“Yes, sir, it may well be.” He was downright friendly now as well as respectful. “Yes, sir, lived here all my life, and that’s twenty-six years, never even seen the beast.”
Vilet said: “Look up yonder then!”
Now chance never plays into my hands that way. If I’d said that, the brute would have been well out of sight before any head turned. And I guess Vilet had never got many breaks of that kind either, for later when we four were settled in our rooms at the Black Prince she had to go over it three or four times, and each time it put her in a warm sweet glow: “’Lookit up yonder then!’ I says, right smackdab on the very second I says it, and wasn’t his o’ face just like a fish and you a-squeezin’ it to get the hook out? — oh snummy!” And she’d bounce and slap her leg and tell it again.
I must have turned when she spoke as quickly as the others, yet I felt as if my head were moving against a resistance, unready to behold a thing that all my life I had feared and in some way desired to behold. Smelling the beast on the road, I had known him from catching that smell once before in the hill country west of Skoar. It’s ranker than puma smell, seems to hang heavier in the air. At that earlier time it had seemed just not quite right for puma, and I had climbed a tree and spent a long night there shivering, smelling him and thinking I did but not once hearing or seeing him. In the morning I’d wobbled down and found his enormous pugs in a bare spot of earth, deep, as if he might have stood there some time observing me through the dark, old Eye-of-Fire, and maybe thinking: Well, let’s wait till Red gets a mite bigger and fatter…
Now, I saw him.
A short way down from the crest of the hill we had descended lay a high flat-topped rock, thirty feet from the road on the open side, across from the forest. The top was slightly tilted, away from the road, so that when we walked past, it had looked like a simple edge, nothing to tell of the slanting platform. Had he watched us go by, or only just now arrived there? Maybe he had been not hungry, or restrained by the fact there were four of us. Maybe he knew my bow meant danger. I imagined him amusing himself with false starts, quivering his hindquarters, playing and enjoying the cat-game of delayed decision and finally for his own reasons allowing us to proceed. Now, following his immediate whim, he stood tall, and I saw him in remote dark gold against the deepening midsummer sky.
He gazed down toward us, or more likely beyond us. He must have known or sensed that the distance was too great for the flight of an arrow from my bow, if he was experienced in such things. He turned on his high rock with no haste at all, flowingly, to stare in another direction, off to the south across the valley, perhaps indifferently observing the smoke of other human places.
He sat down and raised a curled paw to his mouth to lick it and rub it comfortably over the top of his head. Then he washed his flank, and up went a hind leg catstyle so he could lean down and nuzzle his privates. He lost balance comically because of the slope of the rock, righted himself with a comedian’s ease, and lay down and rolled with his feet in the air. And when he tired of that he yawned, and jumped down, and strolled across the road into the woods, and for a while he was gone.
16
That was the first time I had seen the inside of a village. Since then I’ve seen more than I can plainly remember, for when I was with Rumley’s Ramblers we visited one after another throughout Levannon, Bershar, Conicut, Katskil, more than a year in Penn; the atmosphere and the people may vary a great deal, but the general pattern is much the same in all the nations. Wherever you find them, such villages are designed for one fundamental purpose, to give a small human community a bit of safety in a world where our breed is no longer numerous, not rich and sleek as in Old Time, not wise, and not very brave.
They are usually laid out in a square, in some location where a stream crosses fairly level ground. The drinking water comes from the upstream end, and the rest of the stream is regarded as a sewer — saves digging. Main Street , running down the midline of the village, will be rather wide and ordinarily straight, so that when you enter by the front gate you look all the way to the one in the rear; the other streets will be narrow except for the area, not always called a street, formed by a cleared space just inside the stockade. Often a green occupies the center of the village facing Main Street , with the usual equipment — bandstand, whipping post, stocks, pillory and maybe a nice wading pool for the children. You’ll notice one block of houses better than the rest — bigger yards, maybe flower-beds along with the necessary vegetable patch, eveit a slave hut out back next the privy demonstrating that the family owns a servant or two instead of renting them out from the slave barracks on the downstream side of town. On that downstream side, beside the barracks, you can find what the people sometimes call the “factory,” really a warehouse, for the village industries — home weaving, baskets, cabinet-work or whatever. The policer station will be on that side, and the jail, the public stable, the legal whorehouse, blacksmith shop, probably the baitingpit if the village can afford to maintain one; and there will be several blocks on that side where the houses sag together in dejection, the drunks would rather sleep it off in their front yards than indoors, being independent freemen, and if any pigs from the prosperous neighborhood go hunting garbage on that side of town they prefer to travel in pairs.
In between those extremes stand the middle-class blocks, where the ideal is a harking back to Old Time, with all the houses exactly alike, all yards and gardens exactly alike, all the privies exactly alike with small crescent windows of precisely the same size emitting the same flavor of socially significant togetherness.
Now that I’d made Sam a Mister in my hasty way, he couldn’t get out of it, and figured he might as well r’ar back and enjoy it. He was still carrying himself like God’s favorite adviser when we blew in at the Black Prince. As a result, the weedy ancient in charge of the flea-bag fawned all over us, charging twice the normal rate for two of his best rooms which would have done credit to a hog fann anywhere; Sam wanted to bargain, but was afraid it might damage the picture of ourselves as slightly important nobs. He said later that this was a considerable grief to him, descended as he was from a long line of illustrious chicken-thieves. He caught up on the bargaining later, with Rumley’s Ramblers. I’ve heard Pa Rumley say that Sam could have bargained the beard off a prophet, and he meant Jeremiar himself, which was near-about the finest praise Pa Rumley could give any man. You know how attached prophets get to their beards, and Jeremiar was a vigorous type, who worked up such a thriving trade in woe and lamentations that the opposition finally crowded him into an ark and sent him down-river among the bull-rushers to get rid of him.
A group of pilgrims from up north had already got the very best rooms at the Black Prince, overlooking Main Street; our two were second best, I guess, each with a slit of window looking north; I would have hated to see the worst. Beside the rickety cots they called beds the walls displayed dark smears telling of collisions between the human race and one of its closest, sincerest admirers. And over all things like a saintly benediction lay the smell of cabbage.
In a bedbug, so far as I understand him, there is not a trace of mirth or loving-kindness. Even their admiration for humanity is based on deep-seated greed. They have intellect, to be sure — how else would they know the exact moment when you’re about to fall asleep, and select that moment for a stab? Dion says bugs go by instinct. I asked him: “What’s instinct?” He said: “Oh, you go to hell!” Then Nickie flung in the statement that when you do something p’ison clever without a notion of what it’s all about, that’s instinct. But I still think they have intellect, and they probably brood too much until it curdles their dispositions, for note this: I never met a bug who showed me a trace of liking or respect, no matter what I’d done for him. Contempt is what they show, contempt. I’ve known a bug to stare me in the eye with my gore dripping from his jaws, and anyone could tell from his vinegary face that he was comparing me with other meals in the past and finding fault with everything — too salt, too gamy, needing more sass, something. He wouldn’t have complimented me if I’d spiced my ass and put butter on it. So I contemptify ’em right back. I hate bugs. Damn a bug.