Iulus moved deliberately but without distraction through the sad scene. He located some peasant Feastday costumery, though they were hardly actual peasant clothes, for they were beautifully made, never-worn attic costumes out of a comic opera, with velveteen capes, horn buttons, crocheted sleeves, and patent leather boots draped loose about the ankle, their only camouflage being the absurd distance they put us from the present grisly proceedings. They were, in fact, costumes from the pageant collection of the royal family, who during summer vacations near Semper Vero liked to dress as peasants and live “the simple life.” It was the only uniform Iulus could think of that would not compromise us with some faction in Cannonia, where seven different wars now raged. And I realized for the first time that he meant to accompany me out.
Iulus packed up the crown in a rucksack using great piles of manuscript for wadding. Then he deliberately filled a plaid valise with files, a Gladstone with correspondence, and a velvet ladies’ hat box with the plates of the Cannonian currency and the kennel studbook. He took particular care with a hand-tooled leather box with a raised monogram, Z. Then he picked up each of the nine pups under their front legs, and bussing them on the nose, buried them in the cart of straw. We mounted up on the narrow wooden seat, where I was happy to ride shotgun, and when he lay a gentle bootheel on the animal’s rump, the pony immediately broke into an electrifying tolta—faster than a walk, gentler than a trot.
As the cart creaked away, leaving the old sire exposed, like the great Old One, mauled by the young, who bleeding away sires a thousand sons. Picking up his ears and raising his still massive chest, he passed a curdling glance in our direction. His haunches quivered as if to follow us, but he soon thought better of it, and as the cart spewed gravel in its wake, turned his head away as if content with our receding echo. We set off into a pewter Cannonian mid-morning, green turds spinning out of the blond horse, and I felt the double melancholy of not only leaving a place to which I might never return, but of leaving a place that I was not sure existed. I turned for a final glance of Semper Vero. Across a bold curve of the Mze, a filmy veil of fog was rolling down the mountain spurs, and from the central turret of the manor, a single cloud pennon streamed. Then the translucent clouds deepened and darkened, and swiftly, almost instantaneously, at high noon, the light failed. In the dying afterglow, the country stretched into the nothingness beyond. Oh, how this soldier-boy wanted something different to belong to!
We rode in abrupt and arbitrary transition, just as in popular books, forded the shallow Its easily, and were gradually joined on either flank by solemn corteges of Astingi, winding across the blackened fields of no-man’s-land, to take shelter with us on the far side of the river. Their movement had none of the hallmarks of an advance or retreat. No weapons, insignias, or standards were on display. Legless veterans were carried on the shoulders of others. The men in their raspberry overcoats or menacing black felt cloaks, whips looped about their waists, rode in a mute assembly about the wagons of women and children, their great wheeled kettles and mobile hookahs in a fluid organization which required not a single verbal order. It was less an army than a biological force, simply crossing yet another river, another journey from nowhere to nowhere; for they had already forded the Mze twice upstream, in order to ford it again. The Astingi were laconic and expressionless, without so much as a backwards glance at their homelands. In their easy ancient resignation, they seemed neither warriors nor victims. Their very posture, their impressive silence, seemed only to indicate that entering history at its “cutting edge” was for them the most boring place to be.
Late in the day, beneath a flotilla of barrage balloons, we could make out the desultory massing of American supplies in the oxbow of the river. Brown Studebaker trucks scurried like she-bears as far as the eye could see. A PX was already going up, and next to the stockade with its California-style barracks for displaced persons, I could make out the outlines of a swimming pool and athletic fields. The Cannonian dusk would soon be filled with flyballs, as America mounted her exhilarating project to prove history wrong.
From the meadow bank, the Astingi peered from their ponies across the tawny river. On the far side, a group of sullen, drunken GIs stripped to the waist were skipping stones (a fact which seemed to startle even my impassive guide), and when a lanky left-hander skipped a pebble some twenty times across the whiskey-colored water, the Astingi vanguard scattered as if they had seen a ghost. Iulus stopped the cart and dismounted, studying the far bank in his binoculars. Then he turned his back and gestured to the lead horseman returning from the river, who seemed to recognize him despite the costumery. He galloped up and they had a brief discussion, speaking a language unlike any I had heard, lyrical but agglutinative, as if every word were a verb, a dactylic canter where each initial syllable set off a platoon of vowels which rushed away like birds after a gunshot, a basso continuo turning every A to O, every O to U, and every U to zero.
The Astingi leader regrouped his advance guard and followed Iulus down to the muddy embankment. My guide stared at the water for some time; then with a brisk but casual motion, he suddenly bent down and caught a trout in his bare hands. When he held it up, the huge half-naked adolescents on the far bank stopped laughing, just as the Astingi troop began. And then as Iulus turned round, putting the fish in a fold of his loose boot, the Astingi began to ford the river with renewed confidence, their faith in superior reflexes restored. They refused to use the bridge, their ponies negotiating the eddies so effortlessly one could not tell if they were actually walking or swimming.
We ourselves crossed the pontoon bridge lodged with the bloated carcasses of many horses and farm animals. I showed the bored MPs my papers, and they waved us into the camp, which we entered as if from another century, another planet, as if from some B-grade movie — two Kulaks in their Sunday best, a horsedrawn hayrick with its smuggled riches — the oldest trick in the book — and one, as it turned out, that was being replicated a thousand times a day along the stopline, each American policeman more credulous or indifferent than the last, as murderers, spies, and thugs by the score took shelter amongst the people who called Heaven their home. We were billeted at the rear of the camp which now stretched across two double oxbows of the Mze. The back office had finally caught up with our advance and was busily collecting information while denying rumors of a last great push to destroy the Soviets in their tracks, which naturally had elicited no great enthusiasm in the ranks. There was no longer any mention of Terra XX.
A crowd of soldiers had already gathered about our cart, more curious about the single mechanical conveyance to survive their artillery barrage intact than our fey costumery, cautiously patting the prehistoric horse who gently nipped back, and cooing like a bunch of schoolgirls over the litter, which had now poked their heads from the straw, ears erect and rumps awhirr. Iulus decided then and there to break up the litter, for they were in that twelfth week of canine life in which the bonding to humans is best transferred.