Tales of Neveryon

by Delany, Samuel R.

  ‘Arkvid stood up, stalked to the door, then turned. And gave a sudden, great, and generous laugh, which was what Rulvyn men used to do when they were crossed by women – though since the coming of money, that laugh is no longer so generous, but is shot through with contempt. And he left, still laughing, for the Men’s House.

  ‘“Now you mustn’t mind him,” Ydit said, as Ii and Acia turned to me. “The fact that he even tries to have such ideas is a compliment to you. For didn’t you first tell us about the great, dark places below memory where stories and numbers come from?” (Where do you get your crazy ideas, one of them had asked me not a week ago. What was I supposed to say? Well, then, they wanted to know why didn’t everybody come up with stories and numbers? For the Rulvyn are persistent. Well, I explained, in some people the things in the deep, dark places are so deep and so dark that they cannot say their names. I don’t know … it had a sort of beauty when I said it.) “You let yourself get too upset about the babbling of hunters,” Ydit went on. “You always have, too.” And she looked at me wryly and passed me one of the clay bowls Acia’s mother had made, full of tamarind juice whose amber was still aquiver from where Ii had just sipped. I took it. I sipped. I said:

  ‘“But don’t you see, Ydit. This rult-jealousy of Arkvid’s is all out of his own overvaluation of the rult, and nothing more. Let me describe exactly what happened while you were out a few days back.” When I had, they all laughed.

  ‘“Though, even so,” Ii said through her laughter, “you must admit that a raised knee to shield a naughty child’s prying eyes or simply to turn a boy a modest-so-much for the same effect is not a lot in the line of overvaluation. There are some men, of this tribe too, who carry on about their rults as if they were indeed their gorgis – and what’s more as if their gorgi had just been kicked by a mountain goat!”

  ‘“And to give our prestigious husband credit, there are women who sometimes act with their hunter as if they would like to snatch their rults away. After all,” Acia went on, wiping her mouth of barley flakes, “would you really want to go to bed with our husband without one? One could do it, probably: but you must admit it would be bizarre!” And they all laughed.

  ‘“Seriously,” Ydit said; she was toying with a fruit rind. “You and Ii are not being honest with our most prestigious husband’s newest wife.” She looked down at the bowls among us, dropped the rind on a pile of rinds. “There are more things than you suggest behind his idea. And you know it.”

  ‘The others were suddenly very quiet. I looked at Ydit, who – suddenly and startlingly – looked up at me. “Many, many years before you came, Venn, a terrible thing happened in the tribe. And while we laugh and joke here, we are all thinking about it. And I am sure Arkvid was thinking about it when he got his idea. What happened, all those years ago, is that the Great Hunter Mallik went mad. But it was a slow, evil madness. First he brought home no meat, but ate all his catch, raw, alone in the woods. Then he befouled with urine and feces the rest and left it to rot in the forest. He refused to sleep with any of his six wives, and finally he took to bringing home sand in his feathered hunting sack, and scattering it on his wives’ turnip gardens. Several nights he left his house and tore up the turnip fields of the women who lived in the thatched house next door so that his wives were obliged to replant them; and, in general, he made his wives’ lives miserable. There are many stories of the awful things that occurred within that sad, unfortunate home. Once, in a rage, he beat his oldest son to death, and another time he broke his little daughter’s wrist with a turnip rake. He disgraced his wives in every way; he even walked around the village with his rult all undone, hanging down with its inner carving showing like a careless, baby boy whose mother has neglected to retie the thongs after washing – and when there was a naven, he refused to dress himself in the Men’s House, but would run off instead into the woods and spend four or five days in the forest, from which he would return half starved and ranting like some old holy woman, only without any holy words. And within the house he made his wives’ lives an endless and terrible dream by mockings and by violences of the sort that the sane can hardly imagine. Several times he put poisonous herbs into the cooking pots and sat laughing and singing while his wives and children lay sick and vomiting in their front yard. This is when he did not take to threatening and beating them all outright – I have spoken of the murder of his son …? One night, after what particular outrage no one can be sure, his wives, driven half to madness themselves no doubt, with the help of Mallik’s mother and an aunt, killed him while he lay sleeping. They cut off his hands and his gorgi and his feet; these they buried at the four corners and the center of the oldest wife’s turnip garden. Then they …” Her eyes moved away from mine. “They took his rult, broke it, dipped the pieces in blood and hung them by the thongs from the doorposts. Then they slit the throats of their children; and then their own throats. All were found dead the next morning. You can’t imagine what it was like, Venn, for twelve-year-old Arkvid to come upon that obscene, bloody carving dangling from the door of his mother’s brother’s home; and then to walk in upon the carnage –” and she stopped for the look that crossed my face; for once more I had been brought up by how small a tribe my beloved Rulvyn were, how quickly they grew up, how young they married, how soon they died – with everyone related to everyone in at least three directions, and where “many, many years ago” can be three as easily as thirty, and where a seventeen-year-old wife, with a child at her feet, telling you of something that happened in her great grandmother’s time might just mean six years ago when her fifty-year-old great grandmother was, indeed, alive. For as well as farming and cooking and baby-caring with Ydit and Acia and Ii, somehow I had managed to learn how Acia had got lost in the forest for three days when she was seven, and how she had slept next to a suckling mother goat; and how Ii had stolen a big jar of honey when she was ten and was beaten for it till she couldn’t walk for three days; or how Acia used to run off at night as a girl and sit by the stream for hours in the moonlight – and mynad other things that made up who these women were – in the same way I suppose I tended to forget that one’s prestigious hunter ever had a childhood, or that anything had ever happened in it worth remembering. “You see, something is going on down in the places below memory you so easily speak of.” Ydit looked at me again. “The rult has always been too much here associated with death: for it is what empowers the hunter to kill his goats and his geese and his turtles. And on that day, hanging bloody and broken from that profaned doorpost, it was a sign of the death for all who lay inside.” She took my wrist in her hand and dropped her head to the side. “So if our most prestigious hunter has devised a way to make the rult a sign of life – if he wants to see the child growing in my womb as me growing a little rult, then I think there is a beauty, a necessary beauty there.” Her smile formed and became that strangely private and at once public smile that I always envied in the Rulvyn women and have always missed so in the women of the shore; “I have the best-irrigated turnip fields in the village. So I can certainly allow our hunter his little idea.”

  ‘“Yes,” I said. And I took the wrist of her hand with my other hand and held it tightly; for I felt she was stronger than I, I did. And I wanted to hold on to someone strong when I said this: “There is a beauty there. And Arkvid is a good hunter, as well as a very nice man; I am truly fond of him. But his idea is still wrong. The story of Mallik is a terrible story, but it says, sadly, far more about the overvaluation I spoke of than about women’s jealousy of rults. You are the wives of our most prestigious hunter and I love you more than sisters. Yet ignorance is ignorance, no matter where you find it – even in our most prestigious hunter himself. And I would betray the love I bear you, as well as dishonor his own prestige, if I said otherwise.” And while I held her wrist and she held mine, I was actually afraid that she would pull her hand away and strike me, for the Rulvyn women were proud, powerful, and honorable women, and it was a point of honor with them that n
o one dishonor their hunter.

  ‘But Ii said: “We are all betraying the spirit of the evening.” And she laughed and pushed away the tamarind bowl. “At least we are if we go on talking about such weighty matters as Mallik and rults and right. Women, there’s a naven tonight! And we shall never be dressed for it by the horn’s fifth bleat if we do not hurry up.”

  ‘“All right,” I said; and Acia let go of my wrist. I let go of hers. We put away the dishes and pots and the palm fronds, and all was back to a normal that can only be achieved in a place where work is so steady and constant. Nevertheless, I think they had all begun to sense that I was growing dissatisfied with life there.’ Venn sighed. ‘Yes, ignorance is ignorance – and there is as much here at the shore as there is among the Rulvyn in the hills. But our life is easier here, and I can spend my mornings with you children, dispelling what little part of that ignorance I can, and your parents will keep me alive with their gifts while I do – whereas with the Rulvyn there was only turnips, bridges, paints, pots, and babies. So I would rather live here. But in a sense, Norema, Arkvid’s idea was very like yours. I don’t mean just that I feel they are both wrong; rather, they are alike in the way in which they both strive toward rightness and the way in which they manage to take what is real and what might be right, put them in each other’s places, then draw lines between that simply cross no space.’ Venn mulled for a few more steps. ‘I wonder if the Rulvyn men still have ideas like that now that money has come and power has shifted. Today, if a woman crosses a man, it is the woman who must laugh. But they do it with little chuckles, embarrassed snickers, and pleading smiles. They cannot do it openly and generously. They no longer have it in them.’

  Again she was silent.

  ‘Venn,’ Norema asked, ‘what’s a naven?’

  Venn raised an eyebrow. ‘Ah, yes. The naven.’ She smiled. ‘It is a celebration ceremony performed when almost any act of social importance is done in the village: when a girl harvests her first turnip crop, when a boy kills his first wild goose, when a house is built, when a yellow deer is sighted wandering through the village, or when a honey tree is found in the forest. Then the men go to the Men’s House and take two long, fat calabash melons, tuck their gorgis up behind them, and tie the melons between their legs long way, with tufts of dry grass all around them, so that it looks as if they have great, outsized, women’s gorgis, and they put on women’s aprons and headdresses and take up old, broken turnip rakes – meanwhile the women, in their homes, tie a long brown gourd, with two big, hairy, dyll-nut husks behind them, up between their legs, so that it hangs down, and tuck dried grass all around them; and they put a man’s old, split penis sheath around the gourd, and they paint themselves with hunting paint, and put on chin feathers, and they take old, broken and cracked spears, and mangy shoulder furs and put them on; and the older women – though the younger ones may not – tie an old piece of burnt wood to their bellies like a rult. At the sound of five bleats on the sacred gourd – and sometimes it’s only blown two or three times, and everybody starts to the door and, when it stops short of five, all laugh and go back in again – at the sound of five bleats, everybody rushes outside into the square to dance as hard as they can. Uncles get down on all fours and rub their heads on their niece’s knee. People take leafy switches and beat up as much dust into the air as possible. Fires are set blazing and drums are pounded and rattles shaken. There are lots of comic songs and skits performed in which wives refuse to cook for their husbands, who then starve to death, and in which husbands are unfaithful to their wives, who then run about the village pretending to be mountain wolves. The whole thing climaxes in a village feast. And through it all the children, who have woken up with the noise by now, run around pointing and squealing at their mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles, who are all cavorting in each other’s clothes, as though it was the funniest thing in the world.’ And from the particular look on Venn’s face, though there was no laughter in it, Norema thought that it might indeed be.

  Norema said: ‘It’s like a reflection –’

  ‘– of a reflection,’ Venn said. ‘It doesn’t reverse values. It makes new values that the whole tribe benefits from. Now there’s a custom I wish would work its way down to the shore. Here, girl–’ Venn once more took Norema’s shoulder. ‘I want you to think about what I said before, about reflections, and what you said about men and women, until you see how they aren’t the same. I want you to think about my idea until you see what’s wrong with yours – and indeed you may find out in the process things wrong with mine as well. If, when you finish, you can tell me about them, I will be very grateful. Will you do this for me?’ The horny hand tightened. ‘Will you?’

  Norema, who loved wonders (and who had been given many by this woman) said, ‘Yes, I I… all right. I’ll try …’ And wondered how one even began such a task. And in the midst of wondering, realized that Venn, whom she really wanted to talk to some more, was wandering away across the docks.

  On a boat an old sailor with a bald, freckled scalp, was laughing and telling a very involved story to a younger man who was scrubbing doggedly at a deck railing, not listening. Was this, she wondered, an image of Venn and herself? On the dock, crumpled against the piling, was Mad Marga, in a man’s ragged jerkin, snoring through loose lips. Sores speckled her large, loose arms, her scaly ankles. Hip flesh pushed through a tear in her rags. Food or something had dried on her chin. Was Marga, wondered Norema, in some way an image of Norema’s own strong, inquiring mind? Or of the naven? Or of all women; or of all women and men? And how to find out?

  Along the dock sounded the chang-chang-chang of one of the new metal hammers recently brought from Nevèrÿon that her mother thought so ill of and her father found ‘interesting.’ What was the relation of the wooden mallet and dowels with which Big lnek fixed down deckboards in her parents’ boat yards and this new, metal-headed engine and the iron spikes it could hold wood together with – as long as you did not use them near water.

  And more important, how to tell? And what relation would whatever method she devised to tell bear to the method through which Venn had arrived at her inexpressible principle?

  In the boat yards that afternoon, Norema wandered about aimlessly for an hour; then, when Inek made a comment, prepared a cauldron of glue inefficiently for another hour, so that at least it looked as if she were doing something. Thinking: the value of real work and the value of work-just-for-show: couldn’t those be the first two terms in an example of Venn’s principle? And what would the third term be …? But she also began to think of things to do, ways to examine.

  That evening she took out a sheaf of reed paper on which were the carefully drawn plans for a boat that already stood half finished in the yard, its ribs rising naked and supported by cut treetrunks, which, over the years of their use, had lost much of their bark but still dangled some, like sea weed. She stood with her weight mostly on one foot and studied the plans. She climbed up through the thick struts, bearing cuts of the smoothing blades like inverted fish scales up their curves; and she studied the boat – not so much to see how one followed the other, but to see what each, as two things that did so follow, was in itself, how each was different.

  Soon she got another piece of reed paper and one of the styluses (which you hung around your neck on a leather thong, and a horn with an inch of berry juice in the bottom that you dipped your stylus into) and began making notes, sketches, more plans.

  Next morning she was at the yard early, getting out paint jars, artist’s mirrors, stencils, trimming patterns, and examining them under the porch roof which, as the sun warmed the storage hut, buzzed with the insects that lived in the thatching. Then she left the yard and walked toward the forest. She looked at flowers and seeds. She looked at dead leaves and live ones, holding them close to examine how the pale veins branched through the flat, tough green or the frail, brittle brown, and squinted up at the dark, brown branches, an expanding net in the flakes of green that massed about
them. In the midst of all this, various ideas like image, model, example, expression, representation, symbol, and reflection began to separate themselves for her. Her thoughts went back to what Venn had said, as Norema walked back to the boat yard. Inside the gate, she told a quickly made-up story to little Jori, who stared at her through the tale with wide, incredulous eyes, pawing at the sawdust with her bare toes and twisting at a piece of vine, her pale hair matted for all the world like a clutch of pine splinters. Then Norema asked Jori to tell the story to Big Inek. Then she got Big Inek to tell it back to her. He grunted between sentences each time his mallet fell on the thumb-thick dowel which sank more each stroke, its head splintering a little more each hit: at which point she remembered the old and the young sailor she had seen on the docks with Venn, and realized, not as two connected ideas, but as a single idea for which there were no words to express it as a unity: while any situation could be used as an image of any other, no thing could be an image of another – especially two things as complicated as two people. And to use them as such was to abuse them and to delude oneself – that it was the coherence and ability of things (especially people) to be their unique and individual selves that allowed the malleability and richness of images to occur at all.

  Such was her concentration on Venn’s idea that the only thing she took away from Venn’s morning class next day was a patch of sunlight through a hole in the trap above in the thatch, falling to shape itself to the brown shoulder of the girl who sat in front of her, and the rustle of Venn’s stick in the straw with which the class floor was covered.