Mason & Dixon

by Thomas Pynchon

  Taking its time, the Worm proceeds to one of the Batts or Islands in the River, where it sets up its base of operations. Its needs are simple,— Food, drink, and the pleasure to be had from killing. It eats sheep and swine, it drains milk from cattle nine at a time,— the number nine recurs in the Tale, tho’ the reason is dark,— and careless dogs, cats, and humans are but light snacks to it. Around it, a circle of Devastation appears, pale and soil’d, which no one enters, and which the World must keep shifting for, a little at a time, as it goes on widening,— the Worm each day venturing a little further from its base, till at length the circle of terror advances to include a direct view of the Battlements of Lambton Castle itself, the final sanctuary, surely inviolable,— although the people in the Castle dare not try to organize an exodus, for the Worm when it must can travel at great speed, faster than horses can gallop,— they have watch’d in terror many Chases to the death across the Tide-Plain below, as, once alerted, the Worm has easily cut its Victims off in the open, far from any refuge or escape.

  So there begins an Obsession by the Worm,— The Chapel is never empty now, the Steward has begun taking inventory, rationing lists are in early but serious negotiation. Days once idle are now fill’d with defensive chores. Engineers try to get the Trebuchet on the roof into working order, tweaking the shape of the Sling-Release Hook. . . . The Worm is by now grown so large that it may comfortably coil ’round the entire Castle. One day, there will come to it some Sign,— the call of a Raven, the exact shape of a Moon, the racing shadow of a cloud,— which will lead, by an unreadable train of Serpent thought, to a convulsive breaching of these walls and a merciless search within, a Face suddenly looming in the roofless Sky, a Feast. No one can say when. The Evil One has Lambton Castle literally in Its Embrace. The. . . .local folk keep a vigil, blending in against the brush on the somber hillsides, calculating how fast they’ll have to move when the creature turns its attention to them. Days pass,— presently, weeks. The Worm continues to enlarge its Zone of emptiness, but with a change of Center,— returning now after each excursion to coil about the Castle, where it lies all night digesting loudly its day’s predation. It is into this increasingly desperate Siege, that John Lambton now returns from his Crusade.

  At first look, impaling foreigners seems to have agreed with him,— he is tann’d and fit and easy in the Saddle. But beneath the hearty Mask lies a Dread of what he will encounter. Approaching the Castle, he can smell the Worm long before he sees it. He would have much preferr’d a Dragon, Dragons having from time to time, in County Durham, chosen to infest the roads and lay desolate the countryside,— it falling, usually, to such known antidraconical families as the Latimers, Wyvils, or Mowbrays, to respond. But those creatures were winged and claw’d, fire-breathing, noble in conformation, the reptilian detailing ever harmless, almost an afterthought. Nothing like what John Lambton, rounding the last bend before home, beholds, recognizes, and understands as his own creation, something he must now before God deal with.

  Time has not been kind to the Worm he threw in the well. It had been unpleasant enough to look at when only elver size,— now, despite what he has seen in the East, he must labor not to turn away. The eighteen vents have grown astonishingly, and hang, pulsating, each surrounded by a deep black annulus of something glist’ring and corroded. The Face has lost the youthful malevolence that Lambton remembers,— has rather become, deep in its abandonment, now purely a Weapon in the service of blood-lust, a serpent’s gift for paralyzing its prey with a certain Gaze that the potential Luncheon, once returning it, is helpless to defy. Even Lambton, though at a safe enough distance, finds it strangely attractive.

  He has not exactly been to the Holy Land,— where he ended up, in fact, was Transylvania,— this being one of the very last Crusades, taken up more in a privateering spirit by one Cardinal Cæsarini and a party of adventurers from many lands, who by breaking the Truce of Szeged and then losing at the battle of Varna, helped prepare the way for the Turks who were to capture Constantinople a few years later. During a long Iliad of hard soldiering and small, mortal, never-decisive engagements amid dramatic hilltops, haunted castles, mysterious flocks of Bats that always seem’d to be lingering about, Lambton one night, seeking diversion, had visited the encampment of a band of Gypsies, who included in their number a Sibyl widely respected for having successfully foretold every wedding, birth, adultery, and flow of wealth in this Locality for longer than anyone could remember. Solemnly, she inform’d him of the exact situation prevailing at Lambton Castle. “Then must I hasten home, to destroy this Monster. Shall I prevail?”

  “Bocsánat,— I do not do Deaths. I am far too cheerful. You want to see a Roumanian for that sort of thing.”

  “ ’Twould be little more than a sporting contest . . . ?” young Lambton talking fast, “no more violent than jousting, really . . . ?”

  “Milord, please,— my time is as precious as yours. What I can do is bring in a priest here, divide the Fee, arrange an Oath for you.”

  “Anything,” he assur’d her, “but quickly.”

  The Oath was fairly simple, he read it over a few times, couldn’t find much wrong with it, so willingly knelt beside his sword and vow’d, that if God should allow him victory over the Worm, he would sacrifice unto Him the first living thing he then happen’d to see. “There are penalty clauses,” the priest helpfully pointing them out, upon the long piece of parchment he’d just sign’d.

  “If I prevail, then so drench’d in blood shall I be, that Bloodshed will weigh less upon my conscience, than it does even here, in Transylvania,” avow’d the open-faced yet somber young Heir. “Therefore, I shall not default.”

  Once back in Durham, however,— having come to think of God under the aspect more of Fortune than of anything more Churchly,— he understands that his Duty also includes providing what he can, himself, on Earth, to shorten his odds.

  Choosing from among the small crowd of youths always to be found, when the Worm is away, about the approaches to the Castle seeking Engagement as Runners, Lambton arranges for his father, immediately the Worm’s destruction shall be signal’d by a blast upon a hunting horn, to send out one of the Castle Hounds. Neither Lambton thinks of this as cheating. It will be a legitimate sacrifice. Every one of those dogs is like family.

  Young Lambton next rides up to Washington,— the Colonel’s ancestral home, in fact,— to consult with the Armorsmith who fitted him out for his Crusade. Galloping toward the glow of the forge,— visible for miles, now and then reflected in the Wear,— he considers his basic tactical problem, which is the Worm’s reported ability, even hack’d into separate pieces by conventional sword-work, to reassemble itself and fight on.

  “I’ve been looking into this very difficulty,” the Armorer greets him. “Glad you came by,— here, come and see.” Inside the shop, lit by the lurid glow of the coals, with a sweating apprentice staring at them unfathomably, gleams a suit of Armor, to young Lambton’s exact measurements, provided all over with hundreds of firmly attach’d sword-quality Blades, whose honed edges flicker with sanguinary light.

  “Perfect. It won’t be able to use its coils,— it’ll have to come head-on, and happen I’ll get lucky with m’ Pike . . . ?”

  They discuss tactics far into the night. He returns with the Armor, pack’d in Straw. For the first Time, he understands that ev’rywhere about, for leagues, sleep Souls in real Bodies, mortal as any in Hungary, impossible longer to ignore, and that at Dawn, by way of their dreams, will they all wake knowing what is to happen that day.

  Young Lambton chooses to wait out upon the Worm’s own Batt, the river flowing swiftly by on either side. Birds are subdued, treed. For the benefit of observers, of whom there are many, he kneels a moment, appearing to repeat his sacred Oath, before rising to put on, very care-fully, piece by razor-keen piece, his bloodletting suit,— till all at last is ready. Then he hears it,— the unimagin’d tons o
f wet and purposeful Flesh, moving a-clatter through the reeds, ever closer, till out of the riparian mist emerges, towering, the savage Head, the deathlike Face, of the great Worm. It hisses, in a long exhalation. When the smell reaches him, young Lambton smiles grimly. “Plenty of time to vomit when we’re done, thanks.”

  The fight is slow, bloody, repetitive. A Dream,— fever-shot, unwaking. It lasts most of the day. Small boys approach as close as they dare. Adolescent Rogues comment upon the weaponry, the suit, the hacking technique. Townsfolk watch from the Hill-sides the red, thrashing immensity filling the river, and the tiny, glitt’ring Knight. To his Obstinacy there seems no limit. Those who remember him as a flighty and lazy Child marvel at the change. “Before he went off to Jerusalem . . . ?— he’d’ve run away, the bugger.” Young Lambton fights on. At last, after too many cuts, deep and deeper, the Worm’s capacity for self-repair is overcome, it lets out a series of last liquid hateful screams, echoing up the Valley all the way to Chester-Le-Street, and perishes, to be borne away, most of its blood ahead of it, already halfway to Dogger Bank, chunks of Flesh forever separate, out into the North Sea, where even the most voracious of the fish will only pick at it.

  With the last of his strength, Lambton climbs to the now deliver’d Castle, stands before it, and blows upon his Oliphant. The dogs inside hear it and all start barking at once. They grow so agitated that none of the Lambton servants dares approach them. Meanwhile, blissfully having forgotten about the terms of the Oath, vertiginous in a Storm of emotions, the Elder Lambton can think only of seeing his son again. He is an agèd man, but he runs as he can over the drawbridge, arms held out. “John! Oh, my Boy!” He is of course the first living thing young Lambton sees.

  “Eeh!” Young John just stands there, almost too tired to realize what has happen’d. Now, by the terms of his Contract, ’tis his father he must kill. It would be easy,— so foolish in his transport is the old man that a single embrace, folding him tightly but without mercy into the bladed Vambraces and Breast-Plate of the Worm-stain’d armor, would do the job. He could say he had been too exhausted to think. Then again, the Oath was taken in Hungary. . . . As God exempts England from many of Europe’s less agreeable obligations to History, so, surely, must Oaths taken in foreign lands, at which foreign Priests and Gypsies attend, be without force here? He allows himself this sophistry,— it delays acting upon what he already knows,— that he cannot kill his father, that he must break the Oath, as he once consciously broke the Truce of Szeged . . . thus already corrupted, why shouldn’t he? He lets go his sword, the image of the Cross he has sworn upon, lets it fall, turns, walks away, looking for someone who can help him out of the edg’d, and now perhaps even venomous, iron weapon he is wearing. Henceforth, when attending to internal business, he will put it on again and again, for the rest of his Life.

  “The penalty stipulated in the Contract, to remain in force for nine generations,— one for each pair of holes in the Creature,— was that no Lord of Lambton die in his bed. Under this Gypsy curse, one by one, they drown’d, they were kill’d in battle,— Wakefield, Marston Moor,— sure ’twas, none died in bed. The last, the ninth Lord, was Henry Lambton, and one of my letters from Durham, brought me, whilst at the Cape, news that he’d died, three weeks after the Transit of Venus, riding ’cross the new Lambton Bridge in his carriage.”

  “Halfway between Shores,” murmurs Mason, “his mortal Transit how brief. Never to reach Lambton, his own bit of Earth,— ”

  “Actually, he was heading the other way,” says Dixon, “out over the Wear, into the world,— another Adventure.”

  “Cruelly serv’d,” it seems to the Revd. “Nine innocent Generations. Whatever aid against the Worm young Lambton invok’d, its Source requir’d Blood Sacrifices. Because he spar’d his own Father’s Life, it curs’d him and his Line most grievously for hundreds of years? What Agency could be so remorselessly cruel? Is it possible that at the battle in the Wear, the wrong forces won?”

  “Why, Christ won, that Day . . . ?” Dixon,— whose present state of religiosity is a puzzle to everyone,— appears to find it curious that anyone could think otherwise.

  “Hum. Christians won, anyway,” pronounces Capt. Shelby.

  “Howbeit,” Revd Cherrycoke suggests, “the Worm may have embodied . . . an older way of proceeding,— very like the ancient Alchemists’ Tales, meant to convey by Symbols certain secret teachings.”

  “ ’Tis that Worm in that Well, that’s the Signature here.—” Set in a Tent opening, twilight breeze off the Mountain flowing in around him, flaming autumn sky behind him, Evan Shelby is suddenly taller, more sly and cruel than he seem’d at first meeting, with a way of rolling his eyes to convey Celtic madness. “The Ancient figure of the Serpent through the Ring, or Sacred Copu-lation,— a much older magic, and certainly one the Christians wanted to eradicate.”

  “Thoughts that in my Line of work are too often denounc’d as ‘Stukeleyesque,’ or at the least ‘Stonehengickal,’” adds the Revd.

  “Not to mention ‘Masonick,’” Dixon broadly pollicating his partner,— but Mason is hundreds of Chains remov’d into Morosity, accepting without full attention a glaz’d jug of the local white corn Whiskey from the Captain, who continues,—

  “Nevertheless, Sir, the Serpent-mound which is at Avebury in England, looks very like one I have seen to the West of here, across Ohio. They might have been built by quite similar races of People.”

  “Red savages, in Britain?” Revd Cherrycoke a bit puzzl’d.

  “Sir, when you go out there and talk to them about it,” Capt. Shelby insists, “the Indians tell you that the Serpent, as the other earthworks unnumber’d of that Country, was already ancient, by the time their own people arriv’d. Indians speak of a race of Giants, who built them. . . . I had to hide all night once, within the Coils of some Serpent . . . they fancy the fiercer Animals. . . . All night, the Shawanese kept their distance, and I even managed to sleep,— briefly but in great comfort, somehow certain they would never venture close enough to find me. I woke strangely energiz’d, the Foe had vanish’d, the Dawn was well under way.”

  In the distance a Wench shouts, “There, Tom,— you’ve ripp’d me Bodice again!” Capt. Shelby rolls a paternal eye outdoors, in her direction. Nothing that passes here must escape him.

  The Surveyors, enjoying previous acquaintance, eastward of here, with wilderness Squires upon the model of Capt. Shelby, have already discuss’d his Character. “Large Eyebrows,” Mason had opined, “betray a leaning to pugnacious eccentricity,— there is a passage in Pliny to that effect. Or, there ought to be.”

  “We’re about as far from Philadelphia, here, as Durham from London,” Dixon offer’d, “— much further, if you figure in the Trees and things, Precipices, Gorges,— and it seems quite like home, West being for Americans what North is for Geordies, an increasing Likelihood of local Power lying in the Hands of Eccentrics, more independence, more Scotismus, as tha’d say.”

  And, “Brows/ Of dauntless courage and considerate pride/ Waiting revenge . . . ,” the Revd had quoted them Milton, upon Satan.

  “And really the odd thing,” the Captain’s Eye now rolling back, fiendishly, to play full upon Dixon, “is that from the level of the ground, why, it seems but a high wall of dirt.— The only way even to make out the Serpent shape of it, is from an hundred feet straight up.”

  Dixon reddens, believing, for no reason, that Shelby somehow knows of his childhood flights over the Fells. “There must be a hilltop . . . ? a tall Tree, close by . . . ?”

  “Not close enough to ’spy down upon it from, regrettably, Sir.” Anyone who wonders what Imps look like in their Middle Years would be perhaps more than satisfied with Shelby’s Phiz at the moment,— Malice undiminish’d, with a Daily Schedule that leaves him too little time to express it.

  “Then—” Mason catches himself about to ask how Capt. Shelby can kn
ow what the Plan View looks like, unless he has himself gain’d an impossible Altitude, noting also the thicketed eyebrows of the Welshman waiting, rearrang’d, for just this question.

  “You must appreciate this is no idle Drudgery,— not some band of Savages, groping about earthbound for the correct Shape. Rather, ’tis a sure Artist’s line, the Curves sweeping in preordain’d accommodation to the River,— if I grow too Rhapsodic, pray set the Dogs upon me. You would need to see one of these Works to understand.”

  61

  So,— quite early the next morning there they both are, about to go visit one of the local Mounds with the possibly unstable Capt. Shelby as their Guide,— the frost along the Tent-Rigging bleach’d in the last of the Moon,— their breaths upon the Air remaining white for longer than ’twould seem they ought. Mason and Dixon step out of the Perimeter, into the Wild, now as entirely subject to the Captain’s notions of Grace as any Romans, lur’d by promises of forbidden Knowledge, in the Care of an inscrutable Druid. “Come along,” cries the Captain jovially. “We need to be there just at Sunrise.”

  “Folly,” Mason mutters.