Neveryóna, or The Tales of Signs and Cities

13. Of Survival, Celebration, and Unlimited Semiosis

‘THERE.’ TRITTY POINTED TO the goblets on the tray the elderly slave-woman carried: their sides were joined slabs of vitric red and blue, framed in cast metal, hugely heavy.

‘And here…’ The earl lifted a thin pitcher from a tray of pitchers the red-headed slaveboy brought up. ‘This one’s yours.’ He tilted it — and Pryn quickly brought her goblet, in both hands, beneath the lip. Water-clear and tossing back firelight from the lamps’ flaming and the goblet’s own glistening sides, liquid filled it.

Because it was so heavy, she lifted it quickly to taste: the coldest water, with a fruity ghost — sharpness interrupted, which made her take a larger swallow in memory of initial cool.

Greater sharpness made her head reel.

The earl set the pitcher down, picked up another, and poured dark liquid into the goblet Lavik held.

‘Now you must tell us your own story.’ Inige came over with his own goblet, which his father filled from still another pitcher with something opaque and green. ‘Tritty’s right. It always happens when you invite guests that you expect to entertain. All you end up doing is trying to impress them. You must tell a story of your own, because we really want to hear it!’

‘Ardra,’ Tritty said, ‘come here and have your drink. It’s tradition, darling.’

‘I don’t like the blue,’ Ardra said. ‘I think the red tastes better.’ He stood up from the stone steps, strode forward, picked up a goblet from the proffered tray, a pitcher from the other, and poured himself a goblet of…blue liquid, set the pitcher back on the tray, went to the steps, and, taking a noisy sip, sat.

‘Ardra…!’ Tritty said.

‘The trouble with stories — ’ Pryn laughed — ‘is that when I write them in my head, they’re fun because I can write them slowly, make changes, correct them if they’re wrong, make sure all the names have the right initial signs. But if I tell them, then they come out any-old-how or however. I don’t think I’ll ever be a tale-teller. I suppose I could tell about my trip from Ellamon to Kolhari, the men who captured me, or the women, or what happened to me later in the city — only…’ She blinked about the room and, in momentary embarrassment, took a long, throat-burning draught. The strange sharpness struck. She coughed. ‘Only…I don’t really understand all that happened, myself. And besides — ’ She coughed again — ‘you’re not very interested in the people I met, which is all I could talk about anyway…’

Pryn thought she saw their hand-waving protests, but heat blurred her eyes and made her unsteady. Somebody put a hand on her shoulder — she fell, or sat (she’d thought she was going to fall…) on the couch behind her.

She still held the goblet.

‘Are they going to bring the baby back down again…? I suppose it’s too late. I could tell about when I came south from Kolhari. This man I came with; and his friend. Smugglers — only I’d be embarrassed to; besides, I’m not interested in those people anymore…though they taught me enough. A story?’ She took another long sip from the metal rim, because the drink’s effect seemed the less the more of it she swallowed — this one didn’t burn so. Was her mouth numbing? ‘A story. Well. There was an ordinary, fifteen-year-old girl who looked like a beautiful young queen…or was there a queen who looked like an ordinary, bushy-headed girl?’

‘This sounds like a real story!’ she heard Inige say.

Pryn smiled.

Her goblet was vast as the torchlit sea, its clear waves sloshing pink and blue slopes.

‘…only I can’t remember what version I’m supposed to…I could tell them…all. Now…after the girl had done all sorts of terrible things and learned all sorts of magical things, in their proper sequence, her maternal father…’ Pryn frowned into the drink, which seemed to have cloudy streaks through it, perhaps from her own spittle. ‘In one version, it’s her dead father, I think. In another it’s her maternal…uncle — he took her up into a stone chamber, on a hill, or in a tower, just like yours I guess, where she saw a…city!’ Pryn looked up and narrowed her eyes in the lamplight’s dazzle. Tears banked her lower lids, obscuring the backlit listeners reclining about the chamber. ‘At a great dinner for her — really, this has been a wonderful dinner! I’ve never eaten food like this before in my life or drunk such…at a great dinner, her absent father, or her maternal uncle did something terrible…’

The silence broke in lingering waves; after lots of it, Ardra said, swinging his fists between his knees: ‘It’s a good story. We all know it. And that’s a good place to pause. But it doesn’t end there. You have to go on.’

Pryn took another drink that was so cold yet made her so warm. She blinked. ‘…He did something terrible. Only I don’t remember…his family name. There’s good reason to remember it, only I don’t know if I ever knew what it was.’ One of them had moved…

Pryn looked up on red. Her eyes moved up over red. It was Tritty’s dress, because Tritty’s face was at the top, smiling down.

Tritty touched her shoulder. ‘That’s a marvelous story — one I’ve loved for years. We all have. Old stories are the best, I think. That’s one of the most beautifully crafted parts of the engine to raise Neveryóna. But you can’t sit here and tell me you’ve forgotten the family name of the queen’s maternal uncle! That’s the whole point — at least it is if you’re telling it to us!’

‘I’m not a good tale-teller,’ Pryn apologized. ‘I’d much rather write it down, where I could think about what I’m supposed to be saying.’ She felt unsteady, unhappy, and out of place. ‘If there weren’t the pressure of having to tell it, I could find out the real story, all of it. I could write why it means something special to me, too, as well as you — ’

‘Jue-Grutn,’ Tritty prompted. ‘Go on, now. We all know it, so it doesn’t matter how well you tell it. Jue-Grutn was the family name of the queen’s maternal uncle. The name of my husband — and his father; and his father’s father. With very old stories, such distinctions cease to matter. But that’s the part we love to hear most — here. Whenever we can, we get a guest to…But it’s part of the engine — my husband said he was explaining it upstairs? We have a vested interest, of course. I’m sure you can understand…’

Pryn’s gaze lost itself in her shimmering drink. ‘The Earl Jue-Grutn gave her…’

Then, at once, what shimmered was terror. Whether it was inside her or outside her, she didn’t know. She didn’t move.

Under flamelight, liquid flashed.

Did she hurl the heavy goblet?

Did she scream?

Did she throw out an arm, upsetting some small table?

Did she overturn her couch as she stood, so that the bolsters flopped on the carpet?

Did she lurch across the floor, shoving aside first Inige and then Lavik, who moved to stop her?

Later she was able to reason that she had done at least three and had definitely not done one. But which three and which one, though she would even list them and list them again on wax, clay, and parchment in every conceivable order, she was never sure. Was it the Wild Ini’s blade she waved above her head? Was it a carving knife snatched from the side-table that made Jenta spread his arms and fall back, while the earl came up behind him, then turn to grab Ardra, who’d rushed forward? She remembered the earl’s cloak, flung up and out, tenacious of its blues in lamplight. Did he try to stop her? Did she run into it? Or through it? Someone yelled, ‘Stop her!’ Certainly it was the earl and not she who bellowed, ‘The astrolabe, no — !’ Certainly someone yelled, ‘No, don’t let her — !’ But she was out one arch or another.

And nothing, really, was certain.

Did she run through myriad halls, searching through corridors and chambers for an exit? Did slaves in white collar-covers run out and, confused at her career, step back? Did she plunge through the low stone passage to burst into the black garden, starred with lamps —

She pushed through hangings, half-opened doors, bushes, branches, into dark. She remembered grasping a branch to come to an unsteady halt — torch-bearing men passed below the rock she swayed on, Inige at their head, iron and white cloth about the other necks, talking: ‘This way…gone in this direction…you said you heard…’ mixed with the barbarian tongue. Later she hesitated on a muddy stretch before a stubbly field, out on which she could see a leafless tree — so there must have been moonlight…? She had no memory of a moon. Were there voices? She dashed across the stubble, hearing her feet slap in the ground below the grass, wetter than she’d thought. She plunged into dappled dark that cut her and tickled her and beat her hips and shoulders, catching in the chain about her neck as if the twigs were trying to snatch away the clinking astrolabe, which she would have gladly torn off her neck and given up. She’d said she didn’t want it…

…blinking, trying to push herself up, with pebbles under her hands. She blinked again, at something huge and pale. She tried to turn her face away from it before she realized it was the moon, bigger than she had ever seen a moon in the mountains, just above the horizon — which rippled.

Pryn pushed back, pebbles under her hip, dragging her feet beneath her. Pebbles rolled down the slope. She looked up at a tall rock, with trees beyond it. She looked behind her. Another rocky finger prodded crookedly at the night, but shorter.

Both rocks were chalky white.

Pryn pushed to sitting, dragging her heels back, and locked her arms about her knees, resting her chin on them, in a lucidity that seemed near sickness, though if she didn’t move, she might be all right. She bit her inner lip and looked across rippling fog.

At the moon…

Cawing, and she looked up — to see leaves fall and what seemed a flurry of leaves; only it was the bird itself, momentarily at the proper angle for her to catch the wing’s green before ivory light leached all color. In a chatter of little stones and leaves, Pryn suddenly pushed to her feet. She stepped to the ledge.

Below rolled fog; below that, water. Pryn blinked. Wave rolled over wave. Taking a great breath, which made her stomach ill and her balance shaky, she shouted as loud as she could: ‘I am Pryn, and I have come to warn the Worm of the Sea of the Blue Heron’s…!’ She did not know where the words came from, nor their proper conclusion. But a sudden gout, breaking silver above the mist, made her push the heel of her hand up hard against her mouth and step back.

Through the ripplings at the slope’s foot something else…rippled. Now catching light and glimmering, it looked like water. Dark and heaving, it seemed a solider fog.

Out there…?

Something splashed and she looked off at it.

Somewhere else, a splash — Pryn looked over there. There was another, below her. She looked down: water broke like a metallic flower, falling open and dropping shattered petals into mist, beautiful and burning in the chill.

The ground’s shaking was almost too slight to feel. Then a whisper only as loud as the slightest breeze by her ear grew to a tremble, a roar.

She thought to sit again, lest she be thrown. But she saw, at three places, fog break from something solid and dark as power.

Not fog.

Stone.

Dripping and streaming, stone poured water into fog. The towers rose, two taller, one smaller, a bridge between the three, spurting out windows, spilling through newels.

Sea foamed. Buildings shrugged water into it. There and there were other roofs, a broken wall, more walls standing, two buildings: one nearly whole supported one nearly collapsed.

Driven from the sea, fog hung above her, before her, about her. She stood in an emptiness she knew was permeated with mist she could not see. Frothing, the water mixed jade and ivory. Enough buildings had risen to see streets. Where two crossed, water whirled, swirled, rushed out by the walls.

A wall fell…?

No, a mud bank broke from stone, to slosh off between the ruins.

Pryn saw them first as a row of regular eruptions in the rush.

Six, seven, eight, nine carvings cleared the flood, which, as the water lowered, were the capitals of nine columns, one of the line — the sixth or seventh — missing.

The columns rose. Weeds strung away. Water lowered more. Weeds dropped on algae-filmed stone. The column fallen across its base rose above the ripples. Some of the muddy streets were paved with patterned blue flags. Other buildings had broken columns before them…

That was when she saw it, glittering.

The earth rumbled; the water raged. Muddied and weed-streaked, it still gleamed, so much of it as had washed free of mud and refuse. Whatever desires she’d pushed away to give it up surged back, like foam, like wind. She didn’t want to take any — only to see it from closer…only perhaps a few coins.

There was so much of it!

It filled alleys. Glimmering, it spilled into wider avenues. There, that must have been a whole house, or even several small houses, piled over with it.

Half running, half falling down the embankment, Pryn only managed to get her feet under her when they plunged shin-deep in mud. She staggered on, arms wheeling, till she reached the first pavement. Weeds in windows hung on wet stone. Mud clung to the wall beside her. Fallen masonry, broken shells, and soaked branches made her progress by the dripping pillars as slow as it had been in the silt. Dirty-footed, wet-handed, scratches on her shoulders and legs, Pryn edged between cold rocks, pushed away a cool branch of driftwood, moved close along a broken wall, its carvings veiled in moss.

She could see gold at that alley’s end!

But the tiny street was too blocked and clotted with some half-fallen building to get through. Did it move…? In the heaps of nuggets, trinkets, coins, did some tremor in the risen seafloor cause that momentary cascade of wet metal?

That’s when she remembered the dragon.

Pryn looked up. Beyond the broken cornice, yellow fogs drifted, luminous before a moon she could no longer see. But I only want to see it…Pryn took hold of her astrolabe, as cold as if it, too, had lain in the waters. She moved to the building corner, looked around it…

Six wagon-loads…? Only six? More like six hundred…! Heaping the far side of the yard, most of it was yellow, but a lot was iron dark with tarnish or silver-green with algae. What part of the ruins were under that sloping glimmer?

The heaped treasure was mountainous!

Pryn looked the other way at the half-crumbled cistern, beyond which were more free-standing columns — and started! But the gleaming head, demonic, half on its side, was also gold…

Then the mountains moved!

A ripple passed over the glimmering slope — not the shimmer from high to low of tumbling coins, but sideways, over the whole of it; then another ripple, bottom to top. Gold unfolded over gold.

The building corner struck Pryn, buttock and shoulder blade. (She hadn’t realized she’d been backing away.) Rising, gold articulated along some glittering numismatic pleat, then along another fanning from it, then yet along another. Between, the loose and flashing folds billowed and rose, a wing scaled with coins, taut, spined, darkening a fifth the sky, dragged its shadow over the yard, opaque to all moonlight with its auric load, yet still glittering within its black, become beast, become Gauine herself.

Beyond the columns, the golden head rolled upright and — looked at her!

Mouth open, Pryn crouched, back against uneven stone. Somewhere, distant in the ruins, another gold wing rose above roofs.

The head slid. Some half-standing wall fell before the huge muzzle rose. Black puddles in pits of crumpled foil, the eyes, now one, now the other, lowered slow, brazen lids and lifted them. Hovering above the columns, above the smashed cistern, above Pryn, the long, ragged lip, clotted with gems, lifted from teeth not gold but stained bone, some whole, some split, all hiked in coral gum.

Pryn pushed back, slipped, almost went sprawling, but got her feet under her. Standing, she looked up. The great wings, first one, then the other, moved.

She heard wind.

She heard water.

She took another breath and called, loud enough to hurt her throat: ‘Oh great Gauine, I have come to give my treasure…!’ She stopped.

Because the golden head, staring down, that rose and rose above her, now descended!

Fear? Terror? What she felt was not terror, because the beast above her was terror itself, and to gaze up at it — all jaws and eyes — was to watch, as jaws opened and eyes blinked, terror’s articulations entirely from without. She felt herself in some reckless state where ecstasy and obliviousness, daring and distraction, were one.

The gesture came from the same place as the words, though — then — she could not have said where that was. She grasped the chain at her neck and pulled it over her head. First it caught under her ear, then in her hair, but she yanked it loose.

Pryn hurled the astrolabe as high and hard as she could.

Gauine roared.

Gauine beat her wings.

The sea and the winds leapt to answer.

And Pryn ran.

Gauine’s roaring didn’t stop.

Pryn’s feet splashed on streaming flags. She pushed from a slim pillar swaying on its pedestal, dodged shaking driftwood. Water rilled at her ankles, rushing. Pryn went off paving — into mud!

Mud shook.

Mud quivered.

Beating at her, splashing about her, the water wet her knees. She slogged, flailing. Water was at her waist. Pryn fell, grasping foam, but came up spluttering and this time grabbed the root sticking from the embankment, managed to pull herself up, now going crabwise on the slope, coughing and trying to spit the salt from her throat. (Her aunt had never told her the sea was salt!) She didn’t remember gaining the ledge. But she remembered backing through low bushes, her shift dripping down the backs of her thighs.

Water spilled together over the unbearable city.

She remembered coming out from trees again, and again, and then again to the edge of the rocks, with the inlet spread before her, a few sand bars interrupting the glitter that the night breeze unraveled over the whole of it.

The moon was high and small.

She remembered walking in moon-speckled forest.

She remembered sitting wide awake with her eyes closed.

She remembered walking a lot more.

She remembered blinking, with leaves blocking deep blue.

Leaning against tree bark, she realized that it was dew-wet, that the leaves against her shins were wet too, and that perhaps it had just rained in the faint dawn-light.

She squatted by some bare ground, where the sick feeling passed long enough for her to pick up a twig and scratch her name in the wet dirt. Something was wrong with it — it lacked both capital and diacritic! Again the nausea welled, but it was not as strong as it had been for hours now. She stood, temples throbbing, a stinging along the backs of her legs from squatting so long.

Pryn moved among trees.

She first realized she was on brewery grounds when, at the hillcrest, she saw Old Rorkar’s house. Up the nearer slope was the workers’ barracks, where she slept. Down there was the office shed. She remembered taking a momentary account: her name was Pryn — she did know how to write it. In the pockets of her dress were…no iron coins? Her blade — Ini’s blade…? But Tratsin’s carving tool — no, the earl’s carving knife; or some memory that doubled them both…at any rate, it had gone even before the city had risen. Pryn blinked, frowned, and remembered what had occurred. Almost like relief, the nausea welled again, driving it from her mind. She opened her mouth, taking shallow breaths. Her few coins and the Ini’s blade were under her straw in the barracks.

Pryn felt at her neck.

The chain and astrolabe were, yes, gone.

Her hand went to her hair, found a leaf, and pulled it away. I must look like someone who’s slept in the woods! she thought. The nausea passed again, leaving her still unsteady. Her mouth was very dry.

Standing with a hand on the tree beside her, Pryn felt two conflicting urges. One was to go to her barracks, take her knife, her coins, and strike out on the north road without a word. The other was to go down past the cooling caves, cross the road to the eating hall, take her morning bowl of soup — Rorkar always said, though Pryn had only heard it quoted, ‘A heavy meal in the morning slows the worker till noon’—and fall into her usual routine, again without a word.

‘…a kind of madness,’ she whispered. Someone had said that recently. But she was not sure who or why.

There was another urge, of course: to go into the barracks, lie down on her straw, and sleep; but because she was fifteen, and because this was a salaried job, and because the job carried a double title that separated her somehow from the others, she dismissed that one as childish — though in five or ten years it might well have been the one she would follow. As it was, while she decided between the first two, the hide-covered planks of the barracks door were set aside and one, then three, then five women came out. (The women usually managed to leave before the men.) A few more came — one waited for a friend who joined her.

Pryn stepped behind the tree.

Two barbarian men came out.

They were all headed for the eating hall.

Three more women left, two with their children behind and before them. One barbarian shooed the snoring eight-year-old out ahead of her with gestures for which Pryn could hear Tritty saying, ‘Now, Ardra…!’ Would Petal snore when she was older? Would Lavik make such gestures? But Tritty and Ardra, Pryn remembered, weren’t barbarians anyway, were from further north, or east, or west…What Pryn decided, because she was that kind of young woman, was to follow both her first two urges.

More women came out of the barracks — which meant her end of the dim sleeping hall would be almost deserted.

She walked forward.

One man, leaving, looked at her — which made her decide to pick over her hair for more leaves and make sure to wash in the stream behind the building where, each morning, one half or the other of the workers kneeled to splash their faces and arms.

She went and washed.

The money was still under the straw. She took it out. And the knife. She put on the green dress Madame Keyne had given her, because it had two sizable internal pockets, whereas the work-dress she’d gotten here had none. She put her money in one. She stuck the knife into the sash on her other hip, then bloused the green shift over it so that the knife was more or less covered, though no one would be surprised at her carrying a blade. Still…

She went outside — should she go back in and sleep?

Twice she’d thought she might throw up. She’d decided to forgo breakfast.

Pryn walked down to the office.

Pushing inside, passing piled barrel staves and nested pots, she realized what she didn’t remember — couldn’t remember — was waking. She had no memory of opening her eyes in the forest, of going from a nothing to a now that would let her locate a discontinuity with some previous thought or feeling, a discontinuity that could be read as containing sleep — a sleep that contained a dream. Equally lacking was any memory of the dream of the golden dragon ending…Had it ended? Could that giant bejeweled fact suddenly peer at her from behind some shack or tree or keg?

When she stepped into the office cubicle, Yrnik turned from the waxed board with the little erasing lamp flickering in his hand. ‘Pryn…?’ Did he look at her strangely? She wanted to feel her hair for more leaves. ‘Pryn, I think you’ve made a…’ His forehead wrinkled above ivory eyes whose irises looked like circles cut from dead leaves. ‘I’m sure you’ve made a mistake in these figures. The last ones here — only two barrels of fertilizer out of the auxiliary cooling cave for all of yesterday? You must have made an error. It just doesn’t tally with the numbers you’ve written down for the rest of the week.’ He read: ‘“Nine,” “eight,” “twelve,” “ten”…Now “two”? I mean you can’t just go writing down things like that about those people. That’s why I sent you to watch them. Carefully. And to write down — carefully — what you saw. Two? If I tell that to Rorkar, he’d turn all of the workers in there out on the road. And you must know, they’re the ones that can least afford it.’

‘Perhaps you shouldn’t tell him,’ Pryn said.

Yrnik frowned. He turned back to melt more figures to ghosts. ‘What…?’

Pryn took a breath. ‘I must have made a mistake. Yes. I meant to write “twelve.” Only the earl’s cart came for me just then and — ’

‘Oh,’ Yrnik said. ‘Twelve. That sounds better, certainly. “Twelve”—and while we’re at it, “forty-nine” is a little high for the main cave. We’ll make that “forty” and start over again, all right? And no more mistakes.’

‘Yes,’ Pryn said.

Yrnik pursed his lips, setting the lamp on the shelf below the cleared board. ‘They were looking for you earlier, you know. When you weren’t in the barracks.’

Pryn’s eyes widened. She tried to relax her whole face. She opened her hands.

‘His Lordship and Old Rorkar, this morning. You must have had quite an evening at his Lordship’s. I said you’d probably gotten up early and gone walking.’

Pryn moved dry lip on dry lip. ‘Yes…I went walking — earlier.’ Had the dream, she wondered, begun at the earl’s? Suddenly she said: ‘I’m going to the eating hall to catch Tetya on his way up. For his writing session.’

‘Oh, I don’t think — ’

But Pryn turned and sprinted away among staves, pots, leaning tools, hanging baskets and out flapping hide.

More workers stood in front of the eating hall than usual. Many were climbing into a large, open wagon. Ahead on the road, another wagon full of men and women was just rolling off north. Everybody was in a good mood. Half a dozen men stood at the road side, bending and hooting with laughter at a story from a heavy woman at the wagon’s edge. She gestured and grimaced, making strange growls and grunts — in the narrative, Pryn caught the passing nivu, the casual har’, but understood none of the barbaric comedy.

She crossed the cool, yellow dirt and turned from the door when a bunch of jabbering men came out followed by several silent women.

‘There you are!’ Juni ducked from the door-hanging, drying her hands on her work apron. She wore a dress that was very blue.

Juni hurried over to her. ‘What in the world happened to you last night?’ (Pryn thought it might be reassuring to take out her knife. But wouldn’t it look odd to Juni…?)’ His Lordship drove down here this morning, woke up Old Rorkar, and the two of them were in the hall soon as we opened, asking if anyone had seen you.’ Juni’s dress had none of the metallic glitter of the earl’s cloak, but it was definitely the same color.

Pryn put her palm against the knife and felt it through the doubled cloth.

‘The earl said you’d decided to come home by yourself…? He said he’d offered to have you driven back, but there was some misunderstanding…?’

Pryn blinked. ‘Yes.’ She thought: I’ll just say ‘yes’ to everything anyone asks until a dragon plucks me up and away and I’m gone…

‘It’s an awfully long walk back from his Lordship’s estate; Juni said. ‘But then, the moon was full last night. It was still out when I got up to come here this morning. I just wish it hadn’t rained, though…Well, when they went to the barracks, you weren’t there!’

Pryn nodded.

Juni took a large breath. ‘Finally they went and got Bruka anyway. And took her out back! It was awful! Afterwards, when his Lordship had driven off, Rorkar came in and sat in the empty hall and kept on saying this wasn’t the way he wanted to begin the Labor Festival. I felt so sorry for him…!’

‘Bruka?’ Pryn frowned.

‘They should have waited to find you,’ Juni said. ‘That’s what Rorkar told his Lordship. I mean, even a slave has some rights — and there’s supposed to be a witness. But his Lordship got very angry and said I’m sorry, my man, but for all he knew the silly girl — which was you — wouldn’t be back! He said they’d looked for you several hours before they decided you must have made your own way home. And besides, he said, when Bruka was confronted with it, she’d confess.’ Juni tossed her apron hem down. ‘They went and got her and took her out in the back…’ Her dark eyes widened. ‘They used to do it here in front, you know, for everybody to see. Two big logs, sticking out of the ground right there by the road, with manacles hanging on them! I remember, because when I was six or seven, my cousin drove me by and we saw them doing it. It bothered me for days, weeks — oh, it still bothers me…Where are you going?’

Pryn walked away along the wall.

She heard Juni come up behind her, stopped when Juni put her hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t go back there…’

Pryn glanced over her shoulder.

‘There’s nothing you can do. I mean there was nothing you could have done, even if they’d found you — since they didn’t wait. They’ll cut her loose when everyone comes back this evening — ’

Pryn walked again.

‘Well, don’t stay there too long, then!’ Juni called. ‘I’m going to get in the wagon…I wish you’d come, too; and tell me all the wonderful things that happened last night at his Lordship’s…’

Pryn turned the back corner of the hall.

There were some barrels on the eating hall’s back porch. That’s all. It didn’t feel particularly like morning. She looked across the stone benches stretching to the forest.

She’d expected a stake driven into the ground somewhere and the old woman dangling, chained to it.

She saw nothing.

Out in front she heard another wagon pull up. Someone was shouting for someone else to hurry, hurry up! Someone else was laughing very hard about it — or something else entirely.

Pryn walked out between the benches.

Reaching the aisle, she crossed over dandelions and sedge. Weeds tufted gravel and fallen leaves. She walked between the next seats. The tarred staples left rusted halos on the stone. In various chipped indentations, water had gathered. A third of the staples had broken off. Many were only nubs.

At the bench’s end, Pryn walked around the weedy dirt piled against it.

Five, or six, or seven benches away, a rope was tied round one of the staples. It went over the stone’s edge and down.

It was moving.

Pryn frowned.

She climbed up to stand on the bench nearest. With a long step and a jump, she got to the next; and the next; and the next —

The woman lay on her side, face against the rock. The vine was lashed half a dozen times around her bony forearms, from her wrists halfway up to her elbows, which were pressed together. The skin above the rope was red. Her dress had been stripped to her waist. She was breathing very quietly.

As Pryn stood looking down, Bruka opened her eyes. She didn’t look particularly surprised. But after a few moments, she closed her eyes again and shifted her bound arms. The vine rope slid an inch along the stone.

The first thing Pryn thought was that it wasn’t as horrible as she’d expected.

It was only rope, not chain; and only along two of the welts on her back had the skin broken enough to bleed — though as Pryn climbed down, she saw a splatter of red on the weeds. And there was a brown smear on the bench’s side.

Pryn squatted, looking about. There was no one — though later she told herself it wouldn’t have mattered if there were. She would have done the same. She took the knife from her sash under the fold, grabbed one of the lengths of vine rope tied to the staple, and began to saw at it. Getting through it took about two minutes — it was much better rope than she’d been able to make for her dragon bridle.

She was halfway through the second when Bruka opened her eyes again and said, ‘What are you doing?’

‘Cutting you free.’

‘Did he send you? Is the sun down?’

Pryn shook her head and kept sawing.

‘You’re freeing me…!’ Bruka struggled to sit up.

Pryn grunted; the rope was jerked from her hand. She pulled it back and kept sawing.

‘The indignity…!’ Bruka whispered. ‘They wouldn’t do it out front, where people could see. No. They hid me away here in the back — pretending it wasn’t happening! Why do it, then? But they know, now: people won’t tolerate it — not the free ones! Then why do it, I said. Who’s it to be an example to, I asked. Not an old woman like me, an old slave…there won’t be any more slaves, soon. They won’t put up with it…You’re freeing me? You’re mad!’ The old woman narrowed her eyes. ‘You’re mad, you know. You know what they’ll do to you — a lot worse than this! It’s a crime what you’re doing — ’

Pryn stopped sawing. ‘Do you want me to leave you here?’

With her fingers on the bench edge, Bruka dragged herself up. ‘No…!’

Pryn grasped the rope and sawed at it some more.

‘But you’re mad — !’

‘Me and Queen Olin,’ Pryn said. ‘Since I got you into this mess with that useless astrolabe — it’s gone now, by the way, so don’t worry — this seems the least I can do.’ On least the rope parted. ‘Let me see your arms.’

Bruka thrust them forward.

Pryn pulled at the rope, but it was knotted at both ends of the lashing. Bruka’s fingers and hands were puffy.

‘Here…’ Pryn moved around beside her, so that she could get the bound arms under one of hers to steady them. ‘Hold still, or I might cut you…’ It was hard sawing; and Pryn still didn’t feel all that well. In the middle of picking and cutting at the knot, her forehead broke out in beaded water, and her sawing arm began to slip against her side. ‘What are you going to do when you get free?’ She cut more.

‘Oh, they think I don’t know, because I’m an old woman. But I do! There are ways for a slave to get north to Kolhari and not once step on the main road. There’re the little trails and paths the smugglers use. There’re the little roads. I know…’

‘You’re going to Kolhari?’ Pryn glanced back at her. ‘Me too. Perhaps I’ll see you there.’ She went back to her cutting.

‘They don’t have slaves in Kolhari,’ Bruka said. ‘Only free men and women.’

‘Mmm,’ Pryn said. She pushed away the image of an old woman alone in those crowded streets.

‘There’s a Court of Eagles,’ Bruka said. ‘Where everything is decided fairly. With real eagles, too. I talked to a man who went to Kolhari once, and he said he saw no eagles. But I said there must a real eagle there, someplace. Don’t you think?’

‘Oh, there is,’ Pryn said. ‘It’s huge. Its wingspan would block the sunlight away from this whole brewery. Its feathers are gold and iron. Its beak and claws are clotted with gems. And it guards the city and keeps its markets and businesses running quite smoothly, thank you. But they keep it hidden. You’ll be in Kolhari quite a while before you ever get a look at its glittering face. They’re vicious birds, you know — eagles. Mountain birds; and I come from the mountains. Dirty, too. Really, they’re just a kind of vulture — ’

‘You’re mad,’ Bruka said.

The rope came free. ‘There…’

Pryn put the knife up on the stone and unwrapped Bruka’s bound arms. The grain of the vine had printed itself on the yellow flesh — and of course there was another place, Pryn saw as she unwrapped more lashing, where the rope was again knotted about her forearm. But that only took a half-minute to untie.

‘It happened to my father, too,’ Bruka said. ‘The same way. I wish I’d known him, at least long enough for him to tell me — but it wouldn’t have done any good. They always said I was a headstrong girl.’ The last of the rope came away, and Bruka suddenly grinned. ‘Like you, eh?’

Pryn waited for the old woman to flex her swollen hands. But she only stretched her arms out; sitting up tall, she looked over the bench tops.

Pryn looked too.

There was still no one.

‘You’re sure you can get north to Kolhari…?’ Pryn asked.

The swollen hands on the marked and raddled forearms came back to Bruka’s neck. The old slave grimaced, slipping two fingers of each hand under the iron collar at each side. She pulled.

The lock separated, and the collar came open on its hinge. Pryn had an impression of incredible strength, a strength that, if it could tear open such a collar, could easily have broken the ropes!

Bruka looked at her, then frowned at what was certainly an odd expression on Pryn’s face. ‘But I never wear it locked,’ she explained. ‘In the day it’s all right, I guess. But at night it chokes me…someone got a key here, years ago. Old Rorkar never knew. But I think the lock’s broken by now, anyway. The hinge is tight, so it holds…’ She took the collar from her neck and put it on the bench. Once more she frowned at Pryn. ‘I’m not too old, you know. I’ve always wanted to go. I can. I know how. I’ve always known. Thank you for freeing me.’ Bruka reached forward, touched Pryn’s knee. ‘Thank you, my Lady…’Then she scrambled awkwardly to her wide feet, pulled her dress up over her dark-aureoled breasts, stuck her yellow arms through the ragged holes, turned and hurried toward the trees. Bent nearly double, she was among them; was within them; was gone.

Pryn stood.

She wiped her forehead with her fingers and shook them. Drops darkened the stone. She picked up the knife, lifted the blousing, stuck it in her sash, and let green cloth fall.

She picked up the collar, holding an iron semi-circle in each fist. The metal loop to attach the neck-chain separated the second and third fingers of her right hand. She brought its double tenon into the groove: a click.

She pulled.

Another click — it came open again, though the hinge was indeed firm enough to hold it at whatever position, opened or closed.

Pryn raised it to her neck.

The iron was a neutral temperature against her skin. Holding it with both fists, though, she couldn’t close it all the way; so she took it off again and stuck it around her sash, closed there, pulling enough cloth through to cover it.

Pryn walked back among the benches toward the building corner. She felt as though she’d been here an hour — though, really, it was probably no more than ten minutes. When she came around the hall, they were only just starting the wagon. Horses clomped forward. Then, at the wagon’s edge, Juni hollered at the driver to stop, stop, please, stop, just once more, and everybody groaned or laughed as though this had happened two or three times already.

‘Come on, come on!’ Juni waved at Pryn.

Because the wagon was going north on the road, Pryn went over to it. Juni and someone else helped her climb up over the side. (One of the things they’d apparently had to stop for already was for Juni to take off her apron and bring it back into the hall. She wasn’t wearing it now.) ‘All right, all right!’ Juni called to the driver when Pryn was still half over the rail. ‘We can go!’

The wagon started.

Everyone cheered.

As Pryn settled on the straw, Juni leaned close to her. ‘I hope you’re satisfied! I told you not to go back there — oh, don’t look so sullen and suspicious!’ She slapped Pryn’s knee playfully. ‘Try to remember that it’s a holiday. I want to hear all about what it’s like to dine at his Lordship’s. What did you eat? Was it marvelous…? I know it was, because I’ve heard rumors among the slaves — ’

‘Juni,’ Pryn said, ‘why would they do that to that poor woman? She’s all tied up back there. She’s been whipped. She’s just lying there, like she’s half dead. I mean, just because she read my — well, she didn’t read it. She only recognized it.’

Juni made a disgusted face as though she were not going to discuss it. Then her hands flopped together in her lap and she sat back. ‘It is sad. But slaves are not supposed to drink. Bruka knows that. And from the earl’s own mug…? It was just spiteful breaking of the rules. Even Rorkar agreed it was the kind of thing that couldn’t just be let pass…And Bruka’s half mad anyway. It’s the kind of thing she’d do!’

Pryn was frowning again.

‘Well, they said you saw it!’ Juni declared. ‘The earl was in the back, talking to you that day. He put his mug down on a bench — you know, the fancy one he carries whenever he comes to visit here? Bruka just picked it up and drained it. He said you were right there.’

‘Yes, but — ’ Astonishment worked its way through the numbness that had enclosed the morning. ‘But her father had — ’

‘—drunk out of the same mug?’ Juni closed her eyes and raised her chin. ‘That’s what she was shouting and screaming when they dragged her in the back.’ She looked at Pryn again. ‘Then his little Lordship boomed out — he’s got quite a voice when he’s riled — yes, her father had put his foul lips to that mug, and he too had been strung up and whipped for it. Then Bruka screamed she didn’t know about that part. Nobody had ever told her that part before — which I have to admit I didn’t believe, because slaves, you know, remember everything. But by then, of course, they’d got her tied up in the back. And Tetya had returned with the whip — ’

‘Juni — ’ Bewilderment joined astonishment — ‘that can’t be the reason…I heard him tell her to — ’ But she did not want to draw more of Juni’s thoughts to her real reasons for outrage. ‘I mean, why didn’t his Lordship say something about it yesterday — two days ago, when it happened?’

‘Cyka said it to me.’ Juni looked dour. ‘Rorkar said it to his Lordship. It’s what anyone would have thought. But his Lordship said that when it happened he’d thought to let it pass, because, after all, she was just a crazy old slavewoman who had belonged to his father and who still had a malicious streak. But he had forgotten about the Labor Festival. And in his father’s day, this was the holiday when good slaves were rewarded for their obediences and bad slaves punished for their defiances. Precisely because it was the morning of this particular day, he’d felt obliged to come by and say something. After all, rules are rules. And even Old Rorkar said, yes, that was true.’ She blinked at Pryn. The wagon jounced. The workers on the other side had started a song. ‘She didn’t deny it, you know. Still, after two days, and with a crazy old woman…’ Juni shook her head. ‘You know, it’s just like his Lordship to do something like that. Nobody around here trusts him.’ She gave a small humph. ‘Not know it was the Labor Festival, indeed! It happens every year, and always on the same day. Myself, I don’t believe it any more than I believe Bruka.’ She glanced up. ‘I hope it doesn’t rain again.’

Of course Pryn had not known it was the Labor Festival either. The why was simple. The area’s most important holiday of the summer and held on the longest day of the year, it was an occasion every local knew about and assumed everyone else knew, too. No one had thought to mention it directly to Pryn any more than anyone had thought to mention, ‘There’s sky overhead,’ or, ‘There’s earth underfoot.’ What references she’d overheard were all oblique enough so that, without knowing what they referred to, she’d had no way to interpret them and so hadn’t really heard them at all.

Pryn tried to reassess the morning in terms of what she’d seen and heard last night, what she’d seen behind the eating hall, what she’d just heard from Juni. No doubt you have put together a more or less coherent explanation for what occurred at the inlet under the moon. Because it was a long time ago, and because the fashions in such explanations change, Pryn had put together a possibly very different one — though no less coherent to her. No matter how different the explanations, however, she had reached some conclusions from it that should be understandable to you and me. Either the greater explanation she was seeking was too complex for what was merely simple and ugly; or that greater explanation which would encompass all these jumbled details was of a complexity beyond any she could presently conceive. In either case, she did not like it here. She was glad she’d freed the old woman, and hoped she got to Kolhari — though to think it was to doubt it.

She was glad to be leaving herself.

Which is when the wagon turned from the north highway onto a narrow road. Trees lowered over.

Pryn seized the wagon’s side.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Juni said. ‘You look like you’re about to jump out!’

‘Where are we going — ?’

‘To the Labor Festival. Down at the beach…?’

Will Rorkar and Tetya be there? And Yrnik?’ But she had seen Yrnik that morning; nothing had happened. ‘Will his Lordship and his family come?’

‘Oh, Tetya and Yrnik will wander by about two or three. Rorkar will arrive at four — though I wouldn’t be surprised if Tetya didn’t show up this year. When he left the hall this morning, he didn’t look like a young man ready for a party. I don’t think he has much of a stomach for slave whipping.’

‘Tetya did the actual whipping?’ Broken welts, smeared stone, splattered weeds…

‘Oh his Lordship was very insistent about that! The younger generation and all.’ Juni put on a pompous voice and a practically death’s-head leer. “If your nephew isn’t up to it, my man, I can always call in my son. Inige is waiting for me in the carriage…?” She brushed straw from her lap. ‘Drinking. It’s so stupid — for Bruka, I mean. Today she could have drunk herself silly if she’d wanted — on Festival day, everyone’s allowed. Oh, even some of these good people around us now will behave quite disgracefully before the day’s over. That’s why I go home early. I mean when everybody’s sick and falling all over the beach, I can tell you I’m ready to leave! I’ll stay for the first three fights. After that, I’m gone — though I’m always back an hour later!’ She giggled. ‘You asked when the earl will come? His Lordship and his lady will drive by for a bit, just at sunset — to gloat over the remains and watch the torches reflected in the water. That’s pretty, as long as it’s too dark to see what a mess everyone’s made on the sand. The earl’s children may come earlier — they like this sort of thing. Did you meet them last night?’

Pryn nodded.

‘I think Jenta’s as handsome as they make a man — though I hear he’s quite strange.’ Juni raised an eyebrow. ‘The daughter’s supposed to be a bit of a character, too. I heard something about her having a baby…?’ Sighing, she reached over to pat Pryn’s knee. ‘But don’t worry. It’ll be fine this morning. Oh! Stop the horses!’ And she was half up, waving at the driver. ‘Come on, stop! Stop, up there! Just once more? Please!’ Steadying herself first on this man’s shoulder, then on that woman’s, Juni made her way across to the other side of the wagon.

Pryn turned.

Trees fell back from the wagon’s far side.

Grinning over his shoulder and shaking his head, the driver pulled up before a thatched shack.

In the yard, beside some pots and baskets, an old woman had set up her loom. She pulled back on the tamper, thrust her shuttle through the strings, tamped again, then leaned forward in her threadbare shift and twisted the intricately ridged and ribbed stick that reversed the height of the alternates. The shuttle shot through shaking strings.

‘All right, Auntie!’ Juni called. ‘Will you come with us? I told you I’d stop by for you again. Here we are!’

‘Go on,’ the old woman said. ‘The Festival’s for young people. Not for me — nobody wants me there. Besides, I have too much to do.’ She bent down to turn over a handful of coarse yarn in one of the pots.

‘But it’s a holiday, Auntie,’ Juni said. ‘You’re not supposed to work today.’

’I’ll work if I want to. It’s the Labor Festival. I want to labor. You young people don’t know what work is. Go on, now. You don’t want me around. I don’t know how to have a good time — I hear you say it. And you’re right.’

‘Well, you might learn if you’d come!’

‘I don’t like jouncing in wagons. My bones are too brittle.’ She tamped, sent the shuttle back, leaned forward, and gave a sharp twist to the separator. ‘You won’t stay past three o’clock yourself — I know you. You’ll be back early; you always are. Who wants to watch a bunch of drunken men, impertinent slaves, and crude forest folk all pretend they like each other till they can’t keep it up any longer and fall to fighting — when they’re not getting sick all over themselves! There’s bound to be an accident. You know, there was a drowning down there three years ago. People get careless at these things, go drown themselves, if not each other.’

A man leaning on one knee said: ‘I was there three years ago. Nobody got drowned!’

‘It was seven years ago,’ a woman near him whispered. ‘No, eight — nine years now, I think! But she always says three. She doesn’t really remember. She says it every year.’

‘There was a drowning three years ago. I haven’t gone since, and I’m not going now. Thank you for your trouble. Now get on your way!’

‘Are you sure, Auntie?’

‘I said I wasn’t going.’ She leaned, she twisted. ‘How sure does a woman have to be…?’

Juni sighed loudly and sat back from the rail.

The driver had watched it all. Laughing, he turned to the horses and started the wagon.

The shuttle shot.

Juni turned from the rail on her knees. ‘Well, I tried.’ She crawled back between grinning workers across the straw to Pryn’s side. ‘Everybody saw me. She just won’t come.’

From the yard the old woman called: ‘You can tell me about it when you come back this afternoon!’

Juni closed her eyes. ‘Yes, Auntie! Goodbye, Auntie!’ She opened them and sat back. ‘Well, I did try. But there’s no changing her.’

With some assurance that she was not being pursued by omnipotent powers, Pryn let herself smile.

‘She’s not really my aunt, you know,’ Juni said. ‘She’s my older cousin — she’s really a good sort. You wouldn’t believe it, but she used to have a reputation as the girl who always danced till moon-down. But that was a long time ago, and such things change. I hope I don’t — though I suppose I will. It’s bound to be a family thing, don’t you think? But then, she’s only a cousin — .’

Pryn thought: I’ll stay a few hours at the beach, then head back for the north road. Maybe I’ll only stop a day or two at Kolhari, before I make my way further north…? No, Kolhari deserved at least a week. A few weeks, even; or months…She didn’t want to return to Ellamon. Somehow, though, it was easier now both to be here — and to leave.

Trees dropped back from Pryn’s side of the wagon. Beyond dense brambles, she saw the thatched roofs of several distant buildings.

Juni leaned toward her. ‘The dyeing houses…’ She nodded at the far structures. ‘I worked there for a summer, before I came to the brewery. It’s harder work — I suppose you make more money. But Nallet, who owns them, is much more of a stickler than Rorkar. I guess that’s because he’s younger and feels he has to show he won’t take any nonsense. Nallet’s workers will be at the Festival too, of course. But I didn’t really like it there. I’m glad I’ve got the job I have now. Still — ’ She held up the hem of her dress for Pryn to see. Sun through the trees played over the night-dark blue. ‘They do nice stuffs, don’t you think?’

Pryn nodded.

Trees closed around; trees opened. The sun had burned off the overcast. They came in sight of the crowded wagon ahead. Soon they almost overtook it. Someone there started another song. Some people in Pryn’s wagon joined. Juni got into a conversation with some other women.

Pryn looked over the rail at passing pines.

Again trees fell back. On a rocky field where she thought there might easily be the same kind of caves as on Rorkar’s property, Pryn saw a number of long buildings. Beside one stood a dozen plows. Some were small and single-handled; others were large enough to need an animal or a person to haul through the ground.

‘Now that,’ Juni said, ‘used to be the site of our weapons manufactory. Armor, swords, helmets — everything for the soldier and the fighting lord. This whole area used to be known for it. But that was years back, when Auntie was a girl.’

‘Has it become a farm?’ Pryn asked.

Juni laughed. ‘No, silly! They make stone hammers and farm equipment now!’

The wagon rolled.

Someone told her this beach was called Neveryóna. Yes, there were a few old ruins off in the woods, and some ancient foundations out on the islands she could see from here, but nothing to speak of. Was there ever a city? she asked. No, No — true, some folks said as much. But it couldn’t have been more than a village. No, not a city. But the Festivals had always been held here. Pryn was told this out on the sand by a hefty, tow-headed sunburned man of about twenty-one, who had a barbarian accent so thick she could barely understand him. He worked in the dyeing houses and showed her his hands to prove it, if she didn’t believe him! Yes, this was where they’d had the Festivals in his parents’ time; and in his parents’ parents’.

Was it sacred to some god, perhaps, Pryn wanted to know.

No.

Well, had it ever been sacred to some god — perhaps a great dragon god, guardian of the ruins, who lived among the stars?

No. He knew of no such gods around here.

After that she stayed pretty much to herself, sitting at the edge of the grass with her feet on the sand, looking out across the inlet to the gray hills or off at the glittering sea. It wasn’t too hard to be alone. There were a lot more people than just the brewery folk — enough, indeed, to populate a small city!

She said that to herself several times.

The friendliness local people can extend to strangers is always, beyond a point, problematic, as Pryn’s stay at Enoch had reminded her. From time to time there had been strangers in Ellamon. From time to time Pryn had made friends with them. But you just couldn’t draw a friend of a week into the alliances, aversions, shared concerns, mutual suspicions, committed bonds and vague acquaintances of a lifetime — not at an affair like this, where any one of those relationships might change in an instant.

She said that to herself several times, too. (Off with this group, off with that, Juni had not spoken to her for forty minutes.) Pryn felt lonely and thought, really, she ought to go now. She wondered why she stayed.

Sitting on a rock beside some bushes out of sight of the road where the wagons pulled up, she listened to the neighing horses and pictured them nosing one another. She could hear them beyond the ridge. She also thought about her father, whom she had never seen — who, indeed, had been absent from her speculations almost as long as her aunt.

What would he have her do?

Then she thought: Really, her aunt, her mother, Old Rorkar, Yrnik, even Cyka in the eating hall, any real father she might have had, Madame Keyne, the Liberator — even the earl, however vindictive, however despicable. (Was it only power that allowed him to reinterpret reality like that? Pryn suddenly knew: if she’d known what Juni had later told her in the wagon, lost in an attempt to find the nature of the slave’s true guilt or the lord’s true reason, she would never have cut the old woman free!) Yes, all of them were authorities for her. She did what they seemed to ask when they confronted her. When they were not there, she found herself still doing what they might want, as though all of them only stood for that obsessive, absent father who was with her always. Oh, he listened to them and modified his concerns in the light of their demands, to be sure. But he was the real enforcer of any submission, overt or intuited. For what, she wondered, did he stand —

Among the youngsters playing in the shallows, in retaliation to a splashing, one skimmed her forearm over the water, sending up white gold into the sun. On her rock, Pryn started with a momentary image of a gold wing rising from the waters — till it shattered about the girl’s shrieking pursuers; and perspective, with the fixing of attention, returned.

It still set Pryn’s heart pounding.

She had a momentary intuition of all the conflicts between the north and south of all Nevèrÿon contoured by such jeweled eagles, such gilded dragons. But then, what could such fanciful beasts actually do, save finance a bit of the real power wielded by a Rorkar, a Madame Keyne, even a Gorgik, or a provincial earl more powerful than them all. Such power seemed rather paltry before her father not there…

A kind of madness…?

Pryn stood up from her rock, determined to leave that moment — and saw several real and solid reasons to stay.

Over a rock-walled furnace out on the sand, a man turned a triple spit, each tine set with several trussed fowl. In dull dresses too long for the heat, which had already grown notable, women carried shovels full of smoking coals to a shallow pit a few feet off, over which, on a crusted, blackened grill, two split kids barbecued. At the trees, people rolled out dripping barrels, from where they’d been stored the night in some stream, and set them on rough tables in the shade. A dozen people stood about with mugs, sampling what was clearly Rorkar’s contribution to the Festival. With a long journey ahead and little money, it might be wise to eat first and take a bag of food with her — if she could put one together unobtrusively.

At another fire lay several sacks of yams. Some children gingerly placed the red, rooty nodules about the flames.

A grizzled man came down the beach, a net sack over his shoulder filled with what looked like flat, gray stones. A youngster ran from the water to accompany him to a fire, where a large earthen pot had been set to boil. (Save her single afternoon at the Old Market, Pryn, who was after all a mountain girl, had never seen a clam. And despite all auxiliary roastings and grillings, the Labor Festival was essentially a clambake.) The net was dumped into the steaming pot; two women pushed a circular board cover over the top.

People applauded.

The net was thrown down on the sand. Pryn thought: Maybe I can get one of those, when they’re finished boiling their rocks…

Someone was lugging another off toward another pot.

As the morning went on, the beach became all cooking, all eating, all noise. People with instruments covered with leather heads pounded them. People plucked drawn strings over hollow gourds and shells, yodeling accompaniments.

Men drank beer, gossiped, and boasted about themselves.

Women drank beer, gossiped, and boasted about men and women not there.

Pryn drank beer, ate some roast chicken…and a clam. ‘If you don’t like it,’ Juni said, having turned up at the same fireplace, ‘you don’t have to eat them! Oh, what a face! Here, I’ll take your bucket! There’s lots of other things to try. Weka?’ who was about eleven, all black eyes and freckles. ‘Weka, take Pryn and make sure she gets some baked sweet potato! And don’t forget to let her dip it in the honey!’ So Pryn went with Weka and peeled back the flaking skin from a hot potato and dipped it in a large, messy honey pot with a few leaves and some sand in it, and ate a piece of barbecued goat…and three more steamed clams, which she decided were not that bad. Just…different. Besides, who knew what the fashion in foods might be when she got back to Kolhari.

The sun burned the fog from the hills. (Was that thing that seemed part of the mountain on the other side of the water his Lordship’s home? Yes, someone said.) It also burned away some of her fatigue.

She managed to find a discarded cloth sack, in which were some bread crumbs, which she carried about wadded up under her arm. For a while, she despaired of getting anything into it, without being obvious. Finally she managed to get in two roasted potatoes; then several cuts from a roasted goat’s leg; and three separate quarters from three roast ducks, from three different fires. It was too full to carry under her arm now; she just dangled it from one hand.

Ambling round a bend, Pryn now saw the beach was longer than she’d thought. There was as much activity down this stretch as there’d been on the former hundred or so yards. The ground here, she saw as she walked along the muddy sand by the water, split into an upper and lower level. A six-meter earthen slope widened between, its black dirt stuck about with roots, rocks, and small brush. She walked along the lower strip, swinging her sack and looking at the people strolling at the edge of the upper. There was music above, whose source she couldn’t see.

What stopped her were the tops of two rocks over the upper ledge. Both were chalky white. One was substantially taller than the other. They looked like two giant, aged fingers prodding at blue air…

Three little girls came barrelling down the slope, shrieking. Pryn began to scramble up. She grasped at roots with her free hand — now she climbed over a weedy tide-line; for a while she went crabwise.

People were cooking at the rim, right where she came over. Someone offered her a hand at the top, and Pryn thanked her, while the others stood laughing, and did she want a bucket of clams?

‘No, no thank you. No. Not right now…’

Between the two rocks a colorfully painted wagon had parked. One side had been let down into a platform. Drummers and musicians sat at either edge of a stage decorated with fantastic props. A very fat man was just finishing an energetic dance with a tall, supple woman. Breathing heavily, feathers shaking on his shoulders and gold paint in wings about his eyes, he walked to the front of the platform and bowed. ‘Thank you! Thank you, ladies and gentlemen!’ Then he said something in the barbarian language, which may have meant the same thing — but it made one group in the audience standing about laugh loudly. ‘This will be our last show for the day,’ the fat man went on. ‘Afterward, we’ll pack up to head off north. But you’ll see us again next summer, at your wonderful, joyous, generous Labor Festival! But we’re not finished! There’s more to come — so you can be generous with your gifts as our musicians pass among you. Please be generous! And now our show continues…!’ He turned sharply, clapped his hands over his head, and skipped ponderously from the stage.

People laughed.

Some of the musicians sitting on the stage’s edge jumped from the platform to move among the audience, collecting small iron coins, either in their cloaks or in the bodies of their actual instruments. Other musicians came out on the platform, already playing a rhythmic melody.

Now with her scarf and bells, diminutive, freckled Vatry rushed to the platform’s center and began to shake her hair and leap and smile and wink into the audience, now and again turning one of her astonishing flips!

People were generous!

Three times Pryn saw gold held up, to be thrust a moment later over the shoulder of another watcher and tossed into some musician’s basket or outstretched cloak.

To one side of the audience in a loose group stood a dozen or so slaves. Most wore their collars on naked shoulders. None was from the brewery. Pryn saw a few white collar-covers, but not many. Given her coming journey, she did not want to give the mummers any of her coins. But everyone else seemed to be, in laughing, clinking handfuls. The musicians were not asking from the slaves…

Pryn stood near a grove of pecan trees. Vatry did another flip, and all attention, including the musicians’, went forward. Pryn put down her sack, reached under her bloused-out shift, pulled the iron collar from her sash, and raised it to her neck. She pushed the iron semicircles closed — a small click.

Dropping her hands, Pryn looked about.

She felt a tingling over her entire body. No one seemed to be watching. It struck her for the first time, as she dropped her chin almost to hide it now she wore it, that the collar was not particularly comfortable. She picked up her sack and stepped out from the other side of the trees. She walked, leisurely (she hoped), toward the slaves at the clearing’s side.

A musician passed her with several different kinds of flutes tied top and bottom with thongs and strung about her shoulder. Her spread cloak sagged with iron coins — and at least as much gold as Pryn had once seen Madame Keyne thrust into the hands of a would-be assassin. With her oddly angled, wide-spaced eyes, the musician only glanced at Pryn. Pryn felt her body heat from ankles to ears. But the musician did not pause for any contribution.

The slaves she moved next to did not look at her either. While Vatry continued her dance, Pryn looked at them a lot, though — mostly for differences between herself and them which might betray her to some more-practiced eye. Were their hands, as they clapped at Vatry’s next flip, held differently from hers? Was there something special in the way this one beside her carried his sloping shoulders? Or in the way that heavy woman toward the front there kept rubbing her hand back and forth on the print skirt at her thigh? Or the way that one enfolded his cracked mug in both hands with the fingers interlocked at the front? What about the way the one with the collar-cover stood, one sharp hip thrust out? Certainly there must be something that marked them as different, marked them as belonging to the collar — which, now that she had become part of its meaning, was, after all, only a sign.

For a while Pryn found herself trying to imitate the gesture of one, the stance of another, seeking whatever might give her imposture more authority, till her attention was caught up by the skit that had replaced Vatry on the platform.

There was a beautiful princess, played by the leading lady, who somehow looked much younger than Pryn knew her to be from the time she’d eaten with the mummers back in the Kolhari market. There was the great and glittering monster, operated from offstage, who wanted to eat the princess. There were several dashing young men, some of whom had mothers and some of whom had girlfriends, and all of whom seemed to be in furious, comic competition; there was also a slave, who seemed, as far as Pryn could tell, to belong to everyone, since everyone gave him orders. He received many comic kicks and beatings, but nevertheless was always getting away with something — now a glass of wine from a fine supper that had erupted into a comic argument, now with a piece of gold from a stupidly mismanaged bargain. Both the slaves on one side and the workers on the other laughed. Indeed, two slaveboys, no older than she and both with brimming mugs, poked each other in the sides and made such loud comments, and seemed so generally tickled at seeing themselves represented on stage at all, it looked to Pryn as if it might grow into a real disturbance. Some of the workers were clearly annoyed; but none of the slaves seemed inclined to stop it. A few musicians still moved about, taking some last coins. In the excited state the collar produced, Pryn grew sweatingly uncomfortable at the rowdiness beside her. Finally she lifted her sack and moved toward the back. At the ledge, she just glanced down at the lower beach —

Along at the water’s edge, kicking bare feet at the wet sand, were Yrnik and big-eared, gawky-elbowed Tetya! They were laughing about something. Indeed, Tetya did not look like a boy who only that morning had beaten an old woman into insensibility. But then, Pryn thought as she stepped away, she probably did not look like a girl who’d just freed one.

Certainly they hadn’t seen her. Nor did they look as if they were headed up here.

The idea had been with her. But at a glimpse of someone from the brewery, idea became movement. Vatry was not in the skit. Two other mummers’ wagons — for props, scenery, and sleeping space — sat either side of the rocks. Pryn took her sack off beyond the wagon she’d recognized as the prop cart in which, when she’d last seen them in the city, Vatry had been housed.

The side wagons were angled back to the tree. Some musicians not in this skit stood at the wagon’s end near the horses. The musician who’d passed Pryn with her cloak of coins now cuddled the feedbag around one red muzzle. She stroked the bony forehead while the creature ate. Pryn felt something of the tingle again; she went further along beside the trees. She planned to work her way through the brush into the backstage area. But the further away she was when she started in, the less chance there’d be of someone shooing her off. Sack over one shoulder, she pushed in among saplings and undergrowth. If she’d gotten through her last night, certainly she could get through it today. When she reached the shadow of the larger trees, the undergrowth lessened. She worked her way to where the wagons must be, then started out.

She saw the rocks; she saw the wagon tops.

The center one had painted houses hanging on its back. Behind the wagon to the right, five mummers in their costumes hauled away a third of the monster, who’d apparently devoured the slave and just met defeat for it at the hands of the most sympathetic of the young men, who’d been played by a very tall, very beautiful, very black actor. On stage, the young man and some fishermen and the princess were singing about it now —

There was Vatry!

The little dancer stood in the door of the nearest wagon, talking to a man with a dark, muscular back. He wore a loin-rag wrapped around his hips and between his legs; a shaggy sheath hung at his belt.

Vatry’s hair was wild, unkempt, and there was no red in it.

The man’s was black and tied with a rag. He was handing Vatry a sack, not much larger than Pryn’s.

Vatry took it and thrust it inside behind the wagon’s door jamb.

The man turned to walk away — and became a woman!

Pryn caught her breath.

Of course it had been a woman all along — she’d only thought it was a man! The black rag that held in the thick hair did not go across her forehead, but across her eyes. In it were two eyeholes, though Pryn could not have been more surprised if there’d been three, or five, or seven!

She walked toward Pryn. Her breasts were not large, but they were definitely a woman’s, not just muscular pectorals, for all Pryn tried to read them as such.

She strode into the undergrowth, pushing back leaves. As she passed, she looked at Pryn with only mild surprise.

It was the first anyone had looked directly at her since she’d moved off with the slaves.

Between frayed slits, the eyes were intensely blue.

Pryn thought for an awkward moment: Her hair’s blue, too! But it was only sun-dappling slipping across the blue beads she wore chained in her hair. Sun flaked over terra-cotta shoulders. And she was off among trees; was only a shadow; was a sound in leaves; was — like Bruka — gone.

Pryn stood, astounded.

Beyond the leaves, Vatry lingered in the wagon door, still in her bells and scarfs. Slowly, she stepped back inside.

Pryn swallowed. Then, sack bouncing, she pushed from the undergrowth, crossed the clearing, was up the wagon’s single step, and through the colorful hanging. ‘Vatry…!’

Inside the wagon was a smell of incense and old varnish. Paintings of castles, of waves, of forests, of houses, of mountains leaned against the walls. Ornate armor hung from the ceiling. A trap in the roof let in sunlight. Sitting on a shelf-bed against the back, Vatry pushed away a hanging blanket and peered through dusty sun. ‘Yes? What do you — ?’

‘Vatry, who was…’ Pryn lost her question to the strangeness of the wonder-cramped wagon.

Vatry frowned. Her eyes were winged with paint. ‘What do you…? You? Oh, that girl…from the city!’ She stood up, pushing the blanket further back on the rope over which it was strung. ‘It’s Pryn…?’

Excited, Pryn nodded. She’d really thought Vatry might not remember her at all.

‘What are you doing here at this…?’ Suddenly the freckled hand went back against Vatry’s breast. ‘But you’ve been captured!’ she cried in her odd accent. ‘Oh, you’ve been taken! That’s awful! Is there anything anyone can do?’ She leaned forward in complete sincerity.

Which bewildered Pryn — till she remembered the collar. ‘Oh, this…? No, it’s just a…it’s not real. I mean, it’s broken!’ She dropped her sack to the floor, raised her chin, slipped a finger into each side of the iron band, and tugged — of course this would be the moment when the broken lock held…

But the hinge gave.

Pryn took the iron from her neck. ‘I was only pretending — using it, as a disguise.’ Then she said: ‘It’s for you!’

Vatry frowned. ‘What?’

‘I mean for the skits. You do skits with slaves in them. I thought they might use it…for the show.’

Suspicion found its way into Vatry’s voice. ‘Oh…’

‘Vatry, I have to get away from here! I want to get back to Kolhari!’

‘Don’t we all!’

‘When you pull out this evening, could I ride along — ?’

‘This evening? Oh, no!’ Vatry shook her head. ‘We don’t hang around these places till evening! These local shindigs get a little rough by sundown. Everyone’s gambled away all their money, or gotten too drunk to follow a skit anyway. Every local hooligan thinks the holiday isn’t complete unless he’s stolen something or other from our props as a souvenir. And any little tramp diddled behind the rocks, who decides she doesn’t like it, always finds it easier to blame it on one of our boys instead of the leering local lout who actually got to her. It makes less trouble for them later. Well, I did it myself once — but I’ve been paid back many times over! No, we don’t hang around these kinds of places. We should be packed up and rolling inside an hour.’

‘That’s even better!’ Pryn said. ‘Oh, please, can’t I come? You see, there’re some people looking for me — at any rate, they may be looking for me. I did something that they won’t like. Of course, I don’t know if they realize it was me, yet — ’

‘What did you do? Steal some old geezer’s hard-won hoard?’ Vatry pointed toward Pryn’s sack.

‘Oh, that’s just food I got for the trip.’ Pryn took a breath. ‘What I did was free one of the old geezer’s slaves!’

‘That was noble,’ Vatry said, ‘I suppose — if foolhardy!’

The sack the masked woman had brought lay on rumpled cloth at the foot of Vatry’s bed. ‘What’s in that?’

‘What’s in what?’ Vatry said.

‘That bag the woman gave you?’

Vatry pulled in her small shoulders. Her forehead wrinkled. ‘What woman?’

‘Well, she looked like a man, but I’m sure — I know it was a woman. In that sack there.’

Vatry considered a moment. ‘There wasn’t any woman here — or man.’

‘Of course there was. With a black rag mask.’ Pryn was trying to remember the tale-teller’s tale. Blue Heron…? But that had been her name. ‘She passed right by me when — ’

Vatry leaned over, reached into the sack, and pulled out something small and black. ‘What’s this?’ She held out her hand.

Pryn looked. ‘I don’t…know.’

Vatry closed her fingers, turned her hand over, threw the black pellet down on the wagon floor — thack! It bounced back into her hand. She turned her palm up to show Pryn.

‘It’s a ball…?’

‘Yes. A child’s playing ball, that you see the children tossing about on the streets all through Kolhari. It’s nothing special — absolutely not worth a mention.’ Her odd accent gave her a measured tone. ‘It’s not worth any kind of mention at all, is it, now?’

‘Oh, no.’ Pryn shook her head. ‘Of course it’s not!’

Vatry rolled the ball between thumb and forefinger. ‘These come from further south of here. I’ll bring this bag of them with me up to Kolhari. I’ll sell them for a few iron coins to some vendor in the market, who’ll sell them to the passing children for their end-of-summer games. It may keep me from having to break my back carrying sacks of onions for noisy barbarians in the eating halls for a day or two, when the troupe here lets me go. Certainly there’s nothing wrong with that, is there?’

Pryn shook her head again. ‘Of course not.’

‘Certainly it’s not worth any sort of a mention — to anyone. Do you understand?’

Pryn remembered the smugglers she’d come south with, and their cartload of contraband, against which this minuscule enterprise seemed laughable. ‘Vatry, there may be other people after me too. What ancient custom I violated or bit of intrigue I might have tripped over, I don’t begin to understand and don’t want to. But they tried to poison me last night! At least I think they did. They may try again — and maybe they won’t. But they’re bad people. They order slaves to be whipped for nothing. And I don’t want to stay to find out why — and no, I saw no woman here. Did she give you a sack? I certainly didn’t see it! What was in it? I wouldn’t have a clue!’

Vatry looked serious. She pulled the sack into her lap, put the ball back in it, then pushed it behind some bedding at the bed’s other end. ‘You say they tried to poison you because you freed one of their slaves…?’

It seemed hopelessly complicated to explain right then that it was the other way around. Pryn nodded.

‘Well,’ Vatry said. ‘I’ve heard of stranger things in this strange and terrible land.’ She looked at Pryn a little sideways. ‘I tell you what. We’ll go to the director. I’ll ask — just once, mind you — if you can come along. I won’t insist. I’m not going to make a nuisance of myself just for your sake. If he says yes, fine. But if he says no, you’ve got to promise me you’ll go on about your business as best you can and not make any fuss.’

‘If he’ll just let me ride along with you for fifty stades — ’

‘We’ll ask,’ Vatry said. ‘He may say yes; he may say no. Now come on.’ She stood and stepped around Pryn.

On the rumpled bedding, where the sack had lain, was a very long knife. It wasn’t a full sword; but two inches beyond the hilt, the blade became…two blades! Both bore the file marks of sharpening on inner and outer edges.

‘Vatry — Oh, Please…one more question?’

‘What?’

‘That is the kind of blade they use in the west — in the Western Crevasse?’

Vatry looked put out. ‘How would I know such things?’

‘I just thought maybe, with your accent — I mean it isn’t southern, it certainly isn’t northern. And it doesn’t sound like island speech — you might be one of those women from…?’ Pryn suddenly wished she hadn’t spoken. She was overcome with the conviction Vatry would turn on her and accuse her of spying from the bushes. She felt herself start to deny it before the accusation was made, and thought desperately: By all the nameless gods, let me be silent! Let me keep still!

And the real Vatry before her, who after all was as good-hearted and sentimental as it was possible to be in such primitive times and still survive, said: ‘It’s just a prop. For the skits. Like this thing — !’ and she pulled the collar from Pryn’s hand, held it up, then tossed it back on the bed, where it clinked against the twinned sword. ‘Come on. And no more about this silliness or I’ll send you on your way right now!’

Cheeks still rouged, eyelids still gilded, the fat man had doffed his feathers for a cloak of coarse canvas and was directing the loading of the scenery being hauled down from the middle wagon, now the skit was over.

Vatry said: ‘My friend here’s in some trouble, it seems, and needs a ride north. She was wondering if you’d let her come along with us — at least for a while.’

‘I wouldn’t think so!’ the fat man said. ‘We can’t just take up strangers like that. There’s hardly enough room for us.’ He looked at Pryn through his fantastic make-up — then smiled! ‘Oh…the little girl from the Kolhari market! How in the world did you end up in this forsaken backwater?’

The recognition made hope leap. ‘Well, I — ’

But the fat man went on: ‘I’m sorry, my puffy little partridge, but we can’t give a ride to every stray we run into — you understand.’

‘I’ll work,’ Pryn said. ‘I’ll do anything!’

The fat man paused, tongue filling one rouged cheek. ‘Well, as I remember, you don’t play the drum very well. You’re obviously not a dancer. Can you sing?’

‘I never — ’

‘Then you’re not a singer.’ He turned to Vatry. ‘You know, we’re in enough trouble as it is, what with Alyx taking off like that last week. I’m trying to keep all the accounts in my head, as well as work up dialogue for the new skit, which nobody seems to be able to — or wants to — remember lines for. Once I make them up, I can’t remember them. I’ve got too many other things to think about if I want to keep this troupe together. Now if your friend here could write down words and keep accounts like Alyx — but she’s only an ignorant mountain girl who’s somehow gotten herself lost in the country. My heart goes out to her, but — ’

‘But I — !’ Pryn interrupted.

‘But you what?’

This is how, after her days among the changeable mysteries of the barbaric south, Pryn came to be riding with the mummers on the north road at evening. (‘I think she’d better stay out of sight until we’re actually under way,’ Vatry said. The fat man said: ‘Ah, it’s one of those, is it? Well, it’s not the first time for us. I doubt it’ll be the last.’ Besides her dictation, accounting, and dialogue coaching duties, at their next performance stop, the director told her, Pryn would take a few gold coins into the audience. During the collection she would wave one, then another over her head and make a show of tossing them into the passing cloaks or baskets. Pryn said: ‘Oh…!’ And when they were actually rolling down the beach, staring out a chink in the wagon door, she passed as close to Ardra’s face as yours is to this book! He was turning to Lavik, who pulled him aside, laughing, and said, ‘Watch out for the baby — !’ He carried screeching Petal.) They didn’t put her in with Vatry. There were already too many other people sleeping in that wagon.

The bed she got was just above one of the musicians’; yes, the one she’d passed with the coins — who turned out to be as well the third wagon’s driver. When they were a goodly handful of stades along the north road, Pryn climbed up the ladder at the wagon’s end and out the roof-trap. She perched in the corner, dangling her feet inside.

The driver sat forward at the edge, holding the reins and not quite humming.

A wagon joggled ahead, beneath tall trees, toward the hillcrest. Behind fields there was just a sight of sea. Clouds banked before them, silver and iron, walls and pillars, towers and terraces, shape behind shape.

‘It looks like a city,’ Pryn said.

Topping the hill, they started down.

The driver glanced back. She had broad cheekbones under odd, foreign eyes. One of her flutes was strapped behind her shoulder. ‘We still have cities to go through before we reach Kolhari — little cities, to be sure. Towns, is more like it. Villages…’ The wagon joggled. She turned to the horses.

‘That’s the city you must learn to read,’ Pryn said. ‘That’s the city you must write your name on — before you can make progress in a real one; at least I think so!’

The driver laughed without looking back. ‘You’re a strange one.’

Pryn watched the clouds.

‘I hear that you can,’ the driver said. ‘Read and write, I mean.’

‘I do all sorts of thing: read, write, free slaves, ride dragons — kill, if I have to.’ Pryn guessed the driver was about twenty-five.

The foreign musician flipped her reins. ‘I wish someone would figure a way to write down music. That’d be something! Then I could be sure to remember my tunes.’

‘I don’t see why it can’t be done.’ Pryn thought: Now I’ve had all sorts of experiences that might be of use to the Liberator among his causes. (The astrolabe was gone, yes, but she had retrieved the iron collar from Vatry’s bed. Perhaps she could fix the lock.) Perhaps when I get to Kolhari…‘If you can write down words,’ she said, suddenly, ‘I don’t see why we can’t find a way to write down…’ And hadn’t some successful musician been pointed out to her in the Kolhari market? ‘I’ll work on it!’ At Kolhari, she might just stop by to see Madame Keyne — oh, if only for a while…

The driver laughed.

Pryn sat a long time staring at the sky.

Now, old city of dragons and dreams, of doubts and terrors and all wondrous expectation, despite your rule by the absent fathers, it’s between us two!