Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities

  But one thing all agreed on: the building they’d broken into that night was empty. No guards stood at the gate. No soldiers strolled the roof. No furniture stood in the rooms. No garbage moldered in the great pots, three broken, behind the kitchen midden. Oh, perhaps a vagrant now and again had climbed the wall to build a brief fire by one or another outbuilding—but the charred sticks in the makeshift rings of stone were as likely to be years as months or weeks old. How could a powerful political leader, and his secretaries, and his courtiers, and his armed garrisons, and his plans, and his records, and his recruiting forces, and his provisions, aides and officers vanish from a walled estate with, at most, an hour’s warning (more likely minutes’), leaving no certain sign?

  Not that the story ended here. But now the various versions multiplied more. The Liberator was still at work throughout Nevèrÿon, now in the south, claimed some, now in the north. The Liberator was no more, claimed others—indeed had never been. Or at least had never been other than an eccentric freeman, wearing a slave collar for his own eccentric purposes, wandering the Old Market of the Spur and talking too much in the taverns about fanciful political schemes. Now some said not only was this the false headquarters of the Liberator, but, though all had thought him that fabled man, the collared giant himself was only a ruse or, indeed, a lieutenant, or one of many lieutenants to the true Liberator, who was actually a wiry, one-eyed man, once a cunning bandit (who may or may not have been a former slave) and who was, for perverse and powerful reasons (that is, sexual), the true wearer of the collar. No, said others, it was the giant who was the Liberator, and the one-eyed man was his lieutenant. Each wore the collar, declared others who said they’d seen them. Both wore the collar at different times for different reasons, reasoned others who claimed such reason was only common sense, given the confusion among those who ought to know. There was no one-eyed man, the smuggler heard from a drunken soldier who’d declared he’d fought under Gorgik when, collarless, the Liberator had spent time as an officer in the empress’s Imperial Army: ‘That was just a dream he sometimes had. I remember it as clearly as I remember my mother’s hearth. We’d be standing night guard outside his tent and hear him within, mumbling in his sleep over such a one-eyed apparition. It was only bad dreams.’ There was no scarred giant, he heard from a crippled cutpurse who swore he’d run with the one-eyed man when his gang had holed up in the Makalata Caves. ‘One time at night as we all squatted by the fire, he talked of a great foreman with a scar down his face who’d been kind to him when, for a few months as a boy, he told us, he’d been taken by slavers. But that was only campfire talk.’ Still, whatever the version, or whatever the various versions’ relation to the ineluctable truth they mirrored, masked, manifested, or distorted, all agreed, as they agreed the mansion ravaged that foggy night had been empty, that it was on such nights as this, when all boundary lines and limits were thrown into question, that the Liberator could be counted on to do his most pointed work—if, indeed, there was, or had ever been, such a man.

  The oxcart halted beside the smuggler, who turned now to slap the beast’s red haunch.

  Ox and man walked again through fog, the cart trundling.

  The smuggler knew, yes, more of these conflicting stories than might be expected of someone with either his past history or present position. Had he been able to write and read of what he knew, we might even call him a student of such tales—though he was an illiterate in a largely illiterate age.

  A youth quick to smile, easy of gesture, and slow in speech, his usual talk stayed with genial anecdotes dramatizing (exaggerations, to be sure) his comic incompetence at all callings. Passing acquaintances found him easy to enjoy and easier to forget, and few remembered the way his questions could grow quiet, intelligent, continuous, and committed. Fewer still would have marked him, thick-wristed, beer-bellied, and haft-fingered as he was, as a young man obsessed.

  But many times, in the taverns and markets of Kolhari and other towns, in back-country inns and desert oases, he’d listened for mention of the Liberator; and when a story touching on Gorgik began at the counter of some winter’s mountain inn or around some summer’s seaside beach-fire, he was ready with measured, attentive questions, based on his own assessments, collations, and orderings of the tales he’d heard so far. On three occasions now, he’d found himself having to argue hotly that he was not a spy for the High Court, seeking to traduce an Imperial usurper. One night he’d actually had to run from a much louder and less rational argument that started at a forest resting place in the eastern Avila with a dough-bellied man, who, it turned out, had once sold slaves himself and had lost a brother and a friend to the swords of a huge, city-voiced bandit and his barbarian accomplice. (‘A yellow-haired dog of a boy with—I tell you, by all the gods of craft—both his eyes! They certainly called themselves Liberators—though they were nothing but the scum of all slave stealers!’) Another than our smuggler might have let such violences dissuade him from his research. His dubious profession led him, however, to expect trouble anyway, though time had proved him not prone to it: these inconveniences were not too great a price for information.

  The situations that resulted in such troubles had only impressed on him, finally, that the object of his obsession was not some innocent and indifferent fable, but rather a system of hugely conflicting possibilities and immensely turbulent values. And whether the Liberator was actually that great a concern to the High Court itself, as some maintained, the smuggler had, by now, as much evidence to refute as to confirm.

  The origin of his interest had been, at least as far as he could reconstruct it, the most innocent of happenstance. Perhaps that innocence was what justified the intensity of his pursuit.

  There had been a girl.

  A lively little partridge, she’d come on one of his early trips to the south, with him and a friend—a walleyed city boy, born in the gutters of the Spur, a raucous Kolhari twang in his crude and constant chatter the young smuggler had, at times, found comic in its licentiousness and, at others, comforting on those vastly still, ponderously deserted back forest trails, just for the noise. The two youths had been paid by a Kolhari market vendor to run a shipment of magical implements to a merchant in the Garth who knew of certain southerners who would pay handsomely for the marvelously empowered trinkets—but not as handsomely as the price you’d have to charge if you absorbed the exorbitant tax the Child Empress’s customs inspectors would impose.

  By now he’d forgotten the girl’s name among the names of several such girls he’d taken on several such trips. (At what friend’s house had he met her? She’d been in some kind of trouble and had wanted to leave the city. But the details were gone from memory.) Once they’d begun, there’d been bad feelings between her and his foul-mouthed friend. Eventually one morning, somewhere south of Enoch, while he lay dozing in the blankets beside their burnt-out fire, she’d bent over him to tell him she was off for water. (Though he’d been half asleep, he remembered that.) His friend had found the empty water pot, a dozen steps from the campsite, set carefully on a stump. They’d looked for her a bit, waited a bit more, had speculated on accident, on passing slavers. But then, she’d run off from them once already, his friend had pointed out.

  They’d do better with her gone.

  They’d gone on.

  He never saw her again.

  Indeed, today, had he run into her on the streets of Able-ani or Ka’hesh, he might not have recognized her. What he remembered, however, was something she had said.

  On the first day of their journey they’d halted the cart just beyond the Kolhari gates. Sitting on a fallen log, the girl had toyed with a chain around her neck from which hung some odd piece of jewelry, chased round its rim with barbaric markings. (Though he could not recall her face, he could bring back her brown fingers on the bronze pendant fixed to its neck chain. That was jaw-clenchingly clear.) And she had said:

  ‘I met a man, while I was in the city—a wonderful man! His friends called hi
m the Liberator. He walked with me for an afternoon in the Old Market—he knew all about the market, all about Kolhari, all about the world! I mustn’t tell you too much of him. That would be dangerous. But I went to visit him again, in his headquarters—a big old mansion he’d rented out in Neveryóna. Oh, you’d think he was wonderful, too. I know you would. He was brave, gentle, and handsome—like you! Though he had a scar down one side of his face. He gave me…’

  But here recollection blurred. Thinking about it since, he’d completed her statement many ways. Did she say he’d given her the knife she always wore in her sash, hidden under her bloused out shift? Or the shift itself? Or the necklace? Or the tiny cache of iron coins, which, like the parsimonious mountain girl she was, she’d always been so chary of spending? But she’d talked a lot, and he’d seldom listened, as she’d soon grown used to not getting back much in the line of answers. (His friend and the girl, both had loved to chatter. Silly to have expected them to get along. It took a quiet person, like himself, to go so easily with such. He hadn’t seen his friend in a year.) Months later, when the girl was gone and the storming of the Liberator’s mansion was discussed from Ellamon to Adami, the smuggler’s numberless encounters with the name Gorgik the Liberator had brought back the girl’s memory and made her words from that morning the core of an obsession. (‘…wonderful!…He was brave, gentle, and handsome—like you!…He gave me…’ But how could he have listened more when he’d been so surprised she’d felt that way about him at all?) And whenever, later, the Liberator was discussed, her chance mention seemed to have given him a tad more knowledge than the others had. (‘…He walked with me for an afternoon in the Old Market…his headquarters, a big old mansion he rented out in Neveryóna…’) Though he seldom spilled much of it into words, that extra knowledge was supremely pleasurable; and he cherished that pleasure, nourishing it with continued inquiry. Sometimes while considering less likely versions, he had to relegate the girl’s remarks temporarily to the same dubious order as other conflicting accounts. (‘…a scar down one side of his face…’ Well, some said he was scarred; some said he was one-eyed; some mentioned both. And some mentioned neither.) But because hers had come first, most of the time it was easy enough to let her statements stand as the fixed truth around which he organized the other narrative bits into their several narrative systems, thence to organize the systems themselves as to most probable likelihood—while another part of his mind, the acquisitive part, the part that went poking and prodding in other people’s memories for any and all fragments, no matter how preposterous (memories failing with time and boredom or inflated with imagination and self-aggrandizement), that part could claim, just as truthfully as the part that privileged a forgotten girl’s chance remark, to be equally interested, or as passionately disinterested, in them all.

  There’d been other women in his life more recently, three of them actually (and not that recent—), one younger and two older than he. Only the youngest had been able to pretend any tolerance at all to his speculations on the Liberator; and even her pretense had lasted only a while. Could that be, finally, why it had been so easy to leave them?

  Would that long-vanished mountain girl have been able to sustain her interest in the Liberator, he wondered, in the face of what his had become?

  He turned by another wall.

  Behind him the house that may or may not have once been the Liberator’s moved into mist.

  3

  MINUTES LATER, OFF THROUGH fog, the smuggler made out a gate. Odd, he thought, as his cart rolled by mortared stones, for all these moonlight visits he was still not sure which lord’s estate he went to—but then, he was not working for the lord.

  He squinted to see if he could make out guards, only decorative in any case here in the city. Ahead he saw what might be a spear leaning from a far niche—

  ‘Pssst!’ from the door beside him.

  He halted his ox.

  Through a view hole in the planks, a lamp glimmered with butter-colored light.

  ‘Well!’ came through muffling boards. ‘You’re here, then. Good!’

  Wick flickering in its snout, the clay tub slid onto the small shelf, its base scraping sandy wood. The small moon, instead of holding a halo to the door, cleared the near air.

  Metal scraped plank. Plank scraped stone. A board beside the one with the hole moved back in the rock.

  He grunted at his stopped ox, as if to stop her again.

  The old woman said: ‘Uhhh! This fog, I don’t like it one bit!’ She pulled away another board and set it back by the first. Tied up, the daytime leather hangings were bunched above. ‘Bad things happen in such weather. I’ve seen enough of this mist, and I know. Though it’s all the better for the likes of you, isn’t it? Well, I hope it follows you south and leaves some clear suns and moons with us here in the city. Boy!’ she called back by her hip. ‘You could at least lend a hand with these. No, never mind. I’ve moved them already. Bring that bag here. Be quiet! Do you want to wake the new kitchen girl we hired yesterday? She doesn’t need to know of our doings. Oh, no. Not her, yet.’ Someone behind her scrambled over something (‘Quiet!’ the woman hissed), picked it up, moved with it. She reached behind, then swung forward a cloth sack. ‘Here, take it, now. And go on. Go on, I say! You have your instructions. They’re the same as last time. You’ve done it before. Do the same again. Deliver it to the same place. You’ll get the same reward when you arrive. And the same when you return. Now be off—’

  ‘I go out now, grandma?’ a boy shrilled behind her in a heavy barbarian accent. ‘I go out?’

  The servant woman swayed into the glow, her hood putting a shadow on her deeply seamed cheek, which, in the haze, was the darkest thing about. The accent meant there was no possibility of blood between them. The smuggler looked at her brown, creviced, northern face.

  ‘No one see me,’ the little barbarian went on behind her. ‘I hide in the fog and be back before—’

  ‘Not on your life!’ the woman shot back. ‘You think I’d let you go off in this miasma? Bad men are out in the city on nights like this, believe me: thieves, smugglers, murderers, and worse—like this one here!’ She gestured at the smuggler, and her face wrinkled more—yes, smiling, he realized now. ‘Here, I say. Take it.’

  He took the bag from fingers almost as large-knuckled as his own. ‘Yes, ma’am.’ What she’d lugged in one hand was heavy enough for him to hold in two. ‘I’ve got it.’ He hefted the sack against his chest, turned to the cart, and dropped it, clanking and changing shape, as it slid over what was already there. He pushed it under a cluster of old-fashioned three-legged pots, bound together by their handles and only a month back declared, by official edict from the High Court, incapable of holding magic as long as they were unsealed, and therefore—when unsealed—untaxable. Behind him he heard one board and another scrape into place; then the bar.

  ‘Come away, now, boy.’ The voice was muffled again. ‘Give me your hand I say…’

  He looked back to see the luminous hemisphere this side of the opening shrink, then vanish. The buttery flame wavered behind the hole, grew small, was gone.

  Where the haloed moon had hung was a pearly smear. Holding the canvas cover in blunt fists, the young smuggler yanked its edge down more firmly. Stepping to the ox’s cheek, he grasped the harness, clicked his tongue against his mouth’s roof with an indrawn breath, and tugged the heavy-shouldered beast around on the return road.

  Walking ahead of his loud cart, he smiled. Now, he thought, I’m a smuggler again. A bad man about in the streets. (Whatever was in the bag had been metal and in many flat pieces. He’d felt their round edges. Which was odd, though not remarkable.) Once again he was taking a contraband load to the south, carrying from people he didn’t know to other people he didn’t know. Nor, save for the metal makeup and disk-like shapes that had come to him over a few moments through the canvas, was he sure what he carried.

  Years back when the smuggler had begun smuggling, at one point o
r another he’d look to find out what was in his sack: salt, silver, jewelry, magic fetishes, or sometimes even the sealed bullae in which clinked the mysterious contract tokens that signed, in those primitive times, a certain level of commerce. But it was common lore among smuggling men and women that the less one knew of what one carried, the better things were both for the client and, finally, for oneself. He’d accommodated such lore by putting off his look each trip till nearer and nearer its end. Finally, somehow, three, then seven, then numberless trips had passed when he’d forgotten to look at all. Now the thought only returned to him as the memory of a juvenile risk he’d used to take. (And am I really that young anymore? the smuggler wondered. Now and again it seemed to him he’d been smuggling an awfully long time.) Perhaps his meticulous inquisitiveness over anything and everything concerning the Liberator came from having to deflect natural curiosity from where, naturally, it was wanted. He’d thought that often. But this was the third time now he’d gone south at the behest of the old woman at the estate wall’s secondary door. He’d first gotten the commission from another thief (‘…Follow these turnings. Be there with your cart at this time…’) and could honestly say he did not know her name, nor the name of the family she was servant to, nor whether she worked for her own gain, her master’s, or someone else’s. I know nothing of you; but then (he spoke along to himself, on the road back into the city) you know nothing of me, old woman. You have no notion you’re talking to a man with a passion and a purpose. Only a small stone’s heave from here is the Liberator’s house, but you’ve no idea that I may know more tales of that fabled home and hero than any else save probably his one-eyed lieutenant—more, possibly, than anyone in Nevèrÿon, if some of my conjectures are true.