Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  ‘It was Fluffy’s suggestion: perhaps another dose of Toad’s painkiller? So they let Vrach swig down a good bit. Then there was nothing to do but send us back. The caravan had to move on. With Vrach’s arms around our shoulders, Namyuk and I supported him between us. Lord Anuron sent a soldier along.

  ‘The tall lord wished us well.

  ‘In the course of our concern, none of us even mentioned that, once more, our collars were in place.

  ‘To go even half a mile with a man who can only use one leg is not easy. A few times the soldier switched off with us, when Namyuk or I needed a rest. Three times Vrach asked us to leave him alone awhile in the bushes. The third time, when he called us in to get him, he was breathing hard and looked up at us with a worried smile, grimacing as we got his arms again around us. “You see it feels in the worst way like I’ve got to piss.” He grunted as he came up between us. “But I can hardly get it to trickle.”

  ‘At the barracks, Namyuk and I were sent straight off to the pit for our dirty work, while guards took over Vrach. Because he’d been there ten years, I guess, and because he’d always been a good miner, he was allowed to lie in sick.

  ‘That evening, through supper and into the night, we heard his groans—shouts, some of them, finally—coming from the next barracks over.

  ‘Even the trickle had stopped.

  ‘They didn’t have to kill him.

  ‘Two nights later he died.

  ‘In the morning I saw them carry him out. Though he’d only been dead those hours, gut and belly were big as a corpse’s left to bloat a month.

  ‘I’ve thought about it often. It might even make a better story—another mummer’s tale—to say it was my anger, my rage at Vrach’s murder that spurred me to freedom, to my own liberation, to the liberation of all Nevèrÿon’s slaves. It’s a tale I’ve sometimes told, sometimes to others, sometimes to myself. Like any slave, I’ve many more than this one. I’ve told some often enough to know the truth that’s in them. There’s certainly lots of reality. But a tale I’ve told much more rarely, though I’ve found myself thinking of it again and again, is the story of the night when none of us knew (or, at least, I didn’t) Vrach would die; when, through my chance observation at the flap of that lamp-lit tent, I gained my self, the self that seeks the truth, the self that, now and again in seeking it, becomes entangled in falsehood, error, and delusion, as well as outrage and pride—the self that tells the tales.

  ‘But more and more, now that my purpose is so largely won, I reflect on the paradox that one cannot reach for something till one has something to reach with. That night at the tent, when I recognized my own lusts in the lord, I knew that I was different from other slaves: and with that knowledge it began to flood upon me the endless ways in which I and all the slaves I knew were, for all our differences, subject to one oppression. That night at the tent, when I recognized that I, a slave, and he, a lord, could see in each other one form to desire, it began to flood upon me, as I rehearsed the night’s talk on which I’d grounded the oneness of master and slave, the endless ways in which that lord and I were different in every aspect of our class, history, condition—and every other social category imposed to form us.

  ‘I wanted his power, Udrog. I wanted it desperately. And by recognizing that want, I woke to my self: what I wanted was the power to remove the collar from the necks of the oppressed, including my own. But I knew, at least for me, that the power to remove the collar was wholly involved with the freedom to place it there when I wished. And, wanting it, I knew, for the first time since I’d been brought to the mines—indeed, for the first time in my life—the self that want defined.’

  The fire crackled awhile.

  Udrog, who’d attended this tale with stretches of interest and stretches of boredom, had again become alert when addressed by his name. Still and silent for so long, now he ventured a comment: ‘That lord, when he put the collar on his own neck, he freed you to put it around your own—’

  ‘In no way did he, or his gesture, free me!’ Gorgik glanced sharply at the boy, who wriggled against him, sighed, and lay back, though from a twitch in his shoulder here or a movement of his mouth there, it was possible the boy was going on with some other story to himself, even as Gorgik declared: ‘How could he have freed me?

  ‘That man was not free to put the collar on and wear the sign of his desire openly among both intimates and strangers. When he started at my presence that night, what I saw was a man as terrified of discovery as, no doubt, I’d have been had I been in his place.

  ‘That man was not free to give me my freedom: even as we recognized our own lusts in each other—even if the notion to buy and free a slave had suddenly struck him—because of our mutual recognition I was now the last slave he would have chosen to free. (Wasn’t I the first he chose to recollar?) With my recognition, which, believe me, he recognized as well, I’d already gained too much power for him to tolerate in me any equality.

  ‘I’m talking, understand, Udrog, of an incident almost wholly outside the chain of language that holds us to the social world, as far outside those chains as a true, observed, and social incident can be. But real as the incident was, had someone chosen to question me about it, I certainly would have lied—with full knowledge I was lying—to protect my lord, to protect myself. And I suspect he would have lied, too, to protect himself, to protect his slave. But the reason I’d have lied, far more than for the protection, is because, at that moment, I had no notion of how the truth might be articulated. And I’m willing to grant him the same.

  ‘But he, free me?

  ‘How could you, Udrog—or I—even think it, once he relocked my collar? Say rather the gesture with which he placed the collar on his own neck, when he thought himself unseen, was a mirror in which I saw—or in which I could anticipate—the form of my own freedom. Say rather that when he placed the collar again on me and locked it, he broke that mirror—but without in any way obscuring what I’d already seen in it.

  ‘Well, all that was a long time back. I’m telling you of things that took place in another world, Udrog. There’re no slaves now. There haven’t been since you were a child. And some like us, at least in the larger cities, wear their collars openly—which is why you, here, can be as forward as you are. Can you, with your freedom, understand that? But now you have heard the beginning, understanding what you have, lie here a little longer and let me tell the end. It’ll only take a bit more time. For many years later, when I—’

  But Udrog, about to protest that this was not the particular type of torture he’d had in mind for the evening, pushed suddenly to his knees, pointed off from the rug, and cried out: ‘What’s that?’

  The big man frowned, raised up on one elbow, and looked behind them. ‘What, Udrog?’

  ‘There, look! Do you see it?’

  ‘See what …? Oh, there, you mean?’

  ‘But what is it?’

  Frowning, Gorgik turned over on the rug. ‘A cat—at least that’s what it looks like.’

  The animal had run from the shadow to pass silently within inches, and now stood, some feet off, looking back, firelight luminous in one eye and moving in and out of the other as its head moved left, then right.

  ‘What’s it doing here?’ Udrog demanded.

  ‘Whatever cats do when they wander around empty castles at night.’ Gorgik shrugged. ‘Come, boy. Lie back down while I finish my tale.’

  But Udrog reached up, pulled his collar open, and turned to Gorgik. ‘Maybe it would be better if you were the slave. For a while. Here—’ He pushed the collar about Gorgik’s neck. ‘This way I can show you, first, how I like it done. You’d like that, too; I know it. I’ll show you—’

  ‘Be still, boy!’ Though he wore the collar now, Gorgik spoke in the same commanding voice as before: but there was a smile in with it. And Udrog, caught among fear, lust, impatience, and, yes, interest, looked around again—the cat had gone—then settled himself on the rug against the big man, who’d alr
eady started speaking.

  6

  ‘FREEDOM FELL TO ME at twenty-one as much by chance as servitude had fallen to me at fifteen. Another caravan stopped at the fields near the mines. This one belonged to the empress’s Vizerine. She bought me on a whim as capricious as that of any noble’s I’ve talked of. When she tired of me, she gave me my freedom—and a three-year officer’s commission in the Imperial guards. But, because of that night when I was seventeen, freedom came to a man who could want, who could wish, who could dream. Under the reality of freedom, I learned to act.

  ‘Once, during the last year of my Imperial service, when I was returning with my cart to rejoin my troops at Ka’hesh, as I passed through some southern market in the daytime heat, suddenly I halted my ox, turned to the slaver who’d parked there by the tomato stall with his six charges—both he and his wares were scrawny and slow-moving—and purchased them all from him.

  ‘I ran my forefinger over their gums (bony here, spongy there), blinked at their wide-spaced teeth (this one broken, that one rotten), stared into their pimply ears (full of flakes and discharges), an examination the slaver insisted I make, coughing the while as he urged me to it. Even as I did it, I tried to tell him I did not need it, but my voice, hoarse, snagged and snared on my outrage, so that the five or nine words I muttered came out as incomprehensible grunts or whispers. Finally, silently, I thumbed iron and gold from my palm into his grimy, crisscrossed fingers, re-roped their arms behind them at his instructions, and at last secreted the iron key in the leather military purse on one of my belts. The man must have thought me mad or near mute. Was my partial paralysis—not only of voice but of hand and foot, for stepping up to bind one old woman, I stumbled, and in paying I dropped three coins in the dirt—desire for some barbarian boy, like you, among the six, Udrog, his hair thinned out by ringworm? Was it fury at the institution that had smashed my childhood out of existence and had strewn these half-dozen broken, sunburned creatures at the shore of what was left me of my life? Or was it just fear that something—huge, unnamable, and incomprehensibly greater than I—would, for my transgression, crack the clouds, reach down, and crush me on the dust?

  ‘All three were there to mute me, to halt my hands, to shake my feet. Yet, mumbling, halt, shaking, I did it. Then I took my six slaves, behind my cart, outside the town, removed their collars, and, with embarrassed curtness, told them: “You’re free, now. All of you. So go on.” Two thanked me effusively. One just stared. And, after faint smiles at me, guarded frowns at one another, and a great deal of blinking in the sun, three more—including the barbarian with the scabby scalp—turned with the same so-human persistence that had, doubtless, let them walk to that town in chains and, free, walked away from it, as inarticulate as I.

  ‘When I rolled on to rejoin my men, the collars were deep in my provision cart.

  ‘Another time, Udrog, perhaps a year beyond my Imperial service, I walked down a road where only occasional moonlight through this or that tear in the clouds let me identify in the dirt the dozens of lapping prints of what had to be a band of chained and collared chattel. Then I saw a campfire off to the side of the road and heard, not a tired, drunken slaver haranguing his property to move, to get their crusty bodies here or there, to let this one or that one have his share of food, but, rather, I swear it, an exaggerated and comic parody of the slaver you used to see in the mummers’ skits that mocked those same overseers: he was shouting, blustering, shrieking, beating at them with some kind of club, now at this crippled woman, now at that old man, while some were crying, and some, afraid to cry, only whimpered … the part the mummers so judiciously leave out.

  ‘I had a sword. I had a knife. And the expression on my face, there in the darkness, was the same grin I’d given so readily both to guard or slave back at the mines.

  ‘One weapon in each hand, I crept through the brush, like a bandit sneaking up for a roadside murder. Did I hesitate, watching him beating and screaming, as long as I did at the edge of the firelight to observe exactly the nature of his crime? Was it fear—even as I grinned—that held me? Did I wait as long as I did so that I could see how many men he had with him? Did I tarry those ten, fifteen, twenty seconds to judge my chances better, better to plan my one-man attack in the dark? No, Udrog: for one second after the other, I kept wondering if the man were, somehow, in the midst of some ill-conceived joke—that this was some foolishness I was watching that had just gotten out of hand.

  ‘After all, standing a little way off, one of the three armed overseers with him was laughing as hard as he could, even as blood splattered from the slaver’s stick.

  ‘Did I finally start from desire, rage, fear? What I felt, Udrog, was the same tingling that had rolled through my body the night the tall lord had removed my neck iron. Why not call it freedom? I pushed to my feet, sprinted forward, swung my sword—in one hack, I think I severed his arm, and, in another, cut through his slaver’s apron to slice open both his thighs. As he fell, I turned on one of the other men, who was not laughing. It was quick and bloody and very noisy. Everyone shouted, including me. Once I yanked a chain free from its peg links and cried, “Run! Run! you’re free …!” though only two slaves ran. (I’m sure they thought their liberator quite as crazed as their overseers—two of whom, by now, I’d killed and one more of whom I’d badly wounded.) As I was opening the locks, one slave blundered into my knife and cut an arm—how deeply I never learned—because she fled shrieking.

  ‘I whirled, and the remaining guard danced back, whispering, “No, no—! All right! No …!” then turned and barreled into the forest as if he too were a fleeing slave.

  ‘There were twenty-seven captives. I stalked through firelight with salt in my mouth (once, when I’d turned to swing at someone, I’d bitten my inner cheek to blood), unlocking collar after collar after collar.

  ‘“Go on, now …! Go on …! Get out of here!”

  ‘Those two incidents tell you of the day and night of my struggle, Udrog; but let me talk of its evenings and dawns. For, more than a year later, in the late afternoon, while gold light glittered in the higher leaves and, to the east, fragments of blue between branches began to deepen, I was talking and laughing with some dozen of us who had stopped to enjoy the belonging, the protection, the temporary community around some forest campsite, when it somehow came out that, among this particular group of travelers who’d happened to come together at the camp, almost half of us had, at one time or another, been slaves. First one had told his story; then another had told hers. Oh, believe me, they were no less incensed at the injustice of servitude than I was. When it came my turn to talk, I made one joke and another about my clumsiness, my haltness, my inarticulateness while I had stumbled through that mute manumission in the market sunlight; now I derided the tingling procrastination I’d felt before that grinning night attack—a delay that had only allowed a dozen more of the slaver’s blows to fall.

  ‘A heavy woman standing at the group’s edge sipped from a water mug she held in both hands and said: “I remember you, Gorgik. I was a slave you freed.” And while all were silent, two men, one cross-legged and close to the fire with flames a-glimmer on his brown knees and one squatting off in blue-black shadow from a wide branch fanning to within inches of his balding head, now explained, first one, then the other, that they were slaves the woman had freed—though, for all she chewed her mug rim and twisted at her coarse green sleeve, she remembered them individually no better than I remembered her.

  ‘I’ve often tried to recall whether it was an ex-slave or merely a free barbarian at the evening fire, appalled at what the rest of us had been saying of slavery, who first made the suggestion: “Even if only ten of us banded together to work for the end of slavery in Nevèrÿon, we could accomplish a hundred times what the same ten, working in isolated anger, could do. Lead us, Gorgik.”

  ‘“How can I lead you?” And I laughed. “I cannot tell rage, fear, or desire from the love of freedom itself. Nor am I at all sure they aren’t
, finally, the same.”

  ‘A black man with a shaved head and whip marks on both flanks said from the group’s middle: “But you can grin at the confusions; you can dismiss the distinctions—they do not stop you. You can act. Lead us, Gorgik.”

  ‘And, yes, I wondered whether he were slave, criminal, or both. But I bent to my pack, wedged below my knee against the log I sat on, tugged it apart, and pawed through to pull out a metal collar—the two hinged semicircles of iron. I sat up, lifted it, and closed it on my neck. “What does this mean to you?” I asked, putting my hands back on my knees. Yes, I felt fear. Yes, I felt desire. Both had roughened my voice—though, perhaps, to them, it only made me sound the more authoritative. But I knew I had to give them a sign—to perform an act—that would show them who I was.

  ‘Someone who’d drunk a bit too much said: “Is that the sign you take to tell us you were once a slave, that you are now a leader of slaves, that you are the liberator come to set men and women free? Yes, I like it, Gorgik. Lead us.”

  ‘Now I laughed again. And got some drink myself. And as the fire grew brighter against the coming dark, conversation drifted to the more violent matters of darkness. But at dawn—not the next dawn, but a dawn maybe eight months later—I remember how I stood, checking my weapons, conferring with my aides, going over my plans with this cell leader and that one, under the larch trees in the wet grass. There were twenty with me that morning; we had come to a suburb just outside Kolhari and had slept just beyond a village wall. There were only two with me who had been among our company that former evening. My lieutenant was a barbarian not much older than you, Udrog, whom I had purchased as a slave in Ellamon and who was now my lover; and who had already learned with me the crises of the night.

  ‘We were going to meet that morning with a slave-holding baron, to talk through the sunlit hours. But we were ready to fight if, when darkness came, our peaceful negotiations had not made suitable progress. As I readied myself, I felt the same tingling about me—the fear, the desire, the rage. But somehow we had started a kind of revolution. Dream had become deed—indeed, private act had become an entire system of public actions.