It was over my head in those years; now I realize how hard and patiently the Holy Murcan Church worked as an umpire in wartime. Being committed to a policy of lovingkindness (within reason of course) the Church took no part in war except to provide chaplains for the armed forces and facilities for the military type of prayer — which putS a slight Strain on monotheism at times. Behind the scenes, however, the top brass of Church and State would be watching for a suitable moment when both sides were wearied out enough to negotiate. When that time came the Church would supervise, examine any treaty proposed, and approve it so long as it wasn’t too openly hoggish. For the nations after all are not merely great democracies but Murcan democracies — that is, united in the faith though not in politics. The Church is fond of calling herself Mother Church, enjoying the role of skirted arbiter in the smeary bloody squabbles of her children (whom she didn’t beget, but never mind that) and I guess she can truly claim to be the savior and protectress of modern civilization, such as it is.[13]

Since those days I have learned so much — from good stern Mam Laura of Rumley’s Ramblers who made me solid with reading and writing, from Nickie above all, and from the years when Nickie and I were Dion’s aides in his effort as Regent of Nuin to bring some enlightenment into the mental murk of his times — so much more than I ever learned in childhood that it is difficult to sort out what I knew then from later knowledge. It was in my boyhood, at the tavern, that I heard an old man, a traveler, describe the sack of Nassa in Levannon, a city notoriously sinful and a hatcher of heresies, in a war Levannon fought against Bershar soon after winning her independence from Moha. The Bershar hill-men laid siege to the city for fifty days. According to the teller of the tale, this was a case where the Church took sides almost openly, encouraging devout communities in other lands to send Bershar material support. It caused some angry heretical mutterings here and there. When Nassa surrendered at last, the survivors were disarmed, turned loose and hunted down like woodchucks or rats, and then the whole city was set to the torch — “for the glory of God,” as the Bershar commander put it. His remark was unpopular, especially in the Low Countries, where aid to Bershar had upped the taxes. Church dignitaries were greatly shocked at this “misinterpretation” of the ecclesiastical position, and the Prince Cardinal of Lomeda was obliged to come out on the steps of the Cathedral and be shocked in public before a grumbling crowd would quit and disperse.

When the war itself ended, the treaty specified that Nassa must never be rebuilt, and Levannon had to agree; it never had been. Our traveler could not recall what year the war was, but he said the pines where Nassa used to stand had grown better than twenty feet tall. And he said that the city of New Nassa, a few miles from the simple war memorial among the pines, was a much stronger town in the military as well as the economic sense — better command of the eastern road… Joking of course, Old Jon asked him: “Was you, sir, one of them terr’ble Nassa heretics, sir?” The traveler looked at him too long and unwinking, like an ancient turtle, and then laughed barely enough for politeness, without answering.

A regiment was coming to defend Skoar, Emmia had said. They’d use the Northeast Road — no other available except the West, and that must be busy if there had already been fighting in the Seneca region. It shouldn’t matter to me, I thought, since I meant to avoid roads anyway until I was a long way from Skoar. My uneasiness subsided for lack of fuel and I drifted into a sort of sleep.

I woke in slowly lightening darkness, pulled from a warm riot with a girl who was not Caron but only a trifle bigger and older. I can’t bring back much of her now except a red flower in the back of her dark hair that tickled my nose. She was singing; I kept whispering to her she better not, we better not do anything until Father Milsom fell back out of sight on the other side of the stockade. I was awake, my thighs gripping nothing but a branch. I ached, and I’ll never see her again. They don’t come back. Dion remarks it’s just as well they don’t, for if we hoped to find our unfinished dreams we’d be forever sleeping, and who’d cook breakfast?

Skoar, in fact everything of my fourteen years — (even Caron, even Sister Carnation) — seemed to me in that time of waking to have become like a mixed sound of voices behind me, farther and farther behind me on a road where I could do nothing but go forward.

The fog became swirls of gray replacing the night; I saw the shape of willow branches near my eyes. I wriggled down the tree in the milk-soft confusion and pushed on up the mountain, hungry, not much rested but clear in the head. The policers wouldn’t like the fog, so I tried to, though it slowed me down. I arrived at my cave in half an hour, famished. I could spare no time to hunt. The fog was thinning away under the pressure of an invisible sun.

I dug up my money first — fifteen dollars altogether, it ought to help as soon as I came to any place where money mattered. At a moment when sunlight broke through the fog and edged the leaves with wet trembling gold, I had in my palm the shiny dollar Emmia had given me: it seemed not so very bright. After dropping it among my other coins I could hardly tell it from the rest. Then I recovered my sack, with the golden horn — and my luckcharm of course. Could I have known all the time that it was there, but needed some compelling reason for running away? — from Emmia? Skoar? From my boyhood self because I must have done with it?

A slim-witted wild hen came searching her breakfast of bugs barely ten yards off. My arrow lifted her head from her neck — she’d never miss it. I couldn’t stop to make a cooking fire, but drank the blood and dressed her off, and ate the heart, liver and gizzard raw, wrapping the rest in burdock leaves for lunchtime. I recall I gave the luckcharm no credit, although in many ways I was still quite religious.

The nearest stream began at a spring on the mountain’s northeast slope beyond my cave, a small loud brook with alders and brambles along the banks. I knew it ran two miles or so through the woods and then across the Northeast Road at a little ford. I could follow it almost to the road and then use the road as a guide, glimpsing it now and then to check my position as I traveled east — toward Levannon.

The brook covered the bottom of a scratchy tunnel, a narrow green hell. Thinking of policer dogs, I had to try it. I stuffed my moccasins in the sack again, to save them. My bare feet winced at the thought of snakes, and took a beating on the stones.

Of course when the dogs lost the scent the men would use some brains, following the brook with the dogs searching both banks. At a break where the brambles gave way to common weeds, I stepped out and walked away, to make it look as if I had given up and started back toward Skoar. I passed within grabbing reach of a big oak but went beyond it, to a thicket where I messed around a little and peed on the leaves to keep the dogs amused. Then I backtracked and swung into the oak with care to leave no damaged twigs. From the oak, by risking one leap far above ground, I passed to another tree, and then from branch to branch all the way back to the brook.

They’d at least lose time beating their gums over it, maybe decide I was a demon and sit down and wait for a priest to come help them louse it up. But I stayed with the stream another half-mile, and when I left it I did so by the way of the trees again, proceeding through the branches to another great oak. There I climbed high, to study the land.

Clouds swarmed eastward playing dark games before the sun. Edgy weather, a petulant wind stirring the oak leaves with sultry insistence. A spring storm might be advancing.

13

According to a famous paragraph in the Doctrine of Necessary Evils, war is a periodic outlet for man’s “natural” violence, unavoidable till the second coming of Abraham; thus it is a duty of the Church to allow a “limited amount” of violence, under proper control. It is interesting to note that this idea of the inevitability of violence was old in Old Time — not to say moldy — and the proponents of it were as well able then as now to overlook the history of some nations that had passed through many generations without war, to say nothing of the multitude of private lives that reject violence in favor of reason and charity. — Dion M.M.