Tales of Nevèrÿon

by Samuel R. Delany

  But the mission was done. She sighed.

  Myrgot stood in her tent door; she looked up at the black Falthas clawing through evening clouds and wondered if she might see any of the dark and fabled beasts arch the sunset. But no, for when all the fables were done, dragons were pretty well restricted to a few hundred yards of soaring and at a loss for launching from anywhere other than their craggy ledges. She watched the women in red scarves go off among other tents. ‘Jahor …?’

  The eunuch with the large nose stepped from behind her, turbaned and breeched in blue wool.

  ‘I have dismissed my maids for the night. The mines are not far from here …’ The Vizerine, known for her highhanded manners and low-minded pleasures, put her forearm across her breasts and kneaded her bare, bony elbow. ‘Go to the mines, Jahor. Bring me back the foulest, filthiest, wretchedest pit slave from the deepest darkest hole. I wish to slake my passion in some vile, low way.’ Her tongue, only a pink bud, moved along the tight line of her lips.

  The eunuch touched the back of his fist to his forehead, nodded, bowed, backed away the three required steps, turned, and departed.

  An hour later, the Vizerine was looking out through the seam in the canvas at the tent’s corner.

  The boy whom Jahor guided before him into the clearing limped a few steps forward, then turned his face up in the light drizzle which had begun minutes ago, opening and closing his mouth as if around a recently forgotten word. The pit slave’s name was Noyeed. He was fourteen. He had lost an eye three months ago: the wound had never been dressed and had not really healed. He had a fever. He was shivering. Bleeding gums had left his mouth scabby. Dirt had made his flesh scaly. He had been at the mines one month and was not expected to last another. Seeing this as a reasonable excuse, seven men at the mines two nights back had abused the boy cruelly and repeatedly – hence his limp.

  Jahor let him stand there, mouthing tiny drops that glittered on his crusted lips, and went into the tent. ‘Madame, I –’

  The Vizerine turned in the tent corner. ‘I have changed my mind.’ She frowned beneath the black hair (dyed now) braided in many loops across her forehead. From a tiny taboret, she picked up a thin-necked copper cruet and reached up between the brass chains to pour out half a cup more oil. The lamp flared. She replaced the cruet on the low table. ‘Oh, Jahor, there must be someone there … you know what I like. Really, our tastes are not that different. Try again. Bring someone else.’

  Jahor touched the back of his fist to his forehead, nodded his blue-bound head, and withdrew.

  After returning Noyeed to his barracks, Jahor had no trouble with his next selection. When he had first come rattling the barred door of the guards’ building, he had been testily sent on in among the slat-walled barracks, with a sleepy guard for guide, to seek out one of the gang foremen. In the foul sleeping quarters, the burly slave whom Jahor had shaken awake first cursed the eunuch like a dog; then, when he heard the Vizerine’s request, laughed. The tall fellow had gotten up, taken Jahor to another, even fouler barracks, found Noyeed for him, and all in all seemed a congenial sort. With his scarred and puggish face and dirt-stiffened hair he was no one’s handsome. But he was animally strong, of a piece, and had enough pit dirt ground into him to satisfy anyone’s nostalgia de la bone, thought Jahor as the foreman lumbered off back to his own sleeping quarters.

  When, for the second time that night, the guard unlocked the double catch at each side the plank across the barrack entrance, Jahor pushed inside, stepping from the rain and across the sill to flooring as muddy within as without. The guard stepped in behind, holding up the spitting pine torch: smoke licked the damp beams; vermin scurried in the light or dropped down, glittering, to the dirt. Jahor picked his way across muddy straw, went to the first heap curled away from him in thatch and shadow. He stopped, pulled aside frayed canvas.

  The great head rolled up; red eyes blinked over a heavy arm. ‘Oh …,’ the slave grunted. ‘You again?’

  ‘Come with me,’ Jahor said. ‘She wants you now.’

  The reddened eyes narrowed; the slave pushed up on one great arm. His dark face crinkled around its scar. With his free hand he rubbed his great neck, the skin stretched between thick thumb and horny forefinger cracked and gray. ‘She wants me to …?’ Again he frowned. Suddenly he went scrabbling in the straw beside him and a moment later turned back with the metal collar, hinged open, a semicircle of it in each huge hand. Once he shook his head, as if to rid it of sleep. Straw fell from his hair, slid across his bunched shoulders. Then he bent forward, raised the collar, and clacked it closed; matted hair caught in the clasp at the back of his neck. Digging with one thick finger, he pulled it loose. ‘There …’ He rose from his pallet to stand among the sleeping slaves, looking twice his size in the barracks shadow. His eyes caught the big-nosed eunuch’s. He grinned, rubbed the metal ring with three fingers. ‘Now they’ll let me back in. Come on, then.’

  So Gorgik came, with Jahor, to the Vizerine’s tent.

  And passed the night with Myrgot – who was forty-five and, in the narrowly restricted area she allowed for personal life, rather a romantic. The most passionate, not to say the most perverse, lovemaking (we are not speaking of foreplay), though it run the night’s course, seldom takes more than twenty minutes from the hour. As boredom was Myrgot’s problem and lust only its emblem, here and there through the morning hours the pit slave found himself disposed in conversation with the Vizerine. Since there is very little entertainment for pit slaves in an obsidian mine except conversation and tall-tale telling, when Gorgik began to see her true dilemma, he obliged her with stories of his life before, and at, the mines – a few of which tales were lies appropriated from other slaves, a few of which were embroideries on his own childhood experiences. But since entertainment was the desired effect, and temporariness seemed the evening’s hallmark, there was no reason to shun prevarication. Five times during the night, he made jokes the Vizerine thought wickedly funny. Three times he made observations on the working of the human heart she thought profound. For the rest, he was deferential, anecdotal, as honest about his feelings as someone might be who sees no hope in his situation. Gorgik’s main interest in the encounter was the story it would make at the next night’s supper of gruel and cold pig fat, though that interest was somewhat tempered by the prospect of the ten-hour workday with no sleep to come. Without illusion that more gain than the tale would accrue, lying on his back on sweaty silk his own body had soiled, staring up at the dead lamps swaying under the striped canvas, sometimes dozing in the midst of his own ponderings while the Vizerine beside him gave her own opinions on this, that, or the other, he only hoped there would be no higher price.

  When the slits between the tent lacings grew luminous, the Vizerine suddenly sat up in a rustle of silks and a whisper of furs whose splendor had by now become part of the glister of Gorgik’s fatigue. She called sharply for Jahor, then bade Gorgik rise and stand outside.

  Outside Gorgik stood, tired, lightheaded, and naked in the moist grass, already worn here and there to the earth with the previous goings and comings of the caravan personnel. He looked at the tents, at the black mountains beyond them, at the cloudless sky already coppered one side along the pinetops: I could run, he thought; and if I ran, yes, I would stumble into slavers’ hands within the day; and I’m too tired anyway. But I could run. I…

  Inside, Myrgot, with sweaty silk bunched in her fists beneath her chin, head bent and rocking slowly, considered. ‘You know, Jahor,’ she said, her voice quiet, because it was morning and if you have lived most of your life in a castle with many other people you are quiet in the morning; ‘that man is wasted in the mines.’ The voice had been roughened by excess. ‘I say man; he looks like a man; but he’s really just a boy – oh, I don’t mean he’s a genius or anything. But he can speak two languages passably, and can practically read in one of them. For him to be sunk in an obsidian pit is ridiculous! And do you know … I’m the only woman he’s ever had?’ />
  Outside, Gorgik, still standing, eyes half closed, was still thinking: yes, perhaps I could … when Jahor came for him.

  ‘Come with me.’

  ‘Back to the pit?’ Gorgik snorted something that general good nature made come out half a laugh.

  ‘No,’ Jahor said briskly and quietly in a way that made the slave frown. ‘To my tent.’

  Gorgik stayed in the large-nosed eunuch’s tent all morning, on sheets and coverlets not so fine as the Vizerine’s but fine enough; and the tent’s furnishings – little chairs, low tables, shelves, compartmented chests, and numberless bronze and ceramic figurines set all over – were far more opulent than Myrgot’s austere appointments. With forty minutes this hour and forty minutes that, Jahor found the slave gruff, friendly – and about as pleasant as an exhausted miner can be at four, five, or six in the morning. He corroborated the Vizerine’s assessment – and Jahor had done things very much like this many, many times. At one point the eunuch rose from the bed, bound himself about with blue wool, turned to excuse himself a moment – unnecessarily, because Gorgik had fallen immediately to sleep – and went back to the Vizerine’s tent.

  Exactly what transpired there, Gorgik never learned. One subject, from time to time in the discussion, however, would no doubt have surprised, if not shocked, him. When the Vizerine had been much younger, she herself had been taken a slave for three weeks and forced to perform services arduous and demeaning for a provincial potentate – who bore such a resemblance to her present cook at Court that it all but kept her out of the kitchen. She had been a slave only for three weeks: an army had come, fire-arrows had lanced through the narrow stone windows, and the potentate’s ill-shaven head was hacked off and tossed in the firelight from spear to spear by several incredibly dirty, incredibly tattooed soldiers so vicious and shrill that she finally decided (from what they later did to two women of the potentate’s entourage in front of everyone) they were insane. The soldiers’ chief, however, was in alliance with her uncle; and she had been returned to him comparatively unharmed. Still, the whole experience had been enough to make her decide that the institution of slavery was totally distasteful and so was the institution of war – that, indeed, the only excuse for the latter was the termination of the former. Such experiences, among an aristocracy deposed by the dragon for twenty years and only recently returned to power, were actually rather common, even if the ideas taken from them were not. The present government did not as an official policy oppose slavery, but it did not go out of its way to support it either; and the Child Empress herself, whose reign was proud and prudent, had set a tradition that no slaves were used at Court.

  From dreams of hunger and pains in his gut and groin, where a one-eyed boy with clotted mouth and scaly hands tried to tell him something he could not understand, but which seemed desperately important that he know, Gorgik woke with the sun in his face. The tent was being taken down from over him. A blue-turbaned head blocked the light. ‘Oh, you are awake …! Then you’d better come with me.’ With the noise of the decamping caravan around them Jahor took Gorgik to see the Vizerine. Bluntly she informed him, while ox drivers, yellow-turbaned secretaries, red-scarved maids, and harnessed porters came in and out of the tent, lifting, carrying, unlacing throughout the interview, that she was taking him to Kolhari under her protection. He had been purchased from the mines – take off that collar and put it somewhere. At least by day. She would trust him never to speak to her unless she spoke to him first: he was to understand that if she suspected her decision were a mistake, she could and would make his life far more miserable than it had ever been in the mines. Gorgik was at first not so much astonished as uncomprehending. Then, when astonishment, with comprehension, formed, he began to babble his inarticulate thanks – till, of a sudden, he became confused again and disbelieving and so, as suddenly, stopped. (Myrgot merely assumed he had realized that even gratitude is best displayed in moderation, which she took as another sign of his high character and her right choice.) Then men were taking the tent down from around them, too. With narrowed eyes, Gorgik looked at the thin woman in the green shift and sudden sun, sitting at a table from which women in red scarves were already removing caskets, things rolled and tied in ribbons, instruments of glass and bronze. Was she suddenly smaller? The thin braids, looped bright black about her head, looked artificial, almost like a wig. (He knew they weren’t.) Her dress seemed made for a woman fleshier, broader. She looked at him, the skin near her eyes wrinkled in the bright morning, her neck a little loose, the veins on the backs of her hands as high from age as those on his from labor. What he did realize, as she blinked in the full sunlight, was that he must suddenly look as different to her as she now looked to him.

  Jahor touched Gorgik’s arm, led him away.

  Gorgik had at least ascertained that his new and precarious position meant keeping silent. The caravan steward put him to work grooming oxen by day – which he liked. The next night he spent in the Vizerine’s tent. And dreams of the mutilated child woke him with blocked throat and wide eyes only half a dozen times. And Noyeed was probably dead by now anyway, as Gorgik had watched dozens of other slaves die in those suddenly fading years.

  Once Myrgot was sure that, during the day, Gorgik could keep himself to himself, she became quite lavish with gifts and clothing, jewels, and trinkets. (Though she herself never wore ornaments when traveling, she carried trunks of the things in her train.) Jahor – in whose tent from time to time Gorgik spent a morning or afternoon – advised him of the Vizerine’s moods, of when he should come to her smelling of oxen and wearing the grimy leather-belted rag – with his slave collar – that was all he had taken from the mines. Or when, as happened quite soon, he should do better to arrive freshly washed, his beard shaved, disporting her various gifts. More important, he was advised when he should be prepared to make love, and when he should be ready simply to tell tales or, as it soon came, just to listen. And Gorgik learned that most valuable of lessons without which no social progress is possible: if you are to stay in the good graces of the powerful, you had best, however unobtrusively, please the servants of the powerful.

  Next morning the talk through the whole caravan was: ‘Kolhari by noon!’

  By nine, winding of between fields and cypress glades, a silver thread had widened into a reed-bordered river down below the bank of the caravan road. The Kohra, one groom told him; which made Gorgik start. He had known the Big Kohra and the Kohra Spur as two walled and garbage-clotted canals, moving sluggishly into the harbor from beneath a big and a little rock-walled bridge at the upper end of New Pavē. The hovels and filthy alleys in the city between (also called the Spur) were home to thieves, pickpockets, murderers and worse, he’d always been told.

  Here, on this stretch of the river, were great, high houses, of two and even three stories, widely spaced and frequently gated. Where were they now? Why, this was Kolhari – at least the precinct. They were passing through the suburb of Neveryóna (which so recently had named the entire port) where the oldest and richest of the city’s aristocracy dwelt. Not far in that direction was the suburb of Sallese, where the rich merchants and importers had their homes: though with less land and no prospect on the river, many of the actual houses were far more elegant. This last was in conversation with a stocky woman – one of the red-scarved maids – who frequently took of her sandals, hiked up her skirts, and walked among the ox drivers, joking with them in the roughest language. In the midst of her description, Gorgik was surprised by a sudden and startling memory: playing at the edge of a statue-ringed rock pool in the garden of his father’s employer on some rare trip to Sallese as a child. With the memory came the realization that he had not the faintest idea how to get from these wealthy environs to the waterfront neighborhood that was his Kolhari. Minutes later, as the logical solution (follow the Khora) came, the caravan began to swing off the river road.

  First in an overheard conversation among the caravan steward and some grooms, then in another betw
een the chief porter and the matron of attendant women, Gorgik heard: ‘… the High Court …,’ ‘… the Court ’… and ‘… the High Court of Eagles …,’ and one black and sweaty-armed driver, whose beast was halted on the road with a cartwheel run into a ditch, wrestled and cursed his heavy-lidded charge as Gorgik walked past. ‘By the child Empress, whose reign is good and gracious, I’ll break your fleabitten neck! So close to home, and you run off the path!’

  An hour on the new road, which wound back and forth between the glades of cypress, and Gorgik was not sure if the Khora was to his right or left.

  But ahead was a wall, with guard houses left and right of a gate over which a chipped and rough-carved eagle spread her man-length wings. Soldiers pulled away the massive planks (with their dozen barred insets), then stood back, joking with one another, as the carts rolled through.

  Was that great building beside the lake the High Court?

  No, merely one of the outbuildings. Look there, above that hedge of trees …

  ‘There …?’

  He hadn’t seen it because it was too big. And when he did – rising and rising above the evergreens – for a dozen seconds he tried to shake loose from his mind the idea that he was looking at some natural object, like the Falthas themselves. Oh, yes, cut into here, leveled off there – but building upon building, wing upon wing, more a city than a single edifice, that great pile (he kept trying to separate it into different buildings, but it all seemed, despite its many levels, and its outcroppings, and its abutments, one) could not have been built …?

  He kept wishing the caravan would halt so he could look at it all. But the road was carpeted with needles now, and evergreens swatted half-bare branches across the towers, the clouds, the sky. Then, for a few moments, a gray wall was coming toward him, was towering over him, was about to fall on him in some infinitely delayed topple –