‘Rain?’ asked the little princess. ‘But it doesn’t rain. Not at this time of year, my monkey. Not in Nevèrÿon. Now there’s only fog.’ She waved the goblet, spilling more cider, her speech more unsteady. ‘Be still, or I shall order you roasted. On a spit! And I shall eat you up, as Mad Olin once ordered her own sons so served, when, indeed, it did rain with such torrential fury that—’
‘Master!’ Noyeed was up on his knees on the table. ‘Master, when we quit this castle to move on to some other—’
But the princess was chuckling to herself, over her drink. ‘I dream…’ she repeated. ‘I dream, here on the border of Nevèrÿon. In my old, cold castle, I dream of nobility and grandeur and truth. I dream of using my meager hoard to finance a great man in his humane and wondrous cause, which I know is benevolent and brave. His truth and commitment will reintroduce purpose, passion, excitement, and wonder among these ancient stones. I will love and revere him in his commitment to his truth. He will respect and cherish me in my commitment to him. Oh, I dream…’ As she smiled, firelight burnished her drab collar, her goblet. ‘If I escape this dream with my life—’ she sipped again—‘I will be satisfied. With less, and I won’t complain. If I escape with my life in any way enriched, well then, I shall count myself the luckiest of women. Oh, I’m old enough to know that dreams have their own beginnings, their own climaxes, their own ends—that, when a wandering taleteller imposes such orderings on her stories, it makes those chaotic compilations so much less like life, yet so much more exciting. No, when I began this dream, one of the things I was determined to do was dream it to its end, if only to see what such a dream might leave me with. Life, I sometimes think—like dreams, like stories, like plans, even like lies if you will—is to be pondered on, interpreted, interrogated: but you had best not try to change it too radically in the middle, or you risk never finding its secret. If you must leave my dream, my great Liberator, my one-eyed lieutenant, to follow yours, you must leave. I can stand being left again with mine.’
Beyond the beam, the soldiers’ noise rose, with clattering arms and laughter. An officer with a sheaf of parchments ducked in through the far hanging, now pausing to call something to one soldier, now making his way through several others in comradely converse.
Gorgik raised a bushy eyebrow.
On the table edge, Noyeed grasped his knees once more. ‘And how did you learn to dream such wise dreams, my mistress?’
But the little princess was gazing into her cider.
Reaching the table, the officer dropped his bunched parchments on the map. ‘You might look at these, my Liberator, if you’re still making plans to depart…?’
‘Leaving me,’ mumbled the princess. ‘Yes, here on the border of Nevèrÿon, you’re already making plans to leave, to go on. But where are you going?’
Noyeed turned toward her on the table. ‘My princess, the further we get from the center, the better the fighting. Haven’t you said so yourself? And so, we plan, we dream of going on, going further, going beyond…’
Gorgik picked up one and another parchment, putting this one aside, handing that one back, gazing at the next and nodding. ‘It’s going well.’ Most stayed on the table; Gorgik looked at Noyeed, at the princess. ‘Reinforcements for us have come from friends both to the east and the west. But the empress’s troops are still new here and unacquainted with the territory. When we started, I didn’t think it could be done. But we’re holding off the small forces that the local brewers and less powerful nobles have been able to muster. They have no trained fighters among them, other than those the Child Empress has been able to send them. How many of them can read a map, much less make one?’
The officer lingered. ‘My Liberator…?’
Gorgik looked up.
‘The guard told me to tell you he’s caught another smuggler. Outside the castle, he was trying to sneak his cart across the princess’s grounds.’
‘A smuggler?’ The princess put down her goblet. ‘A smuggler, you say? No! What would a smuggler be doing on my lands? I allow no smuggler on my grounds—’
‘He may be a spy, master…’ Noyeed remarked, softly and intensely. ‘Soon, they will be sending even more spies than they do already.’
Gorgik looked up. ‘We’ve had enough experience with spies by now to know how best to take precautions. Bring him up,’ Gorgik said to the officer and, turning, to the others, ‘so that we can ponder on, can interpret, can interrogate this smuggler, this spy…But first—’ Gorgik stood up behind the table—‘clear the hall!’ This was a bellowed order.
Soldiers began to stand, as if they were used to such directives.
‘Clear the hall, now!’ Gorgik looked down. ‘You too, little princess. Retire now, and leave the hall to me.’
‘But why, my Liberator…?’ She was clearly annoyed at having to move.
‘If he is a spy said Gorgik, ‘I would rather he not know who I am.’
She rose from the bench, taking her goblet. ‘I don’t understand all this secrecy. This is not the way my father or my uncle would have conducted such a campaign from these halls.’
‘I’m a public man, my princess. That means my only meaning is the web of signs I publicly inhabit. Thus, I would appear to our visitor as close to naked, unarmed, and without ornament as I can.’
‘But—’
‘We do not have many soldiers. Those we have are so few they can vanish easily among the corridors and chambers of your great castle here, or into the lands around them if they have to. I have few—and our smuggler will leave here thinking I have none. Or, at any rate, he will think I have no more than the guard who captured him. Later, if he meets someone who has fought against our brave handful, that one will say I have many—while he will declare I do not. And what will happen in the course of their altercation? Believe me, the number of fighters I have will double, treble, quadruple by the end of their argument on one side—while, on the other, even the guard who took this smuggler will, no doubt, vanish completely as this smuggler insists I carry on my campaign entirely alone. Princess, I have made a point never to be fully present within the central crypts of power where I’m reputed to reside—at least never in the full force, true complexity, and complete organization by which most hope to know me. It is a strategy I learned many years ago when I worked for Lord Aldamir in the south. Such subterfuge has laid about me a fog of confusion and misinformation that has often aided me—’
‘But then, master,’ stated Noyeed, ‘you are seldom fully absent either.’
The Liberator chuckled. ‘And that I learned simply from the exigencies of the times.’ The chuckle—‘Now go, my princess—’ as he looked about, again became a bellow: ‘And clear the hall! Quickly! Clear it!’ He glanced at the one-eyed man. ‘You stay, Noyeed.’
‘Yes, master!’
The dripping roof brushed his hair and made him crouch again, as he clutched the sack to his chest.
‘Get in, now!’ The guard shoved the small of his back, hard, so that, staggering, he reached out with one hand to steady himself against the wall that crumbled under his fingers like dried mud. Behind him: ‘Get in!’
He rushed toward the hanging, thinking to find blackness, pushed through, ducking under a sagging lintel, to hear the echo of his breath change timbre. He stopped and stood, slowly, in the flickering room. A beam slanted through it, ceiling to floor. Beyond, a plank table stood by a wide fire.
A man sat behind it.
Another squatted on the table itself among mugs, goblets, and parchments.
When the young smuggler had realized the guard who’d accosted him was taking him to the Liberator, he’d thought pretty much everything he’d thought before, felt pretty much everything he’d felt before, when he’d met the man on the bridge or, again, when he’d found the man in the clearing. There was curiosity and pleasure and wonder. There was fear and disbelief and—as the guard had shoved him through the corridor—outrage at betrayal.
Because of his two earlier
encounters, for all he’d felt, for all he’d thought, he said none of the things he’d said before.
But as he stood in the flicker, however, he began to think and feel something new:
I have just become one of those people who, from now on, must say: There are two of them, not one. There’s a big one, with a scar down his cheek. And there’s a little one, with one blind eye, who goes about in a slave collar. And, for all my researches, that is not who I was only moments ago…
Or have I become that…? (The smuggler narrowed his eyes, for the feeling of disorientation was different from the other times: it was smaller, clearer, more precise.) In this ill light, have I really seen them? Or am I only putting those identities upon the shadowed faces before me, like a student come down to write his unreadable profanities on some wall in the Spur? Be clear. Be certain. Be careful with this truth. Because I am better equipped to see it than most, I above all must not let my equipment itself fool me.
The big man stood up at his bench, walked to the table’s end, and came around it.
The young smuggler edged forward, hugging his sack.
The big man was naked, with only some leather web pouching his genitals. At one ear, his hair was braided with a bit of thong.
On the table, the little man rested a sharp chin on his knees.
The smuggler squinted, trying to clear both faces in the flames’ light. But, looking back and forth between them, trying to hold on to the full and heavy features or the small and acute ones, the fire and his attention itself seemed to distort vision.
On the cheek of the big one standing—a veritable giant—that could have been a scar…
The little one squatting blinked one eye. His other was sunken; or sealed; or perhaps was only in shadow…
‘Are you…’ the young smuggler hazarded.
‘—the Liberator?’ The big man laughed. What do you think? What do you see around me?’
The young smuggler shook his head, bewildered, and hugged his sack higher.
‘Do you see here all the Liberator’s hundreds of troops?’ He gestured about the empty hall. ‘His dozens of secretaries, aides, and orderlies? his spies and provocateurs? the whole elaboration of the fighting forces with which, carrying on his campaign, he has freed thousands of slaves throughout the nation and has made even the Child Empress herself and all her ministers quake in the High Court? Or do you see, perhaps, a single man with a guard or two in an all but abandoned castle?’
The smuggler frowned at the man on the table, who laughed, sharply and shortly.
‘Or perhaps—’ The little man spoke in an accent very different from the big one’s clear, Kolhari diction—‘you think you see two men…?’ Pushing parchments with his hip, he moved to the table edge to drop one ankle over. ‘You don’t, you know.’ Yes, a metal collar, nearly black, hung on his scrawny neck. ‘You don’t even see one. No human forms stand or sit before you. You face only some illusion that mimics the form of men as, without names, the gods do. No real castle of granite and fitted stone stands around you. Think, rather, that as the night fog drifted and flowed about you, making one shape after another, as the night sounds rose and fell, twittered and cheeped, at some unfixable point in your journey they came together for a moment in the suggestion of the man and his shadow some have called the Liberator, as well as this castle about him, and the guard who your memory says brought you here. Realize that, there and here, those wisps and chitterings have played on your imagination to suggest even me and the words I speak, now, here. Wandering in the mists, you merely think you’ve come into the presence of the Liberator, when actually it’s the fog-filled night’s autumnal sorcery—’
The Liberator raised his hand. (The little man silenced.) ‘What questions do you have for me? Do you want to know who I am? Or where you are? Or what I intend to do with you now that I’ve had you brought here? Talk.’ The big man actually smiled. ‘You’ll find we autumnal night wisps are not that frightening.’
The young smuggler took a breath and, with one hand, released his sack and pointed to the table. ‘Those…?’ Because that was all he could think of now: they were the only thing that seemed solid.
Frowning, Gorgik glanced back; Noyeed looked down beside him.
‘Those skins,’ the smuggler said. ‘They have writing on them, don’t they…?’
Gorgik nodded.
(A scar? A shadow…?)
‘Can you read?’
Glancing back again, the big man frowned at the little one.
The little man hazarded: ‘I can’t. But he can. Can you?’
The young smuggler shook his head quickly. ‘Oh, no!’
‘You can’t? Not at all?’ The big man stepped closer, observing. ‘Oh, I bet you know the signs for…’ The green eyes narrowed in the flickering light—‘women’s genitals, men’s excreta, and cooking implements, in all their combinations, the curses that are forever scratched and scrawled on walls up in the city—you sound as if you’ve spent some time in Kolhari. Am I right?’
‘Oh, yes. Those writings, yes,’ the smuggler lied. ‘I can read those.’ Momentarily he was back in that hot afternoon when his Kolhari friend had labored with a stick over a stretch of mud down at the edge of the Khora, ineffectually trying to teach him the written forms of profanation.
‘Like everyone in this country the big man commented over his shoulder to the smaller, ‘slowly he is learning to read and write. Take a lesson there, Noyeed.’
‘But what do…you use it for?’ (Noyeed! Then that was the little one’s name! Then the big one must be…No, he must wait.) ‘The writing, I mean?’
‘I use it to remember. To remember, clearly and accurately, what I have, what I need, what I’ve done, what I must do, where I’ve been, where I must go, what I’ve seen, and what I must still look for. Memory often plays tricks on you even minutes after your thoughts have settled somewhere else.’
‘Oh, I know!’ The smuggler nodded.
‘With writing, you are free to use your thinking in other ways. I can observe clearly and carefully what I have to—but do not have to worry about recalling it later if it is written down. It’s an interesting system, the one that actually puts down words themselves. Myself, though, I use an older, commercial script, from before the current system made its way to Nevèrÿon from the Ulvayns. It’s one my father used back in Kolhari, when he worked on the waterfront.’
Kolhari, thought the smuggler. And his father (story fragments moved up in his mind. Other fragments receded), on the waterfront…?
‘Why do you ask all this?’ The big man frowned. ‘If you can’t read and write anything save wall scratchings, what difference does it make to you if I do? But tell me, what does someone like you think of this new writing?’
The smuggler blurted: ‘I hate it! The students, they use it all the time. They started all that scratch and scrawl. When I first saw it, I used to think they were putting up messages to each other—putting them right out there on the walls, too, just because the rest of us wouldn’t know what they meant! Because they can pass them out in the open like that, they think they’re better than we are. I hate students, and I hate their writing!’ What was the name of the boy he’d given the ride to, down from Kolhari? Many did feel that way about the students and their script. But why, he wondered, was he saying, here, when questioned, that he did? Still, once started, he could not stop. ‘I wouldn’t be a student for anything! I’m glad I’m a good and—’
‘—honest laborer?’ the Liberator finished for him.
The smuggler swallowed.
‘Or, perhaps,’ said the Liberator, uncannily, ‘you were about to say, smuggler…?’
The smuggler blinked.
‘My guard caught you trying to take your cart across the princess’s land here—to escape the Imperial customs inspectors of Sarness, no doubt. I know them well. They’re no friends of mine, either.’ He stepped forward. ‘Too bad you couldn’t admit you were a smuggler. We might have had more to say
to each other, then. But we don’t. Cutpurse or potter’s boy, that’s still the kind of honesty I look for in the young of our nation—and so seldom find. But that you are like so many in Nevèrÿon is not anything I can hold against you.’
The smuggler thought: When I came in, this room seemed so big, its roof so high. But his head comes just beneath the ceiling beams he passes under.
‘You’re a youth of your times, like so many others. Who’d blame you for being the slave of those times? Who could chide you for trying, in whatever misguided way the times provide you with, to master them? What are you carrying there?’ He reached out a hand. ‘Here. Let me see.’
The young smuggler glanced left and right and, holding the sack still tighter, pulled back.
The Liberator snorted—yes, it was a chuckle. ‘Come. Show me now. Tell me, are you taking your contraband up to the north or are you traveling down to the south with it? Speak; now!’ The Liberator grasped the sack in the young smuggler’s arms with his great fingers at the same time as he stepped up, blocking the firelight.
The young smuggler blurted: ‘South! I’m going south—running contraband from Kolhari down into the Garth. I’m the most foolish, the clumsiest, the most incompetent of smugglers. But you know that! You saw it! I needn’t tell you. But I know running around and freeing slaves isn’t cheap. I know you need all you can get. All right, then—’
The great hand tugged; the sack fell away from the smuggler’s chest. As the Liberator turned to the fire, the light fell on his heavy features clearly enough to show the scar that dropped across one eye and down the broad cheek. The two green eyes looked over at the smuggler. The heavy lips thinned. ‘You think I want to steal your sack from you?’ He yanked at the cord binding it closed. A tear of some sort had been recently sewn with rough vine. The tie pulled loose. Holding the neck with one hand, the Liberator looked in and reached inside.
What he pulled out was a small, round ball. He frowned at it, frowned at the smuggler, reached in again. Now he drew out a whole handful of balls. ‘You’re taking these…south?’ One by one he dropped the black spheres back in the bag.