Neveryona (5 page)

The three horses hammered abreast of her, halted.

The tallest and, from his reddish beard and open face, the youngest grinned. ‘What are you looking at, girl?’ Some teeth were missing.

Pryn recovered from her crouch, thigh deep in scratchy brush. ‘Are you slavers?’ – though in asking, she’d realized they were not.

Another rider, a weathered man, squat, muscular, and hairy-shouldered, threw back his head and laughed. His teeth, the ones visible, were large, yellow, and sound.

The third was naked, save a cloth tied about his forehead and hanging to his shoulders. ‘Do we look like slavers?’ His voice was rough enough to suggest a throat injury. On the right side of his body, Pryn saw, as his horse wheeled and wheeled back over the road, long scars roped him, chest, flank, and thigh, as though someone had flung blacksnakes at him that had stuck. ‘Do you think we look like slavers, girl?’

Pryn shook her head.

‘Slavers!’ The youngster laughed. Despite his height, Pryn was sure he was not a year older than she. ‘Us, slavers? Do you know Gorgik the Liberator? We’re going to join him and his men at – ’ He stopped, because the other two grimaced. The squat one made half a motion for silence. The youngster leaned forward, more soberly. ‘You want to know if we’re slavers? Well, we have a question for you: Are you one of the Child Empress’s spies, in the pay of the High Court of Eagles?’

Once more Pryn shook her head.

‘That’s what
you
say.’ The youngster lowered his voice. ‘But how do
we
know?’ His gappy grin remained. ‘The Liberator isn’t the most popular man in Nevférÿon. The Empress’s spies are cunning and conniving.’

Pryn stepped onto the road. ‘
You
know I’m not a spy the same way
I
know you’re not slavers.’ What she thought was that they might be bandits; she did not want to act afraid. ‘You don’t look like slavers. I don’t look like a spy.’

The youngster leaned even lower, till he looked at her right between his mount’s red ears. ‘While you and I both may very well have seen slavers, and so know what slavers look like, what if we here have never seen a spy …?’

Pryn frowned. She had never seen a spy either.

The squat one said: ‘Spies often look like other than spies. It’s one sign by which you know them.’ He moved thick fingers in the graphite-gray mane.

The naked one with the headrag and the scars said: ‘This road runs from the Faltha mountains to port Kolhari. Which way do you go?’

‘There.’ Pryn pointed toward the city.

‘Good. Come up on my horse. We’ll take you into town.’

Again Pryn shook her head, ‘I can get there by myself.’

The scarred rider pulled a four-foot lance from a holder on his horse’s flank, ‘If you don’t come with us,’ he said evenly, ‘we’ll kill you. Make your choice, spy.’

Pryn thought of bolting from them, thought of running between them, and stood.

The rider held his lance with his elbow against his scarred side so that his forearm was at a right angle to his body. The metal point showed the hammer marks of its forging. ‘Our friend here –’ he jerked his chin toward the bearded boy – ‘has said more than he should have. You’re going into the city anyway. Ride with us. You
may
be a spy. We can’t take chances.’

Pryn walked across the road toward his horse. ‘You don’t give me much choice.’

The scarred man said: ‘Sit in front of me.’

Angry and frightened, Pryn reached up to grapple the horse’s hard neck. The naked man bent. He shoved his lance back into its holder and slid his hand under Pryn’s raised thigh to tug her up, while she got one leg awkwardly before his belly. (I’ve climbed on a dragon without help!) As she slid back against him, one of his hands came around her stomach. The mare stamped dirt. The rider behind her, stomach against her, flapped reins before her. She felt him kick the horse – not to a gallop but a leisurely trot. The others, trotting, cantering, trotting again, came abreast. Pryn’s capitulation made her anger more acute. ‘Since I am being punished for what your young friend knows and almost said, at least let me know what it is. Who is this Liberator – and take your hand off my breast!’ She pushed the rider’s hand from where the dark fingers had moved.

The squat rider laughed. ‘You want to know about Gorgik? Once he was a slave; now he’s vowed to end all slavery throughout Nèvdrÿon. Some say that someday, if not soon, he may be a minister! Myself, I knew him years
ago when he was an officer in the Child Empress’s army. One of the best, too.’ The squat man rubbed a wide, studded belt bound high on hairy ribs. ‘I fought under him – but only for a month. Then they broke up our division and sent me off with another captain. But we’re going to fight under him again – if he’ll have us. Hey, boys?’

‘Aye!’ came from the one boy beside her.

The naked man put his hand lightly back on Pryn’s stomach.

‘Only with him a month, yes.’ The squat rider grew pensive. ‘He won’t remember me. But we loved that man, we did – every one of us under him. And slavery is an evil at least two of us know first hand.’ He laughed again and guided his horse around a branch fallen on the road. Other hooves smashed leaves. ‘That’s why we three go to –’

‘Move your hand!’ Pryn shoved the naked rider’s arm from where it had again risen. Hoisting herself forward, she glared over her shoulder, ‘I didn’t want this ride! I’m not here to play your dumb games! Cut it out!’

‘Look, girl,’ the rider said from the rags about his dark face. ‘You sit behind me. That way, you can –’

‘ – she can put
her
hands where she wants!’ cried the bearded youth. His face and the squat one’s held the wide grins of stupid boys.

Pryn decided that, of the three, the bearded youngster
was
the fool. Till then she’d vaguely thought that, since his age was closest to hers, he might be the easiest to enlist for help. But he talked foolishly and was probably too intimidated by the older two anyway.

Her rider reined. She swung her leg over the horse’s neck and slid down to the road. The squat one back-stepped his horse to give her another unwanted hand. (Remember, Pryn thought, as she came up behind one
smooth and one scarred shoulder, within the week you have ridden a dragon …) Filthy and frayed vine cord knotted the rags to her rider’s head. Those scars? A mountain girl living in harsh times, Pryn had seen women and men with wounds from injury and accident. What was before her, though, suggested greater violence than the mishandling of plowhead or hunting knife. She put her hands on the rider’s flanks. His flesh was hard and hot. She could feel one scar, knobby and ropy, under her hand’s heel.

Slavery?

The horse trotted.

The flapping headdress smelled of oil and animals. Pryn leaned to the side to see ahead – mostly trees now, with the road’s ruts descending into them. Gripping the horse’s sides with her knees and the rider’s with her hands, she settled into the motion.

Once she thought: A beautiful young queen, abducted on the road by fearful, romantic bandits … But they were not romantic. She was not beautiful. No, this was not the time for tale-teller’s stuff. It was a bit fearful. But as yet, she reflected, she was not
full
of fear. From the threat of death to the straying hands, it all had too much the air of half-hearted obligation.

Once more she moved her head from behind the flapping cloth and called to the bearded boy, who had been riding beside her almost ten minutes, ‘Where is this Gorgik the Liberator? Go on, tell me.’

Clearly, from boyish excitement, he wanted to. But he glanced at his companions. As clearly, she had been right about his intimidation. ‘You’ll see soon enough,’ he called back across the little abyss of hooves, dust, and wind.

The shift from country to city Pryn never quite caught. Now there was a river by the road. The horses’ hoofbeats
changed timbre. She looked down – yes, the road itself along which they trotted was, now, paved with flat stones set in hard mud. She looked up to see green-tiled decorations interspersed with terra-cotta castings on an upper cornice of a wealthy home beyond a stone wall lapped with vines. On the other side of the road she saw an even higher roof, over a higher wall, moving up toward them as the other fell behind.

And the river was gone.

‘You wanted to know where Gorgik the Liberator is?’ her rider called back. ‘Look there!’

They wheeled off the main highway.

Ahead, armed men stood before a gate in another wall. Above, Pryn saw the top story of another great house. Much of the decorative tiling had fallen away. Behind the crenellations a dozen men ambled about the roof, some with spears, some with bows. At the corner one sat on a cracked carving – dragon or eagle she couldn’t tell – looking down into the yard.

The younger and older either side, Pryn’s rider reined at the wooden door in the stone wall, which was half again as high as the youngster on his horse.

The squat one bawled out in a voice much too loud simply to be speaking to the men in leather helmets either side of the gate, with their broad knives hanging at their hips: ‘Go in and tell your master, Gorgik the Liberator, that three brave fellows have come to pledge hands and hearts to whatever end he would put them!’

With the blue eyes and frizzy blond beard of a barbarian – rare enough in northern Ellamon to cause comment when you saw one in the market – a guard stepped toward them, pushed up his helmet; and bawled back: ‘What names might he know you by?’

‘Tell your great and gracious master, Gorgik, that the Southern Fox –’ he gestured toward Pryn’s rider –’ and
the Red Badger – ’ which was, apparently, the bearded boy – ‘and myself, the Western Wolf –’ the thick hand fell against his own black rug of a chest – ‘have come to serve him! Ask him what he knows of us, and whether the tales of our exploits that have preceded us are sufficiently impressive to allow us to join his company! Let him consider! We shall return in a few hours to seek admittance!’

The barbarian guard nodded toward Pryn, then said in a perfectly ordinary voice: ‘There’re four of you …?’

In an equally ordinary voice the Western Wolf said: ‘Oh. I forgot the kid.’ He turned back to the gate, took a breath, and bawled: ‘Tell him that the Blue Heron is also among our number and to consider her for his cause!’

Then Wolf, Badger, and Fox, with the Heron behind (thinking of Raven and capital letters), wheeled from the gate. Dust struck up from the road high as the horses’ haunches.

As the great houses drifted by her behind high walls and palm clusters, what Pryn thought was: Here, I am suddenly in this world of men, made to ride when I want to walk, touched when I want to be left alone, and given a new name when I’ve just learned to write my old one, all under some fanciful threat of death because I
might
be a spy. (Just what tales, she wondered, had
they
been listening to?) I don’t like it at all, she thought. I don’t like it.

As unclear as the shift between country and city had been, Pryn was equally uncertain – as she was thinking all this – where the change had come between suburb and center. But when the horses clattered across a paved and populous avenue to splash into a muddy alley of stone houses with thatched shacks between, she realized it had.

They crossed another street.

Down another alley water flashed between masts.

They turned onto another avenue. Noise and confusion dazzled her. Living on the edge of a mountain town, without ever really considering herself part of them, Pryn had known the gossipings, prejudices, and rigidities of town life that had played through Ellamon’s quiet streets. But here, the hustle and hallooing made her wonder: How, here, could anyone
know
anyone?

Twice in one block the Fox’s horse danced aside to avoid someone, first a woman who dashed from the crowds at one side of the street, a four-foot basket strapped to her back, to plunge among people on the other side; second, three youngsters chasing after a black ball. Pryn clung to the Fox’s twisting back. (The little girl, naked as Pryn’s rider and muddy to the knees, grabbed up the black pellet, which had ceased bouncing to roll a ragged course between cobbles. With a barbarian boy in a torn smock tripping behind, the children fled off down another side street.) The horses began to trot once more beside the hurrying men and women; one man hailed a friend across the road; another ran after someone just departed – to tell her one last thing.

When the white-haired woman left the corner, she was deep in conversation with a younger, who wore a red scarf for a sash. A man and a woman servant behind held decorated parasols over them – or tried to. The sunlit edge kept slipping back and forth across the older woman’s elaborate coif and silver combs. Now she pushed bracelets and blue sleeves up her arms and turned to another woman in her party with short hair incongruously pale as goat’s cream. This one – not much more than a girl, really – wore leather straps across bare shoulders; a strap ran down between abrupt, small breasts. She carried several knives at her belt and walked the hot stones barefoot. Pryn saw beyond the scarred shoulder she clung to that another woman servant had despaired of shading
this sunken-eyed, cream-haired creature. (Was she yet eighteen? Certainly she was no more than twenty.) She stepped away here, then off there, now looking into a basket of nuts some porter carried by her, now turning to answer the older woman with the combs. A woman at least forty, the servant frowned at her and finally let the parasol shaft fall back on her own shoulder.