Tales of Nevèrÿon

by Samuel R. Delany

  By the dusty yards and stone-walled warehouses where the great commercial caravans pulled up after their months out in the land, with their mules and horses and covered carriages and open carts and provision wagons, once Gorgik stopped to talk to a caravan guard who stood a bit away from some others – who were squatting at the corner over a game of bones.

  Rubbing his sweating hands against his leather kilt, the man began to speak to Gorgik of bandits in the mountains and brigands in the deserts – till, in a swirl of dark brocade, with street dust rising about his sandals, a merchant with cheeks as wrinkled as prunes, long teeth stained brown and black, and a beard like little tufts of wool stuck all over his dark jaw, rushed forward waving both his fists about his shoulders. ‘You …! You …! You’ll never work for me again! The steward has told me all, all about your thievery and your lies! Oh, no – you’ll not endanger my carriages with your cowardice and your conniving! Here –’ From among his robes the old man pulled out a handful of coins and flung them so that gold and iron struck the guard’s neck, chest, and hip. (As if the disks were hot from the smithy across the street, the guard flinched away.) ‘That’s half your pay! Take it and be happy for it – when you’re not worth a single bit of iron!’ And though the guard wore a knife at his hip (and that must have been his spear leaning on the wall behind them) and was younger, bigger, and certainly stronger than the enraged merchant, he went scrabbling for his coins in the street and, with only a snarl and a glare – not even a fully articulated curse – snatched up his spear and hurried off. Only when he was a block away did he look back. Once. That’s when Gorgik saw that the other guards had stopped their gambling to stand and move a step nearer. Still muttering, the old man turned back among them (who, Gorgik realized, were still very much expecting their own full salaries). They followed the merchant back to the warehouse, leaving Gorgik in the street with half an adventure in his head, a tale yearning for completion.

  Another time when he and some friends were playing near the docks, from beside a mound of barrels a woman called to them: ‘Come here … you children!’ She had a hard, lined face, was taller than his father, and her hair was shorter than his mother’s. Walking up to her, they could see her hands and feet both were callused and cracked about their lighter edges. ‘Where …,’ she asked, quiet, tentative, ‘tell me … where do they hire the women to wash the clothes?’

  He and his friends just looked.

  ‘Where do they … hire the washerwomen?’ Her speech was accented; her skin was that deep, deep brown, a shade or two darker than his own, so often called black. ‘They hire women … somewhere near here, to wash the clothes. I heard it. Where is it? I need work. Where … where should I go?’

  And he realized what halted and held back her words was fear – which is always difficult for children to understand in adults; especially in an adult as tall and as strong as this hard, handsome woman.

  One of the older girls said: ‘You don’t want to do that. They only hire barbarian women to do that, up in the Spur.’

  ‘But I need work,’ she said. ‘I need it … the Spur – where is that?’

  One of the younger boys started to point. But, as if in an excess of nervousness or just high spirits, another suddenly shouted and at the same time flung his ball into the air. A moment later all of them were running and yelling to each other, now leaping across a coil of rope, now dodging around an overturned dingy. He looked back to see the woman calling after them – though, for the shouting, he could not hear – and turned, as a friend tagged him, around a corner into another alley, all the time wondering what she was crying, what more she wanted to tell, what else she wanted to ask … The rest of the afternoon, in the dockloaders’ calls, just below his friends’ shrieks between the warehouses, behind the echoes of his own shouts across the yard where he ran after the others, he seemed to hear her, hear the fragments of some endless want, fear, hope, and harassment …

  And still another time, when he wandered into the yard, he saw the boy (a few years older than himself? an old-looking sixteen? a young-looking eighteen?) sitting on the abandoned cistern’s wall.

  Thin.

  That’s the first thing he thought, looking at those knobbly shoulders, those sharp knees. Gorgik walked nearer. The boy’s skin had begun the same brown as his own. But it was as if some black wash of street dirt and gutter water had been splashed over him, heels to ears. The boy was not looking at him but stared at some spot on the flagstones a little ahead, so that it was easy to walk by and look at him more closely –

  When he saw the iron collar around the boy’s neck, Gorgik stopped – walking, thinking, breathing. There was a thud, thud, thud in his chest. For moments, he was dizzy. The shock was as intense as heat or cold.

  When his vision cleared, the next thing Gorgik saw were the scars.

  They were thick as his fingers and wormed around the boy’s soiled flanks. Here the welts were pink, there darker than the surrounding skin – he knew what they were, though he had never seen anyone bearing them before. At least not from this close. They were from a flogging. In provincial villages, he knew, whipping was used to punish criminals. And, of course, slaves.

  Wanting desperately to move away, he stood staring for seconds, minutes, hours at the boy – who still did not look at him. No. Only seconds, he realized when, a breath later, he was walking on. Reaching the other alley, he stopped. He took three more breaths. And a fourth. Then he looked back.

  Under his matted hair, the slave still had not looked up.

  Stepping close to the wall, Gorgik stood there a long time. Soon he had framed ten, twenty, fifty questions he wanted to ask. But each time he pictured himself going up to speak to the collared boy, his breath grew short and his heart pounded. Finally, after trying three times, he managed to saunter again across the yard – first behind the cistern: the boy’s back was webbed with six welts that, even as Gorgik counted them with held breath, seemed like a hundred in their irruptions and intersections. After waiting almost three minutes, he crossed the yard again, walking in front of the boy this time – then crossed twice more, once in front and again in back. Then, all at once, he left hurriedly, fearing, even though the boy still had not looked, someone passing by one of the alley openings might have seen – though the slave himself (newly escaped? a mad one who’d wandered off from, or been abandoned by, his master?), immobile on the cistern wall, gazed only at the ground.

  Half an hour later, Gorgik was back.

  The boy sat on the flags now, eyes closed, head back against the cistern wall. What had begun as a series of silent questions had turned for Gorgik into an entire dialogue, with a hundred answers the boy had begun to give him, a hundred stories the boy had begun to tell him. Gorgik walked past, his own feet only inches from the foul toenails. He gazed at the iron collar, till, again, he was moving away. He left by the Alley of No Name, telling himself that, really, he’d spied enough on this pathetic creature.

  The dialogue, however, did not end.

  When he returned in the lowering light an hour on, the boy was gone from the wall. Seconds later, Gorgik saw him, on the other side of the yard, by one of the buildings, curled up with his back against the sandstone, asleep. Again Gorgik walked past him, at several distances, several times – one minute or five between each passage. But finally he settled himself against the far alley entrance to watch, while the tale the boy told him in his mind went on and on, stopping and starting, repeating and revising, sometimes whispered so faintly he could not catch the words, sometimes crisp and vivid as life or dream, so that the square before him, with its circular cistern and the few pots, mostly broken, beside it, grew indistinct beneath a sky whose deepening blue was paled by an ivory wash above the far building, as the moon’s gibbous arc slid over it –

  The slave stretched out a leg, pulled it back, then rubbed at his cheek with one hand.

  And the tale halted, again hammered to silence by Gorgik’s heart. While Gorgik had been talking to
himself, he’d been thinking, really, how easy it would be, once the boy woke, to go up to him, to speak, to ask him where he was from, where he was going, to offer sympathy, maybe a promise to Tatum with food or a coin, to inquire after the particulars of his servitude, to proffer friendship, interest, advice …

  Across the yard the slave stretched out his other hand, made a fist. Then, not suddenly but over a period of ten or fifteen seconds, he rocked a few times and pushed himself up on one arm.

  Contending fear and fascination bound Gorgik as strongly as they had the moment he’d first glimpsed the dirty fellow’s collar. Gorgik pulled back into the doorway, then peered out again.

  With a child between, two women ambled by and into the yard. Again Gorgik froze – though they paid no more attention to the boy lingering in the doorway than they did to the slave lounging by the wall. As the three of them strolled across the dust, the dirty youth stood, very slowly. He swayed. When he took a step, Gorgik saw that he limped – and a dozen tales in his head were catastrophically revised to accommodate it.

  Walk out now and nod at him, smile at him, say something …

  The two women and their child turned out of the yard down the Street of Small Fish.

  The slave limped toward the cistern.

  Gorgik stood paralysed in the alley door.

  When the scarred youth reached the cistern’s waist-high wall, he stopped, not really looking into it. Hair stuck out about his head, sharp in the moonlight. After a few moments, he lifted his face, as though the single thread of cloud across the indigo sky attracted him. He raised his hands to his neck, to hook his fingers over the collar. He tugged –

  What occurred next was, in the moment it happened, wholly unclear to Gorgik, for the tale he was just then telling himself was of an escaped slave who, with his criminal markings and limping toward an abandoned cistern, had raised his face to the moon and, in a moment of rebellion, grasped his collar to yank futilely and hopelessly at the iron locked on his neck – the collar that forever and irrevocably marked him as a fugitive for the slavers who patrolled the land, searching out new laborers in the villages, mostly these days (so he’d heard) in the south …

  The semicircles of metal, hinged at the back, came apart in the boy’s fists, as though the lock had not been set, or was broken. Now the boy raised the metal to the moon, its curved jaws open in his hand like black mandibles on some fabled dragon or even some unknown sign Gorgik’s father might mark down in the dockside warehouse.

  The boy tossed the collar over the wall.

  Only when the iron vanished below the stone (the splash was very soft – and a beat after he expected it) did Gorgik realize that the collar, broken, or not locked in the first place, had truly been removed. With no comprehension as to why, he was overcome by chills. They rolled over him, flank, thigh, and shoulder. His fingers against the doorway corner were sweaty on the stone. After five breaths with his mouth wide so as not to make a sound, questions began to pour through his mind: Was this some criminal only pretending to be a slave? Or was it a slave who, now that he’d freed himself from the iron, would pretend to be a criminal? Or was it just a young madman, whose tale in its broken, inarticulate complexities he could never hope to know? Or was there some limpid and logical answer to it that only seemed so complex because, till now, he’d never thought to ask the proper questions?

  The boy turned and lowered himself to sit again on the stone.

  Gorgik moved his hand, just a little, on the jamb.

  Go, he thought. Speak to him. He may be older, but I’m still bigger than he, and stronger. What harm could it do me, if I just went up and asked him to tell me who he is, to give me whatever bit of his story …? Chills irrupted again, while he searched among the tales he’d been telling himself for any right reason to fear – in the middle of what had every aspect of terror about it, save motivation.

  For some reason he remembered the woman on the docks. Had her fear, in all its irrationality, been anything like this …?

  Five minutes later, he walked into the yard again – as he had already done half a dozen times that day. The boy sat there, still not looking. Gorgik’s own eyes fixed on the thin neck, below ear and black, spiking hair, where the collar had been. In the moonlight, now and again as he neared, with this step and with that, he could almost see the iron against the dirty brown, where a neck ligament was crossed by an irregular vein …

  No, the collar was gone.

  But even absent, it plummeted Gorgik into as much confusion as it had before, so that, as he passed, it was all he could do not flinch away, like the guard before the merchant’s coins, ears blocked by his own loud blood, all speech denied – and he was walking on, to the other side of the yard, down the alley, unable to remember the actual moment he’d passed the boy, who, he was sure, still had not looked up.

  Gorgik was back at the yard with the sunrise.

  The flogged boy was gone.

  But as he wandered about, now glancing into the nearly empty cistern (he could make out nothing among the flashes on the black), now ambling of to examine this corner or that alley entrance, while dawn light slanted the western wall, all Gorgik was left with was a kind of hunger, a groping after some tale, some knowledge, some warm and material feeling against his body of what had escaped through silence.

  Soon he returned to his house, where the dock water glittered down between the porch planks.

  Kolhari was home to any and every adventurer – and to any and every adventure they were often so eager to tell. As Gorgik listened to this one and that, now from a tarry-armed sailor packing grain sacks at the docks, now from a heavy young market woman taking a break at the edge of the Spur, now to a tale of lust and loyalty, now to one of love and power, it was as if the ones he heard combined with the hunger left from the ones he’d missed, so that, in a week or a month, when he found himself reviewing them, he was not sure if the stories he had were dreams of his own or of the lives of others. Still, for all the tales, for all the dreaming, an adolescence spent roaming the city’s boisterous back streets, its bustling avenues, taught Gorgik the double lesson that is, finally, all civilization can know:

  The breadth of the world is vasty and wide; nevertheless movement from place to place in it is possible; the ways of humanity are various and complex – but nevertheless negotiable.

  Five weeks before Gorgik turned sixteen, the Child Empress Ynelgo, whose coming was just and generous, seized power. On that blustery afternoon in the month of the Rat, soldiers shouted from every street corner that the city’s name was now, in fact, Kolhari – as every beggar woman and ship’s boy and tavern maid and grain vendor had been calling it time out of memory. (It was no longer Neveryóna – which is what the last, dragon-bred residents of the High Court of Eagles had officially, but ineffectually, renamed it twenty years before.) That night several wealthy importers were assassinated, their homes sacked, their employees murdered – among them Gorgik’s father. The employees’ families were taken as slaves.

  While in another room his mother’s sobbing turned suddenly to a scream, then abruptly ceased, Gorgik was dragged naked into the chilly street. He spent his next five years in a Nevèrÿon obsidian mine thirty miles inland at the foot of the Faltha Mountains.

  Gorgik was tall, strong, big-boned, friendly, and clever. Cleverness and friendliness had kept him from death and arrest on the docks. In the mines, along with the fact that he had been taught enough rudiments of writing to put down names and record workloads, they eventually secured the slave a work-gang foremanship: which meant that, with only a little stealing, he could get enough food so that instead of the wiry muscles that tightened along the bony frames of most miners, his arms and thighs and neck and chest swelled, high-veined and heavy, on his already heavy bones. At twenty-one he was a towering, black-haired gorilla of a youth, eyes permanently reddened from rockdust, a scar from a pickax flung in a barracks brawl spilling one brown cheekbone. His hands were huge and rough-palmed, his f
oot soles like cracked leather.

  He did not look a day more than fifteen years above his actual age.

  2

  The caravan of the Handmaid and Vizerine Myrgot, of the tan skin and tawny eyes, returning from the mountain hold of fabled Ellamon to the High Court of Eagles at Kolhari, made camp half a mile from the mines, beneath the Falthas’ ragged and piney escarpments. In her youth, Myrgot had been called ‘an interesting-looking girl’; today she was known as a bottomless well of cunning and vice.

  It was spring and the Vizerine was bored.

  She had volunteered for the Ellamon mission because life at the High Court, under the Child Empress Ynelgo, whose reign was peaceful and productive, had of late also been damnably dull. The journey itself had refreshed her. But within Ellamon’s fabled walls, once she had spent the obligatory afternoon out at the dragon corrals in the mountain sun, squinting up to watch the swoopings and turnings of the great, winged creatures (about which had gathered all the fables), she found herself, in the midst of her politicking with the mountain lairds and burghers, having to suffer the attentions of provincial bores – who were worse, she decided after a week, than their cosmopolitan counterparts.