear about Nupal. The trading of our village has always been with Maplestock, and surely nobody goes to Nupal except those tinkers and gyppos and ramblers with their freaky wagons, squirrel-eyed children, scrawny dogs. A sad place it must be, Nupal, more than seven hundred crammed into the one village, as I hear it. I don’t understand how human beings can live like that—the houses may not be standing as horridly close together as folk tell. Maybe I’ll see the place in passing. I’ve noticed a dozen times, the same souls who sniggle about with ugly fact until it looks like fancy will turn right-about and ask you to believe that ugly fancy is fact.

I went down the road not running any more, nor thinking more about Father Horan. I thought of Eden.

Then I thought about my mother, who is going to marry Blind Hamlin the candlemaker, I’m told. She wouldn’t tell me herself, the winds told me. (Toby Omstrong told me, because he doesn’t like me.) Let’s hope the jolly wedding isn’t delayed by concern over my absence—I am not coming back, Mother. Think of me kindly while tumbling with your waxy man, or better, think of me not at all, the cord is cut, and anyhow didn’t you pick me up somewhere as a changeling?

Hoy, there I was on your doorstep all red and nasty, wrapped up in a cabbage leaf! Likely story. But we can’t have it thought that you gave birth to a monster, even one begotten by a little shoemaker whose image you did your best to destroy for me. (But I saved some pieces, I try to put them together now and then. I wish I could remember him; the memories of others are not much more help than wind under the door, for people don’t understand what I want to know—small blame to them, they can’t hear the questions I don’t know how to ask—and I think your memories of him are mostly lies, Mother, though you may not know it.) “He was a poor sad soul, Benvenuto.” Was he, Mother? “He broke my heart with his unfaithfulness, Benvenuto.” But Blind Hamlin is going to stick it back together with mutton-fat, remember? “He drank, you know, Benvenuto, that was why he could never make a decent living.” Why, I will drink to you, Mother, I will drink to the wedding in Mam Miriam’s best apple brandy before I leave this poor empty house where I am writing.

Don’t destroy Blind Hamlin, Mother. I don’t like him, he’s a crosspatch bag of guts, but don’t destroy him, don’t whittle him down as you must have scraped my father down with the rasp of words—but I forget, I am a changeling. Poor Blind Hamlin!—there may be witchcraft in it, Mother. It troubles me that a man who can’t see makes candles for those who will not. Don’t destroy him. Make another monster with him. I’d like a monster for a half-brother—but there, never mind, I’m not coming back to Trempa, make all the monsters you wish. The world’s already full of them.

I am not writing this for my mother. She will not be the one to find it here. Whoever does—I pray you, read this page if you like and the one before it that begins “She wouldn’t tell me herself”—read and then throw away, in God’s name. For I would like the truth to be somewhere in the world, maybe in your head, whoever you are, but I don’t wish to slap my mother in the face with it, nor Blind Hamlin either. Blind Hamlin was never unkind to me. I am all soreness, the tenderest touch smarts on a burned skin. I will mend. I don’t hate my mother—do I hate anyone?—is it a sign of my monster-hood that I don’t hate anyone?—or if I do, I will mend, I’ll cease hating wherever I am going, and even forget. Especially forget. Read those pages and throw away and then, you too, forget. But save the rest, if you will. I don’t want to die altogether in your mind, whoever you are.

Down that road I came. I think I left behind me most of what had appeared certain in the world; the new uncertainties are still to find. Where did I encounter you? Who are you?—oh, merely the one supposed to find this letter. So then you are not the new person I need to find—someone not Eden, nor Andrea whom I loved, but some other. But with Andrea I understood that heaven would open whenever he looked on me.

In that road through the woods beyond Wayland’s field the trees stand close on either side, oak and pine and enormous tulip trees where the white parrots like to gather and squabble with the bluejays, and thickets that swell with a passion of growth wherever an opening like that road lets through the sun. Oaks had shifted into the bronze along with the clear gold of maple trees when I passed by, yet I saw few leaves fallen. You remember some of the wise prophets in Trempa have been saying it’ll be a hard winter, with snow in January for sure. The Lord must save a special land of forgiveness for the weather prophets—other lands of liars have some chance of learning better. As I looked along the slender channel of the road, I saw the stirring of distant treetops under the wind, but here that wind was hushed, cut to a modest breeze or to no motion at all. And suddenly the stillness was charged with the fishy loathsome reek of black wolf.

It is a poison in the air and we live with it. I remember how it has always happened in the village: days, weeks, with no hint of the evil, and when we have forgotten and grown careless, then without warning the sour stench of them comes on the air, and we hear their rasping howl in the nights—nothing like the musical uproar of the common wolves who seldom do worse than pick up a sheep now and then—and people will die, ambushed, throat-torn, stripped of flesh and bones cracked for the marrow. Some tell of seeing the Devil walk with them. He teaches them tricks that only human beings ought to know. He leads them to the trail of late travelers, to lonely houses where a door may be unlatched, or someone seized on the way to shed or outhouse. And yet they do say that black wolf will not attack by day; if a man comes at him then, even if he is at his carrion, he may slink off; now I know this is true. At night black wolf is invincible, I suppose. The smell hung dense on that woodland road, coming from all around me, so that I could not run away from it.

I had my thin strength, and a knife; my knife is from the hands of Wise Wayland the Smith, and there is a spell on it. For look you, no harm comes to me if I am wearing it. I was not wearing it when Andrea’s family moved away and took him with them—all the way to Penn, God help me. I was not wearing it when they came on me with Eden in Wayland’s field and called me monster.

In fear I went ahead, not trying for quiet because no one ever surprises black wolf. I came on the beast on the far side of a boulder that jutted into the road, but before that I heard the sounds of tearing. It had ripped the liver from the body. Blood still oozed from all the wounds. Enough remained of the face so that I knew the man was old Kobler. His back-pack was not with him, nor any gear, so he had not been on his way to the village. Perhaps he had been taken with some sickness, and so the wolf dared to bring him down in broad day.

By this time Kobler will be expected in the village. They’ll wonder why he doesn’t come marching to the General Store with his stack of reed baskets and Mam Miriam’s beautiful embroideries and such-like, and slap down his one silver coin, and fill his back-pack with the provisions for Mam Miriam and himself. True, he was never regular in the timing of his visits; another week or two might go by before anyone turns curious. People don’t think much unless their convenience is joggled, and old Kobler was so silent a man, never granting anyone a word that could be held back—and Mam Miriam herself hardly more than a legend to the town folk—no, I suppose they won’t stir themselves unduly. All the same I must leave, I must not be caught here by those who would stone me for their souls’ benefit. Nothing keeps me in this house now except a wish to write these words for you, whoever you are. Then I will go when the night wind is blowing.

It was an old dog wolf, and foul, alone, his fangs yellowed. He held his ground hardly a moment when I walked down on him with the knife of Wayland flashing sunlight on his eyes. I did not understand immediately that Kobler was past help—then the wolf moved, I saw the liver, I knew the look on the old man’s mask was no-way meant for me. Jon Kobler, a good fellow I think, Mam Miriam’s servant, companion, and more. He shrank from the world as she did, nor do I see how you could hold it against either of them, for often the world stinks so that even a fool like me must hold his nose. It will not harm them now if I tell you they were lovers.

The wolf slunk off through the brush into a ravine. It must have been the power of Wayland’s knife—or is it possible that black wolf is not so terrible as folk say? Well, mine is a knife that Wayland made long since, when he was young; he told me so.

He gave it to me on the morning of the best day of my life. Andrea had come to me the day before, had chosen me out of all the others in the training yard— although I seldom shone there, my arm is not heavy enough for the axe or the spear-throwing, and in archery I am only fair, undistinguished. He challenged me to wrestle, I put forth my best, almost I had his shoulders down and he laughing up at me, and then presto! somehow I am flung over on my back and my heart close to cracking with happiness because he has won. And he invited me to go on the morrow with him and some of his older friends for a stag hunt through Bindiaan Wood, and I had to say, “I have no knife, no gear.”

“Oh,” says Andrea, and April is no kinder, “we’ll find extra gear for you at my father’s house, and as for a knife of your own, maybe Wayland the Smith has one for you.”

I knew that Wayland Smith did sometimes make such gifts to boys just turning men, but had never imagined he would trouble with one so slight-built as I am and supposed to be simple-minded from the hours with the books. “You do hide your light,” says Andrea, whom I had already loved for a year, scarcely daring to speak to him. He laughed and pressed my shoulder. “Go to ancient Wayland, do him some little favor—there’s no harm in him—and maybe he’ll have a knife for you. I would give you mine, Benvenuto,” he said, “only that’s bad magic between friends, but come to me with a knife of your own and we’ll make blood brotherhood.”

So the next morning I went to Wayland the Smith with all my thoughts afire, and I found the old man about to draw a bucket of water from his well, but looking ill and drooping, and he said, “O Benvenuto, I have a crick in my arm—would you, in kindness?” So I drew the water for him, and we drank together. I saw the smithy was untidy with cobwebs, and swept it out for him, he watching me and rambling on with his tales and sayings and memories that some call wanton blasphemies—I paid little heed to them, thinking of Andrea, until he asked me, “Are you a good boy, Benvenuto?” His tone made me know he would like to hear me laugh, or anyway not mind it, indeed I could hardly help laughing at a thousand silly notions, and for the pleasure of it, and the joy of the day; and that was when he gave me this knife I always carry. I don’t think I answered his question, or at least only to say, “I try to be,” or some such nonsense. He gave me the knife, kissed me, told me not to be too unhappy in my life; but I don’t know what one must do to follow that counsel, unless it is to live the way all others do, like baa-sheep who come and go at the will of the shepherd and his dog and must never stray from the tinkle of the wether’s bell.

Oh, yes, that day I went on the hunt with Andrea, armed with the knife that was given me by Wayland Smith. We killed a stag together, he marked my forehead, with our own blood then we made brotherhood; but he is gone away.

There was nothing anyone could have done for old Kobler except pray for him. I did that—if there’s anything to hear our prayers, if the prayers of a monster can be noticed. But who is God? Who is this cloud-thing that has nothing better to do than stare on human pain and now and then poke it with his finger? Is he not bored? Will he not presently wipe it all away, or go away and forget? Or has he already gone Way, forgotten?

You will not have me burnt for these words because you will not find me. Besides, I must remember you are simply the unknown who will happen on this letter in Mam Miriam’s house, and you may even be a friend. I must remember there are friends.

When I rose from kneeling beside the poor mess that was what remained of Kobler, I heard rustling in the brush. That wolf had no companions or they would have been with him tearing at the meat, but perhaps he was rallying from his fright, hungry for something young and fresh. I understood too that the sun was lowering, night scarcely more than an hour away. Night’s arrival would be sudden in the manner of autumn, which has a cruelty in it, as if we did not know that winter is near but must be reminded with a slap and a scolding. Only then did I think of Mam Miriam, who would expect Kobler’s return.

When was the last time any of you in Trempa saw Mam Miriam Coletta? I had not even known she was daughter to Roy Coletta, who was governor of Ulsta in his time. Or was this only something she dreamed for me, something to tell me when perhaps her wits were wandering? It doesn’t matter: I will think her a princess if I choose.

She was twenty-five and yet unmarried, hostess of the governor’s mansion at Sortees after her mother’s death, and she fell in love with a common archer, one of the Governor’s Guard, and ran away with him, escaping from her locked bedroom on a rope made from a torn blanket O the dear romantic tale! I’ve heard none better from the gyppos—their stories are too much alike, but this was like some of the poems of Old Time, especially as she told it me, and never mind if her wits wandered; I have ceased speculating whether it was true.

You think the archer was this same man who become Poor Old Kobler, marching into town fortnightly with his back-pack and his baskets, and the embroideries by a crazy old bedridden dame who lived off in the Haunted Stone House and wouldn’t give anyone the time of day?

He was not. That archer abandoned her in a brothel at Nuber. Kobler was an aging soldier, a deserter. He took her out of that place and brought her to Trempa. He knew of the old stone house in the woods so long abandoned—for he was a Trempa man in his beginnings, Jon Kobler, but you may not find any bones to bury— and he took her there. He repaired the solid old ruin; you would not believe what good work he did there, mostly with wood cut and shaped out of the forest with his own hands. He cared for her there, servant and lover; they seem not to have had much need of the world. They grew old there, like that.

Rather, he did, I suppose. When I saw her she did not seem very old. Why, I first heard talk and speculation about them (most of it malicious) when I was six years old; I think they must have been new-come then, and that’s only nine years ago. Yesterday or perhaps the day before, nine years would have seemed like a long time to me. Now I wonder if a thousand years is a long time, and I can’t answer my own question. I am not clever at guessing ages, but I would think Mam Miriam was hardly past forty; and certainly she spoke like a lady, and told me of the past glories as surely no one could have done who had not known them—the governor’s mansion, the dances all night long and great people coming on horseback or in fine carriages from all over the county; she made me see the sweaty faces of the musicians in the balcony, and didn’t she herself go up one night (the dance at her tenth birthday party) to share a box of candy with them? She spoke of the gardens, the lilac and wisteria and many-colored roses, the like you never saw in Trempa, and there were odd musky red grapes from some incredible lan$ far south of Penn, and from there also, limes, and oranges, and spices she could not describe for me. Telling me all this simply and truly, she did seem like a young woman, even a girl— oh, see for yourself, how should I know? There she lies, poor sweet thing, in the bed Jon Kobler must have made. I have done what I could for her, and it is not much.

I am wandering. I must tell of all this as I should, and then go. Perhaps you will never come; it may be best if you do not.

I prayed for Kobler, and then I went on down the road—despising the wolf but not forgetting him, for I wish to live—as far as its joining with the small path that I knew would take me to Mam Miriam’s. There I hesitated a long while, though I think I knew from the start that I would go to her. I don’t know what it is in us that (sometimes) will make us do a thing against our wishes because we know it to be good. “Conscience” is too thin a word, and “God” too misty, too spoiled by the many who mouth it constantly without any care for what they say, or as if they alone were able to inform you of God’s will—and please, how came they to be so favored? But something drives, I think from within, and I must even obey it without knowing a name for it.

You see, I had never followed that path. No one does. The road like the old stone house itself is haunted. Anyone who ventures there goes in peril of destruction or bewitchment. So far, I am not destroyed.

Once on the path—why, I began to run. Maybe I ran so as to yield no room in my thought to the fear that is always, like black wolf, waiting. I ran down the path through a wilderness of peace. There were the beeches, gray and kind—I like to imagine something of peace in their nearness. I know that violence might be done in the presence, in the very shadow of the beech trees, as in any other place where the human creature goes; a little corner of my mind is a garden where I lie in the sun not believing it. In their presence on that path I ran without shortness of breath, without remembering fear, and I came to the green clearing, and the house of red-gray stone. It was growing late, the sun too low to penetrate this hidden place. In shadow therefore I came to Mam Miriam’s door and pounded on the oak panel. But gossip had always said that the old woman (if she existed at all outside of Jon Kobler’s head, if he didn’t create those dazzling embroideries himself out of his own craziness and witchcraft) was bedridden and helpless. So my knocking was foolish. I turned the latch and pushed the heavy sluggish thing inward, closing it behind me, staring about half-blind in the gray light.

The house is trifling-small, as you will see if you dare come here. Only that big lower room with the fireplace where Jon cooked, the bench where he worked at his baskets, clogs, wooden beads, and this other room up here with the smaller hearth. There’s this one chair up here where I sit now (Kobler used to sit beside his love’s bed, you know) and the little table I write on, which I am sure they used drawn up beside the bed for their meals together, for the night pitcher of water she no longer needs. You will be aware now that she did exist. There’s the roll of linen cloth—Kobler must have gone all the way to Maplestock to buy that—and some half-finished table mats, pillow slips, dresser covers. There’s her embroidery hoop, the needles, the rolls of bright yarns, and thread—I never knew there were so many sizes and colors. And there she too is lying. She was; she lived; I closed her eyes.

I looked about me in that failing evening, and she called from upstairs, “Jon, what’s wrong? Why did you make such a noise at the door? You’ve been long, Jon. I’m thirsty.”

The tone of her voice was delicate, a music. I cannot tell you how it frightened me, that the voice of a crazy old woman should sound so mild and sweet. Desperately I wanted to run away, much more than I had wanted it when I stood out there at. the beginning of the path. But the thing that I will not call Conscience or God (somewhere in the Old-Time books I think it was called Virtue, but doubtless few read them)—the thing that would never let me strike a child, or stone a criminal or a mue on the green as we are expected to do in Trempa—this mad cruel-sweet thing that may be a part of love commanded me to answer her, and I called up the stairway, “Don’t be afraid. It’s not Jon, but I came to help you.” I followed my words, climbing the stairs slowly so that she could forbid me if she chose. She said no more until I had come to her.

The house was turning chill. I had hardly noticed it downstairs; up here the air was already cold, and I saw —preferring not to stare at her directly till she spoke to me—that she was holding the bedcovers high to her throat, and shivering. “I must build you a fire,” I said, and went to the hearth. Fresh wood and kindling were laid ready, a tinderbox stood on the mantel. She watched me struggle with the clumsy tool until I won my flame and set it to the twigs and scraps of waste cloth. That ancient chimney is clean—the fire caught well without smoking into the room. I warmed my hands.

“What has happened? Where is Jon?”

“He can’t come. I’m sorry.” I asked her if she was hungry, and she shook her head. “I’m Benvenuto of Trempa,” I told her. “I’m running away. I must get you some fresh water.” I hurried out with the pitcher, obliged to retreat for that moment for my own sake, because meeting her gaze, as I had briefly done, had been a glancing through midnight windows into a country where I could never go and yet might have loved to go.

Why, even with gray-eyed Andrea this had been true, and did he not once say to me, “O Benvenuto, how I would admire to walk in the country behind your eyes!”

I know: it is always true.

(But Andrea brought me amazing gifts from his secret country, and nothing in mine was withheld from him through any wish of mine. I suppose all the folk have a word for it: we knew each other’s hearts.)

I filled the pitcher at the well-pump downstairs and carried it up to her with a fresh clean cup. She drank gratefully, watching me, I think with some kind of wonder, over the rim of the cup, and she said, “You are a good boy, Benvenuto. Sit down by me now, Benvenuto.” She set the cup away on the table and patted the edge of the bed, and I sat there maybe no longer afraid of her, for her plump sad little face was kind. Her soft too-white hands, the fingers short and tapered, showed me none of that threat of grasping, clinging, snatching I have many times seen in the hands of my own breed. “So tell me, where is Jon?” When I could not get words out, I felt her trembling. “Something has happened.”

“He is dead, Mam Miriam.” She only stared. “I found him on the road, Mam Miriam, too late for me to do anything. It was a wolf.” Her hands flew up over her face. “I’m sorry—I couldn’t think of any easier way to tell it.” She was not weeping as I have heard a woman needs to do after such a blow.

At last her hands came down. One dropped on mine kindly, like the hand of an old friend. “Thus God intended it, perhaps,” she said. “I was already thinking, I may die tonight.”

“No,” I said. “No.”

“Why should I not, my dear?”

“Can’t you walk at all?”

She looked startled, even shocked, as if that question had been laid away at the back of her mind a long time since, not to be brought forth again. “One night after we came here, Jon and I, I went downstairs—Jon had gone to Trempa and was late returning—I had a candle, but a draft caught it at the head of the stairs—oh, it was a sad night, Benvenuto, and the night wind blowing. I stumbled, fell all the way. There was a miscarriage, but I could not move my legs. An hour later Jon got back and found me like that, all blood and misery. Since then I have not been able to walk. Nor to die, Benvenuto.”

“Have you prayed?” I asked her. “Have you besought God to let you walk again? Father Horan would say that you should. Father Horan says God’s grace is infinite, through the intercession of Abraham. But then— other times—he appears to deny it. Have you prayed, Mam Miriam?”

“Father Horan—that will be your village priest.” She was considering what I said, not laughing at me. “I believe he came here once some years ago, and Jon told him to go away, and he did—but no charge of witchcraft was ever brought against us.” She smiled at me, a smile of strangeness, but it warmed me. “Yes, I have prayed, Benvenuto… You said you were running away. Why that, my dear? And from what?”

“They would stone me. I’ve heard it muttered behind windows when I passed. The only reason they haven’t yet is that Father Horan was my friend—I thought he was, I’m sure he wanted to be, once. But I have learned he is not, he also believes me sinful.”

“Sinful?” She stroked the back of my hand, and her look was wondering. “Perhaps any sin you might have done has been atoned for by coming out of your way to help an old witch.”

“You’re not a witch!” I said. “Don’t call yourself that!”

“Why, Benvenuto! Then you do believe in witches!”

“Oh, I don’t know.” For the first time in my life I was wondering whether I did, if she in all her trouble could be so amused at the thought of them. “I don’t know,” I said, “but you’re not one. You’re good, Mam Miriam. You’re beautiful.”

“Well, Benvenuto, when I am busy with my embroideries, I sometimes feel like a good person. And in Jon’s embraces I’ve thought so, after the pleasure, in the time when there can be quiet and a bit of thinking. Other times I’ve just lain here wondering what goodness is, and whether anyone really knows. Bless you, am I beautiful? I’m too fat, from lying here doing nothing. The wrinkles spread over my puffy flesh just the same, like frost lines coming on a windowpane, only dark, dark.” She closed her eyes and asked me, “What sin could you have done to make them after stoning you?”

“The one I most loved went away last spring—all the way to Penn, Gold help me, and I don’t even know what town. I was lonely, and full of desire too, for we had been lovers, and I’ve learned I have a great need of that, a fire in me that flares up at a breath. In Wayland’s field a few days ago, where the corn shocks are standing like golden women, I came on someone else, Eden—we had been loving friends, though not in that way. We were both lonely and hungry for loving, and so we comforted each other—and still, in spite of Father Horan, I can see no harm in it—but Eden’s people found us. Eden is younger than me—was only driven home and whipped, and will suffer no worse, I hope. Me they call monster. I ran away from Eden’s father and brother, but now all the village is muttering.”

“But surely, surely, boy and girl playing the old sweet game in an autumn cornfield—”

“Eden is a boy, Mam Miriam. The one I love, who went away, is Andrea Benedict, the eldest son of a patrician.”

She put her hand behind my neck. “Come here awhile,” she said, and drew me down to her.

“Father Horan says such passion is the Eternal Corruption. He says the people of Old Time sinned in this way, so God struck them with fire and plague until their numbers were as nothing. Then he sent Abraham to redeem us, taking away the sin of the world, so—”

“Hush,” she said, “hush. Nay—go on if you will, but I care nothing for your Father Horan.”

“And so God placed upon us, he says, the command to be fruitful and multiply until our numbers are again the millions they were in Old Time, destroying only the mues. And those who sin as I did, he says, are no better than mues, are a kind of mue, and are to be stoned in a public place and their bodies burned. After telling me that, he spoke of God’s infinite mercy, but I did not want to hear about it. I ran from him. But I know that in the earlier days of Old Time people like me were tied up in the marketplaces and burned alive, I know this from the books—it was Father Horan taught me the books, the reading—isn’t that strange?”

“Yes,” she said. She was stroking my hair, and I loved her. “Lying here useless, I’ve thought about a thousand things, Benvenuto. Most of them idle. But I do tell you that any manner of love is good if there’s kindness in it. Does anyone know you came here, Benvenuto?” She made my name so loving a sound!

“No, Mam Miriam.”

“Then you can safely stay the night. I’m frightened when the night wind blows around the eaves, if I’m alone. You can keep the fright away. It sounds like children crying, some terror pursues them or some grief is on them and there’s nothing I can do.”

“Why, to me the night wind sounds like children laughing, or the wood gods running and shouting across the top of the world.”

“Are there woodgods?”

“I don’t know. The forest’s a living place. I never feel alone there, even if I lose my way awhile.”

“Benvenuto, I think I’m hungry now. See what you can find downstairs—there’s cheese, maybe sausage, some of the little red Snow Apples, and Jon made bread—”

Her face crumpled and she caught at my hand. “Was it very bad—about Jon?”

“I think he was dead before the wolf came,” I told her. “Maybe his heart failed, or—a stroke? I’ve heard black wolf won’t attack in broad day. He must have died first in some quick way, without pain.”

“Oh, if we all could!” That cry was forced from her because her courage had gone, and I think it was only then that she really knew Jon Kobler was dead. “How could he go before me? I have been dying for ten years.”

“I won’t leave you, Mam Miriam.”

“Why, you must I won’t allow you to stay. I saw a stoning once in Sortees when I was a girl—or maybe that was when my girlhood ended. You must be gone by first light. Now, find us some little supper, Benvenuto. Before you go downstairs—that ugly thing over there, the bedpan—if you would reach it to me. God, I hate it so!—the body of this death.”

There’s nothing offensive in such services, certainly not if you love the one who needs them: we’re all bound to the flesh—even Father Horan said it. I wished to tell her so, and found no words; likely she read my thought.

Downstairs everything had been left in order. Jon Kobler must have been a careful, sober man. While I was busy building a fire to cook the sausage, arranging this and that on the tray Jon must have used, I felt him all around us in the work of his hands—the baskets, the beads, the furniture, the very shutters at the windows. Those were all part of a man.

In some way my own works shall live after me. This letter I am finishing is part of a man. Read it so.

When I took up the tray, Mam Miriam smiled at it, and at me. She would not talk during our meal about our troubles. She spoke of her young years at Sortees, and that is when I came to leam those things I wrote down for you about the governor’s mansion, the strange people she used to see who came from far off, even two or three hundred miles away; about the archer, the elopement, all that. And I learned much else that I have not written down, about the world that I shall presently go and look upon in my own time.

We had two candles at our supper table. Afterward, and the night wind was rising, she asked me to blow out one and set the other behind a screen; so all night long we had the dark, but it was not so dark we could not see each other’s faces. We talked on awhile; I told her more about Andrea. She slept some hours. The night wind calling and crying through the trees and over the rooftop did not waken her, but she woke when for a moment I took my hand away from hers. I returned it, and she slept again.

And once I think she felt some pain, or maybe it was grief that made her stir and moan. The wind had hushed, speaking only of trifling illusions; no other sound except some dog barking in Trempa village, and an owl. I said, “I’ll stay with you, Mam Miriam.”

“You cannot.”

“Then I’ll take you with me.”

“How could that be?”

“I’ll carry you. I’ll steal a horse and carriage.”

“Dear fool!”

“No, I mean it. There must be a way.”

“Yes,” she said, “and I’ll dream of it awhile.” And I think she did sleep again. I did, I know; then morning was touching the silence of our windows.

The daylight was on her face, and I blew out the candle, and I told her, “Mam Miriam, I’ll make you walk. I believe you can, and you know it too.” She stared up at me, not answering, not angry. “You are good. I think you’ve made me believe in God again, and so I’ve been praying that God should help you walk.”

“Have I not prayed?”

“Come!” I said, and took her hands and lifted her in the bed. “Come now, and I’ll make you walk.”

“I will do what I can,” she said. “Set my feet on the floor, Benvenuto, and I will try to lift myself.”

This I did. She was breathing hard. She said I was not to lift her, she must do it herself. “There’s money in the drawer of that table,” she said, and I was puzzled that she should speak of it now when she ought to be summoning all her forces to rise and walk. “And a few jewels brought from Sortees, we never sold them. Put them in your pocket, Benvenuto. I want to see you do that, to be sure you have them.” I did as she said— never mind what I found in the drawer, since you have only my word for it that I did not rob her.

When I turned back to her, she was truly struggling to rise. I could see her legs tensing with life, and I believed we had won, even that God had answered a prayer, a thing I had never known to happen. A blood vessel was throbbing fiercely at her temple, her face had gone red, her eyes were wild with anger at her weakness.

“Now let me help,” I said, and put my hands under her armpits, and with that small aid she did rise, she did stand on her own legs and smile at me with the sweat on her face.

“I thank you, Benvenuto,” she said, and her face was not red any more but white, her lips bluish. She was collapsing. I got her back on the bed Jon Kobler made, and that was the end of it.

I will go into the world and find my way, I will not die by my own hand, I will regret no act of love. If it may be, I will find Andrea, and if he wishes, we may travel into new places, the greater oceans, the wilderness where the sun goes down. Wherever I go I shall be free and shameless; take heed of me. I care nothing for your envy, your anger, your fear that simulates contempt. The God you invented has nothing to say to me; but I hear my friend say that any manner of love is good if there’s kindness in it. Take heed of me. I am the night wind and the quiet morning light: take heed of me.

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