A, B, C: Three Short Novels

by Samuel R. Delany

The big guard, Uk—what a name!—came back and took her arm. As he pulled her into the wedge of lamplight that was the tent opening, she started to look away so that he might not recognize her. Then something made her stare straight at him.

  His heavy-featured face was looking directly ahead, neither to the right nor left. A soldier, she realized, following orders—doing nothing more, nothing less. For all his brutality to Rimgia and Abrid, that’s all he was. A pig, a dog, a worm; and yet as much without will, she thought, as without sensitivity. He really doesn’t see me at all, Naä reflected. Do any of them—

  “Thank you, Uk. Dismiss the others and return to duty.”

  And the big soldier, with a fist flung high, backed through the flap.

  The lieutenant stood by the desk against the tent’s striped wall. There was a smell in the tent that made her recall both the smell in Qualt’s yard and the stronger smell in the malodorous basket from the afternoon—without its being exactly like either. Was it the mildewed canvas itself? But no, it was a spoiled scent far closer to animal than vegetable.

  Like a black-draped statue, the lieutenant turned in the light of the lamps, one of which—a shallow tripod brazier on a low table by the cot, where a puma skin, the skull still in it, had been thrown across the dark wool blanket (was that what smelled? she wondered)—had a yellow hue: the lamp hanging from the tent’s center by its several brass chains and the lamp on the desk’s corner both burned with the harshest white fire.

  —

  Outside the tent, Uk stepped to the left of the entrance, breathed deeply in the darkness, spread his legs, put his hands behind his back, taking the at-ease guard position, and thought: There, that’s done, however little it was. What am I? A man following orders, nothing more, nothing less. I’m a soldier. Forget this sensitivity. It doesn’t become me. Though the night had grown chill around him, there was almost a warmth in the realization, so that, for the first time that day, it seemed he could let his mind drift, let his eyes fix on a bit of light from the tent flaps that fell on a grass tuft and a flat stone while he remembered a stream somewhere, with broken mud, dragonflies, frogs…

  —

  When the lieutenant looked at Naä, she lowered her eyes, to let the edge of Rimgia’s shawl fall as low across her face as it could, even as she thought: but he doesn’t know what I’m supposed to look like at all!

  The lieutenant walked over to her and pulled at the rope. It was tied so loosely that its two coils dropped down around her feet even as he tugged them once. (There had been three coils when Rimgia had first been tied….) Naä held the shawl closed at her neck. But he did not seem to think it particularly odd. The feeling that none of them, none of them at all, actually saw her became for a moment a dazzling conviction. I could be anyone here, and it would make no difference—

  The lieutenant stepped toward the desk again and turned, his black-gloved fingers on some parchments there. A day’s beard peppered his cheek.

  “Thou lookest to be hard worked,” she said shortly, assuming the Çironian idiolect. Her own voice sounded breathless and faint to her. But the words would not stop. “Has doing injury worn thee down?”

  He glanced up at her with a smile, which, she realized, looked simply tired. In the brazier’s light, his eyes were a smoky hue, as if the irises were circles cut from the undersides of oak leaves, around black pupils.

  He said, “I haven’t slept much—or well, recently.” The oddly hoarse voice, with the carrion odor all around, made her feel as if she’d entered some place more primitive, primordial, and basically lawless than any she recalled from her travels.

  “Bad dreams?” Bitterness whetted her voice to a greater sharpness than she’d intended.

  Kire walked across the rug, reaching up to push a black pom through a black loop. His hood slipped from bronze hair. It and his cloak dropped to the ground to make a motionless puddle of night, frozen in the moment of its fall. Turning to sit on the cot’s edge, absently he felt the prairie lion’s skull with black-gloved fingers. Kire’s green eyes strayed back to Naä’s.

  She pulled the shawl tighter and felt her body tingling with impatience for him to make the move, say a word, give her one reason to lunge with the knife—at his neck. Yes, certainly in the neck. Could she slip beneath the back of the tent? And the stabbing itself—could she do it so quickly, so deftly, that there would be no noise? Should she wait for him to turn from her? Or should she move closer now—

  “You’re not a very tall woman,” he said, looking up at her. “See over there?” He nodded toward the back of the tent. “One of the ground cords”—and she had the momentarily uncanny feeling that he had heard her thoughts—“at the rear wall has come untied. You can easily slip under the canvas there if you like—yes, you can go. I have no reason to frighten you any more than you’ve already been frightened.” He gestured to the tent wall. “Go on.”

  “You want me to go?” she said, dropping the Çironian inflection, but realizing that she had only when he glanced back with raised eyebrow. “Suppose I don’t want to. Suppose I want to stay and find out what kind of man you are.”

  “You’re not of Çiron,” he said after a moment. “Who are you?”

  “You’re called Kire,” she said. “My name is…Naä. I’m a wanderer, a singer; I’m someone who’s come very much to love this place, over which you wreak fire, slaughter, and misery.”

  What he did next rather surprised her. He lifted the puma pelt from the bed and swung it over his back. She caught a glimpse of its underside, where bits of red and things rolled into black fibers and filaments, only just dried, still clung to the uncured hide. With the motion came a heightened smell—it was the source of the stench! The catch under one set of claws, sewn there clumsily with a thong, he hooked to a fastening on the other side of the pelt. Affixed to the Myetran that way, the puma head leered from his shoulder, beside his own.

  “Why do you wear that?” she asked.

  “This?” He spoke as though the dropping of the cloak and the donning of the hide had been the most unconscious and happenstance of acts. “It was a gift. From a friend. I like it. Cloaks are supposed to blow and ride out behind you on the wind, but ours are too heavy. It takes the glory out of soldiering. This, at least, looks like what it is.” With a black glove, he caressed the face beside his own, with its sealed lids, its bared fangs. “And it will remind you, no matter how pleasant I seem really, I have teeth.” (That he might call this odd and smelly space pleasant almost drew a surprised comment from her. But she held it in.) “Come—if you’re going to stay, sit here, in the chair”—he indicated the seat at his desk—“where we can talk more easily. Won’t you take off your shawl?”

  She only held it tighter. But being closer to him would be good. Yes, get closer. She sat in the chair, her knees inches from his.

  Yellow fires ran round within the copper rim of the small brazier by his elbow. “You know these people well,” Kire said. “Tell me, are they really as gentle as they appear?”

  “Yes,” she said, unable to keep the challenge out of her voice. “They are.”

  He smiled. “Couldn’t you tell me something small-minded, mean, and nasty you’ve found among them; or maybe even some overt and active evil: a crippled child teased and made fun of? An old woman’s milk stolen from her goat so that she must go hungry, once again? Something that might ease my dreams just a little? Certainly the ordinary pettiness, jealousies, the envy and ire that hold any little town together, beneath the polite greetings and pleasantries in the market square about last week’s rain and today’s fine weather, must be as common here as they are in any other village. You’re a well-traveled woman. You’ve seen none of the provincial nastiness here that makes the children of such places so frequently loathe their home and yearn to flee somewhere with breathing room, intelligent conversation, and fine music?”

  “They’ve been happy with the music I’ve brought,” Naä said. “And I’ve been happy with their conversation. I haven
’t looked for more. And what sort of fool are you”—she looked at him as sharply as she spoke—“that you think the things you speak of could possibly balance the death, the misery, the evil you inflicted here within the hour of your coming?”

  He looked back at her directly. The lion beside him, for the instant, seemed a creature who’d closed its eyes to keep from hearing. A muscle moved in the lieutenant’s unshaven jaw. Then he said: “Do you know anything about Myetra, singer? If you visited us, you might be surprised at how pleasantly our farmers and their daughters can dance in a spring evening to the great log drums their wives make in the mountains; or how colorful and cunning the representation of sea creatures and sea plants on the tiles decorating the facades of the waterfront warehouses. It’s a pleasant place, but there are too many people in it. There is not enough food—and above all not enough land for our people. It’s very simple, singer, what we’ve chosen to do. It’s a plan as clean and as imperative as…as a blood drop rolling down a new-plastered wall. You see us now taking lives, breaking apart cultures and traditions, here at Çiron, next at Hi-Vator, after that at Requior, then Del Gaizo, and eventually at Mallili—finally even at Calvicon. But soon what you will see, in a band from water to water, is the growth of a rich, intelligent, and wonderfully hardworking and resourceful people, taking land, making food, imparting their ways and wonders on these myriad backward folk who have no notion of their own histories for more than five or six generations into the past—the length of time a burial scroll will last before it simply rots away. It’s a fine plan, singer. And it inspires the officers above me as well as the simple soldiers below me.”

  “And does this plan give you the right to do anything, anything at all—at any level of cruelty and destruction to anyone in your way?”

  The lieutenant mused. “There are some among us who think that it does.” At every third sentence, the roughness to his voice made her wonder if he weren’t drunk.

  “And you? What do you think?”

  “There are some, both above me and below me, who probably say that I think too much.”

  In the stench of the uncured hide, within hearing of the burry tones that, really, sounded more animal than human, Naä wondered how anything that anyone might call thinking at all could go on here.

  But he moved his forearm, with the black glove on his hand, along the edge of the desk by the yellow-burning lamp. “Tell me, singer, what would you do if we were in each other’s place? What would you do if you wore a stiff black cloak and, despite your love of your home, a sense of injustice—if not of justice itself. But yes, the truth is: I’m troubled at justice’s absence, and that trouble stays as close to me as this lion’s face is to my own. Would you try to leave, feign sickness, resign your post to another? Or would you stay, mitigating the crimes those around you commit—changing a death sentence to a prison term, making an execution a flogging, reducing a flogging of twenty lashes to ten? Tell me, singer?”

  Naä frowned. Then stopped frowning and thought: this is perhaps the moment to do it. But the words came from somewhere: “I would get very little sleep.” And because these words came too, she said: “If you love your own home, can’t you love the idea of home that other people have? That’s what a sense of justice is, isn’t it? And the plan you talk of, it’s not a just one at all. I’ve looked your men in the face. I’ve heard your superiors talking. Your men have forgotten all plans and are only faithful to following orders. And all your superiors are after is the power and privilege the plan has most accidentally ceded them! So without justice behind it or real commitment to support it, what is your plan after that?” The words came, she found herself thinking, like the words to a new song. “Why not turn openly against it? Why not fight it and them until they strip skin and muscle from you, till no muscle moves, till there is no blood left in you to move them—”

  “Now—” And she was thinking, Will actions come as fast and as easily as those words? when he said, “I should probably smash you across the face with my fist for daring even to suggest resistance to Myetra.” He raised his hand, and the gloved fingers curled slowly in. “And show you why, through sheer force, that is such an absurd notion. But I don’t think I shall…this time.” He looked at her seriously.

  Again she felt her whole body begin to tingle. “You mitigate,” she said. “You turn twenty lashes to ten. And when you are told to rape, break, and violate, you turn it into talk—”

  He raised a bronze eyebrow. “Who told you that?”

  “Your guard,” she said quickly, “when he was bringing me back from town. Those were Prince Nactor’s…orders, yes?”

  “Uk?” The lieutenant looked honestly puzzled. Then he barked a syllable of laughter. “You’re a liar—or a fool! That sort of loose tongue is not Uk’s style. Believe me, I know my men. No, we had a guard here once who might have said that. But he’s…not with us now. And what I said to Nactor, I left with Nactor, young lady. Right now I hate Prince Nactor as he hates me. No…I think perhaps I will walk you back to the village. We will go together: this way you will have no problems with obstreperous or loose-tongued guards.” He rose.

  And amidst the tingling, she thought, Somewhere on the burnt field, somewhere in an alley of the town, yes, when the two of us are alone together, that’s where I’ll do it. Certainly that would be better—

  He stood and reached down for her shoulder. But suppose he binds me again? she thought as she rose in his grip. Wasn’t it better to do it now and have done? (His black-gloved fingers on her shoulder were strong.) Or was hers simply the endlessly rationalized delay of someone blatantly terrified of killing?

  “I think,” she said softly, “you are a good and thoughtful man.”

  What she thought was: you are an evil pig a-wallow in a rotten sty….

  He didn’t pick up the rope as, holding her arm, he walked her by the brazier, the chair, the desk, across the matting toward the tent flap.

  Still supporting her, with his other black glove he took the canvas and pulled it back.

  Standing just outside, the prince ran his gauntleted hand down one side of his beard, then the other, and said: “Kire, you are a fool! ‘Hate Prince Nactor’? Guards!” Naä pulled back as Kire released her arm. A dozen shadowy soldiers waited in ordered formation behind the bearded prince “Arrest Lieutenant Kire—for incompetence, insubordination, and treason! And also the woman—”

  The hesitation that had plagued her moments ago vanished before the immediate. Naä dodged behind the lieutenant, lunged for the table, thrust her hand under the brazier, and hurled fire—in a sheet that astonished her, even as it hung a moment in the air and flickered and threw up coiling smoke tendrils, a curtain of blue and yellow effulgence, of falling, flaming oil, dropping to the matting, arching toward the striped wall opposite. That same moment she hurled herself to the floor and rolled against the tent’s back canvas. Guards shouted. Were any of them dodging around the back? But yes, and she was under, up in the dark and the cool night, running. Mercifully no tree or water barrel stood before her, or she would have smashed into it and knocked herself unconscious.

  Naä ran.

  Branches raked at her, bushes snatched at and scraped her. Rimgia’s shawl caught and tore. Naä paused to jerk it (swallowing the impulse to scream); she pulled free, snatched it after her, and ran again in a chatter of brush and leaves till she tripped and went sprawling. What she’d tripped on was large and rolled a little, loudly.

  Flies in the dark make an unholy sound—and hundreds of them scritted, disturbed now, from whatever she’d fallen over. She caught the stench—like the puma pelt and the basket and the ravine itself, intensified to gagging, eye-watering level—and pulled herself away.

  (She would forever recall it as some villager’s corpse, slain and left to lie. Actually, though, it was a prairie lion carcass: the evening just before the attack, Mrowky and Uk had been ordered to dump it in the forest three hundred paces off. But Mrowky couldn’t stand the thing and ha
d insisted on leaving it here: right now, we’ve taken it far enough, nobody’ll find—no, I mean it! I’m leaving it! I don’t care what you do. Put the damned thing down, I said—now!)

  Turning, gasping, Naä saw flames behind her; between the sounds of her breaths, back in the camp she heard soldiers shouting.

  Another sound: the splat of water tossed on canvas (with the sound of the last flies setting)—how close she still was! How little ground she’d covered! And there were soldiers beating loudly in the brush behind the burning tent. Naä pushed herself up and ran again. For a long time.

  —

  Qualt’s and his companion’s mischief had also continued on, as you surely inferred. At various places about the town and the camp there’d been four more rains of garbage from the trees. The one Qualt felt most satisfied after was when, during the distraction that the last shower of fish heads, peach pits, and old bird’s nests provided, his flying friend, still unseen, had been able to drop two skins of water into the diamond-wired corral where more than a dozen oldsters and infants were sitting or standing, more or less bewildered, in the burning sun.

  But now, with the Winged One, in the darkness, Qualt was once more crouched among the trees beside the Myetran camp, listening—rather the Winged One was listening and reporting to Qualt what he heard, for they were too far away from the tent for Qualt to hear directly. Heads bent together in the dark, ear touching ear, the Winged One related: “He asks if you folk are as gentle as you appear….She says yes, you are….Now he wants to know what town secrets, what petty jealousies, envy, and ire she can tell him of; while she…she says you like her music, and she likes what you have to say….He tells her what a pleasant place his own home, Myetra, is, and how, after they have crushed Çiron, they will go on to destroy Hi-Vator, Requior, Del Gaizo—”

  Somewhat to Qualt’s surprise, it was at the mention of Hi-Vator that the Winged One suddenly went a-quiver in the dark. The wind of his sails set the leaves about them shaking and shushing. And one membrane brushed and brushed Qualt’s back.