Neveryóna, or The Tales of Signs and Cities

8. Of Models, Mystery, Moonlight, and Authority

PRYN FOLLOWED MADAME KEYNE over the worn doorstep. Grilles high in the corners let in light. On a large table by one wall, Pryn made out what first looked like piles of something green; other colors, here and there, flecked about it. In the middle of it was a…house!..a toy house! Pryn blinked. And toy trees! And toy statues! Around it all ran a stone wall, about eight inches high.

Pryn exclaimed: It’s…your home!’

‘And my garden,’ Madame Keyne pointed out. ‘And my wall. And my waterfall. And my bridge. And my fountains — watch!’

Madame Keyne went to the hut wall, where various containers and conduits were fixed. Standing on tiptoe, she checked if one were filled. She examined another, then pulled a small lever.

Pryn had gone up to the table’s edge. The model’s precision was, indeed, magical, as if one might find the break in the wall at the corner — or the rotten bars at the stream entrance. On one tree-shaded rise Pryn saw a tiny stone hut, a path of tiny red bricks winding up to it and a tiny bench against its back, its wooden door indeed set ajar, so that she had to imagine two diminutive female figures had just stepped over its threshold, one of whom, even now, at a miniature table’s edge, leaned over a tinier rise, atop which stood a tinier hut, its tinier door ajar, and over whose tinier threshold had just stepped —

A splashing made Pryn look up.

On the far rise, water sluiced through the arched grate [had the bars rusted through? The water covered them, and Pryn couldn’t tell), ran along the stream bed, moved out along the four brick-lined tributaries to fill one, then two more, then the last of the brick-rimmed pools.

Water reached the falls and broke on fish, dolphin, kraken, and octopus. It swirled the rocks between the banks at the falls’ bottom. As it swept beneath the bridge, one, then two more, then the last of the fountains at the bridge’s corners sprayed, left and right, into the little stream. Water wound by bowers and benches, beneath overhanging branches of shade tree and willow, around the house, divided in three at a stone clearly carved for the purpose, and rushed on.

‘Did your…friend make this? ‘The delicacy of the model was as close to magic as Pryn could conceive.

Madame Keyne pulled another lever. A contraption on the wall, with angled paddles, began to turn. ‘No. This, actually, was made by Belham — he was the inventor of the fountain and the architect for many gardens about Sallese and Nevèrÿona, you know.’

Pryn breathed, ‘Oh…!’

Leaves on the miniature trees fluttered; miniature willow fronds above the stream began to flitter fishbone shadows over the water in the sunlight barred by the high grilles. Waves of darker green played across whatever had been used to imitate grass.

‘A map of the garden…?’

‘Yes,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘You might say that. Did you see the fountains?’

‘Oh, yes! They work, too! That’s wonderful!’

‘Have you determined how they work?’

Pryn frowned. ‘I just assumed that…up there, the water in those four pools runs down through some kind of pipes to the four fountains on the bridge below the falls…?’

‘Can you say why the fountains spurt into the air — instead of merely dribbling out in an uninteresting spill?’

‘I suppose — ’ and, to be fair, Pryn had seen the fountains through the gates around the grounds of the Suzerain of Vanar’s High Hold and had even once delivered lunch to an uncle and cousin who had been called in with a work crew to repair one in much the same manner as Clyton had repaired Madame Keyne’s — ‘it’s because the tributary pools are so much higher. The water remembers its higher position and leaps up…to regain the level of the source!’ That is what she’d heard her great-aunt say.

‘A good explanation! Almost the exact words of the barbarian who built it — so exact, I am tempted to think that brilliant and tragic man spent time in your own neighborhood. But no matter.’ Madame Keyne folded her arms. ‘It was when Belham was building these fountains and working in this hut that Venn first came from the Ulvayn islands to visit my family. Belham had finished this model, but was still supervising the workers at the falls itself. He showed Venn his model, here; and she spent a long time examining it, coming back to look at it by herself, and generally playing with it when the barbarian was not actually using it for his measures. Sometimes she would go right from here to examine the bottom of the real falls down below. (Belham thought she was a very eccentric woman and often complained about her inquisitiveness.) Finally she told my father, “I am going to build you something.” And she moved in here for several days, during which Belham fumed and stayed in the main house with us. After perhaps a week, she had built — ‘ Madame Keyne turned away from the miniature garden — ‘this.’

Pryn turned with her, to confront the shadowy construct on the far side of the hut.

Madame Keyne stepped across the dusty flags.

Pryn, after a moment, stepped after.

On a stand, that put it about eye-level, sat a large bronze bowl. Leaded to the bowl’s side was a copper tube that curved down and around to end at the edge of another large bowl set on a lower part of the stand; the second bowl’s bronze rim came just below Pryn’s knee.

‘What will happen if I fill up the top bowl with water?’ Madame Keyne asked.

‘Water, I suppose, will run out the tube and down and around and into the bottom bowl.’ Pryn spoke with confidence but tried to preserve margin for any correction that might turn out to be the mysterious point of it all.

‘Just as in the fountain,’ Madame Keyne confirmed. ‘And, as with the fountain, the water remembers its higher position and tries to leap back up. However, you will notice that the tube leaving from the upper bowl does not leave from its bottom, as do the pipes from the tributary pools; rather it leaves from low on the bowl’s side. And in the bottom bowl, the tube end does not point straight up, as in a fountain, but spills in — also from the side. Now look more closely in the top bowl.’

Pryn stepped up to peer over the top bowl’s rim; it had been filled with some kind of plaster, from which a shape, with all sorts of grooves, gullies, and irregularities, had been gouged. The plaster had dried — it looked as if a single hand had, in one motion, scooped out the hollow.

‘…and at the bottom bowl.’

That bowl, Pryn saw when she bent to look, was filled to the brim with fine sand. The surface was quite smooth.

‘Now — ’ Madame Keyne stepped away to more containers and levers on the wall — ‘I’m going to fill the upper bowl with water.’ A lever squeaked.

From a spigot just above the whole contraption, water sloshed down into the top bowl among the irregular plaster shapes.

From the tarnished tube at the rim of the bottom bowl, Pryn saw, moments later, water spurt across the sand, dig into it, wash some of it away, spread, dig, spread again. Sand and water overflowed the rim — to be caught in the trays and filters and drains set beneath it. In the lower bowl, second by second, sand gouged away; crevices and gulleys deepened.

‘There,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘That’s enough.’ She threw the lever back.

The water in the upper bowl lowered, clearing wet peaks and valleys.

The shimmer across the lower bowl, still filled, stilled.

‘Now,’ Madame Keyne instructed, ‘examine both.’

Pryn looked into the upper: wet pink plaster, small puddles in the deepest depressions — the impression of a single hand-swipe was even stronger. She could make out the clear tracks of the four fingers, the angled gouge of the thumb. Halfway across, all turned to the left. A few inches further on, there was another crater as if, in the hand’s pulling loose, some extra clot had come out too.

Pryn bent to look at the bottom bowl. The water seemed to have scooped out quite a gouge. Under the bowl, on the filter tray, sand stood in wet piles. Sand streaked the bottom bowl’s bronze sides.

Pryn looked in.

Beneath the water, Pryn saw four distinct troughs in the remaining sand, with a fifth angled from the side. Halfway across, all turned to the left. Then, a few inches on, a crater…

‘It’s the same!’ Pryn exclaimed, seeing as she said so that it was not exactly the same; shapes were gentler, some were less distinct. ‘It’s almost exactly…’

Madame Keyne nodded. ‘Not only does the water remember its height in that top bowl, it remembers the entire shape within that bowl, remembers it all the way down the length of the tube through which it runs, remembers it well enough to recreate that shape when it runs into conditions that allow it to demonstrate what it remembers.’ Madame Keyne turned toward the hut’s still open door. ‘What is below is an…almost perfect map of what is above, as the model of my garden is an almost perfect map of the garden itself.’

Between astonishment and the desire to demand a repeat demonstration, Pryn followed.

‘After Venn showed us that — ’ Madame Keyne stepped into the doorway light — ‘and we were all as astonished as you — Belham, my father, my brother, myself — Venn said, and I shall never forget the equally astonishing humility on her island face as she said it, “Any barbarian can look at the bottom of a falls and see in the rising splash the principle of the fountain. But what I have seen, what I have devised a way to show to you, so that you have seen it too, will remain a wonder till the globe of the world and the globe of the sun meet in their common center, and the one consume the other. This wonder humankind will know and forget, know and forget, know and forget again. And that knowing and forgetting will approximate the peaks and depths of civilization as close as the plaster rises and valleys of Belham’s model approximate the rises and valleys of your garden.”’ Madame Keyne paused in the doorway, her arms folded, looking down. ‘The house, of course, is in a valley. I was standing in this doorway, here, watching Venn, outside, talking. And I thought: “Moving from place to place in society, power remembers…”’ She laughed. ‘And I think that was the beginning of my interests in magic, of the sort you have seen me engaged in at the New Market.’

Pryn stepped out into the leaf-splayed light after Madame Keyne.

‘That afternoon, Venn quit our house for the south. Belham was very upset, I recall. He got terribly drunk that night, and made a great bother of himself all about the grounds…he’d been commissioned by several other families to make fountains in their gardens, too. Myself, I’ve always felt that ours were the nicest.’ Madame Keyne did not close the hut door but walked back to the bench and, with a little sigh, sat. Ini’s knife still lay on the stone. Pryn looked at the woman, who, at this point, seemed both frailer and more wondrous.

‘The purport of magic is so simple, it’s odd that it is not as obvious as…But then, what was obvious to Venn was not obvious to Belham. Still, in any encounter there is always a stronger side and a weaker side — and both sides always have power. But because there is magic loose in the world, the stronger had best pay attention to the weaker if the stronger wishes to retain its position. You are not in a terribly strong position. I am not in a terribly weak one. We are not arguing, you and I, about which of us holds which place. You want to know my reasons for bringing you here. I want to know your reasons for coming. It only seems fair to me to ask, since you, at this point, know so much of me!’

Once more Pryn sat down on the grass — and felt the cloth of her dress, rumpled beneath one buttock, and a twig, nipping under the other. ‘Let me use what little power I have, then: you tell me first.’

Madame Keyne’s smile took on its familiar ambiguity. ‘But you know already. I brought you here because I was jealous.’

‘Jealous of…?’

‘Jealous of Jade.’ Madame Keyne’s shoulders lowered; her hands moved back on blue-covered knees. ‘I suppose it’s been three months now since Jade found her Wild Ini — in the public park, too, not a bench away from where, two and a half years before, I myself found Jade. Jade makes friends easily. Ini talked to Jade — Ini took her about the Spur, Ini fascinated her, Ini visited her here at our home. I talked to Ini, I took Ini about our garden, I fascinated Ini. Soon her talents were unofficially in my employ. Jade and Ini’s relationship is precisely as you see it — nothing to grow jealous of, now, is it? And yet I grow jealous. In my jealousy I resolved to take the first beautiful street girl I saw for my own.’

‘—and that was me?’

‘You are not traditionally beautiful, you know — ’

‘Radiant Jade is very beautiful.’

‘Yes.’ Madame Keyne sighed. ‘She’s quite beautiful. Often I have thought her quite the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known.’

‘I don’t have the set of features and lineaments that…threaten to spill you over into the silence of death?’

Madame Keyne laughed. ‘But for me, my dear, there are no such features and lineaments — whereas Jade simply does not know what hers are.’ Madame Keyne’s smile seemed to mock itself. ‘Of course, everyone else who knows her does: little street girls just into town with the memory of murder in their faces — ’

Pryn felt herself stiffen. But Madame Keyne hadn’t known — couldn’t have known about the man in the cellar…

‘There,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘Just what you did — just now. A kind of sulkiness, a kind of suspicion.’

And Pryn laughed. ‘It isn’t fair, Madame — ’ laughing seemed all there was to do — ‘the way Jade feels about Ini. I mean, along with the way she feels about your bringing me here.’

The laughter made Madame Keyne smile again. ‘That kind of fairness doesn’t exist — or rather is for children buying lengths of sugar cane from the vendor in the Old Market, whining to daddy, whose concern is always elsewhere, about who has gotten the bigger piece. The potter god who glazed us did not paint us all evenly, nor even all with the same glaze; nor were we all fired at the same temperature.’

‘So I must go…?’

‘Girl, I had no more notion of using you to replace Jade as my secretary than I had of riding a dragon! But it so happens you do read and write. More and more people can, these days. I didn’t know it when I first saw you — though Jade will never believe it wasn’t part of my plan from the beginning. But then, I shall never believe it was merely concern for the secretarial aspect of her situation that impelled all Jade’s actions toward you — though in an hour or a week she will be insisting that was all there was to it. Oh, well; I suppose she’s no different from Ergi, who thinks that every young woman he sees me with shall henceforth be moved into my house and made heir to my worldly property. Such misreadings are very common — more, they are very powerful, almost as powerful as the proper ones.’

‘What will you do with Ini?’

‘She will stay in my official employ until it is time for her to leave. But that is something Jade and I — and the Ini — will have to decide.’

‘It seems so strange.’ Pryn sighed. ‘I mean that you only brought me here to make Jade jealous — ’

‘Did I say that?’ Madame Keyne leaned forward, looking a little surprised. ‘Certainly, I didn’t say — ’

‘No, but I thought that’s what you meant. I mean, when you said…’

Madame Keyne frowned. ‘Do you think so?’ She pursed her lips. ‘Now myself, that had never occurred to me. Make Jade jealous…of me? But perhaps it occurred to Jade…No wonder she is so pained by your presence, then, for it must seem a very intentional hurt. The pain inflicted by a loved one that we believe inadvertent, to the extent we love truly, is bearable. But the pain we suspect is inflicted because we are considered not really human and therefore fit to be hurt, that makes us ache to the depths of our most human bowels.’ She pondered a moment. ‘Ergi would think as you did — Why shouldn’t Jade? But no. I was not jealous of what Jade had — have the Ini? In any way one might reasonably want her, I do have her. No, I wanted to do what Jade did. I wanted to be free to do it. I brought you here to be free. That’s all.’ She smiled. ‘I wanted to do what Jade did. And I have discovered, by trying, that…it is not within my power.’

‘Madame Keyne,’ Pryn said, ‘before I came here, my life was caught up in a world of men, where everything was purpose, plan, and plot — yet I was always outside it. But here, where everything is nuance, emotion, and jealousy, somehow I have found myself at the most uncomfortable and precarious center — where I feel just as excluded!’

‘Are you saying you are some sort of mystic and are prepared to abandon both the worlds of men and of women for the world of magic and marvels? You are a special young woman, I can tell. Still, that is not what I would have thought you most suited for. But now I have told you why I brought you here. You must tell me why you came.’

‘I came here because I…’ Pryn looked down. ‘Because I was looking for a friend.’

‘A friend?’ Madame Keyne regarded the girl curiously. ‘I dare say we haven’t distinguished ourselves much in the friendship area. Though, who knows: perhaps one day you will be able to think of us as friends…’

‘She was a woman I heard about, once,’ Pryn went on. ‘She wore blue beads in her hair and carried a double blade — ’

‘The Western Crevasse!’ exclaimed Madame Keyne. ‘Your friend was a woman of the Western Crevasse, where men serve and women rule and do all that men do in Nevèrÿon. Where did you meet this wondrous creature?’

‘I never met her,’ Pryn explained. ‘I only heard about her.’

‘Only heard about her…?’ Madame Keyne frowned. ‘Only heard? Ah, child, let me tell you something. When I was a girl, I, too, used to hear of those marvelous and mysterious fighting women of the Western Crevasse. Now and again someone would report that their red ships had pulled into the Kolhari docks. When I was a girl, I would hear my brother whispering to my father; that week no one would let me go down to the port, and I would be sure those wonderful women were what they were whispering of. When I was older, once or twice I sneaked down into the city when I heard that their strange ships were supposed to be in. And as I wandered among the children bouncing their rubber balls, sometimes I would find a fishing ship from the Ulvayn islands, which occasionally employed a woman or three among its hands. But I never did see any of those double-bladed warriors. Let me tell you, girl. The warrior women of the Western Crevasse do not exist. Nor have they ever existed. They only grew up in stories because women like you — and me — from time to time wished they existed, because men like my father and brother were terrified they might. I think we use them as a kind of model. A model for thinking. But the truth, I’m afraid, is that the closest thing you and I will ever find to those raven-haired legends is our own pale-haired Ini. After all, we want them to do all the things for us Ini does. But we want them to do them out of a profound, moral innocence that obliterates all the darkness and rescinds all the terror that our own little monster carries about with her everywhere she goes. Well, you can’t have that kind of innocence any more than you have the kind of fairness that gives each child the same size piece of cane down to the centimeter. Your blue-beaded, double-bladed hero, coming to save you from the hands of wily men — and women — who can perform any degree of violence in the course of its accomplishment yet with never a selfish thought, does not exist. Indeed, she would be quite terrifying if she did. Indeed, if she did, she would not be tall, but short, she would not be black-haired but blond, and she would be horribly wounded, a hopelessly mad and poisonous little white gillyflower of a girl. But at least we — or my poor Radiant Jade, at any rate — accept our Ini for what she is. Whether she wear my scarf or no, she does not accept us. But we have a compensation which, in the long run, is denied her. It is, simply and insipidly, love. As confused with other motives as it may be, deferred, displaced, speaking in codes when it would speak at all, written in shaky signs in shadowy ill-lit corners, it is still what brought you here. Somewhat purified, somewhat clarified, somewhat analyzed — and that is all any one of us can ask it to become — it is what sends you on your way.’ She joined her hands in her lap. ‘Girl, you have been swept up in this wildest of gardens by a great and real power. Now that you are about to leave, you may be tempted to shrug off the whole experience as an unfortunate irrelevance, best put out of current thought, best expunged from future memory. But you must know, as you make your way in the wider world, the same play of power and desire rages in all men and women, contouring all acts, aligning all motivations, no matter what the object. Nor will your own soul be free of that play. That play is desire, in all its myriad forms. And as you look back on us from time to time to judge or to rejudge us — and you will — do not be kind. All I would have you do is remember that we, in this garden, have been a bit more responsible, a bit more honest than most. Do not praise us for it, in these passionate and primitive times. But do not dismiss us heedlessly, either by forgetfulness or too-quick censure.’ Madame Keyne searched in her skirts with jangling wrists. Finding her purse, she pulled and plucked it open, went into it with one and another finger, teasing out one, a second, a handful of coins. ‘Here — this is for your coming efforts on my behalf to question the Liberator. No…I think it better to pay in advance in such cases. After all, there is the chance you won’t return. Take it, take it right now. Yes, you have pockets in that dress. Go on.’ (Pryn took the iron coins uncertainly.) ‘Now come, girl, and give me a kiss.’

‘Madame Keyne,’ Pryn declared for, though she was by nature affectionate, not only had she seen something of fountains in her own home, she had also seen prostitutes in the Ellamon market and had whispered and giggled with the other children about them, ‘you take me from the Bridge of Lost Desire, you give me a handful of coins, then you ask for a kiss…?’

‘—like a kiss from a daughter, my dear, expressing her affection to a mother, before she leaves on some necessary journey out into the world, with a coin or two diligently saved and given with concern.’

‘Well,’ Pryn said, ‘I never got along very well with my mother. I didn’t really see much of her.’

‘Very well, then, to a father — if you must; a long-lost father, returning from the wars, in time to catch a peck and a hug before his daughter begins her own eccentric or domestic adventures along whatever courses her own lifetime may take her.’

Though Pryn had not had a father, she had wanted one; but she hesitated a moment more. Finding the pockets, she dropped in the coins, stepped forward, bent, and, blinking, kissed the brown cheek.

One moment, lost in the desert of that warm, dry skin, Pryn thought she understood what had occurred; she let her mouth, then her own cheek, stay against Madame Keyne’s, thinking all the time that a tremor would pass through the woman any moment — or at least expecting to see, as she stepped back now, a tear make a moist oasis somewhere on that dry flesh.

Madame Keyne was smiling.

Though not particularly at Pryn.

‘Well,’ Madame Keyne said after a breath. ‘You gave me that contact, that touch, that communion on your own — freely. Despite all exchanges, which always occur. Nothing compelled you, nothing coerced you. And I shall live off that freedom of yours for…a minute? A month? A lifetime?’ She laughed softly. ‘It was, in its quiet way, as glorious as if I rode some wild and winged beast, soaring against sun-silvered clouds. Certainly it is worth as much as the caresses Jade wheedles, tricks, blackmails, and cajoles from the Ini.’ Madame Keyne raised an eyebrow, as though responding to a surprise on Pryn’s face that Pryn, at any rate, hadn’t felt. ‘Oh, yes — because I know how innocent we are, I have a measure of how innocent they are. Even if they don’t know it — Oh, you may mark it on vellum! Now go. Down to the kitchen with you. You remember Gya, who oversaw your bath and bedding when Ini brought you in last night? She will give you a supper basket at the kitchen door — I think Jade and I shall dine by ourselves tonight. Or, if not, I shall dine alone. Later, when the sun is fully down, you may take this — ’ Madame Keyne picked up the knife and held it out to Pryn — ‘to the break in the corner of my garden that leads through into the garden of the Liberator. If you can contrive an audience with him, ask my question, and return — ’

‘But Madame — ’

‘Oh, don’t mind about the knife. You should have some small weapon with you. In these vicious and violent times it won’t be taken amiss. Ini has more of them than she needs. One less from her collection is one more bit of trouble I don’t have to worry about her getting into.’

‘Oh, no, Madame — ’ Pryn took the weapon and immediately felt uncomfortable holding it. ‘It’s just that the Liberator isn’t in his…’ She stopped. Her meager knowledge — her tiny bit of power — seemed too precious to squander here. ‘Madame Keyne, if you want me to ask the Liberator your question, you must return me to the middle of the city, at the mouth of the Bridge of Lost Desire. From there I’ll be able to find my way to — ’

‘My dear girl, if that’s what I must do to have an answer, then I shall do without! Here we have been talking of responsibility, and you would have me turn you out into the same dangers from which I plucked you? No!’

‘But Madame Keyne — ’

‘You’ve come near getting killed once since you’ve been in my charge. I am not about to repeat the possibility. You will do it my way, or you will not do it! I want no more protests, girl. As I told you already, and as Jade herself suspects, the answer is simply not that important!’

They sat together in the small, open-roofed chamber. On the counters about them lay clay tablets, shells with styli sticking from them, chisels, brushes. Reeds in bunches soaked in shallow trays of alum water. Rubbed and unrubbed parchment lay piled about, held down from the breeze by small pumice blocks. Against the wall leaned boards covered with yellow wax, boards covered with pink wax, tablet molds, piles of clay tokens, blocks of ink.

The little tripod had not yet been lighted.

‘I thought, because we didn’t get much work done today, you might like to eat in here.’ Jade replaced a flower, fallen to the white cloth, in its vase. ‘We might work later. Here. Together.’

‘Yes.’ Madame Keyne reached into the basket and pulled loose the red scarf tucked about the wicker. ‘A useful idea. A pleasant idea!’

‘Here, let me do that for you!’ Jade took the scarf end from Madame Keyne’s hand and pulled it loose — from large, succulent fruits. ‘And let me see, now. Yes. Gya has given us some of her wonderful small loaves!’ Jade pulled loose a second scarf from a second basket. ‘I asked her to make them when I was dithering about this afternoon. I know how much you like them — Oh, Rylla, I’m afraid I got no work done today!’

‘You asked cook…? Thank you, Jade! I certainly didn’t do very much work myself. Though I suppose I did get into town and review the construction, earlier on this morning, I have been putting off for so long. Now I don’t have to think about that for another three days.’

Jade touched a third scarf over a third basket, this one somewhat spotted. It came half away from a cut of meat, gray and rose. Jade paused. ‘You worked today. I did not. Somehow, everything you say indicts me. There is nothing I can do for you that means anything…!’

Madame Keyne was silent a moment. Then she reached out and put her hand on top of Jade’s. ‘I would have nothing meaningful in my life if I did not have you and all that you do for me, all that you are to me.’

Their joined hands pulled away the scarf. Jade had washed the clay from her fingers. Only a bit clung about her nails. ‘Sometimes, Rylla — ’ Jade held Madame Keyne’s hand more firmly, then more gently — ‘you are very cruel.’

‘Because I love you?’

‘Because when I become resentful, become confused, when I become frightened and lash out, at you, at myself, at everyone, you do not stop me.’ Looking down, she withdrew her fingers to the white cloth’s edge.

‘How could I…?’ Madame Keyne looked bewildered.

‘You could say, in the middle of it, or before it even began, at any point…’ Jade looked away from the table. ‘Oh, it is hard to say! I cannot say it. It would be easier to write it — ! You could say — ’ She blinked at Madame Keyne — ‘“Jade, I love you.”’ Shaking her head, the secretary suddenly, quietly smiled. ‘Is it so surprising that when I am at my least lovable that is when I most need to know your love? If only I could hear that from you during those terrible times, then I could become myself again.’

‘You have said that before. Yet it always surprises me.’

‘You have acted on it before. If you never had, I could not have stayed in this confining garden. And yet, because from time to time you withhold it, it is hard for me not to feel that — from time to time — my humiliation is something you inflict on me, you create in me, you exploit for purposes that are beyond me to understand — ’

‘Oh, Jade!’ Madame Keyne leaned forward and took both her secretary’s hands, drawing them across the table top. A bracelet clinked against the vase. ‘No…’ (The replaced flower fell again to the cloth-covered table.) The women leaned forward from their backless stools. ‘It is hard for me, Jade, in a circle of my own servants, with Ini there, with that girl, Pryn, simply to say things — ’

‘It is hard for you, with me rolling and screaming in the dirt, to feel such things — ’

‘No…’ Madame Keyne sat back. ‘No, I feel them. It is only as I said.’

‘Yet that is still what I hear when you say it.’

‘And because I know that is how you read it, I must take the responsibility for it as though I had actually marked it on vellum myself.’ There was something of questioning, something of dismay in Madame Keyne’s inflection. But who could say what the proportions were?

‘You could have stopped me,’ Jade repeated.

‘You stopped the Ini. That was the important thing. As for the rest…’ Madame Keyne shrugged. Then she shook her head. ‘My poor, my dear, my most radiant Jade. You have your bad habits. I have mine. And there are, alas, some things it is simply — and habitually — hard for me to do, in public.’

‘Public? But we are all within your garden walls! You have brought us all here — the servants, even the Ini, even that girl. What public is that?’

‘I have allowed each of you to come, for your own reasons — and mine. To each, I have my responsibilities, which again involve my reasons with theirs — and yours. Were I some crazed aristocrat, living a neighborhood away, I might read into such a situation some absolute power to influence all about me unto life and death. But I’m not, and I can’t. Oh, certainly I can abuse the power I have. If a servant’s face or gait displease me, I may say, “Your work is performed not quite to the style that I desire,” and dismiss him. If some house girl’s manners or politics are too unsettling or too loud, I might — depending on her gait and face — say much the same. But the nameless gods have decreed that there will be enough young women both comely, intelligent, and poor so that the rich and powerful can exploit desire in the name of labor — the rich who can read and decipher desire’s complex signs — in such a way that power here will reproduce itself there, and we may learn from those paupers at once beautiful and egregious — ’

‘But it’s true, Rylla! You are always in public — even within your own gardens: you are always prepared for some fancied spy to observe you from the bushes, overhear you from the eaves.’

‘And you, Jade, are always in private, terrified lest someone see you, someone judge you, someone condemn you; and your better nature is paralyzed under expectation of that perpetual gaze, that eternal acuteness that is everywhere about to break in on your privacy and fill it with anxiety. Only when you feel shored up against all such eyes and ears can your better nature speak.’

‘But because you are always within the publicity of your servants, your employees, your acquaintances, your friends, and — yes — your lover, you are condemned to have no better nature. I know that you are a very lonely woman, Rylla. And your loneliness is not what I love about you — it is too much like mine. I think what I love is the illusion of an inner privacy that might, somehow, be made public…’

When Jade was silent a while, Madame Keyne said: ‘When your illusions collapse — or when mine do — then we both need to hear, “I love you,” from the other. No, it is not so much to ask: that we speak our truest thought clearly.’

Jade smiled again. ‘Do you remember, Rylla, when you took me on that business trip to the south?’

‘Ah!’ Madame Keyne rocked back on her stool. Coming forward, she seized her secretary’s hands again with a desperate eagerness. ‘How could I forget!’

In her own eagerness, Jade pulled one hand away to gesture. ‘Remember, we stopped at that inn where that bandit gang had also taken rooms for the night?’

‘I thought they were slavers, or only young smugglers — and there were no more than three! — who had sold off their wares and thought it would look more respectable to appear as honest highwaymen!’ Madame Keyne laughed.

‘I was so terrified! And they had the room right beside ours, with the thinnest wall between. They drank so loudly and made so much noise! I was afraid to speak, even in a whisper, for fear we should be overheard — ’

‘Ah, yes!’ Madame Keyne sat back. ‘But we had our business that had to be gone over that night. So I took a waxed writing board and scratched you a note — ’

‘—and, trembling, I scratched one back to you.’ Jade smiled. ‘I was sure they would hear the stylus in the wax itself and be able to know just from the sound what we exchanged between us!’

‘Exactly what you wrote me! I was quite surprised.’

‘And you wrote back: “I love you more than life and wealth and they will never know of it.” Or was it “wealth and life”—?’

‘I think it was “breath and wealth.” Or was it “light and breath”—? No matter; it was the right matter for the time!’

‘It was the right matter to calm my fear — enough so I could tell you of my terror.’

‘My wonderful Jade — you used to be terrified of so many things, back then. Slavers who were bandits; bandits who might be slavers — ’

‘Yet as we sat on the edge of the bed, passing the board back and forth, concentrating so hard on what we glyphed into its surface, now rolling the scrapings away and sticking them to the board’s bottom, staring at the board in the candlelight without even looking at each other, stopping to thumb out an ill-scribed sign — ’

‘Oh, I always watched you, Jade — at least when I wasn’t writing!’

‘—yet our questions and answers seemed to go so quickly by and through our business for the night…and moved on to other things, other thoughts, till at last we were writing back and forth of our most intimate feelings, our most intimate fears. It was as if the stylus itself were aimed at just those hidden parts of our souls. It was as though the wax already bore the signs and only waited for us to scratch the excess away to reveal the truth. And all the while, those evil folk in the next room laughed and listened, listened and laughed!’

Laughing, Madame Keyne said: ‘I thought they were too busy laughing to hear a thing! Though it’s true, writing to you across that little gulf that you could not speak over for your reasons and I would not for mine, for all the sinister laughter about us — and bandits, slavers, or smugglers, it was certainly sinister enough! — I have never felt so intimate with another human as I did that night, nor felt I could be more honest, or more — ’

‘Ah!’ Jade threw up a hand. ‘You just cannot admit you are wrong!’

Madame Keyne looked puzzled.

‘They were not slavers! Or smugglers! They were bandits. And they listened to every word we said, determined to rob us on the least pretext!’

‘Quite probably they were bandits!’ declared Madame Keyne. ‘Most likely I was wrong. Rob us? No doubt they needed no pretext at all!’

‘We were in the south,’ declared Jade. ‘The south is my country, not yours!’

‘We were indeed thirty, almost forty, stades south of Kolhari.’ Madame Keyne shook her head again, again smiling. ‘And the next morning, you made us leave the inn and return to the city — it was too dangerous, you said. So we never did complete our business that trip.’

‘See! You cannot admit you were wrong,’ Jade cried. ‘You must always be right!’

‘It is very easy for me not to be right — most probably I was not right. There is a definite possibility I was — definitely — wrong. There is a definite possibility that the probability was large, huge, overwhelming. Certainly there was no need to take chances. I admit to it all! The only thing I cannot admit to is that…I believe what I don’t believe!’

‘I hate that in you!’

‘I do not love it in you, either!’

Jade looked down. ‘But you went back, two weeks later, and completed what business you had. Alone.’

‘Yes.’ Madame Keyne sighed. ‘I did. Ah, I missed you on that trip. All the bandits and slavers and smugglers seemed to have melted away. And there was no one to sit on the bed’s edge with in the lamplight at evening and write notes to. Without you, it was only dull business.’

‘I do not like to travel,’ Jade said. ‘Business trips, the rushing, the inconvenience, being gawked at by strangers, the small talk with new acquaintances that one will forget ever having known in a week — that is for you. It’s not to my taste. When I come to a new town, a new city, I like to stay in one place for a time, to live there, to meet the street girls and talk to the market vendors, to learn the names of its alleys and avenues; I like to find myself a little garden and walk in it a while. You, Rylla, you run through cities and towns and villages as if they were all suburbs of one great city in which you could never quite find your home. It’s as if you were afraid to hear what your own thoughts might say to you were you to move slowly enough for them to overtake you.’

‘I think it is fear that I might have to read the results of my own actions inscribed on the pliable wax of the world.’ Madame Keyne sighed again.

‘You talk too much and travel too fast,’ Jade said. ‘That’s why you’re so unhappy.’

‘I suppose, when I am unhappy, that is, indeed, the reason. But what was so important on that trip we took together was not the sort of things we say to each other now, but rather what, that night, you wrote to me, what I wrote to you. There, outside my garden walls, I think I felt that what I wrote was, finally and nakedly, private, safe from any spy — ’

‘There, hemmed in by the fear of all I did not know about me, I thought that what I felt was nakedly, totally public, overseen by all eyes, overheard by all ears — ’

‘Yet it was honest. You felt that, didn’t you? That it was honest?’

‘Though I may have been impelled to honesty through fear for my life, yes, it was more honest than I had ever felt I could be with another person.’ Jade smiled. ‘But your writing, Rylla, in the shaping of your signs, is atrocious! There were words I was not even sure of that night!’

‘As you wrote to me. Several times. And I’ve tried to do better.’ Madame Keyne laughed. ‘But that is why I need a secretary. And you suffered to read my messages, and responded with your own, as beautiful as the script in which you scribed them; you struggled to make out whatever, and however clumsily, I meant.’

Jade sighed. ‘I have often wondered if simply because of those frightening men in the next room, you were not just driven, like some slave lashed on by an overseer’s whip, to come closer to your own real thoughts while we wrote to one another that night — ’

‘And I have often wondered if, because writing is so different from speaking, so much slower, so much more considered, if you weren’t forced to consider, slowly, what you really felt — ’

‘Well,’ Jade said, ‘I suppose it’s the same thing — ’

‘—produces the same results,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘Works the same way.’

‘It was wonderful, certainly! And yet so strange — ’ Jade gave a little shudder. ‘But you are right, Rylla. I feel as though I am at all times observed; and I am paralyzed by those eternally judging eyes — or, when I am not paralyzed, I am frightened to the point of anger, of incoherence, of rage. Often I’ve even felt that it was you who observed me, you who judged me. And then I have been at my worst, certainly. At least to you. But I know, and always have known, finally, that it was not you. You, too, feel you are always observed; but you read in that fancied attention the benevolence, the approval, the applause of the market for the mummers. Your life seems to all about you nothing but success — and without your successes, there would be only failure for me. Often I think it isn’t fair.’

‘You are right,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘It isn’t.’

‘At other times, I only wish I could confront, once and for all, the stranger who is always gazing at me, just out of my line of sight, who is always overhearing what I say and finding it silly or selfish or wrong. If I could truly create such a confrontation, I would be rid of it forever! That I try, so often and so hard, sometimes seems to be the only thing in the world that makes my life worth living.’

‘You are right,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘There is nothing more important than that perpetual and repeated confrontation with the nameless ones. Otherwise one can never become free, can never remain free.’

‘And sometimes I think the difference between you and me is that I have at least tried to engage them directly, that I have at least tried, however frightened I was, to look at them, whereas you have not — not really. You have never listened intently to their breathing just behind your shoulder. You have never turned suddenly to stare one in the face. If you did, if you could see them, truly know that they were there, you would be as terrified as I, and would know your own weakness, know how unhappy you are.’

‘Again, I think you may be right.’

‘No…’ Jade shook her head. ‘Though I love you, I know you do not believe me. Again, because you cannot admit that you are wrong — ’

Somewhere a branch fell, off in the bushes. One or the other of the two women glanced up from the table with vague curiosity. The other went on talking.

Certainly it was no more than a branch.

But it made Pryn pull sharply back from the window’s edge. She looked about the hedges. She looked back at the window. (Inside, one of them said: ‘I love you, and I know that you love me. That is all I know. That is all I need to know…’ But the voice spoke so softly Pryn did not catch which woman it was, so that the words seemed like a message glimpsed on a discarded clay tablet without any initialed name above or below, sender and destination forgotten.) The gauze hanging to the sill was as gray as the wall around it. No sun fell through at this hour. Doubtless the women inside, had they looked, could have seen out as easily as Pryn could see in. Really, she must not stay any longer. It just wouldn’t do to be caught here.

Pryn walked along close to the house. Turning the corner, she let herself move out between the bushes.

As she came around by the back door of the kitchen, Gya shoved aside the woven hangings and stepped out. The red scarf around her head was blotched with perspiration. ‘Here’s your supper!’ She handed out a basket. Things in it were wrapped in large leaves.

Pryn pulled one loose: strips of celery, cut turnips, and carrots fell out. And a sizable piece of roasted meat. There was a jar with a wooden stopper, whose surface was still damp and about which she could smell apples. Could it be cider…? There was also a small, dark loaf. ‘Thank you!’

The housekeeper stood on the doorstep, scratching at the hip of her skirt.

Pryn broke off a piece of the loaf and put it in her mouth, to be astonished at its sweetness. (She had tasted neither corn flour nor banana bread before, both of which these were.) She broke off another piece and ate it.

‘And if you see the other, white-headed one, tell her to come and get hers too,’ the hefty woman called. She turned back to the hanging raffia. ‘Though sometimes I do believe that one doesn’t eat at all!’

‘Yes,’ Pryn called again. ‘Thank you! I will!’

Now and again the moon shone blue-white between coursing clouds. Brambles bent and whispered around her. She pulled a branch from dark stone to reveal the darker opening. Had the far end been blocked up? But she squeezed herself, crouching, into the fissure. She slipped through a memory of narrow, underground corridors. Then moonlight speckled brambles outside the rocks just beyond her left eye. Slipping out sideways, she pushed away chattering branches and stood up in the heavy growth. Pryn gazed over brush that darkened under a cloud, then paled to mottled blue as the cloud dragged off.

There was no light in the great house across the cluttered wilds. Somewhere beyond the house itself, a campfire fluttered beside some outbuilding’s door.

Was that a soldier moving along the great house’s roof? No, Pryn decided. This evening the upper cornices were patrolled only by changes in the moonlight along the cracked balustrade. Dark, the house seemed far bigger than Madame Keyne’s.

Pryn pushed forward, clenching her jaw at the rattling brush.

She was approaching a clear space — and struck her shin.

Hopping back, looking down, holding aside leaves, she saw a stone expanse, which, she realized looking out over it, was why there was a clearing. She stepped up on the stone lip.

Across the mossy rock, she saw the sculpted stands, each topped with carved shells, like the ones at the corners of Madame Keyne’s bridge.

She was standing at the edge of a great fountain that no longer worked at all. She looked about for higher ground. In the wild rises around, had time clogged conduits and tributaries with refuse in the same way a little murderess had packed the emblem of her service down a drain?

What am I doing here? she thought, stepped from the lip, and moved around it toward the house. But he’s not there…

That was what she knew.

That knowledge had led her to volunteer her services in the first place. But here she was, on the strength of that knowledge charged with a mission which that knowledge, precisely, assured her could not succeed.

This is ridiculous, she mouthed for the seventh time, freeing a twig caught in the coin-filled pocket at one side of her dress, moving a branch that snagged on the knife at the other, now pulling back from thorns that scraped her calf where she’d hiked the dress up for easier maneuvering.

She reached the end of brush and bramble and stepped into what was merely waist-high grass.

That back window — were those cloth hangings inside it? She could climb in. Coming closer, her gaze rose to the roof, whose cracked and crumbled balustrade, as she walked up, approached her in some infinitely delayed topple.

A leaf blew from the roof above to spin and spiral at her, till a texture change in the earth underfoot made her look down — at the window, now before her, with its dark drapes.

Pryn vaulted to the sill, got her feet up, dropped one foot over, pushing back hangings. The cloth was incredibly gritty — she heard it tear. As she jumped down, another cloud drifted from the haloed moon. Light fell through the open roof into the inner court — very like Madame Keyne’s.

Might this, Pryn wondered, be what Madame Keyne’s home would look like in ruins years hence? All furniture had been taken out, the floor tiles broken — five or six benches had been up-ended against the wall —

Footsteps!

Pryn crouched beside one as a thick-necked soldier walked from the stairway across the floor, glanced up at the moon, then went to the doorway, where he paused in the shadow — a moment later his urine hissed against the door post. Still barefoot, Pryn resolved she would leave by the window she’d entered.

The soldier — no doubt the one she’d thought mere moonlight on the cornice — went.

Slowly, Pryn stood.

There’s no one in the house, she thought. At least no one important. I am alone with the absent Liberator. It was preternaturally silent. She felt like the central figure in a complex joke whose humor was just beyond her; she also felt exorbitantly free, as if her knowledge allowed her to wander, to run, to fly on spined wings anywhere in the moonstruck dark — as long as she flew quietly. She stepped from behind the bench. The dead barbarian…?

Lusts as depraved as…? Unanswerable questions glittered in her mind like mummers’ gibes in a market skit before which a shadow audience howled silent laughter.

Pryn walked across the court and climbed the steps down which the soldier had come. As she entered the archway at the top, the house reached the end of any similarity with Madame Keyne’s.

In the corner of the large room a ladder led to a hole in the roof; moonlight spilled in. Was this how the Liberator’s guards went up for their theatrical patrol during the day?

Pryn smiled at the lack of attempt to maintain even the fiction of a dweller in this space. She walked over the tile floor and through another arch: another bare room. Narrow windows along the wall let slats of silver. She went up to one and looked, carefully, out. At the outbuilding men and women stood or sat about the fire. Someone added a log.

In the breeze, branches dipped and rose between the window and what she looked at, so she moved to the next sill. Two men came in through the small door in the plank gate, stopping to joke with two others leaving.

Hand on the knife at her hip, Pryn turned to cross the high-ceilinged room.

What shall I tell Madame Keyne when I go back? she wondered. And why should I go back at all? Pryn stepped through another archway, the floor all shadow-dappled from, this time, a wide and generous window beyond which hung more branches. Was this how a queen, or maybe even an empress, felt, moving through her own castle?

On her third step, she saw.

He stood at the edge of shaking light.

Truly frightened, Pryn fought back nervous laughter. At the same time, part of her wondered, quite coolly, what she might say to this guard, seconds from now; what might he say to her — certainly he had seen her. She was standing in a clear swatch of moon.

The man — the big man — stepped forward.

And Pryn got chills.

Chills surged the backs of her shoulders, tickled her thighs. She wanted very much to be somewhere else, and at the same time to move seemed impossible — which only made the feeling more intense, more unsettling.

The chills came on and on.

‘What are you doing here…?’ she whispered. ‘I mean, how…did you get in!’

He gave a snort. ‘These old Neveryóna mansions have their cisterns too.’ Heavy features shifted about the scar. ‘The one here’s been empty as long as the one down in the Spur. What am I doing here? Well…we had some more trouble, earlier today, of the same sort we had the last time you were with us. This seemed as good a place as any to retreat. Now. What are you doing here? And how did you get in?’

‘I…’ Pryn swallowed. ‘Well, I came in the window — looking…for you! Only you weren’t supposed to be here — ’

A sound across the room —

A figure blocked more moonlight under a far arch, then darted to the Liberator’s side, to crouch, looking up at Gorgik, looking over at Pryn. Black hair straggled the bony forehead. The single eye blinked.

Gorgik’s great hand dropped to the one-eyed bandit’s shoulder.

As if those fingers and knuckles and nails were too heavy to bear, Noyeed sank to one knee. ‘Is that the spy, Master…?’

‘Me,’ Pryn started, ‘a spy…?’ She could not tell, in the flickering through the branches, if any irony had worked its way into the Liberator’s scarred face.

‘You disappeared in the middle of the last little fracas we had, Blue Heron — then, when it was over, some of the new men, the Wolf and the Fox, told me how they’d known you before. They said they’d suspected you of spying even then.’

‘But I — ’

‘Blue Heron,’ Gorgik said, ‘can you honestly tell me that you know nothing of the red-bearded demon with the jangling ankles who attacked us in our underground cellars this afternoon? Can you say truthfully that you were not sent here by powerful merchants to ply me with questions of strategy, alliances, and policies, the answers to which you will report back for a handful of coins?’

‘I — ?’

‘Master,’ Noyeed hissed. ‘I think she’s lying!’

‘You’d think the first words of a mother to her child were riddled with untruths, little savior.’ Gorgik jogged the bandit. ‘From the life you’ve led, who’d blame you? Still, I’ve told her my reasons for coming here. Now I want her to tell me hers.’ He looked at Pryn. ‘You say you came, looking for me — and, however unexpectedly, you’ve found me. What is your mission?’

‘I only wanted…’

Noyeed’s eye batted and glittered.

‘I only wanted to…say goodbye. I am leaving this strange and terrible city! I am leaving Kolhari! I wanted to…thank you. For being friendly to me on the bridge. And to say goodbye.’

‘I see.’ The Liberator settled his weight more on one hip. ‘Is that all?’

‘Yes. And to…’ Pryn looked down. ‘…to ask you a question.’

Gorgik dropped his hand from Noyeed’s shoulder. Noyeed reached up to scratch it. There was something loose around his neck. In the moon-dapple, Pryn was not sure what it was.

‘What did you want to ask?’

‘It’s only a question for myself.’ Pryn blinked. ‘That barbarian, the one your…friend there killed. Before he died, he said you…sold him. As a slave. Was that true?’

‘Yes.’

‘But that’s terrible!’ Pryn frowned. ‘You’re the Liberator! Why did you do it?’

‘Actually I sold him — as a slave — on a dozen different occasions. As I recall, he sold me — to slavers and to private owners also — well over half a dozen times.’

Pryn’s frown had begun as condemnation; it crumbled into bewilderment. ‘But I don’t understand…!’

‘It was the nature of our relationship — when we had a relationship.’ Gorgik shrugged. ‘That’s the trouble with spies, you know. It’s not that they carry information. It’s that they carry fragmentary information, out of context, misconstrued, badly interpreted, incomplete, and misread.’

‘I’m not a spy!’ Pryn said. ‘I just don’t understand — ’

‘You know that we were slavery-fighters together. It was simply more efficient to have one of us working from within the slave gangs.’

‘Yes’ Pryn said. ‘But certainly that’s not what he meant by…’

Gorgik looked with dappled face at the dappled floor. ‘It’s hard to say, with someone like Prince Sarg, what he meant. Nor is he here to clarify it for us. But there are as many ways to read the iron collar, the chain, and the whip as there are to read the words a woman or a man whispers under the tent’s shadow with the moonlight outside. But you’re too young to — ’

‘Oh, no!’ Pryn protested. ‘No. I’m not!’

The giant looked up. ‘Well, perhaps not.’ He smiled — though the scar, like a careless mark scrawled across eye, cheek, and lip, confused that smile’s meaning. ‘You’ve heard camel drivers in the market, cursing their beasts, one another, and the whole inconvenient and crowded world of commerce through which they must drive their herd? The brutal repetition in their invention and invective alone keeps such curses from being true poetry.’

She wasn’t sure how poetic curses were, but she knew camel drivers were foul-mouthed. Pryn nodded.

‘Are you too young to have heard, little Heron, that some of these same men, alone in their tents at night with their women, may implore, plead, beg their mistresses to whisper these same phrases to them, or plead to be allowed to whisper them back, phrases which now, instead of conveying ire and frustration, transport them, and sometimes the women, too, to heights of pleasure?’

Though Pryn had never heard it put so bluntly before, she knew enough to suspect the process existed, and nodded quickly lest she be thought less worldly than she was.

The giant’s smile broadened. ‘Now there are some, who, wishing to see the world more unified than common sense suggests it could possibly be, say that to use terms of anger and rage in the throes of desire indicates some great malaise, not only of camel drivers but of the whole world; that desire itself must be a form of anger and is thus invalid as an adjunct to love — ’

‘I would say,’ Pryn said, who after all had heard her share of camel drivers taking their herds from prairie to desert over the rough Falthas, ‘the sickness is using terms of desire in the throes of anger and rage. Most curses are just words for women’s genitals, men’s excreta, and cooking implements joined up in preposterous ways.’

‘A theory the most intelligent and high-minded of our young have always been fond of. But both arguments are very much of the same form. Both assume that signs thought about in one way and felt to mean one thing mean other feelings that are not felt and other thoughts that are not in the mind. Since the true meanings in both arguments are absent from the intentions of the man or woman speaking, one finally ends with a world in which neither love nor anger can really be condoned, since neither is ever pure. The inappropriate signs do not enrich the reading; they pollute it. And it’s surprising how fast one argument becomes the other — as the most intelligent and high-minded of our young grow older. But there’s another way to read.’

Pryn’s frown questioned the wavering leaf-light the moon threw about the room. Here and there a twig’s or branch’s shadow was doubled on the bare plaster by leafy refraction.

‘Even the most foul-mouthed camel driver knows a curse from a kiss, whatever signs accompany it.’ Gorgik snorted. ‘Enriched pleasure is still pleasure. Enriched anger is still anger.’ Along with the quiet tenor of his city voice, the scar and moon-dapple inflected his features toward some other meaning than the anger she kept reading there. ‘A word spoken in the noon sun does not necessarily mean the same as it does when uttered in the moonlight. The words by which we indicate a woman’s genitals, men’s excreta, or cooking implements are not, in themselves, lusty. They simply can be used in many ways — among many others.’

With adolescence, Pryn had certainly taken on the sometimes troubling knowledge that almost anything with an outside and an inside supporting movement from one to the other could be sexually suggestive. ‘But what does this have to do with your…friend who tried to kill you?’

The Liberator sighed. ‘The signs by which slavery manifests itself in the world in many ways resemble the camel driver’s curse.’ The great hand had strayed to the bandit’s neck. Gorgik hooked a forefinger around…it was an iron collar that hung there! ‘The collar itself may be a sign of all social oppression — yet its wearing can also be an adjunct of pleasure. My little barbarian prince, while we fought and loved together, was very much one out to have the world more unified — while I, in such matters, am…a camel driver.’ Gorgik’s laugh had a nervous relief that Pryn wondered at. ‘Sarg claimed he felt no bodily pleasure in the collar. Under the sun he and I wore it to advance our fight against slavery, to infiltrate and obliterate it. At night? Well, he tolerated it — at first. Sometimes he laughed at it. Later he began to argue against it; and it was an argument much like the one I — and you — have sketched out: its oppressive meaning debased love; its sexual meaning made of slavery itself an even more terrifying mystery. Finally he refused to wear it any longer. Nor did I press him to it — since he allowed it to me. But as Sarg wore the collar less and less by night, I could not help notice the change in the way he wore it by day. That he wore it much more by day, while that is true, is not so much the point as that he now insisted on wearing it. Several times when we were camped outside a town, he wore the collar into the local market while he bought our supplies, whereupon he would brazenly insult, or cheat, or anger someone, then, at their complaint, bring them back to his “master”—me — and I would have to promise to discipline my “slave.” Then, when the offended party was gone, he would laugh, finding it all a great joke that we should now share. The first time, I read it as a boy’s high spirits and laughed — uneasily — with him. The second time, it was a bother; and I was simply silent while he laughed alone. The third time, I grew angry and told him it was a bother — and a dangerous bother at that! He grew angry in return. That, indeed, was one of our first arguments over the slippery meaning of the iron ring. But from then on, in our forays against the slavers of the west, more and more he demanded to be the one to play the slave — because, as he would now chide me, first jokingly, then seriously, I could not be trusted in the role. For me, you see, it was too charged a sign. Yet as soon as he had the collar on, as soon as he had been “sold” and had gained admittance into the slave pens, he would needlessly prolong his time there, sometimes boasting to the bored guards, sometimes to the confused slaves, of his exploits outside…before, together, we would let them know why he — and I — had come! Sometimes he would ignore our plans and signals altogether, so that I would not know what had happened to him. Later, laughing, he would say it did not matter if we began an hour or three hours after I, waiting for him outside, had expected. For hadn’t we succeeded? Often, as I left after selling him, I would see him turn to taunt the overseers, drawing attention to himself and his collar at precisely the moments when he should have remained most inconspicuous. Several times by such behavior he put his own life and mine in danger — his reasoning was that whatever eccentricities he indulged within the iron band, they were better than any actions I might perform, as his were not contaminated by the secret productions of lust. Yet to put on the collar and walk into a group of slaves and their masters seemed to throw Sarg into a kind of trance, a strangely reckless state where ecstasy and obliviousness, daring and distraction, were one with bravery itself. I did not want to fault him then — and do not now. Many times — bravely — he saved my life. Many times I saved his. But that was the situation, and to talk about it with him was to enter an endless maze of anger, recriminations, and resentments where it was always my overvaluation of the collar that was to blame for any fault I found in his actions while he wore it. Carelessness? Forgetfulness? Heedless braggadocio? What did any of them matter if we were still alive — if we could still free slaves? If we ourselves were truly free? I loved him. And I believe he loved me — certainly he was honestly and infinitely grateful to me, for he would have been a true slave without me; and we both knew it. Had we been embarked on an enterprise where only our own desires were at stake, I think I would have stayed with him, would have fought to keep him, would have risked my life and possibly lost it — fought for my own values and through whatever the world set between us so that we might remain together. But we had a cause that I felt was more important than my own life or safety; and so, possibly all too conveniently, I felt that cause was more important than what we might have won for ourselves by solving such problems.

‘That day we had camped outside a provincial, western hold. Over the previous nights we had freed several gangs of slaves in the area, and I was growing wary that our next strike might be anticipated, since we used basically the same tactics each time. Perhaps we should wait? Or move on? But no, Sarg said; why not strike again — I didn’t want him to wear the collar, he claimed, laughing. Obviously I was jealous of his wearing it. I took the iron to fasten it around Sarg’s neck. He took it from my hands, I recall, and put it on himself. Wearing the leather apron and fur cape many slavers sported in those climes, I led him to the buyers we had singled out: three men who had managed to bring together, through cunning raids and careful bargaining, a gang of men and women whom they were taking off to some killing labor in a desert mogul’s great cave-carving project, where, to create those incredible columns and corridors that are palaces for five or seven generations and then, for the next thousand years, become the haunts of beggars, slaves toil in near-darkness by the hundreds and die by tens and twenties each week. Of course Sarg would not come to the selling board with his head bowed and his shoulders hunched, as most slaves would. Rather he wandered up ahead of me, looking about, grinning and curious — for he claimed, and with some justification, that slaves all observe their masters carefully but that masters pay no attention whatsoever to their slaves. The chief slaver pounded Sarg’s back, ran his thumb under Sarg’s upper and lower lip, now into one cheek, now into the other, to see how many of his teeth were loose. Sarg was a strong lad, with a sound mouth, and well-muscled, the kind of worker they like for gang labor. I received my handful of iron coins and left him there, grumbling over falling prices in flesh — and immediately turned aside to go off behind the rocks and climb to the overhang from which I could look down and coordinate my attack from without with Sarg’s from within. Hidden in the bushes, I watched as he was led back to the other wretches, who stood peg-linked to the plank they carried on their shoulders. Their heads hung. Their feet shuffled in the dust. Sarg was already strutting and laughing. “You think I’m an ordinary slave?” he called, as if — I always felt when he did it — to me. “Ha! You think, just because I wear the iron, I am an ordinary slave. You don’t know who I am at all!” They did not hit him — one shoved him a little, toward the gang. Many times, you must understand, he had explained to me, when I had chided him on such behavior, “If I rave thus, they only think me crazy. And if masters pay little attention to slaves, they ignore completely those slaves they think mad. Besides, it sets an example of defiance to the other slaves, and I get pleasure from it. A pleasure of the mind, not the body! You should see in such taunts that bravery which, if all slaves showed at once and together, would crumble the institution and there would be no need for liberators like us! Given the pleasure that the collar brings you, you would deny me my joy in such outbursts…?” This time I saw the slaver narrow his eyes at Sarg. And I had seen slavers narrow their eyes at him before. The slaver called over one of the others. I had seen slavers point Sarg out before to one another and laugh. This man did not laugh. He nodded at a whispered instruction from his fellow, then turned to leave the encampment. Our plan was to wait for nightfall, when Sarg would have gotten a chance to decide which slaves we could trust to aid us and which would be too frightened. But twenty minutes later, from my vantage, I saw the man returning — with twenty imperial guardsmen. They were down the road, out of the line of sight of the camp. My first thought was to give Sarg our signal — the wail of a wild dog — and at least throw down to him a blade I kept for him under my furs and begin the attack at once. But as I raised my hands to my mouth to howl, there was a rustle in the brush beside me, and three other guardsmen stepped out. I thought they knew who I was and was only a moment from rashness. But seeing my leather apron and cape, one turned to the others and said: “See, they hire us to patrol this campsite till dawn, and already they’ve posted a lookout here against these accursed Liberators,” and nodded to me. “Let’s move further on.” I nodded back, trying to look as much like a lookout as possible. There were other guards, I saw, moving behind the trees. Sarg, down in the campsite, did not see, nor was he even looking. For two men to fight with the help of twenty slaves against three slavers is a viable battle. For two men to fight twenty or more armed guards expecting an attack is not. Should I have thrown him his sword then? He would have fought then — and died. Perhaps he wanted to die. But though all his actions seemed to say so, I still think such a reading of them was not mine to make. What I did, after a moment’s thought, was to turn away and leave the site — leave the west and make my way back toward Kolhari, to redouble my efforts where slavery was already at its weakest, and thus establish a position to move back into those areas where it is still strong. I left Small Sarg, my barbarian prince. I did not even think about returning to the guarded site that night. I do not even know if Sarg ever knew that the guards were there. Or that his own actions had called them in. I left him a true slave, without a weapon. Yet, for the week, for the month, and still sometimes on such moonlit nights as this, I can hear his argument. “You wanted to get rid of me. The guards were only an excuse to abandon me because you did not like my fighting manner, which was no more than high-spirited bravery itself. You wanted to be free of my recriminations in order to pursue your own desires. Your only real objection to my carryings on was that I did not act enough the slave to appease your lustful fantasies. And it was your desire to see me in the collar that made me a slave — that now abandoned me to slavery.”’ The Liberator shrugged. ‘How does one refute such an argument? I’m only glad I had a cause to help me put such recriminations aside.’

‘It’s as if,’ Pryn said, suddenly, ‘he felt all those desires secretly that you felt openly! But because his were secret, even from himself, they took control of him and led him to those foolish and dangerous actions, while your desires were known and acknowledged, and so, if anything, you were the better Liberator for it…?’

Gorgik snorted again. ‘It would be a lie if I said I had not thought the same from time to time. But what I let myself think idly, I do not necessarily believe.’ He lifted the collar on his finger so that it tugged Noyeed’s head to the side. Then he let the iron fall to the little man’s neck. ‘Sarg said he felt no lust within the iron. I say I do. Why should I assume he spoke any less truly of his feelings than I speak of mine? If such a sign can shift so easily from oppression to desire, it can shift in other ways — toward power, perhaps, and aggression, toward the bitterness of misjudged freedoms by one who must work outside the civil structure. We killed many slavers, Sarg and I — he was only a boy, really. I do not think dealing death makes the best life for the young. The chance organization of my inner life and those situations life has thrown me into have taught me, painfully, a sign can slide from meaning to meaning. What prevented it from sliding another way for Sarg? For me, the collar worn against the will meant social oppression, and the collar worn willfully meant desire. For Sarg, the collar was social oppression, as well as all asocial freedom. Nothing in our lives, save my anger, challenged that meaning for him. And my anger was a lover’s anger, which too often feels to the loved one as oppressive as a parent’s. We fought — the two of us — for a vision of society, and yet we lived outside society — like soldiers fighting for a beautiful and wondrous city whose walls they have nevertheless been forbidden to enter. Sarg did not have the meanings I had to help him hold his own meanings stable. That is all. And my desire’s position in this blind and brutal land means only that I know desire’s workings better than some — but it does not make me either a better or a worse Liberator. Only what I do with my understanding changes that. Do you understand a little more now?’

Pryn nodded. ‘Perhaps. A little.’

‘And do you think, now, you might be able to write a clearer account of it?’

‘Oh, yes, I — ’ Then she realized he meant an account for some absent master of her possible spying. Pryn felt her face heat in the half-dark.

‘Well, perhaps I do too — now.’ Gorgik snorted again. ‘Perhaps I, too, saw in myself that other meaning, Sarg’s meaning, when I left him. Certainly, when he swung down from that balcony at me, across the cellar, I saw all the dangers of such asocial freedom descending upon me — and they were indeed as terrifying and as paralyzing as the first and sudden discovery in one’s own body of lusts which have no name. You say you’re leaving the city? Probably that’s wise. Tell me, girl, which way are you heading?’

‘I came down from the northern mountains,’ Pryn said. ‘I suppose I’ll head…south.’

‘Ah, the monstrous and mysterious south! I remember my time there well. I hope you learn as much about the workings of power while you are there as I did.’ The Liberator’s free hand moved absently to his broad chest, where his bronze disk hung. The broad thumb slid over the marked verdigris, as if the hard flesh might read what was inscribed there by touch: certainly the shifting leaf blotches made it impossible to decipher those signs by sight. ‘Tomorrow I have my meeting with Lord Krodar, first minister to the Empress. The denizens of the High Court have little love for the south. I’m afraid this astrolabe is, in its way, a map of just that southern-most peninsula which those now in power have traditionally seen as their nemesis. To enter new territory displaying the wrong map is not the way to learn the present paths that might prove propitious.’ Thick fingers moved from the disk to the chain it hung from. Gorgik suddenly bent his head to loose the links from under his hair. Pryn saw his own collar was gone…and now realized it was the Liberator’s that hung around the bandit’s neck, ludicrously too large and lopsided on the jutting collarbones. ‘When I was a boy in this city — ’ the Liberator raised his head — ‘half your age, if not younger — oh, much younger than you — my father brought me to visit a house in Sallese. I remember a garden, some statues, I think a fountain…maybe some fountains near running water.’ The Liberator laughed. ‘When I heard this house was for rent, I was told it was in Sallese — and I felt the return of old joy to think I might be taking for my headquarters the very home I had visited as a child. It isn’t in Sallese, you know. It’s right next to Sallese, in the suburb called Neveryóna, where the titled aristocracy have their city homes — those who are not staying at the High Court of Eagles itself. Once, they actually tried to call the whole city Neveryóna, but that never went over very well, and when the Child Empress came to power…’ His mind seemed to reach for that distant time, while moonlight spilled its shadow over his face’s rough landscape. ‘It seems an irony to be here rather than there — though it’s not ironic enough to make me truly laugh. Here, girl.’ Gorgik gestured with his two fists, below which, in moon dapple, the chained disk turned and turned back. ‘If you knew the trouble this has guided me through, you might not take it. Yet I suspect the trouble I have got through under its weight is trouble I have lifted from the neck of all Nevèrÿon — an illusion, perhaps; but then, perhaps the fact that it is an illusion I believe in is why I am signed and sign myself “Liberator.”’

Pryn stepped forward.

Gorgik raised the astrolabe.

Noyeed reached between his legs to scratch — and blinked.

As she neared them, moonlight flittered over Pryn. She felt a growing sense both of disgust and trust. Had she not just spent the time with Madame Keyne — and the Wild Ini — she might have thought that the trust was all for Gorgik and the disgust all for Noyeed. But in the conflict and complication, the chills, which had never really ceased, resurged. Was this fear? Was it more? It seemed to have lost all boundary; it filled the room, the house, the city the way the flicker and glitter of moonlight filled her very eyeballs.

Gorgik passed the chain over her head. Tale fragments of the crowning of queens returned to her. Links, warmed through the day against the Liberator’s neck, touched the back and sides of hers — and a memory rose to startle: jerking the twisted vines up over a scaly head…

Fear was replaced by terror. Pryn had a moment’s vision of herself in a complex and appalling game where Madame Keyne, the Liberator, the Child Empress Ynelgo, perhaps the nameless gods themselves, were all players, while she was as powerless as some wooden doll, set down in the midst of an elaborate miniature garden.

Something grappled her wrist.

She looked down — all the motion she could muster. And the moment’s terror was gone. Noyeed held her forearm with hard fingers.

The eye turned from Pryn to Gorgik — the Liberator was looking down with the same questioning Pryn fancied on her own face.

‘She has a knife, master!’ Noyeed’s gappy gums opened over his words like a mask of Pryn’s own former fear: he looked as if he were avoiding a blow. ‘See — at her waist? The spy has a blade! I was only protecting your life, master — protecting it as I have protected it before, as I will always protect it!’

Pryn wanted to laugh and only waited for the Liberator’s great and generous laughter to release hers.

‘Very well then, Blue Heron.’ Gorgik did not laugh. ‘Take my gift, with your blade, into the south.’

Pryn jerked her arm from Noyeed’s grip. The little man, squatting at their feet, almost lost balance. She stepped back. The chain pulled from the Libertor’s hands. The astrolabe fell against her breasts.

‘No one can say for certain what confusion I give you.’ (Gorgik’s perturbation seemed far from her own. And where, a moment back, she had felt at one with him, a oneness inscribed in wonder and fear, now she felt only annoyance inscribed on more annoyance.) ‘Tomorrow I shall go to the High Court of Eagles for…the first time? Does anyone in this strange and terrible land ever go anywhere, without having been there before in myth or dream? The ministers with whom I shall confer will ask me a simple question. Beyond my campaign to free Nevèrÿon’s slaves, whom will I ally myself with next? Will I take up the cause of the workers who toil for wages only a step above slavery? Or will I take up the marginal workless who, without wages at all, live a step below? Shall I ally myself with those women who find themselves caught up, laboring without wages, for the male population among both groups? For they are, all of them — these free men and women — caught in a freedom that, despite the name it bears, makes movement through society impossible, that makes the quality of life miserable, that allows no chance and little choice in any aspect of the human not written by the insertion or elision of the sign for production. This is what Lord Krodar will ask me. And I shall answer…’

Balancing on the balls of her feet, Pryn felt as unsteady as little Noyeed, crouched and blinking, looked.

‘I shall answer that I do not know.’ Gorgik’s hand found the little man’s shoulder; the horny forefinger hooked again over the collar. Noyeed, at any rate, seemed steadied. ‘I shall say that, because I spent my real youth as a real slave in your most real and royal obsidian mines, the machinery of my desire is caught up within the working of the iron hinge. Slavery is, for me, not a word in a string of words, wrought carefully for the voice that will enunciate it for the play of glow and shade it can initiate in the playful mind. I cannot tell this minister what slavery means, for me, beyond slavery — not because desire clouds my judgment, but because I had the misfortune once to be a slave.’

Elation triumphed over all fear; annoyance was gone. And joy seemed a small thing to sacrifice before what Pryn suddenly recognized as the absolute freedom of the real, a freedom that, in its intensity, had only been intimated by the truth of dragons.

She turned, started for the archway —

‘Where are you going…?’ which was the one-eyed bandit.

‘To the south!’ Pryn called.

Gorgik laughed.

And Pryn ran through moon-slashed rooms, down leaf-loud steps, across the unroofed court. Climbing through the window, she laughed to be leaving by the way she’d entered because of something so indistinguishable from habit when one was this free that habit seemed…But she did not know what it seemed; and crashed through grass and garden brambles, rushed by a stifled fountain, pushed back branches at the wall, felt along stone for the opening, found it, wedged herself into darkness —

Her shift snagged as she slid by rock. She pulled — and heard something tear. Still, she managed to get one arm out, then her head —

‘Give me my knife!’

Fingers grappled her hair; and her arm, yanking.