Tales of Neveryon (11 page)

He knew all his men, and had a far easier relationship with them than most officers of that day. But only a very few did he ever consider friends, and then not for long. A frequent occurrence: some young recruit would take the easiness of some late-night campfire talk, or the revelations that occurred on a foggy morning hike, as a sign of lasting intimacy, only to find himself reprimanded – and, in three cases over the two years, struck to the ground for the presumption: for these were basic and brutal times – in a manner that recalled nothing so much (at least to Gorgik, eternally frustrated by having to give out these reprimands) as the snubs he had received in the halls of the High Court of Eagles the mornings after some particularly revelatory exchange with some count or princess.

Couldn’t these imbeciles learn?

He had.

The ones who stayed in his garrison did. And respected him for the lesson – loved him, some of them would even have said in the drunken evenings that, during some lax period that, now at a village tavern, now at a mountain campsite where rum had been impounded from a passing caravan, still punctuated a guard’s life. Gorgik laughed at this. His own silent appraisal of the situation had been, from the beginning: I may die; they may die; but if there is any way their death can delay mine, let theirs come down.

Yet within this strictly selfish ethical matrix, he was able to display enough lineaments both of reason and bravery to satisfy those above him in rank and those below – till, from time to time, especially in the face of rank cowardice (which he always tried to construe – and usually succeeded – as rank stupidity) in others, he could convince himself there might be something to the whole idea. ‘Might’ – for survival’s sake he never allowed it to go any further.

He survived.

But such survival was a lonely business. After six months, out of loneliness, he hired a scribe to help him with some of the newer writing methods that had recently come to the land and composed a long letter to the Vizerine: inelegant, rambling, uncomfortable with its own discourse, wisely it touched neither on his affection for her nor his debt to her, but rather turned about what he had learned, had seen, had felt: the oddly depressed atmosphere of the marketplace in the town they had passed through the day before; the hectic nature of the smuggling in that small port where, for two weeks now, they had been garrisoned; the anxious gossip of the soldiers and prostitutes about the proposed public building scheduled to
replace a section of slumlike huts in a city to the north; the brazen look to the sky from a southern mountain path that he and his men had wandered on for two hours in the evening before stopping to camp.

At the High Court the Vizerine read his letter – several times, and with a fondness that, now all pretence at the erotic was gone, grew, rather than diminished, in directions it would have been hard for grosser souls to follow, much less appreciate. His letter contained this paragraph:

‘Rumors came down among the lieutenants last week that all the garrisons hereabout were to go south for the Garth in a month. I drank beer with the Major, diced him for his bone-handled knives and won. Two garrisons were to go to the Able-aini, in the swamps west of the Falthas – a thankless position, putting down small squabbles for ungrateful lords, he assured me, more dangerous and less interesting than the south. I gave him back his knives. He scratched his gray beard in which one or two rough, rusty hairs still twist, and gave me his promise of the swamp post, thinking me mad ’

The Vizerine read it, at dawn, standing by the barred windows (dripping with light rain as they had dripped on the morning of her last interview with Gorgik, half a year before), remembered him, looked back toward her desk where once a bronze astrolabe had lain among the parchments. A lamp flame wavered, threatened to go out, and steadied. She smiled.

Toward the end of Gorgik’s three years (the occasional, unmistakably royal messenger who would come to his tent to deliver Myrgot’s brief and very formal acknowledgements did not hurt his reputation among his troops), when his garrison was moving back and forth at bi-weekly intervals from the desert skirmishes near the Venarra
Canyon to the comparatively calm hold of fabled Ellamon high in the Faltha range (where, like all tourists, Gorgik and his men went out to observe, from the white lime slopes, across the crags to the far corrals, the fabled, flying beasts that scarred the evening with their exercises), he discovered that some of his men had been smuggling purses of salt from the desert to the mountains. He made no great issue of it; but he called in the man whom he suspected to be second in charge of the smuggling operation and told him he wished a share – a modest share – of the profits. With that share, many miles to the south, he purchased three extra carts, and four oxen to pull them; and with a daring that astonished his men (for the empress’s customs inspectors were neither easy nor forgiving) on his last trek, a week before his discharge, he brought three whole cartfuls of contraband salt, which he got through by turning of the main road, whereupon they were shortly met by what was obviously a ragged, private guard at the edge of private lands.

‘Common soldiers may not trespass on the Hold of the Princess Elyne – !’

‘Conduct me to her Highness!’ Gorgik announced, holding his hand up to halt his men.

After dark, he returned to them (with a memory of high fires in the dank, roofless hall; and the happy princess with her heavy, jeweled robes and her hair greasy and her fingers thin and grubbier than his own, taking his hard, cracked hands in hers and saying: ‘Oh, but you see what I’ve come home to? A bunch of hereditary heathens who think I am a goddess, and cannot make proper conversation for five minutes! No, no, tell me again of the Vizerine’s last letter. I don’t care if you’ve told me twice before. Tell me
again
, for it’s been over a year since I’ve heard anything at all from Court. And I long for their
company; I long for it. All my stay there taught me was to be dissatisfied with
this
ancient, moldy pile. No, sit there, on that bench, and I will sit beside you and have them bring us more bread and cider and meat. And you shall simply tell me again, friend Gorgik …’) with leave for his men and his carts to pass through the lands; and thus he avoided the inspectors.

A month after he left the army, some friendlier men of an intricately tattooed and scarred desert tribe gave him some exquisitely worked copper vases. Provincial burghers in the Argini bought them from him for a price five times what he recalled, from his youth in the port, such work was worth in civilized lands. From the mountain women of Ka’hesh (well below Ellamon) he purchased a load of the brown berry leaves that, when smoked, put one in a state more relaxed than beer – he was now almost a year beyond his release from the army – and transported it all the way to the Port of Sarness, where, in small quantities, he sold it to sailors on outgoing merchant ships. While he was there, a man whom he had paid to help him told him of a warehouse whose back window was loose in which were stored great numbers of … But we could fill pages; let us compress both time and the word.

The basic education of Gorgik had been laid. All that followed – the months he reentered a private service as a mercenary officer again, then as a gamekeeper to a provincial count’s lands, then as paid slave-overseer to the same count’s treecutters, then as bargeman on the river that ran through that count’s land, again as a smuggler in Vinelet, the port at the estuary of that river, then as a mercenary again, then as a private caravan guard – all of these merely developed motifs we have already sounded. Gorgik, at thirty-six, was tall and great-muscled, with rough, thinning
hair and a face (with its great scar) that looked no more than half a dozen years older than it had at twenty-one, a man comfortable with horse and sword, at home with slaves, thieves, soldiers, prostitutes, merchants, counts, and princesses; a man who was – in his way and for his epoch – the optimum product of his civilization. The slave mine, the Court, the army, the great ports and mountain holds, desert, field, and forest: each of his civilization’s institutions had contributed to creating this scar-faced giant, who wore thick furs in cold weather and in the heat went naked (save for a layered disk of metal, with arcane etchings and cutouts upon it – an astrolabe – chained around his veined and heavy neck, whatever the month), an easy man in company yet able to hold his silence. Often, at dawn in the mountains or in evenings on the desert, he wondered what terribly important aspects there were to his civilization in excess of a proper ability, at the proper time, to tell the proper tale. But for the civilization in which he lived, this dark giant, soldier, and adventurer, with desires we’ve not yet named and dreams we’ve hardly mentioned, who could speak equally of and to barbarian tavern maids and High Court ladies, flogged slaves lost in the cities and provincial nobles at ease on their country estates, was a civilized man.

– New York
  October ’76

The chain of deconstruction cannot, of course, be contained here: for if the image functions as a violent displacement from the origin, life, or meaning to which it apparently refers, there is a second fundamental question raised more or less explicitly in each of these essays. What about my text as the image of the image: what about the possibility of reading …?

– Carol Jacobs
The Dissimulating Harmony

The Ulvayn islands lay well east of port Kolhari; known on the Nevèrÿon shore for the fisherwomen who occasionally appeared at the mainland docks, these islands had – had anyone bothered to count – probably four fishermen to every fisherwoman. Alas, its particular fame on the Nevèrÿon coast was more a projection of the overmasculinization of that culture (empress and all) than a true reflection of the island culture so famed.

Nevertheless Norema’s mother had been for a time firstmate on a fishingboat (captained by an older cousin, a rough-skinned and wrinkled woman after whom Norema had been named – for fishing tended to run in families); the child spent her first two years more or less bound to her mother’s back, as Quema swayed on the boat’s pitched and pitching deck. Snar, her father, was a boat builder; and after the second girl was born, Quema left the fishingboat to work in Snar’s island boat yard. The second girl died, but Quema stayed on at the yard, where the boat skeletons rose, more and more of them each year, their high ribs yellow for the first week, gray thereafter. She sorted bundles of pitch-backed bark, went into the village to harangue the smith to finish a shipment of brads made from a combination of metals and magic that her husband (with Venn’s help) had discovered did not rust; she stirred at great cauldrons of glue, while her daughter tagged along and stared, or ran off and giggled. And she felt unhappy
with life and proud of her husband and girl and wished she were back at sea.

Another daughter came, who lived. Both Snar and Quema spent more time directing other workers who labored in the yard; and Norema ran after her younger sister now, more than her mother did.

Snar was a tall, sullen man with a rough beard and tool-scarred hands, who loved his family and his work with breath-stopping intensity – and was frequently and frankly impossible with anyone he did not think of as a friend; indeed, he made a rather bad salesman in a prospering business that soon had to deal with many more people from other islands and even Nevèrÿon herself, rather than just the small circle who had bought his boats or brought him boats to repair in the early years. Quema, on the other hand, had the personality called in the inns and drinking places along the island’s docks (and in that long-ago distant language the term applied equally to men and women) a good sailor, which meant someone who could live easily in close quarters with others under swaying conditions. So Quema actually did much of the selling and bargaining over materials from their suppliers and over finished boats with their customers; and she frequently took the girls to other islands, rimmed with blue and silver sand, when she went out on business.

Coming back from such a trip, at night, with moonlight on the deck of the boat they’d built themselves (at any rate, twelve-year-old Norema had carried bark and driven dowels and caulked seams and mixed glue; and three-year-old Jori had once stepped in a bowl of that same glue), the three sat on the deck with the fire box glowing through its grillwork, fish grilling on its tines, and the rocks of the Lesser Ulvayns thrusting high and sheer at the sea’s edge like the broken flanks of some shattered, petrified beast.
Quema sat across from the fire box; the flattened copper circles she wore in her ears ran with light (her hair, in that moonlight, had lost the last of its reds to some color like the gray shrubs that grew on the island hills); the rings and her hair quavered in the gusts. And she told her daughters stories about sea monsters and sunken cities and water witches and wind wizards; sometimes she told of sailing lore and fishing routes; and sometimes just the lazy, late-night woman-talk of people and places mother and daughter could discuss here in a detail so much more exact, insightful, and intense because – here – moonlight and the dark mirror circling them put the subjects at a distance that had precisely the proper illumination and focal length for such marine investigation. (Venn had a curved mirror that she had once shown to Norema; and had made up a term in that language which might as well be translated ‘focal length.’) Sometimes they just sat and didn’t talk at all, their backs wedged against the rail of the boat, feeling the sea’s sibilances under them and the rocking night over them and the probing chills around them (usually, by now, Jori was asleep, curled against her mother’s leggings). Norema stared across the seven feet of damp, varnished decking to where her mother sat, arms across her knees, looking as contented as Norema ever saw her, and Norema sometimes wondered, too, if her mother hadn’t been somewhat cheated by her father’s near fanatical absorption in his craft and trade. For wasn’t it here that an eminently sea-worthy and seasoned woman really belonged, under the wind and the moon, with her own good boat rocking on the belly of the Great Mother, like a woman half dreaming on her back with her own sea-daughter astraddle her?