Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

  But standing among cool trees with his mouth wide so that nothing might hear him breathing and his body bent along the same curve as the trunk he leaned on so that few would even see him if they passed, or ambling diagonally across a foul alley near some city market, with a bumptious lope that, as much as his light skin and yellow hair, marked him an outsider, country bred and uncivilized, a true, common, and most ordinary barbarian of the most socially unacceptable sort, the boy achieved a certain invisibility, both sylvan and urban, that protected him from the reprisals of just such people as his preferred sexual activities, now in the country, now in the town, might most have shocked.

  What, most specifically and most recently, had confused Udrog was, however, this:

  Days before, wandering west in the vicinity of the High Hold of fabled Ellamon, the boy had come across a campfire off the road where he’d found himself in the bushes watching, then sitting across from, finally talking to, and at last eating with, a big-bellied bandit. The man’s flank was scarred like a criminal’s or slave’s, he wore a carved peg through one ear, and one hand was missing a finger. One blind eye was a red ruin between half-closed lids, wrecked by a double scar that rose over his cheek and went on to split his brow as if the point of some uncanny blade had once lifted through his features, marking him not only with ropy lines of flesh but also with a bewildered amazement that, even as the ruptured ball had sunk away in the healing, had still not quit his face. The bandit’s talk had been distracted, full of violences that both frightened Udrog and entertained him, even as the man offered him more food, jokes, and tales of derring-do. Then, in the middle of it, the one-eyed man had begun to call himself Gorgik the Liberator, the Greatest of Her Majesty’s Ministers, and the Savior of the People.

  And did the boy have anything he might wish to spare for the Liberator’s great and noble cause of helping ex-slaves establish themselves in the land?

  Udrog had certainly heard of that fabled Minister, who, some years before at the time of the empress’s proclamation, had been for a while the most famous man in Nevèrÿon. Indeed, there’d even been some tale connected with Gorgik the Liberator, that the boy only half remembered, about someone with a scar—or was it a single eye?

  Not that Udrog was particularly disposed to believe the bandit: he had the distinct feeling that, after only a sentence or two, the man might even set on him … or would have, had Udrog been traveling with any pouch or purse or cart. (The young barbarian, like so many of Nevèrÿon’s marginals, went naked and without possessions: it was the best protection against someone’s wanting to rob you.) Nor was he disposed to contradict the one-eyed man: there was something about this bandit/Liberator’s distracted tale of soldiers spying on them from off in the woods, or troops which with a single call could be marshaled from over the hill, that spoke of madness as much as villainy.

  While he finished up the piece of meat on the roasting stick the bandit had given him, Udrog thought about propositioning the gruff, ugly fellow—but decided he was too crazy.

  So, suddenly, Udrog was up and off into the woods, tossing the stick behind him (‘Where are you going? to leak in the trees, ’ey? Well, then, hurry back. I have more to say to you, boy …!), swiping a jar from beside the bandit’s cart that, perhaps because it was on the man’s blind side, the bandit didn’t see.

  In the woods he cracked open the seal.

  The jar contained some highly fermented beer. Udrog drank as much as he could, threw the rest away, then, on a pleasingly drunken whim, snuck back to crouch in the shadows, to see what the bandit was doing: perhaps there was something more he could steal.

  While, from behind leaves, twigs, and darkness, Udrog watched the scruffy madman mumbling by his fire, another cart pulled up to the clearing; some men walked along with it. They hailed the bandit and (they looked like bandits themselves) asked if they could use his flame. In the course of the monosyllabic exchanges, somehow an argument broke out.

  Then the one-eyed man was up and rushing for his mule cart, doubtless for some weapon—whereupon he was stabbed and stabbed and stabbed again by one of the quietest men waiting just behind him, knife already drawn.

  A real murder! thought Udrog with great gravity and some fear. Occasionally he’d come across the traces of one, so that he might say he’d seen it, boasting to other youngsters he met later in the city. But the act itself? That was rare to catch!

  The murderers began to rifle the bandit’s cart, while Udrog, his drunkenness gone and a sickishness left, was torn, in his hiding place, between waiting for them to finish so he might pick over the leavings and getting out of there—when he heard another wagon!

  The murderers stopped their search and fled.

  From their clothes, their manners, and the caravan guards with them, the new arrivals seemed merchants or traveling businessmen. They climbed down to look at the corpse sprawled on bloody leaves in the firelight. They expressed grave shock at the heinous slaughter. They walked around and around the fire. They stared off anxiously into the trees. (One stood for a while with his worried face, unblinking and unseeing, not much farther from Udrog’s, unbreathing and unmoving, only a few leaves hanging between them, than your nose is now from your knee.) They talked with their guards and one another of the violence lingering in all the margins of Nevèrÿon today. Finally, they ordered the guards to lift the body and strap it to their wagon’s back.

  But they did not kick the corpse; or beat it with a stick a few times to see if it was really dead; or immediately search the cart for anything salable; or try to flee the place as fast as possible—in short, they seemed to Udrog madder than the one-eyed man.

  One merchant, who finally went to look through the bandit’s wagon, found, first, some well-wrought weapons and, a moment later, an embroidered belt. ‘I guess we have a thief here, murdered by more of the same for his booty. It must have been the men we heard moving so quickly away.’

  ‘Or,’ said another, stepping over to see, ‘we could have a man more important than he looks, but with the good sense not to travel these back roads wearing such ostentatious finery—much good the deception did him.’ (The next remark stayed with Udrog:) ‘For all we know, he might be some minister of state in disguise. It would be just our luck, too, to fall in on an assassination. We’ll take his body back to Ellamon and see if anyone there can identify him.’

  They took the corpse, the mule, and much of what was in the cart away, to leave Udrog, still in the bushes (the moon had just come up), staring at the fireplace, while silver smoke rippled and raddled over the ashes.

  Now, unknown to Udrog (or, indeed, to the merchants), within the walls of the High Hold of fabled Ellamon that same day, Lord Krodar, minister to the Child Empress, come to the mountain hold on the most delicate of Imperial missions, finally succumbed to a fever, which had come on the aging archon three days before. When, by nightfall, that most powerful lord was declared by his distraught doctors to be at last and truly dead, riders galloped out from the Vanar Hold toward all points of empire with the news, while, through the dark hours, servants and hired men and women worked by lamp and candle to ready six black carriages for the funeral cortege, which, with twenty-four drummers, twelve either side, would return the body first to Kolhari and the High Court of Eagles, where the Child Empress Ynelgo would join the procession, then go on to the south and Lord Krodar’s birthplace in the Garth Peninsula for the interment.

  Before sunrise, the drums began to pound.

  The six wagons pulled out of the Vanar Hold.

  Half an hour later they rolled from the High Hold of fabled Ellamon itself.

  About an hour after Udrog woke next day, he was walking at the edge of the north-south highway, hitting at the weeds leaning from the shoulder with a bit of branch and feeling very hungry, when he heard an ominous beating, growing louder and louder, like the heart of a giant about to burst from its own strength. Minutes later, the wagons and the drummers and the attendant guards moved slowly and thundero
usly into the slant light that, here and there, cut the violet shadows under the branches. Dawnlight caught on beaten brass ornaments set in black-lacquered wood, still showing green in the crevices from the night’s over-quick polishing.

  Clearly this was the funeral procession of a great lord of state!

  Thunderously, it rolled away.

  Half an hour later, after taking some plums from an orchard and eating them, Udrog came back to the same orchard to ask the farmer he’d sneaked past (down at the other end of the field, fifteen minutes before) what recent news there’d been. He’d picked the poorest looking and most destitute of the three farms he’d passed from which to get both his breakfast and his information. The farmer was a man almost as marginal as Udrog: but it was the only farm at which the barbarian felt at ease.

  ‘Some state minister,’ the skinny man said. ‘Did you hear his funeral wagons go by? I don’t know much about it, save that he died up near Ellamon. Probably murdered by assassins on the road—that’s how they always did it in my youth. They’re taking him south to Kolhari, I guess. Now get off from here. I don’t have anything for you, boy!’

  A richer farmer might have known more, might have said more, might have been more generous with food and facts. But that was the margin Udrog traveled in, felt most comfortable in.

  Remembering the merchant’s remark last night about the corpse’s possible identity, what Udrog thought about it all was: the one-eyed man he’d met had not been lying! He had been a minister to the empress! The murderers had been assassins! What Udrog had taken as signs of grandiose madness in the one-eyed man had been signs of the grand itself.

  And Gorgik the Liberator, Minister to Her Majesty and Savior of the People, was dead.

  Last night Udrog had seen him slaughtered beside his campfire.

  Today he’d seen his funeral procession pass by on the road.

  Oh, certainly, Udrog was not so stupid as to tell anyone he’d seen Gorgik the Liberator (traveling in his bandit’s disguise) killed—or that he could probably identify the killers if it came to that. In times like these, such information could get you thrown into a dungeon somewhere. Still, the whole incident rather pleased him, as if he’d had a private and privileged experience that allied him to the larger world’s controlling scheme.

  Later that morning Udrog was lucky enough to beg a ride on a fast horse at the back of the saddle of a private messenger, galloping along certain back roads with information a wealthy Ellamon importer needed to send hurriedly to one of his suppliers in the south. A good-hearted, hard-riding fellow, the messenger might have dispelled Udrog’s confusion. But it never occurred to the boy to ask. And the man did not offer much in the way of conversation to the scruffy, itinerant barbarian. Still, the day’s gallop was fun, if tiring. The messenger gave him an iron coin at the end of it (with which the boy bought a meal one village over) and sent him on. And they’d passed ahead of the funeral procession, anyway—though they hadn’t actually seen it, for they were not taking the main highway. And the funeral caravan went slowly, stopping at each small town for a respectful hour or two while the more curious inhabitants came out to stare at the milling soldiers, at the sweating drummers, at the entourage of red-robed aristocrats who traveled with them, while whatever lingering aristocracy (or just the very rich) who wished to join them came down on their horses or in their closed funeral wagons to ride on with the procession to Kolhari and into the Garth.

  These mangled facts, then, were what the naked Udrog had carried with him into the ruined castle that evening when he decided to rest.

  When he awoke in the ancient hall, it was not only the sounds and the fire and the naked man, squatting by him, watching, that were strange. The strangest thing was that the naked man claimed to be someone Udrog himself had seen murdered beside a campfire a night back; and, that morning, the boy had seen his drumming funeral cortege roll past. Udrog was sure the big man was lying to him. Everyone lied in sexual situations. (Certainly Udrog did, whenever possible.) But, so far, the lie, if strange, seemed harmless—since Udrog knew the truth.

  This more or less marks the extent of Udrog’s confusion. But there are still things to say of that about which the boy was clear.

  When, by the roadside campfire, the one-eyed bandit had claimed to be Gorgik the Liberator, from the first exchanges between them Udrog had observed signs of madness, deceit, and danger numerous enough to make him wary and watchful for the rest of the night—however he’d later re-read them beside the loud procession of the dead as signs of greatness, nobility, and power. Those signs, indeed, were why he had not propositioned the bandit. And the night’s violence had only confirmed the rightness of his intuition.

  When, by the castle fire, this man claimed to be Gorgik the Liberator, from the first exchanges between them Udrog had observed no such signs at all. He’d heard no halts, over-excitements, and sudden uncertainties. The strangenesses, the oddities, the blatant contradictions with what Udrog believed to be the case all seemed, somehow, within the firelit summer stones, too abstract to act on—although Udrog was quite ready to dismiss the entire ruling class of Nevèrÿon as mad, or at least very different from himself. These oddities puzzled him, yes, as, finally, so much in the world puzzled; but they were not decipherable signs with clear warnings of danger he could read, comprehend, and respond to with proper care and precaution.

  So, in the way a child will accept a judgment of the unknown from an adult who at least seems sane, Udrog tried to accept these.

  In the same way that, had something about this man caused Udrog to feel wary and suspicious, no abstract reassurance or intellectual explanation could have swayed the boy’s action and observation from what he felt was the right concern for such a case, so, as this man’s manner and bearing made Udrog feel safe and protected despite all contradictions with the world around, nothing moved the boy toward the poise-for-flight, the suspension of desire that might have seemed, given his confusion, more appropriate.

  Udrog had already followed his sexual whims through many situations that would have been more than strange enough to deter, with our greater age and wisdom, you and me.

  Thus he followed them here.

  The desired collar had been produced.

  But with the impatience of a child before his own lusts, he wished the deed begun and done quickly. The prospect of more talk introduced only another contradiction.

  Udrog lay beside the big man, listening impatiently, quiet through the tale, but only because Gorgik was bigger and stronger than he, if not, for the moment, his master.

  4

  THEY LAY ON THE fur rug, the boy in the slave collar, the man beside him, watching the ceiling beams, which the fire, flickering lower and lower, lit less and less.

  ‘Odd, even tonight: the man whose corpse comes toward this town, whose funeral I go tomorrow to join with full honor and respect, was once my greatest enemy. How many times, in the early years, when I was abroad in the land, not much better than a bandit, when my tactics and campaigns and strategies were about to fall before the impossibility of my enterprise, was it his face I dreamed of striking, his heart I hoped to hack out, his body I tingled to torture, till, mewling and weeping, he went down, down, down into death! For he was already a minister, with all the weight of birth and tradition behind him, in support of Nevèrÿon’s most conservative policy as regards the institution I’d sworn to destroy. By the time I was called to court as a minister myself, we’d already had a dozen encounters, some of them cool and reasoned—some of them near mortal. But now, as I came within the walls of the council room with a voice and a vote and at last the title of equal, my enemy was suddenly my teacher, my critic, my exemplar. He was the mirror I had to look into to learn what I was to do. Only by searching among his could I find what had to become my strategies; for he was a man—I admit it—far more skilled in the ways of state, diplomacy, and government than I. It was he I had to imitate if I would win the day. I was now a minister, a man sworn to e
nd, by political means, what I had not been able to end by military might:

  ‘I would make the Court of Eagles, with the Child Empress speaking for it, end slavery in Nevèrÿon. I knew it could be done. But doing it? In the real world of hunger and thirst, sorrow and joy, labor and leisure, it’s hard to imagine the intricacies of power that make the law move, that make its enforcement possible, that make a mandate from the empress—“Slavery is now ended in Nevèrÿon!”—more than words muttered by a madwoman on a foggy field.

  ‘To learn, then, I had to turn to a man, a minister, and a politician, dead today, who, for all his skill, was then still nameless to half the country—whose anonymity, in fact, was half his might.

  ‘He hated me.

  ‘I hated him …

  It’s strange, Udrog, to feel the clear and cloven boundary between you and all you’ve ever stood against break away. But to win what I wanted from him, I had to become more and more like him.

  ‘Maybe you know it, Udrog. I was once a slave. When the Child Empress Ynelgo seized power, my parents were slaughtered; I was taken captive and sold to the empress’s obsidian mines at the foot of the Faltha Mountains. I was not far from your age now when I was left there—when the collar you wear willingly tonight was clapped and locked around my most unwilling neck. Certainly I can tell you: my first sexual interests in the collar were fixed years before that when I was perhaps—oh, five or six. In the back room of a warehouse where my father worked, once, as a child I’d come upon some two dozen slaves in their collars toward whom I’m sure I felt …? But the pause holds desire as much as it holds all my uncertainties about it. Yes, I have such memories. You have, too. We both return to them, now and again, to weave, unweave, and reweave the stories that make our lives comprehensible to us. But whatever fascination, or even partial truth, such memories hold, how useful can they be to someone who wishes to understand how his or her freedom works? How can you define the self from a time when the self was too young to understand definition? Let me speak instead of the stunned, wary, and very frightened boy who, a decade later, was a slave.