The smuggler climbed the next step, a laugh in his throat struggling with his tongue. Then chills started behind his shoulders to cascade his back, pour over his buttocks, and trickle his thighs. ‘No…’ he whispered, trying to ignore both the laugh and the tingle: flat and emotionless, the word sounded like something mumbled by a new mummer on a market-wagon platform, its blandness and softness conveying only the new performer’s fear, alone before a hundred eyes. ‘No…!’ There, at least he could recognize his own voice in the echo. The tingling came on. He stepped up another step. ‘Me, free a foul, filthy, and wretched slave like you? Ha!’ All in a syllable, the laugh burst out with mummerly conviction. ‘No!’
‘Free me, master…You can do anything to me, lord. Abuse me, ravish me, keep me a slave forever or cast me loose. You have the power! For you it’s all the same…’
Was it the great brazier, the smuggler wondered as he stepped to the next step, that kept the fog from seeping within this crypt? ‘I know what you want, you low and lustful slave!’ (Declaring it with all the intensity he could muster, he still could not have said precisely what that was.) ‘You’ve done nothing to deserve anything from me! You’re low as the garbage tossed in the gutters of the Spur! You’re low as the refuse the muck crew picks up from the floors of polluted cisterns! You’re low as the deepest and darkest hole in the empress’s obsidian pits!’ Speaking, he took a huge step onto the seat itself, to stand on it, naked, moving one hand impersonally to his genitals at the return of impersonal lust, as if his body, even to his cock’s reengorgement, now began to mime desire as a last resort before the loss of what he’d felt before.
He turned on the stone seat and looked down at the man prone at the steps’ bottom.
The small shoulders flexed. The buttocks tightened and relaxed. A muscle defined itself, now in an arm, now in a leg. ‘Free me, master. You have the power. You’ve always had it. For all eternity. You stand above me. I lie below you. You only have to use it on my miserable, suffering, enchained body…’
Chains racketing, the little man rolled to his back.
The stomach muscles grew rigid in the firelight as he lifted his knees to his chest. Wrinkled, vegetative, half-embedded in black moss, the man’s penis was soft, which surprised the smuggler. Did the traditional mark of passion’s absence mean (centered in a body whose twitches and jerks spoke of all sane limits’ passionate transgression) age? Did it mean debauchery run beyond function? Perhaps it meant the transgression itself was somehow a mime, and those quiverings and shakings were actually centered about some invisible control. Did it mean that he had not gone beyond a limit but, rather, knew everything he was doing? He’s placed me here, the young smuggler thought. Then it struck: And he would do anything for me now! As if in some displacement of the inner dialogue, the little man raised his chin above his corded neck and whispered: ‘…anything, anything, master…you can do anything…’ Dragging chains around his raised thighs, the man reached through his legs to probe between his buttocks, with leather-bound hands. The single eye held both the smuggler’s, while the face twisted with the breathing, the reaching. The forehead creased above the slant rag hiding the wounded socket. Knees rocked. In his hand, the young smuggler became aware of the hardness, which, as his two forefingers lifted under his glans, thrust from its half-obliterated sleeve, became even harder, the skin along the side to which it curved hurting a little, which it sometimes did when he was very excited. Tearing and straining, the eye below would not blink. In the mouth the wet tongue twitched. The lips moved about a moist exhortation: ‘Master…?’
The smuggler came.
It was as surprising as that. During the fifteen or twenty seconds of it, a heat started below his knees as if some fire he stood near abruptly flared. The sensation mounted his thighs, his body’s trunk, till, within the flame he’d somehow become, a fist of muscle, contracting again, again, once more, and again, propelled his mucus forward. Unsteady between painful gasps, his heart blocking his ears with its thuds, his right leg quivered, near to buckling. A muscle in one flank strained to true pain. His first articulate thought was that, in the course of it, there had been none of the sub-vocal awareness (It’s beginning. Yes, it’s…Now, it’s beyond halting. This one’s not so good…? No, this one is really fine!) which usually made orgasm bearable.
The pleasure—if something so intense, so unconnected with words, could be pointed to with a word—rolled away like water off beveled sand, leaving the beach still saturated. (He took another breath. Pain caught again in his side. He looked about, to see how to climb down.) What lay beneath was fear. Was it simply the surprise of ejaculation coupled with his pounding heart, together miming terror? One hand unsteady on a gritty hide over the throne’s arm, he jumped.
His leg would not stop shaking!
As he came on down the steps, the little man grasped the smuggler’s ankle, which twisted in hard fingers, wet from one or the other of them. ‘Free me…!’
The young smuggler pulled loose, nearly fell, and rushed across the tile, the floor going from mosaic to dirt.
As he neared the brazier, he realized the hall was not empty.
Off by the wall a flame moved sideways, raised, and went on to ignite another. The twin fires lit what one had been too dim for: the head, arm, and shoulder of a yellow-haired barbarian, carrying his brand from niche to niche.
As the smuggler neared the brazier, he heard falling gravel. Someone had wheeled up a stilted ladder. At the top, her chin aflicker, a woman tossed in a pailful of coal.
She glanced down. The smuggler almost ran.
Still panting, he hurried over the bridge toward the wide stairs. By a fitful torch, two youngsters, boy and girl, shook out a hide with thudding snaps. Dust rose between the smuggler and the flame. The boy, who was black, coughed.
Had any of them seen him? Heard him? He looked back. Had they realized what he was doing as he stood atop the throne? (His back tingled.) At least the little man had been on the floor. But he, standing high in firelight…Why did that happen to me? he wondered. What is that supposed to mean about me? He pushed those thoughts out of his head with the immediate practicality: Return? Might the man need help to carry away his chains? Certainly he was some morning cleaner or porter, who, among these others, had thought to get here before the rest and avail himself of the empty space until his coworkers arrived.
He must have known what he was doing….
The young smuggler started up, leaving behind the subterranean matutinal preparations. (He could not imagine the hall’s use.) Possibly they had not been observed or, if observed, his action had not been recognized for what it was (Do you see something like that unless you’re looking for it?) He pushed through the hangings, thinking that though such sexual sensation was among the most intense he’d ever felt, easily he—
‘Excuse me,’ the woman in the middle of the room said. She lowered the bench from those stacked up. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be down helping them clean out the—’
‘No!’ He looked about sharply, stepping back. Swinging hide brushed his buttocks and shoulders. ‘Yes. No…! They sent me up here to get…’ He pointed beyond her to the hangings in the far arch. ‘In there! I’ll be down with it in just a minute.’ Then, without waiting for her to speak, he dashed by her through the far hangings into the next room.
And into blackness.
The torches that had burned in the niches before were out. As his hand found stone, his foot clinked some chain still on the floor. Feeling along the wall, he looked back, but the woman had not pushed aside the hangings to follow or spy. He stepped, reached out again, stepped, reached out: as his hand felt sackcloth, he thought:
I’m glad I’m not as young as all that! Such sensations as he’d just had, encountered early enough, could become the object of all sexual searching. No, for all its intensity, wonder, pleasure, he could easily live his life without experiencing that again.
Sacks were behind. Stone was under hand. A stub
bed toe on a step up confirmed that he was, indeed, somewhere within the tunnel.
That’s the kind of feeling, he thought, stumbling in the dark, one could kill to regain. But he had known a truth. (He staggered on, surrounded by the echo of his breath.) The truth of the throne of power, the truth of the secret center, the truth of the hidden crypt, the lie of the limit to pleasure. Or had he? He stumbled again. He had told a truth before, to the one-eyed man: about his feelings for the Liberator. The Liberator was the greatest man in all Nevèrÿon. The Liberator—
He halted, as if he’d become aware of someone with him in the tunnel. But it was not the Liberator he imagined breathing beside him in blackness; nor the one-eyed man. It was the Liberator’s barbarian adversary of rumor, conjecture, and surmise.
For he knew, with the same certainty by which he knew his own name, that the barbarian who had died fighting the Liberator in some sexual crusade was a lie. The kind of pleasure one might kill to regain? Yes. But for just that reason—because, whatever pain accompanied it, it was pleasure, not pain—no one would kill to release himself from it. If there had been such a barbarian as rumor and fable told of, his situation had certainly been more complicated than that which the smuggler, with his care, study, and collation, had assembled from these rumors and fables to speak of so easily in the market. Again, as had happened so many times over the duration of his obsession, he realized he knew something about the Liberator, about the collar, if not his one-eyed lieutenant who also sometimes wore it. Indeed, the smuggler thought, the wonder is that I know.
Though how the known differed from the lies, distortions, and displacements that wove together language’s dream of meaning he could not, as he felt his way again through the dark, make clear.
And why, now, did his judgment of the Liberator’s greatness seem so trivial? (No, his thought did not halt just because it had crossed a certainty.) Could it be that, in the heat of lust’s extremity, the very concept of truth had come unstuck from his initial utterance to the one-eyed man and, in its molten state, fused now to this new notion, so that his new ‘truth’ was finally just as much an assemblage, a dream, a lie as all his other stories?
He staggered on, around one corner, around another, and was just wondering if perhaps he had missed a turnoff or, even more likely, had wandered into some side tunnel that would lead him on aimlessly and endlessly through the dark with only his own breath for company, when, ahead, he saw light glimmer on the wet wall.
Seconds later, he stepped onto the cistern’s sheeted floor.
He looked up.
Gray morning had wiped away night. Five long logs lay across the cistern top, some ropes still lashed to them—none of which he’d seen earlier.
He looked down.
The little man’s leather kilt lay on dry stone. Across it was the smuggler’s clout-cloth. He stepped over to it, squatted, and lifted it. ‘Ahh!’ He’d tried to toss it toward the drier rock; one end, of course, had fallen in the water. Leave it? (Above him, he heard female shouts, one over here, then, moments later, one over there.) No. Though he was not above going about the streets like a naked barbarian, cloth was not so common you abandoned a length of it, until it was soiled beyond washing and worn beyond patching. (‘Ayeee!’ and ‘Ya-ha!’ Then, ‘Ha!’ and, moments later, ‘Aye!’ above.) He picked it up: wet, it turned out, not only at the end but in half a dozen other spots along it. He wrung it, stood, doubled it over his shoulder, and walked to the staples. He fingered the edge of the broken one. Another sagged till it looked as if it might pull free with the next hand or foot set to it.
He climbed.
It didn’t under either.
As his head rose above the cistern wall, he looked around the yard.
His first thought was that both were about the age at which he’d first run away for Kolhari: two young women were throwing a child’s black ball back and forth from one corner to the other. Both wore the same sort of clout whose end clung so coldly now to the smuggler’s back.
With her yellow hair cropped for vanishing summer, the barbarian whipped the ball into the air with a snap of her arm—‘Aaiii!’—that shook her tanned breasts.
A dark Kolhari girl, her hair bound back in a puffy bush with a leather thong, the other ran across the yard, leapt with both hands high, caught it, and swung her arms down and around her till her fists almost brushed the pavement, then snapped it—‘Ya-hey!’—into the air, while the barbarian, staring up, ran a step in one direction, two in another, then raced off in a third to catch it, to cry out, to fling it high again.
Wondering if they saw him, the young smuggler climbed from the cistern. He watched for three breaths, walked a little way off, then turned back to look through four more shouts and tosses. The fog had left only a ghost of dampness in the air. Though the morning was clear and the yellow sun lit the wall across from an eastern alley, down a northern street mist still put the sheerest veil over the houses.
‘Ay-yahaaa!’ The barbarian stumbled on her throw: the ball shot almost straight up.
‘Oh! Hey…!’ Her companion ran across the yard, stopped a few steps from her friend, who sat now on the stone with her hands behind her, one of her shoulders and one of her breasts and one of her knees in sunlight. With delight, the smuggler saw the copper freckles speckling all three.
The dark girl put her fingers over her mouth, laughing, stepping about, shaking her head, moving from sunlight to shadow to sunlight. In an unexpected and astonishing gift, the smuggler saw her back, so much the darker, was freckled too—with those even rarer points of patinaed bronze that made him want to put his eye an inch away from one, then, suddenly, thrust out his tongue as if it might hold some marvelous taste other than the skin’s faint salt.
The barbarian rocked forward, swaying in a torrent of giggles.
Between her fingers the Kolhari one asked: ‘Are you hurt? I mean…’
The other managed: ‘Yes, yes, it’s all right. I mean, no. I’m all right!’ Finally she said: ‘The ball—did you see where it went?’
Catching her breath, the dark one pointed across the yard: ‘In there, I think.’
‘Oh, no…!’ The barbarian began to laugh again.
Both looked toward the cistern.
‘I heard it go in,’ the smuggler called. ‘It bounced on the back wall and splashed down on the bottom.’
He could not have said, later, if the feeling had come before he’d spoken and therefore had impelled him to speech, or if it were the detritus of speech, composed of the leftover heart pounding from his bravery in speaking at all. But he waited to see if their look, if their laugh, if some word from them would include him.
They looked.
They smiled.
One of them (‘You said you…heard it go in?’) spoke.
But through the intensity of his gaze, though he nodded, tried to smile, and realized he was only staring, he lost the specificity of the exchange in the dazzle of the sun-swath that tipped the standing one’s brown and spotted shoulder, that bronzed the dotted shin, breast, and cheek of the one sitting. The answer? The truth? For a moment everything reeled in a fiery gust (from the far sun? from the distant sea?), while the sky cracked.
Pieces of the day balanced, gray and yellow.
‘Well, there’s no water in it.’ The barbarian pulled her feet under her, reached about to push herself erect. ‘I can climb down and get—’
‘Don’t you dare!’ declared the other. ‘You’re going to go down into some old empty cistern? You don’t know what you’ll find in there—!’ They laughed again.
Across the yard, he tried, tried again, tried a third time to make some joke, to comment, to volunteer climbing down for them—but all three left no visible trace on the two youngsters, one a yellow-haired barbarian whore (really, he doubted it; but he hoped she was, like himself, a whore), one a brown and respectable Kolhari girl. His throat muscles had moved, but not his lips or tongue. Certainly, he thought, in the pursuit of such eccentri
c pleasure it could be no easier to whisper, ‘Master…!’ for the first time than to speak to a woman whose body and bearing moved you in desire’s more familiar paths. He started across the yard for the sunny alley from which, as best he could remember, he’d entered the yard in darkness.
Walking naked over dust, he glanced at them again: They are beautiful, he thought simply, bluntly, truthfully. Why use men’s bodies when there are such as these in the city? But as, from the alley’s end, their laughter swirled his nakedness, he knew what he’d learned of the Liberator as he’d stood on the throne, whether fog-blurred dream or granite truth, had only secondarily to do with bodies.
6
CERTAINLY THESE WERE MORE primitive times than ours, when public nudity was a sign neither of madness, rebellion, nor art. Along with the ceramic-hard sole and the wood-rough palm, it meant rather, in both men and women, a certain level of income, a certain order of labor. Since the smuggler’s gains, when smuggling went well, were modestly above that level and the physical work needed to survive at it had been, of late, somewhat below it, he could take a certain joy in the deception as he wandered—naked—toward the market in the dawn’s near empty streets. The few he shared them with, women and men, were most of them naked too.
Several times he had to stop and go back a turning when some alley deposited him on a corso where, if the sun were really over there, meant the market was not in the direction he was walking.
Clout still over his shoulder, he finally came out in the old square; three-quarters of the stalls were already up on the worn brick. More were being set out. Vendors called to one another, and the earliest shoppers already wandered between counters and under awnings, carrying baskets and bags.
Certainly at this time crime was among those callings conducted more primitively than today: it did not seem overly imprudent to a smuggler of his age and experience to leave his cart unattended for an hour (the encounter in the crypt had taken somewhat less) among the others parked by the market’s side. At any time, the empress’s inspectors might be wandering here and there, observing, reporting, fining. But, because of the several new markets that had, in recent years, opened up closer to the waterfront, inspectors were becoming less and less efficient at their never very well defined tasks.
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