Free Tales of Neveryon by Samuel R. Delany

him with regard.’
    To which the girl looked absolutely blank for another moment. Then she laughed a – high and childish laugh that had in it an hysteric edge he had not heard before in any of his courtier acquaintances’ merriment. ‘The Empress Ynelgo would certainly not have you put out just because your clothes are poor. Though, really, if you were going to come, you might have shown
some
consideration.’
    ‘The Empress’s reign is just and generous,’ Gorgik said, because that’s what people always said at any mention of the Empress. ‘This will probably sound strange to such a wellbred little slip of a thing like yourself, but do youknow that for the last five days I have not –’ Someone touched his arm.
    He glanced back to see Curly beside him.
    ‘Your Highness,’ said the Baron, ‘have you been introduced to Gorgik yet? May I have the honor of presenting him to you? Gorgik, I present you to Her Majesty, the Child Empress Ynelgo.’
    Gorgik just remembered to press the back of his fist to his forehead. ‘Your Highness, I didn’t know…’.
    ‘Curly,’ the Child Empress said, ‘really, we’ve already met. But then, I can’t really call you Curly in front of him, now, can I?’
    ‘You might as well, Your Highness. He does.’
    ‘Ah, I see. Of course, I’ve heard a great deal about Gorgik already. Is it presumptuous to assume that you –’ Her large eyes, close to the surface of her dark brown face (like so many of the Nevèrÿon aristocrats), came to Gorgik’s – ‘have heard a great deal about me?’ Then she laughed again, emerging from it with: ‘Curly …!’ The sharpness clearly surprised the Baron as well.
    ‘Your Highness.’ The Baron touched his fist to his forehead and, to Gorgik’s distress, backed away.
    The Empress looked again at Gorgik with an expression intense enough to make him start back. She said: ‘Let me tell you what the most beautiful and distressing section of Nevèrÿon empire is, Gorgik. It is the province of Garth – especially the forests around the Vygernangx Monastery. I was kept there as a child, before I was made Empress. They say the elder gods dwell somewhere in the ruins on which it was built – and they are much older than the monastery.’ She began to talk of Nevèrÿon craftsmenlike gods and general religion, a conversation which need not be recounted, both because Gorgik did not understand the fine points of such theological distinctions, and alsobecause the true religion, or metaphysics, of a culture is another surround, both of that culture’s slaves and of its lords: to specify it, even here, as different from our own would be to suggest, however much we tried to avoid it, that it occupied a different relation to its culture from that which ours does to ours – if only by those specified differences. (We are never out of metaphysics, even when we think we are critiquing someone else’s.) Therefore it is a topic about which, by and large, we may be silent. After a while of such talk, she said: ‘The lands there in the Garth are lush and lovely. I long to visit them again. But our nameless gods prevent me. Still, even today, there is more trouble from that little spit of land than any corner of the empire.’
    ‘I will remember what you have told me, Your Highness,’ Gorgik said, because he could think of no other rejoinder.
    ‘It would be very well if you did.’ The Child Empress blinked. Suddenly she looked left, then right, bit her lip in a most unimperial way, and walked quickly across the room. Threads of silver in the white shift glimmered.
    ‘Isn’t the Empress charming,’ Curly said, at Gorgik’s shoulder once more; with his hand on Gorgik’s arm, he was leading him away.
    ‘Eh … yes. She … the Empress is charming,’ Gorgik said, because he had learned in the last months that when something must be said to fill the silence, but no one knows what, repetition of something said before will usually at least effect a