Tales of Nevèrÿon

by Samuel R. Delany

  ‘I told you! I’ve answered your questions! I’ve answered them and answered them truthfully! I have never set foot in the Garth! The astrolabe was a gift to me when I was practically a child. I cannot even recall the circumstances under which I received it. Some noble man or woman presented it to me on a whim at some castle or other that I stayed at.’ (The Suzeraine replaced the poker on the furnace rack and turned to a case, hanging on the stone wall, of small polished knives.) ‘I am a man who has stayed in many castles, many hovels; I have slept under bridges in the cities, in fine inns and old alleys. I have rested for the night in fields and forests. And I do not mark my history the way you do, cataloguing the gifts and graces I have been lucky enough to –’ Gorgik drew a sharp breath.

  ‘The flesh between the fingers – terribly sensitive.’ The Suzeraine lifted the tiny knife, where a blood drop crawled along the cutting edge. ‘As is the skin between the toes, on even the most calloused feet. I’ve known men – not to mention women – who remained staunch under hot pokers and burning pincers who, as soon as I started to make the few smallest cuts in the flesh between the fingers and toes (really, no more than a dozen or so), became astonishingly cooperative. I’m quite serious.’ He put down the blade on the table edge, picked up the towel from the basin and squeezed; reddened water rilled between his fingers into the bowl. The Suzeraine swabbed at the narrow tongue of blood that moved down the plank below Gorgik’s massive (twitching a little now) hand. The ‘thing wrong with having you slanted like this, head up and feet down, is that even the most conscientious of us finds himself concentrating more on your face, chest, and stomach than, say, on your feet, ankles and knees. Some exquisite feelings may be produced in the knee: a tiny nail, a small mallet … First I shall make a few more cuts. Then I shall wake our friend snoring against the wall. (You scream and he still sleeps! Isn’t it amazing? But then, he’s had so much of this!) We shall reverse the direction of the slant – head down, feet up – so that we can spread our efforts out more evenly over the arena of your flesh.’ In another basin, of yellow liquid, another cloth was submerged. The Suzeraine pulled the cloth out and spread it, dripping. ‘A little vinegar…’

  Gorgik’s head twisted in the clamp across his forehead that had already rubbed to blood at both temples as the Suzeraine laid the cloth across his face.

  ‘A little salt. (Myself, I’ve always felt that four or five small pains, each of which alone would be no more than a nuisance, when applied all together can be far more effective than a single great one.)’ The Suzeraine took up the sponge from the coarse crystals heaped in a third basin (crystals clung, glittering, to the brain-shape) and pressed it against Gorgik’s scorched and fresh-blistered thigh. ‘Now the knife again …’

  Somewhere, doors clashed.

  Gorgik coughed hoarsely and repeatedly under the cloth. Frayed threads dribbled vinegar down his chest. The cough broke into another scream, as another bloody tongue licked over the first.

  Other doors, nearer, clashed.

  One of the slaves with the wire sewn in his ears turned to look over his shoulder.

  The Suzeraine paused in sponging off the knife.

  On his bench, without ceasing his snore, the torturer knuckled clumsily at his nose.

  The chamber door swung back, grating. Small Sarg ran in, leaped on the wooden top of a cage bolted to the wall (that could only have held a human being squeezed in a very unnatural position), and shouted: ‘All who are slaves here are now free!’

  The Suzeraine turned around with an odd expression. He said: ‘Oh, not again! Really, this is the last time!’ He stepped from the table, his shadow momentarily falling across the vinegar rag twisted on Gorgik’s face. He moved the canvas hanging aside (furnace light lit faint stairs rising), stepped behind it; the ragged canvas swung to – there was a small, final clash of bolt and hasp.

  Small Sarg was about to leap after him, but the torturer suddenly opened his bloodshot eyes, the forehead below his bald skull wrinkled; he lumbered up, roaring.

  ‘Are you free or slave?’ Small Sarg shrieked, sword out.

  The torturer wore a wide leather neck collar, set about with studs of rough metal, a sign (Small Sarg thought; and he had thought it before) that, if any sign could or should indicate a state somewhere between slavery and freedom, would be it. ‘Tell me,’ Small Sarg shrieked again, as the man, eyes bright with apprehension, body sluggish with sleep, lurched forward, ‘are you slave or free?’ (In three castles the studded leather had hidden the bare neck of a free man; in two, the iron collar.) When the torturer seized the edge of the plank where Gorgik was bound – only to steady himself, and yet … – Sarg leaped, bringing his sword down. Studded leather cuffing the torturer’s forearm deflected the blade; but the same sleepy lurch threw the hulking barbarian (for despite his shaved head, the torturer’s sharp features and gold skin spoke as pure a southern origin as Sarg’s own) to the right; the blade, aimed only to wound a shoulder, plunged into flesh at the bronze-haired solar plexus.

  The man’s fleshy arms locked around the boy’s hard shoulders, joining them in an embrace lubricated with blood. The torturer’s face, an inch before Sarg’s, seemed to explode in rage, pain, and astonishment. Then the head fell back, eyes opened, mouth gaping. (The torturer’s teeth and breath were bad, very bad; this was the first time Small Sarg had ever actually killed a torturer.) The grip relaxed around Sarg’s back; the man fell; Sarg staggered, his sword still gripped in one hand, wiping at the blood that spurted high as his chin with the other. ‘You’re free …!’ Sarg called over his shoulder; the sword came loose from the corpse.

  The door slaves, however, were gone. (In two castles, they had gone seeking their own escape; in one, they had come back with guards …) Small Sarg turned toward the slanted plank, pulled the rag away from Gorgik’s rough beard, flung it to the floor. ‘Master …!’

  ‘So, you are … here – again – to … free me!’

  ‘I have followed your orders, Master; I have freed every slave I encountered on my way …’ Suddenly Small Sarg turned back to the corpse. On the torturer’s hand-wide belt, among the gnarled studs, was a hook and from the hook hung a clutch of small instruments. Small Sarg searched for the key among them, came up with it. It was simply a metal bar with a handle on one end and a flat side at the other. Sarg ducked behind the board and began twisting the key in locks. On the upper side of the plank, chains fell away and clamps bounced loose. Planks squeaked beneath flexing muscles.

  Sarg came up as the last leg clamp swung away from Gorgik’s ankle (leaving dark indentations) and the man’s great foot hit the floor. Gorgik stood, kneading one shoulder; he pushed again and again at his flank with the heel of one hand. A grin broke his beard. ‘It’s good to see you, boy. For a while I didn’t know if I would or not. The talk was all of small pains and long times.’

  ‘What did they want from you – this time?’ Sarg took the key and reached around behind his own neck, fitted the key in the lock, turned it (for these were barbaric times; that fabled man, named Belham, who had invented the lock and key, had only made one, and no one had yet thought to vary them: different keys for different locks was a refinement not to come for a thousand years), unhinged his collar, and stood, holding it in his soiled hands.

  ‘This time it was some nonsense about working as a messenger in the south – your part of the country.’ Gorgik took the collar, raised it to his own neck, closed it with a clink. ‘When you’re under the hands of a torturer, with all the names and days and questions, you lose your grip on your own memory. Everything he says sounds vaguely familiar, as if something like it might have once occurred. And even the things you once were sure of lose their patina of reality.’ A bit of Gorgik’s hair had caught in the lock. With a finger, he yanked it loose – at a lull in the furnace’s crackling, you could hear hair tear. ‘Why should I ever go to the Garth? I’ve avoided it so long I can no longer remember my reasons.’ Gorgik lifted the bronze disk from his chest and frowne
d at it. ‘Because of this, he assumed I must have been there. Some noble gave this to me, how many years ago now? I don’t even recall if it was a man or a woman, or what the occasion was.’ He snorted and let the disk fall. ‘For a moment I thought they’d melt it into my chest with their cursed pokers.’ Gorgik looked around, stepped across gory stone. ‘Well, little master, you’ve proved yourself once more; and yet once more I suppose it’s time to go.’ He picked up a broad sword leaning against the wall among a pile of weapons, frowned at the edge, scraped at it with the blunt of his thumb. ‘This will do.’

  Sarg, stepping over the torturer’s body, suddenly bent, hooked a finger under the studded collar, and pulled it down. ‘Just checking on this one, hey, Gorgik?’ The neck, beneath the leather, was iron bound.

  ‘Checking what, little master?’ Gorgik looked up from his blade.

  ‘Nothing. Come on, Gorgik.’

  The big man’s step held the ghost of a limp; Small Sarg noted it and beat the worry from his mind. The walk would grow steadier and steadier. (It had before.) ‘Now we must fight our way out of here and flee this crumbling pile.’

  ‘I’m ready for it, little master.’

  ‘Gorgik?’

  ‘Yes, master?’

  The one who got away …?’.

  The one who was torturing me with his stupid questions?’ Gorgik stepped to the furnace’s edge, pulled aside the hanging. The door behind it, when he jiggled its rope handle, was immobile and looked to be a plank too thick to batter in. He let the curtain fall again. And the other doors, anyway, stood open.

  ‘Who was he, Gorgik?’

  The tall man made a snorting sound. ‘We have our campaign, little master – to free slaves and end the institution’s inequities. The lords of Nevèrÿon have their campaign, their intrigues, their schemes and whims. What you and I know, or should know by now, is how little our and their campaigns actually touch … though in place after place they come close enough so that no man or woman can slip between without encounter, if not injury.’

  ‘I do not understand …’

  Gorgik laughed, loud as the fire. ‘That’s because I am the slave that I am and you are the master you are.’ And he was beside Sarg and past him; Small Sarg, behind him, ran.

  3

  The women shrieked – most of them. Gorgik, below swinging lamps, turned with raised sword to see one of the silent ones crouching against the wall beside a stool – an old woman, most certainly used to the jeweled collar cover, though hers had come off somewhere. There was only iron at her neck now. Her hair was in thin black braids, clearly dyed, and looping her brown forehead. Her eyes caught Gorgik’s and perched on his gaze like some terrified creature’s, guarding infinite secrets. For a moment he felt an urge, though it did not quite rise clear enough to take words, to question them. Then, in the confusion, a lamp chain broke; burning oil spilled. Guards and slaves and servants ran through a growing welter of flame. The woman was gone. And Gorgik turned, flailing, taking with him only her image. Somehow the castle had (again) been unable to conceive of its own fall at the hands of a naked man – or boy – and had, between chaos and rumor, collapsed into mayhem before the ten, the fifty, the hundred-fifty brigands who had stormed her. Slaves with weapons, guards with pot-tops and farm implements, paid servants carrying mysterious packages either for safety or looting, dashed there and here, all seeming as likely to be taken for foe as friend. Gorgik shouldered against one door; it splintered, swung out, and he was through – smoke trickled after him. He ducked across littered stone, following his shadow flickering with back light, darted through another door that was open.

  Silver splattered his eyes. He was outside; moonlight splintered through the low leaves of the catalpa above him. He turned, both to see where he’d been and if he were followed, when a figure already clear in the moon, hissed, ‘Gorgik!’ above the screaming inside.

  ‘Hey, little master!’ Gorgik laughed and jogged across the rock.

  Small Sarg seized Gorgik’s arm. ‘Come on, Master! Let’s get out of here. We’ve done what we can, haven’t we?’

  Gorgik nodded and, together they turned to plunge into the swampy forests of Strethi.

  Making their way beneath branches and over mud, with silver spills shafting the mists, Small Sarg and Gorgik came, in the humid autumn night, to a stream, a clearing, a scarp – where two women sat at the white ashes of a recent fire, talking softly. And because these were primitive times when certain conversational formalities had not yet grown up to contour discourse among strangers, certain subjects that more civilized times might have banished from the evening were here brought quickly to the fore.

  ‘I see a bruised and tired slave of middle age,’ said the woman who wore a mask and who had given her name as Raven. With ankles crossed before the moonlit ash, she sat with her arms folded on her raised knees. ‘From that, one assumes that the youngster is the owner.’

  ‘But the boy,’ added the redhead kneeling beside her, who had given her name as Norema, ‘is a barbarian, and in this time and place it is the southern barbarians who, when they come this far north, usually end up slaves. The older, for all his bruises, has the bearing of a Kolhari man, whom you’d expect to be the owner.’

  Gorgik, sitting with one arm over one knee, said: ‘We are both free men. For the boy the collar is symbolic – of our mutual affection, our mutual protection. For myself, it is sexual – a necessary part in the pattern that allows both action and orgasm to manifest themselves within the single circle of desire. For neither of us is its meaning social, save that it shocks, offends, or deceives.’

  Small Sarg, also crosslegged but with his shoulders hunched, his elbows pressed to his sides, and his fists on the ground, added, ‘My master and I are free.’

  The masked Raven gave a shrill bark that it took seconds to recognize as laughter: ‘You both claim to be free, yet one of you bears the title “master” and wears a slave collar at the same time? Surely you are two jesters, for I have seen nothing like this in the length and breadth of this strange and terrible land.’

  ‘We are lovers,’ said Gorgik, ‘and for one of us the symbolic distinction between slave and master is necessary to desire’s consummation.’

  ‘We are avengers who fight the institution of slavery wherever we find it,’ said Small Sarg, ‘in whatever way we can, and for both of us it is symbolic of our time in servitude and our bond to all men and women still so bound.’

  ‘If we have not pledged ourselves to death before capture, it is only because we both know that a living slave can rebel and a dead slave cannot,’ said Gorgik.

  ‘We have sieged more than seven castles now, releasing the workers locked in the laboring pens, the kitchen and house slaves, and the administrative slaves alike. As well, we have set upon those men who roam through the land capturing and selling men and women as if they were property. Between castles and countless brigands, we have freed many who had only to find a key for their collars. And in these strange and barbaric times, any key will do.’

  The redheaded Norema said: ‘You love as master and slave and you fight the institution of slavery? The contradiction seems as sad to me as it seemed amusing to my friend.’

  ‘As one word uttered in three diferent situations may mean three entirely different things, so the collar worn in three different situations may mean three different things. They are not the same: sex, affection, and society,’ said Gorgik. ‘Sex and society relate like an object and its image in a reflecting glass. One reverses the other – are you familiar with the phenomenon, for these are primitive times, and mirrors are rare –’

  ‘I am familiar with it,’ said Norema and gave him a long, considered look.

  Raven said: ‘We are two women who have befriended each other in this strange and terrible land, and we have no love for slavers. We’ve killed three now in the two years we’ve traveled together – slavers who’ve thought to take us as property. It is easy, really, here where the men expect the women t
o scream and kick and bite and slap, but not to plan and place blades in their gut.’

  Norema said: ‘Once we passed a gang of slavers with a herd of ten women in collars and chains, camped for the night. We descended on them – from their shouts they seemed to think they’d been set on by a hundred fighting men.’

  Sarg and Gorgik laughed; Norema and Raven laughed – all recognizing a phenomenon.

  ‘You know,’ mused Norema, when the laughter was done, ‘the only thing that allows you and ourselves to pursue our liberations with any success is that the official policy of Nevèrÿon goes against slavery under the edict of the Child Empress.’

  ‘Whose reign,’ said Gorgik, absently, ‘is just and generous.’

  ‘Whose reign,’ grunted the masked woman, ‘is a sundried dragon turd.’

  ‘Whose reign –’ Gorgik smiled – ‘is currently insufferable, if not insecure.’

  Norema said: ‘To mouth those conservative formulas and actively oppose slavery seems to me the same sort of contradiction as the one you first presented us with.’ She took a reflective breath. ‘A day ago we stopped near here at the castle of the Suzeraine of Strethi. He was amused by us and entertained us most pleasantly. But we could not help notice that his whole castle was run by slaves, men and women. But we smiled, and ate slave-prepared food – and were entertaining back.’