Neveryóna, or The Tales of Signs and Cities

10. Of Bronze, Brews, Dragons, and Dinners

IT REARED, LOPSIDED, AT the crossroads’ southeast corner.

Pryn looked at it, scrambled behind it, came out, walked away from it several times in several directions — now on all four rutted paths, now off in the bushes — and came back. Eventually she decided that what was currently the juction’s southeast corner had once been the center of a large, circular enclosure. Here and there the undergrowth paused at the edge of flat, uptilting stones that once, how long ago, had paved it all. Several stones were still set precisely together. And there were large cut ones off to the side that, with interruptions, defined a kind of rim. The traffic circle must once have been almost twenty meters in diameter. And on either side of the four rutted paths that joined here, hewn rocks off in the bushes suggested that all four had once been at least three times the width they were now.

It took Pryn a good forty minutes, scrambling around in the underbrush, to ascertain all this. She was looking at the dragon — half off its pedestal and leaning to the side — trying to envision it, free of vines and lichen, as the center monument in the crossing of two great highways, when she heard hoofbeats along the western route.

Automatically, she stepped back behind the pedestal’s half-buried corner.

A minute later, the first six-horse wagon, shaking gilded fringe, swayed and thundered around the turn. Next came an open cart full of soldiers. The half-dozen closed wagons behind it were large as the mummers’ portable stage and prop conveyances. The horses went at a light canter — though not faster than a person might sprint. For now Pryn saw a lithe runner leap from the draped portals of a rear wagon and overtake one, another, and a third wagon, to swing up on the running board and disappear within — while from another wagon at the front another runner dropped, to let the caravan overtake him, wagon after wagon passing, till he swung up into a rear one — delivering what messages, among what personages, Pryn could not imagine.

The caravan clattered around the turn and rumbled away north — the road down which, not an hour before, Pryn had come strolling.

Certainly, Pryn decided in the returning silence, those loud wheels were the ones the time-obliterated highways had been built for. Once, no doubt, caravan runners could sprint on smooth pavement instead of beating through the bush along the road’s shoulder.

Pryn came out and sat on the pedestal’s ivied corner, wondering where the caravan was coming from and what might be its business. Taking the north road like that, it could only have one destination: Kolhari — perhaps even the High Court of Eagles itself.

She pulled a leaf from a vine that clutched the rocky base beside her.

Through the settling dust, Tetya was coming down the road. He was the nephew of the local brewer, Old Rorkar, whose hotsheds and cooling caves were perhaps a mile up, where Pryn had been working now almost a week.

‘Did you see them?’ Pryn called.

Tetya nodded, ambling.

‘Who do you think it could be?’

‘Lots of people.’ Tetya crossed the juncture. ‘The Usurper of Strethi, perhaps — only his wagon colors are blue and orange, I think. And it could have been the Princess Elyne — though she hasn’t made a trip to these parts during my lifetime; uncle says she used to come here quite frequently. Or it could have been Lord Krodar and his entourage, which is sometimes rumored to include the Child Empress Ynelgo herself — though we’re never certain exactly when she comes. It’s always very secretive. The only way to be sure who it is, of course, is if they stop at uncle’s office and order a shipment of beer. They frequently do. But also they ride in wagons purposely painted with colors associated with great houses other than their own — to confuse the likes of you and me.’ Tetya dug a forefinger in his ear. ‘So unless they stop to order a few barrels from uncle, there’s no way to be sure.’

Tetya was a gangling, good-natured boy. Pryn had found herself completely able to relax with his rural openness. But he also had his bothersome side. He seemed terribly young to Pryn — all elbows and ears and knees, like one of the gangling puppies lolloping about behind the brewery’s equipment shed. His beard lay in little curls over his face, with great gaps of baby-smooth cheek between. Pryn had laughed at the changing voices of the twelve-, thirteen-, and fourteen-year-old boys of her own mountain town. But Tetya’s voice seemed to have snagged permanently on those awkward intervals, still cracking and creaking at an age when most boys she’d known at home had made at least the physical part of the passage to manhood. If only from the things she’d been through since her flight above the Falthas (for, after all, she had traveled and murdered and talked with the Liberator, been shown the memory of water by Madame Keyne and had made love with a smuggler), Pryn felt she had a right to consider herself a mature woman. But once, she and Tetya had actually sat down and worked it out (with Yrnik’s help): Tetya was nineteen days older than Pryn.

‘What do you think they were here for, Tetya?’

Tetya turned to sit on the pedestal beside her. ‘To visit the Earl Jue-Grutn.’

Pryn frowned. Like most wanderers in that time, whenever Pryn stopped it was because she’d been suddenly overcome with the notion that if she followed the road further, it would soon give out entirely and she would have to confront the ultimate wildness, the unrectored chaos, the unthinkable space in which the very distinctions between earth, air, and water would soon break down. But here, a few hundred yards or so beyond what she had, once again, assumed to be the end of the world, was a major crossroads — or at least the traces of one. And a great caravan had just rolled by it. ‘Where are we, here, Tetya?’ Pryn asked. ‘What’s down all these…highways?’

Tetya mmmmed and looked about. ‘Well, if you walk along there for half an hour, you’ll get to the castle of Lord Aldamir — though no one has lived in it for more years than you and I’ve got, put together. Straight on, and you come to the ruins of the Vygernangx Monastery, after perhaps a mile, though the last feyer — that’s the old barbarian word around here for priest — gave up trying to live in it half a dozen years back.’ Tetya pointed down the road from which the wagons had come. ‘And along there is where the Earl Jue-Grutn lives. He’s pretty much the most powerful noble left in all the Garth.’ Suddenly Tetya twisted about, grasped some vines on the pedestal behind them, and yanked.

Tendrils popped and chattered; vines tore from the stone.

Surprised, Pryn stood up.

‘Do you know what that says?’ Tetya asked.

Pryn looked at the chiseled markings that had been hidden under the leaves. She reached out to trace one with a finger. Her other hand rose to her astrolabe.

‘I thought you might know, since you’re supposed to be teaching me to read — ’ That was one of the jobs Tetya’s uncle, Rorkar, had assigned Pryn during her first days at the brewery. ‘Those signs look the same as the ones on that disk around your neck.’

Pryn looked more closely. ‘They do look similar…sort of.’

Bracing one hand against the rock, Tetya pulled away more vines.

As leaves came loose, Pryn asked, ‘You think they’re writing…?’

‘How should I know?’ Tetya threw down the foliage and wiped his hand on his leg. ‘You’re supposed to be teaching me!’

‘If it is writing — ’ Pryn lifted the astrolabe from her chest to examine the marks about its rim — ‘it isn’t any that I know how to read. Maybe you should get Yrnik up here, and he could tell you.’ The brewery foreman, Yrnik, could read and write too: he was also the brewery accountant. For some time now, apparently, he’d been asking Old Rorkar for a literate assistant, but none had shown up — until Pryn had wandered by, seeking a laboring job.

Old Rorkar himself was illiterate, and Yrnik had apparently come by much like Pryn, some years back; he had only slowly convinced the old peasant brewer of the advantages of written records. Still, the notion had seemed logical; and the logic had proved profitable. Illiterate though he was, Rorkar was still a clever man. With only one person around possessing the skill, it had not occurred to anyone to pass that skill on; but when it turned out that someone Pryn’s age might, indeed, have the knowledge as completely as Yrnik himself, Rorkar had come up with the notion that Pryn tutor nephew Tetya, as well as assist Yrnik with the records. Pryn asked: ‘Has Yrnik seen these marks?’

‘He ought to have. He’s been around here long enough. They’re on lots of old pieces of stone and old carvings and things.’

‘And he’s never said he could read them?’

‘He told me he couldn’t.’

‘Then why did you ask me?’

‘You’re not Yrnik.’ Tetya turned to look back up the road. ‘Just because he couldn’t didn’t mean you wouldn’t.’

‘Did Yrnik think it was writing?’

‘He didn’t know either,’ Tetya said. ‘I think it is.’

‘It looks very old.’ Pryn turned and sat again on the pedestal’s edge. ‘There’re lots of old things around here. Did you know that this place here, maybe hundreds of years ago, maybe even thousands, used to be the crossroads of two great highways — oh, ten times as wide as they are now!’

‘Fifty years,’ Tetya said.

Pryn had expected either to be praised for her discovery if he’d already known it, or challenged if he did not. She glanced at him suspiciously. Fifty years? But then, there was Belham’s Bridge and Venn’s Rock back in Enoch…

‘Fifty. That’s what uncle says.’

‘What was fifty years ago?’ Pryn asked, mocking obtuseness. ‘What does your uncle say?’

‘Fifty years ago these were wide, well-paved highroads; and the dragon stood at the crossing’s center, with wagons and mules and goats and oxen passing about it on all sides.’

‘How old is your uncle?’ Pryn frowned.

‘Almost sixty — almost sixty-five, I guess!’

‘And he remembers it from when he was a little boy?’

‘He says so.’ Tetya shrugged. ‘I don’t know if it’s true or not, but that’s what lots of the old people around here say.’ He stood up. ‘We’d better get back to the brewery — if you want to keep your job.’

‘What do you mean?’ Pryn declared. ‘I finished all the work Yrnik set me!’

‘My uncle’ Tetya said, ‘expects you, when you’re finished, to ask Yrnik for more — and not to go wandering off on your own. He says if you do it three more times, he’s going to throw you out, whether you can read and write or not.’

‘Oh — ’ Pryn said, a bit more off-handedly than she felt. ‘Everybody else was almost finished, anyway. I just didn’t think that — ’ She sighed. Pryn liked the brewery, with its sheds and barracks and caves; she liked the men and women who worked there. And even if it wasn’t the end of the world — or hadn’t always been — she wasn’t ready to go on just yet. ‘Let’s get back, then.’

‘I don’t want you kicked out,’ Tetya said as they started back up the road, ‘because I’ll never learn to read. Yrnik’s too busy — and stubborn — to teach me.’

‘Then you’ll have to work — and think — harder during our session tomorrow morning!’

‘Maybe if I learn enough from you,’ Tetya said, ‘I can figure out what those marks mean by myself,’ which struck Pryn first as a silly idea, then as an interesting one.

Across the road from the brewery was a tavern — if you could call it that. What it most resembled was the barrack-like eating hall in which Pryn had hauled grain and yams for an evening back in Kolhari. The markings on the ceiling beams, the painted ornamentations over the doors and windows, the shaggy bark on the undersides of the benches were so like the place she had worked (back then without really noticing any of them), she realized the city place must have been modeled on the country establishment — probably to make its barbarian clientele feel more at home in the impersonal city. Many of the barbarians who worked in the fields or in the brewery itself ate there, as most of them, Pryn had soon learned, were itinerant workers on their way north. Certainly, here the food was better than Pryn remembered from her night’s scraps in Kolhari. And unlike the city laborers, a good third of the field workers and half the brewery staff were women. Field workers of both sexes frequently had a child or three in tow. The atmosphere was convivial. And though Rorkar owned the place, as he did the brewery itself; and though Yrnik came striding through it from time to time, with loud jokes and cuffings of the shoulders of the men and women passing with bowls and boards; and though Tetya sat at the long corner table with the noisy local boys blowing the foam from the tops of their mugs at one another and slapping at one another’s heads in retaliation and generally indulging a constant hilarity that defeated female intrusion — still Pryn found the hall a place where she could get away from work, if not from the tangle of eating, sleeping, and playing in which work in that part of the land was bound up. She was even getting used to the strange spice, which she’d found out from the kitchen girl, Juni, who worked behind the counter, was called cinnamon.

Pryn had been presented with the inequities of city life so flamboyantly that she rather romanticized them in memory. The inequities of the rural life around her, of which the urban disparities seemed an intensified version, she could view with a kind of detachment. It only took her the time of one slowly sipped mug of red beer (what Old Rorkar brewed were strong berry ciders and low-proof grain fermentations that were often mixed in a variety of proportions for a variety of flavors — the range, in those days, going by the single term: beer) to see that for all the conviviality, there was only civil intercourse between itinerant barbarians and locals. Barbarian mothers cuffed any of their children who went to gawk at local workers. Local women with bowls held high edged by clusters of barbarian men who, instead of laughing and joking and even assisting them to their seats as they did with their own, ignored them. The two-dozen-odd slaves Rorkar owned, who worked back and forth between the brewery and Rorkar’s own home, came in to deliver messages or baskets of produce. Sometimes a worker would hail one of the iron-collared men or women to stay for a mug or a bowl. After all, they worked side by side in the same fields and orchards and fermentaries, no? But the invitation was always silently ignored, sometimes to the inviter’s laughter, sometimes to his anger. The slaves upset the barbarians particularly — because the slaves were all so clearly barbarian-born themselves. Once a man who Pryn thought was only teasing a slave suddenly attacked him; they had to be separated by onlookers.

‘Why don’t they let the slaves eat here?’ Pryn asked Juni, who did many of the jobs in the eating hall Pryn had done back in the hall’s city sister. ‘They could set up a table for them, or let them have a mug of beer after they made their deliveries.’

‘Slaves can’t drink.’ Behind the serving counter, Juni wiped her hands on her apron. ‘They get whipped if they’re caught at it. They’d be beaten if they ever ate here, too.’ She turned to pull a large crock, empty now, back across the scarred wood. ‘Besides, the slaves have their own place. They eat on the slave benches out back.’

It was raining lightly when Pryn, still with half a mug of beer in her fist, pushed out the hide-hung doorway and ambled down by the hall, over wood chips and cinders and pine needles, now looking off at the trees, now gazing down at the rim of her unglazed mug, darkening here and there with raindrops. Inside, the muffled noise of the eaters gave way to the noise of the kitchen workers. Pryn rounded the back corner.

Somehow, the fact that the benches were of stone surprised her. Twenty, thirty, maybe forty rows of them stretched toward the woods. Many were chipped or broken. Between some of the distant ones, brush had grown up.

Pryn walked over the wet gravel beside the near ones. Every half-meter along the bench tops, an iron staple had been driven in. Some had broken off. Old tar, used to retard rust, still clotted the iron half-circles.

On the bench nearest the hall, in the drizzle, hunched over clay bowls, five slaves were eating. Their collars were not chained to the staples. Still, they sobered Pryn. She knew there were no more than two dozen, all told, in the brewery. But how long ago, she wondered, had two hundred, or four hundred, or five hundred, sat, chained, eating in the same posture as the five there, rain salting their backs.

A gust; and a branch above her added to the sprinkle. Pryn walked on and sipped. A thousand years ago? she thought. A hundred? Fifty…?

The man who walked from behind the far edge of the hall wore a wonderful cloak. It was a blue almost dark enough to be black, yet even at this distance, through the drizzly evening, it was blue, stunning and eye-absorbing. Here and there metallic embroideries glittered in it. The edges were myriad colors. The man was squat, with bushy white hair.

He carried a beer mug, a large one; it was glazed and decorated with ornate reliefs.

One slave looked up.

The cloaked man smiled and raised his hand in a greeting.

The slave nodded, grinned.

The cloaked gentleman walked out between the files of benches and stood a moment, sipped from his elegant mug (Was it beer he drank?), and turned. Pryn thought two things as his look swept her. (He had a short white beard that made the puffy hair clouding above his ears look almost comic.) First, his smile was inhumanly, unnaturally, preternaturally radiant. Second, though his eyes had swept by her, Pryn was sure he had not seen her. As he completed his turn and began to walk back toward the hall, she wondered what, indeed, he had seen in the stony traces of such massive servitude.

He reached the benches where two of the slaves sat, pushed back his cloak, sat beside them, and began talking to the collared old woman hunched next to him; her head turned from time to time in its iron to glance at him or nod. Like all the slaves at the brewery, women or men, her hair was cut off short all over her head; and she was old enough to be somewhat balding anyway. The cloaked man sat very straight in the rain, while the slave hunched to protect her food.

Pryn chose a path that would take her through the benches and near enough to them to catch a word or two. If she paused to take a sip from her mug as she passed, he might not even suspect she were trying to overhear. Pryn turned among the benches and wandered over the shaly ground. What she heard, however, when she neared, made her pause longer than she’d intended.

‘Here,’ the man was saying, holding out his mug before the hunched slave woman, ‘take a drink, Bruka. You’ve worked through this day long and hard — you don’t have to tell me. I know the worker you are. Who deserves a drink more than you?’

‘Oh, no, my lord.’ Bruka gave the man a worried grin. Some of the woman’s teeth were gone. ‘We’re not supposed to, and I might get in trouble. It’s not worth the beating, my lord,’

The man laughed. ‘Now I know — and you know I know — that you folks have your own ways of getting your drink, that Old Rorkar, if he doesn’t know about for sure, at least suspects. He’s just decided to look the other way. Don’t tell me you’ve never tasted the work of your own hand before, Bruka…? How can a drink with me hurt?’

‘If it’s true that we get our own — and I’m not saying it is, my lord — it’s only another reason why I needn’t drink from that!’ The old woman jammed a wooden spoon full of vegetable stew into her mouth, laughing and chewing at once. (It was the same cinnamoned stew Pryn had eaten earlier for supper inside.) ‘Besides, that elegant mug of yours — it’s beautiful work, for sure. Why would a man like you want my dirty mouth on that?’ Bruka laughed again and turned back to her bowl.

‘A man like me…?’ mused the white-haired gentleman. ‘The truth is, Bruka, there are very few men like me in this world, lord or slave.’

‘That’s true, my lord.’

‘And if I were so weak that the touch of a slave’s lips to my cup would topple me from my position, what sort of position could it have been in the first place? You’ve worked hard, and I know the thirst that must be upon you. As a child, didn’t I spend my share of days working in these fields?’ I know how thirst can crawl into the bones and dry the body out from within. Drink, Bruka.’

‘You speak the truth again, my lord.’ The slave shook her head. ‘But my father told me, my lord, when I was a child: “Never drink from the master’s or mistress’s cup. For the slave, such a cup holds only the dregs of disgrace, pain, and death.”’

‘Did he, now, Bruka? And let me tell you: when I was a child — before you were born — I saw my father, with this very mug, go to the slave-barracks where your father lay, sick with the fever that killed off a third of both your family and mine, and give him a drink. Your father took a long, cooling draught from my father’s hands out of this same cup I hold now. Your father drank from it. And you refuse?’

‘Did he now?’ The slave woman frowned. ‘I didn’t know my father very long, my lord. He died the same week your late mother sold me and the rest of the orchard gang to Old Rorkar, here. Rorkar’s a good master, my lord. But he’s not your father.’

‘I know, Bruka. Murjus, there, was one of that same gang, weren’t you, my man?’ The gentleman gestured to another slave hunched on the bench ahead, who glanced back now and said:

‘Yes, my lord. That’s the truth, my lord.’

Bruka was still looking at the mug. ‘My father, you say?’ Suddenly she put her bowl down on the stone beside her. ‘I think I will take that drink!’ She seized the green-and-red ceramic in both hands. (Two of her nails were deformed from some injury, and another was split to the quick.) Bruka put the mug to her mouth and raised it, while her adam’s apple rose and fell, rose and fell in her red, wrinkled neck.

Pryn watched — she had stopped only two meters away. All that had really surprised her from the exchange was the realization that the man in the cloak was older than the woman in the iron — though both had almost equal bald spots.

The adam’s apple still rose and fell. The slave-woman was draining the mug — the gentleman realized it, too. His bushy eyebrows rose. Consternation worked into the lines around his lips and eyes before amusement blurred it.

‘That was good, my lord!’ Bruka wiped her mouth with her wrist.

Shaking his head, the gentleman took the mug back. ‘Well, you certainly were thirsty, old woman!’ That was when he saw Pryn — who suddenly wanted to move off in several directions or bury her face in her own mug, all at once.

But she stood and looked.

‘And hello, young woman!’ The gentleman put his mug on one knee and his large, clean hand on the other, regarding Pryn with a friendly enough look. ‘Now you certainly can’t be from around here. Let me see. I’d say…’ Still smiling, he narrowed his eyes. ‘Mountains…yes, a young woman of the mountains. From somewhere near…Ellamon? Go on, tell me I’m right!’

Surprised, Pryn nodded.

His smile broadened. ‘Ever ride a dragon?’

Mouth open, Pryn nodded again.

‘So did I!’ Spreading his elbows, the gentleman leaned forward, so that the wonderful cloak fell down around them. ‘“Now look at that!” my father cried, on our way down from the high slope where we’d gone to watch the little girls and their trainers put on their fabled performance. “They’ve got one here the kids can ride!”’ Smiling, the white-haired gentleman dropped his head to the side, as though inviting Pryn into his memories. ‘“Well, he’s not going to ride it,” declared my mother. But then, you know, nothing would do my father but that I try — I couldn’t have been more than half your age. But I remember it all, just as clearly! Oh, yes, at Ellamon — my father took me up to the bark fence, with mother looking stern, and father reassuring her that it was bound to be perfectly safe, and when would we be back at Ellamon any time soon, and just how often did a boy get a chance to ride through the air on a dragon. It was a very old dragon.’ The gentleman chuckled. ‘The little corral, all decked out with perfectly useless prods and flails and dragon-manacles to look like a real one, was out on a stony ledge. The very bored young woman managing it explained to my father that the dragon took off and flew over that gorge there, landed on the ledge over there (where we could see another young woman sitting), at which point it would turn around, take off again, and fly back here; and, yes, it was a very well-trained dragon and had been doing it for years — all this in a peremptory tone that rather put my father off, I think. He wasn’t used to being spoken to like that, though it pleased my mother, who assumed it was what he deserved for condescending to such foolishness in the first place. Finally my father said, yes, go ahead, and the young woman put a wide belt around me and buckled it — not very tightly, either. It had four metal rings on it. She lifted me onto the dragon’s hard back. The beast wore a leather body-harness, with several straps hanging from it down to the ground. She picked up one and another, and put them through the rings, lashing me on. Then she handed me the reins to hold — I’d already noticed they didn’t go to the dragon’s head, like the reins on the dragons we’d just seen performing; they were tied to the harness’s shoulder strap, so that no matter how hard or in what direction I might pull, they wouldn’t have guided it anywhere. But that, I suppose, was in case I got it into my head, midflight, to take my dragon off somewhere I wasn’t supposed to. “Don’t you think there should be a rope or a chain to the creature from the corral here?” my mother asked in a loud voice. “When it’s flying, I mean. Just as a precaution…?” No one answered her, which only confirmed her notion that the concession was evil, silly, and dangerous. The young woman dashed around to the other side to tie the other straps to the other rings. As she was lashing the last one to the belt, the scaly old thing waddled forward, lifted wide wings — When it went off the edge, I was quite terrified! I mean, it just walked to the cliff and…fell. But then those laboring sails beat, and beat, and beat again; and we began to rise through the late morning, while I tried to lean forward and hug its cool windy neck. I remember glancing behind me. There was my mother, holding on to her chin, and my father, looking like he might leap after me, and the bored young woman, who’d sat down on an upturned barrel, all growing smaller with the swaying mountain. I tried to sit up — and was brave enough to half do it. But we’d already reached our glide’s height. Wings banked for descent to the far ledge…I remember hearing claws scrape rock. My dragon scrambled a few steps over stones. The young woman waiting there wasn’t as bored as the other. I looked down at her as she seized the dragon harness to walk the creature about on the ledge. To this day I can recall how dirty her nails were. Her short hair was wrapped through with some decorative cord. As she came around with us, she tugged one of my straps to make sure it was tight — I guess it usually was. Then she gave me a big grin. I think I fell in love with her. The beast completed its turn. She slapped its haunch —

‘And we fell off the cliff again.’ The old gentleman’s eyes blinked above wet cheeks. (Was it raining harder?) ‘No, my parents agreed, this time in accord, I could not do it again. My father paid with both gold and iron, so it must have been rather expensive, even for those days. And I played at dragons and dragon riders all the way to the aunt’s brother-in-law’s niece’s where we were being hosted for lunch; and where I charmed some of the guests — and bored some others, I’m sure — with my loud version of dragon riding, till one of the servants took me with five or six other children down to the lake by the fountain. After we paddled about a bit, a slave brought our lunch out in several ceramic bowls, one of which had a dragon painted on it — I’m afraid it only got me going again.’ He sighed, smiling. ‘And that’s practically all I remember of the entire Ellamon trip!’

After moments Pryn said: ‘My dragon was a wild one. I caught her myself.’

‘Of course you’re much older than I was,’ the gentleman said.

Pryn said: ‘I don’t think they have the dragon ride anymore. For children.’ She looked at her mug. ‘The dragon corrals still put on exhibitions for people who come up to see. But some of the corrals have been closed down — they tore down the biggest when I was nine. My cousin was on the work crew…but the rest still put on shows.’ She blinked because of a drop of water on her eyelash. There’re not so many dragons anymore.’

‘Never a hearty breed,’ the gentleman said. ‘They’ll probably be extinct in a hundred years. That’s why they were put under Imperial Protection.’

‘My aunt said something once about there being a children’s dragon ride, a long time ago. But they…closed it down. Before I was born.’

‘This was certainly before you were born!’ The gentleman turned to pick up his mug. ‘Forty years ago, at least — fifty years ago. More than fifty years ago!’ He shook his head. ‘I am getting on. We are getting on, aren’t we Bruka?’

Just then the rain doubled, and — in the next breath — tripled.

On the bench ahead Murjus looked at the sky with a whiny grunt.

The gentleman stood, pulling his cloak first over one shoulder, then over the other. ‘We’d better be going inside.’

Pryn walked with him between stapled benches, gone dark and shiny with rain, back toward the building. The slaves hunched further over their bowls, spooning faster at their stew. The rim of the gentleman’s empty mug appeared and disappeared from under his cloak’s edge. The roof stuck out enough to give them some protection. He moved in front. She followed on the strip of drier ground, her inner shoulder bumping the wall, watching drops stand on the deep nap of his outer.

‘That slave drank all your beer,’ Pryn said. ‘She was a greedy creature.’

‘I was looking forward to a last mouthful before I went in, yes.’ He glanced back, smiling (so Pryn stepped up beside him). ‘But slaves grow thirsty too.’

‘Would you like some of mine?’

A bushy eyebrow rose. He looked at Pryn, at his own mug, at hers again, at his own. ‘Eh…no. Thank you, no.’ He stepped ahead at the door, and pushed back wet hide.

Pryn stepped in behind him.

She watched him walk through the hall, water dripping and gleaming from the dark embroideries. Making her own way to the counter, she climbed to the stool.

The gentleman had stopped to speak to three barbarian workers — and in their own language, too, just as clearly as he had been speaking with Pryn in hers. Yrnik knew a few barbarian phrases that he could shout to get the workers to move faster. And Tetya had told her some words you were not supposed to say — which barbarians said all the time. But now, with both that man’s hands on his blue-black shoulders, now with his own hand on the shoulder of that one, the gentleman seemed a kind of magnificent little barbarian himself. Pryn sipped her beer (was it watery from the rain?) and watched two women nervously wait behind some men — to present their five children to him, Pryn realized. Days ago, indeed, one of those little girls had been made to return a peach Pryn had given her, which had bothered Pryn a while, before she realized the kinds of separations that existed about her. She put her elbow behind her and leaned back on the counter. ‘Juni…?’

With the hem of her apron around her forefinger, Juni was rubbing at a spot of spilled food which had escaped the general wiping and dried to the wood.

‘…who is that?’

Juni looked up and opened her mouth. ‘Why, it’s the earl!’ She leaned closer to touch Pryn’s arm. ‘Didn’t you see the caravan that went by here a while ago?’

‘That was his?’

‘No,’ explained Juni. ‘That was his visitors! But now he’s finished entertaining his friends from the north, he can come along here and pay us a visit.’ She laughed. ‘Look at him there! You know, he’s a great magician. So if you look at him, don’t look at him wrong!’

Pryn frowned.

‘Oh, it’s true!’ Juni went again to picking at the food spot, this time with a fingernail. ‘Now I’ve never seen any of his magic, but I’ve heard tell! And I’m telling you what I’ve heard. Ah — ’ and she tapped Pryn’s arm again. ‘Look there!’

Pryn turned.

Hide swung back from the door again. Old Rorkar came through, some new laborers behind him, toward the serving area.

The morning he’d hired her, Old Rorkar’s broad, knobby feet had been bound in broad leather sandals. Since then, however, Pryn had not seen the peasant brewer in any kind of shoe. Behind the counter the cook, Cyka, saw them coming, jammed her flat wooden spoon into the stew crock, turned to the counter, and planted both hands on brown, wide-splayed fingers. It was her most frequent gesture, and whenever she did it, Pryn thought of some farm woman snatching two root clusters from the earth and flopping them down on a rock for view. Cyka grinned over teeth ice-gray and perfect.

‘…not find it like those city jobs you’re heading to, where you can wander in at any hour of the morning or afternoon. Lateness won’t be tolerated.’ Old Rorkar slapped his own small, hard hand on the wood. ‘Cyka, these are some new men. This is Kudyuk.’ With a patriarchal arm around towering Kudyuk’s shoulder, Rorkar moved him forward.

‘Kudyuk,’ Cyka repeated with a nod, turned to take a dish from a pile of dishes, and ladled into it a flat of stew. She placed it in the hands of the tall, hairy-armed barbarian.

‘And this is Zaiky.’ Another arm around the shoulder.

‘Zaiky.’ Another nod; another stew bowl.

Juni came up beside Cyka to deal out wooden eating spoons, which the laborers picked up.

‘This is har’Leluk,’ Another shouldered arm.

‘Leluk…har’Leluk.’ A nod; a bowl.

Leluk was a woman — and har,’ Pryn had just learned, was a barbarian term meaning ‘radiant’ when it preceded a woman’s name; otherwise it was a general intensifier, like ‘very’ or ‘terribly’ or, indeed, ‘radiantly,’ when it sounded, as it frequently did, in general converse.

‘This is Donix.’

‘Donix.’ More stew.

A week back, Pryn had been presented to Cyka in the same way, with the same arm, the same nod and bowl. Once you were presented as a worker at the brewery by the owner, Cyka would give you a bowl and a mug every evening thereafter — though the mug came only after the first full day’s work. Rorkar, they said, remembered each worker’s name long enough to get from the hiring table to Cyka; and Cyka remembered it through all eternity. At least three times Pryn had seen her refuse food to a man who’d been fired a few weeks before but who had tried to come back and sneak a free meal.

‘And this is Jarced.’

‘Jarced,’ who got his arm from Rorkar, his bowl from Cyka, and his spoon from Juni.

Finished serving, Cyka put her hands on the counter and nodded beyond Rorkar’s shoulder.

‘Eh…yes, Cyka? What is it?’

Cyka gestured with her bristly chin.

‘Eh…what?’

Rorkar looked back, turned.

At that moment the earl left the group with which he’d been speaking and started up between the tables, much the way he had walked among the benches, with that luminous smile.

Old Rorkar took on a look of repressed excitement that made Pryn see a little of his nephew across that wide forehead, under those bushy brows, and in the prominent jaw and unevenly bearded cheek. ‘My lord!’ Rorkar raised the back of his right fist to this forehead.

On either side of the approaching earl, men and women were rising. ‘Rorkar, my man!’ Reaching the peasant brewer, the earl gently pulled the wrinkled wrist away from the high forehead, bald as his own. ‘Now, now, I’ve told you many times: such gestures are unseemly within the walls of your own place of business, Rorkar. Save them for those public occasions when both of us are equally bound by the constraints of ritual.’

‘And I have told you equally many times, my lord: I do not forget that this was not always my business, but belongs to me only by the generosity of your late and noble father — all Nevèrÿon is the poorer for his passing.’

‘Yes, yes, you’ve been saying that for twenty years! And I notice another year has gone by where you have not taken my advice — a lusty peasant like you should find himself a young wife to get him a son as an heir to take over in his old age.’

‘And I have told you, my lord: wives are not for me. I am married to the brewery here.’

‘And I have told you: if it’s your waning powers that worry you, my man, I have ways…’ The earl raised a finger and lowered a brow, which made some onlookers laugh and others draw in breath.

‘My lord, my hopes are — still — all in my nephew, Tetya. Tetya?’ Rorkar looked about the hall. ‘Tetya, are you here? Come, pay your respects to his Lordship!’

Grinning, Tetya pushed up, all elbows and ears.

‘Why, Tetya, you’ve grown a head since I saw you last!’ the earl cried. ‘It lets me know how long it’s been since I last visited!’

‘My lord!’ Tetya blurted, smacking his fist’s back to his forehead. ‘It’s only been three or four months since you were here!’

‘And I didn’t see you that time because you were away at your cousin’s — did I see you just when you got back? Anyway, you’ve shot up like a sapling!’

‘My lord,’ Rorkar said, ‘we’ve made some changes since you last came. I’ve hired someone to teach Tetya to write. A young woman from the north…?’Rorkar looked about. Catching sight of Pryn, he beckoned her over.

Pryn got down from her stool.

‘This is Pryn.’ Rorkar’s arm fell about Pryn’s shoulder.

Imitating Tetya and Rorkar, she raised the back of her first to her forehead. ‘My lord…’

‘Ah, yes. I’ve already met this remarkable young woman.’ The earl folded his hands, the mug still hanging on his forefinger. ‘Well! Not only do you ride dragons, you can write! And read, I presume?’

Arm still about her, Old Rorkar called to some general audience that seemed to be just beyond the actual onlookers, ‘You see! You see! He’s already met her! Nothing escapes his Lordship!’

‘What system do you read and write by?’

Pryn was not sure what he meant. ‘The one they use from Kolhari to Ellamon — so that you can speak the words written. It uses larger characters to begin people’s names…?’ She wondered if she were differentiating it enough; and, if so, from what.

‘Ah, yes. The syllables that came from the Ulvayn Islands about fifteen years back. I gather they’re now the most popular system throughout Nevèrÿon. Would you believe, among the six or seven systems I’ve mastered from time to time, it’s not among them!’ He laughed. ‘Well, you are an exceptional young woman! I should like to invite you to my home. My wife and I would be happy to receive you for dinner. Perhaps tomorrow evening…about five o’clock?’ The earl lowered his chin; his glance took in Rorkar, who made some gesture that seemed to say both ‘of course’ and ‘it’s nothing.’ Only seconds later Pryn realized the invitation meant she must miss the last hour’s work. ‘Good, then. I shall send a carriage for you at four-thirty — No!’ The earl’s free hand rose from his cloak. ‘Don’t protest!’ (Pryn had not thought of protesting.) ‘Come as you are. It will be an informal evening. Wear one piece of jewelry, one bit of gold or jade more than that bronze pendant you have on now, and we shall consider you frightfully overdressed. I shall be wearing exactly what I wear now. I shall expect you to do the same.’

Pryn, who had no jade or gold to wear, became aware in one instant of three things: relief from an anxiety she had not even realized she felt until it vanished. Also, everyone around her, including Tetya and Rorkar, had been holding their breaths; she knew, when they all started to breathe. Finally, the astrolabe, which she had never thought of as jewelry, suddenly seemed a notable weight, worthy of mention, if only because the earl had mentioned it. ‘Yes, my lord.’ Her aunt would have wanted her to add, and so she added, ‘Thank you, my lord.’ Then, as an afterthought, she clapped the back of her fist to her forehead again.

The earl pulled his cape about him and looked at Tetya. ‘My respects to your family.’ He turned to Rorkar. ‘My best wishes for your nephew’s continued progress.’ Without waiting for a response from either, he turned and walked toward the door.

‘Well!’ Old Rorkar dropped his arm from Pryn’s shoulder. ‘Well…you…er…really, I think it’s very fine of the earl to invite you. It’s fine with me. Really, it’s fine. And why don’t you come up to my place this evening. I mean later. Not for dinner. You’ve already had dinner, haven’t you? Here?’

‘Yes, she has,’ was Cyka’s oblique interjection.

‘Good. Come by the house for…for a late mug of beer, then. Tetya will be there. Yes, do come by. As informally as you would go…to his Lordship’s. Yes!’ Rorkar let out a laugh that seemed as perceptively unsure as the earl’s smile had seemed obliviously confident. ‘In an hour: you and Tetya. Of course you will, won’t you?’

Having first taken Rorkar’s words as an order, Pryn now began to hear their entreaty. As she said, ‘Yes, sir,’ she wondered if the proper thing to do were again to touch her fist against her forehead.

The earl reached the hide.

The hide swung back.

The earl stepped back.

Yrnik stepped in — and punched himself in the head! (That’s how it looked to Pryn.) He started to move aside, then remembered and grabbed the hide back for his Lordship. The marvelous cloak sailed up and after its colored hem — and was gone. The hide fell. Yrnik’s fist opened and his fingers turned on his forehead to scratch his nappy head. Blinking in the doorway, Yrnik looked about the hall.

‘Yes?’ Rorkar’s horny hand again touched Pryn’s shoulder, but lightly. ‘You’ll come? You and Tetya. And Yrnik. Yrnik too.’

‘Of course.’ Then, because she felt uncomfortable, Pryn walked off down the hall, glanced back, and called again, ‘Yes, sir!’ She passed the craggy-faced foreman and pushed outside.

Damp air wrapped her round with cool evening light.

The eaves dripped. Beyond the brush, a wagon trundled away on the wet road. Rain from the eaves hit her shoulder.

A hiss made her look left.

‘My lady…?’ Hand to the wall, face wet, body crouching: the eyes blinked.

‘Bruka…?’ Staring at the iron collar, Pryn was not sure it was Bruka.

‘My lady, have you come here to spy?’

‘Spy…?’ Pryn raised her hand to where the chain hit her thumb. It was Bruka; and Murjus emerged from behind the far corner of the hall, waiting. ‘Why do you ask me if I — ?’

Bruka walked up to Pryn, bent as though it still rained and she still protected her meal. (Was it her spine?) The slavewoman grasped the astrolabe. ‘Where did you get this, girl! Tell me, what northern lord sent you here?’ The chain jerked against Pryn’s neck. ‘Which one? If you love life, tell me! He has seen it: there’s nothing to be gained by hiding!’

‘But I’m not hiding anything!’ Pryn said. ‘Someone just…gave it to me! The Liberator. In Kolhari. I only wore it because…’ and realized, as she searched for reason, there was none she could mark down.

Bruka glanced back at Murjus, then turned to lift the astrolabe on its chain. ‘Once again Mad Olin’s circle has returned to the Garth, unbidden, by chance, simply because someone gave it to you?’

‘—and he has seen it?’ Murjus rasped from the building’s corner. ‘It has come back to destroy us!’ He walked up by the wall. ‘To bring that back into the Garth is to unleash on us the madness of Olin herself — you must be mad to bring it! You should have never set foot in the Garth Peninsula. When the Vygernangx Monastery thrust even the tip of one tower over the tree tops within the circle of your vision, you should have turned yourself around to ride, run, crawl away as fast as you could go, till you were away from any and all lands ever part of Lord Aldamir’s domain! Your heedlessness will loose ruin and destruction on all Nevèrÿon!’

‘But he has seen it!’ Bruka exclaimed. ‘I saw him look. He knows it’s here as well as we. It’s too late — ’

‘Does he want it?’ Pryn demanded. The agitation broke through to her in a way she experienced as both annoyance and anger, though later she would realize it had been even more than fear. ‘I don’t want it! Let him take it — ’

‘But he can’t take it,’ declared Murjus, from behind Bruka. ‘The earl could no more take it from you than one of us could — unless you gave it of your own free will!’

‘And perhaps not even then!’ Bruka whispered. ‘Its power is too strong!’

‘But I don’t want it!’ Pryn suddenly pulled the chain from around her neck and over her head. ‘You take it! Throw it away if you want — ’

Bruka’s hands, both of them, jerked behind her. She stepped back, and back, and back again. Murjus pulled behind the house till just a blue eye and some wet hair showed.

‘I didn’t bring it here for any reason!’ Pryn shook the chain at the two retreating slaves. ‘I’m not a spy! I told that to…to the man who gave it to me! And I tell you, I don’t — ‘

The sound behind her made her whirl.

It was the hide squeaking on its wooden pegs.

Rorkar stepped out, his arm about Tetya. Yrnik came after them. Rorkar glanced at Pryn. His faint frown took in the astrolabe swinging from her fists.

Had the metal disk with its angular markings burst into sparks, Pryn would not have been surprised. At a tickling on her shoulder she looked sharply behind her. But it was only drops from an overhead branch.

The slaves were gone.

She turned back.

Rorkar still looked. ‘You will come?’ he asked. ‘In about an hour?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Pryn lifted the chain back over her head. The astrolabe fell against her breasts. It didn’t burn; or freeze; or hum; or ring; or quiver.

Rorkar walked on with Tetya and Yrnik.

The feel of the chain on her neck returned her to more normal conjecture. Certainly Rorkar had seen nothing peculiar in…Olin’s circle. The circle of different stars?…Was that what the tale-teller had called it so long ago? For the first time in a while, Pryn remembered the young queen who had murdered all those people. All Rorkar had just seen, certainly, was a foreign girl adjusting a local-made pendant. But then, she thought as she started across the wet grass, his Lordship the earl had not made any special gesture of recognition at the sight of the astrolabe either — unless his exhortation to come tomorrow wearing exactly what she wore now…

The overhead branch, sighing, splattered her again, which sent chills down about her shoulders as she reached up to rub the drops away.

It wasn’t really a house.

Several thatched cottages had been reinforced, expanded, joined together, here by the addition of a wooden wall, there by the erection of a stone one. The grove around it still sprinkled the tufted eaves. It had rained and stopped and rained and stopped again since Pryn had left the hall. The western hills were snarled over with clouds, slashed through by long wounds from the sun. The high brush near her broke up some of that coppery light and laid it in swatches over the daubed wall. Down the eastern slope the orchards, the brewing sheds, the laborers’ barracks where she slept were sinking into a shadow-like pool that had slipped in as if from the sea she knew was somewhere beyond those crags and shaggy pines.

Pryn knocked. The door, this one of plank, swung in an inch, not locked. But no one came to answer it.

Pryn knocked again.

A breeze in the branches gathered the leaf chatter into a roar, then shushed it. Perhaps this house, which had been pointed out to her and into which she’d several times seen Rorkar go, was not the house…

Pryn knocked a third time — this time caught the leather-covered boards on her palms and pushed them back on their rope hinge…

Sunset through the west window fell over the floor mats whose damp odor momentarily threw Pryn miles and years away to the mountain hut of a married cousin on a winter morning when it had actually snowed in the night and the white powder had begun to melt…

A young woman came into the room, drying her head with a print cloth that flopped about her hips. The towel fell from short, curly hair. ‘Excuse me…?’ Naked save the collar at her neck, she was not much older — or younger — than Pryn.

‘I was…supposed to come here.’

‘Oh,’ the slave said. ‘You’re Tetya’s tutor?’

Pryn nodded.

‘The master’s mentioned you on and off this whole week now.’ She balled up the cloth. ‘Somehow I just thought you were a boy. And an older boy at that. Come in.’ She put the cloth down on a bench at the wall and started off through a doorway.

Pryn followed down a passage, one wall of which was stone.

As they stepped out of the hallway, Tetya turned at the wooden table where he was sitting and smiled; and Rorkar did not.

At the porch’s edge, Yrnik leaned on a supporting pole, gazing out over slopes, valleys, hills — the view here was astonishing — while the roof edge dripped.

The house slave said: ‘Can I get you anything?’

Rorkar grunted.

The house slave, apparently understanding, went off to get it.

Under the wooden table legs, Pryn saw the old peasant wore sandals.

Pryn stood for the length of half a dozen breaths, till Tetya said: ‘Come here and sit down. Uncle doesn’t mind.’

As Pryn started to the bench beside Tetya, Old Rorkar grumbled, ‘Who are you to say what I mind or don’t mind?’ so that Pryn stopped again. Rorkar glanced up at her, apparently surprised at her surprise. ‘Well, go on! Sit down — if you want. Why should I object?’

Feeling as uncomfortable as, moments ago with the familiar dampness of the mats, she had felt at home, Pryn slipped onto the bench beside Tetya.

‘I mean,’ Rorkar went on, ‘this is not a house like his Lordship’s, mind you, with “Come in,” and “Do sit down,” and “Won’t you have some of this or that?” Even if I have a slave or two, it’s because I need them. You do what you want here. It’s just an ordinary house. You can do the ordinary things that anyone wants to.’

The house slave returned with a wide tray of woven slats on which were a pitcher and some mugs. She set the tray on the table.

Rorkar said: ‘Have some beer…if you want some.’

But as Pryn reached for the pitcher, he waved his hand. ‘No, let the slave pour. What do you think we have her here for?’ As Pryn pulled her hand back to her lap, he added, ‘No, no; go on — go on, take it yourself, if that’s how you want to do it. You just do what you’re most comfortable doing. Go on.’

Pryn glanced about, about as uncomfortable as it was possible to be.

‘Just because she can write — ’ Rorkar chuckled — ‘I think she feels she’s too good for our ordinary ways here, eh?’

Mild confusion became mild anger. Pryn thought (and as she thought it, she thought of the characters it would take to write it): I’ve never had a slave pour for me in my life! At the same moment she pictured the Liberator. She picked up the pitcher and poured copper liquid into a mug till yellow foam crested the brim.

Then she set the pitcher down.

Foam still rose, brimmed the mug’s red lip, and rolled over.

The slave filled the others.

When Pryn lifted hers, foam dripped into her lap. In a distant part of the country, she thought, setting the mug back on the table, perhaps you must expect to feel uncomfortable. Written symbols still flickered among the words. And the Liberator had worn an iron collar too. ‘Why did you want me here?’

‘Well, his Lordship invited you to his house. I just wanted to see why he…well, I thought it would be nice to invite you here. Too. As well. We’re very ordinary people, here, you know. Not like his Lordship at all. If you didn’t want to come…?’

Pryn shrugged. ‘Thank you for inviting me. It was very nice of you.’ Great-aunt would have approved.

‘I had the feeling, you know, that you didn’t want to come. I said to myself, why should she want to visit me just because she’s been invited to visit his Lordship. There’d be no reason.’

Yrnik sucked his teeth and turned from the post.

‘Well, it’s true! I would understand if she didn’t. Who wants to make someone do something they don’t want to? Perhaps she thinks she deserves to be invited?’ Rorkar leaned toward Tetya. ‘Hey, do you think that’s what she thinks?’

Pryn turned toward Tetya, vaguely curious as to what, precisely, he did think. Tetya handed Yrnik up a mug. Then he took one for himself — and blew foam, splattering, onto the table.

Pryn exploded with laughter — while Rorkar batted at his nephew’s head.

‘Weasel! Badger! Dirty shoat! You think you’re in some barbarian shambles? This is a decent home, with decent people living in it! I suppose you’d do that if his Lordship invited you to his home too!’

‘His Lordship,’ Pryn said, recovering, ‘seems to be a very fine man.’ Her aunt’s endless sullenness and interminable suspicions came back among all the reasons she’d yearned to leave home. Here, looking directly at this mummer’s skit of it, she felt oddly free of them. It had occurred to her that these insults and wheedlings were far less shattering than murder or sex, so that she could suffer them with the provisional interest of one who had ridden in the sky — and could write about it.

‘Hey…?’ Rorkar turned to her.

‘I said, “His Lordship seems a man comfortable with all peoples, a fine and good person.”’ Pryn realized, as one who could write, that this was not what she had said at all.

‘Oh. Well…I suppose his Lordship is comfortable enough. He’s certainly rich enough to be comfortable. Not as rich as he once was, though — and you can be sure it galls him. But he’s comfortable. Well, so am I. Comfortable. Here in my house. Here. I’m comfortable enough with what I have — here — with what I’ve made for myself, out of it all. Though not with people. It’s true. You’re right.’ Rorkar took a long drink from his mug. ‘I’m not comfortable with people. New people. Just like you say.’ He laughed again. ‘Always wondering what they think of me, you know? I’m just an ordinary man. I’ve been a little luckier than some — worked a little harder than some others.’

‘I never thought you were uncomfortable.’ Pryn had thought the old peasant was barbarically rude; the notion, however, that this rudeness might be a manifestation of an equally barbaric discomfort intrigued her enough for her to stay seated. ‘With people.’

‘You didn’t?’ Rorkar inquired. ‘Well, believe me, I am! I’m a very ordinary man — have all the feelings any ordinary man has — or, I dare say, an ordinary woman. Even an ordinary girl. Like you.’ He smiled, actually looking at Pryn directly for the first time since she’d come in; which was when Pryn decided both that she did not like him, and that he was probably not a bad human being. She smiled back — and felt somewhat sorry at her judgment.

‘I like you,’ Rorkar continued. ‘I liked you from the first I met you, out at the hiring table. In the field. When you came up, looking for a job — looking like a fat little chipmunk. That’s why I hired you in the first place. I don’t hire somebody that I don’t take to — certainly not as a tutor for my nephew. But of course that wasn’t decided on till later. When Yrnik found out you could write. I asked you up here, you know, to see what his Lordship might possibly see in you to invite you to his home! It can’t only be that you can write. Yrnik there can write, and he’s never been invited to his Lordship’s. But now I think I see it. It’s simply because you’re a nice, ordinary person. Like me. Like any of us. And you’re honest about it. The way I am. His Lordship looked at you and saw that. Me, I’m too uncomfortable with people to look at them and see that right off — to look at strangers and see that. Before I get to know them.’

‘Yrnik’s not a pretty girl.’ Tetya scooped more foam from his mug with a forefinger and sucked it off. ‘That’s all. Uncle doesn’t trust his Lordship.’

‘Well, now I never said…’ Rorkar frowned at Tetya, at Yrnik (who had taken his mug back to the pole and was again gazing moodily on the darkening landscape), at Pryn.

‘If all your land and your slaves once belonged to his Lordship, you probably shouldn’t trust him.’ Pryn smiled to hear her aunt’s inflections in her own voice and found them, so far from home, both warming and annoying. ‘I wouldn’t.’

‘Well…’ A corner of Rorkar’s mouth pulled into a half-frown. ‘Oh, it certainly wasn’t all his. Some of it was, I admit. Most of the parts you see, I suppose: the slave barracks we converted into the eating hall and the land around it. And the orchards that front the road, of course — but I had the road built. The road’s mine…but all this land belonged to one lord or another. What land in the Garth didn’t? And it wasn’t all the earl’s, by any means — though he’s very anxious, the Earl Jue-Grutn, whenever we meet, that it be clearly stated whose land it once was. In twenty years I’ve never met him where it wasn’t clearly stated. You will never meet him where he doesn’t state it, I’ll bet you. And if, somehow, he’s tricked out of stating it, or distracted from stating it, he’ll be a very unhappy earl!’ Rorkar laughed. ‘Won’t he? No — ’ Rorkar’s mug came down on the table — ‘I don’t trust him! Why should I? Do you?’ That to Yrnik — ‘You grow up, boy, and take over this brewery — ’ and that to Tetya — ‘believe me: You’ll be a fool to trust him! You say he gets along with all kinds of people? Well, why doesn’t he get along with me, I ask you? No, I’m very much the one who has to get along with him! You heard him, this evening? All of you did — you too, girl. “Why don’t you get married, old peasant? If you’re too old, I’ve powers to restore you.”’ The elderly man puckered his lips in a disgust so strong Pryn thought he might spit on his own floor. ‘Why should a man’s marriage be anyone’s affair but his — it’s not as if I were some witless fool — like your father, Tetya — or my own father, for that matter, who needed a master to tell him in which wench he’d do best to look for offspring. I tell my own workers today — when they ask me — which strapping fellow or strong wench will give them a child with a good back and a fine character. I can judge differences in men — and women. And he would tell me? Ha! I never wanted to marry, and I have my reasons — though certainly he would never understand that. When last I was at the earl’s home — ’ Rorkar suddenly frowned at Pryn — ‘for certain you didn’t think he only invited you to his house and never invited me, did you?’

Pryn shook her head.

Rorkar shook his too, more slowly, ponderingly. ‘Imagine, thinking something like that! The last time I was at the earl’s house to dine with him and his wife — that’s not the wife he has now, I’m talking about. The earlier one — I’ve met the new one too, of course. Anyway. The other wife. It was after dinner. The earl and I were walking in one of the gardens, and his Lordship put his hand on my arm and said, “Really, Rorkar. I’m always joking with you about marriage, but you’ve become a man of property and prestige. You should take yourself a woman, a practical and industrious woman, to help you run your business and to keep up appearances. A man in your position — or mine — we look better to our underlings when we have wives.” His last wife left him, you know. Just like that — so for “appearances” he divorced her and took another. He’s got a third, now, the youngest of the lot.’ Rorkar humphed. ‘When I tell a worker what suitor she should choose to give us good sons and daughters, the woman and her mate stay together. A mate for appearances! Can you imagine it?’ Rorkar bent toward Pryn and laid his hard, small hand on her arm. ‘Who would mate like that? That’s certainly not what I’m about! No, that’s not what we’re about at all in this house — no, this is not a great house at all. It’s the ordinary house of an ordinary man. Perhaps an earl worries and frets about appearances. But not an ordinary man like me! Why should I?’

While he’d leaned toward her, under the table, Pryn noticed, he’d taken the opportunity to work his sandals off. They lay, one rightside up, one upside down, by the table leg. Pryn rubbed the edges of her bare feet together.

‘What uncle really gets mad at,’ Tetya said, ‘is the way his Lordship calls everyone “my man”—just as though we were still his slaves.’

‘Who are you to say what I get mad at and what I don’t!’ snapped the peasant. ‘And I was never his slave! Nor was my father a slave of his father’s…one of my grandmothers, it’s true, was owned by Lord Aldamir. But she escaped and only came back after ten years; she took over a piece of land to farm and was never bothered by his Lordship. At all. That’s the truth. It is true: the earl addresses everyone as “my man.” One day when he comes by, I should simply say, “Well, hello there, my man”—even before he opens his mouth to speak to me at all. Now that would be a joke. Don’t you think?’ Rorkar took another swallow, and elbowed Tetya. ‘A fine joke!’ He settled back and drew bare feet beneath him.

Yrnik turned against his post to gaze at the table with the same moody expression with which he’d been gazing out at the evening.

The naked house slave, whom Pryn had not noticed depart, returned through the hall door. The girl looked about, rubbing at one ear, then stepped in and squatted by the jamb as if awaiting instruction.

‘Of course I shall never do it.’ Rorkar looked into his mug. ‘I’m not a joking man. Never had time for jokes — not with the brewery, here. But it would be a joke, now. If I did it. Nothing serious — he’d pee all over himself, like a drunken slave caught dipping in the barrel!’

Pryn smiled.

No one else did.

Rorkar looked up. Where do you know his Lordship from?’

Pryn’s smile dissolved in puzzlement.

‘Come on. He said he’d already met you. When did you meet him? And where?’

‘I…I only met him outside the hall,’ Pryn said. ‘Minutes before you came in. In the rain.’ Part of her confusion was that she did not want to mention her exploration of the old slave benches. ‘We only spoke a few words.’

‘Only a few words?’ His frown deepened. ‘In the rain?’ Rorkar held his mug against his tunic belly. Small, knobby fingers meshed around it. ‘Now, I didn’t know that. I thought he meant he’d met you at some great house or other, when he was visiting some other important lord. That’s what I thought he meant — back when I asked you up here. Though, of course, you didn’t strike me as that kind of person — you seemed like an ordinary enough girl. Even if you can read and write a little. Yrnik there can read and write, and he’s an ordinary man. Aren’t you — Yrnik, my man!’ Rorkar laughed. ‘But that’s why I want Tetya to learn. There’s nothing that says ordinary folk can’t know a thing or two. I can’t read or write. And you heard his Lordship: even he doesn’t know how to read and write by the system you do…that’s probably because it’s a commercial system. His Lordship knows nothing of commerce. And I still don’t trust him…’

Pryn had a sudden premonition Tetya was about to say something like: Uncle only invited you up here because he thought you were somebody the earl thought was important — and interrupted this Tetya-of-the-mind with: ‘Does this — ’ she lifted her astrolabe — ‘have anything special about it?’

‘Hey?’ Rorkar squinted. ‘Is what special?’

‘This.’ Pryn had already decided that there was no secret in the astrolabe that she might want to preserve or exploit, even for such a treasure as the tale-teller had spoken of. (That was for non-existent masked warriors with double-bladed swords!) As she lifted it, she saw how much the evening had dimmed. ‘Do you know anything about it? Any of you?’ The sky was as deep a blue as some dahlia at Madame Keyne’s. ‘Tetya already said he didn’t — only that the marks around the edge might be writing. A kind of writing…’

‘Let me see.’ Yrnik stepped forward. ‘That thing you wear around your neck?’ He put his mug on the table and laid thick, dark fingers on the wood, leaning. ‘I’ve seen such marks on old stones around here. But the thing itself is not something I know — a sailor once showed me something like it for finding where you were on the open sea, he said — something to do with different stars. Here, I can hardly make it out…’

‘Let me have a look.’ Rorkar lifted the bolted disks and turned them, squinting. ‘It’s good work. Local work. Old work, too — like something that could well have been made around here, from the marks on it. Like Yrnik said. It’s the kind of thing we might turn up as boys, exploring some old abandoned great house.’

‘Somebody gave it to me in an all but abandoned great house in Neveryóna.’

‘Neveryóna?’ Rorkar frowned. ‘What would a girl like you know of Neveryóna — an ordinary, northern girl?’

Pryn looked at him, puzzled.

‘Well,’ Rorkar went on, ‘I suspect you just happened to be there, that’s all! Before you were here. And you met somebody else who happened to be there who gave it to you. There’s nothing out of the ordinary in that!’ He let the astrolabe fall. (Pryn sat back.) ‘There’s your explanation!’

‘Sir…?’

‘It’s a piece of local work. You were in Neveryóna. You met somebody there who gave it to you. Just like you said. When I was a boy, sometimes when I’d go exploring, I used to find things. Old things. Like that. Sometimes I gave them to people. If I didn’t want them myself. That’s nothing extraordinary.’

Although Pryn didn’t want to protect or exploit the astrolabe, she was wary of mentioning the slaves’ responses. Those responses were now clearly in her mind. ‘And you?’ She leaned forward to look across the table at the girl squatting at the door. ‘Do you know anything about this?’

‘Ah, you see!’ Rorkar cried. ‘She asks the master and the slave, both now that’s his Lordship’s style! I think she wants to be a little like his Lordship. Well, everyone does. It’s a fine style too, as far as it goes at any rate, it makes a fine appearance. Though I still don’t trust him — however it looks! I’m not saying you should or you shouldn’t. He’s invited you for dinner. It’s up to you. What could be special about it, anyway?’

Pryn blinked. The old peasant could switch subjects as abruptly as he could ride one beyond bearing. ‘I really don’t know,’ Pryn said. ‘I just thought you might know something more about it than I did.’

‘Oh,’ Rorkar grunted. ‘Well, I don’t. And it’s getting dark.’ He drained his mug, set it down. ‘No more,’ he said to the squatting slave, who was not about to move toward refilling. ‘This isn’t one of those places like his Lordship’s, where cookfires and nightlamps battle with darkness halfway to sunrise. No, I’m an ordinary man who must toil like all ordinary men.’ He put his palms on his knees.

‘And I’d best get back to the dormitory before all the light’s gone.’ Pryn stood up from the table. She added, just to try switching the subject on her own: ‘I’d heard talk that his Lordship was some kind of magician.’ She stepped around the table’s corner. ‘But it was only chatter from some workers.’

‘A magician?’ Rorkar grunted again. ‘Oh, yes, the barbarians will chatter on about such things — and so will he, from time to time, with his “ways to assist the waning powers.” But I’ve never seen him do any magic. Not that one reserves belief only for what one can see — like some ordinary worker who won’t even believe there’s a town over the hill unless you carry him there in a cart. Still…I wouldn’t trust him.’

Pryn walked towards the door. ‘Well, good night.’

‘Good night,’ Rorkar said. ‘Yes, good night. It was good of you to come. Good night.’

The slave stood.

‘Yes,’ Rorkar said loudly. ‘I forgot. I didn’t mean anything by forgetting.’ He waved his small, knobby hand at the slave. ‘Show her to the door.’

Because the master’s answers had revealed so little, Pryn found herself staring at the back of the slave preceding her along the dark passage. But the slave had answered nothing either. In the dark, all the anxiety of Bruka’s outburst and the earl’s — yes — unmotivated invitation swelled. Walking behind this girl, this slave, this faceless sign of the human, this collared node of labor and instruction, Pryn felt a moment of disorientation which imagination answered with an image, not of the Liberator, but of Pryn herself wearing the iron collar. She was astonished to feel before that image a relief as intense as the previous anxiety, an intensity as strong as any desire, sexual or other, she’d ever known.

Outside, it was lighter than she’d expected.

Leaving the house to walk down the hill, she began a silent dialogue, mostly with Old Rorkar, about what an exasperating, embarrassing, and rude man he was; how all his prattle about lack of appearances and doing the ordinary thing had made her, an ordinary girl, as uncomfortable as it was possible to be — what must his nephew have felt! That she didn’t have to ask. She had an aunt, no different from him at all! That terrified pettiness was what she had left! That was what she had abandoned. A good man? Yes — even perhaps a Tratsin when he was twenty or twenty-five. But today, he was Rorkar. And that was not what she had come to the end of the world to find! Throughout this little mummer’s playlet she kept protesting: ‘Sitting there, at your table, you made me feel like a slave!’ Or: ‘Bound in the ordinary restraints of good manners, I might as well have been your slave!’ Sometimes playing through, at this point she would march over and take the collar off the squatting girl by the door and clap it around her own neck. Sometimes she would arrive for the encounter already wearing the shocking iron — that she would get a smith to forge for her from the growing collection of small coins under her straw pallet with which Rorkar was paying her. Well, she didn’t have quite enough just yet…During the ninth or thirteenth time through this skit which gave her such satisfaction — and which she’d all but resolved she would write down sometime tomorrow — it occurred to Pryn: She hadn’t felt all that much embarrassment or discomfort, at least not with the intensity that, in her little drama, she’d been declaring. But she had ridden a dragon; she was extraordinary. That was what freed her to protest — or to take on the collar. After all, she realized, she really wanted to wear it because the slave was the one person in the room whose feelings she had no notion of whatsoever (was she really ignorant? Or did she, like Bruka, know, perhaps, everything?), so that finally it had seemed that within the iron ring was a space of mystery, excitement, and adventure where only an extraordinary person might go without terror (perhaps a little fear, yes), like herself — or the Liberator. Who else would dare? Certainly not his Lordship — not somebody who had ridden a dragon under such tamed conditions it practically didn’t count.

Or did it?

She reached the workers’ barracks, with its slatted door, its vermin-infested roof beams. (Had these once been slave quarters?) She went to the women’s end of the dormitory and found her blanket on its fresh straw, between two barbarian women, one of whom slept with her eight-year-old son who had something wrong up his nose and snored wetly. Well, Old Rorkar had managed to give her one piece of information, however clumsily, that she was glad of. She shouldn’t trust the earl. She shifted the astrolabe on its chain from under her shoulder to a more comfortable position, felt the knife secreted with her sparse moneys beneath Madame Keyne’s washed and folded shift on which her head lay. But of course, she reflected, what was there to trust or not to trust him with, even if the astrolabe were the object of his interest? She envisioned herself removing the chain from her neck and tossing it to him — or presenting it graciously to him as a gift — in either case, the same sort of amusingly arrogant gesture as taking on the collar. And probably as unnecessary.

Pryn slept.