George Mills Read Free Page B

Guillalume laughed. “Well, that’s a good one all right,” he said, “but it comes a little late after what you told me on the journey. Unless you were lying of course——or boasting.”
    “What I told you?”
    “In the ripe times, when we cruised geography, when we lay in our sweet, wine-stained straw and listened to the music and watched the girls dance. Not one as pretty as your own, you said. The damage is done. Your son will have been born by now. The generations are unleashed. Get back on your horse.”
    But he didn’t. He simply walked off deeper into the forest. He could hear Guillalume call, “Mills? Mills! I’m still your master.”
    “I don’t think you’ve jurisdiction in Horseland,” he shouted back.
    “Mills? Mills? I have something to tell you. Mills? We’re not lost!” The stableboy turned around. All he could see was the green armor of the woods. And then Guillalume appeared in a green archway he’d made by pushing back two thin saplings. “We’re not lost,” he said again.
    “I am.”
    “Oh, I don’t know where we are, I don’t claim that, but we’re not lost. Being lost is the inability to find the place you want to be. I’m going to tell you something. I knew the turn-off.”
    “What?”
    “I knew the turn-off. You were in the lead. I didn’t signal. I let you miss it.”
    “But why?”
    “You must promise never to tell anyone.”
    “Who would I tell?”
    “Promise.”
    “There’s no one to tell. There’s only barbarians around and I don’t speak Asshole.” Guillalume looked at him. “All right. I promise.”
    “They sent us to fight in a holy war. We would both probably have been killed. That’s why I let you go on when we came to the turn-off. Let’s be barbarians, Mills. They don’t have younger sons. Perhaps they don’t even have stableboys.”
    This was ten centuries ago. Greatest Grandfather Mills wasn’t born yesterday. His master may well not have had jurisdiction in the—to them—lawless land not to which they’d come but to which they’d been translated by the footloose, fancy-free horses. There were no typewriters then, no room at which an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards in infinite time might have knocked out Hamlet, but, in a way, the just two horses in the just seven months had done just that——not Hamlet, of course, but Adventure, Adventure itself, bringing them through the random, compassless, ever swerving obliquity of tenuously joined place and across the stumbled, almost drunken vaulting of nameless—to them nameless—duchies and borders and diminishing jurisdictions to this——the at last ragged, corey chaos of alien earth. What else was Adventure if it was not only not knowing where one was but where one could be, not only not knowing where one’s next meal was coming from but even what color it was likely to be?
    Mills understood this, as he’d understood, was way ahead of, Guillalume’s heartbreaking explanation of fixed men, of the mysteriously gravid and landlocked quality in them that forbade all yeasty rise and usurpation and that put even self-improvement perhaps and the transmigration of privilege certainly—he was not convinced so much that Guillalume was his master as that someone was—out of the question. It was only this—that someone was—that kept him from slicing Guillalume’s throat. Let him rave in his precious italics. (Let’s be barbarians, Mills! Oh do let’s!) He had Guillalume’s younger son number. And even understood what was behind the let’s-be-barbarians crap: the principle of bought time——the sly, unspoken notion that at any moment death could elevate him, like the man who wins the pools, the death of brothers, Guillalume’s long-shot hope. Whereas for him, for his lot, death would merely hammer him—them—more deeply into place, delivering as it would mere heirloom, his father’s—got from his father who got them from his—nasty tools of the