Flight from Nevèrÿon, page 38
Arly sat me on a firm, overturned basket near his door, ducked within the ragged hanging, then came out, the handles of two un-glazed clay cups hooked on the stained fingers of one hand and a jar in the crook of his arm. He lowered himself by his crutch to a rock to sit before me, then let the crutch fall to the worn grass. Leaning forward he poured out a liquid clear as water. Then he sat back, the jar held up at his right shoulder in both hands, waiting for me to taste mine before he poured his own—the way, indeed, I’d instructed him to pour at table so many years before!
As we grinned at each other, I picked the cup up from the ground and sipped: it was not water. It was sharp and went along the throat with all the aspects of fire save heat. At the same time, there was a strong feeling that, had it gone at only a slightly different angle, it would have slid in as coolly as a mountain ice chip. What he’d served me, I realized, was one of the strong Avila rums.
I said once that Arly had the unearned reputation of a drunkard in the tiny barbarian village where we’d found him. Well, I began to realize, over the years he’d hobbled a few steps along toward earning it.
There are many who claim the drink is poisonous.
But I will say, after he had poured his own, and I had taken several sips more, it lent a warmth of spirit to the already hot day. And I was not about to judge my old traveling companion in what was after all only his hospitality toward me.
As we talked of this and that, his life, mine, then, now, and the time between, I asked him: ‘Tell me, Arly, what did you think of that whole trip? What’s the part you remember best?’
He look at me slyly. ‘You know which part I remember.’ He jabbed a stained finger at me with a complicitous grin.
‘I know which parts I remember,’ I told him. ‘But you must tell me for yourself.’
‘That time,’ he prompted me, ‘you know. In the castle. Of one of your cousins.’
I smiled, nodding, thinking he meant his first visit to a royal house with me, when he’d gotten lost and I’d had to go searching for him. Indeed, I’d told that story with numerous embellishments, many times since. But Arly went on:
‘You know. The one where your noble cousin had killed himself.’
I frowned, suddenly lost.
‘You remember,’ Arly insisted. ‘We took the wagon through all those broad, endless orchards of fruit trees. And finally, when we came up to the stone gate, the woman you told me later was a slave, though she wore her iron collar under a jeweled neck-piece, said to us that the baron was dead—they had found him only that morning in the gardens, where he had eaten many, many of the small, poisonous petals of the white ini flower…?’
I must have still frowned, though a memory was beginning to flicker; because Arly frowned a moment at me, before he went on:
‘When we went inside, the whole castle was in confusion. They could only give us a single room to stay in for the night—’
‘Of course!’ I exclaimed. ‘The Baron Inige!’ I didn’t remember the orchards. But now I began to picture a servant (slave?) standing at a half-opened gateway between two high, stone newels, telling me that we could not be received within because there had been a great tragedy in the house. The baron was dead, and by his own hand. ‘But we didn’t go in,’ I protested. ‘Did we?’ The whole incident would never have come up in any spontaneous account from me. As it was, I could only recall that moment at the entrance. ‘Certainly we went on somewhere else. Arly. We wouldn’t have gone inside after that.’
‘Oh, yes!’ Arly nodded. ‘We did! I was very frightened, and I didn’t want to. That soldier with us—what was his name?’
‘Terek.’
‘Yes, that soldier stood by me, while we waited behind the wagon. He knew I was frightened, too. He nudged me with his arm. I was so frightened—and he thought it was funny! You were at the gate, talking with the slave. Oh, so gently and persuasively, with such smiles, you went on—you told her just how you and the dead man were related, and how terrible it must be for all in the castle, and that perhaps we could be of some help, and that you understood how upset everyone must be, and, no, you wouldn’t think of intruding, but we had traveled so far, your guard and your servant were so tired, and we would not be any trouble, so that perhaps if they could find rooms for us simply for a night and—’
‘Arly—’ I laughed—‘I have no memory of any of this!’
‘—finally they let us in,’ he finished. ‘We brought the wagon right inside, through the gates of the dead man’s house. You knew I was scared too!’ he added, accusingly. ‘You looked at me when the mules went by the big stone posts and grinned!’ Then, smiling down into his cup, he shifted on his rock. His scarred stump moved in a kind of sweeping motion that would have placed the missing limb at no particular position, save possibly kicking into the air. And I thought, how many hundreds of times had I seen it do that? Yet, I’d never thought of it once in all these years. ‘They told us to take a single little room on the castle’s top floor, up some old, steep, stone stairs. And you got very angry afterwards, because it meant all three of us would have to sleep in the same chamber, and you said you didn’t want to have to sleep in the same room with a smelly barbarian and a dirty soldier—’
I started to protest. ‘Surely I’d only meant it wouldn’t look proper to the great house’s remaining servants…’ My picture of myself for that period was (and still is) wholly egalitarian—more, perhaps, than was even wise. But the truth is, once within the baron’s gates, I had no memory at all. Till that moment, had you asked me if I’d ever been inside the home of my tragic relative, the Baron Inige, I’d have answered, ‘No,’ convinced I spoke the truth.
I said: ‘Terek could let himself get rather dirty, couldn’t he?’
I wanted to stay in the room, because I was scared to walk around in the halls and corridors where the dead man had walked. But when it got dark, you and the soldier—Terek? Was that his name?—decided to play a trick on me and took me up on the castle’s roof. I didn’t want to go. But you made me!’
‘Now how did we get you to go anywhere that you didn’t want to?’ For I had a few solid memories of Arly’s stubbornness—an all too fabled barbarian trait.
‘You went,’ Arly said. ‘I wasn’t going to stay in there alone!’ He drank more rum. ‘There wasn’t any wall around the roof, either. And there were lots of stone things—like stone huts and places where windows stuck up and things. Part of the roof was sloped, too, right down to the edge.’ Certainly I knew the kind of castle roof he meant. But equally certainly I had no memory of ever being out on one with Arly. ‘It had been raining, and the roof slates were still wet. And you know this—’ he bent to slap his hand against the flattened and frayed end of his crutch—‘doesn’t hold so well on wet stone as this—’ and he swung his soiled hand back against the cracked and blackened sole of his foot. ‘The clouds were blowing fast, now over the moon, now free of it. One minute it was dark as pitch. The next it was light. The two of you ran away and hid from me, and began to make strange noises, and pretend to be demons and monsters and strange beasts, and chase me around and hide from me again.’
‘But you must have known it was only us…?
‘Ahhh!’ Arly’s voice rose, with his chin, in dismissal of my protest. ‘I knew it was you. But in such a house, perhaps the demons that haunted the place actually now possessed you. That’s why you played such pranks. That’s why I was so afraid. In such a house, with such a death only that morning, it was a reasonable fear—at least from the way you carried on! Once, when I was running from you, the soldier stuck the end of his spear out from behind some stone abutment and tripped me, so that I fell.’
‘Arly—!’ Though even as I spoke, memories returned of moments when Terek’s teasing (if not my own) of the one-legged youth had probably gone too far. What came back even more strongly, however, were those chases and games of tag where all of us contended that Arly on his crutch was as fast and agile as either of us—which was, indeed, almost true. Some of those chases were at night, even in the moonlight—but surely not on the roof of my dead cousin’s house. ‘Arly, I just don’t think we—’
‘Then you ran right out into me.’ He put his cup down and clapped his blackened hands together. ‘And knocked me over. Then you laughed, while I rolled down the slope toward the edge of the roof. Oh, I knew, then, that monsters chased me, and that I would now fall to my death!’
I swallowed another mouthful of rum. ‘But didn’t we catch you…?’
‘No!’ Arly declared, an astonished questioning to it even greater than the exclamation, as if there was no reason in the world to think we might have. He said: ‘I just didn’t roll that far. I hurt my leg real bad, too, when you pushed me down.’ He reached forward to rub his calf, as if memory brought back the pain. ‘Then the soldier came out and stood there and laughed at me because I was such a frightened fool. But I was afraid to say how much it hurt, because I thought you might start in again and say you would leave me behind to be a slave in that haunted and frightening castle.’
‘But—’ As I started to protest again, the faintest memory returned, however: Terek standing with his spear, in light dim enough to have come from a beclouded moon, laughing over a seated, unhappy Arly, who had just slipped or fallen across his crutch, while I looked on. Could that have been atop the castle roof? Could my purposeful push have been the cause of the fall? The memory was no clearer than that of the servant woman at the gate. And even had I recalled the two faint recollections on my own, I never would have remembered that they were from the morning and evening of the same day, or what Arly claimed lay between.
Arly sat, rubbed, smiled. ‘We had some good times, then, didn’t we? I went a lot of places with you, saw a lot of things.’
‘Yes,’ I said. I was still trying to think: Could I have been a partner in torment of that lame, ignorant youth—and forgotten it? We did.’ But the topic itself seemed too complicated to pursue through the warmth of the day and the glow of the rum. ‘Well, tell me: did you ever learn any more of Belham or Venn, after our trip? I’ve often wondered how all that struck you.’
Arly looked at me and frowned. ‘Belham?’ he said. ‘And that other name? Were they some peasants we let ride in the wagon once?’
‘No, Arly!’ I was both astonished and amused—happily so, as it drove away some of my discomfort. ‘Don’t you remember—?’
But he had reached out for the jar to pour himself another cupful. ‘Belham, that’s a barbarian name. But not the other. “Venn,” it was? It sounds like a name from far away. Maybe from the islands or someplace…’
Somewhere a crutch tapped on the rock floor; barbaric eyes lifted toward the cave ceiling…
We talked about many other things that day. Oh, I mustn’t suggest that we had no memories in common. We talked a lot of Terek, and even though Arly had not remembered his name, we were still soon mustering new opinions about him, as if our friend were only off for a walk in the woods and was expected back in minutes—though neither of us had seen him in more than a decade.
I supposed we helped to elaborate his monster.
Although with each cup of rum he drank, Arly would again declare how fine a time we’d had together, in general his memories were not so pleasant as mine. But then, neither had his life been as pleasant, before or since. Also, I thought later, he had the recollections one might expect from a man who, with great bravery, had traveled only once—and that in order to get from the village where he’d been born to the town where, in all probability, he would die. Through the afternoon, somehow I never brought up my own (nor questioned Arly’s) reminiscences of the border god who’d terrified us the night I’d tried my futile flight. It just did not seem the proper time to speak much more of monsters.
Soon Arly hobbled with me back through the dreary huts to point me toward my hosts’ home at the other side of the village. We parted in a convivial glow of rum and late afternoon sun caught among leaves immobile in a breezeless spring. I walked through that little city, rehearsing the tale I would make of it to my friends when they arose from their afternoon naps: You’ll never guess who I…or perhaps better, While I was out walking this afternoon, of all the people in the world I met…But in this way I went on trying to tell myself what had just happened, for the whole of the forty-minute walk back. Yet as I came in sight of my hosts’ garden wall, their two-story home showed above it, with its facing tiles and terra-cotta cornices, any anecdotes contoured to the good feeling of the encounter so intimately and intricately worked through with its troubling revelations seemed more and more impossible—till, I confess, once I actually entered the gate, I could not bring myself to mention the meeting with Arly at all, for all my slightly tipsy rehearsals of it on my way home; though, indeed, I feel sometimes I have been rehearsing it ever since, now one way and now another—this only the most recent, though by no means the final, run-through.
Yes, I met Terek once, too—a little over a year after my afternoon with Arly. It was high summer in Kolhari; a day off from the school, and I’d gone to visit a merchant friend, a man of some travel himself. I was to meet him not at his home but at one of the caravan yards among the store buildings adjoining the New Market. Indeed, I’d known he’d been awaiting the arrival of a large commercial caravan for some weeks now: it had been gone seven months and was expected any day.
The half-dozen closed carriages and several high-piled wagons must just have pulled into the yard minutes before I strolled up. The drivers and grooms were joking with one another around the horses. The loaders had not been given their instructions yet and lounged by the warehouse wall. And the caravan soldiers sat about the yard in little clusters, playing bones, or stood leaning on their spears and watching.
My first thought was that my merchant friend would probably not be able to go to lunch with me now as we had planned. I did not see him in the yard. No doubt he was within, conferring with Her Majesty’s inspectors. But as I made my way toward the lashed-back hanging over the wide door, I saw a soldier standing by the wall, leaning on his spear before him, rubbing his chin on his forearm.
I frowned.
Could it possibly…?
I walked toward him. Tall, dark, lanky, yes, the man had a once-broken nose. As I neared, he let go his spear with one hand to reach up and rub his cheek. The same gnawed pits of broken and scabby horn were sunk on his fingertips, well back from the crowns. I glanced below his leather kilt, for the scar on his leg.
It was there.
‘Terek…?’ I said.
He didn’t turn.
‘Terek…!’ I stepped before him.
His eyes blinked in a gaunt, weathered face that, save the nose, I must say did not seem overly familiar, now that I was closer.
‘Your name’s Terek, isn’t it?’
The soldier gave the smallest nod—and waited. Clearly, he did not recognize me.
I smiled. ‘Do you remember me? You were a guard on a caravan of mine, oh—more than ten years ago now!’
Among his sullen features, a smile only threatened his mouth and eyes—but not of recognition; it was the one you give a stranger who’s made some well-intentioned mistake. For all his identifying marks, he looked less and less familiar, so that, again, I asked: ‘Your name is Terek…?’
‘Yes…?’ He waited for some explanation.
‘Well, you were a guard. On a caravan of mine. It was a rough one too. It wasn’t as big as this. But we lost both our carriages. We traveled most of the last months with just a wagon, and only the three of us—you, me, and a barbarian called Arly. He had only one—’
‘You mean—’ shifting position, he said suddenly—‘when we went through the Menyat? Where the stores ran out and half the guards mutinied? I had to stick my blade in the gut of three of my best friends on that one! Then we were stuck down in the canyon, and all there were was berries and cactus pith, for four months, caught down in those rocks!’ (The sudden outburst in the sullen demeanor was Terek—the Terek I remembered. It made me smile—and perhaps he thought, from that, I recognized his account.) ‘We didn’t dare come up, because of the bandits…’
While I smiled, at first I wondered if this were simply another incident he recalled that I’d forgotten. But no; neither my carriages nor my cart had gone as far west as the Menyat Canyon. ‘How long ago was that?’ I asked.
(What my own memories brought back as I had struggled a moment with his was a young, broken-nosed man on a leafy road thrusting his blade through the neck of a shrieking brigand.)
‘Four years.’ Terek considered. ‘Maybe five years back. I was out almost two whole years on that one.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘What I was talking about was over ten years ago. And I don’t think it was that rough.’
He reached up to rub his neck again. ‘More than ten years,’ he said. ‘That’s a long time ago. Were you the steward?’ He sounded doubtful.
‘No.’ Still smiling, I shook my head. ‘We knew each other. You told me all about how you got that scar. The young officer in the army—’ I pointed to his leg. (He glanced down then looked up with a raised eyebrow like someone who’d forgotten a scar was there.) ‘We were friends, you and I. I was practically a boy. You stayed on when the others left me. In the end, it was just three of us and a wagon: you, me, and a crippled barbarian—he lives off to the west of the city, now. I saw him just last year. It was…my caravan.’ I really felt odd saying that, for I truly treasured the memory of what I’d still thought was a three-way friendship among equals, even with Arly’s additions. ‘You don’t remember?’
He gave a shrug I want to think was so small because he might have been embarrassed. ‘Maybe,’ he said. He pursed his lips a moment. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Well, ten, twelve years, or more…’ I shrugged too. ‘That is a long time. But it was you.’
‘Maybe,’ he repeated.
I watched him, remembering the strange transformations of recognition in those moments meeting Arly. This lack of recognition was, in its way, almost as interesting. Terek had not grown particularly bald or fat, nor had he gone through any other great bodily change. Where before he’d been a young soldier, now he was a middle-aged one. He’d guarded caravans before mine; clearly he’d guarded them since. The trip with me had simply not been that memorable. I thought of trying to identify it further for him—tripping Arly on the castle roof? The terror at the border? Perhaps with a drink or two he might have been prompted to recall….
