Tales of Neveryon (32 page)

But Madame Keyne’s brow knit, and her hand left Old Zwon’s to tickle her bony chin. ‘Feyers of the Vygernangx monastery in the Garth peninsula, you say?’

‘The very ones, madame.’

‘Because I too have received a missive from them recently, old man. About a secretary of mine who also stopped there – also on a mission to Lord Aldamir. Also – may I tell you? – she was inquiring about those … but the what and why of my petition is not important. Suffice it to say that I too had sent her to petition his Lordship for an import franchise –’

‘Had you, now?’

‘I had. I dispatched my secretary – like you, at the beginning of spring – to the south. Like you, I waited for
word, expecting it within the week. When, after three weeks, my fears began to grow, I can honestly say it was not toward absconsion that my thoughts turned. Though I had sent her with a goodly sum and gifts and presents to boot. I suppose I just assumed that I had provided for her so well that for her to escape that provision would be for her to doom herself – especially in the south – to a condition that no one could reasonably desire. You must understand that my secretary was a woman – I felt then and still feel – of privileged intelligence and uncommon sensibility.
My
thoughts ran rather to brigands or disease – for the south can be as pestilential as the alleys of the Spur. I too dispatched a message to that southern lord, outlining my fears. And by return boat I received a message – written only in one language, but perhaps they perceived that, as a merchant, I would have greater access to a translator than you would should their language prove to be not my most facile – from one Feyer Senth of the Vygernangx. It said that things had gone exactly as I feared; upon Norema’s debarking from the boat at Garth, she was set upon by bandits. These evil men, sensing the weakness of a woman, had endeavored to rob her of all her possessions, but at last they were repelled by the good and loyal workmen on the dock. Norema sustained only a wound on her leg. She was taken to the monastery of these most hospitable southern feyers – no doubt the very ones that housed your knavish lout – where her wound became septic, her condition feverish. Three days later, they said, she was dead.’ Madame Keyne shook her head. ‘Those kind priests, by the same boat, returned me all the crates and bags which Norema had taken with her – by their account, everything save the clothes in which her body was buried. Even the bag of coins I had sent with her came back to me apparently untouched. Ah, I cannot
tell you how I have smarted since over my stupidity for sending such a fine and fearless woman into such barbarous dangers.’

Zwon’s head, before Madame Keyne’s had stilled, began to shake in sympathy. ‘Truly the south is a strange and terrible land, where every evil we here in civilized Kolhari can imagine of it comes reflected back to us with an accuracy as perfect as the image in the belly-mirrors that the young men of the Ulvayn from time to time wear on our docks … Yes, it must be a terrible place. No wonder its natives would rather starve here in our slums than brave its uncivilized horrors of bodily disease and moral degeneracy … though of course they end up bringing both with them to sicken our civilized streets. Madame –?’ for here an oblique thought clearly startled the old man and from his features’ agitation he was clearly struggling to give it voice: ‘But tell me … how …
what
was the mission, the goal, the object of your secretary’s visit? To Lord Aldamir, I mean?’

‘But does it matter?’ Madame Keyne’s hand again clove to the back of the potter’s. ‘I have practically forgotten. What must be foremost in our mind is that we shall be henceforth joined in a money-making scheme all in the glorious and innocent here and now – not in the errors of a disastrous past. Money, old potter, money – believe me, I am convinced that it is the greatest invention in the history of mankind and, for all your doubts, an entirely good thing. Get yourself another assistant. Get two. Get ten. Believe me, there will be work enough for them. Certainly there are youths a-plenty idling away their time on New Pav
ē
that would be well-served by honest work. Why need we dwell on the schemes of the past that, with all their pain, have come to nothing, when glory lies in the schemes of the present? Four-legged pots, well-formed
and cheaply made, that is where I want you to put all your thoughts and energies, old man!’

Away in another alley, children’s shouts pummeled and tumbled in the autumn sun, though they were too far off to distinguish any one word amidst their childish gamings.

– New York
June ’78

But there is a negative work to be carried out first: we must rid ourselves of a whole mass of notions, each of which, in its own way, diversifies the theme of continuity. They may not have a very rigorous conceptual structure, but they have a very precise function. Take the notion of tradition: it is intended to give a special temporal status to a group of phenomena that are both successive and identical (or at least similar); it makes it possible to rethink the dispersion of history in the form of the same; it allows a reduction of the difference proper to every beginning, in order to pursue without discontinuity the endless search for origin …

– Michel Foucault
The Archeology of Knowledge

Wide wings dragged on stone, scales a polychrome glister with seven greens. The bony gum yawned above the iron rail. The left eye, fist-sized and packed with stained foils, did not blink its transverse lid. A stench of halides; a bilious hiss.

‘But why have you penned it up in here?’

‘Do you think the creature unhappy, my Vizerine? Illfed, perhaps? Poorly exercised – less well cared for than it would be at Ellamon?’

‘How could anyone know?’ But Myrgot’s chin was down, her lower lip out, and her thin hands joined tightly before the lap of her shift.

‘I know
you
, my dear. You hold it against me that I should want some of the “fable” that has accrued to these beasts to redound on me. But you know; I went to great expense (and I don’t just mean the bribes, the gifts, the money) to bring it here … Do you know what a dragon is? For me? Let me tell you, dear Myrgot: it is an expression of some natural sensibility that cannot be explained by pragmatics, that cannot survive unless someone is hugely generous before it. These beasts are a sport. If Olin – yes, Mad Olin, and it may have been the highest manifestation of her madness – had not decided, on a tour through the mountain holds, the creatures were beautiful, we wouldn’t have them today. You know the story? She came upon a bunch of brigands slaughtering a nest of them
and sent her troops to slaughter the brigands. Everyone in the mountains had seen the wings, but no one was sure the creatures could actually fly till two years after Olin put them under her protection and the grooms devised their special training programs that allowed the beasts to soar. And their flights, though lovely, are short and rare. The creatures are not survival oriented – unless you want to see them as part of a survival relationship with the vicious little harridans who are condemned to be their riders: another of your crazed great aunt’s more inane institutions. Look at that skylight. The moon outside illumines it now. But the expense I have gone to in order to arrive at those precise green panes! Full sunlight causes the creature’s eyes to inflame, putting it in great discomfort. They can only fly a few hundred yards or so, perhaps a mile with the most propitious drafts, and unless they land on the most propitious ledge, they cannot take off again. Since they cannot elevate from flat land, once set down in an ordinary forest, say, they are doomed. In the wild, many live their entire lives without flying, which, given how easily their wing membranes tear through or become injured, is understandable. They are egg-laying creatures who know nothing of physical intimacy. Indeed, they are much more tractable when kept from their fellows. This one is bigger, stronger, and generally healthier than any you’ll find in the Falthas – in or out of the Ellamon corrals. Listen to her trumpet her joy over her present state!’

Obligingly, the lizard turned on her splay claws, dragging the chain from her iron collar, threw back her bony head beneath the tower’s many lamps, and hissed – not a trumpet, the Vizerine reflected, whatever young Strethi might think. ‘My dear, why don’t you just turn it loose?’

‘Why don’t
you
just have me turn loose the poor wretch chained in the dungeon?’ At the Vizerine’s bitter glance,
the Suzeraine chuckled. ‘No, dear Myrgot. True, I could haul on those chains there, which would pull back the wood and copper partitions you see on the other side of the pen. My beast could then waddle to the ledge and soar out from our tower here, onto the night. (Note the scenes of hunting I have had the finest craftsmen beat into the metal work. Myself, I think they’re stunning.) But such a creature as this in a landscape like the one about here could take only a single flight – for, really, without a rider they’re simply too stupid to turn around and come back to where they took off. And I am not a twelve-year-old girl; what’s more, I couldn’t bear to have one about the castle who could ride the creature aloft when I am too old and too heavy.’ (The dragon was still hissing.) ‘No, I could only conceive of turning it loose if my whole world were destroyed and – indeed – my next act would be to cast myself down from that same ledge to the stones!’

‘My Suzeraine, I much preferred you as a wild-haired, horse-proud seventeen-year-old. You were beautiful and heartless … in some ways rather a bore. But you have grown up into another over-refined soul of the sort our aristocracy is so good at producing and which produces so little itself save ways to spend unconscionable amounts on castles, clothes, and complex towers to keep comfortable impossible beasts. You remind me of a cousin of mine – the Baron Inige? Yet what I loved about you, when you were a wholly ungracious provincial heir whom I had just brought to court, was simply that
that
was what I could never imagine you.’

‘Oh, I remember what you loved about me! And I remember your cousin too – though it’s been years since I’ve seen him. Among those pompous and self-important dukes and earls, though I doubt he liked me any better than the rest did, I recall a few times when he went out of
his way to be kind … I’m sure I didn’t deserve it. How is Curly?’

‘Killed himself three years ago.’ The Vizerine shook her head. ‘
His
passion, you may recall, was flowers – which I’m afraid totally took over in the last years. As I understand the story – for I wasn’t there when it happened – he’d been putting together another collection of particularly rare weeds. One he was after apparently turned out to be the wrong color, or couldn’t be found, or didn’t exist. The next day his servants discovered him in the arboretum, his mouth crammed with the white blossoms of some deadly mountain flower.’ Myrgot shuddered. ‘Which I’ve always suspected is where such passions as his – and yours – are too likely to lead, given the flow of our lives, the tenor of our times.’

The Suzeraine laughed, adjusting the collar of his rich robe with his forefinger. (The Vizerine noted that the blue eyes were much paler in the prematurely lined face, than she remembered; and the boyish nailbiting had passed on, in the man, to such grotesque extents that each of his long fingers now ended in a perfect pitted wound.) Two slaves at the door, their own collars covered with heavily jeweled neckpieces, stepped forward to help him, as they had long since been instructed, while the Suzeraine’s hand fell again into the robe’s folds, the adjustment completed. The slaves stepped back. The Suzeraine, oblivious, and the Vizerine, feigning obliviousness and wondering if the Suzeraine’s obliviousness were feigned or real, strolled through the low stone arch between them to the uneven steps circling down the tower.

‘Well,’ said the blond lord, stepping back to let his lover of twenty years ago precede, ‘now we return to the less pleasant aspect of your stay here. You know, I sometimes find myself dreading any visit from the northern aristocracy.
Just last week two common women stopped at my castle – one was a redhaired island woman, the other a small creature in a mask who hailed from the Western Crevasse. They were traveling together, seeking adventure and fortune. The Western Woman had once for a time worked in the Falthas, training the winged beasts and the little girls who ride them. The conversation was choice! The island woman could tell incredible tales, and was even using skins and inks to mark down her adventures. And the masked one’s observations were very sharp. It was a fine evening we passed. I fed them and housed them. They entertained me munificently. I gave them useful gifts, saw them depart, and would be delighted to see either return. Now, were the stars in a different configuration, I’m sure that the poor wretch that we’ve got strapped in the dungeon and his little friend who escaped might have come wandering by in the same wise. But no, we have to bind one to the plank in the cellar and stake a guard out for the other … You really wish me to keep up the pretence to that poor mule that it is Lord Krodar, rather than you, who directs his interrogation?’

‘You object?’ Myrgot’s hand, out to touch the damp stones at the stair’s turning, came back to brush at the black braids that looped her forehead. ‘Once or twice I have seen you enjoy such an inquisition session with an avidity that verged on the unsettling.’

‘Inquisition? But this is merely questioning. The pain – at your own orders, my dear – is being kept to a minimum.’ (Strethi’s laugh echoed down over Myrgot’s shoulder, recalling for her the enthusiasm of the boy she could no longer find when she gazed full at the man.) ‘I have neither objection nor approbation, my Vizerine. We have him; we do with him as we will … Now, I can’t help seeing how you gaze about at my walls, Myrgot! I
must tell you, ten years ago when I had this castle built over the ruins of my parents’ farm, I really thought the simple fact that all my halls had rooves would bring the aristocracy of Nevèrÿon flocking to my court. Do you know, you are my only regular visitor – at least the only one who comes out of anything other than formal necessity. And I do believe you would come to see me even if I lived in the same drafty farmhouse I did when you first met me. Amazing what we’ll do out of friendship … The other one, Myrgot; I wonder what happened to our prisoner’s little friend. They both fought like devils. Too bad the boy got away.’