George Mills Read Free

of the barns where the farmers permitted them to stay.
    “M’lud, m’lord?”
    “I was just thinking…Have you noticed how no one will shake hands with us anymore or return our salutes?”
    “No class, guv. They’re a bolshy lot.”
    “Well perhaps, Mills, but it occurs to me that they haven’t the custom.”
    “Just what I was sayin’, your lordship.”
    “Well, but don’t you see, Mills? If they haven’t the custom, then it’s very likely no one’s shown it to them.”
    “I ’ave.”
    “Yes, certainly, but if real knights had been by, cam paign ers——well, it’s just that one would have thought they’d have seen it by now. They’re not a stupid people. Look at the stores in this barn, think of the delicious produce we’ve seen them grow, the delightful cuts of meat they’ve shared with us, all the fine stews.”
    “Yar?”
    “Butter. And, what do they call it, cheese? Yes, cheese. I’ve kept my eyes open, Mills. That butter and cheese are made from ordinary cow’s milk. We don’t do butter, we don’t do cheese. This is an advanced technological civilization we’ve come upon here. And wine. They do that out of fruit.”
    “They never.”
    “Oh they do, Mills, yes. Out of fruit.”
    “Bleedin’ Jesus.”
    “But they haven’t the handshake, they haven’t the salute.”
    “No manners.”
    “Quite right. One suspects one is off the beaten track, rather. I don’t think our fellows have been by. I think we’re lost.”
    But what could they do? If they were lost and had left it to the horses—as both now openly confessed—and the horses had taken them deeper and deeper into ever more amicable country, what could they do but leave it entirely to the horses? Mills articulating that if horses knew anything—hadn’t he seen them return to the stables riderless?—it was the main chance, their own steedly interests. They had done pretty well by them thus far. Why shouldn’t they do even better? Take them into even finer country? Guillalume’s fright seemed tuned by the moonlight.
    “What?” asked Mills.
    “They’ll take us to Horseland.”
    “To Horseland, sir?”
    “Someplace where there are no riders, where the hay grows wild as meadowgrass. Carrying us through the better weather as if we ambled along the Gulf Stream or the tradewinds of earth.”
    And a few days later—still high summer—someone twisted Mills’s fingers when he extended his hand.
    “Here you!” Mills shouted at him, pulling his hand back. “Fuckin’ barbarian!”
    They had come—or Mills thought they had—to the Duchy of Barbaria. Guillalume, once the sense of Mills’s word forcibly struck him, could not conceive of where they now were as a place given over to any sort of organization at all. He intuited, and spoke of this in whispers to Mills, that there would be no kings, no barons or dukes here, no knights allegiant, no sheriffs, no treasury to exact taxes or a yield of the crop, no astrologer or priest and, if there were armies, no officers to lead them.
    “No law,” Guillalume said, “only custom. No rule, only exception. No consanguinity, only self. No agriculture, only Nature; no industry, only repair; no landmark; no——”
    “Shh,” Mills cautioned, and pointed fearfully toward the man who had pulled his fingers. The barbarian had turned and, making some shrill signal, whistled his horse from the dark forest where it had been foraging. It was eighteen hands at the very least and its upper lip had been torn from it violently, leaving a visible picket of filed, pointed teeth. Its flanks were scored with a crust of wounds, a black coping of punishment, its entire body studded, random as stars, with war wart, bruise. The man placed his shoe deep in a ledge of whittled horseflesh and pulled himself up on its back where he sat in a bare saddle of calloused lesion and looked down on Mills and Guillalume, shook his finger at them and laughed, baring teeth which perfectly matched the horse’s