Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities Page 4

  The three horses hammered abreast of her, halted.

  The tallest and, from his nappy beard and open face, the youngest grinned. ‘What are you looking at, girl?’ Some teeth were missing.

  Pryn recovered from her crouch, thigh-deep in scratchy brush. ‘Are you slavers?’—though in asking, she’d realized they were not.

  Another rider, a weathered man, squat, muscular, and hairy-shouldered, threw back his head and laughed. His teeth, the ones visible, were large, yellow, and sound.

  The third was naked, save a cloth tied about his forehead and hanging to his shoulders. ‘Do we look like slavers?’ His voice was rough enough to suggest a throat injury. On the right side of his body, Pryn saw, as his horse wheeled and wheeled back over the road, long scars roped him, chest, flank, and thigh, as though someone had flung blacksnakes at him that had stuck. ‘Do you think we look like slavers, girl?’

  Pryn shook her head.

  ‘Slavers?’ The youngster laughed. Despite his height, Pryn was sure he was not a year older than she. ‘Us, slavers? Do you know Gorgik the Liberator? We’re going to join him and his men at—’ He stopped, because the other two grimaced. The squat one made half a motion for silence. The youngster leaned forward, more soberly. ‘You want to know if we’re slavers? Well, we have a question for you: Are you one of the Child Empress’s spies, in the pay of the High Court of Eagles?’

  Once more Pryn shook her head.

  ‘That’s what you say.’ The youngster lowered his voice. ‘But how do we know?’ His gappy grin remained. ‘The Liberator isn’t the most popular man in Nevèrÿon. The Empress’s spies are cunning and conniving.’

  Pryn stepped onto the road. ‘You know I’m not a spy the same way I know you’re not slavers.’ What she thought was that they might be bandits; she did not want to act afraid. ‘You don’t look like slavers. I don’t look like a spy.’

  The youngster leaned even lower, till he looked at her right between his mount’s red ears. ‘While you and I both may very well have seen slavers, and so know what slavers look like, what if we here have never seen a spy…?’

  Pryn frowned. She had never seen a spy either.

  The squat one said: ‘Spies often look like other than spies. It’s one sign by which you know them.’ He moved thick fingers in the graphite-gray mane.

  The naked one with the headrag and the scars said: ‘This road runs from the Faltha mountains to port Kolhari. Which way do you go?’

  ‘There.’ Pryn pointed toward the city.

  ‘Good. Come up on my horse. We’ll take you into town.’

  Again Pryn shook her head. ‘I can get there by myself.’

  The scarred rider pulled a four-foot lance from a holder on his horse’s flank. ‘If you don’t come with us,’ he said evenly, ‘we’ll kill you. Make your choice, spy.’

  Pryn thought of bolting from them, thought of running between them, and stood.

  The rider held his lance with his elbow against his scarred side so that his forearm was at a right angle to his body. The metal point showed the hammer marks of its forging. ‘Our friend here—’ he jerked his chin toward the bearded boy—‘has said more than he should have. You’re going into the city anyway. Ride with us. You may be a spy. We can’t take chances.’

  Pryn walked across the road toward his horse. ‘You don’t give me much choice.’

  The scarred man said: ‘Sit in front of me.’

  Angry and frightened, Pryn reached up to grapple the horse’s hard neck. The naked man bent. He shoved his lance back into its holder and slid his hand under Pryn’s raised thigh to tug her up, while she got one leg awkwardly before his belly. (I’ve climbed on a dragon without help!) As she slid back against him, one of his hands came around her stomach. The mare stamped dirt. The rider behind her, stomach against her, flapped reins before her. She felt him kick the horse—not to a gallop but a leisurely trot. The others, trotting, cantering, trotting again, came abreast. Pryn’s capitulation made her anger more acute. ‘Since I am being punished for what your young friend knows and almost said, at least let me know what it is. Who is this Liberator—and take your hand off my breast!’ She pushed the rider’s hand from where the dark fingers had moved.

  The squat rider laughed. ‘You want to know about Gorgik? Once he was a slave; now he’s vowed to end all slavery throughout Nevèrÿon. Some say that someday, if not soon, he may be a minister! Myself, I knew him years ago when he was an officer in the Child Empress’s army. One of the best, too.’ The squat man rubbed a wide, studded belt bound high on hairy ribs. ‘I fought under him—but only for a month. Then they broke up our division and sent me off with another captain. But we’re going to fight under him again—if he’ll have us. Hey, boys?’

  ‘Aye!’ came from the one boy beside her.

  The naked man put his hand lightly back on Pryn’s stomach.

  ‘Only with him a month, yes.’ The squat rider grew pensive. ‘He won’t remember me. But we loved that man, we did—every one of us under him. And slavery is an evil at least two of us know first hand.’ He laughed again and guided his horse around a branch fallen on the road. Other hooves smashed leaves. ‘That’s why we three go to—’

  ‘Move your hand!’ Pryn shoved the naked rider’s arm from where it had again risen. Hoisting herself forward, she glared over her shoulder. ‘I didn’t want this ride! I’m not here to play your dumb games! Cut it out!’

  ‘Look, girl,’ the rider said from the rags about his dark face. ‘You sit behind me. That way, you can—’

  ‘—she can put her hands where she wants!’ cried the bearded youth. His face and the squat one’s held the wide grins of stupid boys.

  Pryn decided that, of the three, the bearded youngster was the fool. Till then she’d vaguely thought that, since his age was closest to hers, he might be the easiest to enlist for help. But he talked foolishly and was probably too intimidated by the older two anyway.

  Her rider reined. She swung her leg over the horse’s neck and slid down to the road. The squat one backstepped his horse to give her another unwanted hand. (Remember, Pryn thought, as she came up behind one smooth and one scarred shoulder, within the week you have ridden a dragon…) Filthy and frayed vine cord knotted the rags to her rider’s head. Those scars? A mountain girl living in harsh times, Pryn had seen women and men with wounds from injury and accident. What was before her, though, suggested greater violence than the mishandling of plowhead or hunting knife. She put her hands on the rider’s flanks. His flesh was hard and hot. She could feel one scar, knobby and ropy, under her hand’s heel.

  Slavery?

  The horse trotted.

  The flapping headdress smelled of oil and animals. Pryn leaned to the side to see ahead—mostly trees now, with the road’s ruts descending into them. Gripping the horse’s sides with her knees and the rider’s with her hands, she settled into the motion.

  Once she thought: A beautiful young queen, abducted on the road by fearful, romantic bandits…But they were not romantic. She was not beautiful. No, this was not the time for tale-teller’s stuff. It was a bit fearful. But as yet, she reflected, she was not full of fear. From the threat of death to the straying hands, it all had too much the air of half-hearted obligation.

  Once more she moved her head from behind the flapping cloth and called to the bearded boy, who had been riding beside her almost ten minutes, ‘Where is this Gorgik the Liberator? Go on, tell me.’

  Clearly, from boyish excitement, he wanted to. But he glanced at his companions. As clearly, she had been right about his intimidation. ‘You’ll see soon enough,’ he called back across the little abyss of hooves, dust, and wind.

  The shift from country to city Pryn never quite caught. Now there was a river by the road. The horses’ hoofbeats changed timbre. She looked down—yes, the road itself along which they trotted was, now, paved with flat stones set in hard mud. She looked up to see green-tiled decorations interspersed with terra-cotta castings on an upper corni
ce of a wealthy home beyond a stone wall lapped with vines. On the other side of the road she saw an even higher roof, over a higher wall, moving up toward them as the other fell behind.

  And the river was gone.

  ‘You wanted to know where Gorgik the Liberator is?’ her rider called back. ‘Look there!’

  They wheeled off the main highway.

  Ahead, armed men stood before a gate in another wall. Above, Pryn saw the top story of another great house. Much of the decorative tiling had fallen away. Behind the crenellations a dozen men ambled about the roof, some with spears, some with bows. At the corner one sat on a cracked carving—dragon or eagle she couldn’t tell—looking down into the yard.

  The younger and older either side, Pryn’s rider reined at the wooden door in the stone wall, which was half again as high as the youngster on his horse.

  The squat one bawled out in a voice much too loud simply to be speaking to the men in leather helmets either side of the gate, with their broad knives hanging at their hips: ‘Go in and tell your master, Gorgik the Liberator, that three brave fellows have come to pledge hands and hearts to whatever end he would put them!’

  With the blue eyes and frizzy blond beard of a barbarian—rare enough in northern Ellamon to cause comment when you saw one in the market—a guard stepped toward them, pushed up his helmet; and bawled back: ‘What names might he know you by?’

  ‘Tell your great and gracious master, Gorgik, that the Southern Fox—’ he gestured toward Pryn’s rider—‘and the Red Badger—’ which was, apparently, the bearded boy—‘and myself, the Western Wolf—’ the thick hand fell against his own black rug of a chest—‘have come to serve him! Ask him what he knows of us, and whether the tales of our exploits that have preceded us are sufficiently impressive to allow us to join his company! Let him consider! We shall return in a few hours to seek admittance!’

  The barbarian guard nodded toward Pryn, then said in a perfectly ordinary voice: ‘There’re four of you…?’

  In an equally ordinary voice the Western Wolf said: ‘Oh. I forgot the kid.’ He turned back to the gate, took a breath, and bawled: ‘Tell him that the Blue Heron is also among our number and to consider her for his cause!’

  Then Wolf, Badger, and Fox, with the Heron behind (thinking of Raven and capital letters), wheeled from the gate. Dust struck up from the road high as the horses’ haunches.

  As the great houses drifted by her behind high walls and palm clusters, what Pryn thought was: Here, I am suddenly in this world of men, made to ride when I want to walk, touched when I want to be left alone, and given a new name when I’ve just learned to write my old one, all under some fanciful threat of death because I might be a spy. (Just what tales, she wondered, had they been listening to?) I don’t like it at all, she thought. I don’t like it.

  As unclear as the shift between country and city had been, Pryn was equally uncertain—as she was thinking all this—where the change had come between suburb and center. But when the horses clattered across a paved and populous avenue to splash into a muddy alley of stone houses with thatched shacks between, she realized it had.

  They crossed another street.

  Down another alley water flashed between masts.

  They turned onto another avenue. Noise and confusion dazzled her. Living on the edge of a mountain town, without ever really considering herself part of them, Pryn had known the gossipings, prejudices, and rigidities of town life that had played through Ellamon’s quiet streets. But here, the hustle and hallooing made her wonder: How, here, could anyone know anyone?

  Twice in one block the Fox’s horse danced aside to avoid someone, first a woman who dashed from the crowds at one side of the street, a four-foot basket strapped to her back, to plunge among people on the other side; second, three youngsters chasing after a black ball. Pryn clung to the Fox’s twisting back. (Naked as Pryn’s rider and muddy to the knees, the little girl grabbed up the black pellet, which had ceased bouncing to roll a ragged course between cobbles. With a barbarian boy in a torn smock tripping behind, the children fled off down another side street.) The horses began to trot once more beside the hurrying men and women; one man hailed a friend across the road; another ran after someone just departed—to tell her one last thing.

  When the white-haired woman left the corner, she was deep in conversation with a younger, who wore a red scarf for a sash. A man and a woman servant behind held decorated parasols over them—or tried to. The sunlit edge kept slipping back and forth across the older woman’s elaborate coif and silver combs. Now she pushed bracelets and blue sleeves up her arms and turned to another woman in her party with short hair incongruously pale as goat’s cream. This one—not much more than a girl, really—wore leather straps across bare shoulders; a strap ran down between abrupt, small breasts. She carried several knives at her belt and walked the hot stones barefoot. Pryn saw beyond the scarred shoulder she clung to that another woman servant had despaired of shading this sunken-eyed, cream-haired creature. (Was she yet eighteen? Certainly she was no more than twenty.) She stepped away here, then off there, now looking into a basket of nuts some porter carried by her, now turning to answer the older woman with the combs. A woman at least forty, the servant frowned at her and finally let the parasol shaft fall back on her own shoulder.

  Pryn had assumed Fox, Badger, and Wolf had seen them too—but the horses, grown skittish at the traffic, must have distracted them. And the women’s course veered closer than even Pryn had expected—

  One of the servants gave a small shriek.

  The horses reared.

  The white-haired woman turned in startled anger. She stepped back, hands down in blowing blue. The woman with the red scarf at her waist took the older woman’s shoulder and gave a wordless shout of her own. Servants scrambled. One dropped a parasol. The woman with the scarf turned from the older to grab it up.

  The horses reared again.

  Pryn clutched the Fox and clamped her knees to keep astride. Forehooves clattered to the street. The manservant shouted: ‘Country ruffians! What’s wrong with you! Out of the street, now! Out of the street! Don’t you know enough to let a woman of Madame Keyne’s standing in this city have the right of way? Rein your horses back! Rein them, I say—!’ The Fox’s horse started to rear again, but jarred, stopping.

  Pryn felt it ankle to jaw. It was as if a dragon in airborne career had suddenly smashed rock. What had happened was that the small, cream-haired woman had grasped the horse’s bridle and, with a jerk, brought the beast up short.

  The little woman’s gray eyes were suddenly centers where lines of effort and anger met. The horse jerked against her grip three times, then stilled. ‘Stupid—!’ the woman got out between tight teeth. The angry eyes swept up by the Fox to meet Pryn’s. The horse quivered between Pryn’s legs. Under Pryn’s hands, the Fox’s scarred shoulder flexed and flexed as he tried to rein his animal from her.

  Suddenly the little woman released the bridle and stalked off after the others, who had collected themselves to hurry on, again deep in their conversation. Servants hurried behind them, parasols waving.

  The horses moved about one another. Fox, Badger, and Wolf were all cursing: the women, the city, the sun above them, the people around them. Swaying at the Fox’s back, Pryn tried to look after the vanishing group. Now and again, across the crowd, she thought she caught sight of the cream-haired woman behind the party, off in some alley with sea at its end.

  ‘Get down!’

  Pryn looked back at the dirty headdress, scarred shoulder right, unscarred left.

  ‘Go on, girl!’ the Fox demanded; the horse stilled. ‘We brought you to the city, where you wanted to go. Get down now! Be on your way!’

  Confused, Pryn slid her foot back, up, and over, then dropped to the cobbles, with the sore knees and tingling buttocks of a novice rider—dragons notwithstanding. She stepped back from the moving legs, looking up.

  The three above her, on their stepping horses, looked do
wn.

  The Badger, with his tightly-curled beard, seemed about to ask something, and Pryn found her own lips halting on a question: What of the Blue Heron and Liberator? Despite her anger, her impressment had at least provided a form for her arrival. Aside from roving hands, she’d believed there high-sounding purpose. But as she ducked back (someone else was shouting for them to move), she realized they were, the three of them, country men, as confused and discommoded by this urban hubbub as she was.

  ‘Are you going to kill her now?’ the Badger blurted, looking upset.

  ‘She’s no spy!’ The Western Wolf leaned forward disgustedly to pat his horse’s neck. ‘She’s no different from you, boy—a stupid mountain kid run off from home to the city. I’ve a mind to turn you both loose and send you on your ways—’

  Pryn had a momentary image of herself stuck in this confusion with the young dolt.

  But the Fox said, ‘Come on, the two of you, and stop this!’ He turned his horse up the street; the two turned after him.

  Pryn watched them trot off—to be stopped another half-block on by more people crossing. People closed around Pryn. After she had been bumped three times, cursed twice, and ignored by what must have been fifty passers-by in the space of half a minute, she began to walk.

  Everyone else was walking.

  To stay still in such a rush was madness.

  Pryn walked—for hours. From time to time she sat: once on the steps in a doorway, once on a carved log bench beside a building. The tale-teller’s food had been finished the previous night and the package discarded; so far she’d only thought about food (and home!) when she’d passed the back door of a bread shop whose aromatic ovens flooded the alley with the odor of toasted grain.