George Mills Read Free Page A

own. He lashed viciously and wheeled.
    “We’ll double back,” Guillalume said.
    “How?”
    They had in fact left the last roads behind them weeks before and since then had traveled cross country through fields, along stubbly verge, vague property. They had come to rivers—not for the first time; they had been coming to rivers since crossing the Channel; always, so north were they, the current had been gentle, little more than oblique pull, the minor tug and Kentucky windage of a just now bending inertia—shallow enough—leave it to the horses—to wade across. But it was not even Europe now, not even the world. They were no place cultivated, months away from the frontier, beyond all obedient landscape, behind the lines, surrounded by a leaning, forbidding stockade of trees, so stripped of direction they quibbled left and worried right and troubled up from down. Bereft of stance, they indiscriminately mounted each other’s horses and hot-potato’d the simplest decisions.
    “Shall we try the blue fruit?”
    “The blue? I should have thought the silver.”
    “Maybe the primrose.” But there was little sweetness in any of them, or in the flesh of fish or hares. There was a saline quality in everything they ate now, an essence not so much of condiment or seasoning as of additive, long-haul provision, the taste of protected stores, the oils that preserved and kept machinery supple, the soils and salts that extended meat. They were always thirsty.
    Then one morning Mills refused to mount, refused to advance further. “They’ve betrayed us,” he said. He meant the horses. And he laughed bitterly. “So this is Horseland!”
    “There is no Horseland!” his superior said. “Get on your beast, Mills.”
    “Why should I? You said yourself there’s no law here, no kings or treasury. We ride each other’s horses, share and share alike. We discuss lunch, decide dinner, choose the blue fruit or the primrose. Why should I? You said yourself——”
    “Exactly! I said. I did. Listen to me, my Mills. I’m your superior, just as that barbarian we saw was mine. Learn this, Mills. There are distinctions between men, humanity is dealt out like cards. There is natural suzereignty like the face value on coins. Men have their place. Even here, where we are now, at large, outside of place, beyond it, out of bounds and offside, loosened from the territorial limits, they do. It’s no accident that Guillalume is the youngest son for all it appears so, no more accident than that you are the Horseshit Man. It isn’t luck of the draw but the brick walls of some secret, sovereign Architecture that makes us so. It’s as simple as the scorn in my voice when I talk to you like this, as natural as the italics my kind use and your kind don’t. Now do as I tell you, get on your horse. No, wait.”
    “Sir?”
    “Have I hurt your feelings? Have I saddened you? Because I didn’t mean——There can be respect, you know; there can be affection, noblesse oblige. So come on, Mills, bear up, carry on. We’ll get back on our horses and——What is it?”
    “You’ve doomed me,” Mills said. “You’ve cursed my race.”
    It was so. Mills apologized silently to the sons he was yet to have—if they ever got out of this mess—for the heritage he was yet to give them, grieved for the Millsness he was doomed to pass on, for the frayed, flawed genes—he thought blood—of the second-rate, backseat, low-down life, foreseeing—if he ever got out of this mess—a continuum of the less than average, of the small-time, poached Horseshit Man life, prophesying right there in what Guillalume himself had told him could not have been Horseland all the consequences to others in the burdened bestiality of his blackballed loins.
    “Come on, let’s go then,” Guillalume said.
    “I’m staying,” Mills said.
    “What? Here? ”
    “I don’t wish on no one the injury of my life.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    Mills explained, sulking, and