Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  Outside, boisterous revelers passed, singing and laughing.

  Through a door near the side of the counter, a yellow-haired man with some limp flowers in his hair, a gold collar, and a blue robe suddenly stepped forward, surveyed the room, clapped his hands before his chest and announced: ‘Well, there’re enough of us to start. You’re all concerned about the plague, I know. No one is more concerned about it than we are, here, believe me. We’re so happy you could come. We’ll take contributions only on your way out. I’m your Wizard for the—’ someone coughed, and he turned with a raised eyebrow. ‘You’re here, of course, for the Calling…?’

  Someone said: ‘…of the Amnewor.’

  Some looked at one another as though that had been a dangerous name to speak.

  Nobody answered with an audible ‘Yes.’ But a few nodded. A few others pushed back from their tables, ready to rise.

  ‘Very good. Very good,’ the man said. ‘If you’ll all just follow me, right through this way. There’re steps down. It’s narrow and rather steep. So please don’t crowd. Just go carefully.’

  People began to follow him through the door.

  Somehow, in a motion that suggested she was afraid she might be left behind, the hooded old woman slipped ahead of me. She glanced back at me. I smiled. She looked embarrassed and turned away. We followed the crowd.

  Over the heads of those before me, I could see that the walls beyond the doorway were rough rock. From somewhere below, I heard an ethereal music. The voice of the Amnewor, I said to myself, and wondered, indeed, what monster the night would bring.

  As I went through the low doorway, ahead I saw the yellow hair of the big shoemaker. He paused, looked down, then, from the way his head lowered, he must have begun to descend the steps.

  I moved forward, with the others.

  9.84 People who did not attend the Calling of the Amnewor: Arly, Gorgik, Joey, Larla, Meise, the old mummer, Norema, Pheron, Radiant Jade, Samuel Delany (Chip), Terek, Toplin, Toplin’s mother, Toplin’s lover, and, in general, many, many more, of course, than who did.

  9.85 ‘Failure signs our beginning,’ the Wizard began in the dark, ‘for where else can we start, save from weakness, fear, and a crushing incapacity before a purity so rich it sometimes seduces us into thinking our own consciousness is at one with it? Failure will sign our end. Our first step into the darkness here is a realization of that failure—if only the failure to remember what must be remembered if civilization is to persist, our failure to forget what must be forgotten if, personally, we are to endure in it. Harps and cymbals tinkle with rising anticipation. Bring the first brand.

  ‘There!

  ‘Gasp, if you will. But seated on the throne, ribs thrust through the chest’s tattered leather, long teeth loose in that nude jaw, it leans, lopsided in firelight, a trace of the life now negated in its brown bones and dried gristle, imbued not with life but with meaning by what passes in positive glory over our heads: the Liberator who is subsumed on this day of Carnival by the true seat of power—which is not here.

  ‘Look!

  ‘Was it righter in life than the master it fell before? Not likely, in the larger scheme. But it lived once; and, dead, it lingers beneath our unholy torches.

  ‘How can we start from anyplace else before this monstrous and murderous dying, dying, dying which plagues us?

  ‘Amnewor!

  ‘Amnewor!

  ‘Amnewor!

  ‘Drums and reeds echo us. But the Calling is not one we make to the monster, through the medium of this desiccated corpse. The Calling of the Amnewor is, rather, the call that the barely believable monster herself will make to this symbol of our mortality that we have enthroned for the night—a Calling that animates it, however marginally.

  ‘Do not look behind!

  ‘Her several eyes, from the size of a minnow’s to the size of the full moon low on the horizon and clustered only in odd numbers, open, now here, now there, at your back, across her vast flesh slimed with oceanic slough and filth. The heat of her warms your nape, the joints of your knees. Above you, her many mouths erupt in the loose, liquescent skin, some so small you could not push one finger into their tiny, sucking slits, some so huge and slobbering that the tongue within is sliced to bloody strips by broken teeth (more than a hundred, ragged in the several rows of gum, and each as large as your hand), while others are all soft cheek and uvula and lip—spitting, hissing, sucking—some supported by internal bone, however distorted from traditional jaw and beak, others dangling in immense and flaccid flaps, fluttering and flatulent with the fetid airs, rumbling out here, gushing in there.

  ‘Listen!

  ‘Above the tambourine and sistrum, you can hear her, huge as a merchant’s three-story house on fire, breathing behind you…Do not look, I say! Do not! High in the suppurating and pulsing meat of her brow, a single jewel, blood red, with ninety-seven flat and glimmering surfaces across it and the size of a baby’s head, is sunk in a circlet of iron and gold, bolted to the bone beneath. Once you see it, you cannot look away. (I know! I watch it now!) What does an Amnewor eat?

  ‘Human eyes!

  ‘Human tongues!

  ‘And the hot jelly of human brains! She sucks them through the ear, after piercing the drum and small bones within, using her knobby fingers, all narrow as sapling twigs, from which thin claws grow, six and seven inches. Oh, once you look, once you are hypnotized by the red jewel, she will hold you rigid in her muscular tentacles, while, with her tiny hands, she tears you to pieces…

  ‘Why else have we chosen a decayed corpse for a champion? (Little bells tinkle. The flute flutters eerily.) Eyeless, tongueless, earless, it alone can face the Amnewor from vanquishing distance. It alone can answer her call.

  ‘Do you hear it, now? The music has momentarily halted. Look at the throne!

  ‘Bring another brand!

  ‘And another!

  ‘There, did you see?

  ‘The dead hand moved!

  ‘It slid an inch on the stone beside the skewed boat of bone. Now, yes, the slack jaw pulls shut, rattling its remaining teeth, and the knee swings wide as the foot slips dry tarsal and metatarsal over the hide on the top step.

  ‘See how weakly it tries to stand! What strength it takes to vanquish the little bit of death that, so long ago, killed it! Blind, deaf, dumb, yet it hears the call. We must give it a guide.

  ‘There, rush to it, little girl!

  ‘She takes up her cat-skull staff to run and stand before the steps. Someone has drawn a mask across her face, though it’s only makeup, and her clear eyes blink above her full, healthy cheeks. That health, that innocence (that mask) will protect her from the gaze of the Amnewor waiting in the shadow behind you, looking over your heads, as terrible as the gods who, were they there in your place, might be mistaken for you yourselves.

  ‘Someone has tied a bit of black and orange cloth in a cunning cape around the girl’s shoulders.

  ‘Beneath it the two ends of a leather thong hang on her chest, their raddled tips telling of some fetish snatched violently free. What doom or victory might it have guided her to? It’s gone. We’ll never know. She has become merely the guide to our victory, who—stiffly, unsteadily—manages to rise, now, from the throne.

  ‘Gongs echo through the crypt.

  ‘It stands on the top stair, as the fat little girl, holding her staff high, steps back.

  ‘The skeletal foot falls to the step below, and the whole frame shakes and shivers, dropping dried skin and cartilage crumbs; a rib falls loose, to click on the stone, rocking. One toe bone is left on the step above. One finger remains behind on the seat. Will our champion crumble entirely before true confrontation?

  ‘But the immense, glimmering monster behind you has already begun to quiver, heave, and show signs that, certainly, were you to see them, you’d take for anger and fear, as the mortal remains of our prince skitter and clatter to the step’s bottom. For haven’t we all suspected, all along, that human beings are
sometimes more godlike than the gods; certainly their deaths are more absolute than the death of any god, named or unnamed, we’ve ever storied. And as certainly, decay, which is what the Amnewor after all is, cannot feed on the already and absolutely dead. Is that small distinction between the dying and the dead where hope for victory lies?

  ‘The Amnewor is, you know, a god of edges, borders, and boundaries. You may even have encountered her, reeking and putrid on some overhung night, as you tried to get from here to there, all at once too intensely aware of what the separation between them meant. But we have called her, to serve us now—though by this displacement to the center she has not so much changed her nature; for no matter how Nevèrÿon expands, even as it reaches out to encompass death and the stars, she’ll still prowl and linger along its rim.

  ‘“She?” I already hear some of you repeat it, with a note of ironic censure, a moment before turning from me in a positive distinction that will lose you all hope with the return of what we call the real. Stay! Again I say: do not avert your eyes, for many of us know of, and some of us here have even visited, a land that is not Neverjton, but where a similar ritual must be held with a male monster, the corpse of a princess, and a little boy for guide. Though the names might be different, the same, or absent, can’t we recognize one monster here, common to us all, prowling the border between one and another, or even between us and a land more different still from ours? I assure you, these are as real as the monster that guards what is, after all, the other’s boundary as much as it is ours. For she does not care what distinctions she guards, or how we sex her in a homage to the concept of distinction itself. She only cares that distinctions exist.

  ‘Once more the little girl raises her staff.

  ‘Suddenly there’s a sound—

  ‘Keep calm!

  ‘No, please, keep calm!

  ‘Whatever happens, don’t look away!

  ‘On the canvas sheet that just unrolled at our little guide’s sign, flapping and roaring from the darkness above, like a wind from the edge of forever, you can see a mammoth beast so grossly painted it is difficult to tell whether it is a dragon or an eagle; it wavers there, ambiguous as the stone carving over the gates to the grounds of the High Court. What gazes out through its hollow eyes? Lust? Pride? Avarice? Ignorance? Want? The guide leads the skeleton past, and though he quivers, shakes, and seems fit to fall completely to pieces, he vanquishes all representations of the enemy by that technique I would urge on you, at least tonight with regards to the monster behind you: not looking at it.

  ‘There, another canvas falls open, roaring like pain itself, among whose folds and shadows a raging landscape glimmers. Wave or mountain, forest or desert, what is important here is that the lack of a human figure pictured upon it signs the whole range of human desolations living men and women can endure, at least a moment, before they die. And he? He vanquishes those wastes simply by moving, with his clumsy and awkward step, across it, appearing—just managing to appear at all—a human form against it, for all his death and desecration, an irreducibly social trace.

  ‘Somewhere in that part of our city most separated, most distant, and, indeed, most protected from the general populace, the Liberator, already beyond the ambiguous gates, approaches the castle, a gray wall coming toward him, towering over him, about to fall on him in some infinitely delayed topple…till a door swallows him, and he moves forward through wide corridors, cheering behind him, well-wishers on both sides, as he strolls closer and closer to the seat of power that has summoned him here…

  ‘But here? In this oldest, central section of our city, the corpse moves on, limping and staggering, shedding flesh and mold, till, only inches before you, its dead fingers reach to your left while its skull drops hugely right, its dry hands stretch to the right while its skull lolls left, as if it would determine which way it must go to continue toward the power that has called.

  ‘The music resounds and pounds with military insistence.

  ‘He reels…for you are the border he must pass, transgress, obliterate with some terminal motion to become one with what animates him.

  ‘Oh, again I tell you: do not look away from the empty eyes backed with black bone. For if you are seduced into turning for a moment by the monster that breathes and hisses at your back, that heats your shoulders to sweat—that, indeed, guards you—he will slip past.

  ‘You will be defeated.

  ‘But see: still making your nostrils pinch with the expectation of a putrefaction he’s too long dead to reek of, his scentless joints falter, and he falls, slips, at last clatters to the dusty floor as lifeless as—finally—we always knew him to be, vanquished at our feet.

  ‘That he fails (again, and again, and again) to transgress the boundary you represent, between the possible and the probable, the imprecise and the precise, the dying and the dead, the surmised and the certain, that (once more) he does not join with the absolute outside which, you are sure though you have never seen her, controls you unto life and death, means, somehow, at the High Court, the Liberator may, at least in part, succeed; that our champion may not have been thoroughly subsumed by the power that called him back from the border.

  ‘It means there is some hope that we need not close forever and absolutely with the power of our own despair, that some informative contradiction remains to be untangled, which may define the distance between our lives and the plague. And both those of us with, and those of us without, the disease can at least believe we understand the same fact, no matter how monstrous further contradiction proves that belief, that boundary between us, actually to have been.

  ‘The little girl with her cat-skull staff? Ah, while our gaze dispersed the apparition as any group disperses the information that falls into it, she slipped by our legs and passed us—to be caught and devoured by the Amnewor? An innocent, awful sacrifice? So fast and absolute we did not hear her scream? Who can tell.

  ‘We certainly can suspect, though.

  ‘That is very likely the reality of the monster, still invisible behind, as well as the meaning of what lies before, crumbled to dust on dirty tile.

  ‘Only we must admit this final contradiction over the absence at our feet: the skeleton has not really moved from its throne at all, in the course of all this glorious music.

  ‘It leans there, silent, accusing us with void sockets of this last self-deception. Harps and drums! Flutes and cymbals! Friends, when you return to the full, confusing, and fallible world above, speak to others of how you saw, at least, a bony finger twitch, a dry foot slide across the cowhide, how certainly you perceived that little motion in death that must be what life means; for only by that response can you affirm that the Amnewor has called.

  ‘Some of you will even say, as truthfully, that you saw the skeleton sit up, stand, stagger down the steps, reel across the tile and dirt as far, or farther, than I have described.

  ‘But remember, as you speak, it is the discrepancy, the contradiction, the gap between what you recall and what you can say (even as you strive for accuracy and articulation) that vouchsafes our hope, that indicates the possibility of something more, just as, at this end, its total articulation (the complete knowledge that one lies) signs, again, our failure.’

  9.86 People who attended the Calling of the Amnewor: the barbarian woman who helped Toplin’s mother, Madame Keyne, Kentog, the Master, Nari, Namyuk (Zadyuk’s younger brother), Noyeed, the old servant woman, Lord Vanar, a once young smuggler, Zadyuk, and many, many others, though less, of course, than attended the celebration at the High Court in honor of the Liberator.

  10 ‘I’m sorry, Leslie, but that’s precisely what he doesn’t do!’ Kermit sat with his knees wide and his arms over them, dangling the paperback from one hand. ‘He doesn’t capture—or “document,” to use his word—the feel of the gay community between ’82 and ’84, when he was apparently writing his story and the AIDS coverage was at its height. And he certainly doesn’t document the feel of…well, of the day-to-day life
of the ancient people who once lived here, in this city—’ He gestured at the chopped up landscape. A few tents stood about among the diggings and, in a few places, a palm—‘or in the towns and villages that we’ll presumably find around it. He’s just playing at their lives, anachronisms all over the place; and his rituals and gods are obviously phony to the core! I mean, even in terms of his own allegory, just look at what he’s done. He starts off promising us a story about various and sundry little people, trying to deal with a medical catastrophe, but slowly and inexorably the Discourse of the Master displaces everyone else’s, until, finally, it completely takes over. Soon, it’s even speaking or the little people—at least those the Master himself wants to consider. In this case that’s the military, a soldier who moves from loyalty to forgetfulness (if not total muteness!) in a very suspicious way, and a lumpen laborer, whom he just chooses to present, here, as a comic and a cripple! But at the same time, the Master’s Discourse is seducing us with its rhetoric, its insight, its professions of honesty, fallibility, and personal doubt, while he ignores whomever he chooses. In this case (as I can’t believe you, a mathematician and linguist, as well as a self-professed feminist, didn’t notice), that’s women and homosexuals—until, Leslie, in a move that dates back to the time the first Mesopotamian warlord financed the first temple in honor of Marduk or whomever, the worldly Discourse of the Master is replaced by the transcendental rhetoric of the Priest—our barbarian Wizard with the daisies—saying more or less the same thing the Master said, only in absolute terms, lest we dare question it. But it’s precisely what we heard before, a little muffled, from the mouth of the Master himself: in our failure lies our salvation! And there’s even a never-never land, where the low shall be made high and the high made low, off in the Western Crevasse. Well, whose failure, I’d like to ask. The Master’s? Oh, yes. Do tell me another one! You can be sure anywhere he’s failed, he doesn’t have an inkling. Failure, failure, wonderful failure…? Just suppose the people who isolated the virus and who’re developing the vaccine took that tack? For God’s sake, Leslie, he’s even published a roster of who did and didn’t attend services! No, I’m afraid Delany’s Kolhari is very smalltown. It’s an old, old, old, old story. And for all his marginal numbers, his Benjaminesque montage, or his Bakhtinian polylogue, or whatever, there’s not a new—much less radical—thing in it! And I don’t like it one bit. (Who is this ‘Joey’? A hustler and a hophead? He’s certainly not my significant other.) Nor can I see why you do. Only for some reason you’ve traveled many, many thousands of miles to bring me a copy (with an enthusiasm that, I assure you, is wholly unwarranted) to ask me what I think. Well, there! I’ve read it—or skimmed it, at any rate. Certainly I’ve read as much as I need to. And I’ve told you!’