Tales of Nevèrÿon

by Samuel R. Delany

  Meals at home, where she pondered all Venn had said of the matrix of money and material in which her parents’ business was fixed and which bounded her parents’ so diverse personalities, sometimes approached disaster: her father frowned across the wooden table with its clay and brass settings. The woman who helped her mother with the house and the cooking, clicked her teeth and said Norema must not have put her head on when she’d gotten up that morning. Jori laughed. And Quema asked – so many times that her father told her to stop – if there were anything the matter. Through it all, their words were images of illogic and incomprehension; her soup was the sea and her bread was the island a-float in it. The smell of apples in batter recalled the orchards where she had picked them last week, or run with others to steal them last year. Every sensation led to the memory of myriad others. Any pattern perceived could be set beside any other, the relation between the patterns becoming a pattern of its own, itself to be set beside another and related …

  She went to the waterfront and looked at nets and trees. She looked at women and men with rough hands and rags tied around their heads, working on their boat rigs. She looked at fish scales and bird feathers and at a broken length of boat ribbing, just washed ashore, whose smoothing-blade cuts were invisible on the grainy gray. She looked at three women and a man carrying baskets of fish, roped around their shoulders, up the sand, which clung to their feet high as their ankles, an image of glittering shoes. The baskets were woven from tree branches. She drew on her paper the curve of sand around the water, and beside it, the curve of water up to the sand. Behind a beached snaggle of wood, she heard a sound like a baby, and looked behind it to find Marga, asleep and crying to herself. Later she heard a gull shriek like a mad woman, wailing. And a day later, when she was coming down a narrow alley toward the docks, from the window beside her she heard a baby – for the world like a mewing gull.

  In a blade of sunlight a-slant the dust between the shadows of two stone huts, she stopped. While she listened, she remembered, for the first time in a while, the actual walk with Venn down the stream when the idea she had been examining these last days had been first presented to her. She recalled her absurd attempt to construct an example – an image that, because it was constructed of things it simply did not fit, reversed the idea into an idea silly by itself, ridiculous in application – ridiculousness that could easily, she saw, have strayed into the pernicious, the odious, or the destructive, depending how widely one had insisted on applying it. There was Venn’s idea (the baby had stopped crying); there was her image of it, formed of all possible misunderstanding; and there …

  Something happened: it happened inside her head; it happened to her mind, and its effect spread through her body like a chill, or a warmth, and was realer than either. She gasped and blinked, looked at the sun, dust, shadow, tried to apprehend what had just changed, and felt a stray thread on her sleeve tickle her arm in the breeze, a leather crease across her instep from her soft leather shoe, the air passing in through the rims of her nostrils breathing, the moisture at the corners of her eyes.

  It’s a new thought, she thought. But immediately knew that was only because she had been thinking in words so insistently for the past few days that words came easily to cling about everything in her head; she quickly shook them away to look at the idea more clearly. It was at least as inexpressible as Venn’s so highly inexpressible idea, which, image before image ago, had been its content. She opened her mouth, feeling her tongue’s weight on the floor of her mouth, the spots of dryness spreading it, and tasting the air’s differences, which marked not the air’s but the tongue’s itself. Words fell away, leaving only the relations they had set up between the sensual and the sensory, which was not words but which had been organized – without any of it ever leaving its place on the reed paper of her perception – by words: that organization was the way in which the stretch of sand between the house walls beside her and the stretch of sky between the house roofs above her could reflect one another; the thrum of a wasp worrying at its gray, flaking home under the thatched eaves up there could recall the thrum of water worrying the root-tangled spit at the beach’s far end, leaving the sand, leaves, wings, waves, wasps …

  What a glorious and useless thing to know, she thought, yet recognizing that every joy she had ever felt before had merely been some fragment of the pattern sensed dim and distant, which now, in plurality, was too great for laughter – it hardly allowed for breath, much less awe! What she had sensed, she realized as the words she could not hold away any longer finally moved in, was that the world in which images occured was opaque, complete, and closed, (though what gave it its weight and meaning was that this was not true of the space of examples, samples, symbols, models, expressions, reasons, representations and the rest – yet that everything and anything could be an image of everything and anything – the true of the false, the imaginary of the real, the useful of the useless, the helpful of the hurtful) was what gave such strength to the particular types of images that went by all those other names; that it was the organized coherence of them all which made distinguishing them possible.

  But of course that was not what she had known … only an expression of it, one sort of image. And yes, she thought, remembering Venn again, to express it was to reverse much of its value. To express it was to call it containable: and it was its uncontainableness she had known.

  Some flash caught her eye; she turned and saw Fevin coming down the side street. Rolls of net hung over his shoulder; net dragged behind him in the dust. Her sister Jori and two little boys were trying to step on it. The flash had come from a mirror tied to one boy’s – no, not to a little boy, she realized; it was Lari, her sister’s friend. Norema thought of rults and Rulvyn, mirrors and models; and smiled.

  Fevin hailed her: ‘Have you heard what happened to old Venn?’

  Norema looked perplexed. ‘What?’

  ‘While she was off last night, on one of her exploring trips, she fell down from a tree and –’

  Norema’s eyes widened.

  ‘– and sprained her hip. She just got home this morning; some youngsters found her hobbling through the swamp.’

  ‘Is she all right?’ Norema demanded.

  ‘As right as one can be at seventy with a sprained hip – when you were already crippled at thirty-five.’

  Norema turned and dashed up the street while Fevin suddenly bellowed: ‘Hey, you little ones. Cut that out! You tear my nets and I’ll tear off your toes!’

  Norema ran through sun, over shells, under shadow. On wooden, leaf-littered stairs, she tugged at the rail, taking three steps at a time, while the breeze dipped branches almost to her head and, from the bare earth banked on the other side, roots wriggled free and stuck there, under thin dust. She leaped rocks she had helped position in the stream for stepping, jumped to the bank (which broke open under her feet between grass blades) and, with grass flailing her calves, reached the rut that wound the high rock on her left (the great oak on her right) to the thatched school shelter.

  In front of the shack, she demanded of Dell, who had one hand on the corner post, squinting after some bird who beat away between the leaves, ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘Uh-hm,’ Dell said, not looking down. ‘But she’d like to see you.’

  Norema dashed to the door, pushed inside. Thatch that has been rained on and sun-dried and rained on and sun-dried enough ceases to have much smell of its own, but it begins to do something to the other smells around it, underlining some, muting others, adding to others an accent missing in stone or wooden dwellings. On the shelves along one wall: rocks, small skeletons, butterflies, rolls of reed paper tied with rubbed vine. On the other wall: a cooking fire’s mudded stones, with a series of wooden baffles for the smoke that Venn had been experimenting with a year ago but had never gotten to the efficiency of your average kitchen hearth. A half charred potato lay on the ashes against the stone.

  The bed had been pulled over to the table (instead of pulling
the table to the bed, which was typically Venn). Three scrolled, metal lamps hung from the ceiling. Chains for a fourth dangled near them. On the table among sheets of reed paper, were brass rules, compasses, calipers, astrolabes, and a paint-box finer than the ones her father kept his blueprints in. Venn sat on the bed, her naked back full of sharp bones and small muscles – still the hard back of a sea woman, a turnip hoer, a bridge builder. The skin at the crease of her armpits was wrinkled, that across her shoulders thin.

  Norema said: ‘I heard about …’

  Venn turned slowly (painfully?) on the raddled furs. And grinned. ‘I was wondering if you’d come to see me.’

  Then the young woman and the old woman laughed, at their different pitches in the close room, but with a shared, insistent relief.

  ‘The boys have been hanging around being helpful all morning. The trouble is I don’t like boys – I suppose that’s why I spend so much energy being pleasant and patient with them. Then patience wears through, and I get snappish and send them off. Where were you, girl? Have you ever noticed about the men on this coast? It’s the strangest thing: they will cook for one another at the drop of a leaf – on fishing trips, out overnight in the hills, or visiting one another in some bachelor hut full of litter and squalor. But the only time it would even enter their heads to cook for a woman – even if she’s crippled and in bed with a sprained hip – is if they want to bed her. And I, fortunately, am past that. Come around here, woman. Under the shelf there is a basket: most of the things in it would make a nice salad – and I assume you’re clever enough to recognize the things that wouldn’t. (If you’re dubious, just ask.) You’ll find a knife under there; and a bowl. That’s right. I’d do it myself, but my better judgement tells me not to even try to walk for at least three days. Did I ever tell you about my Nevèrÿon friend – who once went with me up to visit the Rulvyn? Yes, of course, I was telling you only a week or so ago. Well, you know we haven’t seen each other for years. My friend is from an old and complicated Nevèrÿon family, half of which, so I have been told, are always in dungeons somewhere and the other half of which are always fighting to avoid dungeons – with perhaps still another half fighting to keep them there. Well, only a night ago, my friend came to see me. All the way from Nevèrÿon. And in a beautiful boat, the richest I’ve ever seen, with its rowing slaves dressed finer than the members of our best families, I tell you. And we talked – oh, how we talked! Till the sun rose and I had heard of the most amazing and dire marvels, all of which my friend asked my opinion on – as if I were some Rulvyn holy woman, fresh from a spate of meditation in the mountains! Ha! And when the first waterfront sounds drifted up from the blue between the trees, my friend left.’ Venn sighed. ‘What a marvelous boat! And I shall probably never see my friend or the boat again. But that’s the way of the world. Ah, of course I’m sure you would rather hear about what happened to me last night. Has it ever occurred to you – and it did to me, last night, when I got to overhear two hill women who passed under me in the swamp where I was relaxing in a rough-barked tree: paddling along on their raft, they each spoke slightly different dialects, and were having trouble understanding each other, I realized – but at any rate, it occurred to me that language always has the choice of development two ways. Consider: you’re inventing language and you come on an object for the first time, so you name it “tree.” Then you go on and you find another object. You have the choice of calling it a tree-only-with-special-properties, such as squat, hard, gray, leafless, and branchless, for instance – or you can name it a completely different object, say: “rock.” And then the next object you encounter you may decide is a “big rock,” or a “boulder,” or a “bush,” or “a small, squat tree,” and so on. Now two languages will not only have different words for the same things, but they will end up having divided those same things up into categories and properties along completely different lines. And that division, as much or more than the different words themselves, will naturally mold all the thinking of the people who use that language. We say “vagina” and “penis” for a man’s and woman’s genitals, while the Rulvyn say “gorgi” for both, for which “male” and “female” are just two different properties that a gorgi can exhibit – and believe me it makes all the difference! Still, the initial division, as one goes about on the first, new, bright trip through a world without names is, for all practical purposes, arbitrary. (That was when I fell out of the tree and sprained my cursed hip! That salad looks good, woman. There are two bowls.) Now consider, for instance, even the word for word …’

  Two years later, Venn died.

  She had apparently gone up through the trap of the teaching station to lay under the winter stars, with a few instruments, a few sheets of reed paper, and there, probably just after dawn – for her body was not yet stiff – with what thoughts a-dash through her mind like the shooting stars of which she had logged seven, she died: and Norema and Jori and the other, with oddly dry throats, blinking a lot, and opening and closing their hands, stood in the grass, looking up, while Fevin, at the roof’s edge, lowered (with a rope around the chest and under the arms) the thin woman with the stained hem and flapping, bony ankles.

  Three months after that, the red ship came.

  3

  ‘Have you seen it?’ Jori demanded, bursting into the kitchen from the back garden. ‘It’s so big!’ and ran through the kitchen, banging her hip against the plank table hard enough to make the bowls and the pans clatter. Quema scowled at a pot of something bubbling on the firehook. Norema put the shell, whose pale, inner lip she had been polishing with a piece of worn, wild kid’s skin, on the table, and wondered if she should go to the docks or not.

  She didn’t – that afternoon.

  And the stories began to come back:

  The boat had stayed at the waterfront dock not more than an hour; only three women had come down the plank to squint around – their hair was dusty, braided, brown. Then they had gone back up. The boat had weighed anchor again and was now up in the middle of the sounds, the reflection of its high, scarlet, scroll-worked rim wrinkling over and running on the water.

  All its crew were women or girls, came back the story now. They had sent out a small skiff for the port: the women had gone to the inn and sat there and told stories and drank: tall ones, short ones, brown ones, black ones, fat ones, blond ones – every kind of woman you could think of!

  (Norema began to look askance at Enin who was recounting this. A small skiff? How many women were in it all together? Twenty! Thirty! exclaimed Enin, then frowned: Well, maybe six … or seven. Norema shook her head.)

  All the crew were women or girls except the captain, came back next morning’s revision. He was a great, tall, black man with brass rings in his ears, a leopard skin over one shoulder, wooden-soled sandals with fur straps, broad bands of tooled leather around his thick calves and forearms, six small knives in finger-long scabbards on the heavy chain around his short kilt of a cloth made all of interlocked metal rings that jingled when he ambled the dock.

  Norema’s father stood by the yard’s plank fence (it was shaggy with bark) and listened to Big Inek recount this, and frowned, rolling an awl handle between his thumb and forefinger.

  Norema watched her father frown and watched her mother, with an arm full of boards, pause behind him, hear also, frown harder, and walk on.

  Jori, behind one of the net houses, told her that evening, in a slather of blue shadows with the water down between the dock-boards flashing copper, about Morin (the girl who had once sat in front of Norema with sunlight on her shoulder beneath Venn’s thatched teaching porch). Morin was a tall, bony girl, slow to understand, quick to laugh, who worked a boat that had been her uncle’s but was now good as her own – or so she said. She had come to Venn’s classes infrequently, and only this, really, because for a while Venn had taken a special interest in her that seemed to have more to do with her talents as a fisherwoman than her wit: her likes ran toward late evenings in the tavern where s
he hung on the edge of boisterous gatherings, with bright eyes, drinking nothing herself for hours, saying little for the same – till all at once she would get up and leave: two- and three-day trips alone in her boat, fishing only to eat, which trips would end with her sudden return to dock, loud and boisterous as if drunk herself, generally cursing out the village for the backwater sumphole that it was, and treating this group or that group to a round of drinks at the tavern, trying for all the world to start a boisterous evening, upon which, if it got going, she would fall silent and watch, again, bright eyed; and only water in her mug. At any rate, Jori went on, Morin’s dislike for village life was well known. So no one could have been too surprised when she fell in to talking with a bunch of the ship’s sailors, or that they offered her a job; or that she had accepted.

  Well:

  Her father and her uncle, whom she lived with, had a fit! They forbade her to go. When she refused to stay, they beat her up and locked her in the house and now refused to let her out until the boat left the shore. And that’s not all, Jori went on, for that afternoon, three older girls had come back from swimming (with Imek’s little daughter tagging along), and had met the Captain and two of the sailors, one of whom was a fat, yellow-haired woman, who, at the inn the night before, had drunk amazing amounts and slapped her scarred, fleshy hands on the counter and told shrill stories that had kept everyone laughing for hours; the Captain and the two sailors had taken the girls out to the boat! An hour later, when one of the sailors rowed the girls back, parents and relatives had gathered on the shore to snatch up their offspring. The sailor had not docked because she had seen the angry group, and had made the children swim in, the last few feet – at which point someone had jumped in and tried to upset her skiff and gotten his knuckles pounded with an oarhandle for his pains. The sailor had rowed back to the ship.