Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

  ‘A day, a night, an evening, a morning …

  ‘But we are talking of actions that were to go on for years, Udrog, through many days, many nights, many mornings and evenings.

  ‘Many were gloriously successful.

  ‘Many were shot with defeat.

  ‘And for those actions I was beaten down and raised up again; I suffered private joys and public failure, personal loss and social glory. Commitments are odd, Udrog. You have them. You live by them. And live for them. But most of us who’ve given our lives to them don’t relish talking of them a lot. You do what you have to do to maintain them. When asked about them, you grin a little. Sometimes you grunt. For the most part, you look stony and let others figure it out.

  ‘Rage, fear, desire—and the love of freedom?

  ‘None of them encourages articulateness. Sometimes I wondered at this as I rehearsed for the hundredth time, alone in my tent by lamplight, what I would have to say the following day, now to a delegation of merchants, now to a meeting of farmers, now to a council of lords—or sometimes when, come through some fence in the night, I caught my breath to begin whispering to a gang of slowly waking quarry slaves. Sometimes I wondered at it even when, my throat raw with shouting, blood running from my shoulders to my fingers, I swayed in the light of some torched chateau, amidst the screams and guts, daring to hope, with my teeth tight, I might see another dawn.

  ‘Sometimes there were hundreds of us fighting together. And often, Udrog, I looked around, breathless and blinking, to find I fought alone. But as often, when I thought despair would swallow up my more and more isolate struggle, I found friends, slave and free, men and women, willing to fight with me and for me, who wielded a hot, bright energy I’d thought lost from the land.

  ‘Oh, it was quite a revolution we led, Udrog. And fucking? I can’t imagine anyone doing it more, or more imaginatively, than we did. Some revolutions are cold, bloody, celibate businesses. Others are violent and hot. And some others, like this one, fixed within the system by the innocence of full belief, take lust’s heat and raise it to levels of day-to-day excitement most good citizens simply cannot imagine—or, if they imagine it, can’t remember their imaginings more than a masturbatory minute. There were boys. There were men. And, yes, there were women. You! Come to me like a dog on all fours! And you? Crawl on your belly like a worm! Bind me, beat me; and I’ll piss all over your thigh! All through my life I’ve reached as best I could for my freedoms, my powers, and my pleasures. When I was a slave, sometimes I reached for them prematurely, sometimes cruelly, sometimes with great pain, if not bodily harm, to myself and others. When I was free, I learned that the power, the freedom, the pleasures you and I would indulge here tonight take place within the laws of a marginal society and an eccentric civility that allows us to grasp them, one and the other, with a stunning force and joy that whoever skulks after them like a slave cannot imagine. Ah, I see that perks your interest. You reach again for my collar—there! You want it back now? But I knock your hand away. You smile, waiting: for me to confirm the pleasure you, too, know can be excited by carefully planned delay to truly terrifying heights. You’d have liked our revolution, Udrog, if you’d had the heart to join it or the luck to live through it. The only problem with such excess was that I had no way to know if a new fellow passing through my bed on the way to my cause was going to debate with me till sunrise—or fuck and suck my brains out. Still, I got enough of both debate and sex so that I never wanted for either more than half a day. Oh, yes, I had my bad dreams. I had my good ones, too. Both required critique.

  ‘That was evening work.

  ‘Yes, I worried over the right and wrong of them, with my fellows and friends, long into many nights, through the darkness and into the next new, brilliant day. But while I let those worries guide me, I would not let them stop me. And I was lucky enough, through them all, first to have a lover who loved me but did not believe in me. Though, for all he fought by my side in the early years, his love finally turned to hate. Then he was replaced by a lover who believed in me but did not love me. And when, after a handful of years, he realized what held him to me was only enthusiasm for a dream, his belief turned to indifference. He drifted away. Though I’ve searched for him, in my fashion, I’ve never seen him since I came to power. But I’m grateful to them both for the criticisms that, in their different ways, they offered. But I’ve often thought that had I been cursed with one who both believed and loved, I’d have likely turned out the tyrant and monster the first always feared I was, and the second, half blind though he was, always saw I might become.

  ‘But at last I was called to the High Court of Eagles by the empress, whose reign is long and leisurely, to conduct my work from within its walls. My ministry first fell on me, I tell you, Udrog, like a plague. I thought, from then on, I would be restricted to a daytime revolution. In those first months at the court, there were hours when I sat in my new offices, feeling as if I were starving amidst the splendor. But once two hundred newly freed slaves began a revolt in the Avila: I had to ride out of Kolhari by moonlight, as I was the only one they would allow to negotiate between them and the lords. Another time the report came in the middle of the night that some western earl, grown madder and madder as his holdings were whittled down by time and economics, had begun indiscriminately murdering freemen and slaves, claiming his carnage for the elder gods who’d once ruled in the south. I had to lead troops against him—and it was I, with my own sword, who, after a day’s battle in the raging rain, hacked his head free so that it hung from his neck by a single sinew, and the quarts of his blood slurred the sopping sands. Oh, there was enough of the night left in my work to satisfy any adventurer. And soon I’d learned that the license at court was no different from the licentiousness outside it, at the same time as I learned that the lord I’d hated through it all was now the most specific reality I had to deal with, morning and evening, in the council chamber—if the day were to be mine. These were brave and brutal times in a brave and brutal land. I’d been called to the High Court not just as a man, but as a man with a purpose and a passion. How I carried them out was my own affair. And so, a slave at seventeen, I was a respected minister at forty-seven, in pursuit of my political goals with all the energy and commitment I could muster (one with those I began to conceive that long-ago night)—till finally, by this and that, I managed to triumph over the man whom death has just brought down: the council finally agreed officially to abolish slavery from Nevèrÿon—to lend the task not only silent tolerance, but Imperial edict, might, and organization.

  ‘His protests were marked only by silences and dark looks from his corner of the council table.

  ‘But the High Court was at last prepared to enforce emancipation to the extent of empire.

  ‘The decree would go out from Her Majesty, the Child Empress.

  ‘Six years ago, when that happened, Udrog, though you might not remember it so well, there was quite a celebration. Among all my memories of the man whose funeral journey I go to join with tomorrow, the one that returns most often is from that morning in the Council room, when, the decisive meeting done, the others came up to laugh and clap me on the shoulder.

  ‘The old man walked over, smiling.

  ‘Many grew silent before him; they knew my success was his defeat. “Congratulations to you,” he said. “I know how hard you’ve fought for this. And I respect you for it, Gorgik. It’s only a notion,” he went on, “but such a decision as you’ve led us to today requires a certain … sign. It’s well known, nor have you ever made a secret of it: you spent some years as a slave in the empress’s obsidian mines at the foot of the Faltha Mountains. Through you as much as anyone, slavery is hardly a shadow of what it once was. The mines are all but closed down. My researches tell me only three slaves are left there, among a dozen guards and paid maintenance men, to oversee the property in the empress’s name. To think, once more than three hundred of my—” he dropped his eyes in a moment’s self-correction—“three
hundred men once labored there. But what better way to celebrate your achievement? Why not return to the site of your youthful indenture and, with your own hands, take the collars from the necks of the last slaves there, while, here in the capital, on the same day, the empress will make her proclamation? We will celebrate your victory both here and in the new, thriving towns that have grown up between Kolhari and Ellamon, between the Argini and Kolhari. They’ll all send delegates to see you perform your terminal manumission. I can think of no better way to make a gesture to the people more in keeping with this day and decision, both of which are yours.”

  ‘When your opponent speaks smilingly, you listen warily. But if this were capitulation, I wanted to receive it graciously. The intricacies of bringing the council around had made me aware that neither my life nor his nor both of ours together were over in the hive-like halls of the High Court. My feelings about his suggestion? Though I can be fascinated by ritual and repetition, I’ve never sought out pomp and ceremony—though as much as anyone I know the value of a successful public sign. I thought his notion childish, presumptuous, and stupid. But if the only price I were asked for my success was this, then for the time ahead we still would have to work together I thought I’d best pay it.

  ‘I looked at him.

  ‘I mulled this over with the speed he’d managed to teach me.

  ‘I said: “In a week then, My Lord, I’ll ride to the foot of the Falthas, where I shall carry out your wish as you have expressed it.” And, fist to my forehead, I bowed.

  ‘Three or four observing read my obeisance as a mark of my triumph. But that is the way with the exchange of signs among the suggestions and suspicions, the implication and innuendoes surrounding the play of power in the halls of the High Court.

  ‘There at the capital, a caravan of closed wagons was made ready; I oversaw some of the preparation and cursed that I had to take time from important matters to do it; then managed to delegate the rest to others. Messengers were dispatched north and south to prepare the day. Somehow by the night I was to leave for the mines, I and my secretaries and my assistants and my aides had actually done all we had to in order for the ceremony itself (including the empress’s proclamation in Kolhari) to be more than words.

  ‘The ceremony?

  ‘Because I had done the work around it, because messages had been sent, alliances secured, commitments confirmed, promises elicited, and pressures put to see that certain other promises were quickly carried out, the celebration can be dismissed as the empty sign it was. The bored musicians, the official delegates, the curious locals, the interminable speeches, the lateness that began it, the rain that interrupted it, the banquet that concluded it all made it the mirror image of any number of like provincial functions. But what I want to tell of tonight, Udrog, the incidents that complete my story, happened in the margins of that ritual vacuousness.

  ‘Because I’d done my work well, I’d brought no significant worries with me. What would it be like, I wondered as I rode in my closed wagon, to return to the barracks, the mines, the fields about them I had not seen, save to ride by when traveling hastily between north and south with my mind on other things, after twenty-six years? I threw my thoughts ahead to the pit.

  ‘I am a man who, where his thoughts go, his body follows.

  ‘During a morning stop, I climbed from the wagon and told my caravan steward I would take an extra horse and ride ahead: I wanted to spend some time, if only a little hour, along among the scenes of my servitude.

  ‘I’m glad I did.

  ‘As my horse finally trotted through what a farmer and two women carrying some calves in a high-sided cart had assured me, under the overcast sky, were the grounds of the old obsidian mines, I found roads where no roads had been; I found trees and underbrush in places that had been open fields; I found both a hill and a pond I had no memory of at all; I saw huts and houses off where there should have been empty bogs. And the single mine tunnel I came on was one that, back when I’d been there, surely had already been shut down, while the ones in which I and my companions once sweated had either been filled in or swallowed up by the encroaching forest—I certainly couldn’t find them! When I rode out from among the trees and saw the long wall of a slave barracks, nothing about it looked familiar. A caretaker was just coming out, an old barbarian woman in a collar—one of the slaves, I realized, I’d come to free.

  ‘When I rode up to speak, though I tried to be friendly, she was taciturn. But once I told her who I was, she became all welcome and solicitude. Gorgik the Liberator? Yes, she knew all about the ceremony to take place later that day. There’d been talk of nothing else here for a week. She grew terribly excited, knocking the back of her fist against her forehead, with a slew of praises for our empress, whose reign partook of every alliteration she could call up. And would I come inside? Did I wish to meet the others? She would take my horse, would find refreshments for me, would indeed, serve me in any way she could.

  ‘No, I told her. I’d only come to look at the place where (yes, she knew of it) I’d spent five years as a slave.

  ‘“A lot must have changed,” she said.

  ‘I nodded. “Yes. I can see.” I asked her to tell me what she could. Of course she would. Yes, these were the slave quarters of the old Imperial obsidian mines. She’d been here fifteen years. There was a man, another of the three slaves in residence whom I’d be freeing along with her that day, who’d been here for twenty. He’d even worked as a miner in the last years of obsidian production. But he was off right now on an errand. The third slave, she said, was a youngster of twenty-two, who hadn’t been here a full ten years yet. A good-for-nothing, she assured me. But, really, when the older man came back I should speak to him. The guards and free caretakers who had the actual responsibility for overseeing the Imperial property? Well, these days they came and went every two or three years. None of them had any firsthand knowledge of the place. But she would tell me everything, anything I wanted to know, if, indeed, she knew it. As best I could make out from what she said, the barrack buildings I had lived in—as well as the one Vrach had died in—had been pulled down long ago. Ill-built, slat-walled structures, today there was not a mark on the earth to show where they’d stood. No, she’d never seen them. The demolition had occurred before she’d come: she pointed where she thought she remembered hearing they’d once been—amidst the briars and waving sumac on the slant there. (If she were right or wrong, I could not say. But I didn’t remember the clearing our barracks had been ranged around as particularly slanted.) The long building she’d just stepped from, she assured me, was, however, the oldest barracks at the mines. True, it was about barracks size, as I remembered them. Certainly it must have been here when I was a boy, she declared to my frown, for though some work had been done on it ten years back (and she led me over to point out the newer planks), as clearly the rest of it dated from fifty, if not sixty, years before that. Looking at the walls with her, I had to agree.

  ‘Along the foundation (and none of the barracks I remembered had had foundations at all), every few inches a stub of metal was sunk into the stone. In two places an iron staple remained: once staples had been driven in at equal intervals all along it. Only those two were whole. The rest had rusted away or broken off so that only nubs were left. “When I first got here,” the woman said, as she watched me stare down at them from my horse, “there were at least ten whole ones. We still tarred them over each season.” She was wondering, I could tell, if I’d ever been chained there. “But they let that go, with so much else to do and fewer and fewer to do it, three or four years after I came. And by three or four years after that, they were down to what you see. In a way, it’s a shame. Oh, I wouldn’t want them used, any more than you would, sir. Still, I’ve always thought they should be preserved. Just so people won’t forget. I mean, the way it used to be. When you were here.” Some of the studs had come completely out, leaving only holes. Rusted stubs (or holes) extended all the way down the stone base of the
fifteen-yard building. In the years since my freedom came, I’d seen many such foundations (or sometimes stone benches, or sometimes stone walls) where numberless rows of staples spoke of the hundreds of slaves once chained there, slaves who had worked the quarries or the mines or the fields in the generations before mine. The staples were signs of the oldest slave quarters, going back a century or more, of which this building was easily an example: I’d first seen them when I spent time as a soldier in the south and in the west. When they were first explained to me, I remember how I’d noted to myself that there’d been none at the mines. There we’d been chained together only when we were moved in groups from place to place, as happened when some of us were pulled out to help with a forest fire, or to pile rocks, logs, and mud against a flooding stream. Looking at this stapled stone, I wondered if I’d actually come to a wholly different mine in a wholly different place from the one I’d lived at and labored in, for though I’d presumably spent five years only a dozen yards away in what was now brush and sumac (if the woman spoke rightly), I had no memory at all of this building, these stones, or its nubs!

  ‘My horse stepped about restlessly. I patted her neck. “Tell me.” I frowned down at the woman in her brown shift. “There was an open field where caravans used to stop, behind the … well, behind what we then called the south barracks. Once you left the living quarters here, it was about half a mile away.”

  ‘“You mean the place where they’re going to have the ceremony …?” She was a barbarian, like you, Udrog. But her skin was burned so brown she already looked like a freeman, and the overcast seemed to leave it and the iron at her neck one hue below straw-colored hair. “Where you’re to take off our collars.”