Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  ‘In the Rulvyn before money, there were always many more unmarried males than unmarried females. Frequently the unmarried men were the not-so-skilled hunters. Outside every Rulvyn tribal ground, there is a Men’s House, rather like the thatched-over place we meet to talk every morning. The unmarried men can go there, meet there, stay there for days at a time if they like. Many of these men were connected by friendship or family ties to some large family group, with which they ate, slept, sometimes even formed informal sexual ties with one of the wives. But such men tended to become far closer with each other—if only because they did not have even the social use the fine hunters had. Because they had the Men’s House to go to, they began to figure out money-gathering schemes there, and there plan the business ideas, and arranged their plans among themselves and one another. Very soon, these were the men who could afford to get married, who could take women for themselves—while the fine hunters could not. Groups of women found themselves married to and working for these new husbands who basically preferred to spend their time with one another, rather than living as the single, valued male in a communal woman’s work group. The sign of the family was no longer a fine, proud hunter content to be made much of by the women who constituted the family itself. Now the center of the family itself was a man, harassed and harried by the worries of uncomfortable and competing working women, women who were now the signs of his power, a man who would prefer to spend his time with other men in the same situation who could at least be sympathetic to his problems.

  ‘In the Rulvyn before money, large, old families with many wives and a single hunter—sometimes even two or three, if there were enough wives—were the glories of the tribe. Now that money has come, even the men who are involved in businesses together cannot afford families of more than three or four women. Women are afraid to join families too large, just as the men are afraid of enlarging them. The feel and flow of life among the Rulvyn is very different from what it was before.

  ‘When last I was there, a woman still married a man with the same rituals and prayers, feast-foods, and flowers; but the look in her eyes has changed. So has the look in his. There are still men in the Men’s House gossiping or polishing their spears’ heads, but what they gossip about is not the same. Hunters still rise before dawn and stand in front of their huts to chant a ritual supplication; but the tone they chant in has a very different timbre. And the women, at their turnip gardens and their basket making and their child chasing and their pot painting and their pigeon feeding, still pause and lean together and talk. But what they talk of is different; and their tones are shriller, their whispers quieter, and their faces show a different sort of strain; and the children, running and laughing or crying between their legs, seem to point this change in their mothers, rather than seem to express the tribe’s full and complex life.’ They walked a few more steps, Venn’s stick threshing. Venn’s face furrowed. ‘You know, I first began to realize how powerful this thing is that I am telling you about—which, you must realize, is not money any more than it is mirrors or boat models or monsters, or even the telling of tales—when an old and very intelligent friend of mine came to see me. We became friends a long time ago, once when I was in Nevèrÿon. This friend has only twice visited me here on my home island; and that was the time I took my last visit, with my friend, up to visit the Rulvyn. Now Nevèrÿon is where money comes from, and indeed they have used it there for at least four generations now—far longer than we. In Nevèrÿon, all things, they say, can be bought with it, and—so I finally discovered through my friend—everyone thinks in the colorings and shadings it seems to cast, even when those are not true colors. When we went up into the hills, we visited two Rulvyn tribes—one that had been using money for a while now, and another, much further back, that had not yet really adopted the custom of coin. We visited families in both, played with children in both, were given a great dinner in both, watched a wedding in one and a funeral in the other. And do you know …? My friend could not see the difference. At least not the differences I saw. Even when I explained them, tried to point out the specific changes, my friend simply put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Venn, if you’ve got a big, strong, lazy hunting man, with five or six wives who do all the child rearing and the food gathering and the gardening and the housekeeping and the water carrying, of course he’s exploiting them; I don’t care whether there’s money around or not! As far as a new kind of man getting married, or families not being quite so large, you are just observing the social turnover that must occur in even the most fixed social system if it is indeed to remain stable and not simply collapse. The shrinking family size is much more likely from either a desire to imitate their more prospering cousins living monogamously down at the harbor, or a reflection of poor rainfalls and reduced turnip yields. No, my dear girl”—and why my friend calls me that I shall never know, since I am three years the elder—“you are as much an inventor of fancies as you are an observer of facts—though without a few fancies, I know, the facts never really make sense. Still, the only difference I can see between your two Rulvyn tribes is that the one which uses money seems a little more active, a little more anxious. And that, Venn, is the way of money. All you are seeing is your own nostalgia for your girlhood trips up here into the hills, which were no doubt colored with pleasantries of youth and idealism, which is—won’t you admit it?—finally just a form of ignorance.”’ Venn made a snorting sound and struck at a low branch. ‘Nostalgia! When I was twenty-two I lived with the Rulvyn for nearly three years. I married into the family of a woman named Ii, a large, heavy woman with small, green eyes, whom I thought was the wittiest person I had ever met. There were two younger wives in the family also, Ydit and Acia, who thought the world of me because I’d shown them how to make irrigation ditches through their turnip gardens. There was a crevasse which we all had to climb down and climb up again every time we wanted to get across to the tribal meeting ground. I designed a bridge and we built it out of great stones we four levered down from the hills and with trees we cut down and tugged out of the forest—it’s still standing. And three years ago, when my friend saw it—oh, what exclamations about the marvelous cleverness of native knowledge, once that tall, proud people put down their spears and cleaned off their hunting paint! No, I gave my Nevèrÿon friend no enlightenment that, indeed, it was a much better example of what that tall, proud people could do once they put down their babies and their water baskets and their turnip rakes. Nor did I mention the design was mine … Living there, those three years, was a wonderful experience for me. I made some of the best friends of my life. Yet, when I had spent three years there, I had quite decided that I must get out by any effort. Spending practically every minute of your day on pure survival is an absolutely involving and absolutely boring life. Our hunter was a great-shouldered, beetle-browed creature with a chest like a shaggy red rug, named Arkvid. Oh, I remember when they married me to him—flowers in his hair, feathers and daubs of yellow clay in mine; and Oh! the feast we had, of wild turtle meat and stuffed goose, all of which the poor man had had to hunt down the previous day because turtle meat spoils so fast in that heat; and then, he had been up with ritual chantings and what have you, purifying himself on the steps of the Men’s House half the night—but pride wouldn’t let him show for a moment how exhausted he was. And it was his third marriage that year, poor thing. When I decided to leave, three years later, Ii and Ydit and Acia argued with me for days. They liked me and they needed me, and in the savage mind that’s an unbeatable combination. And certainly I loved them … After Ii had exhausted all her wit and good humor to make me stay, Ydit took me for a long, sad walk in the woods to see how the new arrangement of fire bricks I had suggested for her mother’s kiln was working out, and recounted in a perfectly heart-wrenching way everything we had ever done together, said together, and how much it had meant to her, while her little two-year-old Kell galloped about us, beating in the leaves with her stick and bringing back the names of every plant and flow
er and saying it dutifully three times—what a marvelous child. By herself, she might have made me stay. And then, when we got back from Ydit’s mother’s, Acia had raked my turnip garden for me; and, as I stood there, quite astonished, she stepped up to me and silently handed me a clay bowl she had painted herself with green birds and green flowers—about a month before, I had invented green paint and now the whole tribe was using it on everything. When I told them I still had to leave, they got Arkvid to come to me.

  ‘We were in the house, I recall; and it was evening. He came in wearing all his ceremonial hunting gear—only used for holiday and show—his fur shoulder pieces, his feathered chin strap, his bark penis sheath (green), feathers stuck all behind the thongs binding his rult to his belly, and a flint-headed spear over his shoulder, hung with shells and colored stones. He walked slowly and regally around the floor mat, displaying himself to me—he really was magnificent! Then he stood up before me, opened his feather-rimmed sack, and presented me with a turtle—the shell had already been cracked and the carcass bound back together with bark-twine.

  ‘He asked me most humbly would I put a little turtle meat in with the turnips and the millet and the mushrooms and the palm hearts and the dyll nuts that I had been grinding, cutting, shelling, mashing, stewing, and what-have-you all day. And when I took off the twine, and opened the shell, I found that he had gutted it and cleaned it already and packed the carefully sliced meat with pungent leaves for flavor. Meanwhile Ii and Ydit and Acia were, one by one, finding things to do outside the hut—though one could hear them hovering beyond the walls.

  ‘Arkvid was not what you would call an articulate man. But he was a good hunter, and he had a certain … one can only call it an affinity, with trees, turtles, rivers, geese, gazelles, and rocks. I don’t think he thought like them, actually. But I think he felt like them—if you know what I mean. And in the same way, I think he had a perfectly nonverbal understanding of women. While I was taking out the spiced turtle meat and arranging it on the hot stones along the side of the fire, he did the most natural and wonderful and unpremeditated thing in the world: he began to play with my baby. There on the floor mat the two of them were poking at each other and laughing at each other and prodding each other. Now his spear rolled off, rattling its string of shells against the wall. There went his chin feathers; then his penis sheath was somewhere back under the edge of the sleeping platform; and the next thing you know, the two of them were naked as eggs, and giggling all over the cabin floor. And as babies will, mine finally curled up in the crook of Arkvid’s knee and went to sleep. And Arkvid lay still on the floor, watching me, and breathing as hard from his bout of baby wrestling as if he had just placed first in one of the hunting games the men staged for our entertainment once a month on the morning after the moon pares itself down to the smallest whittling. Then he asked me to come to him … oh, it was marvelous, and marvelously sad; and in a life where there was so little time for emotions, such things become so intense. After we made love, he put his great, shaggy head on my stomach and cried softly and implored me to stay. I cried too, stroking the back of his neck which was my favorite spot on him, where the red hair made little soft curls—and left next morning at dawn.’ Venn was silent the next few steps. ‘My little baby son, just a year-and-a-half old … I left him with the Rulvyn. It has always struck me as strange the rapidity with which we absorb the values of people we share food with. If my child had been a daughter, I might have stayed. Or brought her back here to the shore with me. The Rulvyn value daughters much more than sons—Oh, to a stranger like my friend, it seems just the opposite: that they make much more fuss over sons. They pamper them, show them off, dress them up in ridiculous and unwearable little hunting costumes and scold them unmercifully should any of it get broken or soiled—all of which seems eminently unfair to the child and which, frankly, I simply could not be bothered with, though the others thought I was the stranger for it. They let the little girls run around and do more or less as they want. But while all this showing off and pampering is going on, the demands made on the male children—to be good and independent at the same time, to be well behaved and brave at once, all a dozen times an hour, is all so contradictory that you finally begin to understand why the men turn out the way they do: high on emotions, defenses, pride; low on logic, domestic—sometimes called “common”—and aesthetic sense. No one pays anything other than expectational attention to the boys until they’re at least six or seven; and nobody teaches them a thing. Girl children, on the other hand, get taught, talked to, treated more or less like real people from the time they start to act like real people—which, as I recall, is at about six weeks, when babies smile for the first time. Sometimes they’re dealt with more harshly, true; but they’re loved the more deeply for it.’ Venn sighed. ‘Yes, a daughter … and it would have all gone differently. I didn’t see my son for sixteen years … afraid, I suspect, that if I went back he might hate me. That was when I went away from the islands, finally, to Nevèrÿon, and the mountains and deserts beyond her.’ Venn hit the leaves again, laughing. ‘And when I finally did come back, here to my island and up into the hills? He was a handsome young man, astonishingly like his father. A great, strong boy, a good hunter, quick to laugh, quick to cry, and with a river of sweetness running throughout his personality one kept threatening to fall down into and drown in.’ Another sigh broke through, though the smile stayed. ‘Alas, he’s not what you’d call bright. Not like a daughter would have been, raised in that family. He was desperately pleased to see me, and everyone in the village knew that his mother was the foreign lady who had built the bridge. Oh, he was proud of that! Ydit’s Kell was a wonderful young woman—I told you I had invented green paint? Kell took me and showed me all the pigments she had recently made herself—reds, browns, purples—and as soon as she got me alone, she seized my arm and asked me whether I thought it would be a good idea for her to move down from the hills to the harbor here at the island’s edge, for with her gray eyes and her black braids and freckles, she was curious about the world … a marvelous young woman! She finally did come here for a while, took a husband from another island, left him two years later, and came back … and that was all twenty years ago, before money really came to the Rulvyn.’ The stick shushed again in walking rhythms. ‘And how many years later is it, and my Nevèrÿon friend is saying all my observations are nostalgia? I know what I’m nostalgic about! And I know what changes in the Rulvyn society money has brought. If you don’t look closely at what’s in the mirror, you might not even notice it’s any different from the thing in front of it. And now, of course, you’re wondering what all this has to do with your father’s boat yard, ’ey, girl?’ Venn’s smile turned on Norema. ‘Because it does.’ Venn’s hand came up to take Norema’s shoulder. ‘We here on the island’s shore haven’t always had money either. It came from Nevèrÿon with the trade our parents established. And you can be sure that since it came, the values we live with now are a reversal of those we had before, even if the forms that express those values are not terribly far from what they were. We at the shore have always lived by the sea, so our society was never organized like the Rulvyn. More than likely—on the shore—social power was always more equally divided between men and women. On the shore, women tend only to have one husband, and husbands tend only to have one wife. If you reverse a sign already symmetrical, you do not distort its value—at least quite so much. Yet I think we all retain some suspicion of a time when things carried about with them and bore their own powers—baskets, heaps of fruit, piles of clams, the smell of cooking eel, a goose egg, a pot, or even a cast of a fishing line or a chop with a stone axe at a tree. Though if growing old has taught me anything, it is that knowledge begins precisely as we begin to suspect such suspicions. Your parents pay me to talk to you every morning; I am happy they do. But they pay the same money to Blen’s and Holi’s father and uncle who are so skilled with stone they can build a stone wall in a day: and the same money goes to Crey, who
is a hulking halfwit, but is lucky enough to have a back and arm strong enough to dig shit-ditches. The same money goes to your mother for a string of her sea trout as goes to your father for a boat to go catch sea trout of one’s own from. So much time and thought goes into trying to figure out what the comparative worth of all these skills and labors are. But the problem begins with trying to reduce them all to the same measure of coin in the first place: skilled time, unskilled time, the talk of a clever woman, nature’s gifts of fish and fruit, the invention of a craftsman, the strength of a laboring woman—one simply cannot measure weight, coldness, the passage of time, and the brightness of fire all on the same scale.’

  ‘The image in the mirror,’ Dell said, ‘it looks real, and deep, and as full of space as the real. But it’s flat—really. There’s nothing behind the mirror—but my belly.’ He pulled one of his three braids over his shoulder, and let his fist hang on it. ‘And if you tried to store a basket of oysters in it, you’d certainly spill shells.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Enin, ‘that money, like a mirror, flattens everything out, even though it looks, at first, like a perfect copy, moving when things move, holding shape when they’re still.’

  ‘I certainly mean something like that. Your father’s a craftsman, Norema. To be a craftsman is to be a little dazzled by the magic of things—wood, rock, clay, metal, flesh, bone, muscle: and it is also to be a little awed by the change each can work on the other under the twin lamps of application and dedication. But at the same time, he can sense the flatness in the mirror of money that claims to give him for all his work a perfect and accurate copy. Yet money is a faithful mirror—for the more he works, the more he is paid; the better he works, the better he is paid … except that more and better, in that mirror, flatten to the same thing. But I suspect this may be why he tries to bury himself in his work, not so much to make the money that allows him to go on working, more and better both, but to get away from it: only it surrounds him on all sides, and the only way to escape from such a situation is inward. So he retreats from everything, even you, and your sister, and your mother.’ Venn sighed, and dropped her hand from the girl’s shoulder.