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have changed my mind.’ She frowned beneath the black hair (dyed now) braided in many loops across her forehead. From a tiny taboret, she picked up a thin-necked copper cruet and reached up between the brass chains to pour out half a cup more oil. The lamp flared. She replaced the cruet on the low table. ‘Oh, Jahor, there must be someone there … you know what I like. Really, our tastes are not that different. Try again. Bring someone else.’
    Jahor touched the back of his fist to his forehead, nodded his blue-bound head, and withdrew.
    After returning Noyeed to his barracks, Jahor had no trouble with his next selection. When he had first come rattling the barred door of the guards’ building, he had been testily sent on in among the slat-walled barracks, with a sleepy guard for guide, to seek out one of the gang foremen. In the foul sleeping quarters, the burly slave whom Jahor had shaken awake first cursed the eunuch like a dog; then, when he heard the Vizerine’s request, laughed. The tall fellow had gotten up, taken Jahor to another, even fouler barracks, found Noyeed for him, and all in all seemed a congenial sort. With his scarred and puggish face and dirt-stiffened hair he was no one’s handsome. But he was animally strong, of a piece, and had enough pit dirt ground into him to satisfy anyone’s
nostalgia de la bone
, thought Jahor as the foreman lumbered off back to his own sleeping quarters.
    When, for the second time that night, the guard unlocked the double catch at each side the plank across the barrack entrance, Jahor pushed inside, stepping from the rain and across the sill to flooring as muddy within as without. The guard stepped in behind, holding up the spitting pine torch: smoke licked the damp beams; verminscurried in the light or dropped down, glittering, to the dirt. Jahor picked his way across muddy straw, went to the first heap curled away from him in thatch and shadow. He stopped, pulled aside frayed canvas.
    The great head rolled up; red eyes blinked over a heavy arm. ‘Oh …,’ the slave grunted. ‘You again?’
    ‘Come with me,’ Jahor said. ‘She wants you now.’
    The reddened eyes narrowed; the slave pushed up on one great arm. His dark face crinkled around its scar. With his free hand he rubbed his great neck, the skin stretched between thick thumb and horny forefinger cracked and gray. ‘She wants
me
to …?’ Again he frowned. Suddenly he went scrabbling in the straw beside him and a moment later turned back with the metal collar, hinged open, a semicircle of it in each huge hand. Once he shook his head, as if to rid it of sleep. Straw fell from his hair, slid across his bunched shoulders. Then he bent forward, raised the collar, and clacked it closed; matted hair caught in the clasp at the back of his neck. Digging with one thick finger, he pulled it loose. ‘There …’ He rose from his pallet to stand among the sleeping slaves, looking twice his size in the barracks shadow. His eyes caught the big-nosed eunuch’s. He grinned, rubbed the metal ring with three fingers. ‘Now they’ll let me back in. Come on, then.’
    So Gorgik came, with Jahor, to the Vizerine’s tent.
    And passed the night with Myrgot – who was forty-five and, in the narrowly restricted area she allowed for personal life, rather a romantic. The most passionate, not to say the most perverse, lovemaking (we are not speaking of foreplay), though it run the night’s course, seldom takes more than twenty minutes from the hour. As boredom was Myrgot’s problem and lust only its emblem, here and there through the morning hours the pit slave foundhimself disposed in conversation with the Vizerine. Since there is very little entertainment for pit slaves in an obsidian mine
except
conversation and tall-tale telling, when Gorgik began to see her true dilemma, he obliged her with stories of his life before, and at, the mines – a few of which tales were lies appropriated from other slaves, a few of which