Tales of Neveryon (21 page)

Everyone said fruit and game were getting scarcer.

To be a barbarian prince meant that when his mother yelled and shrieked and threatened death or tribal expulsion, people did what she said with dispatch – which included stoning Crazy Nargit to death. Crazy Nargit, within the space of a moon’s coming and going, had gotten into an argument with a woman called Blin and killed her. Everyone said that Blin had been in the wrong, but still. Then Nargit got into another fight with Kudyuk and broke the young tow-headed hunter’s leg so that Kudyuk would be unable to walk for a year and would
limp for the rest of his life. Also, Crazy Nargit had killed a black, female rat (which was sacred) and for two days wandered around the village holding it by the tail and singing an obscene song about a tree spirit and a moth. The rat, Small Sarg’s mother insisted, made it obvious that Nargit wished for death.

His uncle, shaking his blue-stone strings of women’s ear-bangles, had suggested simply driving Nargit from the tribe.

Sarg’s mother said her brother was almost as crazy as Nargit; the tribe wasn’t strong enough to keep Nargit out if he really wanted to come in and just kill people, which is what, from time to time, with clenched teeth and sweating forehead, shivering like a man just pulled out of the stream after being tied there all night (which several times they had had to do with Nargit when he was much younger), Nargit hissed and hissed and hissed was exactly what he wanted above all things to do. Nargit, his mother explained, was bound to get worse.

So they did it.

Stoning someone to death, he discovered, takes a long time. For the first hour of it, Nargit merely clung to a tree and sang another obscene song. After two more hours, because Sarg was a barbarian prince (and because he was feeling rather ill), he went and found a large rock and came back to the tree at the foot of which Nargit was now curled up, bloody and gasping – two small stones hit Sarg’s shoulder and he barked back for the others to cease. Then he smashed Nargit’s skull. To be a barbarian prince meant that, if he wanted to, he could put on women’s jewelry and go off in the woods for long fasting periods and come back and be consulted himself. But he preferred men’s jewelry; there was more of it, it was more colorful, and (because he was a prince) he had a better collection of
it than most. His older and radiant sister, who had very red, curly hair, and whose reign, therefore, as barbarian queen was expected to be quite spectacular, was already practicing the imperial ways of his mother.

Small Sarg was left pretty much alone.

The stretch of woods that went from just beyond the fork of the little river and the big stream (where many weasels lived) up to the first fissure in the rocky shelves (two days’ walk all told) he knew to practically every tree, to every man-path and deer-path, almost every rock and nearly every pebble; indeed, most of the animals that lived there he could identify individually as well as he could recognize all the human members of the Seven Clans, which, together, formed his principality. Outside that boundary, there was nothing: and nothing was part of darkness, night, sleep, and death, all of which were mysterious and powerful and rightly the province of terror – all outside his principality was unknown, ignored, and monstrous. The Seven Clans consisted of the Rabbit Clan, the Dog Clan, the Green Bird Clan, and the Crow Clan – this last of which was his.

It was only after the strangers came and took him away that it occurred to him there really were just four to the Seven Clans, and that therefore his tribe had probably once been much larger. Suddenly Small Sarg began to conceptualize something that fitted very closely to a particular idea of history – which, because we have never truly been without it, is ultimately incomprehensible to the likes of you and me – only one of the many ideas he had been learning in the rough, brutal, and inhuman place they called civilization. Once that had happened, of course, he could never be a true barbarian again.

Beneath the thatched canopy that covered half the square, the market of Ellamon was closing down for the evening. Light slanted across dust scaled, like some reptile, with myriad lapping footprints; a spilled tomato basket, a pile of hay, trampled vegetable leaves … a man with a wicker hamper roped around his shoulders stopped shouting, took a deep breath, and turned to amble away from under the canopy, off down an alley. A woman with a broom trailed a swirling pattern as she backed across the dust, erasing her own bare footprints among a dozen others. Another man pulled a toppling, overturning, evergrowing pile of garbage across the ground with a rake.

In one corner, by a supporting post, a fat man stopped wiping sweat from his bald head to brush at a bushy mustache in which, despite his pullings and pluckings, were still some bread flakes, and a bit of apple skin; also something stuck the corner hairs together at the left. His dark belly lapped a broad belt set with studs. A ring with a modern and sophisticated key, a double forefinger’s length, hung at the hip of his red, ragged skirt.

Beside him on the ground, chained in iron collars, sat: an old man, knees, elbows, and vertebrae irregular knobs in parchment skin otherwise as wrinkled as many times crushed and straightened vellum; a woman who might have just seen twenty, in gray rags, a strip of cloth tied around her head, with an ugly scab showing from under the bandage. Her short hair above and below the dirty cloth was yellow-white as goat’s butter; her eyes were narrow and blue. She sat and held her cracked feet and
rocked a little. The third was a boy, his skin burned to a gold darker than his matted hair; there was a bruise on his arm and another on his bony hip. He squatted, holding his chain in one hand, intently rubbing the links in his rough fingers with a leaf.

A shadow moved across the dust to fall over the single heavy plank to which all their chains were peg-locked.

The slaver and the woman looked up. The old man, one shoulder against the support pole, slept.

The boy rubbed.

The man whose shadow it was was very tall; on the blocky muscles of arm, chest, and shin the veins sat high in thin, brown skin. He was thick legged; his face bore a six-inch scar; his genitals were pouched in a leather web through which pushed hair and scrotal flesh. Rings of brass clinked each step about one wide ankle; his bare feet were broad, flat, and cracked on their hard edges. A fur bag hung on his hip from a thin chain that slanted his waist; a fur knife-sheath hung from a second chain that slanted the other way. Around his upper arm, chased with strange designs, was a brass bracelet so tight it bit into the muscle. From his neck, on a thong, hung a bronze disk, blurred with verdigris. His dusty hair had been braided to one side with another leather strip, but, with the business of the day, braid and leather had come half unraveled. The leather dangled over the multiple heads of his ridged and rigid shoulder. He stopped before the plank, looked down at the chained three, and ground one foreknuckle around in his right nostril. (Black on one thumbnail told of a recent injury; the nails were thick, broad through heredity, short from labor, and scimitared at cuticle and crown with labor’s more ineradicable grime.) His palms were almost as cracked and horny as his soles. He snuffled hugely, than spat.

Dust drew into his mucus, graying the edge.

‘So. This is the lousy lot left from the morning?’ The man’s voice was naturally hoarse; bits of a grin scattered among general facial signs of contempt.

‘The girl is sound and cooks in the western style, though she’s strong enough for labor – or would be with some fattening. And she’s comely.’ The slaver spread one hand on his belly, as if to keep it from tearing away with its own dark doughy weight; he squinted. ‘You were here this morning, and I was speaking to you about a price …?’

‘I was here,’ the man said, ‘passing in the crowd. We didn’t speak.’

‘Ah, just looking then. Take the girl. She’s pale, passionate and pretty; knows how to keep herself clean. She’s of a good temper –’

‘You’re a liar,’ the tall man said.

The slaver went on as though he had not been interrupted: ‘But you
are
interested in buying …? In this high and loathsome hold, they seem to think slaves are too good for them. Believe me, it’s not as if they were concerned with the fates of the wretches for sale. I want you to know I take care of my wares. I feed them once a day and put them through a bathhouse, wherever we happen to be, once every new moon. That’s more than I can say for some. No –’ He wiped again at his trickling forehead with a fleshy thumb. ‘No, they think here that such luxuries as I have out are namby-pamby and not suited for the austere mountain life.’

A brown child with a near-bald head, breasts small as two handfuls of sand, and rags wrapped around her middle, ran up clutching something in leaves. ‘A dragon’s egg!’ she panted and, blinking, opened her hands. ‘A dragon’s egg, fertile and ready to hatch, from the corrals
of the flying beasts not two miles above in the rocks. Only a bit of silver. Only a –’

‘Go on with you,’ said the slaver. ‘What do you think, I’ve never been in the high hold of fabled Ellamon before? Last time I was here, someone tried to sell me a whole trayful of these things; swore I could raise the beasts into a prime flock and make my fortune.’ He
humphed
, making to push the child, who merely turned to the tall man.

‘A dragon’s egg …?’

“A dragon’s egg would be a good bargain at only a bit of silver.’ The man prodded the leathery thing in the leaves with a rough forefinger. ‘But this – I spent a week here, once, picking these off the trees that grow down near the Faltha Falls. Dragonfruits they’re called. Lay them in the sun for a week, turning them every day, and you have something that looks a pretty passable version of one of the winged wonders’ seeds.’

‘Is
that
how they do it?’ The slaver flapped both hands on his stomach.

‘– only you forgot to pull the stem off this one,’ the tall man said. ‘Now go away.’

The girl, still blinking, ran off a few steps, looked back – not at the two men standing, but at the tow-headed woman, whose hair was as short as (if so much lighter than) her own, who was still sitting, who was still rocking, who was whispering something to herself now.

‘So, you know the lay of the rocks ’round Ellamon.’ The dark-armed slaver moved his hands up and down over his stomach, moving his stomach up and down. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Gorgik – unless I have need for another. When I do, I take another for a while. But I’ve stopped in many mountain holds over the years, fabled or unfabled, to spend a day, or a week, or a month. That makes Ellamon no different for me from any hundred other towns on the
desert, among the peaks, or in the jungles.’ Gorgik inclined his scarred face toward the slaves, gesturing with his blunt, stubbled chin. ‘Where are they from?’

‘The old man? Who knows. He’s the one I couldn’t sell in the last lot – a bunch of house slaves, and him. All the time asleep anyway. The boy’s new-captured from some raid in the south. A barbarian from the jungles just below the Vygernangx … ’ One hand left the slaver’s gut to prod at Gorgik’s chest – ‘where your astrolabe comes from.’

Gorgik raised a bushy eyebrow.

‘The stars, set so on the rhet, must be from a southern latitude. And the design around the edge – it’s the same as one the boy had on a band around his ankle before we took if off him and sold it.’

‘What’s he doing?’ Gorgik frowned. ‘Trying to wear his chains through by rubbing them with a leaf?’

The slaver frowned too. ‘I’ve kicked him a couple of times. But he won’t stop. And he certainly won’t rub it through in his lifetime!’

With his knee, Gorgik nudged the boy’s shoulder, ‘What are you doing?’

The boy did not even look up, but kept on rubbing the leaf against the link.

‘He’s simpleminded?’ Gorgik asked.

‘Now the woman,’ said the slaver, not answering, ‘is from a little farming province in the west. Apparently she was once captured by raiders from the desert. I guess she escaped, made it all the way to the port of Kolhari, where she was working as a prostitute on the waterfront; but without guild protection. Got taken by slavers again. Thus it goes. She’s a fine piece, the pick of the lot as far as I can see. But no one wants to buy her.’

The woman’s eyes suddenly widened. She turned her
head just a little, and a faint shivering took her. She spoke suddenly, in a sharp and shrill voice that seemed addressed not to Gorgik but to someone who might have stood six inches behind him and seven inches to the side: ‘Buy me, master! You will take me, please, away from him! We go to the desert tribes and I’ll be sold there again. Do you know what they do to women slaves in the desert? I was there before. I don’t want to go back. Please, take me, master. Please –’

Gorgik asked: ‘How much for the boy?’

The woman stopped, her mouth still open around a word. Her eyes narrowed, she shivered again, and her eyes moved on to stare somewhere else. (The girl with the false egg, who had been standing fifteen feet off, turned now and ran.) Once more the woman began to rock.

‘For him? Twenty bits of silver and your astrolabe there – I like the quality of its work.’

‘Five bits of silver and I keep my astrolabe. You want to get rid of them before you have to waste more on their food – and bathhouses. The Empress’s slave-tax falls due within the next full moon on all who would take slaves across province lines. If you’re going with these to the desert –’

‘Three Imperial gold pieces and you can have the lot of them. The boy’s the best of the three, certainly. In Kolhari I could get three gold pieces stamped with the face of the Empress for him alone.’