Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  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, wall-eyed 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 mentioned 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 sautéed and fried, Pryn muttering nivu under her breath like an unknown word from a poem overhead 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.

  The story would doubtless tell how Pryn finally made love to the elder youth, several times over several days. ‘I love you, and I know that you love me,’ she told him—several times through that glorious season. He liked hearing it, too: it made him smile. (The younger one, when he overheard her once or twice, seemed to like it just as much and smiled just as broadly.) ‘That is all I know. That is all I need to know,’ she would finish; but when she had, she always felt caught up in some play of preposterous contradictions, as if it were a line from a mummer’s skit she could never read aloud with the proper inflection. That was probably why, she decided later, she said it as many times as she did. Still, with sunlight on his bearded, broken face, the elder would smile at her, or nuzzle her neck, or walk with her among the trees, his arm about her shoulder.

  He never, however, said much of anything back.

  As we have noted, it wasn’t the first time Pryn had had sex, for in mountain towns of the sort she’d grown up in such intercourse was frequently accomplished at an even earlier age than in the cities. But it was not yet her tenth time, either; and it was certainly her first time with someone only two weeks away from a total stranger—and without the support of a society ready with rituals, traditions, and the coercive wisdom necessary to turn the passing pleasure of adolescence straightway into a family at any sign of natal consequence. The story would also tell how, nights later, when they’d decided to stay over at an inn, the wall-eyed one brought back to Pryn’s room two of the Empress’s soldiers from a garrison housed in an old barracks outside the town and argued with her for a solid hour, not loudly but with the same earnest perseverance she’d seen him use to free a cart wheel in a stream when it had caught on a submerged root. Finally she agreed to make love to them.

  Synopsized, the hour’s whispered conclave had run:

  The elder youth had spent too much money on beer in the inn’s tavern that evening, so that now, even with Pryn’s remaining coins, they did not have enough to pay for their rooms; nor was this civilized Kolhari, where they might be turned out with a scolding on account of their youth or made to stay and work off the debt. It was a backwater province where everyone was related to everyone else and where the locals had proved themselves hostile to strangers in a dozen ways already.

  Anything might happen here.

  The money the soldiers would give her was the only way the three of them would have enough to pay for their lodging next morning.

  It wasn’t—quite.

  But the innkeeper finally agreed—angrily—to forfeit the small difference and sent them off. Clearly he did not wish to see them return.

  Certainly the story would tell how, some three hours after they were on the road, Pryn managed to get into an angry and perfectly ridiculous argument with the elder—indeed, the argument was so idiotic that, after she’d stalked off in a rage, leaving both of them for good, she was sure, she could not even reconstruct what its points had been. (It wasn’t because of the soldiers. He didn’t even know about them, having been sleeping too soundly because of the beer. And the wall-eyed one had promised…!) She only knew she was glad to leave him, glad to leave the both of them! Then, after tramping for two more hours along the sun-dappled, dusty road, Pryn began to cry.

  She was thinking about being pregnant.

  Indeed, Pryn now admitted to herself, she had been thinking about almost nothing else for several days, though before last night it had seemed a hazy daydream involving going back to Kolhari, or even Ellamon, with the elder friend, while the younger, in the dream, remained in the south—or vanished!

  But now, somehow, there was nothing pleasant left to it. The pock-marked youth from the farm was lazy and the wall-eyed one from the city impossible; and she knew they would not cease their smuggling or dissolve the
ir friendship over some child by her.

  The story would tell how, over the next three days, practically every six hours Pryn broke out crying—suddenly and surprisingly, whether she was by herself walking in the woods or passing a yard with people in it.

  Once a man said she could ride downriver with him in his boat if she would help him with the fishing. She got into the shallow skiff and sat, looking at the woven reed lining. His hair thinning in front and tied with a thong behind one ear, the fisherman pulled on the wide wooden oars. Pryn looked about the boat’s floor at the coils and tangles of line, the bone hooks stuck along a piece of branch, the woven nets heaped around; suddenly she felt a surge of uselessness and a second surge of exhaustion, which surges battled, burning, in her eyes—tears, for the tenth or the hundredth time, spilled her puffy cheeks.

  She sat in the boat, crying, while the fisherman, with his big-knuckled, pitch-stained hands, rowed and watched her, saying nothing.

  Finally Pryn coughed, pulled her own hands back into her lap, and blinked. ‘My name is Pryn,’ she got out, ‘and I can…I’m going to have a baby!’

  Despite his thinning hair, the fisherman looked no more than twenty-four. He pulled and leaned, pulled and leaned, pulled and leaned. With three bronze claws fastened to the rag wrapped around his waist and between his very hairy legs, the wide strap over his right shoulder went taut, then slack, taut, then slack, over the sunken well in his narrow, near-bald chest, ‘My name is Tratsin,’ he said after a while. I’m going to have one, too.’

  Pryn looked up quite startled.

  Tratsin pulled on the oars. ‘My wife,’ he added, by way of explanation, ‘I mean. She’s having it. For me.’ Taut; slack. ‘It’s been all girls so far—this will be my third. Well, four, actually. The first was a boy, but she lost him. That was even before she would live with me. In these parts they say it’s a curse to have girls. But you know who takes in the aged parents? The girls, that’s who. My parents lived with my sisters. My wife wouldn’t live with me until after her father passed—though my boy died only a month later. I think that’s because he needed his own father—me. And when I get too old to work, I’ll live with one or the other of my girls, I’ll bet you. And I’ll be a father they’ll want to have live with them. That’s important. Come home with me, girl. Come home. My wife’s name is Bragan. She’s a good girl. About your age, I’d bet. But skinnier. At least she used to be. Certainly no more than two or three years older. Come home, now…’

  Somewhere in all this Pryn started crying again.

  Over the stades they rowed downstream, three times Tratsin stopped to fish. In the course of it, Pryn learned he was not really a fisherman, but a benchmaker. He’d taken his two days off for the month to travel north, had rented one of the reed-lined boats, and was fishing downstream over the second day toward home. A man has to get away from the women sometimes, he said—though he seemed happy enough for Pryn’s company. He said: His wife, Bragan, was seven months along toward another child. He hoped it might be a boy, but a girl would be all right. Girls could work, too. His younger brother, till only weeks ago, had lived with them—Malot, now he’d been a strange boy. He’d worked at the quarry, but he’d run off to the city. At any rate, that’s what everyone assumed—it was all he’d talked of for the six months before he and Bragan’s household money had disappeared one day. It had wounded Tratsin deeply, his brother’s running away. Wounded him to the heart. They lived, Tratsin and his family, in the town of…but Pryn missed the name; she’d begun to cry again. Probably Malot would come to a bad end, Tratsin went on. (Pryn sniffled and tried to listen.) His wife’s cousin, Gutryd? She lived with them, too. And spoiled the girls and was a silly girl herself. He didn’t understand Gutryd. He didn’t think she was happy.

  His boss was good, though.

  His working conditions were good.

  His wife was a good girl: she let him go fishing on his two days a month off.

  He was a happy man, Tratsin reasoned.

  With six freshwater perch, one of which Pryn caught herself when Tratsin let her throw in the line, and seven or eight brook trout—they threw back lots of little palmsized fish he said wouldn’t taste good at all—they came that evening to a bank loud with crickets. They pulled up at a muddy beach where half a dozen boats with woven linings had been tied to branches so that their prows were lifted clear of the water. The sky was deep blue, halfway into night. The air was dry and cool. Now and again the bushes and shacks about them flickered into full daylight with hazy lightning.

  ‘Come with me, now.’ Tratsin’s bare feet sank in black mud, breaking cracks around in it. ‘Come. You’ll like Bragan. She’s a good girl. And she’ll help you. You’ll see.’ Thunder trundled somewhere in the cool summer sky. Again lightning flickered. ‘Come. This way.’

  Pryn did like Bragan, who pushed aside the hanging in the shack doorway and, after Tratsin whispered to her briefly, declared: ‘You’re having a baby!’ She clapped her hands to the sides of her own seven-and-a-half-month belly under the sleeveless brown shift while the hanging fell against her shoulder. ‘Come in, now! Come in! Your first weeks? You must be dead tired. My two girls—oh, I carried both of them easily enough. But this one?’ Firelight flickered in her frizzy hair. ‘Well, I was sick as a poisoned dog for the whole first month and a half! That’s why I think it’s going to be a boy—Ah! I want it to be a boy so badly! I had a boy first, but he died, poor little thing. Boys carry harder and higher, they say. Or is it girls? I never can remember! But come in! Come in!’

  The shack’s single room was comically crowded, and Pryn was too tired to remember who was who, other than that the heavy one with the dead black hair and beard—Kurvan—was Tratsin’s best friend.

  ‘You working yet?’ were Tratsin’s first words to him.

  ‘I wasn’t working yesterday morning when you left.’ Leaning against the wall, Kurvan folded his arms over his fleshy chest. ‘What makes you think I’d be working when you got back?’

  ‘You haven’t been working for almost three weeks.’ Bragan stepped around a baby basket on the floor. ‘You should have a job!’

  ‘Until he came home you were happy enough to let me lounge and gossip by your fireplace!’ Kurvan laughed. ‘Now you both start in on me!’

  ‘You should have a job,’ Tratsin said. ‘I could get you a job. Since Malot’s gone, they need another man at the stone pit. I could speak to—’ But that actually seemed to get black-bearded Kurvan annoyed.

  So Bragan cried: ‘Let’s get this young woman some soup!’ She put her arm around Pryn, heading her around the end of a bench toward the corner fireplace.

  ‘Get her some beer,’ Kurvan said. ‘Beer’s good for pregnant women. We have fine beer here. It comes from the breweries down on the coast,’ and he turned to help himself from a dripping barrel set back between two plank beds.

  ‘Soup!’ protested Bragan, then turned to Pryn. ‘Unless you’d rather not—with this one, I couldn’t eat a thing, night or day, for the first six weeks. Though my sister said that’s only supposed to last for three. Ahh! and in the morning! Everything I tried to get down—?’ She made a spewing gesture. ‘What a mess!’

  A baby began to cry, The other woman in the room—the sister? Gutryd?—went to see about it, while Bragan ladled soup, thick as stew, first from one pot, then from another, into one red clay bowl and the next.

  The stuff in the first cauldron was brown and meaty; the stuff in the second, which Bragan spilled on top of it so that the two made ribbons across one another in the bowl, was creamy and dotted with yellow vegetables. Filled with the two of them, the red clay heated Pryn’s palm to burning as she raised the bowl to her mouth—to be struck by a memory out of childhood:

  The gray-veiled woman traveler from the Ellamon market, who wore the wide silver rings, had told her aunt, ‘And their double soups? The glory of southern cookery, I say—though you must know the people to find any. They won’t serve it at the inns.’ And her aun
t had said, ‘Chemistry, medicine, alchemy, and the other branches of charlatanry that sap the purse of our Suzerain today at the wheedling of clever men, they’re all forms of the woman’s science of cuisine—especially that part of it concerned with midwifery. Belham told me that. Do you know of Belham, the barbarian inventor from the south? He stayed here in fabled Ellamon—oh, it was many, many years back—’

  Kurvan handed Pryn a piece of bread, burned in spots on the crust but with (as she took the third bite, she realized) dough still raw in it. She ate hungrily, nevertheless, thinking that it was the kind of loaf people had brought back to her cousin in outrage (or begrudging sympathy) during the first months of his bakery. With it she shoveled soup into her mouth.

  The soup was wonderful!

  ‘That woman is hungry!’ Holding his own bowl, Kurvan squatted down in a clear spot on the floor mat. ‘She’ll have a fat and healthy youngster, with good bones and a worker’s back, if she eats that way.’

  ‘You should have a job, Kurvan,’ Gutryd said sitting on the bench next to Tratsin, who was almost finished with his bowl. ‘Three weeks without work? Bragan’s right. It isn’t good for you or your family.’ She reached down for the loaf leaning against the baby’s basket. ‘You want to be able to marry and have a fine family of healthy children now, like Tratsin and Bragan, don’t you?’

  To wake with straw tickling her cheek and ankle and the smell of damp thatch and babies and last night’s cooking, the pallet below the straw hard under one shoulder and water dripping somewhere from the torrents that had poured loud enough to wake her just before sunrise (Pryn did not open her eyes), was to realize that, before she’d started these adventurings, she’d spent most of her life in such a shack. It was to realize that whenever these adventurings were through, no matter how far away they deposited her, unless life for her went very differently from what she or anyone else might expect, she was likely to spend most of her life to come in such a shack—however better insulated she might make it.