by Paula Guran
Silver splattered his eyes. He was outside; moonlight splintered through the low leaves of the catalpa above him. He turned, both to see where he’d been and if he were followed, when a figure already clear in the moon, hissed, “Gorgik!” above the screaming inside.
“Hey, little master!” Gorgik laughed and jogged across the rock.
Small Sarg seized Gorgik’s arm. “Come on, Master! Let’s get out of here. We’ve done what we can, haven’t we?”
Gorgik nodded and, together they turned to plunge into the swampy forests of Strethi.
Making their way beneath branches and over mud, with silver spills shafting the mists, Small Sarg and Gorgik came, in the humid autumn night, to a stream, a clearing, a scarp—where two women sat at the white ashes of a recent fire, talking softly. And because these were primitive times when certain conversational formalities had not yet grown up to contour discourse among strangers, certain subjects that more civilized times might have banished from the evening were here brought quickly to the fore.
“I see a bruised and tired slave of middle age,” said the woman who wore a mask and who had given her name as Raven. With ankles crossed before the moonlit ash, she sat with her arms folded on her raised knees. “From that, one assumes that the youngster is the owner.”
“But the boy,” added the redhead kneeling beside her, who had given her name as Norema, “is a barbarian, and in this time and place it is the southern barbarians who, when they come this far north, usually end up slaves. The older, for all his bruises, has the bearing of a Kolhari man, whom you’d expect to be the owner.”
Gorgik, sitting with one arm over one knee, said: “We are both free men. For the boy the collar is symbolic—of our mutual affection, our mutual protection. For myself, it is sexual—a necessary part in the pattern that allows both action and orgasm to manifest themselves within the single circle of desire. For neither of us is its meaning social, save that it shocks, offends, or deceives.”
Small Sarg, also crosslegged but with his shoulders hunched, his elbows pressed to his sides, and his fists on the ground, added, “My master and I are free.”
The masked Raven gave a shrill bark that it took seconds to recognize as laughter: “You both claim to be free, yet one of you bears the title ‘master’ and wears a slave collar at the same time? Surely you are two jesters, for I have seen nothing like this in the length and breadth of this strange and terrible land.”
“We are lovers,” said Gorgik, “and for one of us the symbolic distinction between slave and master is necessary to desire’s consummation.”
“We are avengers who fight the institution of slavery wherever we find it,” said Small Sarg, “in whatever way we can, and for both of us it is symbolic of our time in servitude and our bond to all men and women still so bound.”
“If we have not pledged ourselves to death before capture, it is only because we both know that a living slave can rebel and a dead slave cannot,” said Gorgik.
“We have sieged more than seven castles now, releasing the workers locked in the laboring pens, the kitchen and house slaves, and the administrative slaves alike. As well, we have set upon those men who roam through the land capturing and selling men and women as if they were property. Between castles and countless brigands, we have freed many who had only to find a key for their collars. And in these strange and barbaric times, any key will do.”
The redheaded Norema said: “You love as master and slave and you fight the institution of slavery? The contradiction seems as sad to me as it seemed amusing to my friend.”
“As one word uttered in three different situations may mean three entirely different things, so the collar worn in three different situations may mean three different things. They are not the same: sex, affection, and society,” said Gorgik. “Sex and society relate like an object and its image in a reflecting glass. One reverses the other—are you familiar with the phenomenon, for these are primitive times, and mirrors are rare—”
“I am familiar with it,” said Norema and gave him a long, considered look.
Raven said: “We are two women who have befriended each other in this strange and terrible land, and we have no love for slavers. We’ve killed three now in the two years we’ve traveled together—slavers who’ve thought to take us as property. It is easy, really, here where the men expect the women to scream and kick and bite and slap, but not to plan and place blades in their gut.”
Norema said: “Once we passed a gang of slavers with a herd of ten women in collars and chains, camped for the night. We descended on them—from their shouts they seemed to think they’d been set on by a hundred fighting men.”
Sarg and Gorgik laughed; Norema and Raven laughed—all recognizing a phenomenon.
“You know,” mused Norema, when the laughter was done, “the only thing that allows you and ourselves to pursue our liberations with any success is that the official policy of Nevèrÿon goes against slavery under the edict of the Child Empress.”
“Whose reign,” said Gorgik, absently, “is just and generous.”
“Whose reign,” grunted the masked woman, “is a sun-dried dragon turd.”
“Whose reign—” Gorgik smiled—” is currently insufferable, if not insecure.”
Norema said: “To mouth those conservative formulas and actively oppose slavery seems to me the same sort of contradiction as the one you first presented us with.” She took a reflective breath. “A day ago we stopped near here at the castle of the Suzeraine of Strethi. He was amused by us and entertained us most pleasantly. But we could not help notice that his whole castle was run by slaves, men and women. But we smiled, and ate slave-prepared food—and were entertaining back.”
Gorgik said: “It was the Suzeraine’s castle that we last sieged.”
Small Sarg said: “And the kitchen slaves, who probably prepared your meal, are now free.”
The two women, masked and unmasked, smiled at each other, smiles within which were inscribed both satisfaction and embarrassment.
“How do you accomplish these sieges?” Raven asked.
“One or the other of us, in the guise of a free man without collar, approaches a castle where we have heard there are many slaves and delivers an ultimatum.” Gorgik grinned. “Free your slaves or . . . ”
“Or what?” asked Raven.
“To find an answer to that question, they usually cast the one of us who came into the torture chamber. At which point the other of us, decked in the collar—it practically guarantees one entrance if one knows which doors to come in by—lays siege to the hold.”
“Only,” Small Sarg said, “this time it didn’t work like that. We were together, planning our initial strategy, when suddenly the Suzeraine’s guards attacked us. They seemed to know who Gorgik was. They called him by name and almost captured us both.”
“Did they, now?” asked Norema.
“They seemed already to have their questions for me. At first I thought they knew what we had been doing. But these are strange and barbaric times; and information travels slowly here.”
“What did they question you about?” Raven wanted to know.
“Strange and barbaric things,” said Gorgik. “Whether I had worked as a messenger for some southern lord, carrying tales of children’s bouncing balls and other trivial imports. Many of their questions centered about . . . ” He looked down, fingering the metal disk hanging against his chest. As he gazed, you could see, from his tensing cheek muscle, a thought assail him.
Small Sarg watched Gorgik. “What is it . . . ?”
Slowly Gorgik’s brutish features formed a frown. “When we were fighting our way out of the castle, there was a woman . . . a slave. I’m sure she was a slave. She wore a collar . . . But she reminded me of another woman, a noble woman, a woman I knew a long time ago . . . ” Suddenly he smiled. “Though she too wore a collar from time to time, much for the same reasons as I.”
The matted-haired barbarian, the western woman in her mask, the
island woman with her cropped hair sat about the silvered ash and watched the big man turn the disk. “When I was in the torture chamber, my thoughts were fixed on my own campaign for liberation and not on what to me seemed the idiotic fixations of my oppressor. Thus all their questions and comments are obscure to me now. By the same token, the man I am today obscures my memories of the youthful slave released from the bondage of the mines by this noble woman’s whim. Yet, prompted by that face this evening, vague memories of then and now emerge and confuse themselves without clarifying. They turn about this instrument, for measuring time and space . . . they have to do with the name Krodar . . . ”
The redhead said: “I have heard that name, Krodar . . . ”
Within the frayed eyeholes, the night-blue eyes narrowed; Raven glanced at her companion.
Gorgik said: “There was something about a monastery in the south, called something like the Vygernangx . . . ?”
The masked woman said: “Yes, I know of the Vygernangx . . . ”
The redhead glanced back at her friend with a look set between complete blankness and deep knowingness.
Gorgik said: “And there was something about the balls, the toys we played with as children . . . or perhaps the rhyme we played to . . . ?”
Small Sarg said: “When I was a child in the jungles of the south, we would harvest the little nodules of sap that seeped from the scars in certain broadleafed palms and save them up for the traders who would come every spring for them . . . ”
Both women looked at each other now, then at the men, and remained silent.
“It is as though—” Gorgik held up the verdigrised disk with its barbarous chasings “—all these things would come together in a logical pattern, immensely complex and greatly beautiful, tying together slave and empress, commoner and lord—even gods and demons—to show how all are related in a negotiable pattern, like some sailor’s knot, not yet pulled taut, but laid out on the dock in loose loops, so that simply to see it in such form were to comprehend it even when yanked tight. And yet . . . ” He turned the astrolabe over. “ . . . they will not clear in my mind to any such pattern!”
Raven said: ‘The lords of this strange and terrible land indeed live lives within such complex and murderous knots. We have all seen them whether we have sieged the castle of one or been seduced by the hospitality of another; we have all had a finger through at least a loop in such a knot. You’ve talked of mirrors, pretty man, and of their strange reversal effect. I’ve wondered if our ignorance isn’t simply a reversed image of their knowledge.”
“And I’ve wondered—” Gorgik said, “slave, free-commoner, lord—if each isn’t somehow a reflection of the other; or a reflection of a reflection.”
“They are not,” said Norema with intense conviction. “That is the most horrendous notion I’ve ever heard.” But her beating lids, her astonished expression as she looked about in the moonlight, might have suggested to a sophisticated enough observer a conversation somewhere in her past of which this was a reflection.
Gorgik observed her, and waited.
After a while Norema picked up a stick, poked in the ashes with it: a single coal turned up ruby in the silver scatter and blinked.
After a few moments, Norema said: “Those balls . . . that the children play with in summer on the streets of Kolhari . . . Myself, I’ve always wondered where they came from—I mean I know about the orchards in the south. But I mean how do they get to the city every year.”
“You don’t know that?” Raven turned, quite astonished, to her redheaded companion. “You mean to tell me, island woman, that you and I have traveled together for over a year and a half, seeking fortune and adventure, and you have never asked me this nor have I ever told you?”
Norema shook her head.
Again Raven loosed her barking laughter. “Really, what is most strange and terrible about this strange and terrible land is how two women can be blood friends, chattering away for days at each other, saving one another’s lives half a dozen times running and yet somehow never really talk! Let me tell you: the Western Crevasse, from which I hail, has, running along its bottom, a river that leads to the Eastern Ocean. My people live the whole length of the river, and those living at the estuary are fine, seafaring women. It is our boats, crewed by these sailing women of the Western Crevasse who each year have sailed to the south in our red ships and brought back these toys to Kolhari, as indeed they also trade them up and down the river.” A small laugh now, a sort of stifled snorting. “I was twenty and had already left my home before I came to one of your ports and the idea struck me that a man could actually do the work required on a boat.”
“Ay,” said Gorgik, “I saw those boats in my youth—but we were always scared to talk with anyone working on them. The captain was always a man; and we assumed, I suppose, that he must be a very evil person to have so many women within his power. Some proud, swaggering fellow—as frequently a foreigner as one of your own men—”
“Yes,” said Norema. “I remember such a boat. The crew was all women and the captain a great, black-skinned fellow who terrified everyone in my island village—”
“The captain a man?” The masked woman frowned beneath her mask’s ragged hem. “I know there are boats from your Ulvayn islands on which men and women work together. But a man for a captain on a boat of my people . . . ? It is so unlikely that I am quite prepared to dismiss it as an outright imposs—” She stopped; then she barked, “Of course. The man on the boat! Oh, yes, my silly heathen woman, of course there is a man on the boat. There’s always a man on the boat. But he’s certainly not the captain. Believe me, my friend, even though I have seen men fulfill it, captain is a woman’s job: and in our land it is usually the eldest sailor on the boat who takes the job done by your captain.”
“If he wasn’t the captain, then,” asked Norema, “who was he?”
“How can I explain it to you . . . ?” Raven said. “There is always a man in a group of laboring women in my country. But he is more like a talisman, or a good-luck piece the women take with them, than a working sailor—much less an officer. He is a figure of prestige, yes, which explains his fancy dress; but he is not a figure of power. Indeed, do you know the wooden women who are so frequently carved on the prow of your man-sailored ships? Well he fulfills a part among our sailors much as that wooden woman does among yours. I suppose to you it seems strange. But in our land, a single woman lives with a harem of men; and in our land, any group of women at work always keeps a single man. Perhaps it is simply another of your reflections? But you, in your strange and terrible land, can see nothing but men at the heads of things. The captain indeed! A pampered pet who does his exercises every morning on the deck, who preens and is praised and shown off at every port—that is what men are for. And, believe me, they love it, no matter what they say. But a man . . . a man with power and authority and the right to make decisions? You must excuse me, for though I have been in your strange and terrible land for years and know such things exist here, I still cannot think of such things among my own people without laughing.” And here she gave her awkward laugh, while with her palm she beat her bony knee. “Seriously,” she said when her laugh was done, “such a pattern for work seems so natural to me that I cannot really believe you’ve never encountered anything like it before—” she was talking to Norema now—”even here.”
Norema smiled, a little strangely. “Yes, I . . . I have heard of something like it before.”
Gorgik again examined the redhead’s face, as if he might discern, inscribed by eye-curve and cheek-bone and forehead-line and lip-shape, what among her memories reflected this discussion.
Something covered the moon.
First masked Raven, then the other three, looked up. Wide wings labored off the light.
“What is such a mountain beast doing in such a flat and swampy land?” asked Small Sarg.
“It must be the Suzeraine’s pet,” Norema said. “But why should he have let it go?”
“So,” said Raven, “once again tonight we are presented with a mysterious sign and no way to know whether it completes a pattern or destroys one.” The laugh this time was something that only went on behind her closed lips. “They cannot fly very far. There is no ledge for her to perch on. And once she lands, in this swampy morass, she won’t be able to regain flight. Her wings will tear in the brambles and she will never fly again.”
But almost as if presenting the image of some ironic answer, the wings flapped against a sudden, high, unfelt breeze, and the beast, here shorn of all fables, rose and rose—for a while—under the night.
The adventures of Paksenarrion Dorthansdotter began in novel Sheepfarmer’s Daughter (1988). Over the course of three books the peasant girl escapes marriage to a pig farmer to become a mercenary, then a paladin of Gird. She must work, fight, and sacrifice herself to insure a rightful king gains the throne despite various evil forces. Beyond this first trilogy, Elizabeth Moon (1945– ) explores Paksenarrion’s universe in two prequels, five sequels, and a dozen or so short stories. Moon’s novels are epic military fantasy that balances gender and the role of women. There’s much more “sword” than sorcery and heroism requires discipline, honor, and self-sacrifice more than derring-do. In “First Blood,” set in the Paksenarrion universe, a young squire finds himself riding toward his first battle.