Gorgik stood, his own blade finally drawn. Pryn scrambled up the furs to crouch by him.
At the steps’ foot, grunts and gasps and snarls: the barbarian and the man with the leather-bound hands and feet pummeled and bit and gouged at each other.
There was blood on the white hide.
Those who had rushed away rushed back.
Up from the grappling men, blood spurted—a crimson arch, half a meter high. Blood puddled the tile. The spurt fell. At the puddle’s edge, red wormed along a grouted crevice.
The barbarian was still, curled on his side like someone suddenly gone to sleep.
The other pushed himself up on all fours, head hanging. He went back to one knee. His shoulders were thin and brown. As well as his hands and feet, his knees and elbows were wrapped with leather. His black hair was long and in one place matted together—but by old dirt, Pryn realized, not blood. Breathing hard, he turned to grin at the throne.
And Pryn saw he had just one eye.
The pupil was black, wet; the white was deeply bloodshot. The eye looked ready to weep.
Momentarily Pryn thought he must have just lost the other; but the way the whole eyeless side of his face was sunken, with only the thin slash of a permanently sealed lid—the loss must have occurred years ago.
‘You’re safe, master!’ The little man laughed. The gaps and rots rimming his gum would have made the Badger’s mouth seem sound. He took big, gasping breaths. The muscles over his narrow chest looked strained to the tearing with them. ‘See, master? You’re safe!’ He grinned; he panted. The eye still seemed near tears. Looking about, he pointed at the barbarian’s sword, some feet away. ‘No harm from that now!’
The hilt of his own thin knife jutted awkwardly in the barbarian’s chest.
Somewhere off in firelight, the rope still swung, slowly.
‘Say—do you know me, master?’
Others moved up to crowd behind those already crowding.
‘Do you remember little Noyeed, from among the slaves at the obsidian mines…?’
The Liberator frowned.
‘No, you don’t remember me, master! I was an ugly, awkward, dirty boy. You were the foreman of our work gang, a slave like the rest of us—oh, yes!’ The little man looked about at the gawkers. ‘He was a slave, you know—my master. In the obsidian mines at the foot of the Faltha mountains. I was a slave with him!’ The little man threw up his chin, grabbed the flesh of his neck with bloody, bound hands and pulled the skin taut. ‘See! I am free! I am free! I escaped the mines! My neck is bare! And he still wears his collar, in our name! Wears it for us all! But when he was a slave, when I was a slave—’ Noyeed turned back, his wet eye blinking over his atrocious grin—‘he saved my life! You saved my life, master! And I have saved yours! I’d save yours a hundred times and give mine in the bargain; I’ve never forgotten you, master! Never!’
Gorgik still frowned. ‘I…remember you, Noyeed. And I—’ Gorgik stepped down a step. ‘I saved your…life?’
‘Aye, you saved me—so that I could go on to become Noyeed the runaway, Noyeed the scavenger, Noyeed the bandit—’ He grimaced—‘Noyeed the murderer!’ With a shrill laugh, he shook his head. ‘No, master, I’m not a good man!’ He got to his feet. ‘But you saved me—so that twenty-odd years later I could meet this barbarian dog, himself only just escaped from slavers in the west, hiding out in the caves of Makalata at the edge of the desert, skulking there among beggars, bones, and ashes, with his tales of treachery and betrayal, his plots for revenge and assassination! A madman, I tell you! A madman! He was going to assassinate my Gorgik, my master, the great and famous Gorgik, the Gorgik men and women speak of as the Liberator over all Nevèrÿon—the Gorgik without whom I never would have lived to make what little I have of my poor life!’ Noyeed turned to the throne. ‘I followed him, master! I followed him all the way across Nevèrÿon. I followed him here to the capital and finally to this subterranean hall! I tell you, half the time I couldn’t even believe his madness—that he would try to kill you! But when he made his move—’ The little man scurried to the corpse, one hand touching the ground three times in the journey (Pryn thought of dismounting from a dragon), grasped his hilt, and tugged the blade free to raise it in torchlight—‘I was here to make mine!’ He looked at Gorgik with his wet, black eye. ‘I was here for you, master, as you were for me—when I was a boy and we were both slaves in those cursed mines. Remember it?’
‘From what I remember,’ Gorgik said, ‘you might have more reason to hate me than to love me, Noyeed.’
‘Hate my master? Hate the man who saved me?’ Noyeed laughed again. ‘You are a great man now, master. Myself, I’m only a breath of freedom better than a slave. But I do not pretend to understand the jokes and jests of the great.’ He turned to the others. ‘My master jokes! But isn’t he a great man, my Liberator, my master, my Gorgik?’
The mumbling through the gathered men and women seemed more confusion than agreement. But it also seemed to serve the little man for corroboration. He grinned again, poking his blade-tip about for his sheath.
Men had crowded onto the steps, trying to see. One brushed Pryn’s arm. She glanced up to see the Western Wolf, at this point oblivious to her.
‘Shall I tell you how he saved my life?’ Noyeed looked back at Gorgik. ‘Shall I tell them, master?’
Gorgik came down another step, his frown—because of the scar, Pryn decided—particularly fierce. ‘Yes. You may tell them. Tell us all.’
The little man turned back to the others and drew another gulping breath. ‘I was not much below fourteen when I and some friends, playing near our village in the east, were taken by slavers. We fought, my friends and I—and I watched my nearest friend torn in three by two slavers who would slake their lusts on her body there. I saw my brother’s legs broken and his ribs cracked so that two stuck from the skin of his side—a day later they threw him, still breathing, down a cliff—I heard that. Him breathing. I didn’t see it. One of them had hit me in the face with the blunt end of a stick so hard the eyeball burst in my head—’ He jabbed a thumb at his sunken socket. I walked with them three days completely blind. Only after that did the first shadows of sight return in my remaining eye. Somewhere in it a birthday passed that I did not speak of and neither did they. A week later, they sold me among an even dozen to the obsidian mines, where I was given over to one of the barracks where Gorgik here—’ the thumb jabbed toward the Liberator—‘was the slave foreman. Oh, he was a slave, yes! But he was a powerful one! Had we been working on the grounds of some great lord’s estate, and not in that stinking imperial pit, he would have worn the white collar-cover of the highest ranking slave—everyone said so! And he deserved it! But no such honors were given in that deadly hole. You see that scar on his face?’ Again the little man pointed; and Pryn wondered if this were a tale he’d told frequently at taverns and campfires across Nevèrÿon, or if it were a secret story, rehearsed silently and continually for one glorious recitation. ‘You see it? Didn’t he have it the first time I blinked my good eye clear of what stuck my lashes together, half out of my head with fever and weak from thirst, and saw him for the first time, standing above me, looking down at me where I lay on my foul straw? They told me later he had gotten it in a brawl among the slaves when a guard went after him with a pickax because he had tried to protect some boy from their torments—it was legend in the camp. All talked of it. Am I right, master?’
‘Was it, now?’ Gorgik snorted. ‘And I cannot even remember the boy’s name. Go on, Noyeed.’
‘He was kind to me, my master was. I was just a child, smaller than that girl—’ which was a thumb at Pryn—‘half blind, almost too sick to walk—though that didn’t stop them from working me. They sent me down in the hole anyway, to carry out scraps of rock through the mud and dark. A slave who did not go down into the mines received neither food—which perhaps I could have done without a day or two—nor water—which I needed to guzzle, constantly and continuously, fo
r I always felt my skin was on fire over my bones. My master there, often he held my head while I drank—or while I threw up when I drank too much; or he would let me rest against the mine wall, looking stern at any man about to protest my indolence. And when, in the evening, back in the barracks, I would fall on my straw, too weak to fight for my supper and water, he would bring me food and a full gourd to drink from and sometimes would even sit and talk with me, joking to cheer me up, staying with me long enough so that no one came to steal my supper—making a little easier my steady slide toward a death that, even then, I only saw as an inevitable relief from the terror. I thought I would die.
‘So did they.
‘One night a bunch of miners in the dark came to my corner, held me down, and used my boy’s body like a woman’s, one after the other, now grunting, now biting my shoulder, now hissing threats of death should I cry out.’ (Leaning against the fur-covered arm of the throne, Pryn shifted her hip and wondered just how this little man thought a woman’s body was to be used.) ‘The next day, even the guards declared I was too far gone to go down into the pit. A day without food and water would probably have allowed me to put the second foot over the threshold of death where, clearly, I had already put the first. But Gorgik joked with the guards: “Oh, I think I can get another day or two of work from him. Give him an hour or so, and he’ll perk up.” Then he carried me into the hole himself, and throughout the day brought me water to drink, and for the rest left me alone. As for the others, well…clearly there was no reason to keep it from me. Now and then I would hear one of them talking within my hearing. Some that had abused me the night before, since I was not expected to last much longer, whispered to each other how they would be back that night to get what use they could of me—I tell you, if at the height of their lusts I had gone from live meat to dead, it wouldn’t have bothered them, till my actual corpse had got too cold to heat their night-labors. I knew that if what had been done to me the previous night were done to me again, by dawn I would be dead. But that evening, after supper, Gorgik brought a big-hipped man with a large nose, who wore clean blue wool, to my pallet—a eunuch of some noblewoman whose caravan had stopped for the night at the foot of the Falthas. She wanted a slave—for what reason I never knew. But Gorgik, as a foreman, had been asked to pick one out; and chose me—seeing clearly that any such change would have had to be for the better. The eunuch took me back to the lady’s tents and camels and provision wagons. It began to rain, I remember, while we walked. Twice, between the barracks and the caravan, I fell, and the eunuch, with many grunts of disgust, helped me to my feet. I remember standing alone among the tents, my eye closed, my head up, tasting the drops, feverish, more asleep than awake, and knowing—’ the bright eye blinked—‘as I knew you knew, master, that those who came to abuse me that night would find only my soiled straw, stained with the blood that had run between my legs from the night before and stinking of the urine I had spilled there because I was too frightened to crawl to the pee-trough.’ The little man, standing by the fallen barbarian, joggled the shoulder with his foot. ‘The noblewoman didn’t buy me. Why anyone might want such a sick and half-blind puppy as I was—why I should think anyone might, or why Gorgik there should think so…’ The little man blinked his eye. ‘Such is not really thinking; only the desire from desperation! Eventually the eunuch took me back to the mine. By now I was stopping every five or ten meters, my body blasted and shaken by a rasping cough, the snot flying, the mucus stringing my chin—I remember the eunuch, out of something between disgust and compassion, taking out his key and unlocking the hinge of my collar so I might breathe easier, though he left it around my neck. It was still dark and raining when I was brought back to the barracks. Nobody noticed that my collar was open. And the eunuch was quickly off to find a replacement. But I had been given one more night of life—for it was too late, now, for men who had to work the hours we worked to indulge such sport as had been planned. One more night of life—with death waiting ahead of it just as surely as it had before. But something had happened. Sick as I was, I had walked through damp fields, had passed by trees and looked at starlit mountains almost as a free man might look. Frequently the barracks were not secured on rainy nights—where might a slave go in his iron collar? But my collar was loose! I was exhausted, yet also feverishly awake. The guard was gone in the rain with the eunuch. I pushed to my knees and made my way to the door, refusing by main force to cough again, keeping my mouth wide or clenching my teeth by turns, gasping through my nose to suppress any sound that might give me away. The other slaves slept. I was outside the door—and fell in the mud. And crawled in the mud, I tell you now, with the pebbles cutting my knees and my hands. I know how weak I was; that night I crawled no more than a thousand feet from the mine encampment; and lay the day in the woods. Why they didn’t come looking for me, I don’t know. Perhaps they thought I was dead—perhaps the guards, hearing of the plan to abuse me as I had heard it myself, simply assumed I had died in the assault and my body been summarily disposed of. Such disposals were common enough in that place. Given my obvious destiny—death—perhaps they thought it better not to pursue me. Perhaps it was simply because I was no man and not much of a boy; or perhaps they were discouraged by a word from my master.’ Noyeed flashed another lopsided grin at Gorgik. ‘I know that toward evening I began to drag myself along again, starvation now joining my other ills. Still crawling, I finally reached a clearing, which, from the worn footpaths and the pattern of tent-post holes across the ground, I realized was the camp the caravan I had been to the previous night had, earlier that day, moved on from. Such a wealthy caravan as that leaves a wealth of garbage. That night I ate their garbage, slept in it, and woke to find myself rained on as I lay in it and slept again without moving; and, no doubt, ate more of it when I awoke. I left my collar in it. Somehow, even open, its stiff hinge had made it cling about my neck till I pulled it apart with my own hands. No doubt it’s still there, where I buried it, in that muddy refuse pit beside the caravan site at the base of the ragged Falthas. What I ate or where I slept over the next three nights, I don’t remember. The next I recall I was crouching in the dark outside a circle of firelight, blinking with my one eye at the conviviality of the travelers sitting about the flames, smelling the food they passed among them till I was sick with it. I did not dare enter. I was too frightened. On another night, I watched a band of slavers with their sorry wares make camp near a stream; and I asked myself if I were any better off than those chained and collared folk, who at least were being fed a double handful of oaten mush, spooned on the board laid down between their double line, their hands roped behind them, their chains clicking and clicking the plank as their heads bobbed, eating. And somehow my fever passed. I chewed my roots and, when one root made me sick, chewed no more like it. Somehow I sensed the ones that gave me nourishment and dug up more of the same. I ate beetles that scurried over logs before my dirty fingers. And when, on still another night, I walked into the firelit circle about still another gathering, whose camp and food preparations I had watched for hours till the sun had pulled all darkness down between the trees, I did not care if they were slavers or worse, so long as they would speak to me, look at me, beat me—even kill me.’ An incantatory delight had informed the little man’s tale till now. But here he drew his shoulders in, looked about nervously, as if he were suddenly struck with the amount of time he’d talked before this audience who’d just watched him kill. ‘The like of you fine folk would consider them worse. They would, master! They fed me. They beat me. They washed me. They made fun of me. They gave me a place to sleep. They joked with me, and they cursed me, and they set me hard—and, later, even dangerous—tasks. And though I ran away from them almost as long ago as I crawled away from the mine, they were the closest thing I ever had to a family, once I was snatched from my own. I follow their profession to this day—they were bandits!
‘I admit it!
‘I’m proud of it!
‘To be a bandit is
better than to be a slave!
‘Ah, master, my memory muddies much of this. But what I recall clearly through it all is you! You, master! You were the one who carried me up and down from the pit when I was too sick to walk. You were the one who sent me out of the slave pen with the noblewoman’s eunuch the night the others would have set upon me and killed me with their lusts.’ The little man looked down at the corpse; Pryn could see a sheepish grin pulling through the hard muscles of his face. ‘Treachery? Betrayal? The things this dog accused you of, even if you had done them, are nothing so special. Believe me, I’ve done my share of both! If all of us who’d done so had to die for it this day, there’d be few left in Nevèrÿon, either at the High Court or at the pit.’
One woman and several of the men chose to laugh at that, which made the little man look up, grinning.
‘I remember you in the mines, Noyeed,’ Gorgik said. ‘I remember holding your head while you drank, and carrying your small, hot body against me down into the hole. No doubt I shooed a few miners away who thought to put the rations of a dying boy to better use than you might. Such was my nature then; it’s much the same now. Tell me, Noyeed, do you remember the seven men who came to your straw that night and covered your body with theirs; and who—yes—whispered of coming to you again? There were seven—four common pit-slaves, a foreman, and two guards among them. Do you recall?’
The little man’s face twisted; he shook his head. ‘I’ve cursed my memory a thousand times—remember them? Remember their faces? Oh, no, it was too dark! Their voices? It was all grunts and whispers, while my ears rang with fever. If you could name me one, I’d kill him as quickly as I killed this dog!’
Gorgik snorted. ‘To be sure.’
Noyeed laughed again. ‘Master, you gave me life! You sent me from the mines to have that taste of freedom that returned to me the possibility of life in the midst of death! That’s why you must live!’ Turning, he spat on the corpse. ‘That’s why this barbarian dog had to die!’