‘Jahor attempted to dissuade you, I remember. Such damps were bad for the lungs and the liver. But you laughed at him and went out. I retired upstairs. But before I lay down, I pushed back the shutters to look out on the glowing air. I could not see the ground or make out an entire tree.
‘The castle seemed to bob about in moon-soaked vapor. I remembered how, days before, from the same window, I had watched you stroll in the sun where, more than likely, you now strolled in the fog. I smiled. For as you had brought your vanished friend’s oppressive absence into the castle, it seemed you had at last taken it out with you. Standing there, looking for you and wholly unable to see you, I felt, for the first time since you’d come, at peace. What might you be saying to the little creature who haunted you like a dream? During all the years that have passed since then, I have just assumed it was central to your being, the articulation of some secret on which your very self was founded, the origin and end between which was organized all you despaired of, all you hoped for. Perhaps it was only because, while I looked out at the inconstant mist, I could assume you had such a center that put me at such peace that night. Feeling that such a center existed for you, I could assume there was one—however out of touch with it I was—for me.
‘The next day the tale teller went off, with a reward of coins from us both. And a little later, you rode from my courtyard, back to Kolhari and glory. Am I only a woman who wishes to see love, even so demonic a love as yours, at the core of things? But I have often wondered since—I have often longed to ask you in the years that have passed—if, indeed, were you to tell your tale some night, in enough detail and at great enough length, would the secrets you and your one-eyed demon, ghost, or god uttered to each other that evening out in the fog be solid and central to it? Or would they only flicker at the corners of our attention, like marginal remarks that might as well be elided because, in fact, the whole tale was only the intersection of so many margins?
‘Is it perhaps that your true story, my liberator, as you pass from the lowest to the highest, simply goes on and on, like so many others’, only hinting at forms and figures and overall patterns in passing? Do you really repeat yourself so often and at such variance? Perhaps we cannot fathom the stories’ unity. Perhaps we cannot interpret the strategies of their diversifications. (Are both failures, finally, one?) Or is it only that we, hearing you tell it, are sundered by it and so, split and shaken, must ask you, from our various and several positions, to repeat it: whereupon you, sundered by our demands, shaken and split, retell what always seems, because of the violence done you and us in the request, another tale. Well, there are some tales that may never be told in this strange and terrible land: the tale of a revolutionary’s success, through loss, gain, and glory, within and without the High Halls of Court, is doubtless one. The story of one powerful woman’s advice and administrations to another over the years on the basis of greater age and experience, such as my service to our empress, whose reign is proud and proven (if only by your story, Gorgik), is doubtless another.
‘As Vizerine to the Empress, as Liberator to the land, you and I have lived those tales—yet even we, in these basic and barbaric times, would be hard put to tell them: we were too busy living them to attend to their narrative form. And neither of us thought to keep a mummer or a tale teller about to narrate them for ourselves and others, to give them a classic mold. We must satisfy ourselves, then, with empty signs, marginal mutterings, attending rather to the celebratory engine of someone else’s distant and speculative art.
‘Will someone someday ever essay their rich specificity? No, I will never hear mine related. I doubt you will ever hear yours. However laudable our actions, as tales neither aids enough men now in power.
‘Gorgik, I look around me at the strong men and women of Nevèrÿon. I have always tried to seize their images for my own. But I know I am not a strong woman any longer. It doesn’t frighten me. It doesn’t worry me. I still retain enough strength to face my death. Still, every time I leave my castle, I wonder if I shall come back to it. When, I ponder, will it join the vacant ruins, scattered like bug husks on the land, which, more than any one else’s, are now yours?’
The drumming had put Larla to sleep. And, at once, it woke her. She started in the corner of the carriage. The hanging had fallen back from the window. Sunlight blazed over the Vizerine, turning her white braids silver, making the red wool folds seem waves of blood. She was sleeping, head back in the corner, wrinkled lips apart …
She was sleeping, wasn’t she? Larla peered forward. But, yes. It was more than just the wagon’s shake. She could see the dark jaw moving. She reached out to hook the hanging again to the upper sill, so that the sun did not fall directly in the old brown face. She was muttering on in her sleep (as usual), though about what the serving woman had no idea. More and more confused about more and more things these days, the Vizerine still seemed to Larla in many ways (the women felt it deeply) an extremely clear-minded old thing. She only wished Jahor had come. Not only did the eunuch know just how to deal with the Vizerine, but he himself was a witty creature and, if the mood was on him, could be as amusing as any traveling tale teller—though, as had been muttered in the castle for the last year, the mood had fallen on him less and less. These days he seemed more given to brooding than anything else. Well, it was getting on in the morning. Should she take out some fruit from the hamper? Oh, perhaps in a while. Why, there, for a moment she’d almost ignored the drums! Larla moved about enough to get comfortable—then sat forward again to make sure her mistress was all right. Satisfied, she leaned back in the jogging wagon.
9
WAKING, GORGIK COUGHED INTO fur, felt stone beneath … He lifted his head, rubbed his mouth, and, pushing himself up, opened his eyes. From the windows along the higher tier, light—shadowed with leaves—flickered in the hall. He looked back. In the recess behind the hearth, the fire was dead.
Yes, he was alone.
One shoulder and one leg were stiff. But that was every morning now. They would loosen. He cleared his throat. (Someday, he thought, this nighttime choking will kill me … ) Was Udrog up and wandering? Or had the barbarian—far more likely—already run off? Gorgik put his hand on his chest and slid it to his shoulder. Moving his thumb against his neck, he frowned.
Then, on the rug, he sat up fully, looking to see where the collar had fallen.
The extinguished torch, thrown on the floor last night, lay a few feet away.
But there was no iron on the rug or on the stone around it. He lifted the edge of the fur three places to look under, then let it drop. Pursing his lips, he rubbed his naked neck. So, he had met a little barbarian thief! Suddenly, he started up frowning. On his feet, he dragged up the fur behind him and walked to the arch. He turned behind the wall, hurried up the steps, the rug over his shoulder, crossed the level landing, and went up the next flight:
The boards still leaned at intricate angles across the tower room’s doorway. He dropped the fur (it fell against his ankle) to remove one carefully. As he lifted the second, the rest toppled to the stone, loudly—as they’d been meant to. Still, it startled. He stepped across them, looking around:
Helmet, grieves, sword, pack, the bed’s bare boards …
Neither the barbarian nor last night’s local prowler had thought to come up here. But that had been why he’d chosen it. And the room was cool.
He liked the morning’s smell. Leaves moved outside the shutter. To see what would happen, he called loudly, ‘Udrog!’ three times down the stairs, and twice out the window. The scummed pool was still. He called once more. His mare neighed from where she was chained in one of the remaining garden sheds. Yes, the key was still in the bottom of his pack. Udrog and the collar were gone.
He sat on the bed’s edge, listening to morning birds, watching leaf shadow the sun shook out on the wall. After some minutes, he went again to his pack, squatted before it (his bladder burned with the night’s collected water), and pulled out his clothes f
or the day’s ride. Standing, he began to dress. When he was in his military undergarments, suddenly he loaded everything into his sack, dragged it downstairs and out to the horse. Still looking for the boy, he smiled at the discrepancy between experience (the barbarian was gone) and desire (if I look for him, maybe he’ll be here).
At the shed, he urinated by rotting planks, in a longtime coming, longtime lingering trickle that seemed, in the past year, always to fall as weakly as the urge rose strongly. Pondering age’s daily disappointments, he turned back to his sack to don armor, robe, and ornament. He pulled a heavily medallioned width of canvas about his belly. Ah—just to put the stuff on was to sweat!
The horse’s silken flank twitched a fly off into the shed—and a memory he’d been dipping into and drifting away from since waking cleared:
Opening his eyes in the dimmest light, he’d seen the barbarian boy, kneeling with his back to him, rise to stand.
(He’d turned over and gone to sleep again.)
Pausing at one wide shoulder strap and buckle, Gorgik laughed out loud. (The horse stepped about in her chain.) He’d been assuming it was some image from years ago. But it had happened that morning! He’d woken long enough to see Udrog get up to leave. Why was it so difficult to weave together the strands of the present, without having one or another of them slide into the past?
There: the strap was set.
Food for the horse? He could take care of that down in town. He hoisted up the sack, its contents divided in two halves with loose cloth in the middle, and shoved it over the animal’s back. He looked down at himself again, hip and haunch heavy with metal. Well, it went along with formal affairs—births and funerals and the artificial occasions those in a position to might momentarily declare as important as one of the others.
The key was in his hand. He bent to unlock the iron, with its coiling chain, closed on the mare’s foreleg. Then, hesitating, he straightened again, and walked a bit away to look for a while among the trees.
Once he glanced back at the castle. He tried to picture the branches and shrubs, which had already taken over the courtyard and blurred all articulation in the grounds, coming closer and closer to those sloping walls till the building, sunken in soil and piled around with leaves, a few trunks thrusting from it, grew indistinguishable from forest boulders.
The picture completed, he turned from it.
He tossed the key up and caught it.
And grinned. And thought how little he felt like grinning.
To tell a tale, he’d often felt, was to take as much as you gave—for he’d always had an anecdotal turn. (Had it been getting out of hand in the past year?) But because the scamp had made off with his collar, he felt bested in the exchange.
The trees stood quietly, waiting with him, while he pondered.
He’d defined himself so long by his opposition to this dead lord, it was as if—at the death—he’d been pushing against a mountain to have it collapse into a field over which he’d gone staggering and reeling; as if, running across a plain, he’d gone over a cliff, into the air, flying, flailing, falling; as if he’d woken with an unspeakable power that felled all he looked at so that even as he gazed around to assess the damages, he’d only wrecked more.
When the old definitions are gone, he thought, how we grasp about for new ones!
What am I, then?
And what is this ‘I’ that asks?
Despite their separation, the questions seemed one.
Yet to articulate them was to be aware of the split between them, between the mystical that asked them and the historical they asked of, between the unknowable hearing them and the determinable prompting them, so that finally he came to this most primitive proposition: only when such a split opened among the variegated responses to a variegated world was there any self.
But, on such a morning, where do I turn to find it (he wondered), to limit it, to seize it and secure it? Where do I look for a model, a mirror, an image of the questing self seeking self-knowledge? Do I turn to the corpse I’m out to meet who’ll dominate my day? Or to the live and lusty youngster that slipped away in the night? Should I search in the ever-rising, ever-encroaching green and gray stuff of nature, or in the ever-falling, ever-failing stone and metal works of hand? Will I find it in my own body, which, though it is the register of all pleasure, whether of head or heart or flesh, is nevertheless a site of increasing ache and ailment; which grows more anesthetized to sex as it grows more sensitive to pain; which, no matter how bad it looks, always looks better than it feels?
No, he couldn’t see the north-south road from here. And, anyway, there was no exact timing to these things. All he could do was ride down, wait for the funeral to pass, and take his place in the procession.
He was annoyed about the collar! All the way here, he’d debated whether he should put it on today, as a sign of the past, perhaps some sign for the future, or maybe a mark of the division between. Well, the blond thief had solved that one, however unhappily. Oh, he probably wouldn’t have worn it. Still, he’d have liked the choice.
Despite the annoyance, or even because of it, the brush and rock around, the breeze overhead, the loam below, the bird above the bush, the bug down on the bough, all seemed exhaustingly alive—no, not with youth’s unified wonder, but with the tension between small pleasures and small pains that were the life of middle age. (It had not been twenty minutes: he had to urinate again!) For pain as much as pleasure was a sign of life. And I, he thought, am off to a funeral, where we shall ride quietly, on our horses or in our wagons, dazed by drums and deeming all in order, while we pretend that stomachs are not rumbling, that morning quince and honey do not linger by the tongue, that gas does not shift in the gut, that a shadow passing on a bare calf or a raised arm does not recall at least the memory of desire for the most sedate—that will be our obeisance to death.
Down the slope Gorgik could just see the nearest village huts. He stood on slant rock, gazing away from the sun, with leaves combing the breeze to his right and a lapwing darting on his left. Mounded and raddled at the horizon, yellow clouds looked for the world like buildings and walls and avenues: narrow your eyes a little, and you couldn’t tell if they were rock or lingering fog. Heat lay on one arm, like a warm palm. Shadow cooled the other where the moisture under his armor dried in the crevice between arm and flank, or beneath the brocade and hide that belted hip and belly. (Really, he was too old for boys like that!) How long he’d been away from people. Seeking a sign of the social, the civilized, the artifactual, he raised a hard hand to his neck, feeling for some decoration, mechanical, metal, consecrated to an elided function, so that, on such a man in such fine armor, another such ornament would have had almost no meaning.
But nothing was there.
After a while, he went back for his horse.
10
‘I WAS IN THE castle!’ In the yard the pig girl stood with the cat in her arms, looking down at the barefoot old woman squatting by her loom. ‘Last night, after dark! Kitty went with me. I took a torch up. But you didn’t really need it because of the moon. The bigger boys had left long logs in the receiving hall fireplace last winter. Back then, they were damp, and you could never get them going. But the wood must have dried out since, because when I went and put my fire to them, they flared right up, and … then I put my torch out and went up on the balcony …’ Here she paused, stroking with one finger behind the cat’s ear.
The old woman shifted the strings on her loom, thrust one shuttle of light-colored yarn halfway through, then pulled up another dark one to complete the row. ‘And no one was there … nobody at all. Not even in the dead of the dark. Am I right?’
‘I played that lords and ladies were walking and talking.’ The pig girl stroked the cat’s back. ‘Lord Anuron … and the Lesser Lady Esulla—did they ever live at the castle?’
The old woman looked up for the first time that morning. ‘No … those weren’t the names of the lord and lady of our castle. There was no o
ne there, was there …’ It was not inflected like a question. But she frowned. ‘Earlier, when I was coming out to start on my work, I saw a scraggly bearded barbarian boy sauntering down the path. Perhaps he’d stopped in the castle for the night. But there was no one else. You didn’t see him, did you? I certainly haven’t seen anyone but him who could have been up there. And he wasn’t the one she was talking about yesterday, with all that fine horse and rich armor.’
‘Oh, no!’ The pig girl hugged the cat tighter. ‘There was no one at all. There were lords and ladies, who wore beautiful dresses and wonderful cloaks. They held a contest, there in the great hall, and they made slaves fight against free men … and when the slaves won, they took the collars from their necks and gave them to them as prizes. Then they had a great celebration, with musicians and a beautiful pavilion out in the grounds, and a banquet with foods even finer than at our holiday meals!’
The old woman frowned harder at the girl.
This was a new story!
The pig girl rocked the cat:
‘Then, in the middle of it, a dragon flew in and began to screech and hoot through the upper corridors, and made a great rattling along the columns; then I threw my torch down, because I’d already put it out anyway—and everyone was terrified and ran off. Only I sneaked back in, later, because it was dark and no one could see me …’ In the morning sun, the girl and the woman blinked at each other. Birds chirruped from within the bushes across the path. With over-deep deliberation, the pig girl said: ‘I don’t think anyone was there …?’
The old woman looked back at her work. ‘I didn’t think so either.’
Just then the tall woman walked into the yard. She had a dish of dried apricots and pears at one hip, its edge against her brown skirt. From the fingers of her other hand, she dangled an empty basket. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘has the great man ridden by yet, to join his funeral? He’s got to come right along here, if he wants to reach the north-south road. Even you would have to see him.’