‘it’s a piece of local work. You were in Neveryóna. You met somebody there who gave it to you. Just like you said. When I was a boy, sometimes when I’d go exploring, I used to find things. Old things. Like that. Sometimes I gave them to people. If I didn’t want them myself. That’s nothing extraordinary.’
Although Pryn didn’t want to protect or exploit the astrolabe, she was wary of mentioning the slaves’ responses. Those responses were now clearly in her mind. ‘And you?’ She leaned forward to look across the table at the girl squatting at the door. ‘Do you know anything about this?’
‘Ah, you see!’ Rorkar cried. ‘She asks the master and the slave, both – now that’s his Lordship’s style! I think she wants to be a little like his Lordship. Well, everyone does. It’s a fine style too, as far as it goes – at any rate, it makes a fine appearance. Though I still don’t trust him – however it looks! I’m not saying you should or you shouldn’t. He’s invited you for dinner. It’s up to you. What could be special about it, anyway?’
Pryn blinked. The old peasant could switch subjects as abruptly as he could ride one beyond bearing, ‘I really don’t know,’ Pryn said, ‘I just thought you might know something more about it than I did.’
‘Oh,’ Rorkar grunted. ‘Well, I don’t. And it’s getting dark.’ He drained his mug, set it down. ‘No more,’ he said to the squatting slave, who was not about to move toward refilling. ‘This isn’t one of those places like his Lordship’s, where cookfires and nightlamps battle with darkness halfway to sunrise. No, I’m an ordinary man who must toil like all ordinary men.’ He put his palms on his knees.
‘And I’d best get back to the dormitory before all the light’s gone.’ Pryn stood up from the table. She added, just to try switching the subject on her own: ‘I’d heard talk that his Lordship was some kind of magician.’ She stepped around the table’s corner. ‘But it was only chatter from some workers.’
‘A magician?’ Rorkar grunted again. ‘Oh, yes, the barbarians will chatter on about such things – and so will he, from time to time, with his “ways to assist the waning powers.” But I’ve never seen him do any magic. Not that one reserves belief only for what one can see – like some ordinary worker who won’t even believe there’s a town over the hill unless you carry him there in a cart. Still … I wouldn’t trust him.’
Pryn walked towards the door. ‘Well, good night.’
‘Good night,’ Rorkar said. ‘Yes, good night. It was good of you to come. Good night.’
The slave stood.
‘Yes,’ Rorkar said loudly. ‘I forgot. I didn’t mean anything by forgetting.’ He waved his small, knobby hand at the slave. ‘Show her to the door.’
Because the master’s answers had revealed so little, Pryn found herself staring at the back of the slave preceding her along the dark passage. But the slave had answered nothing either. In the dark, all the anxiety of Bruka’s outburst and the earl’s – yes – unmotivated invitation swelled. Walking behind this girl, this slave, this faceless sign of the human, this collared node of labor and instruction, Pryn felt a moment of disorientation which imagination answered with an image, not of the Liberator, but of Pryn herself wearing the iron collar. She was astonished to feel before that image a relief as intense as the previous anxiety, an intensity as strong as any desire, sexual or other, she’d ever known.
Outside, it was lighter than she’d expected.
Leaving the house to walk down the hill, she began a silent dialogue, mostly with Old Rorkar, about what an exasperating, embarrassing, and rude man he was; how all his prattle about lack of appearances and doing the ordinary thing had made her, an ordinary girl, as uncomfortable as it was possible to be – what must his nephew have felt! That she didn’t have to ask. She had an aunt, no different from him at all! That terrified pettiness was what she had left! That was what she had abandoned. A good man? Yes – even perhaps a Tratsin when he was twenty or twenty-five. But today, he was Rorkar. And that was not what she had come to the end of the world to find! Throughout this little mummer’s playlet she kept protesting: ‘Sitting there, at your table, you made me feel like a slave!’ Or: ‘Bound in the ordinary restraints of good manners, I might as well have been your slave!’ Sometimes playing through, at this point she would march over and take the collar off the squatting girl by the door and clap it around her own neck. Sometimes she would arrive for the encounter already wearing the shocking iron – that she would get a smith to forge for her from the growing collection of small coins under her straw pallet with which Rorkar was paying her. Well, she didn’t have quite enough just yet … During the ninth or thirteenth time through this skit which gave her such satisfaction – and which she’d all but resolved she would write down sometime tomorrow – it occurred to Pryn: She hadn’t felt all that much embarrassment or discomfort, at least not with the intensity that, in her little drama, she’d been declaring. But she had ridden a dragon; she was extraordinary. That was what freed her to protest – or to take on the collar. After all, she realized, she really wanted to wear it because the slave was the one person in the room whose feelings she had no notion of whatsoever (was she really ignorant? Or did she, like Bruka, know, perhaps, everything?), so that finally it had seemed that within the iron ring was a space of mystery, excitement, and adventure where only an extraordinary person might go without terror (perhaps a little fear, yes), like herself – or the Liberator. Who else would dare? Certainly not his Lordship – not somebody who had ridden a dragon under such tamed conditions it practically didn’t count.
Or did it?
She reached the workers’ barracks, with its slatted door, its vermin-infested roof beams. (Had these once been slave quarters?) She went to the women’s end of the dormitory and found her blanket on its fresh straw, between two barbarian women, one of whom slept with her eight-year-old son who had something wrong up his nose and snored wetly. Well, Old Rorkar had managed to give her one piece of information, however clumsily, that she was glad of. She shouldn’t trust the earl. She shifted the astrolabe on its chain from under her shoulder to a more comfortable position, felt the knife secreted with her sparse moneys beneath Madame Keyne’s washed and folded shift on which her head lay. But of course, she reflected, what was there to trust or not to trust him with, even if the astrolabe were the object of his interest? She envisioned herself removing the chain from her neck and tossing it to him – or presenting it graciously to him as a gift – in either case, the same sort of amusingly arrogant gesture as taking on the collar. And probably as unnecessary.
Pryn slept.
11
Of Family Gatherings, Grammatology, More Models, and More Mysteries
The birth of political power, which seems to be related to the last great technological revolution (cast iron), at the threshold of a period which would not experience profound shocks until the appearance of industry, also marks the moment when blood ties began to dissolve. From then on, the succession of generations leaves the sphere of pure cyclic nature and becomes oriented to events, to the succession of powers. Irreversible time is now the time of those who rule, and dynasties are its first measure. Writing is its weapon. In writing, language attains its full independent reality of mediating between consciousnesses. But this independence is identical to the general independence of separate power as the mediation which forms society. With writing there appears a consciousness which is no longer carried and transmitted directly among the living: an impersonal memory, the memory of the administration of society. ‘Writings are the thoughts of the State; archives are its memory,’ (Novalis).
– GUY DEBORD
Society of the Spectacle
After the noon eating break came an hour when the auxiliary cooling cave produced huge amounts of noise. The chains and pulleys, by which empty barrels were hauled down from the barrel pile, knocked against the stacked containers; the swinging barrels rasped and banged the hauling links.
There was not, however, much work done.
One workman lowered a barrel by a chain and pulley, taking as long as ten minutes to do it, while another knocked it back and forth with a guide pole – to make more noise.
On the rocky floor, a dozen workers just … stood.
Then the more industrious ones, usually women, took down the long wooden paddles to skim the fluffy scum off the troughs over the chamber floor, knocking the mess into the barrel. The paddle handles clacking the barrel rim made more noise still – while another barrel got lowered from the barrel stack, and sometimes raised again, then lowered once more. The scum-filled barrel was finally rolled out through the main cooling cave and put with the barrels of scum skimmed from the main cave’s troughs. Set out in a clearing by an oak grove, they stood till local farmers, driving up, carted them off for fertilizer.
During the same hour, the main cooling cavern was a fury of after-lunch activity, with mule carts and paddle cleaners and troops of skimmers and barrel-stackers and barrel-rollers. But anyone passing the half-closed gate of the auxiliary cave heard such a racket knocking and banging within, that they’d surely think twice as much work was taking place inside as in the bustle out here.
It was all acoustics.
On Pryn’s fourth day, Yrnik had assigned her, among her accounting duties, to keep count on the comparative number of scum barrels that came out of the auxiliary cave and out of the main cave. Once stacked outside, the barrels’ origins were indistinguishable; and the farmers were always coming up to pick up a barrel or two of free fertilizer anyway, so that even markings would not have been truly efficient.
Pryn kept count.
Each day the main cave produced between forty and fifty barrels of yellow-green gunk.
The auxiliary cave, Pryn realized as she stood among the men and women along the cave wall, listening to barrels bang, could easily have filled twelve or thirteen, given the number of wide, wooden, first-fermentation settling troughs foaming over the floor.
That afternoon it produced three.
Pryn passed hours watching the whole infinitely delayed operation.
When she went off to the equipment store (the converted barracks that included Yrnik’s office), she stood for a long while before the wax-covered board Yrnik had hung on the wall for temporary notes. On a ledge under it was a seashell in which Yrnik kept the pointed sticks he’d carved for styluses. An oil lamp with a broad wick sat beside the shell. You used it to melt the wax when notes had to be erased over a large area. Pryn picked up a stylus and looked at the board’s translucent yellow.
Once she said out loud: ‘But I’m not a spy …!’
The main cave had put out forty-seven barrels of fertilizer that day.
Pryn took the stick and gouged across a clear space: ‘Main cave, forty-one barrels – auxiliary cave, nine barrels.’
She looked at that a while, rereading it silently, mouthing the words, running them through her mind as she had run her dialogue on the way back to the dormitory last night: ‘Forty-seven’? ‘Three’? she said to herself in several tones of voice. ‘Who am I to commit myself to a truth so far from what is expected?’ Over the next few days she could push what she might write closer to what she’d seen. But that would do for now. ‘To write for others,’ she thought, ‘it seems one must be a spy – or a teller of tales.’ She put the stick back in its shell.
The wax was covered almost equally with her own and Yrnik’s markings. (In the bottom corner were some of Tetya’s practicings, in signs notably larger.) Bushels of barley, barrels of beer; names of fields, numbers of workers; names of workers, numbers of barrels; names of customers, numbers of orders; comments on qualities of rope, quantities of carrots, amounts of crockery for the eating hall, numbers of pruning hooks for the orchards. Notes Yrnik decided to keep more than a few days, Pryn would transcribe on clay tablets that it was also her job to flatten, carry out to dry, and bring in to stack against the barracks wall. Sometimes she remembered har’Jade, with new sympathy for a secretary’s job – for ‘Yrnik’s secretary/ Tetya’s tutor’ was Pryn’s official, double title. When the wax on the board was melted with the lamp and pressed flat, now with the thumb, now with the hand’s heel, frequently it retained ghosts of old characters within its translucence. Still on the board were the half-legible memories of more than a year’s production. Surface and ghosts together waited for new inscriptions.
For the next three days Pryn watched the men and women loitering in the auxiliary cave. For the next three days she adjusted her figures.
This afternoon, however, standing around with the other loiterers, she noticed something – or rather, began to think articulately about something she’d noticed in the days before. Most of the workers gathered here in the auxiliary cave were old. Five were definitely sick – she could imagine Madame Keyne sending them home. A few, like herself, were new or inexperienced. Nobody laughed or joked; it was too loud. The workers stood or leaned on the wall, watching. The first day she’d come, their faces had been strange; but now this aging woman, the other old man, that hare-lipped boy were familiar. For them all she could construct solid reasons why they used this hour’s sham work – a sham that seemed to have grown without conspiracy. Watching, she tried to remember if she had known all this on the first day she’d stumbled on them here, so that she’d altered her figures out of inarticulate knowledge of the greater situation. But no. It had been more the anxiety at writing down something too far from the wanted.
Finally she went back out into the main cave: fifty-one barrels.
The auxiliary cave had filled two.
Returning to the storehouse office, Pryn was wondering whether to adjust that ‘two’ up to a ‘six,’ a ‘seven,’ or an ‘eight,’ when Tetya passed the office door: ‘I saw the earl’s cart drive up – !’
Pryn grabbed a stylus from the seashell, scratched ‘fiftyone’ and ‘two,’ then dashed out.
Would it be a great wagon with six horses like the ones that had rumbled past her the afternoon at the crossroads, when she had first heard the earl’s name? No. She repeated it to herself three times, five times, two more times. No. No. She should expect nothing grander than the canopied cart that had conveyed her to Madame Keyne’s (Might the earl drive himself …?) and must not be disappointed if it were an open workcart of the sort she had ridden away from Kolhari in, or even the flat wooden-railed kind that rolled up to the oak grove to take off the fertilizer. She came out the storehouse door. His Lordship was the sort of man to value the utility of a common workcart …
Pryn stopped.
Standing on the road – well, it was a cart, because it had three horses at one end. A woman drove it – a slave with a white damasked collar-cover. The object itself, however, made Pryn want to laugh, not from derision, but from inability to take in its opulence! Her first writable thought: it was an oversized reproduction of something yanked from the earth, a rootish knot with all sorts of excrescences, off-shoots, and out-juttings.
She walked toward it. Was it symmetrical? The far side, which she couldn’t see directly, still exhibited the same overall form as the near.
She walked around it.
The slave made a point of not watching.
The back was more ornate than the front. Its sides were intricately carved. Certainly the designs looked regular – though the reason she would have written ‘certainly’ in their description was because, when she was three steps closer, it became clear that they were not; both the ‘certainty’ of their similarity and the ‘clarity’ of their differences were lost in the decorative profusion. Well …
It had wheels. There was a place to climb into it.
Pryn climbed.
The bench was covered with material beneath which was something soft as fresh straw but without straw’s pokes and prickles. Bits of torn fabric? The f
inest moss? What, she wondered, was under that dark purple? The soft, sloughed scales of baby dragons?
While she wondered, the driver bent forward; the cart started south.
Relinquishing the mystery of the cushion stuffing, she looked over the far side of the cart’s carved wall – the carvings there were completely different from those on the side she’d first seen. Those on the side she had climbed up suggested animals, rocks, and clouds. She immediately slid back over that side to make sure; those on the far side (while she looked at animals, rocks, and clouds she was sure) had suggested plants, birds, and fish. She slid over the wondrously comfortable cushion to make sure: yes (while she looked at plants, birds, and fish), they were clouds, rocks, and animals …
Catching her breath, she threw back her head, because suddenly the cart was the whole world – or an image of it. Blinking, she saw the whole world around her – oh, only a part of it, with any certainty, any clarity. But the trees she passed, the rocks she passed, the clouds she passed under, the animals and birds they might contain very much suggested the whole, in its greater invisibility.
She went back to examining carvings, this time on the cart’s inner rail, so that she hardly noticed the slave swing right at the crossroads. She only glimpsed the lopsided dragon when she happened to glance back at some bird call.
The carved beast disappeared around a bend.
The road ahead was all wonders: rocky streams, shaggy trees, flowering copses – each, a moment later, followed by some artfully made thing, a wooden bridge, some group of winged stone leopards, a marble bench. Culture informed nature with a host of human ghosts, or nature surrounded culture with a field of breath-stopping beauty and unknown history. In concert, astonishment and agnosia abolished their own distinctions. (Was that magic?) The cart slowed.
A woman ran up. ‘You’re here!’
Pryn had never seen her before, but her smile was familiar, though Pryn was too a-quake from the ride to remember from where. The woman wore a shift of a brilliant red Pryn had never yet seen in fabric. The dress was finished at sleeves and hem and scooped neck with bits of something shiny that may have been gold or may have been red. The way they flashed and flickered, Pryn couldn’t tell. The woman’s toes pushed and poked from the glittering hem. Were her nails the wrong color? As she came, they glimmered and teased the eye on the polished terrace flags. Yes, for some reason her toenails were also red!
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