A, B, C: Three Short Novels

by Samuel R. Delany

  A rope dropped over his shoulders to be yanked tight. Another soldier was down off his horse to grasp Rahm’s hands and pull them behind him. “We’ll take him with us on the rest of the patrol around the common before we deliver him to the holding cell.” Another rope went round his wrists.

  As the horse in front started away, Rahm was tugged forward so that he stumbled, nearly falling.

  He kept his feet, though. The feeling was a kind of numbness. (The other Myetran soldier was back on his horse now. Horses clopped on the street at both sides of him.) But within the numbness there was something else: it was a feeling hard for Rahm to describe. It was as if the thing that had, the night before, grown to fill him, that had almost become him, had now, at the horse’s first tug, torn loose from him. It was as if his flesh had parted and the thing that had filled him had remained standing, unmoving on the street—so that only the rind of him was dragged away, a limp thing collapsing through the light-lashed dark.

  Not that the thing left behind stayed still.

  It followed. It came steadily, easily after them, even as Rahm stumbled on. It moved firmly, watched impassively. (For moments Rahm was convinced that if he glanced back, he would see it, coming after them, lowering in the dark.) It observed them, impartial, now like something circling them, now like something walking with them. That impartiality, that impassivity, that sheer chill, was more unsettling than the indifference of the soldiers in front of him and beside him, taking him through the streets about the common—because Rahm’s stumbling was, anyway (most of it), feigned. When his wrists had yanked from the soldier’s hands, the knot hadn’t been pulled tight yet: it would have been nothing to bunch his fingers and, though the hemp might burn, wrench a hand free. The rope around his arms and chest was only, he was sure, one great shrug away from coming loose. These Myetrans, Rahm thought, were used to dealing with terrified men and women.

  But Rahm realized, as he stumbled and blinked in their passing lights, trying to look terrified and cringing, the thing that went with them—the thing that was really he—was not frightened. (Did they, Rahm wondered, find the sight of a frightened man or woman somehow beautiful? But they did not even look at him. Were they, perhaps, like the Winged Ones, listening? He did not think so.) It was not frightened at all.

  chapter five

  From the corner of Hara’s hut, Naä watched the soldiers ride off with Rahm. She had seen him at the first house, followed him to the second—recognizing him only in the light from the open shutter before it closed (till now, she’d assumed him killed in the first night’s massacre)—and come behind him quietly at the third. She’d followed him through the breezy night, excitement growing, anticipating what he might say to her, his surprise at seeing her, his pleasure at knowing she was alive and free as he was, when finally she would overtake him with a word—

  Really, she’d been about to speak when the patrol had come up, and in a moment’s cowardice she cursed herself for, she’d ducked back out of the light and stood, still and stiff as she could stand, one fist tight against her belly, her back against the shack wall’s shaggy bark.

  The whole capture quivered before her, leaving her with the anger, the frustration, the outrage you might have at a child or lover snatched from your arms. She watched them ride off with Rahm—and by starts, hesitations, and sprints, at a safe distance, one street away from the common, she followed them.

  —

  Since she had first left Calvicon, Naä had pretty much done as she wanted—within the constraints necessity placed about a wandering singer’s song. She was a woman of strong feeling and quiet demeanor. Last night she’d watched what had happened in the Çironian village, but from the ends of alleys, crouching behind fences, up through the chink in a grain-cellar door, while soldiers and villagers had rattled the boards above her, till one arm broke through to flail, bloody, about her in the dark, hitting her on the ear and shoulders, while she knelt in the three-foot space below, trying not to make a sound while others screamed above her.

  Before sunup, Naä had climbed quietly out, stumbled over the bodies, and—like Rahm—started from the town.

  She had not, however, gone as far.

  She walked an hour in the dark, till the salmon-streaked promise of sunrise hemmed the night. She stopped beneath a maple grove, looked down among dark roots squirming at her feet, put her hands to the sides of her head, and, breathing deeply, stood awhile, now with eyes opened, now with them closed. A few times, she gave an audible gasp.

  Once she shook her head.

  Then she took her hands down slowly to let them fall finally against her thighs.

  A minute later, she whispered, “No!”

  Then she turned and began to walk briskly back. At the edge of the burial meadow, she crouched in a clump of brush, while one and another wagon pulled up to the field all through the morning, each accompanied by three or four soldiers, to dump its corpses.

  To the sound of creaking cart beds and thumping bodies, she fell asleep—and woke, hours later, in the hot sun, with a nauseous smell in her nose and a bad taste in her mouth. Looking carefully through the brush, she saw that no attempt had been made to cover the bodies on the grass.

  One cart had been left near.

  But no one was about.

  Keeping to the woods, she went around to the charred ruins of Ienbar’s shack. Again, she waited for moments. Then she pulled her harp around before her, dropped to her knees, tugged aside a half-burned log, and gutted out a hole for the instrument. With some cloth, burned along one side, she wrapped it. A large rock went over the opening. Then she scattered dirt and cinders on it. Fifteen minutes later, as she kicked away knee prints, footprints, then stepped back onto the grass, she was sure no one would know her harp was entombed there. Walking along the burned foundation, she paused to look back, then beat at the charcoal on her knees and hands, now and again wiping at her smudged face. Just inside, on a log gone gray and black over its burned-away side, the blade discolored near the bone handle with burn marks but the point sharp and the edge bright, one of Ienbar’s well-sharpened cooking knives lay. She stepped in, picked it up, looked at it on both sides, then pushed it under the sash at her belt.

  Very soon she’d hunted up the site of the Myetran camp.

  Hidden in the brush and low trees on a slight rise, Naä watched awhile. She thought hard. When she had decided what she might do, she turned back—

  And caught her breath.

  She let it out again, with one hand at her throat; then, as she recovered herself, touched the tree beside her. “Qualt, I didn’t realize you were…”

  When he dropped from the low branch on which he’d been sitting, she caught her breath again, because he was so loud in the leaves around them. “Naä,” he said, though obviously he’d been watching her for minutes, “what dost thou here?”

  “The same thing I bet you are. Look.” She turned back to the camp below them. “Those open carts there—can you believe it, they’ve brought their water in them, over from the quarry. Someone goes to get a dipper of water from them perhaps every five or ten minutes. It would be easy to get behind them and…What could you put in them, Qualt, to foul the supply and make the drinker gut-sick? And—”

  The youth settled on one hip, grinning. “Yes?”

  “Right over there is the back of their enclosure, where they’ve put their horses. It’s very close to the woods. If I could get some tinder and start some dry weeds burning, I could heave them inside—I know horses, Qualt. They don’t like fire. And if they bolted, those railings wouldn’t hold five minutes. Now if there was only something we could do about the prisoners. I think that’s the corral where they’ve got them, way across there. But I don’t believe I could get that far without being spotted. There was all this activity there, just about twenty minutes back—”

  The young garbage collector nodded, dappled light behind one ear making it luminously red—Qualt had tied his long hair back. “They took many of the
m back into town to put them in the council building.”

  “In the council building?” Naä asked.

  “It looked to me as if they took everyone between fifteen and fifty years old and decided to put them in the cellar of the strong building. Only the Old Ones and the little children are left out there, in the hot sun.”

  “You saw them?” she said. “I was here twenty minutes ago, and I couldn’t…But you saw them—take the prisoners from here all the way into town and put them in the council building?”

  Qualt pursed his lips a moment, blinking. Then he said, “Come. Thou knowest where my hut is, by the dump?”

  “I’ve never been there. But Rimgia once pointed out the path to it.”

  Qualt snuffled, grinning; she realized it was a joke when he said, “There—thy nose will tell thee where it is if thou comest anywhere close. Go on and meet me there.”

  He turned, grabbed a branch of the tree he’d been perched in, and started to climb.

  “Won’t you come with me, Qualt?” she asked, surprised.

  “Go on.” He looked back over his shoulder. “Go there. And I’ll meet thee.” He vaulted up to the next branch. A moment later his outsize feet pulled up among the leaves. “Go on. Don’t worry. I’ll be there!”

  It wasn’t a time for questioning. And besides, she couldn’t see him any longer, even when she squinted—though she could still hear the leaves and the branches gnashing against one another. Naä started through the trees again.

  She couldn’t imagine she’d taken much time. When, not half an hour later, she came around the corner of his house, she was as surprised to see him standing in the yard, among his odd and leaning collection of junk, as she had been when she’d turned to see him in the woods.

  “Here,” he said, with no explanation as to how he’d gotten from one place to the other so much ahead of her. “This is for their water.” He picked up the old basket sitting on the moss by his foot. On both the basket edge and the handle, bits of wicker had come loose.

  “What is—” Then she wrinkled her face. In the general stink from the proximity of the dump, this stench cut through with distressing putrescence. Leaves lined the wicker. In among them nested something odorous and black—no, a wet green so dark it might as well be black.

  “Where in the world did you get that?” she asked.

  Qualt nodded to the side. “Down in the ravine. There’s lots of stuff I know about in there. Likely thou mayest get this on thy hands. Thou must wash them well with both soap and salt, before thou touchest thy face or mouth—otherwise, thy guts shall soon run loose as the Myetrans’ when this stuff goes in their drink.” Qualt handed her the foul basket. “Under the leaves are iron and flint for fire. The cattail fluff that you can get down this side of the quarry lake will give thee lots and lots of smoke—if smoke is what thou wishest.”

  Behind Qualt stood a much larger basket, brim full, that Naä glanced down at now: millet cobs, some half-eaten yams, a chicken head—

  “And any of the dried stuffs from the side of the hill beside the big rocks near their camp will flame up nicely.”

  “All right,” she said. “This should do, I think—at least I hope it will.”

  There were no thanks. But both grinned at each other. Then, the little basket at her thigh, she was moving off through the woods, making again for the Myetran camp.

  Naä was astonished how easily the carrying out of the plan went. Behind one wagon, a handful of slop, up and over the edge—splash; then on behind the next—splash again; and behind the next. Back under the cover of the trees, she tried out the flint and metal on a bit of the bale of dried brush she’d gathered, repeating to herself as she crouched in the shadow, “It’s the idea and not the doing—and having the stuff to do the doing with!”

  At the horse enclosure, she thrust five big bales of dried kindling one after the other through the back fence. With spears crossed, way on the far side the two guards looked resolutely in the opposite direction.

  She was back in the woods, starting to bring down another bale, when an officer rode up to return a horse to the enclosure—so she waited. Minutes later, she was down on her knees, behind the last bale, beating and beating the iron against the stone till the oiled rag suddenly caught. A moment later, there was a rush of heat, of crackling, of orange flame—and she was running off again, into the woods. She turned back once, as two horses trotted over to examine the fire, then suddenly reared, whinnied, and galloped away—and do you know, the spear guards still had not looked!

  She ran faster up the forested hill. Only twenty steps later, when more horses began to whinny behind her, did she hear the first man shout.

  A moment later, she was again on her knees, laughing.

  She laughed again, about an hour on, when, as she walked among the houses nearer the common, chubby Jallet, Mantice’s boy with the cast in his right eye, stopped to tell her what had happened to the soldiers, returning to camp under the trees behind the council building:

  “When those bad men went under the stand of trees that are so thick in their branches that they make noon look near night, an old cabbage hit one of them on the shoulder; then eggs and goat offal and chicken heads and other nasty things began to pelt them from up in the leaves—from someone who could aim too. For one got a splat of shit in his visor and another with his helmet off got cut on the face with a broken pot!”

  Still laughing, Naä managed to say: “But it must have been—” Then she caught herself. “It must have been quite a little rain of slop and garbage!”

  “It wasn’t Qualt,” Jallet said.

  Naä was surprised that the child’s thoughts had gone like hers to the dump. But then, what else would a town person have thought?

  “It wasn’t anybody at all,” Jallet explained, “because the Myetrans got real angry and began to climb the trees and look about, and there wasn’t anybody in them. Nobody had gone up them. And nobody—except the Myetrans—ever came down!”

  “I see,” Naä said. “So it just…happened!”

  Jallet nodded, with his unsettling glance that, because of the cast, you never knew where it was fixed. But while Naä laughed, she wondered.

  Later that evening, though, when she was passing through the common, she saw four Çironians bound before a group of bewildered villagers. As she stopped to watch, the bored officer in his black hood and immobile cloak announced their crime was “mischief against Myetra! For the crime of which, ten lashes each!” Their hands thonged together before them, their clothes torn from their backs, the woman and the three men shuffled from side to side, blinked, and looked frightened. Were they, she wondered suddenly, being lashed for her misdoings? Or Qualt’s? It was the first moment of circumspection she’d had in the heady rush of her mischief. When the first lash fell, little Kenisa, standing next to her and looking very serious, reached up quietly to take Naä’s hand—Naä flinched a moment, so that Kenisa glanced up at her. But then, Naä had already gotten the soap and salt and done the obligatory hand washing earlier at Hara’s house.

  Several times and very loudly, the sunset curfew ordinance was read out at all corners of the common.

  And finally, in full darkness, Naä was still slipping between the houses and along the back paths behind them, contemplating what more she might do to cause the soldiers inconvenience, when she saw Rahm.

  —

  For the first minutes behind the horses, Rahm had stumbled and crouched at the end of the rope. Then he just walked, head low and half bent over. Finally he’d come on behind them, the tall, muscular youth Naä knew as Ienbar’s helper and her friend—almost as if, bit by bit, he’d put aside some mime of weakness he’d been performing for his captors that they had not even bothered to notice. It’s amazing, Naä thought, hurrying on beside, they really haven’t looked at him once.

  I could run out, take my knife, slash the rope, and the two of us could be free and off in the dark in seconds! She grasped the knife at her belt, finally pul
led it loose. But whenever she squeezed the handle, picturing herself sprinting forward, she felt a glittering web of terror, a web flung up between her and the figures moving through the dark streets.

  If I surprised him and he really stumbled or cried out…

  If just one of them chose to look back, by chance…

  If he or I made some accidental sound…

  This bravery of the body in sight of bodies was very different, she realized, from the sort she’d managed earlier, with a camp half asleep under the hottest of the day’s sun.

  But still, across the little span of night, not one of the soldiers had actually looked at him, so smug were they in their superiority! Naä was still thinking this when the soldiers, Rahm bound behind them, returned to the common’s edge and started across for the council house. Qualt had been right: the strongest building in the town was now being used as a Myetran prison. She stepped out, then stopped as though the stone wall were only feet in front of her instead of cattycorner across the square. Naä stepped back into the last doorway, to watch the soldiers and her friend mount the ten stone steps and enter the plank door. Torchlight flickered within. She cursed, cursed again. But there was no way to breach those well-set rocks. She turned among the houses and began to hurry down a back street.

  Half an hour later, Naä was again among the dark trees, the Myetran camp before her—though, save a cook fire off over there or a line of light under the edge of a tent to the right, it was all but invisible. She crossed between the underbrush and a back wall of canvas, that, bellying with the night’s breeze, gave a snap, then sagged. Moving closer, she heard a voice within:

  “Lieutenant Kire, this will stop! I ordered them executed. You had them flogged.”

  A softer voice, with a roughness to it almost menacing: “Nactor, my prince—”

  “I want no explanations! You, Kire, have been given a great opportunity, an opportunity allowed to few—to lead a brigade of Myetra. Is this how you use your officer’s privilege? This is how you’d have Myetra known? Were you not so good a soldier with different family connections, things would go badly for you now—very badly. It is only your skill at arms that saves you from my anger.” There was a pause. “It’s dangerous to cross me, Kire. You know that, don’t you?”