‘The doll? Who decided that the young should rehearse the physical care of infants, so that they know them as objects to be bounced, cuddled, or abandoned when boring before they know their own, real infants as living beings full of the responsiveness anterior to language that is the basis of all expressed reason?
‘The ball? Who decided that youths should develop speed, agility, and rhythm before they have become comfortable with the physical realities of endurance, perseverance, and steadfastness that alone can make any play, political or artistic, yield true satisfaction?
‘The game board? Who decided that the women and men of our nation must stimulate the faculties of strategy and count before they have learned to note, analyze, and synthesize — the knowledge that alone can direct such skill toward responsible employment?
‘And here we have become entrapped in our own gaming, faced with the unpredicated and unpredicted consequences of our lightest notion. Such oppressive threats are precisely what we fall to the moment we try to free ourselves from the oppressions of the game of art. But where have we wandered to?
‘I do not recognize these aisles and counters. Do they sell the newest wares that I have not the experience to read? Do they sell the oldest, whose secrets I have never before been able to penetrate? Lost in unfamiliar lands, we are merely creatures uninformed, foundering, asking, and finding. Lost in the map of those lands that is the city among them and the market within it, we become one with the map, cartographer and cartograph, reader and read; the separating line can only be scribed with the magic rule and measured with magic calipers, its position and direction only obtainable with an astrolabe set to unknown constellations in an imaginary sky, the distinction in the value of the respective sides calculable only in unmarked coins — a division which vanishes as we stare at it, which, as it vanishes, erases with it all freedom, all power and possibility of choice.
‘Thus lost, the only image we are left is that of ourselves as one of those great, nameless craftsfolk, intently playing at a game equally nameless, whose end is the creation of precisely that reality — and unreality — so obviously bogus when it is politically decreed or imaginatively modeled: that image is, I fear, the final concoction worshiped as freedom by the totally enslaved. But — be thankful, girl! — we have reached the market’s edge and are almost loose from this insidious commercial pollution!’
Pryn had listened to much of this, but from time to time she had let her mind, if not her feet, wander down alleys entirely different from the ones down which her companion would have led her. She forced open the ripe fig a woman a stall behind had handed her and bit the sweet purple, flecked with white seeds, turning her own thoughts, which had gone their own ways as she had strolled between awning and awning.
Occasionally the huge slave’s monologue had seemed to coincide with the real market they walked through; more times than not, however, it seemed to exist on quite another level. One man with a green-painted tray, for example, had grinned at Pryn and handed her a succulent peach, which Pryn had eaten to its red, runneled pit — then thrown that pit down on to the brick. It had all occurred without a mention from the giant extemporizing beside her. Another example? The musician whom the slave had described was certainly as sweet and attractive and docile a creature as might have existed. The young woman Pryn had actually seen, however, hesitating between beer barrel and cider keg, was rather shabbily dressed in what may once have been an elegant bit of fabric; now it was quite frayed and stained and bunched about her, every which way. Her hair was wild, her hips were wide, her shoulders narrow, and she blinked and turned, from booth to booth, one finger hooked through her jug handle, swinging it as if to some clanging inner rhythm. The moment the slave had turned toward the fountain, Pryn had seen the young woman suddenly fling the jar down — so that red clay shattered on red brick! Then she stalked off between the stalls. Four or five times more Pryn saw her, now at the end of this aisle, now crossing another, arms folded, staring ahead, making her headlong way around this stall or that. Was she thinking of some great musical composition, Pryn had wondered; or perhaps she was contemplating her own explanation for the array of tools and produce about them. Once, coming around a stand of flowers, the musician actually brushed against the slave (it was between mummers and toys); she stepped back, unfolded her arms, and blinked up at him with baffled but distinctly approving surprise that clearly held recognition. Then she folded her arms once more and marched off. But as she had already had her place in the narration, none of this registered on the low voice winding on and on among the vendors and porters. Seconds later another vendor had suddenly held out two blood-black plums. Pryn had taken one and sunk her teeth in it, nodding her gratitude. The giant, however, had not even noticed — nor had he halted his peroration. The vendor, smiling and shaking his head, had put the other plum back. This slave and I? thought Pryn. It is as if we are walking through different markets, in different cities. But the fig, offered her by a woman behind a counter piled high with them, had brought Pryn’s thinking to its turn. Vendors were not handing free fruit to everyone among these stalls and aisles, she realized.
Is it something about me?
But the only thing about me, she went on to herself logically, is that I’m walking with him. Could it be that she was walking through his city, his market, in some way she did not yet know?
The giant, who had been quiet a while, spoke again: ‘You said your companions were looking for Gorgik the Liberator?’ For the first time since they had left the bridge, he looked at Pryn directly. ‘Would you like me to take you to him?’ He smiled for the first time since they had left the Bridge of Lost Desire.
Is the Liberator your master?’ Pryn asked
Again his scarred face became grave. ‘You ask very simple questions that are almost impossible to answer.’
Pryn started to speak, but a notion overtook her that no doubt overtook you several pages ago — indeed, if it took Pryn longer to realize than it took you, it was not because Pryn was the stupider; it was simply because for her this was life, not a tale; and it was all a very long time ago, so that the many tales that have nudged you to such a reading had not yet been written.
‘Come,’ the giant repeated. He started to leave the market by a narrow street.
‘Shouldn’t we go back across the bridge and up into the city?’ Pryn asked. ‘The men who brought me into town stopped at a great house out in the suburbs, where the Liberator stays — ’
The man half snorted, half laughed. ‘If you want the Liberator, come with me!’
Tossing away the fig stem, Pryn hurried up to reach the giant’s side. ‘He…isn’t in the house in the suburbs?’
The giant looked at her, considering. ‘It’s a trick I learned when I worked as a messenger for a great southern ruler, the Dragon Lord Aldamir. Many people are curious as to the whereabouts of the Liberator. I make sure there are endless loud voices answering that curiosity. There have been no open conflicts as of yet directly traceable to the High Court — but there have been spies.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘It’s a good idea, when people are curious, to give them something to sustain that curiosity — and direct it.’
‘You’re not really a slave,’ and it was much easier to say than Pryn had thought it would be, ‘are you?’