Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  On line behind me for the Philadelphia bus was a bearded college student on his way to visit friends and family at home. His calculated casualness and studied disarray strangely reflected what ambled and stumbled all round us: his beard and long hair worn that way because he liked it, not because he couldn’t afford to cut it; the clean, pink shirt left out of his old, white corduroy pants because it felt comfortable that way, not because he’d forgotten it was possible to affect your appearance by the exertion of such small energies; the old sneakers worn because they were comfortable, not because he’d found them in a trash can after spending four days with no shoes at all. His wire-framed glasses were clean. His watch was on time—at one point I asked him what time it was, and the next thing you know we were having an astute enough conversation about economic conditions in the country and how they were reflected in what passed around us.

  He sat in the seat ahead of me on the bus, listening to the earphones of his silent Walkman, while we rolled through breaking dawn, down to Philadelphia.

  Another journal entry, based on notes made that morning in November and written out more fully a day or so later.

  Another (very minor) reason the Nevèrÿon series is a document.

  9.81 How did I find out where it was? It was rather easy, the Master explained. In every group, no matter how carefully you select them, one or two are always more disreputable than the rest. Even in this school, we have ours. So I went to one and told him: ‘Look, I want to know where they’re holding the Calling of the Amnewor.’ My voice let him know that, while I was serious, I wasn’t accusing him of anything. When he told me, of course, I knew I’d had my suspicions all along.

  Where else in Kolhari could they have held it?

  By late afternoon, most of the students had gone off for Carnival. At five o’clock, I went out, pausing on the lawn while a cricket, who’d somehow found her way into town, chirrupped in urban isolation and despair. I looked at the infirmary. Another student was laid up, all sadfaced at not being able to attend the merry-making, but—bless her—she’d only sprained an ankle. (Earlier, when I’d visited, she’d made noises about using the time to study.) Walking out toward the Pave, I turned down the slope between the sycamores, some of which I’d replanted and some of which my neighbors had brought in, after my example.

  Well, I asked myself, why are you going to this uncivilized affair? Is it for Toplin? Is it for the ill, the harried, the worried, the ground down? But with only the silent street about me, I could not answer a strict yes. Pure curiosity? But I’m of an age to know that little if nothing in this strange and terrible land is pure.

  The problem with these practices—and I’ve attended enough, both inside the city and out—is that I frequently know more about them than the benighted jungle bunny hopping up and down performing them.

  Doughty old servants when I was a child—with the family how many generations and forbidden to talk of such things—oh, they delighted in terrifying spoiled aristocratic brats, whining for an hour before bedtime, with the very tales and tenors aristocratic parents had fled long ago and wherever.

  In the south, of course, it’s Gauine: a great dragon of jewels and gold, long as the land, with a wingspread wide as the sky. She’s supposed to guard some town that doesn’t exist anymore—though I looked for it long enough when I visited the area.

  Up north it’s Ropig Crigsbeny: a boar the size of a mountain, who gobbles whole tribes at a mouthful and shits man-high piles of skulls. But there’ve been enough wars around there—and enough hacked-off heads—to understand why nobody wants to talk about him much.

  I confess, the Amnewor is new to me. Yes, I’ve heard the name—as a minor fact in some other god’s story. Precisely what it did, though, I can’t remember. That, of course, makes it more intriguing. Death. It was associated with endless, mindless, pointless death. But which of them isn’t? I recall—

  9.811 The problem with the ‘suspension of disbelief’ theory of fiction in general and of F&SF in particular is that it makes art (however willingly) a kind of cheat. People who want to preserve art’s privilege of subversion (and of, yes, shock) have said: ‘Fine, let it be a cheat!’ e.g., Picasso: ‘Art is the lie that makes the truth bearable.’ But certainly this is not an enterprise where I want to cheat at all.

  As did writers from Flaubert and Baudelaire (who vacillated) to Pater and Wilde, I believe art is wholly a formal enterprise, encompassing almost all the tenets that the nineteenth century spoke of as l’art pour l’art, tenets that have made the twentieth century’s experimentation possible. (What postmodern doesn’t?) How, then, to reconcile that belief with all this topicality?

  I think the answer lies in that the writer is always generating meanings (and not organizing references), even the most topical meanings. Reference, after all, is only a particularly limited sort (or better, use) of meaning in a particularly limited context: and that is neither the subject-dominated literary text nor the object-dominated paraliterary text.

  (To refer to reference always requires a frame, and is always therefore an act of meaning…)

  9.82 Journeying through the city, what I recall (and I always do, whenever I go anyplace where the street noise lowers enough for me to hear myself think, the Master said) is my journey through Nevèrÿon when I was seventeen.

  For that was when truly I first learned of monsters.

  Nevèrÿon.

  Officially, I was crossing it.

  What I wanted to do, of course, was flee it—though I couldn’t tell my uncle that.

  I could hardly tell myself. But that was my secret plan.

  My overt object and itinerary as I presented it to my uncle was, however, of the highest moral and intellectual order. I wanted—I told him—to seek out all the works, monuments, and remaining memorials of the barbarian inventor, Belham. There were enough traces of his handiwork here in Kolhari to excite any boy with a like penchant for invention. Born in southern lands, he’d come up to lay out some of our city’s finest avenues and estates; then he went north…

  But his architectural innovations preserve the High Court and make it livable to this day.

  Coinpress? Corridor?

  He was responsible for both.

  And there are a dozen gardens, both in Sallese and Neveryóna, where his fountains still plash among the greenery and flowers. Moving about the city, you think of his as a wholly urban sensibility. But the traditions are clear. He was not born here; he did not die here.

  He came from somewhere else.

  He left for somewhere else.

  And at seventeen, my adolescent obsession, my first mission, my purpose and passion was to reconstruct that journey, that life, from origin to end; for the wonders left in Kolhari alone suggested the most marvelous and misty cross-section among complex endeavors that covered the country.

  In preparation for the journey, for almost eight months—a long time for sustained effort from someone seventeen—besides visiting every architectural structure in Kolhari that boasted Belham’s hand, I’d met with every relative I could, resident in the city or visiting, to get information about him as well as a list of locations for whatever of his projects might remain in our nation. (Some, of course, had vanished in small time, but an impressive number endured.) In this wise, I’d constructed a map and with it, made notes, from which I seriously considered writing a detailed account of Belham’s life and works, like those that various councilors were forever proposing to put together about some of our queens and kings, to have them carved on certain walls at the court—and never getting round to it. You must understand that this was before the writing system from the Ulvayns came to the mainland: that fixes specific words to parchment, stone, or papyrus. But in those days, we had only the various commercial scripts, with their signs for amounts, products, ideas, names, and injunctions, and it was in the two of these languages I’d mastered that I intended to write this work.

  The ease with which you could write it today makes my ad
olescent ambition seem a grandiose dream verging on the preposterous. Contemplating it in the light of the newer writing, I am only more impressed than ever with that early and ambitious foolishness.

  What do you take on a journey if you are a seventeen-year-old prince who expects to be gone a year? Money, of course. And tents. And provisions; and tools to set them up. Of course a chest of sumptuous gifts for the noble houses at which, from time to time, you will be a guest. And another of bright trinkets for commoners who aid you and require recompense. And two closed carriages to carry it all in. And six armed soldiers, skilled with spear, sword, and bow, to protect you from bandits. And three men to rotate as drivers and general grooms (though they, too, should have weapon experience). And a body servant—some soft souls say two, three, or more. And a caravan steward to coordinate it all. My uncle assured me I would need a companion of my own class and interests, as well. I made noises about stopping off to pick up a young cousin of mine from some castle or other in the west—a move, once we started, I had no intention of making. Very few of my class have my interests; and among those who do, that cousin was not one.

  The night before we left, my uncle held a party for me—to which I arrived late: I’d finally gotten a chance to visit a merchant woman in Sallese whose gardens boasted a set of Belham’s finest fountains. The spewing jets played at the four corners of a bridge across the stream at the bottom of the falls foaming behind her house. As I recall, she was quite anxious to show me something else, kept up in a maintenance shack at the top of the garden rise. She said it held Belham’s own garden maquette—but I had seen many like it before—as well as something created by another inventor, a contemporary of, or an assistant to, Belham, when he’d worked there for her father.

  She wouldn’t tell me what it was.

  But Belham alone was my Great Man, my Hero, and my only Passion—also I was late.

  So I thanked her, declined her invitation, examined her handsome fountains and their ingenious tributary pools on the gardens’ upper level; and left for home.

  Next morning our caravan pulled out of my uncle’s gates, while the gatekeeper, up later than I at the night’s revels, planted the end of the crossbeam in the dust to lean on it, yawning, as the sky’s deep blue lightened moment by moment toward a gray that threatened rain.

  It didn’t break, as I recall, till our third day out from the city.

  The outlines of Belham’s story are widely known: born in the south and distinguishing himself there by his mathematical and architectural ability, he soon came to the attention of local nobles, who encouraged him to work at various holds about the land. Finally he was summoned by Queen Olin to Kolhari, and later worked here for various lords and wealthy merchant families. But he was a drinker, a womanizer, and a commoner to boot, as well as a ranging and restless spirit. After Olin was deposed, he traveled even further north, where he finally died from falling down a cliff, while drunk, one cold and rainy evening, near a village just beyond Ellamon.

  The map I’d made indicated forts, temples, bridges, roads, and fountains all over Nevèrÿon that Belham’s name was connected with. How did I intend to reconstruct the journey from south to north that was his life? I joined each point on my map by a single line to the point nearest. Certainly that was the most logical path he would have traveled. And one drizzly afternoon, perhaps a week beyond our departure, I sat under a tarpaulin that had been put up for me at our camp. A hickory fire burned near me, from logs that my caravan steward, suspecting rain, had put by in our wagon the day before. I unrolled the map from arm to arm of my lounging chair, now and again sipping a berry drink through a brass straw. The liqueur was local to the town just above which we’d stopped, and my man, Cadmir, born there and boasting of it half the day before, had run down and back to purchase a jar and bring it up for my enjoyment.

  Three of my soldiers squatted by a wagon wheel, tossing bones with one of my drivers—for the sprinkle was not so fierce as to distract them from their gambling.

  Suddenly they laughed.

  The driver had told them, I realized, the perfectly foul joke that, after some deliberation as to whether or not it was meet for one of my station, I’d told to him that morning as we’d sat together on the carriage’s rocking bench. (‘And make sure you tell it to Terek,’ I’d suggested, for the dark, lanky soldier had already struck me as the most sullen among my men, though sometimes he could give out with a startling smile.) I glanced up, to see first Terek (of the dark skin and broken nose), then the others, grin in my direction. I grinned back: of course, the driver had told them what I’d said about Terek as well. But none seemed to have taken offense. Feeling supremely well liked, I went on looking at my map. I still recall the pride I felt, that cool afternoon, as I moved a forefinger over the vellum. Clearly this was the opening of my Great Work. The logic, the order, the sheer reasonableness of it, in the lines that crossed the geographical signs for mountains and rivers and forests, were as beautiful as—I thought then—truth must always be.

  There was Belham’s life!

  I sat gazing on the totality out of which all Belham’s creations had grown.

  Had it occurred to me that perhaps one or two of his marvels had missed my notation? Yes, I knew for a fact I had left out at least two, because though I had their descriptions from several people, no one knew exactly what towns they were in. Did I suspect that perhaps he had not gone quite so directly, now and again, between proximate locations? From stories I’d already gotten from various noble cousins, I was sure there were three places from which he’d gone on to some far place to build before returning to a nearer town to build again. Had it occurred to me that a few of the works bearing his name had probably not been built by him at all, but were imitations by others in his style? I had down three such for certain, since, despite the name, others remembered the true builder. But these bits of special knowledge were what gave me the expert’s sense that spiced my general pleasure.

  What did I think, then, of all these mistakes and exceptions? What did they mean for my serpentine pattern winding Nevèrÿon?

  I was convinced, as only youth can be, that if new wonders by Belham were reported to me that day, that if new forgeries were at that very moment unmasked, the revisions would surely lie so close to the line I already had down—that any corrections to be made in such an astute picture as mine must be so minuscule—that, were he looking over my shoulder, Belham himself would praise my method and take it for his own, astonished at how precisely any addition he might make already lay within the general curve and contour of his life as I had sketched it.

  Somewhat eccentrically, my quest’s first goal was the town, in the Faltha Mountains, of Belham’s death. I wanted to stand atop the ledge where he had stood, had staggered…and had, drunkenly, slipped down. Indeed, I wanted to climb to that ledge’s bottom and stand at—even lie upon—the place where he had lain, with his broken legs, to die. I wanted to see if, in my youth, gazing on the rocks and trees he’d gazed on, I could intuit from them the final thoughts of the aged and injured genius. And I was determined not to stop off at any of the other monuments on my map until I’d had this moment of terminal empathy.

  From his dying place I’d planned to move back, then, along the line I’d laid out, to his last accomplishments at Ellamon—the landscaping and fountains of my cousin’s gardens at the Vanara Hold. Then, wonder by wonder, I would follow that line (skirting only Kolhari), till, sinking into the south, I reached his place of birth. Thus at each station, I could contemplate the marvels there in terms of all that had lain ahead for him, which I would now know, though it was unknown to him. What more reasonable way, I thought, was there to comprehend the great and sweeping pattern of a great man’s sweeping life?

  As we drew deeper into the Falthas, of course it rained—rained as though the gods’ own cistern had cracked open to spill endlessly over the woody, rocky slopes we rode: it rained for the whole three days we approached Ellamon.

  The roa
d grew treacherous.

  Soon my balding and heavy-lipped caravan steward climbed into my wagon to confer with me, his robes drenched, his bushy eyebrows water-jeweled, and an edge in his voice betraying his impatience with my impractical notion of bypassing the fabled High Hold: Could the young master see his way to stopping first at Ellamon proper and importuning some hospitality from his fabled relatives—enough to wait out this bad weather?

  I was, of course, as wet and as cold as any of my men, for several times I’d had to leave my wagon when we crossed a particularly narrow stretch. As we rolled, with the steward sitting beside me, I looked through the wagon’s forward window, between the driver’s legs: our horses went unsteadily on the branch-strewn, runneled path. While we joggled, damp and cold, the wagon slid about.

  ‘Of course,’ I told him; ‘we’ll stop at Ellamon first,’ and saw my orderly dream, like an overloaded wagon slipping from muddy mountain ruts, go smashing over the rocks at the roadway’s edge.

  At Ellamon an aged cousin—whom I’d never met till then—took us into his great house with much goodwill and solicitousness, putting my servant with his in the scullery and placing my soldiers first in his empty barracks, then bringing them in to dine with us—at my egalitarian suggestion. For when I learned they would be served the same food as we, prepared in the same kitchen, there seemed no need for such a lonely meal with only the two of us in that long, echoing chamber.

  My cousin was honestly pleased with the suggestion and seemed to enjoy the resultant jokes, laughter, battle tales, and pleasantries, while we ate his parsnips and roast mutton and the windows, flaring with lightning, dripped on the western wall.

  The next morning the rain had stopped. Once there, however, I had to stay the day. I’d told my cousin of my interest in Belham. He was a well of information. As he took me out to show me Belham’s fountains in his own gardens he gave me instructions on how to get to the town nearest Belham’s demise, down to the specific landmarks and the turns I would have to take at them to reach, first, the town, then the ledge outside it, where the Great Man had fallen. (Could we have gotten there without him?) He told me of the inn, long since come down, where Belham had drunk his last mugs of hard cider before wandering off into the evening; he told of a half-witted, fourteen-year-old goatherd, who’d glimpsed the Great Man, still alive, struggling at the cliff’s bottom on two consecutive days, but who later confessed she’d been too frightened to help him or tell anyone, since someone had told her that the barbarian stranger was a wizard who could move great rocks at will. And he told me of the quarrymen, who, a day later, came upon him and brought him up—barely breathing by the time they found him and dead when they got him back to the inn. In short, he made the whole harrowing and horrid incident live.