Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  ‘A few,’ the young smuggler said.

  ‘Everyone does on that overground sewer.’ The man took another bite. ‘Oh, I bet you met them, too. Now, they say, since the Liberator’s been about, they walk back and forth across the bridge and all around the city, wearing their collars right out for the world to see, as if they had nothing to be ashamed of…’ The man bit again, chewed a long time, watching the smuggler. ‘The Liberator himself is one of them, they say. That’s something, ’ey?’

  So the smuggler said: ‘But you yourself were never a real slave…?’

  The man wiped his chin with his forefingers. ‘And if I was, what of it?’ He pointed to the smuggler’s stick. ‘Go on, eat it. Cook it too much, and the flavor goes.’

  The smuggler raised his stick to examine the seared meat. Juice rolled down against the skin between his thumb and forefinger, making him angle it sharply away—not from heat so much as surprise.

  The man chuckled. If a man’s a slave, then he’s not a man. If he was once a slave, well then, the better man he is for rising above it. Wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘A man that I believe is one of the greatest in Nevèrÿon was once a slave.’ Saying it this time did not have the same effect on him as it had when he’d last announced it. For a moment he wondered if it were no longer quite as true. ‘His soldiers are somewhere not too far from here. Over east, I heard.’

  ‘The Liberator…? Is he now?’ The man nodded. ‘Yes, well, some folks say he’s one-eyed. And some folks say he’s scarred. Like me. Is that right? Well, what’s it to you, if what they say is true?’ The man looked down at his meat, examining the wreckage from his uneven teeth. ‘You ever seen him? Would you know what he looked like if you ran into him?’

  ‘I’ve been told he’s brave, gentle, handsome—like you, eh?’ The smuggler chuckled. ‘Or like me—for all our scars and pockmarks and your single eye. At least that’s what some have said.’

  ‘And what do you say? Just that he’s a great hero, right?’ The man chuckled too; then, after a few more moments, he said: ‘I was once a slave. In the Imperial mines below the Faltha Mountains. That’s where I caught these lashes. Now I’m free.’ He glanced up at the smuggler. ‘And I fight to bring that freedom to all other slaves. That’s what I’m doing here.’ He hesitated a moment. ‘So now that you know who I am, what will you do for me?’

  The pleasure the smuggler felt was like a heat rising through his body, as if he’d taken the flame from between them within himself. He felt a great smile battling out on his face, while a memory returned of a subterranean hall, where a little one-eyed man stood naked on a throne in flickering torchlight above an indistinct figure groveling on the steps. The young smuggler made some inner gesture to push away the image, for he knew that the one thing he had no desire to do was to serve or service anyone again on either side of such a sexual split. To his surprise, the image vanished, as the pleasure of recognition, strong as relief, rose, filling him, obscuring all doubt and discomfort. ‘They say you wear the collar—I mean, that you’ve worn it on the bridge in Kolhari. But you said you only—’

  ‘Well—’ the man pursed his lips—‘it’s not a thing you’re going to admit right off to any stranger is it?’ (The young smuggler shook his head quickly.) ‘Not that what I told you wasn’t true. Sometimes what you play with as a youngster returns to plague you as a man? How does that sound?’

  The smuggler nodded. ‘And your forces. They’re housed in the Princess Elyne’s castle, not far off…?’

  ‘Oh, well, now.’ The man leaned back a moment. ‘Some of them are there. Some of them are here. I mean, all around us. A man like me doesn’t wander out in the countryside alone—it would be too risky, you see what I mean? I have some of my men up there—’ he pointed over the smuggler’s shoulder toward the rocks—‘and over there, and back there. Right now. They’re watching us. I want you to know that. Telling you is only fair. We’re watched, and watched carefully, you and me. That’s how I knew you were there. My men saw you and signaled. I only employ the best men, too. They’d lay down their lives for me at any moment. So don’t think there’s some trick you can try against me and get away with. If you were some spy, say, from one of the slave-holding barons, there wouldn’t be anything you could do to me now.’

  ‘Or if I was a customs inspector?’ The smuggler glanced about the foggy leaves, grinning.

  The man frowned. ‘You’re too young to be a customs inspector. You think I believe the empress would send someone like you after…after a full-grown man?’ He shook his head. ‘No, you’re a smart-aleck hustler from up in Kolhari, running a wagon load of contraband down to the south.’ He still looked dubious. ‘That’s all.’

  The smuggler blinked at the trees. He was thinking that those watching them could not be more than twenty meters off in any direction, or the fire would be invisible in this dense mist. ‘I’d like to join your soldiers and fight for you—of course, I could only do it for a while,’ the smuggler said. ‘I’m not much of a fighter, I don’t guess. And I have to be somewhere south of here pretty soon. Though, in this fog, for all I know, I could as easily be rolling north, west, or east. That’d be like me too. But I’d still like to fight for you a while—just to see what it was like. Though I’d be pretty surprised if you needed or wanted me. You want people as committed to the ending of slavery as you are, people who know its evils from the way its scarred their own lives, who’ll stand to the death against it. Myself, I’ve seen old barracks where slaves were once housed. I’ve seen rows of stone benches with the iron rings sunk along their tops, out in the sun at the edge of an overgrown field, where five hundred were once chained while they ate their gruel in the rain. But there were no slaves left when I went past, and even the manacles on the whipping post were rusted through. I’ve talked to some old men and women, come to the city with scars like yours, who remember slavery. And I’ve talked to a few young ones, too, more recently escaped from the west—and mad they were! If you told me slavery makes you mad, I’d believe it. And when I was a boy, on the farm where my aunt and mother worked, we’d see a line of fifteen or twenty scrawny wretches passing on the road, chained to a plank they carried on their shoulders by day, that they dropped between them to eat off at the evening meal, the bunch of them led along by some leather-aproned men, one with red eyes, one with a harelip, and one with a cough worse than any of his charges—and we’d tell tales of slavers for days, and the grown-ups would threaten us with stories of how, were any of us ever to leave the farm or the fields, we’d be taken by such men, prowling around the country, and put in chains within the hour. And the tales would go on for weeks, for months. And maybe a year later, we’d see another such gang pass.’ The smuggler began to eat his roast, which was hot and tastier than he’d expected. ‘But you see, I don’t know slavery the way you do. I’m committed to the idea of you—and, believe me, to eat with you, here, tonight, to be able to say I’ve seen you and sat with you, talked with you while you rested from your journey and I rested from mine—well, I’ll be able to boast of nothing better, sitting and nodding in the sun in front of some thatched shack, when and if I reach my dotage. But in the same way I’m committed to you, I’m not really committed to your ideas. I mean: I don’t know what you know of slavery to make it real. I only know…well, this little part of you.’

  ‘So for you—’ the man snorted—‘the slave pits of the Thane of Varhesh are not real—because twelve of them have been filled in, and three of them are empty? True, he doesn’t have the nine hundred slaves his father owned. But I’ll tell you: the one pit now open, in which he nightly locks eighty or ninety men and women, still smells so foul you’d puke if you got within thirty feet of it.’ He nodded. ‘I puked. And I didn’t think I would. You say slavers only came by your farm once a year? Then you’ve never ridden through some southern clutch of huts and yam fields, off in the forest where they only babble in the barbarian tongue and in that so badly even the fifty words you know of the la
nguage hardly make you understood; but the slavers have been by only a night before. And you watch the fathers wandering about, crying for their stolen sons and daughters, stopping now and again to beat their faces bloody against sharp-barked palms or on the slant rocks, while the women throw handfuls of sand into the evening’s cooking pot, tearful and silent, for the grieving meals they’ll eat for a week after such a raid. And I tell you, now: the last time I rode by such wasn’t a year, or five years, or fifteen years back. It was only four months by, not two hundred stades west of here. And it made me as sick to my heart as the stench of the Varhesh pit made me to my stomach when I worked on…when I rode by it, six years ago.’ The man ripped off another piece in teeth the smuggler was sure would soon come loose at such violence.

  With the next bit of his own roast, juice tickled the smuggler’s chin; he turned to wipe it on his shoulder. ‘Oh, I know slavery’s real.’ He chewed, swallowed, bit again; wiped again. ‘It’s real when you tell me. Anything that was real to you, I would fight to know its reality! I don’t think slavery is good. I don’t support it. If anyone asked my opinion, I’d tell them what you said seven years ago, in your audience with Lord Krodar, that so outraged him: “Slavery is the evil that makes a mockery of any man or woman who stands in the sun, breathes in the air, and dares to think that freedom, love, or their right to will is untainted by it—or hopes, even for a moment, that bodily tortures, cuts, and brandings wait more than an hour or a week or a year ahead in some government dungeon because of the horror that would make any man or woman turn from its evil as soon as fight it.” They spoke of it through all the markets of Nevèrÿon; they repeated what you said, and many said it wrong. But I asked and inquired of many more, till I’d finally put the right version together—that’s what you must have said! And I haven’t forgotten it. How could anyone forget who’s seen real slaves, or even those in their real collars on the Bridge of Lost Desire—much less gone with them? I know about it. I only say I do not know it. Not as you once knew it. A few times I’ve helped exslaves that I didn’t have to, doddering women and doltish boys, hugely brave and hopelessly naïve, all confused by the city, come to Kolhari, lonely and lost. For that confusion and the city that creates it I do know. A few times I’ve avoided helping those men in rural parts who were seeking to profit from what remains of slavery. To say I know what I know—and, indeed, what I don’t know—is only to say that I’ve listened to all of them, and I know what I’ve done is not the same as bearing arms among your troops, as marching by your side, one of your most trusted scouts, as knocking the links loose from the hasp that held them. Well, the truth is, someone like you couldn’t trust the likes of me. And you’d be right not to.’

  ‘But you’ve helped some slaves and hindered some slavers? No doubt you have. It’s more than I’ve done…’ The man frowned again. ‘I mean it’s more than, at times in my life, I’ve felt I was…able to do.’ Suddenly he grinned again. Perhaps when the customs inspectors become as hard on smugglers as the lords of Nevèrÿon have been on their slaves, then you’ll start to fight, ’ey?’

  The young smuggler laughed, bit, and nodded all at once. ‘And what I know you’ve done for the cause of slaves will brace me in every battle.’ Once more he looked up and about at the trees. Your men are watching us? Here we are, at the center, then—of five, fifty, a hundred-fifty eyes?’ He shrugged, still smiling, thinking that there could be no more than…seventeen men at most in the woods about them. ‘I’ve always wondered what I would say if I met you. I’d always figured my tongue would stall in my mouth like a cart whose axle tangles in some underwater root halfway over the stream, or the way it does when I want to tell some specially freckled girl who makes me want her more than I want the words to tell her so, and the fear of those words, as she says she doesn’t want me, becomes as large as the stone that, when the cart jounces across it, breaks the old axle. But here I am, talking to you. And believe me, what I say, now, it’s…well, it’s what I think. It’s what I feel. The truth? No, I wouldn’t call it that. But it’s as close as a thief, a liar, and a bad man out in the night is likely to get—now that was said of me by an old woman who knew me, really, no better than I know you. Yet she was right in her way. And if she can be on so little personal knowledge, then so can I!’

  ‘I bet you’re a real bad man too.’ The man laughed.

  But the smuggler was going on. ‘You know that sign with the two lines that cut each other? It’s the only one I can recognize—a friend told me it was also the sign for illiterates like us. The students call it an “X” and use it to mark the maps on which they plot the stories they call history: I’ve seen them together, examining one, in the taverns they frequent down in the Spur—because they can’t afford the prices out in Sallese where they study. Sometimes I’ve seen it among the marks on the wall of the bridge stanchion down at the piss-trough, where the barbarians have gone and marked over it with their own meaningless scribble, like the ones you see carved all over the ruined walls and monuments in the south. Well, that’s the mark we make, you and I: my journey, your journey, here where they cross. And from our meeting you’ll go on in your fight for what you believe, and I will go on with my smuggling, hustling, and scheming. Neither one of us will have changed, really. Yet I can’t imagine a greater changing force in my own life than you, than such a meeting with you!’

  ‘You sound like some babbling student yourself!’ The man laughed again.

  ‘But it’s nothing to you,’ the smuggler went on. ‘And it shouldn’t be. Look, here: you’ve given me food, offered me a moment of safety, protection, and company in this fog-riddled night. I’ve never expected that from anyone, much less from you. That you’re the one who gave it to me is the only thing anyone could ever remember me for. There’re thirty, forty—or maybe fifteen, if I’m honest—men and women I remember because they’ve gotten even less from you than I have. Someone who fought for you told me you sometimes stopped here—and that’s why I came here; and that’s why I’ll remember her, above all her foreign ways! Her name was Raven—’

  ‘Sure, I remember him!’ the man declared.

  ‘It’s silly and foolish, but you can’t imagine the pleasure of it!’ Once more he looked about the flame-hollowed dark, wondering what the listeners might be thinking of his outpouring, which only made him laugh out loud. ‘The pleasure of it! That’s the most important thing. Meeting you, like this, knowing that at last I’ve encountered the person who’s meant more to me than anyone else, what greater pleasure could I possibly have? What more could I ever—’

  ‘Hold up there, now.’ Carefully, the man pushed his stick’s end into the ground, letting the wand bend over a near rock; the remaining meat hung above the lowered flame. Reaching toward the dish beside him, he grasped the knife handle. What are you carrying in your cart? Come on. Tell me.’

  The young smuggler frowned. ‘Carrying? What do you mean…?’

  ‘I mean you’re a smuggler running contraband from Kolhari down into the Garth. What have you got in your cursed oxcart? I want to know, now!’

  ‘But what’s that to—?’

  ‘Look!’ The man lowered one knee to the ground and drew in a long breath. The knife handle lifted above the leaves. Firelight slid the blade. ‘You think running around and freeing slaves is cheap? I need all I can get for my campaign. All right, then. What have you got?’

  The young smuggler pushed back on the wet ground with his fists and heels. Twigs and pebbles scraped his buttocks.

  ‘Come on. The way you feel, you should be proud to contribute to my cause. Tell me what you’re hauling!’

  ‘I don’t know!’ As much from the truth as from fear, the smuggler pushed back once more.

  In the young smuggler’s wagon, under the canvas, along with the pots and the sack, there were blades both shorter and longer than the one the man across the fire held; there were two clubs, one with metal points inset on the end, one without, and a short bow and a quiver holding nine arrows,
each fixed with chipped, sharpened, and weighted flints, then five more wrapped at their tips with wadding, which, soaked in expensive oil, would burn strong enough to speed through air without extinguishing; there were five slate knives, and three of various metals, only one of which, despite its regular oilings, had begun to rust; but he had long since taken to leaving them deep in his cart until some emergency grew, not over minutes, but over hours—at about the time he’d ceased looking in his sack.

  The man went from one knee to both feet, solidly as an ox rising from its haunches.

  The smuggler tried to push back again; his heels gouged ground.

  Then the man sprang across the fire, his blade high. Anklets clattered. Smoke spun under his heels.

  The smuggler went down on his back in wet leaves, as the man landed, one foot either side of him.

  ‘Come on! Get yourself up! Let’s see what you got!’ The man reached down and grabbed the smuggler’s arm, yanked it; and it hurt. ‘Go on! Get your cart!’ The flat of the knife blade slapped the smuggler’s chin, hard. It pressed his head back against the ground.