‘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.

  6

  CERTAINLY THESE WERE MORE primitive times than ours, when public nudity was a sign neither of madness, rebellion, nor art. Along with the ceramic-hard sole and the wood-rough palm, it meant rather, in both men and women, a certain level of income, a certain order of labor. Since the smuggler’s gains, when smuggling went well, were modestly above that level and the physical work needed to survive at it had been, of late, somewhat below it, he could take a certain joy in the deception as he wandered—naked—toward the market in the dawn’s near empty streets. The few he shared them with, women and men, were most of them naked too.

  Several times he had to stop and go back a turning when some alley deposited him on a corso where, if the sun were really over there, meant the market was not in the direction he was walking.

  Clout still over his shoulder, he finally came out in the old square; three-quarters of the stalls were already up on the worn brick. More were being set out. Vendors called to one another, and the earliest shoppers already wandered between counters and under awnings, carrying baskets and bags.

  Certainly at this time crime was among those callings conducted more primitively than today: it did not seem overly imprudent to a smuggler of his age and experience to leave his cart unattended for an hour (the encounter in the crypt had taken somewhat less) among the others parked by the market’s side. At any time, the empress’s inspectors might be wandering here and there, observing, reporting, fining. But, because of the several new markets that had, in recent years, opened up closer to the waterfront, inspectors were becoming less and less efficient at their never very well defined tasks.

  Across the square he could see other wagons rolling up. Having finished deliveries, a few were pulling out. An hour, yes, the smuggler thought. But much more than that was pushing even primitive prudence.

  He walked by stalls of cheap jewelry, exotic vegetables, farm tools, and cooking implements, till he reached the donkeys and oxen and ponies standing before their various carts. His own red-flanked beast swung her head and blinked her eyes’ black marbles over her feed bag. Unhooking it, he glanced toward the shelter. Most of the passengers from before sunup had already gotten their rides. More recent arrivals sat, waiting. The drunken workman (if he were not a bum) still sprawled over half his bench.

  A youngster, naked as the smuggler, walked toward him as he tugged the feed bag away. (The beast swung her head to follow it.) ‘Excuse me. You’ve finished your deliveries…?’ the boy asked. ‘If you’re going south, maybe I can get a ride with you for a few iron coins?’

  ‘Sure.’ The smuggler put the bag up under the driver’s bench. ‘For a few stades, that should be all right.’ He’s a student, the smuggler thought, and felt, behind his smile, oddly uncomfortable with his own nakedness before this younger, slimmer nudity. So, just as though it had nothing to do with the boy before him, he pulled his clout from his shoulder, bound it about his hips, ran it between his legs, and tucked it in at his waist: still damp. As he bound it, he thought: And how do I know he’s a student? For his morning’s adventures had left him feeling analytical.

  Well, for one thing, he goes about naked like the poorest barbarian laborer when he clearly isn’t one. His black hair is in the side-braid that goes with the military, while equally clearly he is no more a soldier than the barbarian who’d stood below the bridge. At the same time, for all his nakedness, on his feet he wears the leather coverings of some working man who toils on broken stone. But it’s all for the potential rocks he might, as a student, tread, rather than for any daily encountered hardship. (The boy’s beard was much less neatly trimmed than that of the man sleeping it off over in the shelter.) And this one, the smuggler noted, wears the same bindings around his palms as the one-eyed man had earlier—though on this youth they’re probably not from his place of origin, but rather from some custom observed in passing and imitated for its quaintness. Probably the student would be able to tell more of their use and history than the one-eyed man, who, whatever his sexual eccentricity, most likely had been born to them. Making up his mind not to ask more about them, the smuggler put his thick hand between the ox’s horns to rub. ‘You study with one of the masters out near Sallese?’

  No doubt having thought his nudity had stripped him of all identifying signs, the student grinned down at the brick. ‘I’m just an apprentice. Right now I run and fetch, wax boards, and make tablets for the older ones. I won’t take up my own field of study till spring, when my reading has gotten stronger.’

  The smuggler looked past the student at the shelter; the student glanced too.

  Still sleeping, the drunken man seemed moments from toppling off the bench.

  ‘You notice,’ the smuggler said with a considered sigh, ‘how there’re more people out around the bridge, drunk, mad, or just exhausted, who look like they might have been working three weeks ago?’

  The student nodded. ‘That’s what my master says. Out at the school, everyone argues that these are hard times in Kolhari.’

  And the young smuggler, who hadn’t heard any more people than usual say such a thing, laughed and clapped the student’s shoulder. ‘Up on the cart with you, and we’ll see if we can’t at least get you started on your trip!’ for basically he was a friendly fellow, and he did not want the student to think his remark somehow chided the student’s calling, for youths who took up formal studies were often the butt of jokes from the city’s laboring classes, if not of direct hostility. With no gods of their own, the saying ran about Kolhari, were the students not out to give names to everyone else’s? ‘I’m not the best driver. But if we break down—’ he gave the boy a grin—‘I’ll get you to help me push.’

  Grinning back, the boy grasped the cart’s side and pulled himself up while the smuggler walked once around to see if everything was in place. (The booty sack was still wedged firmly under canvas behind the lashed pots.) Coming round to the other side of the bench, he climbed up and took the reins in his hands. ‘Hieee!’ he called, then clicked a bit, looking out over the moving heads and stationary awnings that filled the market. Half standing beside the student, the smuggler, as they started, sat down, hard, on the bench.

  Three carts rolled ahead of them. Moving through the women and men with their baskets and barrows, the boys and girls with their sacks and sledges, he heard others—an elderly woman driver halloed shrilly for another cart to move—start behind.

  His departure was exactly as he’d wished.

  Reining the beast right, the smuggler saw the little man ambling between a stall of bladed tools and another of painted bowls. He still wore his collar, the bindings on his hands and feet, and the rag over his eye. He’s a tired man, the smuggler thought. Whatever had made him bolt the crypt had stilled in him now; and the little man seemed only a diminutive stranger, up the night and making (again, most probably) for the bridge to complete the debauch that had, no doubt, been nowhere near as surprising or satisfying or educational for him as for the young smuggler.

  Suddenly the smuggler grinned. ‘Hey there, one-eye!’ he called above the market’s noise, for he had never been one to pretend next day that the night before had not happened, with either women or men. ‘You still don’t have a coin for me?’

  The one-eyed man turned.

  Then he did something quite as astonishing as anything the smuggler had seen since he’d first come to Kolhari: he reached up, pulled the rag from his head, yanked it from his hair, and stood blinking two perfectly fine eyes in the autumnal morning, while porters and shoppers and vendors stepped around him. There was recognition on his face but no particular humor.

  ‘You mean you’re not…!’ The smuggler sat back on the bench and laughed. ‘Well!’ he called, suddenly glad he was on a moving cart and the little man was not. ‘Maybe I’ll see you next time I cross the bridge! And maybe you’ll see me!’ Laughing, he shook the reins over his ox, who moved heavily on. The little man turned to walk away. ‘Now would you think—’ the smuggler elbowed the student beside him—‘I mean, I’d thought he might be—’ But what did this student know of the smuggler’s researches? ‘For someone who manages to get by, I can think some dumber things than anyone I know!’

  ‘You know him?’ the student asked.

  Recovering from his laugh, the smuggler shrugged. ‘He…owes me a little money. Yeah, he’s someone I know.’

  ‘He’s a slave.’ The student nodded knowingly.

  The smuggler chuckled. ‘Well—’ He shrugged again. ‘You know…’

  ‘Oh,’ the student said. ‘He’s one of those.’

  The student didn’t say any more for a while, and the young smuggler soon found himself explaining silently to the student of the mind beside him: Ah, you study with your wise master out in Sallese, but you’ve no idea of some of the things I’ve learned right on the stones of the bridge back there. Those stones could probably teach even you a few things.

  To which the student (of the mind) replied: You think you’re the only one who knows of such? Certainly, then, you know that more than one student, down on his luck, has come to the bridge to earn the odd coin or two and learn something of life in the process—though usually we disguise ourselves, for the buyers of Kolhari don’t like us when we come in our ordinary attire, as I wear now.

  The smuggler glanced at the boy. Would he be that kind? (Tell me, are you that kind?) No, thought the smuggler. (No, said the student. No, I’d never do something like that. Look at me. I don’t look like that sort, do I? Of course I wouldn’t!) Though what the signs were that told him so were anybody’s guess.

  Regarding this commercial bustle with an enthusiasm silent as the smuggler’s, the youth, whose nakedness did not sign barbarism, whose braid did not sign the military, whose bagged feet did not sign labor on dangerous stones, and whose bound hands did not sign distant origin, sat there, observing all with a student-like interest (freckles on his forearms, too, the smuggler now noticed: and freckles on a male were as physically repulsive to him as they were attractive on women), a collection of appropriated signs, as if he himself were a living lie, an embodied dream.

  The silent dialogue ran on as the cart moved between the stalls and out of the market. Without speaking they rode through the wakening city, toward the southern gate.

  7

  THOUGH HE’D TAKEN A passenger to make his wagon seem more like an honest delivery cart, the smuggler had only planned to keep the student till that night, when he would find some excuse to put him down and let him catch some other southbound wagoner. (The boy’s name was Kenton. But how long will I remember that? the smuggler wondered.) Out on a three-day journey south, however, the youth proved companionable and, that evening, laughed loudly at the smuggler’s story of how he’d been fired from a lumber crew when he’d been found sleeping beyond the lunch break, and how he’d been chased out of an abandoned barn he’d once decided to rest in by an irate farmer, even as he protested his willingness to work for his stay, and how he’d been cursed down a Kolhari alley by a potter for whom he’d been unpacking loads of imported clay because he’d dropped three of them in a row and they’d broken open on the street—all of which had occurred three to five years back, but which the smuggler related as if they’d happened only weeks ago.

  Perhaps, he thought, I might take him on for two of his three days’ journey.

  The next afternoon, when the smuggler’s tales of his own fallible labors began to run down, he found the student, so silent before, now full of his own talk. (Once the smuggler had asked him if he had any thoughts on the Liberator, Gorgik, to which the student frowned and said, ‘Gorgi? I’ve heard the word. It’s a foreign term, from the Ulvayn Islands, no?’ which, by now, was an answer the smuggler had gotten enough times so that, for him, it was the sign that more questions would be pointless about his chosen topic. Today, he never pursued his inquiries beyond such an answer.) And it became easy just to listen to the young man run on about this and that; now and again the smuggler grunted to sign that he was listening—precisely when his attention was the furthest away.

  But the noise was a comfort.

  The boy had not questioned any of the back trails they’d taken, and he’d happily gotten down several times, to pull loose a root that had stuck in the wheel, or to guide the cart over the round stones of a stream. Could it be, the smuggler wondered on the second evening when they made camp over a fire where the student had volunteered to cook a respectable pot of stew from some dried cod and roots the smuggler had brought along under the canvas (he did such things, he explained, for the others out at the school), that he’s so careful with his questions because he knows I carry contraband, and he thinks all this is a kind of adventure? Well, then, his reticence is to be valued as much as his chatter; he’s not such a bad sort after all.

  So the student stayed with the smuggler’s wagon six hours into the third day’s ride, till he said: ‘This is where I was telling you about. Right here,’ and got down before a house which, he explained for the third time, was an inn run by an aunt of his. After a few moments, standing in the road, the student said: ‘You’re not like a lot of the others, you know?’ The boy looked up at the smuggler on the driver’s bench. ‘I’ve heard them—’ and he drew his shoulders up ‘“I wouldn’t be one of them students for anything. I’m glad I’m a good and honest laborer.”’

  From the cart seat, the smuggler grinned down at the youngster, naked in the road and looking up in leaf-dappled light. He, of course, had heard it too. But this was the second time the student had said it. The first had been two days ago at the beginning of their trip, though no doubt the boy had thought the smuggler had misunderstood him or had been thinking of something else right then, for the smuggler had not said anything back. ‘Well,’ the smuggler said, ‘I’m not a good and honest laborer.’ He’d thought about saying that before, too. But as he’d remained silent, the student was repeating it now. The smuggler toyed with the words, I’m a good and honest smuggler. Should he add that? No, it would only be a stupid and witless thing to blurt now. So he just kept grinning at the youngster grinning up at him from the road.

  ‘Why don’t you come inside?’ the student asked, suddenly. ‘You can stay over for the night. My aunt’ll feed you, if I say you’re my friend. It won’t cost you anything—and we’ll call it an even exchange for the ride.’ The pale brown eyes blinked above the adolescent beard.

  Remembering the ‘one-eyed’ man, so stingy with his coins, the smuggler said: ‘I didn’t carry your aunt down here. I carried you. So you pay me the three iron coins we agreed on; it’s less than half what anyone else would’ve charged you. But I’m that kind of a fool, and I know it. Pay me. Then, if you want to invite me in to a free meal just for friendship, that’s up to you.’

  ‘Oh, well. Yes,’ the student said. ‘Sure. I see.’ He dropped to one knee on the grassy ridge between the road ruts and untied one of his baggy shoes with his bound hands. ‘That’s fair enough. I mean, it’s what we agreed.’

  The smuggler had already decided the loose boots were where the youth kept his meager moneys.

  Handing up the three coins, the leather still a-flap about his foot, the student, standing, said: ‘Actually, you know, I have to walk on another stade to the west before I reach my mother’s house. It’s just my father’s sister who lives here. So, maybe it’d be better if you didn’t stop here at my aunt’s…I mean, I’m just going in to say hello, anyway, really, before I go on—’