Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  Nari shook her head a little, as if already answering a no or an unknown to what Zadyuk was about to say.

  ‘What’s…the matter with him?’ Zadyuk asked anyway.

  ‘The island woman who lives in the room next to his, she’s been in to take him water and things and help him clean himself—I met her outside, as I was leaving…’ Nari tried to compress her voice the way, moments back, Zadyuk had compressed her arms. What happened was that voicing itself dropped from her speech, leaving not even a true whisper, but a gesture at words, which Zadyuk, narrowing his eyes, read from the movement of her lips and tongue rather than heard:

  ‘She says it’s a plague. She says she’s seen it—’ Nari caught her breath, shivered once, and spoke out again: ‘She’s seen it before, she said, in the islands. When she was a girl. It killed so—!’

  ‘Nari…!’

  They looked at each other.

  But around them, complex and glittering like some choice weave Pheron might swirl above his head in Zadyuk’s and Nari’s small, second-floor, stone-walled room, lay the New Market, to its east the waterfront, down the side streets between the recently completed warehouses and storage buildings, to its south the artisans’ shops, their dull storefronts and colorful displays at the sides of badly paved alleys with names like Potters’ Lane and Netmenders’ Row, to its west Her Imperial Majesty’s Public Park, where mothers brought their children and students brought their studies and where Nari had often brought her fancies to tell Zadyuk (and sometimes Pheron) as they walked there after work on summer evenings, and to its north the vigorous business district about Black Avenue and the ethnic enclaves beyond it, the trade and traffic constant among them, the movement back and between them endless, from the Spur with its reeks and wailing barbarian babies to the palm-lined avenues of Neveryóna and Sallese, with their dark-skinned, dark-robed nobles and their anxious, amiable merchants, ambling by the falls and fountains in their walled estates.

  4.1 Twenty-three years old, Nari was born in the autumnal month of the Badger, off in Adami. Both her parents came to Kolhari when she was two, a few years after the ascension of the Child Empress Ynelgo. Nari was an only child, rather a rarity in that time, that place.

  When she was seventeen and beginning to ‘experiment with sex’ (as another epoch would put it), Nari’d wanted a son passionately—in that age with no birth control. But she knew with a definiteness that sometimes astonished her, she did not want a daughter. Indeed, her deepest and most secret desire was for a little, yellow-haired, barbarian boy—something of an impossibility, as she was a small, brown girl with thick, black hair, whom many people complimented by telling her she could easily be taken for some aristocratic daughter of the nobility.

  ‘If I got pregnant,’ she said once to a girlfriend (other young women her age were getting pregnant and having little girls and boys all around her), ‘and it turned out a girl, I think I’d kill myself!’ Her friend laughed, but Nari was worried by the strength of her own feelings. ‘I’d give her to another mother,’ she corrected herself,’ and then I’d…kill myself—’ which, as she said it, seemed neither wise nor probable, if, after all, the unwanted daughter had already been got rid of.

  One could try again.

  Her very best friend was an older barbarian named Meise, with three sons of her own, all by different men, who was now pregnant for the fourth time by some vanished yellow-haired ne’er-do-well and was anxious for a girl. Meise was one-third owner of the Kraken (where, as far as Nari could tell, Meise did all the work), just off the Alley of Gulls. Nari herself sometimes helped in the kitchen.

  One evening, when rain pelted the street and chattered on the tavern roof, and the younger woman and the older woman leaned on opposite sides of the counter, each with a half-finished mug of beer, lazily wiping out one crock after another and moving them from the dripping ones on the left to the dry ones on the right, Nari got Meise to promise that if Meise’s new baby was a boy, and if Nari herself should get pregnant and have a girl within the year, they’d trade.

  A day later, Nari was sure that Meise had forgotten the whole, giggling exchange. Or at least she pretended she had.

  That bothered her, too.

  Nari had several barbarian boyfriends in those years; and a good number of chances to get pregnant.

  Yet she didn’t.

  At nineteen, when she met, and again, at twenty, when she began to live with, Zadyuk, her parents, out of despair, and Meise, out of real delight at her nice young friend’s nice young man, decided they liked him. He was certainly an improvement on Tarig, Kudyuk, and Bedog—Nari’s last three barbarians. For one thing, Zadyuk looked a great deal more like what Nari thought a real barbarian ought to and acted a good deal less like what even she had begun to think must go with such looks in this age and epoch.

  But though she had not talked about it with anyone, including Meise, she’d also begun to wonder if she were one of those women who just wasn’t going to have a child.

  After the first year with Zadyuk, he suspected it too. They talked. Nari was not all that surprised when Zadyuk didn’t think it was so awful.

  ‘You know,’ she had said, speaking almost into his armpit in the room lit only by moonlight through the back window, ‘I’d always thought I wanted a nice, yellow-haired son. I mean, with the kind of life I was leading, I always thought, soon, I’d have a child, whether I wanted to or not. Since I had to, that’s the one I wanted.’ She snuggled into him; they were lying on the bed. (Pheron had visited earlier in the evening; they were happy.) ‘But I don’t really like children, Zadyuk. Boys or girls. Oh, they’re nice enough when you don’t have to take care of them. But Meise’s new brat, whom I used to think I’d even trade for, drives me crazy when I’m over there! And he’s the cutest looking little barbarian I know—besides you!’

  Zadyuk chuckled into her dark hair.

  ‘I think the baby is why I stopped working there,’ she went on. ‘Just so I didn’t have to help.’

  Nari had occasionally worked as a laundress among barbarian women in the Spur; but for the last year and a half now, she’d been managing her own group of washerwomen, with two young drivers (one girl, one boy) who went out to collect washing even as far as Sallese. (They did all the students’ laundry for at least one of the schools on the near edge of the city’s merchant neighborhood.) She was becoming rather successful in her business.

  4.11 If a mid-twentieth-century orthodox Freudian could return to Kolhari and present Nari with the theory of ‘penis envy’ (to explain her girlish desire for a son) and ‘sublimation’ (to explain her new success in her work), though myself I think the analysis would be false, Nari, a primitive woman in a superstitious time, would probably find the notion intriguing, even plausible.

  There were a number of such fables about in that land in those days—especially among the barbarians.

  4.2 Twenty-five years old, Zadyuk was the middle of three brothers. (Kudyuk—a different Kudyuk from Nari’s former petty-thief boyfriend—two years older than Zadyuk, had been gone from Kolhari six years now and had more than likely come to a bad end; he was seldom mentioned in his family. Namyuk, a year younger, had had a string of not terribly good jobs and a few times actually had got himself in trouble. He lived in the Spur, was going from bad to worse, and didn’t seem to care.) All three boys had been born in Kolhari, Zadyuk in the month of the Finch. Their father was a barbarian from the south. Their mother, half barbarian, was herself actually born in the city. Zadyuk’s parents’ life in Kolhari predated the coming of the Child Empress to the High Court of Eagles, and they clearly had mixed feelings about the most recent influx of southerners.

  Zadyuk worked as a sandal maker at one of the leather stalls in the New Market, where, last year, he’d had an interesting bit of luck. The sandals he made were popular with the students out in Sallese. One evening, when he’d taken a wagon load of laundry out to the school for Nari (she was between drivers), in the yard among the school’s t
hree buildings he saw a student wearing not the usual sole-with-straps (or, more usual, going barefoot), but rather the full, somewhat baggy leather foot-coverings that workers on rough and stone-filled construction sites used around the city.

  Just then another boy recognized him from town as a sandal maker and approached: ‘Do you make shoes like that?’ the boy asked.

  Zadyuk said: ‘Sure. Do you like them?’ Then he grinned. ‘Come on down to our stall. In the New Market. You know where it is.’ The next morning he went into the leather stall early and made two pairs by opening: they took more leather but were simpler to make than the interweave of straps and buckles that were the stylish sandals of that day.

  Toplin was in for his the hour the market opened.

  Over the next three months Zadyuk sold over a hundred pairs of ‘work shoes’ to students. Zadyuk had begun that month as a worker at the stall of an aging boss who seldom came in. By the end of it, he was foreman of a stall of his own, employing three more leather-crafting artisans. And had been since.

  But at Zadyuk’s counter, the youngsters did not have to put up with the teasing and, occasionally, outright hostility they met with when they purchased their work shoes from the usual workmen’s shoemaker.

  4.21 Zadyuk carried a deep, if now settled, resentment toward his parents for giving him and, indeed, his two brothers the three most common male barbaric names in Nevèrÿon. Performing in their wagons in the city markets, the mummers, when they portrayed a barbarian character in their skits, always named him Kudyuk or Zadyuk. And at least once, when Zadyuk was sixteen, he’d actually seen a show in which there were three barbarian brothers named, yes, Kudyuk, Zadyuk, and Namyuk—big, brawling, brutal fellows, so stupid they could not even keep their own names straight; and there was a running joke about a nonexistent fourth brother, ‘Yuk-yuk.’ While the rest of the audience laughed and applauded, Zadyuk had watched with pursed-lipped fascination, his fists in sweaty knots that cooled when, suddenly, now and again, he would force them open. Indeed, he was never sure when people called him ‘Kudyuk’ if they were honestly mistaking him for his brother, or if they just felt one barbarian monicker was as good as any other.

  Back when he’d been sixteen, he’d tried to change his name to something nice, northern, and innocuous. Yes, ‘Pheron’ was what he’d picked. What an impossible three weeks! His friends, yellow-haired barbarians and brown respectable folks alike, kidded him endlessly. Everybody seemed to realize immediately what his motivations were and teased him mercilessly. There was nothing but to give it up. Well, Zadyuk was a good barbarian name; and Nari, whenever he grumbled about it, said she wouldn’t want him called anything else.4.22 Six months after he and Nari began living together they met Pheron.

  Nari started a conversation with the thin, black-eyed, brown-skinned youth one day in the market when he came in with an armful of his fabrics. She brought him to Zadyuk’s leather stall, where the three of them began to talk; then a woman buying a pair of sandals decided she also wanted to purchase one of Pheron’s pieces for a scarf. It was a great joke when they told her where, if she ever wanted to, she could have it laundered…

  The three young people marveled at how little time it took them to become the closest of friends.

  But, though he’d started to a couple of times with Nari, Zadyuk never told either Pheron or Nari directly about the attempted name change nine years before. Especially not after he decided that Pheron really was his closest friend in Kolhari.4.231 If a mid-twentieth-century orthodox Freudian could return to Kolhari and present Zadyuk with the theory of repressed homosexuality’ (as the basic force behind civilization)—though myself I think the analysis would be false—Zadyuk, a primitive man in a superstitious time, would probably find the notion intriguing and even plausible.

  There were a number of such fables about in that land in those days, especially among the established classes of Kolhari.

  4.3 Pheron? Where does he come from, with his nice, northern, innocuous name…?

  His workshop was not far from the New Market. With a shifting string of young assistants, he worked harder than both Nari and Zadyuk over any given week, sold to a clientele slightly higher socially, to make somewhat less money than the laundress and shoemaker together.

  Pheron’s father had worked on the New Market when it was being built. (It had been completed five years ago, after three years of labor.) Seven years back, Pheron would sometimes bring his father his dinner in the afternoon to the construction site.

  Watching men dig and roll barrows about the site, Pheron had sometimes thought: ‘There is nothing, nothing, nothing I could do here—except, perhaps, carry a slop bucket for the workers.’

  His mother, whom he’d always considered a terribly interesting woman, with her songs and jokes and eccentric opinions and furious energy, had died, after a brief illness, when he was fourteen. He’d missed her desperately. But two things soon grew clear.

  His relationship with his father became much better than it had been—for his parents had always argued over him. As Pheron himself took over the cleaning and cooking and general household duties, rather as if he had been (and he and his father both joked about it) a daughter, a kind of friendship took over between father and son. At one point, as he recalled some of his parents’ wrangling, it suddenly struck him: it was not him they had disapproved of, but only of how each other had treated him.

  And with one of them gone, unfair though it still seemed that it had taken his mother’s death to bring it about, the conflict had ceased.

  4.31 If a mid-twentieth-century orthodox Freudian were to present Pheron with the theory of ‘penis envy’ and ‘sublimation,’ he would probably have said:

  ‘The only thing is, I envy them too. And I’ve got one. Nor is it small. And heaven knows, I don’t sublimate. I go right for it!’

  And if the orthodox Freudian went on to present the theory of ‘repressed homosexuality’ as the basic force behind civilization, Pheron’s comment would most likely have been:

  ‘But what makes you think it’s repressed?’4.32 There is something incomplete about Pheron. (Since there is no Pheron, since he exists only as words, their sounds and associated meanings, be certain of it: I have left it out.) My job is, then, in the course of this experiment, to find this incompleteness, to fill it in, to make him whole.

  But at this point, however, there’s a real question where to look for the material: in the past? in the future? on the roaring shore where imagination swells and breaks? in the pale, hot sands of intellection? in the evanescent construct of the here and now—that reality always gone in a blink that is nevertheless forever making history?

  4.4 The lintel’s shadow pulled away, and he narrowed his eyes in the sun spilling on the grass between the buildings. A younger man, the Master wondered, did I squint as much, stepping out of doors? How odd one can close one’s eyes to such light but not one’s ears to such noise.

  The students shouted and tossed their balls and roamed the lawn.

  He stood with his lids near met, smiling. Because, walking out among his students, he smiled.

  Toplin would have been in the thick of their ball tossing…

  Can I hear his absence through their games? Eyes all but shut, the Master caught the shadow of three dashing by his left indoors and, a moment later, one sauntering out on his right. With a tiny joy, he (who claimed to know all his children by their footsteps, even around corners) recognized none of them. Then, as if in reaction to the joy, there was…

  Nothing, he thought. An absence. But it’s an absence in me. What will I fill it with?

  Work? Fear of the illness? Mistaken notions? Brilliant speculation? Care and concern for the ailing Toplin, whose distraught, angry mother had taken him away only an hour ago, back to her somewhat pretentious house in its somewhat unfashionable neighborhood?

  That he truly did not know was the absence. He opened his eyes to the sun and stalked among the young women and young men laughing and l
oitering in the light—certainly—of his knowledge.

  4.41 If a mid-twentieth-century theorist of any sort could return to Kolhari and present the Master with just about any modern notion, say Freud’s concepts of ‘the unconscious,’ ‘transference,’ ‘repression,’ or ‘infantile sexuality’ (I believe these theories to be basically correct), the Master would probably not put much stock by them—even though there were a number of such fables about in the land in those days.

  The Master has too many carefully worked up theories of his own, however—and even a few small, but clear, hopes that they are coherent and rich enough to interest people into days well beyond ours, however foggily (powerfully?) he conceives ‘the future.’ But he is a primitive man in a superstitious time, and though he has a surprisingly sophisticated intuition of this, it is precisely when his theories turn to grapple this most important problem of his day that they became truly incomprehensible to those coming after him even by a generation, much less millennia.

  4.5 The nameless old servant—the crevices broken into her cheeks and forehead are what medicine will eventually call Touraine-Solente-Golé syndrome—stopped beside the leather hanging over the scullery doorway, in the dawn’s cool and rustle. She’d not yet gone to wake the new kitchen girl. (That, indeed, Larla needed to be awakened quite so many mornings did not speak well for her first month at the estate. Still, she didn’t mind working on a house with a lord gone suddenly and so distressingly ill. There were some who wouldn’t stay for that.) She thought of Lord Vanar and, as an aged woman might at that time, pondered magic, disease, power, and felt…