Doctor Mirabilis by James Blish Read Free Book Online Page A

Shortly
     they would be moving off to give their one day’s work out of the week at the big house; in fact, they were moving away from
     him already. Thinly over the motionless fields a hoarse baritone voice began bawling:
    Bytuene Mershe and Averil
         
When spray biginneth to springe,
    The lutel foul hath hire wyl
         
On hyre lud to synge ….
    but the lyric, so plainly of spring and the gentry, came stiffly from amidst the rime-caked villein’s beard on to the November
     air and began to fade:
         
Ich libbe in love-longinge
         
For semlokest of alle thynge,
         
He may me blisse bringe,
    Icham in hire baundoun ….
    and yet, just as the hewing party was almost gone entirely to Roger’s sight, other voices, equally unmusical, began to float
     back the round:
    An Hendy hap ichabbe yhent,
    Ichot from hevene it is me sent,
    From alle wymmen ml love is lent
    Ant lyht on Alysoun! …
        
lyht on Alysoun I …
               
on Alysoun! …
    Alysoun,
said the Yeo Valley.
Alysoun … soun … soun.
    Heaving his huge keg of a chest up and down, the horse blew solemnly between his thick mobile lips, and Roger, too, resumed
     breathing with a subdued start. What was left behind of the world was essence, without sound, motion or life, keeping its
     slight claim to be real in the rank order of the generation of forms only because it was – least close of all secondary qualities
     to the primary and real – still bitterly cold. In contemplation of these things as they always had been, it was impossible
     to believe that Yeo Manse had changed or could change in th’eternalie of the world. Though Heraclitus had never been able
     to put his foot twice into the same river, he had never been in any doubt about which was river and which was foot (one was
     cold, one got cold; buthow in memory could he trust the order of these events, one being – secondary – used to judge the primary other?); everything
     changed, but only to remain more and more perfectly the same, like the River Meander which cut new banks and channels every
     year to maintain that clear, fixed, Platonic word of which the river in flux could never be more than a shadow.
    But the shadowy solid horse beneath him, still sweaty after its delicate slide into the valley, trembled and reminded him
     that this was no ultimate Horse he was riding, he himself no Idea of Man, and Yeo Manse no shadow of some ultimate Estate;
     they all had names, and things with names pass away. He would have to give this horse-with-a-name (though it be John Blund,
     or just ‘yon hay-bottle’) a rub before very long or it would come down with the glanders – and though there might be some
     ultimate Glanders in Plato’s cave, when one hitched it to a horse with a name, one had a sick horse, which was a good deal
     more serious in this world than any coupling of Sickness with Horseness; and the Heraclitean river – not the Yeo, but a much
     more drastic Meander – flowed in an underground torrent beneath Yeo Manse, too, as under all things else.
    As that river flowed on inexorably, the morning grew older … it must be well after eight already … but for a while Roger found
     himself unable to move on, urgent though his errand was, and more urgent though the danger grew with each increment of delay.
     These ditch-guarded pasturelands deep in long brown grass, the vineyard surrounded with its fence woven on close-set stakes,
     the plough-lands lying humped and frozen in the heatless sunlight, the owl-haunted timber stands, the willow plantation where
     withies and barrel-hoops were cut, the palisaded orchards where every tree was a boy’s lesson in climbing for the daylight
     and a well of sharp cider and perry for the evening meal; the voices of the serfs, the shapes of the hills, the blue bend
     of the sky over the wrinkling Yeo … these were all his home, now most strangely and heartbreakingly hostile in its – absolute,
     changeless