The boy tossed the collar over the wall.
Only when the iron vanished below the stone (the splash was very soft—and a beat after he expected it) did Gorgik realize that the collar, broken, or not locked in the first place, had truly been removed. With no comprehension as to why, he was overcome by chills. They rolled over him, flank, thigh, and shoulder. His fingers against the doorway corner were sweaty on the stone. After five breaths with his mouth wide so as not to make a sound, questions began to pour through his mind: Was this some criminal only pretending to be a slave? Or was it a slave who, now that he’d freed himself from the iron, would pretend to be a criminal? Or was it just a young madman, whose tale in its broken, inarticulate complexities he could never hope to know? Or was there some limpid and logical answer to it that only seemed so complex because, till now, he’d never thought to ask the proper questions?
The boy turned and lowered himself to sit again on the stone.
Gorgik moved his hand, just a little, on the jamb.
Go, he thought. Speak to him. He may be older, but I’m still bigger than he, and stronger. What harm could it do me, if I just went up and asked him to tell me who he is, to give me whatever bit of his story …? Chills irrupted again, while he searched among the tales he’d been telling himself for any right reason to fear—in the middle of what had every aspect of terror about it, save motivation.
For some reason he remembered the woman on the docks. Had her fear, in all its irrationality, been anything like this …?
Five minutes later, he walked into the yard again—as he had already done a dozen times that day. The boy sat there, still not looking. Gorgik’s own eyes fixed on the thin neck, below ear and black, spiking hair, where the collar had been. In the moonlight, now and again as he neared, with this step and with that, he could almost see the iron against the dirty brown, where a neck ligament was crossed by an irregular vein …
No, the collar was gone.
But even absent, it plummeted Gorgik into as much confusion as it had before, so that, as he passed, it was all he could do not to flinch away, like the guard before the merchant’s coins, ears blocked by his own loud blood, all speech denied—and he was walking on, to the other side of the yard, down the alley, unable to remember the actual moment he’d passed the boy, who, he was sure, still had not looked up.
Gorgik was back at the yard with the sunrise.
The flogged boy was gone.
But as he wandered about, now glancing into the nearly empty cistern (he could make out nothing among the flashes on the black), now ambling off to examine this corner or that alley entrance, while dawn light slanted the western wall, all Gorgik was left with was a kind of hunger, a groping after some tale, some knowledge, some warm and material feeling against his body of what had escaped through silence.
Soon he returned to his house, where the dock water glittered down between the porch planks.
Kolhari was home to any and every adventurer—and to any and every adventure they were often so eager to tell. As Gorgik listened to this one and that, now from a tarry-armed sailor packing grain sacks at the docks, now from a heavy young market woman taking a break at the edge of the Spur, now to a tale of lust and loyalty, now to one of love and power, it was as if the ones he heard combined with the hunger left from the ones he’d missed, so that, in a week or a month, when he found himself reviewing them, he was not sure if the stories he had were dreams of his own or of the lives of others. Still, for all the tales, for all the dreaming, an adolescence spent roaming the city’s boisterous back streets, its bustling avenues, taught Gorgik the double lesson that is, finally, all civilization can know:
The breadth of the world is vasty and wide; nevertheless movement from place to place in it is possible; the ways of humanity are various and complex—but nevertheless negotiable.
Five weeks before Gorgik turned sixteen, the Child Empress Ynelgo, whose coming was just and generous, seized power. On that blustery afternoon in the month of the Rat, soldiers shouted from every street corner that the city’s name was now, in fact, Kolhari—as every beggar woman and ship’s boy and tavern maid and grain vendor had been calling it time out of memory. (It was no longer Neveryóna—which is what the last, dragon-bred residents of the High Court of Eagles had officially, but ineffectually, renamed it twenty years before.) That night several wealthy importers were assassinated, their homes sacked, their employees murdered—among them Gorgik’s father. The employees’ families were taken as slaves.
While in another room his mother’s sobbing turned suddenly to a scream, then abruptly ceased, Gorgik was dragged naked into the chilly street. He spent his next five years in a Nevèrÿon obsidian mine thirty miles inland at the foot of the Faltha Mountains.
Gorgik was tall, strong, big-boned, friendly, and clever. Cleverness and friendliness had kept him from death and arrest on the docks. In the mines, along with the fact that he had been taught enough rudiments of writing to put down names and record workloads, they eventually secured the slave a work-gang foremanship: which meant that, with only a little stealing, he could get enough food so that instead of the wiry muscles that tightened along the bony frames of most miners, his arms and thighs and neck and chest swelled, high-veined and heavy, on his already heavy bones. At twenty-one he was a towering, black-haired gorilla of a youth, eyes permanently reddened from rockdust, a scar from a pickax flung in a barracks brawl spilling one brown cheekbone. His hands were huge and rough-palmed, his foot soles like cracked leather.
He did not look a day more than fifteen years above his actual age.
2
THE CARAVAN OF THE Handmaid and Vizerine Myrgot, of the tan skin and tawny eyes, returning from the mountain hold of fabled Ellamon to the High Court of Eagles at Kolhari, made camp half a mile from the mines, beneath the Falthas’ ragged and piney escarpments. In her youth, Myrgot had been called ‘an interesting-looking girl’; today she was known as a bottomless well of cunning and vice.
It was spring and the Vizerine was bored.
She had volunteered for the Ellamon mission because life at the High Court, under the Child Empress Ynelgo, whose reign was peaceful and productive, had of late been also damnably dull. The journey itself had refreshed her. But within Ellamon’s fabled walls, once she had spent the obligatory afternoon out at the dragon corrals in the mountain sun, squinting up to watch the swoopings and turnings of the great, winged creatures (about which had gathered so many of the fables), she found herself, in the midst of her politicking with the mountain lairds and burghers, having to suffer the attentions of provincial bores—who were worse, she decided after a week, than their cosmopolitan counterparts.
But the mission was done. She sighed.
Myrgot stood in her tent door; she looked up at the black Falthas clawing through evening clouds and wondered if she might see any of the dark and fabled beasts arch the sunset. But no, for when all the fables were done, dragons were pretty well restricted to a few hundred yards of soaring and at a loss for launching from anywhere other than their craggy ledges. She watched the women in red scarves go off among other tents. ‘Jahor …?’
The eunuch with the large nose stepped from behind her, turbaned and breeched in blue wool.
‘I have dismissed my maids for the night. The mines are not far from here …’ The Vizerine, known for her high-handed manners and low-minded pleasures, put her forearm across her breasts and kneaded her bare, bony elbow. ‘Go to the mines, Jahor. Bring me back the foulest, filthiest, wretchedest pit slave from the deepest darkest hole. I wish to slake my passion in some vile, low way.’ Her tongue, only a pink bud, moved along the tight line of her lips.
The eunuch touched the back of his fist to his forehead, nodded, bowed, backed away the three required steps, turned, and departed.
An hour later, the Vizerine was looking out through the seam in the canvas at the tent’s corner.
The boy whom Jahor guided before him into the clearing limped a few steps fo
rward, then turned his face up in the light drizzle, that had begun minutes back, opening and closing his mouth as if around a recently forgotten word. The pit slave’s name was Noyeed. He was fourteen. He had lost an eye three months ago: the wound had never been dressed and had not really healed. He had a fever. He was shivering. Bleeding gums had left his mouth scabby. Dirt had made his flesh scaly. He had been at the mines one month and was not expected to last another. Seeing this as a reasonable excuse, seven men at the mines two nights before had abused the boy cruelly and repeatedly—hence his limp.
Jahor let him stand there, mouthing tiny drops that glittered on his crusted lips, and went into the tent. ‘Madame, I—’
The Vizerine turned in the tent corner. ‘I have changed my mind.’ She frowned beneath the black hair (dyed now) braided in many loops across her forehead. From a tiny taboret, she picked up a thin-necked copper cruet and reached up between the brass chains to pour out half a cup more oil. The lamp flared. She replaced the cruet on the low table. ‘Oh, Jahor, there must be someone there … you know what I like. Really, our tastes are not that different. Try again. Bring someone else.’
Jahor touched the back of his fist to his forehead, nodded his blue-bound head, and withdrew.
After returning Noyeed to his barracks, Jahor had no trouble with his next selection. When he had first come rattling the barred door of the guards’ building, he had been testily sent on in among the slat-walled barracks, with a sleepy guard for guide, to seek out one of the gang foremen. In the foul sleeping quarters, the burly slave whom Jahor had shaken awake first cursed the eunuch like a dog; then, when he heard the Vizerine’s request, laughed. The tall fellow had gotten up, taken Jahor to another, even fouler barracks, found Noyeed for him, and all in all seemed a congenial sort. With his scarred and puggish face and dirt-stiffened hair he was no one’s handsome. But he was animally strong, of a piece, and had enough pit dirt ground into him to satisfy anyone’s nostalgie de la boue, thought Jahor as the foreman lumbered off back to his own sleeping quarters.
When, for the second time that night, the guard unlocked the double catch at each side the plank across the barrack entrance, Jahor pushed inside, stepping from the rain and across the sill to flooring as muddy within as without. The guard stepped in behind, holding up the spitting pine torch: smoke licked the damp beams; vermin scurried in the light or dropped down, glittering, to the dirt. Jahor picked his way across muddy straw, went to the first heap curled away from him in thatch and shadow. He stopped, pulled aside frayed canvas.
The great head rolled up; red eyes blinked over a heavy arm. ‘Oh … ,’ the slave grunted. ‘You again?’
‘Come with me,’ Jahor said. ‘She wants you now.’
The reddened eyes narrowed; the slave pushed up on one great arm. His dark face crinkled around its scar. With his free hand he rubbed his great neck, the skin stretched between thick thumb and horny forefinger cracked and gray. ‘She wants me to …?’ Again he frowned. Suddenly he went scrabbling in the straw beside him and a moment later turned back with the metal collar, hinged open, a semicircle of it in each huge hand. Once he shook his head, as if to rid it of sleep. Straw fell from his hair, slid across his bunched shoulder. Then he bent forward, raised the collar, and clacked it closed. Matted hair caught in the clasp at the back of his neck. Digging with one thick finger, he pulled it loose. ‘There …’ He rose from his pallet to stand among the sleeping slaves, looking twice his size in the barracks shadow. His eyes caught the big-nosed eunuch’s. He grinned, rubbed the metal ring with three fingers. ‘Now they’ll let me back in. Come on, then.’
So Gorgik came, with Jahor, to the Vizerine’s tent.
And passed the night with Myrgot—who was forty-five and, in the narrowly restricted area she allowed for personal life, rather a romantic. The most passionate, not to say the most perverse, love-making (we are not speaking of foreplay), though it run the night’s course, seldom takes more than twenty minutes from the hour. As boredom was Myrgot’s problem and lust only its emblem, here and there through the morning hours the pit slave found himself disposed in conversation with the Vizerine. Since there is very little entertainment for pit slaves in an obsidian mine except conversation and tall-tale telling, when Gorgik began to see her true dilemma, he obliged her with stories of his life before, and at, the mines—a few of which tales were lies appropriated from other slaves, a few of which were embroideries on his own childhood experiences. But since entertainment was the desired effect, and temporariness seemed the evening’s hallmark, there was no reason to shun prevarication. Five times during the night, he made jokes the Vizerine thought wickedly funny. Three times he made observations on the working of the human heart she thought profound. For the rest, he was deferential, anecdotal, as honest about his feelings as someone might be who sees no hope in his situation. Gorgik’s main interest in the encounter was the story it would make at the next night’s supper of gruel and cold pig fat, though that interest was somewhat tempered by the prospect of the ten-hour workday with no sleep to come. Without illusion that more gain than the tale would accrue, lying on his back on sweaty silk his own body had soiled, staring up at the dead lamps swaying under the striped canvas, sometimes dozing in the midst of his own ponderings while the Vizerine beside him gave her own opinions on this, that, or the other, he only hoped there would be no higher price.
When the slits between the tent lacings grew luminous, the Vizerine suddenly sat up in a rustle of silks and a whisper of furs whose splendor had by now become part of the glister of Gorgik’s fatigue. She called sharply for Jahor, then bade Gorgik rise and stand outside.
Outside Gorgik stood, tired, lightheaded, and naked in the moist grass, already worn here and there to the earth with the previous goings and comings of the caravan personnel. He looked at the tents, at the black mountains beyond them, at the cloudless sky already coppered one side along the pinetops: I could run, he thought; and if I ran, yes, I would stumble into slavers’ hands within the day; and I’m too tired anyway. But I could run. I …
Inside, Myrgot, with sweaty silk bunched in her fists beneath her chin, head bent and rocking slowly, considered. ‘You know, Jahor,’ she said, her voice quiet, because it was morning and if you have lived most of your life in a castle with many other people you are quiet in the morning; ‘that man is wasted in the mines.’ The voice had been roughened by excess. ‘I say man; he looks like a man; but he’s really just a boy—oh, I don’t mean he’s a genius or anything. But he can speak two languages passably, and can practically read in one of them. For him to be sunk in an obsidian pit is ridiculous! And do you know … I’m the only woman he’s ever had?’
Outside, Gorgik, still standing, eyes half closed, was still thinking: yes, perhaps I could … when Jahor came for him.
‘Come with me.’
‘Back to the pit?’ Gorgik snorted something that general good nature made come out half a laugh.
‘No,’ Jahor said briskly and quietly in a way that made the slave frown. ‘To my tent.’
Gorgik stayed in the large-nosed eunuch’s tent all morning, on sheets and coverlets not so fine as the Vizerine’s but fine enough; and the tent’s furnishings—little chairs, low tables, shelves, compartmented chests, and numberless bronze and ceramic figurines set all over—were far more opulent than Myrgot’s austere appointments. With forty minutes this hour and forty minutes that, Jahor found the slave gruff, friendly—and about as pleasant as an exhausted miner can be at four, five, or six in the morning. He corroborated the Vizerine’s assessment—and Jahor had done things very much like this many, many times. At one point the eunuch rose from the bed, bound himself about with blue wool, turned to excuse himself a moment—unnecessarily, because Gorgik had fallen immediately to sleep—and went back to the Vizerine’s tent.
Exactly what transpired there, Gorgik never learned. One subject, from time to time in the discussion, however, would no doubt have surprised, if not shocked him. When the Vizerine h
ad been much younger, she herself had been taken a slave for three weeks and forced to perform services arduous and demeaning for a provincial potentate—who bore such a resemblance to her present cook at Court that it all but kept her out of the kitchen. She had been a slave only three weeks: an army had come, fire-arrows had lanced through the narrow stone windows, and the potentate’s ill-shaved head was hacked off and tossed in the firelight from spear to spear by several incredibly dirty, incredibly tattooed soldiers so vicious and shrill that she finally decided (from what they later did to two women of the potentate’s entourage in front of everyone) they were insane. The soldiers’ chief, however, was in alliance with her uncle; and she had been returned to him comparatively unharmed. Still, the whole experience had been enough to make her decide that the institution of slavery was totally distasteful and so was the institution of war—that, indeed, the only excuse for the latter was the termination of the former. Such experiences, among an aristocracy deposed by the dragon for twenty years and only recently returned to power, were actually rather common, even if the ideas taken from them were not. The present government did not as an official policy oppose slavery, but it did not go out of its way to support it either; and the Child Empress herself, whose reign was proud and prudent, had set a tradition that no slaves were used at Court.
From dreams of hunger and pains in his gut and groin, where a boy with clotted mouth, scaly hands, half his face in darkness, and his flank wrapped round with whip welts tried to tell him something he could not understand, but which seemed desperately important that he know, Gorgik woke with the sun in his face. The tent was being taken down from over him. A blue-turbaned head blocked the light. ‘Oh, you are awake …! Then you’d better come with me.’ With the noise of the decamping caravan around them Jahor took Gorgik to see the Vizerine. Bluntly she informed him, while ox drivers, yellow-turbaned secretaries, red-scarved maids, and harnessed porters came in and out of the tent, lifting, carrying, unlacing throughout the interview, that she was taking him to Kolhari under her protection. He had been purchased from the mines—take off that collar and put it somewhere. At least by day. She would trust him never to speak to her unless she spoke to him first: he was to understand that if she suspected her decision were a mistake, she could and would make his life far more miserable than it had ever been in the mines. Gorgik was at first not so much astonished as uncomprehending. Then, when astonishment, with comprehension, formed, he began to babble his inarticulate thanks—till, of a sudden, he became confused again and disbelieving and so, as suddenly, stopped. (Myrgot merely assumed he had realized that even gratitude is best displayed in moderation, which she took as another sign of his high character and her right choice.) Then men were taking the tent down from around them, too. With narrowed eyes, Gorgik looked at the thin woman in the green shift and sudden sun, sitting at a table from which women in red scarves were already removing caskets, things rolled and tied in ribbons, instruments of glass and bronze. Was she suddenly smaller? The thin braids, looped bright black about her head, looked artificial, almost like a wig. (He knew they weren’t.) Her dress seemed made for a woman fleshier, broader. She looked at him, the skin near her eyes wrinkled in the bright morning, her neck a little loose, the veins on the backs of her hands as high from age as those on his from labor. What he did realize, as she blinked in the full sunlight, was that he must suddenly look as different to her as she now looked to him.