And why should that be anything to me? laughed the seamed servant of the mind he carried with him. (Her words were as clear as if she sat atop his cart.) Will that help you finish your job the faster? Will it make you braver, quicker, more cautious, more clever in carrying out your task?
To which the smuggler laughed back, answering: Ah, grandma, how much you and your kind miss, who judge the rest of us only by how well we can do your work. But you’re one of those who thinks there’s no more to life than that, aren’t you?
His lips moved in the mist.
As the old woman began to defend her position and denigrate his, he ambled along the damp avenue, now posing one argument, now posing another, now revising his own polemic, now revising hers, this time toward anger, that time toward submission, now with the barbarian boy adding his comment, now with the long-vanished mountain girl giving hers.
…a man with a passion and a purpose as great, in its way, I’d guess, as the Liberator’s, or perhaps even greater, for it covers all the Liberator does and has done, yet has none of the emotions that drive him to error, that trip him now in defeat, a passion and purpose that, for all its committed disinterest, has nothing to do with this scheming and scuffling, this cheating and wheedling that make up the daily lives of you and me.
But here he was, already turning onto the Sallese road.
Neveryóna was behind.
He looked back for the Liberator’s mansion. But while he’d been wrangling with his imaginary companions about the worth of his commitment to this bit of myth and history, he’d managed to wander, without noticing, past the myth’s major historical manifestation. Perhaps the fog had grown so thick it had swallowed the empty house?
No. He’d been too busy talking to himself.
Momentarily he considered going back to scale the wall and, tonight, exploring it, adding some firsthand knowledge to all his hearsay, seeing for himself the floors and windows and empty chambers that may (or may not) have been the Liberator’s.
…make you braver, quicker, more cautious, more clever in carrying out your task? (Believe it, she was still going on!) No, certainly this was not the night to trespass on fabled grounds, leaving a cart of contraband outside. What might he expect to find of the Liberator in such a place anyway, years after it had been ransacked by angry marauders? (He walked through vapor.) He’d be back in Kolhari in a few weeks.
There’d be more foggy mornings.
4
HE WALKED; AND THE city drew in to him.
Either side the street, sandstone walls and planked-over doorways closed out mist. Moon-glimmer on wet flags spoke of recent rain, though no drops had tickled his shoulders.
A large basket on his back, strapped with raffia rope to his forehead, an old man came from an alley, crossed before the ox, and trudged behind a cistern into more mist.
Later, down another street, he saw a door open and three people rush out, followed in a moment by two more. One held up a lamp filled with the cheap oil that burned red. Some moments’ mumbling, and they went back in—except one woman who ran away along the alley, while, from inside, with one hand high on the jamb, a man leaned out to call: ‘Yes! Yes! Tell him they sent me up here to get…’ He missed the object—probably medicinal and certainly magical. ‘I’ll be down with it in a minute! Now run!’ Fog and darkness obscured the hems and collars that might have placed them for him socially. The man’s voice sounded foreign, however, and better bred than might be expected in this neighborhood.
He passed the incident he would, no doubt, never know more of than this. Certainly it hinted at stories as complex as any he could tell of the Liberator. But he knew them only as inarticulate surmises; and would forget them, he knew too, in moments amidst the voices playing in his mind, would absorb them among the myriad forgettables that were the encounter, over any hour, dark or light, with the city.
Cart wheels wobbled on cobbles.
He turned his ox off Black Avenue onto the Pave, which sloped down to the Spur. Fog and moonlight grayed the building walls. Planning to leave Kolhari by one of the little southern roads, rather than the northern connection with the great north-south highway, he’d wanted to move out with the earliest market delivery carts so as to have, at least for the opening of the journey, the safety and anonymity of the more traveled backroads below the city.
An hour or so before sunup, the market porters set torches here at the bridge mouth for predawn traffic. This morning the flare at the far wall had already snuffed to a black brand touched with coals. Sickly and silver, the near flame limped and lazied under smoke.
As he crossed the quayside, firelight feeble on the pitted bridge wall showed only how much denser the mist had become—and a few incomprehensible graffiti. Something to be thankful to the fog for: it was harder to see the scrawls and scratches that, day by day, appeared—more and more of them—on the bridge’s walls and stanchions or on the houses nearby. The first writings he’d seen, more than a year ago, had been long and intricate. They had been put up (for writing was what they were) by the students who now and again came into town from their suburban schools out near Sallese. But as the old messages washed out or were rubbed off and new ones were written up, soon a few signs among them seemed to take predominance, till today they were about the only ones you saw. And he’d caught both barbarians and baronets—as well as students—marking them with a lump of red clay or a bit of burnt wood, believing, as they did so at dawn or sunset, that they were unobserved. The smuggler had it on the authority of his foulmouthed friend (who of course had mastered them immediately and had once spent an afternoon actually trying to teach them to the smuggler, who simply had not been able to remember a one, till both had become angry and frustrated; they’d seen each other a few times since, but that had really been the end of their friendship) that these particular signs transcribed the varied and eccentric curses of the city’s itinerant camel drivers, which combined in eccentric ways various terms for women’s genitalia, men’s excreta, and cooking implements.
Unable to read even as much of them as the scamps who wrote them and could read nothing more, the smuggler had finally trained himself to ignore them; they were marrings to be overlooked while the eye was out for other, more meaningful detail.
Usually when the moon lingered toward the day the torches were not set out, and he’d be able to see all the way across the bridge, into the market square, to the glimmer on the water that plashed in the fountain at the square’s center—as long as the stalls and vending stands were not yet up.
But tonight, to fight the fog that now and again closed out the moon completely, the torches had, indeed, been lit. As the cart rolled onto the bridge, waist-high walls at either side and clotted shallows beneath, the weak fire showed the crockery shapes under the lashed canvas; then firelight slid away, leaving them black. And the bridge thrust three meters into dim pearl—and vanished.
He cuffed the ox’s shoulder to hurry her, confident that the old structure was the same stone, bank to bank, as it had been by day or by other nights. Still, images of breaks and unexplained fallings drifted about him.
The cart rolled loudly forward.
The haze kept quiet distance.
Somewhere just beyond the flares, the Child Empress’s couriers came at noon to cry out news to the people crossing. Was it marked by a raised paving stone? He hadn’t caught a courier in months.
He walked.
Mist retreated.
Bridge flags floated out of it.
Ahead he saw a boy by the wall, head down, pulling and pulling at a lank lock. One sandal was missing; the broken straps were still bound around his muddy calf. The other was held by only one of its thongs, so that the sole dragged behind.
The boy pulled.
The fog rolled.
As his cart passed, the smuggler looked away from the mad youth—and into more mist.
During the afternoon and evening, the bridge served not only as entranceway into the Old Market of th
e Spur, but also as workplace for most of Kolhari’s prostitutes. Once the market that made it profitable to pursue such sexual enterprise shut down, however, the women and men and boys and girls listlessly or vigorously hawking their bodies lingered on the bridge only an hour or so past sunset, when the market’s mummers and bear-tamers and acrobats and street musicians also left for the night. (Were they not all, so said a mummer with whom the young smuggler had once been friends, merely purveyors of entertainments at different orders of intimacy?) When the last rowdy youngster ceased calling across the walkway after his or her friends, when the last middle-aged man, unsteady with too many mixed mugs of cider and beer, gave up his search for known, if not knowledgeable, flesh, when the last and oldest prostitutes fell in with one another, shoulder to shoulder, to walk tiredly back to the Spur, for a while the bridge might seem empty. But soon you noticed the sparse population remaining—there during the day, certainly, but absorbed, then, by the traffic coming and going. Now, made prominent by isolation and darkness, they became distressingly visible: the mad, the displaced, the sleepless, the disturbed.
At the bridge’s market terminus, people leaving the city could gather with their bundles before sunrise and pay a few iron coins to the wagon drivers in from the provinces for a return trip out to this or that near county. Certain wagoners carried more people than produce; the custom had become so established that, off the market end, the Child Empress had recently rebuilt the shelter, with awning, more flares, and split-log benches, where, wet mornings, passengers could wait for rides.
He glanced up for the moon. A quarter of the sky was blurrily bright, but that was its only sign.
The triple facts of sex, madness, and travel lent their certain intrigues here. Though each had its hours of the night or day when it was most in evidence, the young smuggler had crossed the bridge enough times, and at enough variety of times, to know that none was ever really absent if you looked. With his smuggling cart, he himself was now heir to the travel; in earlier years he’d first come as part of the sexual provender—and at least once he’d spent three whole weeks here, during which, if he had not been properly mad, he’d been near enough. As he walked, memories flickered: an argument he’d once had with the mummer before they’d gone to a fine supper on the waterfront; the taste of grit on a parsnip he’d picked up from the pavement here and eaten; a conversation he’d overheard near the wall years back about the kind of boys some lord or other used to proposition on these same flags; the memory of a girl he’d watched pull water from a cistern not far away, her red hair, her freckled arms.
Walking beside his cart, the smuggler thought clearly and firmly, as if his own inner voice could drown the others out:
I probably know details and incidents about the Liberator’s history that even he has forgotten. Yet who around me knows I have such knowledge? Not the madmen swaying in the night, nor the schemers behind their planked-up doors, nor the lazy whores and hustlers working here in daylight.
Nearing the market, he first heard, then made out, the naked barbarian boys by the steps that led down under. (Beyond, making minuscule moons in the fog, torches burned by the passenger shelter.) One was running up, then down the steps, leaning heavily on the rail.
The young smuggler slowed his cart to watch with suspended amusement. A young woman and an older man, who till now must have been walking somewhat behind him, moved ahead. The woman carried a bundle against her side. They were going toward the shelter.
A barbarian about fourteen ran across the bridge to squat beside them and, fists and buttocks bouncing above wet stone, cooed: Where you going? Now come on, tell me! Where you fine folks going?’ He cocked his head, blond hair gone silver in dim deceiving light. You won’t tell me where you heading? I won’t follow you! I won’t rob you! I won’t hurt you! You city folks don’t need to be afraid of me now!’ He laughed.
The dark couple trudged on.
The smuggler pulled his cart up to the stair and walked around his ox to pat the hard ridge between her stubby horns.
Blinking black eyes in blurred-over moonlight, the beast stepped back.
Traces creaked.
Leaving his cart among milling boys, the young smuggler started down the bowed steps. (Strange, thought the smuggler. No one but cutpurses steal in a crowd. And his cart was not a purse.) At their foot a rock shelf extended from the stanchion. Troughs had been cut in it, sloped to the running water. Here men came to relieve themselves. (Women used the stair at the other side, which led to a similar arrangement, visible along the shelf.) The smuggler reached the bottom with a memory of other moonlit nights, when the bridge above had laid sharp shadow on the grooved stone. Most nights when he’d stayed on the bridge, he’d sleep down here, his back against the graffiti-marred wall.
Tonight there was no shadow, and the gray light misted halfway under. Several women were busily doing something on the far side. More barbarians lounged here, most notably younger or older than those above. One of the oldest folded his arms and, as the smuggler stepped by, actually said to the shortest: ‘All right. Tell me: what’s a kid like you doing out at this hour?’
‘I told you already,’ the blond boy said, ‘I’m not a kid.’
‘Yeah,’ said another, probably younger. ‘He knows his way around!’
The smuggler stepped to one of the troughs, and, with the growing heat behind his groin at coming urine, moved his clout aside with one hand and with the other guided his heavy splatter over the rock.
Another barbarian stood a-straddle the trough three away, this one in a loincloth, pulled back now. He held himself, as though he’d either finished or not yet begun to make water. The smuggler noted that he wore his pale hair in a clublike braid over one ear. You saw such braids frequently enough in Kolhari, though usually not on barbarians, since it was a style left from the old Imperial Army, who, years ago, had devastated the lands from which, today, the blond southerners came, in greater and greater numbers.
Beyond the barbarian, just out of the diminished light, a shape moved slowly against the stanchion wall—likely two people in sexual embrace, though whether they were two women, two men, or one of each, was anybody’s guess. The smuggler hoped it was one combination, assumed it was another (from what he knew of the bridge) and, had anyone asked, would have stated the third—if only to appease the times’ prejudices; though quickly he’d add, with a self-deprecating laugh, that, given his luck, all three probably made out better than he.
Finishing, he shook himself, pinched and pulled his foreskin free of water, shook again with wet fingers, then tugged the cloth back between his legs. (Since he’d been a child, all bodily secretions had given him an odd comfort. Puberty had simply added another. Privately, he admitted, his heavy hands enjoyed them all.) Skirting naked loiterers, he started up.
At the top he heard: ‘Where you think you going, fine Kolhari man? Come on, tell me. Tell me, now! Afraid I’ll follow you? Afraid I’ll rob you? Afraid I’ll beat you? You don’t have to be afraid of me, city man!’
In a white tunic with dark ribbon woven round its sleeves, a tall man walked along the bridge toward the shelter, ignoring the boy cavorting by him. He was dressed like someone who should have had a private wagon. That he was here, sack on hip, to engage a public cart suggested to the smuggler he belonged to his toga no more than the boy below belonged to his braid.
‘Hey, barbarian,’ an older boy called from the wall, ‘why do you talk like such a fool? Hey—’ now the second barbarian strode into the central walkway—‘barbarian! Why—’
The first danced back, grinning. ‘I’m just asking these fine Kolhari men and women why they—’
‘—do you talk like such a fool?’ Suddenly the second grappled the first in a headlock.
‘Hey! Let go of me!’ His mouth muffled by a forearm, the first giggled. ‘Let me go…you crazy barbarian!’ He was dragged past the young smuggler and down the stairs.
The smuggler clicked his tongue. His cart began to
roll.
From the far stairs at the women’s side, four girls, followed by a fifth, ran up, talking intently. Also barbarians, they struck the smuggler as youngsters who had been in the city a goodly time. Chattering in the sibilant southern tongue, they hurried off the bridge. ‘Hey, look at all the big boys, out so late!’ the one trailing called. She laughed and caught up to the group, while a boy shouted something in their own language after them. At which point—probably unrelated to the baiting—one of the girls remembered something forgotten below and turned back to the stairs, the others turning, running up, chattering after her.
Back against the bridge’s newel, another girl squatted beside a bundle corded with vine rope. She was fifteen or sixteen. Her shift’s shoulder was torn. In moon-blur the smuggler could see a smudge—or a bruise—on her jaw. She was just clean enough so he could not tell if she were a passenger or a derelict. If derelict, he thought, she’d probably struggled with her attire to bring it up to this ambiguous state.
Wandering by, a mumbling crone dragged her sack, which would contain (for several times on Kolhari streets the smuggler had seen such women’s bags tear open) bits of cloth, broken pots, a wooden hairpin, a cheap leather necklace from a province the woman herself had never visited.
The man in the toga passed, paying no more attention to her than he had to the barbarian taunts.
Spitting, whispering, the crone moved to the bridge’s rail, searching for something not there.
The seated girl looked away—the sight too painful, too predictive, or both.
The togaed man turned toward the flares at the passenger shelter.
The young smuggler guided his cart off the bridge and into the market.
Under an orange torch, people sat on split-log benches. Nearby, carts had already pulled up. Some of the drivers talked together. Others had wandered off to the warehouses in the adjoining alleys.
By the shelter’s wall, a man slept on the brick, head against the wood. One drawn up on the other’s soiled ankle, his feet were wrapped in the thong-bound skins a worker would wear laboring on the splintered rock at some city demolition site. By torch-glow and moon-mist, the smuggler could see, however, that the soles were hardly scuffed, as though they’d not yet been worn to work, while the cloth around his loins was threadbare, torn, and dirt-stiff. The thong that held it tight on a belly that creased above it was broken and retied many places.
The Complete Series Page 87