by Paula Guran
Small Sarg, with his dirty hand, knocked the bald man’s clean one away. The chair overturned and the bald man curled and uncurled on the darkening carpet. There was blood on his collar piece now.
“You think I am such a fool that I don’t know you can call guards in here as easily as food-bearers and house-cleaners?” Small Sarg looked at the woman on the ladder, the boy at the globe. “I do not like to kill slaves. But I do not like people who plot to kill me—especially such a foolish plot. Now: are the rest of you such fools that you cannot understand what it means when I say, “You’re free”?”
Parchments slipped from the shelf, unrolling on the floor, as the woman scurried down the ladder. The boy fled across the room, leaving a slowly turning sphere. Then both were into the arched stairwell from which Small Sarg had come. Sarg hopped over the fallen slave and ran into the doorway through which (in two other castles) guards, at the (single) tug of a cord, had come swarming: a short hall, more steps, another chamber. Long and short swords hung on the wooden wall. Leather shields with colored fringes leaned against the stone one. A helmet lay on the floor in the corner near a stack of greaves. But there were no guards. (Till now, in the second castle only, there had been no guards.) I am free, thought Small Sarg, once again I am free, running, running through stone arches, down tapestried stairs, across dripping halls, up narrow corridors, a-dash through time and possibility. (Somewhere in the castle people were screaming.) Now I am free to free my master!
Somewhere, doors clashed. Other doors, nearer, clashed. Then the chamber doors swung back in firelight. The Suzeraine strode through, tugging them to behind him. “Very well—” (Clash!) “—we can get on with our little session.” He reached up to adjust his collar and two slaves in jeweled collar pieces by the door (they were oiled, pale, strong men with little wires sewn around the backs of their ears; besides the collar pieces they wore only leather clouts) stepped forward to take his cloak. “Has he been given any food or drink?”
The torturer snored on the bench, knees wide, one hand hanging, calloused knuckles the color of stone, one on his knee, the fingers smeared red here and there brown; his head lolled on the wall.
“I asked: Has he had anything to—Bah!” This to the slave folding his cloak by the door: ‘that man is fine for stripping the flesh from the backs of your disobedient brothers. But for anything more subtle . . . well, we’ll let him sleep.” The Suzeraine, who now wore only a leather kilt and very thick-soled sandals (the floor of this chamber sometimes became very messy), walked to the slant board from which hung chains and ropes and against which leaned pokers and pincers. On a table beside the plank were several basins—in one lay a rag which had already turned the water pink. Within the furnace, which took up most of one wall (a ragged canvas curtain hung beside it), a log broke; on the opposite wall the shadow of the grate momentarily darkened and flickered. “How are you feeling?” the Suzeraine asked perfunctorily. “A little better? That’s good. Perhaps you enjoy the return of even that bit of good feeling enough to answer my questions accurately and properly. I can’t really impress upon you enough how concerned my master is for the answers. He is a very hard taskman, you know—that is, if you know him at all. Krodar wants—but then, we need not sully such an august name with the fetid vapors of this place. The stink of the iron that binds you to that board . . . I remember a poor, guilty soul lying on the plank as you lie now, demanding of me: ‘Don’t you even wash the bits of flesh from the last victim off the chains and manacles before you bind up the new one?’ ” The Suzeraine chuckled: “ ‘Why should I?’ was my answer. True, it makes the place reek. But that stench is a very good reminder—don’t you feel it?—of the mortality that is, after all, our only real playing piece in this game of time, of pain.” The Suzeraine looked up from the bloody basin: a heavy arm, a blocky bicep, corded with high veins, banded at the joint with thin ligament; a jaw in which a muscle quivered under a snarl of patchy beard, here gray, there black, at another place ripped from reddened skin, at still another cut by an old scar; a massive thigh down which sweat trickled, upsetting a dozen other droplets caught in that thigh’s coarse hairs, till here a link, there a cord, and elsewhere a rope, dammed it. Sweat crawled under, or overflowed, the dams. “Tell me, Gorgik, have you ever been employed by a certain southern lord, a Lord Aldamir, whose hold is in the Garth Peninsula, only a stone’s throw from the Vygernangx Monastery, to act as a messenger between his Lordship and certain weavers, jewelers, potters, and iron mongers in port Kolhari?”
“I have . . . have never . . . ” The chest tried to rise under a metal band that would have cramped the breath of a smaller man than Gorgik. “ . . . never set foot within the precinct of Garth. Never, I tell you . . . I have told you . . . ”
“And yet—” The Suzeraine, pulling the wet rag from its bowl where it dripped a cherry smear on the table, turned to the furnace. He wound the rag about one hand, picked up one of the irons sticking from the furnace rack, drew it out to examine its tip: an ashen rose. “—for reasons you still have not explained to my satisfaction, you wear, on a chain around your neck—” The rose, already dimmer, lowered over Gorgik’s chest; the chest hair had been singed in places, adding to the room’s stink. “—that.” The rose clicked the metal disk that lay on Gorgik’s sternum. ‘these navigational scales, the map etched there, the grid of stars that turns over it and the designs etched around it all speak of its origin in—”
The chest suddenly heaved; Gorgik gave up some sound that tore in the cartilages of his throat.
“Is that getting warm?” The Suzeraine lifted the poker tip. An off-center scorch-mark marred the astrolabe’s verdigris. “I was saying: the workmanship is clearly from the south. If you haven’t spent time there, why else would you be wearing it?” Then the Suzeraine pressed the poker tip to Gorgik’s thigh. Gorgik screamed. The Suzeraine, after a second or two, removed the poker from the blistering mark (amidst the cluster of marks, bubbled, yellow, some crusted over by now). “Let me repeat something to you, Gorgik, about the rules of the game we’re playing: the game of time and pain. I said this to you before we began. I say it to you again, but the context of several hours” experience may reweight its meaning for you—and before I repeat it, let me tell you that I shall, as I told you before, eventually repeat it yet again: When the pains are small, in this game, then we make the time very, very long. Little pains, spaced out over the seconds, the minutes—no more than a minute between each—for days on end. Days and days. You have no idea how much I enjoy the prospect. The timing, the ingenuity, the silent comparisons between your responses and the responses of the many, many others I have had the pleasure to work with—that is all my satisfaction. Remember this: on the simplest and most basic level, the infliction of these little torments gives me far more pleasure than would your revealing the information that is their occasion. So if you want to get back at me, to thwart me in some way, to cut short my real pleasure in all of this, perhaps you had best—”
“I told you! I’ve answered your questions! I’ve answered them and answered them truthfully! I have never set foot in the Garth! The astrolabe was a gift to me when I was practically a child. I cannot even recall the circumstances under which I received it. Some noble man or woman presented it to me on a whim at some castle or other that I stayed at.” (The Suzeraine replaced the poker on the furnace rack and turned to a case, hanging on the stone wall, of small polished knives.) “I am a man who has stayed in many castles, many hovels; I have slept under bridges in the cities, in fine inns and old alleys. I have rested for the night in fields and forests. And I do not mark my history the way you do, cataloguing the gifts and graces I have been lucky enough to—” Gorgik drew a sharp breath.
“The flesh between the fingers—terribly sensitive.” The Suzeraine lifted the tiny knife, where a blood drop crawled along the cutting edge. “As is the skin between the toes, on even the most calloused feet. I’ve known men—not to mention women—who remained staunch under hot p
okers and burning pincers who, as soon as I started to make the few smallest cuts in the flesh between the fingers and toes (really, no more than a dozen or so), became astonishingly cooperative. I’m quite serious.” He put down the blade on the table edge, picked up the towel from the basin and squeezed; reddened water rilled between his fingers into the bowl. The Suzeraine swabbed at the narrow tongue of blood that moved down the plank below Gorgik’s massive (twitching a little now) hand. ‘the thing wrong with having you slanted like this, head up and feet down, is that even the most conscientious of us finds himself concentrating more on your face, chest, and stomach than, say, on your feet, ankles and knees. Some exquisite feelings may be produced in the knee: a tiny nail, a small mallet . . . First I shall make a few more cuts. Then I shall wake our friend snoring against the wall. (You scream and he still sleeps! Isn’t it amazing? But then, he’s had so much of this!) We shall reverse the direction of the slant—head down, feet up—so that we can spread our efforts out more evenly over the arena of your flesh.” In another basin, of yellow liquid, another cloth was submerged. The Suzeraine pulled the cloth out and spread it, dripping. “A little vinegar . . . ”
Gorgik’s head twisted in the clamp across his forehead that had already rubbed to blood at both temples as the Suzeraine laid the cloth across his face.
“A little salt. (Myself, I’ve always felt that four or five small pains, each of which alone would be no more than a nuisance, when applied all together can be far more effective than a single great one.)” The Suzeraine took up the sponge from the coarse crystals heaped in a third basin (crystals clung, glittering, to the brain-shape) and pressed it against Gorgik’s scorched and fresh-blistered thigh. “Now the knife again . . . ”
Somewhere, doors clashed.
Gorgik coughed hoarsely and repeatedly under the cloth. Frayed threads dribbled vinegar down his chest. The cough broke into another scream, as another bloody tongue licked over the first.
Other doors, nearer, clashed.
One of the slaves with the wire sewn in his ears turned to look over his shoulder.
The Suzeraine paused in sponging off the knife.
On his bench, without ceasing his snore, the torturer knuckled clumsily at his nose.
The chamber door swung back, grating. Small Sarg ran in, leaped on the wooden top of a cage bolted to the wall (that could only have held a human being squeezed in a very unnatural position), and shouted: “All who are slaves here are now free!”
The Suzeraine turned around with an odd expression. He said: “Oh, not again! Really, this is the last time!” He stepped from the table, his shadow momentarily falling across the vinegar rag twisted on Gorgik’s face. He moved the canvas hanging aside (furnace light lit faint stairs rising), stepped behind it; the ragged canvas swung to—there was a small, final clash of bolt and hasp.
Small Sarg was about to leap after him, but the torturer suddenly opened his bloodshot eyes, the forehead below his bald skull wrinkled; he lumbered up, roaring.
“Are you free or slave?” Small Sarg shrieked, sword out.
The torturer wore a wide leather neck collar, set about with studs of rough metal, a sign (Small Sarg thought; and he had thought it before) that, if any sign could or should indicate a state somewhere between slavery and freedom, would be it. “Tell me,” Small Sarg shrieked again, as the man, eyes bright with apprehension, body sluggish with sleep, lurched forward, “are you slave or free?” (In three castles the studded leather had hidden the bare neck of a free man; in two, the iron collar.) When the torturer seized the edge of the plank where Gorgik was bound—only to steady himself, and yet . . . —Sarg leaped, bringing his sword down. Studded leather cuffing the torturer’s forearm deflected the blade; but the same sleepy lurch threw the hulking barbarian (for despite his shaved head, the torturer’s sharp features and gold skin spoke as pure a southern origin as Sarg’s own) to the right; the blade, aimed only to wound a shoulder, plunged into flesh at the bronze-haired solar plexus.
The man’s fleshy arms locked around the boy’s hard shoulders, joining them in an embrace lubricated with blood. The torturer’s face, an inch before Sarg’s, seemed to explode in rage, pain, and astonishment. Then the head fell back, eyes opened, mouth gaping. (The torturer’s teeth and breath were bad, very bad; this was the first time Small Sarg had ever actually killed a torturer.) The grip relaxed around Sarg’s back; the man fell; Sarg staggered, his sword still gripped in one hand, wiping at the blood that spurted high as his chin with the other. “You’re free . . . !” Sarg called over his shoulder; the sword came loose from the corpse.
The door slaves, however, were gone. (In two castles, they had gone seeking their own escape; in one, they had come back with guards . . . ) Small Sarg turned toward the slanted plank, pulled the rag away from Gorgik’s rough beard, flung it to the floor. “Master . . . !”
“So, you are . . . here—again—to . . . free me!”
“I have followed your orders, Master; I have freed every slave I encountered on my way . . . ” Suddenly Small Sarg turned back to the corpse. On the torturer’s hand-wide belt, among the gnarled studs, was a hook and from the hook hung a clutch of small instruments. Small Sarg searched for the key among them, came up with it. It was simply a metal bar with a handle on one end and a flat side at the other. Sarg ducked behind the board and began twisting the key in locks. On the upper side of the plank, chains fell away and clamps bounced loose. Planks squeaked beneath flexing muscles.
Sarg came up as the last leg clamp swung away from Gorgik’s ankle (leaving dark indentations) and the man’s great foot hit the floor. Gorgik stood, kneading one shoulder; he pushed again and again at his flank with the heel of one hand. A grin broke his beard. “It’s good to see you, boy. For a while I didn’t know if I would or not. The talk was all of small pains and long times.”
“What did they want from you—this time?” Sarg took the key and reached around behind his own neck, fitted the key in the lock, turned it (for these were barbaric times; that fabled man, named Belham, who had invented the lock and key, had only made one, and no one had yet thought to vary them: different keys for different locks was a refinement not to come for a thousand years), unhinged his collar, and stood, holding it in his soiled hands.
“This time it was some nonsense about working as a messenger in the south—your part of the country.” Gorgik took the collar, raised it to his own neck, closed it with a clink. “When you’re under the hands of a torturer, with all the names and days and questions, you lose your grip on your own memory. Everything he says sounds vaguely familiar, as if something like it might have once occurred. And even the things you once were sure of lose their patina of reality.” A bit of Gorgik’s hair had caught in the lock. With a finger, he yanked it loose—at a lull in the furnace’s crackling, you could hear hair tear. “Why should I ever go to the Garth? I’ve avoided it so long I can no longer remember my reasons.” Gorgik lifted the bronze disk from his chest and frowned at it. “Because of this, he assumed I must have been there. Some noble gave this to me, how many years ago now? I don’t even recall if it was a man or a woman, or what the occasion was.” He snorted and let the disk fall. “For a moment I thought they’d melt it into my chest with their cursed pokers.” Gorgik looked around, stepped across gory stone. “Well, little master, you’ve proved yourself once more; and yet once more I suppose it’s time to go.” He picked up a broad sword leaning against the wall among a pile of weapons, frowned at the edge, scraped at it with the blunt of his thumb. “This will do.”
Sarg, stepping over the torturer’s body, suddenly bent, hooked a finger under the studded collar, and pulled it down. “Just checking on this one, hey, Gorgik?” The neck, beneath the leather, was iron bound.
“Checking what, little master?” Gorgik looked up from his blade.
“Nothing. Come on, Gorgik.”
The big man’s step held the ghost of a limp; Small Sarg noted it and beat the worry from his mind. The walk woul
d grow steadier and steadier. (It had before.) “Now we must fight our way out of here and flee this crumbling pile.”
“I’m ready for it, little master.”
“Gorgik?”
“Yes, master?”
“The one who got away . . . ?”
“The one who was torturing me with his stupid questions?” Gorgik stepped to the furnace’s edge, pulled aside the hanging. The door behind it, when he jiggled its rope handle, was immobile and looked to be a plank too thick to batter in. He let the curtain fall again. And the other doors, anyway, stood open.
“Who was he, Gorgik?”
The tall man made a snorting sound. “We have our campaign, little master—to free slaves and end the institution’s inequities. The lords of Nevèrÿon have their campaign, their intrigues, their schemes and whims. What you and I know, or should know by now, is how little our and their campaigns actually touch . . . though in place after place they come close enough so that no man or woman can slip between without encounter, if not injury.”
“I do not understand . . . ”
Gorgik laughed, loud as the fire. “That’s because I am the slave that I am and you are the master you are.” And he was beside Sarg and past him; Small Sarg, behind him, ran.
3
The women shrieked—most of them. Gorgik, below swinging lamps, turned with raised sword to see one of the silent ones crouching against the wall beside a stool—an old woman, most certainly used to the jeweled collar cover, though hers had come off somewhere. There was only iron at her neck now. Her hair was in thin black braids, clearly dyed, and looping her brown forehead. Her eyes caught Gorgik’s and perched on his gaze like some terrified creature’s, guarding infinite secrets. For a moment he felt an urge, though it did not quite rise clear enough to take words, to question them. Then, in the confusion, a lamp chain broke; burning oil spilled. Guards and slaves and servants ran through a growing welter of flame. The woman was gone. And Gorgik turned, flailing, taking with him only her image. Somehow the castle had (again) been unable to conceive of its own fall at the hands of a naked man—or boy—and had, between chaos and rumor, collapsed into mayhem before the ten, the fifty, the hundred-fifty brigands who had stormed her. Slaves with weapons, guards with pot-tops and farm implements, paid servants carrying mysterious packages either for safety or looting, dashed there and here, all seeming as likely to be taken for foe as friend. Gorgik shouldered against one door; it splintered, swung out, and he was through—smoke trickled after him. He ducked across littered stone, following his shadow flickering with back light, darted through another door that was open.