Neveryona

by Samuel R. Delany

  They continued, walking, talking.

  On the other side of the bridge she saw a man, unsteady with drink, stop and look at her. In the same way she had felt herself the center of attention with the unseen boys who’d come up behind, now she tried to tell herself that, no, he wasn’t really staring at her. As she passed, he turned, looking. The moment he was out of eye-sight, Pryn felt an overwhelming urge to look back and see if he were following – and at the same moment felt that that, above all, was what she must not do. It would only make some horrible and unnameable and inexplicable thing occur.

  As she walked on, the conflict inside her grew, filling up her head, then her whole body, reaching toward some unbearable level till she groped for her knife –

  He ran around the newel ahead of her, came a dozen steps onto the bridge, stopped a dozen steps in front of her – a naked barbarian boy. Suspended in a moment of astonishment, he paused, like someone running to keep an appointment only to realize, on arrival, that the person ambling by the appointed corner is not the expected party but only a passing stranger – that, indeed, the appointment itself was for a different day, if not a different street, at a different hour, in a different town altogether.

  The boy blinked, turned, ran off down the Spur-side quay. Carefully, Pryn looked behind her. (Her hand had gone up from her knife hilt. Her knuckles knocked bronze.) The drunken man was walking away unsteadily.

  Here, thought Pryn, I can follow every story, image, and bit of misinformation to its source in memory; yet I have no notion where such contradictions come from. Not look back? I’d best learn when to, or – better – just shake such contradictions from my head; if I don’t, and still I stay in such cities, I shall be dead of them!

  Pryn walked from the bridge out onto the empty market’s worn brick. (She could be afraid. But what was it she must learn to fight …?) Crossing the square in the night-breeze, she stopped by the stone fountain, bent, drank, then looked up, trying to decide which of the hills about her fed this foaming basin.

  She bent to drink again.

  Were this another story, what we have told of Pryn’s adventures till now might well have been elided or omitted altogether as unbelievable or, at any rate, as uncharacteristic. In that other story, Pryn’s next few weeks might easily have filled the bulk of these pages.

  Such pages would tell of a dawn’s waking in the public park. They would recount a day of watching beggars along the waterfront – and the three not very profitable hours Pryn spent begging herself. The coins Madame Keyne had given her, without hope of adding to them, did not seem much to live on. Those pages would chronicle the evening she carried baskets of yams and sacks of grain from store to kitchen in a large eating establishment frequented by doggedly hungry, dirty men, most among them barbarian laborers who’d managed to secure jobs in the New Market. (The food most popular among them was a kind of vegetable stew which, when Pryn tasted it, proved almost inedible because of some pungent spice whose flavor glimmered all through it.) They would describe the two young women Pryn met working there, who dissuaded her from her plan for the next day: to go to the New Market and ask for a job as a bucket carrier. For didn’t Pryn know? Only barbarian women took such jobs. That was no way to climb the social ladder.

  One, about twenty, was a short redhead with immense energy and a thick accent (non-barbarian) who would not say where she was from. Her name was Vatry, and she told Pryn she was a dancer. The other was taller, older, heavier, slower, less insistently friendly; still, Pryn found herself taking to her. She was a second cousin, or a friend of a second cousin, of the woman who managed, but did not own, the eating hall. Much later, when Pryn was quite exhausted and had been assured neither she nor Vatry could work there tomorrow because the two brothers who usually did the job would be returning the next day from a family funeral out of town, it was she who said, once she discovered that Pryn had some money of her own, that Pryn could come with her and sleep in her room.

  Vatry seemed relieved.

  Since there was an extra pallet and lots of blankets, it turned out to be as comfortable a sleep as Pryn had gotten in a while.

  That story would tell how Pryn met Vatry, as planned, the next afternoon in the Old Market. Vatry knew the mummers who performed their skits there. Pryn and Vatry watched one of the comic extravaganzas from inside the mummers’ prop wagon, crouched among old musical instruments, with mountains and flowers and clouds and waves painted on leather and canvas roped to wooden frames and stacked about them. Actors offstage pulled cords to make an artificial beast with metal eyes open and close its mouth – while another offstage actor roared – then lowered a wooden eagle whose wings could be flapped by other actors pulling other cords. (A girl, who, in false white hair and beard at the beginning of the skit, had hobbled about the platform in a very funny imitation of a crippled geezer, crouched beside them now, hands cupped to her mouth, cawing and shrieking and cawing.) It would tell how Vatry, five years older and a head shorter than Pryn – who, after all, was not tall – performed for the mummers between two skits. The performance was called an ‘audition.’ Pryn was given a clay drum with a leather head to pound, and sat, pounding it, with the other musicians at the stage edge, making simple rhythmic music, while Vatry grinned and gaped and bounced and bent and turned impressive cartwheels and finished with an astonishing backflip. Later, Pryn must have asked her twenty-five times how she did it and where she’d learned it; but Vatry just laughed. Everyone was very friendly and told Vatry to go walk about the market for an hour while they made their decision. Pryn was nervous, but Vatry thought the whole situation very funny and kept darting off to look at that or this – Pryn once used the opportunity to buy a piece of sugar cane for herself. Then she decided that had been a silly way to spend one of her coins; but it was done. Once Vatry ran up holding a chain on which was … Pryn’s astrolabe! She explained that, while, minutes ago, the two of them had been watching a man with a trained bear, Vatry had seen someone lightly lift it from where Pryn had stuck it into her sash that morning and make off with it. Vatry had gone after him and, as lightly, lifted it back! To Vatry it all seemed amusing, but Pryn found herself wondering, as she put the chain once more around her neck, if the tiny, energetic redhead weren’t more talented as a pickpocket than as a dancer. She gave Vatry the last of her cane. Then they returned to the mummers where, as they stepped up on the by now half-dismantled platform, the corpulent man, who had done a silly dance himself in the first skit with a tall woman who could bend every which way, announced perfunctorily: ‘More cartwheels and flips; less bumping and bouncing. If you want supper, go back to the wagon there. You can take your friend,’ which meant Vatry had been hired. Pryn ate that evening with the mummers, terribly excited about Vatry’s coming tour – which is mostly what the other mummers talked of as they passed food along the benches under the darkening sky, bruised green and copper along the market’s western edge. Vatry herself did a lot of complaining, mostly under her breath and to Pryn, about the director’s instructions. ‘Does he think I sell my dances the way a prostitute sells her body on the bridge at the other side of the market? What he wants me to cut out are all the magic parts, the truly wondrous parts! But nobody understands magic in this vicious and vulgar city!’ The troupe, apparently, would soon travel to markets throughout Nevèrÿon. What wonderful people, Pryn thought as she leaned on her knees and ate fruit and a mush of grain and fried fat that the leading lady said was practically all they ate in her home town when she was growing up, though Pryn was as unsure where that was as she was of Vatry’s origins. They drank beer from clay buckets and passed around platters of roasted potatoes. Indeed, the only thing that seemed to interest these odd and exciting people more than travel, past and to come, was sex, about which they joked constantly and in several languages. But the jokes – the ones she could understand – made Pryn laugh, and only now and again did she feel any apprehension about what the night might bring.

  Though she’d eaten wit
h the mummers, it wasn’t Pryn who had been hired to dance, or who could now blanket off a section of one of the cramped prop wagons to sleep, or who had the wonders of all Nevèrÿon’s markets promised her for the season.

  What the night brought was mass confusion.

  Pryn went back to her other friend’s room and was just at the door when she heard scuffling inside. At first she started to move away. Then she heard her friend cry out. Pryn pushed the door open and ran in. A very drunken man was hitting her friend, who had a large yellow and red bruise on her face already and who was making a piteous sound. Pryn opened her mouth and grabbed her knife, both without thinking. She cut the man deeply on the arm and not so deeply on the buttock – and when he tried to grab a workhammer with which he’d already hit the woman, or at least had been threatening to, Pryn slashed the back of his shoulder. This time he got out the door and stumbled down the steps. Her friend was very upset and said they couldn’t stay there because, first, he might come back and, second, there was blood all over everything and, third, the landlord, if he saw any of it, would throw them both out – so they went to the room of one of the woman’s friends, three streets away.

  The story would certainly tell of the two young men Pryn met who were also visiting there that evening. It would, no doubt, record the intense conversation, much later that night among all the young people, about the city’s violence. ‘You say you’re scared every time you hear people walking up behind you on the street?’ said the younger of the two men, who had a Kolhari accent so thick that for the first minutes Pryn had to restrain herself from laughing, for it sounded like something you might hear from a mummer in a comic skit. ‘You can’t live like that! You have to develop strategies. Now you – ’ he pointed to the woman who worked in a harness house and whose room it was – ‘suppose you were walking along, at night, and you heard footsteps. What would you do?’ Pryn didn’t know and, with the young woman addressed, said so. ‘You’d listen, that’s what!’ the young man cried. ‘And if the people were talking among themselves, men alone or mixed men and women, you’d know it was all right. If they weren’t talking, then you’d move!’

  ‘What if they’re talking about you?’ asked a pretty girl who’d given Pryn’s friend a rag dampened with vinegar to hold against her bruise.

  For some reason, that made everybody laugh – except the girl who’d said it and Pryn’s friend. (The vinegar made the whole cramped room smell.) ‘Most of the time they will be talking, too,’ the Kolhari youth went on. (For the two young men, at any rate, the laughter seemed to have dealt with the objection.) ‘But you have to learn things like that, otherwise you’ll be too scared to go out in the street!’

  Pryn, who’d never thought about such strategies in Ellamon, was impressed – the objection notwithstanding – and resolved at least to try it.

  The story would tell how the two young men that night said they were planning to take a cartload of something they didn’t want to talk about too much someplace in the south they didn’t want to name; and since, with whichever strategies, Pryn didn’t want to wander about in streets in which also wandered some half-mad creature whom she had considerably injured, she asked if she could go with them.

  The young men thought it was a fine idea.

  The story would tell how the night before they actually left – several days after they’d planned to, which gave Pryn a chance to practice her ‘strategy,’ and find that, more or less, it worked – there was some festival in a neighborhood of the city Pryn had never been in before, but where the younger one (with the comic accent – though he was getting easier for her to follow each day, if not hour, she spent in the city) said he had some friends. That night people crowded the streets. Bonfires blazed over a small square; and the smell of roasted pig and barbecued goat drifted down every alley.

  Pryn and the two youths walked through the throng, passing under high-held torches. And though they never did find the younger man’s friends, twice they were taken into people’s houses and given lots of beer and, once, some roasted pork. The elder now and again met several people he knew; once Pryn thought she glimpsed the man she’d cut. But that was better than the first day, when she’d seen him every twenty minutes, now turning this corner, now standing in that doorway – which finally was what was wrong with strategy, since it didn’t cover that. Still later, over the heads of the crowds, Pryn caught sight of the mummers’ wagon, with its raised stage and torches flaming along its upper edge. Yes, there was Vatry, turning her cartwheels and doing her backflips and, indeed, looking better than she had in her audition, because, for one thing, she now wore lots of small bells around her wrists and trailed green and yellow scarves from her waist and neck. At Pryn’s urging, the three of them tried to work closer to the stage. Pryn was sure Vatry had smiled at her – indeed, the little dancer was always moving stage front and winking here or waving there. Certainly, Pryn maintained, someone like Vatry would have many friends all over Kolhari, all over Nevèrÿon! But the elder youth just laughed and said that was the way with mummers. And he had known his share. Besides, the crowd was too thick to get any nearer. And so was Pryn, quipped the younger one in his Kolhari twang. (He had dull dark hair and was extremely thin.) Pryn smiled and wished he hadn’t said it. Finally they found a place by one of the fires, beside which some orange-robed women stood together singing a mournful song in a strange language.

  The three young people felt mildly embarrassed – but happy. They all thought the song was moving, even though they didn’t know what it was about. And Pryn, for herself, decided night in the city was not so bad after all. But why, she wondered, were they leaving tomorrow at sunrise?

  The story would certainly tell how the elder of the two youths had, till six months ago, worked on a farm half a day’s ride from town. He was twenty-three and, despite his bearded, pock-marked face and huge, apparently uncleanable farmer’s hands, seemed to Pryn the sweetest, gentlest, funniest person she had ever met.

  With his comic drawl, nineteen and still no beard yet – and a slight cast in one eye that sometimes reminded Pryn of Noyeed – the scrawny youngster, dirty and dank-haired, had not so long back been a pipe-fitter’s apprentice in a shop off Bronzesmith Row.Both youths had left their jobs under ignominious circumstances, of which they seemed, nevertheless, quite proud. Both would sit for hours, in company or just with Pryn, alternating anecdotes that dramatized, in the case of the younger, his complete detestation of, and, in the case of the elder his complete incompetence at, anything resembling work. Yet Pryn soon saw, when their canvas-covered cart came to any stream or stretch of rough road, however much he claimed to detest it, the scrawny, walleyed one labored with an energetic earnestness that should have shamed his bigger, bearded, pit-cheeked companion. In the evening around their campfire, the elder’s arm about her shoulder, Pryn also learned that the younger had the most repugnant ideas about women and sex she’d encountered since the late Nynx. She leaned against the elder, while across the fire the younger outlined interminable schemes involving women and money, women and money, the one taking the place of the other in his discourse more rapidly even than they might on the Bridge of Lost Desire. At first Pryn tried to argue with him. Later she only half listened, or tried not to listen at all. Also, now, the elder did not talk as much, nor tell his funny, self-deprecating tales, but sat, staring into the flames, while, in the orange flicker, Pryn looked back and forth between the fire and his ruined, romantic face, trying to imagine what he saw – trying also to shut out the other’s droning on about wealth and parts of women’s bodies; for he seemed truly incapable, Pryn finally decided, of talking of women at any one time as other than breasts or eyes or legs or genitals or knees or buttocks or arms or hair. (He had this thing about women’s knees, which he was always explaining.) Occasionally she mustered an amused tolerance for him and his more grotesque strategies. (For every one he had to acquire quick money or avoid urban danger, he had six to start conversations with strange women – each
of which he seemed unshakably convinced was as fascinating to Pryn as to himself.) More often, however, she felt simply a quiet disgust. She was thankful that he was only nineteen and had not yet found opportunity to try out any of his more bizarre plans – at least not on the scale he envisioned. She wondered how the elder, whose shoulder she leaned so sleepily against, could tolerate, much less cherish, this distressing youth’s friendship. When she mention it during some rare minute when they were alone, he shrugged it off, saying that his friend was really a good sort and worked hard.

  The last, certainly, was true.

  On the third evening out, when the mutton and dried fruit prepared back in Kolhari for the first two days was gone, Pryn waited to see how the cooking duties would be divided. At her great-aunt’s, she’d done a good deal of it, and after they made camp she was ready to volunteer. But the wall-eyed one had already taken out crocks and pots and had apparently, earlier in the afternoon, put salted cod to soak in a jar at the back of the wagon, and was now cutting turnips and already quite efficiently into the preparation of the food they had brought for later meals. So Pryn horsed about with the bearded elder, who didn’t seem inclined to help at all – until the wall-eyed one made his third (twangy, nearly incomprehensible, but definitely dirty) joke about women too lazy to cook. Pryn said angrily: ‘Why do you say that! I was going to help …’ The elder took her part – while the younger went on cooking and grinning his disfocused grin. The next evening, however, Pryn insisted on helping, and after a few (disfocused) protests that her help wasn’t needed, the wall-eyed one accepted her aid. This became their pattern of food preparation for all the meals they fixed outdoors. Pryn and the younger chopped and soaked and sauteed and fried, Pryn muttering nivu under her breath like an unknown word from a poem overheard in another language. The elder would sit, not watching – once he fixed something on the cart. Sometimes he would get wood. More often he just lounged or ambled about. No one complained. But one reason Pryn kept at it was because when the wall-eyed one cooked was the only time he wasn’t talking about women’s bodies, and Pryn had decided that if they were to be any sort of friends, she’d best do something with him then.