Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  One caught on the neck, fell to the floor, and rolled. Noyeed was off the table to retrieve it. ‘Here!’ He thrust it over the man’s arm and in.

  The scarred giant pushed the sack with its tie-cord at the smuggler. ‘Here, take it, now. And go on. Go on, I say!’

  The smuggler grabbed up the sack, cradling the neck against his shoulder to keep the toy balls from spilling over the floor; he grasped at the cord, trying too quickly and too clumsily to bind the neck closed. ‘I’m only the poorest, most careless, most clumsy—’ He glanced up again; the little man in his iron collar waited beside the Liberator, like the big man’s foreshortened shadow. Yes, one eye was definitely missing. The flesh had sealed within the socket, leaving only the scar lid and lashes made within a depression deep and round as if it had been rolled into the sharp face by one of the balls.

  The smuggler whispered:

  ‘Master…?’

  ‘I’ve freed you. Out of here, now,’ the big one said, ‘before I change my mind!’

  The smuggler swallowed, turned, and rushed under the low beam, through the hangings, and into the hallway. He’d expected to find the guard who had led him up here. But the man had gone.

  He hurried with the sack along the corridor. Under torchlight here and there, he tried to recall the brief interview with the Liberator and his one-eyed lieutenant—unless the great one speaking to him had been the lieutenant and little Noyeed was, indeed, the Liberator…?

  And the scar?

  And the single eye?

  He’d seen them now, yes? Unless, of course, that had been a trick of firelight, or even the detritus of the terrors from out in the mist that, even now, drifted before the torches in their wall niches—the fog that seeped through the walls about him as if the stone itself were steam. Could he trust his memory? Or anything else. Why had he lied to the Liberator’s questions about his direction, about his ability to read? ‘Master,’ he’d called him! By all the nameless gods, had he uttered a word of truth? Could it be, he wondered, he’d only thought he’d seen what he’d seen because of his own desires, researches, expectations?

  The Liberator was certainly no murdering highwayman.

  One had certainly worn the collar.

  But then, he’d known that since the night how long ago on the Kolhari bridge.

  The real and solid meeting in this foggy night had left him the same entanglement of suppositions with which he’d begun his journey—oh, slightly adjusted, slightly shifted, but in ways almost too subtle to name. The illuminating and major change he might have hoped for in an encounter with the real, taking him from night to day, had, equally certainly, not occurred. Just as before, he still carried with him, unknown and untaxable, the intricate, frightening, many-times questioned and faulty certainties still called, at the behest of whatever unnamed gods, truth.

  That was all.

  Now pausing, now hurrying again, now making his way hesitantly, his sack mercifully safe in his arms, he rushed through castle corridors, down steps, and out the door where his cart waited for it in the fog.

  At the turning of a corridor under a guttering torch in its iron cage, they encountered each other later.

  Feeling along the cold wall, the little princess walked unsteadily in her stiff gown, humming to herself.

  ‘Well, master—’ Noyeed laughed, for, by now, both men thought that she would simply wander tipsily on without seeing them—‘it seems that my plan—’

  ‘Your dream, little monkey?’ The princess chuckled. She stopped. She swayed—but she did not look at them.

  ‘—my plan has worked, master!’ (It was well she did not look, for with the torchlight above, both the one-eyed man and the scarred giant looked truly demonic in the dark hall). ‘We’ve been able to move you and your forces out to a part of the nation where slavery is a reality and real force is needed to end it! Here, master, you and I—and you—’ The princess might have thought from their conversation they ignored her as she appeared to ignore them, but the little man reached out to seize her wrist, gaunter than his own—‘we’ve been able to turn revolution into reality!’

  Gorgik nodded in the dark hallway.

  The princess did not appear to realize her arm was in Noyeed’s grip.

  ‘Only sometimes,’ Gorgik said, ‘I wonder if my own dreamings—’

  ‘Your plans,’ said the princess, like a mother correcting a child’s diction.

  ‘—if my dreams are that real, after all. You and I have observed slavery as slaves and as free men, Noyeed. You have observed it as the daughter of a slaveholder, my princess. All three of us, together and apart, have debated and interrogated and argued about it through a thousand firelit nights and into the fatiguing glare of dawn. We all know what drives slavery from the land: a new farming technique, a more efficient yam stick, the spread of minted coin, some imperceptible warming of the very earth itself over fifty years, or an equally unpredictable increase in the rainfall, yielding the greater affluence that makes slavery impracticable and paid labor more profitable. Yet somewhere, through all this experience, observation, and speculation the object must remain intact: slavery. But where is it? Unless we can truly locate it, what can the likes of us do, really, to affect such a thing?’

  She turned to peer at the shadowed faces, one above hers, one below. ‘Yet what are necessary to move a country from slavery to freedom are insight, energy, and commitment,’ declared the little woman, clearly and most undrunkenly, as though the conversation had strayed into an area with which she was totally familiar, totally at ease. ‘Men and women caught in one set of habits do not shift so easily into another merely because the sun shines and the rains fall, my Liberator. You have brought your passion and your purpose here to serve your nation, your times. Could anything be nobler?’

  ‘The idea that a man is a slave to the times may be just as much a dream as the idea that a man can be a master of them—or less than a dream, my princess. A lie, if we know ourselves to be dreaming.’ Gorgik turned to wander a few steps up the hall. ‘Perhaps, the times notwithstanding, I am only here because of a dream, just as much as the empress’s troops, which, true, would not fight me in Kolhari and its environs, but which her ministers send, with their dreams of victory, to fight me at the borderland.’

  ‘We must fight here, master!’ Noyeed released the princess’s wrist, to look at Gorgik, who’d wandered some steps by the stony wall. ‘And we must triumph here. Then we must move on, beyond Nevèrÿon. We are at the border now. And we must move even further. Do you think that the evils we fight to eradicate here end with the ill-defined boundary of this nation? What we fight is the nightmare of oppression and lies. Where we come, we wake men and women to the light of freedom and truth!’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said the princess. ‘I still recognize it. That was, indeed, my dream. Yet just as I recognize it, am about to reach it, just listen to you, my one-eyed monkey; already you are dreaming of leaving!’

  The one-eyed man turned back. ‘No, my mistress—!’

  ‘—leaving me, leaving Nevèrÿon itself, for whatever chaos no civilized person can say. No, do not protest. If that must be part of my dream too, then let it.

  ‘My mistress, I did not want to suggest that—’

  But the princess was walking away again—was indeed beyond them in the dark. Once more they heard her, in the dark, humming.

  11

  THE TWO MEN WALKED together through corridors, up turning steps, and under narrow arches, to come out on the castle roof, just as the moon cleared through a tear in the fog, which, wider and wider, wavering and billowing, ripped across the night: for minutes, abutments and balustrades silvered.

  Gorgik stepped to the edge to gaze between the crenelations. A sea of fog surrounded them, so that the castle seemed to float in it with, here and there, a treetop bobbing, nor many of those. ‘I dream…’ the Liberator whispered.

  Behind him, chuckling, Noyeed dropped to a squat on the chill stones, forearms balanced on his kne
es, ‘What do you dream, master?’

  ‘My dreams? Sometimes I wonder how I can know for sure. When I was at the mines, Noyeed—when we were slaves together at the mines—I abused you like some master might abuse a slave; and, sated from that abuse, I lay my head down on my straw pallet, and I dreamed. I dreamed of freedom. I dreamed of struggling toward it. I dreamed of the ways to secure it. I dreamed of having the power to grant that freedom to the slaves around me, even you—even to you, Noyeed. They were dreams that, today, strike me as not far from the princess’s, however more intense mine might have been. And you were part of my dreams even then. Only none of the other slaves around me knew of them. I could not tell them to any of you. I could not even speak of them clearly to myself. I could only dream. The language had not yet been given to me. But then, soon, somehow, I was free; I was able to struggle for more freedom. I was able to secure it by that struggle. I was able to seize and nourish enough power to grant it to others. Thus I became a liberator. But all through my freedom, through its growth and coming to power, from the very moment that it began, I have been troubled with other dreams, with dark and violent dreams, dreams of that initial abuse that I and six others—four slaves, two guards, and I, a foreman among them—visited on you when you were a sick and helpless child. And that abuse, you tell me, now, you do not remember. It is as if, somehow, once again, I cannot make you know my dreams.’

  ‘And so, you sometimes think, we abuse each other only to make me remember whatever truth it is that I’ve forgotten? A truth, you call it, that I cannot believe is true if only from what I know, what I remember, of my time in the mine with you, master?’

  Gorgik turned from the wall and stood with his back to the stone in moonlight. ‘You are not a forgiving man, Noyeed.’

  ‘I can be a very vengeful man, master.’

  ‘And you took no secret pleasure in the violation we miners—slaves, guards, and a foreman—visited on your body’

  ‘It was agony and terror beyond humiliation, master. Believe me.’

  ‘Then aren’t you a fool, Noyeed, to love and support someone who openly admits he was among their number—even more, to mime again and again, night after night, now as master, now as slave, the very abuse you suffered?’

  ‘Master, I cannot fight all the evils in the world. Therefore I must fight the ones I have known, the ones I can recall.’ Noyeed shook his head. ‘What occurred that night in the slave barracks below the Falthas so many years ago was not written down. No spy lurked there in the darkness, taking notes and noting names. What’s left today is dreams, memories—yours, mine. Well: that you have such dreams means only that you are human. But you are a fool, master, to be a slave to them.’ Noyeed cocked his head in the silver light. ‘I remember the abuse, master.’ He said it tiredly, as if he’d said this many times before in response to what he had, indeed, heard many times. ‘How could I forget it? But it was years ago. Many, many years. And I have no specific memory of you among my abusers. In truth, the more we talk, the more I wonder if I would recognize any of their faces if I encountered them again—even if time had not scrawled over their features with age the way you mark out some miswritten sign on one of your parchments. It was dark that night. And I was ill. Perhaps it was another boy, at another time, you fell on, master, and misremembered as little Noyeed. You say it was not the first time you committed such abuse. My memories of you at the mine, master, are only of your kindnesses to me, time after time after time. Now, perhaps the foreman with the scar, called Gorgik, whom I remember saving my life again and again was not really you but some other. Perhaps I misremember…? Oh, master, I let you have your memories! Let me have mine!’

  Standing at the wall and squatting on the stone, the two watched one another, till finally Noyeed turned his single eye away.

  ‘I have not forgiven you your cruelty, master. I have forgotten it. And that, for you, has been a cruel forgetting.’

  ‘And suppose, Noyeed, someday you remember. Suppose, someday, it comes to you—the way the name of a street you once lived in for a month, which, a decade later, you cannot recall, suddenly returns in the night to wake you sharply from half-sleep. Suppose, some moonlit night like this, as you watch my face, laboring and sweating above yours, suddenly you recall my scar from years ago—’

  ‘Years ago,’ Noyeed said, ‘I was on my belly, not my back—’

  ‘But what if—’

  ‘It’s the game we play, master.’ Noyeed blinked his eye. ‘If I remember, then I may, indeed, forgive you. Or I may strike you dead. It’s an interesting game, master. But till that happens, what can I do? What can you?’ He leaned forward. ‘This forgetfulness of mine, it plagues you, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Noyeed.’

  ‘Then my forgetfulness is my revenge.’ Sitting back, Noyeed looked up in the moonlight. ‘You see, master, I am not a forgiving man. Even to one I love. If I were a forgiving man, I would lie, say I remember—and forgive you.’ Noyeed suddenly reached up to grasp the iron collar at his neck, pulled it, creaking, open, and placed it—open—on the stone before him. His hands came to his knees. ‘What we do together, you and I, we do very much awake. How you take it apart and put the fragments back together again to make those monstrous dreams, and your memories of those dreams, and your waking talk of those memories—master, that is your affair. I can listen. But I cannot forgive…because I cannot judge.’ At the wall, the Liberator was still, till after a time the one-eyed Noyeed said, ‘South…’

  And Gorgik, as if released by the word, stepped forward across the roof, laughing.

  ‘He lied, didn’t he, master!’ Noyeed laughed too. ‘That smuggler we took? Oh, but you caught him out! You knew he could read a few signs. He was a smuggler, and yet, master, you forgave him! You let him go! But now, master, as he goes on his way through the land, he goes knowing your power!’

  ‘South?’ Grunting, Gorgik dropped to squat before Noyeed. ‘No one smuggles such trifles into south! Of course, he’s on his way back to Kolhari. But that kind has not a true word in him. I wouldn’t be surprised if everything he said were a lie. Such as he lies as he breathes. Truth is something he’s never even learned to speak.’

  ‘But you knew the truth about him, master! Didn’t you? You knew the truth of his lies. And the truth is the source of your power!’

  ‘Ah!’ The Liberator chuckled again. ‘What power, Noyeed? Believe me, I have no power with his sort. That’s why I sent him on his way. A better, more honest man, and I might have asked him to join us. But him…? The kind of fight we engage in here would mean nothing to him.’

  ‘But your fight means more and more!’ Noyeed declared. ‘And to more and more People! Master, the last time I was in Kolhari at your behest, I met one not so different. It was on the Bridge of Lost Desire—yes, it was! And as we talked, he spoke your name—I didn’t mention it. He spoke it first. But he thought with my one eye I might even be you, master! Imagine! But you were his hero. He had searched out all he could of you. For him, you were the greatest man in all Nevèrÿon! Greater, even, than the empress! Oh, I suppose he was not really a youth like this one. He was sharp and intelligent and talked like a student. But I would wager there are many such in Kolhari, in Sarness—all over Nevèrÿon! You do not hear of so many because, as they go about this fearful, fogbound land, they meet too many counterfeits, too many imposters, too many who only mimic the gestures of those with true purpose, true passion, true power—from whom they learn nothing about truth. But then, master, when they hear another fable of your exploits, when they hear something of the truth of your deeds and doings, their vision is cleared—’

  ‘Now is that the truth?’ From his squat, Gorgik made a dismissive gesture. ‘No, Noyeed, you only say this to please me. Nor is it necessary. Certainly when you were last in Kolhari, you met some boy. You probably met many. And one told you this, and one told you that, and one you didn’t meet but only heard of may have said something like it to another friend who, to flatter you,
repeated some distorted version of it. And from them all, you’ve put together this little tale. But if I let such delusions take hold, believe it, I’d be the most unfortunate of…’ But here he stopped. ‘It’s too easy to put together such lies, Noyeed. I’ve put together too many myself. South…?’

  They faced each other across the few feet of stone, on which the collar lay, both of them grinning as the light about them brightened and dimmed.

  Fog blew across the moon.

  ‘Yes, you know his sort well, master.’

  ‘Sadly, I know him as well as I know myself, for once I was such—perhaps am only an accident or two away from being such now.’

  ‘Ah, master, you say that of all you meet. You say it of every thief and whore and smuggler. You say it of every merchant and princess and minister—then you tell me it is the source of all true power!’

  Gorgik began to laugh.

  ‘What dreams you have, master! What a dream of power!’ The little man grinned. ‘Where do the pieces of such a dream come from? How do you put them together, master? Where does one learn to dream like that? No, master, we cannot stay here. Soon we must go. We must leave the princess, leave Nevèrÿon, and take your dream, your knowledge, your power beyond this ill-bounded land and truly right the wrongs of the world!’

  But as fog closed out the chill moon, for a while the two men squatted together on the roof, with their dreams, laughing in darkness.

  —New York

  January 1984

  The Mummer’s Tale

  The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess: a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and, reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows. But can the limit have a life of its own outside of the act that gloriously passes through it and negates it?…For its part, does transgression not exhaust its nature when it crosses the limit, knowing no life beyond this point in time?…Transgression, then, is not related to the limit as black to white, the prohibited to the lawful, the outside to the inside, or as the open area of a building to its enclosed spaces. Rather their relation takes the form of a spiral which no simple infraction can exhaust. Perhaps it is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies, which lights up the night from the inside, from top to bottom, and yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its harrowing and poised singularity…