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.
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 girl 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. Instead of the rich nut brown Pryn assumed the normal complexion of all around her not specifically foreign, Vatry’s face and shoulders had a yellowish cast, and she was spotted, hairline to hands and feet, with coppery freckles. Her hair was black and wild, but in direct sun, from certain angles, it glimmered with red—not the brickish hue that sometimes rusted the locks of that rough-haired people (especially the outlying islanders), but a red that seemed to Pryn, who knew as little of henna as she did of kohl, impossible for hair!
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, cro
uched 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 a 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—once Pryn used the opportunity to buy a piece of sugar beet 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, freckled, frenetic girl weren’t more talented as a pick-pocket than as a dancer. She gave Vatry the last of her beet. 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 land!’ 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 with 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’s 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 alone, at night, and you heard footsteps behind you. 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 behind you 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 the 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—thought 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 waist and trailed green and yellow scarves from her wrist and neck. The elder youth stared with a loose-lipped fixity that, as his hand tightened on Pryn’s shoulder, actually made her uncomfortable—till she decided the way to break what she assumed a wholly theatrical spell was to take them up and speak to Vatry, rendering her a real and odd looking little woman with impossible hair and freckles. 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, though, because of the crowd, the three gave up. Eventually 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.
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