Tales of Neveryon (6 page)

Jahor touched Gorgik’s arm, led him away.

Gorgik had at least ascertained that his new and precarious position meant keeping silent. The caravan steward put him to work grooming oxen by day – which he liked. The next night he spent in the Vizerine’s tent. And dreams of the mutilated child woke him with blocked throat and wide eyes only half a dozen times. And Noyeed was probably dead by now anyway, as Gorgik had watched dozens of other slaves die in those suddenly fading years.

Once Myrgot was sure that, during the day, Gorgik could keep himself to himself, she became quite lavish with gifts and clothing, jewels, and trinkets. (Though she herself never wore ornaments when traveling, she carried trunks of the things in her train.) Jahor – in whose tent from time to time Gorgik spent a morning or afternoon – advised him of the Vizerine’s moods, of when he should come to her smelling of oxen and wearing the grimy leather-belted rag – with his slave collar – that was all he had taken from the mines. Or when, as happened quite soon, he should do better to arrive freshly washed, his beard shaved, disporting her various gifts. More important, he was advised when he should be prepared to make love, and when he should be ready simply to tell tales or, as it soon came, just to listen. And Gorgik learned that
most valuable of lessons without which no social progress is possible: if you are to stay in the good graces of the powerful, you had best, however unobtrusively, please the servants of the powerful.

Next morning the talk through the whole caravan was: ‘Kolhari by noon!’

By nine, winding of between fields and cypress glades, a silver thread had widened into a reed-bordered river down below the bank of the caravan road. The Kohra, one groom told him; which made Gorgik start. He had known the Big Kohra and the Kohra Spur as two walled and garbage-clotted canals, moving sluggishly into the harbor from beneath a big and a little rock-walled bridge at the upper end of New Pav
ē
. The hovels and filthy alleys in the city between (also called the Spur) were home to thieves, pickpockets, murderers and worse, he’d always been told.

Here, on this stretch of the river, were great, high houses, of two and even three stories, widely spaced and frequently gated. Where were they now? Why, this
was
Kolhari – at least the precinct. They were passing through the suburb of Neveryóna (which so recently had named the entire port) where the oldest and richest of the city’s aristocracy dwelt. Not far in that direction was the suburb of Sallese, where the rich merchants and importers had their homes: though with less land and no prospect on the river, many of the actual houses were far more elegant. This last was in conversation with a stocky woman – one of the red-scarved maids – who frequently took of her sandals, hiked up her skirts, and walked among the ox drivers, joking with them in the roughest language. In the midst of her description, Gorgik was surprised by a sudden and startling memory: playing at the edge of a statue-ringed rock pool in the garden of his father’s employer on
some rare trip to Sallese as a child. With the memory came the realization that he had not the faintest idea how to get from these wealthy environs to the waterfront neighborhood that was
his
Kolhari. Minutes later, as the logical solution (follow the Khora) came, the caravan began to swing off the river road.

First in an overheard conversation among the caravan steward and some grooms, then in another between the chief porter and the matron of attendant women, Gorgik heard: ‘… the High Court …,’ ‘… the Court ’… and ‘… the High Court of Eagles …,’ and one black and sweaty-armed driver, whose beast was halted on the road with a cartwheel run into a ditch, wrestled and cursed his heavy-lidded charge as Gorgik walked past. ‘By the child Empress, whose reign is good and gracious, I’ll break your fleabitten neck! So close to home, and you run off the path!’

An hour on the new road, which wound back and forth between the glades of cypress, and Gorgik was not sure if the Khora was to his right or left.

But ahead was a wall, with guard houses left and right of a gate over which a chipped and rough-carved eagle spread her man-length wings. Soldiers pulled away the massive planks (with their dozen barred insets), then stood back, joking with one another, as the carts rolled through.

Was
that
great building beside the lake the High Court?

No, merely one of the outbuildings. Look there, above that hedge of trees …

‘
There
…?’

He hadn’t seen it because it was too big. And when he did – rising and rising above the evergreens – for a dozen seconds he tried to shake loose from his mind the idea that he was looking at some natural object, like the Falthas themselves. Oh, yes, cut into here, leveled off there – but
building upon building, wing upon wing, more a city than a single edifice, that great pile (he kept trying to separate it into different buildings, but it all seemed, despite its many levels, and its outcroppings, and its abutments, one) could not have been
built
…?

He kept wishing the caravan would halt so he could look at it all. But the road was carpeted with needles now, and evergreens swatted half-bare branches across the towers, the clouds, the sky. Then, for a few moments, a gray wall was coming toward him, was towering over him, was about to fall on him in some infinitely delayed topple –

Jahor was calling.

Gorgik looked down from the parapet.

The eunuch motioned him to follow the dozen women who had separated from the caravan – among them the Vizerine: a tiny door swallowed them one and another. Gorgik had to duck.

As conversation babbled along the corridor, past more soldiers standing in their separate niches (‘… home at last …,’ ‘… what an exhausting trip …,’ ‘… here at home in Kolhari …,’ ‘… when one returns home to the High Court …,’ ‘… only in Kolhari …’), Gorgik realized that, somehow, all along he had been expecting to come to his childhood home; and that, rather than coming home at all, he had no idea
where
he was.

Gorgik spent five months at the High Court of the Child Empress Ynelgo. The Vizerine put him in a small, low-ceilinged room, with a slit window, just behind her own chambers. The stones of the floor and walls were out of line and missing mortar, as though pressure from the rock above, below, and around it had compacted the little space all out of shape. By the end of the first month, both the Vizerine and her steward had almost lost interest in
him. But several times before her interest waned, she had presented him at various private suppers of seven to fourteen guests in the several dining rooms of her suite, all with beamed ceilings and tapestried walls, some with wide windows opening out on sections of roof, some windowless with whole walls of numberless lamps and ingenious flues to suck off the fumes. Here he met some of her court friends, a number of whom found him interesting, and three of whom actually befriended him. At one such supper he talked too much. At two more he was silent. At the other six, however, he acquitted himself well, for seven to fourteen is the number a mine slave usually dines with, and he was comfortable with the basic structures of communication by which such a group (whether seated on logs and rocks, or cushions and couches) comports itself at meals, if not with the forms of politeness this particular group’s expression of those structures had settled on.

But those could be learned.

He learned them.

Gorgik had immediately seen there was no way to compete with the aristocrats in sophistication: he intuited that they would only be offended or, worse, bored if he tried. What interested them in him was his difference from them. And to their credit (or the credit of the Vizerine’s wise selection of supper guests) for the sake of this interest and affection for the Vizerine they made allowances, in ways he was only to appreciate years later, when he drank too much, or expressed like or dislike for one of their number not present a little too freely, or when his language became too hot on whatever topic was about – most of the time to accuse them of nonsense or of playing with him, coupled with good-natured but firm threats of what he would do to them were they on his territory rather than he on theirs.
Their
language, polished and mellifluous,
flowed, between bouts of laughter in which his indelicacies were generously absorbed and forgiven (if not forgotten), over subjects ranging from the scandalous to the scabrous: when Gorgik could follow it, it often made his mouth drop, or at least his teeth open behind his lips.
His
language, blunt and blistered with scatalogs that frequently upped the odd aristocratic eyebrow, adhered finally to a very narrow range: the fights, feuds, and scrabblings for tiny honors, petty dignities, and minuscule assertions of rights among slaves and thieves, dock-beggars and prostitutes, sailors and barmaids and more slaves – people, in short, with no power beyond their voices, fingers, or feet – a subject rendered acceptable to the fine folk of the court only by his basic anecdotal talent and the topic’s novelty in a setting where boredom was the greatest affliction.

Gorgik did not find the social strictures on his relations with the Vizerine demeaning. The Vizerine worked – the sort of work only those in art or government can know, where the hours were seldom defined and real tasks were seldom put in simple terms (while false tasks
always
were). Conferences and consultations made up her day. At least two meals out of every three were spent with some ambassador, governor, or petitioner, if not at some affair of state. To do her credit, in that first month, we can thus account for all twenty-two evening meals Myrgot did not share with her slave.

Had her slave, indeed, spent his past five years as, say, a free, clever, and curious apprentice to a well-off potter down in the port, he might have harbored some image of a totally leisured and totally capricious aristocracy, for which there were certainly enough emblems around him now, but which emblems, had he proceeded on them, as certainly would have gotten him into trouble. Gorgik, however, had passed so much of his life at drudgeries he
knew would, foreman or no, probably kill him in another decade and certainly in two, he was too dazzled by his own, unexpected freedom from such drudgeries to question how others drudged. To pass the Vizerine’s open door and see Myrgot at her desk, head bent over a map, a pair of compasses in one hand and a straight edge in the other (which, to that clever, curious, and ambitious apprentice, would have signed work), and then to pass the same door later and see her standing beside her desk, looking vacantly toward some cloud passing by the high, beveled window (which, to the same apprentice, would have signed a leisure that could reasonably be intruded upon, thus making her order never to intrude appear, for a lover at any rate, patently unreasonable), were states he simply did not distinguish: their textures were both so rich, so complex, and so unusual to him that he read no structure of meaning in either, much less did he read the meaning of those structures somehow as opposition. In obeying the Vizerine’s restriction, and not intruding on either situation, his reasons were closer to something aesthetic than practical. Gorgik was acting on that disposition for which the apprentice would have despised him as the slave he was: he knew his place. Yet that apprentice’s valuation would have been too coarse, for the truth is that in such society, Gorgik – no more than a potter’s boy –
had
no place … if we use ‘to have’ other than in that mythical and mystifying sense in which both a slave
has
a master and good people
have
certain rights, but rather in the sense of possession that implies some way (either through power or convention) of enforcing that possession, if not to the necessary extent, at least to a visible one. Had Gorgik suddenly developed a disposition to intrude, from some rage grown either in whim or reason, he
would
have intruded on either situation – a disposition that his
aristocratic supper companions would have found more sympathetic than the apprentice’s presumptions, assumptions, and distinctions all to no use. Our potter’s boy would no doubt have gotten himself turned out of the castle, thrown into one of the High Court’s lower dungeons, or killed – for these were brutal and barbaric times, and the Vizerine was frequently known to be both violent and vicious. Had Gorgik intruded, yes, the aristocrats would have been in far greater sympathy with him – as they turned him out, threw him into a dungeon, or killed him. No doubt this means the distinction is of little use. But we are trying to map the borders of the disposition that was, indeed, the case. Gorgik, who had survived on the waterfront and survived in the mine, survived at the High Court of Eagles. To do it, he had to learn a great deal.

Not allowed to approach the Vizerine and constrained to wait till she approached him, he learned, among the first lessons, that there was hardly one person at court who was not, practically speaking, in a similar position with at least one other person – if not whole groups. Thus Lord Vanar (who shared Jahor’s tastes and gave Gorgik several large rocks with gems embedded in them that lay in the corners of his room, gathering dust) and the Baron Inige (who did not, but who once took him hunting in the royal preserves and talked endlessly about flowers throughout the breadth of Nevèrÿon – and from whom Gorgik now learned that an
ini
, which brought back a torrent of memories from his dockside adolescence, was deadly poison) would never attend the same function, though both must always be invited. The Thane of Sallese could be invited to the same gathering as Lord Ekoris
unless
the Countess Esulla was to be present – however, in such cases Curly (the Baron Inige’s nickname) would be
excused. No one known as a friend of Lord Aldamir (who had not been at Court now for many years, though everyone seemed to remember him with fondness) should be seated next to, or across from, any relative, unto the second cousins, of the Baronine Jeu-Forsi … Ah, but with perhaps half a dozen insistently minor exceptions, commented the elderly Princess Grutn, putting one arm back over the tasseled cushion and moving nuts about on her palm with her heavily ringed thumb.