Doctor Mirabilis by James Blish Read Free Book Online Page B

stillness. It had been with bitterness anddefiance toward Robert, and an unbrookable, long-swelling passion to be free of Yeo Manse once and for all, that he had left
     this place to become a clerk, but never with any thought that it would itself reject him in its turn. No, Yeo Manse had borne
     the Bacons on its breast for centuries, and would always lie awaiting his return, should he deign to make it ….
    His shadow, wedded to that of John Blund, slowly lost stature on the earth beneath him. His breast hollow with sullen, helpless
     loneliness, he turned the horse’s head northward. There was nothing more to be learned here; it was all exactly as it had
     always been … except that it was suddenly an alien land.
    We shall not all die,
the self murmured;
but we shall all be changed.
    ‘Us be an old man, Meister,’ Wulf said. ‘Old and cleft a bit, as it mote be said, and most deaf and blind eke, as mote be
     said, and good for naught. But us remembered thee.’
    Old the man was, without doubt nearly eighty, his hairs white, his teeth gone but for a few brown tusks, his skin the texture
     and colour of bad leather. Even across the splintery trestle table in the Oxen, he stank most markedly, a mixture of sod,
     sweat and a sour and precarious digestion; yet, curiously, his homespun was sturdy and almost clean, and his filthy ankles
     rose out of crude but strongly stitched slippers of hide so well and recently cured that the pointed toes still protruded
     straight ahead – in proud contrast to the points of Roger’s own shoes, which tended to fold under the balls of his feet every
     third or fourth step.
    ‘How didst thou know me?’ Roger said, shifting his stone mug on the planking. ‘And how canst thou lurk here away from the
     manse, morning as well as night? Inns are not for serfs, even such a one as this.’
    The old man smiled dimly, as though recalling some exercise of craft half a century bygonnen. ‘Us knew thee, Meister,’ he
     said. The gnarled hand closed about a leather tankard but did not lift it. ‘Us saw thee and followed thee when thou wert but
     a new lamb. Nay, a badger, thou wert,with a girt chest and shoulders, and always at digging and burying. Wold Wulf was proper crofter then with’s boy to lead the
     oxen, twice as old as thou art and with boys of his own now, Meister; and us good for naught in these years, as mote be said,
     but for to hold the cot till us be called. Us be’ent missed now that poor son’s a man grown and ploughs and has childer. Nay,
     wold Wulf may go where us will, as mote be said, and there’s an end to it, Meister.’
    Roger frowned, unable to press the question further, but remaining as puzzled as before. Of course the grandfather of a serf’s
     family would not be missed from the work – he had understood that much of the mystery of the unremembered Wulf the moment
     he had been confronted by this snaggly sour-breathed ruin; but when his query to the suspicious host had flushed Wulf at last,
     the old man had been brought from the back of the inn, still wearing a nightcap in the midst of the day, so that it had been
     made most clear that he was living at the Oxen, which was impossible for a serf; though he be the grandsire of all the serfs
     that ever were.
    The old man seemed to have forgotten that that question, too, had been asked him. He stared with his white-filmed blue eyes
     at the fire, over which a soup of some kind – from which a faint additional odour of hot mutton fat attested to the early
     kill at Yea Manse, for under normal circumstances, no mutton could yet have reached so mean an inn as this –was seething in
     a huge black kettle hanging from an iron chain.
    ‘Us were a sheep herd, then,’ he said abruptly. ‘Us took they sheep to the uplands for pasture, with Hob that was wold Wulf
     ‘s dog that died afore thee’d remember him, Meister, and wold Wulf’s boy that keeps the cot now to carry the hurdles. And
     Tom the steward, that