Neveryóna, or The Tales of Signs and Cities

2. Of Roads, Real Cities, Streets, and Strangers

THIS IS HOW, AFTER seven nights’ unchanging stars, eclipsed only by passing clouds or moon glare, Pryn came to be standing on a roadway atop a hill one dark dawn, looking down at port Kolhari.

Fog lay on the city, obscuring detail. But that hulking edifice to the west had to be the High Court of Eagles. East, regular roofs suggested some wide street between — Black Avenue, perhaps, or even New Pavé. She’d heard travelers in the Ellamon market talk of those wonder-ways —

The sea!

Pryn had been looking at the city itself at least that long before the foggy vastness beyond it closed with its right name. It had to be the sea! A mountain girl, she’d never seen so much water — indeed, so much of anything before! Mists lay here and there on gray-flecked black. Obscuring much of the watery horizon, mists became one with gray sky. Well, it was quite as impressive as she’d heard it was. At the shore, like pine needles sticking up through the fog, she saw what must be ships’ masts along the famous Kolhari waterfront. Nearer, roofs of sizable houses lay apart from one another — perhaps wealthy merchants’ homes in the suburb of Sallese or maybe mansions of hereditary nobles in Neveryóna. My fortune, Pryn thought, may hide down there. A memory of her great-aunt returned, in which the old woman wrung her hands. ‘If your father could only see you…’

When Pryn was a baby, her father had died in the army somewhere to the south — of a sudden peacetime fever outbreak rather than wartime wounds. Her mother, when she visited from where she now lived, several towns away, had several times told Pryn the story of the soldier (in her mother’s words) “as black as your father” who had come through Ellamon with the news, much as Pryn’s aunt told the story of the long-dead barbarian. Still, as a child, Pryn had kept some faint fancy of finding that vanished phantom parent.

Down there?

She answered her own dark morning question, as she had answered it many times before, now on a solitary dawn walk through sunny mountain pines, now standing at evening on some shaly scarp, now at a bright trout pool spilling through noon between high, hot rocks: No. (One thing about riding dragons, Pryn reflected; such childish expectations could be, in the momentary wonder of flight, forgotten — not just put aside by active effort.) Her father was dead.

Pryn? That was her own name; and her mother’s — not her father’s gift. Her mother and father had not been overly married before her mother had become pregnant and her father, upon finding out, had gone off to fight for the Empress. “Not overly married” meant that certain bonding rituals had been publicly observed between them, but certain others that would make those early ones permanent had not. Her mother’s abandonment had occurred within a margin of respectability — inconvenient as it was. But then, the army had not been that convenient for her father, either; its stringencies had apparently given him enough appreciation of the domestic life he’d left so that on his death pallet he’d asked a dusky friend to return his sword, shield, and sundry effects to Ellamon — which Pryn’s mother had immediately sold, giving the money to the aunt to maintain her baby while she went to seek work in another town. Growing up with that wise woman and her other cousins had not been so bad.

Pryn was a girl who knew who she was and could now write her name correctly.

Somehow she’d already connected that, as indeed she connected almost all about her she felt to be mature, with accepting that parental death and suppressing those childish fancies that perhaps the black soldier had been mistaken (had found the wrong woman, the wrong city…), or had been part of some trick by a father even more scoundrelly than her mother, when in her cups, sometimes claimed that brave man to have been, or had simply lied from caprice. No, she thought again. He is dead. I am alive.

And my fortune?

Her memory turned to the tale-teller’s city, risen in mist from the waters, its grand dragon guarding the queen’s treasure in those flooded streets.

Sunlight had begun to break through the overcast. Clouds pulled from swatches of blue.

The real city below, under real fog and real sun, the one now giving way to the other, was ominous. She wondered if the tale-teller’s friend — was it Raven? — with her blue beads and her mask and her double blade had ever stood like this, on this rise, this road, looking down on this city as the earth heaved from dark dawn to morning…

Pryn did not hear the hoofbeats till they were almost on her. (Three times over the week she’d hidden in the bushes while mounted men in leather aprons herded dusty, blond men and women, chained collar to collar, along the road ruts. She’d seen slaves chained to planks outside the walls of Ellamon, six or ten together, waiting to be fed. She’d seen slaves, two or three, chained in the sunny corner of the Ellamon market, under the eyes of an overseer, waiting to be bought.) She whirled about, then dashed for the road’s edge. But she had seen the three riders — which meant the riders had seen her.

The three horses hammered abreast of her, halted.

The tallest and, from his nappy beard and open face, the youngest grinned. ‘What are you looking at, girl?’ Some teeth were missing.

Pryn recovered from her crouch, thigh-deep in scratchy brush. ‘Are you slavers?’—though in asking, she’d realized they were not.

Another rider, a weathered man, squat, muscular, and hairy-shouldered, threw back his head and laughed. His teeth, the ones visible, were large, yellow, and sound.

The third was naked, save a cloth tied about his forehead and hanging to his shoulders. ‘Do we look like slavers?’ His voice was rough enough to suggest a throat injury. On the right side of his body, Pryn saw, as his horse wheeled and wheeled back over the road, long scars roped him, chest, flank, and thigh, as though someone had flung blacksnakes at him that had stuck. ‘Do you think we look like slavers, girl?’

Pryn shook her head.

‘Slavers?’ The youngster laughed. Despite his height, Pryn was sure he was not a year older than she. ‘Us, slavers? Do you know Gorgik the Liberator? We’re going to join him and his men at — ’ He stopped, because the other two grimaced. The squat one made half a motion for silence. The youngster leaned forward, more soberly. ‘You want to know if we’re slavers? Well, we have a question for you: Are you one of the Child Empress’s spies, in the pay of the High Court of Eagles?’

Once more Pryn shook her head.

‘That’s what you say.’ The youngster lowered his voice. ‘But how do we know?’ His gappy grin remained. ‘The Liberator isn’t the most popular man in Nevèrÿon. The Empress’s spies are cunning and conniving.’

Pryn stepped onto the road. ‘You know I’m not a spy the same way I know you’re not slavers.’ What she thought was that they might be bandits; she did not want to act afraid. ‘You don’t look like slavers. I don’t look like a spy.’

The youngster leaned even lower, till he looked at her right between his mount’s red ears. ‘While you and I both may very well have seen slavers, and so know what slavers look like, what if we here have never seen a spy…?’

Pryn frowned. She had never seen a spy either.

The squat one said: ‘Spies often look like other than spies. It’s one sign by which you know them.’ He moved thick fingers in the graphite-gray mane.

The naked one with the headrag and the scars said: ‘This road runs from the Faltha mountains to port Kolhari. Which way do you go?’

‘There.’ Pryn pointed toward the city.

‘Good. Come up on my horse. We’ll take you into town.’

Again Pryn shook her head. ‘I can get there by myself.’

The scarred rider pulled a four-foot lance from a holder on his horse’s flank. ‘If you don’t come with us,’ he said evenly, ‘we’ll kill you. Make your choice, spy.’

Pryn thought of bolting from them, thought of running between them, and stood.

The rider held his lance with his elbow against his scarred side so that his forearm was at a right angle to his body. The metal point showed the hammer marks of its forging. ‘Our friend here — ’ he jerked his chin toward the bearded boy — ‘has said more than he should have. You’re going into the city anyway. Ride with us. You may be a spy. We can’t take chances.’

Pryn walked across the road toward his horse. ‘You don’t give me much choice.’

The scarred man said: ‘Sit in front of me.’

Angry and frightened, Pryn reached up to grapple the horse’s hard neck. The naked man bent. He shoved his lance back into its holder and slid his hand under Pryn’s raised thigh to tug her up, while she got one leg awkwardly before his belly. (I’ve climbed on a dragon without help!) As she slid back against him, one of his hands came around her stomach. The mare stamped dirt. The rider behind her, stomach against her, flapped reins before her. She felt him kick the horse — not to a gallop but a leisurely trot. The others, trotting, cantering, trotting again, came abreast. Pryn’s capitulation made her anger more acute. ‘Since I am being punished for what your young friend knows and almost said, at least let me know what it is. Who is this Liberator — and take your hand off my breast!’ She pushed the rider’s hand from where the dark fingers had moved.

The squat rider laughed. ‘You want to know about Gorgik? Once he was a slave; now he’s vowed to end all slavery throughout Nevèrÿon. Some say that someday, if not soon, he may be a minister! Myself, I knew him years ago when he was an officer in the Child Empress’s army. One of the best, too.’ The squat man rubbed a wide, studded belt bound high on hairy ribs. ‘I fought under him — but only for a month. Then they broke up our division and sent me off with another captain. But we’re going to fight under him again — if he’ll have us. Hey, boys?’

‘Aye!’ came from the one boy beside her.

The naked man put his hand lightly back on Pryn’s stomach.

‘Only with him a month, yes.’ The squat rider grew pensive. ‘He won’t remember me. But we loved that man, we did — every one of us under him. And slavery is an evil at least two of us know first hand.’ He laughed again and guided his horse around a branch fallen on the road. Other hooves smashed leaves. ‘That’s why we three go to — ’

‘Move your hand!’ Pryn shoved the naked rider’s arm from where it had again risen. Hoisting herself forward, she glared over her shoulder. ‘I didn’t want this ride! I’m not here to play your dumb games! Cut it out!’

‘Look, girl,’ the rider said from the rags about his dark face. ‘You sit behind me. That way, you can — ’

‘—she can put her hands where she wants!’ cried the bearded youth. His face and the squat one’s held the wide grins of stupid boys.

Pryn decided that, of the three, the bearded youngster was the fool. Till then she’d vaguely thought that, since his age was closest to hers, he might be the easiest to enlist for help. But he talked foolishly and was probably too intimidated by the older two anyway.

Her rider reined. She swung her leg over the horse’s neck and slid down to the road. The squat one backstepped his horse to give her another unwanted hand. (Remember, Pryn thought, as she came up behind one smooth and one scarred shoulder, within the week you have ridden a dragon…) Filthy and frayed vine cord knotted the rags to her rider’s head. Those scars? A mountain girl living in harsh times, Pryn had seen women and men with wounds from injury and accident. What was before her, though, suggested greater violence than the mishandling of plowhead or hunting knife. She put her hands on the rider’s flanks. His flesh was hard and hot. She could feel one scar, knobby and ropy, under her hand’s heel.

Slavery?

The horse trotted.

The flapping headdress smelled of oil and animals. Pryn leaned to the side to see ahead — mostly trees now, with the road’s ruts descending into them. Gripping the horse’s sides with her knees and the rider’s with her hands, she settled into the motion.

Once she thought: A beautiful young queen, abducted on the road by fearful, romantic bandits…But they were not romantic. She was not beautiful. No, this was not the time for tale-teller’s stuff. It was a bit fearful. But as yet, she reflected, she was not full of fear. From the threat of death to the straying hands, it all had too much the air of half-hearted obligation.

Once more she moved her head from behind the flapping cloth and called to the bearded boy, who had been riding beside her almost ten minutes, ‘Where is this Gorgik the Liberator? Go on, tell me.’

Clearly, from boyish excitement, he wanted to. But he glanced at his companions. As clearly, she had been right about his intimidation. ‘You’ll see soon enough,’ he called back across the little abyss of hooves, dust, and wind.

The shift from country to city Pryn never quite caught. Now there was a river by the road. The horses’ hoofbeats changed timbre. She looked down — yes, the road itself along which they trotted was, now, paved with flat stones set in hard mud. She looked up to see green-tiled decorations interspersed with terra-cotta castings on an upper cornice of a wealthy home beyond a stone wall lapped with vines. On the other side of the road she saw an even higher roof, over a higher wall, moving up toward them as the other fell behind.

And the river was gone.

‘You wanted to know where Gorgik the Liberator is?’ her rider called back. ‘Look there!’

They wheeled off the main highway.

Ahead, armed men stood before a gate in another wall. Above, Pryn saw the top story of another great house. Much of the decorative tiling had fallen away. Behind the crenellations a dozen men ambled about the roof, some with spears, some with bows. At the corner one sat on a cracked carving — dragon or eagle she couldn’t tell — looking down into the yard.

The younger and older either side, Pryn’s rider reined at the wooden door in the stone wall, which was half again as high as the youngster on his horse.

The squat one bawled out in a voice much too loud simply to be speaking to the men in leather helmets either side of the gate, with their broad knives hanging at their hips: ‘Go in and tell your master, Gorgik the Liberator, that three brave fellows have come to pledge hands and hearts to whatever end he would put them!’

With the blue eyes and frizzy blond beard of a barbarian — rare enough in northern Ellamon to cause comment when you saw one in the market — a guard stepped toward them, pushed up his helmet; and bawled back: ‘What names might he know you by?’

‘Tell your great and gracious master, Gorgik, that the Southern Fox — ’ he gestured toward Pryn’s rider — ‘and the Red Badger — ’ which was, apparently, the bearded boy — ‘and myself, the Western Wolf — ’ the thick hand fell against his own black rug of a chest — ‘have come to serve him! Ask him what he knows of us, and whether the tales of our exploits that have preceded us are sufficiently impressive to allow us to join his company! Let him consider! We shall return in a few hours to seek admittance!’

The barbarian guard nodded toward Pryn, then said in a perfectly ordinary voice: ‘There’re four of you…?’

In an equally ordinary voice the Western Wolf said: ‘Oh. I forgot the kid.’ He turned back to the gate, took a breath, and bawled: ‘Tell him that the Blue Heron is also among our number and to consider her for his cause!’

Then Wolf, Badger, and Fox, with the Heron behind (thinking of Raven and capital letters), wheeled from the gate. Dust struck up from the road high as the horses’ haunches.

As the great houses drifted by her behind high walls and palm clusters, what Pryn thought was: Here, I am suddenly in this world of men, made to ride when I want to walk, touched when I want to be left alone, and given a new name when I’ve just learned to write my old one, all under some fanciful threat of death because I might be a spy. (Just what tales, she wondered, had they been listening to?) I don’t like it at all, she thought. I don’t like it.

As unclear as the shift between country and city had been, Pryn was equally uncertain — as she was thinking all this — where the change had come between suburb and center. But when the horses clattered across a paved and populous avenue to splash into a muddy alley of stone houses with thatched shacks between, she realized it had.

They crossed another street.

Down another alley water flashed between masts.

They turned onto another avenue. Noise and confusion dazzled her. Living on the edge of a mountain town, without ever really considering herself part of them, Pryn had known the gossipings, prejudices, and rigidities of town life that had played through Ellamon’s quiet streets. But here, the hustle and hallooing made her wonder: How, here, could anyone know anyone?

Twice in one block the Fox’s horse danced aside to avoid someone, first a woman who dashed from the crowds at one side of the street, a four-foot basket strapped to her back, to plunge among people on the other side; second, three youngsters chasing after a black ball. Pryn clung to the Fox’s twisting back. (Naked as Pryn’s rider and muddy to the knees, the little girl grabbed up the black pellet, which had ceased bouncing to roll a ragged course between cobbles. With a barbarian boy in a torn smock tripping behind, the children fled off down another side street.) The horses began to trot once more beside the hurrying men and women; one man hailed a friend across the road; another ran after someone just departed — to tell her one last thing.

When the white-haired woman left the corner, she was deep in conversation with a younger, who wore a red scarf for a sash. A man and a woman servant behind held decorated parasols over them — or tried to. The sunlit edge kept slipping back and forth across the older woman’s elaborate coif and silver combs. Now she pushed bracelets and blue sleeves up her arms and turned to another woman in her party with short hair incongruously pale as goat’s cream. This one — not much more than a girl, really — wore leather straps across bare shoulders; a strap ran down between abrupt, small breasts. She carried several knives at her belt and walked the hot stones barefoot. Pryn saw beyond the scarred shoulder she clung to that another woman servant had despaired of shading this sunken-eyed, cream-haired creature. (Was she yet eighteen? Certainly she was no more than twenty.) She stepped away here, then off there, now looking into a basket of nuts some porter carried by her, now turning to answer the older woman with the combs. A woman at least forty, the servant frowned at her and finally let the parasol shaft fall back on her own shoulder.

Pryn had assumed Fox, Badger, and Wolf had seen them too — but the horses, grown skittish at the traffic, must have distracted them. And the women’s course veered closer than even Pryn had expected —

One of the servants gave a small shriek.

The horses reared.

The white-haired woman turned in startled anger. She stepped back, hands down in blowing blue. The woman with the red scarf at her waist took the older woman’s shoulder and gave a wordless shout of her own. Servants scrambled. One dropped a parasol. The woman with the scarf turned from the older to grab it up.

The horses reared again.

Pryn clutched the Fox and clamped her knees to keep astride. Forehooves clattered to the street. The manservant shouted: ‘Country ruffians! What’s wrong with you! Out of the street, now! Out of the street! Don’t you know enough to let a woman of Madame Keyne’s standing in this city have the right of way? Rein your horses back! Rein them, I say — !’ The Fox’s horse started to rear again, but jarred, stopping.

Pryn felt it ankle to jaw. It was as if a dragon in airborne career had suddenly smashed rock. What had happened was that the small, cream-haired woman had grasped the horse’s bridle and, with a jerk, brought the beast up short.

The little woman’s gray eyes were suddenly centers where lines of effort and anger met. The horse jerked against her grip three times, then stilled. ‘Stupid — !’ the woman got out between tight teeth. The angry eyes swept up by the Fox to meet Pryn’s. The horse quivered between Pryn’s legs. Under Pryn’s hands, the Fox’s scarred shoulder flexed and flexed as he tried to rein his animal from her.

Suddenly the little woman released the bridle and stalked off after the others, who had collected themselves to hurry on, again deep in their conversation. Servants hurried behind them, parasols waving.

The horses moved about one another. Fox, Badger, and Wolf were all cursing: the women, the city, the sun above them, the people around them. Swaying at the Fox’s back, Pryn tried to look after the vanishing group. Now and again, across the crowd, she thought she caught sight of the cream-haired woman behind the party, off in some alley with sea at its end.

‘Get down!’

Pryn looked back at the dirty headdress, scarred shoulder right, unscarred left.

‘Go on, girl!’ the Fox demanded; the horse stilled. ‘We brought you to the city, where you wanted to go. Get down now! Be on your way!’

Confused, Pryn slid her foot back, up, and over, then dropped to the cobbles, with the sore knees and tingling buttocks of a novice rider — dragons notwithstanding. She stepped back from the moving legs, looking up.

The three above her, on their stepping horses, looked down.

The Badger, with his tightly-curled beard, seemed about to ask something, and Pryn found her own lips halting on a question: What of the Blue Heron and Liberator? Despite her anger, her impressment had at least provided a form for her arrival. Aside from roving hands, she’d believed there high-sounding purpose. But as she ducked back (someone else was shouting for them to move), she realized they were, the three of them, country men, as confused and discommoded by this urban hubbub as she was.

‘Are you going to kill her now?’ the Badger blurted, looking upset.

‘She’s no spy!’ The Western Wolf leaned forward disgustedly to pat his horse’s neck. ‘She’s no different from you, boy — a stupid mountain kid run off from home to the city. I’ve a mind to turn you both loose and send you on your ways — ’

Pryn had a momentary image of herself stuck in this confusion with the young dolt.

But the Fox said, ‘Come on, the two of you, and stop this!’ He turned his horse up the street; the two turned after him.

Pryn watched them trot off — to be stopped another half-block on by more people crossing. People closed around Pryn. After she had been bumped three times, cursed twice, and ignored by what must have been fifty passers-by in the space of half a minute, she began to walk.

Everyone else was walking.

To stay still in such a rush was madness.

Pryn walked — for hours. From time to time she sat: once on the steps in a doorway, once on a carved log bench beside a building. The tale-teller’s food had been finished the previous night and the package discarded; so far she’d only thought about food (and home!) when she’d passed the back door of a bread shop whose aromatic ovens flooded the alley with the odor of toasted grain.

Walking, turning, walking, she wondered many times if she were on a street she’d walked before. Occasionally she knew she was, but at least five times, now, when she’d set out to rediscover a particular place she’d passed minutes or hours back, it became as impossible to find as if the remembered landmarks had sunk beneath the sea.

Several workmen with dusty rags around their heads had opened up the street to uncover a great clay trough with planking laid across it, which ran out from under a building where half a dozen women were repairing a wall by daubing mud and straw on the stones with wooden paddles. (Now, she had passed them before…) A naked boy dragged along a wooden sledge heaped with laundry. A girl, easily the boy’s young sister and not wearing much more than he, now and again stooped behind to catch up a shirt or shift that flopped over the edge, or to push the wet clothes back in a pile when a rut shook them awry.

Pryn found herself behind three women with the light hair of southern barbarians, their long dresses shrugged off their shoulders and bunched down at their waists, each with one hand up to steady a dripping water jar. Two carried them on their heads; one held hers on a shoulder.

They turned in front of her, on to a street that sloped down from the avenue, and, as the shadow from the building moved a-slant terracotta jugs, thonged-up hair, and sunburned backs, Pryn followed. (No, she had never been on this street…) There were many less people walking these dark cobbles.

‘…vevish nivu hrem’m har memish…’ Pryn heard one woman say — or something like it.

‘…nivu homyr avra’nos? Cevet aveset…’ the second quipped. Two of the barbarians laughed.

Pryn had heard the barbarian language before, in the Ellamon market, but knew little of its meaning. Whenever she heard it, she always wondered if she might get one of them to talk slowly enough to write it down, so that she could study it and learn of its barbaric intent.

‘…hav nivu akra mik har’vor remvush…’ retorted the second to a line Pryn had lost.

All three laughed again.

Two turned down an alley that, Pryn saw as she reached it, was only a shoulder-wide space between red mud walls. With the sun ahead of them, the two swaying silhouettes grew smaller and smaller.

Ahead, the remaining woman took her jar from her shoulder and pushed through the hanging hide that served for a door in a wood-walled building.

Pryn walked down the hill. Here, many cobbles were missing; some substance, dark and hard, with small stones stuck all over it, paved a dozen or so feet. A woman overtook her. Pryn turned to watch. The woman wore a dirty skirt, elaborately coiffed hair, and dark paint in two wing shapes around her eyes. It was very striking, the more so because Pryn — looking after her narrow back — had only glimpsed her face. Two boys hurried by on the other side, arms around each other’s shoulders. One had shaved his head completely. Both, Pryn saw, wore the same dark eye-paint — before they, too, became just backs ahead of her.

Sitting on steps leading up to another street, beggars argued loudly. One was missing an arm and an ear; among them a woman, with a crutch under one shoulder, its splintered end protruding over the stone step’s edge, complained about a jar of wine she had stolen from the dried-up earthworm of an innkeeper. It had been bad, but she had drunk it anyway and gotten sick and lain — sick — in the street three days. The stump of her missing leg was crusted with scab.

Pryn hurried by.

On Pryn’s right lay a littered yard between three cracked and yellow buildings. In the middle was a circular stone wall, waist high, long boards over its top. It was about three meters across. Pryn walked up to the enclosure and looked down through the strip of black between the weathered planks. Below, a dark head moved to blot a strip of reflected sky.

Again she turned down the street.

Buildings ended; Pryn looked across to an embankment. The bridge entrance had waist-high stone walls either side. A tall woman at the corner newel was fastening a white damasked collar, sewn with metallic threads and set with jewels. It was one of the decorative collar-covers house slaves in wealthier families sometimes used to hide the ugly iron band all slaves wore by law. Having trouble with the clasp, however, the woman removed the cloth to shake it out. Her long neck was bare. She raised the collar-cover again.

The clasp caught — as halfway over the bridge someone hailed her. Along the bridge’s walkway, in colorful robes and veils (many with painted eyes), young women and men stood, leaned, talked, stared, or ambled slowly.

The woman with the collar-cover ran to grab the arm of the heavy, hairy man who’d called. He wore a helmet like the ones Pryn had seen outside the Liberator’s headquarters.

Watching them stroll away, Pryn crossed to the bridge. She reached the post where the woman had stood, put her hand on it, and looked over the stone rail.

Green water glimmered around moss-blotched rocks, clotted with wood, fruit rinds, broken pottery. Some barbarian children climbed out by the carved stanchion stones. Behind her she heard:

‘Twenty!’

‘Five — ’

‘Nineteen!’

‘Five!’

‘Eighteen?’

‘Five, I say!’

‘Seventeen!’

‘All right, eight!’

Pryn looked up. Coming forward through the loiterers was a portly, middle-aged man in a smart toga with red ribbon woven about the white sleeves, neck, and hem. His hand held the shoulder of a naked, green-eyed, barbarian boy, a year or so younger than Pryn. The boy was arguing in his odd southern accent and gesticulating with one closed fist and one open hand: ‘You give me sixteen? I go with you and do it for sixteen! All right? You give me sixteen, then!’

‘Ten!’

‘Sixteen!’

‘Ten!’

‘Sixteen!’

‘Oh, eleven!’

‘No, sixteen!’

‘Sixteen for a dirty little weasel like you?’ returned the man with a grin. ‘For sixteen, I should have you and your three brothers. I’ll give you twelve!’

‘You give me fifteen!’ the barbarian said. ‘You want my brother? Maybe we go find him and he come too. But he don’t do anything, you know? He just watch. For fifteen I go get my brother and — ’

‘Now what would I want with two of you!’ The man laughed. ‘One of you is bad enough. I’ll take you by yourself, and maybe I’ll give you twelve…’

A black man in a long skirt led a camel up over the bridge. The high humps, rocking gait, and clopping hooves made the loiterers smile. The creature had just soiled herself and suddenly decided to switch her tail —

Pryn herself flinched, though no drop struck.

But the man snatched his hand from the boy’s shoulder and rubbed the flat of his palm, now against his gray beard, now against his splattered shoulder, sucking his teeth and shaking his head.

The young barbarian cackled. ‘Now who’s dirty, old turd-nose! You smell like camel pee!’ With a disgusted wave he stalked off over the walkway.

The portly gentleman looked up from his scrubbing, saw the boy leaving, and hurried after. ‘Thirteen! I’ll give you thirteen, but no more!’

Which halted the boy at the stone rail. ‘Will you give me fourteen? You give me fourteen, and I’ll…’

Pryn looked over at the water below. Two women, a soldier between, made their way over the rocks. Just before they went under the bridge, the heftier woman, red wooden beads chained through her black braids, began to pull away; the soldier kept pulling her back. Pryn tried to hear their altercation, but though their heads were only fifteen feet below, from the angle and the children’s shoutings echoing beneath, she could not make it out. She leaned, she listened, wondering what she might do if one of them looked up to see their incomprehensible quarrel observed —

‘What — !’ came an agitated voice behind her. ‘You again…’

Pryn stood and turned, slowly so as not to look particularly interested in what might be going on —

A huge man stood directly behind her, heavily veined arms folded high on his stomach. He wore bronze gauntlets, dark with verdigris and busy with relief. On his chest hung a copper chain.

‘I saw her first — not you!’ the voice came on — not the giant’s. ‘Get away and leave her, now. She’s not to your taste anyway! Don’t you think all of us around here have seen you enough to know what you’re after?’

The giant had a scar down one cheek. Rough hair, some salted white, made a thick, clublike braid over one ear — only it had come half undone. Rough hair shook in the breeze.

Arms still folded, the giant turned his head a little —

‘Now go on! Go on, I say! She’s no good to you! The young ones need my guidance if they’re to make a living here.’ The man talking so excitedly stood a few steps off, shaking a finger at the giant. ‘Go on, now! Why do you stay? Go!’

And Pryn thought: How handsome he is!

The young man’s eyes, blinking between black lashes, looked startlingly blue. But his skin was as dark as Pryn’s or the giant’s beside her, so that she was not sure, really, if he were barbarian or citizen. He wore only a loincloth, with the thinnest blade at his chain belt. His arms were brown and lithe. ‘You don’t need her!’ he continued his complaint. ‘I do! Come on, now. Give her to me!’ On his extended hand he wore many, many rings, two, three, or more on a finger — even two on his thumb. (The fist by his hip was bare.) Stones and metal flashed in the sun, so that it took Pryn moments to register the hands themselves: the skin was gritty and gray. Below the jeweled freight, his nails, overlong at the ends of long, long fingers, were fouled spikes, as if he’d been down playing like a child in the clotted river’s sludge.

Arms still folded, the giant turned his head a little more —

The handsome young man with the beautiful rings and filthy fingers actually jumped. Then he scowled, spat on the flags, turned, and stalked off along the bridge, where a number of loungers and loiterers were still laughing over the camel.

Pryn looked up as the giant turned back to her. In surprise, she swallowed.

Around the giant’s tree-trunk of a neck was a hinged iron collar.

Pryn had always regarded slavers with fear. Perhaps that fear had spread to the notion of slaves themselves. She knew great families sometimes had them. She had seen slaves in the Ellamon market and more recently on the road. But she had never talked to one, nor had she ever heard of anyone who had. To be standing in a strange city, facing one directly — and such a big one! It was quite as frightening as if she were being appraised by a slaver herself!

‘What are you doing here, mountain girl?’ the great man asked in a voice that, for all its roughness, bore a city accent.

‘Looking…for someone — ’ Pryn stammered. It seemed she must answer something. ‘A friend of mine. A woman.’ Later she would think that it was only after she’d started to speak that the image of the tale-teller’s Raven, with her mask and her double blade, leapt into her mind like a protective demon. ‘But she’s not here, and I…’ She looked at the people about the bridge. ‘I was with some men, before; they were looking for someone called the Liberator…a man named Gorgik.’

The big man leaned his head to the side. ‘Were they, now?’ Shaggy brows drew down.

‘They were going to keep me with them at first, because they thought I was a spy. For the Empress. Then they realized how silly that was, and how difficult it would be trying to keep track of me in the city. So they turned me loose.’ She took a breath. ‘But now I don’t know where to go!’ The next thought struck the same way the memory of Raven had a moment back. ‘But I’ve ridden a dragon! My name is Pryn — I can write it, too. I read, and I’ve flown on a dragon’s back above the Faltha mountains!’

The giant grinned. A third of one front tooth had broken off, but the rest were whole enough. ‘You’ve flown on a dragon above the Falthas, over the narrow-minded, provincial Hold of fabled Ellamon…?’ He unfolded gauntleted arms.

Each callused finger, Pryn saw, was thicker than three of hers bunched together. She nodded, more because of his grin and his recognition of her home than for his judgment of it.

‘And did you bring dried dragonfruit to the market and try to sell it there to unwary tourists as eggs of the fabled beasts themselves, you dragon-riding scamp?’ The grin softened to a smile. ‘You see, I have been through your town.’

‘Oh, no!’ Pryn exclaimed. ‘I’d never do that!’ Though she knew of girls and boys who had, she also knew it was precisely these — at least the girls — who ended up imprisoned as grooms in Ellamon’s fabled corrals. ‘If my aunt ever heard I’d done a thing like that, she’d beat me!’

The man laughed. ‘Come with me, mountain girl.’

‘What are you doing here?’ Pryn blurted. Talking had turned out to be easy enough; but the notion of going with the slave frightened her all over again.

The shaggy eyebrows raised. ‘I, too, was looking for…a friend.’

Pryn found herself staring at the collar. Did slaves, she wondered, have friends? Did this slave want to make friends with her?

The man said: ‘But since I’ve found you instead, I’ll put such friendships off for a while.’

‘Are you going to take me to your master?’ Pryn asked.

The giant looked a little surprised. ‘No.’ Then surprise dissolved back into the scarred smile. ‘No, I wasn’t going to do that. I thought we might walk to the other end of the bridge. Then, if there were someplace you wanted to go, I’d take you there. After that, I’ll leave.’

Pryn looked down at the slave’s feet: horny, dirty, cracked at the edge, barred with ligaments under tangled veins, the ankle’s hock blocky beneath the bronze greave. Above bronze, calf hair curled over the chased rim. That’s not a foot, Pryn thought. That’s a ham someone’s halved and flung down on the street! She looked at his chest. On the copper chain hung a bronze disk the size of her palm — really it was several disks, bolted one on top of the other, with much cut away from the forward one, so that there were little shapes all over it with holes at their points; and some kind of etching on the disk beneath…Around the rim were markings in some abstract design. She looked at his belly. It was muscular, hairy, with a lot behind it pushing muscle and hair forward. He wore five or six loose belts, a thick one and a thin one of leather, one of braided rope, one of flattened silver links, and one of ordinary chain. They slanted his hips at different angles. From one hung a wide, shaggy sheath; from another, some kind of purse; attached to another was a net of mail that went between his legs (a few links had broken) to pouch the rougher and darker genital flesh. She looked again at his face.

He had raised his hand to gnaw a thumbnail.

Pryn thought: Is this how people have looked at him when they purchased him at some auction…? Her cheeks and knees suddenly heated.

The scarred face moved toward some question, but he dropped his hand and smiled. ‘Come. Let’s walk.’

And somehow she was walking with him along the bridge.

‘How long have you been here?’ he asked.

‘In the city?’ She looked up. ‘Since this morning.’

‘I thought it couldn’t be longer.’ He chuckled. ‘Do you know where you are?’

‘You mean in Kolhari?’

‘Do you know where in Kolhari you are?’

Pryn looked at the men and women loafing and leaning on the bridge’s low wall. She shook her head.

He pointed with a thick thumb over the side. ‘That muddy ditch there is the Khora Spur. Three-quarters of a mile up, it runs off the Big Khora. Both go down to the sea, to make this neighborhood in front of us into an island in the middle of town. It’s also called the Spur — the oldest and poorest section of the city. Right now it’s mostly inhabited by barbarians, recently from the south. But it tends to house whoever is poor, new, or down on their luck.’

‘Do you and…and your master live there?’

The big man considered a moment. ‘You might say I do,’ which struck Pryn as a complex answer for a simple question. ‘This street here, running across the bridge, is the upper end of New Pavē. It runs back up into the commercial part of the city, crosses Black Avenue, and finally turns along the sea to become part of the Kolhari waterfront. Here, at this end, it’s called Old Pavē. The bridge itself? We call it the Bridge of Lost Desire, though it had another name, officially, thirty years ago, when all of Kolhari was known as Neveryóna; but I don’t remember what it was. The Bridge of Lost Desire is the current one. On it, you’ll find working most of the city’s — ’

Ahead, a man shrieked.

Pryn looked at her companion — who hadn’t looked at all.

When she looked back, though most people had only moved a step or turned by no more than a small angle, the shriek had created a center:

At it, the handsome young man buried bare fingers in black braids to shake the heavy young woman’s head — a red wooden bead broke from its chain, fell to the flags, and rolled.

‘What do you mean…!’ the young man shouted, shaking his jeweled fist about his shoulder. ‘I don’t want to hear that from you! He didn’t give you enough? No, not from you! What do you mean! Tell me! No, I don’t want to hear it…!’ As he shook, the woman seemed intent on keeping her face blank, her arms limp, and her large feet under her.

Suddenly the young man threw her head away, stepping back. ‘You don’t think I’ll do anything to you? You don’t?’ He struck his dirty, ringed fist back against his own chest, grinding. ‘Look — ’ He shoved his hand on past his shoulder; the beautiful features grimaced — ‘if I do that to myself — ’ Points and edges had caught the smooth skin as though it were rough fabric, to tear a two-inch cut, from which blood ran, turning aside at his nipple to dribble down his flank — ‘what do you think I’ll do to you? Look — ’ Suddenly turning, he struck his ringed fist on the arm of the nearest bystander, a boy whose made-up eyes widened as he backed away, blood welling through his fingers where he clutched his arm (someone grabbed the boy and called, ‘Hey, now! What are you doing, now — ! Come on…!’) — ‘if I do that to him — and I don’t even know the little faggot — what do you think I’ll do to you!’ Working himself up, dancing about, the handsome young man suddenly lunged, ringed hand open and falling toward her face —

The woman flinched.

Then something very complicated happened.

The hand stopped.

One thing making it complicated was that, unlike you and me, Pryn had been watching the woman (who was about Pryn’s age and Pryn’s size). What had first seemed a kind of apathetic paralysis in her, Pryn saw, was actually an intense concentration — and Pryn remembered a moment when, bridling her dragon, the wings had suddenly flapped among the bushes, and for a moment she’d thought she would completely lose control of it; and all she could do was hang on as hard as possible and look as calm as possible, trying to keep her feet from being jerked off the mossy rocks; for Pryn it had worked…

Another thing making it complicated was that Pryn had not been watching the man she was with.

And he had not been watching the encounter.

We’ve spoken of a center the encounter had created. The big man’s course took them within a meter of it. He had not stopped walking; and because Pryn had not been watching him, she had not stopped walking either.

As they came within the handsome young man’s ken, his hand had halted.

His head jerked about, his face for a moment truly, excitingly ugly. ‘All right!’ he demanded. (Now they did stop.) ‘What is it, then? You want to be the Liberator of every piece of camel dung on this overground sewer?’

The woman with the beaded hair did not look at Pryn’s companion, but suddenly stalked off, arms folded across her breasts in what might have been anger, might have been embarrassment. Five other women, waiting outside the circles within circles, closed about her, one holding her shoulder, one leaping to see over the others’ if she were all right — as though they had not seen them either.

The handsome young man took a step after them, then glanced back at the giant, as if unsure whether he had permission to follow. Apparently he didn’t for he spat again and, making a bright fist by one hip and a soiled one by the other, turned his bleeding breast away and walked off in the other direction.

People looked away, turned away, walked away; and there were three, half a dozen, a dozen, and then no centers at all to the crowd. Pryn looked at her companion.

Examining his knuckles, the giant moved his gnawing on to another nail. Once more they began to walk.

As they passed more onlookers, Pryn demanded, ‘Who was he…’

‘Nynx…’ the giant said pensively. ‘I think someone told me that was his name.’ He put his hand to his belly, scratching the hair there with broad nubs. ‘He manages — or, better, terrorizes — some of the younger women too frightened to work here by themselves.’

‘You must have beaten him up in a fight, once!’ Pryn declared; she had heard of such encounters between men in her town. ‘You beat him up, and now he’s afraid you might beat him up again…?’

‘No.’ The giant sighed. ‘I’ve never touched him. Oh, I suppose if it came to a fight, though he’s less than half my age, I’d probably kill him. But I think he’s been able to figure that out too.’ He gave a snort that ended in the scarred, broken-toothed smile. ‘Myself, I go my way and do what I want. Nynx — if that is his name — reads my passings as he will. But from the way he reads them, I suspect I will not have to kill him. Someone else will do it for me, and within the year I’ll wager. I’ve seen too many of him.’ He gave another snort. ‘Such readings are among the finer things civilized life teaches. You say you can read and write. You’ll learn such readings soon enough if you stay around here.’

‘What did he want with me, before?’ Pryn asked.

‘Probably the same thing he wanted from the girl. There used to be a prostitutes’ guild when I was a youngster — lasted up until a few years ago, in fact. It retained its own physicians, set prices, kept a few strong-armed fellows under employment for instant arbitration. They rented out rooms in half a dozen inns around here at cheap, hourly rates — today they charge double for an afternoon’s hour what they charge you to spend the night alone. With all the new young folk in from the country, you see, the old guild has moved out to Neveryóna, and its established members have all become successful hetaeras and courtesans. The new lot struggle for themselves, now, here on the bridge with no protection at all.’ The giant went on rubbing his stomach. ‘Beer,’ he remarked pensively after a moment. ‘I hear it was invented not more than seventy-five years back by barbarians in the south. Whoever brought its fermentation up to the cities has doomed us to a thousand years of such bellies as mine — ’ He glanced at Pryn — ‘and yours!’ He laughed.

Pryn looked down at herself. She didn’t know the word ‘beer’ and wondered if it could be responsible, whatever it was, for her plumpness.

As they neared the bridge’s end, the giant said: ‘Here, why don’t I show you through the — ’

The naked boy who ran around the newel to stop just before them, if he were not the barbarian she’d seen before with the portly man in the toga, could well have been one of his fabled brothers. Green eyes blinked, questioning, at the giant, at Pryn, and back.

The giant said: ‘Not now, little friend. Perhaps later on — I’ll come meet you this evening, if I remember. But not now.’

The boy held his stance a moment, then ran off.

‘Come,’ the slave said, before Pryn could question the encounter. ‘Let me show you around the Spur’s most interesting square — the Old Kolhari Market.’

For beyond the bridge stretched rows of vending stalls, colorful booths with green and gray awnings, and single- or double-walled thatched-over sheds. Porters pushed between them with baskets of fruit, tools, grain, pots, fabric, fish — some were even filled with smaller baskets. Women wheeled loud barrows over red brick paving. Here and there, brick had worn down till you could see ancient green stone beneath. As they walked into the square — five times the size of the market in Ellamon, at least — the tall slave, whom, till now, Pryn had thought of as friendly but somehow reticent, began to talk, softly, insistently, and with an excitement Pryn found stranger and stranger.