Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

The eye and one shoulder, above and below black iron, silvered. ‘What would you do with me, then? If I were the weakest, foulest, sickest of slaves, too frightened to resist any attack, any brutalization, any abuse visited on me by my guards, by my foreman, or by the other slaves about me? Think of me loaded with chains and irons, so that I couldn’t resist your assaults, even if I were strong enough.’ He reached up and put his hand on the smuggler’s arm. I know—they don’t use such chains in the mines now, except when they transport the workers from location to location. Such horrors still occur only with the slavers in the west. But you can imagine it, can’t you?’

  No, it was not a response either to the man’s touch or his tale. What the young smuggler felt now he’d felt enough times before to know that, having a moment ago triumphed over a personal terror, having expressed one tiny inexpressible truth, the bodily sign of terror vanquished was a prickling like rain on the small of his back, his belly, his thighs. And because that terror’s object, the man before him, had, on its vanquishment, moved toward him rather than away, the focus somehow became sexual: his cock, rolling forward in its foreskin, dragged on cloth.

  ‘Follow me down!’ the one-eyed man whispered, dropping his hand to the smuggler’s chest. He turned and swung one leg over the stone. ‘Don’t worry. There’re staples along the wall, so you can make your way to the bottom.’

  A year and a half back, the last legitimate work the smuggler’d done was three months with a filthy crew who’d drained cisterns and cleaned them of the potsherds and children’s balls and bits of waterlogged furniture and general muck that collected on their floors. He’d labored hard, done the job at first with energy and soon with skill; he’d liked the men he worked with, had often been praised by the crew boss: ‘Sure, you joke about what a clumsy lout you are all the time. But I say you’re a

  good and honest laborer, if not the best of them.’ In his last week he’d even been promised more money—and a day later had not shown up. He’d never gone back. Now he never mentioned it. But he knew there were staples on the inner walls of all the city’s cisterns.

  ‘Come with me!’ The little man swung his other leg over, reached in, stood on the inside rung, and stepped down. ‘This one’s been empty for years.’

  ‘Sure. Go on.’ Leaning on the wet ledge, looking at the man’s head, with its knot of rag and hair lowering below him, the smuggler felt the pride any laborer in the sexual services knows when he or she realizes: I can show this one a good time! ‘I’m right behind you!’ He started over.

  Climbing down the staples, the smuggler looked up at the moon. (Below him, a rung had broken; missing the step, he felt one end scrape his calf, but so lightly he didn’t look.) Would the banked fog collapse over the stained shield of bone the loud and unnamed god of war arts had hung on the sky? He did not fancy being at the bottom of an empty cistern in pitch dark with anyone—even a miserable pit slave.

  His lower foot dropped into water—but as he swung out from the staple he was holding by one hand above his head, the other out and waving, he felt rock a quarter of an inch below it. He turned, both feet now on the water-filmed floor.

  Yes, most of the water was out. But three-quarters of the cistern’s bottom was still under half an inch. Over it, the reflected wall cut across night, while rills rushed out and back, raddling mirrored fog.

  By an irregular section of stone that had come away from the wall, the one-eyed man crouched on dry rock. His leather skirt was gone—there, it lay a meter from his hand, with which, squatting, he supported himself. ‘Look—’ and the single eye looked down from the young smuggler—‘you’re free now to do anything you want to your slave. Kick him, beat him, molest his body in any way…’ With the echo, the voice seemed not to come from the little man but rather from the drenched air, as if the city around them, and not the man before him, gave the permission, the instruction, the exhortation.

  The smuggler splashed onto drier flooring. The sexual impulse that had begun moments before, instead of being lowered by the cold water and the cistern’s fetid smell, was, if anything, heightened. He tugged his cloth aside, felt it fall, so pulled it fully away and tossed it down. It’s the voice, he thought with the endless run of thinking that never ceased regardless. What had always damped his performance in his rare encounters with the collared before had been the chidings, the directions, the continuous corrections from the self-elected slave, till, after the delays and displays and hesitations that finally, more than anything, seemed to comprise the act, he’d usually packed his half-flaccid cock back in his clout and, unsatisfied, gone off to face the world, convinced once more that this perversion was just not his to pursue. But now, with this vocal displacement, the words carried no hectoring critique from a new and demanding lover, male or female, accusing him with ignorance of, and inadequacy at, his sexual task. Rather it was a pronouncement of license from the otherwise mute deity of lust’s intriguing and intricate craft, as enticing in its deistic dislocation as, in its too-human immediacy, it could be off-putting.

  ‘This is for you!’ He kicked the crouching man in the thigh (but not hard enough to hurt his own bare foot), raised his leg again and brought his heel down on the man’s buttocks so that he had to catch himself with his hand against the cistern wall. Then he dropped to a squat.’ And this is for me…!’ Momentarily awkward, he positioned himself, one hand on the knobby back, to push forward. His knee hit the cold rock as warmth bloomed about him. The pushings, proddings, and pokings, the bodily resistance only a step away from emotional rejection, had often sapped buggery of all pleasure. But, lubricated with whatever oils for the night or from whatever previous encounters, the body before the young smuggler received him easily within its astounding fire, and the discrepancy between the cold under foot and knee and the warmth inner flesh raised in friction with outer was, rather than an impediment to erotic amazement, amazement’s confirmation. The heat and vulnerability within the body of another, whether he felt it with finger or penis or tongue or toe was always new, always astonishing, always more intense than memory. And wasn’t the memory of that intensity when the sensation itself had been forgotten (the smuggler thought without a break in stroke), the desire all frequenters of the bridge, buyers or vendors or seekers after free fare, searched for—the desire, always lost when not alight, that named those stones? His implant in this humid flesh ran to depths in his own body that, as they were surprised into excitation, he knew were equally unrememberable. And wasn’t that, when desire was lost, why it troubled so profoundly, why it lay so deep?

  The little man pushed back, not in a single thrust, but with a pulsing pressure timed to the smuggler’s thrusting, a rhythm that, when the smuggler slowed, slowed and, when the smuggler hurried, hurried, till the smuggler thought, with as much surprise as the always renewed surprise of pleasure itself: He wants me to enjoy it! While one enjoyed it nevertheless, it was a feeling rare in such encounters. And, yes, it excited him, so that when the man hissed, ‘What are you? The fifth? The ninth? The seventeenth to cover me since moonrise?’ the echoing question seemed so far outside their juncture that, like a god’s, the voice was devoid of all threat and comparison, all solace and praise.

  ‘…if not the best of them!’ The smuggler pushed back, with no idea whether his words or the man’s reported a fact or continued a fantasy. And for the moment he did not care. Among the five, or nine, or seventeen ghosts their echoing breaths filled the cistern with, the young smuggler was, despite his assertion, outside the hierarchy of recrimination and easy in a community of lust. He lay his beard on the little man’s cold shoulder. As he thrust, spit trickled his jaw.

  The little man twisted around, becoming a face and, moments later, a voice—‘…you’re hot! Yes, you’re hot in me! It’s good! Yes, it’s…!’—as near and intimate now as before it had been distant and disembodied. One hand on the ground beside the man’s, the smuggler swung, hips and shoulders hunching and hunching at each end of his bent back to make a cave f
or the creature beneath him, as protected and safe and steady in its contractions as a heart.

  Then the little man moved forward, disengaging. ‘Wait…!’ He spun on the rock.

  For a moment the two crouched, facing, the little man, one-eyed and breathless, the smuggler, on knees and hands, surprised with the cold at belly, groin, and thigh as if, with the motion, rather than simply removing himself the little man had substituted a corpse in which, under his half-masked stare, the smuggler was now impaled.

  ‘Come…’ the man hissed, pushing to his feet. ‘This way. It’ll be better, you’ll see.’ He moved to the break in the stone. Hand, back, and elbow, momentarily in moonlight, disappeared within.

  Wheeling to his feet, the young smuggler followed. He’d assumed the dark blot was simply a place where the stones had fallen or, at most, some shadowed niche. But, as he stumbled inside, a hand on either wall, he realized it was a tunnel—through which no doubt the water had run off.

  ‘Follow me…’ the smuggler heard, breathy in the distance.

  As he moved awkwardly and uneasily in the dark, the narrow space grew crowded with breath. Breath echoed around him, echoed before him. He was a minute along the corridor before he realized the exhalations, with their loud halts and hastenings, were not from the little man meters ahead. They were his own. Missing a step down, he staggered, almost falling. Yet through it, his body was locked in its lust. He groped forward, persistently hard.

  Wetting his hand with crumblings from the wall, stinging his heel on some sandy edge, and breathing, breathing about him, the tunnel thrust him through dark turns.

  A sense of distance, yes; but little sense of time. For despite the five or seven kinesthetic memories he took from the passage, the truth was he ran through it very fast.

  The light was dim and surprising. Something was piled before it.

  Sacks?

  Feeling his way by gritty cloth, he heard metal clink metal: links rattled. He stepped around knotted corners.

  From two rock niches, torches spilled their glimmerings. The little man crouched by the wall, fastening chained iron at his ankle. He glanced up at the young smuggler. The rag across his eye suggested one color and another under bronze flicker: green, maroon, blue. The smuggler knew from moonlight it was grit gray.

  Dragging links over the rock floor, the man stood, turned his back to the smuggler, spread his legs, and leaned his hands on the stone. Jangling against the wall, chain swung. A length lay across the buttocks. Another was wrapped around one leg. The man was breathing hard. His back rose and fell: shadows at knobby vertebrae shrank and lengthened.

  The smuggler came forward, was on him, was in him. Fire caught between their cold bodies. But flesh, chill as it was, was still warmer than the metal pressed between thigh and thigh, buttock and belly.

  Links swung against the smuggler’s leg as he pushed and recovered.

  His chin was against his chest. A drop started on his cheek; another rolled down his shoulder. The one on his face, to his hunchings, moved along his cheekbone, through his moustache, stalled at his upper lip, quivered, then rolled over. Tasting it, he was almost surprised at its salt.

  The heat between them built.

  Then, once more, the little man twisted away, disengaging.

  The young smuggler said, ‘Wait! No, I was just about to—’

  The little man glanced back. ‘Follow me…!’ His hoarse entreaty stopped the smuggler. With the chains he’d just donned clattering about him, he made for the arch across from the stacked sacks and through its hangings. Hides swung. Beyond them, the clinking muffled and, after moments, quieted over greater distance.

  Drying perspiration cooled the smuggler’s thighs and chest. Hairs tickled, lifting. Scratching at leg and shoulder, he walked forward. At the hide he hesitated, wondering at these pastimes, then pushed through.

  The room beyond was bigger. One brand in its niche lit several benches and, as the young smuggler walked in, little else. Some of the benches, up on end, leaned against the wall. The smuggler stepped around them. The little man was not behind them. The hangings at the room’s far arch swayed.

  He walked forward, thinking that this stroll across the ill-lit room was the opposite of his dash in the black tunnel: there darkness had held both his lust and any speculation on it in suspension, while the flickering in this tenantless space, where he’d expected, if not desire’s object, at least a quick relief from horniness, kept pushing him to think, remember, speculate on the fact that, after all, neither men nor this miming of submission and domination was his own pleasure. This was borrowed passion.

  That was, indeed, his thinking.

  But the feeling was that he’d loaned out something that had gone ahead with the little man; and he wanted it back—though he couldn’t have said what it was; or why.

  With this uneasiness, lust ebbed, so that he lingered in the chamber perhaps a minute, breathing loudly, thinking clearly: Should I go on? What might I get from him? What does he want of me? What might I learn about the Liberator, and is it worth all this? He pushed the next hanging aside.

  First he thought it was a slate slab inches ahead. Then, blinking away the moment’s disorientation, he saw wide steps down into vast darkness.

  A dozen brands burned along a distant wall. And in such space, at such distance, a dozen brands gave little light. Somewhere, water gushed. Here and there he could make out balconies around the hall—and a flickering near one torch: water fell between squat pilasters, rushed along the wide conduit crossing the partially tiled floor, and swept under the two bridges that twice blocked the torrent’s glimmer.

  A giant brazier stood beyond the water. Across its coals, flames scuttled.

  At the hall’s far end, between leaning torches, a stone seat rose from a stepped pedestal, its ornate back carved into some beast—eagle? dragon?—which, in the play of shadow, he could not identify.

  Approaching the throne in his chains, the little man stumbled to one knee, pushed back on his feet, and continued toward the vacant chair. He held most of the chains over one arm. Chain dragged behind him on the tiles. Steps restrained by the links between his shins, he moved awkwardly across mosaic, turned a moment to look over his shoulder, and went on.

  Can he see me up here in the darkness? the young smuggler wondered. He let the hide fall behind him and started down the steps, glancing up at the roof, where ropes and grapples looped below beams. The stones under foot were bowed, worn at their centers. Fifty years’ footsteps? Five hundred? The odor recalled night on a winter beach down from the city; at the same time, the echoing water suggested high, summer valleys between widely separated peaks. Yet, overwhelmingly, he felt hugely underground. The conflicting senses of place, with dimnesses and distances, further dissolved the sexual surety that, moments back, had been so absolute.

  Cool air moved in the high hall, though the fog had not come within.

  What, he wondered, am I doing with this collared creature? But as his blood withdrew into its secret sinks and cisterns, its retreat left belly, back, and buttocks, shoulders, thighs, and arms a-tingle—with desire, yes; though, again, not for the man or his chains, but for the state the smuggler had, moments ago, slipped from. The feeling was both less localized and more intense than normal lust.

  Reaching the steps’ bottom, he started over the dirt floor. It was darker here than at the stairs’ top. Like steam, the light seemed to have collected higher in the hall, leaving the floor pitchy. Twenty steps on, his bare foot went from earth to wood as he stepped onto the little bridge.

  Froth whispered below.

  Beyond the brazier’s black wall, he could see the little man in chains at the bottom step before the throne. There were heaps of something—hides? pelts?—one side of the chair.

  And if he is the Liberator, or connected with him, the smuggler thought in a moment’s passing lucidity, what questions should I ask?

  Which is the exact month of your birth? Some say the month of the
Badger; some say the month of the Dog. Though a birth month you only knew by report anyway, and reports could always be wrong. (He remembered his mother and his aunt, arguing once under a plum tree, whether his own birth had come with the Badger or the Bat.) Well, then, which of the three versions of your departure from the obsidian mines for the army is right? And was that before or after you lost the eye? (He stepped from damp wood to dusty tile, trying to imagine the man in chains as an Imperial officer.) And if you’re only the Liberator’s lieutenant, which is it: You and the Liberator have been together half a dozen years? Or you’ve been together intimately since your time together in the mines?

  Above him, the brazier’s rim was burnished with the small flames behind it. As he neared black metal, he felt heat through the darkness. The curved wall itself was, doubtless, hot enough to char flesh should you stumble against it. Ahead, chains dropped, then dragged, on stone.

  He looked down.

  Before the seat, the little man knelt at the steps’ foot. Hides hung over the chair’s arm.

  After a moment, the young smuggler walked from the brazier’s wash of warmth. Cool retouched his shoulders.

  Ahead, the man lay down before the bottom step, one fist near his cheek. In firelight, his callused heel was dirt black, with some cleaner skin before the leather under the instep; then more clean skin, before the cracked ball took up walking’s dirt. The foot dragged on the mosaic; the tiles’ colors were indistinguishable. A chain fell from one stair to the stair below.

  The young smuggler walked up and stepped over the man’s leg with its ankle iron. (The leg moved; a loose confusion of links dragged out to become more chain.) The smuggler put one foot on the step and looked back down at the little man, who was…writhing!

  Fingers opened and closed on the step’s lip. The spine arched; vertebrae were sharp, shifting knobs. An arm moved so that a shoulder blade rose, then fell, among small muscles. Cheek sliding on gritty stone, the man whispered, ‘Free me…’