What happened, however, was that suddenly the man shook the halter, clucked the beasts to a stop, and strode over. He was a good two heads taller than Clodon. ‘You!’ He spoke as though Clodon was someone he’d worked with for years and just run into after a month’s absence. ‘I got a room a few blocks away.’ His direct and open tone made Clodon wonder a moment if this were really a sexual encounter. ‘We can go there when I finish unloading these. How much will you charge me for an hour or so?’
‘What do you want to do?’ Clodon asked.
‘You know.’ The man pursed his lips. ‘The usual.’
‘I don’t do,’ Clodon said, ‘the usual.’
The man said: ‘I don’t do the usual either. That’s why I asked you. What do you say. How much?’
Clodon considered a moment. Then he said. ‘No. I don’t feel like it. Forget it. Not today.’
The man smiled and gave a kind of grunt. ‘All right. Maybe another time, then.’ He started back to his wagon, then turned again. Where can I get one of those?’ He pointed with a thick thumb over his fist at Clodon’s neck.
Surprised, Clodon shrugged.
‘Where’d you get yours?’ the man asked.
Clodon shrugged again. What’s it to you?’
The man suddenly turned again, seized up the halter, and started his cart.
I am in another city, Clodon thought. What would it be like, he wondered, if I put a wing of paint on one eye as well? Perhaps, he thought, this is just a particularly busy time and I’ve never noticed. But how often have I been out on the bridge this early before? Ordinarily, a whole day’s waiting and walking, when he was actually looking for it, got him three, maybe four propositions. These had both come within minutes, when there weren’t even that many people out.
He wished he didn’t feel so ill. He had a headache now. How long, he wondered, would it be before he said yes?
The third came before the hour was out. It was a pudgy, effeminate man—though he was just as direct as the other two—who walked up to Clodon, clasped his hands before him, and declared: ‘My, aren’t you a fine looking gentleman! I assume you’re sitting out here because you mean it? Tell me, how much would it cost me to—’
Clodon only half listened to the man’s request. Halfway through it, he said, ‘Look. That’s just play. I don’t do that. I’m only into serious things.’
‘Are you, now?’ The man raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, perhaps you’re a little too serious for me then …’ He paused, bit at his lower lip. ‘I’d pay you well for it.’ Then he frowned. ‘Will you tell me what it is you do do?’
‘I told you,’ Clodon said. ‘No! Now get out of my face!’
The man gave a small, conciliatory bow, then turned and hurried down the walkway. How long, Clodon wondered, can I keep this up? Yet there was a fascination with it. This new city that the mortician had introduced him to—how, he wondered, did it fit in with the other Kolhari that he knew? Who else lived in it? Could it be that just by sitting here he would meet them all?
The man had said women dwelled here, too …?
Might one of the inhabitants, Clodon wondered, be a strong, young, dark-eyed creature with beautiful feet and cunning hands? Perhaps an hour later, when he began to get hungry, it occurred to Clodon to look in the purse and count exactly how much the man had given him.
The purse contained nine iron coins.
Clodon wore the collar for three days.
He didn’t eat very much during that time.
Never a particularly clean youth, he didn’t wash either.
For the first two, he didn’t leave the bridge at all.
As a kind of endurance test, he refused even to see if he could pull the lock apart. When he took it off, he knew, it would come off for good. That would be the end of it. But until then, it was, he realized, fascinating to be something other than a common country criminal lost in the city’s confusion.
Once he saw his barbarian friend. But apparently he wasn’t speaking to Clodon any more.
But with a frequency that kept surprising him, through the day and evening, one and another person would stop to talk with him, to outline some odd and abhorrent want.
He felt very strange. It was as if the collar both trapped him and, at the same time, freed him into this odd world—freed him, at least, to stand at its edge and, as he listened to one request after another, to gaze out into it.
He said no to them all.
It was at the end of the second day he began to get the feeling the people he refused were actually taking something away from him. Each one, walking off when he told them, curtly, that, no, he didn’t do that, left, he was sure, with a little more; and still a bit more. He slept under the bridge that night. And on the third day, he wandered off it in a kind of daze—actually surprised some barrier was not there to keep him to the place where collar and flogging marks, in combination, alone had the meaning they did.
Later he walked into a yard. There was a cistern in it. He went and sat on the wall awhile, staring down at the flagstones. Once a boy walked by, without really looking at him. Later the boy walked by two or three more times—no, Clodon realized, he was looking.
Not that it made any difference.
For a while he sat on the ground, his back against the cistern. Did he doze a bit?
Finally, growing truly tired, Clodon went over by one of the buildings, lay down, and slept for a few hours. Waking, he stretched out his arm, stretched out his leg—which cramped on him. Standing up, he limped back to the cistern, wondering how long the cramp would take to go away. Some women with a child between them walked by. Now he thought he saw the boy again, standing off in a doorway in one of the alleys. Perhaps because he’d slept some, or because of the cramp, or because he was no longer on the bridge—or because, being off it, he had not actually been approached for some hours—Clodon leaned his thighs against the cistern wall, not really looking over it. Then, after a few moments, he raised his face—it was already evening. The moon was up. A thread of cloud lay across a sky that had deepened to indigo. Clodon lifted his hands to the collar, to hook his fingers over the iron.
He tugged.
With a click, the semi-circles of metal, on the old hinge, came apart in his fists. Clodon pulled the collar from under his hair and raised it to the sky, the curved jaws open in his hand to gulp a bite of blue.
Then he tossed it into the cistern.
It splashed—further down than he could have thought. The water was low.
Still, when you threw things into cisterns, here in the city (Clodon had already learned), old women passing hollered at you: ‘That’s water we have to drink, you know!’ But there were no women.
Clodon turned and lowered himself to sit again on the wall.
Did the boy in the doorway walk by again? Maybe it was another boy, this time. But Clodon was thinking about other things. For the first time, in these last three days, Clodon had looked at the number of people who, indeed, crossed the bridge wearing slave collars. Without even seeing them before, he had just assumed that, on their way to the market for a master, they had been slaves—how stupid could you be? Just before he’d left, he’d seen one, a country fellow only a few years older than himself, who wore the iron on his neck and whose back was crossed with nine, ugly rigid welts. He’d walked by, paying no more attention to Clodon than Clodon once would have paid to him. Clodon tried to remember his image in the mirror. But it was very hard. So he sat a while.
Then he went back to the bridge.
It was a little later, in the moonlight, that the young people, in their tunics and sandals, came down to the Bridge of Lost Desire—and Clodon, turning to watch them, recognized the dark-eyed woman he’d seen six weeks before kneeling on the rock beneath, thinking they were about to come across.
He stopped walking, stopped breathing …
No, we have not tried to sketch out the whole of a life. (He saw the mortician pass two or three times again, too; but they didn’t
speak, or—after the first time—even look at each other.) We’ve only tried to suggest a few fragments, some of which fit together one way, some another, before we move, twenty-five years on, to Clodon in the Narnis inn yard.
12. The eyes. The hands.
Funig said, ‘That’s her!’ just as though the open window she stood at made it impossible to hear him, made it impossible to see his pointing and gesticulating. ‘That’s the one I told you about—the actress, with the mummers, who came with the man from—’
Clodon hit him in the side with his elbow:
‘Go on, now!’ Clodon whispered. ‘Get out of here! Go look after your sister!’
And he thought:
No. No, she couldn’t have the feet too …
And he smiled.
(Funig, after a moment, lurched off around the building corner.)
Smiling, Clodon stopped breathing.
Then, after a few seconds, he turned right—but only to heave the apple core into the bushes. Then he swung left and stalked into the grass, to step the blades with one foot down on top of the other, rubbing them back and forth, wiping his right foot, then his left, free of Krator’s slop. Those eyes, he thought. Those hands …! By all the nameless gods—
But, because he had looked away, had walked away, he was breathing again.
Is it only, he wondered, because I haven’t yet seen her feet that I’m still here? That I haven’t run from the inn yard like a rude boy? Look back at her—
Which is when she said: ‘Will you come here?’
Clodon caught his breath. And looked back.
And pulled in more air.
And smiled.
Again.
‘Please,’ she said, leaning on the sill. ‘Come … just for a moment?’
He started walking toward her, wondering if he might fall or stagger. A jay, silent, swooped between him and the window, bright as a shard of evening hurled across the day.
He kept breathing this time, while, at the sill, she filled up his eyes and he blinked. Would I dare, he wondered, lean in over beside her and peer down at them—just to see? What, with her, would I dare?
As he stepped up, she reached out and a little down—the window put her not a full head above him—and touched his ear, so that her foreknuckles lay against his beard. ‘What’s that?’
He swallowed, turning his head aside. Her fingers—the wonderful fingers—supported his lobe.
‘It’s …’ he began, hoarsely. ‘It’s something I … well, the men wear it, you see. In the Menyat Canyon. Do you know where that is?’ He glanced at her when she dropped her hand.
‘I’ve heard of it,’ she said.
‘It … It’s a …’ knowing that there was a word for it, but losing articulation before her.
What it was was a peg of hard wood, carved with intricate designs and grooved around its middle. Sometime when he was older than twenty but not yet twenty-five, and living among outlaws at the foot of the Menyat, growing bored he’d asked a friend who wore one how to put it in. The peg itself they’d gotten carved by a taciturn geezer who wore three such in one ear and five in the other, with heavily tattooed cheeks and knees. Insertion had involved not just a needle through the lobe, as for some silly ring, but an awl driven through; then, over three weeks, it had to be stretched and stretched further, so that to wear one involved a month’s pain and another’s discomfort.
Today he never thought of it unless someone mentioned it.
She said: ‘Then it’s not Narnis work?’
Clodon shook his head.
‘Oh. I thought you were from around here.’ Her smile fell.
Clodon blinked and grew desperate. ‘But I am! Born in Narnis, grew up here, I’ll probably die here, too—in my own home village!’ He reached up to scratch the ear, feeling the distended lobe and the textured wood as if for the first time. ‘Of course I ran off a while when I was young. I lived for a year in the big city.’
‘Kolhari?’ Her smile had started to return.
He nodded. ‘But that was a long time ago. I’m sure you know it better than I do.’ (She nodded back.) ‘Then, of course, I had to travel a bit. I was in the Menyat—where I got this.’ He flipped the ear peg with his forefinger, feeling it wobble. ‘For a while I went to—’ Daringly, he named his own town—‘where all I got was in trouble.’ Clodon laughed sharply. ‘Oh, they’re small minded, petty people in that place. Not like Narnis, where the people have some breadth. I tell you, that’s a good town to stay away from!’
‘I’ve never even heard of it.’ Her smile faltered again. ‘I doubt I’ll ever visit—unless my troupe decides to put it on the tour. I have to meet up with them in Yenla’h.’
‘You’re a fortunate woman to have missed the place. Yenla’h is much nicer. Oh, I’ve been as far south as Enoch and Adami. I’ve been as far north as Ellamon and Ka’hesh.’ How surprising, he thought, that she listened and spoke like any other woman. ‘But now I’m back in my own village, where I know every boulder and pebble around it, every tree and every twig on her, like I know the veins that cross the back of my own—’
‘Wait,’ she said. Her smile was back. ‘Just a moment, will you?’
Then she was gone from the window—
—so suddenly he wondered, staring at the empty frame, if the whole conversation hadn’t been something he’d imagined out of wanting it and not believing it could be.
He put his hands on the sill, stood on tip-toe, and leaned in to look down the hall. Though he’d been inside the place at least three times, he did not recognize the corridor. At least, he thought, while he strained to catch a glimpse of her, in five weeks I know Narnis well enough for anything she might want to find in it.
Old leather creaked.
As Clodon stood up, he saw her push out from the door-hanging and step, with bare, slender feet, to the dust. He was beyond the point where breath might stop now—
As she walked toward him, her toes reached forward like small, separate limbs on the ball of each foot.
—and his heart malletted behind both ears, till the left one—the one with the peg, the one she’d touched—ached. No, he didn’t stop breathing. But as she paused before him, he lost most of one breath in awe of her.
‘Do you think there’s any chance that you …?’
He forced his eyes up.
She was smiling.
He smiled. He breathed.
He said: ‘What is it? You tell me, and I’ll help—’
‘Unless of course you’re working now, and you don’t have time—’
‘What?’ he blurted. It came out crassly, hoarsely, and made him blink. Then his eyes began to water. The belligerence that had been his life-long response to anything that annoyed, angered, or confused began to rise, tried to rise—‘What do you want—?’ and was struck down by something powerful as a fist. ‘What do you want me to do? I’ll … do it! Anything. That I can help you with. Please! You just tell me …!’
‘Thank you!’ There was some surprise in her voice. ‘You see, I’ve just heard about the gorge. It’s supposed to be very beautiful.’ (Bluntly, blindly, Clodon nodded. He reached up to wipe his tearing eyes.) ‘My traveling companion’s off for the morning. So I thought I’d ask someone to point me in the right direction. Or, maybe—for a coin or two, certainly—to take me there.’
‘I’ll take you,’ Clodon said. ‘I’ll take you there. I wouldn’t take your money for it. But I’d certainly take you to see it. Yes, it’s what everyone talks about!’
In the little more than a month he’d been there, Clodon had heard half a dozen mentions of the Narnis gorge with its high rocks and its crashing falls. He even knew approximately in what direction it was. He’d never actually been there, though. For all his travels, Clodon was not much of a sightseer. And since no one had noted it as a place to get drunk, it had not occurred to him to go.
‘We’ll walk right along up there,’ he said. ‘It isn’t far at all.’
‘You’re sure
I’m not taking you from something?’ (The dark disks around her nipples were the same color as the shadowed skin setting off her eyes, making her breasts, suddenly, quite wonderful!) ‘Really, if you just wanted to tell me where—’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No. We’ll go. You and me, together. I’m not doing anything. It would be nice. And easy—’ He wondered if he should excuse himself a minute, run around, and search up Funig to check on the directions. But Funig would only want to come too—certainly there was no way to keep him from coming back to leer and probably say something stupid, if he didn’t simply confound Clodon’s lies. ‘We’ll go right along, now. Up around this way.’
‘Fine, then,’ she said. Then she said, because he was still standing: ‘Can we leave now?’
He started abruptly across the yard. She walked after him, taking long strides. He waited for her at the corner. She came up the dusty slope. ‘How far is it?’ she asked.
Clodon made a face. ‘Not long. An hour. Maybe two—’
‘They told me last night,’ she said, ‘that it wasn’t more than half an hour’s walk—’
‘I was just thinking that the way a nice lady goes along—’ he gave her another silly grin—‘it might take a little longer!’
‘Oh, I can stride out,’ she said. ‘Don’t you worry!’ They walked together up the path. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
‘Who?’ he said. ‘Me? My name is Clodon.’
‘My name is Alharid,’ she said.
Which sounded foreign and difficult and which, he realized, he’d lost as she’d said it—though he’d been sure, a moment back, that, whatever it was, he’d remember it till his death hour. ‘What kind of name is that?’
‘Alharid?’ She smiled. ‘Well, I don’t really know. Just a name.’
‘Say it again?’ Clodon asked. ‘It’s a nice name …?’
‘Alharid. Some people have problems with it. But when you’re in the theater, that makes it even more memorable to others. Can you say it?’
The Complete Series Page 149