Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  Was he a derelict, the smuggler wondered, or a laborer passed out with drink?

  The smuggler headed his cart toward a group of other wagons, as a morning porter tossed water from a ceramic bucket. Water sluiced near the sleeper’s head. The porter set down his pail, took up his wide broom, and, with shove after shove, sent rills across the brick.

  If one rill wet the sleeper, the smuggler did not see. But suddenly the man pushed up, got his feet under him, and, one arm straight out, staggered to a bench to collapse on it. His head fell back, firelight showing a dirty neck below a neatly trimmed beard.

  What, the smuggler wondered, were the stories that would hold the anomalous details of the togaed gentleman taking a public cart, the squatting girl, or the sleeping man to some lucid and coherent truth, rather than making everyone appear simply another counterfeit, barbarian, citizen, or bum?

  Stalls and kiosks had not yet been dragged out.

  Near the side alley below a flare, wheels crushing dung, cart followed ox in among parked wagons. Did his appear an ordinary delivery vehicle? So much the better. He would leave it with the others for an hour or so, then be off among the first carts returning to the provinces. (He should be neither the first nor the last to go.) There were enough wagons and drivers about so that, even with its contraband, his could stay unattended awhile.

  He tied the reins to the peg on the side of the driver’s bench, pulled out the feed bag, put in more hay from the sack under the seat, then notched it to the bridle. The ox licked his fingers. Wiping his hand on the hip of his clout, while his beast munched and munched and munched, the young smuggler turned back to the square. He’d thought vaguely to sit in the shelter awhile among the passengers. But it might be better not to stay so long in one place, where he could be seen, observed, remembered.

  Better to stroll back and forth a time or two over the water. From this end also, the bridge was still truncated by gray. He wandered onto it. Again he heard, then saw, the barbarians. Thirty steps on, and their argument and laughter (‘Barbarian, why you go on acting such a fool…?’) dissolved in fog behind.

  Ahead, someone sat on the wall.

  5

  FOR THE NEXT FEW steps the young smuggler was not sure if it were woman or man, adult or child.

  The shoulders were narrow. The knees angled wide. The feet were back against the stone.

  His next step, the young smuggler saw several things at once:

  The gaunt face was looking at him. An eye in it blinked. Across the other was a rag. The cloth strip was tied at the side of the small head. Some hair had caught in the knot. Around the man’s neck—now the smuggler saw it was a man—was an iron collar.

  ‘Morning.’ The man nodded. ‘What are you doing out on the bridge at this hour?’

  The smuggler slowed, shrugged, smiled. ‘Walking.’ He’d known men to wear such collars before. Slaves were, of course, almost unknown in Kolhari. If you saw a real one it was likely to be in the retinue of some visiting provincial family. But the sexual tastes of such men were assumed, on the bridge, to be odd and unpredictable. ‘What’s it to you?’ He stopped; he still smiled.

  ‘The market vendors aren’t out yet.’ The good eye glimmered as though full of tears. ‘You should be home in bed, cuddling your girl out of her dreams and into morning.’

  ‘My girl just got a job as a kitchen maid—in a big old mansion, out in Neveryóna.’ The lie came complete and natural; he’d often marveled at the way elements from life so easily joined to make falsehoods—the same way, he’d noticed, they sometimes fused to form dreams. ‘So I don’t see as much of her as I used to.’

  On the stone either side of him, the man’s hands were wrapped with leather strips, recalling a custom in some province that, though the smuggler had passed through it once, he could no longer name. ‘Then what are you doing for sex?’ the man asked, bluntly.

  The three female faces drifted before the smuggler, one younger than he by half and almost black, the other two a decade or more older and pleasingly brown. After a sexually bleak year, they had suddenly filled six weeks of his life (almost three months in the case of the eldest) with sensual riches and emotional complexity that had been, frankly, too much. (Oh, yes. For certain, rather a kitchen girl out in the suburbs.) But he hadn’t seen any of them for a month. He pushed them out of his mind.

  ‘Just about anyone—’ The young smuggler measured his admission—‘and everyone I can.’

  The single eye questioned. ‘You want to come with me, then?’ The man’s insteps, back against the wall, were leather-bound too, which, yes, was the way they wore them in that province. He pushed from the rail to the ground.

  Obvious thoughts often take longer to form in response to life than to letters. And the young smuggler had no letters. Also he was just now considering precisely that which would prevent the connection that has no doubt occurred to you and me. He’d encountered men before with the perversion of the collar; it was, after all, fairly common in Nevèrÿon—as all who’d ever worked the bridge soon learned. Indeed, he’d learned also in those early encounters, the collar was a sign for any number of sexual stances. Its only consistent meaning was that the most common two or three sexual exchanges were not likely to be among the most important for those who wore it. And even that was no more certain than a farmer’s prediction of rain at a haloed moon. Also, the young smuggler knew from his time on the bridge, the maimed, deformed, and blind had needs as strong as anyone’s, and a paraplegic’s or a deaf-mute’s desires could be as complex as a judge’s or a general’s. Those among them who could afford it—including the blind or half-blind—were as likely to buy here as anyone. There was nothing to keep a one-eyed bandit—for the little man surely looked a bandit—from the bridge.

  Then he remembered:

  The Liberator sometimes wore such a collar and was, some said, a one-eyed man, or at any rate was sometimes represented by one.

  ‘All right,’ the young smuggler said. ‘I’ll go with you, if you’ve got a place not too far from here. Even if you don’t, below the bridge we could—’

  ‘For coin or for free?’ The man cocked his head. ‘There’s a barbarian with a braid over his ear, standing at the pee-troughs. He’s been down there more than an hour. If I wanted to give away iron tonight, I’d take him with me.’ He snorted. ‘But I don’t.’

  The smuggler felt his humor balance on a more distressed feeling, having to do with his own, recently much self-questioned age. But he grinned it down in the three-quarter dark. ‘You won’t give me anything? You know, last week I was hauling barrels over at the docks. The week before I was trying to make some money along here. And the week before that I was up in the mountains, cleaning out the cellar for some tavern keeper. I didn’t make much at any of them. Sometimes, you know, I wonder which job I’m the worst at.’ He chuckled; the three weeks’ work were as much invention as his Neveryóna kitchen girl. ‘Still there’re some who’ll give me a few coins, here on the bridge. But I haven’t spoken to many people lately.’ That happened to be true. ‘Kolhari is a lonely city. I’ll go with you for the company, and you can give me what you want. How’s that?’

  The little man considered a moment. ‘If “what you want” means nothing—’ The unsymmetrical face looked grave, turning away—‘then come.’

  ‘Hey, now…!’ The young smuggler fell in beside the man, who’d started toward the market end. ‘Don’t be like that. You make up your mind later what I’m worth. I know it won’t be much. That’s not what I’m asking. But something. Say, where’ve you come from anyway, to be walking these wet stones?’

  Striding his quicker stride on his shorter legs, the little man glanced up. ‘You ask questions like that on a night like this on such a bridge as we cross now?’ His single eye held amusement, also disbelief.

  It was the kind of look, the smuggler thought, you might give a fifteen-year-old barbarian whore declaring drunkenly she was a noble virgin.

  The smuggler rubbed hi
s earlobe between thumb and thick forefinger, looking down at his naked feet hitting fog-wet rock. His grin mimed a shyness he did not feel. ‘Well, now, I suppose if you had a few extra pieces of gold—’

  ‘Gold? Ha!’ the man barked. ‘No, I’m afraid you’re just not that young!’

  ‘…a few iron coins,’ the smuggler said, as if repeating himself, ‘that you could help me out with, afterwards; well, I’d appreciate it. I’m not working now,’ he went on, ‘and my girl can’t see me so often anymore. There’re days, I guess, she doesn’t think I’m the best lover in the world. Maybe I do better with the men. At least I give it a try, hey?’ He raised his face a little, glancing at the one-eyed man, and thought: I may not be that young, little man, but then, neither are you that you can afford to haggle. ‘My girl, she doesn’t know I come down here and fool around on the bridge. But she doesn’t need to know of our doings. Oh, no. Not her.’ Yet he remembered that almost every woman he’d been to bed with since his sixteenth year he’d told about his homosexual adventurings; all had been fascinated. If anything, it seemed to smooth the sexual preliminaries. Only if some other male might overhear it would he hesitate to tell a woman he wanted to pleasure of these masculine explorations. The three so recent (yet so quickly receding) faces returned. He had told them: and hadn’t they all praised him for his gentleness and lovemaking virtuosity? Hadn’t all three wanted him to stay? As inducement, the youngest had offered him her body in what she took to be all sorts of wild and wonderful positions. The eldest (who did all that the youngest did sexually and with much less to-do about it) had also offered him money. At first he’d taken great offense. Then he’d taken the money. (Had that, he wondered now, put the bridge back into mind?) Then he’d taken his leave, anyway—when it had all become too complicated. The third, also older than he, he’d liked the most. But she’d had children and a great deal to do and, really, had considered him in every way—save sexually—a nuisance. No, though she’d been polite enough about it, she hadn’t really wanted him around. Well, the truth was, none of the three had freckles. And that, for him (as he’d found himself telling himself with the growing belligerence of the mightily deprived), left sex with women not much better than what he might do with animals or men.

  Though the intensity of the women’s desires had allowed him to make his precipitate exit feeling (animally) well pleased with himself, still they were gone.

  One had found out about the others, of course.

  The shoutings! The tears! The accusations of crimes enough to make a provincial bailiff start to oil his whip! The youngest had been engagingly stupid. The one with the children had been distressingly sharp. And all three had been, well…He missed them. But here he was, running on with this old story about his sexual secrecy as though it displayed or hid some terribly important truth. ‘I’ll go with you,’ the smuggler repeated. ‘Now I don’t do this a lot. And I don’t claim to be much good at it. But as long as my girl don’t find out, it can’t hurt her. And she’s in Neveryóna, not here. You’ll see what you can do for me.’ He dropped both hands to his legs. ‘Afterwards.’

  The little man, who wore leather about his loins, strode ahead, past the squabbling barbarians, as though abandoning the smuggler. (A woman passenger, herself a barbarian, was asking: ‘Well, where do I go…?’ A blond boy pointed to the stairs at the other side of the bridge.) The smuggler watched the little man move three steps, six steps, nine steps ahead.

  Then he took a breath and hurried after him, off the bridge and onto brick. Fog had retreated enough to see the fountain, a rock in the square’s center, with a basin carved in it to catch what gushed from its top—before the spill ran over into the ring of drains. From a cart near it, several women in desert robes were taking down folded screens and awnings for their stall. One held up a torch for the others to see. As they helped each other open, unload, and unfold, firelight lit wet brick, flashed on the jewelry one wore at her neck.

  ‘You know—’ The smuggler caught up—‘a few years back, I met someone here. He wore a collar. Like yours. He was a southerner. A barbarian—no older than me. He liked me, you see. So I went with him. Like I’m going with you. He told me he’d been a prince in his own land, off to the south. We got to talking: and he told me he’d been taken a slave—a real slave, once. Before he came here. He said he’d been captured from his home in the south, taken north, and sold up in Ellamon. He told me that he’d been set free by the Liberator—you know, the one everyone talks about? Gorgik the Liberator? The one trying to end slavery? He said he and the Liberator had fought together against slavers in the west.’ Purposefully he did not look for the little man’s reaction. ‘So I told him, I said: “You must think the Liberator is a really fine man.” And you know what he said? He said: “I hate him!” He said: “The Liberator freed me from slavery, but he didn’t free me from this!” He meant the collar, you see? “And for doing only half the job, I’d kill him if I could!”’ Now the smuggler looked over. ‘That’s something, hey? What do you think of that?’

  The man paid no more attention than a brown citizen to the blond barbarians’ jibing.

  They crossed the square.

  Over the years, the smuggler had indeed talked to a number of barbarians, also a number of men in collars, a handful of slaves, and several slavers. From these conversations, from hearsay, from observations, and from any number of story fragments about such men, such collars, such slaves—and the Liberator—the Liberator’s onetime barbarian friend-turned-enemy had come together for him along with the conviction that, given one tale and another, he was very close to some historical truth that he wanted to try out on someone who might confirm it—though, as they passed between the fountain and the women, it occurred to him that, after all, the construction of this barbarian adversary was not much different from that of any other lie or dream. I haven’t seen him here for a while,’ he added. ‘The barbarian in the collar, I mean.’ (Certainly, he reflected, he’d never met him.) ‘Maybe something happened to him. You know, they say: “Not to cross the Bridge of Lost Desire again is to die as soon as you leave it.” Well, maybe something happened to him. Maybe he got killed. I heard once that the Liberator killed a barbarian prince who led an attack against him, somewhere in the Spur. Though with all the tales and stories you hear, who could know which to believe.’

  The little man remained silent.

  So, still walking, the smuggler said once more: I haven’t seen him in a long time. Years. The barbarian.’ Then, on an impulse, he asked: ‘What do you think of the Liberator?’

  With that same amusement, that same disbelief, the single eye glanced up. ‘What do you think of him?’

  Dwelling on the ease of lies, the young smuggler found himself—surprisingly—a word from truth. Why not say it, he thought: and felt tightness take his throat. As he tried to swallow it away, his heart pounded, and, swinging dry against his sides, his arms felt his flanks grow slippery with a sweat as chill as if he’d splashed into a wet grave—what, he noted with amusement, he might feel the moment he made up his mind to speak to some dark and freckled summer girl, leaning with her bucket on a cistern wall, whose contempt, whose harsh word, whose rejection, he was sure, would strike him dead upon the yard’s paving as surely as the fiat of any nameless god. Yet in his trips to the bridge, in his trips from it, he’d learned that to turn from such a feeling was to declare oneself subservient to terror, to name terror itself one’s master. To shirk such inner challenge was to admit passion impossible in this world as the nameless gods had crafted it and purpose nonexistent. ‘I think the Liberator is—’ He drew a breath—‘is the greatest man in all Nevèrÿon. For me—and I know I am only one and certainly no representative—the Liberator, Gorgik, may be greater, even, than the Child Empress Ynelgo, whose reign is…’ He searched for something singular, but came up with only the most sedimented saw—‘is just and generous.’

  ‘You think, then, that if this Liberator were ruler of all Nevèrÿon, he would b
e more generous and more just than the empress?’ The little man snorted, then looked up sharply with his single eye beside the slant rag. ‘And do you think there’s a chance that I am he—that I am this Liberator of yours? Or his one-eyed accomplice?’

  ‘No—!’ the smuggler protested. But the man’s correctness gave him an odd relief.

  ‘You think, perhaps, if you say the Liberator is great and I happen to be your man’s lieutenant, then you’re more likely to get yourself a coin or two for the night? Well, you wouldn’t be the first to think such rot. But it won’t do you any good—not tonight, believe me.’ The man stopped walking.

  The smuggler stopped too.

  They’d reached some littered yard in the Spur, by a cistern’s low wall.

  The smuggler thought: Which way did we come? How did we get here?

  ‘Other folk than you have mistaken me for your Liberator. We might pretend that I was him, and that you were only some miserable slave, waiting for his freedom.’ The one-eyed man chuckled hoarsely. ‘But that’s not my pleasure. Not tonight. Not with you. Me, a Liberator? No, tonight let us think of me as the slave—the lowest of the slaves in, say, the empress’s obsidian mines, north at the foot of the Falthas, where once, so they tell it, your Liberator himself toiled in the iron collar. Suppose I was the dirtiest, most miserable half-blind pit slave. What do you say to that?’ Sitting on the cistern wall, the little man leaned forward as mist tore apart under the moon.