‘You know,’ Terek told me as we were taking stores out of the carriage and hoisting them up over the cart’s edge to pack them under the cart cover, ‘we’ll have less trouble with bandits in this thing than we would with that. A closed carriage on these roads just looks like nobility, and if there’s not a sizable number of guards in evidence, it cries out to be attacked.’ That made sense, too.
I became the driver.
Sitting there, reining my mules before me, I was, in just about equal measure, proud of my maturity and of my actual, physical control of our destiny; I was also, yes, frightened lest some arrow strike me from the trees.
The morning after, my last, diminutive, redheaded steward left me—with reasonable warning the night before: ‘This isn’t really a caravan anymore, little master.’ (I was more than a head taller than he, and, though he was fifteen years my senior, this had been his joke from the beginning.) ‘I’m a good caravan manager, but there’s no one here for me to manage, now. By the same token, I’m not a soldier. Why should you pay me a steward’s wages to tag along behind your cart beside your young guard, there?’ A little later I called the lanky, still somewhat sullen Terek to me and sat him down on a log across from me for a serious talk.
‘The truth is,’ I told him, ‘you too should probably quit my company. Certainly you’ll be better off making your way alone than weighted down with worry about me. I’ll soon find another relative in some great house, whom I intend to implore to get me back to Kolhari—but this has been the most reckless and costly of trips. And I must think of remedying it.’
Terek was twenty-three then. Born somewhere off in the country—precisely where, I never did learn—he’d managed to join the army a year or two younger than was permissible. By sixteen or seventeen, he’d seen combat and killed several men; by twenty he’d been the last pupil of the great strategist Master Nabu, and had been made a minor officer in the Imperial Army—where he’d gotten his nose smashed and a scar down his thigh from a young noble-born officer who’d grown jealous of him and, in an argument, had slashed his leg. (He’d slashed back, I’d heard him boast to the other soldiers; then, suddenly, he’d glanced at me, realizing I was listening. I’d just nodded, as approvingly as I could.) After that, he become a private mercenary, hiring out as a caravan guard.
Yet, while I was impressed with his bravery and fighting skills, I was somewhat afraid of this dark, tall man, with the broken nose, the slightly turned-in feet, and the wide hands on which the nails were gnawed down almost to nothing—bitten worse, indeed, than I’ve seen on anyone else in my life.
As I talked to him, telling him he was free to leave me, Terek sat on his log, sword, spear, and bow on the ground between us, clutching his knees and listening as intently as (I imagined) he might to some superior officer explaining a particularly complex battle strategy. ‘You go too, Terek. It’s just not fair. I can manage the wagon alone. There’ve been no bandits in this part of the forest. And even if I eventually have to abandon the cart, well…’ He was growing, I could see, more and more uncomfortable, till he blurted:
‘Where should I go? You want to get rid of me, now? Where do I go, then? What do I do without your damned wagon and your damned mules? And what will you do without me? You’re a boy and a fool! No!’ He shook his head, violently. ‘No, you shouldn’t send me off. It’s no good! What will happen? To me? To you? I won’t go! No!’
My till then controlled fear became simple surprise. But at last, as I had given, somewhat reluctantly, that first soldier permission to leave, I gave this last one permission to stay. My discomfort? It was simply the realization that, from then on, we were not Master and man any longer. We were simply a somewhat quiet, though well-trained, twenty-three-year-old soldier and a somewhat precocious, if slightly pigheaded, seventeen-year-old prince. We were traveling together with the same mule wagon; whether I liked it or not, I had a companion.
Indeed, it was not long after, nor many villages away, that we met crippled Arly. A barbarian outcast in his own village, Arly had one leg gone high at the thigh in a snarl of scarred, hard flesh from some appalling fall as a five-year-old from the front of a runaway stone cart beneath its loud and murderous wheels. Older than I, younger than Terek, and certainly not long on intelligence, he nevertheless had a good imagination, as well as that high humor you sometimes find among the deeply injured; and he was willing to do almost anything in order to come with us—then, indeed, to stay with us. His arms were thicker than Terek’s—though he was shorter than I was. And his remaining leg was strong. He spoke three languages barbarically, where I could converse only in two. (Terek had only one.) Bound round its length with hairy, mint-scented barks, his single crutch was as nimble on rocks and roots as any of the four feet Terek and I had between us; and, on his back, holding it over his shoulder with one hand, he could carry a heavier sack than I could with two. Nothing tied him to his village, where he was usually just tolerated—and sometimes tormented—as a drunkard and an idiot. (He behaved only intermittently like either—and then, usually, with reason.) I suppose the fear and ignorance he shared with his fellow villagers had kept him from running away till now, though he told us he’d thought of little else in the last few years. For his ignorance wasn’t so great that he didn’t realize his own fear could probably be overcome simply by staying close to someone, like myself, with less than he.
Yes, please, he wanted to come!
The reason I took him, however, was that he amused Terek—for through all my good soldier’s sullenness, I could still get a grin from him now and then with a dirty story. And to that end I’m afraid I’d used up not only my peasant widow and dark-robed princess, but their sisters and their serving maids, their cousins and their mothers, all in a perfectly shamless manner. Arly’s accounts of his one-legged exploits among the village women (as much exaggerated, I’m sure, as my own) gave me at least some respite as we made our way.
With Arly I could become audience to the strings of lascivious tales instead of actor.
Terek’s weapon skills were joined with fair hunting ability. Often he speared us rabbits, small pigs, and turkeys. Arly’s infirmity seemed to have lent him a mania for physical accomplishment. Already a decent shot with rock and sling, he badgered Terek for spear-throwing lessons, which the young soldier was happy enough to give; and through the weeks the one-legged barbarian, with his crutch under one shoulder and Terek’s spear held over the other, made a committed and purposeful headway that often left me hot-cheeked as I watched, real respect for him contending with real jealousy. Arly had an extraordinary knowledge of edible leaves, roots, pods, nuts, and fungi—passed to him by the same old woman who’d staunched his severed leg and with whom he’d lived till she’d died, when he was fourteen or so and from which time his pariah status in his village dated. Oddly, then, as well as our driver, I became our company cook with what the other two provided. And with only a few culinary disasters (Arly sneezing at some over-peppered stew; Terek frowning at some particularly pasty pudding I’d prepared from Arly’s vague recipe, with what I’d thought were only some simple, sensible corrections), it worked fairly well. Since then, I’ve several times noticed that in such small groups as ours, whoever prepares the food becomes the leader—or stops cooking.
Despite my youth, you see, I still felt in charge of our movements.
And what had happened to my quest for Belham in all this? Well, somehow, aside from these transformations in materials, men, and methods, I’d still managed, before and after, to visit more than half the locations on my map. Whether the true authority lay in me, or in the piece of vellum, now rolled up and stuffed down inside the wagon, I couldn’t say. Perhaps I only retained my leadership because from time to time I could take our wagon into the yard of some lowering castle and, after five minutes’ conversation with an upper servant, secure an audience with the resident lord, and from there usually gain an offer of hospitality—food, company, and more or less comfortable sleeping accommodations f
or the three of us—for a day or three’s relief from travel.
Another interesting transformation:
On the road, I really felt the three of us were simply friends.
But as soon as we entered one stone gateway or another, Arly would wordlessly become my most attentive, if preposterously clumsy, servant. (His comic confusion in our first such visit, getting lost here and there in the low-ceilinged halls, as he sprinted off to get me water, washing cloths, a bowl of fruit, till I had to go find him, is a tale in itself!) But, do you know, till after he’d taken on the role three times during three such stops, we never discussed it?
At the same time as Arly became my comic man, Terek would transform into my silent, loyal bodyguard.
I don’t think they particularly relished being subservient, or even—particularly—felt it. Yet somehow, without question, the pressure of some noble’s (or even some noble’s servant’s) gaze would force the three of us into this hierarchical order, me as well as them—a hierarchy that would vanish minutes after we’d pulled outside the gates. But these visits were rests, as well as social adventures. (Though of a different order for me: in them I learned more than I wanted to about the vulgarities, pretensions, and sheer madness of the provincial rich.) Really, there was no other way for us to negotiate them, and Arly and Terek could not have had them without me. Perhaps, then, that was why, on our days in the forest, mountain, or desert, when I took out my vellum, squinted up at the sun, then pointed now here, now there on the much marked map, unquestioningly we went where I said.
Indeed, without more than the most passing mentions from me, they even began to develop a kind of respect for Belham and my quest—at least after they’d seen a few of his works, or sat in the corner of some sooty-ceilinged hall, while I discussed him with this heavy-robed duchess or that potbellied duke with the same round eyes and broad cheekbones as I.
But despite my own commitment and my companions’ growing respect, the map itself had undergone as many changes as I had; and while, my losses notwithstanding, I’d changed (I think) for the better, the map, for practical purposes, was a mess. Oh, I don’t mean that the parchment itself was in tatters. That was safe enough—only worn a little at the edges where, from time to time, I’d gripped it too tightly. But the stability of the object only fixed the chaos that had come upon it. For though I had visited more than half the locations marked, by no means had I visited them in order. The confusion in my initial trip to Ellamon and the tiny town beyond only hinted at the confusion my quest had met with throughout the rest of Nevèrÿon:
Buildings and bridges built by Belham and said to be at one town or city had several times turned out to be at others, two or three days away. The map itself had contained its own errors, with villages supposedly situated on one side of a river turning out to be a day or two’s ride from the other. What had been marked as a stream turned out to be a wide river. And a goodly number of wide and rocky streams—known as rivers locally—turned out not to have been marked at all. On several occasions, when two of my carefully noted cities were, indeed, physically close, some unscalable mountain ridge or unclimbable chasm or unfordable river—at least at that spot—lay between them, so that direct travel from one to the other was all but impossible.
At first I made myself the excuse that Belham, unlike me, as a Great Man, would have been undaunted by the unclimbable, the unfordable. But soon I had to admit that, to the extent he had been a great traveler as well, he must have been an efficient one, and, in Nevèrÿon’s varied and variegated landscape, the shortest distance on the map was not always the most practical one to pass across. There were simply too many places where it was easier to go a greater distance over easier terrain than a shorter one across the impassable.
Of course I’d tried to revise my map in the light of this new geographical information. For hadn’t I learned from an elderly woman of Able-Ani, who recalled working as a youngster for an older Belham, hauling water for his workers building the stone temple for which the town today is famous, that there was a bridge in the town, already years old when she was a girl, which Belham had also built across the river that divided it? For a fact, she knew that he had architected the bridge years before when he was in his twenties, and that he’d not been in Able-Ani for twenty years since (he’d told her these things himself), and had now come back, in his early fifties, to construct the temple at the local lord’s request. Now Belham’s time and work in Kolhari had clearly been done after both: the woman recalled his great excitement at receiving a messenger from the High Court. That, she was sure, was the first time he’d been summoned to the court by the queen, not only from Belham’s own words to her as she’d poured out water for him at the temple site, but from everyone else’s excitement over the commission. And she was sure he’d left from Able-Ani to travel direct to the High Court at the queen’s command the very week the temple was finished.
All of this seemed proper from what I knew.
But there was no line direct from Able-Ani to Kolhari on my map; nor were there two lines to that small, elegant city marking two separate monuments (one stone bridge, one rock temple), twenty years apart. Sitting by my camp’s burnt-out fireplace one chill morning, before anyone else was up, I’d tried to draw in these revisions along with the dozens of other geographical corrections I’d learned about, only to realize that, as I worked with my brush at my bit of pumice-rubbed goatskin, that where, before, I’d had supreme order, now I had incompleteness and imprecision superimposed on inaccuracy and error.
Another problem: many times by then I’d heard the name that plagues any researcher into the late works of Belham: Venn. (How I’d avoided it till now, I’ve often wondered since.) Here and there—and almost always in tiny, provincial holds where the inhabitants had forgotten all facts concerning Belham the man, so that I clearly knew more than anyone there about the stretch of road cut through impassable rocks, or the great stones of some archway balanced impressively together—along with Belham’s bridge or building, I’d find ‘Venn’s Stair’ or ‘Venn’s Rock’ or ‘Venn’s Cut.’ Someone, I don’t know who, said he thought Venn was a woman Belham had…
Lived with, like the old peasant at Ellamon I’d been afraid to see?
Been in love with?
Been furious at?
Both?
Neither?
Logic suggests the aging inventor, infatuated with some young, pretty, scatterbrained thing, had begun to name some of his minor works after her. But was she a superstitious peasant he’d diddled behind a barn when she’d offered the old man a cup of beer, or was she some prattling princess with whom, groping after her in some castle chamber where he’d pursued her in the dark, he’d managed (once more?) to disgrace himself? I did not know then, and I do not know now. Perhaps it was some merchant who’d financed him. Perhaps it was some noble friend he’d chosen to honor. No one I happened to meet seemed to know—though at Narnis I found an obviously manmade promenade, with great rock steps cut down to the river; and at Aldanangx, near Makalata, we were directed out to an immense cave that had clearly been cut artificially into the mountain, huge and echoing, with carved columns along its sides. Both bore only Venn’s name—both, truly, greater than any work by Belham I’d seen.
As we stood in the cave’s cool hollow, with his crutch end tapping about on the stone floor and his eyes gazing at the distant ceiling, Arly made the most preposterous suggestion yet: perhaps she—if it was a she—was an inventor and architect herself, comparable to, if not greater than, my Belham. In the columned, echoing space, Terek and I howled and threw our arms around our bellies and doubled over at that one. But the truth is, as we walked out onto sunlit sand (teasing each other with japes about the bandits we’d heard occasionally used the place for a stopover), as we reached our wagon beside the scruffy desert bushes, I realized I simply didn’t know. And in such a situation, the joking logic of a one-legged barbarian counts no less, certainly, than the considered reason of a Nevèrÿon pr
ince. But I’d begun to learn how suspicious were all products of logic. So that now, whenever I encountered Venn’s name, it was not as a bit of revealing information but only a frayed thread pulled loose from the weave and fallen from time’s crowded and confused worktable.
We had recently swung down and around into the lush and forested south, till we were not far from the spot on my old and marked-up map where Belham was supposed to have been born. Certainly I’d given up on the pristine order of my early plan—advice I’m sure, that, had I asked for it, my first and long-gone caravan steward would have given me directly, that feverish night in the Falthas.
But as we’d come closer to what my map had fixed as Belham’s point of origin, benefactors both high and low, on hearing of my goal, had told me that, while, yes, Belham was indeed rumored to have been born in that particular little town, he also was rumored to have been born in another as well—also in several others. And each smiling prince or grinning peasant gave us his (or, in two cases, her) own perfectly logical reason why, of course, this one, that one, or another was, indeed, the most logical choice.
By the morning we started out for the place itself, I had five villages down, each with its claim to be the birthplace of Belham. The five were not, indeed, far apart—or at least, after the traveling we’d been doing, they did not seem so. The three of us were able to get our wagon from one to the other, with a few hours to explore at each, within four days. Nor were we bothered by inclement weather. And by now, trotting in after them among the chickens and the dogs, I could stop any wizened old man or woman, any big-eyed, bandy-legged boy or girl, give them a smile and a nod, and, after the necessary moment of suspicion, usually get a smile back and at least a gesture toward further information, if only the name and whereabouts of someone else in town who might know more about my question.