Tales of Nevèrÿon

  ‘Perhaps, Jahor. Then again, perhaps not. We shall see.’

  Outside the window, the rains, after having let up for the space of an hour’s sunlight, blew violently again, clouding the far towers and splattering all the way in to the edge of the stone sill, running down the inner wall to the floor.

  ‘My Lady, wasn’t there an astrolabe here on your desk earlier this morning …?’

  ‘Was there now …? Ah yes. My pesky little blue-eyed devil was in here only moments ago, picking at it. No doubt he pocketed it on his way down to the stables. Really, Jahor, I must do something about that gold-haired little tyrant. He is a true barbarian and has become the bane of my life!’

  Six weeks is long enough for a man to learn to enjoy himself on a horse; it is not long enough to learn to ride.

  Six weeks is long enough for a man to learn the rules and forms of fencing; it is not long enough to become a swordsman.

  Master Narbu, born a slave himself to a high household in the foothills of the Falthas not far from fabled Ellamon, had as a child shown some animal grace that his baronial owner thought best turned to weapon wielding – from a sort of retrograde, baronial caprice. Naturally slaves were not encouraged to excel in arms. Narbu had taken the opportunity to practice – from a retrograde despair at servitude – constantly, continuously, dawn, noon, night, and any spare moment between. At first the hope had been, naturally and secretly and obviously to any but such a capricious master, for escape. Skill had become craft and craft had become art; and developing along was an impassioned love for weaponry itself. The Baron displayed the young slave’s skill to friends; mock contests were arranged; then real contests – with other slaves, with freemen. Lords of the realm proud of their own skills challenged him; two lords of the realm died. And Narbu found himself in this paradoxical position: his license to sink sword blade into an aristocratic gut was only vouchsafed by the protection of an aristocrat. During several provincial skirmishes, Narbu fought valiantly beside his master. In several others, his master rented him out as a mercenary – by now his reputation (though he was not out of his twenties) was such that he was being urged, pressed, forced to learn the larger organizational skills and strategies that make war possible. One cannot truly trace the course of a life in a thousand pages. Let us have the reticence here not to attempt it in a thousand words. Twenty years later, during one of the many battles that resulted in the ascension of the present Child Empress Ynelgo to the Throne of Eagles, Narbu (now forty-four) and his master had been lucky enough to be on the winning side – though his master had been killed. But Narbu had distinguished himself. As a reward – for the Empress was brave and benevolent – Narbu was given his freedom and offered a position as instructor of the Empress’s own guard, a job which involved training the sons of favored aristocrats in the finer (and grosser) points of battle. (Two of Narbu’s earliest instructors had been daughters of the mysterious Western Crevasse, and much of his early finesse had been gained from these masked women with their strange and strangely sinister blades. Twice he had fought with such women; and once against them. But they did not usually venture in large groups too far from their own lands. Still, he had always suspected that Nevèrÿon, with its strictly male armies, was overcompensating for something.) In his position as royal master at arms, he found himself developing a rich and ritual tirade against his new pupils: they were soft, or when they were hard they had no discipline, or, when they had discipline, had no heart. What training they’d gotten must all be undone before they could really begin; aristocrats could never make good soldiers anyway; what was needed was good common stock. Though Master Narbu was common stock, had fought common stock, and been taught by common stock, Gorgik was the first man of common stock Master Narbu, in six years, had ever been paid to teach. And the good master now discovered that, as a teacher, somehow he had never developed a language to instruct any other than aristocrats – however badly trained, undisciplined, or heartless they were. As well, he found himself actually resenting this great-muscled, affable, quiet, giant of a youth. First, Gorgik’s physique was not the sort (as Narbu was quick to point out to him) that naturally lent itself to horsemanship or any but gross combative skills. Besides, the rumor had gone the rounds that the youth had been put under Narbu’s tutelage not even because of his exceptional strength, but because he was some high Court lady’s catamite. But one morning Master Narbu woke, frowned at some sound outside, and sat up on his pallet. Through the bars on his window, he looked out across the yard where the training dummies and exercise forms stood in moonlight – it was over an hour to sunup. On the porch of the student barracks, beneath the frayed thatch, a great form, naked and crossed with shadow from the nearest porch poles, moved and turned and moved.

  The new pupil was practicing. First he would try a few swings with the light wooden sword to develop form, moving slowly, returning to starting position, hefting the blade again. And going through the swing, parry, recovery … a little too self-consciously; and the arm not fully extended at the peak of the swing, the blade a little too high … Narbu frowned. The new student put down the wooden blade against the barracks wall, picked up the treble-weight iron blade used to improve strength: swing, parry, recovery; again, swing, parry – the student halted, stepped back, began again. Good. He’d remembered the extension this time. Better, Narbu reflected. Better … but not excellent. Of course, for the weighted blade, it was better than most of the youths – with those great sacks of muscle about his bones, really not so surprising … No, he didn’t let the blade sag. But what was he doing up this early anyway …?

  Then Narbu saw something.

  Narbu squinted a little to make sure he saw it.

  What he saw was something he could not have named himself, either to baron or commoner. Indeed, we may have trouble describing it: he saw a concentration in this extremely strong, naked young man’s practicing that, by so many little twists and sets of the body, flicks of the eye, bearings of the arms and hips, signed its origins in inspiration. He saw something that much resembled not a younger Narbu, but something that had been part of the younger Narbu and which, when he recognized it now, he realized was all-important. The others, Narbu thought (and his lips, set about with gray stubble, shaped the words), were too pampered, too soft … how many hours before sunrise? Not those others, no, not on your … that one, yes, was good common stock.

  Narbu lay back down.

  No, this common, one-time mercenary slave still did not know how to speak to a common, one-time pit slave as a teacher; and no, six weeks were not enough. But now, in the practice sessions, and sometimes in the rest periods during and after them, Narbu began to say things to the tall, scarfaced youth: ‘In rocky terrain, look for a rider who holds one rein up near his beast’s ear, with his thumb tucked well down; he’ll be a Narnisman and the one to show you how to coax most from your mount in the mountains. Stick by him and watch him fast …’ And: ‘The best men with throwing weapons I’ve ever seen are the desert Adami: shy men, with little brass wires sewn up around the backs of their ears. You’ll be lucky if you have a few in your garrison. Get one of them to practice with you, and you might learn something…’ Or: ‘When you requisition cart oxen in the Avila swamplands, if you get them from the Men of the Hide Shields, you must get one of them to drive, for it will be a good beast, but nervous. If you get a beast from the Men of the Palm Fiber Shields, then anyone in your garrison can drive it – they train them differently, but just how I am not sure.’ Narbu said these things and many others. His saws cut through to where and how and what one might need to learn beyond those six weeks. They came out in no organized manner. But there were many of them. Gorgik remembered many; and he forgot many. Some of those he forgot would have saved him much time and trouble in the coming years. Some that he remembered he never got an opportunity to use. But even more than the practice and the instruction (and because Gorgik practiced most, at the end of the six weeks he was easily the best in his class), this was
the education he took with him. And Myrgot was away from the castle when his commission began …

  3

  There was an oxcart ride along a narrow road with mountains looking over the trees to the left. With six other young officers, he forded an icy stream, up to his waist in foam; a horse ride over bare rocks, around steep slopes of slate … ahead were the little tongues of army campfires, alick on the blue, with the desert below white as milk in a quarter light.

  Gorgik took on his garrison with an advantage over most: five years’ experience in the mines as a foreman over fifty slaves.

  His garrison contained only twenty-nine.

  Nor were they despairing, unskilled, and purchased for life – though, over the next few years, from time to time Gorgik wondered just how much difference that made in the daily texture of their lives, for guards’ lives were rough in those days. Over those same years, Gorgik became a good officer. He gained the affection of his men, mainly by keeping them alive in an epoch in which one of the horrors of war was that every time more than ten garrisons were brought together, twenty percent were lost through communicable diseases having nothing to do with battle (and much of the knowledge for this could be traced back to some of Master Narbu’s more eccentric saws concerning various herbs, moldy fruit rinds, and moss – and not a few of Baron Curly’s observations on botany that Gorgik found himself now and again recalling to great effect). As regards the army itself, Gorgik was a man recently enough blessed with an unexpected hope of life that all the human energy expended to create an institution solely bent on smashing that hope seemed arbitrary and absurd enough to marshal all his intelligence toward surviving it. He saw battle as a test to be endured, with true freedom as prize. He had experienced leading of a sort before, and he led well. But the personalities of his men – both their blustering camaraderie (which seemed a pale and farcical shadow of the brutal and destructive mayhem that, from time to time, had broken out in the slave quarters at the mines, always leaving one or two dead) and the constant resignation to danger and death (that any sane slave would have been trying his utmost to avoid) – confused him (and confusion he had traditionally dealt with by silence) and depressed him (and depression, frankly, he had never really had time to deal with, nor did he really here, so that its effects, finally, were basically just more anecdotes for later years on the stupidity of the military mind).

  He knew all his men, and had a far easier relationship with them than most officers of that day. But only a very few did he ever consider friends, and then not for long. A frequent occurrence: some young recruit would take the easiness of some late-night campfire talk, or the revelations that occurred on a foggy morning hike, as a sign of lasting intimacy, only to find himself reprimanded – and, in three cases over the two years, struck to the ground for the presumption: for these were basic and brutal times – in a manner that recalled nothing so much (at least to Gorgik, eternally frustrated by having to give out these reprimands) as the snubs he had received in the halls of the High Court of Eagles the mornings after some particularly revelatory exchange with some count or princess.

  Couldn’t these imbeciles learn?

  He had.

  The ones who stayed in his garrison did. And respected him for the lesson – loved him, some of them would even have said in the drunken evenings that, during some lax period that, now at a village tavern, now at a mountain campsite where rum had been impounded from a passing caravan, still punctuated a guard’s life. Gorgik laughed at this. His own silent appraisal of the situation had been, from the beginning: I may die; they may die; but if there is any way their death can delay mine, let theirs come down.

  Yet within this strictly selfish ethical matrix, he was able to display enough lineaments both of reason and bravery to satisfy those above him in rank and those below – till, from time to time, especially in the face of rank cowardice (which he always tried to construe – and usually succeeded – as rank stupidity) in others, he could convince himself there might be something to the whole idea. ‘Might’ – for survival’s sake he never allowed it to go any further.

  He survived.

  But such survival was a lonely business. After six months, out of loneliness, he hired a scribe to help him with some of the newer writing methods that had recently come to the land and composed a long letter to the Vizerine: inelegant, rambling, uncomfortable with its own discourse, wisely it touched neither on his affection for her nor his debt to her, but rather turned about what he had learned, had seen, had felt: the oddly depressed atmosphere of the marketplace in the town they had passed through the day before; the hectic nature of the smuggling in that small port where, for two weeks now, they had been garrisoned; the anxious gossip of the soldiers and prostitutes about the proposed public building scheduled to replace a section of slumlike huts in a city to the north; the brazen look to the sky from a southern mountain path that he and his men had wandered on for two hours in the evening before stopping to camp.

  At the High Court the Vizerine read his letter – several times, and with a fondness that, now all pretence at the erotic was gone, grew, rather than diminished, in directions it would have been hard for grosser souls to follow, much less appreciate. His letter contained this paragraph:

  ‘Rumors came down among the lieutenants last week that all the garrisons hereabout were to go south for the Garth in a month. I drank beer with the Major, diced him for his bone-handled knives and won. Two garrisons were to go to the Able-aini, in the swamps west of the Falthas – a thankless position, putting down small squabbles for ungrateful lords, he assured me, more dangerous and less interesting than the south. I gave him back his knives. He scratched his gray beard in which one or two rough, rusty hairs still twist, and gave me his promise of the swamp post, thinking me mad ’

  The Vizerine read it, at dawn, standing by the barred windows (dripping with light rain as they had dripped on the morning of her last interview with Gorgik, half a year before), remembered him, looked back toward her desk where once a bronze astrolabe had lain among the parchments. A lamp flame wavered, threatened to go out, and steadied. She smiled.

  Toward the end of Gorgik’s three years (the occasional, unmistakably royal messenger who would come to his tent to deliver Myrgot’s brief and very formal acknowledgements did not hurt his reputation among his troops), when his garrison was moving back and forth at bi-weekly intervals from the desert skirmishes near the Venarra Canyon to the comparatively calm hold of fabled Ellamon high in the Faltha range (where, like all tourists, Gorgik and his men went out to observe, from the white lime slopes, across the crags to the far corrals, the fabled, flying beasts that scarred the evening with their exercises), he discovered that some of his men had been smuggling purses of salt from the desert to the mountains. He made no great issue of it; but he called in the man whom he suspected to be second in charge of the smuggling operation and told him he wished a share – a modest share – of the profits. With that share, many miles to the south, he purchased three extra carts, and four oxen to pull them; and with a daring that astonished his men (for the empress’s customs inspectors were neither easy nor forgiving) on his last trek, a week before his discharge, he brought three whole cartfuls of contraband salt, which he got through by turning of the main road, whereupon they were shortly met by what was obviously a ragged, private guard at the edge of private lands.

  ‘Common soldiers may not trespass on the Hold of the Princess Elyne – !’

  ‘Conduct me to her Highness!’ Gorgik announced, holding his hand up to halt his men.

  After dark, he returned to them (with a memory of high fires in the dank, roofless hall; and the happy princess with her heavy, jeweled robes and her hair greasy and her fingers thin and grubbier than his own, taking his hard, cracked hands in hers and saying: ‘Oh, but you see what I’ve come home to? A bunch of hereditary heathens who think I am a goddess, and cannot make proper conversation for five minutes! No, no, tell me again of the Vizerine’s last letter. I d
on’t care if you’ve told me twice before. Tell me again, for it’s been over a year since I’ve heard anything at all from Court. And I long for their company; I long for it. All my stay there taught me was to be dissatisfied with this ancient, moldy pile. No, sit there, on that bench, and I will sit beside you and have them bring us more bread and cider and meat. And you shall simply tell me again, friend Gorgik …’) with leave for his men and his carts to pass through the lands; and thus he avoided the inspectors.

  A month after he left the army, some friendlier men of an intricately tattooed and scarred desert tribe gave him some exquisitely worked copper vases. Provincial burghers in the Argini bought them from him for a price five times what he recalled, from his youth in the port, such work was worth in civilized lands. From the mountain women of Ka’hesh (well below Ellamon) he purchased a load of the brown berry leaves that, when smoked, put one in a state more relaxed than beer – he was now almost a year beyond his release from the army – and transported it all the way to the Port of Sarness, where, in small quantities, he sold it to sailors on outgoing merchant ships. While he was there, a man whom he had paid to help him told him of a warehouse whose back window was loose in which were stored great numbers of … But we could fill pages; let us compress both time and the word.

  The basic education of Gorgik had been laid. All that followed – the months he reentered a private service as a mercenary officer again, then as a gamekeeper to a provincial count’s lands, then as paid slave-overseer to the same count’s treecutters, then as bargeman on the river that ran through that count’s land, again as a smuggler in Vinelet, the port at the estuary of that river, then as a mercenary again, then as a private caravan guard – all of these merely developed motifs we have already sounded. Gorgik, at thirty-six, was tall and great-muscled, with rough, thinning hair and a face (with its great scar) that looked no more than half a dozen years older than it had at twenty-one, a man comfortable with horse and sword, at home with slaves, thieves, soldiers, prostitutes, merchants, counts, and princesses; a man who was – in his way and for his epoch – the optimum product of his civilization. The slave mine, the Court, the army, the great ports and mountain holds, desert, field, and forest: each of his civilization’s institutions had contributed to creating this scar-faced giant, who wore thick furs in cold weather and in the heat went naked (save for a layered disk of metal, with arcane etchings and cutouts upon it – an astrolabe – chained around his veined and heavy neck, whatever the month), an easy man in company yet able to hold his silence. Often, at dawn in the mountains or in evenings on the desert, he wondered what terribly important aspects there were to his civilization in excess of a proper ability, at the proper time, to tell the proper tale. But for the civilization in which he lived, this dark giant, soldier, and adventurer, with desires we’ve not yet named and dreams we’ve hardly mentioned, who could speak equally of and to barbarian tavern maids and High Court ladies, flogged slaves lost in the cities and provincial nobles at ease on their country estates, was a civilized man.