Neveryona (43 page)

Pryn shook her head.

Rorkar shook his too, more slowly, ponderingly. ‘Imagine, thinking something like that! The last time I was at the earl’s house to dine with him and his wife – that’s not the wife he has now, I’m talking about. The earlier one – I’ve met the new one too, of course. Anyway. The other wife. It was after dinner. The earl and I were walking in one of the gardens, and his Lordship put his hand on my arm and said, “Really, Rorkar. I’m always joking with you about marriage, but you’ve become a man of property and prestige. You
should
take yourself a woman, a practical and industrious woman, to help you run your business and to keep up appearances. A man in your position – or mine – we
look
better to our underlings when we have wives.” His last wife left him, you know.

Just like that – so for “appearances” he divorced her and took another. He’s got a third, now, the youngest of the lot.’ Rorkar humphed. ‘When
I
tell a worker what suitor she should choose to give us good sons and daughters, the woman and her mate
stay
together. A mate for appearances! Can you imagine it?’ Rorkar bent toward Pryn and laid his hard, small hand on her arm. ‘Who would mate like that? That’s certainly not what
I’m
about! No, that’s not what we’re about at all in this house – no, this is not a great house at all. It’s the ordinary house of an ordinary man. Perhaps an earl worries and frets about appearances. But not an ordinary man like me! Why should I?’

While he’d leaned toward her, under the table, Pryn noticed, he’d taken the opportunity to work his sandals off. They lay, one rightside up, one upside down, by the table leg. Pryn rubbed the edges of her bare feet together.

‘What uncle really gets mad at,’ Tetya said, ‘is the way his Lordship calls everyone “my man” – just as though we were still his slaves.’

‘Who are you to say what I get mad at and what I don’t!’ snapped the peasant. ‘And I was
never
his slave! Nor was my father a slave of
his
father’s …
one
of my grandmothers, it’s true, was owned by Lord Aldamir. But she escaped and only came back after ten years; she took over a piece of land to farm and was never bothered by his Lordship. At all. That’s the truth. It
is
true: the earl addresses everyone as “my man.” One day when he comes by, I
should
simply say, “Well, hello there, my man” – even before he opens his mouth to speak to me at all. Now
that
would be a joke. Don’t you think?’ Rorkar took another swallow, and elbowed Tetya. ‘A fine joke!’ He settled back and drew bare feet beneath him.

Yrnik turned against his post to gaze at the table with the same moody expression with which he’d been gazing out at the evening.

The naked house slave, whom Pryn had not noticed depart, returned through the hall door. The girl looked about, rubbing at one ear, then stepped in and squatted by the jamb as if awaiting instruction.

‘Of course I shall never do it.’ Rorkar looked into his mug. ‘I’m not a joking man. Never had time for jokes – not with the brewery, here. But it would
be
a joke, now. If I did it. Nothing serious – he’d pee all over himself, like a drunken slave caught dipping in the barrel!’

Pryn smiled.

No one else did.

Rorkar looked up. ‘Where do you know his Lordship from?’

Pryn’s smile dissolved in puzzlement

‘Come on. He said he’d already met you. When did you meet him? And where?’

‘I … I only met him outside the hall,’ Pryn said. ‘Minutes before you came in. In the rain.’ Part of her confusion was that she did not want to mention her exploration of the old slave benches. ‘We only spoke a few words.’

‘Only a few words?’ His frown deepened. ‘In the rain?’ Rorkar held his mug against his tunic belly. Small, knobby fingers meshed around it. ‘Now, I didn’t know that.
I
thought he meant he’d met you at some great house or other, when he was visiting some other important lord. That’s what I
thought
he meant – back when I asked you up here. Though, of course, you didn’t strike me as
that
kind of person – you seemed like an ordinary enough girl. Even if you can read and write a little. Yrnik there can read and write, and he’s an ordinary man. Aren’t you – Yrnik, my man!’ Rorkar laughed. ‘But that’s why I want Tetya to learn. There’s nothing that says ordinary folk can’t know a thing or two. I can’t read or write. And you heard his Lordship: even
he
doesn’t know how to read
and write by the system you do … that’s probably because it’s a commercial system. His Lordship knows nothing of commerce. And I
still
don’t trust him …’

Pryn had a sudden premonition Tetya was about to say something like:
Uncle only invited you up here because he thought you were somebody the earl thought was important
– and interrupted this Tetya-of-the-mind with: ‘Does this – ’she lifted her astrolabe – ‘have anything special about it?’

‘Hey?’ Rorkar squinted, is
what
special?’

‘This.’ Pryn had already decided that there was no secret in the astrolabe that she might want to preserve or exploit, even such a treasure as the tale-teller had spoken of. (That was for non-existent masked warriors with double-bladed swords!) As she lifted it, she saw how much the evening had dimmed. ‘Do you know anything about it? Any of you?’ The sky was as deep a blue as some dahlia at Madame Keyne’s. ‘Tetya already said he didn’t – only that the marks around the edge might be writing. A kind of writing …’

‘Let me see.’ Yrnik stepped forward. ‘That thing you wear around your neck?’ He put his mug on the table and laid thick, dark fingers on the wood, leaning. ‘I’ve seen such marks on old stones around here. But the thing itself is not something I know – a sailor once showed me something like it for finding where you were on the open sea, he said – something to do with different stars. Here, I can hardly make it out …’

‘Let
me
have a look.’ Rorkar lifted the bolted disks and turned them, squinting, it’s good work. Local work. Old work, too – like something that could well have been made around here, from the marks on it. Like Yrnik said. It’s the kind of thing we might turn up as boys, exploring some old abandoned great house.’

‘Somebody gave it to me in an all but abandoned great house in Neveryóna.’

‘Neveryóna?’ Rorkar frowned. ‘What would a girl like you know of Neveryóna – an ordinary, northern girl?’

Pryn looked at him, puzzled.

‘Well,’ Rorkar went on, ‘I suspect you just happened to be there, that’s all! Before you were here. And you met somebody else who happened to be there who gave it to you. There’s nothing out of the ordinary in
that!
’ He let the astrolabe fall. (Pryn sat back.) ‘There’s your explanation!’

‘Sir …?’

‘it’s a piece of local work. You were in Neveryóna. You met somebody there who gave it to you. Just like you said. When
I
was a boy, sometimes when I’d go exploring,
I
used to find things. Old things. Like that. Sometimes I gave them to people. If I didn’t want them myself. That’s nothing extraordinary.’

Although Pryn didn’t want to protect
or
exploit the astrolabe, she was wary of mentioning the slaves’ responses. Those responses were now clearly in her mind. ‘And you?’ She leaned forward to look across the table at the girl squatting at the door. ‘Do
you
know anything about this?’

‘Ah, you see!’ Rorkar cried. ‘She asks the master
and
the slave, both – now
that’s
his Lordship’s style! I think she wants to be a little
like
his Lordship. Well, everyone does. It’s a fine style too, as far as it goes – at any rate, it makes a fine appearance. Though I
still
don’t trust him – however it looks! I’m not saying you should or you shouldn’t. He’s invited you for dinner. It’s up to you. What
could
be special about it, anyway?’

Pryn blinked. The old peasant could switch subjects as abruptly as he could ride one beyond bearing, ‘I really don’t know,’ Pryn said, ‘I just thought you might know something more about it than I did.’

‘Oh,’ Rorkar grunted. ‘Well, I don’t. And it’s getting
dark.’ He drained his mug, set it down. ‘No more,’ he said to the squatting slave, who was not about to move toward refilling. ‘This isn’t one of those places like his Lordship’s, where cookfires and nightlamps battle with darkness halfway to sunrise. No, I’m an ordinary man who must toil like all ordinary men.’ He put his palms on his knees.

‘And I’d best get back to the dormitory before all the light’s gone.’ Pryn stood up from the table. She added, just to try switching the subject on her own: ‘I’d heard talk that his Lordship was some kind of magician.’ She stepped around the table’s corner. ‘But it was only chatter from some workers.’

‘A magician?’ Rorkar grunted again. ‘Oh, yes, the barbarians will chatter on about such things – and so will he, from time to time, with his “ways to assist the waning powers.” But
I’ve
never seen him do any magic. Not that one reserves belief
only
for what one can see – like some ordinary worker who won’t even believe there’s a town over the hill unless you carry him there in a cart. Still … I wouldn’t trust him.’

Pryn walked towards the door. ‘Well, good night.’

‘Good night,’ Rorkar said. ‘Yes, good night. It was good of you to come. Good night.’

The slave stood.

‘Yes,’ Rorkar said loudly. ‘I forgot. I didn’t
mean
anything by forgetting.’ He waved his small, knobby hand at the slave. ‘Show her to the door.’

Because the master’s answers had revealed so little, Pryn found herself staring at the back of the slave preceding her along the dark passage. But the slave had answered nothing either. In the dark, all the anxiety of Bruka’s outburst and the earl’s – yes – unmotivated invitation swelled. Walking behind this girl, this slave, this faceless sign of the human, this collared node of labor
and instruction, Pryn felt a moment of disorientation which imagination answered with an image, not of the Liberator, but of Pryn herself wearing the iron collar. She was astonished to feel before that image a relief as intense as the previous anxiety, an intensity as strong as any desire, sexual or other, she’d ever known.

Outside, it was lighter than she’d expected.

Leaving the house to walk down the hill, she began a silent dialogue, mostly with Old Rorkar, about what an exasperating, embarrassing, and rude man he was; how all his prattle about lack of appearances and doing the ordinary thing had made her, an ordinary girl, as uncomfortable as it was possible to be – what must his nephew have felt! That she didn’t have to ask. She had an aunt, no different from him at all!
That
terrified pettiness was what she had left! That was what she had abandoned. A good man? Yes – even perhaps a Tratsin when he was twenty or twenty-five. But today, he was Rorkar. And that was
not
what she had come to the end of the world to find! Throughout this little mummer’s playlet she kept protesting: ‘Sitting there, at your table, you made me feel like a slave!’ Or: ‘Bound in the ordinary restraints of good manners, I might as well have
been
your slave!’ Sometimes playing through, at this point she would march over and take the collar off the squatting girl by the door and clap it around her own neck. Sometimes she would arrive for the encounter already wearing the shocking iron – that she would get a smith to forge for her from the growing collection of small coins under her straw pallet with which Rorkar was paying her. Well, she didn’t have quite enough just yet … During the ninth or thirteenth time through this skit which gave her such satisfaction – and which she’d all but resolved she
would
write down sometime tomorrow – it occurred to Pryn: She hadn’t felt all
that
much embarrassment or discomfort, at least not with the intensity that, in her little drama, she’d been declaring. But she had ridden a dragon; she
was
extraordinary. That was what freed her to protest – or to take on the collar. After all, she realized, she really wanted to wear it because the slave was the one person in the room whose feelings she had
no
notion of whatsoever (was she really ignorant? Or did she, like Bruka, know, perhaps, everything?), so that finally it had seemed that within the iron ring was a space of mystery, excitement, and adventure where
only
an extraordinary person might go without terror (perhaps a
little
fear, yes), like herself – or the Liberator. Who else would dare? Certainly not his Lordship – not somebody who had ridden a dragon under such tamed conditions it practically didn’t count.

Or did it?

She reached the workers’ barracks, with its slatted door, its vermin-infested roof beams. (Had
these
once been slave quarters?) She went to the women’s end of the dormitory and found her blanket on its fresh straw, between two barbarian women, one of whom slept with her eight-year-old son who had something wrong up his nose and snored wetly. Well, Old Rorkar had managed to give her one piece of information, however clumsily, that she was glad of. She shouldn’t trust the earl. She shifted the astrolabe on its chain from under her shoulder to a more comfortable position, felt the knife secreted with her sparse moneys beneath Madame Keyne’s washed and folded shift on which her head lay. But of course, she reflected, what
was
there to trust or not to trust him with, even if the astrolabe
were
the object of his interest? She envisioned herself removing the chain from her neck and tossing it to him – or presenting it graciously to him as a
gift – in either case, the same sort of amusingly arrogant gesture as taking on the collar. And probably as unnecessary.