Tales of Neveryon (23 page)

Gorgik, eyes on the careening shapes aloft, said: ‘Do you know what we are going to do together here?’

Suddenly the barbarian’s frown changed again. ‘We are?’ He pushed himself up on an elbow and looked at the scarred, stubbled face, the rough, dark hair. ‘But that’s silly. You’re a man. That is what boys do, away from the village huts, off in the forest. You become a man, you
take a woman and you do it in your house with her. You don’t do it with boys in the woods any more.’

Gorgik gave a snort that may have had laughter in it. ‘I’m glad you have done it before, then. It is better that way.’ He glanced at the barbarian. ‘Yes …?’

The barbarian, still frowning, put his head back down on the fur. Gorgik’s fingers relaxed.

Suddenly the slave sat up and looked down at his owner. ‘All right. We do it. But you take this off me.’ He hooked a finger under the collar. ‘You take this off … please. Because … ’ He shook his head. ‘Because, if I wear this, I don’t know if I can do anything.’

‘No,’ Gorgik said. ‘You keep it on.’ Looking up at the barbarian, he snorted again. ‘You see … if one of us does not wear it,
I
will not be able to do anything.’ At the barbarian’s puzzled look, Gorgik raised one bushy eyebrow and gave a small nod. ‘And right now, I do not feel like wearing it … at least tonight. Some other night I will take if off you and put it on myself. Then we will do it that way. But not now.’ Gorgik’s eyes had again gone to the sky; what darkened the moon now were cloud wisps. He looked back at the boy. ‘Does it seem so strange to you, barbarian? You must understand; it is just part of the price one pays for civilization. Fire, slavery, cloth, coin, and stone – these are the basis of civilized life. Sometimes it happens that one or another of them gets hopelessly involved in the most basic appetites of a woman or a man. There are people I have met in my travels who cannot eat food unless it has been held long over fire; and there are others, like me, who cannot love without some mark of possession. Both, no doubt, seem equally strange and incomprehensible to you, ’ey, barbarian?’

The boy, his expression changed yet again, lowered himself to his elbow. ‘You people, here in the land of
death, you really are crazy, yes?’ He put his head down on the crook of Gorgik’s arm. Gorgik’s hand came up to close on the barbarian’s shoulder. The barbarian said: ‘Every time I think I am wearing one chain, I only find that you have changed it for another.’ Gorgik’s fingers on the barbarian’s shoulder tightened.

Small Sarg woke smelling beasts too near. But his next breath told him the beasts were long dead. He turned his face on the fur, relaxed his fingers around the rug’s edge (fur one side, leather the other). Beside him, Gorgik’s great shoulder jerked in the darkness and the rough voice mumbled: ‘… get away from me … get away you little one-eyed devil …’ Gorgik flopped over on his back, one hand flinging up above his head. His eyes were closed, his mouth opened. His breathing, irregular for three, then four, then five breaths, returned to its normal, soundless rhythm. Stubbled overlip and wet underlip moved about some final, silent word: through none of it, Sarg saw, had sleep been broken.

The boy pushed up on his elbow to regard the man. The chain was coiled away on the rock. The collar, wide open, lay half on brown fur near Gorgik’s cracked and horny foot.

Getting to his knees, Sarg reached down and picked it up. He drew his legs beneath him on the rug and held the half-circles in each fist, working the whispering hinge. He looked back at his owner. On that tree-trunk of a neck,
the collar – closed – would cut into the windpipe and pull in the flanking ligaments. On Sarg it had hung loosely, rubbing the knobs of his collarbone.

‘Why would you wear this?’ the barbarian asked the sleeping man. ‘It does not fit you. It does not fit me.’

Gorgik rolled back on his side; and for a moment the barbarian wondered if the man were really sleeping.

A sound that might have been a leaf against a leaf came from somewhere. The barbarian noted it, because that too had always been his way. With a disgusted grimace, he put down the collar, rose to his feet in a motion, stepped to the rock, grabbed the broken wall, leaped (outside that sound again) and came down facing a moon shattered by a lace of leaves and four times as large as any moon should be, as it fell toward the obscured horizon.

He looked around at the fallen rocks, at the trees, at the walls of the inn, and the flakes of light laid over them all. Then, because not only was he a barbarian but a barbarian prince as well – which meant that a number of his naturally barbaric talents had been refined by training even beyond the impressive level of your ordinary forest dweller – he said to the little girl hiding behind the bushes in back of the fallen wall (she would have been completely invisible to the likes of you and me): ‘So, you have got rid of your false dragon’s egg now.’ For he could detect such things on the night’s breath. ‘Why are you crouching back there and watching us?’

What had been the sound of a leaf against a leaf became the sound of a foot moving on leaves. The girl pushed back the brush, stood up, climbed up on the wall, and jumped down. She was all over a dapple of moonlight, short hair, bare breasts and knees. From her breathing, which for the barbarian played through the sounds of night, Sarg could tell she was frightened.

The boy felt very superior to the girl and rather proud of his talent for detecting the unseeable. To show his pride, he squatted down, without lifting his heels from the rock, and folded his arms on his knees. He smiled.

The girl said: ‘You are not a slave any more.’

The barbarian, who had thought very little to date about what a slave exactly was (and therefore had thought even less about what it was not to be one), cocked his head, frowned, and grunted questioningly.

‘You no longer wear the collar. So you are not a slave.’ Then she took a breath. ‘The woman is.’

‘What woman?’ the barbarian asked.

‘The woman you were bound with down at the market today. And the old man. I went down earlier tonight to the campsite where the slaver kept his cart. Then I came here where your new master had taken you. The woman still wears her collar.’

‘And who did you finally sell your egg to?’ the boy asked.

‘I threw it away –’ In a welter of moon-dapplings the girl squatted too, folding her arms on her own knees. (The barbarian heard the change in her breathing that told him that she was both lying and no longer afraid.) She said: ‘Did you see the dragons, earlier tonight, flying against the moon? I climbed up on the rocks to the corrals, to watch the riders go through their full-moon maneuvers. You know the fabled flying dragons are cousins to the tiny night lizards that scurry about the rocks on spring evenings. There’s a trainer there who showed me how the great flying beasts and the little night crawlers have the same pattern of scales in black and green on the undersides of their hind claws.’

‘And who is this trainer? Is he some aged local who has
trained the great dragons and their riders to darken the moon in your parents’ time and your parents’ parents’?’

‘Oh, no,’ She took a little breath. ‘She comes from far away, in the Western Crevasse. She has a two-pronged sword and she is not a very old woman – she has no more years than your master. But she wears a mask and is the only dragon trainer who will take time off to talk to me or the other children who creep up to the corrals. The other trainers chase us away. For the other trainers, yes, are local women who have trained dragons and their riders all their lives. But she has only worked here since last winter. The other trainers only talk among themselves or to the riders – usually to curse them.’

The barbarian cocked his head the other way. ‘So here in this mountain hold, the training of dragons is a woman’s rite?’

‘The riders are all girls,’ the girl explained. ‘That’s because if the dragons are to fly, the riders must be small and light … But the girls who are impressed to be riders are all bad girls – ones who are caught stealing, or fighting, or those who have babies out of wedlock and kill them or sell them; or those who are disrespectful to their fathers. To groom and ride the dragons is dangerous work. The riders ride bareback, with only a halter; and if a dragon turns sharply in the sky, or mounts a glide-current too suddenly, a girl can be thrown and fall down to the rocks a thousand feet below. And since the dragons can only glide a few hundred yards, if they come down in rough and unclimbable terrain, and the dragons cannot take off again, then dragon and rider are left to die there. They say no girl has ever escaped … though sometimes I think they say that only to frighten the riders from trying.’

‘And would you ride dragons?’ the barbarian asked.

‘I am not a bad girl,’ the little girl said. ‘When I go
home, if my aunt discovers I have been out, she will beat me. And she will call me the curse left on her from her sister’s womb.’

The barbarian snorted. ‘If I were to return to my home now, contaminated by this death. I am living my uncle would no doubt beat me too – to drive away the demons I would bring back with me. Though no one would call me a curse.’

The girl snorted now (hearing it, the barbarian realized whom he had been imitating when he’d first made the sound. Are these the ways that civilization passed on? he wondered); the girl apparently did not think much of, or possibly understand, such demons. She said: ‘I would like to ride a dragon. I would like to mount the great humped and scaly back, and grip the halter close in to my sides. I’d obey all the trainers’ instructions and not be lazy or foolish like the riders who endanger their lives in their uncaring mischief and devilment … do you know that the riders killed a man two months ago? He was a stranger who had heard of the fabled band of little girls kept up in the rocks and stole up there to see them. The girls caught him, tied him to a tree upside down by one ankle, then cut him to pieces. And the trainers just looked the other way. Because even though they are only the lowest mountain girls, from bad families every one, all of them criminals and thieves, they are wards of the Child Empress, whose reign is marvelous and miraculous. Oh, they are horribly bad girls! And I am not. You cannot fly, and I cannot fly. Because you are not a girl – and I am not bad.’

‘But you still try to sell strangers false dragon eggs …’ said the boy with gravity.

‘The woman is still a slave,’ said the girl, with equal gravity – though to the barbarian the connection seemed rather unclear. ‘And you are a slave no longer. I snuck
down to the camp and watched the slaver feed the woman and the old man – only a handful of yellow mush, not even on a plate but just dumped on the board where they were chained. Then, when the moon was high, he roused them and drove them before him into the night. They will journey through the darkness, toward the desert. He wants to reach the desert soon and sell the woman before the Empress’s slave tax falls due. If the old man cannot travel fast enough, he will break both his legs and heave him over the side of the road. I heard him say it to a salt smuggler who had made camp on the other side of the same clearing.’ Then she added: ‘It was the salt smuggler to whom I sold my egg. I had to hide well so they would not see me … they will do terrible things to the woman in the desert. You may have once been a slave. But you are not a slave now.’

The barbarian was puzzled by the girl’s urgency, which, from her breathing, was moving again toward fear. Because he was a barbarian, the boy sought an explanation in religion: ‘Well, perhaps if she had done her task as faithfully as I had done mine, instead of calling to passersby to buy her, wailing and rocking like a mad woman, and getting herself beaten for her troubles, her scar showing her to have a nasty temper anyway, she too might have gotten a kind master who would have taken off her collar and her chain for the night.’

The girl suddenly rose: ‘You are a fool, you dirty barbarian slave!’ Then she was only a moon-flicker, a leafy crash of feet.

The barbarian, who really knew very little about slavery, but knew nevertheless that the moon was powerful magic, whether the branches of mountain catalpas or the wings of soaring dragons shattered its light, shivered slightly. He rose, turned, and climbed back over the outroom’s wall.

Seated again on the blanket, he looked at sleeping Gorgik for a while; the broad back was toward him. The tight bronze band high on the arm caught the moon’s faint breath in its chased edge. After a while, the boy again picked up the hinged collar.

He started to put it around his own neck, then returned it to his lap, frowning. He looked again at his sleeping owner. The barbarian moved up the blanket. ‘If I try to close it, he will wake up; though if I only
place
it around his neck …’ Again on his knees, he laid the collar on the thick neck – and was settling back down when the great chest heaved, heaved again; Gorgik rolled over. His eyes opened in his scarred, sleep-laden face. Gorgik shoved himself up on one elbow; his free hand swept across his chest to his chin. The collar flew (landing, Small Sarge could not help noting despite his startlement, near the foot of the blanket only inches away from where he had first picked it up by Gorgik’s foot); for a drawn-out breath, owner and property looked at each other, at the collar, and at each other again.

True wakefulness came to Gorgik’s eyes; the eyes narrowed. A certain handsomeness that, by day, overrode the scar, the heavy features, the reddened eyes, and the unshaven jaw, had vanished in the shadow. Though it did not upset Sarg the way it might have someone less barbaric, the boy saw a combination of strength, violence, and ugliness in Gorgik’s face which, till now, had not struck him.