The warmth shifted; the breathing changed.
Pryn looked down. ‘She’ll be all right, don’t you think?’
‘Sure,’ Lavik said. ‘She’s been on the mend for two, really three, days now. Though, if you listen to the old slaves upstairs, who, for some reason, everyone thinks know about such things—and that’s all Tritty ever listens to—they’ll scare you to death!’ She glanced at Petal over Pryn’s arm to check her own pronouncement of recuperation. ‘She’ll be fine. You know—’ Lavik’s tone grew thoughtful—‘I was thinking about something you said—to father, when we were up on the hill. When you travel to Kolhari from the south, the road really goes around the marsh below the city, joins the northern road, and enters over the same hills you come over from the mountains. But you’ve seen it on maps…?’
‘Yes?’ Pryn said, listening to the dark around them, which sounded the same tone on which Lavik spoke.
‘Do you remember,’ Lavik asked, ‘when I said I’d never seen Kolhari at dawn from the hills?’
Yes?’
‘Well, when I went to court, it wasn’t just my furniture in the provision wagon. In fact I went with nearly a dozen nobles’ children, boys and girls—more girls than boys, actually. When we reached the hills above the city, they stopped our sleeping carriage—it was dawn. We all woke up, the few of us who’d managed to sleep. The drivers and chaperones called the boys out to see. Everyone started out, I remember, but they told the girls that we had to stay inside, because it wasn’t seemly for young ladies to go pell-melling out on the highroad in their night shifts, even if it was dawn and nobody was about. So we stayed in, all excited at what the two—yes, there were only two—boys might be doing. And you know something? As soon as he came back from court, Jenta immediately saw the city in the water—Neveryóna. Just the way you did. But J couldn’t! We’d both always heard about it, of course. But it had to be explained to me, and the streets and alleys and buildings had to be pointed out and outlined before, at sunset, I could even be sure it was really there! And it was only because I had seen some city maps of Kolhari, finally, that I was able to be sure what the rest were talking about.’ They walked through the dark gardens, whose extent and plan Pryn kept silently trying to assess. ‘Do you know what a map is? I mean a real map?’
‘Yes…’ Responding to Lavik’s deep seriousness, Pryn spoke a little lower. ‘Of course. Of course I do.’
‘You’ve seen one?’ Lavik asked. ‘I don’t just mean the silly scratches on the astrolabe this evening that don’t mean anything at all.’
‘Well, I’ve certainly heard of them,’ Pryn said. ‘Heard people speak of them and describe what they do. Sailors use them for navigating coastlines—my aunt explained to me about that. And I’ve seen one of them, anyway.’
‘What did it look like?’ Lavik asked.
‘Well, it was…made of clay and stuff. It was of a garden. It was covered with something that had the same texture as grass. And little molded trees were set about on it. And a toy house. Water ran through the space where the stream went, down the falls, and over bits of ceramic molded like rocks and statues—’
Lavik laughed, quietly and shyly. ‘That’s a garden maquette! We’ve got over a dozen, scattered among the maintenance sheds all over the grounds. They make it easier for the gardeners to keep the plants in order if you’ve really got extensive landscaped property—another one of Belham’s notions. Most gardeners, you know, don’t read—maps or anything else. But you’ve never seen a map…!’ In the dark she looked at Pryn. They passed a flare, and her serious, southern face brightened—flickering—and faded.
Pryn looked away in the dark and saw nothing.
‘You haven’t seen a map! A map is just marks on a piece of parchment. Oh, you can read distances and directions on it—but not much else.’ Lavik paused. ‘I knew you’d never seen one. Somehow, from things you said, I just knew you hadn’t really seen one. I’ve never seen a city—I mean a real one, from outside it, all at once! And you’ve never seen a map!’
Pryn looked back at Lavik, who now looked away—and who sounded as alone as Pryn had ever felt. Pryn watched her, and felt as close to her as she had ever felt to anyone. After a few moments, Pryn looked away, so that she could not see if Lavik looked back at her.
Petal coughed.
The two plump young women, one a mother and one all but motherless, walked through the dark garden, shoulder brushing shoulder, bare feet now loud and now soft on the leaf-strewn brick, and were alone together.
Ahead, Ardra’s back, in the rough cloth, became visible as he passed another torch.
‘Something in the way you talked about it just made me sure you’d never seen one,’ Lavik repeated. ‘Though I swear, I couldn’t tell you what. I don’t know, but once you have a baby, you feel a lot of things—but you don’t do too much analytical thinking.’
‘I know,’ Pryn said, who, in fabled Ellamon, had babysat for many of her cousins’ children and had been, for days at a time, the sole care of her baker cousin’s two-year-old son. ‘When I take care of one for more than three hours at a stretch, I can’t think at all! That’s why I don’t want to have any myself.’ She hugged Petal, sweet and sick as she was, who felt wonderful.
‘Oh, that’s not true!’ Lavik protested. ‘I mean, well…after a week or so, you begin to think again. A little bit, at least. You really do. That is, if you take care of it all by yourself. Of course once the slaves begin taking over, then what you spend all your time thinking about is how to get them to take over more. But you really do get back to some…thinking. Eventually—I think.’
‘I think,’ Pryn said, ‘that babies are wonderful and beautiful and comforting and rewarding, the solace of the present and the hope—the real hope—of the future.’ She sighed. ‘And I don’t want one. At least not now.’
‘Mmm,’ Lavik said.
Pryn glanced at the young woman beside her and saw her looking ahead at her step-brother.
‘Well,’ Lavik said, ‘I feel the same way; and I am glad I have mine. Now. And…’ She looked down at the brick—‘I’ll die a thousand deaths if she does die. But still, I don’t see how anyone who has taken care of one couldn’t understand what you say.’ When she looked up in the passing flare, her face bore her family’s absolute smile.
Pryn looked at the stiff-kneed boy marching ahead of them and wished he would come and carry little Petal, who, small as she was, had begun to seem heavy—for now Pryn also felt that, without the baby between them, she might be able to talk about more with Lavik. At the same time, she resolved not to offer Petal back to her mother until they were again inside the house.
Lavik said: ‘It is nice of you to carry her for me. I appreciate it.’
Pryn wondered if her great-aunt had felt the same way when she’d been presented with Pryn’s own, wiggling, wheezing self by Pryn’s mother, fifteen—well, a month shy of sixteen, now—years ago.
‘We’re almost at the door.’ Lavik touched Pryn’s arm. The path had taken them in a circle through the near night.
Ahead, Ardra walked up to a vast, mottled nothingness and disappeared into it: the castle door.
Then Pryn, Lavik, and Petal went through it too.
13. Of Survival, Celebration, and Unlimited Semiosis
…Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere…
(BARTHES)
What does this paradoxical statement imply? First, it implies that a single reading is composed of the already-read, that what we can see in a text the first time is already in us, not in it; in us insofar as we ourselves are a stereotype, an already-read text; and in the text only to the extent that the already-read is that aspect of a text that it must have in common with its reader in order for it to be readable at all. When we read a text once, in other words, we can see in it only what we have already learned to see before.
BARBARA JOHNSON,
The Critical Difference
‘THERE.’ TRITTY
POINTED TO the goblets on the tray the elderly slave-woman carried: their sides were joined slabs of vitric red and blue, framed in cast metal, hugely heavy.
‘And here…’ The earl lifted a thin pitcher from a tray of pitchers the red-headed slaveboy brought up. ‘This one’s yours.’ He tilted it—and Pryn quickly brought her goblet, in both hands, beneath the lip. Water-clear and tossing back firelight from the lamps’ flaming and the goblet’s own glistening sides, liquid filled it.
Because it was so heavy, she lifted it quickly to taste: the coldest water, with a fruity ghost—sharpness interrupted, which made her take a larger swallow in memory of initial cool.
Greater sharpness made her head reel.
The earl set the pitcher down, picked up another, and poured dark liquid into the goblet Lavik held.
‘Now you must tell us your own story.’ Inige came over with his own goblet, which his father filled from still another pitcher with something opaque and green. ‘Tritty’s right. It always happens when you invite guests that you expect to entertain. All you end up doing is trying to impress them. You must tell a story of your own, because we really want to hear it!’
‘Ardra,’ Tritty said, ‘come here and have your drink. It’s tradition, darling.’
‘I don’t like the blue,’ Ardra said. ‘I think the red tastes better.’ He stood up from the stone steps, strode forward, picked up a goblet from the proffered tray, a pitcher from the other, and poured himself a goblet of…blue liquid, set the pitcher back on the tray, went to the steps, and, taking a noisy sip, sat.
‘Ardra…!’ Tritty said.
‘The trouble with stories—’ Pryn laughed—‘is that when I write them in my head, they’re fun because I can write them slowly, make changes, correct them if they’re wrong, make sure all the names have the right initial signs. But if I tell them, then they come out any-old-how or however. I don’t think I’ll ever be a tale-teller. I suppose I could tell about my trip from Ellamon to Kolhari, the men who captured me, or the women, or what happened to me later in the city—only…’ She blinked about the room and, in momentary embarrassment, took a long, throat-burning draught. The strange sharpness struck. She coughed. ‘Only…I don’t really understand all that happened, myself. And besides—’ She coughed again—‘you’re not very interested in the people I met, which is all I could talk about anyway…’
Pryn thought she saw their hand-waving protests, but heat blurred her eyes and made her unsteady. Somebody put a hand on her shoulder—she fell, or sat (she’d thought she was going to fall…) on the couch behind her.
She still held the goblet.
‘Are they going to bring the baby back down again…? I suppose it’s too late. I could tell about when I came south from Kolhari. This man I came with; and his friend. Smugglers—only I’d be embarrassed to; besides, I’m not interested in those people anymore…though they taught me enough. A story?’ She took another long sip from the metal rim, because the drink’s effect seemed the less the more of it she swallowed—this one didn’t burn so. Was her mouth numbing? ‘A story. Well. There was an ordinary, fifteen-year-old girl who looked like a beautiful young queen…or was there a queen who looked like an ordinary, bushy-headed girl?’
‘This sounds like a real story!’ she heard Inige say.
Pryn smiled.
Her goblet was vast as the torchlit sea, its clear waves sloshing pink and blue slopes.
‘…only I can’t remember what version I’m supposed to…I could tell them…all. Now…after the girl had done all sorts of terrible things and learned all sorts of magical things, in their proper sequence, her maternal father…’ Pryn frowned into the drink, which seemed to have cloudy streaks through it, perhaps from her own spittle. ‘In one version, it’s her dead father, I think. In another it’s her maternal…uncle—he took her up into a stone chamber, on a hill, or in a tower, just like yours I guess, where she saw a…city!’ Pryn looked up and narrowed her eyes in the lamplight’s dazzle. Tears banked her lower lids, obscuring the backlit listeners reclining about the chamber. ‘At a great dinner for her—really, this has been a wonderful dinner! I’ve never eaten food like this before in my life or drunk such…at a great dinner, her absent father, or her maternal uncle did something terrible…’
The silence broke in lingering waves; after lots of it, Ardra said, swinging his fists between his knees: ‘It’s a good story. We all know it. And that’s a good place to pause. But it doesn’t end there. You have to go on.’
Pryn took another drink that was so cold yet made her so warm. She blinked. ‘…He did something terrible. Only I don’t remember…his family name. There’s good reason to remember it, only I don’t know if I ever knew what it was.’ One of them had moved…
Pryn looked up on red. Her eyes moved up over red. It was Tritty’s dress, because Tritty’s face was at the top, smiling down.
Tritty touched her shoulder. ‘That’s a marvelous story—one I’ve loved for years. We all have. Old stories are the best, I think. That’s one of the most beautifully crafted parts of the engine to raise Neveryóna. But you can’t sit here and tell me you’ve forgotten the family name of the queen’s maternal uncle! That’s the whole point—at least it is if you’re telling it to us!’
‘I’m not a good tale-teller,’ Pryn apologized. ‘I’d much rather write it down, where I could think about what I’m supposed to be saying.’ She felt unsteady, unhappy, and out of place. ‘If there weren’t the pressure of having to tell it, I could find out the real story, all of it. I could write why it means something special to me, too, as well as you—’
‘Jue-Grutn,’ Tritty prompted. ‘Go on, now. We all know it, so it doesn’t matter how well you tell it. Jue-Grutn was the family name of the queen’s maternal uncle. The name of my husband—and his father; and his father’s father. With very old stories, such distinctions cease to matter. But that’s the part we love to hear most—here. Whenever we can, we get a guest to…But it’s part of the engine—my husband said he was explaining it upstairs? We have a vested interest, of course. I’m sure you can understand…’
Pryn’s gaze lost itself in her shimmering drink. ‘The Earl Jue-Grutn gave her…’
Then, at once, what shimmered was terror. Whether it was inside her or outside her, she didn’t know. She didn’t move.
Under flamelight, liquid flashed.
Did she hurl the heavy goblet?
Did she scream?
Did she throw out an arm, upsetting some small table?
Did she overturn her couch as she stood, so that the bolsters flopped on the carpet?
Did she lurch across the floor, shoving aside first Inige and then Lavik, who moved to stop her?
Later she was able to reason that she had done at least three and had definitely not done one. But which three and which one, though she would even list them and list them again on wax, clay, and parchment in every conceivable order, she was never sure. Was it the Wild Ini’s blade she waved above her head? Was it a carving knife snatched from the side-table that made Jenta spread his arms and fall back, while the earl came up behind him, then turn to grab Ardra, who’d rushed forward? She remembered the earl’s cloak, flung up and out, tenacious of its blues in lamplight. Did he try to stop her? Did she run into it? Or through it? Someone yelled, ‘Stop her!’ Certainly it was the earl and not she who bellowed, ‘The astrolabe, no—!’ Certainly someone yelled, ‘No, don’t let her—!’ But she was out one arch or another.
And nothing, really, was certain.
Did she run through myriad halls, searching through corridors and chambers for an exit? Did slaves in white collar-covers run out and, confused at her career, step back? Did she plunge through the low stone passage to burst into the black garden, starred with lamps—
She pushed through hangings, half-opened doors, bushes, branches, into dark. She remembered grasping a branch to come to an unsteady halt—torch-bearing men passed below the rock she swayed on, Inige at their head, iron and w
hite cloth about the other necks, talking: ‘This way…gone in this direction…you said you heard…’ mixed with the barbarian tongue. Later she hesitated on a muddy stretch before a stubbly field, out on which she could see a leafless tree—so there must have been moonlight…? She had no memory of a moon. Were there voices? She dashed across the stubble, hearing her feet slap in the ground below the grass, wetter than she’d thought. She plunged into dappled dark that cut her and tickled her and beat her hips and shoulders, catching in the chain about her neck as if the twigs were trying to snatch away the clinking astrolabe, which she would have gladly torn off her neck and given up. She’d said she didn’t want it…
…blinking, trying to push herself up, with pebbles under her hands. She blinked again, at something huge and pale. She tried to turn her face away from it before she realized it was the moon, bigger than she had ever seen a moon in the mountains, just above the horizon—which rippled.
Pryn pushed back, pebbles under her hip, dragging her feet beneath her. Pebbles rolled down the slope. She looked up at a tall rock, with trees beyond it. She looked behind her. Another rocky finger prodded crookedly at the night, but shorter.
Both rocks were chalky white.
Pryn pushed to sitting, dragging her heels back, and locked her arms about her knees, resting her chin on them, in a lucidity that seemed near sickness, though if she didn’t move, she might be all right. She bit her inner lip and looked across rippling fog.
At the moon…
Cawing, and she looked up—to see leaves fall and what seemed a flurry of leaves; only it was the bird itself, momentarily at the proper angle for her to catch the wing’s green before ivory light leached all color. In a chatter of little stones and leaves, Pryn suddenly pushed to her feet. She stepped to the ledge.
Below rolled fog; below that, water. Pryn blinked. Wave rolled over wave. Taking a great breath, which made her stomach ill and her balance shaky, she shouted as loud as she could: ‘I am Pryn, and I have come to warn the Worm of the Sea of the Blue Heron’s…!’ She did not know where the words came from, nor their proper conclusion. But a sudden gout, breaking silver above the mist, made her push the heel of her hand up hard against her mouth and step back.
Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities Page 41