Tales of Neveryon Read Online Free PDF Page A

wall.
    Thin.
    That’s the first thing he thought, looking at those knobbly shoulders, those sharp knees. Gorgik walked nearer. The boy’s skin had begun the same brown as his own. But it was as if some black wash of street dirt and gutter water had been splashed over him, heels to ears. The boy was not looking at him but stared at some spot on the flagstones a little ahead, so that it was easy to walk by and look at him more closely –
    When he saw the iron collar around the boy’s neck, Gorgik stopped – walking, thinking, breathing. There was a thud, thud, thud in his chest. For moments, he was dizzy. The shock was as intense as heat or cold.
    When his vision cleared, the next thing Gorgik saw were the scars.
    They were thick as his fingers and wormed around the boy’s soiled flanks. Here the welts were pink, there darker than the surrounding skin – he knew what they were, though he had never seen anyone bearing them before. At least not from this close. They were from a flogging. In provincial villages, he knew, whipping was used to punish criminals. And, of course, slaves.
    Wanting desperately to move away, he stood staring for seconds, minutes, hours at the boy – who still did not look at him. No.
Only
seconds, he realized when, a breath later, he was walking on. Reaching the other alley, he stopped. He took three more breaths. And a fourth. Then he looked back.
    Under his matted hair, the slave still had not looked up.
    Stepping close to the wall, Gorgik stood there a long time. Soon he had framed ten, twenty, fifty questions he wanted to ask. But each time he pictured himself going up to speak to the collared boy, his breath grew short and his heart pounded. Finally, after trying three times, he managed to saunter again across the yard – first behind the cistern: the boy’s back was webbed with six welts that, even as Gorgik counted them with held breath, seemed like a hundred in their irruptions and intersections. After waiting almost three minutes, he crossed the yard again, walking in front of the boy this time – then crossed twice more, once in front and again in back. Then, all at once, he left hurriedly, fearing, even though the boy
still
had not looked, someone passing by one of the alley openings might have seen – though the slave himself (newly escaped? a mad one who’d wandered off from, or been abandoned by, his master?), immobile on the cistern wall, gazed only at the ground.
    Half an hour later, Gorgik was back.
    The boy sat on the flags now, eyes closed, head backagainst the cistern wall. What had begun as a series of silent questions had turned for Gorgik into an entire dialogue, with a hundred answers the boy had begun to give him, a hundred stories the boy had begun to tell him. Gorgik walked past, his own feet only inches from the foul toenails. He gazed at the iron collar, till, again, he was moving away. He left by the Alley of No Name, telling himself that, really, he’d spied enough on this pathetic creature.
    The dialogue, however, did not end.
    When he returned in the lowering light an hour on, the boy was gone from the wall. Seconds later, Gorgik saw him, on the other side of the yard, by one of the buildings, curled up with his back against the sandstone, asleep. Again Gorgik walked past him, at several distances, several times – one minute or five between each passage. But finally he settled himself against the far alley entrance to watch, while the tale the boy told him in his mind went on and on, stopping and starting, repeating and revising, sometimes whispered so faintly he could not catch the words, sometimes crisp and vivid as life or dream, so that the square before him, with its circular cistern and the few pots, mostly broken, beside it, grew indistinct beneath a sky whose deepening blue was paled by an ivory wash above the far building, as the moon’s gibbous arc slid over it –
    The slave stretched out a leg, pulled it back, then rubbed at his cheek with one