Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities

by Samuel R. Delany

  When, Pryn wondered, had all these whispering plans been made about where she would go and what she would do when she got there, and who would come to her, and who would wait for whom to finish…

  The same times and places, of course, she answered her own query, that they were made in any other little town!

  It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t embarrassment. It wasn’t even hurt. Rather it was a tingling coldness that settled, nevertheless, in those places where embarrassment’s fires could prickle: her cheeks, her knees, the small of her back. She stood before the hut, feeling terribly cold, till Kurvan had been out of sight for minutes. Then she walked to the road and took a few steps along it.

  She could see the bridge over the ravine, the workshop this side of it, the houses beyond it. After a few moments, she said aloud: ‘But I don’t want this town…!’ Certainly she did not want to be this town’s roadside whore with a dirty baby squalling in the yard. She ran both hands slowly down the stomach of the shift Madame Keyne had given her. First the Fox’s wandering hands, then the pimp on the Bridge of Lost Desire, the coins Madame Keyne had given her for a kiss—the two soldiers at the inn in the night…! This is not where I want to be, she thought. Why has everything conspired to put me here?

  Yes, this may be the town she had come from. It might even be the town where she would finally live most of her life. But it wasn’t the town she wanted to be in now. Not the town to have a child in. And certainly not here, in these roadside hovels. The only reason, she realized, that she’d even considered staying was that momentary look of interest from Bragan, and she knew enough of Ellamon to know that Tratsin and Bragan (whether Tratsin stayed here another hour on his return or not) would be among the first friends she would lose if she stayed. Tratsin and Bragan? They were good people, kind people, generous people, both of them. But she was here, on this road, at this hut now, because she was a foreign girl about to have a baby, and they could think of no other place for her.

  The thought came like sentences written on some parchment scrap thrust before her eyes to read:

  My father once walked into a town like this.

  My father once walked out of one, too.

  Certainly he had walked into Ellamon, more or less a stranger. He had met her mother and left her with a child—Pryn. He had left, in his case, for the army and death by fever. But he had left, left just such a town as this. Just walked out of it. That was the thing. In her own way, hadn’t Pryn followed him into Enoch? Well, then, she could just as well follow him out again. Of course, she was not leaving a child behind but taking one with her. Very well, she would have her baby where she might. But it would not be in this narrow-minded provincial hold, where all anyone and everyone could think of was labor. Of course there was no army to snatch her conveniently off to adventure—but there was no army to get a fever in, either. What were imaginary fathers for if you couldn’t use them for something…Blinking at the bridge, and the roofs and trees beyond it against the darkening sky, she had a memory of Tratsin that afternoon in the ravine below it: soldiers had once crossed it…? Perhaps her real father, in the real Imperial Army, had walked into this town! And when he’d died his real death, she wondered, what real and unbearable memories had died with him? Somehow simply asking the question, simply realizing that she didn’t have an imaginary father, but rather that she’d had a real one, real as Bragan or Tratsin or herself, leached all her resolve. Wherever he might have died, her own father—the real man she’d never known—had come from a town much like this, like her mother, like herself. Pryn put her arms across her stomach and turned—crying now—on the road. She was very tired. For all the warm, stormy night, she was cold.

  If I stay, she thought, there must be work I can do other than this—carry water or slops or collect stone chips at the quarry; perhaps find a job with some richer town family in their garden or house; perhaps I might take care of other children, teach them my lettering skills. (Her aunt had begun with her at age seven.) But these people who had placed her here would not give her their children, she knew, if only as punishment for having her own child so far from home. The master and mistress of any rich home she might work in would cast hard glances in this direction as surely as poor folk like Tratsin and Bragan. That was the way in such towns. And the path to the quarry would lead by these huts daily. It was not even that they (or Pryn) had any inflated notion of the perniciousness of such work itself. Rather, she thought, it’s that I’ve learned the forces that limit me to it all too well at Ellamon. They’d been cut into her the way so many small droplets running along the same path cut a ravine to the sea, so that once within it—as if caught in a wound slashed across one’s own body—there was no leaving.

  That was what terrified.

  That was what paralyzed.

  Shivering a little, tired, she walked back toward the road’s edge.

  Tratsin would be coming soon. With things for her. Tratsin was a good man, a kind man. Tratsin had certainly borne his wounds from Enoch’s Margs and Malots, if not the soldiers on the bridge, and he seemed as resigned to them as a man might be who’d never considered the possibility of healing. Maybe she could tell him, and maybe he would understand, how lost she felt in this most familiar of cities. And maybe if he stayed a while it would be better than being so alone…

  Once more the sky flickered, this time rumbling.

  And Pryn stopped.

  The shadow flickered on the printed dust, among shadows of sparse leaves and twigs, flickering with the flickering sky.

  It was the shadow of a sword on the ground, there the point, there the hilt. It was as if the weapon itself hung in the air. But the shadow—that was what had made her stop. Because there were two blades running off the hilt, each the same length, and set parallel.

  Pryn looked up—at Tratsin’s knife stuck in the thin tree above her. Not a weapon at all, it was only a carving tool. Still, the light falling through the leaves above it (most obligingly, the lightning flared again—yes, there it was on the road) was refracted through the spare leaves above so that, hitting it at the proper angle, it seemed to come from two sources, doubling the shadow that reached the ground.

  A drop of rain hit Pryn’s shoulder. She looked about. Perhaps three meters away, another drop cratered the road dust.

  What she felt was a kind of chill. The food? No, it was inedible! Tratsin’s tool? No, he needed it, and, besides, she still had the Ini’s blade tucked at her waist. Once again it seemed that, of all the people she had met on her travels, Madame Keyne had again proved right: No, there were no masked women warriors waiting to save her with double swords. The blade was a man’s, a man who would be returning for it soon. Still, its shadow was real enough for the use she needed to put it to. ‘I can’t stay here…!’ she whispered. Then, very simply and not at all like a young woman who had just made an extraordinarily difficult decision, Pryn turned toward the crossroads and began to walk with long quickening steps.

  Were this an entirely different story, it would no doubt go on to tell how, later that night, when the sky blackened and the rain began to pour, Pryn found a stony niche off the road and lay in it with her back against rock and dry leaves high around her shoulders and knees, torrents thundering across the opening a foot before her face, the curtain of drops now and again gone glittering blue with lightning.

  Presumably the tale would also tell how, the next morning, when she went off a little ways in the woods to urinate, the wet leaves with which she wiped herself were touched with blood.

  She stood looking at them for a long while.

  Then she cried again, this time with a kind of hiccupping relief.

  She didn’t cry much after that. Later that day, when the south road took her through another town, she saw the familiar canvas covered ox-cart, tied outside an inn. She stood, looking at it too, for a time. Then she walked on—only after a couple of minutes, she stopped, turned, and walked back. Ten minutes later, the three young people were laughing together
in the inn-yard. The boys kept asking her what in the world had happened, and she kept laughing and saying nothing, really, she’d just decided to go off by herself for a few days; nothing had happened at all! The boys had gotten some money from somewhere, enough to pay for a fine dinner at the inn, where they’d stopped the night before, they told her, to escape the rain.

  ‘Let’s ask if they have the double soup—it’s quite the best thing in the area, though the inns shy away from the common food. Some of it can be inedible!’

  The innkeeper didn’t have the soup, but made much of her for knowing about it. The boys didn’t volunteer to tell Pryn where the money had come from, and once they got the cart under way Pryn decided not to inquire. Making camp that evening, they saw a few flickerings on the sky—but it looked as if, at least for a while, the summer nights were rained out. After cooking as usual with the younger, just as if she’d never been away, Pryn lay (as usual) in the arms of the elder, with his broken face beautiful beside her and his huge hands heavy on her back, thinking for rather a time.

  Then, on the other side of the fire, the younger pushed up on his elbow and said in his heaviest city drawl: ‘Look, if you two don’t hurry up and fuck, I won’t ever get to sleep! How do you think I get my rocks off?’

  ‘Shut up, you be-shitted goat’s ass!’ the elder shot back, sharply enough to startle Pryn, the exchange’s intensity hinting of some recent argument between them that may well, she fancied, have had her as its topic.

  The younger one chuckled and laid his dark head down. Soon Pryn heard his breathing across the fire take on the slower rhythms of sleep; then the lightly bullish flutter of snoring began from the youth warm against her—so Pryn slept too.

  Light beyond her lids…

  She pushed from under blankets and a warm arm, into cool morning. Pryn rubbed her shoulder, pulled the chained astrolabe back around her neck from where it had worked behind her in the night and, standing, looked at the sunlight coming sideways through the trees.

  On the ground, her blanket companion turned on his back.

  Beyond dead ashes the younger one’s head was completely hidden; but his foot stuck out the bedroll’s bottom.

  Pryn rubbed at her waist where lying on her knife had made her side sore. At her feet, brown eyes blinked above pitted, hairy cheeks. (In firelight that face, with its deep, irregular shadows, often looked quite marvelous. Mornings, however, puffy with sleep and occasionally with beer, it reminded her of a broken cheese.) Tousled hair raised an inch. ‘Where’re you going…?

  She whispered: ‘…some water, from the brook we passed before we made camp last night…?’ Then she went and got the clay jar from the provisions end of the cart. For the hundredth time she repressed the urge to look under the strapped-down canvas at the other end that hid whatever it was they were taking to wherever it was they were taking it. Once she had looked—only to find another canvas. But, as the elder one had explained, since it could get them in serious trouble if they encountered one of the Empress’s customs inspectors, the less she knew about it, the less likely she was to have problems should something go wrong.

  Pryn hooked the jug handle on two fingers and started along the road, repeating: nivu, nivu, nivu…which, among the things she’d thought last night, she’d decided did not have to mean either food or sex.

  After walking for three minutes, she set the empty jug on a stump she passed. An hour later, she came out on a kind of road and turned along it. When a horse-drawn wagon came up, driven by an old man with two old women in the back, she asked for a ride and got one.

  The old people didn’t talk much, but one of the women gave Pryn some hard bread and an apple out of a tightly knotted bag that took fifteen minutes to untie and retie. About two hours along the road, the man remarked that the astrolabe around Pryn’s neck looked like work of the area to which they were headed. He knew, because he’d seen designs like the one at the disk’s edge on work like that before.

  In brief, the story we might have written had things been only a little different would have told of bravery, wonder, fun, laughter, love, anger, fear, tears, reconciliation, a certain wisdom, a turn of chance, and a certain resignation—the stuff of many fine tales over the ages. But in those weeks Pryn did not once think of dragons.

  Thus, we review them briefly.

  10. Of Bronze, Brews, Dragons, and Dinners

  …The French people hated aristocrats about to lose their power more than it had ever hated them before, precisely because their rapid decline in power was not accompanied by any considerable decline in their fortunes…When noblemen lost their privileges, among others the privilege to exploit and oppress, the people felt them to be parasites, without any real function in the rule of the country. In other words, neither oppression nor exploitation is ever the main cause of resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated.

  HANNAH ARENDT,

  The Origins of Totalitarianism

  IT REARED, LOPSIDED, AT the crossroads’ southeast corner.

  Pryn looked at it, scrambled behind it, came out, walked away from it several times in several directions—now on all four rutted paths, now off in the bushes—and came back. Eventually she decided that what was currently the juction’s southeast corner had once been the center of a large, circular enclosure. Here and there the undergrowth paused at the edge of flat, uptilting stones that once, how long ago, had paved it all. Several stones were still set precisely together. And there were large cut ones off to the side that, with interruptions, defined a kind of rim. The traffic circle must once have been almost twenty meters in diameter. And on either side of the four rutted paths that joined here, hewn rocks off in the bushes suggested that all four had once been at least three times the width they were now.

  It took Pryn a good forty minutes, scrambling around in the underbrush, to ascertain all this. She was looking at the dragon—half off its pedestal and leaning to the side—trying to envision it, free of vines and lichen, as the center monument in the crossing of two great highways, when she heard hoofbeats along the western route.

  Automatically, she stepped back behind the pedestal’s half-buried corner.

  A minute later, the first six-horse wagon, shaking gilded fringe, swayed and thundered around the turn. Next came an open cart full of soldiers. The half-dozen closed wagons behind it were large as the mummers’ portable stage and prop conveyances. The horses went at a light canter—though not faster than a person might sprint. For now Pryn saw a lithe runner leap from the draped portals of a rear wagon and overtake one, another, and a third wagon, to swing up on the running board and disappear within—while from another wagon at the front another runner dropped, to let the caravan overtake him, wagon after wagon passing, till he swung up into a rear one—delivering what messages, among what personages, Pryn could not imagine.

  The caravan clattered around the turn and rumbled away north—the road down which, not an hour before, Pryn had come strolling.

  Certainly, Pryn decided in the returning silence, those loud wheels were the ones the time-obliterated highways had been built for. Once, no doubt, caravan runners could sprint on smooth pavement instead of beating through the bush along the road’s shoulder.

  Pryn came out and sat on the pedestal’s ivied corner, wondering where the caravan was coming from and what might be its business. Taking the north road like that, it could only have one destination: Kolhari—perhaps even the High Court of Eagles itself.

  She pulled a leaf from a vine that clutched the rocky base beside her.

  Through the settling dust, Tetya was coming down the road. He was the nephew of the local brewer, Old Rorkar, whose hotsheds and cooling caves were perhaps a mile up, where Pryn had been working now almost a week.

  ‘Did you see them?’ Pryn called.

  Tetya nodded, ambling.

  ‘Who do you think it could be?’

  ‘Lots of people.’ Tetya
crossed the juncture. ‘The Usurper of Strethi, perhaps—only his wagon colors are blue and orange, I think. And it could have been the Princess Elyne—though she hasn’t made a trip to these parts during my lifetime; uncle says she used to come here quite frequently. Or it could have been Lord Krodar and his entourage, which is sometimes rumored to include the Child Empress Ynelgo herself—though we’re never certain exactly when she comes. It’s always very secretive. The only way to be sure who it is, of course, is if they stop at uncle’s office and order a shipment of beer. They frequently do. But also they ride in wagons purposely painted with colors associated with great houses other than their own—to confuse the likes of you and me.’ Tetya dug a forefinger in his ear. ‘So unless they stop to order a few barrels from uncle, there’s no way to be sure.’

  Tetya was a gangling, good-natured boy. Pryn had found herself completely able to relax with his rural openness. But he also had his bothersome side. He seemed terribly young to Pryn—all elbows and ears and knees, like one of the gangling puppies lolloping about behind the brewery’s equipment shed. His beard lay in little curls over his face, with great gaps of baby-smooth cheek between. Pryn had laughed at the changing voices of the twelve-, thirteen-, and fourteen-year-old boys of her own mountain town. But Tetya’s voice seemed to have snagged permanently on those awkward intervals, still cracking and creaking at an age when most boys she’d known at home had made at least the physical part of the passage to manhood. If only from the things she’d been through since her flight above the Falthas (for, after all, she had traveled and murdered and talked with the Liberator, been shown the memory of water by Madame Keyne and had made love with a smuggler), Pryn felt she had a right to consider herself a mature woman. But once, she and Tetya had actually sat down and worked it out (with Yrnik’s help): Tetya was nineteen days older than Pryn.