Tales of Neveryon

by Delany, Samuel R.

  Jahor was calling.

  Gorgik looked down from the parapet.

  The eunuch motioned him to follow the dozen women who had separated from the caravan – among them the Vizerine: a tiny door swallowed them one and another. Gorgik had to duck.

  As conversation babbled along the corridor, past more soldiers standing in their separate niches (‘… home at last …,’ ‘… what an exhausting trip …,’ ‘… here at home in Kolhari …,’ ‘… when one returns home to the High Court …,’ ‘… only in Kolhari …’), Gorgik realized that, somehow, all along he had been expecting to come to his childhood home; and that, rather than coming home at all, he had no idea where he was.

  Gorgik spent five months at the High Court of the Child Empress Ynelgo. The Vizerine put him in a small, low-ceilinged room, with a slit window, just behind her own chambers. The stones of the floor and walls were out of line and missing mortar, as though pressure from the rock above, below, and around it had compacted the little space all out of shape. By the end of the first month, both the Vizerine and her steward had almost lost interest in him. But several times before her interest waned, she had presented him at various private suppers of seven to fourteen guests in the several dining rooms of her suite, all with beamed ceilings and tapestried walls, some with wide windows opening out on sections of roof, some windowless with whole walls of numberless lamps and ingenious flues to suck off the fumes. Here he met some of her court friends, a number of whom found him interesting, and three of whom actually befriended him. At one such supper he talked too much. At two more he was silent. At the other six, however, he acquitted himself well, for seven to fourteen is the number a mine slave usually dines with, and he was comfortable with the basic structures of communication by which such a group (whether seated on logs and rocks, or cushions and couches) comports itself at meals, if not with the forms of politeness this particular group’s expression of those structures had settled on.

  But those could be learned.

  He learned them.

  Gorgik had immediately seen there was no way to compete with the aristocrats in sophistication: he intuited that they would only be offended or, worse, bored if he tried. What interested them in him was his difference from them. And to their credit (or the credit of the Vizerine’s wise selection of supper guests) for the sake of this interest and affection for the Vizerine they made allowances, in ways he was only to appreciate years later, when he drank too much, or expressed like or dislike for one of their number not present a little too freely, or when his language became too hot on whatever topic was about – most of the time to accuse them of nonsense or of playing with him, coupled with good-natured but firm threats of what he would do to them were they on his territory rather than he on theirs. Their language, polished and mellifluous, flowed, between bouts of laughter in which his indelicacies were generously absorbed and forgiven (if not forgotten), over subjects ranging from the scandalous to the scabrous: when Gorgik could follow it, it often made his mouth drop, or at least his teeth open behind his lips. His language, blunt and blistered with scatalogs that frequently upped the odd aristocratic eyebrow, adhered finally to a very narrow range: the fights, feuds, and scrabblings for tiny honors, petty dignities, and minuscule assertions of rights among slaves and thieves, dock-beggars and prostitutes, sailors and barmaids and more slaves – people, in short, with no power beyond their voices, fingers, or feet – a subject rendered acceptable to the fine folk of the court only by his basic anecdotal talent and the topic’s novelty in a setting where boredom was the greatest affliction.

  Gorgik did not find the social strictures on his relations with the Vizerine demeaning. The Vizerine worked – the sort of work only those in art or government can know, where the hours were seldom defined and real tasks were seldom put in simple terms (while false tasks always were). Conferences and consultations made up her day. At least two meals out of every three were spent with some ambassador, governor, or petitioner, if not at some affair of state. To do her credit, in that first month, we can thus account for all twenty-two evening meals Myrgot did not share with her slave.

  Had her slave, indeed, spent his past five years as, say, a free, clever, and curious apprentice to a well-off potter down in the port, he might have harbored some image of a totally leisured and totally capricious aristocracy, for which there were certainly enough emblems around him now, but which emblems, had he proceeded on them, as certainly would have gotten him into trouble. Gorgik, however, had passed so much of his life at drudgeries he knew would, foreman or no, probably kill him in another decade and certainly in two, he was too dazzled by his own, unexpected freedom from such drudgeries to question how others drudged. To pass the Vizerine’s open door and see Myrgot at her desk, head bent over a map, a pair of compasses in one hand and a straight edge in the other (which, to that clever, curious, and ambitious apprentice, would have signed work), and then to pass the same door later and see her standing beside her desk, looking vacantly toward some cloud passing by the high, beveled window (which, to the same apprentice, would have signed a leisure that could reasonably be intruded upon, thus making her order never to intrude appear, for a lover at any rate, patently unreasonable), were states he simply did not distinguish: their textures were both so rich, so complex, and so unusual to him that he read no structure of meaning in either, much less did he read the meaning of those structures somehow as opposition. In obeying the Vizerine’s restriction, and not intruding on either situation, his reasons were closer to something aesthetic than practical. Gorgik was acting on that disposition for which the apprentice would have despised him as the slave he was: he knew his place. Yet that apprentice’s valuation would have been too coarse, for the truth is that in such society, Gorgik – no more than a potter’s boy – had no place … if we use ‘to have’ other than in that mythical and mystifying sense in which both a slave has a master and good people have certain rights, but rather in the sense of possession that implies some way (either through power or convention) of enforcing that possession, if not to the necessary extent, at least to a visible one. Had Gorgik suddenly developed a disposition to intrude, from some rage grown either in whim or reason, he would have intruded on either situation – a disposition that his aristocratic supper companions would have found more sympathetic than the apprentice’s presumptions, assumptions, and distinctions all to no use. Our potter’s boy would no doubt have gotten himself turned out of the castle, thrown into one of the High Court’s lower dungeons, or killed – for these were brutal and barbaric times, and the Vizerine was frequently known to be both violent and vicious. Had Gorgik intruded, yes, the aristocrats would have been in far greater sympathy with him – as they turned him out, threw him into a dungeon, or killed him. No doubt this means the distinction is of little use. But we are trying to map the borders of the disposition that was, indeed, the case. Gorgik, who had survived on the waterfront and survived in the mine, survived at the High Court of Eagles. To do it, he had to learn a great deal.

  Not allowed to approach the Vizerine and constrained to wait till she approached him, he learned, among the first lessons, that there was hardly one person at court who was not, practically speaking, in a similar position with at least one other person – if not whole groups. Thus Lord Vanar (who shared Jahor’s tastes and gave Gorgik several large rocks with gems embedded in them that lay in the corners of his room, gathering dust) and the Baron Inige (who did not, but who once took him hunting in the royal preserves and talked endlessly about flowers throughout the breadth of Nevèrÿon – and from whom Gorgik now learned that an ini, which brought back a torrent of memories from his dockside adolescence, was deadly poison) would never attend the same function, though both must always be invited. The Thane of Sallese could be invited to the same gathering as Lord Ekoris unless the Countess Esulla was to be present – however, in such cases Curly (the Baron Inige’s nickname) would be excused. No one known as a friend of Lord Aldamir (who had not been at Court
now for many years, though everyone seemed to remember him with fondness) should be seated next to, or across from, any relative, unto the second cousins, of the Baronine Jeu-Forsi … Ah, but with perhaps half a dozen insistently minor exceptions, commented the elderly Princess Grutn, putting one arm back over the tasseled cushion and moving nuts about on her palm with her heavily ringed thumb.

  But they were not minor at all, laughed Curly, sitting forward on his couch, joining his hands with a smile as excited as if he had just dicovered a new toadstool.

  But they were minor, insisted the princess, letting the nuts fall back to the silver tray and picking up her chased-silver goblet to brood moodily on its wine. Why, several people had commented to her only within the last month that perhaps the Baron had regrettably lost sight of just how minor those exceptions were.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder if the main sign of the power of our most charming cousin, whose reign is courteous and courageous, is that, for her sake, all these amenities, both minor and major, are forgotten for a gathering she will attend!’ Inige laughed.

  And Gorgik, sitting on the floor, picked his teeth with a silver knife whose blade was shorter than his little finger and listened – not with the avidity of a social adventurer storing information for future dealings with the great, but with the relaxed attention of an aesthete hearing for the first time a difficult poem, which he already knows from the artist’s previous work will require many exposures before its meanings clear.

  Our young potter’s boy would have brought with him to these same suppers a ready-made image of the pyramid of power, and no doubt in the light of these arcane informations tried to map the whole volume of that pyramid on to a single line, with every thane and duchess in place, each above this one and below that one, the whole forming a cord that could be negotiated knot by knot, a path that presumably ended at some one – perhaps the Child Empress Ynelgo herself. Gorgik, because he brought to the supper rooms no such preconceptions, soon learned, between evenings with the Vizerine, dawn rides with the Baron, afternoon gatherings in the Old Hall, arranged by the young earls Jue-Grutn (not to be confused with the two older men who bore the same title, the bearded one of which was said to be either insane, a sorcerer, or both), or simply from gatherings overseen and overheard in his wanderings through the chains of rooms which formed the Middle Style of the castle, that the hierarchy of prestige branched; that the branches interwove; and that the interweavings in several places formed perfectly closed, if inexplicable, loops; as well, he observed that the presence of this earl or that thane (not to mention this steward or that attendant maid) could throw a whole subsection of the system into a different linking altogether.

  Jahor, especially during the first weeks, took many walks with Gorgik through the castle. The eunuch steward was hugely rich in information about the architecture itself. The building still mystified the ex-miner. The oldest wings, like the Old Hall, were vast, cavernous spaces, with open roofs and water conduits grooved into the floor. Dozens of small, lightless cells opened off them, the upper ones reached by wooden ladders, stone steps, or sometimes mere mounds of earth heaped against the wall. Years ago, Jahor explained, these dusty, dank cavelets, smaller even than Gorgik’s present room, had actually been the dwelling places of great kings, queens, and courtiers. From time to time they had housed officers of the army – and, during the several occupations, common soldiers. That little door up there, sealed over with stone and no steps to it? Why, that was where Mad Queen Olin had been walled up after she had presided at a banquet in this very hall, at which she served her own twin sons, their flesh roasted, their organs pickled. Halfway through the meal, a storm had burst over the castle, and rain had poured through the broad roof opening, while lightning fluttered and flickered its pale whips; but Olin forbade her guests to rise from the table before the feast was consumed. It’s still debatable, quipped the eunuch, whether they entombed her because of the supper or the soaking. (Olin, thought Gorgik. Olin’s warning …? But Jahor was both talking and walking on.) Today, except for the Old Hall that was kept in some use, these ancient echoing wells were deserted, the cells were empty, or at best used to store objects that had grown useless, if not meaningless, with rust, dust, and time. About fifteen or fifty years ago, some particularly clever artisan – the same who laid out the New Pavē down in the port, Jahor explained, waking Gorgik’s wandering attention again – had come up with the idea of the corridor. (as well as the coinpress). At least half the castle had been built since then (and most of Nevèrÿon’s money minted); for at least half the castle had its meeting rooms and storerooms, its kitchens and its living quarters, laid out along corridors. There were six whole many-storied wings of them. In the third floor of one of the newest, the Vizerine had her suite; in the second and third floor of one of the oldest, most business of state was carried on around the throne room of the Child Empress. For the rest, the castle was built in that strange and disconcerting method known as the Middle Style, in which rooms, on two sides, three sides, four sides, and sometimes with steps going up or down, opened on to other rooms; which opened on to others – big rooms, little rooms, some empty, some lavishly appointed, many without windows, some incredibly musty; and frequently two or three perfectly dark ones, which had to be traversed with torch and taper, lying between two that were in current, active use, a vast and hopeless hive.

  Did Jahor actually know his way around the entire edifice?

  No one knew his way around the entire court. Indeed, though his mistress went occasionally, Jahor had never been anywhere near the Empress’s suite or the throne room. He knew the location of the wing only by report.

  What about the Child Empress herself? Did she know all of it?

  Oh, especially not the Child Empress herself, Jahor explained, an irony that our potter’s boy might have questioned, but which was just another strangeness to the ex-pit slave.

  But it was after this conversation that Jahor’s company too began to fall off.

  Gorgik’s aristocratic friends had a particularly upsetting habit: one day they would be perfectly friendly, if not downright intimate; the next afternoon, if they were walking with some companion unknown to Gorgik, they would pass him in some rocky corridor and not even deign recognition – even if he smiled, raised his hand, or started to speak. Such snubs and slights would have provoked our potter, however stoically he forebore, to who-knows-what final outburst, ultimate indelicacy, or denouncement of the whole, undemocratic sham. But though Gorgik saw quite well he was the butt of such behavior more than they, he saw too that they treated him thus not because he was different so much as because that was the way they treated each other. The social hierarchy and patterns of deference to be learned here were as complex as those that had to be mastered – even by a foreman – on moving into a new slave barracks in the mine. (Poor potter! With all his simplistic assumptions about the lives of aristocrats, he would have had just as many about the lives of slaves.) Indeed, among slaves Gorgik knew what generated such complexity: servitude itself. The only question he could not answer here was: what were all these elegant lords and ladies slaves to? In this, of course, the potter would have had the advantage of knowledge. The answer was simple: power, pure, raw and obsessive. But in his ignorance, young Gorgik was again closer to the lords and ladies around him than an equally young potter’s boy would have been. For it is precisely at its center that one loses the clear vision of what surrounds, what controls and contours every utterance, decides and develops every action, as the bird has no clear concept of air, though it support her every turn, or the fish no true vision of water, though it blur all she sees. A goodly, if not frightening, number of these same lords and ladies dwelling at the Court had as little idea of what shaped their every willed decision, conventional observance, and sheer, unthinking habit as did Gorgik – whereas the potter’s boy Gorgik might have been, had the play of power five years before gone differently in these same halls and hives, would not even have had to ask.
/>   For all the temperamental similarities we have drawn, Gorgik was not (nor should we be) under any illusion that either the lords, or their servants, accepted him as one of their own. But he had conversation; he had companionship – for some periods extremely warm companionship – from women and men who valued him for much the same reason as the Vizerine had. He was given frequent gifts. From time to time people in rooms he was not in and never visited suggested to one another that they look out for the gruff youngster in the little room on the third floor, see that he was fed, or that he was not left too much alone. (And certainly a few times when such conversations might have helped, they never occurred.) But Gorgik, stripped to nothing but his history, began to learn that even such a history – on the docks and in the mines – as it set him apart in experience from these others, was in some small way the equivalent of an aristocracy in itself: those who met him here at Court either did not bother him about it, or they respected it and made allowances for his eccentricities because of it – which is, after all, all their own aristocratic privileges gained them from one another.

  Once he went five days in the castle without eating. When Gorgik did not have an invitation to some countess’s or prince’s dinner or luncheon, he went to the Vizerine’s kitchen – Jahor had left standing instructions there that he was to be fed. But the Vizerine, with most of her suite, was away on another mission. And since the Vizerine’s cooks had gone with the caravan, her kitchen had been shut down.

  One evening the little Princess Elyne took both Gorgik’s great dark hands in her small, brown ones and exclaimed, as the other guests departed around them: ‘But I have had to cancel the little get-together that I’d asked you to tomorrow. It’s too terrible! I must go visit my uncle, the count, who will not be put off another –’ Here she stopped, pulled one of her hands away and put it over her mouth. ‘But I am too terrible. For I’m lying dreadfully, and you probably know it! Tomorrow I must go home to my own horrid old castle, and I loathe it, loathe it there! Ah, you did know it, but you’re too polite to say anything.’ Gorgik, who’d known no such thing, laughed. ‘So,’ went on the little Princess, ‘that is why I must cancel the party. You see, I have reasons. You do understand …?’ Gorgik, who was vaguely drunk, laughed again, shook his head, raised his hand when the princess began to make more excuses, and, still laughing, turned, and found his way back to his room.