With spring came the red and unmentionable ships from the south. And the balls. (Most things dubbed unmentionable have usually been mentioned quite fully in certain back alleys, at certain low dives, beside certain cisterns, by low men—and women—who do not shun low language. There have always been some phenomena, however, which are so baffling that neither high language nor low seems able to deal with them. The primitive response to such phenomena is terror and the sophisticated one, ignoral. These ships produced their share of both, sold their cargo, and were not talked of.) The balls were small enough for a big man to hide one in his fist and made of some barely pliable blackish matter that juvenile dissection revealed hid a knuckle-sized bubble. With the balls came the rhyme that you bounced to on the stone flags around the neighborhood cistern:
I went out to Babàra’s Pit
At the crescent moon’s first dawning.
But the Thanes of Garth had covered it,
And no one found a place to sit,
And Belham’s key no longer fit,
And all the soldiers fought a bit,
And neither general cared a whit
If any man of his was hit …
The rhyme went on as long as you could keep the little ball going, usually with a few repetitions, as many improvisations; and when you wanted to stop, you concluded:
… And the eagle sighed and the serpent cried
For all my lady’s warning!
On warning! you slammed the ball hard as you could into the cistern’s salt-stained wall. The black ball soared in sunlight. Boys and girls ran, pranced, squinted … Whoever caught it got next bounce.
Sometimes it was ‘… for all the Mad witch’s warning …’ which didn’t fit the rhythm; sometimes it was ‘… for all Mad Olin’s warning …’ which did, but no one was sure what that meant. And anyone with an amphibrachic name was always in for ribbing. For one thing was certain: whoever’d done the warning had meant no good by it.
A number of balls went into cisterns. A number simply went wherever lost toys go. By autumn all were gone. (He was sad for that, too, because by many days’ practice on the abandoned cistern down at the alley end behind the grain warehouse, he’d gotten so he could bounce the ball higher than any but the children half again his age.) The rhyme lingered in the heaped-over corners of memory’s store, turned up, at longer and longer intervals, perhaps a moment before sleep on a winter evening, in a run along the walled bank of the Big Khora on some next-summer’s afternoon.
A run in the streets of Kolhari? Those streets were loud with the profanity of a dozen languages. At the edges of the Spur, Gorgik learned that voldreg meant ‘excrement-caked privates of a female camel,’ which seemed to be the most common epithet in the glottal-rich speech of the dark-robed northern men, but if you used the word ini, which meant ‘a white gilley-flower,’ with these same men, you could get a smack for it. In the Alley of Gulls, inhabited mostly by southern folk, he heard the women, as they lugged their daubed baskets of water, dripping over the green-gray flags, talk of nivu this and nivu that, in their sibilant, lisping way and usually with a laugh. But when he asked Miese, the southern barbarian girl who carried vegetables and fish to the back door of the Kraken, what it meant, she told him—laughing—that it was not a word a man would want to know.
‘Then it must have something to do with what happens to women every month, yes?’ he’d asked with all the city-bred candor and sophistication of his (by now) fourteen years.
Miese tugged her basket higher on her hip: ‘I should think a man would want to know about that!’ She stepped up the stairs to shoulder through the leather curtain that, when the boards were removed for the day, became the Kraken’s back door. ‘No, it has nothing to do with a woman’s monthly blood. You city people have the strangest ideas.’ And she was gone inside.
He never did learn the meaning.
The lower end of New Pavē (so called somewhere between ten and ten thousand years) was one with the dockside. Along the upper end, where the road dipped down again to cross the Bridge of Lost Desire, male and female prostitutes loitered or drank in the streets or solicited along the bridge’s walkways, many come from exotic places and many spawned by old Kolhari herself, most of them brown by birth and darkened more by summer, like the fine, respectable folk of the city (indeed, like himself), though here were a few with yellow hair, pale skin, gray eyes, and their own lisping language (like Miese) bespeaking barbaric origins.
And weren’t there more of them up this year than last?
Some stood about all but naked, squinting in the sun, while some wore elaborate skirts and belts and necklaces, most of the women and half the men with dark wings of paint laid about their eyes, some sleepy and slow-moving, some with quick smiles and inquisitive comments to every passerby, with sudden laughter and as-sudden anger (when the words for women’s genitals, men’s excreta, and cooking implements, all combined in truly novel ways, would howl across the bridge: the curses of the day). Yet all of them had, once they began to talk to you, astonishingly similar stories, as if one tale of pain, impoverishment, and privation (or a single, dull, if over-violent, life) had been passed from one to the other, belonging really to none of them, but only held by each the length of time it took to tell it, the only variation, as this one or that one recounted it, in the name of this small town or that abusive relative, or perhaps the particular betrayal, theft, or outrage that meant they could not go home.
By the dusty yards and stone-walled warehouses where the great commercial caravans pulled up after their months out in the land, with their mules and horses and covered carriages and open carts and provision wagons, once Gorgik stopped to talk to a caravan guard who stood a bit away from some others—who were squatting at the corner over a game of bones.
Rubbing his sweating hands against his leather kilt, the man began to speak to Gorgik of bandits in the mountains and brigands in the deserts—till, in a swirl of dark brocade, with street dust rising about his sandals, a merchant with cheeks as wrinkled as prunes, long teeth stained brown and black, and a beard like little tufts of wool stuck all over his dark jaw, rushed forward waving both his fists about his shoulders. ‘You …! You …! You’ll never work for me again! The steward has told me all, all about your thievery and your lies! Oh, no—you’ll not endanger my carriages with your cowardice and your conniving! Here—’ From among his robes the old man pulled out a handful of coins and flung them so that gold and iron struck the guard’s neck, chest, and hip. (As if the disks were hot from the smithy across the street, the guard flinched away.) ‘That’s half your pay! Take it and be happy for it—when you’re not worth a single bit of iron!’ And though the guard wore a knife at his hip (and that must have been his spear leaning on the wall behind them) and was younger, bigger, and certainly stronger than the enraged merchant, he went scrabbling for his coins in the street and, with only a snarl and a glare—not even a fully articulated curse—snatched up his spear and hurried off. Only when he was a block away did he look back. Once. That’s when Gorgik saw that the other guards had stopped their gambling to stand and move a step nearer. Still muttering, the old man turned back among them (who, Gorgik realized, were still very much expecting their own full salaries). They followed the merchant back to the warehouse, leaving Gorgik in the street with half an adventure in his head, a tale yearning for completion.
Another time when he and some friends were playing near the docks, from beside a mound of barrels a woman called to them: ‘Come here … you children!’ She had a hard, lined face, was taller than his father, and her hair was shorter than his mother’s. Walking up to her, they could see her hands and feet both were callused and cracked about their lighter edges. ‘Where …,’ she asked, quiet, tentative, ‘tell me … where do they hire the women to wash the clothes?’
He and his friends just looked.
‘Where do they … hire the washerwomen?’ Her speech was accented; her skin was that deep, deep brown, a shade or two darker than
his own, so often called black. ‘They hire women … somewhere near here, to wash the clothes. I heard it. Where is it? I need work. Where … where should I go?’
And he realized what halted and held back her words was fear—which is always difficult for children to understand in adults; especially in an adult as tall and as strong as this hard, handsome woman.
One of the older girls said: ‘You don’t want to do that. They only hire barbarian women to do that, up in the Spur.’
‘But I need work,’ she said. ‘I need it … the Spur—where is that?’
One of the younger boys started to point. But, as if in an excess of nervousness or just high spirits, another suddenly shouted and at the same time flung his ball into the air. A moment later all of them were running and yelling to each other, now leaping across a coil of rope, now dodging around an overturned dingy. He looked back to see the woman calling after them—though, for the shouting, he could not hear—and turned, as a friend tagged him, around a corner into another alley, all the time wondering what she was crying, what more she wanted to tell, what else she wanted to ask … The rest of the afternoon, in the dockloaders’ calls, just below his friends’ shrieks between the warehouses, behind the echoes of his own shouts across the yard where he ran after the others, he seemed to hear her, hear the fragments of some endless want, fear, hope, and harassment …
And still another time, when he wandered into the yard, he saw the boy (a few years older than himself? an old-looking sixteen? a young-looking eighteen?) sitting on the abandoned cistern’s wall.
Thin.
That’s the first thing he thought, looking at those knobbly shoulders, those sharp knees. Gorgik walked nearer. The boy’s skin had begun the same brown as his own. But it was as if some black wash of street dirt and gutter water had been splashed over him, heels to ears. The boy was not looking at him but stared at some spot on the flagstones a little ahead, so that it was easy to walk by and look at him more closely—
When he saw the iron collar around the boy’s neck, Gorgik stopped—walking, thinking, breathing. There was a thud, thud, thud in his chest. For moments, he was dizzy. The shock was as intense as heat or cold.
When his vision cleared, the next thing Gorgik saw were the scars.
They were thick as his fingers and wormed around the boy’s soiled flanks. Here the welts were brown, there darker than the surrounding skin—he knew what they were, though he had never seen anyone bearing them before. At least not from this close. They were from a flogging. In provincial villages, he knew, whipping was used to punish criminals. And, of course, slaves.
Wanting desperately to move away, he stood staring for seconds, minutes, hours at the boy—who still did not look at him. No. Only seconds, he realized when, a breath later, he was walking on. Reaching the other alley, he stopped. He took three more breaths. And a fourth. Then he looked back.
Under his matted hair, the slave still had not looked up.
Stepping close to the wall, Gorgik stood there a long time. Soon he had framed ten, twenty, fifty questions he wanted to ask. But each time he pictured himself going up to speak to the collared boy, his breath grew short and his heart pounded. Finally, after trying three times, he managed to saunter again across the yard—first behind the cistern: the boy’s back was webbed with six welts that, even as Gorgik counted them with held breath, seemed like a hundred in their irruptions and intersections. After waiting almost three minutes, he crossed the yard again, walking in front of the boy this time—then crossed twice more, once in front and again in back. Then, all at once, he left hurriedly, fearing, even though the boy still had not looked, someone passing by one of the alley openings might have seen—though the slave himself (newly escaped? a mad one who’d wandered off from, or been abandoned by, his master?), immobile on the cistern wall, gazed only at the ground.
Half an hour later, Gorgik was back.
The boy sat on the flags now, eyes closed, head back against the cistern wall. What had begun as a series of silent questions had turned for Gorgik into an entire dialogue, with a hundred answers the boy had begun to give him, a hundred stories the boy had begun to tell him. Gorgik walked past, his own feet only inches from the foul toenails. He gazed at the iron collar, till, again, he was moving away. He left by the Alley of No Name, telling himself that, really, he’d spied enough on this pathetic creature.
The dialogue, however, did not end.
When he returned in the lowering light an hour on, the boy was gone from the wall. Seconds later, Gorgik saw him, on the other side of the yard, by one of the buildings, curled up with his back against the sandstone, asleep. Again Gorgik walked past him, at several distances, several times—one minute or five between each passage. But finally he settled himself against the far alley entrance to watch, while the tale the boy told him went on and on, stopping and starting, repeating and revising, sometimes whispered so faintly he could not catch the words, sometimes crisp and vivid as life or dream, so that the square before him, with its circular cistern and the few pots, mostly broken, beside it, grew indistinct beneath a sky whose deepening blue was paled by an ivory wash above the far building, as the moon’s gibbous arc slid over it—
The slave stretched out a leg, pulled it back, then rubbed at his cheek with one hand.
And the tale halted, again hammered to silence by Gorgik’s heart. While Gorgik had been talking to himself, he’d been thinking, really, how easy it would be, once the boy woke, to go up to him, to speak, to ask him where he was from, where he was going, to offer sympathy, maybe a promise to return with food or a coin, to inquire after the particulars of his servitude, to proffer friendship, interest, advice …
Across the yard the slave stretched out his other hand, made a fist. Then, not suddenly but over a period of ten or fifteen seconds, he rocked a few times and pushed himself up on one arm.
Contending fear and fascination bound Gorgik as strongly as they had the moment he’d first glimpsed the dirty fellow’s collar. Gorgik pulled back into the doorway, then peered out again.
With a child between, two women ambled by and into the yard. Again Gorgik froze—though they paid no more attention to the boy lingering in the doorway than they did to the slave lounging by the wall. As the three of them strolled across the dust, the dirty youth stood, very slowly. He swayed. When he took a step, Gorgik saw that he limped—and a dozen tales in his head were catastrophically revised to accommodate it.
Walk out now and nod at him, smile at him, say something …
The two women and their child turned out of the yard down the Street of Small Fish.
The slave limped toward the cistern.
Gorgik stood paralysed in the alley door.
When the scarred youth reached the cistern’s waist-high wall, he stopped, not really looking into it. Hair stuck out about his head, sharp in the moonlight. After a few moments, he lifted his face, as though the single thread of cloud across the indigo sky attracted him. He raised his hands to his neck, to hook his fingers over the collar. He tugged—
What occurred next was, in the moment it happened, wholly unclear to Gorgik, for the tale he was just then telling himself was of an escaped slave who, with his criminal markings and limping toward an abandoned cistern, had raised his face to the moon and, in a moment of rebellion, grasped his collar to yank futilely and hopelessly at the iron locked on his neck—the collar that forever and irrevocably marked him as a fugitive for the slavers who patrolled the land, searching out new laborers in the villages, mostly these days (so he’d heard) in the south …
The semicircles of metal, hinged at the back, came apart in the boy’s fists, as though the lock had not been set, or was broken. Now the boy raised the metal to the moon, its curved jaws open in his hand like black mandibles on some fabled dragon or even some unknown sign Gorgik’s father might mark down in the dockside warehouse.
The boy tossed the collar over the wall.
Only when the iron vanished below the stone
(the splash was very soft—and a beat after he expected it) did Gorgik realize that the collar, broken, or not locked in the first place, had truly been removed. With no comprehension as to why, he was overcome by chills. They rolled over him, flank, thigh, and shoulder. His fingers against the doorway corner were sweaty on the stone. After five breaths with his mouth wide so as not to make a sound, questions began to pour through his mind: Was this some criminal only pretending to be a slave? Or was it a slave who, now that he’d freed himself from the iron, would pretend to be a criminal? Or was it just a young madman, whose tale in its broken, inarticulate complexities he could never hope to know? Or was there some limpid and logical answer to it that only seemed so complex because, till now, he’d never thought to ask the proper questions?
The boy turned and lowered himself to sit again on the stone.
Gorgik moved his hand, just a little, on the jamb.
Go, he thought. Speak to him. He may be older, but I’m still bigger than he, and stronger. What harm could it do me, if I just went up and asked him to tell me who he is, to give me whatever bit of his story …? Chills irrupted again, while he searched among the tales he’d been telling himself for any right reason to fear—in the middle of what had every aspect of terror about it, save motivation.
For some reason he remembered the woman on the docks. Had her fear, in all its irrationality, been anything like this …?
Five minutes later, he walked into the yard again—as he had already done half a dozen times that day. The boy sat there, still not looking. Gorgik’s own eyes fixed on the thin neck, below ear and black, spiking hair, where the collar had been. In the moonlight, now and again as he neared, with this step and with that, he could almost see the iron against the dirty brown, where a neck ligament was crossed by an irregular vein …
No, the collar was gone.
But even absent, it plummeted Gorgik into as much confusion as it had before, so that, as he passed, it was all he could do not to flinch away, like the guard before the merchant’s coins, ears blocked by his own loud blood, all speech denied—and he was walking on, to the other side of the yard, down the alley, unable to remember the actual moment he’d passed the boy, who, he was sure, still had not looked up.