An Evening at the Carnival with Mister Christian

And, perhaps, this is where the roots of the colony's destiny lay, the Guild Master thought. Westward -- over land and by way of the sea.

Yet the younger brothers were, he saw, each in their way very unlike their older brother. But in their desire to take root in the land, to prosper within the world they knew, Jeremiah, Jennifer and Langston shared a love for and belief in the idea that life itself was an adventure, that it was meant to be embraced, and above all, to be lived to the fullest. Their love of life was pure, and they held in common with their father a passion for learning all they could, for they embraced the future without fear. So, Langston was the explorer where Jeremiah was root-bound, but what about Jennifer? Well, he said to himself, she is the glue that holds her family together, and she understands the strengths and the weaknesses of both points of view. Indeed, the Guild Master found himself wishing he was a few years younger, for he considered Jennifer the most substantial woman in the colony, someone worthy to build a dynasty by his side.

But Timothy Clemens was of another world, the Master knew. Timothy had been borne to the spirit world, and made no attempt to hide his disdain for worldly pleasures and human needs. Money seemed, apparently, to make no difference to him at all; and after two hard years working the fields neither did his family's farmstead. It seemed his only desire to return to Exeter now, to resume his theologian's studies and enter the priesthood. He saw no worldly purpose beyond the confines of this need, and as time passed the Guild Master saw the boy wanted less and less to do with either the farm, or the work such an enterprise demanded. Though he had yet to reach his seventeenth birthday, the Master saw the boy was already growing fat, and he had seen Jennifer react in horror as Timothy went through the colony harvesting souls, busily pontificating and proselytizing his way through other people's lives like a scythe. To the Guild Master, the tragedy of Timothy's life was that he would never experience life among the living; he was simply too worried about the next life to ever care about something so mundane. He wanted to save souls, but he would never come to know his own, save what his superiors trained him to experience.

Like many people in Europe and the British Isles, the Clemens family had been rendered into one of two camps by the great schism of the Reformation; the Guild Master's family was no exception. Timothy and his mother had sided with the conservatism of the Catholic strain that tentatively remained within the remnants Henry's Church: strict piety defined their puritanical worldview. The other Clemens children had followed their father down a less rigid path, toward reason and enlightenment; in time, Samuel Clemens told his children, this worldview would become the foundation of great new enterprises, perhaps even revolutionary change.

But equally revolutionary was the idea that great wealth could be amassed by people who held no claim to royalty or nobility, or to the church. It was this impulse that guided Samuel Clemens, and this was the guiding strength that held sway over Jeremiah and Jennifer Clemens, and to a lesser degree, over Langston. The old Church and it's constraining life had become an impediment to progress, and the religious freedoms afforded the new colonies would, Samuel Clemens grasped, become the foundation upon which a new mercantile order might be built. All that was necessary was to break free of the existing order, to break free and set loose the Imagination, and the Will, to create a new world.

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And so it came to pass that on an autumn day in 1637 a carnival was borne on delicate threads of hope and imagination. A feast of the mind waiting to feed a hungrily prosperous New England colony, and on the oaken shores of the Charles River the hopes and dreams of all the disparate colonists swirled in mists most surreal. Lives tempered by the warning winds of history, questing lives, reaching for the prize, stood to gain an understanding of the worlds of possibility that lay ahead.

If history is but a prelude to the present, the past held little warning for the children of the colony, if only because curiosity about the future too often came at the expense of a more useable understanding of the past. The pages Samuel Clemens read and understood in the years before his passing were all about to be rewritten, and the past would give no comfort on these distant shores, for alongside the salt marshes and tidal flats that defined the borders of this new colony, forces beyond comprehension were gathering to render anew all that was possible. Whether or not Samuel Clemens' children knew the future was as yet unwritten, therefore unpredictable and, indeed, incomprehensible, the destiny of this new world would be forged within fires of a bargain that not even time itself would dare challenge. There were forces waiting in the night, watching the fires humanity set to light the way ahead. Forces that, had young Timothy Langston known existed, would have driven his soul mad with despair.

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The Guild Master sat on a barrel just outside the lofting shed, lost in thought. Perhaps of all the colonists in Charles Town, he alone possessed a somewhat complete understanding of men and their desires to see the danger when it at last presented itself, but he was, after all, still just a man. A man with his own hopes and dreams, his own driving ambition. And as he sat looking over plans for the guild's next ship, he was lost in thought about this Mr Christian, wondering who this man was, and who -- or what -- was bringing such a mysterious carnival to the colony? He gave a passing thought to Marlowe's Chapbook, the brief fable about poor besotted Faustus, for he had seen images of what he thought was Faust in the swirling mist, but that image had soon slipped from his grasp, superseded by even more potent images of dire consequence -- and lustful profits. Yet when he walked away from the mist, right after he saw the old man walking on the trail, the specter of Faust returned -- and now he could not rid himself of the image.

For while there were no 'names' or other recognizable persons inside the broadsheet, at least none that he could see, for some reason this one fact, that Faust was alive in those swirling mists, disturbed him. But why? Was there a bargain to be struck? Had God and Mephistopheles made a wager -- over the people here? Would that bargain be consummated -- at this carnival of Mr Christian's?

He was troubled by these thought if only because he, like Jennifer Clemens and her brothers, and indeed, most of the other colonists, could hardly wait for Saturday, the day the carnival was set to open, and he had thought of little else since he had seen those tantalizing forms in the ether. Now, as he sat in his workshop, he reflected on what he thought he had seen, and the more he thought about those vexatious forms the greater his unease grew, and with evening coming on, with the dancing shadows of torchlight filling his soul with cold dread, he decided to act. He would go and confront those images, for he had to Understand.

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Rumors were running wild and rampant throughout the colony.

The carnival must certainly arrive before the weekend, or so the thinking went, for Saturday was the date of the opening glanced by one and all in the swirling mists, and Claus Esterhaus just couldn't stand the uncertainty of it's arrival much longer.

Esterhaus found the broadsheet nailed to the side of his lumber mill, fluttering in the breeze like a talisman, before he began his walk home from the mill. He and his men had finished work on the mill just a few weeks before, and though he was a tired and hungry man, when he had seen the notice for the carnival, when he peered inside the mysterious, labyrinthine structures he beheld, he had been taken by evanescent visions of great things to be built in the future, of things he might be fortunate enough to build -- in the future. And while he tried to hold those grand designs he saw in his mind, they ran from his memory with an all too capricious fleetness that had, in the end and like a tempestuous dream, simply left him bereft and undone. With each vision's passing from memory he felt abandoned, isolated, and utterly lost, and as he walked away from the encounter, he thought the visions had come in a dream. Within hours he wasn't sure what, exactly, he had seen, or even if the encounter had ever really happened.

'Ah, perhaps what I saw was little more than the remains of a nightmare, intruding on the day!' he thought as he walked. "What an impossible world! Impossible!" he shouted to the evening's dying breeze.

Esterhaus had journeyed to the New World with his wife Maria, but she had not survived their first winter here, and now he lived alone, and lived in doubt about ever having desired a life in this wretched place. The winters were too cold, the summers too hot and there was an evil dampness about the place, but he thought the insects were the worst of all -- until he had been bitten by one of the many ill-tempered vipers that lurked under every rotting stump or rock. He had been sick for weeks after, and would have died, he felt certain, had it not been for the efforts of Jennifer Clemens.

The Clemens family had come to the colony on the same boat with Claus and Maria Esterhaus, and he had watched with the rest onboard the Emily Rose as Samuel and Rebecca Clemens came down with the pleurisy. Death was inevitable and not long after those two fell ill, the fever came and spirited more away in the night. Esterhaus had been charged with building coffins, for he was a skilled woodworker, and he had earned the trust of the Clemens family when he charged a more than fair price for his work. Even then, Claus Esterhaus remembered, he had liked the looks of Jennifer Clemens, and after she nursed him back from the serpent's bite he positively doted on the girl, but of more importance to his soul, he was sure the girl loved him equally. Why else would she have helped him so?

And today, playing inside the broadsheet, Esterhaus had seen a woman's visage in the swirling mists, and he saw, as he had long suspected, this woman was destined to become the very center of his universe. With no doubt in his mind as he walked away from the wuthering broadsheet, he took this creatures presence in the mist as a sign of better days ahead, and now, quite suddenly, he felt in his heart Jennifer was meant to be his wife. That belief had become as bedrock to the man in the hours after his encounter with the mist, yet he had no courage to do anything about these feelings. He was not a man to react to life without regard to future consequence, but there were times, he knew, that an awareness of what one might reasonably call destiny did little more than obscure the way ahead.

But just who had he seen in the mist? Jennifer? Or someone else?

But then the music started playing, and soon it was driving him mad...

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Langston Clemens made his way to the harbor the same night the colony learned of the carnival, and he took the small boat he had constructed for the Guild and sailed upriver. The native folk first seen by colonists when they arrived on the bay -- now seven long years ago -- had been seen traveling just off the shore and along the rivers in slim bark lined skiffs, and Langston Clemens had been charged with designing and building a working replica of these craft as part of his apprenticeship. One of the native men who visited the colony from time to time -- an older man who came to trade pelts for metal implements the blacksmiths made -- traveled by such a craft, and Langston had befriended the man, taken trips upriver to his village, and he had been able to learn much about these craft on his trips. Soon, however, he began visiting the village for other reasons.

He had first seen the girl in the village on one of those trips, and so smitten was he with her that he made it a point to go upriver as often as he could. Soon introductions were made, and over time Langston and the girl became friends, and despite differences in language and custom, within a year the two became more than fond of one another. Yet as happy as he was with the relationship, the affair soon presented thorny problems to the young colonist and his family.

Langston's predicament wasn't all that unusual in this or any other colony in the New World, for single young men in these colonies often outnumbered available women by -- on average -- a ten-to-one ratio. And more troublesome still, most of the newly arrived colonists were families -- so single women were few and far between. And there were other obstacles -- some subtle and some most overt -- that worked against these relationships, chief among them a festering hostility between natives and colonists that had only grown more heated over time. This lingering hostility had, Langston long ago surmised, been aggravated by poor lines of communication between the two groups, as well as an overt prejudice on the part of both group's leaders. These elements conspired to prevent a meaningful dialogue between the colonists and the native folk, and of more lasting consequence, limited exchanges between each group to simple, and infrequent, mercantile transactions.

There had been little meaningful exchange of customs and traditions since the earliest years of the relationship, and absent such knowledge suspicions of each group's motives only deepened over time. Such mutually reinforcing ignorance, Langston feared, could foster only trouble, and he had worked hard ever since to learn the language and customs of these indigenous people. In due time, as a result of this understanding, Langston's relationship with the native girl took on stronger, more urgent tones.

For, as both Langston and Claus Esterhaus knew, and only too well, the simple biological pressures of enduring isolation was contributing to these hostilities. Simple misunderstandings about one man's intentions soon grew to full-blown territorial disputes. Violent sexual encounters led to armed reprisals. Hostilities increased with each new misunderstanding and each group's ignorance of the other's customs and laws simply aggravated each new wound. Over time, contact between the groups became very limited, and so what contact remained was often of a very violent nature. Yet even so, with so few single women available inside the colony, most single men were more than happy -- even if they were reluctant to discuss these activities -- to engage in this particular form of human intercourse. Despite risks to the uneasy equilibrium that existed between the increasingly hostile camps, nature had a way of taking its course.

And it was under such simmering circumstance that Langston and Na-taka-ri had come to know one another, come to regard the other first as friend, and in time, as lover. It soon came to pass that on most any day young Langston had spare time on his hands, he made for the woods beyond the town and waited for her, and he was rarely disappointed. He found a happiness in her cool eyes, a loving calmness that had escaped his few previous sexual encounters, and he craved her lean body more than any food or drink he had ever tasted. They made love under summer skies, learned each others most intimate languages, and as each began to care for the other all the cultural barriers between them dissolved, and this did not go unnoticed among their peoples.

The two also shared long walks in forests he regarded as almost primeval, and she showed him how to fish the nearby streams when the salmon were running. In time she helped him construct a small smokehouse by the river, and he began taking smoked fish home to his brothers and sister. Though they had their suspicions, Jeremiah and Jennifer asked few questions, while Timothy smoldered along his righteous course without comment.

Then one day he made the journey to their smokehouse and found that Na-taka-ri had built a small lean-to in a small clearing by the river, and soon he stole away most nights too, for now she was always at hand. But Langston came to understand that she was living in this lean-to out of necessity, for she had been ostracized by her people, and now but for him she was alone in this world. He moved their lean-to closer to his family's cabin a few days later, then quietly began building her a small cabin of her own, on their land. And as it happened, one day Jeremiah came along and helped.

It hadn't taken long for Langston to realize that he had very strong feelings for Na-taka-ri. After moving her to his family's land he formally introduced her to his brothers and sister, and though Jeremiah had his doubts about her in the beginning, the eldest Clemens soon regarded her as part of his family. Soon all but Timothy talked with her, they taught each other the language and customs of their respective people, and after a time all but Timothy grew to trust Na-taka-ri. Jennifer enjoyed the company of the other girl, too, despite their apparent differences, and as the cultural barriers dissolved they soon became fast friends. Timothy remained, predictably, another matter, for when he saw her developing relationships with his brothers, he immediately wanted to teach her to read, and he had the perfect book in mind. Vox clamantis in deserto, in word, if not in deed, became his driving motive.

As time passed, Na-taka-ri walked in the forest with Jeremiah and Langston and she taught them about the land and the water and the people who had been there since the earth had been born. She showed them legends in the night sky, and explained the passages of the seasons. The brothers were soon the colony's authority on the local people, and while none of the colonists said anything about Langston's supposed liaisons in the forest, there were many who objected to this woman 'waiting for him out there in the woods'; even so, none really knew the extent of the Clemens' deeper involvement with Na-taka-ri and her culture, and this one simple truth hung over Jeremiah's head like an executioner's blade, for he felt it oddly treasonous and was sure others might think that way too.

When Langston left the cabin that Wednesday afternoon, the same day the broadsheet appeared, he walked into the forest lost within the visions he'd seen, only to find Na-taka-ri shaking and feverish with illness; she was in fact desperately ill, he saw, and then he soon thought she was ill enough to die. He fetched cool water from the stream then ran home to find Jennifer; they returned to Langston's little cabin in the forest but she had no idea what was wrong -- even so Jennifer feared it was a pox -- for Na-taka-ri was burning with fever and small sores had appeared on her belly. Jeremiah came, but he didn't trust anyone in the colony enough to risk asking for help, so the two brothers left and paddled upriver to the native folk's village as fast as they could. Na-taka-ri was sick, Langston explained, burning to the touch, but they learned that many in the village had already fallen ill, and some had already died -- most agonizingly, he learned, for like what they'd found on Na-taka-ri's body, a virulent pox had taken hold and was now spreading like wildfire through the village. The elders had never seen anything like it, and he looked on helplessly as an old woman called out the names of her people in violent delirium, called out for help from spirit-names Langston had never heard before, and he had left feeling so helpless as he walked back to the river, and they returned to the colony, to Jennifer and Na-taka-ri. And there they waited for the fever to break -- or for darkness to come.