Tales of Neveryon Read Online Free PDF

hand.
    And the tale halted, again hammered to silence by Gorgik’s heart. While Gorgik had been talking to himself, he’d been thinking, really, how easy it would be, once the boy woke, to go up to him, to speak, to ask him where he was from, where he was going, to offer sympathy, maybe a promise to Tatum with food or a coin, to inquire afterthe particulars of his servitude, to proffer friendship, interest, advice …
    Across the yard the slave stretched out his other hand, made a fist. Then, not suddenly but over a period of ten or fifteen seconds, he rocked a few times and pushed himself up on one arm.
    Contending fear and fascination bound Gorgik as strongly as they had the moment he’d first glimpsed the dirty fellow’s collar. Gorgik pulled back into the doorway, then peered out again.
    With a child between, two women ambled by and into the yard. Again Gorgik froze – though they paid no more attention to the boy lingering in the doorway than they did to the slave lounging by the wall. As the three of them strolled across the dust, the dirty youth stood, very slowly. He swayed. When he took a step, Gorgik saw that he limped – and a dozen tales in his head were catastrophically revised to accommodate it.
    Walk out now and nod at him, smile at him, say something …
    The two women and their child turned out of the yard down the Street of Small Fish.
    The slave limped toward the cistern.
    Gorgik stood paralysed in the alley door.
    When the scarred youth reached the cistern’s waist-high wall, he stopped, not really looking into it. Hair stuck out about his head, sharp in the moonlight. After a few moments, he lifted his face, as though the single thread of cloud across the indigo sky attracted him. He raised his hands to his neck, to hook his fingers over the collar. He tugged –
    What occurred next was, in the moment it happened, wholly unclear to Gorgik, for the tale he was just then telling himself was of an escaped slave who, with hiscriminal markings and limping toward an abandoned cistern, had raised his face to the moon and, in a moment of rebellion, grasped his collar to yank futilely and hopelessly at the iron locked on his neck – the collar that forever and irrevocably marked him as a fugitive for the slavers who patrolled the land, searching out new laborers in the villages, mostly these days (so he’d heard) in the south …
    The semicircles of metal, hinged at the back, came apart in the boy’s fists, as though the lock had not been set, or was broken. Now the boy raised the metal to the moon, its curved jaws open in his hand like black mandibles on some fabled dragon or even some unknown sign Gorgik’s father might mark down in the dockside warehouse.
    The boy tossed the collar over the wall.
    Only when the iron vanished below the stone (the splash was very soft – and a beat after he expected it) did Gorgik realize that the collar, broken, or not locked in the first place, had truly been removed. With no comprehension as to why, he was overcome by chills. They rolled over him, flank, thigh, and shoulder. His fingers against the doorway corner were sweaty on the stone. After five breaths with his mouth wide so as not to make a sound, questions began to pour through his mind: Was this some criminal only pretending to be a slave? Or was it a slave who, now that he’d freed himself from the iron, would pretend to be a criminal? Or was it just a young madman, whose tale in its broken, inarticulate complexities he could never hope to know? Or was there some limpid and logical answer to it that only seemed so complex because, till now, he’d never thought to ask the proper questions?
    The boy turned and lowered himself to sit again on the stone.
    Gorgik moved his hand, just a little, on the jamb.
    Go, he thought. Speak to him. He may be older, butI’m still bigger than he, and stronger. What harm could it do me, if I just went up and asked him to tell me who he is, to give me whatever bit of his