5

FOR THE NEXT FEW steps the young smuggler was not sure if it were woman or man, adult or child.

The shoulders were narrow. The knees angled wide. The feet were back against the stone.

His next step, the young smuggler saw several things at once:

The gaunt face was looking at him. An eye in it blinked. Across the other was a rag. The cloth strip was tied at the side of the small head. Some hair had caught in the knot. Around the man’s neck—now the smuggler saw it was a man—was an iron collar.

‘Morning.’ The man nodded. ‘What are you doing out on the bridge at this hour?’

The smuggler slowed, shrugged, smiled. ‘Walking.’ He’d known men to wear such collars before. Slaves were, of course, almost unknown in Kolhari. If you saw a real one it was likely to be in the retinue of some visiting provincial family. But the sexual tastes of such men were assumed, on the bridge, to be odd and unpredictable. ‘What’s it to you?’ He stopped; he still smiled.

‘The market vendors aren’t out yet.’ The good eye glimmered as though full of tears. ‘You should be home in bed, cuddling your girl out of her dreams and into morning.’

‘My girl just got a job as a kitchen maid—in a big old mansion, out in Neveryóna.’ The lie came complete and natural; he’d often marveled at the way elements from life so easily joined to make falsehoods—the same way, he’d noticed, they sometimes fused to form dreams. ‘So I don’t see as much of her as I used to.’

On the stone either side of him, the man’s hands were wrapped with leather strips, recalling a custom in some province that, though the smuggler had passed through it once, he could no longer name. ‘Then what are you doing for sex?’ the man asked, bluntly.

The three female faces drifted before the smuggler, one younger than he by half and almost black, the other two a decade or more older and pleasingly brown. After a sexually bleak year, they had suddenly filled six weeks of his life (almost three months in the case of the eldest) with sensual riches and emotional complexity that had been, frankly, too much. (Oh, yes. For certain, rather a kitchen girl out in the suburbs.) But he hadn’t seen any of them for a month. He pushed them out of his mind.

‘Just about anyone—’ The young smuggler measured his admission—‘and everyone I can.’

The single eye questioned. ‘You want to come with me, then?’ The man’s insteps, back against the wall, were leather-bound too, which, yes, was the way they wore them in that province. He pushed from the rail to the ground.

Obvious thoughts often take longer to form in response to life than to letters. And the young smuggler had no letters. Also he was just now considering precisely that which would prevent the connection that has no doubt occurred to you and me. He’d encountered men before with the perversion of the collar; it was, after all, fairly common in Nevèrÿon—as all who’d ever worked the bridge soon learned. Indeed, he’d learned also in those early encounters, the collar was a sign for any number of sexual stances. Its only consistent meaning was that the most common two or three sexual exchanges were not likely to be among the most important for those who wore it. And even that was no more certain than a farmer’s prediction of rain at a haloed moon. Also, the young smuggler knew from his time on the bridge, the maimed, deformed, and blind had needs as strong as anyone’s, and a paraplegic’s or a deaf-mute’s desires could be as complex as a judge’s or a general’s. Those among them who could afford it—including the blind or half-blind—were as likely to buy here as anyone. There was nothing to keep a one-eyed bandit—for the little man surely looked a bandit—from the bridge.

Then he remembered:

The Liberator sometimes wore such a collar and was, some said, a one-eyed man, or at any rate was sometimes represented by one.

‘All right,’ the young smuggler said. ‘I’ll go with you, if you’ve got a place not too far from here. Even if you don’t, below the bridge we could—’

‘For coin or for free?’ The man cocked his head. ‘There’s a barbarian with a braid over his ear, standing at the pee-troughs. He’s been down there more than an hour. If I wanted to give away iron tonight, I’d take him with me.’ He snorted. ‘But I don’t.’

The smuggler felt his humor balance on a more distressed feeling, having to do with his own, recently much self-questioned age. But he grinned it down in the three-quarter dark. ‘You won’t give me anything? You know, last week I was hauling barrels over at the docks. The week before I was trying to make some money along here. And the week before that I was up in the mountains, cleaning out the cellar for some tavern keeper. I didn’t make much at any of them. Sometimes, you know, I wonder which job I’m the worst at.’ He chuckled; the three weeks’ work were as much invention as his Neveryóna kitchen girl. ‘Still there’re some who’ll give me a few coins, here on the bridge. But I haven’t spoken to many people lately.’ That happened to be true. ‘Kolhari is a lonely city. I’ll go with you for the company, and you can give me what you want. How’s that?’

The little man considered a moment. ‘If “what you want” means nothing—’ The unsymmetrical face looked grave, turning away—‘then come.’

‘Hey, now…!’ The young smuggler fell in beside the man, who’d started toward the market end. ‘Don’t be like that. You make up your mind later what I’m worth. I know it won’t be much. That’s not what I’m asking. But something. Say, where’ve you come from anyway, to be walking these wet stones?’

Striding his quicker stride on his shorter legs, the little man glanced up. ‘You ask questions like that on a night like this on such a bridge as we cross now?’ His single eye held amusement, also disbelief.

It was the kind of look, the smuggler thought, you might give a fifteen-year-old barbarian whore declaring drunkenly she was a noble virgin.

The smuggler rubbed his earlobe between thumb and thick forefinger, looking down at his naked feet hitting fog-wet rock. His grin mimed a shyness he did not feel. ‘Well, now, I suppose if you had a few extra pieces of gold—’

‘Gold? Ha!’ the man barked. ‘No, I’m afraid you’re just not that young!’

‘…a few iron coins,’ the smuggler said, as if repeating himself, ‘that you could help me out with, afterwards; well, I’d appreciate it. I’m not working now,’ he went on, ‘and my girl can’t see me so often anymore. There’re days, I guess, she doesn’t think I’m the best lover in the world. Maybe I do better with the men. At least I give it a try, hey?’ He raised his face a little, glancing at the one-eyed man, and thought: I may not be that young, little man, but then, neither are you that you can afford to haggle. ‘My girl, she doesn’t know I come down here and fool around on the bridge. But she doesn’t need to know of our doings. Oh, no. Not her.’ Yet he remembered that almost every woman he’d been to bed with since his sixteenth year he’d told about his homosexual adventurings; all had been fascinated. If anything, it seemed to smooth the sexual preliminaries. Only if some other male might overhear it would he hesitate to tell a woman he wanted to pleasure of these masculine explorations. The three so recent (yet so quickly receding) faces returned. He had told them: and hadn’t they all praised him for his gentleness and lovemaking virtuosity? Hadn’t all three wanted him to stay? As inducement, the youngest had offered him her body in what she took to be all sorts of wild and wonderful positions. The eldest (who did all that the youngest did sexually and with much less to-do about it) had also offered him money. At first he’d taken great offense. Then he’d taken the money. (Had that, he wondered now, put the bridge back into mind?) Then he’d taken his leave, anyway—when it had all become too complicated. The third, also older than he, he’d liked the most. But she’d had children and a great deal to do and, really, had considered him in every way—save sexually—a nuisance. No, though she’d been polite enough about it, she hadn’t really wanted him around. Well, the truth was, none of the three had freckles. And that, for him (as he’d found himself telling himself with the growing belligerence of the mightily deprived), left sex with women not much better than what he might do with animals or men.

Though the intensity of the women’s desires had allowed him to make his precipitate exit feeling (animally) well pleased with himself, still they were gone.

One had found out about the others, of course.

The shoutings! The tears! The accusations of crimes enough to make a provincial bailiff start to oil his whip! The youngest had been engagingly stupid. The one with the children had been distressingly sharp. And all three had been, well…He missed them. But here he was, running on with this old story about his sexual secrecy as though it displayed or hid some terribly important truth. ‘I’ll go with you,’ the smuggler repeated. ‘Now I don’t do this a lot. And I don’t claim to be much good at it. But as long as my girl don’t find out, it can’t hurt her. And she’s in Neveryóna, not here. You’ll see what you can do for me.’ He dropped both hands to his legs. ‘Afterwards.’

The little man, who wore leather about his loins, strode ahead, past the squabbling barbarians, as though abandoning the smuggler. (A woman passenger, herself a barbarian, was asking: ‘Well, where do I go…?’ A blond boy pointed to the stairs at the other side of the bridge.) The smuggler watched the little man move three steps, six steps, nine steps ahead.

Then he took a breath and hurried after him, off the bridge and onto brick. Fog had retreated enough to see the fountain, a rock in the square’s center, with a basin carved in it to catch what gushed from its top—before the spill ran over into the ring of drains. From a cart near it, several women in desert robes were taking down folded screens and awnings for their stall. One held up a torch for the others to see. As they helped each other open, unload, and unfold, firelight lit wet brick, flashed on the jewelry one wore at her neck.

‘You know—’ The smuggler caught up—‘a few years back, I met someone here. He wore a collar. Like yours. He was a southerner. A barbarian—no older than me. He liked me, you see. So I went with him. Like I’m going with you. He told me he’d been a prince in his own land, off to the south. We got to talking: and he told me he’d been taken a slave—a real slave, once. Before he came here. He said he’d been captured from his home in the south, taken north, and sold up in Ellamon. He told me that he’d been set free by the Liberator—you know, the one everyone talks about? Gorgik the Liberator? The one trying to end slavery? He said he and the Liberator had fought together against slavers in the west.’ Purposefully he did not look for the little man’s reaction. ‘So I told him, I said: “You must think the Liberator is a really fine man.” And you know what he said? He said: “I hate him!” He said: “The Liberator freed me from slavery, but he didn’t free me from this!” He meant the collar, you see? “And for doing only half the job, I’d kill him if I could!”’ Now the smuggler looked over. ‘That’s something, hey? What do you think of that?’

The man paid no more attention than a brown citizen to the blond barbarians’ jibing.

They crossed the square.

Over the years, the smuggler had indeed talked to a number of barbarians, also a number of men in collars, a handful of slaves, and several slavers. From these conversations, from hearsay, from observations, and from any number of story fragments about such men, such collars, such slaves—and the Liberator—the Liberator’s onetime barbarian friend-turned-enemy had come together for him along with the conviction that, given one tale and another, he was very close to some historical truth that he wanted to try out on someone who might confirm it—though, as they passed between the fountain and the women, it occurred to him that, after all, the construction of this barbarian adversary was not much different from that of any other lie or dream. I haven’t seen him here for a while,’ he added. ‘The barbarian in the collar, I mean.’ (Certainly, he reflected, he’d never met him.) ‘Maybe something happened to him. You know, they say: “Not to cross the Bridge of Lost Desire again is to die as soon as you leave it.” Well, maybe something happened to him. Maybe he got killed. I heard once that the Liberator killed a barbarian prince who led an attack against him, somewhere in the Spur. Though with all the tales and stories you hear, who could know which to believe.’

The little man remained silent.

So, still walking, the smuggler said once more: I haven’t seen him in a long time. Years. The barbarian.’ Then, on an impulse, he asked: ‘What do you think of the Liberator?’

With that same amusement, that same disbelief, the single eye glanced up. ‘What do you think of him?’

Dwelling on the ease of lies, the young smuggler found himself—surprisingly—a word from truth. Why not say it, he thought: and felt tightness take his throat. As he tried to swallow it away, his heart pounded, and, swinging dry against his sides, his arms felt his flanks grow slippery with a sweat as chill as if he’d splashed into a wet grave—what, he noted with amusement, he might feel the moment he made up his mind to speak to some dark and freckled summer girl, leaning with her bucket on a cistern wall, whose contempt, whose harsh word, whose rejection, he was sure, would strike him dead upon the yard’s paving as surely as the fiat of any nameless god. Yet in his trips to the bridge, in his trips from it, he’d learned that to turn from such a feeling was to declare oneself subservient to terror, to name terror itself one’s master. To shirk such inner challenge was to admit passion impossible in this world as the nameless gods had crafted it and purpose nonexistent. ‘I think the Liberator is—’ He drew a breath—‘is the greatest man in all Nevèrÿon. For me—and I know I am only one and certainly no representative—the Liberator, Gorgik, may be greater, even, than the Child Empress Ynelgo, whose reign is…’ He searched for something singular, but came up with only the most sedimented saw—‘is just and generous.’

‘You think, then, that if this Liberator were ruler of all Nevèrÿon, he would be more generous and more just than the empress?’ The little man snorted, then looked up sharply with his single eye beside the slant rag. ‘And do you think there’s a chance that I am he—that I am this Liberator of yours? Or his one-eyed accomplice?’

‘No—!’ the smuggler protested. But the man’s correctness gave him an odd relief.

‘You think, perhaps, if you say the Liberator is great and I happen to be your man’s lieutenant, then you’re more likely to get yourself a coin or two for the night? Well, you wouldn’t be the first to think such rot. But it won’t do you any good—not tonight, believe me.’ The man stopped walking.

The smuggler stopped too.

They’d reached some littered yard in the Spur, by a cistern’s low wall.

The smuggler thought: Which way did we come? How did we get here?

‘Other folk than you have mistaken me for your Liberator. We might pretend that I was him, and that you were only some miserable slave, waiting for his freedom.’ The one-eyed man chuckled hoarsely. ‘But that’s not my pleasure. Not tonight. Not with you. Me, a Liberator? No, tonight let us think of me as the slave—the lowest of the slaves in, say, the empress’s obsidian mines, north at the foot of the Falthas, where once, so they tell it, your Liberator himself toiled in the iron collar. Suppose I was the dirtiest, most miserable half-blind pit slave. What do you say to that?’ Sitting on the cistern wall, the little man leaned forward as mist tore apart under the moon.

The eye and one shoulder, above and below black iron, silvered. ‘What would you do with me, then? If I were the weakest, foulest, sickest of slaves, too frightened to resist any attack, any brutalization, any abuse visited on me by my guards, by my foreman, or by the other slaves about me? Think of me loaded with chains and irons, so that I couldn’t resist your assaults, even if I were strong enough.’ He reached up and put his hand on the smuggler’s arm. I know—they don’t use such chains in the mines now, except when they transport the workers from location to location. Such horrors still occur only with the slavers in the west. But you can imagine it, can’t you?’

No, it was not a response either to the man’s touch or his tale. What the young smuggler felt now he’d felt enough times before to know that, having a moment ago triumphed over a personal terror, having expressed one tiny inexpressible truth, the bodily sign of terror vanquished was a prickling like rain on the small of his back, his belly, his thighs. And because that terror’s object, the man before him, had, on its vanquishment, moved toward him rather than away, the focus somehow became sexual: his cock, rolling forward in its foreskin, dragged on cloth.

‘Follow me down!’ the one-eyed man whispered, dropping his hand to the smuggler’s chest. He turned and swung one leg over the stone. ‘Don’t worry. There’re staples along the wall, so you can make your way to the bottom.’

A year and a half back, the last legitimate work the smuggler’d done was three months with a filthy crew who’d drained cisterns and cleaned them of the potsherds and children’s balls and bits of waterlogged furniture and general muck that collected on their floors. He’d labored hard, done the job at first with energy and soon with skill; he’d liked the men he worked with, had often been praised by the crew boss: ‘Sure, you joke about what a clumsy lout you are all the time. But I say you’re a

good and honest laborer, if not the best of them.’ In his last week he’d even been promised more money—and a day later had not shown up. He’d never gone back. Now he never mentioned it. But he knew there were staples on the inner walls of all the city’s cisterns.

‘Come with me!’ The little man swung his other leg over, reached in, stood on the inside rung, and stepped down. ‘This one’s been empty for years.’

‘Sure. Go on.’ Leaning on the wet ledge, looking at the man’s head, with its knot of rag and hair lowering below him, the smuggler felt the pride any laborer in the sexual services knows when he or she realizes: I can show this one a good time! ‘I’m right behind you!’ He started over.

Climbing down the staples, the smuggler looked up at the moon. (Below him, a rung had broken; missing the step, he felt one end scrape his calf, but so lightly he didn’t look.) Would the banked fog collapse over the stained shield of bone the loud and unnamed god of war arts had hung on the sky? He did not fancy being at the bottom of an empty cistern in pitch dark with anyone—even a miserable pit slave.

His lower foot dropped into water—but as he swung out from the staple he was holding by one hand above his head, the other out and waving, he felt rock a quarter of an inch below it. He turned, both feet now on the water-filmed floor.

Yes, most of the water was out. But three-quarters of the cistern’s bottom was still under half an inch. Over it, the reflected wall cut across night, while rills rushed out and back, raddling mirrored fog.

By an irregular section of stone that had come away from the wall, the one-eyed man crouched on dry rock. His leather skirt was gone—there, it lay a meter from his hand, with which, squatting, he supported himself. ‘Look—’ and the single eye looked down from the young smuggler—‘you’re free now to do anything you want to your slave. Kick him, beat him, molest his body in any way…’ With the echo, the voice seemed not to come from the little man but rather from the drenched air, as if the city around them, and not the man before him, gave the permission, the instruction, the exhortation.

The smuggler splashed onto drier flooring. The sexual impulse that had begun moments before, instead of being lowered by the cold water and the cistern’s fetid smell, was, if anything, heightened. He tugged his cloth aside, felt it fall, so pulled it fully away and tossed it down. It’s the voice, he thought with the endless run of thinking that never ceased regardless. What had always damped his performance in his rare encounters with the collared before had been the chidings, the directions, the continuous corrections from the self-elected slave, till, after the delays and displays and hesitations that finally, more than anything, seemed to comprise the act, he’d usually packed his half-flaccid cock back in his clout and, unsatisfied, gone off to face the world, convinced once more that this perversion was just not his to pursue. But now, with this vocal displacement, the words carried no hectoring critique from a new and demanding lover, male or female, accusing him with ignorance of, and inadequacy at, his sexual task. Rather it was a pronouncement of license from the otherwise mute deity of lust’s intriguing and intricate craft, as enticing in its deistic dislocation as, in its too-human immediacy, it could be off-putting.

‘This is for you!’ He kicked the crouching man in the thigh (but not hard enough to hurt his own bare foot), raised his leg again and brought his heel down on the man’s buttocks so that he had to catch himself with his hand against the cistern wall. Then he dropped to a squat.’ And this is for me…!’ Momentarily awkward, he positioned himself, one hand on the knobby back, to push forward. His knee hit the cold rock as warmth bloomed about him. The pushings, proddings, and pokings, the bodily resistance only a step away from emotional rejection, had often sapped buggery of all pleasure. But, lubricated with whatever oils for the night or from whatever previous encounters, the body before the young smuggler received him easily within its astounding fire, and the discrepancy between the cold under foot and knee and the warmth inner flesh raised in friction with outer was, rather than an impediment to erotic amazement, amazement’s confirmation. The heat and vulnerability within the body of another, whether he felt it with finger or penis or tongue or toe was always new, always astonishing, always more intense than memory. And wasn’t the memory of that intensity when the sensation itself had been forgotten (the smuggler thought without a break in stroke), the desire all frequenters of the bridge, buyers or vendors or seekers after free fare, searched for—the desire, always lost when not alight, that named those stones? His implant in this humid flesh ran to depths in his own body that, as they were surprised into excitation, he knew were equally unrememberable. And wasn’t that, when desire was lost, why it troubled so profoundly, why it lay so deep?

The little man pushed back, not in a single thrust, but with a pulsing pressure timed to the smuggler’s thrusting, a rhythm that, when the smuggler slowed, slowed and, when the smuggler hurried, hurried, till the smuggler thought, with as much surprise as the always renewed surprise of pleasure itself: He wants me to enjoy it! While one enjoyed it nevertheless, it was a feeling rare in such encounters. And, yes, it excited him, so that when the man hissed, ‘What are you? The fifth? The ninth? The seventeenth to cover me since moonrise?’ the echoing question seemed so far outside their juncture that, like a god’s, the voice was devoid of all threat and comparison, all solace and praise.

‘…if not the best of them!’ The smuggler pushed back, with no idea whether his words or the man’s reported a fact or continued a fantasy. And for the moment he did not care. Among the five, or nine, or seventeen ghosts their echoing breaths filled the cistern with, the young smuggler was, despite his assertion, outside the hierarchy of recrimination and easy in a community of lust. He lay his beard on the little man’s cold shoulder. As he thrust, spit trickled his jaw.

The little man twisted around, becoming a face and, moments later, a voice—‘…you’re hot! Yes, you’re hot in me! It’s good! Yes, it’s…!’—as near and intimate now as before it had been distant and disembodied. One hand on the ground beside the man’s, the smuggler swung, hips and shoulders hunching and hunching at each end of his bent back to make a cave for the creature beneath him, as protected and safe and steady in its contractions as a heart.

Then the little man moved forward, disengaging. ‘Wait…!’ He spun on the rock.

For a moment the two crouched, facing, the little man, one-eyed and breathless, the smuggler, on knees and hands, surprised with the cold at belly, groin, and thigh as if, with the motion, rather than simply removing himself the little man had substituted a corpse in which, under his half-masked stare, the smuggler was now impaled.

‘Come…’ the man hissed, pushing to his feet. ‘This way. It’ll be better, you’ll see.’ He moved to the break in the stone. Hand, back, and elbow, momentarily in moonlight, disappeared within.

Wheeling to his feet, the young smuggler followed. He’d assumed the dark blot was simply a place where the stones had fallen or, at most, some shadowed niche. But, as he stumbled inside, a hand on either wall, he realized it was a tunnel—through which no doubt the water had run off.

‘Follow me…’ the smuggler heard, breathy in the distance.

As he moved awkwardly and uneasily in the dark, the narrow space grew crowded with breath. Breath echoed around him, echoed before him. He was a minute along the corridor before he realized the exhalations, with their loud halts and hastenings, were not from the little man meters ahead. They were his own. Missing a step down, he staggered, almost falling. Yet through it, his body was locked in its lust. He groped forward, persistently hard.

Wetting his hand with crumblings from the wall, stinging his heel on some sandy edge, and breathing, breathing about him, the tunnel thrust him through dark turns.

A sense of distance, yes; but little sense of time. For despite the five or seven kinesthetic memories he took from the passage, the truth was he ran through it very fast.

The light was dim and surprising. Something was piled before it.

Sacks?

Feeling his way by gritty cloth, he heard metal clink metal: links rattled. He stepped around knotted corners.

From two rock niches, torches spilled their glimmerings. The little man crouched by the wall, fastening chained iron at his ankle. He glanced up at the young smuggler. The rag across his eye suggested one color and another under bronze flicker: green, maroon, blue. The smuggler knew from moonlight it was grit gray.

Dragging links over the rock floor, the man stood, turned his back to the smuggler, spread his legs, and leaned his hands on the stone. Jangling against the wall, chain swung. A length lay across the buttocks. Another was wrapped around one leg. The man was breathing hard. His back rose and fell: shadows at knobby vertebrae shrank and lengthened.

The smuggler came forward, was on him, was in him. Fire caught between their cold bodies. But flesh, chill as it was, was still warmer than the metal pressed between thigh and thigh, buttock and belly.

Links swung against the smuggler’s leg as he pushed and recovered.

His chin was against his chest. A drop started on his cheek; another rolled down his shoulder. The one on his face, to his hunchings, moved along his cheekbone, through his moustache, stalled at his upper lip, quivered, then rolled over. Tasting it, he was almost surprised at its salt.

The heat between them built.

Then, once more, the little man twisted away, disengaging.

The young smuggler said, ‘Wait! No, I was just about to—’

The little man glanced back. ‘Follow me…!’ His hoarse entreaty stopped the smuggler. With the chains he’d just donned clattering about him, he made for the arch across from the stacked sacks and through its hangings. Hides swung. Beyond them, the clinking muffled and, after moments, quieted over greater distance.

Drying perspiration cooled the smuggler’s thighs and chest. Hairs tickled, lifting. Scratching at leg and shoulder, he walked forward. At the hide he hesitated, wondering at these pastimes, then pushed through.

The room beyond was bigger. One brand in its niche lit several benches and, as the young smuggler walked in, little else. Some of the benches, up on end, leaned against the wall. The smuggler stepped around them. The little man was not behind them. The hangings at the room’s far arch swayed.

He walked forward, thinking that this stroll across the ill-lit room was the opposite of his dash in the black tunnel: there darkness had held both his lust and any speculation on it in suspension, while the flickering in this tenantless space, where he’d expected, if not desire’s object, at least a quick relief from horniness, kept pushing him to think, remember, speculate on the fact that, after all, neither men nor this miming of submission and domination was his own pleasure. This was borrowed passion.

That was, indeed, his thinking.

But the feeling was that he’d loaned out something that had gone ahead with the little man; and he wanted it back—though he couldn’t have said what it was; or why.

With this uneasiness, lust ebbed, so that he lingered in the chamber perhaps a minute, breathing loudly, thinking clearly: Should I go on? What might I get from him? What does he want of me? What might I learn about the Liberator, and is it worth all this? He pushed the next hanging aside.

First he thought it was a slate slab inches ahead. Then, blinking away the moment’s disorientation, he saw wide steps down into vast darkness.

A dozen brands burned along a distant wall. And in such space, at such distance, a dozen brands gave little light. Somewhere, water gushed. Here and there he could make out balconies around the hall—and a flickering near one torch: water fell between squat pilasters, rushed along the wide conduit crossing the partially tiled floor, and swept under the two bridges that twice blocked the torrent’s glimmer.

A giant brazier stood beyond the water. Across its coals, flames scuttled.

At the hall’s far end, between leaning torches, a stone seat rose from a stepped pedestal, its ornate back carved into some beast—eagle? dragon?—which, in the play of shadow, he could not identify.

Approaching the throne in his chains, the little man stumbled to one knee, pushed back on his feet, and continued toward the vacant chair. He held most of the chains over one arm. Chain dragged behind him on the tiles. Steps restrained by the links between his shins, he moved awkwardly across mosaic, turned a moment to look over his shoulder, and went on.

Can he see me up here in the darkness? the young smuggler wondered. He let the hide fall behind him and started down the steps, glancing up at the roof, where ropes and grapples looped below beams. The stones under foot were bowed, worn at their centers. Fifty years’ footsteps? Five hundred? The odor recalled night on a winter beach down from the city; at the same time, the echoing water suggested high, summer valleys between widely separated peaks. Yet, overwhelmingly, he felt hugely underground. The conflicting senses of place, with dimnesses and distances, further dissolved the sexual surety that, moments back, had been so absolute.

Cool air moved in the high hall, though the fog had not come within.

What, he wondered, am I doing with this collared creature? But as his blood withdrew into its secret sinks and cisterns, its retreat left belly, back, and buttocks, shoulders, thighs, and arms a-tingle—with desire, yes; though, again, not for the man or his chains, but for the state the smuggler had, moments ago, slipped from. The feeling was both less localized and more intense than normal lust.

Reaching the steps’ bottom, he started over the dirt floor. It was darker here than at the stairs’ top. Like steam, the light seemed to have collected higher in the hall, leaving the floor pitchy. Twenty steps on, his bare foot went from earth to wood as he stepped onto the little bridge.

Froth whispered below.

Beyond the brazier’s black wall, he could see the little man in chains at the bottom step before the throne. There were heaps of something—hides? pelts?—one side of the chair.

And if he is the Liberator, or connected with him, the smuggler thought in a moment’s passing lucidity, what questions should I ask?

Which is the exact month of your birth? Some say the month of the Badger; some say the month of the Dog. Though a birth month you only knew by report anyway, and reports could always be wrong. (He remembered his mother and his aunt, arguing once under a plum tree, whether his own birth had come with the Badger or the Bat.) Well, then, which of the three versions of your departure from the obsidian mines for the army is right? And was that before or after you lost the eye? (He stepped from damp wood to dusty tile, trying to imagine the man in chains as an Imperial officer.) And if you’re only the Liberator’s lieutenant, which is it: You and the Liberator have been together half a dozen years? Or you’ve been together intimately since your time together in the mines?

Above him, the brazier’s rim was burnished with the small flames behind it. As he neared black metal, he felt heat through the darkness. The curved wall itself was, doubtless, hot enough to char flesh should you stumble against it. Ahead, chains dropped, then dragged, on stone.

He looked down.

Before the seat, the little man knelt at the steps’ foot. Hides hung over the chair’s arm.

After a moment, the young smuggler walked from the brazier’s wash of warmth. Cool retouched his shoulders.

Ahead, the man lay down before the bottom step, one fist near his cheek. In firelight, his callused heel was dirt black, with some cleaner skin before the leather under the instep; then more clean skin, before the cracked ball took up walking’s dirt. The foot dragged on the mosaic; the tiles’ colors were indistinguishable. A chain fell from one stair to the stair below.

The young smuggler walked up and stepped over the man’s leg with its ankle iron. (The leg moved; a loose confusion of links dragged out to become more chain.) The smuggler put one foot on the step and looked back down at the little man, who was…writhing!

Fingers opened and closed on the step’s lip. The spine arched; vertebrae were sharp, shifting knobs. An arm moved so that a shoulder blade rose, then fell, among small muscles. Cheek sliding on gritty stone, the man whispered, ‘Free me…’

The smuggler climbed the next step, a laugh in his throat struggling with his tongue. Then chills started behind his shoulders to cascade his back, pour over his buttocks, and trickle his thighs. ‘No…’ he whispered, trying to ignore both the laugh and the tingle: flat and emotionless, the word sounded like something mumbled by a new mummer on a market-wagon platform, its blandness and softness conveying only the new performer’s fear, alone before a hundred eyes. ‘No…!’ There, at least he could recognize his own voice in the echo. The tingling came on. He stepped up another step. ‘Me, free a foul, filthy, and wretched slave like you? Ha!’ All in a syllable, the laugh burst out with mummerly conviction. ‘No!’

‘Free me, master…You can do anything to me, lord. Abuse me, ravish me, keep me a slave forever or cast me loose. You have the power! For you it’s all the same…’

Was it the great brazier, the smuggler wondered as he stepped to the next step, that kept the fog from seeping within this crypt? ‘I know what you want, you low and lustful slave!’ (Declaring it with all the intensity he could muster, he still could not have said precisely what that was.) ‘You’ve done nothing to deserve anything from me! You’re low as the garbage tossed in the gutters of the Spur! You’re low as the refuse the muck crew picks up from the floors of polluted cisterns! You’re low as the deepest and darkest hole in the empress’s obsidian pits!’ Speaking, he took a huge step onto the seat itself, to stand on it, naked, moving one hand impersonally to his genitals at the return of impersonal lust, as if his body, even to his cock’s reengorgement, now began to mime desire as a last resort before the loss of what he’d felt before.

He turned on the stone seat and looked down at the man prone at the steps’ bottom.

The small shoulders flexed. The buttocks tightened and relaxed. A muscle defined itself, now in an arm, now in a leg. ‘Free me, master. You have the power. You’ve always had it. For all eternity. You stand above me. I lie below you. You only have to use it on my miserable, suffering, enchained body…’

Chains racketing, the little man rolled to his back.

The stomach muscles grew rigid in the firelight as he lifted his knees to his chest. Wrinkled, vegetative, half-embedded in black moss, the man’s penis was soft, which surprised the smuggler. Did the traditional mark of passion’s absence mean (centered in a body whose twitches and jerks spoke of all sane limits’ passionate transgression) age? Did it mean debauchery run beyond function? Perhaps it meant the transgression itself was somehow a mime, and those quiverings and shakings were actually centered about some invisible control. Did it mean that he had not gone beyond a limit but, rather, knew everything he was doing? He’s placed me here, the young smuggler thought. Then it struck: And he would do anything for me now! As if in some displacement of the inner dialogue, the little man raised his chin above his corded neck and whispered: ‘…anything, anything, master…you can do anything…’ Dragging chains around his raised thighs, the man reached through his legs to probe between his buttocks, with leather-bound hands. The single eye held both the smuggler’s, while the face twisted with the breathing, the reaching. The forehead creased above the slant rag hiding the wounded socket. Knees rocked. In his hand, the young smuggler became aware of the hardness, which, as his two forefingers lifted under his glans, thrust from its half-obliterated sleeve, became even harder, the skin along the side to which it curved hurting a little, which it sometimes did when he was very excited. Tearing and straining, the eye below would not blink. In the mouth the wet tongue twitched. The lips moved about a moist exhortation: ‘Master…?’

The smuggler came.

It was as surprising as that. During the fifteen or twenty seconds of it, a heat started below his knees as if some fire he stood near abruptly flared. The sensation mounted his thighs, his body’s trunk, till, within the flame he’d somehow become, a fist of muscle, contracting again, again, once more, and again, propelled his mucus forward. Unsteady between painful gasps, his heart blocking his ears with its thuds, his right leg quivered, near to buckling. A muscle in one flank strained to true pain. His first articulate thought was that, in the course of it, there had been none of the sub-vocal awareness (It’s beginning. Yes, it’s…Now, it’s beyond halting. This one’s not so good…? No, this one is really fine!) which usually made orgasm bearable.

The pleasure—if something so intense, so unconnected with words, could be pointed to with a word—rolled away like water off beveled sand, leaving the beach still saturated. (He took another breath. Pain caught again in his side. He looked about, to see how to climb down.) What lay beneath was fear. Was it simply the surprise of ejaculation coupled with his pounding heart, together miming terror? One hand unsteady on a gritty hide over the throne’s arm, he jumped.

His leg would not stop shaking!

As he came on down the steps, the little man grasped the smuggler’s ankle, which twisted in hard fingers, wet from one or the other of them. ‘Free me…!’

The young smuggler pulled loose, nearly fell, and rushed across the tile, the floor going from mosaic to dirt.

As he neared the brazier, he realized the hall was not empty.

Off by the wall a flame moved sideways, raised, and went on to ignite another. The twin fires lit what one had been too dim for: the head, arm, and shoulder of a yellow-haired barbarian, carrying his brand from niche to niche.

As the smuggler neared the brazier, he heard falling gravel. Someone had wheeled up a stilted ladder. At the top, her chin aflicker, a woman tossed in a pailful of coal.

She glanced down. The smuggler almost ran.

Still panting, he hurried over the bridge toward the wide stairs. By a fitful torch, two youngsters, boy and girl, shook out a hide with thudding snaps. Dust rose between the smuggler and the flame. The boy, who was black, coughed.

Had any of them seen him? Heard him? He looked back. Had they realized what he was doing as he stood atop the throne? (His back tingled.) At least the little man had been on the floor. But he, standing high in firelight…Why did that happen to me? he wondered. What is that supposed to mean about me? He pushed those thoughts out of his head with the immediate practicality: Return? Might the man need help to carry away his chains? Certainly he was some morning cleaner or porter, who, among these others, had thought to get here before the rest and avail himself of the empty space until his coworkers arrived.

He must have known what he was doing….

The young smuggler started up, leaving behind the subterranean matutinal preparations. (He could not imagine the hall’s use.) Possibly they had not been observed or, if observed, his action had not been recognized for what it was (Do you see something like that unless you’re looking for it?) He pushed through the hangings, thinking that though such sexual sensation was among the most intense he’d ever felt, easily he—

‘Excuse me,’ the woman in the middle of the room said. She lowered the bench from those stacked up. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be down helping them clean out the—’

‘No!’ He looked about sharply, stepping back. Swinging hide brushed his buttocks and shoulders. ‘Yes. No…! They sent me up here to get…’ He pointed beyond her to the hangings in the far arch. ‘In there! I’ll be down with it in just a minute.’ Then, without waiting for her to speak, he dashed by her through the far hangings into the next room.

And into blackness.

The torches that had burned in the niches before were out. As his hand found stone, his foot clinked some chain still on the floor. Feeling along the wall, he looked back, but the woman had not pushed aside the hangings to follow or spy. He stepped, reached out again, stepped, reached out: as his hand felt sackcloth, he thought:

I’m glad I’m not as young as all that! Such sensations as he’d just had, encountered early enough, could become the object of all sexual searching. No, for all its intensity, wonder, pleasure, he could easily live his life without experiencing that again.

Sacks were behind. Stone was under hand. A stubbed toe on a step up confirmed that he was, indeed, somewhere within the tunnel.

That’s the kind of feeling, he thought, stumbling in the dark, one could kill to regain. But he had known a truth. (He staggered on, surrounded by the echo of his breath.) The truth of the throne of power, the truth of the secret center, the truth of the hidden crypt, the lie of the limit to pleasure. Or had he? He stumbled again. He had told a truth before, to the one-eyed man: about his feelings for the Liberator. The Liberator was the greatest man in all Nevèrÿon. The Liberator—

He halted, as if he’d become aware of someone with him in the tunnel. But it was not the Liberator he imagined breathing beside him in blackness; nor the one-eyed man. It was the Liberator’s barbarian adversary of rumor, conjecture, and surmise.

For he knew, with the same certainty by which he knew his own name, that the barbarian who had died fighting the Liberator in some sexual crusade was a lie. The kind of pleasure one might kill to regain? Yes. But for just that reason—because, whatever pain accompanied it, it was pleasure, not pain—no one would kill to release himself from it. If there had been such a barbarian as rumor and fable told of, his situation had certainly been more complicated than that which the smuggler, with his care, study, and collation, had assembled from these rumors and fables to speak of so easily in the market. Again, as had happened so many times over the duration of his obsession, he realized he knew something about the Liberator, about the collar, if not his one-eyed lieutenant who also sometimes wore it. Indeed, the smuggler thought, the wonder is that I know.

Though how the known differed from the lies, distortions, and displacements that wove together language’s dream of meaning he could not, as he felt his way again through the dark, make clear.

And why, now, did his judgment of the Liberator’s greatness seem so trivial? (No, his thought did not halt just because it had crossed a certainty.) Could it be that, in the heat of lust’s extremity, the very concept of truth had come unstuck from his initial utterance to the one-eyed man and, in its molten state, fused now to this new notion, so that his new ‘truth’ was finally just as much an assemblage, a dream, a lie as all his other stories?

He staggered on, around one corner, around another, and was just wondering if perhaps he had missed a turnoff or, even more likely, had wandered into some side tunnel that would lead him on aimlessly and endlessly through the dark with only his own breath for company, when, ahead, he saw light glimmer on the wet wall.

Seconds later, he stepped onto the cistern’s sheeted floor.

He looked up.

Gray morning had wiped away night. Five long logs lay across the cistern top, some ropes still lashed to them—none of which he’d seen earlier.

He looked down.

The little man’s leather kilt lay on dry stone. Across it was the smuggler’s clout-cloth. He stepped over to it, squatted, and lifted it. ‘Ahh!’ He’d tried to toss it toward the drier rock; one end, of course, had fallen in the water. Leave it? (Above him, he heard female shouts, one over here, then, moments later, one over there.) No. Though he was not above going about the streets like a naked barbarian, cloth was not so common you abandoned a length of it, until it was soiled beyond washing and worn beyond patching. (‘Ayeee!’ and ‘Ya-ha!’ Then, ‘Ha!’ and, moments later, ‘Aye!’ above.) He picked it up: wet, it turned out, not only at the end but in half a dozen other spots along it. He wrung it, stood, doubled it over his shoulder, and walked to the staples. He fingered the edge of the broken one. Another sagged till it looked as if it might pull free with the next hand or foot set to it.

He climbed.

It didn’t under either.

As his head rose above the cistern wall, he looked around the yard.

His first thought was that both were about the age at which he’d first run away for Kolhari: two young women were throwing a child’s black ball back and forth from one corner to the other. Both wore the same sort of clout whose end clung so coldly now to the smuggler’s back.

With her yellow hair cropped for vanishing summer, the barbarian whipped the ball into the air with a snap of her arm—‘Aaiii!’—that shook her tanned breasts.

A dark Kolhari girl, her hair bound back in a puffy bush with a leather thong, the other ran across the yard, leapt with both hands high, caught it, and swung her arms down and around her till her fists almost brushed the pavement, then snapped it—‘Ya-hey!’—into the air, while the barbarian, staring up, ran a step in one direction, two in another, then raced off in a third to catch it, to cry out, to fling it high again.

Wondering if they saw him, the young smuggler climbed from the cistern. He watched for three breaths, walked a little way off, then turned back to look through four more shouts and tosses. The fog had left only a ghost of dampness in the air. Though the morning was clear and the yellow sun lit the wall across from an eastern alley, down a northern street mist still put the sheerest veil over the houses.

‘Ay-yahaaa!’ The barbarian stumbled on her throw: the ball shot almost straight up.

‘Oh! Hey…!’ Her companion ran across the yard, stopped a few steps from her friend, who sat now on the stone with her hands behind her, one of her shoulders and one of her breasts and one of her knees in sunlight. With delight, the smuggler saw the copper freckles speckling all three.

The dark girl put her fingers over her mouth, laughing, stepping about, shaking her head, moving from sunlight to shadow to sunlight. In an unexpected and astonishing gift, the smuggler saw her back, so much the darker, was freckled too—with those even rarer points of patinaed bronze that made him want to put his eye an inch away from one, then, suddenly, thrust out his tongue as if it might hold some marvelous taste other than the skin’s faint salt.

The barbarian rocked forward, swaying in a torrent of giggles.

Between her fingers the Kolhari one asked: ‘Are you hurt? I mean…’

The other managed: ‘Yes, yes, it’s all right. I mean, no. I’m all right!’ Finally she said: ‘The ball—did you see where it went?’

Catching her breath, the dark one pointed across the yard: ‘In there, I think.’

‘Oh, no…!’ The barbarian began to laugh again.

Both looked toward the cistern.

‘I heard it go in,’ the smuggler called. ‘It bounced on the back wall and splashed down on the bottom.’

He could not have said, later, if the feeling had come before he’d spoken and therefore had impelled him to speech, or if it were the detritus of speech, composed of the leftover heart pounding from his bravery in speaking at all. But he waited to see if their look, if their laugh, if some word from them would include him.

They looked.

They smiled.

One of them (‘You said you…heard it go in?’) spoke.

But through the intensity of his gaze, though he nodded, tried to smile, and realized he was only staring, he lost the specificity of the exchange in the dazzle of the sun-swath that tipped the standing one’s brown and spotted shoulder, that bronzed the dotted shin, breast, and cheek of the one sitting. The answer? The truth? For a moment everything reeled in a fiery gust (from the far sun? from the distant sea?), while the sky cracked.

Pieces of the day balanced, gray and yellow.

‘Well, there’s no water in it.’ The barbarian pulled her feet under her, reached about to push herself erect. ‘I can climb down and get—’

‘Don’t you dare!’ declared the other. ‘You’re going to go down into some old empty cistern? You don’t know what you’ll find in there—!’ They laughed again.

Across the yard, he tried, tried again, tried a third time to make some joke, to comment, to volunteer climbing down for them—but all three left no visible trace on the two youngsters, one a yellow-haired barbarian whore (really, he doubted it; but he hoped she was, like himself, a whore), one a brown and respectable Kolhari girl. His throat muscles had moved, but not his lips or tongue. Certainly, he thought, in the pursuit of such eccentric pleasure it could be no easier to whisper, ‘Master…!’ for the first time than to speak to a woman whose body and bearing moved you in desire’s more familiar paths. He started across the yard for the sunny alley from which, as best he could remember, he’d entered the yard in darkness.

Walking naked over dust, he glanced at them again: They are beautiful, he thought simply, bluntly, truthfully. Why use men’s bodies when there are such as these in the city? But as, from the alley’s end, their laughter swirled his nakedness, he knew what he’d learned of the Liberator as he’d stood on the throne, whether fog-blurred dream or granite truth, had only secondarily to do with bodies.