Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities

by Samuel R. Delany

  ‘Would you like to see some of those ways?’ Inige asked. ‘Father has a fine collection of different kinds. I’m sure he’d like to show them to you. It’s one of his hobbies.’

  ‘It’s what the locals think of as my “magic”—but I’m sure you are too experienced to be dazzled simply by different kinds of writing.’

  ‘I would like to!’ Pryn declared. She tried to envision what ‘different kinds’ of writing might be; as her mind went from the writing she knew to the marks on her astrolabe that might be a ‘different’ writing, she felt something which she might have written as ‘my concept of writing was revised’ though she could not have written (without the actual writing of it to clarify, if not create, her thoughts) exactly what it had been revised to become. ‘Yes, if you could show me…?’

  ‘We’ll begin dinner, dear, when you come down,’ Tritty said. ‘That’ll be all right, won’t it?’ Beside the stair hung an ornate ribbon. Tritty took it and pulled sharply three times.

  ‘Certainly.’ The earl motioned Pryn toward the steps.

  ‘Can we come too?’ Lavik asked.

  ‘Of course you may,’ her father said.

  Jenta laughed. ‘I haven’t been up there in years!’ He stepped after them.

  ‘I’ll stay down here and help Mother,’ Inige said, surprising Pryn a little, since it had been his suggestion. But she was glad the others were coming.

  As they crowded to the steps, Pryn had to step around the seated boy—

  ‘Ardra, move!’ the earl said, loudly.

  And the boy was up and off somewhere out an arched door while Pryn, with broad Lavik before, strapping Jenta behind, and the earl beside her, trooped up.

  At sounds behind, Pryn looked back—

  Tritty’s ribbon had apparently summoned four, five, over half a dozen slaves! They moved about the room below, in their white collar-covers, shifting hassocks, carrying bowls, trays, bringing in new tables.

  Where in the house, Pryn wondered turning back, had they come from? Not that the house wasn’t large enough to hide a hundred. She was struck with a vision of dozens upon dozens lurking, just out of sight, lingering behind doorframes, beyond windows, in adjoining rooms—and all the while writing down everything they heard! The earl interrupted with a distressing congruence of topic that made Pryn recall Tritty’s hers/ours, to question the whole notion of the arbitrary. ‘Two things slaves are never allowed to do: learn to write—and drink. Both inflame the imagination. With slaves, that’s to be avoided.’

  The stairs rose by several more arched doors into several rough-walled (and two tapestry-covered) rooms.

  ‘I wonder if I should go check on Petal,’ Lavik said. ‘But I’m sure they’re keeping an eye on her.’ They climbed on.

  Ahead, light lapped down the rough wall over bowed steps. Pryn looked up, expecting a window. As they reached the next turn, however, the whole outer wall fell away. Only a waist-high rail of piled stones ran by the continuing steps. She looked out at shaggy hills. Glimmering water lay between them, strewn with rags of algae, and here and there a small island or a great branch caught on a submerged bar, before the inlet joined the darker glimmer of the sea. Pryn caught her breath.

  Lavik said: ‘It is a fine view, isn’t it?’

  Jenta said: ‘Did you ever get the steps at the turning there recarved?’

  ‘About a year ago,’ the earl said.

  Indeed, the steps that carried them around a turn in the runneled wall were not shallow and bowed like the ones they had been climbing, but high and cleanly angled. ‘It had gotten too dangerous to let the children come up here,’ the earl explained. They passed a rectangular cell cut into the stone beside them, perhaps six feet high and sunk another six feet into the rock face. ‘That—’ (Inside, Pryn saw some benches, a table, and a pile of armor in the far corner, from which stuck five or six different length spears, their rusted heads against the wall.) ‘—used to be my “observatory.” For about three weeks, as I remember, when I was Ardra’s age—though, as my father was fond of pointing out, there was singularly little to observe from it other than the fog rolling down from the hills at sunset to cover the water. But I saw it as a place to get above his unreasonable sulks and slave-beatings and angry outbursts at what, I can look back from this distance and recognize, was finally just his understandable distress at his ever-dwindling properties. He made me give it up in less than a month when I sprained my ankle, falling on those steps right there—’ he pointed behind them with a flourish of blue and a happy snort—‘that I only fixed last year!’

  ‘Shows how long it’s been since I’ve been back!’ Jenta gazed out to sea.

  Pryn looked up.

  On the rocky overhang above them, small bushes grew, and moss put its moist green over the undersides of the jutting stone. ‘Where are we…?’

  Jenta laughed. ‘It’s still the house. Many of the original rooms were cut into the side of the palisades here. Five or six—the Great Hall, the Small Hall, the Red Chamber, one or two others—were natural caverns. That’s why they chose to build out from them. There’re inner passages where, if you wander down them far enough, you suddenly come to a carved-out suite of rooms, complete with old, dusty furniture, that great-grandfather, or great-great-great, thought there was reason to construct—rooms even we’ve forgotten about!’

  ‘It plays havoc with the local folklore,’ Lavik said. ‘Some years ago a bunch of very serious people came down from the north to look for remnants of some ancient general who, according to a tale they had traced to this region, had been walled up in some underground pit “at the back of a deep cave.” Now, down in the back of our basement are an awful lot of walled-up chambers, holes, cells and what-have-you—really, it’s creepy down there! Obviously they were looking for somebody some great-great or other had fallen out with back at the dawn of history. After all, our dungeons were caves for an awfully long time. But no, the tale-teller hadn’t said “a castle dungeon”—he had said “at the back of a deep cave.” They had their version and they were going to stick to it. So they went poking about down in the cooling caves Old Rorkar uses at the brewery—as if they’d find anything there except the bones of slaves that had spoken out of turn to some overseer!’

  ‘And you don’t think Old Rorkar enlightened them, now do you?’ Jenta laughed again. ‘He was tickled silly by the notion that Lord Babàra’s bones might be under one of his beer troughs—that’s who they were looking for, Lord Babàra. He named this whole region after himself once, when he first came down from the north. Though I’m afraid it never stuck—except in the north. In fact, I think by now it’s even died out there. Rorkar must have kept those poor people picking and poking a whole month or more with his own “suddenly remembered” versions of this or that old tale.’

  Ahead, the steps ran out—or rather turned, Pryn saw as they neared, into a narrow crevice in the rock. The stone rail ended. Pryn looked down at craggy boulders, grass mortaring them here and there.

  The steps leading up into the fissure were much steeper. The opening itself was hardly a foot wide.

  The earl stepped aside for Pryn to mount.

  At the edge of sunlight, Pryn suddenly frowned. ‘Lord Babàra…’ Pryn looked at the earl ‘You say he named this whole region after himself? Is that why we call you people “barbarians”?’

  ‘I believe that is that origin of the word,’ his Lordship said.

  Pryn laughed. ‘I always assumed it was because you people spoke such a strange sounding language—I mean, of course, strange sounding to us. You know: ba-ba-ba-ba-ba!’ She imitated a child’s version of barbarian chatter.

  ‘Now that’s silly.’ Jenta put a hard, friendly hand on Pryn’s shoulder. ‘We don’t even have that “ba” sound in our own language. “Ba-ba-ba”—that’s how you people up north sound to us down here!’ and with a movement of only the slightest impatience, he started Pryn edging up the crevice steps.

  ‘I told you I have mastered some several
systems of writing over the years. With a number of others I have teased out the rudiments of their methods, if I have not really gained fluency in their practice. I keep them in this chamber here, have for a number of years. As I am sure you’ll see, though, the question soon becomes what is writing and what is not, The distinction itself, as examples proliferate, becomes more and more problematic.’ The chamber they entered was fairly sizable. On the counters and shelves were seashells in which leaned brushes, styli, and chisels—like the shelf under the wax tablet in the brewery office. The walls were hung with parchments and diagrams. To one side, between a row of thick columns above a waist-high wall, you could look out over hills and water toward the ocean. The sun was low enough so that at one place it put an unnaturally straight line of bright gold over the wide, shallow inlet. ‘Here, for example.’ The earl stepped up to a shelf on the wall. Pryn turned away from the carved balustrade to see what he indicated. ‘I have no idea how old this is, and yet it demonstrates for me the problem with all writing systems. You see these painted statuettes: three cows, followed by two women bent over three pots, followed by those pyramids stippled all over I have it on authority they represent heaps of grain—’

  And those are trees there!’ Pryn pointed. ‘Five, six…seven of them.’

  ‘The same authority informed me that each tree should be read as an entire orchard. The barrels at the end are most likely lined with resinated wax and filled with beer, much like the brews you help Old Rorkar produce.’

  ‘It looks like an account from a brewery.’

  ‘An informed reading,’ said the earl. ‘At least that’s what my authority informed me.’

  ‘But what about those two pictures beside it?’ Pryn asked. Standing in a frame on either side of the row of statuettes was some sort of picture. ‘Is the one there drawn on fabric?’

  ‘Actually the one you’re looking at, there to the right, is inked on a vegetable fiber unrolled from a species of swamp reed.’

  Pryn looked more closely: simple strokes portrayed three four-legged animals. From the curves at their heads, clearly they were intended to be cattle—no doubt the same cows that the statuettes represented; for next to them were more marks most certainly indicating two schematic, sexless figures bending over three triangular blotches—the pots. Pryn recalled the ceramic buckets from the New Market and wondered, as she had not when looking at the sculpture, whether the original buckets had contained fresh water or excreta. Beside them were more marks picturing trees, grain, barrels…‘And this other picture?’ Left of the sculptures, in the other frame some dry, brownish stuff was stretched. On it were blackened marks, edged with a nimbus that suggested burning. ‘What’s this?’ Asking, she recognized the even clumsier markings as even more schematic animals, people, pots, trees, barrels, grain…

  ‘The same authority assured me it was flesh once flayed from his own horridly scarred body—he was a successful traveling merchant when I knew him, which lent its own dubiously commercial reading to the three pieces he sold me. Myself, I’m more inclined to suppose it is the branded skin of some slave’s thigh, stripped from the living leg; all too often—five times? six times? seven?—I saw my father oversee the commission of such atrocities on the bodies of the criminals among our own blond, blue-eyed chattels. From even further north than you, that scarred black man had, no doubt, as many reasons for speaking truth as he had for lying. But consider all three—’

  Pryn did; and frowned.

  ‘All instinct tells us: one of them must be art, the one that demonstrates a clear concern for the detail of what it represents that is finally one with its concern for the detail of its own material construction, so that either concern, whether for representation or just skill in the maneuvering of its own material, might replace the other as justification for our contemplation without the object’s abnegating its claim to a realism including and transcending either accuracy or craft. The same instinct tells us with equal insistence that one must be what we have come to think of uncritically as writing, if only because of its smooth, dispassionate surface that proclaims an enterprise which, even if it were contained in some larger, committed reality—commercial, explorative, vengeful—still, as it is contained, is separate from the container. That instinct also tells us, shrieks at us, rather, that one must be pure ideological imposition, both undeniable accusation and irrevocable sentence carried out with the same terroristic strokes, the trace of an act that is both violation and revelation of the worst that can pass between two persons blinded by the illusion, ensnared in the reality, of what we slight with the word “power” and only observe accurately when we imagine gods beyond language. That you and I, from the north and south, would probably agree on which of the three models corresponds to which of my three descriptions is only, itself, a sign of the unity of our cultures despite the illusory distance between them. But because we have both traveled those distances, you once, and I many times, no doubt we can both conceive of cultures that could read any of the three differently from the way we happen to—which conception itself is merely an ornamentation, a flourish, a personal nuance of handwriting on the common sign of our political commonality, only meaningful in terms of the political difference it might—someday—engender. The problem, however, about which my authority was simply mute, despite his other lies and truths, is: Which of the three came first? For even market mummers could easily construct three different skits, depending. To restate (and so, thoroughly to distort) the question: Which one of the three inspired, which one of the three contaminated, which one of the three first valorized the subsequent two in our cultural market of common conceptions? Suppose the brutal, unitary accusation-and-punishment was the initial construction…and later two unconnected scribes tried to create their later models, one purely beautiful, one purely factual? Certainly, the terroristic origin would haunt both their efforts for the knowledgeable reader, destroying any claim to either responsible beauty or responsible disinterest. But then, suppose it was the disinterested scribe who first realized, in the material under hand, that pure description of fields and fruit and workers, from which, at a later time, some brutal creature, blinded by justice or pride or profit or the subtle interplay between, realized, while contemplating that disinterested account, that a slave had lied, that a crime had been committed, that report and reality between them displayed some incriminating incongruity, and who responded by a brutal reproduction of the disinterested report to convict the slave bodily, a report which, in one of those models, we now—for our awed, if not cringing instruction—possess. Suppose, at the same time, another scribe was dazzled by the coolness of the disinterest enough to realize how beauty burns over and around that rigid, frigid abstraction and so created a scorching rendition of it to tease and terrify us with its ever-proliferating suggestions for further readings? Doesn’t the originary disinterest, however polluted by these later visions, somehow redeem them? As we pursue our readings, aren’t they clearly revealed as misreadings, misreadings that might be judiciously, if not judicially, forbidden as an intolerable abuse at a later, happier hour? Only now suppose the aesthetic construction came first: the beauty of some purely natural process, involving real cows, real pots, real orchards, real grain, and that other reality—of real clay, real papyrus, real ink, real flesh, real fire—came together in a moment uncalled-for by any connivance save its own evanescent intensity; and suppose, later, two scribes made their own copies, one a pure description, a purely memorial schema, a purely critical reduction, the other an angry recognition of some cruel replication in life of what art had suggested, repressed, portrayed, distorted. Again, the initial apprehension of beauty, in an entirely different way from the initial apprehension of disinterest, redeems both modes of later inhumanity it engenders on the grounds that they are, still, misreadings—one an underreading, one an overreading certainly, but nevertheless both misguided, because impoverished, because unappreciative of the mystical, beautiful, originary apprehension which a more generous r
eader can always reinscribe over what the misguided two chose to inflict in terms of pain or boredom. Observe the three, girl. One of these is at the beginning of writing—the archetrace: but we will never know which. The unanswered and unanswerable question—that undismissible ignorance—signs my authority’s failure. And I foresee the trialogue, now with one voice silenced, now with another overweeningly shrill, now with the three in harmony, now with all in cacophony, continuing as long as people cease to speak—and all speech is, after all, about what is absent in the world, if not to the senses—before the wonder, the mystery, the confusing, enciphered presence of a written text. But certainly you have seen these…?’ The earl stepped along the shelf.

  Pryn followed, glancing for a moment out between the hills. Lavik had taken a seat at one end of the railing; Jenta sat at the other. Both looked at the inlet. The glimmering gold line had lengthened on the surface with the falling sun; another glimmering line now crossed it, as if some irregularity beneath the water were creating a difference in the surface ripples that was, over that distant area, brilliantly distinguished by the lowering light.

  ‘These ceramic tokens here—’ The earl pointed; and Pryn turned to look—‘are an old method of account-keeping employed both north and south of Nevèrÿon. This has been used time out of mind and will probably go on long after the wonders of our nation are forgotten. Each clay token represents a different product, just as the more ornate statuettes do, and the amounts are represented by the number of tokens or, sometimes, by special tokens used in conjunction. A non-Nevèrÿon merchant might seal a number of them in a soft clay jar, which then becomes the contract, the order, the invoice. But notice the jar, here.’ The earl lifted an ovoid bulla, definitely dry. He shook it, clinking the tokens within. His hand carried the dull clay from shadow into light. ‘The marks on the surface are where whoever sealed the message inside first pressed the tokens into the surface of the jar while it was still wet, so that we might have a visible list of the contents—as though representation itself were a containable product that might, itself, be represented, ordered, organized as to type and quantity. The list allows us to see some picture of what is within, which picture can always be checked—in a moment of contention—by breaking the jar before witnesses. But again, we are left with the problematics all sculptural writing, whether monumental or amphoral, invoke. What should be called original and what should be called copy? Does the visible list merely confirm the accuracy of the representation within? Or do the tokens, when revealed, prove the accuracy of the list? Is it the visible writing or the invisible writing which merits the privileged status of “originary truth”? Those so necessary instincts tell us that the copy, whichever it might be, is of the same order of reality as the tools with which it is made—merely an instrument in some representational enterprise. Still, it is only the most unsophisticated and uncritical notion of commercial or judicial time that supports the instinctive, social, uncritical answer.’ The earl stepped on.