MINUTES LATER, OFF THROUGH fog, the smuggler made out a gate. Odd, he thought, as his cart rolled by mortared stones, for all these moonlight visits he was still not sure which lord’s estate he went to—but then, he was not working for the lord.
He squinted to see if he could make out guards, only decorative in any case here in the city. Ahead he saw what might be a spear leaning from a far niche—
‘Pssst!’ from the door beside him.
He halted his ox.
Through a view hole in the planks, a lamp glimmered with butter-colored light.
‘Well!’ came through muffling boards. ‘You’re here, then. Good!’
Wick flickering in its snout, the clay tub slid onto the small shelf, its base scraping sandy wood. The small moon, instead of holding a halo to the door, cleared the near air.
Metal scraped plank. Plank scraped stone. A board beside the one with the hole moved back in the rock.
He grunted at his stopped ox, as if to stop her again.
The old woman said: ‘Uhhh! This fog, I don’t like it one bit!’ She pulled away another board and set it back by the first. Tied up, the daytime leather hangings were bunched above. ‘Bad things happen in such weather. I’ve seen enough of this mist, and I know. Though it’s all the better for the likes of you, isn’t it? Well, I hope it follows you south and leaves some clear suns and moons with us here in the city. Boy!’ she called back by her hip. ‘You could at least lend a hand with these. No, never mind. I’ve moved them already. Bring that bag here. Be quiet! Do you want to wake the new kitchen girl we hired yesterday? She doesn’t need to know of our doings. Oh, no. Not her, yet.’ Someone behind her scrambled over something (‘Quiet!’ the woman hissed), picked it up, moved with it. She reached behind, then swung forward a cloth sack. ‘Here, take it, now. And go on. Go on, I say! You have your instructions. They’re the same as last time. You’ve done it before. Do the same again. Deliver it to the same place. You’ll get the same reward when you arrive. And the same when you return. Now be off—’
‘I go out now, grandma?’ a boy shrilled behind her in a heavy barbarian accent. ‘I go out?’
The servant woman swayed into the glow, her hood putting a shadow on her deeply seamed cheek, which, in the haze, was the darkest thing about. The accent meant there was no possibility of blood between them. The smuggler looked at her brown, creviced, northern face.
‘No one see me,’ the little barbarian went on behind her. ‘I hide in the fog and be back before—’
‘Not on your life!’ the woman shot back. ‘You think I’d let you go off in this miasma? Bad men are out in the city on nights like this, believe me: thieves, smugglers, murderers, and worse—like this one here!’ She gestured at the smuggler, and her face wrinkled more—yes, smiling, he realized now. ‘Here, I say. Take it.’
He took the bag from fingers almost as large-knuckled as his own. ‘Yes, ma’am.’ What she’d lugged in one hand was heavy enough for him to hold in two. ‘I’ve got it.’ He hefted the sack against his chest, turned to the cart, and dropped it, clanking and changing shape, as it slid over what was already there. He pushed it under a cluster of old-fashioned three-legged pots, bound together by their handles and only a month back declared, by official edict from the High Court, incapable of holding magic as long as they were unsealed, and therefore—when unsealed—untaxable. Behind him he heard one board and another scrape into place; then the bar.
‘Come away, now, boy.’ The voice was muffled again. ‘Give me your hand I say…’
He looked back to see the luminous hemisphere this side of the opening shrink, then vanish. The buttery flame wavered behind the hole, grew small, was gone.
Where the haloed moon had hung was a pearly smear. Holding the canvas cover in blunt fists, the young smuggler yanked its edge down more firmly. Stepping to the ox’s cheek, he grasped the harness, clicked his tongue against his mouth’s roof with an indrawn breath, and tugged the heavy-shouldered beast around on the return road.
Walking ahead of his loud cart, he smiled. Now, he thought, I’m a smuggler again. A bad man about in the streets. (Whatever was in the bag had been metal and in many flat pieces. He’d felt their round edges. Which was odd, though not remarkable.) Once again he was taking a contraband load to the south, carrying from people he didn’t know to other people he didn’t know. Nor, save for the metal makeup and disk-like shapes that had come to him over a few moments through the canvas, was he sure what he carried.
Years back when the smuggler had begun smuggling, at one point or another he’d look to find out what was in his sack: salt, silver, jewelry, magic fetishes, or sometimes even the sealed bullae in which clinked the mysterious contract tokens that signed, in those primitive times, a certain level of commerce. But it was common lore among smuggling men and women that the less one knew of what one carried, the better things were both for the client and, finally, for oneself. He’d accommodated such lore by putting off his look each trip till nearer and nearer its end. Finally, somehow, three, then seven, then numberless trips had passed when he’d forgotten to look at all. Now the thought only returned to him as the memory of a juvenile risk he’d used to take. (And am I really that young anymore? the smuggler wondered. Now and again it seemed to him he’d been smuggling an awfully long time.) Perhaps his meticulous inquisitiveness over anything and everything concerning the Liberator came from having to deflect natural curiosity from where, naturally, it was wanted. He’d thought that often. But this was the third time now he’d gone south at the behest of the old woman at the estate wall’s secondary door. He’d first gotten the commission from another thief (‘…Follow these turnings. Be there with your cart at this time…’) and could honestly say he did not know her name, nor the name of the family she was servant to, nor whether she worked for her own gain, her master’s, or someone else’s. I know nothing of you; but then (he spoke along to himself, on the road back into the city) you know nothing of me, old woman. You have no notion you’re talking to a man with a passion and a purpose. Only a small stone’s heave from here is the Liberator’s house, but you’ve no idea that I may know more tales of that fabled home and hero than any else save probably his one-eyed lieutenant—more, possibly, than anyone in Nevèrÿon, if some of my conjectures are true.
And why should that be anything to me? laughed the seamed servant of the mind he carried with him. (Her words were as clear as if she sat atop his cart.) Will that help you finish your job the faster? Will it make you braver, quicker, more cautious, more clever in carrying out your task?
To which the smuggler laughed back, answering: Ah, grandma, how much you and your kind miss, who judge the rest of us only by how well we can do your work. But you’re one of those who thinks there’s no more to life than that, aren’t you?
His lips moved in the mist.
As the old woman began to defend her position and denigrate his, he ambled along the damp avenue, now posing one argument, now posing another, now revising his own polemic, now revising hers, this time toward anger, that time toward submission, now with the barbarian boy adding his comment, now with the long-vanished mountain girl giving hers.
…a man with a passion and a purpose as great, in its way, I’d guess, as the Liberator’s, or perhaps even greater, for it covers all the Liberator does and has done, yet has none of the emotions that drive him to error, that trip him now in defeat, a passion and purpose that, for all its committed disinterest, has nothing to do with this scheming and scuffling, this cheating and wheedling that make up the daily lives of you and me.
But here he was, already turning onto the Sallese road.
Neveryóna was behind.
He looked back for the Liberator’s mansion. But while he’d been wrangling with his imaginary companions about the worth of his commitment to this bit of myth and history, he’d managed to wander, without noticing, past the myth’s major historical manifestation. Perhaps the fog had grown so thick it had swallowed the empty house?
No. He’d been too busy talking to himself.
Momentarily he considered going back to scale the wall and, tonight, exploring it, adding some firsthand knowledge to all his hearsay, seeing for himself the floors and windows and empty chambers that may (or may not) have been the Liberator’s.
…make you braver, quicker, more cautious, more clever in carrying out your task? (Believe it, she was still going on!) No, certainly this was not the night to trespass on fabled grounds, leaving a cart of contraband outside. What might he expect to find of the Liberator in such a place anyway, years after it had been ransacked by angry marauders? (He walked through vapor.) He’d be back in Kolhari in a few weeks.
There’d be more foggy mornings.