Tales of Neveryon (7 page)

But they were not minor at
all
, laughed Curly, sitting forward on his couch, joining his hands with a smile as excited as if he had just dicovered a new toadstool.

But they
were
minor, insisted the princess, letting the nuts fall back to the silver tray and picking up her chased-silver goblet to brood moodily on its wine. Why, several people had commented to her only within the last month that perhaps the Baron had regrettably lost sight of
just
how minor those exceptions were.

‘Sometimes I wonder if the main sign of the power of our most charming cousin, whose reign is courteous and courageous, is that, for her sake, all these amenities, both minor and major, are forgotten for a gathering she will attend!’ Inige laughed.

And Gorgik, sitting on the floor, picked his teeth with a silver knife whose blade was shorter than his little finger and listened – not with the avidity of a social adventurer storing information for future dealings with the great, but with the relaxed attention of an aesthete hearing for the first time a difficult poem, which he already knows from the artist’s previous work will require many exposures before its meanings clear.

Our young potter’s boy would have brought with him to these same suppers a ready-made image of the pyramid of power, and no doubt in the light of these arcane
informations tried to map the whole volume of that pyramid on to a single line, with every thane and duchess in place, each above this one and below that one, the whole forming a cord that could be negotiated knot by knot, a path that presumably ended at some
one
– perhaps the Child Empress Ynelgo herself. Gorgik, because he brought to the supper rooms no such preconceptions, soon learned, between evenings with the Vizerine, dawn rides with the Baron, afternoon gatherings in the Old Hall, arranged by the young earls Jue-Grutn (not to be confused with the two older men who bore the same title, the bearded one of which was said to be either insane, a sorcerer, or both), or simply from gatherings overseen and overheard in his wanderings through the chains of rooms which formed the Middle Style of the castle, that the hierarchy of prestige branched; that the branches interwove; and that the interweavings in several places formed perfectly closed, if inexplicable, loops; as well, he observed that the presence of this earl or that thane (not to mention this steward or that attendant maid) could throw a whole subsection of the system into a different linking altogether.

Jahor, especially during the first weeks, took many walks with Gorgik through the castle. The eunuch steward was hugely rich in information about the architecture itself. The building still mystified the ex-miner. The oldest wings, like the Old Hall, were vast, cavernous spaces, with open roofs and water conduits grooved into the floor. Dozens of small, lightless cells opened off them, the upper ones reached by wooden ladders, stone steps, or sometimes mere mounds of earth heaped against the wall. Years ago, Jahor explained, these dusty, dank cavelets, smaller even than Gorgik’s present room, had actually been the dwelling places of great kings, queens, and courtiers. From
time to time they had housed officers of the army – and, during the several occupations, common soldiers. That little door up there, sealed over with stone and no steps to it? Why, that was where Mad Queen Olin had been walled up after she had presided at a banquet in this very hall, at which she served her own twin sons, their flesh roasted, their organs pickled. Halfway through the meal, a storm had burst over the castle, and rain had poured through the broad roof opening, while lightning fluttered and flickered its pale whips; but Olin forbade her guests to rise from the table before the feast was consumed. It’s still debatable, quipped the eunuch, whether they entombed her because of the supper or the soaking. (
Olin
, thought Gorgik.
Olin’s warning
…? But Jahor was both talking and walking on.) Today, except for the Old Hall that was kept in some use, these ancient echoing wells were deserted, the cells were empty, or at best used to store objects that had grown useless, if not meaningless, with rust, dust, and time. About fifteen or fifty years ago, some particularly clever artisan – the same who laid out the New Pav
ē
down in the port, Jahor explained, waking Gorgik’s wandering attention again – had come up with the idea of the corridor. (as well as the coinpress). At least half the castle had been built since then (and most of Nevèrÿon’s money minted); for at least half the castle had its meeting rooms and storerooms, its kitchens and its living quarters, laid out along corridors. There were six whole many-storied wings of them. In the third floor of one of the newest, the Vizerine had her suite; in the second and third floor of one of the oldest, most business of state was carried on around the throne room of the Child Empress. For the rest, the castle was built in that strange and disconcerting method known as the Middle Style, in which rooms, on two sides, three sides, four sides, and sometimes with steps going up
or down, opened on to other rooms; which opened on to others – big rooms, little rooms, some empty, some lavishly appointed, many without windows, some incredibly musty; and frequently two or three perfectly dark ones, which had to be traversed with torch and taper, lying between two that were in current, active use, a vast and hopeless hive.

Did Jahor actually know his way around the entire edifice?

No one knew his way around the
entire
court. Indeed, though his mistress went occasionally, Jahor had never been anywhere near the Empress’s suite or the throne room. He knew the location of the wing only by report.

What about the Child Empress herself? Did she know all of it?

Oh, especially not the Child Empress herself, Jahor explained, an irony that our potter’s boy might have questioned, but which was just another strangeness to the ex-pit slave.

But it was after this conversation that Jahor’s company too began to fall off.

Gorgik’s aristocratic friends had a particularly upsetting habit: one day they would be perfectly friendly, if not downright intimate; the next afternoon, if they were walking with some companion unknown to Gorgik, they would pass him in some rocky corridor and not even deign recognition – even if he smiled, raised his hand, or started to speak. Such snubs and slights would have provoked our potter, however stoically he forebore, to who-knows-what final outburst, ultimate indelicacy, or denouncement of the whole, undemocratic sham. But though Gorgik saw quite well he was the butt of such behavior more than they, he saw too that they treated him thus not because he was different so much as because that
was the way they treated each other. The social hierarchy and patterns of deference to be learned here were as complex as those that had to be mastered – even by a foreman – on moving into a new slave barracks in the mine. (Poor potter! With all his simplistic assumptions about the lives of aristocrats, he would have had just as many about the lives of slaves.) Indeed, among slaves Gorgik knew what generated such complexity: servitude itself. The only question he could not answer here was: what were all
these
elegant lords and ladies slaves to? In this, of course, the potter would have had the advantage of knowledge. The answer was simple: power, pure, raw and obsessive. But in his ignorance, young Gorgik was again closer to the lords and ladies around him than an equally young potter’s boy would have been. For it is precisely at its center that one loses the clear vision of what surrounds, what controls and contours every utterance, decides and develops every action, as the bird has no clear concept of air, though it support her every turn, or the fish no true vision of water, though it blur all she sees. A goodly, if not frightening, number of these same lords and ladies dwelling at the Court had as little idea of what shaped their every willed decision, conventional observance, and sheer, unthinking habit as did Gorgik – whereas the potter’s boy Gorgik might have been, had the play of power five years before gone differently in these same halls and hives, would not even have had to ask.

For all the temperamental similarities we have drawn, Gorgik was not (nor should we be) under any illusion that either the lords, or their servants, accepted him as one of their own. But he had conversation; he had companionship – for some periods extremely warm companionship – from women and men who valued him for much the same reason as the Vizerine had. He was given frequent gifts.
From time to time people in rooms he was not in and never visited suggested to one another that they look out for the gruff youngster in the little room on the third floor, see that he was fed, or that he was not left too much alone. (And certainly a few times when such conversations might have helped, they never occurred.) But Gorgik, stripped to nothing but his history, began to learn that even such a history – on the docks and in the mines – as it set him apart in experience from these others, was in some small way the equivalent of an aristocracy in itself: those who met him here at Court either did not bother him about it, or they respected it and made allowances for his eccentricities because of it – which is, after all, all their own aristocratic privileges gained them from one another.

Once he went five days in the castle without eating. When Gorgik did not have an invitation to some countess’s or prince’s dinner or luncheon, he went to the Vizerine’s kitchen – Jahor had left standing instructions there that he was to be fed. But the Vizerine, with most of her suite, was away on another mission. And since the Vizerine’s cooks had gone with the caravan, her kitchen had been shut down.

One evening the little Princess Elyne took both Gorgik’s great dark hands in her small, brown ones and exclaimed, as the other guests departed around them: ‘But I have had to cancel the little get-together that I’d asked you to tomorrow. It’s too terrible! I must go visit my uncle, the count, who will not be put off another –’ Here she stopped, pulled one of her hands away and put it over her mouth. ‘But I
am
too terrible. For I’m lying dreadfully, and you probably know it! Tomorrow I must go home to my own horrid old castle, and I loathe it, loathe it there! Ah, you
did
know it, but you’re too polite to say anything.’ Gorgik, who’d known no such thing, laughed.
‘So,’ went on the little Princess, ‘that is why I must cancel the party. You see, I have reasons. You
do
understand …?’ Gorgik, who was vaguely drunk, laughed again, shook his head, raised his hand when the princess began to make more excuses, and, still laughing, turned, and found his way back to his room.

The next day, as had happened before, no other invitations came; and because the Vizerine’s kitchen was closed, he did not eat. The day after, there were still no invitations. He scoured as much of the castle as he dared for Curly; and became suddenly aware how little of the castle he felt comfortable wandering in. The third day? Well, the first two days of a fast are the most difficult, though Gorgik had no thoughts of fasting. He was not above begging, but he could not see how to beg here from someone he hadn’t been introduced to. Steal? Yes, there were other suites, other kitchens. (Ah, it was now the fourth day; and other than a little lightheaded, his actual appetite seemed to have died somewhere inside him.) Steal food …? He sat on the edge of his raised pallet, his fists a great, horny knot of interlocked knuckle and thickened nail, pendant between his knees. How many times had these lords and ladies praised his straightforwardness, his honesty? He had been stripped to nothing but his history, and now that history included their evaluations of him. Though, both on the docks and in the mines, no month had gone by since age six when he had not pilfered
something
, he’d stolen nothing here, and somehow he knew that to steal – here – meant losing part of this new history: and, in this mildly euphoric state, that new history seemed much too valuable – because it was associated with real learning (rather than with ill-applied judgements, which is what it would have meant for our young potter; and our young potter, though he had never stolen more
than the odd cup from his master’s shelf of seconds, would certainly have stolen now).

Gorgik had no idea how long it took to starve to death. But he had seen ill-fed men, worked fourteen hours a day, thrown into solitary confinement without food for three days, only to die within a week after their release. (And had once, in his first six months at the mines, been so confined himself; and had survived.) That a well-fed woman or man of total leisure (and leisure is all Gorgik had known now for close to half a year) might go more than a month with astonishing ease on nothing but water never occurred to him. On the fifth day he was still lightheaded, not hungry, and extremely worried over the possibility that this sensation itself was the beginning of starvation.

In his sandals with the brass buckles, and a red smock which hung to mid-thigh (it should have been worn with an ornamental collar he did not bother to put on, and should have been belted with a woven sash of scarlet and gold, wrapped three times around the waist with the tassels hanging to the floor; but absently he had wrapped round it the old leather strap he’d used to girdle his loin rag in the mines), he left his room on the evening of the fifth day and again began to wander the castle. This time, perhaps because of the lightheadedness, he entered a hallway he had never entered before – and immediately found himself in a circular stone stairwell. On a whim, he went up instead of down. After two circuits the stairwell opened on another hallway – no, it was a roofed colonnade: through the arches, the further crenellations and parapets of the castle interrupted a night misted by moonlight while the moon itself was somewhere out of sight.

At the colonnade’s end, another stairwell took him back down among cool rocks. About to leave the stair at one exit because there was a faint glimmer of lamps somewhere
of in the distance, he realized that what he’d taken for a buzzing in his own ears was really – blurred by echoing stones – conversation and music from below. Wondering if perhaps some catered gathering large enough to absorb him were going on, with one hand on the wall, he descended the spiral of stone.