Nor was that piece of road so very long, really — a quarter-mile perhaps, or less. The sun was not noticeably lower when we reached the crest of the rise-we did reach it, all four of us alive-and looked down, and saw a thing that might save us from the tiger, or might not.
We saw a stockaded village, the walls fairly well made, and it stood boldly at the edge of the road, no hideaway wilderness thing but civilized, respectable, important in its own right. It lay far enough below us in the valley so that we could see all but the north end of it, which was hidden by forest growth coming close to the stockade. We saw behind the palings a graceful church spire, the usual design of an upright bar rising from the wheel, and an orderly array of rooftops, including those of quite a few two-story dwellings. Next to the road, on our side, was a generous area of cleared land, with corn-patches, and black spots that showed where they maintained guard-fires at night to keep the deer, bison, woods buffalo and small creatures from ruining their plantings. Far down, yes, nearly half a mile, and for much of that distance, until we reached the corn planting, there would still be trees and brush creating a mystery at our left.
As we began the descent, Jed Sever would not look to either side of the road, not into the trees nor away into the lovely sunshine and green slopes of the southern side. He trusted instinct to place his feet for him, and looked upward toward his God, asking forgiveness for the sins of all of us. He was asking also that if the beast should strike it might take him first and not one of his friends — for he, though an even more wretched sinner perhaps beyond hope of salvation, was nevertheless more prepared in his mind for judgment and the wrath to come. “And if it be thy will,” he said, “let their sins be upon me, Abraham chosen of God, Spokesman, Redeemer, and not upon them, but let ’em be washed clean in my blood[18] forever and ever amen.”
Jed also tried to motion poor Vilet away from him to the other, probably safer side of the road, walking himself nearest to the forest cover, the sweat pouring from his forehead like tears. His big hands swung idle with no look of readiness for sword-work.
I can remember the distress his prayer gave me, in spite of my own fear and alertness. It seemed to me, especially in my new and bewildering acquaintance with heresy, that if there was one thing above all I could let no one else carry for me, it was my sins. Today I can discover no sin in anything except cruelty and its variations, and this for reasons that have nothing to do with religion, but on that day I was yet a long way from such opinions.
As we continued down the other side of that hill, the tiger scent diminished. I think it was some shift in the barely perceptible currents of the air. He was present but he did not strike. We moved on down the road — passing the forest cover at our left, reaching the corn plantings, passing them, approaching the open region and the village gate, and he did not strike.
From within the village came the sweet jangling of triple bells. Often they are made of the best bronze from Katskll or Penn — the Church can afford it — and the makers try to cast each group so that it will sound a major triad with the fifth in the bass. The third, struck last, floats in the high treble toward a tranquillity resembling peace, and the overtones play with a hundred rainbows. These village bells were announcing five o’clock: “Time to quit work and pray and have supper.”
Jed’s prayers ended rather flatly. I still glanced behind me as often as I had done when we had the trees at our left, but the tiger did not strike, not then. I did not see him, not then.
The main gate of such a village is usually open during daylight hours so long as a guard is present, but not on Fridays, when it’s considered best to keep folk within God’s easy reach. So that day the ponderous log gate was shut, but I looked through a chink in the log slabs and saw the guard in his grass-thatched shelter, not asleep but mighty restful, sprawled on his cot with a leg hooked over a raised knee and his policer cap let down over his eyes. He bounced up fast enough when I hollered:
Well, there are some things you do and say when approaching a strange village, and some you don’t. I’d goofed in my usual rapid way, too rapid for Sam or Vilet to stop me, as I knew when the guard came swaggering with his javelin up and ready. I whispered to Sam: “Make like a Mister, think you could?”
He nodded, and was in front of me by the time the guard got the gate open and started bawling me out for disturbing the Friday peace-no manners — what ailed me anyhow?
Sam said: “My man, I apologize for my nephew’s hasty speech. I am Mister Samuel Loomis of Kanhar, more recently of Chengo, and the lady is my cousin. This is her husband, Mister Jedro Sever, also late of Chengo but a legal resident of Manster, Vairmant — you may address her as Mam Sever when apologizing for your own bad manners.” Sam had hitched his shirt slightly so that the hilt of his sheathed knife was visible, and he was rubbing a horny old thumb back and forth across the end of the bone knifehilt, and looking down at that thumb along his thin nose, not as if he gave a damn, just sad and patient and thoughtful.
“Mam, I — Mam Sever, I — Mam, I—”
That could have gone on a long time. Sam cut it short by asking delicately: “Is the apology satisfactory, Cousin? And Jackson ?”
“Oh, quait,” says Vilet, hamming it some but not too much, and I mumbled my own snooty graciousness, and
Sam flipped him a two-bit to quiet the pain. Sam had startled me as badly as he had the guard — I’d never guessed he knew how to talk in that hightoned way. Maybe Dion could have found fault with it, but not I. He put me in mind of what I’d imagined about some of the fine old historical characters I’d learned of in school, in what they called a Summary of Old-Time History. Honest, Sam was just as cool and grand and you-be-damned as the best of them — Socrates, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, or that splendid short-tempered sumbitch, I’ll think of his name in a minute, who r’ared up and whipped the Barons and Danes and Romans and things out of merry England and clear across the Delaware before he was satisfied to let them go — Magnum Carter, that’s who it was.
“Well, man,” said Sam, “can we find anything in this village in the nature of decent accommodations?”
“Oh yes, sir, the Black Prince tavern will have nice rooms, I know the people and—”
“How far is Humber Town from here?”
“About ten miles, sir. Oughta be a coach from Skoar going through to Humber Town tomorrow — once a week, Saturdays, and always stops here of course, though with the war and all—”
“Ayah, the rest of our caravan is waiting on that coach at the last village where we stopped, some piddlepot hole in the ground, I didn’t trouble to learn its name.”
“Perkunsvil,” said the guard with solemn pleasure. In a jerkwater village you can hardly go wrong by blackening the reputation of neighboring dumps.
“I guess. We got tired waiting for it. What town is this?”
“This is East Perkunsvil.”
“Nice location. There’s tiger up yonder, by the way — see many hereabout as a rule?”
“What! No, sir, that can’t hardly be.”
Jed spoke for the first time, and reprovingly: “Why not, man? Brown tiger’s like unto the flame of God that burneth where it will.”
The guard bowed, the way you’d better do at hearing anything with a holy sound, but he was stubborn. “Sir, I can tell you, brown tiger never comes anear this town. We don’t ask God’s reasons for the special mercy, it’s just so.”
I’ve noticed every village needs a unique source of pride. It may be a claim that nobody in the village ever had smallpox, or all babies are born with dark hair, or the local wise woman’s aphrodisiacs are the aphrodizziest within forty miles — no matter what, so long as it provides a mark of distinction. In East Perkunsvil I suppose tiger hadn’t come over the stockade within the memory of the oldest inhabitant, so the village was sure God had arranged that he never would. Sam bowed nicely and said: “You be rema’kably favored, doubtless a manifestation.”
18
The Holy Murcan Church apparently adopted the fantasy of vicarious atonement from Old-Time Christianity with one curious modification. According to the modern creed, any saintly man, not only Christ or Abraham, can take on himself the sins of others if the Lord agrees to the deal. Like modern believers, the Christians of Old Time seem never to have felt anything repellent or atrocious in the doctrine that a man could get a free ride into heaven on the suffering and death of another. The parallel to primitive god-killing rituals was of course noted only by scholars.