Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  With every material force and ill-known economic motive that pushed Clodon, however unaware he was of it, desire always lay ahead of him, lazy and limpid, to pull him in the same direction. Wherever profit or personal whim attracted him, desire was always behind to impel, however dimly he perceived it, maniacal and murky. If it does not glitter throughout the narrative we have so far woven, that’s because its place twists through as an absence, like the space left when a thread has been pulled loose to snake from the fabric, but whose path the sophisticated weaver can still follow from the looseness and layering of the threads around.

  Was it really unusual how quickly Clodon had accepted that the two, desire and lust, were not, at least for him, to go together? In his own village, the reason he’d never sought sex with the woman who was his ideal was because exhaustive searching said she wasn’t there: she was something, rather, he had put together the way a village singer takes a line from one song, a refrain from another, while using a stanza from still another once heard from a carter passing through from another hamlet entirely, from the amalgam making a ballad that, a generation hence, all in town will swear began as an accurate account of something that once happened to someone else’s well-remembered, if now long-dead, grandmother.

  In Kolhari, though occasionally he glimpsed her or glimpsed parts of her (though seldom from so near, or so completely, as he did now beneath the bridge that afternoon), it was what some people trivialize by calling the fear of rejection that kept Clodon from her.

  9. This is what Clodon did as he stood, a rock away, with water rushing between them:

  He looked.

  He smiled.

  He thought.

  But he did not breathe.

  The kneeling woman may have spoken; or she may have gestured; or she may have remained perfectly still, blinking twice or thrice …

  In about twenty seconds, Clodon began to feel unsteady. At forty, his vision began to flicker—till, with a great gasp, he turned, tried to get to the rock he’d just left, went into the water up to his knee, cut his foot on something at the bottom—he never knew what—scrambled up on the next stone, made it back to the stanchion, where, on the stair, he bumped into a heavy man coming down who cursed him, reached the walkway above, leaned on the wall, heaving in one and another roaring gasp, till he had to close his eyes, drop to a squat, and put his cheek against the stone. Breaking through a terror so complete it filled every sense with a loud ringing, the first fears came to him that someone might see, that someone might know. But as he crouched there, terror giving way to fear, he did not care.

  Finally, five minutes later, with his legs shaking, he stood.

  And looked around.

  After trying to count ten breaths and getting lost three times, he went back down the stairs, halfway, to peer under the bridge, its arch flickering with an arc of sunlight up from the water.

  She wasn’t there.

  He went back up to the walkway—and noticed, for the first time, the bloody footprints on the bowed stone, and, moments later, that it was his own right foot that bled. He leaned against the wall another minute. Then he went down once more, all the way to the bottom, to look again.

  The shaking had reduced to a quiver in his left leg.

  She must have already gone up the stairs on the other side.

  He spent a lot of time, over the next three days, looking for her. He walked from end to end of the bridge. While he searched, sometimes conscientiously, sometimes just with an eye out in passing, he wondered if this were how the bridge had got its name. Clodon was a boy who valued what strength he had. As he thought back on it, the weakness, the terror, the disorientation that had assailed him before this kneeling woman—that had struck him down into the water and had drawn his blood—just seemed … wrong! Wasn’t it closer to madness than to sex? Now he went to look for her among the stalls in the Old Market of the Spur. Now, at the other end, he searched in the alleys that cut through the business neighborhood.

  One evening, six weeks later, when the moon had come up early and lingered to blue the sky till late, as Clodon returned to the bridge, he saw her—with some young people, who, from their tunics and sandals, were far better off than it had occurred to him she might be. The silver light, shining straight down, put shadows on her eyes as dark as the make-up that, on her, would have been superfluous. Nor did it light her so well that he could see the details of her hands. Or feet. But it was she. The youngsters seemed—Clodon stopped walking, stopped breathing—as if they were about to turn on to the bridge, all of them, laughing and chatting, and come right by him.

  Then they sauntered off down the quay.

  She did not see him.

  But she still looked happy.

  Slowly, slowly, his thumping heart quieted.

  He never saw her again.

  Certainly to seek her out further (he would think this, even as he began to search for her again, or for someone like her) was against all reason. Somehow the pursuit of lust with the girls and women available, using the images gleaned from an unknown woman’s passing foot or hand or eye, while his own eyes were sealed and he hunched and sweated over this woman or that one (or, as it happened, a man who’d promised him a few coins of iron for it), seemed far safer.

  And another thing: from that moment beneath the bridge, he began to find the paint on the eyes of the lazy (or sometimes unbelievably energetic) women who worked the walkways above produced in him the faintest sexual excitation. It was as if, now that he knew what it stood for, he could respond to it, if only as a sign.

  10. But before we return to where Clodon, in the inn-yard, stood smiling up at the woman in the window much as he’d once smiled down at the other under the bridge, we must talk about another, equally perplexing strand weaving through his life in no less complex a pattern: lust.

  The wonder of it was, just how quickly Clodon had separated it from desire—in his mind? No. But certainly in most of his material practices and in almost all of his human actions. Like most men in Nevèrÿon, Clodon had quickly located the fact that, while lust was something of the body, which, certainly, desire might provoke, still, any number of things could quench it—and quench it satisfactorily, if desire itself was only held in the mind. Lust had begun for Clodon (against Imrog) as a weapon: in its onanistic form, he used it as a tool—to relax himself, to reward himself, to indulge himself when, truly, he deserved no reward.

  A weapon or tool it remained, whether he used it skillfully or poorly.

  Before he left Kolhari, Clodon managed to have sex with three prostitutes: one simply got drunk with him one night and rolled with him in a doorway behind a tavern: he got away without paying. The next, he told he would pay but tried to run away afterwards, only to get himself punched five or six times and his arm sprained by a hulking man waiting in a doorway he hadn’t even seen. A third he paid the asked-for price (with money from a purse snatched off a bald man over in the market), mainly because, for a moment when he first saw her, she had been sitting on a step, scratching with one finger between her little toe and the one next to it; and he was sure, for a moment, that those hands and feet would, when she looked at him, go with the eyes he had been seeking.

  It turned out, when she frowned up through the blue-black pigment (which he himself had only ceased to wear a day before) applied unevenly and asymmetrically, he’d been wrong about her in all three aspects.

  With all three women there had been real excitement. But there had been none of the swollen want that makes us all children; and to which a child’s response must be terror.

  In terms of lust, however, and its split from desire, we have now observed Clodon at sixteen.

  Let us look at him at twenty-six, when Kolhari was ten years behind.

  There he was, living out of a provision cart parked beside a lean-to some hundred yards from the outskirts of a village near several ravines at the edge of the desert—a village whose insistent and subtle differences from his own bothered him every
time he wandered in to look at a woman weaving in her yard or tugging an ox by its bridle along an unpaved alley, to see a squatting man at work on a wooden plowhead or bending to wash himself and his three-year-old at a trough beside his hut.

  He was no longer a lean-hipped youth. But he was not yet a fat man.

  In his first day, walking through the town, Clodon looked for things he might steal that would not be missed. Sometimes he’d stop, try to appear friendly, and ask some man or woman if there weren’t work he might do, at least for a few days, hoping they would ignore his scars—till he gave them reason not to. On his last day, he went looking for something large enough to be worth stealing that would also be worth leaving the place for. But in the evenings between, there was sex—with a woman about ten years older than he, who lived in a hovel at the town’s edge: she was not pretty and was a little crazy. Clodon would visit her with a jug of beer. They would sit together before her shack, the jug between them. And Clodon would say, ‘Now, have you ever seen this?’

  ‘No—! What’s that little bit of dirt you’ve got?’

  ‘It’s what the fine women in the big cities wear around their eyes. I’ve seen them. When I lived there. In Kolhari. Now you’d be a fine looking woman if you wore it, too.’

  ‘Wear a lump of dirt in my eye—?’

  ‘No. You just put a little on. It’ll become you. No, no, here. Let me show you—’

  ‘Get away! I don’t want it—’

  ‘No, here—come on, now. It won’t hurt you. Let me show you how they do it!’

  ‘Put it on yourself, then!’

  ‘Oh, and sometimes the men do, too. But differently. Here, it won’t hurt. I promise. No, I promise—let me, now! … Get your hand away! Be still. There—! And … there! Now, see? You look like the finest and most noble lady in the great city of Kolhari, you do!’

  ‘You can see it. I can’t. How could I, when it’s smeared all over my face!’

  ‘But you do look like a fine woman. You are a fine woman—here, have a drink now.’

  ‘You have one!’

  ‘Well, I will!’ And he’d lift the jug, so that the sun heated the ridges above his eyes and his chest warmed from inside and from out. Soon, he would tell her stories of this and that, and she would laugh; and he would gaze at her, with a dumb smile and slack lips. Then they would make love—sometimes in the hut, but more often in the dirt outside.

  Sometimes, for inexplicable reasons, she would cry.

  ‘Why are you weeping?’

  ‘I don’t know! I don’t know …!’

  He made two or three tries to get her to laugh and, when they didn’t work, lost interest. Once, he even got up and left—

  Only to surprise three children crouching behind a lichen-flecked boulder. He shouted. They fled. Then he stalked back to his lean-to and cart.

  Usually, though, sex went more easily. Sometimes, after he had fallen heavily asleep, the woman would sit up, suddenly, while Clodon’s hand fell from her shoulder to the earth, and stare at the scars on his brown flank, tracing one and another with her fingertip to his back. Then she’d try to remember why young girls and foolish women should never speak to a man with such scars, why you should never even look at him, and certainly never be seen with him.

  Especially by staring children.

  For the truth was—and does it really surprise you?—Clodon was a more considerate sexual partner than most she’d had.

  At least when she wore the make-up.

  At least when she smiled.

  And what of Clodon at thirty-six?

  Ten years later he was living with two other criminals. The younger one had even more flogging marks than Clodon, a lazy, foul-tempered boy, who, for all his complaining, hated above all things to be alone. With a kind of desperation, he held the others to him, even as he stole from them, lied to them, and, from time to time, got into fights with them. The other, older than Clodon, had managed to avoid whipping. He was a coward, Clodon had decided, despite his boasts of lifting this and filching that. But when they pulled a back-road robbery, he would more or less do what you told him.

  For a month now the three had been sharing a filthy shack up from the shore perhaps a mile below Vinelet that had once belonged to the youngster’s last partner who’d come to a bad end. From a dropped comment on their way to the stream down the slope or what once got shouted between bouts of laughter in some momentary argument when they were all drunk, Clodon suspected the boy had killed the man.

  But Clodon was a good deal fatter, a good deal louder, and a good deal more of a drunk himself than he’d been ten years ago.

  And there was a lot less sex in his life, too.

  At this point, Clodon would probably not even have considered sex without alcohol. (He did, however, remember the woman beneath the bridge a lot. But, again, we’re talking of lust now—not desire.) The problem, of course, was that too much alcohol made him impotent, so that it was a terribly fine line he had to walk—and the chance to walk it was now offered him less and less.

  Three out of the last five times he’d bedded a woman, it was he who’d cried—though he knew no more why than the woman in the desert had known why ten years back. It was just another reason to avoid the whole business.

  One morning, however, while two jays screamed at each other outside, the youngster stuck his head in by the torn hanging and said, hoarsely, ‘Hey—you two! Get up. Look what I’ve brought! I got two women. They’re hot ones, too! They do everything! They’ve both been fucking with me since last night. They’re about to fry me with their heat!’ From outside, Clodon heard laughing. ‘And they want you two, now! I got some beer in the cart. We can have a good time. They’ll do anything at all—anything!’

  Then the women pushed in.

  ‘Get out of the way,’ the first declared, ‘and let’s see this nest of bandits and bad men you say you live among!’ She was small, plump and shrill.

  The tall one lagged a little behind and stayed almost wholly silent, except when the two of their heads would come together to whisper. Then laughter would push them apart—the plump one with her head back, turning this way and that, waving one hand wildly, the tall one with her mouth tucked behind her fists, her head low and her shoulders shaking.

  Women? Clodon thought, pushing himself to sit. Neither was twenty-five, and he was that age where anything less seemed a child. The tall one whispered again to the plump one, and pointed across the clutter at Clodon. Then the plump one squealed: ‘You’re right! He is!’

  The jays shrieked.

  The next Clodon knew, his arms were full of both of them. (Even as he began to laugh, he wondered if he wouldn’t have found this more enjoyable ten years ago.) ‘Here, now—’ he complained, for he had something of a hangover—‘let me get a drink first. Now let me get a drink—’

  Just then the older criminal with no scars came in from the back. ‘Well, just look what our little friend has brought! Aren’t they the two most tasty morsels in the world? Delicious, I’d say! And I haven’t had my breakfast!’

  ‘Only two of them?’ the tall woman said, shortly, with a face full of Clodon’s rough hair. ‘I thought there were going to be nine or ten!’

  ‘Now you let me get a drink,’ Clodon repeated, trying to hold them both, for the plump one was already starting to wriggle free, ‘and I’ll keep you busy enough for ten or twenty!’

  Clodon would have thought that his older partner, even if he was a coward, would be the one a woman would prefer: he was the tallest, he was the most well spoken, he kept himself the cleanest, and he drank the least. (Hadn’t Clodon managed to learn that sort of thing counted with women?) But though the two visitors spread their attentions all around, clearly their favorites were Clodon and the boy. And, after a little, between the two it was Clodon they seemed to prefer.

  The orgy lasted three days.

  Or was it four?

  Beyond the first hours, Clodon retained only a few intense images.

&nb
sp; The sharpest was when, in a rage, he swung an empty beer pitcher into the youngster’s face, so that the pieces fell, bloody, to the shack floor: then, still gripping the handle and the fragment attached, he smashed it into the boy’s face again, so that the boy dropped back against the wall. ‘Don’t you ever do that to me again!’ Clodon bellowed, and bellowed again: ‘Don’ you ever—’

  The boy went down, wiping blood from his nose and chin with one hand and swinging out drunkenly with the other, saying: ‘No, no … that was just … I didn’t mean … I was just foolin’ … foolin’ …! That’s—’ till Clodon hit him again and the handle crumbled in his hand, cutting his own fingers.

  Another? Or was it part of the same:

  On the ragged cowhide the tall girl held her arm up across her breasts, rubbing it with her other hand, while Clodon tried to help her up. But she looked at his fingers and recoiled. For a moment he stood, unsure what to do, trying to remember just what it was the younger one had done.

  The pot to the face was not, however, what killed him. Clodon was sure of that. Because another of the memories must have come from later.

  Clodon woke. A band of afternoon cut, like a copper blade, from a crack in the wall. The youngster, beside him, his face all scratched, scabbed, and deviled with his own blood, strained and grunted beside Clodon, over the plump one, while she panted. Sleepily Clodon looked to see her breast mash out and out and out again, each time the young one thrust.

  So that it had to have been after the fight with the pot, and, however scratched up, by then he must have been all right.

  Unless that was a dream …

  Another? If it was early or late in the orgy, Clodon couldn’t say. But the plump one leaned against him, while they sat outside under the trees, and whispered: ‘You’re a terrible, frightening man, with those great scars on your back. You must do terrible, frightening things to women. Like me. All the time. Don’t you—?’