‘But I can’t come!’ he blurted. ‘I mean…I can’t come with you!’ He blinked at her, while she questioned with masked eyes. ‘Thank you—for wanting me to. Certainly, for saving me. I mean, I’m pretty much of a loser; I can stumble into more trouble than any three men you’ll meet. I know it. It’s true, I’ve always been like that. I could be flogged for it, and it wouldn’t change, believe me. I could use your protection, I know. And I’m grateful to you for offering it—’

  The masked woman beamed.

  ‘But I’ve got…my own task to do—’

  At which Raven (and one of the others passing by) let a knowing chuckle.

  ‘I’ve got to go he said. I just don’t…well, I don’t feel safe here! Not with that bandit about in the bushes.’ But what was there to be frightened of, he thought with hopeless illogic (realizing the lack of coherence as he thought it), in another man? ‘Really, it’s dumb of me.’ (Ask her for the cart cover…!) ‘But I…well, I want to go! Please, you have to let me go. Now. I’m sorry. Please!’

  ‘Please?’ No longer smiling, the little woman dropped her eyes and bowed her head in a manner that spoke of total acquiescence. ‘Come with us…?’

  The smuggler was suddenly frightened all over; and angry; and hurt. Because he would have to say, again, no. And because, with all three women he had been sleeping with back in Kolhari, he’d often felt the same, suddenly and naturally he did what he’d done with them when he felt this way, though he experienced less desire now for this hard little woman than he’d felt for any man who, from time to time, he’d indulged on the bridge:

  He took her small face in his big hands (her eyes beat, in their mask, lifting, surprised) and pulled her to him. Only (as had the others, toward the angry, unhappy ends) she stiffened and would not come. So he came to her, with his heavy body, and let his hands go down her neck to her shoulders, then behind them, and across them; and he hugged her. Like them, it was like hugging some stone or tree that would not give. (He remembered the last woman he’d put his arms around—the little, stupid one.) And yes, just as rigid, just as stiff. (Are all the women in all the world, he wondered, really alike, no matter the seeming difference…?) Holding her, he tried again to remember her getting on to his cart bench in the rain. When he’d offered her the ride, the signs she’d displayed of aspiring to some masculine power had surely masked, at least for him, something unquestionably and quintessentially feminine, so that the signs of aspiration themselves had been eccentric, amusing, playful; and she’d seemed merely a playful and amusing, if eccentric, creature. But now, with the advent of her friends, it was clear that she no longer aspired to that power; it was—and had been all along—hers. Whatever had been quintessentially feminine was an illusion (in her? in all women?). Certainly he’d had enough experience with the women and men of his country to recognize that the signs she displayed toward him now all spoke of a certain masculine weakness. (He looked down, brushing her forehead, almost inadvertently, with his lips.) Yet they were all saturated with that same astonishing, displaced, and dispossessing power, so that, as he had not with the others, he released her more hurriedly than he had them and stepped back, his heart beating a bit more rapidly than he’d expected, his breath coming a bit faster than it had before. How many women of his own land, he wondered, had stepped too quickly back from their saviors, granting them only a half-measure of what they needed above all things to go on? Where, he wondered, had she, had they—he looked about the clearing at her friends—seized such power? But because there was nothing in the whole of his primitive life from which to construct the lie, from me (as there would have been with any who’d ever before questioned the sources of his own strength), he felt as uncomfortable, as unsettled, as discommoded as a girl.

  As had all the others, she smiled.

  ‘I’m going…’ he whispered. ‘I have to—’

  ‘Hooop-ah!’ one woman cried as, having finished with the spoils, two others lifted the bandit’s cart, racketing loudly, to overturn it. Its remaining contents crashed out on leaves.

  Startled, the smuggler looked back at the wrecked campsite. It wasn’t just the cart: stones about the fireplace had been kicked away. The cooking pot had overturned. And the dish from which the bandit had prepared the smuggler’s roast had been broken and the meat stepped on in the wanderings back and forth.

  The others walked over. The barrel-chested woman who’d taken him before to the cart said, not to him: ‘We go now? Yes?’

  The smuggler stepped to his ox’s shoulder; looking at the tree with the donkey’s and the ox’s reins, for a moment he was unsure which set went to which beast. ‘The donkey,’ he said, at last deciphering the twisted lines; he began to untie his ox. ‘What are we going to do with him?’

  The barrel-chested woman said: ‘We leave it here, yes? For him. If he come back, he want it? He need it! It be good for him. Right?’ Then, in a movement, she turned, pulled out her twin blades, raised them high over her head, and hacked, breath-jarringly hard, at the donkey’s flat neck. It took her down into a crouch, as she tugged on through the broad neck muscles. The head didn’t sever at the blow, though the smuggler expected to see it fall free. The animal gave a breathless gargle, staggered to the side, went down on its forelegs, got up again—staggered into the ox, into the woman (who stood now, breathing hard), stumbled out to the end of its reins, spurting and splattering, its mouth working wildly inside the bag, lost its hind footing, lost its fore-footing again—and fell over. The ribs heaved for three loud, clotted roars, then stilled.

  ‘There.’ The woman put her sword away. ‘We leave it for him. He find it.’

  In the canvas feed bag, the donkey suddenly snorted; it kicked, quivered, gasped again—then, over a few more seconds, died.

  The ox stepped about.

  Where he’d been splashed, blood dribbled the smuggler’s calf. He didn’t even reach down to wipe it.

  His heart hammered; this surround of terror was as pervasive as the fog.

  Raven had walked off again.

  Looking about, he saw that the redhead was watching him. He blinked, questioning, confused—in the middle of it, he realized he wasn’t breathing, sucked in a great gasp (harsh enough to make Raven glance back over) and, with it, the sweetish smell of slaughter. His ox was lowing, steadily, loudly, and not looking at the carcass. Catching her bridle up short, the smuggler freed her reins and led her away. Her lowing and the creaking cart behind covered the mutterings with which he tried to quiet her.

  The women, including Raven, were talking rapidly in their language.

  The gaunt one took a long stick and plunged it in a pot they’d pulled from the bandit’s wagon, raised the dripping end, and thrust it in the fire. It spluttered, as flame contended between the damp wood and the easy oil she’d soaked it with.

  Then it flared red.

  With the bright brand high, she kicked apart the fireplace, damping coals with sandalfuls of earth.

  As the woman stamped about in the ashes, the smuggler looked back at his ox. Its shoulder and flank were matted with donkey blood.

  Still talking, the others moved off into the trees, the mist. The smuggler took his cart along behind. Leaves got between him and the flare the gaunt woman carried aloft. Then, at the spot he’d first left his cart, red flame caught in an equine eye, on a dappled shoulder; there was neighing and the sound of hooves in brush.

  They’d left horses tethered in the darkness!

  One and another of them mounted, while he stopped his cart again, wondering would they just ride off and leave him in the pitchy woods. Hooves smashed about in the undergrowth toward him; blackness blocked the brand; and Raven’s voice came down at him from what—since he could not see her at all, really—might have been some tree’s upper branches. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll go slowly. So you can follow.’

  They did, for a while—long enough, anyway, for him to get the cart on the road. Two more flares had been lit from the first; there were three brands now. Among the half-dozen riders cantering before him in the black, red flames smoked from cheap oil.

  Once alone and twice with a companion, once holding up one of the torches, then twice in the dark, Raven rode back to him.

  ‘Where will you go?’ he asked her the last time, walking along by his animal.

  ‘To the Crevasse!’ Some jollity had begun among the women ahead, and, stamping and cantering, Raven had carried it back with her. ‘The Western Crevasse! We are leaving Nevèrÿon at last!’

  Ahead, one of her landswomen shouted something into the night, waving her brand—the one who’d slain the donkey.

  ‘There,’ Raven explained to him in her most reasonable tone, ‘all will be well. The lips of the Crevasse are shaped as the inner blades of a sword. Once we ride within them—’ and here she clapped her hands over her horse’s head—‘we will again be in a place where sanity and civilization reign. And the madness of this nation, with its slaves and liberators, this land that boasts an empress but is really governed by scheming men whom you can never find when you look for them, will be behind us for good! Will you come with me, wise and pretty man?’

  ‘I can’t…!’

  Raven rode round his cart once, then, without acknowledging she’d heard him, galloped ahead, leaving him plodding in back.

  He wondered if the judgment of the redhead (who rode her horse up with the others) about her friend, would turn out to be true.

  A stade or two along, he stopped his cart to climb up on the bench, now feeling behind him for this, now checking under the seat for that. Should he take out one of his weapons, just to have it beside him? But the resolve ran from him even as he considered it. He let himself slouch forward, sucking in long, moist breaths from the cricketless night. The cart rattled on beneath him. When he looked up, the brands were only a pink, wobbling blur, through mist. Now and again he could hear the women’s shouts, their laughter.

  As the distance between them increased he thought to call out. What wouldn’t I do, he wondered, to have them continue this frightening protection?

  He felt truly abandoned.

  Just to see what happened, the smuggler tried to imagine himself in the Kolhari crypt, standing on the throne in torchlight, with Raven in chains at the foot. Or perhaps the other way around…? Varying the pictures in his mind, he waited for desire’s stirring that might reveal to him where all the night’s anxiety had lain.

  But the wells of his body remained silent, offering up not the faintest quiver of confirmation, so that, in the dark, he could believe for a moment that the wells themselves were not there.

  No; that, he thought, considering the absurd and fading fancy, is just what we could never do. It’s too close to something real (and, like all unexamined reality, therefore truly unknown) for me to trust myself or her in such chains before the other.

  Let them go ahead, he thought. Let her go….

  With the wagon’s shaking in the darkness, did he drift off…? Because now, though the cart still jogged and the beat still followed whatever ruts, there was no light ahead. The women had finally ridden off, as if they’d never stepped from the fog.

  He was surrounded by black.

  The smuggler held the reins, which now and again shook over his knuckles—though, in truth, if they led to an actual ox or if she’d been replaced during some moment of inattention by a winged beast who now crawled with him across the sky or over the sea or through towering clouds, he could not have said for certain.

  Should he stop?

  Perhaps he should curl up in the cart itself, waiting for sunlight (or a scabbed and bleeding face…!) to peer over its edge?

  Should he try to sit where he was, wakeful, while they wandered on the road or off the road, to what dark destination he could not possibly imagine, in wait for light?

  For the moment, even to form the question in the rattling black was exhausting, so that all he could do was return to the dialogue that had been running on beside him. Yes, he repeated to the grizzled smuggler of the mind, you wouldn’t believe how much of my time, of my life I’ve spent following the Liberator, like some fool looking for a hero to give his life meaning. I went around as if he were my passion and my purpose! Then, one night, just like this, riding through the south in my cart, I finally ran into him. It was at a campsite, just down from the road. Him, a hero? He was only a bandit! As soon as he’d thrown me off my guard with a pretense of friendship, by offering me food, he turned around and tried to kill me! Even wanted to steal my wagon load—said it was for his cause! Oh, it was definitely him. I’d met one of his women—no, one of his men. She told me the place where I might find him. I mean, he told me. The man had his scars, all right. But it turns out the single eye they talk of is only a half-milky iris. I escaped with my life. Usually, you know, he has his men with him—if not right there, then stationed in the woods around him, waiting to come to his rescue at a call. I was just lucky that this time he’d chosen to go on a scouting mission alone. Not that he didn’t try to lie about it. But I figured he was bluffing. With one of the blades I keep in my cart, I gave him a cut across the face—perhaps I lost him his other eye! He didn’t stay to let me see, but ran off. I overturned his cart and killed his donkey. I should have gone through the cart for spoils, but I wouldn’t touch a thing in it—it had a handsome tooled-leather cart cover. I should have taken that, at least. But I wouldn’t touch it. Well, that’s the sort of fool I am! He must have been too scared or too hurt to follow me.

  You just hope he doesn’t run into you again someday, opined his phantom companion. I know these highway murderers…And the young smuggler looked about in the blackness.

  Oh, I managed to get my cart away, and struck out on the dark road in fog thick enough to blot all moon and stars, if not the sun itself! You’d think, wouldn’t you, a man like that with all the trust and faith people have in him throughout Nevèrÿon—and I know they do, for I’ve talked to many of them and, indeed, once had it myself—would feel some obligation to honesty and right behavior. Imagine such a man, sneaking up behind you in the dark, leaping on you from the back, trying to stab you like some thief in an old Kolhari alley—

  Is that what he did to you…?

  No. No, the young smuggler explained, taking a great breath and looking about again. But he would have if he’d had the chance. For now, since I met him, I know the kind of man he is. He only exploits for his own ends the faith that fools like me have in him. Believe me, I know that now, from firsthand experience. I mean: Can you imagine it, Gorgik the Liberator, the man everyone talks of, only a common cutthroat? Fool that I was, I thought he was a great man, committed to the relief of human suffering, when all he does is lurk about at every campsite and crossroad, at every—

  With a shudder, the smuggler blinked, staring into black as if it were a slate wall inches ahead. The truth! he thought, desperate in the dark. The truth! Is that the kind of fool you are? The wise men and teachers of Nevèrÿon who talked of truth as if it were some glowing and generous light? The truth was a blackness into which anyone might be reasonably terrified to enter alone; any and every horror, he knew, could wait there.

  And what is the truth? (He moved a little on the bench.) You are a frightened, ignorant man on a foggy, moonless night.

  The young smuggler began to cry.

  He did not make much sound doing it.

  The companionable voice running on beside him certainly didn’t notice. I’ve heard many people, it confided, gruff and fatherly, who don’t approve of the Liberator at all. They say he’s out for himself like everyone else. And you must admit that in these harsh and hazardous times that’s a reasonable assumption for anyone to make.

  Crying quietly, the young smuggler answered: Well, believe me, I can say from what I know: he’s a liar and a murderer and a self-serving thief, no better than you, no better than me. Believe it: if only because I know me, I now know him…

  No, I’ll never tell that story, the smuggler thought. Tears still rolled his cheeks. I’ll never tell it to anyone!

  First of all (he snuffled, then spat to the side in the black; a wheel jarred over a root or rock), it’s a stupid tale. Anyone who knows anything about the Liberator at all could catch me out in a minute. A fool I am, yes; but not that big a fool…

  Taking another breath, he shivered. But, as his cart rolled through the black, he went on telling it to himself.

  10

  BAREFOOT, TWO CARRIED THE trunk across uneven stone, the tall one grunting more than the heavy one. A look, a word, a jerked chin to coordinate their toss: the wood crashed into the fireplace wider side to side than the length of both, laid head to foot.

  Gorgik looked up from the goatskin map on the plank table as sparks rose before small flames.

  In billowing smoke, the soldiers danced back, grinning and beating bark bits from their hands, one against hairy thighs, one against bald ones.

  The heavy barbarian was a woman.

  Gorgik nodded to them.

  Saluting, backing away, then turning, they ambled off.

  A year or a hundred years ago a roof beam had broken, one of its ends crashing down to the floor’s center, the other still lodged at the ceiling’s corner. The soldiers stepped around it to join the others.

  Between the six beams remaining, the sooty inlay had not even sagged. But since the fall, torch holders had been bolted to the slant beam’s side, weapon hooks and woven hangings had been fixed to its bottom, so that, however awkwardly, as if awaiting some never begun repair, it was, today, part of the hall’s architecture.

  Beyond it, a soldier stood up from among the others, to turn his sword, examining it in torchlight. Were there two blades rising from its hilt—

  But that, Gorgik thought, would be a trick of the fire; or a trick of the beer he’d decided he would not drink and had anyway.

  Squatting on the table’s end in his iron collar, arms locked round his knees, Noyeed stared, not at the flame, but at the joined stones beside it.