Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  ‘“Yes,” I said. “I imagine so.”

  ‘“It’s right through there. You take your horse around the bend, and you’ll find the road swinging off to the left.” (Road, I thought. There’d only been a footpath in my time, which, here and there, had been overgrown enough so that in parts you couldn’t even call it that.) “Ride along for ten minutes at the gentlest walk—or gallop hard for two—and you’ll come to it. It’s right within sight of town.”

  ‘A town? I thanked her and reined about, starting in the direction she’d pointed. Could there have grown up a town? Still, the traveling time sounded right. I rode along, following her directions, not recognizing any tree, nor remembering any boulder; right where she’d said, I took up a double-rutted wagon path, wide enough to let two horses canter abreast. For all I knew, I could have been going in the opposite direction from the one I wanted, at a mine in a hundred stades away from the one I’d actually worked in. Riding along, I worried through possible explanations. Perhaps the building I’d just seen had been there when I was, but had been abandoned somewhere back in the woods, years before, as the spaces I had lived and labored in had been swallowed up since. Because the structure had stood ten or twenty (or thirty or forty) meters off in the forest, I’d simply never known it was there. Time passed, and as other buildings were torn down, the space around this one was cleared away to bring it back into use …

  ‘Or perhaps it had actually been among the six, seven, eight slat-walled barrack buildings I recalled. I just didn’t remember it: having not known at the time what those studs and staples were, I simply had not seen them. Still, for the staples to stay—and the woman had said there had been at least ten whole ones, when she’d arrived fifteen years ago—they had to be tarred every season or so. I’d been a miner there five years, first a common pit slave and finally a foreman. Who would wander off in the undergrowth to tar staples on an abandoned building swallowed by the brush? Wouldn’t I have remembered someone in the barracks sent to do such work?

  ‘Then it struck. There’d been one building, off from our barracks, I’d never entered through all my five years. I’d never stood directly before it; I’d only glimpsed its roof, now and again, over the tops of trees—many of them sumac bushes. At the same time I suddenly recalled, on those exhausted evenings when I and the others had come back from the pit, maybe three times noticing some guard making his way through our tired group with a bucket of tar. I’d never thought to ask about it. But now I knew what the building was.

  ‘Once it might have been a slave barracks, years before I’d come there. What it had been when I’d labored at the mines was the guards’ quarters.

  ‘Slaves were not allowed near it.

  ‘That was why I had never seen its stapled foundation. And if that was the guard building, then the road my horse walked along must be running toward the caravan site. Then, as I looked at the trees and greenery around me, the clarity vanished. Because if that was the guard building and this wagon road actually lay more or less along the old path, that would have put my barracks themselves in an entirely different direction from the one in which the old woman had pointed …

  ‘I sighed and looked around. How close did this road, I wondered, lie to the path along which Namyuk, the caravan soldier, and I had helped Vrach? As I looked off at the bushes, I wondered where along it we might have paused to let Vrach try to spill his ruptured bladder. I looked up through the branches at the gray sky. How had the clouds lain on the blue that day?

  ‘A thought returned I’d mulled on many times in past years: I had no idea where Vrach was buried. As pit slave and foreman, I could count thirty slaves who’d died here by violent or natural means. But I did not know where any of their bodies lay.

  ‘In Kolhari, if you follow Netmenders’ Row up from the waterfront past the pottery shops that cluster near the docks, all the way to where it crosses the Avenue of Refuse Carters, then on another half mile, till, after passing through the quarter of desert folks, it all but loses its name, you come to a potter’s field, where, with numberless victims of that night-long massacre in the Month of the Rat, my parents, I’d been told, were interred. I’d visited it occasionally over the years, sometimes to see other surviving children of that night walking by the spare trees, pausing to stare at the unevenly sunken ground, or gazing toward a dirt mound beside which another communal pit had been opened for the beggars whose corpses had been picked up on a cold dawn from under the Bridge of Lost Desire. But at the mines, where hundreds of men had toiled for a century or more, confined the length of their lives till they died (often before age thirty), I simply did not know what field or swamp or hillside held a one of their bodies—where, indeed, my own would have been tossed had I fought with Piffles.

  ‘As I rode, looking for a break in the clouds, I thought—not for the first time, but with an intensity that made the thought seem new—that what we’d been most denied as slaves here was our history. Oh, we’d had our jokes and tales, our accounts of heroics and glories, whispered of now and again during the day, now and again before we fell into our exhausted sleep in our weevily straw. But, as I rode, I also remembered how, no longer in the mines but abroad in the army, I’d heard soldiers tell tales they swore had happened to a friend that were identical to tales fellow slaves, a few years before, had sworn to me had happened to friends of theirs: I was young when I first learned that, while the incidents that can befall a man or a woman are as numberless as sunlit flashes flickering on the sea, what the same man or woman can say of them is as limited as the repertoire on the platform of some particularly uninventive mummers’ troupe. Indeed, it is that repertoire. Our history had been denied us as systematically as we had been denied the knowledge of our burial place, or as we had been denied sight of the guards’ house or any hint that, whatever its apparatus of oppression, that house had once been ours.

  ‘What I had begun to do that night at the caravan site, in the pathetic, impoverished way allowed a single youth, without help or communal language or public tradition, was to construct the start of a personal history. What I had learned is that such a personal history must, just like impersonal ones, be founded as richly on desire as on memory.

  ‘Would I recognize the caravan site at all? I had been in the barracks every day. The field, in my five years, I’d only visited half a dozen times. And yet, if only from what had happened there, I felt I must know it. Among some trees, I came out on a slope.

  ‘Was this it …?

  ‘Across the grass and under dark pines, mountains rose into morning mist—though the trees didn’t come as far down as I remembered.

  ‘And there were dwellings off at the foot. They hadn’t been there thirty years ago. The wagon path I rode on continued down and across some two hundred yards of grass to disappear among the huts and hovels—more than a path, really, but not yet a road. Along its middle ran a rib of small stones, weeds thrusting up among them. On either side of its dusty ruts (gray rather than tan beneath the overcast), tall grasses swayed like ship masts along an endless, double dockside.

  ‘I don’t think I can explain how uncomfortable that new track across the field made me. But looking along it, I found myself thinking: that path, clearly grown up in the last few years, could sink back into the grass in just about the same time it had taken to wear its way in, so that no one might ever know it had been there. Indeed, the clustered huts at its far end looked no more permanent. But, if it proved particularly useful, and if the huts thrived, some bunch of farmers and fieldhands might eventually cart out loads of sand and gravel, to scatter along it, to even out the low points that yearly sank beneath summer puddles, and finally to pave it with large flags, mud, and tar—so that it might hold contour for a hundred years. But now it lay poised before some moment of material choice that I would have nothing to do with, however meaningful or meaningless the ceremony I conducted beside it should be. Mine was simply another set of feet to walk on it, contributing only their minuscule amount to its
usefulness, an amount no greater for a minister than for a slave. But neither it nor, really, the tiny town it led to was more fixed than my own evanescent memories—though thirty families might now consider the village at its end their home and twice that many children, born here since I’d left, might believe their field the whole human universe, and that this path was the ultimate lane connecting here to there. But my analysis only made them—village and road—in their newness and their ephemerality, that much more annoying.

  ‘No, this couldn’t be the meadow I remembered …

  ‘But if it was, just over the rise to my left should lie the north-south highway, along which respectable travelers and footsore wanderers and farmers in their carts and many-wagoned caravans moved back and forth from the High Hold of fabled Ellamon to Kolhari. (From that highway, in minutes or hours, my own caravan should turn in to make camp—and raise its ceremonial pavilion.) Turning from the town, I trotted my horse off to see. What should I do if, when I topped the ridge, there was only more grass? Could the highway have been in a wholly other direction? Could I have misremembered things as completely as now and again I suspected I had—?

  ‘But there it was:

  ‘The north-south road, the Royal Highway, the Dragon’s Way!

  ‘I wheeled my horse back and forth and around in breathless joy. Yes, if one blotted out that excuse for a town struggling on over there, this had to be it—the place where, one night thirty years ago, I became myself.

  ‘I walked my horse back to the wagon path, looking at the field, the slope, the jagged Falthas. I jumped down to tie my mare to a tree and looked up the slant. I was standing within yards of the spot where, thirty years before, I’d stood with half a dozen other slaves, our guard on one side, the tall lord on the other, the two of them talking across us.

  ‘Since then I’d known as friends name-bearing relatives to the Lesser Lady Esulla. No, she, I knew, had never married Lord Anuron. And only two years back I’d dined at a heavily piled table with the aging Count Jeu-Forsi—across from me and half a dozen guests to my left—white-haired and plump now, but still called Toad.

  ‘No, I didn’t make myself known.

  ‘I looked across the field, trying not to see the cart track that scarred it, trying not to see the village, like a new bunion on the mountains’ foot. Instead I tried to reconstruct precisely where Fluffy’s wagon had been parked, where the clearing had been in which Lord Anuron had wrestled Vrach, exactly where the fringed pavilion had risen, or where the lamplit tent had stood—grinning, as I foundered among these dim speculations, because, within hours, my own wagons, tents, and pavilion would rise there, destroying any hope of an accurate image of the past with their own insistent presence.

  ‘I would walk to the new village, I decided suddenly. This nostalgia was absurd. I must see what lay here now. I started out—directly along the road, first on one side of the weedy mound down its middle, then on the other. Although I tried to fix my thoughts on the here and now before me, still, while I walked, I pondered: Did these ruts carry me over the spot where I’d stood at the tent flap in the dark, gazing in the lamplight at the naked lord? Did they perhaps lead me along the line I’d walked between the lighted tent and the sleeping Vrach?

  ‘To think too long on such things is to feel the gut twist, the throat constrict, and the emptiness behind all mirrors swell. And it was a long walk to that town. But I almost managed to dismiss the ache by telling myself: You have come here as a man victorious at the termination of a great battle. This must be your celebration …

  ‘At which point again I saw the face of that mighty minister, my enemy, dead tonight but that day at the side of the empress in Kolhari, and at whose behest I’d come here. For a moment, like some ghost or god of the field, it seemed much like the face of the tall lord … Could either have known of this pain, I wondered? Could either have possibly and purposefully placed me here, like a piece moved on some gaming board, to make me feel precisely this? But the preposterousness of the thought finally released me from it all. Again, as I walked, I grew certain of the celebratory present I was moving toward. To gain it, the past was what I must not think of anymore today. Yet when I was ten meters from the first thatched and hide-walled hovel, I stopped. I watched a few folk amble between the huts. One glanced at me. I wondered if she knew who I was.

  ‘Then I turned and walked back toward the part of the field with which—how else can I put it?—I was more familiar.

  ‘I’d almost recrossed the whole of it when I saw, up beyond where my horse was tied, the four on foot coming down the cart track.

  ‘In front was the old slave woman, in her brown shift and iron collar.

  ‘Three men were with her. One was a rangy, elderly man, also in brown, also in iron. He must be the long-term slave she’d told of. She and he were smiling broadly. And there was a younger one, a muscular, well-knit fellow, with matted hair, a leather clout around his hips, and iron at his neck. He was not smiling: but he walked with his mouth half open.

  ‘He was missing some teeth.

  ‘Have I mentioned it, Udrog? Namyuk had also had that dull habit of wandering about with his lips apart. A moment’s confusion: the young slave was Namyuk. The old woman and the old man were bringing him to me! Illusion, yes; but it was strong enough so that I waved my hand, quickened my step, and grinned like a madman. It lasted only seconds, but when the thought shook clear from my mind, what replaced it was: no, it wasn’t the young slave who was my old friend, but the older one! How long had the woman said he’d been here? She’d only kept it from me as a surprise—

  ‘That illusion cleared too, of course. And I felt myself an ass. (She’d said the older slave had been here twenty years, which would mean he had come six years after I’d left. For a moment though, I’d thought it had been only two, rather than three, decades!) And I was standing before the old, leather-necked fellow, who, there in his collar, was smiling as broadly as I had been, his long teeth yellow and sound, while I tried to salvage the fragments of my own smile.

  ‘The youngster watched me with his gray-eyed, gap-toothed gaze.

  ‘But neither the young man nor the old was any more Namyuk than I.

  ‘The woman stepped forward, gesturing at her companions. The man was Mirmid, she said. Her own name was Har’Ortrin. The youngster here was Feyev. (Feyev’s dull face only let the faintest of smiles pass around his dark, dark lashes, his light, light eyes.) But she’d told me of them before …? I looked at the fourth, a man with no collar, standing back and to the side. He was dressed in a leather clout sewn up with thongs, the same sort as Feyev. A simple and brutish fellow, he looked wary, uncomfortable, squat, strong—and as dirty as Feyev, too. With surprise, I realized he was a guard, as he blurted: “And I’m Iryg, sir.” He threw his hand up to knock the back of his fist on his forehead. “A free servant of the empress—the empress … whose reign is loose and liberal!” Even now, every few seconds, Namyuk’s face in memory seemed to join Feyev’s before me; and though it defied all sense, I was sure Iryg was not just similar to, but the physical twin of, the guard who’d once walked us here to the caravan site—though it was only because I carried such an unclear image of the old one that this new one replaced it so easily.

  ‘In honor of my coming, of the coming ceremony, of the freedom that was to come to them, this was, of course, a holiday. There was no real work; so Har’Ortrin had brought them here to meet me. “ … If you don’t mind, sir. You seemed such a kind sort, for one so great. And you’ve come here on our behalf, anyway. So I just thought, if it wasn’t any bother—and you’d said you wanted to talk to Mirmid … who’s been here so much longer than I have. And maybe if the boy’ll listen—” she nodded toward Feyev, who wasn’t paying much attention—“he might learn something meaningful of this place he’ll leave tomorrow forever!”

  ‘“Come, then.” I smiled at them. A heavy tree had pulled up by the roots and fallen a bit away; another trunk, this one cut, had been laid one end
across it. I told them: “Let’s sit and talk.”

  ‘The five of us went and sat. It all began very well.

  ‘“Yes, that’s right, sir. Har’Ortrin told me where she’d pointed out the old barracks to you. But that wasn’t where they were at all!” Mirmid explained. “She wasn’t here for any of that. The barracks you were in were on the other side of the building that’s there now … yes, sir. The guards used to use it for their own, though we all live in it today. At any rate, your old barracks burned down in the fire—a year before I came. Everybody said what a terrible night that was! No one ever really got the number of slaves burned up. Among the thirty or forty left, they were always mumbling that it was negligence, or even done on purpose; or at least could have been prevented—all those creatures roasted alive in their straw-filled coops! When I was brought here, you could see burnt bits and pieces, still scattered about—it hadn’t grown up fully. But what she’s talking about over on the slope were the temporary shacks they put up right afterwards when they first tried to run the place on a reduced scale—where I stayed when I first came. That’s when they closed up the three big tunnels—the ones you must have worked in. And opened up a smaller one, closed down years before, that was still supposed to have some good lodes in it. But that didn’t go so well … finally they decided more or less to shut the whole place down: down came the temporary shacks. Most of us were sold off to the west. But there were only twenty-five or so of us by then, anyway. They brought some women in, to cook and clean, since it was only maintenance going on by then. That’s when Har’Ortrin came. Today, of course, there’s just the three of us …”

  ‘While he talked on, my thoughts were abroil.

  ‘When Mirmid mentioned the fire, I was thrown back to a breezy evening on a river’s rocky bank, where, as an officer in the Imperial guards, I’d stopped to question a band of desert men in their heavy robes, with copper wires sewn up the backs of their ears, who’d first told me of the holocaust at the mines. So, of course I’d known of it, known at least in vague report how bad it had been. But since it was so long ago, at the prospect of returning somehow I’d blotted it out.