Salernum

Her dress was filthy. Already the brown rep fabric began to yellow under the sweat-stained armpits. The skirts, heavy with water and algae that she waded over, hung sternly around her rounded hips. Panting hard as she dragged a heavy case behind her, Yuliya stopped in front of a procession of small shacks that dotted a clearing. Up ahead, the outline of a city stabbed into the blue belly of the sky. A dirty, rugged man sat on a crate, alone.

“What is this place?” she asked him.

His response was vulgar and crude. He regarded her coldly, with a belligerance she could perceive, though not necessarily understand. But his rudeness was refreshing. He had asked her what a free woman, with no homestone, could possibly hope to accomplish by entering the gates of a foreign city. The question made perfect sense to her.

She had few coin in her pocket when she left Telnus. It was soon forfeited to a traveling troupe of actors, who promised in exchange to escort her to Ar. It was too bad that on the way the group was ransacked by outlaws–she wondered what became of them as she stole away from the commotion, dragging behind her only a trunk which she supposed held food and provisions, but was later discovered to contain only stage costumes.

The man laughed at that.

“It’s rough being a woman, especially free,” she remarked. “If only I were one of those invisible boys.”

It struck a chord. Invisibility, that is. The man, the tanner as she by then discovered, had read her mind. It was strange that she could instinctively trust him. She liked the way he seemed to scold the world just by looking at it; something about his crass and profane dialect calmed her. Men like him were separate from society, as she had been herself. It only seemed natural that he should trust her.

“Take me as your apprentice!” she had demanded of him. “You will have free labor, and I will have your word to conceal me! And a place to sleep, and a plate to eat from.”

He was hesitant; but he was also paranoid. This was a winning competition: for the price of two coppers and some checking up on the Administrator’s business, he would take her on. In the meantime, he permitted her only the luxury of his name. The tanner was not a bright man, however, for when she asked him what his name was, he refused to supply it.

She found out later it was Esau from a slave of the city after a fitting description of the man was supplied. Esau–and a story was concocted with it.

The trunk of costumes served its due. She bound her breasts to flatness with rep cloth and garbed herself in ostentatious clothing and cloaks–heavy garments for the weather, but necessary to divert the attention from her meager body. She sliced off her black hair with a sharp dagger. To her lips she affixed a makeshift mustache, created from her own locks.

Armed with her disguise, she ventured forward. There was much to be done.

Kain

She wondered if he was still in the north.

In the center square of Telnus, a small round fountain jutted out from the unformit of the cobble. She liked to sit there, calm and observant, surrendered to the sound of the soothing water. Two men, a slaver and a physician, stood before her, gripped in an argument over a slave. A slave, she thought wistfully; wasn’t there rule about that? Men are not to fight over beasts of burden, so to speak. And yet they did. That a slave was meaningless was only a lie men told women. She had never really been fooled.

Only some minutes earlier, she had spoken to that slaver about Verity, who had assumed submitting to Yuliya was some step toward her destiny. He had revealed that once he was both, Verity’s master and her companion. She couldn’t quite comprehend why it made her angry. Regardless, the slaver, Jaxon, to whom surely slaves must have become disposable by now, still seemed to care greatly. Slaves as mere objects? Mere beasts of burden? Mere sluts? They could shout that lie from the rooftops, but it would never become true.

Slaves were always of use to her. Frequently she had felt closer to them in spirit than she did to the haughty, boring Free to whose ranks she supposedly belonged. But perhaps it was because she once had been a slave herself, though she did not stay a slave. She had known the jealousies of a Free Woman, but even then, even with him, she couldn’t really be that which Gorean men desired most.

She remembered one particular time when, in the breathless heat of her small baker’s hut, marinated in the fowl smell of a burning hearth, she served Kain his evening meal and rebuked him on all the money he was spending. Even then, when things hadn’t become their worst, she could already feel she was losing him. It was only that afternoon, after all, that she hired a slave to follow him and watch him in the tavern. She had loathed herself then.

She remembered briefly that moment, when she grabbed his half-finished plate out from under him, demanding, “Are you finished?”

“No,” he had said firmly and pressed her hard against the side of the hearth. She felt his strength and his warmth and his cruelty, but even then, if she had to point to a time, then would be the last time she could remember when he still loved her.

When they made love, she couldn’t even bring herself to be angry at him. She surrendered fully, despite a gnawing knowledge that perhaps he had wanted her to resist. It was the chase that attracted him to her first. It was the danger and uncertainty. What had they become now? A couple. And it had stopped being love then, because at the core, they were simply two people with nothing but loneliness in common.

The last time she saw him, he was unconscious on a rug, empty glass bottles of sul paga clinking together around his supine form as they rolled across the floor.  The ship was moving to the North, to Torvaldsland, but it had made another stop in Kar. She packed a small trunk, left him only a small amount of the money they had brought together, and got off onto the docks.

The notions of what may have gone through his head when he woke up to find her missing still haunted her. It had perhaps been unnecessarily cruel. How would she feel, after all, if he had done the same to her? But in the end, it was the fleeting nature of her presence in his life that had seemed to attract him so much. If anything, this was just an ironic way to end things.

So what would happen, she thought to herself, if someday down the line, she was to see Kain again? What if the horrible had occured and she belonged to someone else then? Perhaps Kain would find himself in the same situation Jaxon did with Verity. Perhaps her anger arose out of that, because it reminded her of her own lover. And at the core of everything between her and Kain was a vindictive loathing. She couldn’t forgive him for letting her go.

Verity

Yuliya slept in an alley. Like a common urt, she told herself wistfully, but perhaps that she was still in one piece spoke to some odd alignment of the stars, wherein one act of misfortune (missing the boat) led to an uncharacteristic bit of luck. For there she was, still possessing a few coins, and though caked in dirt and soot, still free.

She straightened out her dirty brown dress and rebraided her oily, dirty hair. Her stomach grumbled, but she was used to hunger. Perhaps later that day she would cajole a slave girl to steal some bread for her, perhaps a sliver of meat too if she was lucky. But really, she needed to start thinking about what she would really do. She had skills of self sufficiency buried deep down somewhere, flattened perhaps by years of baggage–of slavery, of companionship. Had she really become like them, those fragile women who deluded themselves of their freedom? For freedom was the ability to survive independently, even if that notion did take a heaping portion of suspended disbelief.

In the middle of the square, she stopped in her tracks. A tall, slim woman stood alone some paces away. She seemed composed and still, yet magnetic, enigmatic. Her dress draped carefully the outline of the figure, all graceful lines and angles, like modern architecture.

It was Verity, she would recognize her even now, after what seemed like years. She stepped closer and remarked on the woman’s scarf–for she had, in fact, been wearing the same one.

They reconnected, even joked, as they exchanged their own stories of the past. Last Yuliya had seen Verity, the woman was still a blacksmith in the trading post of Parsit’s, which had now been deserted. After a shipwreck, Verity had lost sensation in her hands and, having been deprived of the most important tools in her caste work, now relied on singing to support a livelihood. Yuliya’s story, or at least as she told it, was less tragic. Her good for nothing sleen of a Companion drank and gambled away their baking business in Laura, and after an exhaustive travel to Torvaldsland and more disappointment when they arrived, she had chosen to leave.

And now here she was, destitute in Telnus without a single talent to her name–none that mattered anyway. “Forgery and espionage,” she had said quietly to Verity when they were alone, “just doesn’t pay what it used to.” Her old friend was coy at first, but soon, they reached a certain understanding, as if the memories of their past flooded back.

Where was it that she met Verity, the woman she would come to befriend and admire, who had at one time been her closest companion in the world? It must have been at a time when both women were in trouble. They worked together in the Umbra, following honestly Aashe’s convoluted ploys. Once, they had stolen the medical records of the Ubara of Rovere, in an effort to break its alliance with Fina. That had dire consequences in the end. Another time, they were commissioned to create a poison–they did not know at the time that Aashe required it for the planned kidnapping of Tharna’s Tatrix. Later, in their small sewing shop whose basement doubled as a gambling tavern and a forgery office, the heads of major Gorean cities–ranging from Kar to Treve, bid on the Tatrix, and by proxy, control of her silver mines. Once, they had been instruments in intrigues and wars, in epic circumstances. And now they stood in the square of Telnus, one a singer and another practically a she-urt. Yuliya, at least, felt nostalgic and depressed.

They pilfered Ka-la-na from the empty tavern and shared it beneath the Telnus docks. The city was alive with secrets, they hypothesized as they took large gulps of the bittersweet spirit. They could sing together, they could satirize whom it suited, they could involve themselves on “the inside.” They could leverage power. As they spoke and planned, Yuliya had felt almost hopeful again, almost like she could return something that seemed unreturnable–the past.

She looked out into the distance again, and the way the setting ruddy sun bled on the jolting indentations of the blue water. She wondered briefly where most of the Umbra had dispersed to. Were they, too, bakers and merchants and craftsmen now? And where was Aashe? Whatever happened to that old louse?

Arrival

She left him in the North.

The far view, flayed by the streaks of the sun on the rippled water and the edge of the heavy wooden vessel tumbling toward the horizon, dissolved in a dizzying wash of light and distance. Yuliya Miles stood there dumbfounded, silent, and still, fingers clutched angrily into the heavy ruffles of her plain brown dress. An onlooker, some sailor or a passing she-urt, might have remarked on how her tiny figure on the dock that morning, arched slightly ahead toward the sea, would make a compelling puzzle piece to be found in the corner of a great cityscape painting. If they were poetic or insightful, which as a rule she-urts and sailors were not, they might even have thought she was about to jump.

She had been traveling to Ar, or at least that was the plan. Ar seemed far enough, loud enough, alive enough to distract her from him. He was just a bother anyway, she told herself in recollection of that sight of him, splayed out on the dirty wooden floor of their shack, like a hide rug with the head and paws still attached. He seemed empty to her then, and a little sad.

But mostly, she was angry. The bottles clinked on the ground in their sad percussion. It wasn’t really love, it couldn’t have been. Love was something wrapped up in a little box, on a shelf somewhere that she couldn’t reach because she was so short. Love was otherwordly and surreal, and sometimes hard, but what they had–it couldn’t have been love. She would have fought for love, if it were that, but it wasn’t. If anything, they were just two people with something in common.

It was only the memory, the rosy retrospection that haunted her. Not the last embers of something that was once on fire, but some vestigial habit. Her thoughts throbbed like phantom limbs. He was an annoying tune she couldn’t get out of her head. And so, she was running to Ar to forget.

Damned be that little cabin boy who had told her the ship was stopping in the Isle of Cos for two ahn. She wandered too far, fond as she was suddenly of fresh air and still ground after days on the tumultuous sea, until she found herself lost in a network of building sites. Telnus could commiserate with her, she had thought wistfully. It resembled then what she imagined her insides would be if she were to lay them out flat on some table.

By the time she reached that slab of concrete overhanging the water, the boat she had taken was dissolving in the distance. Her few belongings–dresses, veils, a book of old baking recipes, one of his shirts that she could not forgive herself for taking, and a set of lockpicks she had not used in a very long time, were all gone with it. Her coin purse and the dress on her back was all that remained, though the pittance of both combined could not even afford her passage on another ship.

The citizens of Telnus shuffled by. Sailors prepared for a journey. The bare feet of rushing slaves thudded on the cobblestone. The city was alive, like a breathing beast with its intricate anatomy, its grotesque organs and instinctive impulses. She felt like a tumor, like an acne spot. Ar was unreachable, and her heart was stomping around in her chest. She turned from the sea, for it was in the North that she left him, and it couldn’t have been real love.