Tales of Neveryon

by Delany, Samuel R.

  Gorgik said: ‘It was the Suzeraine’s castle that we last sieged.’

  Small Sarg said: ‘And the kitchen slaves, who probably prepared your meal, are now free.’

  The two women, masked and unmasked, smiled at each other, smiles within which were inscribed both satisfaction and embarrassment.

  ‘How do you accomplish these sieges?’ Raven asked.

  ‘One or the other of us, in the guise of a free man without collar, approaches a castle where we have heard there are many slaves and delivers an ultimatum.’ Gorgik grinned. ‘Free your slaves or …’

  ‘Or what?’ asked Raven.

  ‘To find an answer to that question, they usually cast the one of us who came into the torture chamber. At which point the other of us, decked in the collar – it practically guarantees one entrance if one knows which doors to come in by – lays siege to the hold.’

  ‘Only,’ Small Sarg said, ‘this time it didn’t work like that. We were together, planning our initial strategy, when suddenly the Suzeraine’s guards attacked us. They seemed to know who Gorgik was. They called him by name and almost captured us both.’

  ‘Did they, now?’ asked Norema.

  ‘They seemed already to have their questions for me. At first I thought they knew what we had been doing. But these are strange and barbaric times; and information travels slowly here.’

  ‘What did they question you about?’ Raven wanted to know.

  ‘Strange and barbaric things,’ said Gorgik. ‘Whether I had worked as a messenger for some southern lord, carrying tales of children’s bouncing balls and other trivial imports. Many of their questions centered about …’ He looked down, fingering the metal disk hanging against his chest. As he gazed, you could see, from his tensing cheek muscle, a thought assail him.

  Small Sarg watched Gorgik. ‘What is it …?’

  Slowly Gorgik’s brutish features formed a frown. ‘When we were fighting our way out of the castle, there was a woman … a slave. I’m sure she was a slave. She wore a collar … But she reminded me of another woman, a noble woman, a woman I knew a long time ago …’ Suddenly he smiled. ‘Though she too wore a collar from time to time, much for the same reasons as I.’

  The matted-haired barbarian, the western woman in her mask, the island woman with her cropped hair sat about the silvered ash and watched the big man turn the disk. ‘When I was in the torture chamber, my thoughts were fixed on my own campaign for liberation and not on what to me seemed the idiotic fixations of my oppressor. Thus all their questions and comments are obscure to me now. By the same token, the man I am today obscures my memories of the youthful slave released from the bondage of the mines by this noble woman’s whim. Yet, prompted by that face this evening, vague memories of then and now emerge and confuse themselves without clarifying. They turn about this instrument, for measuring time and space … they have to do with the name Krodar …’

  The redhead said: ‘I have heard that name, Krodar …’

  Within the frayed eyeholes, the night-blue eyes narrowed; Raven glanced at her companion.

  Gorgik said: ‘There was something about a monastery in the south, called something like the Vygernangx …?’

  The masked woman said: ‘Yes, I know of the Vygernanx …’

  The redhead glanced back at her friend with a look set between complete blankness and deep knowingness.

  Gorgik said: ‘And there was something about the balls, the toys we played with as children … or perhaps the rhyme we played to …?

  Small Sarg said: ‘When I was a child in the jungles of the south, we would harvest the little nodules of sap that seeped from the scars in certain broadleafed palms and save them up for the traders who would come every spring for them …’

  Both women looked at each other now, then at the men, and remained silent.

  ‘It is as though –’ Gorgik held up the verdigrised disk with its barbarous chasings –‘all these things would come together in a logical pattern, immensely complex and greatly beautiful, tying together slave and empress, commoner and lord – even gods and demons – to show how all are related in a negotiable pattern, like some sailor’s knot, not yet pulled taut, but laid out on the dock in loose loops, so that simply to see it in such form were to comprehend it even when yanked tight. And yet …’ He turned the astrolabe over. ‘… they will not clear in my mind to any such pattern!’

  Raven said: ‘The lords of this strange and terrible land indeed live lives within such complex and murderous knots. We have all seen them whether we have sieged the castle of one or been seduced by the hospitality of another; we have all had a finger through at least a loop in such a knot. You’ve talked of mirrors, pretty man, and of their strange reversal effect. I’ve wondered if our ignorance isn’t simply a reversed image of their knowledge.’

  ‘And I’ve wondered –’ Gorgik said, ‘slave, free-commoner, lord – if each isn’t somehow a reflection of the other; or a reflection of a reflection.’

  ‘They are not,’ said Norema with intense conviction. ‘That is the most horrendous notion I’ve ever heard.’ But her beating lids, her astonished expression as she looked about in the moonlight, might have suggested to a sophisticated enough observer a conversation somewhere in her past of which this was a reflection.

  Gorgik observed her, and waited.

  After a while Norema picked up a stick, poked in the ashes with it: a single coal turned up ruby in the silver scatter and blinked.

  After a few moments, Norema said: ‘Those balls … that the children play with in summer on the streets of Kolhari … Myself, I’ve always wondered where they came from – I mean I know about the orchards in the south. But I mean how do they get to the city every year.’

  ‘You don’t know that?’ Raven turned, quite astonished, to her redheaded companion. ‘You mean to tell me, island woman, that you and I have traveled together for over a year and a half, seeking fortune and adventure, and you have never asked me this nor have I ever told you?’

  Norema shook her head.

  Again Raven loosed her barking laughter. ‘Really, what is most strange and terrible about this strange and terrible land is how two women can be blood friends, chattering away for days at each other, saving one another’s lives half a dozen times running and yet somehow never really talk! Let me tell you: the Western Crevasse, from which I hail, has, running along its bottom, a river that leads to the Eastern Ocean. My people live the whole length of the river, and those living at the estuary are fine, seafaring women. It is our boats, crewed by these sailing women of the Western Crevasse who each year have sailed to the south in our red ships and brought back these toys to Kolhari, as indeed they also trade them up and down the river.’ A small laugh now, a sort of stifled snorting. ‘I was twenty and had already left my home before I came to one of your ports and the idea struck me that a man could actually do the work required on a boat.’

  ‘Ay,’ said Gorgik, ‘I saw those boats in my youth – but we were always scared to talk with anyone working on them. The captain was always a man; and we assumed, I suppose, that he must be a very evil person to have so many women within his power. Some proud, swaggering fellow – as frequently a foreigner as one of your own men –’

  ‘Yes,’ said Norema. ‘I remember such a boat. The crew was all women and the captain a great, black-skinned fellow who terrified everyone in my island village –’

  ‘The captain a man?’ The masked woman frowned beneath her mask’s ragged hem. ‘I know there are boats from your Ulvayn islands on which men and women work together. But a man for a captain on a boat of my people …? It is so unlikely that I am quite prepared to dismiss it as an outright imposs –’ She stopped; then she barked, ‘Of course. The man on the boat! Oh, yes, my silly heathen woman, of course there is a man on the boat. There’s always a man on the boat. But he’s certainly not the captain. Believe me, my friend, even though I have seen men fulfill it, captain is a woman’s job: and in our land it is usually the eldest
sailor on the boat who takes the job done by your captain.’

  ‘If he wasn’t the captain, then,’ asked Norema, ‘who was he?’

  ‘How can I explain it to you …?’ Raven said. ‘There is always a man in a group of laboring women in my country. But he is more like a talisman, or a good-luck piece the women take with them, than a working sailor – much less an officer. He is a figure of prestige, yes, which explains his fancy dress; but he is not a figure of power. Indeed, do you know the wooden women who are so frequently carved on the prow of your man-sailored ships? Well he fulfills a part among our sailors much as that wooden woman does among yours. I suppose to you it seems strange. But in our land, a single woman lives with a harem of men; and in our land, any group of women at work always keeps a single man. Perhaps it is simply another of your reflections? But you, in your strange and terrible land, can see nothing but men at the heads of things. The captain indeed! A pampered pet who does his exercises every morning on the deck, who preens and is praised and shown off at every port – that is what men are for. And, believe me, they love it, no matter what they say. But a man … a man with power and authority and the right to make decisions? You must excuse me, for though I have been in your strange and terrible land for years and know such things exist here, I still cannot think of such things among my own people without laughing.’ And here she gave her awkward laugh, while with her palm she beat her bony knee. ‘Seriously,’ she said when her laugh was done, ‘such a pattern for work seems so natural to me that I cannot really believe you’ve never encountered anything like it before –’ she was talking to Norema now –‘even here.’

  Norema smiled, a little strangely. ‘Yes, I … I have heard of something like it before.’

  Gorgik again examined the redhead’s face, as if he might discern, inscribed by eye-curve and cheek-bone and forehead-line and lip-shape, what among her memories reflected this discussion.

  Something covered the moon.

  First masked Raven, then the other three, looked up. Wide wings labored off the light.

  ‘What is such a mountain beast doing in such a flat and swampy land?’ asked Small Sarg.

  ‘It must be the Suzeraine’s pet,’ Norema said. ‘But why should he have let it go?’

  ‘So,’ said Raven, ‘once again tonight we are presented with a mysterious sign and no way to know whether it completes a pattern or destroys one.’ The laugh this time was something that only went on behind her closed lips. ‘They cannot fly very far. There is no ledge for her to perch on. And once she lands, in this swampy morass, she won’t be able to regain flight. Her wings will tear in the brambles and she will never fly again.’

  But almost as if presenting the image of some ironic answer, the wings flapped against a sudden, high, unfelt breeze, and the beast, here shorn of all fables, rose and rose – for a while – under the night.

  – New York

  July ’78

  Appendix

  (Some Informal Remarks toward the Modular Calculus, Part Three)

  by S. L. Kermit

  1

  When, in the spring of 1947, Muhammed the Wolf flung his stone into the cave near Ain Feshkla, breaking open the jar containing the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or, indeed, when, eighty years before, the Turkish archeologist Rassam and the Englishmen Layard and Smith shoveled through into the Temple Library at Nineveh, giving the world the Gilgamesh epic, both provided steps in a clarification that had been progressing apace even among the discoveries made as Schliemann’s workers sunk their pickaxes at Hissàrlik.

  The fragment known as the Culhar’ (or sometimes the Kolharē) Text – and more recently as the Missolonghi Codex (from the Greek town where the volumes, now on store in the basement of the Istanbul Archeological Museum, were purchased in the nineteenth century, and which contain what is now considered to be one of the two oldest versions of the text known) – not only has a strange history, but a strangely disseminated history. The most recent stage of that dissemination has joined it with an abstruse mathematical theory and the creative mind of a fascinating young scholar.

  The Culhar’ Text itself, a narrative fragment of approximately nine hundred words, has been known and noted in many languages for centuries, among them Sanskrit, Aramaic, Persian, Arabic, and Proto-Latin. From time to time, claims of great antiquity have been made for it – 4,500 B.C., or even 5,000 B.C., which would put it practically inside the muzzy boundaries of the neolithic revolution. But such claims, at least until recently, have been dismissed by serious scholars as fanciful.

  Still, the fact that versions of the text have been found in so many languages suggests that at one time it was considered a text of great importance in the ancient world. But the reasons why the text was considered so important have only recently come to light.

  The only ancient people who did not, apparently, know of the Culhar’ fragment were, oddly, the Attic Greeks – though their ignorance of it no doubt goes a long way to explain the length of time it has taken for modern speculation to reach any productive level.

  In 1896, four years after Haupt published the second of his two-volume edition of the then extant cuneiform tablets, by chance a scholar of ancient Persian, visiting Peter Jensen in Germany when the latter was engaged in his German translations which were to appear in 1900 and 1901, recognized one of the fragmentary tablets that had been clearly excluded from the Gilgamesh tale as a Babylonian version of the Culhar’, which till then had more or less generally been thought to have originated in ancient Persia many years later.

  The establishment of the Culhar’ Text’s composition at a date notably before Homer was a highly significant discovery. Indeed, had the Nineveh tablets been found to contain, say, a Babylonian translation of one of the Homeric hymns, scholarly circles would no doubt have been thrown into a turmoil that would still be reflected today in every introduction to the Iliad or the Odyssey and every popularized account of modern archeological investigations. As it was, however, the notice taken of that discovery seems to have been restricted to mentions only by three German orientalists. And two of those mentions were in footnotes. Still, at least one of the footnotes made the point that a question – which apparently had last vexed a whole monastery full of ninth-century Rumanian monks – had once again come to the fore: In just what language did the Culhar’ fragment originate?

  Schliemann’s successor at Hissàrlik, Carl William Blegan, discovered a Greek version of the text in the fourth down of the nine cities built one a-top the other at the site of Troy. Did even older versions exist in level Vila, the level now believed to be the historical Ilium? If so, it was apparently not among the booty Agamemnon brought back to the Argolis.

  We have mentioned the Dead Sea Scrolls already: what was found in ’47, among the sewn-together parchments in their wrappings of linen and pitch among the jars and copper scrolls from the caves on the Dead Sea Shore, was one parchment fragment, clearly not among the major scrolls and not clearly related to the Essene protocols as were the interesting majority of the others, containing an ancient Hebrew text that seemed to be nothing less than a fragmentary vocabulary in which hieroglyphiclike markings were equated with ancient Hebrew words and phrases. It was initially assumed, by Khun, Baker and others, that this was a lexicon to facilitate the study of some lost Egyptian text. But either because of the political situation existing between Egypt and Israel, or because the Hebrew words were not part of the vocabulary associated with the Exodus, interest was more or less deferred in this particular parchment. (Edmund Wilson in his book on the Dead Sea Scrolls does not even mention its existence.) And the judgement that the language was actually Egyptian was, itself, disputed on so many counts that the question finally vanished with the excitement over the contents of other texts from other jars, other sites.

  At any rate, it was not until 1971 that a young American scholar, K. Leslie Steiner, who had been given an informal account of this parchment by a friend at the University of Tel Aviv, realized that most
of the Hebrew words seemed to be translations of words that appeared in that at-one-time most ubiquitous of ancient texts: the Culhar’ fragment.

  2

  K. Leslie Steiner was born in Cuba in 1949. Her mother was a black American from Alabama; her father was an Austrian Jew. From 1951 on, Steiner grew up in Ann Arbor, where both her parents taught at the University of Michigan, and where Steiner now holds joint tenure in the German, Comparative Literature, and Mathematics departments.

  Steiner’s mathematical work has mostly been done by an obscure spin-off of a branch of category theory called ‘naming, listing, and counting theory.’ By the time she was twenty-two, her work had established her as one of America’s three leading experts in the field. This was the work that she was shortly to bring to bear on the problem of this ancient text in such a novel and ingenious way. When she was twenty-four, Steiner published a book called The Edge of Language with Bowling Green University Press – not, as one might imagine from our account so far, a treatise on ancient scripts, but rather a study of linguistic patterns common to comic books, pornography, contemporary poetry, and science fiction,* one of the decade’s more daunting volumes in the field of popular and cross-cultural studies. Steiner’s linguistic/archeological interests, nevertheless, have been a consuming amateur hobby – the tradition, apparently, with so many who have made the greatest contributions to the field, from Heinrich Schliemann himself to Michael Ventris, both of whom were basically brilliant amateurs.

  Steiner’s recognition of the scroll as a lexicon meant to facilitate the study of the Culhar’ Text in some long-lost language would be notable enough. But Steiner also went on to establish that the language was not Egyptian, at least not any variety we possess. Eighteen months of followup seemed to suggest, from the appearance of the lost script, that, if anything, it was a variety of writing related to the cuneiform ideograms of the Mesopotamian and Indus Valley regions. Her subsequent efforts to locate exactly which form of cuneiform it might be (during which she herself distinguished three distinct forms among the numerous untranslatable tablets that still exist) will no doubt someday make another fascinating book. Suffice it to say, however, that in 1974, one Yavus Ahmed Bey, a 24-year-old research assistant in the Istanbul Archeological Museum, directed Steiner to a codex of untranslated (and presumably untranslatable) texts on store in the library archives.