Neveryona (6 page)

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 sudden 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 down.

The Badger, with his red 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
their 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.

Walking, turning, walking, she wondered many times if she were on a street she’d walked before. Occasionally she
knew
she was, but at least five times, now, when she’d set out to rediscover a particular place she’d passed
minutes or hours back, it became as impossible to find as if the remembered landmarks had sunk beneath the sea.

Several workmen with dusty rags around their heads had opened up the street to uncover a great clay trough with planking laid across it, which ran out from under a building where half a dozen women were repairing a wall by daubing mud and straw on the stones with wooden paddles. (Now, she
had
passed them before …) A naked boy dragged along a wooden sledge heaped with laundry. A girl, easily the boy’s young sister and not wearing much more than he, now and again stooped behind to catch up a shirt or shift that flopped over the edge, or to push the wet clothes back in a pile when a rut shook them awry.

Pryn found herself behind three women with the light hair of southern barbarians, their long dresses shrugged off their shoulders and bunched down at their waists, each with one hand up to steady a dripping water jar. Two carried them on their heads; one held hers on a shoulder.

They turned in front of her, on to a street that sloped down from the avenue, and, as the shadow from the building moved a-slant terra-cotta jugs, thonged-up hair, and sunburned backs, Pryn followed. (No, she had
never
been on this street …) There were many less people walking these dark cobbles.

‘…
vevish nivu hrem’m har memish
…’ Pryn heard one woman say – or something like it.

‘…
nivu homyr avra’nos? Cevetaveset
…’ the second quipped. Two of the barbarians laughed.

Pryn had heard the barbarian language before, in the Ellamon market, but knew little of its meaning. Whenever she heard it, she always wondered if she might get one of them to talk slowly enough to write it down, so that she could study it and learn of its barbaric intent.

‘…
hav nivu akra mik har’vor remvush
…’ retorted the second to a line Pryn had lost.

All three laughed again.

Two turned down an alley that, Pryn saw as she reached it, was only a shoulder-wide space between red mud walls. With the sun ahead of them, the two swaying silhouettes grew smaller and smaller.

Ahead, the remaining woman took her jar from her shoulder and pushed through the hanging hide that served for a door in a wood-walled building.

Pryn walked down the hill. Here, many cobbles were missing; some substance, dark and hard, with small stones stuck all over it, paved a dozen or so feet. A woman overtook her. Pryn turned to watch. The woman wore a dirty skirt, elaborately coiffed hair, and dark paint in two wing shapes around her eyes. It was very striking, the more so because Pryn – looking after her narrow back – had only glimpsed her face. Two boys hurried by on the other side, arms around each other’s shoulders. One had shaved his head completely. Both, Pryn saw, wore the same dark eye-paint – before they, too, became just backs ahead of her.

Sitting on steps leading up to another street, beggars argued loudly. One was missing an arm and an ear; among them a woman, with a crutch under one shoulder, its splintered end protruding over the stone step’s edge, complained about a jar of wine she had stolen from the dried-up earthworm of an innkeeper. It had been bad, but she had drunk it anyway and gotten sick and lain – sick – in the street three days. The stump of her missing leg was crusted with scab.

Pryn hurried by.

On Pryn’s right lay a littered yard between three cracked and yellow buildings. In the middle was a circular stone wall, waist high, long boards over its top. It was about three meters across. Pryn walked up to the enclosure and looked down through the strip of black between
the weathered planks. Belowa, a dark head moved to blot a strip of reflected sky.

Again she turned down the street.

Buildings ended; Pryn looked across to an embankment. The bridge entrance had waist-high stone walls either side. A tall woman at the corner newel was fastening a white damasked collar, sewn with metallic threads and set with jewels. It was one of the decorative collar-covers house slaves in wealthier families sometimes used to hide the ugly iron band all slaves wore by law. Having trouble with the clasp, however, the woman removed the cloth to shake it out. Her long neck was bare. She raised the collar-cover again.

The clasp caught – as halfway over the bridge someone hailed her. Along the bridge’s walkway, in colorful robes and veils (many with painted eyes), young women and men stood, leaned, talked, stared, or ambled slowly.

The woman with the collar-cover ran to grab the arm of the heavy, hairy man who’d called. He wore a helmet like the ones Pryn had seen outside the Liberator’s headquarters.

Watching them stroll away, Pryn crossed to the bridge. She reached the post where the woman had stood, put her hand on it, and looked over the stone rail.

Green water glimmered around moss-blotched rocks, clotted with wood, fruit rinds, broken pottery. Some barbarian children climbed out by the carved stanchion stones. Behind her she heard:

‘Twenty!’

‘Five –’

‘Nineteen!’

‘Five!’

‘Eighteen?’

‘Five
, I say!’

‘Seventeen!’

‘All right, eight!’

Pryn looked up. Coming forward through the loiterers was a portly, middle-aged man in a smart toga with red ribbon woven about the white sleeves, neck, and hem. His hand held the shoulder of a naked, green-eyed, barbarian boy, a year or so younger than Pryn. The boy was arguing in his odd southern accent and gesticulating with one closed fist and one open hand: ‘You give me sixteen? I go with you and do it for sixteen! All right? You give me sixteen, then!’

‘Ten!’

‘Sixteen!’

‘Ten!’

‘Sixteen!’

‘Oh, eleven!’

‘No, sixteen!’

‘Sixteen
for a dirty little weasel like you?’ returned the man with a grin. ‘For sixteen, I should have you
and
your three brothers. I’ll give you twelve!’

‘You give
fifteen
!’ the barbarian said. ‘You want my brother? Maybe we go find him and he come too. But he don’t do anything, you know? He just watch. For fifteen I go get my brother and –’

‘Now what would I want with two of you!’ The man laughed. ‘One of you is bad enough. I’ll take you by yourself, and
maybe
I’ll give you twelve …’

A black man in a long skirt led a camel up over the bridge. The high humps, rocking gait, and clopping hooves made the loiterers smile. The creature had just soiled herself and suddenly decided to switch her tail –

Pryn herself flinched, though no drop struck.

But the man snatched his hand from the boy’s shoulder and rubbed the flat of his palm, now against his gray beard, now against his splattered shoulder, sucking his teeth and shaking his head.

The young barbarian cackled. ‘Now who’s dirty, old turd-nose! You smell like camel pee!’ With a disgusted wave he stalked off over the walkway.

The portly gentleman looked up from his scrubbing, saw the boy leaving, and hurried after. ‘Thirteen! I’ll give you thirteen, but no more!’

Which halted the boy at the stone rail. ‘Will you give me
fourteen?
You give me fourteen, and I’ll …’

Pryn looked over at the water below. Two women, a soldier between, made their way over the rocks. Just before they went under the bridge, the heftier woman, red wooden beads chained through her brown braids, began to pull away; the soldier kept pulling her back. Pryn tried to hear their altercation, but though their heads were only fifteen feet below, from the angle and the children’s shoutings echoing beneath, she could not make it out. She leaned, she listened, wondering what she might do if one of them looked up to see their incomprehensible quarrel observed –

‘What – !’ came an agitated voice behind her. ‘You again …’

Pryn stood and turned, slowly so as not to look particularly interested in what might be going on –

A huge man stood directly behind her, heavily veined arms folded high on his stomach. He wore bronze gauntlets, dark with verdigris and busy with relief. On his chest hung a copper chain.

‘I saw her first – not you!’ the voice came on – not the giant’s. ‘Get away and leave her, now. She’s not to your taste anyway! Don’t you think all of us around here have seen you enough to know what
you’re
after?’

The giant had a scar down one cheek. Rough hair, some salted white, made a thick, clublike braid over one ear – only it had come half undone. Rough hair shook in the breeze.

Arms still folded, the giant turned his head a little –

‘Now go on! Go on, I say! She’s no good to you! The young ones
need
my guidance if they’re to make a living here.’ The man talking so excitedly stood a few steps off, shaking a finger at the giant. Go on, now! Why do you stay? Go!’