The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  ‘Who was he?

  ‘How did he become something other?

  ‘My father began as a common sailor on the Nevèrÿon coast and ended as an importer’s dispatcher at the Kolhari docks. My mother began as a porter in a market of the Spur and ended as a woman in her own house with no other work than caring for her family and supervising the barbarian girl she paid to help with cooking and cleaning. Both of them, in affluent times, took their lives far beyond childhood expectations. And since they had, they expected me to. As they had done better than their parents, they wished me to do better than they. Believe me, little man from whom, I suspect, no one has ever expected anything, such expectations—like such suspicions—are a burden.

  ‘I didn’t carry it. Better say I set it down each day I crossed our dockside doorstep to saunter the city’s alleys or run the Kolhari waterfront; say that I kept as far from it as I could: I befriended bad company, became a sneak thief one day and a daredevil the next. Say I hid it behind every smiling lie I told whenever a lie would suit me. Youth hurled me through a life never set, in its greater form, by anything other than laziness. Oh, I was friendly and good-natured enough; but only because friendliness and good nature were the easiest way to win the worthless goals that were all I’d set myself as I tried to avoid everything that might be called responsibility. I was only a grin and a joke and a gratuitous kindness (the only sort I’d let myself indulge) from becoming a scoundrel who, in another decade, would have inserted his scurrilities into some business venture, likely with success, but only through the adult form of the laziness that had formed the boy. Yet, by one of those chances that, searching out the inevitabilities they call history, Nevèrÿon’s masters mull over and explore for years afterward, till the exploration becomes a distortion we who lived through it can no longer recognize at all, when I was fifteen my life swerved.

  ‘The Dragon was struck down.

  ‘The Eagle was raised up.

  ‘My parents were slain. My father’s death I saw. My mother’s, in the other room, I heard.

  ‘And I was taken as a slave to those dripping, noxious pits at the Falthas’ foot, beyond all expectations now.

  ‘My first weeks at the mines I was shattered, numbed, even a little mad. As far as I could think at all, all I thought of was escape. But the only escapes I could imagine were magical, mystical—impractical and impossible: while we sat outside, hunched over our suppers by the barracks, one of the fabled dragons supposed to live wild on the Falthas’ upper ledges would swoop down; and, as the rest screamed and fell in terror, I’d leap on the beast’s green neck to be carried off and up to new heights of light and glory. Or, one morning when I got up from our dirty straw, everyone I looked at, slave, guard, or free farmer in the neighboring field, would cringe and crumple, unable to bear my eyes, which, in the night, had grown fatal with power, so that, simply and suddenly, I would walk away to an inanely volcanic and sunlit leisure and delight. Or, again, while I toiled in the mud and slippery rock, the air fouled by the red flares set in iron on the walls, I would start to crawl forward, down some dank, hip-high passageway, into the dark, while the space narrowed and narrowed; yet somehow it never ended or became too low to wriggle forward; and, after hours, days, weeks of inching through sweaty black, I’d emerge in a wide and wondershot meadow where the sun was cool as autumn and the stars as warm as summer, a land of wholly inverted values where the very sign of my servitude, the iron at my neck, would be taken by all I met as a symbol of transcendent freedom.

  ‘But the extravagance of these fancies was balanced—overweighted, bowed, and bound down—by what had been numbed, deadened, all but killed in me by capture. Everything that allowed thought to become word, idea to become act, or plan to become practice had been shocked, stunned, petrified. I was no more capable of fixing a real plan toward freedom, or of making a move to implement it, than I was of flying into the sky, killing with a glance, or crawling under a mountain. All possibility of praxis had, thanks to that random seizure, died. What did those around me see, guards, foremen, and my fellow slaves, when they looked over? After the first months, when the shock of my circumstances had settled, what they saw was a good-natured fellow just sixteen, moving on toward seventeen, who now or again would lie or steal to better some side of his indenture, who now and again might indulge a gratuitous kindness equally to slave or guard. (One such—food I swiped from an overfat foreman to give to a boy only months newer to the mines than I and harassed by the guards for his jokes and high spirits—precipitated a riot and gained me this scar. In the confusion, a guard flung a pickax at me; the point caught my forehead and tore on down my cheek. I’d wanted to help the boy because he amused me in a place where very little made you grin. I was mauled because the guards had already decided such spirit as his might be a point around which rebellion could gather; and all who took to him were marked. The lesson was that, when you are oppressed, your acts, even if gratuitous, must not only be, but must seem, aimless, random, purposeless—so that reprisals don’t fall on whomever you’d help: afterward the boy was transferred to the worst and most murderous mining division.) But all my actions, however they were interpreted, were only done to alleviate the tension and discomfort of the moment; I was to cowed even to consider the linkage moment makes with moment to create the history that, despite our masters, is never inevitable, only more or less negotiable. Through it all, though now and then I had hours of equally gratuitous anger, there was no bit of rebellion. What rebels had been all but slain in me; and all my labor, all my jokes, all my banter with those around me, in the pits, at the barracks, or in the journey between, were simple—even mechanical—habit, left over from my life before; habit that only aped a certain liveliness, while the self which gives life meaning had been banished from my body. What they saw, I’m telling you, Udrog, was the perfect slave. They saw it because, during the height of my freedom, loose among Kolhari’s docks and at large among her side streets, I had been already so near the debased creation all political power yearns to turn its subjects into that my new condition made (my masters wanted me to believe in order to control me; and I wanted to believe in order to survive their control) no difference.

  ‘What did I think at the time?

  ‘I was intact. Only circumstances had changed.

  ‘Ha!

  ‘I think it was three months above a year after my capture that the lords came to the mines. But it could have been six months more—or six months less.

  ‘What I remember, at any rate, is this:

  ‘One afternoon rain brought us back from the flooded pits an hour early. Ivory clouds were piled around the ragged Falthas. The piney escarpments in the late light were black as the heaped chips we hauled from the obsidian tunnels after we cut the larger blocks and slabs. Copper smeared the west with red, as evening scratched the sky to blood. Crossing the leaf-strewn barracks yard, I’d stopped to look down at myself in one of the puddles that joined another with a silver ribbon across black earth while the water threw back the burning day—when the foreman bawled: “You there! I want you over at the south barracks! And you too—yes, and you!”

  ‘Confused, I started toward where I’d been directed, along with half a dozen others who’d been picked from among the tired men returning from the pit to our quarters.

  ‘Beside the south barracks, the seven of us milled: two wore leather clouts; the rest were naked. All were filthy—dirt to the hair and eyebrows. All of us were in our iron collars. But it was clear we’d been chosen, from among the hundred fifty miners, because we were the biggest, the strongest, the most strapping fellows in the place. And it should tell you something about the others of us that so many of the seven were as young as we were. A guard came, cursing, in among us; and, a moment later, four strange soldiers with spears and shields stepped up. (We glanced at them, then stared into other puddles and did not whisper.) One gave the order forward, and—with the soldiers at the corners of our group—we started through trees and brush to
turn down a slope of tall grass, which beat wet whips against our thighs to make the dirt there mud.

  ‘We’d gone half a mile when I saw, beside a grove ahead, horses tethered among several wagons, while more soldiers led four or five others, stepping high at the end of their lead lines. With spears and shields another dozen Imperial guards ambled about. By one closed carriage men were raising a blue pavilion with braided fringe. Once I glimpsed some rich red cloak (passing between the common leather ones) set with so much metal and so many glittering stones my first thought was that at the center of this military show must be some mummers’ troupe, like those I’d sometimes watched as they mimicked the doings of earls and baronines back in the Kolhari market.

  ‘Someone shouted for us to halt.

  ‘Standing there on grass already muddied and worn down, I’d forgotten the guard with us, nor did I see the tall man who’d stepped up on the other side, till one called to the other, voice carrying over us as if we were not there: “All right. We can handle them from here. We don’t need you. Leave them and go back to your barracks.” The man who spoke was tall, brown, and stood easily on the wet slope. I looked at his sandals, his worked metal belt, and the half-dozen neck chains from various government orders hanging, bronze and copper, over his blouse. Edged with fur, his cloak had fallen forward over one shoulder. This was no mummer miming with theatrical exaggeration the image our debased populace carries of Nevèrÿon’s nobility. Here was a noble himself! “Thank you, my man—in the name of the empress, whose reign is grand and gracious.” The lord raised his hand to touch the back of his fist to his forehead in that traditional gesture of respect, which, as he performed it, became the merest relief of the tiniest irritation, practically unfelt—he brushed it away that quickly!

  ‘“Yes, sir!” The guard looked astonished and uncomfortable and dumb at once. He was squat and strong, with a heavy lower lip, a leather clout sewn up with thongs, and a club hanging at his hip. He had stolen my supper three times, had nearly broken that club across my calves twice, and had stood laughing over me when I’d lain bleeding from that pickax flung by another guard he counted as his friend. He was almost as dirty as we were. “Of course—yes. You’ll be all right with them, My Lord? Well, sure, if you say so, sir. Right, sir. Right.” Then, as if struck by gross memory, he smashed the back of his fist against his forehead. “The empress …!” bowing, backing, barefoot, up the slope, he beat his head again. “Yes, the empress, whose reign—” He almost tripped. And fisted his forehead once more. “Whose reign is just and generous …!”

  ‘The tall lord smiled. “Come on, men. I’ll put you to work in a moment. You’ll be serving me, also Lord Anuron, and Count Jeu-Forsi—Anuron, is the big one running around in the red. You see him, down there? And the Lesser Lady Esulla rides with us. I doubt you’ll see too much of her. But she’s the reason you’re here. If she tells you to do something, jump to it. You hear me, now?” He laughed and led us into the encampment to turn us over to the caravan steward, who put some of us to work hauling tent ropes and staking down the pavilion, while others of us were told to unload the provision wagons, and still others sent to help with the horses—though they had quite enough soldiers and servants for the work. But we did as we were instructed and tried to stay as unnoticed as possible among those around us who knew so much better what they were doing than we. Bewildered by our momentary transition, we had no way to question it.

  ‘Not till years later did I begin to learn the mix of guilt and fascination with which Nevèrÿon’s lords regarded their slaves—though it manifested itself about me for the whole of the afternoon and evening. What I did learn that day, however, was a myriad of separate facts about the nobility, whom, during the time of my freedom, I’d never seen from so close.

  ‘That day was the first I heard the preposterous nicknames they call one another, in parody or denial of their power, the red-cloaked Lord Anuron was Piffles to his face—and Acorn Head behind his back, even when his fellow lords were addressing his own servants. Count Jeu-Forsi was called Toad by his companions. And Fluffy, a name I overheard from time to time, now as I carried someone’s trunk across the yard, now as I came back with an armload of rope (the three young lords had stopped to talk beside two soldiers staking down the last pavilion guy), I assumed was the unseen Lesser Lady.

  ‘In ten minutes, I was treated to one or those tantrums all too frequent among the very, very rich: within some group of his own guards and servants Lord Anuron began to turn about, left and right, his red cloak waving, shouting in a shriller and shriller voice: “All right! You think you can dominate me? You think you run everything? Well, you don’t, you know! It’s uncivilized! I could have every one of you replaced by real slaves! Oh, and don’t you think I wouldn’t for one second! You see, I’ve already called seven of them here! So you all just better watch yourselves! I should have every single one of you whipped, whipped, whipped within an inch of your shitty little lives! No, I will not tolerate it! I will not, I tell you!” Then, quivering—between the shoulders of two soldiers, I could see the thick, strapping young man was on the verge of tears!—he turned and stalked from the encampment.

  ‘“I’m afraid Piffles—” the tall lord who’d met us spoke right at my ear; it startled me—“is under quite a bit of strain through here. You mustn’t mind him when he gets like that. You’ll get all too used to it in a while. Sorry.” Then, while I blinked after him, he walked away. I don’t know if I was more surprised by Lord Anuron’s outburst or by my being spoken to by another lord as if I were someone whose judgment of it mattered!

  ‘Over the next hour, now overhearing the guards, now the servants, now daring to exchange a quick grin and some whispers with another miner, now through some chance comment from the lords themselves, I pieced together a story as romantic as any mummers’ skit.

  ‘The three lords had been traveling from the western desert to the eastern shore. Stopping at a baron’s estate a few days back, they’d learned that the baron’s daughter, the Lesser Lady Esulla, was to journey in the same direction. In these days of bandits and the general dangers of travel, the baron wished to know, would the lords consent to let her wagon join their caravan? Lady Esulla had been recently widowed. The purpose of her trip was to seek a new husband. Indeed, either Lord Anuron or Count Jeu-Forsi might find an alliance with her family both honorable and profitable.

  ‘Most certainly they would. They’d be honored, they said. It was their privilege to ride with and offer their protection to the baron’s daughter.

  ‘The first three days of travel had seen a rising competitiveness between the two lords whose family connections made them acceptable husbands—Jeu-Forsi and Anuron—with more and more daring deeds of a more and more outrageous sort, now perpetrated by one, now by the other. That, in fact, was why seven strong slaves had been ordered up from the mines, as part of some entertainment for her ladyship, though the day before, when it had become clear to the lady that this stranger and stranger behavior on the part of her traveling companions was really some manic courtship rite, her response had simply been to remain within her traveling wagon throughout the day. Though that wagon, the one at the side of the clearing with the woven curtains drawn tightly across its windows, had stopped with theirs, and one or two of her servants had been in and out of it briefly (“Yes, her ladyship was well … no, she did not wish to be disturbed”), the Lesser Lady herself had not appeared—which only made the young blades that much more irritable.

  ‘I was wholly unclear about what entertainment we had been called to provide. But as we were set now to this job, now to that, I just assumed, whatever it was, it had been put by because of the lady’s lack of cooperation. I became as curious as anybody in the camp (as curious as I might have been had I been observing it all in a skit of countesses and thanes on the mummers’ market platform): what was going on within that silent wagon, with its drawn curtains, its red and orange designs, its closed carriage door?

  ‘Yet now
and again, something or other would bend that interest:

  ‘First, I happened to step behind one of the other wagons and saw Count Jeu-Forsi, sitting on an overturned chest, knee to knee with a miner called Namyuk, who’d been captured three years before by slavers on some back road in the south. The count was drinking from a cider jug and was already drunk. “You must let me touch it. Let me. Let me, I say. There! No, no, you can’t protest. If you do, I shall order it cut off. I can do that, you know. I just don’t understand why all of you have such big ones—even those of you who weren’t born to servitude. When the slavers go out on capturing raids, is that the first thing they look for? Now tell me, doesn’t that feel good? You must say yes. Say ‘Yes’ to me. It feels good enough when I do it to my own. ‘Yes.’ Now.” The irony is that, I’d long ago noted back at the mines, Namyuk was completely repelled by, and uninterested in, the various sexual adjustments any large group of men denied women make among themselves almost immediately. Perhaps because he was such a strong boy, he’d managed to keep almost wholly away from them. (As soon as I’d realized they were flourishing about me, I was at their center.) Often that takes a show of violence. But there was no violence possible here. Namyuk glanced up at me with a dull, opened-mouth look neither of surprise nor horror nor outrage nor disgust. (He was missing some teeth.) It was simply the blank stare of the stunned. The drunken count did not see me. I’m afraid I grinned—before I stepped back out of sight. Did I have a moment of sympathy? Sadly and savagely I think I found Namyuk’s plight funny. And my real thoughts were all of the lord: so, this was the noble sot who was wooing the mysterious Lesser Lady. It seemed a bit of comic relief to heighten the drama going on in the clearing.