Neveryona

by Samuel R. Delany

  ‘it’s as if,’ Pryn said, suddenly, ‘he felt all those desires secretly that you felt openly! But because his were secret, even from himself, they took control of him and led him to those foolish and dangerous actions, while your desires were known and acknowledged, and so, if anything, you were the better Liberator for it … ?’

  Gorgik snorted again, it would be a lie if I said I had not thought the same from time to time. But what I let myself think idly, I do not necessarily believe.’ He lifted the collar on his finger so that it tugged Noyeed’s head to the side. Then he let the iron fall to the little man’s neck. ‘Sarg said he felt no lust within the iron. I say I do. Why should I assume he spoke any less truly of his feelings than I speak of mine? If such a sign can shift so easily from oppression to desire, it can shift in other ways -toward power, perhaps, and aggression, toward the bitterness of misjudged freedoms by one who must work outside the civil structure. We killed many slavers, Sarg and I – he was only a boy, really. I do not think dealing death makes the best life for the young. The chance organization of my inner life and those situations life has thrown me into have taught me, painfully, a sign can slide from meaning to meaning. What prevented it from sliding another way for Sarg? For me, the collar worn against the will meant social oppression, and the collar worn willfully meant desire. For Sarg, the collar was social oppression, as well as all asocial freedom. Nothing in our lives, save my anger, challenged that meaning for him. And my anger was a lover’s anger, which too often feels to the loved one as oppressive as a parent’s. We fought – the two of us – for a vision of society, and yet we lived outside society – like soldiers fighting for a beautiful and wondrous city whose walls they have nevertheless been forbidden to enter. Sarg did not have the meanings I had to help him hold his own meanings stable. That is all. And my desire’s position in this blind and brutal land means only that I know desire’s workings better than some – but it does not make me either a better or a worse Liberator. Only what I do with my understanding changes that. Do you understand a little more now?’

  Pryn nodded. ‘Perhaps. A little.’

  ‘And do you think, now, you might be able to write a clearer account of it?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I –’ Then she realized he meant an account for some absent master and her possible spying. Pryn felt her face heat in the half-dark.

  ‘Well, perhaps I do too – now.’ Gorgik snorted again. ‘Perhaps I, too, saw in myself that other meaning, Sarg’s meaning, when I left him. Certainly, when he swung down from that balcony at me, across the cellar, I saw all the dangers of such asocial freedom descending upon me – and they were indeed as terrifying and as paralyzing as the first and sudden discovery in one’s own body of lusts which have no name. You say you’re leaving the city? Probably that’s wise. Tell me, girl, which way are you heading?’

  ‘I came down from the northern mountains,’ Pryn said. ‘I suppose I’ll head … south.’

  ‘Ah, the monstrous and mysterious south! I remember my time there well. I hope you learn as much about the workings of power while you are there as I did.’ The Liberator’s free hand moved absently to his broad chest, where his bronze disk hung. The broad thumb slid over the marked verdigris, as if the hard flesh might read what was inscribed there by touch: certainly the shifting leaf blotches made it impossible to decipher those signs by sight. ‘Tomorrow I have my meeting with Lord Krodar, first minister to the Empress. The denizens of the High Court have little love for the south. I’m afraid this astrolabe is, in its way, a map of just that southern-most peninsula which those now in power have traditionally seen as their nemesis. To enter new territory displaying the wrong map is not the way to learn the present paths that might prove propitious.’ Thick fingers moved from the disk to the chain it hung from. Gorgik suddenly bent his head to loose the links from under his hair. Pryn saw his own collar was gone … and now realized it was the Liberator’s that hung around the bandit’s neck, ludicrously too large and lopsided on the jutting collarbones. ‘When I was a boy in this city –’ the Liberator raised his head – ‘half your age, if not younger – oh, much younger than you – my father brought me to visit a house in Sallese. I remember a garden, some statues, I think a fountain … maybe some fountains near running water.’ The Liberator laughed. ‘When I heard this house was for rent, I was told it was in Sallese – and I felt the return of old joy to think I might be taking for my headquarters the very home I had visited as a child. It isn’t in Sallese, you know. It’s right next to Sallese, in the suburb called Neveryóna, where the titled aristocracy have their city homes – those who are not staying at the High Court of Eagles itself. Once, they actually tried to call the whole city Neveryóna, but that never went over very well, and when the Child Empress came to power …’ His mind seemed to reach for that distant time, while moonlight spilled its shadow over his face’s rough landscape. ‘It seems an irony to be here rather than there – though it’s not ironic enough to make me truly laugh. Here, girl.’ Gorgik gestured with his two fists, below which, in moon dapple, the chained disk turned and turned back, if you knew the trouble this has guided me through, you might not take it. Yet I suspect the trouble I have got through under its weight is trouble I have lifted from the neck of all Nevèrÿon – an illusion, perhaps; but then, perhaps the fact that it is an illusion I believe in is why I am signed and sign myself “Liberator.” ’

  Pryn stepped forward.

  Gorgik raised the astrolabe.

  Noyeed reached between his legs to scratch – and blinked.

  As she neared them, moonlight flittered over Pryn. She felt a growing sense both of disgust and trust. Had she not just spent the time with Madame Keyne – and the Wild Ini – she might have thought that the trust was all for Gorgik and the disgust all for Noyeed. But in the conflict and complication, the chills, which had never really ceased, resurged. Was this fear? Was it more? It seemed to have lost all boundary; it filled the room, the house, the city the way the flicker and glitter of moonlight filled her very eyeballs.

  Gorgik passed the chain over her head. Tale fragments of the crowning of queens returned to her. Links, warmed through the day against the Liberator’s neck, touched the back and sides of hers – and a memory rose to startle: jerking the twisted vines up over a scaly head …

  Fear was replaced by terror. Pryn had a moment’s vision of herself in a complex and appalling game where Madame Keyne, the Liberator, the Child Empress Ynelgo, perhaps the nameless gods themselves, were all players, while she was as powerless as some wooden doll, set down in the midst of an elaborate miniature garden.

  Something grappled her wrist.

  She looked down – all the motion she could muster. And the moment’s fear was gone. Noyeed held her forearm with hard fingers.

  The eye turned from Pryn to Gorgik – the Liberator was looking down with the same questioning Pryn fancied on her own face.

  ‘She has a knife, master!’ Noyeed’s gappy gums opened over his words like a mask of Pryn’s own former fear: he looked as if he were avoiding a blow. ‘See – at her waist? The spy has a blade! I was only protecting your life, master – protecting it as I have protected it before, as I will always protect it!’

  Pryn wanted to laugh and only waited for the Liberator’s great and generous laughter to release hers.

  ‘Very well then, Blue Heron.’ Gorgik did not laugh. Take my gift, with your blade, into the south.’

  Pryn jerked her arm from Noyeed’s grip. The little man, squatting at their feet, almost lost balance. She stepped back. The chain pulled from the Liberator’s hands. The astrolabe fell against her breasts.

  ‘No one can say for certain what confusion I give you.’ (Gorgik’s perturbation seemed far from her own. And where, a moment back, she had felt at one with him, a oneness inscribed in wonder and fear, now she felt only annoyance inscribed on more annoyance.) Tomorrow I shall go to the High Court of Eagles for … the first time? Does anyone in this strange and terrible land ever go
anywhere, without having been there before in myth or dream? The ministers with whom I shall confer will ask me a simple question. Beyond my campaign to free Nevèrÿon’s slaves, whom will I ally myself with next? Will I take up the cause of the workers who toil for wages only a step above slavery? Or will I take up the marginal workless who, without wages at all, live a step below? Shall I ally myself with those women who find themselves caught up, laboring without wages, for the male population among both groups? For they are, all of them – these free men and women – caught in a freedom that, despite the name it bears, makes movement through society impossible, that makes the quality of life miserable, that allows no chance and little choice in any aspect of the human not written by the insertion or elision of the sign for production. This is what Lord Krodar will ask me. And I shall answer …’

  Balancing on the balls of her feet, Pryn felt as unsteady as little Noyeed, crouched and blinking, looked.

  ‘I shall answer that I do not know.’ Gorgik’s hand found the little man’s shoulder; the horny forefinger hooked again over the collar. Noyeed, at any rate, seemed steadied. ‘I shall say that, because I spent my real youth as a real slave in your most real and royal obsidian mines, the machinery of my desire is caught up within the workings of the iron hinge. Slavery is, for me, not a word in a string of words, wrought carefully for the voice that will enunciate it for the play of glow and shade it can initiate in the playful mind. I cannot tell this minister what slavery means, for me, beyond slavery – not because desire clouds my judgment, but because I had the misfortune once to be a slave.’

  Elation triumphed over all fear; annoyance was gone. And joy seemed a small thing to sacrifice before what Pryn suddenly recognized as the absolute freedom of the real, a freedom that, in its intensity, had only been intimated by the truth of dragons.

  She turned, started for the archway –

  Where are you going …?’ which was the one-eyed bandit.

  To the south!’ Pryn called.

  Gorgik laughed.

  And Pryn ran through moon-slashed rooms, down leaf-loud steps, across the unroofed court. Climbing through the window, she laughed to be leaving by the way she’d entered because of something so indistinguishable from habit when one was this free that habit seemed … But she did not know what it seemed; and crashed through grass and garden brambles, rushed by a stifled fountain, pushed back branches at the wall, felt along stone for the opening, found it, wedged herself into darkness –

  Her shift snagged as she slid by rock. She pulled – and heard something tear. Still, she managed to get one arm out, then her head –

  ‘Give me my knife!’

  Fingers grappled her hair; and her arm, yanking.

  Of Night, Noon, Time, and Transition

  To attempt to define more precisely the ‘city’ is pointless; it is ‘civilization’ itself we must define.

  – RUTH WHITEHOUSE

  The First Cities

  ‘Give it to me, little spy!’

  Pryn jerked away and, with a foot she’d gotten free, kicked at the Ini, missed – struggling, she glimpsed the dark face, backlit by moonlight through pale hair.

  ‘Give it to me! You don’t know how to use it! It will only get you in trouble! It’s mine …!’

  Still wedged into the opening, Pryn felt for the knife with her free hand and jerked the other loose from Ini. Between the rocks, she could not get it out – and wedged in further to escape the Ini’s yanks and punches.

  ‘Give it to me now! I saw you spying on Madame Keyne! Jade and Madame Keyne! This morning and this evening – didn’t you think I saw you? When I tell Madame, she’ll know what you are! Give it to me – No, don’t go back in there! No, it’s dangerous in there! It’s terrible! Horrible! Anything might happen – come back with my …’

  But Pryn was again out the other side, standing, stumbling back in brambles, waiting for the white-blond head to emerge. She breathed, hissing between her teeth. Her side had begun to ache again. She took another breath …

  Silence.

  She waited.

  But the Ini, murderous to those she thought powerless – again, Madame Keyne had been right – was terrified of anything she perceived as authority. And this untenanted house of power and all the grounds around it had become, at least for the dwellers over the garden wall, the authoritative center of the city.

  Pryn wondered if she ought to throw the knife back through the hole; but she was afraid to get too close, in case that was the moment Ini chose to overcome terror and emerge.

  If I see her, Pryn thought viciously, I’ll kick her head –

  She didn’t see anything.

  At least not coming out of the wall.

  Calmer now, with none of the elation she’d felt before, Pryn made her way along the rock, her hand on the knife in her sash, now and again glancing over her shoulder.

  If there were breaks in Madame Keyne’s walls, given the conditions here there must be great gaps leading out every which way …

  After the wall turned, many meters along (it must be facing on the main avenue by now, she thought; and still wasn’t sure), Pryn found a place where, indeed, some stones had fallen and a tree had grown up close enough to allow her to climb. And she was too tired to search further.

  She climbed, clambered across leaves fallen on the top stones, knocked small pebbles to the ground, and jumped.

  On the high road in the moonlight, she brushed off her dirty hands, rubbed her sore knees, and looked about at the groves of palms, at the walls around her, at the roofs beyond them.

  … to the south? Pryn laughed on the empty avenue; and walked, not sure whether she were wandering into or out of the city. For all her tiredness, she felt quite lucid.

  She could write down the salient points of her situation clearly tonight. She was a mountain girl, new in the city, with a strange astrolabe, a few coins, and a stolen knife at her belt. Adventurer, warrior, thief …? (True she wasn’t sure which way she was going.) It would be exciting to leave the city by some unknown direction, turned out onto the land to wander wherever she might …

  Forty minutes later, she knew she was definitely moving toward the city’s center. Once she turned up a dark street she thought looked familiar. Several times she turned up others that were completely unknown. Then, from an unexpected direction, she came out of an alley at the familiar bridge.

  As she strolled onto it, the moon hung just over the ragged roofs beyond.

  The bridge was nearly deserted.

  All that actually lived in the city seemed to have retired for the night. She looked down over the stone wall at the water, to see moon-flicker here and there between rocks. From somewhere she remembered an old tale of night in Kolhari with throngs of merry-makers, high-held torches, songs in the alleys, revelers moving from party to party, house to house … What traveler in the Ellamon market had she overheard voicing such lies? Certainly that was not this city, nor this night, nor this neighborhood.

  Ahead, by the wall, she saw two women in tense, quiet converse. The younger kept touching the broad white collar-cover worn by the older, then dropping her head to shake dark hair, which now and again the older would stroke with a wide, work-scarred hand.

  She heard footsteps behind her and male voices, slowly overtaking her. For moments she was sure that she would be grabbed, that someone would push her down on the stone, that the coins would be ripped from her pocket: the men broke around her – boys, really, she saw now, though no less frightening because of it – and passed ahead.