Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities

by Samuel R. Delany

‘Just as in the fountain,’ Madame Keyne confirmed. ‘And, as with the fountain, the water remembers its higher position and tries to leap back up. However, you will notice that the tube leaving from the upper bowl does not leave from its bottom, as do the pipes from the tributary pools; rather it leaves from low on the bowl’s side. And in the bottom bowl, the tube end does not point straight up, as in a fountain, but spills in—also from the side. Now look more closely in the top bowl.’

  Pryn stepped up to peer over the top bowl’s rim; it had been filled with some kind of plaster, from which a shape, with all sorts of grooves, gullies, and irregularities, had been gouged. The plaster had dried—it looked as if a single hand had, in one motion, scooped out the hollow.

  ‘…and at the bottom bowl.’

  That bowl, Pryn saw when she bent to look, was filled to the brim with fine sand. The surface was quite smooth.

  ‘Now—’ Madame Keyne stepped away to more containers and levers on the wall—‘I’m going to fill the upper bowl with water.’ A lever squeaked.

  From a spigot just above the whole contraption, water sloshed down into the top bowl among the irregular plaster shapes.

  From the tarnished tube at the rim of the bottom bowl, Pryn saw, moments later, water spurt across the sand, dig into it, wash some of it away, spread, dig, spread again. Sand and water overflowed the rim—to be caught in the trays and filters and drains set beneath it. In the lower bowl, second by second, sand gouged away; crevices and gulleys deepened.

  ‘There,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘That’s enough.’ She threw the lever back.

  The water in the upper bowl lowered, clearing wet peaks and valleys.

  The shimmer across the lower bowl, still filled, stilled.

  ‘Now,’ Madame Keyne instructed, ‘examine both.’

  Pryn looked into the upper: wet pink plaster, small puddles in the deepest depressions—the impression of a single hand-swipe was even stronger. She could make out the clear tracks of the four fingers, the angled gouge of the thumb. Halfway across, all turned to the left. A few inches further on, there was another crater as if, in the hand’s pulling loose, some extra clot had come out too.

  Pryn bent to look at the bottom bowl. The water seemed to have scooped out quite a gouge. Under the bowl, on the filter tray, sand stood in wet piles. Sand streaked the bottom bowl’s bronze sides.

  Pryn looked in.

  Beneath the water, Pryn saw four distinct troughs in the remaining sand, with a fifth angled from the side. Halfway across, all turned to the left. Then, a few inches on, a crater…

  ‘It’s the same!’ Pryn exclaimed, seeing as she said so that it was not exactly the same; shapes were gentler, some were less distinct. ‘It’s almost exactly…’

  Madame Keyne nodded. ‘Not only does the water remember its height in that top bowl, it remembers the entire shape within that bowl, remembers it all the way down the length of the tube through which it runs, remembers it well enough to recreate that shape when it runs into conditions that allow it to demonstrate what it remembers.’ Madame Keyne turned toward the hut’s still open door. ‘What is below is an…almost perfect map of what is above, as the model of my garden is an almost perfect map of the garden itself.’

  Between astonishment and the desire to demand a repeat demonstration, Pryn followed.

  ‘After Venn showed us that—’ Madame Keyne stepped into the doorway light—‘and we were all as astonished as you—Belham, my father, my brother, myself—Venn said, and I shall never forget the equally astonishing humility on her island face as she said it, “Any barbarian can look at the bottom of a falls and see in the rising splash the principle of the fountain. But what I have seen, what I have devised a way to show to you, so that you have seen it too, will remain a wonder till the globe of the world and the globe of the sun meet in their common center, and the one consume the other. This wonder humankind will know and forget, know and forget, know and forget again. And that knowing and forgetting will approximate the peaks and depths of civilization as close as the plaster rises and valleys of Belham’s model approximate the rises and valleys of your garden.”’ Madame Keyne paused in the doorway, her arms folded, looking down. ‘The house, of course, is in a valley. I was standing in this doorway, here, watching Venn, outside, talking. And I thought: “Moving from place to place in society, power remembers…”’ She laughed. ‘And I think that was the beginning of my interests in magic, of the sort you have seen me engaged in at the New Market.’

  Pryn stepped out into the leaf-splayed light after Madame Keyne.

  ‘That afternoon, Venn quit our house for the south. Belham was very upset, I recall. He got terribly drunk that night, and made a great bother of himself all about the grounds…he’d been commissioned by several other families to make fountains in their gardens, too. Myself, I’ve always felt that ours were the nicest.’ Madame Keyne did not close the hut door but walked back to the bench and, with a little sigh, sat. Ini’s knife still lay on the stone. Pryn looked at the woman, who, at this point, seemed both frailer and more wondrous.

  ‘The purport of magic is so simple, it’s odd that it is not as obvious as…But then, what was obvious to Venn was not obvious to Belham. Still, in any encounter there is always a stronger side and a weaker side—and both sides always have power. But because there is magic loose in the world, the stronger had best pay attention to the weaker if the stronger wishes to retain its position. You are not in a terribly strong position. I am not in a terribly weak one. We are not arguing, you and I, about which of us holds which place. You want to know my reasons for bringing you here. I want to know your reasons for coming. It only seems fair to me to ask, since you, at this point, know so much of me!’

  Once more Pryn sat down on the grass—and felt the cloth of her dress, rumpled beneath one buttock, and a twig, nipping under the other. ‘Let me use what little power I have, then: you tell me first.’

  Madame Keyne’s smile took on its familiar ambiguity. ‘But you know already. I brought you here because I was jealous.’

  ‘Jealous of…?’

  ‘Jealous of Jade.’ Madame Keyne’s shoulders lowered; her hands moved back on blue-covered knees. ‘I suppose it’s been three months now since Jade found her Wild Ini—in the public park, too, not a bench away from where, two and a half years before, I myself found Jade. Jade makes friends easily. Ini talked to Jade—Ini took her about the Spur, Ini fascinated her, Ini visited her here at our home. I talked to Ini, I took Ini about our garden, I fascinated Ini. Soon her talents were unofficially in my employ. Jade and Ini’s relationship is precisely as you see it—nothing to grow jealous of, now, is it? And yet I grow jealous. In my jealousy I resolved to take the first beautiful street girl I saw for my own.’

  ‘—and that was me?’

  ‘You are not traditionally beautiful, you know—’

  ‘Radiant Jade is very beautiful.’

  ‘Yes.’ Madame Keyne sighed. ‘She’s quite beautiful. Often I have thought her quite the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known.’

  ‘I don’t have the set of features and lineaments that…threaten to spill you over into the silence of death?’

  Madame Keyne laughed. ‘But for me, my dear, there are no such features and lineaments—whereas Jade simply does not know what hers are.’ Madame Keyne’s smile seemed to mock itself. ‘Of course, everyone else who knows her does: little street girls just into town with the memory of murder in their faces—’

  Pryn felt herself stiffen. But Madame Keyne hadn’t known—couldn’t have known about the man in the cellar…

  ‘There,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘Just what you did—just now. A kind of sulkiness, a kind of suspicion.’

  And Pryn laughed. ‘It isn’t fair, Madame—’ laughing seemed all there was to do—‘the way Jade feels about Ini. I mean, along with the way she feels about your bringing me here.’

  The laughter made Madame Keyne smile again. ‘That kind of fairness doesn’t exist—or rather is for
children buying lengths of sugar cane from the vendor in the Old Market, whining to daddy, whose concern is always elsewhere, about who has gotten the bigger piece. The potter god who glazed us did not paint us all evenly, nor even all with the same glaze; nor were we all fired at the same temperature.’

  ‘So I must go…?’

  ‘Girl, I had no more notion of using you to replace Jade as my secretary than I had of riding a dragon! But it so happens you do read and write. More and more people can, these days. I didn’t know it when I first saw you—though Jade will never believe it wasn’t part of my plan from the beginning. But then, I shall never believe it was merely concern for the secretarial aspect of her situation that impelled all Jade’s actions toward you—though in an hour or a week she will be insisting that was all there was to it. Oh, well; I suppose she’s no different from Ergi, who thinks that every young woman he sees me with shall henceforth be moved into my house and made heir to my worldly property. Such misreadings are very common—more, they are very powerful, almost as powerful as the proper ones.’

  ‘What will you do with Ini?’

  ‘She will stay in my official employ until it is time for her to leave. But that is something Jade and I—and the Ini—will have to decide.’

  ‘It seems so strange.’ Pryn sighed. ‘I mean that you only brought me here to make Jade jealous—’

  ‘Did I say that?’ Madame Keyne leaned forward, looking a little surprised. ‘Certainly, I didn’t say—’

  ‘No, but I thought that’s what you meant. I mean, when you said…’

  Madame Keyne frowned. ‘Do you think so?’ She pursed her lips. ‘Now myself, that had never occurred to me. Make Jade jealous…of me? But perhaps it occurred to Jade…No wonder she is so pained by your presence, then, for it must seem a very intentional hurt. The pain inflicted by a loved one that we believe inadvertent, to the extent we love truly, is bearable. But the pain we suspect is inflicted because we are considered not really human and therefore fit to be hurt, that makes us ache to the depths of our most human bowels.’ She pondered a moment. ‘Ergi would think as you did—Why shouldn’t Jade? But no. I was not jealous of what Jade had—have the Ini? In any way one might reasonably want her, I do have her. No, I wanted to do what Jade did. I wanted to be free to do it. I brought you here to be free. That’s all.’ She smiled. ‘I wanted to do what Jade did. And I have discovered, by trying, that…it is not within my power.’

  ‘Madame Keyne,’ Pryn said, ‘before I came here, my life was caught up in a world of men, where everything was purpose, plan, and plot—yet I was always outside it. But here, where everything is nuance, emotion, and jealousy, somehow I have found myself at the most uncomfortable and precarious center—where I feel just as excluded!’

  ‘Are you saying you are some sort of mystic and are prepared to abandon both the worlds of men and of women for the world of magic and marvels? You are a special young woman, I can tell. Still, that is not what I would have thought you most suited for. But now I have told you why I brought you here. You must tell me why you came.’

  ‘I came here because I…’ Pryn looked down. ‘Because I was looking for a friend.’

  ‘A friend?’ Madame Keyne regarded the girl curiously. ‘I dare say we haven’t distinguished ourselves much in the friendship area. Though, who knows: perhaps one day you will be able to think of us as friends…’

  ‘She was a woman I heard about, once,’ Pryn went on. ‘She wore blue beads in her hair and carried a double blade—’

  ‘The Western Crevasse!’ exclaimed Madame Keyne. ‘Your friend was a woman of the Western Crevasse, where men serve and women rule and do all that men do in Nevèrÿon. Where did you meet this wondrous creature?’

  ‘I never met her,’ Pryn explained. ‘I only heard about her.’

  ‘Only heard about her…?’ Madame Keyne frowned. ‘Only heard? Ah, child, let me tell you something. When I was a girl, I, too, used to hear of those marvelous and mysterious fighting women of the Western Crevasse. Now and again someone would report that their red ships had pulled into the Kolhari docks. When I was a girl, I would hear my brother whispering to my father; that week no one would let me go down to the port, and I would be sure those wonderful women were what they were whispering of. When I was older, once or twice I sneaked down into the city when I heard that their strange ships were supposed to be in. And as I wandered among the children bouncing their rubber balls, sometimes I would find a fishing ship from the Ulvayn islands, which occasionally employed a woman or three among its hands. But I never did see any of those double-bladed warriors. Let me tell you, girl. The warrior women of the Western Crevasse do not exist. Nor have they ever existed. They only grew up in stories because women like you—and me—from time to time wished they existed, because men like my father and brother were terrified they might. I think we use them as a kind of model. A model for thinking. But the truth, I’m afraid, is that the closest thing you and I will ever find to those raven-haired legends is our own pale-haired Ini. After all, we want them to do all the things for us Ini does. But we want them to do them out of a profound, moral innocence that obliterates all the darkness and rescinds all the terror that our own little monster carries about with her everywhere she goes. Well, you can’t have that kind of innocence any more than you have the kind of fairness that gives each child the same size piece of cane down to the centimeter. Your blue-beaded, double-bladed hero, coming to save you from the hands of wily men—and women—who can perform any degree of violence in the course of its accomplishment yet with never a selfish thought, does not exist. Indeed, she would be quite terrifying if she did. Indeed, if she did, she would not be tall, but short, she would not be black-haired but blond, and she would be horribly wounded, a hopelessly mad and poisonous little white gillyflower of a girl. But at least we—or my poor Radiant Jade, at any rate—accept our Ini for what she is. Whether she wear my scarf or no, she does not accept us. But we have a compensation which, in the long run, is denied her. It is, simply and insipidly, love. As confused with other motives as it may be, deferred, displaced, speaking in codes when it would speak at all, written in shaky signs in shadowy ill-lit corners, it is still what brought you here. Somewhat purified, somewhat clarified, somewhat analyzed—and that is all any one of us can ask it to become—it is what sends you on your way.’ She joined her hands in her lap. ‘Girl, you have been swept up in this wildest of gardens by a great and real power. Now that you are about to leave, you may be tempted to shrug off the whole experience as an unfortunate irrelevance, best put out of current thought, best expunged from future memory. But you must know, as you make your way in the wider world, the same play of power and desire rages in all men and women, contouring all acts, aligning all motivations, no matter what the object. Nor will your own soul be free of that play. That play is desire, in all its myriad forms. And as you look back on us from time to time to judge or to rejudge us—and you will—do not be kind. All I would have you do is remember that we, in this garden, have been a bit more responsible, a bit more honest than most. Do not praise us for it, in these passionate and primitive times. But do not dismiss us heedlessly, either by forgetfulness or too-quick censure.’ Madame Keyne searched in her skirts with jangling wrists. Finding her purse, she pulled and plucked it open, went into it with one and another finger, teasing out one, a second, a handful of coins. ‘Here—this is for your coming efforts on my behalf to question the Liberator. No…I think it better to pay in advance in such cases. After all, there is the chance you won’t return. Take it, take it right now. Yes, you have pockets in that dress. Go on.’ (Pryn took the iron coins uncertainly.) ‘Now come, girl, and give me a kiss.’

  ‘Madame Keyne,’ Pryn declared for, though she was by nature affectionate, not only had she seen something of fountains in her own home, she had also seen prostitutes in the Ellamon market and had whispered and giggled with the other children about them, ‘you take me from the Bridge of Lost Desire, you give me a handful of
coins, then you ask for a kiss…?’

  ‘—like a kiss from a daughter, my dear, expressing her affection to a mother, before she leaves on some necessary journey out into the world, with a coin or two diligently saved and given with concern.’

  ‘Well,’ Pryn said, ‘I never got along very well with my mother. I didn’t really see much of her.’

  ‘Very well, then, to a father—if you must; a long-lost father, returning from the wars, in time to catch a peck and a hug before his daughter begins her own eccentric or domestic adventures along whatever courses her own lifetime may take her.’

  Though Pryn had not had a father, she had wanted one; but she hesitated a moment more. Finding the pockets, she dropped in the coins, stepped forward, bent, and, blinking, kissed the brown cheek.

  One moment, lost in the desert of that warm, dry skin, Pryn thought she understood what had occurred; she let her mouth, then her own cheek, stay against Madame Keyne’s, thinking all the time that a tremor would pass through the woman any moment—or at least expecting to see, as she stepped back now, a tear make a moist oasis somewhere on that dry flesh.

  Madame Keyne was smiling.

  Though not particularly at Pryn.

  ‘Well,’ Madame Keyne said after a breath. ‘You gave me that contact, that touch, that communion on your own—freely. Despite all exchanges, which always occur. Nothing compelled you, nothing coerced you. And I shall live off that freedom of yours for…a minute? A month? A lifetime?’ She laughed softly. ‘It was, in its quiet way, as glorious as if I rode some wild and winged beast, soaring against sun-silvered clouds. Certainly it is worth as much as the caresses Jade wheedles, tricks, blackmails, and cajoles from the Ini.’ Madame Keyne raised an eyebrow, as though responding to a surprise on Pryn’s face that Pryn, at any rate, hadn’t felt. ‘Oh, yes—because I know how innocent we are, I have a measure of how innocent they are. Even if they don’t know it—Oh, you may mark it on vellum! Now go. Down to the kitchen with you. You remember Gya, who oversaw your bath and bedding when Ini brought you in last night? She will give you a supper basket at the kitchen door—I think Jade and I shall dine by ourselves tonight. Or, if not, I shall dine alone. Later, when the sun is fully down, you may take this—’ Madame Keyne picked up the knife and held it out to Pryn—‘to the break in the corner of my garden that leads through into the garden of the Liberator. If you can contrive an audience with him, ask my question, and return—’