Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities

by Samuel R. Delany

  Somewhere a branch fell, off in the bushes. One or the other of the two women glanced up from the table with vague curiosity. The other went on talking.

  Certainly it was no more than a branch.

  But it made Pryn pull sharply back from the window’s edge. She looked about the hedges. She looked back at the window. (Inside, one of them said: ‘I love you, and I know that you love me. That is all I know. That is all I need to know…’ But the voice spoke so softly Pryn did not catch which woman it was, so that the words seemed like a message glimpsed on a discarded clay tablet without any initialed name above or below, sender and destination forgotten.) The gauze hanging to the sill was as gray as the wall around it. No sun fell through at this hour. Doubtless the women inside, had they looked, could have seen out as easily as Pryn could see in. Really, she must not stay any longer. It just wouldn’t do to be caught here.

  Pryn walked along close to the house. Turning the corner, she let herself move out between the bushes.

  As she came around by the back door of the kitchen, Gya shoved aside the woven hangings and stepped out. The red scarf around her head was blotched with perspiration. ‘Here’s your supper!’ She handed out a basket. Things in it were wrapped in large leaves.

  Pryn pulled one loose: strips of celery, cut turnips, and carrots fell out. And a sizable piece of roasted meat. There was a jar with a wooden stopper, whose surface was still damp and about which she could smell apples. Could it be cider…? There was also a small, dark loaf. ‘Thank you!’

  The housekeeper stood on the doorstep, scratching at the hip of her skirt.

  Pryn broke off a piece of the loaf and put it in her mouth, to be astonished at its sweetness. (She had tasted neither corn flour nor banana bread before, both of which these were.) She broke off another piece and ate it.

  ‘And if you see the other, white-headed one, tell her to come and get hers too,’ the hefty woman called. She turned back to the hanging raffia. ‘Though sometimes I do believe that one doesn’t eat at all!’

  ‘Yes,’ Pryn called again. ‘Thank you! I will!’

  Now and again the moon shone blue-white between coursing clouds. Brambles bent and whispered around her. She pulled a branch from dark stone to reveal the darker opening. Had the far end been blocked up? But she squeezed herself, crouching, into the fissure. She slipped through a memory of narrow, underground corridors. Then moonlight speckled brambles outside the rocks just beyond her left eye. Slipping out sideways, she pushed away chattering branches and stood up in the heavy growth. Pryn gazed over brush that darkened under a cloud, then paled to mottled blue as the cloud dragged off.

  There was no light in the great house across the cluttered wilds. Somewhere beyond the house itself, a campfire fluttered beside some outbuilding’s door.

  Was that a soldier moving along the great house’s roof? No, Pryn decided. This evening the upper cornices were patrolled only by changes in the moonlight along the cracked balustrade. Dark, the house seemed far bigger than Madame Keyne’s.

  Pryn pushed forward, clenching her jaw at the rattling brush.

  She was approaching a clear space—and struck her shin.

  Hopping back, looking down, holding aside leaves, she saw a stone expanse, which, she realized looking out over it, was why there was a clearing. She stepped up on the stone lip.

  Across the mossy rock, she saw the sculpted stands, each topped with carved shells, like the ones at the corners of Madame Keyne’s bridge.

  She was standing at the edge of a great fountain that no longer worked at all. She looked about for higher ground. In the wild rises around, had time clogged conduits and tributaries with refuse in the same way a little murderess had packed the emblem of her service down a drain?

  What am I doing here? she thought, stepped from the lip, and moved around it toward the house. But he’s not there…

  That was what she knew.

  That knowledge had led her to volunteer her services in the first place. But here she was, on the strength of that knowledge charged with a mission which that knowledge, precisely, assured her could not succeed.

  This is ridiculous, she mouthed for the seventh time, freeing a twig caught in the coin-filled pocket at one side of her dress, moving a branch that snagged on the knife at the other, now pulling back from thorns that scraped her calf where she’d hiked the dress up for easier maneuvering.

  She reached the end of brush and bramble and stepped into what was merely waist-high grass.

  That back window—were those cloth hangings inside it? She could climb in. Coming closer, her gaze rose to the roof, whose cracked and crumbled balustrade, as she walked up, approached her in some infinitely delayed topple.

  A leaf blew from the roof above to spin and spiral at her, till a texture change in the earth underfoot made her look down—at the window, now before her, with its dark drapes.

  Pryn vaulted to the sill, got her feet up, dropped one foot over, pushing back hangings. The cloth was incredibly gritty—she heard it tear. As she jumped down, another cloud drifted from the haloed moon. Light fell through the open roof into the inner court—very like Madame Keyne’s.

  Might this, Pryn wondered, be what Madame Keyne’s home would look like in ruins years hence? All furniture had been taken out, the floor tiles broken—five or six benches had been up-ended against the wall—

  Footsteps!

  Pryn crouched beside one as a thick-necked soldier walked from the stairway across the floor, glanced up at the moon, then went to the doorway, where he paused in the shadow—a moment later his urine hissed against the door post. Still barefoot, Pryn resolved she would leave by the window she’d entered.

  The soldier—no doubt the one she’d thought mere moonlight on the cornice—went.

  Slowly, Pryn stood.

  There’s no one in the house, she thought. At least no one important. I am alone with the absent Liberator. It was preternaturally silent. She felt like the central figure in a complex joke whose humor was just beyond her; she also felt exorbitantly free, as if her knowledge allowed her to wander, to run, to fly on spined wings anywhere in the moonstruck dark—as long as she flew quietly. She stepped from behind the bench. The dead barbarian…?

  Lusts as depraved as…? Unanswerable questions glittered in her mind like mummers’ gibes in a market skit before which a shadow audience howled silent laughter.

  Pryn walked across the court and climbed the steps down which the soldier had come. As she entered the archway at the top, the house reached the end of any similarity with Madame Keyne’s.

  In the corner of the large room a ladder led to a hole in the roof; moonlight spilled in. Was this how the Liberator’s guards went up for their theatrical patrol during the day?

  Pryn smiled at the lack of attempt to maintain even the fiction of a dweller in this space. She walked over the tile floor and through another arch: another bare room. Narrow windows along the wall let slats of silver. She went up to one and looked, carefully, out. At the outbuilding men and women stood or sat about the fire. Someone added a log.

  In the breeze, branches dipped and rose between the window and what she looked at, so she moved to the next sill. Two men came in through the small door in the plank gate, stopping to joke with two others leaving.

  Hand on the knife at her hip, Pryn turned to cross the high-ceilinged room.

  What shall I tell Madame Keyne when I go back? she wondered. And why should I go back at all? Pryn stepped through another archway, the floor all shadow-dappled from, this time, a wide and generous window beyond which hung more branches. Was this how a queen, or maybe even an empress, felt, moving through her own castle?

  On her third step, she saw.

  He stood at the edge of shaking light.

  Truly frightened, Pryn fought back nervous laughter. At the same time, part of her wondered, quite coolly, what she might say to this guard, seconds from now; what might he say to her—certainly he had seen her. She was standing in a clea
r swatch of moon.

  The man—the big man—stepped forward.

  And Pryn got chills.

  Chills surged the backs of her shoulders, tickled her thighs. She wanted very much to be somewhere else, and at the same time to move seemed impossible—which only made the feeling more intense, more unsettling.

  The chills came on and on.

  ‘What are you doing here…?’ she whispered. ‘I mean, how…did you get in!’

  He gave a snort. ‘These old Neveryóna mansions have their cisterns too.’ Heavy features shifted about the scar. ‘The one here’s been empty as long as the one down in the Spur. What am I doing here? Well…we had some more trouble, earlier today, of the same sort we had the last time you were with us. This seemed as good a place as any to retreat. Now. What are you doing here? And how did you get in?’

  ‘I…’ Pryn swallowed. ‘Well, I came in the window—looking…for you! Only you weren’t supposed to be here—’

  A sound across the room—

  A figure blocked more moonlight under a far arch, then darted to the Liberator’s side, to crouch, looking up at Gorgik, looking over at Pryn. Black hair straggled the bony forehead. The single eye blinked.

  Gorgik’s great hand dropped to the one-eyed bandit’s shoulder.

  As if those fingers and knuckles and nails were too heavy to bear, Noyeed sank to one knee. ‘Is that the spy, Master…?’

  ‘Me,’ Pryn started, ‘a spy…?’ She could not tell, in the flickering through the branches, if any irony had worked its way into the Liberator’s scarred face.

  ‘You disappeared in the middle of the last little fracas we had, Blue Heron—then, when it was over, some of the new men, the Wolf and the Fox, told me how they’d known you before. They said they’d suspected you of spying even then.’

  ‘But I—’

  ‘Blue Heron,’ Gorgik said, ‘can you honestly tell me that you know nothing of the red-bearded demon with the jangling ankles who attacked us in our underground cellars this afternoon? Can you say truthfully that you were not sent here by powerful merchants to ply me with questions of strategy, alliances, and policies, the answers to which you will report back for a handful of coins?’

  ‘I—?’

  ‘Master,’ Noyeed hissed. ‘I think she’s lying!’

  ‘You’d think the first words of a mother to her child were riddled with untruths, little savior.’ Gorgik jogged the bandit. ‘From the life you’ve led, who’d blame you? Still, I’ve told her my reasons for coming here. Now I want her to tell me hers.’ He looked at Pryn. ‘You say you came, looking for me—and, however unexpectedly, you’ve found me. What is your mission?’

  ‘I only wanted…’

  Noyeed’s eye batted and glittered.

  ‘I only wanted to…say goodbye. I am leaving this strange and terrible city! I am leaving Kolhari! I wanted to…thank you. For being friendly to me on the bridge. And to say goodbye.’

  ‘I see.’ The Liberator settled his weight more on one hip. ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Yes. And to…’ Pryn looked down. ‘…to ask you a question.’

  Gorgik dropped his hand from Noyeed’s shoulder. Noyeed reached up to scratch it. There was something loose around his neck. In the moon-dapple, Pryn was not sure what it was.

  ‘What did you want to ask?’

  ‘It’s only a question for myself.’ Pryn blinked. ‘That barbarian, the one your…friend there killed. Before he died, he said you…sold him. As a slave. Was that true?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But that’s terrible!’ Pryn frowned. ‘You’re the Liberator! Why did you do it?’

  ‘Actually I sold him—as a slave—on a dozen different occasions. As I recall, he sold me—to slavers and to private owners also—well over half a dozen times.’

  Pryn’s frown had begun as condemnation; it crumbled into bewilderment. ‘But I don’t understand…!’

  ‘It was the nature of our relationship—when we had a relationship.’ Gorgik shrugged. ‘That’s the trouble with spies, you know. It’s not that they carry information. It’s that they carry fragmentary information, out of context, misconstrued, badly interpreted, incomplete, and misread.’

  ‘I’m not a spy!’ Pryn said. ‘I just don’t understand—’

  ‘You know that we were slavery-fighters together. It was simply more efficient to have one of us working from within the slave gangs.’

  ‘Yes’ Pryn said. ‘But certainly that’s not what he meant by…’

  Gorgik looked with dappled face at the dappled floor. ‘It’s hard to say, with someone like Prince Sarg, what he meant. Nor is he here to clarify it for us. But there are as many ways to read the iron collar, the chain, and the whip as there are to read the words a woman or a man whispers under the tent’s shadow with the moonlight outside. But you’re too young to—’

  ‘Oh, no!’ Pryn protested. ‘No. I’m not!’

  The giant looked up. ‘Well, perhaps not.’ He smiled—though the scar, like a careless mark scrawled across eye, cheek, and lip, confused that smile’s meaning. ‘You’ve heard camel drivers in the market, cursing their beasts, one another, and the whole inconvenient and crowded world of commerce through which they must drive their herd? The brutal repetition in their invention and invective alone keeps such curses from being true poetry.’

  She wasn’t sure how poetic curses were, but she knew camel drivers were foul-mouthed. Pryn nodded.

  ‘Are you too young to have heard, little Heron, that some of these same men, alone in their tents at night with their women, may implore, plead, beg their mistresses to whisper these same phrases to them, or plead to be allowed to whisper them back, phrases which now, instead of conveying ire and frustration, transport them, and sometimes the women, too, to heights of pleasure?’

  Though Pryn had never heard it put so bluntly before, she knew enough to suspect the process existed, and nodded quickly lest she be thought less worldly than she was.

  The giant’s smile broadened. ‘Now there are some, who, wishing to see the world more unified than common sense suggests it could possibly be, say that to use terms of anger and rage in the throes of desire indicates some great malaise, not only of camel drivers but of the whole world; that desire itself must be a form of anger and is thus invalid as an adjunct to love—’

  ‘I would say,’ Pryn said, who after all had heard her share of camel drivers taking their herds from prairie to desert over the rough Falthas, ‘the sickness is using terms of desire in the throes of anger and rage. Most curses are just words for women’s genitals, men’s excreta, and cooking implements joined up in preposterous ways.’

  ‘A theory the most intelligent and high-minded of our young have always been fond of. But both arguments are very much of the same form. Both assume that signs thought about in one way and felt to mean one thing mean other feelings that are not felt and other thoughts that are not in the mind. Since the true meanings in both arguments are absent from the intentions of the man or woman speaking, one finally ends with a world in which neither love nor anger can really be condoned, since neither is ever pure. The inappropriate signs do not enrich the reading; they pollute it. And it’s surprising how fast one argument becomes the other—as the most intelligent and high-minded of our young grow older. But there’s another way to read.’

  Pryn’s frown questioned the wavering leaf-light the moon threw about the room. Here and there a twig’s or branch’s shadow was doubled on the bare plaster by leafy refraction.

  ‘Even the most foul-mouthed camel driver knows a curse from a kiss, whatever signs accompany it.’ Gorgik snorted. ‘Enriched pleasure is still pleasure. Enriched anger is still anger.’ Along with the quiet tenor of his city voice, the scar and moon-dapple inflected his features toward some other meaning than the anger she kept reading there. ‘A word spoken in the noon sun does not necessarily mean the same as it does when uttered in the moonlight. The words by which we indicate a woman’s genitals, men’s excreta, or co
oking implements are not, in themselves, lusty. They simply can be used in many ways—among many others.’

  With adolescence, Pryn had certainly taken on the sometimes troubling knowledge that almost anything with an outside and an inside supporting movement from one to the other could be sexually suggestive. ‘But what does this have to do with your…friend who tried to kill you?’

  The Liberator sighed. ‘The signs by which slavery manifests itself in the world in many ways resemble the camel driver’s curse.’ The great hand had strayed to the bandit’s neck. Gorgik hooked a forefinger around…it was an iron collar that hung there! ‘The collar itself may be a sign of all social oppression—yet its wearing can also be an adjunct of pleasure. My little barbarian prince, while we fought and loved together, was very much one out to have the world more unified—while I, in such matters, am…a camel driver.’ Gorgik’s laugh had a nervous relief that Pryn wondered at. ‘Sarg claimed he felt no bodily pleasure in the collar. Under the sun he and I wore it to advance our fight against slavery, to infiltrate and obliterate it. At night? Well, he tolerated it—at first. Sometimes he laughed at it. Later he began to argue against it; and it was an argument much like the one I—and you—have sketched out: its oppressive meaning debased love; its sexual meaning made of slavery itself an even more terrifying mystery. Finally he refused to wear it any longer. Nor did I press him to it—since he allowed it to me. But as Sarg wore the collar less and less by night, I could not help notice the change in the way he wore it by day. That he wore it much more by day, while that is true, is not so much the point as that he now insisted on wearing it. Several times when we were camped outside a town, he wore the collar into the local market while he bought our supplies, whereupon he would brazenly insult, or cheat, or anger someone, then, at their complaint, bring them back to his “master”—me—and I would have to promise to discipline my “slave.” Then, when the offended party was gone, he would laugh, finding it all a great joke that we should now share. The first time, I read it as a boy’s high spirits and laughed—uneasily—with him. The second time, it was a bother; and I was simply silent while he laughed alone. The third time, I grew angry and told him it was a bother—and a dangerous bother at that! He grew angry in return. That, indeed, was one of our first arguments over the slippery meaning of the iron ring. But from then on, in our forays against the slavers of the west, more and more he demanded to be the one to play the slave—because, as he would now chide me, first jokingly, then seriously, I could not be trusted in the role. For me, you see, it was too charged a sign. Yet as soon as he had the collar on, as soon as he had been “sold” and had gained admittance into the slave pens, he would needlessly prolong his time there, sometimes boasting to the bored guards, sometimes to the confused slaves, of his exploits outside…before, together, we would let them know why he—and I—had come! Sometimes he would ignore our plans and signals altogether, so that I would not know what had happened to him. Later, laughing, he would say it did not matter if we began an hour or three hours after I, waiting for him outside, had expected. For hadn’t we succeeded? Often, as I left after selling him, I would see him turn to taunt the overseers, drawing attention to himself and his collar at precisely the moments when he should have remained most inconspicuous. Several times by such behavior he put his own life and mine in danger—his reasoning was that whatever eccentricities he indulged within the iron band, they were better than any actions I might perform, as his were not contaminated by the secret productions of lust. Yet to put on the collar and walk into a group of slaves and their masters seemed to throw Sarg into a kind of trance, a strangely reckless state where ecstasy and obliviousness, daring and distraction, were one with bravery itself. I did not want to fault him then—and do not now. Many times—bravely—he saved my life. Many times I saved his. But that was the situation, and to talk about it with him was to enter an endless maze of anger, recriminations, and resentments where it was always my overvaluation of the collar that was to blame for any fault I found in his actions while he wore it. Carelessness? Forgetfulness? Heedless braggadocio? What did any of them matter if we were still alive—if we could still free slaves? If we ourselves were truly free? I loved him. And I believe he loved me—certainly he was honestly and infinitely grateful to me, for he would have been a true slave without me; and we both knew it. Had we been embarked on an enterprise where only our own desires were at stake, I think I would have stayed with him, would have fought to keep him, would have risked my life and possibly lost it—fought for my own values and through whatever the world set between us so that we might remain together. But we had a cause that I felt was more important than my own life or safety; and so, possibly all too conveniently, I felt that cause was more important than what we might have won for ourselves by solving such problems.