Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

  ‘If you get drunk again,’ Funig said, who wasn’t sure if he were nineteen, twenty, or twenty-one, ‘I won’t come to wake you any more. You’re dirty when you’re drunk. At least I go in my shack and sleep till I’m better.’

  ‘An honest laborer can always get up after an honest drunk. That’s as true in Narnis as it is in any other town.’ Clodon went over to the oak to pee. ‘How did I get this fat, Funig? You know, I was once as lean a boy as you.’

  ‘What’s honest about you, you old thief?’

  Clodon’s water hit the bark, dribbled to the dirt, to separate in dusty worms that crawled beside the roots to run away between his bare feet. Clodon scratched his side. Besides those from his flogging at sixteen, another half dozen welts had been laid on top of them not eight years back, when he’d been caught again near Sarness for banditry. Why he hadn’t been sentenced to death, he’d never been sure, for in working the back roads with a mule wagon and a dozen knives, clubs, and swords hidden beneath the tooled leather cart cover, he’d killed a handful of men—and at least three women. But the Sarness trial had been as ludicrous as the one back in his own village. Again, he’d been taken drunk; again he’d been too sick through it to say anything or be sure exactly what was going on. Only this time, it seemed, the elders thought he’d done much less than he had, rather than much more—which was why he’d gotten off with only a flogging: the second in his life. There were a dozen welts on him now.

  But he had half a dozen other scars today—one through his lower lip and one across an eyebrow—he never thought about.

  Five weeks ago, when he’d come here to this mountain town, looking for the local outcast or the imbecile who might befriend him, he’d found Funig in the first afternoon. Drinking with Funig out behind the refuse dump, in the moonlight, he’d told the boy the story of those more timely scars, in a grave voice, interspersed with many wise nods and much shaking of his forefinger and somber warnings to keep free of real crime: such welts or worse were always the result.

  Now how could a man who gave you such advice be truly bad?

  And hadn’t Teren himself, when, next morning, Funig and Clodon had gone to hire on at the work site, rubbed his beard with his thumb and said: ‘Flogging marks on a man only mean he once took out a debt he’s paid back since. Work hard, Clodon, and they won’t stand against you here.’ Clodon had heard it before and knew how far it went. Still, the boy was impressed. Born in the town, and living there all his life, Funig had already amassed a sizable reputation on his own as a village drunk and ne’er-do-well. But he’d managed to avoid being whipped. In the weeks since Clodon had come, though, Funig had been Clodon’s accomplice in a handful of thefts Narnis seemed able to absorb. Half of them had been the sort Funig might well have done by himself—though he’d probably have spaced them more widely. But a few had made the boy sniff and blink and swallow at their daring. Once they were done, of course, Funig was all grins and delight and slapping his thigh, ready to run boast to everyone.

  ‘The best thing to do once you’ve done something like that is put it out of mind, Funig. You forget it; they’ll forget it.’

  Such advice was useless, though. The boy would rather glory in his misdemeanors: he had too many of his own resentments against the town. (Clodon stood before the oak, shaking his head.) Funig just wasn’t sharp enough—and Clodon knew it—to do much more than beg. But since Clodon had told him the story of his unexplained good luck at Sarness, now Funig saw only the welts that lay there for high banditry. It was true irony: while Clodon might have used them to make a rum-sodden point to a rum-sodden fool, he himself spent far more time dwelling on the original indignities committed against him when he was a boy than he did on that second flogging. As for the rest? Well, forget it!

  Clodon shook himself free of water.

  Maybe it was time to quit this village sumphole, leave Narnis, and return to that more profitable—if more dangerous—life.

  ‘Come on. Let’s go down and see if Teren can use us to dig with the foundation crew,’ Funig said. ‘Last night when he came by the tavern, he said he could use as many men to help as would show up sober in the morning. We should hurry. He said he was going off early and he wasn’t going to wait around.’

  ‘You mean he’s gone already? Why did you come and wake me then—?’

  ‘Oh, no! He’ll still be in the yard there—’

  ‘And if he is, he’ll just say, “Why are you wasting your time with Clodon? You’re a fool, Funig, but you’re an honest fool. Clodon’s a bad man. All he can do is get you in trouble; the only thing anyone in this town is waiting for him to do is to leave it.”’ For since the initial homily about debts paid, Teren had said that too—as soon as Clodon and Funig had come back drunk and an hour late from the second mid-day break.

  ‘And I’ll tell him I can be friends with who I want!’

  Clodon and Funig started across the worn grass beside the three old huts that had been abandoned up here and filled with so much junk you couldn’t even crawl in to use whatever shelter the half-fallen roofs might give.

  ‘That’s just what I’ll say to him!’ Funig’s lurch took his head away and back, away and back. They turned beside the bark fence, beyond which stood the first inhabited shacks. ‘See if I don’t. Haven’t I told him before? Teren has money: and he’s building his big, new, stone house—’

  ‘—you mean the likes of us are building it for him!’

  ‘—but he doesn’t have the right to tell me who I can talk to and who I can’t. And he’d be surprised how honest I am, wouldn’t he?’ Funig’s grin swung at Clodon and away. ‘We could tell him a thing or two!’

  ‘You probably already have.’ But Clodon grinned back. ‘You are a fool to hang out with me, you know?’

  ‘You think you’re the first to say it?’ Still grinning, still lurching, Funig shrugged. ‘Then, I’m a fool.’

  ‘And I’m hungry.’

  They passed under a tree bough that threw its shadow on the dust.

  ‘Pull me down an apple. You’re tall enough for that.’

  Funig stopped, reached up among the green arrow heads that were the leaves, jumped—and came down with the fruit in his hand: the irregular globe was mottled red, a third of it green. ‘Here, old pig.’ He made a gesture to toss it, laughed again, then handed it to Clodon.

  Who snatched it away with a humph. ‘You are a fool, boy. Just like everyone says. What would you do if you had no one to tell you how to do things?’

  ‘I’d do all right.’ Funig looked up again among the overhead green, started to reach again, to jump—but thought better. He looked at Clodon’s apple, for all the world as if he might ask for it back.

  ‘Ha!’ Clodon bit into the sour-sweet flesh.

  They turned down between the houses. ‘Even if Teren’s already gone off, maybe I can get something to eat from Jara.’ Jara was Funig’s fat, sullen half-sister, who worked at the tavern.

  ‘You mean you know you woke me for nothing? If we don’t work today, boy, I’m going to whip you—’ On whip Clodon swung out to smack the back of Funig’s ill-shaped head.

  But Funig lurched away. ‘We can get some food—’ he protested.

  ‘You can get some.’ Clodon took another bite. ‘Jara’s not going to give me anything.’ For the first week Clodon had shown up with Funig at the tavern’s back door, Jara had been ready enough to sneak them a tray of this or a bowl of that. But now, when they came together, she’d curtly say there was nothing left and rush back in.

  ‘But she’ll give it to me,’ Funig said. ‘Then we can share it. Once it’s in my hands, it’s mine. She can’t say who I can share my own food with now, can she?’

  ‘You’re always saying now that one can’t make you do this, and this one can’t say that to you. But they do, don’t they, boy.’ He let more rumbling gas.

  It may have been too much for Funig to reason out. So, like most that was beyond him, he ignored it. ‘You know,’ Funig said, ‘Last
night at the tavern, after you’d gone—’ (Clodon had been put out, actually, in an argument with the owner, Krator—which was why he’d gone to sleep sober; since Teren, fond of beer himself, in an expansive mood, and less and less eager as his new house went on to return to his old thatched cottage, had been buying drink for his workers)’—a man came in, from Minogra. He was with an actress. She says she works with a mummers troupe. But she’s not with them now.’

  ‘Minogra, was it?’ Clodon had been at the cliffside village just before he’d come to Narnis. Like so much else in his life, Minogra was something he didn’t like to think about. (Certainly it was easier to dwell on the indignities of twenty-two years ago than on what had happened at Minogra!) But Funig was going on:

  ‘He was talking in the tavern about that man—the one they call Gorgik the Liberator, the one who’s fighting to free the slaves, all over Nevèrÿon …?’

  ‘And what did they say?’

  ‘Mostly the same things they always do. They say he led a raid on some slave pens to the east. They say someone saw him with a band of freed followers in the west. Dimit said he was a great man for it, and Puron stuttered out that he was only a t-t-t-trouble maker and should be p-p-p-put down or l-l-l-locked up!’ Funig laughed: there were not that many folk in the village he could make fun of. Then a memory came: ‘The man from Minogra said the Liberator fights alongside a barbarian, and the two of them have been all over the country, freeing slaves together.’

  ‘Lazy, dirty sorts, barbarians. I’m glad we don’t have any around here—though I knew some when I lived in Kolhari. Oh, a few of them could be just as nice as you or me. They’re the ones who are the slaves—at least in the south. Well, we have no slaves here, thank the nameless gods. So we don’t need any Liberator. It’s just tavern talk.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Funig said. ‘If they did have slaves, it would be my luck to be one. You know what else I heard?’

  Clodon took another bite of apple. ‘What?’

  ‘They said he wears an iron slave collar himself—even though he’s not a slave, now. He won’t take it off till he’s finished his task.’

  Clodon laughed. ‘Oh, he won’t, won’t he—a slave collar?’ He shook his head. ‘So that’s the sort he is! I met a few of that kind, too, when I was in the city.’ He snorted. ‘Well, I suppose a man can be that and be a Liberator too. Though it makes you wonder.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Funig asked. ‘Be what? What kind?’

  ‘No, you’d have to have lived a year or so in a big city like Kolhari to know what I’m talking about.’ Clodon chuckled. ‘They don’t have ones like that out here—at least not out where you can see them!’

  ‘One what?’ Funig asked.

  ‘Like … well, in Kolhari there used to be this bridge, and on it—no, it’s too complicated. You be happy you’re a fool, Funig.’

  ‘He’s a brave man, this Gorgik, this Liberator. And a great one. Everybody talks about him, all the time. At the tavern, anyone who has a story about him can always get people to listen. Even in Narnis. I bet a lot of the stories are just made up, too. About him and his barbarian. They go about freeing slaves, punishing slave owners, righting wrongs, doing what they want. It’s almost like being a bandit, out in the land … and doing what you want? You can do that in the city. Or you can do that on the road.’ Funig shook his ungainly head. ‘But you can’t do your shit in a town like this, without someone coming along to tell you to get back and wipe it up. It must be a fine life, don’t you think?’

  ‘I think it’s stupid and crazy.’

  ‘We could do something like that—leave Narnis and go out and live off what we could get on the road … like you said you used to?’

  ‘Ha!’ Clodon said. ‘And will again—but not with a fool like you. Don’t take on about it, boy. I’m doing you a favor.’ Snorting another laugh, Clodon finished the apple and held the core in his big fist, wet and crumbling. ‘You wouldn’t last a month outside of town. You need a few brains for that, and brains is not your strong point. Better honest work—at least for the likes of you. Probably me too, at least awhile. Where were the men to meet Teren? We’ll show him how to dig his cursed foundation!’

  When they got to the tavern and went into the yard, of course Teren and the others had left for the work site an hour ago, Krator told them—then tossed a bucket of slop to the side so that it splattered over their feet. Funig protested: ‘Hey, now, you don’t have to—’

  ‘Go on up to the site,’ Krator said. ‘You know where it is.’ He reached back in the door, pulled out another bucket and tossed it.

  Funig danced away from the splatter. ‘You mean he’s gone already—?’ he said for the third time.

  So Clodon sucked his teeth and cursed and shook his fist and called Funig every kind of fool for waking him.

  ‘Well, if you go on up to the site,’ Krator repeated, preparing to take the buckets in, ‘maybe he’ll put you to work when you get there. And maybe,’ he added, ‘he’ll say that if you’re too lazy to show up with the others, then you must not need the pay.’ With an impatient breath, Krator ducked back beyond the leather flap that was the doorway. A moment later he called out, ‘And Funig, don’t you go in the back bothering Jara. She’s busy now.’

  ‘Funig,’ Clodon went on, ‘you get me up and down here all for nothing! What do you call that? You’ve got a rock between your ears! Why’d you wait so long to get me—?’

  While Funig was saying, ‘Well, if he can’t wait for us, we’ve got other things we can do, don’t we, Clodon? Don’t we?’

  ‘You’re a fool, Funig!’

  From inside Krator called: ‘Why don’t the two of you just go on up—’

  Which is when Clodon saw the actress.

  She came to the window in the tavern’s sandy wall, and her skin was the color of a dark pear and her irises were startlingly black between two little almonds of ivory each. And the skin around them was darker. She smiled out on the inn yard like someone enchanted with the morning, who found this altercation between the village men intriguing and amusing and delightful and earthy; and the movement with which she stepped, in a moment, over in the window, with its shutters back for morning, was as graceful as any branch rising before a winter sun. She leaned an arm on the sill with her hand just visible, looking straight at him. Her fingertips ended in clean, cared-for nails. And, when Clodon stared back, her smile fragmented into laughter, and he found himself not speaking while his own stare became a smile. He nodded tentatively to her, feeling awkward about being a fat, loud, dirty man, with slop on his feet and an apple core in his fist, but smiling more broadly for it, because he also felt, looking at her looking at him—

  5. At sixteen, when Clodon ran away to Kolhari, he’d lived as best he could on the city’s crowded streets, loitering around the edge of the market, sleeping in this alley, or under that set of stairs, ambling across the bridge, or seeking out some neighborhood festival, where, with the music and the laughing and the drink and the food, it was almost possible to feel a part of the street life around him. He moved through the city, a lean youth, with a suspicious, or sometimes simply a stunned, expression, bearing the marks on his back and flanks of his provincial crimes.

  Within days of arriving, he discovered how to make a few coins on the Bridge of Lost Desire; but taking money from men who wanted to do what, a few times back in his village, he and his friends had forced the weakest and most cowardly boy among them to do only for degradation and humiliation’s sake seemed a slippage in values that was simply too uncomfortable. So while he spent a good deal of time in that most nefarious of neighborhoods in the city, he did not patrol the bridge’s walkways to search out money, food, or shelter with friendly glances to all who passed as frequently as some others. He didn’t relish begging, but the lies he often told to get a coin or a meal from this or that reluctant benefactor he could enjoy, especially when they worked.

  Once a barbarian, about his own age and living on the street as he w
as, told him: ‘Go down to the alley behind the market, to the second warehouse there. A grain merchant’s always standing about in the yard: he’s looking for smugglers to drive carts of illegal goods into the south. Bet he’ll give you a job.’

  ‘Why don’t you go?’ Clodon asked.

  The barbarian ran a hand through his bronze hair and grinned over a gap in his teeth. ‘I’m the wrong color. He doesn’t want fellows who look like me. He wants respectable looking drivers. You’ll get the job—if you wash and wear a shirt.’

  Clodon did neither. But he did stroll down to look for the merchant. He found him, standing in the second warehouse’s yard and talking to a secretary. The merchant wore lots of leather and frayed fabric laced up tight around his neck, so that sweat beads stood out across his dark forehead under whitening hair. The secretary left, but Clodon still lingered at the building’s corner, wondering what he would say. Finally, he walked up, stopped in front of the man, and said: ‘Hey. You’re looking for drivers to take carts into the south? I can do that. I don’t mind smuggling, either.’

  The merchant looked at him with a bemused expression. The silence between them grew uncomfortable. Finally Clodon wondered if he should just grunt some curse, spit on the ground, turn, and walk off. (Perhaps this was the wrong merchant …?) But even that seemed awkward now.

  Then the man said: ‘I can’t hire you.’

  ‘Why not?’ Clodon rubbed his thigh with a knuckle. A rash had started there that itched him, though you couldn’t see anything unless you looked closely at it in full sunlight. ‘I can handle mules. I’ve worked with oxen,’ both of which happened to be true. ‘Which do you want me to—’

  ‘There.’ The merchant pointed to Clodon’s side. ‘There—you see?’

  Clodon looked down, where the welts crawled around his flank. They made him uncomfortable and he chewed over another curse.

  But the merchant said: ‘You’ve already gotten yourself in trouble in whatever huddle of hovels you hail from—so I can’t take you on. Oh, you don’t have to tell me. It was an unfair trial. No one paid attention to your side of the story when it was presented to the elders. They’d had it in for you a year before they caught you and had you whipped. That’s why you’ve come to Kolhari, where an honest laborer has a chance. I’ve heard it before. But I still can’t use you. Not for this job. I can’t have a man driving for me who brings attention to himself every time the clouds clear and the sunlight falls on his back.’