Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  While Angelus clanged on the cracked church bell, Tam stood with his head downcast. He was supposed to be praying. In a way he was, the impenetrable rote-learned Latin slipping through his brain like the reiteration of a mantra, but he was also pleasantly occupied in speculating how plump his daughter might become if they could farm all three fields each year without destroying the soil, and at the same time thinking of the pot of fennel-spiced beer that should be waiting in his hut.

  As the Angelus ceased to ring, his neighbor’s hail dispelled both dreams.

  Irritated, Tam shouldered his wooden-bladed hoe and trudged along the Wealdway, worn deep by two hundred years of bare peasant feet.

  His neighbor, Hud, fell in with him. In the bastard MidlandSussex hybrid that was the Lymeford dialect, Hud said, “Man, that was a long day.”

  “All the days are long in the summer.”

  “You were dreaming again, man. Saw you.”

  Tam did not reply. He was careful of Hud. Hud was as small and dark as himself, but thin and nervous rather than blocky. Tam knew he got that from his father Robin, who had got it from his mother Joan—who had got it from some man-at-arms on her wedding night spent in the castle. Hud was always asking, always talking, always seeking new things. But when Tam, years younger, had dared to try to open his untamable thoughts to him, Hud had run straight to the priest.

  “Won’t the players be coming by this time of year, man?” he pestered.

  “They might.”

  “Ah, wouldn’t it be a great thing if they came by tomorrow? And then after Mass they’d make their pitch in The Green, and out would come the King of England and Captain Slasher and the Turkish Champion in their clothes colored like the sunset, and St. George in his silver armor!”

  Tam grunted. “ ‘Tisn’t silver. Couldn’t be. If it was silver the robbers in the Weald would never let them get this far.”

  The nervous little man said, “I didn’t mean it was silver. I meant it looked like silver.”

  Tam could feel anger welling up in him, drowning the good aftertaste of his reverie and the foretaste of his fennel beer. He said angrily, “You talk like a fool.”

  “Like a fool, is it? And who is always dreaming the sun away, man?”

  “God’s guts, leave off!” shouted Tam, and clamped his teeth on his words too late. He seldom swore. He could have bitten his tongue out after he uttered the words. Now there would be confession of blasphemy to make, and Father Bloughram, who had been looking lean and starved of late, would demand a penance in grain instead of any beggarly saying of prayers. Hud cowered back, staring. Tam snarled something at him, he could not himself have said what, and turned off the deep-trodden path into his own hut.

  The hut was cramped and murky with wood smoke from its open hearth. There was a smoke hole in the roof that let some of it out. Tam leaned his hoe against the wattled wall, flopped down onto the bundle of rags in the corner that was the bed for all three of the members of his family and growled at Alys his wife: “Beer.” His mind was full of Hud and anger, but slowly the rage cooled and the good thoughts crept back in: Why not a softer bed, a larger hut? Why not a fire that did not smoke, as his returning grandfather, who wore a scar from the Holy Land to his grave, had told him the Saracens had? And with the thought of a different kind of life came the thought of beer; he could taste the stuff now, sluicing the dust from his throat; the bitterness of the roasted barley, the sweetness of the fennel. “Beer,” he called again, and became aware that his wife had been tiptoeing about the hut.

  “Tam,” she said apprehensively, “Joanie Brewer’s got the flux.”

  His brows drew together like thunderclouds. “No beer?” he asked.

  “She’s got the flux, and not for all the barley in Oldfield could she brew beer. I tried to borrow from Hud’s wife, and she had only enough for him, she showed me—”

  Tam got up and knocked her spinning into a corner with one backhanded blow. “Was there no beer yesterday?” he shouted. “God forgive you for being the useless slut you are! May the Horned Man and all his brood fly away with a miserable wretch that won’t brew beer for the husband that sweats his guts out from sunup to sunset!” She got up cringing, and he knocked her into the corner again.

  The next moment there was a solid crack across his back, and he crashed to the dirt floor. Another blow took him on the legs as he rolled over, and he looked up and saw the raging face of his daughter Kate and the wooden-bladed hoe upraised in her hands.

  She did not strike him a third time, but stood there menacingly. “Will you leave her alone?” she demanded.

  “Yes, you devil’s get!” Tam shouted from the floor, and then, “You’d like me to say no, wouldn’t you? And then you’d beat in the brains of the old fool that gave you a name and a home.”

  Weeping, Alys protested, “Don’t say that, husband. She’s your child, I’m a good woman, I have nothing black on my soul.” Tam got to his feet and brushed dirt from his leather breeches and shirt. “We’ll say no more about it,” he said. “But it’s hard when a man can’t have his beer.”

  “You wild boar,” said Kate, not lowering the hoe. “If I hadn’t come back from The Mead with the cow, you might have killed her.”

  “No, child,” Tam said uneasily.

  He knew his temper. “Let’s talk of other things.” Contemptuously she put down the hoe, while Alys got up, sniffling, and began to stir the peaseporridge on the hearth. Suddenly the smoke and heat inside the hut was more than Tam could bear, and muttering something, he stumbled outside and breathed in the cool air of the night.

  It was full dark now and, for a wonder, stars were out. Tam’s Crusader grandfather had told him of the great bright nights in the mountains beyond Acre, with such stars that a man could spy friend’s face from foe’s at a bowshot. England had nothing like that, but Tam could make out the Plow, fading toward the sunset, and Cassiopeia pursuing it from the east. His grandfather had tried to teach him the Arabic names for some of the brighter stars, but the man had died when Tam was ten and the memories were gone. What were those two, now, so bright and so close together? Something about twin peacocks ? Twins at least, thought Tam, staring at Gemini, but a thought of peacocks lingered. He wished he had paid closer attention to the old man, who had been a Saracen’s slave for nine years until a lucky raid had captured his caravan and set him free.

  A distant sound of yelping caught his ear. Tam read the sound easily enough; a vixen and her half-grown young, by the shrillness. The birds came into the plowed fields at night to steal the seed, and the foxes came to catch the birds, and this night they had found something big enough to try to catch them—wolf, perhaps, Tam thought, though it was not like them to come so near to men’s huts in good weather. There were a plenty of them in Sir Robert’s forest, with fat deer and birds and fish beyond counting in the streams; but it was what a man’s life was worth to take them. He stood there, musing on the curious chance that put venison on Sir Robert’s table and peaseporridge on his, and on the lights in the sky, until he realized Alys had progressed from abject to angry and must by now be eating without him.

  After the evening meal Alys scurried over to Hud’s wife with her tale of beastly husbands, and Kate sat on a billet of wood, picking knots out of her hair.

  Tam squatted on the rags and studied her. At fifteen years, or whatever she was, she was a wild one. How had it happened that the babe who cooed and grasped at the grass whistle her father made her had turned into this stranger? She was not biddable. Edwy’s strip adjoined Tam’s in Fallowfield, and Edwy had a marriageable son. What was more reasonable than that Kate should marry him? But she had talked about his looks. True, the boy was no beauty. What did that matter? When, as a father should, he had brushed that aside, she had threatened plainly to run away, bringing ruin and the rope on all of them. Nor would she let herself be beaten into good sense, but instead kicked—with painful accuracy—and bit and scratched like a fiend from hell’s pit.

  He
felt a pang at that thought. Oh, Alys was an honest woman. But there were other ways the child of another could be fobbed off on you. A moment of carelessness when you didn’t watch the cradle—it was too awful to think of, but sometimes you had to think of it. Everybody knew that Old People liked nothing better than to steal somebody’s baby and slip one of their own into the cradle. He and Alys had duly left bowls of milk out during the child’s infancy, and on feast days bowls of beer. They had always kept a bit of iron by Kate, because the Old People hated iron. But still . . .

  Tam lighted a rushlight soaked in mutton fat at what was left of the fire. Alys would have something to say about his extravagance, but a mood for talking was on him, and he wanted to see Kate’s face “Child,” he said, “one Sunday now the players will come by and pitch on The Green. And we’ll all go after Mass and see them play. Why, St. George looks as if he wears armor all of silver!”

  She tugged at her hair and would not speak or look at him.

  He squirmed uncomfortably on the ragged bed. “I’ll tell you a story, child,” he offered.

  Contemptuously, “Tell your drunken friend. I’ve heard the two of you, Hud and yourself, lying away at each other with the beer working in you.”

  “Not that sort of story, Kate. A story no one has ever told.”

  No answer, but at least her face was turned toward him. Emboldened, he began:

  “ ‘Tis a story of a man who owned a great strong wain that could move without oxen, and in it he—”

  “What pulled it, then? Goats?”

  “Nothing pulled it, child. It moved by itself. It—” he fumbled, and found inspiration—“it was a gift from the Old People, and the man put on it meal and dried fish and casks of water, and he rode in it to one of those bright stars you see just over church. Many days he traveled, child. When he got there—”

  “What road goes to a star, man?”

  “No road, Kate. This wain rode in the air, like a cloud. And then—”

  “Clouds can’t carry casks of water,” she announced. “You talk like Edwy’s mad son that thinks he saw the Devil in a turnip.”

  “Listen now, Kate!” he snapped. “It is only a story. When the man came to—”

  “Story! It’s a great silly lie.”

  “Neither lie nor truth,” he roared. “It is a story I am telling you.”

  “Stories should be sense,” she said positively. “Leave off your dreaming, father. All Lymeford talks of it, man. Even in the castle they speak of mad Tam the dreamer.”

  “Mad, I am?” he shouted, reaching for the hoe. But she was too quick for him. She had it in her hands; he tried to take it from her, and they wrestled, rock against flame, until he heard his wife’s caterwauling from the entrance, where she’d come running, called by the noise; and when he looked round, Kate had the hoe from him and space to use it and this time she got him firmly atop the skull—and he knew no more that night.

  In the morning he was well enough, and Kate was wisely nowhere in sight. By the time the long day was through he had lost the anger.

  Alys made sure there was beer that night, and the nights that followed. The dreams that came from the brew were not the same as the dreams he had tried so hard to put into words. For the rest of his life, sometimes he dreamed those dreams again, immense dreams, dreams that—had he had the words, and the skill, and above all the audience—a hundred generations might have remembered. But he didn’t have any of those things. Only the beer.