The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  The smuggler dug his fingers into the earth.

  ‘Obey me, or I’ll cut your stupid throat!’

  Above him, the man’s face was dark. Behind, mist glowed. In it, here and there, a pine branch bobbed. Light over the hairy shoulder under-lit the bearded jaw, so that one half of that lip gleamed—precisely to the cut.

  The peg shook in the distended lobe.

  ‘Now—sure!’ the smuggler declared. ‘Whatever you want! You take it! You can have it!’ He tried to separate two images. But they muddled each other, neither clear enough for him to be certain what it was. ‘Why would I want to keep anything I had from you? I tell you, you’ve…been my hero for years! Here, let me up. Yes, I’m taking a sack from Kolhari down into the Garth!’ The blade jarred his chin: ‘…don’t do that!’ He forced a laugh. ‘You think I care if you get it? The kind of witless fool I am, I’m surprised I got this far!’ One image was some vague idea of what towns, neither his Garth destination nor Kolhari, he might go to for a year or so if he got out of this with his skin: betrayed clients could turn vicious in these pointed and primitive times. ‘I’m honored to give anything I can to your cause. Anything I have. Believe me!’ The other had to do with the Liberator, his men planted about the clearing, waiting for some smuggler to come by. The masked woman! She had suggested he come here! (No doubt, he thought on hopelessly, frantically, all she’d told him of the scar, the eye, the history had been lies!) Of course, she still worked for this ‘Liberator’—

  ‘Get up, now! Show me your booty sack! My men’ll be in here to skewer you six ways to seven if you try anything!’

  ‘Yes—’ But the blade joggled his jaw.

  ‘Up slow.’

  It retreated an inch.

  As the smuggler got his feet under him, the point stayed just out of sight below his chin, now and again touching his throat.

  The man leaned forward and, grabbing the smuggler’s arm again—‘There!—’ spun him, pulling it up behind his back; at the same time the smuggler felt metal jab low beside his spine, hard enough to hurt if not cut. ‘Let’s get to your cart and see what you have.’ The man pushed him forward.

  One of the smaller knives, the smuggler thought. Perhaps he could reach in and grab it; then, with a lunge…‘See,’ he said. ‘Right in there. I’ll get—’ He reached over the cart’s edge with his free hand, then snatched it back. The blade that had been behind him swung down before him to hack the wagon’s sideboard. His arm was jerked up painfully.

  ‘If you want to keep either of your hands, let them be still! You think you’ll pull out some sword or club? I’m already missing one finger from such a mistake. Don’t you think I know what you’ve got in there?’ He snorted. I’ve been doing what you’re doing, boy, more years than you’ve been alive. Let’s reach in slowly. No quick moves; no tricks; and…yes, go on now.’

  One arm still pulled tight behind, the smuggler reached forward for the canvas cover, tugged it aside, and dragged the sack up from behind the pots. ‘Here it is! I told you I’d give it—Ow!’ His arm was yanked again. The man shoved him roughly away from the cart and, as the smuggler staggered off, grasped the sack himself in his free hand, strode around the donkey’s hind end (from inside the feed bag, the beast gave three braying honks), stepped toward the fire, and hacked at the cloth with his sword. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got!’

  They fell from the slash, clashing and clattering. The disks were as big as the man’s palm. As they clanked to the ground by the fire, the smuggler saw that the rims were deeply embossed with barbaric markings, holding strange curls and curves within. Bolts fixed the centers as if, with each one, there might be several layers together.

  Other images contending in the smuggler’s mind pulled clear of each other. The same way he could hold separate the conflicting tales of the Liberator, he now began to separate two tales of his own fate within the next moments.

  The first ran quite simply: the man before him was, in fact, the Liberator, with or without his surrounding men, and what the smuggler had been told over the years by the most cynical of the Liberator’s detractors—that he was, indeed, little more than a bandit, an outlaw, and a self-serving villain, whatever his personal lusts or personal politics might be—was true. In which case most likely, the smuggler realized, he would be dead within minutes; because bandits did not rob you on the road, then let you live to seek recompense or revenge.

  The second was almost as simple: the man before him was, in fact, no Liberator at all but only a smuggler too, who had gone along with the young smuggler’s own ravings—ravings whose preposterousness, no doubt, had decided him to try this bit of banditry in the first place, and which preposterousness, equally doubtless, was the only reason the smuggler was still alive. There were no accomplices off in the trees. But, for the same reasons as before, if not in moments then in minutes, the man would realize he must dispense with him.

  What both tales had in common was the smuggler’s own imminent slaughter. Where they differed was that in one, there probably were men about them to help with it; in the other, there probably were not. The young smuggler was as unsure of which tale was correct as he was of any other conflicting facts he’d ever collected about his Liberator.

  But it was neither bravery nor fear, therefore, that made him turn to flee; merely, rather, the realization that to stay meant certain, while to flee meant only probable, death. And even to be alive this long meant that he was very lucky or had found a very inexperienced bandit, whether the man was the true Liberator or not.

  He turned and crouched in a motion, leg muscles bunched to hurl himself into gray that would be black ten steps on.

  As he did so, a man stepped out of firelit fog with drawn sword: so now, halfway through his first step, with perfect knowledge of which tale was the ineluctable truth, the smuggler veered aside, seeing, here and there, still others coming from the trees—and slipped, and went down; and rolled, falling, to his back, because he wanted to see what came, even if it was only the blade that ended his life.

  Behind him, the Liberator/bandit shouted: ‘No, you—’

  And the stranger, who stepped over him now, became a woman and said, in a familiar voice: ‘That’s no way to treat a wise and pretty man!’ She merely lifted the point of her sword across the bandit’s Liberator’s face.

  There was something about her blade…

  The man didn’t scream. He made some great and horrid gasp, dropping the sack from one hand, the knife from the other, and grabbed for his eye. As he staggered back, blood rolled between his fingers, thickest where the one was missing.

  Raven said to him, as he crouched, blind with blood and shaking, before her: ‘You see this blade I have? It’s doubled, not like yours at all. It’s as sharp on the inner sides as it is on the outer, all the way down to its fork. Oh, you wouldn’t believe the things I could catch in it and cut. Let me see. First I’m going to slip your balls between the tines and whack them off—snick, snick!—first one, then the other. Then I’ll cut your nose off with an upward swipe; perhaps after that an ear. And while you’re listening for it to fall, I’ll take your penis in my hand, slip my blade around it, and hack it loose below the hair. Then I’ll pinch your tiny nipples, tug them forward, and bring my forked blade up around them and cut them free—Oh, believe me, I’ll open up all the scars of Eih’f and make them run red again!

  ‘Or,’ she went on, ‘do you think you’d rather flee…? There’s six good women here.’ The others that had stepped out of the encircling mist were also women. ‘Six double blades, out and waiting, all around you. And believe me, my friends are much rougher and meaner than I. True beasts, each with her own twinned sword, and far more skilled with it than I am. That one there? Anything I cut off you, she’ll probably eat it—and none too neatly, either! And that one—ah…!’ Raven made a disgusted grimace. ‘I can’t bear to tell you the horrors I’ve seen her perpetrate on a man’s body, not even with her blade but with her dirty fingernails. And she’
s got ten of those!’ Leaning forward, she hissed: ‘And she likes her men fat, weak, and conniving—like you!’ On his back, the smuggler looked around, blinking at the women who stood, in a ring, about the fire. Only five had swords, he saw. Hanging back a little, a sixth, with lighter hair, had no weapon out at all. Flames and blades flickered. ‘Do you want to run?’ the masked woman asked.

  Raven was the only one in a mask—though they were all bare-breasted, hearty creatures; Raven, the smuggler also saw, was the shortest.

  ‘If I were you,’ she continued, ‘I’d run. You may get cut a little, as we follow you. But if you stay, the pain, not to mention the humiliation to your male honor, as we move you on your way to death (and death is surely yours if you stay, for we are not likely to let you go to seek recompense or revenge), is such that the notion of civilization as woman conceives it will be defiled beyond redemption. Believe me: a fate worse than death awaits you if you linger.’ Then she snarled: ‘Though you defile civilization yourself, with every breath you take! A finger first? Or a toe? Or a testicle? Or a nostril? Each is worth as little, on you!’ Here she reached out the blade, and only laid it against his hip, no more heavily than the bandit, moments ago, had laid his under the smuggler’s chin.

  The smuggler was sure the man, hands over his face and reeling, had not even heard Raven’s excoriation. But at the touch of metal, he turned, still blind, and barreled toward the trees, passing between two of the women, who, here, uttered throat-ripping roars, leaped into the air with swords high, to swing them viciously down—clearly and intentionally missing him by a foot!

  The fleeing man’s shoulder struck a tree. He stumbled to one knee, bloody hands coming away from his face to grab at the ground; he tried to get, and slipped, and tried again, and finally got, his feet under him.

  First the two who’d swung at him, then—as he fell again, and was up again, lumbering off in fog and brush—the other women, began to laugh, covering his crashings away with their shrill barkings.

  Raven walked back to the young smuggler, stepped across him with one foot and looked down. Her sword, which he finally saw was split into two parallel blades, its twin points only an inch or so apart, was aimed more or less at his ear. She extended her other hand. ‘Let me help you up, pretty man!’

  Again he pushed at the ground with his heels. Again, they gained no purchase in the soil. He shook his head a little. ‘That was the Liberator…?’ He spoke with a despair that, as he heard it, he knew she could not understand. He lifted a hand, thinking to push hers or her blade away.

  Raven seized his big fingers in her small, hard ones and, looking to her side, raised her sword to thrust its twin points into its hairy scabbard. ‘Him?’ She frowned again at the smuggler, giving his arm a small tug. ‘That evil, ugly bandit? Him? The Liberator? That cut bit of earthworm, wiggling here in the mud?’ She snorted. ‘Though I’ll wager that when and if his wound heals, he’ll look a bit more like the Liberator than he did before!’ and the smuggler, whose thoughts were leaping from moments of muddle to moments of lunar-bright precision, found himself wondering, still on his back: Is that because of the scar that will remain, or because her sword points had crushed his half-blind eye completely, like an egg? ‘Oh, my foreign friend,’ Raven declared, ‘it is truly said in my land, “Men must not trust other men!” They wait for one another, smiling face to face, supporting every lie and self-deceit one can offer the other, yet always ready to distract with flattery or falsehood—and the moment the innocent turns away, the other is ready to claw his back as soon as a back is offered…Him? The Liberator?’ She gave a disgusted grunt. ‘He was no more than any yellow-headed boy you’d find prostituting himself about the Old Market of Kolhari. A thief! Less than a thief! The vilest of highwaymen!’ Now she shrugged. ‘Perhaps even a smuggler…? No! No smuggler or prostitute could be that low!’ She smiled down with small teeth. ‘A smuggler, perhaps? We shall look in his cart and see! You might find something to take along with you! Come. Can you stand?’

  His arm shook in her grip.

  ‘Come, pretty man. Up with you, now. Don’t you want to see what you’ve won from that old and ugly reprobate?’ She tugged again.

  Again he tried to stand. Again he slipped—the heel of his hand, as he reached behind to push erect, no more successful in the muddy earth than the heel of his foot had been. ‘You should have killed him…!’ he got out, looking around at the others.

  Half with blades sheathed, half with doubled tines still against their thighs, they grinned at him in firelight.

  ‘If he comes back—?’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about him.’ Raven tugged once more, harder this time, and the young smuggler in her grip was so weak he nearly fell.

  For some reason, he felt he was about to cry.

  With an expression that, even in this quarter-light, he recognized as patient, desiring, and containing all he could know of tenderness and goodwill, Raven looked down at him. ‘Don’t worry. I have freed you. You are safe. Get up.’

  Had she announced with rage and snarls that he would be tortured and humiliated as thoroughly as, minutes before, she had threatened his attacker, he could not have been more surprised by the moment’s terror that pulsed and, a second later, vanished.

  Sitting on the ground, he shivered—and kept shivering, as moments became minutes—while, with the same solicitude, Raven tugged, really, so gently and urged, really, so fondly and, finally, lifted him to his feet with the patience of someone who must have done this (once? many times?) before with men who had acted, he was sure, just as he was acting now.

  ‘You’re all right,’ she insisted, supporting him, while he realized, clearly, that he wasn’t. ‘You’re safe. Don’t worry.’

  The young smuggler looked about the circle of her friends. Raven seemed so small! Surely she hadn’t been that small when she’d first ridden in his cart.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she went on, beaming at him. ‘You’ve been through quite an experience.’ Now and again she would say something to those around her in her own language. Sometimes they’d laugh. (At him? he wondered, and didn’t care.) Sometimes they just answered in their shrill, flat voices.

  ‘You should have killed him!’ he said again, when he felt steadier; because that was the long-thought wisdom of such situations in such primitive times, concerning men like his attacker, like himself. ‘You threatened to! Why didn’t you do it?’

  One of the older women said something harsh. (About the natural viciousness of men, he was sure.) For a moment, he thought, she must have understood him.

  Raven answered with something equally harsh, then said to him in her gentlest tone, ‘Do you think we are barbarians that we go around killing any man on the road we see? That’s not how civilized women act.’

  Standing a little way from the fire, having picked up one of the sticks to examine the remainder of the roast meat, the lighter-haired one with no weapon said: ‘He won’t come back. Don’t worry. He’s too frightened. He’s too hurt. Besides, there’re more of us than there are of him.’

  Her accent was not theirs. Certainly she was a woman from the Ulvayn Islands. Recognizing a more familiar foreigner, he took a deep breath and made himself stand straighter, fighting what in the last minutes had become a lassitude that, among these strange women, unsettling as it was, still had its blurrily sensuous comfort.

  ‘Why didn’t we kill him!’ Raven declared. ‘Kill him? What a strange man you are. Do you think women can go around killing just any and all men, like that? What monsters would do such a thing?’ she went on in a voice so preposterously secure in its right to be heard. ‘Though, truly, in this strange and terrible land where men aspire to woman’s place, sometimes you must make a pretense of knowing how it’s done by those spiders, mantises, and other vermin who, from time to time, do.’

  ‘But then…’ He stepped away from her, while she stood back herself and regarded him from her mask.’ But…why did you come here? For me…?’

 
Again her grin. ‘Why? You want to know? Well! You are just a very pretty man! When I met my friends—’ she gestured toward the others—‘in Sarness, I said to them: “Ah, you would not believe the one who, just moments ago, gave me a ride on the rain-lashed road. Come, come! Come, if you want to see beauty beyond that of all the sons of Eih’f!”’

  The one whom, before, he’d thought might understand his language gave a loud humph and turned away, to survey the foggy dark, as if she expected something unpleasant to creep, tentatively and momentarily, out of it.

  ‘They’re all true women, the lot of them. What woman wouldn’t come with such an enticement?’

  Another, who’d gone off in the dark, reappeared now and said something that carried anger.

  Raven’s response was ribald. At least the others all grinned. ‘Of course when we found your cart tracks gave out just a few meters before the turnoff I’d mentioned to you,’ she went on, ‘immediately I knew where you must have gone. Here! To this lousy den where every thief and cutthroat highwayman, fearful of the Sarness inspectors, seeks respite from the road between Enoch and Varhesh. Well, I said to them: Let’s go in and take a look at where he’s made his camp.’ She glanced down, now, almost shyly. ‘Only, you were here with another man—pretty enough I suppose, in his way; though not so pretty as you. And we hung back in the darkness, like the lustful girls that linger, I suppose, within all women. We wanted to hear what you might say to one another when there was none of us about to intimidate you into silence. Who knows? Perhaps I even hoped to hear you mention me to your treacherous companion…But like all the men in this land, you had only words for the Liberator. Well, I suppose you’re not that much different from the rest—’

  ‘Raven,’ said the island woman, ‘perhaps we should go on. There’s no reason to stay here.’

  But the masked woman made a dismissing gesture. ‘Soon, as we listened, we realized your new friend was not a good man. Not at all. Not like you, who would give a wet and tired woman a ride and a smile, out of no more than the sweet and natural goodness of a wise and pretty heart.’ Here, smiling herself, she reached out her small, hard fingers to touch his cheek. He looked at her eyes, in the frayed mask holes. In this light they might have been black.