Tales of Nevèrÿon

by Samuel R. Delany

  ‘We were in the house, I recall; and it was evening. He came in wearing all his ceremonial hunting gear – only used for holiday and show – his fur shoulder pieces, his feathered chin strap, his bark penis sheath (green), feathers stuck all behind the thongs binding his rult to his belly, and a flint-headed spear over his shoulder, hung with shells and colored stones. He walked slowly and regally around the floor mat, displaying himself to me – he really was magnificent! Then he stood up before me, opened his feather-rimmed sack, and presented me with a turtle – the shell had already been cracked and the carcass bound back together with bark-twine.

  ‘He asked me most humbly would I put a little turtle meat in with the turnips and the millet and the mushrooms and the palm hearts and the dyll nuts that I had been grinding, cutting, shelling, mashing, stewing, and what-have-you all day. And when I took off the twine, and opened the shell, I found that he had gutted it and cleaned it already and packed the carefully sliced meat with pungent leaves for flavor. Meanwhile Ii and Ydit and Acia were, one by one, finding things to do outside the hut – though one could hear them hovering beyond the walls.

  ‘Arkvid was not what you would call an articulate man. But he was a good hunter, and he had a certain … one can only call it an affinity, with trees, turtles, rivers, geese, gazelles, and rocks. I don’t think he thought like them, actually. But I think he felt like them – if you know what I mean? And in the same way, I think he had a perfectly nonverbal understanding of women. While I was taking out the spiced turtle meat and arranging it on the hot stones along the side of the fire, he did the most natural and wonderful and unpremeditated thing in the world: he began to play with my baby. There on the floor mat the two of them were poking at each other and laughing at each other and prodding each other. Now his spear rolled off, rattling its string of shells against the wall. There went his chin feathers; his penis sheath was somewhere back under the edge of the sleeping platform; and the next thing you know, the two of them were naked as eggs, and giggling all over the cabin floor. And as babies will, mine finally curled up in the crook of Arkvid’s knee and went to sleep. And Arkvid lay still on the floor, watching me, and breathing as hard from his bout of baby wrestling as if he had just placed first in one of the hunting games the men staged for our entertainment once a month on the morning after the moon pares itself down to the smallest whittling. Then he asked me to come to him… oh, it was marvelous, and marvelously sad; and in a life where there was so little time for emotions, such things become so intense. After we made love, he put his great, shaggy head on my stomach and cried softly and implored me to stay. I cried too, stroking the back of his neck which was my favorite spot on him, where the red hair made little soft curls – and left next morning at dawn.’ Venn was silent the next few steps. ‘My little baby son, just a yearand-a-half old … I left him with the Rulvyn. It has always struck me as strange the rapidity with which we absorb the values of people we share food with. If my child had been a daughter, I might have stayed. Or brought her back here to the shore with me. The Rulvyn value daughters much more than sons – Oh, to a stranger like my friend, it seems just the opposite: that they make much more fuss over sons. They pamper them, show them off, dress them up in ridiculous and unwearable little hunting costumes and scold them unmercifully should any of it get broken or soiled – all of which seems eminently unfair to the child and which, frankly, I simply could not be bothered with, though the others thought I was the stranger for it. They let the little girls run around and do more or less as they want. But while all this showing off and pampering is going on, the demands made on the male children – to be good and independent at the same time, to be well behaved and brave at once, all a dozen times an hour, is all so contradictory that you finally begin to understand why the men turn out the way they do: high on emotions, defenses, pride; low on logic, domestic – sometimes called “common” – and aesthetic sense. No one pays anything other than expectational attention to the boys until they’re at least six or seven; and nobody teaches them a thing. Girl children, on the other hand, get taught, talked to, treated more or less like real people from the time they start to act like real people – which, as I recall, is at about six weeks, when babies smile for the first time. Sometimes they’re dealt with more harshly, true; but they’re loved the more deeply for it.’ Venn sighed. ‘Yes, a daughter … and it would have all gone differently. I didn’t see my son for sixteen years … afraid, I suspect, that if I went back he might hate me. That was when I went away from the islands, finally, to Nevèrÿon and the mountains and deserts beyond her.’ Venn hit the leaves again, laughing. ‘And when I finally did come back, here to my island and up into the hills? He was a handsome young man, astonishingly like his father. A great, strong boy, a good hunter, quick to laugh, quick to cry, and with a river of sweetness running throughout his personality one kept threatening to fall down into and drown in.’ Another sigh broke through, though the smile stayed. ‘Alas, he’s not what you’d call bright. Not like a daughter would have been, raised in that family. He was desperately pleased to see me, and everyone in the village knew that his mother was the foreign lady who had built the bridge. Oh, he was proud of that! Ydit’s Kell was a wonderful young woman – I told you I had invented green paint? Kell took me and showed me all the pigments she had recently made herself – reds, browns, purples – and as soon as she got me alone, she seized my arm and asked me whether I thought it would be a good idea for her to move down from the hills to the harbor here at the island’s edge, for with her gray eyes and her black braids and freckles, she was curious about the world … a marvelous young woman! She finally did come here for a while, took a husband from another island, left him two years later, and came back … and that was all twenty years ago, before money really came to the Rulvyn.’ The stick shushed again in walking rhythms. ‘And how many years later is it, and my Nevèrÿon friend is saying all my observations are nostalgia? I know what I’m nostalgic about! And I know what changes in the Rulvyn society money has brought. If you don’t look closely at what’s in the mirror, you might not even notice it’s any different from the thing in front of it. And now, of course, you’re wondering what all this has to do with your father’s boat yard, ’ey, girl?’ Venn’s smile turned on Norema. ‘Because it does.’ Venn’s hand came up to take Norema’s shoulder. ‘We here on the isalnd’s shore haven’t always had money either. It came from Nevèrÿon with the trade our parents established. And you can be sure that since it came, the values we live with now are a reversal of those we had before, even if the forms that express those values are not terribly far from what they were. We at the shore have always lived by the sea, so our society was never organized like the Rulvyn. More than likely – on the shore – social power was always more equally divided between men and women. On the shore, women tend only to have one husband, and husbands tend only to have one wife. If you reverse a sign already symmetrical, you do not distort its value – at least quite so much. Yet I think we all retain some suspicion of a time when things carried about with them and bore their own powers – baskets, heaps of fruit, piles of clams, the smell of cooking eel, a goose egg, a pot, or even a cast of a fishing line or a chop with a stone axe at a tree. Though if growing old has taught me anything, it is that knowledge begins precisely as we begin to suspect such suspicions. Your parents pay me to talk to you every morning; I am happy they do. But they pay the same money to Blen’s and Holi’s father and uncle who are so skilled with stone they can build a stone wall in a day: and the same money goes to Crey, who is a hulking halfwit, but is lucky enough to have a back and arm strong enough to dig shit-ditches. The same money goes to your mother for a string of her sea trout as goes to your father for a boat to go catch sea trout of one’s own from. So much time and thought goes into trying to figure out what the comparative worth of all these skills and labors are. But the problem begins with trying to reduce them all to the same measure of coin in the first place: skilled time, unskilled time, th
e talk of a clever woman, nature’s gifts of fish and fruit, the invention of a craftsman, the strength of a laboring woman – one simply cannot measure weight, coldness, the passage of time, and the brightness of fire all on the same scale.’

  ‘The image in the mirror,’ Dell said, ‘it looks real, and deep, and as full of space as the real. But it’s flat – really. There’s nothing behind the mirror – but my belly.’ He pulled one of his three braids over his shoulder, and let his fist hang on it. ‘And if you tried to store a basket of oysters in it, you’d certainly spill shells.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Enin, ‘that money, like a mirror, flattens everything out, even though it looks, at first, like a perfect copy, moving when things move, holding shape when they’re still.’

  ‘I certainly mean something like that. Your father’s a craftsman, Norema. To be a craftsman is to be a little dazzled by the magic of things – wood, rock, clay, metal, flesh, bone, muscle: and it is also to be a little awed by the change each can work on the other under the twin lamps of application and dedication. But at the same time, he can sense the flatness in the mirror of money that claims to give him for all his work a perfect and accurate copy. Yet money is a faithful mirror – for the more he works, the more he is paid; the better he works, the better he is paid … except that more and better, in that mirror, flatten to the same thing. But I suspect this may be why he tries to bury himself in his work, not so much to make the money that allows him to go on working, more and better both, but to get away from it: only it surrounds him on all sides, and the only way to escape from such a situation is inward. So he retreats from everything, even you, and your sister, and your mother.’ Venn sighed, and dropped her hand from the girl’s shoulder.

  ‘So therefore,’ Dell said, coming up beside Norema, ‘you should try and learn the dedication and application from him and forgive the coldness.’

  ‘And you should learn the old values from him,’ Enin said, stepping up between her and Venn on her other side, ‘and understand and forgive him for being befuddled by the new ones.’

  Both boys looked at Venn for approval.

  ‘There are certain thoughts,’ Venn said, dryly, ‘which, reflected by language in the mirror of speech, flatten out entirely, lose all depth, and though they may have begun as rich and complex feelings, become, when flattened by language, the most shallow and pompous self-righteousness. Tell me, why do all the boys on this island have such shallow, pompous, self-satisfied little minds – for, though I love him like a brother, Norema, your father suffers from that quite as much as he does from the situation we have been discussing. Yes, I suppose it does make one nostalgic for the silent, inland hunters. There at least one can imagine the depths … for a year or two.’

  ‘Venn?’ Norema felt relief enough from the uncomfortable things she’d felt at Venn’s turning her attention to the boys to ask for that attention back: ‘From what you say, in a society like ours, or the Rulvyn, money is only the first mirror, or the first telling of the sea monster tale. What is the second mirror, or the second telling, the one that doesn’t reverse, but changes it all into something else?’

  ‘Ah!’ Venn dropped the tip of her stick in more leaves. ‘Now that is something to speculate on.’ She laughed her old woman’s laugh. ‘Who knows what that would be now …? A method of exchange that would be a reflection of money and a model of money without being money. Well, perhaps you could get everybody to count what money each had, give each a sheet of reed paper and a piece of charcoal, then take all the money itself and collect it in a central money house, where it could be used for works the village really needed, and for dealings with foreign traders; and each person would conduct her or his business with the other members of the tribe on paper, subtracting six coins from this one’s paper and adding it on that one’s sheet, and the like …’ Venn fell to musing.

  ‘I see how that would cut out the middle person,’ Dell said. He was a boy forever fascinated by the impossible, and would no doubt be suggesting such a scheme to the class within the week, as if the idea were completely his. ‘But the reflection of the reflection is not supposed to reverse the values back; it’s supposed to change them into something completely new!’

  ‘But I can see how it would do that,’ said Enin. He was always taking clever ideas and running them into the ground. ‘People would have to trust each other even more than they did just trading goods. And that trust would probably be a new value in our tribe. And suppose you wanted to get together a business. You could go to a lot of people and get each one to pledge just a little bit of their money on paper, and then go right off and act just as though you had it. It’s like Venn said: money always is where goods and work aren’t. Well, this way, it’s not that you have your goods and work in the same place as the money, but you have a kind of money that can be in a lot of places at once, doing lots of different things. That’s got to make everything completely different. I mean, who knows how far the differences would go. Anything you could figure out how to make, if you could just tell people about it, you could probably get enough of this new kind of money to make it. Instead of boats that sailed from island to island, you could make boats –’

  ‘– that flew from land to land,’ suggested Dell, ‘by digging with their wings and tunneling under the floor of the sea. Instead of a woman having a turnip garden of her own, you could have one big turnip garden –’