Tales of Neveryon (24 page)

‘What is it …?’ Gorgik asked. ‘What is it, barbarian?’

‘That,’ the boy said, who only in the instant that he actually spoke saw what he now pointed to. ‘The man who sold me to you said that come from the south – from the part of the country which is my home. Do you know my home country … I mean, have you ever go there?’

Gorgik dropped his chin to stare down at the astrolabe hanging against his chest. He snorted. ‘I don’t know your home, boy; and I don’t want to know it. Now lie down and go to sleep, or the collar goes back on. We have to move early tomorrow when we quit this mountain sump-hole for Kolhari.’ Gorgik lay down again and twisted around on the blanket, pulling a corner over his shoulder that immediately fell off, kicking at a fur fold that seemed to have worked its way permanently beneath his shin. His eyes were closed.

The barbarian lay beside him, very still. After a few minutes Gorgik’s heavy, brown, braceleted arm fell over Sarg’s paler shoulder. The barbarian, feeling more or less awake yet drifting off to sleep far more often than he realized, and Gorgik, wide awake but lying perfectly still with his eyes closed and hoping to be thought sleeping, lay together till sunrise, for by now it was only an hour or two till morning.

– Pleasant Valley
May ’78

The justification of such abbreviation of method is that the sequence of images coincides and concentrates into one intense impression of barbaric civilization. The reader has to allow the images to fall into his memory successively without questioning the reasonableness of each at the moment; so that, at the end, a total effect is produced.

– T.S. Eliot
Preface to ‘Anabase’

‘… entirely a good idea, my boy.’ The old man with the clay-ey hands sat back on the split-log bench to rest his knuckles, rouged with terracotta, on rough knees. ‘Think of the people it connects! It makes all of us one, as if we were fingers a-jut off a single palm: myself, a common pot spinner, a drudger forty years in this poor waterfront shop in this poor port city; a noble gentleman like Lord Aldamir, once an intimate, you may be sure, of the Child Empress herself (whose reign –’ The knuckles came up from knee to forehead, and the wrinkled eyes dropped to the shards about the floor – ‘is fine and fecund); and even that taciturn giant of a messenger who approached me with that distant lord’s ingenuous plan; and the children who will buy the little treasures, bounce them, prattle over them, trade and treasure them. It is as though we are all rendered heart, bone, liver, and lights of a single creature. Money –’ and his eyes rose as high at the name of the exchange commodity as they had dropped low at the mention of the Empress – ‘is what allows it all to be. Yes, though others argue, I’m convinced it’s an entirely good thing. Ah, my boy, I can remember back when it was all trade. A pot went out; eggs came in. Another pot; barley this time. Another pot; goat’s milk. But suppose I wanted cheese when there was only butter available? Suppose someone with butter needed grain but had more than enough pots? Oh, those were perilous times – and
perilous in ways that money, which can be saved, stored, spent wisely or foolishly, and doesn’t go bad like eggs or butter, has abolished. But that was fifty years ago and need not worry a young head like yours … All of us, a lord, a lord’s man, an enterprising and successful artisan with a will to expand his business, and the little children whose joyous laughter guilds the city from the alleys of the Spur to the gardens of Sellese – the web of money makes us all one!’

‘And the one who sells these little rubber balls you would import from Lord Aldamir in the Garth Peninsula, here to Kolhari.’ The young man smiled.

‘Well, of course, that’s where you come in, Bayle. I am a common potter and you are a common potter’s boy: but though I am as near sixty as you are near twenty, believe me, it is only a beginning for us both. And I shall need you to do a great deal more than simply sell. We are still a little business and must do everything ourselves, you and I …’

Bayle grinned at the thought of incorporation into this creature whose blood was coin.

‘Yes,’ said old Zwon, for perhaps the seventh time that morning, ‘as far as I can see, money is an
entirely
good idea! As fine an idea as writing and public drainage systems, I’ll be bound. As fine as fibrous rope and woven fabric – indeed, as the stone chisel and the potter’s wheel itself. And I remember, boy, when every single one of those marvels – save the potter’s wheel – entered my life, or my father’s life, or my grandfather’s. You sit there, and they surround you. You don’t know what the world was like without them. Levers and fulcrums, levers and fulcrums – that’s all there was and they raised stone walls and made cities look like cities. But for the common woman or common man going about a common day’s business,
give me a piece of rope or a clay drainpipe any day. Well –’ Zwon’s hands made claws over his knees – ‘it will mean a bit of travel for you, Bayle. For Lord Aldamir wants someone whom I trust to visit him in the south and survey the actual orchards – I wonder how extensive those orchards must be if he intends to harvest so many of the little toys – to oversee the shipment personally. Now that, my boy, is the true aristocratic style filtering down to us urban scufflers. Well –’ Between the old knees, clay-ey claws meshed – ‘you better get down to the docks, Bayle. You have your bedroll packed, your letter of introduction to his Lordship. The boat sails this afternoon, but I want you to be at least an hour early, since we have yet to invent an accurate timetable for shipping traffic in and out of Kolhari harbor. Go on, now, boy!’

Bayle, the potter’s boy, with all the delight proper to an eighteen-year-old launched on a journey involving adventure and responsibility, stood up still grinning (was he nervous? Yes!), hoisted his bundle by its woven strap and heaved it over his shoulder. ‘Zwon, I’ll make you proud! I will! Thank you!’

‘Ah,’ said Zwon, ‘these are brutal and barbaric times and you are journeying into the brutal and barbaric south. You may well have to do any number of things on this trip that are not so prideful – I’ll mark that clearly on the clay,’ which was an adage long used by Kolhari potters. ‘What
I
want you to do is any and all of those things that will make me rich!’

Bayle was a strong, stocky lad, with an inch of black beard – mostly beneath his chin (no real mustache), with broad shoulders from cutting firewood to fit the open pine fires for the rough rhaku ware, and the elm and hickory kilns for the figured, three-legged pots and glazed animals; his forearms were heavy from holding clay to shape on
the turning wheel. A comfortably thick body made him look like a young bear – a thickness that twenty years hence would be fat, but for now simply made him look affable. He stood in the middle of the shadowed shop and laughed his most affable laugh, for he was a well-liked youth and knew it. (And to do well when you are well-liked is usually easy.) Laughing, he turned on soft sandals, their broad straps laced to his knees. He strode over shards to the door, ducked his curly head at the slant lintel. He did not need to; but a year ago an extraordinarily tall and handsome black had worked for a month in the shop, who
had
needed to duck in order to enter and leave: and Bayle, impressed with the man’s carriage, had taken up the gesture, though the top of his own curly head – and Bayle’s father, a fat man with remnants of the same onyx curls, had been bald at twenty-five – barely brushed the wide-grained plank. With thumb under his belt, Bayle adjusted the cloth, bound once between his legs and twice around his hips, and stepped to the pitted street.

Half a dozen potter’s shops squeezed between fish stalls, wine sellers, cheap taverns and cramped dwellings – a third the shops that had been there fifty years ago, which had given the waterfront end of the alley its name: Potters’ Lane. An irony: three blocks over, port Kolhari supported some seventeen more potters in a street named, incongruously enough, Netmenders’ Row.

Lugging his roll on his back, grown quickly sweaty beneath it, Bayle went down the curving alley, its right side a-blaze with white sun (bright, warn-wood buildings), the left a-swim in blue shadows (garbage-clotted puddles still drying about the uneven road). Ships usually departed in the morning or the evening – now it was no more than three hours after noon. The little street emptied him out on Old Pav
ē
, five times as wide, a third as
crowded: oxcarts trundled, merchants strolled by with heads hooded or parasols raised against the heat. Bayle’s bundle slid on his back with his striding; the strap was wet on his dribbling shoulder. Fifty yards ahead, the cobbled road shivered before the docks and warehouses, almost deserted now at the hottest part of the day.

There was his ship!

And the tavern across from it, with scattered oyster shells before it, had colored stuffs hung out on the poles set in the ground for awnings. Three sailors and a porter sat on their stools, leaning together over the split-log benches, laughing quietly and continuously at some endless round-robin account.

Bayle walked in under the awning, set his bundle on broken shells, and sat at an empty table, only vaguely aware of the voices of two women that came from the curtained alcove in the back: he did not pay attention to any of their quiet conversation, that had begun before he’d come in, that continued through his three mugs of cool cider, that was still going on after he got up to wander over to the boat to take a look at his berth.

‘Come now, dear girl: don’t mind the heat. There’s your ship. Who knows how many hours before it puts out for the Garth. And a tavern, right across from it! Let’s sit out under one of those awnings in the front and drink a toast to your coming adventure and my coming wealth. Who’d have thought, when I struck up a conversation with you in the public garden only a day after you’d arrived in Kolhari, that, a year later, you’d be my most trusted secretary and my missionary to the south to petition Lord Aldamir! Oh, it’s an enterprise we are well bound up in, and rest assured the result will be wealth for us both. Mark it, Norema – for it is inked like writing on vellum that has
soaked clear through and will not come off for all your scraping with a writing knife –’ which was an old adage among Kolhari merchants – ‘money draws to money. And we start from a very good position. Ah, ten years ago, when I took over my dear, dead brother’s foundering business – nothing but a mass of papers, names of ships, lists of captains and sailors, and the key to several warehouses in which I found the most terrifying things – I’m sure I felt all the fears that a childless woman of forty, with only the memory of a husband gone out my life before I was thirty, could possibly feel in those hectic and heartless times. But now that I am fifty and have made a go of it for a decade, I have learned some of that fear is actually what men call the thrill of adventure; and I have come to enjoy it, in reasonable doses. Besides, what’s in my warehouses no longer frightens me. Oh, yes, Norema, let us sit here out in the sunlight and drink something heady and hearty!’

‘Madame Keyne,’ said the serious-looking young woman with the short red hair, ‘they have a curtained women’s alcove inside …?’

‘Would you be more comfortable inside?’ the older woman asked in a swirl of diaphanous blues and greens, bracelets and finger chains and anklets and ear bangles a-clatter – for veils and bangles were the rich and conservative attire in that time and place for a rich and conservative matron. ‘But then –’ blues and greens settled – ‘you really
were
asking on my behalf, weren’t you?’ She sighed, and her hands disappeared in the folds of her dress. ‘Here I am – here
we
are – on the threshold of an adventure, nautical for you and economic for us both: I certainly don’t wish to be bothered now by obstreperous men, neither the well-off who, if we sit out under the awnings, will think their attentions flatter us, nor the not so well-off whose
attentions would annoy us though they have no other aim than to make us put up a pleased smile before that annoyance, nor the completely destitute – the mad or crippled ones who live in such pathetic incompetence they cannot tell us from their mothers and expect any woman to hand out food and sympathy and money from sheer constitutional maternalism.’

Norema smiled. ‘But
you
would be unhappy in the shadowed and curtained women’s alcove, where we could escape such annoyances –’

‘– because I
wish
to sit out in the air and light. Which is precisely where we would
not
escape them. Well, it is no surprise to you, having worked for me a year. I do not like woman’s place in this society, and that place is nothing so simple as a curtained alcove in the back corner of a waterfront tavern, or a split-log table in the front of one; that place you know is neither my walled garden in Sellese that makes the world bearable for me, nor my warehouses at the back of the Spur, which makes the bearable possible. And while we stand here brooding over why we can be happy neither in the sun nor in the shadow, give a thought too to the brilliant notions on art, economics, or philosophy we are not now having because we are concerned instead with
this!’
She beat her hand through her skirts: the blues and greens flew up from layers of indigo and chartreuse. ‘Come, Norema, let us go back into our alcove and enjoy a pitcher of cider!’ The older woman started in among the tables and benches, a faint smile on her face – because she thought the younger woman behind was no doubt smiling too at what that young woman would certainly take to be excessive. The young woman followed with a perfectly serious expression – because, although she felt an almost obsessive compulsion to be honest with her employer, which compulsion grew from the twin
motivations that, first, very few other people were, and second, she had an astute awareness of her employer’s rather astonishing business acumen in a world where business was an enterprise not more than three generations old. Norema felt an awe before this woman that had, months ago, decided her that the lightest of Madame Keyne’s pronouncements were worthy of the heaviest consideration – a decision she’d already had many reasons to approve in herself.