2

SOME YEARS LATER, AT the ear of his ox, ahead of his half-empty provisions cart, a young smuggler walked through the outer streets of Kolhari.

A gibbous moon still shone.

Call him stocky rather than thin. At some angles he looked even loutish: there’d been little enough in his life to refine him since he’d first run away from the farm for the city. At others, however, he was passably handsome, if you ignored the healed-over pockmarks from an acne that, though now long finished with, had been more severe than most and whose traces still roughened his forehead and marred his cheeks above the thinner hairs edging his beard. Peasant or prince could have had that face as easily, but the hard hands, the cracked feet, and the cloth bound low on a belly already showing its beer were trustable signs, in those days, he was not the latter.

The cart wheels rumbled onto the road generally considered the division between Sallese, a neighborhood of wealthy merchants and successful importers, lucky businessmen and skillful entrepreneurs, and Neveryóna, a neighborhood of titled estates and hereditary nobles with settled connections—though lately the boundary had become blurred. Today there were any number of business families who’d dwelt in the same mansion for three generations, some of whom had even acquired a title or two by deft marriage of this youngest daughter to that eldest son; and more than one noble family had been forced by the times to involve itself in entrepreneurial speculation.

The young smuggler squinted.

Moonlight leached all green from the leaves, all brown from the trunks.

Was it two hours till dawn?

Something moved by an estate wall’s turning, way along the crossroad. Something pale, something slow, something huge as a dragon coiled the suburban avenue.

Overspilling the hills above the city, fog had crawled down through wide streets and narrow alleys, till, across the whole town, it kissed the sea with an autumn kiss.

The cart rolled; the smuggler looked left.

Certainly the last time he’d come to Neveryóna by moonlight, he’d been able to see three times as many mansion roofs, even to the High Court of Eagles. Ordinarily such a moon would light the black peaks, which till an hour ago had held back the mist. But now both mansions and mountains were over-pearled, moondusted, veiled.

The cart rolled; the smuggler looked right.

More fog had moved in, as if, rippling in from the waterfront to the road’s end there, a phantom ocean collapsed toward him.

He looked over his shoulder. The young smuggler had traveled many roads, you understand, and had often looked back at the way winding to the horizon, while he’d thought: Is it possible I’ve come so far? both fearful at, and proud with, his ignorance of the distance a moment before. Behind him, however, the pavement looked less like a road than like a yard—say one from the inner city with a neighborhood cistern sunk in it and closed round by haze. As fog cut away the distance ahead and behind, so it cut away pride and fear, or any other feeling of accomplishment in his journey. What was left him was dull, small, and isolate.

His bare foot squashed damp leaves.

He looked forward.

Visible above the wall, its crenelations irregular in moon-mist, the mansion he neared now slowed his gait. Not his destination, it was, he knew, deserted—as were several walled estates near here. But there was a story to this one, and he angled away to see better where tiles had fallen from the façade, and terra-cotta castings had dropped from the cornice to crash—how many years before?—onto the lawns, behind silent stone.

The mansion had once been a lesser town house of a southern baron, Lord Aldamir, who, as his power had eroded in the south, had leased this home in the north to a series of minor nobles. They had not treated it well, had finally abandoned it. Then the political upstart, Gorgik the Liberator, had rented the building as headquarters for his campaign to abolish slavery throughout Nevèrÿon. The Liberator’s armed men had patrolled its roof and stood guard at its deep-set gate. Horses had cantered to the studded entrance, their riders bawling messages for the leader within.

The Liberator was a giant of a man, so people said, and had once been a slave himself in the empress’s obsidian mines at the foot of the Faltha Mountains. Gaining his freedom, he’d continued to wear his slave collar, declaring it would stay round his neck till, whether by armed force or political mandate, slavery itself was obliterated from the land.

Later, people noted that it was not the radicalness of his program that had so upset the country, for, in truth, slavery as an economic reality had been falling away from Nevèrÿon ever since the Dragon had been expelled from the High Court twenty-five years before, when the Eagle—or her manifestation in the Child Empress Ynelgo—had commenced her just and generous reign. Rather it was the radicalness of his appearance that had bothered the nobles, merchants, and their conservative employees—not the Liberator’s practice so much as his potential; for appearances are signs of possibilities, at least when one remembers that what appears may be a sign by masking as easily as by manifesting.

Several armed and surprise attacks on the Liberator had been financed from various sources. Gorgik had repelled them. But once a rabble of unemployed and impoverished workers, supplemented by soldiers from the private guard of nobles close to the court (despite their aid, the contributors had managed to remain as nameless as the gods), gathered on a misty night in the month of the Weasel, when the fog lapped late over the mountains and rolled down through the moonlight to obscure the city’s corners and crevices.

They’d stormed the Liberator’s house.

Here, however, the story crumbled into conflicting versions. Some said that, on hearing the approaching horde, the Liberator had fled with his supporters to the hills around Kolhari and up into the Falthas. Others said, no, that was impossible. The gang had been too stealthy, too quick. It was far more likely that, in the fog, they had simply raided the wrong mansion and the Liberator, hearing of it a mansion or two away, had had time to escape. Still others claimed they’d got the proper house all right—the very building that rose behind the wall before the smuggler now—but the information that this was the Liberator’s headquarters had been, itself, misdirection. The home here had never belonged to the Liberator at all; the true headquarters were a close and careful secret.

But one thing all agreed on: the building they’d broken into that night was empty. No guards stood at the gate. No soldiers strolled the roof. No furniture stood in the rooms. No garbage moldered in the great pots, three broken, behind the kitchen midden. Oh, perhaps a vagrant now and again had climbed the wall to build a brief fire by one or another outbuilding—but the charred sticks in the makeshift rings of stone were as likely to be years as months or weeks old. How could a powerful political leader, and his secretaries, and his courtiers, and his armed garrisons, and his plans, and his records, and his recruiting forces, and his provisions, aides and officers vanish from a walled estate with, at most, an hour’s warning (more likely minutes’), leaving no certain sign?

Not that the story ended here. But now the various versions multiplied more. The Liberator was still at work throughout Nevèrÿon, now in the south, claimed some, now in the north. The Liberator was no more, claimed others—indeed had never been. Or at least had never been other than an eccentric freeman, wearing a slave collar for his own eccentric purposes, wandering the Old Market of the Spur and talking too much in the taverns about fanciful political schemes. Now some said not only was this the false headquarters of the Liberator, but, though all had thought him that fabled man, the collared giant himself was only a ruse or, indeed, a lieutenant, or one of many lieutenants to the true Liberator, who was actually a wiry, one-eyed man, once a cunning bandit (who may or may not have been a former slave) and who was, for perverse and powerful reasons (that is, sexual), the true wearer of the collar. No, said others, it was the giant who was the Liberator, and the one-eyed man was his lieutenant. Each wore the collar, declared others who said they’d seen them. Both wore the collar at different times for different reasons, reasoned others who claimed such reason was only common sense, given the confusion among those who ought to know. There was no one-eyed man, the smuggler heard from a drunken soldier who’d declared he’d fought under Gorgik when, collarless, the Liberator had spent time as an officer in the empress’s Imperial Army: ‘That was just a dream he sometimes had. I remember it as clearly as I remember my mother’s hearth. We’d be standing night guard outside his tent and hear him within, mumbling in his sleep over such a one-eyed apparition. It was only bad dreams.’ There was no scarred giant, he heard from a crippled cutpurse who swore he’d run with the one-eyed man when his gang had holed up in the Makalata Caves. ‘One time at night as we all squatted by the fire, he talked of a great foreman with a scar down his face who’d been kind to him when, for a few months as a boy, he told us, he’d been taken by slavers. But that was only campfire talk.’ Still, whatever the version, or whatever the various versions’ relation to the ineluctable truth they mirrored, masked, manifested, or distorted, all agreed, as they agreed the mansion ravaged that foggy night had been empty, that it was on such nights as this, when all boundary lines and limits were thrown into question, that the Liberator could be counted on to do his most pointed work—if, indeed, there was, or had ever been, such a man.

The oxcart halted beside the smuggler, who turned now to slap the beast’s red haunch.

Ox and man walked again through fog, the cart trundling.

The smuggler knew, yes, more of these conflicting stories than might be expected of someone with either his past history or present position. Had he been able to write and read of what he knew, we might even call him a student of such tales—though he was an illiterate in a largely illiterate age.

A youth quick to smile, easy of gesture, and slow in speech, his usual talk stayed with genial anecdotes dramatizing (exaggerations, to be sure) his comic incompetence at all callings. Passing acquaintances found him easy to enjoy and easier to forget, and few remembered the way his questions could grow quiet, intelligent, continuous, and committed. Fewer still would have marked him, thick-wristed, beer-bellied, and haft-fingered as he was, as a young man obsessed.

But many times, in the taverns and markets of Kolhari and other towns, in back-country inns and desert oases, he’d listened for mention of the Liberator; and when a story touching on Gorgik began at the counter of some winter’s mountain inn or around some summer’s seaside beach-fire, he was ready with measured, attentive questions, based on his own assessments, collations, and orderings of the tales he’d heard so far. On three occasions now, he’d found himself having to argue hotly that he was not a spy for the High Court, seeking to traduce an Imperial usurper. One night he’d actually had to run from a much louder and less rational argument that started at a forest resting place in the eastern Avila with a dough-bellied man, who, it turned out, had once sold slaves himself and had lost a brother and a friend to the swords of a huge, city-voiced bandit and his barbarian accomplice. (‘A yellow-haired dog of a boy with—I tell you, by all the gods of craft—both his eyes! They certainly called themselves Liberators—though they were nothing but the scum of all slave stealers!’) Another than our smuggler might have let such violences dissuade him from his research. His dubious profession led him, however, to expect trouble anyway, though time had proved him not prone to it: these inconveniences were not too great a price for information.

The situations that resulted in such troubles had only impressed on him, finally, that the object of his obsession was not some innocent and indifferent fable, but rather a system of hugely conflicting possibilities and immensely turbulent values. And whether the Liberator was actually that great a concern to the High Court itself, as some maintained, the smuggler had, by now, as much evidence to refute as to confirm.

The origin of his interest had been, at least as far as he could reconstruct it, the most innocent of happenstance. Perhaps that innocence was what justified the intensity of his pursuit.

There had been a girl.

A lively little partridge, she’d come on one of his early trips to the south, with him and a friend—a walleyed city boy, born in the gutters of the Spur, a raucous Kolhari twang in his crude and constant chatter the young smuggler had, at times, found comic in its licentiousness and, at others, comforting on those vastly still, ponderously deserted back forest trails, just for the noise. The two youths had been paid by a Kolhari market vendor to run a shipment of magical implements to a merchant in the Garth who knew of certain southerners who would pay handsomely for the marvelously empowered trinkets—but not as handsomely as the price you’d have to charge if you absorbed the exorbitant tax the Child Empress’s customs inspectors would impose.

By now he’d forgotten the girl’s name among the names of several such girls he’d taken on several such trips. (At what friend’s house had he met her? She’d been in some kind of trouble and had wanted to leave the city. But the details were gone from memory.) Once they’d begun, there’d been bad feelings between her and his foul-mouthed friend. Eventually one morning, somewhere south of Enoch, while he lay dozing in the blankets beside their burnt-out fire, she’d bent over him to tell him she was off for water. (Though he’d been half asleep, he remembered that.) His friend had found the empty water pot, a dozen steps from the campsite, set carefully on a stump. They’d looked for her a bit, waited a bit more, had speculated on accident, on passing slavers. But then, she’d run off from them once already, his friend had pointed out.

They’d do better with her gone.

They’d gone on.

He never saw her again.

Indeed, today, had he run into her on the streets of Able-ani or Ka’hesh, he might not have recognized her. What he remembered, however, was something she had said.

On the first day of their journey they’d halted the cart just beyond the Kolhari gates. Sitting on a fallen log, the girl had toyed with a chain around her neck from which hung some odd piece of jewelry, chased round its rim with barbaric markings. (Though he could not recall her face, he could bring back her brown fingers on the bronze pendant fixed to its neck chain. That was jaw-clenchingly clear.) And she had said:

‘I met a man, while I was in the city—a wonderful man! His friends called him the Liberator. He walked with me for an afternoon in the Old Market—he knew all about the market, all about Kolhari, all about the world! I mustn’t tell you too much of him. That would be dangerous. But I went to visit him again, in his headquarters—a big old mansion he’d rented out in Neveryóna. Oh, you’d think he was wonderful, too. I know you would. He was brave, gentle, and handsome—like you! Though he had a scar down one side of his face. He gave me…’

But here recollection blurred. Thinking about it since, he’d completed her statement many ways. Did she say he’d given her the knife she always wore in her sash, hidden under her bloused out shift? Or the shift itself? Or the necklace? Or the tiny cache of iron coins, which, like the parsimonious mountain girl she was, she’d always been so chary of spending? But she’d talked a lot, and he’d seldom listened, as she’d soon grown used to not getting back much in the line of answers. (His friend and the girl, both had loved to chatter. Silly to have expected them to get along. It took a quiet person, like himself, to go so easily with such. He hadn’t seen his friend in a year.) Months later, when the girl was gone and the storming of the Liberator’s mansion was discussed from Ellamon to Adami, the smuggler’s numberless encounters with the name Gorgik the Liberator had brought back the girl’s memory and made her words from that morning the core of an obsession. (‘…wonderful!…He was brave, gentle, and handsome—like you!…He gave me…’ But how could he have listened more when he’d been so surprised she’d felt that way about him at all?) And whenever, later, the Liberator was discussed, her chance mention seemed to have given him a tad more knowledge than the others had. (‘…He walked with me for an afternoon in the Old Market…his headquarters, a big old mansion he rented out in Neveryóna…’) Though he seldom spilled much of it into words, that extra knowledge was supremely pleasurable; and he cherished that pleasure, nourishing it with continued inquiry. Sometimes while considering less likely versions, he had to relegate the girl’s remarks temporarily to the same dubious order as other conflicting accounts. (‘…a scar down one side of his face…’ Well, some said he was scarred; some said he was one-eyed; some mentioned both. And some mentioned neither.) But because hers had come first, most of the time it was easy enough to let her statements stand as the fixed truth around which he organized the other narrative bits into their several narrative systems, thence to organize the systems themselves as to most probable likelihood—while another part of his mind, the acquisitive part, the part that went poking and prodding in other people’s memories for any and all fragments, no matter how preposterous (memories failing with time and boredom or inflated with imagination and self-aggrandizement), that part could claim, just as truthfully as the part that privileged a forgotten girl’s chance remark, to be equally interested, or as passionately disinterested, in them all.

There’d been other women in his life more recently, three of them actually (and not that recent—), one younger and two older than he. Only the youngest had been able to pretend any tolerance at all to his speculations on the Liberator; and even her pretense had lasted only a while. Could that be, finally, why it had been so easy to leave them?

Would that long-vanished mountain girl have been able to sustain her interest in the Liberator, he wondered, in the face of what his had become?

He turned by another wall.

Behind him the house that may or may not have once been the Liberator’s moved into mist.