The Complete Series
Page 93
‘And the eagle sighed and the serpent cried
For all Mad Olin’s warning!’
When nothing emerged from it in answer, she laughed. ‘Because of the rhyme that the children of Kolhari bounce their balls to, every child in that city’s streets knows something of that particular tale—whether they know they know it or not. But my friend assured me that this one never became part of the islands’ lore, though it involved so many of their sailors and boats. But what history remembers here, it forgets there.’
‘And what it forgets there,’ said the smuggler, who liked the roll of the phrase, ‘it remembers here.’
‘Only sometimes,’ said the masked woman, upsetting what had seemed as pleasant a symmetry of thought as of sound. ‘That’s if we’re lucky. Even further along the Way, at the far end of the town, where the road turns among the crags, so Gorgik’s one-eyed lieutenant told us, when he was a boy and the slavers who’d stolen him from his home only a hundred stades inland from here first brought him north, it was just over those rocks that they pushed his wounded brother to his death—or at any rate, he said, it was just after they’d passed through a town where the sea sounded the same on its shingle, as did the crying and laughing of its children, and the bickerings and braggings of its skilled artisans and lazy loafers. He’d been completely blind at the time, he explained, sight having not yet returned to his good eye. But though he’d asked the city’s name when they passed through, one day a few years back he woke up to realize he could no longer bring it to mind. But if Sarness were not it, he said, it was a town very like it, and somewhere on the Royal Road.’ She looked into the mist before them, as if it had just revealed some immense secret. ‘Fables…’
The young smuggler said: ‘You’re among those who say the Liberator is the one who carries the scar, while his lieutenant, Noyeed, bears the single eye…?’
Raven frowned. ‘The Liberator, Gorgik, is a giant of a man, scarred down his left cheek; and his lieutenant, the singular and subtle Noyeed, has only half his earthly sight—though I’d wager that what he sees by unearthly means more than makes up for the loss.’ She let the mist question him.
He answered it with his laughter. ‘I’ve known some before who’ve said it was the other way around.’
‘I’ve been with the Liberator for three months now.’ She frowned through her mask: that clearly was her answer. ‘I was among his most trusted scouts.’
‘And now you’ve left him.’ The smuggler shrugged. ‘Not that either means much. My own memory is often weak about details of things I just did yesterday. And you can’t expect someone to recall every word spoken or each bit of clothing worn by someone else, when they didn’t know anyone else would ever ask about it…’
She looked at him oddly. No, he thought. She’s not the kind to take such excuses. But he’d had conflicting tales from more ordinary people than she who’d made far stranger claims.
They stood, silent.
Then she laughed, harshly, shrilly. ‘So serious, all you pretty men! So serious!’ though he would have sworn he’d been speaking with a fair suggestion of levity. Her laugh went on, long and barking. She clapped him on the arm. ‘It’s the plump and pretty ones who always want to contradict an honest woman at any and every turn. Well, they say in my country, the wiles of wise men are an asset to their beauty.
‘So, Wise and Pretty, here’s some advice:
‘Thirty stades along, this back road joins the Dragon’s Way, which, as we both know, swarms with Imperial customs inspectors. Now I have no reason to think someone like yourself should have any wish to avoid those diverse and devious fellows, for you show not the smallest sign by which one might judge you other than an ordinary wagoner traveling from town market to town market—save that you travel on a road smugglers frequently travel, looking so much like an ordinary wagoner…’ (For a moment, the smuggler thought, her eyes in their frayed holes glittered.) ‘Yet if, and whyever, you’d as soon bypass those inconvenient men in the pay of the Child Empress, whose reign, all say, is both sane and sensible, you might cut across the lands of the Princess Elyne and, on the other side, pick up the little road that runs along the border of the Garth. A gaggle of those inspectors set out every evening in five directions from Sarness to catch those who chance the roads round here, hoping that night’s cover will protect them. If you were what you clearly are not, my warning might save you some bother—if not your pretty neck. Heed me, and you may have a better chance of ending up where you want to. No—!’ She pushed out her hand as if to halt him. ‘Don’t protest your innocence. Nothing I have said has put it in question. I speak with no more direction and intention than the fog blowing here and there about us. A mere stade from here, down from the left side of this road, is a good spot where a woman—or a man—might take a wagon over easy rocks and in among wide-spaced trees, till she came to a naturally protected clearing, where you could make camp. At least half a dozen times in the last three months, since I’ve been scouting the area, I have seen Her Majesty’s inspectors ride right by it. The Liberator himself first showed it to me: he used it as a stopping place back in his own smuggling days. You only have to turn your cart from the road after the grove of tall cypresses on the right and just before the rocky outcrop. But that’s assuming a wise and pretty man like yourself might need such protection—’ again her laugh barked in the mist—‘when of course that’s absurd!’
She started away from the wagon, taking wide steps in the soft dirt. Skirting a bush bobbing in the breeze, she grew vaguer, less distinct and, finally, vanished on the slope toward the hidden seaside town.
Frowning at her memory, the young smuggler turned back to his ox, clicked his tongue; again the beast lugged forward. He walked beside the racketing cart in the fog.
As man and cart made their way through twilight, the road seemed no longer than it was wide; they might as easily have been wandering some fogbound plain as traveling a strait path. Now and again, the mist smothered all sense of motion, and the smuggler felt he remained in one spot while the earth shifted under him, compensating his steps.
An inner voice chanted some children’s rhyme he’d used to hear in Kolhari. Why ponder that now? But, then, Raven had declaimed its closing couplet. Remembering that, he felt a moment’s temporal disorientation to match the spatial. Had he been running over those rhyming lines five minutes now? Or fifty—
The tall shadows to the right had to be cypresses. He paused. The cart kept moving; as the tailgate passed him, he started walking again. That was an outcrop of ribbed rock ahead.
‘Hiii…!’ He halted his ox and walked to the road’s edge.
Yes, the cart could turn off here. He looked about, wondering how the place might appear to someone who knew the area—not that Imperial customs inspectors were usually native to the lands they patrolled. Perhaps in such a fog an inspector would not be too thorough. He went back to his wagon, led the beast over and off. Some meters along, he halted his ox again, returned to the road—on the way he pulled loose a branch—and swept out cart and hoof tracks for ten meters. Then, backing up, he obliterated his footprints as they emerged under him, till they turned over the road’s edge. Tossing the branch away, he walked down to his wagon. Since he’d begun his sweep, the sky had gone from gray to purple.
The beast lowed.
They started walking.
The way went round rock and under more trees.
The smuggler saw the glow off between bushes, like ground-level moonlight. As he stepped through underbrush, it became pale orange. Leaves hung between it and him, sharply black as ashes. A boundary-less fire, the fog itself seemed to burn.
The young smuggler halted his cart with a hand heavy on the beast’s shoulder and a few clicks, took seven deep breaths, and walked on. Ten steps, and of course it was a campfire with stones around it. A man squatted by it, he and the fire misty.
The smuggler moved behind a damp trunk. A twig scraped his calf. Leaves tickled his shoulder.
Tethered to a tree, a donkey swished its tail—which is why the smuggler saw it; it munched in its bag.
A four-legged pot sat over the fire. Steam whipped from it, joining smoke and fog: unlike the ones in his own cart, the smuggler reflected, those could still hold magic.
The man held out a stick.
On both arms he wore bronze bands; around one ankle leaned carved and cast rings, wood and metal. About his neck hung chains and thongs. A carved peg pierced one ear.
Skewered on his stick’s fork, meat broiled.
Juice dripped, to bubble on the rock.
The young smuggler watched, trying to breathe softly, speculating, remembering.
Two men had shared possible paternity for the young smuggler. One had been generally loud, usually angry, and, during the smuggler’s childhood, had intermittently descended on his mother’s cottage, often drunk, demanding food, money, or a place to sleep—had disrupted his and his mother’s life till, by the time the smuggler was seven, he’d wholly hated the man. The other had lived a farm away but frequently rode his mule by the fields where his aunt and mother were employed. Now and again he’d stopped to play with the youngster who may or may not have been his son, to joke with him, to give him a ride or, when the boy was older, take him, with his mother’s permission, on short trips to a neighboring village—a genial and woods-wise fellow, whose only fault was that he always left unexpectedly, staying away for months. The smuggler had soon learned it was the existence of both that kept either from living permanently at his mother’s shack. But some of his strongest childhood memories (and childhood was a vague and misty time the smuggler did not usually ponder) were of standing at a distance and watching now one of them, working halfway across a field, now the other, sitting and eating beneath a tree, now one, standing in the sun by the farm wall, or the other, sleeping on a scatter of chaff by another farm’s barn. Watching, the young smuggler could feel both delight in the one and displeasure at the other leaving him, while the thought replacing the feeling (no matter which possible father he observed), the thought filling his head, the thought pouring from his eyes and nostrils and ears to flood the sun-drenched day was: He’s so big! And the bigness would grow bigger, and bigger, till it filled not just the day but all nights and days before and after it, till he was light-headed before such bigness and was sure he was smaller himself than a pissant struggling in the grass at his toes.
Half hidden by the tree and the cool fog, the smuggler felt moments of the same light-headedness as he watched the man at the fire. Ignoring the memories that came with it, he thought: Perhaps I’m hungry…his roast and his pot look good.
Just then, without glancing up, the man said: ‘Why are you standing off there in the dark? Come, into the firelight where I can see you.’
Chills started behind his shoulders to cascade down his back, pour over his buttocks…It’s only the surprise, he told himself. (His foot caught under some groundcreeper, so that, stepping out, he staggered.) Chills trickled his thighs. The earth was spongy under small plants. ‘That’s a good fire you’ve got there.’ He recovered his balance, recalling that when he’d thought of fire before, he’d decided not even to try one in this damp.
The man turned his stick one way, then back. ‘If you bring your cart on down, you can squat here a bit and share it with me.’ Reaching out, he gestured in a way the smuggler, moving forward, assumed meant ‘come here’—though it could as easily have meant ‘go on.’ The hand was missing most of its third finger, and the man’s lower lip looked as if it had been cut through and awkwardly healed. A scar slanted over one eyebrow; the ends of others gouged above his beard. Firelight gleamed on a milky blot over half his right iris. Firelight on his hairy side lit three ropy welts around from his back—which meant, as slave or criminal, one time or another he’d been flogged. The hand dropped. ‘Now bring that loud ox of yours along.’
The smuggler turned to hurry back into what, by now, had become true darkness. With damp leaves beating his cheek, with twigs hitting his hip, he thought:
Now could that possibly be…?
But, no.
Though she’d said he sometimes scouted alone…
The smuggler pushed back a branch—which scraped the cart’s side. By his wagon, he felt along for his animal, who, at his hand, stepped forward. He caught the bridle and pulled back.
The ox lowed again.
The cart rolled.
Leaves about him blotted flame-lit mist. Leading his beast back into the light, the smuggler grinned. ‘Now, I bet I’m wrong about you.’ The ox glanced at the fire, at the donkey. ‘But you look like you know the land about here well.’ Tugging the bridle, he felt his feet slip on wet ground.
‘Just because I know this clearing every smuggler between Enoch and the Avila has been telling every other about for twenty years now?’ The squatting man humphed—and pushed down a piece of meat on a second forked stick he’d prepared while the smuggler had been off in the trees.
The young smuggler laughed. ‘Now you see, I didn’t know it. At least not before a very odd traveling lady told me of it just a while back.’
Beside the squatting man sat a dish in which red meat, some pelt still on it, glistened at the rim. Across it leaned a broad knife as long as the man’s thigh.
The smuggler tied his ox’s reins to a thin tree growing from the same bole out of which grew the one the donkey’s sweat-blackened thongs were knotted to. ‘You look like a man who carries a bit of authority with him.’ He turned to walk back between the animals to the fire.
‘Because I have a few more years than you?’ The man held out the second stick. ‘Or do you think I’m some customs inspector, waiting here to feed any young thief or bandit who comes along in the night?’
The smuggler took the stick from the three knotted fingers and thick thumb grasping it. ‘No, you don’t look like a customs inspector.’ He squatted at the far side of the fire. Smoke rolled from between them to join the fog. He extended the loaded stick into the flame beside the other hanging roast. After a while he asked: ‘Do you see with that eye?’
The man grinned across the fire. Two teeth to the side of his mouth were gone and the one forward of the gap was badly rotted. He leaned his head to the side, as if he were not used to the question. ‘I see well enough. You want to stay on my good side, don’t try any sudden movements to the right. This eye can tell night from day, a shadow from a light, and—if you’re close enough—a smile from a frown. And the other, believe me, misses nothing.’ He gave another quick, gappy grin. Why do you need to know?’
The smuggler rotated the stick. ‘I’d just guess a lot of folks who meet you think that eye is blind. Do some call you “One-eye”?’
‘Yes. Sometimes.’ The man grunted. ‘I don’t mind it. I knew a dwarf once, in the K’haki: everyone called him Runt. Another fellow who rode the Venarra Canyon was half again my height, with arms and thighs thick as slop pails and a chest and belly like beer kegs sitting sideways on one another. We all called him the Hog. No one meant anything by it. They don’t mean any more by what they call me.’
‘What I meant was—’ the smuggler turned the stick back—‘you say you have some sight in that eye. So those who only knew you from afar might call you “One-eye.” But those who know you better might not.’ Then he said: ‘And there’s other kinds of authority besides the empress’s,’ and added: ‘whose reign is fulsome and fecund.’
‘And whose customs inspectors are a nuisance, at least to the likes of us, eh?’ The man took his stick from the fire, examined the meat, and sniffed at it with nostrils that sounded clogged. He looked up again. ‘Why these questions…? You must think I’m a customs inspector. Well, it’s wise to keep some d
oubt with offers of friendship from strangers on the road. But believe me, only smugglers come here. Anyone could tell you that. What do you say?’
‘That perhaps you were…once a smuggler?’ The young smuggler narrowed his eyes as a shift in the air made the smoke plume rise, then fall away, between them. ‘Did you wear the collar?’
The man frowned. ‘What collar?’
‘The one that went with those whip welts.’ The smuggler nodded toward the man’s flank. ‘The iron collar slaves wear by law.’
The man sunk his teeth, good and bad, into his meat, tore off a hunk, and chewed, loudly, with glistening chin hairs, his mouth open a good deal of the time. Finally he said: ‘You know Kolhari?’
The smuggler nodded.
‘I bet you do. You sound like you’ve spent some time there. You know that bridge that goes over into the old part of the city, the part they call the Spur?’ He spoke with his mouth half full. ‘With the market in it?’
The smuggler nodded again.
‘When I was as young as you—’ the man gestured with greasy knuckles—‘or even younger, and I’d just got to the city for the first time, I was already carrying six scars from a bailiff’s whip.’ He thumbed toward his side. ‘I was a wild boy in my hometown, even before I started to wander. And the whip is all they had to calm you down, whether you were slave or laboring peasant. But one day when I was crossing the bridge—now you know what goes on, back and forth, across the bridge, don’t you…?’
The smuggler nodded a third time.
‘I met a man there. He was probably as old as I am now. A fine looking man, too. To meet him and talk to him, you’d have thought he wasn’t any different from you and me, you know what I mean? But he wanted me to come home with him. Lived in a fine house, too, out near Sallese. Had his own cart and a couple of horses and a paid servant to drive him—though he didn’t use his driver to take him down to the bridge, you can be sure. Oh, no. He didn’t want anyone to know what it was he was up to there. He kept a collar, you see: a forged collar of iron, like they lock round the necks of slaves. And he would have me wear it—or sometimes he would put it on. And we…’ The man cocked his head the other way, as if considering whether to say more. ‘But you know what I mean. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have asked, right? I made good money off him, too. No less than a handful of iron coins—every time I saw him. Oh, and often a gold one! He said my welts for honest punishment made me look like a real slave.’ He grunted. ‘But that’s a long while back. It never meant anything to me. And I wouldn’t do it today. You ever meet anyone like that?’