The woman flinched.
Then something very complicated happened.
The hand stopped.
One thing making it complicated was that, unlike you and me, Pryn had been watching the woman (who was about Pryn’s age and Pryn’s size). What had first seemed a kind of apathetic paralysis in her, Pryn saw, was actually an intense concentration — and Pryn remembered a moment when, bridling her dragon, the wings had suddenly flapped among the bushes, and for a moment she’d thought she would completely lose control of it; and all she could do was hang on as hard as possible and look as calm as possible, trying to keep her feet from being jerked off the mossy rocks; for Pryn it had worked…
Another thing making it complicated was that Pryn had not been watching the man she was with.
And he had not been watching the encounter.
We’ve spoken of a center the encounter had created. The big man’s course took them within a meter of it. He had not stopped walking; and because Pryn had not been watching him, she had not stopped walking either.
As they came within the handsome young man’s ken, his hand had halted.
His head jerked about, his face for a moment truly, excitingly ugly. ‘All right!’ he demanded. (Now they did stop.) ‘What is it, then? You want to be the Liberator of every piece of camel dung on this overground sewer?’
The woman with the beaded hair did not look at Pryn’s companion, but suddenly stalked off, arms folded across her breasts in what might have been anger, might have been embarrassment. Five other women, waiting outside the circles within circles, closed about her, one holding her shoulder, one leaping to see over the others’ if she were all right — as though they had not seen them either.
The handsome young man took a step after them, then glanced back at the giant, as if unsure whether he had permission to follow. Apparently he didn’t for he spat again and, making a bright fist by one hip and a soiled one by the other, turned his bleeding breast away and walked off in the other direction.
People looked away, turned away, walked away; and there were three, half a dozen, a dozen, and then no centers at all to the crowd. Pryn looked at her companion.
Examining his knuckles, the giant moved his gnawing on to another nail. Once more they began to walk.
As they passed more onlookers, Pryn demanded, ‘Who was he…’
‘Nynx…’ the giant said pensively. ‘I think someone told me that was his name.’ He put his hand to his belly, scratching the hair there with broad nubs. ‘He manages — or, better, terrorizes — some of the younger women too frightened to work here by themselves.’
‘You must have beaten him up in a fight, once!’ Pryn declared; she had heard of such encounters between men in her town. ‘You beat him up, and now he’s afraid you might beat him up again…?’
‘No.’ The giant sighed. ‘I’ve never touched him. Oh, I suppose if it came to a fight, though he’s less than half my age, I’d probably kill him. But I think he’s been able to figure that out too.’ He gave a snort that ended in the scarred, broken-toothed smile. ‘Myself, I go my way and do what I want. Nynx — if that is his name — reads my passings as he will. But from the way he reads them, I suspect I will not have to kill him. Someone else will do it for me, and within the year I’ll wager. I’ve seen too many of him.’ He gave another snort. ‘Such readings are among the finer things civilized life teaches. You say you can read and write. You’ll learn such readings soon enough if you stay around here.’
‘What did he want with me, before?’ Pryn asked.
‘Probably the same thing he wanted from the girl. There used to be a prostitutes’ guild when I was a youngster — lasted up until a few years ago, in fact. It retained its own physicians, set prices, kept a few strong-armed fellows under employment for instant arbitration. They rented out rooms in half a dozen inns around here at cheap, hourly rates — today they charge double for an afternoon’s hour what they charge you to spend the night alone. With all the new young folk in from the country, you see, the old guild has moved out to Neveryóna, and its established members have all become successful hetaeras and courtesans. The new lot struggle for themselves, now, here on the bridge with no protection at all.’ The giant went on rubbing his stomach. ‘Beer,’ he remarked pensively after a moment. ‘I hear it was invented not more than seventy-five years back by barbarians in the south. Whoever brought its fermentation up to the cities has doomed us to a thousand years of such bellies as mine — ’ He glanced at Pryn — ‘and yours!’ He laughed.
Pryn looked down at herself. She didn’t know the word ‘beer’ and wondered if it could be responsible, whatever it was, for her plumpness.
As they neared the bridge’s end, the giant said: ‘Here, why don’t I show you through the — ’
The naked boy who ran around the newel to stop just before them, if he were not the barbarian she’d seen before with the portly man in the toga, could well have been one of his fabled brothers. Green eyes blinked, questioning, at the giant, at Pryn, and back.
The giant said: ‘Not now, little friend. Perhaps later on — I’ll come meet you this evening, if I remember. But not now.’
The boy held his stance a moment, then ran off.
‘Come,’ the slave said, before Pryn could question the encounter. ‘Let me show you around the Spur’s most interesting square — the Old Kolhari Market.’
For beyond the bridge stretched rows of vending stalls, colorful booths with green and gray awnings, and single- or double-walled thatched-over sheds. Porters pushed between them with baskets of fruit, tools, grain, pots, fabric, fish — some were even filled with smaller baskets. Women wheeled loud barrows over red brick paving. Here and there, brick had worn down till you could see ancient green stone beneath. As they walked into the square — five times the size of the market in Ellamon, at least — the tall slave, whom, till now, Pryn had thought of as friendly but somehow reticent, began to talk, softly, insistently, and with an excitement Pryn found stranger and stranger.
3. Of Markets, Maps, Cellars, and Cisterns
Let us bear in mind, however, that a long oral recital made by the central figure of a novel to a willing, silent listener is, after all, a literary device: that the hero should tell his story with such precision of detail and such discursive logic is possible, say, in The Kreutzer Sonata or The Immoralist, but not in real life…Nevertheless, this literary convention once conceded, it depends upon the author of such a récit to put into it the whole of a being, with all his qualities and defects as revealed in his own peculiarities of expression, with his judgments sound or false, his prejudices unknown to him, his lies, his reticences, and even his lapses of memory.
‘THE CITY FASCINATES — AS all who come to it expect it to. Do certain country markets necessarily secrete cities about themselves? Must a nation raise markets, and cities around them?’ The giant slowed as they entered between two rows of stalls. Those left held wooden rakes and brass-headed mallets. Those right were filled with leafy green, knobbly yellow, and smooth red vegetables. ‘The city sits in the midst of empire, a miniature of all that surrounds it: a map on which — true — you cannot read distances and directions, but on which you can mark qualities of material existence as well as the structure of certain spiritual interactions. People come from the country to the city with country wares, country skills; you need only look at who walks in its streets, who lives in its hovels and High Courts to know what is abroad in the land. I told you, over there live the barbarians most recently up from the south? A bit west, above the Khora, is a neighborhood of northern valley folk who still wear pastel robes, loose hoods pulled up about the old women’s faces and thrown back from the corn-rowed heads of the men, their hems stained to the knees with brackish streetmuds that would never soil them in their own greenwalled land. Two streets below is an enclave of desert families, the men with copper wires sewn about their ears, the women with tell-tale dots of purple dabbed on their chins. If you walk the unpaved alleys between, you will see desert boys, in moody clusters stalking close to the mud walls, suddenly spot a lone valley dweller in pale, ragged orange crossing at the corner; and you will hear the desert youths call the same taunts that, as grown warriors in the land of their parents, they would cry from their camels as they rode to meet the long-robed invaders.