Tales of Neveryon by Samuel R. Delany Read Free Book Online

demeaning for a provincial potentate – who bore such a resemblance to her present cook at Court that it all but kept her out of the kitchen. She had been a slave only for three weeks: an army had come, fire-arrows had lanced through the narrow stone windows, and the potentate’s ill-shaven head was hacked off and tossed in the firelight from spear to spear by several incredibly dirty, incredibly tattooed soldiers so vicious and shrill that she finally decided (from what they later did to two women of the potentate’s entourage in front of everyone) they were insane. The soldiers’ chief, however, was in alliance with her uncle; and she had been returned to him comparatively unharmed. Still, the whole experience had been enough to make her decide that the institution of slavery was totally distasteful and so was the institution of war – that, indeed, the only excuse for the latter was the termination of the former. Such experiences, among an aristocracy deposed by the dragon for twenty years and only recently returned to power, were actually rather common, even if the ideas taken from them were not. The present government did not as an official policy oppose slavery, but it did not go out of its way to support it either; and the Child Empress herself, whose reign wasproud and prudent, had set a tradition that no slaves were used at Court.
    From dreams of hunger and pains in his gut and groin, where a one-eyed boy with clotted mouth and scaly hands tried to tell him something he could not understand, but which seemed desperately important that he know, Gorgik woke with the sun in his face. The tent was being taken down from over him. A blue-turbaned head blocked the light. ‘Oh, you
are
awake …! Then you’d better come with me.’ With the noise of the decamping caravan around them Jahor took Gorgik to see the Vizerine. Bluntly she informed him, while ox drivers, yellow-turbaned secretaries, red-scarved maids, and harnessed porters came in and out of the tent, lifting, carrying, unlacing throughout the interview, that she was taking him to Kolhari under her protection. He had been purchased from the mines – take off that collar and put it somewhere. At least by day. She would trust him never to speak to her unless she spoke to him first: he was to understand that if she suspected her decision were a mistake, she could and would make his life far more miserable than it had ever been in the mines. Gorgik was at first not so much astonished as uncomprehending. Then, when astonishment, with comprehension, formed, he began to babble his inarticulate thanks – till, of a sudden, he became confused again and disbelieving and so, as suddenly, stopped. (Myrgot merely assumed he had realized that even gratitude is best displayed in moderation, which she took as another sign of his high character and her right choice.) Then men were taking the tent down from around them, too. With narrowed eyes, Gorgik looked at the thin woman in the green shift and sudden sun, sitting at a table from which women in red scarves were already removing caskets, things rolled and tied in ribbons, instruments of glass and bronze. Was shesuddenly smaller? The thin braids, looped bright black about her head, looked artificial, almost like a wig. (He knew they weren’t.) Her dress seemed made for a woman fleshier, broader. She looked at him, the skin near her eyes wrinkled in the bright morning, her neck a little loose, the veins on the backs of her hands as high from age as those on his from labor. What he did realize, as she blinked in the full sunlight, was that he must suddenly look as different to her as she now looked to him.
    Jahor touched Gorgik’s arm, led him away.
    Gorgik had at least ascertained that his new and precarious position meant keeping silent. The caravan steward put him to work grooming oxen by day – which he liked. The next night he spent in the Vizerine’s tent. And dreams of the mutilated child woke him with blocked