Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities

by Samuel R. Delany

  There was a knock.

  Startled, Pryn looked around.

  The door pulled slowly open; Radiant Jade, holding a tray, edged in. She stood there for seconds with a very uncertain smile. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said at last, ‘but almost all the servants except cook, gardener, and a few of the kitchen help have gone. Really, it’s some very nice fruit, though.’ The barbarian accent was so light Pryn kept losing it—and listening the harder for its faint feathering on the s’s and r’s. ‘Rylla said to stop my nonsense and bring you some fruit…and some honey with it. But myself, I never take honey with my fruit in the morning—still, if you want, I’ll go back…?’

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ Pryn said. ‘No, I don’t need any,’ and thought how nice it might have been to have had some.

  ‘You’re not used to servants, are you?’ The secretary crossed the room and put the tray down on the window ledge. ‘Well, neither was Ini when she first came. But she got used to them fast enough. Just in time for them all to leave, too. So this morning everyone must double as house and grounds staff—nor are they happy about it, either. I won’t be surprised if we lose another today. But not cook, though. Not gardener.’ While she’d been speaking, she’d been looking out the window. Here she leaned out further. ‘Gya and gardener are faithful.’

  ‘Why…have they left?’ Pryn ventured. She was not really being disingenuous but simply felt that in uncertain situations it was better to explore the already familiar. ‘What do you think the reason is?’

  ‘You can’t see it from here as well as you can from my room.’ (Pryn was not sure if that were part of an answer—or even if her questions had been heard.) ‘But it’s there, nevertheless.’

  Pryn rose and went to the window. ‘What are you looking at?’

  ‘There.’ Radiant Jade pointed. ‘The Liberator’s headquarters.’

  Leaning over the wide ledge, Pryn could see, across the wall at the end of the garden, somewhere off in the next yard, the cracked balustrade with its ambling soldiers.

  ‘I despair of having to replace cook. Training a new housekeeper will be bad enough—though heaven knows I’ve done it before. Still, cook is a position you don’t want to keep reestablishing in a house like this. But gardener is faithful—Gya, gardener, and me!’ She pulled her head back in. ‘Isn’t it interesting: it takes much less to liberate servants than it does slaves. For servants, it seems, all you have to do is move in next door.’ Jade turned her back to the sill.

  Pryn took up a yellow peach from the blue bowl on the tray and turned too, biting.

  ‘Do you think he’s going to liberate us here?’ The secretary folded her arms and stepped away, looking quite on edge. ‘I wonder if he thinks that simply by moving in next door, he can loosen her grip on the subjects she rules?’

  ‘The Empress…?’ Pryn took another bite.

  Radiant Jade glanced back with a kind of bafflement that made the girl simply feel stupid. ‘…rules us? Here? In this house?’

  ‘…Madame Keyne?’ Pryn offered.

  The secretary shook her head with a tragic little grimace. ‘You think she is ruler here…?’ Suddenly another thought seized her, and she dropped her arms and straightened her back.

  Pryn thought she was about to leave and said: ‘You’re a barbarian, aren’t you?’ She took a third bite of the peach, which, for all its size and color, was completely unripe. The flesh was as hard—and as tasteless—as raw potato.

  ‘Yes.’ Apparently Jade was not leaving but only waiting to change the subject.

  ‘Do you speak the barbarian language?’

  ‘Till I was seven years old, I spoke nothing else.’ She walked around the bed once and then sat on the foot, her hands on the knees of her green skirt.

  Half sitting on the sill, Pryn asked, ‘Do you…know what nivu means?’

  Amusement joined the conflicting emotions already on Jade’s face. ‘Where did you hear a word like that? Did you hear some barbarian call our home here a chatja nivu?’

  ‘I don’t…remember if that was the phrase,’ Pryn said, quite sure it wasn’t. ‘And I don’t think they were talking about Madame Keyne. What would it mean if I had?’

  ‘Chatja nivu means a house where the women refuse to cook for men. But that doesn’t tell you much, does it!’ Radiant Jade laughed. ‘In many barbarian villages, ones that still have very little contact with Nevèrÿon, there’re lots of customs that more civilized folk are likely to think of as magic. In most tribes, for example, work is very strictly divided between the sexes. Only men can kill certain animals. Only women can kill certain others. Lashing together the thatch for the roof of a new hut is work only men may do. Cooking food—and no one may eat uncooked food in the south—is work only done by women. But sometimes when a husband sufficiently angers his wife, by refusing to do his own work, or by making love to another woman, the wife may refuse to cook for him. Then the man must wander about the village, begging other women to cook. And if no woman will—and they usually won’t if his wife has real reason and simply isn’t sick or busy—he will finally starve to death and die.’

  Pryn’s eyes widened; she took another bite of hard peach.

  When a woman refuses to cook for a man, that, in my language, is nivu.’

  ‘But I’ve heard the word on the street,’ Pryn said. ‘I mean, here in the city. The barbarian women talk of nivu this and nivu that. All the barbarian women in Kolhari can’t be starving their husbands…?’

  Jade laughed again. ‘Customs change when people come to the city—in most barbarian tribes customs have changed well before people leave. Here, today, on the streets of Kolhari, nivu may mean any lack of support a woman may show a man. Even the silliest disagreement may be spoken of with the word—in the city, I think there are always such disagreements. But you see, it also has the other meaning that is older and more powerful.’ Jade turned her hands back and forth on her knees. ‘In our own land, it is one of the most powerful of women’s words—and here in yours, it has become one of the most trivial. Well, it is still a good word for you to know, even if you are not a barbarian—since you have found refuge in a chatja nivu.’

  ‘Doesn’t the cook in this house cook food for the gardener?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And still this would be called a…a chatja nivu?’

  ‘Your accent is very good.’ Radiant Jade moved her head a bit to the side. ‘But as I said, nivu does not have to refer to cooking.’

  Pryn was about to let herself smile, when Radiant Jade said:

  ‘You know I’m not happy you’re here. I think it was dreadful, dragging you off like that. But Rylla is impulsive.’

  ‘I might not be alive if she weren’t!’

  ‘So I’ve heard.’

  Despite the fruit’s hardness, Pryn’s teeth, in the next bite, touched pit. ‘I suppose I’m not that happy to be here either. I don’t understand why I’m here. I know Madame Keyne likes to influence people and events. But if you’re going to influence people, don’t you think you should do it with their consent?’

  The secretary pursed her lips. ‘You’re better off here than you would be running loose in the streets.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Pryn said. ‘Probably, even. But still, nobody seems to want to tell me why I’m here.’

  ‘Rylla—Madame Keyne—has simply…taken an interest in you.’

  ‘But her interest is so confusing,’ Pryn persisted. ‘Why me in particular? And why does she keep that frightening creature downstairs in her employ? Why are you here…?’

  Toying with the scarf at her waist, Radiant Jade suddenly stood and began to pace the room, as though she were the one trapped—the door still stood wide. ‘Me? Why am I here? But I shouldn’t be!’ As she paced, she twisted the cloth harder. ‘I should be anywhere else! I should be in the forests, spearing hyenas. I should be in the mountains, hurtling onto the backs of winged worms to soar above the peaks. I should be on the sea, in a skiff, reaching to grasp the flying fish in my naked fi
ngers. I should be—’ She stopped suddenly and looked down—‘in some little barbarian village, like the one where I was born, ignorant, dirty, illiterate…not in this great, confining city, in this great, confining house.’

  Pryn wondered if she should mention her own dragon riding, or the part it had played in bringing her here. What she finally said was: ‘Why don’t you leave?’

  Jade looked up.

  ‘You say the other servants have gone.’

  ‘With me—’ the secretary blinked—‘it’s different. Rylla needs me.’ The scarf-wringing ceased. ‘She can’t get along without me. Sometimes I want to leave…’

  Pryn felt a kind of sympathy with the distress of this woman whom she had watched earlier work and smile. But she also felt an equal frustration before that distress’s indecipherable motive, a motive that insisted on remaining as hidden as the one behind Pryn’s own presence. ‘How long have you been here?’ Pryn asked.

  ‘Oh, forever…Many years—three years.’ Jade sighed. ‘But it seems like forever.’

  ‘Did Madame Keyne…take an interest in you?’

  Jade looked surprised. ‘I never thought of it in those terms before. But you might say she did. Yes, you might very well say just that.’

  ‘Did she take an interest in the Wild Ini too?’ Pryn asked eagerly, for she thought she detected the beginnings of a pattern.

  ‘An interest?’ From surprise, the secretary’s face moved to total astonishment. ‘In the little Viper? I think she rather hates her and would like to see her dead!’

  ‘But hasn’t Madame Keyne hired her?’

  Jade narrowed her eyes. ‘Yes.’ She looked down at her lap. ‘At last. Or at any rate, she has promised to—today. But it’s only because you’re here that she’s consented.’ Jade blinked at her hands.

  While she was waiting, Pryn put the last of the hard peach back on the tray, picked up a pear and bit it. It was even harder.

  Pryn put the pear down, moved the tray of fruit to the window’s side, turned, and sat on the sill. ‘How did you meet Madame Keyne? I mean, how did she first…take an interest?’

  At the edge of the secretary’s lowered face, Pryn saw the expression change. When the face came up, it was smiling—which was not what Pryn had expected. ‘How did we meet?’ The fingers left the knees to mesh between them. Radiant Jade had very strong, reassuring hands, for all their current nervousness. ‘It wasn’t very complicated. When I left my little village, way in the south, I thought to come north to the city, because I had heard there was less chance for a lone woman to be taken slave here than in the smaller towns and holds.’

  ‘Did you ever see any slavers when you were traveling?’ Pryn asked. ‘I did. Three times.’

  ‘Yes—I saw slavers. And I hid by the side of the road till they passed.’

  ‘Me too!’ Outside, some cloud had pulled from the sun. Pryn felt her back warm; on the floor, both sides of her shadow, tiles reddened. ‘But how did you come here—I mean to this house?’

  ‘When I came to the city, the first job I took—’ the secretary glanced behind her at the door, then looked back to Pryn—‘was with a desert man who lived in the Spur and who brought in laundry from the rest of the city—and I and a dozen other barbarian women washed it. I hated the job and would take every opportunity to sneak off to the cedar groves—the place the Empress designated a public park two years ago. Once, when I was sitting on one of the benches, a woman—our cook here, Gya—came to talk to me and told me her mistress, who had occasionally seen me there, wished to make my acquaintance. I went with her—and met Madame Keyne. She took me to a tavern, I remember, on the waterfront; and in the curtained alcove for women at the back she bought me many mugs of cider. I thought it all terribly elegant at the time. Then she invited me to dine with her, here at her home, the same evening. When she first learned I was a laundress, she promised to give me all her laundry to do—then she found out I could read and write.’ Radiant Jade sat back and laughed. ‘So she made me her secretary—and for the next six months sent her laundry to the man in the Spur. She said she felt guilty for taking me away, though few of his girls ever worked for him more than two months anyway.’

  Pryn laughed too. ‘Madame Keyne sounds like a very kind woman.’

  ‘Oh, she is!’ exclaimed Jade. ‘She is! Rylla is kindness itself! That’s why I feel so awful, so guilty! It isn’t fair—I tell myself that all the time. And yet there’s nothing to be done. There are some situations in which we are not our own masters. I think she knows that—I know she does. How could she not know it if she brought me here? If she brought you?’

  These questions seemed to take things back into the discomfort and confusion from which, a moment ago, Pryn had thought they’d emerged. To insert a clear and comfortable fact, Pryn said: ‘I write—and read—too.’ She’d thought the statement a pleasantry, a sign of shared experience far less spectacular than their mutual experience of slavers, an emblem about which civility might flourish, if not a friendship grow. From Jade’s expression, however, Pryn realized that discomfort had intensified, if not purified.

  ‘You…!’

  Fear joined the emotions struggling on Jade’s face, a fear Pryn herself had been fending off and which seemed equally divided between them.

  ‘You—?’

  Pryn stood up from the sill, then sat again when the secretary stood up from the bed.

  Jade’s fingers jerked about, now toward her face (without touching it), now toward her hips (without touching there either). ‘You!’ She stepped unsteadily forward. ‘I should have known—the traitorous vixen! You can read—and write!’ She turned and fled the room.

  6. Of Falls, Fountains, Notions, and New Markets

  To use one of Kula’s metaphors, one must keep looking down into the well, into the deepest water, down into material life, which is related to market prices but is not always affected or changed by them. So, any economic history that is not writ ten on two levels—that of the well’s rim and that of the depths—runs the risk of being appallingly incomplete…English historians have shown that as of the fifteenth century the traditional public market was accompanied by what they have called the private market (I would prefer to stress the difference and call it the countermarket). For indeed, did it not try to free itself from the rules imposed upon the traditional market, rules that were often paralyzing in their excessiveness?

  FERNARD BRAUDEL,

  Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism

  THE ALTERNATION BETWEEN EASE and unease in Pryn’s recent life had become so frequent she no longer felt the need to name it. She wandered around the room a while longer, now looking out the window at the garden, now looking through the door along the courtyard balcony. She examined corners, looked under chair bottoms. On one circuit she decided not to eat the grapes—the only untasted fruit remaining on the tray. A circuit later, she picked one, bit it: juice and sweetness exploded over her tongue. She devoured the bunch, one after one, till the little stems, their maroon crowns surrounding yellow nubs where the fruit had pulled free, prickled above the blue glaze between the brown pear with its white wound and the red pit with its remaining bite of pith.

  Licking sticky fingers, Pryn thought she heard sounds in another part of the house. She stepped out the door. Yes, somewhere on another floor, someone was shouting at someone who was trying to quiet her. She looked over the rail at the inner court. Statuary, plants, benches were arranged, she saw now, in separate groupings, a low, inlaid table at the center of each.

  She went to the stairway and started down.

  The muffled yelling stopped.

  There were not even wrinkles in the cushions where the Ini had lain.

  Pryn crossed toward the door—the one Madame Keyne had stood in. A metal gate, it stood ajar. At its sides heavy drapes were tied back no doubt to be closed in breezier weather.

  Pryn pushed through as the heavy-set woman, with a scarf around her head, came along by the house,
three young women and a young man behind her. Pryn recognized the cook. She had lugged in the bathtub last night, but Pryn had not seen the others before.

  As they walked, the red-scarfed woman instructed: ‘…and, of course, lateness will not be tolerated. Your duties among the chickens and pigeons are not arduous, Larla, but they are exacting; and you will be expected to take care of the swans and peafowl as well. Samo, you will learn most of your gardening duties from Clyton, who has been here for many years now; but you will also be expected to precede Madame to the country home in Ka’hesh by at least a week to help with the heavy cleaning there—the place is always a shambles at the end of winter, because she will rent it out to the local young nabobs when she is not using it; and they are none too careful, though it’s a finer home than any of their own draughty piles…’

  As they drew abreast of her, among the house girls Pryn saw the new gardener’s assistant, a dark-haired youth, rather too thin, a bit round-shouldered; still, he glanced at her with heavily lashed, very black eyes. I wonder, thought Pryn, moving the waist about on her new shift, does he think I’m a woman of the house? which made her smile at herself. (And perhaps my father is alive…?) No, I am not traditionally beautiful. Still….

  She’d been trying to remember details of her distress at the Ini and her confusion over Radiant Jade. But when behavior seemed so completely without reason, especially when all around was new as well, it was hard even to think about it, much less hold on to the feelings it evoked—unless that behavior was directly before you. What was directly before her now? More trees, more rocks, more flowers…

  She frowned over her memories of the morning.

  The interests of these women, Pryn realized, were far stronger than she’d thought. But what, exactly, did they do? Since Pryn had done it with boys on several occasions (and rather enjoyed it), she fancied that she should know most of what there was to know, at least about that part of it. Certainly it couldn’t be much different, she reflected, from what, only a year or so back, she’d come upon her girl friends Janina and Fetija doing behind the storage shed at the back of her cousin’s bakery. She’d teased them about it for three days, till Fetija had cried and Janina had punched her. And what Fetija and Janina had done was finally not much different from what she herself had done once when she was nine with an older girl cousin—at the older girl’s behest, of course.