Universe 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Terry Carr

  There is yet another factor to be considered, one closely related to that referred to in the previous sentence. Even if Colón precisely fulfills his expectations, what will the consequences of this success be for Spain? Many substances about which we know little, and which may well be hazardous, will begin to enter the kingdom in large quantities, and control over their sale and distribution will be difficult to achieve. We run a substantial risk of seeing our nation filled with addicts to toxins now unknown. Nor is it possible to discount the dangers of ideological contamination, which is as much to be feared as is physical. It is doubtful if the inhabitants of the distant lands the Genoan plans to visit share our religious and cultural benefits. Yet it is probable that some of their number may settle on our soil and attempt to disseminate their inadequate but perhaps seductive doctrines among our populace. As we are now on the point of expelling the Jews from our state and have nearly overcome the Muslim Moors, why should we hazard the homogeneity we have at last achieved after almost eight centuries of sustained effort?

  The sudden influx of new goods will also disturb our traditional economic organization. There can be no doubt that there will be an increase in the monetary supply because of the profit made by reselling Eastern goods throughout Europe, but can a corresponding increase in the volume of goods and services be predicted? If the answer to this question is in the negative, as all current economic indicators would imply, then the “success” of Colón would seem to bring with it a concomitant inflationary pressure that would tend to eat into the profits of that “success” and would make life more difficult and expensive for the average Spaniard. Also, any substantial increase in the sea program would entail the diversion of labor from its traditional concerns to maritime activity. Such a shift could not help but further disjoint our economy, and cannot be anticipated with anything other than trepidation. The dislocation could even be so severe as to cause emigration to the Eastern lands, which would of course entail a drain of the best of the kingdom’s populace from its shores.

  Finally, if the government of Spain is to approve, fund, and provide manpower for the Colón expedition, it must have some assurance that it is not dangerously imperiling the health and future well-being of the members of that expedition. Such assurance is not at all easy to come by. The dangers of a seaman’s trade are well known, and he performs his duties on what can only be described as a diet of “junk food”: hardtack, salt meat, and dried peas, with perhaps a bit of cheese. This regimen is manifestly unhealthful, and Colón and the men under his charge would be unable to supplement it except by fishing. They would not enjoy the advantage, as do sailors of the Mediterranean Sea and also the Portuguese in their journeys down the coast of Africa, of replenishing their supplies at relatively brief intervals, but would be compelled to make do once having departed the Canary Islands. Nor is the situation in regard to potables much better, these being restricted to casked water and wine. The probability is extremely high that at least some of the former will go bad; the latter not only faces this danger, but, if drunk to excess, has the potential of severely compromising the efficiency of ship’s operations and thereby reducing an already low safety margin. Sleeping arrangements are equally substandard; indeed, for almost everyone they are nonexistent. Ships are so designed that only the captain has a cabin with a bunk, and even this private space is scarcely more than that to be found in a closet ashore. Sailors and underofficers sleep where they are able to find room, in the same clothing they have worn during the day. Thus the life-support systems of any expeditionary force at the current level of technology must be deemed inadequate.

  Navigational instruments are also crude in the extreme. Quadrant and astrolabe are so cumbersome, and so likely to be grossly affected by ship’s motion, as to be little more useful than dead reckoning in the determination of latitude; dead reckoning alone serves in estimating longitude. For a voyage of the length anticipated by Colón, these factors, in combination with the stormy nature of the Atlantic and the likelihood of meeting unanticipated hazards with no support facilities upon which to fall back, give the Genoan’s proposals a degree of risk so high no merciful sovereign could in good conscience allow his subjects to endanger themselves in the pursuit thereof.

  Therefore, it is the determination of the Special Committee on the Quality of Life, appointed by Your Hispanic Majesties as per the environmental protection ordinances of the realm, that the proposals of Colón do in the several ways outlined above comprise a clear and present danger to the quality and security of life within the kingdom, and that they should for that reason be rejected. Respectfully in triplicate submitted by

  Jaime Nosénada

  Chairman of the Special Committee on the Quality of Life

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  * * * *

  Mary C. Pangborn’s first published story, “The Back Road,” appeared in Universe 9. Here is her second, a wry story of rogues and magic, coshes and sorcery . . . and a surprising curse.

  THE CONFESSION OF HAMO

  Mary C. Pangborn

  Set down all I tell you, Brother Albertus, and may the devil fly away with you if you bend any of my words from their true meaning. Give them a better sound if you will, you with your book learning, but the truth is strange enough; let there be none of your clerkly twistings and turnings to make either more or less of it. Forty days I’ll be here in sanctuary; we have plenty of time.

  Yes, I confess myself guilty of taking a life, though I do not admit it was murder, no, for I never meant to hurt that silly fat merchant, only to relieve him of part of his superfluity. How was I to know he had a skull as frail as an egg? But it was robbery on the highway, and so they would hang me. I’ve no mind to yield myself to that. When my forty days are gone, happen I’ll abjure the realm as the law commands, and wade out into salt water each day until there’s a ship to take me away. Time enough.

  You see no need for my words to be written down? Ah, you will see, sir, I promise you. For I have that to tell which might be scoffed at for an idle tale were there only my word for it, yet when it is written soberly in ink on good parchment, it will be known for truth. More, good father: there is a very dreadful sin weighing on me, the telling of which I must approach in fear and trembling; bear with me then, for it may need many words to make all clear.

  I’m told I was born in the same year as our valiant King Harry, who killed so many Frenchmen at the great battle of Agincourt some three years past. And they say the King’s grace was some eight and twenty years of age when he fought that battle—now God forbid I should name my poor self in the same breath as the King, yet I call myself a true freeborn Englishman even as he is, the saints preserve him. So there is time ahead of me before I can count two score winters; I’m not ready to let them take me and hang me by the neck. And it may be you can feel with me in this, for you cannot be so many years older than I, though you are somewhat fatter.

  Where was I? Oh aye, I was born. Hamo of York they call me, and sometimes Hamo the Red, for my hair. I was some twelve years old when my mother died, and I wearied of the kitchen service in my lord’s household and ran away. I doubt they ever thought me worth the chasing—a weazened bony snippet of a boy, idler and troublemaker. Here’s a handful of sins at the beginning: idleness and mischief, that’s sloth, and disobedience, running away from my rightful lord. Eh well, there’s worse to come.

  Not much to be said of my early years on the road, before I met with Tom—begging, a bit of thieving, lending a hand to the jugglers at fairs —sometimes I’d even work, if my belly was empty enough. It wasn’t a bad life. I’d tramped the length of the realm before I was twenty, Lands End to Berwick, and found warm welcome all along the way, from young wenches and honest wives both. . . .

  Now, with respect, Brother, that is a foolish question. How could I know? Was I ever in one place so much as two months, to say nothing of nine? How can a man guess how many bairns he may have sired? I’d not be surprised if England is well peppered with my redhead
s. But I will swear by any godly oath you like, I never took a wench against her will and liking. Willing they were, and pleased with me. I’ll not tell you about one or another. I do hereby confess myself guilty of the sin of lechery—mea maxima culpa—let one confession stand for all of them.

  But this is not what your abbot is hoping I may tell you.

  Most kindly the noble abbot received me, when I knelt before him begging for sanctuary; most patiently he heard me as I confessed my crime of robbery. Of that he said nothing; he stroked his holy chin, and eyed me thoughtfully, and he said, “I am told you spent some time journeying with a man known as Moses the Mage.” And I said this was true, for how should I deny my friend? Then he said, “It is rumored that this so-called mage has made a study of the art of alchemy, the search for the Elixir, called by some the Philosopher’s Stone.” And again I said, this rumor is true. Then he said no more except to promise I should receive sanctuary, and that he would send me a confessor to assist me in cleansing my soul of sin. And for this grace, and especially for his sending you to me, I am most deeply and humbly grateful. Now it would be presumptuous in me to suppose I could read the abbot’s saintly thoughts, yet it did seem to me he felt that any knowledge of the secret work of alchemy might be too heavy a burden for such a simple soul as mine, and only by divesting myself of that burden, yielding it up to one too holy to be corrupted by it, might I hope to save myself. Wherefore, if you will but hear my confession and write as I bid you, I will reveal to you—for the abbot’s ear—all that I know of the making of gold.

  Let me first tell you about Moses the Mage.

  He had already taken that name when I met him first, but he was baptized Thomas—Tom o’ Fowey, a Cornishman. Maybe you know they have a language of their own, not like any other; it would make you wonder if you were in any part of England. When I joined him he was mostly making weather magic, and a marvel it was to hear him lashing out in his strange tongue, all the folk gowking at him—he could switch to priestly Latin fast enough if anyone smelling like a bailiff came near. He’d been raised for a priest, until he decided the life would not suit him, and he had more clerkly learning than many of them, saving your presence. Now the spirits that bring wind and rain surely understood Cornish, for Tom’s weather sayings were usually right.

  He could make an awesome figure of himself: tall and thin he is, with a mighty beak of a nose, and when he appeared as Moses he wore a black patch over one eye. Folk whispered he had sacrificed that eye in a pact with some evil spirit, in exchange for secret knowledge. Times we’d be in peril of a charge of sorcery, and the bailiff’s men would be looking for a tall dark one-eyed man; when they’d find us, I’d be sitting there with the black patch on me, a harmless little redheaded beggar, and Tom with his two great solemn dark eyes whole and sound, a holy pilgrim fingering his rosary; so the fellows who described him would be put to shame. Once it was a near thing, when the sheriff’s man pulled off my eye patch, but he backed away fast, terrified and cursing, seeing my eye horribly red and dangerous. We never traveled without an onion.

  Weather magic wasn’t our only business; we also traded in drugs and herbal mixtures, and sometimes we’d have a stock of the rare alicorn, which is the powdered horn of the unicorn, as you know—a strong cure for all poisons. Now there are rogues without bowels or conscience who will sell you a mess of powdered chalk and call it alicom. We never did such a thing, though I’ll not deny we might have mixed the true stuff with other matters, so as to have enough for everyone. One market day we had our stall set up and Tom was crying our wares in his big voice while I went among the people to take their money: “Here it is,” he cries, “the only true alicorn, the one remedy for all poisons, that brave sailors bring you at great peril from strange and far places!” and he gives them a generous earful of Cornish to show how far and strange it was. “Here you see a piece of the horn itself—come close, friends, handle it, see for yourselves!” And then I saw a little man off at the edge of the crowd laughing to himself. Tom saw him too, and flung his Cornish speech at him, and when next I looked that way the man was gone. Scared off, I thought

  Alicorn fetches a good price, and we’d sold all we had, so we were enjoying a good hot supper at the inn when here comes that same little man sidling up to us, grinning and ducking his head at Tom. “Give ye good den, Master Moses,” says he, “and will you not drink with me?”

  Tom was scowling at him, and I held my breath, for Tom can be a fearsome man in a rage—the gust of his anger will blow you as high as the church steeple, till the sun comes out sudden and he’s your good friend again. But this time he only growled a bit. “You’ll be a Cornish-man?” he says, begrudging it. The fellow lays a finger to his nose and puts his head to one side, as though he had to think about the answer. “Not exactly,” says he, “but some of the words I know, yes. Black Jamie I am called, at your service.”

  Dressed all in black he was, and black-haired he might have been once, but the trifle of hair he had left was all white, only a bit of it sticking up over each ear; a small sharp face with the nose and chin pointing at you like knives, and little no-colored eyes watching from ambush. Still, he spoke us quiet and friendly-like; Tom offered him our salt, and he made a ceremony of taking some of it to show he meant us no harm. So bit by bit we fell to talking easily, the good ale warming us; we could tell he was one of us, of the company of the road.

  Jamie said, “You’ll be somewhat of a scholar, Master Moses?”

  “Now how would you know that?” says Tom.

  “Why, you’re too modest, man, you’re better known along the road than you think,” and Jamie winked at him. Fumbling at his pouch, he got out a little book, a shabby dirty old thing, no more than a dozen pages sewed together. Held it out in his left hand. “I’ll warrant you can read this,” he says.

  Tom took the book over to the light of the torch by the fireplace, grumbling and grunting over it. “Aye, I can read the words,” says he. “It is alchemy, I can see that much.” We knew about alchemy; we had friends on the road who made a good living at the art, in the way I’ll be telling you.

  “Words,” says Jamie. “Strong magic in grand long words, Master Moses, none knows it better than yourself.”

  We did know. Tom was trying over the big words on his tongue, tasting and liking them, and Black Jamie watching his face. “I’ll be honest with you, my friends,” says Jamie (now surely we ought to have been on our guard when he said that!). “I’ve learned all the words in that book, I do not need it, and if you like, I will sell it to you for one silver penny. And you can lose nothing, for if you do not find you have a good bargain of it, I will buy it back from you for two pennies the next time we meet.”

  “So you’re thinking we’ll meet again?” I asked him.

  “That shall be as God wills,” says he—said it solemn enough, but I did notice he never made the sign of the cross. Tom gave him a penny for the book, and I don’t remember that we took leave of him; the next time we gave a thought to him, he was gone.

  We spent some days studying the book, Tom reading out the words and I putting them all away in my memory, and true enough there never was a book with finer treasure of long words in it, far more than a penny’s worth. Yet they would not be sufficient, as we knew, and I said, ‘This is all very well, Tom, but it takes gold to make gold.”

  “I know,” he said, and sighed. “Ah, I do wish we had a bit of gold.”

  Now everyone knows you ought to have a care how you speak those words I wish, for there is no knowing who or what may be listening. Yet I will swear Tom spoke no more than those innocent words, so there is no explaining what happened, unless maybe Black Jamie had a hand in it. For it was the very next day we came upon a man dead by the side of the road. A holy pilgrim, by his dress, lying there most peaceful, his hands folded on his breast, never a mark on him; you could tell it was only that his time had come to die, there where he was. His pouch was empty; he had a plain gold cross on a chain around his
neck.

  I did not like to take the cross off him. Tom said, “Surely ‘tis the holiness that matters, not the gold,” and he took off his own little wooden cross that had been blessed by Our Lady of Walsingham, and put that on the dead man instead of the gold one; and we went our way. It seemed an honest exchange, and we had done the man no harm. And I will swear neither of us had harbored any sinful thought of calling on the dark powers to help us—not then. . . .