Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

  ‘Al—’ Clodon hesitated. ‘No … I don’t think I can. I’d get it wrong. And then you’d laugh at me.’ But he didn’t mind her laughter: indeed, he wanted her to smile and laugh as much as she might. ‘Al-lary—’

  ‘Alharid.’

  ‘Ulrik—’

  ‘Alharid?’

  ‘Clodon!’

  ‘Oh, you’re doing it on purpose!’ And she did think that was funny.

  ‘But I really can’t say it,’ he told her. ‘It sounds like a foreign name.’

  ‘Not at all!’ she said. ‘At least it’s not foreign where I come from.’

  Clodon stopped and turned to orient himself—wondering if, from the little height they’d walked to, he might learn more. They were fifty feet from the inn and only a bit above it. By the back of the low stone building, in the shade, Funig sat against the wall, pawing something up out of a bowl. He’d gotten his breakfast from Jara and had snuck off to have it alone! There, he was up on one knee, squinting after them—set to run, now that Clodon had seen him.

  Clodon looked at Alharid. ‘That’s my friend,’ he said with a jerk of his head.

  She raised her hand to wave.

  ‘No, leave him alone!’ Clodon all but reached out to pull her arm down. ‘He’s got things to do.’ He turned and started up the road again.

  ‘Oh.’ She walked with him.

  If, in a minute, Funig came lurching up behind them with an offer to share his pot, Clodon would tell him what he could do with it!

  But a minute later, they were still alone.

  Clodon said: ‘Al … Alharid?’ So much for friends, in these mean, small-minded towns.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Now I was wondering. About the man they said you came here with.’

  ‘He’s from Minogra,’ Alharid said.

  ‘Now that’s a town I’ve never been in. But I hear it’s not more than three, four days off.’

  ‘I’ve only spent an afternoon there myself. It’s a little clutch of buildings up on a cliffside—not much else.’

  ‘Is he your fellow?’

  ‘Him?’ She put her hands against the dark skirt covering her thighs and bent forward to laugh, then threw back her head. ‘Oh, no—he’s a very proper country gentleman! He has a whole set of little fruit orchards there. And I’m sure at least one, if not three, mistresses, besides his very dour faced wife you couldn’t tell from a house slave, the way he orders her about to bring him this and fetch him that! He’s got eight grown children—and I don’t think he’s as old as you are!’

  Clodon thought about saying he had a few himself. Then thought better. But she was going on:

  ‘You can be sure: he’d rather take seven of the welts off your back and put them on his own, before he’d have anything carnal to do with a woman who mounts the mummer’s platform in the markets of the great cities and sings and dances and plays her Highness the Empress one night, a prostitute the next, and an evil sorceress the night after. No.’ She shook her head. ‘He was nice enough to offer me a ride and what little protection he could as far as Narnis and the next town over. But he has his business. I have mine. And there we’ll part company.’ She glanced at him. ‘He has his troubles with my name too.’

  ‘The Empress,’ he said. ‘And a prostitute—and a sorceress? You’re very young to be so many things.’

  ‘Do you think so? How sweet! What age do you think I am?’

  ‘Seventeen?’ The woman under the bridge he’d always thought had been about twenty. ‘Eighteen?’

  ‘Oh, you’re not sweet at all!’ she declared. ‘You’re lying!’

  Thinking he’d been found out, he tried to look sheepish.

  ‘I’m a good deal closer to thirty than I am to twenty—and from the wrong direction, too. At least if you’re in my line of work.’

  Clodon was startled. He had thought she was twenty, or not much above. ‘Well, you know,’ he said. ‘You get my age and all you youngsters start to look alike.

  ‘Youngster?’ She cocked her head. ‘Then you are sweet after all, I suppose! And with no make-up on, either? But I’m not a little girl, though I’m endlessly flattered you think so.’

  They were coming to the edge of the village proper. The prospect of an hour’s walk beyond it through rocks and trees to an unknown end began to weigh on Clodon.

  Off between two poorer shacks a boy was walking whom Clodon had seen before. Sometimes Funig had spoken to him—he was supposed to be a bad sort. His parents were dead, and he lived with his grandfather. He wouldn’t stay on any job more than a few days; and the village rumor was that if he went on the way he was, he was not more than a year from a flogging.

  ‘You stay here—’ Clodon said, suddenly, and hurried off after him. ‘Hey—!’

  The boy kept walking.

  ‘Hey, you hear me talking to you?’

  The boy glanced back, but kept going.

  ‘Here, stop up a minute! I’m speaking to you.’

  With a wary look, the boy halted.

  Clodon came up to him, lowering his voice. ‘How do I get to the gorge?’

  The boy said: ‘What?’

  ‘The gorge. Which way is it?’

  The boy said: ‘Why?’

  ‘Come on,’ Clodon said, ‘tell me! The lady there, she has to go. You know where it is?’

  The boy moved one foot on the dirt and scowled, as if debating with himself whether to say.

  ‘Come on, now!’ Clodon said. ‘You want me to take a hand to you?’

  ‘Well, it isn’t that way.’ The boy nodded back toward where the woman stood.

  Clodon put a fist on his hip. ‘Then how do you go? You probably don’t even know!’

  ‘What if I didn’t?’

  Clodon grunted and raised his chin.

  The boy said: ‘You take the big path. It goes along to it.’

  ‘What big path?’

  ‘The big path,’ the boy said. ‘Down there.’ He pointed through the country alley. ‘When it splits, you go that way’ which was a jerk of his head to the left. ‘Puts you right out at the bottom of Venn’s Stair.’

  ‘And that’s it?’ Whatever Venn’s Stair was, Clodon just hoped it was where he wanted to go.

  ‘You’ll be right at it.’ The boy looked Clodon up and down, as if getting ready to say something. But Clodon sucked his teeth, turned, and hurried back to Alharid—remembering, with irrelevant surprise, from years and years ago, a woman with a water jar on her shoulder who’d once given him directions in Kolhari. For all the disadvantages of city life, there was something to be said for a place where, when you asked someone something, they told you what you wanted to know without a lot of smart answers.

  ‘What was that about?’ Alharid asked.

  ‘I just had some business with him.’ Clodon gave a few small nods. He didn’t want to go down that way if the boy was just standing and staring and glanced back to see if the boy had gone.

  The boy was standing and staring.

  Well, they could go down a little ways above and catch the same big path—if it was the one Clodon, now, was sure it was. ‘Come on.’ He started again.

  She walked with him. ‘I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop,’ she said. ‘But I thought I heard him say it was that way …?’ She gave a very small incline to her head.

  ‘It is,’ he said. ‘We’ll go over there in a bit.’ The path became steeper. ‘You know, some things, local sights, you know? Because you live with them all your life, you never go see them. Now would you believe, I haven’t been up to the gorge since I was his age.’ He thumbed back to where the boy still watched. ‘I hardly remember the way. They were supposed to be building a new road there, a few years back, so that people like you could go and see it any time they wanted.’ All these stories, Clodon thought. Well, at least they filled the time. ‘But I never even heard if they finished it or not. That’s all I was asking about.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  He wondered if she believed any of them
. ‘We’ll go by here.’

  Beyond the next house the path aside sloped grandly down. In two minutes they came to a wide dirt road, which Clodon recognized as the one on which, a hundred yards back and around a bend, Teren was building his new house. At least the work site was behind them.

  They turned along it.

  The road sloped gently.

  ‘It splits off up here,’ he said. ‘We have to keep an eye out for it.’

  ‘All right.’ She looked up at the trees on either side. ‘It is a wonderful day, isn’t it?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes. Are you from Kolhari?’

  ‘I’ve lived there more of my life than not. But no, I wasn’t born there—though, in Kolhari, that’s true of half the people you see on the street. It’s like every small town in Nevèrÿon, poured into one kettle and mixed about.’

  He was afraid she’d start to ask him about his year there. So he said: ‘Your traveling friend—someone told me, last night at the inn, he was talking about the Liberator, this Gorgik fellow? There was a great discussion.’

  ‘Oh, was there now?’ She shook her head a bit. ‘When we were riding together, though I certainly tried, I couldn’t get him to talk about anything! After a few stabs, I finally sat back and decided I’d best be the demure thing he’d be most comfortable with. Gorgik the Liberator? Now that’s something I happen to know of. His loss. But isn’t that the way with country gentlemen?’

  ‘They were talking about him and his barbarian friend. I knew some barbarians when I was in Kolhari. But they weren’t much for friendship.

  ‘Well, why should they be, at least with us?’

  He wasn’t sure what she meant, so he said, ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Really,’ she went on, ‘that’s exactly what I mean. About the barbarian. That’s news a year out of date! If he’d done more than grunt at me when his wagon wheel went over a rock, he would have known it and had something interesting to say to his tavern cronies when he got here. I went to bed early.’ She frowned. ‘And slept so late … !’

  ‘What do you know about the Liberator?’

  ‘Well, he’s not fighting alongside his barbarian any more. They had a falling out.’

  ‘That would be what I’d expect from the barbarians I knew, when I was in Kolhari.’

  ‘His new lieutenant is a strange little one-eyed man. There’re all sorts of tales. Some say it’s magic; some say politics.’

  ‘Have you ever seen him?’

  ‘Which one? The Liberator? His lieutenant?’

  ‘Either.’

  ‘Oh, when our troupe plays the old Kolhari market, sometimes he walks through the square—’

  ‘Off the Bridge of Lost Desire?’ Clodon offered.

  ‘That’s the one. Our platform and wagons always were set up on the far side. Did you ever see us?’

  Clodon snorted. ‘I was there twenty-five years ago, little girl!’ He’d never seen any mummers at all, though once someone had told him vaguely what they did.

  ‘Well, then, you certainly wouldn’t have seen me in the troupe! I didn’t mount the boards for the first time till I was at least thirteen. Then, at seventeen I retired to be the loving wife of a man who didn’t appreciate my talent at all. I made my triumphal return to the stage when I was twenty—don’t ask me what happened to the children. You’ll make me start to cry.’

  Clodon laughed. ‘You don’t ask me about mine; I won’t ask you about yours.’ When he looked at her again, though, she was blinking at him seriously.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘we’re not such a nice pair after all.’

  He frowned back. ‘What about the Liberator?’

  ‘Oh, the great Gorgik? He doesn’t like the theater. I told you he walks about in the market. Now in between our skits, now from around the corner of one of the prop wagons, I’ve had him pointed out to me fifty times. And I’ve pointed him out at least to fifty others. Oh, he’s a very impressive man to see. And to listen to, at least I’ve been told so. I’ve never heard him speak myself, but I’ve spoken to others who’ve heard him not an hour before telling me about it. They say he has a great and sincere desire for freedom for all Nevèrÿon’s oppressed.’

  ‘Oh, I know what kind of desire he has!’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘there’s that too. But then he’s never made a secret of it.’

  ‘How could he,’ Clodon said, ‘if he wears his collar right out for all to see?’

  But she seemed to be thinking of something else. ‘I’ve always wondered why he never stopped to watch us. No time for it, I suppose. Though, in at least a dozen of our entertainments, we’ve made him a character—now the hero, now the villain, depending on the temper of the times. But that’s fame for you. Myself, if I were him, I’d want to see what people were saying about me. But he’s a man with a mission. A man? He’s practically a giant. He strides about, in his great iron collar—’

  ‘With the welts of a rebellious slave across his back?’

  Alharid frowned. ‘No, actually.’ She pursed her lips. ‘He has a scar on his face—right down across one eye. A bit like yours, there. At least it’s in the same place. But it’s much bigger. Not that anyone could mistake the two of you for one another.’ (The road had split. Without even a mention, Clodon had taken them off to the left, like one easy and familiar with this landscape a lifetime. Only why, he wondered, was the general slope down, rather than up?) ‘He was a real slave himself, once. But you knew that.’ (Clodon hadn’t till now. It made it all seem odder.) ‘It’s how I think we all know he’s sincere. But all his rebellion came only once he managed to get free: no, he avoided flogging while he was in servitude. There’re as many among the more radical factions in this land who think that stands against him as there’re those, among the conservatives, who find it a trait to praise. No.’ With a considering expression, she shook her head slowly. ‘He has no flogging marks. And that’s the sort of thing I’d remember.’

  ‘And why would somebody like you remember something like that?’

  ‘It’s the kind of thing one sees about a man. If you’re me, at any rate. The fact is, for reasons I couldn’t begin to tell—’ she looked at him with a sideways smile that was different, and more interesting, than any of her others—‘I’ve always had a fascination with men who rebelled enough to get themselves whipped for it. Doesn’t that make me a silly woman, now!’

  He looked at her, having, at this point, forgotten to smile.

  ‘What kind of fascination …?’

  ‘Oh, what kind of fascination does a woman develop? I even married one, once. Eighteen welts across his back from three different whippings in three different towns. No, I’m not talking about the scoundrel I left the mummers for when I was seventeen—he should have been flogged! Both before he met me and, certainly, after. But this was in Sarness—much later. It didn’t last very long. A disaster, really. They came and arrested him practically out from under me—I could still smell his sweat on the insides of my arms. Oh, I suppose I should have fought and screamed and bitten and tried to hold him to me. But it wouldn’t have made much difference. I just stood there … and watched while they took him away. I guess my fascination doesn’t really extend that far. It probably would have been lovely, though, if we’d just been friends for a while. Like you and me.’

  Clodon had—almost—stopped breathing again. He said: ‘I have a fascination with … women … with—’ He gulped in air, and looked at her; she looked at him with all seriousness, all smile gone; and suddenly it seemed so terribly important to say it, for he was sure he would never have another chance—‘who smile at me with eyes … like your eyes. Who have such hands as you have.’ There, was that it? Turning his face forward, he realized he couldn’t see the road at all in front of him. ‘Who walk—’ He heard his voice catch roughly—‘with such feet as you walk with.’ He slapped both hands against his face, pulling a breath between his palms, rubbing his eyes with horny fingers. And went on walking. ‘And it’s going to shake me apart, to
day, if it doesn’t kill me before the night comes. Is that the kind of fascination … that you have? That you could have … for someone who had …?’ He tried to say it but it was something between a choking and a grunting and a gasp.

  While he rubbed his eyes and kept walking, she didn’t speak, so that, as when she’d vanished from the window, he began to wonder if, yet again, she were really there at all and this was only some fantasy that had, in his dotage, become too real.

  ‘I’m an old man,’ he said. ‘An old, bad, dirty man. Sometimes rough men, old men, men with no breeding, like me, they’ll talk about each other’s foolishness over the girls, and they’ll say, “Well, you know, he hadn’t had a woman in a while,” to explain why one of them did what they did. But they’re fools and liars. I’ve had women, plenty of women, in all the ways a man can have them—but, when I see you—’ He took his hands, his ugly hands, the right one with its missing finger, away from his eyes, blinking the road back into tearing clarity—

  She touched his shoulder … with her fingertips! And they moved in a way that told him she was walking with him, was listening to him, even though he couldn’t look at her.

  ‘—but when I see you,’ he said, ‘I know I’ve never had any woman before—not like you. I’ve never been nearer one than now, never glimpsed one from so close before, and certainly never spoken to any. I’m an ugly, dirty, bad old man, who’s never had a woman—like you? But why should I even have to say that part? And it’s the crudest thing the nameless gods have ever done to me to make me say it now. To you. Like this. And look such a fool for it!’

  They walked for a while. There was a roaring someplace. She said:

  ‘Then why have you done it?’ There was, at least, concern in her voice. ‘What did you hope to do by … saying it?’

  ‘I don’t know’ he said. ‘I don’t know! Nothing! I don’t know …’

  They walked a little further. The air had grown damp around them. After a bit she said:

  ‘No …’ in such a way that he looked at her. ‘No, that’s not the kind of fascination I mean.’