Neveryóna, or The Tales of Signs and Cities

3. Of Markets, Maps, Cellars, and Cisterns

‘THE CITY FASCINATES — AS all who come to it expect it to. Do certain country markets necessarily secrete cities about themselves? Must a nation raise markets, and cities around them?’ The giant slowed as they entered between two rows of stalls. Those left held wooden rakes and brass-headed mallets. Those right were filled with leafy green, knobbly yellow, and smooth red vegetables. ‘The city sits in the midst of empire, a miniature of all that surrounds it: a map on which — true — you cannot read distances and directions, but on which you can mark qualities of material existence as well as the structure of certain spiritual interactions. People come from the country to the city with country wares, country skills; you need only look at who walks in its streets, who lives in its hovels and High Courts to know what is abroad in the land. I told you, over there live the barbarians most recently up from the south? A bit west, above the Khora, is a neighborhood of northern valley folk who still wear pastel robes, loose hoods pulled up about the old women’s faces and thrown back from the corn-rowed heads of the men, their hems stained to the knees with brackish streetmuds that would never soil them in their own greenwalled land. Two streets below is an enclave of desert families, the men with copper wires sewn about their ears, the women with tell-tale dots of purple dabbed on their chins. If you walk the unpaved alleys between, you will see desert boys, in moody clusters stalking close to the mud walls, suddenly spot a lone valley dweller in pale, ragged orange crossing at the corner; and you will hear the desert youths call the same taunts that, as grown warriors in the land of their parents, they would cry from their camels as they rode to meet the long-robed invaders.

‘But look!

‘The Old Market here is only a particularly recomplicated inscription of the nation around it. The woman there, out in the sun, turning her dripping pig on its spit above that pan of coals, where folks gather to buy her good slice on a piece of bread for a coin — her mothers cooked such pigs for holy festivals in a province ninety stades to the west, where, in the proper week of spring, you can still ride by to the smell of hot crackling. Across the crowd from her, you see that bearded man forking baked yams into the trays strapped to the necks of the waiting boys? Those boys will run with them back across the bridge and up through the cobbled streets, by shops and inns and merchants’ offices, selling them for iron coins — just as boys sell them from door to door in the province of Varhesh, where the bearded man hails from. And the yellowing chunks of sugar beet those children coming toward us are munching? The youngsters buy them from a vendor just down the way, who cuts them with a curved copper knife. Once a month, he makes the journey to his home province in Strethi, where he loads his cart full. The knife he uses here in the market is the same sort as the women of the Avila plains use at the beets’ harvesting. What is sold him there, what makes its way here, is part of the harvest that does not go into the great stills of that region in which are fermented its various poisonous rums — which, indeed, one can buy only three stalls away out of the sealed clay jars that stand under the dark red awning. But all those foods so quickly obtained here, those foods one can munch or sip as one wanders from stall to stall, looking for staple purchase, are signs of the great distilleries, piggeries, religious festivals, and diligently hoed fields about the nation, the ease of consumption here murmuring of the vast labors occurring a province, or three provinces, or ten provinces away.

‘But see that woman, with the dark rags around her head: on the rug before her are ranged some three-legged cooking pots — she’s from a good family, though she’s fallen on hard times. Many of her pots are chipped. Most of them are second-hand. Such domestic tools tell much of the organization of our nation’s industry, if not its economy.

‘Glance at the stand beside hers. When I passed this morning, a man was observing those sharpened sticks which the women in the most uncivil parts of our nation use to break up the soil in their turnip fields — and which the wealthy matrons in the suburbs of Sallese and Neveryóna use in their gardens when a passion for a single bloom compels them to tend a foot of soil with their own hands, draping protective gauzes over it against marauding insects, wrapping the stem in wet fabric, mixing chopped meat and grain with the broken earth, and chanting certain spells to encourage one rare pink and gold orchid to bloom — while acres are left to the gardener. Do you see: the same man is back, trying to sell the vendor his bundle of raking sticks, each of which has a head carved into three prongs. From what we can see of the interchange, it looks as if the vendor will actually take them.

‘But come around here, and see the stall that sits just behind them. What a great stack of four-legged cooking pots! Even as we stand here, the barbarian women passing by have bought two; now three more — now another man is running up; and the helper has just sold another at the stall’s far side.

‘These challenges of commerce sign the endlessly extended and attenuated conflict of local custom against local custom, national tool against national tool, that progression of making about the land so slow only the oldest can see it, and then usually only to lament the passing of the good old days, the good old ways, the way things used to be, and be done.

‘Three-legged pots? Four-legged pots? Single-pronged yam sticks? Three-pronged yam sticks? We observe here stages in a battle that, in one case, may have been going on for decades and, in another, may only be beginning. Only after another decade or three or seven will wanderers in this market, ignorant of its beginnings, be able to see its outcome. But come down this way.

‘That’s right, along here. Next to the domestic and agricultural tools, this is my favorite stall. Do you see what’s spread out over this counter before us? This pair of calipers here is locked to a single measure and thus cannot really measure anything. Observe these mirrors, thonged at the four corners so they may be tied to various parts of the body. Those little disks of wood, you’ll see if you pick them up, mimic coins, though no weight or denomination is marked on center or exergue. Unfurl that parchment there; that’s right — the surprise on your face is a double sign, reminding me that you know how to read and at the same time announcing that you cannot read what is inked on that skin. (Yes, put it back, before the old man with the tattooed cheeks sees us — he is one of the touchiest vendors in the market.) The northern sage who went to the cave of Yobikon and sat with his ink block, brush, and vellum in the fumes issuing from the crevices in the cave floor to take the dictation of the goddess of the earth could not read those marks either, be assured. Still, he bears the honor of having been amanuensis to deity. These scripts are its trace. Those wooden carvings, with thongs on them like the mirrors, are tied about the bellies of male children in the tribes of the inner mountains of the outer Ulvayns. They assure prowess, courage, and insight in all dealings with goats and wild turtles. These metal bars? From the markings on them, clearly they are some sort of rule. But like the calipers, the graduations on them are irregular and do not come all the way down to the edge, so that it would be hard, if not impossible, to measure anything with them. But you have guessed by now, if you do not already know such trinkets from your own town market: each of these is magic. The one-eyed woman, the tattooed man’s assistant, back in the corner pretending to sort those bunches of herbs but really watching us, will, if she takes a liking to you, explain in detail the magical tasks each one of these tools is to perform. You would be astonished at the complexities such tasks can encompass or the skill needed to accomplish them — tasks and skills at least as complex as any of the material ones employing the tools we have already seen a single aisle away. But can you follow how such tools map and mirror the material tasks and skills we have left behind? How many of these are concerned with measurement! (Doubtless the scroll is an inventory of spiritual artifacts and astral essences.) Each is the sign of the thirst and thrust to know; each attempts to describe knowledge in a different form, each form characteristic of some place in the national mind: once again, this map does not indicate origins, only existences. But the one-eyed woman has signaled to the tattooed man, who is coming over. We’d best pass on. From fear of contagion, if not true sympathy for the heightened consciousness these tools presuppose and require, he is perhaps the most insistent among these vendors that whoever handles his wares should purchase.

‘But you have noticed those barrels there. Have such casks come as far north as Ellamon? They contain the southern beer that so puzzled you a moment back, though in Kolhari it has become the passion of nearly every free and honest laborer. The thirsts it satisfies, you might well mark, not only mirror but mock those spiritual thirsts we’ve been talking of. Certainly the children lugging up their double-handled beer pots, ready to carry them here and there for a working aunt, or father, or uncle, or the houseboys and market maids there with their waxed leather bags, the insides still moist with yesterday’s draught, attest to the materiality of such thirsts, however much our poets try to spiritualize them. Note that young woman, with her pitcher, hesitating behind the crowd lined up at the syphon.

‘I shall talk more of her in a moment.

‘But have you marked the smaller barrels further down, attended by that wizened little woman with country labor stamped all over the flesh of her hands and in the muscles that band her wrinkled cheeks? Notice how she holds her bristly chin high, which means her neck once wore an iron collar — wore it many years. The casks she oversees contain a delicate cider from the family estate, high in the northern hills, of the late Baron Inige. Its taste pleased his family and his family’s guests for generations; and in his own lifetime, thanks to his interest in horticulture, that taste reached a piquancy unsurpassed in the nation — at least that’s the claim of those who can afford to pursue such investigations. One or two of our more prosperous waterfront taverns managed to import it only a handful of years ago, making the journey up to the hills and bringing it back in their own carts. In the last year, the estate itself, fallen on hard times since the baron’s death, has let that freed retainer there bring in a few barrels from time to time to sell in the market here.

‘But I was speaking of the young woman who hesitates with her pitcher between the two. For, though I have never been inside her home, simply from passing her in the market, seeing her on the street with her mother, watching her run across Black Avenue to greet her father, I have learned a great deal about her — and her situation. Her father is a workman, who loves his beer with the best, but who, some years back, had the notion and the money to hire several of his fellows, specializing in the laying of underground clay pipes; his skill and the skill of the artisans he employs has improved his condition in every way. The girl’s mother was once a washer woman who laundered fine fabrics for the families of Sallese; but when she and her husband built their new home in the prospering tradespeople’s district on the west side of the city, a sense of decorum made her sacrifice her laundering to the very real duties of her newer, larger home. The girl’s brother, as a boy, was apprenticed to a successful pot spinner down in Potter’s Lane to replace an erring youth who disappeared from the same position into the barbaric south with money and franchise orders some years back. The girl is terribly proud of her younger brother, for you know that the very gods of our country are represented as patient, meticulous craftsfolk, who labor at the construction of the world and who may never be named till it is completed.

‘The girl plays beautifully on several of the stringed instruments they carve so well in the east. When she was a baby, a wise woman, begging from door to door in the city, saw the child, cast bones and wooden coins on the pavement, and read, in the array, of a great and profitable musical talent asleep in the infant’s fingers. The parents accordingly sat the child to study with one of the eastern music masters who had recently located here, as soon as she was old enough. The prophecy seems to be fulfilling itself, and her talent has awakened. Already she has composed several sacred litanies, and several times, now, her mother, presuming upon that old acquaintance with the mistresses for whom she once did washing, has taken the girl to wealthy homes in the suburbs to play. Several times, now, the girl has been requested to entertain at gatherings of the lords in Neveryóna, for which she and her family have been handsomely compensated. Only last week, in fact, she was playing some of her compositions for the discerning and glamorous lunching about a flowered and bestatued pool, when an elderly baronine, moved deeply by the young woman’s song, suggested, so rumor has it, that if the artist would compose something in praise of the Child Empress, an audience might be arranged at the High Court itself. Yes, that is the very girl we are observing now, her pitcher on her thumb, hesitating between sophisticated cider and common beer.

‘Certainly, by now, you have your own notions about which direction she will finally turn. Will contagion or sympathy govern her choice? How many of the factors I have outlined will go into the final overbalancing we call decision? All, I suspect — if only because she is a particularly sensitive person. (Some say her voice and fingers were fashioned by our gods for some celestial craft-fair competition!) In her own songs she has praised both the delicacy of the one drink and the heartiness of the other.

‘Come, let’s leave her to choose, appreciative of the complexities that play now so silently on her spirit. Only be certain that whichever way she turns, it will be to assuage thirsts far more intricate than those the tongue alone can know. Now take your place in line with me, to drink the water from this gushing, public stone. The underground steam that feeds the fountain here, before brick and pavement encircled it, closed over its tributary, and civilized it, is what first made this a trading spot back when all around was merely a brambly field, with the wide, rocky brook of the Khora running by it to the sea. But remember, as you touch your lips to the water breaking and flashing on your palms, your own movements here will sign, as much as anyone else’s in the market — to the proper reader — aspirations, ideals, and nostalgias that pervade an empire.

‘Have you drunk your fill?

‘Good.

‘Let’s wander on.

‘Do you see those yellow and blue birds twittering in their reed cages — loosely woven baskets is what they really are. The mottled objects piled on the counter across from them are the eggs of the same caged creatures, collected in the wild and pickled in vinegar till their shells soften and their insides congeal as though steeped in boiling water. Right above and to the left, on the shelves at the stall’s back, are still the same birds, this time carved in wood or molded of clay, but painted far more gaudily than the colors their live models ever wear, even when they flash in the sun-dapplings between frond and vine in the southern jungle. Note that short, grave man with the shaved head who stops to make a purchase, now at one counter, now at the next. The white collar-cover he wears hides the same iron I carry on my neck. Owned by a wealthy family visiting the city, he is making purchases his master and mistress decided on during a trip here yesterday afternoon. That someone could want all three — live bird, pickled egg, and carved bird — seems to sign a voraciousness in our attitude toward that odd construct of civilization, nature, a voraciousness abroad wherever the conceiving engine that builds villages, towns, and cities is at work, almost as if the central process of civilization itself were to take a “natural” object and possess its every aspect: the thing itself, its material productions, its very image.

‘Look down that aisle, and you will see a fragment of the same process without the mediation of middleman and purchase order.

‘Those good folk are running with their baskets and bags toward that vendor wheeling his barrow up from the waterfront. A mountain dweller, you have probably never heard of the fare he vends, for until a month ago no one would have considered it fare — except perhaps some of the more primitive shore tribes along those bournes where civilization has not yet inserted its illusory separation of humans from the world which holds them. Till then, what this man now sells at exorbitant prices was part of the slough and garbage that tangled a fisherman’s net: lobster, crab, oyster, shrimp…About a month back, down where the waterfront gives way to the beach, some of our city’s more fashionable young folk were taking an evening stroll, when they saw a madman on the shore devouring the soft, inner flesh of these repulsive, armored sea beasts. Nearly all of the company were properly appalled; but one, however, thought she caught a glint of some mysterious and unnameable pleasure in that madman’s eye. Later, with a hammer and a wooden blade, she contrived to get hold of one of these creatures for herself and taste of its protected innards. Now it has been known for years among primitive fishers that a clam eaten at the wrong time of year can kill; or, indeed, that these beasts fall into noxious decay even faster than fish in general. Yet such is civilization’s appetitive passion that it cannot allow the madman lone access to his skewed, mystical, minuscule pleasure, rare enough in the circling contradictions of his unreason. I say this incident took place a month ago; but really — it has hardly been a full three weeks.

‘Look at them!

‘Have you seen a more animated and enthusiastic group about any vendor here? Already woodcarvers and metalworkers have begun to fashion special mallets, picks, pliers, and prongs to assist in extracting the delicate, sweet flesh. No doubt the jeweler will shortly cast the same implements in gold, set about with agates and tourmalines — for these new flavors will reach the imperial palate before the songs of our young musician reach the imperial ear, despite the baronine’s entreaty. News of these flavors, these pleasures will penetrate the walls of the palace; news of this fashion in food will work its way throughout the land. And I tell you this: if one could map the progress of this news — fascinating, outrageous, appalling, marvelous — moving north, south, east, west of us, one would have a guide to the most trustworthy communications network we possess, putting to shame the Empress’s highways and winded couriers, jogging along with messages from merchant, bandit, politician, and pleasure-seeking prattler alike in their hide sacks.

‘But I see you staring down that aisle there, at the end of which the people gather. Above them, the old woman in the young boy’s mask is helping to set up the platform for the performance. Those mummers cast another sort of reflection of our country; as you can see, it’s one that many are anxious to watch. The actor there in the mask of a girl, with bits of glass in his hair, supposed to be diamonds, and the white dress down to the ground, no doubt represents our beloved Child Empress Ynelgo, whose reign is personable and practical. It is an image our nation holds of her from her ascension — back, indeed, when I was about your age now. The other one there, in the mask of a man with a scar down his cheek and who wears a wooden version of the iron collar, would seem to be the Liberator, Gorgik, of whom you spoke. So, we are to have a political satire. The populace will see an amusing distortion of its own preconceptions of these figures; as the audience recognizes the skewly familiar, it will laugh. Had the Liberator or the Empress the patience, no doubt each might learn something of the way he or she is publicly perceived. But I certainly do not. And the Empress is not the sort to come wandering, veiled and obscured by time and inaccessibility, into the publicity of her realm. But from the props and painted pieces coming out of the wagon, I suspect the scene is to be Kolhari. The young actor there, dressed as an old woman vendor? The little girl playing a potato-selling boy? I wouldn’t be surprised if they had chosen to lay their fictional encounter here in the Old Market itself, just where we have been walking. Come away, girl. The truth is that both our Empress’s conservative supporters and our Liberator’s radical adherents will soon lose patience with the liberal distortions the mummers will impose upon the real that, finally, both agonists share. Which side, given its head, would shut them down the faster is as moot as the decision between cider and beer. Both parties I know would rather opt for a more realistic portrayal of, say, a simple encounter, in a market place such as this, between a real young girl who might, indeed, have really dreamed of being a queen and a real slave who might well have had some real thoughts on the desirability of freedom: what these two saw, what they said, their points of human contact, their inevitable moments of distrust and hostility — that, certainly, is the performance the radicals would applaud. Of course an equally realistic encounter, say, between an aging woman who must bear not only the idiotic title Child but also the real weight and responsibilities of state with, say, a real slave who, indeed, had really dreamed of becoming a political leader and a savior of his class, an encounter in which we might observe the real ignorances of such a slave and the queen’s real sympathy and wisdom about the very real political matters the slave would correct by overweening will and inefficient magic — that is the performance the conservatives would applaud. Either would be preferable to the shenanigans shortly to be abroad. But as we make our demands in the name of that meeting point between ethics and art, we overlook that both radical and conservative versions are no less concoctions than the concoction we would have them replace: one has a real queen and an unreal liberator, the other has a real slave and an unreal queen. And it is the notions of reality and unreality themselves which finally become suspect when either one is mirrored in art, much less when both are mirrored together. The liberal audience, claiming to be equally tolerant, or intolerant, of both sides (and one suspects, alas, they really comprehend neither), no doubt reads, as we have been reading, for the final sign of the mummers’ value: they may be equally offensive to both sides. And it is only some perception of that reading — and not the fact or referent of the performance which is read — that allows the agonists to suffer their antics. I can only Humph and walk off in silence, because I am the man I am…a slave to all the forces whose flow and form we have been trying here to mark. You are a free woman, which, from my position, means you are probably ignorant of what forces compel you.

‘I would not be one of them.

‘Stay here, if you like, chained by their lies and illusions no less magical than the coins and calipers on the counter behind. But, I see, you are following me…Is it inertia, fear, or merely politeness that makes you abandon their enthralling spectacle of variety and unity, singly expressed by the best-intentioned misdirection, for my monotone drone, picking at awkward distinctions?

‘Myself, I can find the toys for sale at this counter amusing, at least for a while. The clay dolls for young boys and girls; these rubber balls for older children; the gaming boards for young men and women — like material tools, each seems to proclaim its intelligible task: how to erase boredom, in some useful way, from the leisure civilization imposes. The answers these toys suggest at first seem innocent enough: “We shall initiate amusing rehearsals of future tasks without the goad of responsibility,” they declare. “We shall exercise the body, while it is free of the paralyzing knowledge of real dangers that hang on the outcome of necessary action. We shall stimulate the mind without the mind-numbing political constraints a truly meaningful decision imposes.” Considered not in terms of their ends but of their origins, however, they become more ominous.

‘The doll? Who decided that the young should rehearse the physical care of infants, so that they know them as objects to be bounced, cuddled, or abandoned when boring before they know their own, real infants as living beings full of the responsiveness anterior to language that is the basis of all expressed reason?

‘The ball? Who decided that youths should develop speed, agility, and rhythm before they have become comfortable with the physical realities of endurance, perseverance, and steadfastness that alone can make any play, political or artistic, yield true satisfaction?

‘The game board? Who decided that the women and men of our nation must stimulate the faculties of strategy and count before they have learned to note, analyze, and synthesize — the knowledge that alone can direct such skill toward responsible employment?

‘And here we have become entrapped in our own gaming, faced with the unpredicated and unpredicted consequences of our lightest notion. Such oppressive threats are precisely what we fall to the moment we try to free ourselves from the oppressions of the game of art. But where have we wandered to?

‘I do not recognize these aisles and counters. Do they sell the newest wares that I have not the experience to read? Do they sell the oldest, whose secrets I have never before been able to penetrate? Lost in unfamiliar lands, we are merely creatures uninformed, foundering, asking, and finding. Lost in the map of those lands that is the city among them and the market within it, we become one with the map, cartographer and cartograph, reader and read; the separating line can only be scribed with the magic rule and measured with magic calipers, its position and direction only obtainable with an astrolabe set to unknown constellations in an imaginary sky, the distinction in the value of the respective sides calculable only in unmarked coins — a division which vanishes as we stare at it, which, as it vanishes, erases with it all freedom, all power and possibility of choice.

‘Thus lost, the only image we are left is that of ourselves as one of those great, nameless craftsfolk, intently playing at a game equally nameless, whose end is the creation of precisely that reality — and unreality — so obviously bogus when it is politically decreed or imaginatively modeled: that image is, I fear, the final concoction worshiped as freedom by the totally enslaved. But — be thankful, girl! — we have reached the market’s edge and are almost loose from this insidious commercial pollution!’

Pryn had listened to much of this, but from time to time she had let her mind, if not her feet, wander down alleys entirely different from the ones down which her companion would have led her. She forced open the ripe fig a woman a stall behind had handed her and bit the sweet purple, flecked with white seeds, turning her own thoughts, which had gone their own ways as she had strolled between awning and awning.

Occasionally the huge slave’s monologue had seemed to coincide with the real market they walked through; more times than not, however, it seemed to exist on quite another level. One man with a green-painted tray, for example, had grinned at Pryn and handed her a succulent peach, which Pryn had eaten to its red, runneled pit — then thrown that pit down on to the brick. It had all occurred without a mention from the giant extemporizing beside her. Another example? The musician whom the slave had described was certainly as sweet and attractive and docile a creature as might have existed. The young woman Pryn had actually seen, however, hesitating between beer barrel and cider keg, was rather shabbily dressed in what may once have been an elegant bit of fabric; now it was quite frayed and stained and bunched about her, every which way. Her hair was wild, her hips were wide, her shoulders narrow, and she blinked and turned, from booth to booth, one finger hooked through her jug handle, swinging it as if to some clanging inner rhythm. The moment the slave had turned toward the fountain, Pryn had seen the young woman suddenly fling the jar down — so that red clay shattered on red brick! Then she stalked off between the stalls. Four or five times more Pryn saw her, now at the end of this aisle, now crossing another, arms folded, staring ahead, making her headlong way around this stall or that. Was she thinking of some great musical composition, Pryn had wondered; or perhaps she was contemplating her own explanation for the array of tools and produce about them. Once, coming around a stand of flowers, the musician actually brushed against the slave (it was between mummers and toys); she stepped back, unfolded her arms, and blinked up at him with baffled but distinctly approving surprise that clearly held recognition. Then she folded her arms once more and marched off. But as she had already had her place in the narration, none of this registered on the low voice winding on and on among the vendors and porters. Seconds later another vendor had suddenly held out two blood-black plums. Pryn had taken one and sunk her teeth in it, nodding her gratitude. The giant, however, had not even noticed — nor had he halted his peroration. The vendor, smiling and shaking his head, had put the other plum back. This slave and I? thought Pryn. It is as if we are walking through different markets, in different cities. But the fig, offered her by a woman behind a counter piled high with them, had brought Pryn’s thinking to its turn. Vendors were not handing free fruit to everyone among these stalls and aisles, she realized.

Is it something about me?

But the only thing about me, she went on to herself logically, is that I’m walking with him. Could it be that she was walking through his city, his market, in some way she did not yet know?

The giant, who had been quiet a while, spoke again: ‘You said your companions were looking for Gorgik the Liberator?’ For the first time since they had left the bridge, he looked at Pryn directly. ‘Would you like me to take you to him?’ He smiled for the first time since they had left the Bridge of Lost Desire.

Is the Liberator your master?’ Pryn asked

Again his scarred face became grave. ‘You ask very simple questions that are almost impossible to answer.’

Pryn started to speak, but a notion overtook her that no doubt overtook you several pages ago — indeed, if it took Pryn longer to realize than it took you, it was not because Pryn was the stupider; it was simply because for her this was life, not a tale; and it was all a very long time ago, so that the many tales that have nudged you to such a reading had not yet been written.

‘Come,’ the giant repeated. He started to leave the market by a narrow street.

‘Shouldn’t we go back across the bridge and up into the city?’ Pryn asked. ‘The men who brought me into town stopped at a great house out in the suburbs, where the Liberator stays — ’

The man half snorted, half laughed. ‘If you want the Liberator, come with me!’

Tossing away the fig stem, Pryn hurried up to reach the giant’s side. ‘He…isn’t in the house in the suburbs?’

The giant looked at her, considering. ‘It’s a trick I learned when I worked as a messenger for a great southern ruler, the Dragon Lord Aldamir. Many people are curious as to the whereabouts of the Liberator. I make sure there are endless loud voices answering that curiosity. There have been no open conflicts as of yet directly traceable to the High Court — but there have been spies.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘It’s a good idea, when people are curious, to give them something to sustain that curiosity — and direct it.’

‘You’re not really a slave,’ and it was much easier to say than Pryn had thought it would be, ‘are you?’

‘I’ve sworn that while a man or woman wears the iron collar in Nevèrÿon, I shall not take the one I wear from my neck.’

They turned a corner.

‘The opposition says that the only reason I exist is because the reign of the Child Empress is itself lenient and liberating,’ he went on. ‘But though the slave population in urban centers has always been low — and is getting lower — there are still road-, mine-, and agricultural slaves by the gangload, as well as a whole host of house workers and estate slaves, owned largely by hereditary royalty. Do you see that old tavern building three streets down?’ He stopped to point. ‘In the basement of that inn are the real headquarters of Gorgik the Liberator.’

When Pryn glanced up, the giant again wore his scarred smile. ‘But, like all things concerning the Liberator, one approaches it by a somewhat devious route. Come along here.’

The alley he led her down certainly didn’t go toward the indicated inn but in a completely oblique direction. The sense of adventure that had dissolved into a kind of quivering anomie when the riders had left her on the street was now rewritten across the field of its own dissolution without really reforming it. She felt excitement; she also felt discomfort. Earlier, she definitely hadn’t wanted an adventure — but would have accepted it. Now, dragons notwithstanding, she was unsure if she wanted an adventure at all and was equally unsure what accepting one might mean.

‘This way, girl.’

Off the alley was another yard. In it stood another cistern. The stone wall came up to Pryn’s waist. The man walked to it, grabbed one of the split birch logs lying across it, and swung it back. Frayed bits of rope were tied to it, as though a canvas had once been lashed there.

The man picked up a bit of white mortar from the wall’s top and tossed it in.

Moments later, its clatter on the rock floor echoed up. ‘You see?’ He grinned. ‘No water.’ Turning to sit his naked buttock on the wall, he swung one leg over, then the other. ‘Follow me down.’ He grasped some handhold within, moved to stand on it, and dropped, by stages. His head vanished; his hand disappeared from the ledge.

Had Pryn read, or even heard of, those tales we have mentioned, she would doubtless have used this opportunity to flee — as indeed I would advise any of my readers to do who might find themselves in a similar situation. But this was a long time ago. She could not have heard such stories. More to the point, the great slave who was not a slave could not have heard them either. And bridling, positioning, and urging her dragon from its ledge had been unpleasant, angering, and frustrating.

Feeling unpleasant, angry, and frustrated, Pryn climbed over the wall at the same spot as the man, to find, inside, immense, rusty staples set in the inner stone, making a kind of ladder. As she climbed down by lichen-flecked rock, as shadow slid up over her eyes like water, Pryn wondered briefly, as well might you, what if this man were not who he implied he was, but rather some strange and distressing creature who would hack her to pieces once she set foot on the bottom. (Though most of those tales had not been told, a few, of course, had.) She stumbled — the last rung was missing — to be grasped at her shoulder by his great hand. ‘Watch yourself. This way.’

If the water was gone from the cistern, the bottom was still pitted and puddled. In sunlit bands falling between the overhead logs, she saw half a dozen broken pots on the wet flooring, a few pieces of wood, some bricks, and a number of small, round things too smooth to be stones. At one place the wall had fallen away to form a…cave?

‘In here.’ He had to bend nearly double to enter it — head and knees first, huge hand lingering in a slant of sunlight on the stone jamb, an elbow jutting in shadow. Then elbows and buttocks were gone; then the hand. Pryn followed them into the dark, feeling the moist walls beside her with her palms, vaguely able to see him ahead; feeling along beside herself; then unable to see at all. (Well, she thought, if he does turn around and try to cut me to pieces, I’ll be able to get out faster than he will.) She could hear her own breath; she could hear his breath too; a pebble clicked against a pebble on the ground. After a long while she heard him stumble, grunt, and call back: ‘Step down.’

Five steps later, Pryn stumbled. And stepped down. She moved her toes to the next ledge, and down, still going along the wall with her fingers. Exactly when she noticed the orange flicker on the damp wall, she wasn’t sure. But soon she was walking on level dirt and blinking a lot — and she could make out his dark shape, walking upright.

Here the ceiling was very high between the close-set stones. At first Pryn thought the great pile of darkness before them was dirt; but when she stepped around it, it turned out to be sacks with rope-lashed corners. The wall to the left had, by now, fallen back.

The man paused below a torch burning in a niche high in the rock. Pryn came up beside him. The flickering banked at his scar, pulsing and failing and threatening to overspill onto his cheek. He smiled at her — turning his face, with its broken tooth, into a mask a mummer might wreck terror with. There was a flat glow on his shoulder. Despite the demon look, Pryn breathed easier for the first time since they’d entered the alley.

He started ahead through a vaulted arch into a room with half a dozen torches about, shadowing and brightening the dirty mosaic floor. As she followed him in, a man and a woman carrying a split log bench between them came in by another wide entrance, glanced at them (the woman smiled), set the bench on a pile of benches by the wall, and nodded to Pryn’s companion. The smile and the nod, if not simply the couple’s presence, somehow abolished the momentary demonic image and moved friendship from a possibility to be gambled on to a probable fact. Then they went.

Pryn followed the giant into the next room with even more torches on the walls — these in iron cages. Perhaps twenty-five men were there; and half a dozen women. Some who had been sitting on benches now stood. All looked. Most standing stepped back. One man called: ‘So, our Liberator has returned from his survey of the city! How did you find it, Gorgik?’

The big man did not answer, but only raised a hand, smiling.

One woman turned to another near her and said something like: ‘…vabemesh har’norko nivu shar…’

Gorgik’s response was an outright laugh. ‘Ah — ! Which reminds me,’ he called to her. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you something for a while now —’

Another man interrupted. ‘The others are waiting for you, down in the receiving hall, Gorgik.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Gorgik nodded and walked.

As the others moved after him, Pryn wondered if she should fall back among them; but one man stood back to let her go forward just as, a few feet ahead, Gorgik looked at her and beckoned her to him.

She hurried up. This time his hand fell on her shoulder, reminding her for all the world of the portly gentleman in the toga and the naked barbarian boy she’d seen on the bridge — quite ludicrously, though she could not have written why unless she invented new signs.

This archway was hung with heavy drapes. A man before them pushed the hangings aside, and she and Gorgik went through, to start down wide steps.

Pryn blinked.

So many more flares and torches along the walls of this hall, yet it seemed so much darker — it was dozens of times as big! Distantly she heard free water. Because she associated the sound with outside vastness, this inside seemed even larger.

All the hall’s center, a metal brazier, wider across than Gorgik was tall, flickered over its coals with low flame. As they descended, Pryn looked up to see half a dozen balconies at different heights about the walls. One corner of the hall looked as if it were still being dug out. Earth and large stones were still heaped there. On another wall she saw a carved dragon, three times a man’s height — though from the rubble piled low against it, it, too, had only recently been dug free. Overhead, large beams jutted beneath the ceiling, from which, here and there, hung tangles of rope.

As they came down the steps, someone called: ‘The Liberator!’

A roar rose from the fifty, seventy-five, possibly hundred fifty people about the hall. (Pryn, unused to crowds, had little experience by which to judge such numbers.) It quieted, but did not die. The whispers and comments of so many, echoing under the high roof, joined with the sound of falling waters.

Pryn looked aside as she reached the bottom step.

Water poured between squat columns beside one of the balconies, the falls spewing fog that wet the rock behind it, to rush, foaming and glimmering, along a two-meter-wide ditch. The conduit ran between carved balustrades; after going beneath one bridge of stone and one of wood that looked as if it had been recently built between the remains of a stone one which had fallen in, it ran off through an arched culvert in the dragon-carved wall.

Some of the floor was tiled, but most was dirt, scattered with loose stones. As they walked, Gorgik bent to whisper, ‘Yes, that stream is part of the system that feeds the public fountain…’

‘Oh,’ Pryn said, ‘yes,’ as if she had been pondering precisely the question he had answered. Was that the way one began to think like a Liberator? she wondered. It’s as though all of Nevèrÿon makes sense to him! At least all of this city.

They crossed the wooden bridge and passed near enough to the brazier to feel heat from its beaten, black walls. Ahead were more steps, five or six. They led up to a large seat, half covered with skins. A stone wing rose at one side from under a tiger’s pelt. From the other, a sculpted bird’s head, beak wide in a silent screech, stuck from black fur.

The others halted. Hand still on Pryn’s shoulder, Gorgik went to the steps. At the first one, he bent again. ‘Sit at the foot here.’

The third step from the bottom was covered with white hide. Pryn turned and sat on it, running her hand over it. She felt grit. White cow? Horse? (Who, she wondered, had charge of cleaning them?) She put her heels on the edge of the step below, while Gorgik mounted to the seat.

Pryn looked out at the people waiting about the hall. She looked up at Gorgik — his horny toes with their cracked edges and thickened nails pressed the black and white hair of a zebra skin four steps up and level with her nose.

‘My friends — !’ The Liberator’s voice echoed under high vaults. (Pryn glanced at the ceiling and thought of the tavern above. Had it been anywhere near the size of this subterranean vastness?) ‘It’s good to see so many familiar faces — and good to see so many new ones!’ The foot moved a little. Firelight shifted on tarnished bronze: Gorgik sat on the hide covering the seat. (Was it as dusty as the one under her own heel?) ‘Still, it reassures me that our number is small enough that I can address you informally, that I can gather you together so that my voice reaches all of you at once, that I can walk among you and recognize which of you has been with us a while and which of you is new. Soon, our growing numbers may abolish that informality.’

Pryn again looked over the faces that had, at least a moment back, seemed numberless.

She started!

Beyond those standing nearest, she saw, in his ragged headdress, the scarred Fox turn to whisper to the bearded Badger, while just behind him the squat Western Wolf frowned — at her!

‘That so many of my friends are here in the city warms me. That so many of you have come here to the city to offer me your support speaks to me of the unrest throughout Nevèrÿon because of the injustices marring our nation. The difference between the number of you here yesterday and the number of you here today tells me of the growing power that informs our cause. Yesterday, I left you with a question: Would I be able to get a hearing at the High Court to present my case? Today, I bring you a gratifying answer: Yes.’ A murmur rose over the water’s rush, then fell. ‘I received the news earlier this afternoon — and went to walk in the city. While it rang in my head, while it afflicted my eyes, till the city itself seemed wondrous and new, and the market, where I so frequently go to hear the harmonies of labor and commerce, seemed a new market, ringing with new music, a market in which I had never walked before.’ Again Pryn turned to look up. Mostly what she could see was a large knee obscuring the face and a rough elbow that moved behind its gesturing hand. ‘The High Court has agreed to give me an audience with one of its most powerful ministers, Lord Krodar!’

Amidst the approbations, one woman called, ‘Why won’t they let you speak to the Child Empress herself?’

‘—whose reign is monstrous and monotonous!’ called a man.

Coming from a place where such things just weren’t said, Pryn was as startled as she had been by the sight of the Fox and the Wolf. But others laughed. Hearing that laughter, she decided she liked the feeling of freedom it gave — and remembered flying.

‘My plans are prudent and practical,’ Gorgik countered, which brought more laughter with it, ‘monstrosity notwithstanding. I am satisfied with this as a beginning. You come from all over Nevèrÿon,’ Gorgik’s voice echoed on. ‘You come with your different reasons, your different gifts. This young woman at my feet comes with no more than curiosity.’ Pryn looked up again. The face — what she could see of it beyond the knee — smiled before it looked back up. ‘I accept that; and I am as happy to have her with us as I am anyone here. You there — ’ Over Pryn’s head the great hand went out. ‘You hail from the foothills of the Argini, am I right? I can tell by the leather braiding about your arm. Once, when I passed through your province, I saw a low stone building with seven sharply pointed triangular doors, the stone head of a different animal at each apex. When I asked what the building was, I was told a phrase in your language…?’

‘“Ya’Kik ya Kra Kyk!”’ a heavy man with close-cropped hair called out.

‘Yes,’ answered Gorgik. ‘That’s it! And can you tell me what it means?’

‘It means the House of the Goddess who Weaves Baskets to Carry Grain to Women, Children, and Animals.’

‘And is she a goddess of freedom or slavery?’

The man frowned. ‘She’s a goddess of prosperity…’ He raised a hand to tug self-consciously at the leather braids looped on his fleshy biceps. ‘She’s a goddess of labor. So I guess she’s a goddess of freedom…’

‘Good!’ called Gorgik. ‘Then she might smile on us and our cause, here, even though there are few women among us and, today at any rate, only one child…’

The laughter, friendly enough, made Pryn look up. Beyond his blocky knee, the Liberator looked down at her, while Pryn wondered at her demotion from young woman to child. She looked out again at the Red Badger, who, with his big mouth, missing teeth, and new beard, had gotten her into the first trouble of her journey.

‘It is important for all of us to learn about, and learn to respect, the customs over all our land. You there — ’ This time he pointed toward the barbarian woman who, again, had leaned to whisper to a neighbor.

She looked up.

‘When I was a youngster, running in the streets of this city, I used to hear the women from the south talking the southern language together. The word that again and again fell out of those lingering, liquid sentences was nivu. When I first began to learn a few words of the tongue from your men, it never came from their mouths. Yet even today, walking in our streets, one hears you southern women talking of nivu this and nivu that. Tell me; what does it mean? I know enough of your language to ask for food and lodging and to tell when a man is saying he’s full-fed and content or when he’s saying he’s sick and hungry. But I still don’t know the significance of this word.’

The woman’s rough yellow hair, tied behind her neck, clearly bespoke barbaric origins. ‘My Liberator,’ she called out in a friendly enough voice, but with the thickest barbarian accent Pryn had ever heard, ‘if you knew anything of our life and language, you would know that nivu is not a man’s word.’

Gorgik laughed. ‘So I was told once before. But we are all friends here, men and women, with a common cause that will benefit us both. We work for justice; and justice should have no secrets. Tell me the meaning of the word.’

‘Very well, my Liberator. Nivu is an old barbarian term that means—’

‘FOOLS — !’

Later Pryn realized she had seen the man — squatting on the rough stone balcony by the falling water — some minutes before he stood up, arms out from his sides, belly jerking visibly with the breath he heaved into each word:

‘YOU FOOLS — the lot of you!’