‘“No. Not them. The guards.”
‘“Which guards?”
‘He shrugged again, again looking vaguely around, as if his attention were wandering. But I knew it was a kind of mime. “You know,” he said. “Some of the men who like to do it … that way—real rough; they get jobs as guards here. So I do it with them. Some of them, anyway. And one of them said—”
‘“Iryg?” I asked.
‘Feyev’s icy eyes came back, bright and narrow. “No! Not him!” He was actually angry. I felt a kind of tingle. “Iryg’s a fool! He only laughs about the ones who do; and makes jokes about us. About me. He tells you about my ‘perverse depravity’ without saying my name … then goes on and says I’m really a good slave—that’s the kind of game he likes to play! But I don’t care. Not about him.” (I did not even ask if Mirmid was Iryg’s nasty-tempered one; or Har’Ortrin his woman thief. I knew these games, too. They’re all part of a single one where the winner deals out humiliation to the losers.) “But some of the guards … well, like I said, they like to fuck rough. So I do it with them. That’s all. Like you. Sometimes they give me money. They say I should save it for when I’m free. But I don’t save very much. And I am free—now!” In his collar, he gave his gappy grin. “Well, some of them were talking about how …” The grin began to break up. I saw worry beneath it. “I don’t mean they put me up to it. Oh, no. I’m not getting anybody in trouble. It was my idea, me coming here like this … afterwards.” (While he spoke, while I watched his dull face that at least I knew could be angry, could worry, could smile, it was still hard to believe he’d ever had any idea on his own.) “You’re a powerful man, sir. A strong man. We saw you … I saw you staring at me; before. And since they say you like it that way, too, I thought maybe, if you liked it with me, you might … Maybe you could help me some. I mean, afterwards. With some money.”
‘“Tell me,” I said. “Do you like doing it? That way, I mean?”
‘Feyev shrugged again. “I don’t mind.”
‘“Here,” I said, suddenly. “What are you doing with that thing on?”
‘Feyev lifted his chin above the collar. “My teeth,” he said. “I suppose I’m not as good-looking as some you’ve had. Because my teeth fell out. Someone like you, you could get anyone, I guess. But some of the guards say it makes it better, though; they say I look like such a low-down fool … I have a whip mark on my shoulder—it’s not a real one. But some of them like it—” He started to turn and show me. “And you looked at me—”
‘“My poor, poor man” I said, “this is not right. You can’t just come in here like this and think someone might—’ Though, as I said it, I wondered what would make him think otherwise. “But you … tell me, now that you’re free—“I asked the question mechanically (as, I realized with embarrassment, I’d asked it of them all when we sat on the log before the ceremony: but from so many conversations with so many slaves, I’d learned there was no other question more likely to produce a happy answer. Again I wished I had stayed silent)—“where are you going? What are you going to do now?”
‘“I’ll go to the city—to Kolhari.” Though his face brightened as it had before, it was not the answer he’d given before. “Some of them told me there’s a bridge there, outside an old marketplace, where I could hang out. Maybe make a few coins … you know, doing what I do with them.”
‘“The Bridge of Lost Desire,” I said. “To be sure.” I felt some relief that what he’d spoken of out on the log with Mirmid and Har’Ortrin had been, for him, a kind of mummer’s tale. But I was unprepared, in the midst of the day’s formalities, speeches, and ideals, to encounter the simple sadness of a dull young man whose every thought was of another way to prostitute himself. “I’ve known my share who’ve gone there. Had I not been locked away here, I might have gone there myself. But it’s not an easy life on the streets of Kolhari.”
‘“Then I’ll just have to work hard at it.” He gave me another half-toothed grin. “If I get stuck, then I’ll try some of the things you said, before.”
‘My practical suggestions. “You’ll work very hard.” I thought of offering him some witless work on my own. (But what, I wondered while I thought it, could such a youth do besides stalk the walkways of the bridge?) I thought of accepting his offer and giving him a handful of coins. Or just the coins—and sending him away. Yet any choice seemed a trap I’d somehow set myself. I’d wanted to legislate his freedom, not ensnare myself in his survival. “Give that thing here.” I reached out.
‘Questioningly, he handed me the collar. “You want to put it on?”
‘The only reason it surprised me, I guess, was because it had been so far from my mind. “No,” I said. “No, I don’t want to … not now.” I took it in both hands, looked at it, looked at him.
‘As though there were only one other choice, he stepped toward me and raised his chin.
‘I took a breath. And raised it. Why? Perhaps to see what would happen if I did. I closed the collar again on his neck. My hands stayed on the iron.
‘He looked at me with his light eyes. Then, slowly, he smiled: “You do want to, don’t you …?”
‘If that pause is desire, while he may well have been within it, I was wholly outside it. Oh, there was some physical response—most definitely—and as a younger man, I might have pursued it, seeing what I could work it into. But it was of the sort that, I knew from experience, if I tried to follow it in even the simplest way, it would only die against this unpleasant reality. And because I stood outside desire’s pause, I was incapable of any clear reading of what might or might not be occurring within it, either in Feyev, or in myself. And that was the ambiguity that had killed—would kill—its physical detritus.
‘“Let me tell you what I think is going on, Feyev.” With my hands on his neck, looking down at a face that had already turned to look away from mine, I was aware how much taller I was than he. “Think of it just as a story. But listen: because I’m not a stupid man. Someone—maybe one of the guards, one I haven’t met—told you to come and give yourself to me. You’ve done it before. You’ll do it again, no doubt. You’ll want a lot of money for it. And if I give it to you, because he gave you the idea and maybe loaned you the collar—you’re supposed to give him some, or half, or most of it. The two of you wouldn’t try to do me out of money by violence. There’re too many of my own soldiers around in the caravan for that. He’s probably waiting for you back at the barracks. Maybe you’re even a little afraid of him—especially if you go back empty-handed. But you’re just going to have to tell him that it fell through. After all, you are free now. Certainly I understand why he—or you—thought up the idea. I mean, if it’s a guard, he’s also out of a job. And so are you. Now. What do you think of my tale?”
‘Feyev stood there awhile. Then he looked up. “So what? We could still have fun.” He looked away again. “If I was your slave, you could make me do it. But I’m free now. So you have to pay me. Something. For it. That’s all. You set me free. Why don’t you do it, then?”
‘I shook my head. “Not if you want money.” I managed half a grin; and took my hands away. “And maybe not even if you didn’t. You go on your way now, Feyev.”
‘“Is the reason you won’t do anything with me because there’s somebody else in with the plan? Because you think that’s the story. Because it isn’t all like that—I mean not all of it. Sure, some of it is. But not all.”
‘“Right now,” I said, “if I heard the full tale, I’m sure it’d just be worse. I’m complimented you want to please me. I don’t blame you for going along with it. You’re going to have a very hard time—harder than you have any idea. Perhaps another day I might even have gone along with it, too, and said, ‘So what.’ But with all that’s been happening today, I’m just too tired,” though it was the silences from another night entirely that loaned meanings to this evening’s words. “Besides, I want to give you the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps I’ll run into you in Kolhari. But righ
t now I want to rest. By myself.”
‘He blinked up at me, nodded a little, his mouth still open.
‘“Go on, now. Get out.”
‘“You’re sure … you’re tired?”
‘I nodded.
‘“All right.” He stepped by me and pushed open the tent flap. “Because I couldn’t do it for nothing. That would be like I was still a slave. And free men get paid for what they do. That’s what they told me.” He started out. Then, at once, he looked back, with his bright, bright eyes. “You’re right, you know. My story’s not as good as yours. It is Iryg—the one back at the barracks, waiting for his cut. He told me I had to get paid. And I don’t like him any more than I said I did … He knocked out some of my teeth, once, when he thought I was trying to steal something I didn’t even know was there. But he broke the lock for me. So he has to get paid, too. I guess it would be better if it was one of the guards who at least liked to do it the way you do. Or maybe it wouldn’t be.” Feyev shrugged. “I don’t know. Thank you, master,” though the nameless gods know what it was he thanked me for. “Good-bye.” He walked out.
‘I went to the flap and pulled it open. Standing there, I watched him walk, heavy-footed and a little stooped, off beneath gray and indigo. Lightning flared. The soaked field glistened. As he crossed the puddled road in the flicker, foot to foot with his reflection, he reached up, pulled the collar from his neck (I thought I heard the broken lock click), and let it swing down by his thigh. On his shoulder, I saw a whip mark—that was not real. More lightning overtook the evening. Thunder overtook the lightning. I turned back and let the tent flap fall.
‘Feyev’s leather clout lay on the rug, so like the one I’d worn—sometimes—at the mines. Thunder rolled away outside. Drops began to thud the canvas.
‘I sat on the bed and thought: I’m too tired?
‘I snorted.
‘That one was not even worthy of a mummer.
‘I felt numb, yes. But there was a tingling through it that tightened my muscles and defeated all rest. Rage? Fear? The love of freedom? Iryg was a perfect … mule turd; I simply could not pay him through Feyev; and Feyev was a perfect fool to think I might! Still, couldn’t the real reason for my refusal have been as simple as age or aphanasis? Perhaps it was only Feyev’s resemblance to Namyuk: for him such sex had been so outside the question, I couldn’t believe any of Feyev’s gestures were other than a game without a prize. As I sat on the bed by the lamp, listening to the rain, the whole of that other day and night rushed back. What would have happened, I wondered, if, thirty years ago, I had been able to speak, move, acknowledge, or initiate the sexual actuality in which I and the tall lord had found ourselves? Had I just been given another chance to find out—a chance which, once more, I had not taken? There, when I’d been bound round by real oppressions, known and unknown, every gesture had seemed readable: this one luminously sexual, that one solidly political, all showing their true form in the harsh light of power, none of them muddied by deceit, sloth, ire, or greed.
‘Out of that clarity I had constructed my “self”.
‘But here, when power was mine and I was as close to being the lord—the perfect, freedom-bearing, benevolent lord, empowering the oppressed—as was possible, I could find nothing clear anywhere about me: not in the present, not in the past, not in my own motives, not in anyone else’s. The single move that had abolished slavery and dismissed the guards had made the separation between guard and slave itself ambiguous.
‘Wasn’t it true, I asked myself, sitting there, that I’d paused in my hectic work one morning, only three days before, back in the city, for a moderately satisfying hour of sexual exploration with a perfect stranger I’d met on the street who no more knew I was a minister than you would have had I not told you? And I’ll tell you this now, Udrog: two days after I returned from the mines to Kolhari, I passed an evening of fine sexual extravagance among three old friends. But all I could come to, as I sat there, listening to the water roar on the cloth and watching the flame at the lamp spout, was that, years before in this same field, at the flap of a tent like this one, I had looked into a mirror, recognized that mirror for what it was, and seized the image within it for my use. Now, at a sudden turn of chance, in need of an image to seize, I’d glimpsed that what I’d thought were mirrors and images and an “I” looking into and at them were really displaced, synthetic, formed of intersecting images in still other mirrors I’d never noticed before—mirrors whose angle, tactility, and location, because there were so many of them, because they were visible only through what was reflected of them in other mirrors, I couldn’t hope to determine (much less determine a coherent pattern in which to place them), much less determine which, if any, were real and which were merely intersections in others.
‘You understand, Udrog, my glimpse was not of the world around me. I speak of nothing so simple or cynical as disillusion: nothing had happened that day I had not been acquainted with long before. (Of what else was the revelation made but of such past acquaintances?) It was of the self that encompasses both folly and wisdom, enthusiasm and cynicism, illusion and disillusion, the self I had seized from the world, the self that had managed, after thirty years’ effort, only a week before to seize the world back—when, with my victory in the council room, I’d actually won the game of time and pain. Oh, it would be too much of a mummers’ tale to say that as I had once, on that field, found my self, there on the same field I lost it. I was trying to find, rather, the order in an asymmetric difference in the middle of which I was off balance each time I turned to grasp it; and you could dismiss me as a very silly man who’d learned nothing in his fifty years if you thought I was talking about some simple and singular reversal in the position of slave and lord, or that I set some equivalence between Feyev’s involvement in a corrupt guard’s failed scheme to win a handful of coins—and Piffles’s mindless murder.’
Udrog had been patient. He’d even extended that patience, when the core of it ran out, by telling himself (rather than listening) exactly how patient he was being. But now he pushed up, bunched his fingers, and thumped them on Gorgik’s chest, interrupting (‘I was searching, Udrog, you see for—’) Gorgik’s next sentence:
‘But the story just goes on and on. Does this difference make you want to fuck more? That’s what I want to know!’
Gorgik looked down at the barbarian, surprised. ‘Well, it positioned me more and more outside of desire—again, I don’t mean in any way that could make you say sex no longer interested me. Still, I found myself—’
But the first part of the answer was what Udrog had expected; and, beginning to fear for any satisfaction at all, he was just not interested in the second.
Udrog sat up. ‘I told you, I know what you want. You want someone to be the master, to take over for you, to tell you what to do, to cut off this stupid talking with an act. That slave, Feyev, you couldn’t tell whether he really wanted to do it then. So it didn’t excite you, that’s all. Here—’ Udrog jumped up before the fire; his shadow fell over the big man still on the rug. ‘I know all about that. I’ll show you what you need. No—move your hand, slave! You’re wearing the collar now!’ Naked above him, Udrog gave Gorgik a barefoot kick in the side. ‘You’ll see what I want. Turn over! I’ll beat you within an inch of your life, you piece of dragon dung!’ Udrog raised his hand in the firelight, prepared to bring it down in some violent and violating blow—
The hooting began up behind the colonnade. At the same time, there was a great rattling: someone was banging something back and forth between the columns. The noise came on, moved; the rattling moved with it.
Udrog stared around, his hand still high—and jumped away from Gorgik as, from back in the shadow, the cat ran straight across the floor.
The creature leaped across Gorgik’s belly and off the rug, right between Udrog’s feet.
The barbarian stumbled, shouted, and almost fell to the stone. What in the … What’s going—?’
The hootin
g and the clacking careened toward the end of the columns—something was up there, moving quickly and making a great noise. Something flew from the darkness, to fall, clattering, on the floor: a stick, some two feet long. It rolled a few inches, while the noise traveled off into a corridor, growing quieter … and, finally, stopped.
‘What was that …?’ Udrog demanded.
‘I think …’ Gorgik had sat up himself. The stick, he could see by the firelight, had blackened wadding at one end. Looking up again, he began to laugh. ‘I think it was some local field lad or milking lass in the balcony. Ten years old? Twelve? Somewhere around that age, from the glimpse I got. Well, we gave them a start. They decided to repay us in kind.’
Udrog turned sharply, looking up, and backed onto the fur. ‘You mean somebody was watching what we were doing?’
‘We didn’t do very much.’ Gorgik stretched out again, moving over on the rug.
‘Hey—’ Udrog frowned down at the big man. ‘You can’t do that kind of stuff when you have people hanging around, spying on you! They don’t understand that kind of thing. You—!’ He shouted up into the dark. ‘You get out of here, now! Get out!’ There followed some curses that combined terms for women’s genitals, men’s excreta, and cooking implements in truly novel ways. Finishing, Udrog shook his head and looked back at Gorgik. ‘How are we going to do anything with somebody up there, watching?’
‘They’re not watching now,’ Gorgik said.
‘I know.’ Udrog squatted on the rug.
Gorgik put his hand on the boy’s knee.
Udrog pushed it off. ‘No, you can’t do things if people are hanging around. Up there. That’s not right. Not our kind of thing. Or even if they might come back to watch you, you know?’
Gorgik was silent.
Udrog started to stretch out, then looked again at the columns running about the room’s upper tier. ‘You think they’ll come back?’
Gorgik shook his head. ‘No.’
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