Neverness Read Online Free PDF Page A

know.
       Neith brushed yellow hair from his wet eyes and said, "My God, it's the Bastard and his fat friend - what's his name? - Burpo? Lardo?"
       "_Bardo_," Bardo said.
       "They were just about to leave," Soli said.
       I suddenly did not feel like leaving. My mouth was dry, and there was a pressure behind my eyes.
       "Don't call him 'Bardo'," Neith said. "When we tutored him at Borja, everyone called him Piss-All Lal because he used to piss in his bed every night."
       It was true, Bardo's birth name was Pesheval Lai. When he first came to Neverness, he had been a skinny, terrified, homesick boy who had loved to recite romantic poetry and who had pissed in his bed every night. Half of the novices and masters had called him "Bardo," and the other half, "Piss-All." But after he had begun lifting heavy weights above his head and had taken to spending the nights with bought women so that he wet his bed with the liquids of lust instead of piss, few had dared to call him anything but "Bardo."
       "Well," Tomoth said as he clapped his hands at the novice behind the bar. "Piss-All and The Bastard will toast with us before they leave."
       The novice filled our mugs and tumblers. Bardo looked at me; I wondered if he could hear the blood pounding in my throat or see the tears burning in my eyes.
       "_Freyd_," Tomoth said. "To the dead of Sodervarld."
       I was afraid I was about to cry from rage and shame, and so, looking straight into Tomoth's ugly metal eyes, I picked up my tumbler and tried to swallow the fiery skotch in a single gulp. It was the wrong thing to do. I gagged and coughed and spat all at once, spraying Tomoth's face and yellow mustache with tiny globules of amber spit. He must have thought that I was mocking him and defiling the memory of his family because he came at me without thought or hesitation, came straight for my eyes with one hand and for my throat with the other. There was a ragged burning beneath my eyebrow. Suddenly there were fists and blood and elbows as Tomoth and his brothers swept me under like an avalanche. Everything was cold and hard: cold tile ground against my spine, and hard bone broke against my teeth; someone's hard nails were gouging into my eyelid. Blindly, I pushed against Tomoth's face. For a moment, I thought that cowardly Bardo must have slipped out the door. Then he bellowed as if he had suddenly remembered he was Bardo, not Piss-All, and there was the meaty slap of flesh on flesh, and I was free. I found my feet and punched at Tomoth's head, a quick, vicious, hooking punch that the Timekeeper had taught me. My knuckles broke and pain burned up my arm into my shoulder joint. Tomoth grabbed his head, dropping to one knee.
       Soli was behind him. "Moira's son," he said as he bent over and reached for the collar of Tomoth's fur to keep him from falling. Then I made a mistake, the second worst mistake, I think, of my life. I swung again at Tomoth, but I hit Soli instead, smashing his proud, long nose as if it were a ripe bloodfruit. To this day, I can see the look of astonishment and betrayal (and pain) on his face. He went mad, then. He ground his teeth and snorted blood out of his nose. He attacked me with such a fury that he got me from behind in a head hold and tried to snap my neck. If Bardo had not come between us, peeling Soli's steely hands away from the base of my skull, he would have killed me.
       "Easy there, Lord Pilot," Bardo said. He massaged the back of my neck with his great, blunt hand and eased me toward the door. Everyone stood panting, looking at each other, not quite knowing what to do next.
       There were apologies and explanations, then. Lionel, who had held himself away from the melee, told Tomoth and his brothers that I had never drunk skotch before and that I had certainly meant them no insult. After the novice refilled the mugs and tumblers, I said a requiem for the Sodervarld dead. Bardo toasted Tomoth, and Tomoth