Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  ‘Together?’ Bragan demanded, as if it were possible Tratsin had missed work to go with his jobless friend.

  ‘Tratsin went to work.’ Pryn held a wet rag in one hand and some bowls under her other arm. ‘And Kurvan just…went.’

  ‘Oh. Well.’ Bragan dried her wet elbow against the gray cloth she’d finally wrapped around herself. ‘That’s better than Kurvan’s hanging about all day and talking. Oh, he’s a good man. But let him, and he’ll explain everything in the world to you and how it relates to everything else. Then, when you tell him we’re just poor working people here, he’ll say it’s because we won’t consider such things that we stay poor.’ She laughed. ‘Now have you ever known anyone like that?’

  Pryn thought of Gorgik, of Madame Keyne, and wondered how to speak of them; but, ducking in through the back door again, Gutryd said, ‘Here, Pryn. You can take that jar down to the river and bring some water for me, if you like…’

  Pryn made several trips to get water in a large clay jar. At the bank she watched five dark women, filling jars as large and handling them more easily. She carried hers, its neck dribbling, back between the shacks.

  ‘You know, I always used to wish Tratsin could spend a day home with me.’ In the yard, Bragan wrung out a hank of cloth, then shook fold from wet fold to lay it over the basket’s rim. ‘Only, when he does, it’s always because he’s sick, so it’s just like having an extra baby in the house. Finally, I realized it wasn’t Tratsin I wanted so much as the excitement of going off to the mountains to work, of hiking upriver to fish—something I thought he could bring me just by staying here! But the moment I realized it, I realized—and it came practically with my next breath—he couldn’t bring that! If I wanted such excitement, I would have to go out and seek it. And three days later, as I stand here—’ She shook out more unbleached fabric—‘I knew I was pregnant with this one!’

  And inside, minutes later: ‘Ah, you see—’ turning from Pryn, who stood now on the bench to rummage in the purple shadows of an upper shelf under the thatched roof—‘always I must do the scolding.’ Bragan snatched up the toddler from where she was about to crawl onto the hearth. ‘Tratsin, when he comes home, is either all hugs and cuddles, or he just ignores them; so I’m the bad parent.’ She came back, joggling her daughter, to stand by Pryn’s knee, while afterimages of the sun with a branch through it glimmered before Pryn in shelved shadow. It smelled like figs. Dusty crocks. Bound straw dolls with clay heads and hands. Below: ‘He says he doesn’t want to punish them because he wants them to love him. Which is all very fine, but children must be punished sometimes. So I’m left the great monster to plague their dreams as well as the dream itself they cling to, while he remains just human. Oh, I envy him the ways by which he shirks power and stays only a man. Can you find it?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s here.’

  Then outside again, while Pryn handed Gutryd up the dripping garbage basket which Gutryd dumped over into the smelly cart: ‘So, you’re pregnant. You and Bragan, a pair!’ Standing on the log that ran along the cart’s side, Gutryd pounded the basket’s bottom. Perspiration glittered on her temple. (The cart’s driver had very large, heavily veined ears sticking out of hair as bushy as Pryn’s.) ‘You’re quite different, of course, you two—I mean the way you act. But somehow I don’t think that makes much difference, now, does it?’ Which Pryn hadn’t thought at all. The notion was surprising, if not worrying. (Six years older, she would simply have thought it wrong.) ‘I almost thought I was, three months ago! Pregnant, I mean. Well! When the full moon drove my blood out at last, I was a very happy woman! I don’t think Malot was so crazy to go off to the city. After all, he was in trouble here—though you mustn’t tell anyone I told you. Still, it surprised us all he actually went. One day he was here, and then—like magic—gone! I thought it was magic myself at first, but Kurvan said, no, he’d just run off to Kolhari. And Tratsin agreed. Well, no one will know him there—and often he wasn’t a pleasant boy to know here. But you’ve been there. I’d like to go. Although I wouldn’t like to have a baby there, from what I’ve heard.’

  And inside again, Bragan: ‘You haven’t seen the abandoned huts up near the crossroads yet, have you?’ It was a considered observation. Another mat collapsed between her hands, to be folded, bulkily, again, then again. ‘You can stay in one of them tonight—Kurvan or Tratsin will take you when they get back. But you see how crowded we are here. They’re not as nice as this, of course, but then there’ll only be one of you—at least for a few months more. You can fix it up as nicely as you like.’

  ‘Oh…!’ It struck Pryn with the surprise of the inevitable. ‘Yes…’ Feelings of rejection contended with feelings of gratitude.

  ‘But you see how difficult it would be if you did stay with us. For too long. Oh, I don’t mean you haven’t been helpful.’ Bragan smiled apologetically. But she also looked relieved, as if she’d been contemplating saying this a while. ‘You understand.’

  ‘Oh,’ Pryn said again, ‘I do.’

  ‘It would be best, I think. And it’s not very far away. Believe me, we’d help you just as much as you’ve helped us. Enoch is not a very big town. You don’t get too far away from anyone here. Old, yes. But not big.’

  For the first time Pryn thought of it as an incipient city, a little one with a garbage service and a name and a riverside dock.

  ‘I’ll be honest. They’re not so large.’ Bragan put the mat down—almost on the napping baby; she cried out, moved it aside, laughed, put her hand to her neck, blinked, and went on: ‘But you’ll have a roof over you. That’s better than nothing. You’ll be near the quarry road. And that’s not bad.’

  Which is when Gutryd stepped inside and said: ‘Really, it’s not. From time to time, I’ve thought of moving there myself. Don’t worry.’ (Pryn wondered just how long they’d been discussing her coming move.) ‘It all seems a little strange, I know. But you’re used to the way we do almost everything here. And soon we’ll be used to you.’

  Which made Pryn blink and smile.

  ‘Ah!’ as a memory assailed Bragan. Tratsin didn’t take his dinner—I haven’t even fixed it! Now that’s so like him.’ She sighed. ‘And me.’ She turned to the hearth, where Gutryd already sat on a wooden stump and, with two triple-tined wooden forks, was picking through a bit of wool, teasing it out, by small tugs, to fine fluff, now pausing to pinch loose a twig or leaf-bit, which she tossed viciously into the fireplace before falling back to her carding.

  ‘Are you going to do that whole basketful?’ Bragan asked. ‘Well, I suppose it has to be got through sometime. But once it’s done, someone should spin it—because if it just sits here for three days, with these children, you know the shape it’ll be in—’

  Against the wool basket lay a flat stone with two irregular holes…

  ‘Oh, I’ll do it.’ Pryn did not like spinning. ‘I mean I can, if you don’t have anything else for me to do…’ Still, she spun well. And Bragan didn’t have any other job for her right then. So Pryn sat at the other side of the hearth from Gutryd, took up a lapful of carded fleece and the spinning stone, and twisted at one corner of the wool till she had a long enough thread to wrap through the spindle’s holes (not a very well-balanced spindle, either) and began to knock its rough side with her palm, letting it twirl the fiber into a fine yarn, which she fed out evenly from her fist between bunched fingers.

  ‘You do that very skillfully’ Bragan laughed. ‘You’re one of those women who does it so well you’d think you invented it yourself!’ She turned to a wicker onion bin on top of which sat last night’s loaf, still wrapped in a bread cloth, and began to busy herself with food. ‘Now me, when I spin, it’s all thumbs and knots…’

  Thinking of invention, Pryn said: ‘The soup…’

  ‘Mmm?’ Gutryd looked up, picking.

  Pryn glanced at the two empty pots, which had been raised to higher hooks above the fireplace’s ash-banked embers. ‘The soup we had, last night. I was just thinki
ng—’

  ‘Ah!’ Bragan exclaimed, tugging the outer leaves down from something that looked like a leek. ‘If we had some more, I’d put a ladle of that in a bowl and send you off to Tratsin with it. He doesn’t mind cold soup. But Kurvan eats enough for three. When he stays here, leftovers don’t.’

  ‘What about the soup?’ Gutryd looked back at her flying picks. ‘Do let her talk, Bragan. Get you alone and you’re bad as Kurvan.’

  ‘In my home, in the mountains, in Ellamon, where my great-aunt lives—’ Pryn brushed her hand at the rock’s edge, its spin finally fast enough to steady its joggling—‘it’s very much like here. Oh, we knot the edging on our floor mats differently. And we don’t scratch those funny designs into the base of our pots—the food we eat is different. Still, lots in Enoch is very much like home. Except the soup. The double soup, in the two pots, the way you make it.’

  ‘You don’t have soup in the mountains?’ Gutryd picked.

  ‘We don’t have soup like that, made in two pots and served in a single bowl. But you see, back in my town, oh, years ago, my aunt met a traveling woman once—she brought her some autumn apples and talked with her. My aunt always liked to talk to strangers—at least she used to. And the woman told us about your soup.’

  ‘My soup?’ Bragan asked. ‘I learned to make it from my uncle. And Tratsin’s cousin, Mordri, makes it much better than I do—but she won’t tell me exactly what she puts in it. You’d think it was some kind of magic!’

  ‘But that’s just it!’ Pryn spun the rock. ‘It is magic, or at least it almost is, to me. You see, there I was, out in the Ellamon market, sitting in the shade of the dyer’s stall, maybe ten years old, with a little bit of sunlight through a hole in the thatch falling right into my eyes, while my aunt and the traveling woman sat on the benches out under the awnings, leaning together over large plates with a few bits of cut-up fruit. The woman traveled with a little boy, I remember, about my age, who may have been a slave—but I don’t think so, because he wore lots of copper jewelry around his thighs and wrists and squatted out in the sun making patterns in the dust with a pouch full of colored stones. And she said, “If you ever go to the south, I mean into the head of the barbarian lands beyond Kolhari, you must try their double soups—no, you can’t get it at the inns. They think it’s food only for peasants, not tourists. But in the people’s homes, sometimes it’s served. The glory of southern cookery…Vegetables cooked in one pot, and meat boiled almost to pieces in the other and thickened with goats’ cream—”’

  ‘That’s what it is!’ Bragan turned suddenly. ‘Of course—that must be what Mordri uses! And the rest of us, mixing a handful of ground wheat to thicken it—but then you can get goat’s cream in Mordri’s village! No one herds goats around here. If I sent Kurvan after some of the wild ones roaming in the hills—’

  ‘Oh, Bragan,’ Gutryd said, ‘Let her finish! She said something about magic!’

  ‘It’s as though on that odd afternoon, while I listened to the traveling woman in her rings and veils and watched her little boy play with his stones, something was fixed in my childhood by her description, that grew and changed and worked on me, worked secretly in the dark places below memory; her description of your soups here began working and working on me there, pulling me and guiding me, first away from my home, then through Kolhari, then on into the south, till I met Tratsin, and at last, in Tratsin’s boat, here to—Enoch? Yes, to this old, old city.’ Pryn knocked the stone, watching it spin as she talked. ‘As if by magic I was led here…led here by the silent strength of that traveling woman’s words—she sold pictures of the stars that she would make for you on pieces of wet clay, and for an extra iron coin, she would tell you what they had to say of you on the day of your birth—that is, if you knew it. If you didn’t, she would guess at what day that must have been from the way you looked and the things you said, according to what the stars might suggest. Something worked and worked from her words to bring me here and finally to taste the soup, your soup, the soup here that she spoke of—’

  ‘Ah!’ Something in Pryn’s eloquence (or perhaps in Pryn’s spinning) seemed to catch Bragan up; she turned from turnips and green peppers.

  With her own surprise at her recognition of Bragan’s, Pryn thought: There’s something very wrong with all that.

  Trying hard to explain what she might have written (and what is, in a world where many such tales have been read, easy to call ‘her thoughts’), Pryn frowned. ‘But there’s something wrong…’

  Gutryd put her picks down and looked confused.

  Bragan put down her knife and rag, looking both surprised and interested.

  ‘All that happened—’ Pryn stopped the spinning rock between thumb and forefinger; she lowered thread, spindle, and fluff to her lap—‘is that a traveling woman in gray veils spoke within my hearing—spoke of something as many men and women have spoken of various things to me or near me—and years later, now, last night, something happened—among the many things that have happened to me…I ate your soup; which made me remember what she said, years ago—made it mean something.’

  ‘Made what the woman was saying into magic…?’ With her confused look, Gutryd suddenly struck Pryn as a woman who’d find anything to do with magic fascinating. ‘Or made the soup magic…?’

  ‘Made it into a tale,’ Bragan said. ‘Is that what you mean? Made it into a tale you could tell…the tale you just told?’

  ‘That’s right Pryn said, surprised the understanding came from Bragan when she’d expected it from Gutryd. ‘Made it all into a story. I mean—’ Here Pryn laughed and lifted her fleece till the rock rose from her lap; she set it spinning again—‘sometimes I think there must be nothing to the world except stories and magic!’ (She’d never thought anything like that before in her life!) ‘But I guess stories are more common—while magic is rare, I’m afraid. But until I questioned it, I’d just assumed it was the other way around. Which isn’t to say anything bad of either one…’

  ‘Well.’ Gutryd sounded disappointed. ‘I know something that certainly isn’t a story. In two months you—’ she nodded toward her cousin—‘and in seven or eight months you—’ she looked at Pryn—‘will deliver yourselves of children. That’s what’s real. But perhaps it’s magic, too—oh, this is all like Kurvan’s talk—very clever, but I can’t really understand it!’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know…’ Bragan looked quite happy—indeed, the most familiar thing in the whole room to Pryn suddenly seemed Bragan’s expression; because it was the one Pryn used to descry, among all her great-aunt’s wrinkles, years ago, at the advent of an interesting stranger. Well, let me finish this up.’ Bragan nodded toward Pryn. ‘You’d best get back to your spinning—and after you take this to Tratsin at the workshop, you can come back and have something to eat. You’ll eat supper with us here tonight, too, before you go…? Oh, it will be fun to have you living in Enoch. Yes, it is like Kurvan’s talk; and that’s why I like Kurvan! Now the trouble with Tratsin…’ and went on (turning all she’d said of her husband before into a tale, Pryn thought), while Gutryd carded and Pryn spun. Listening to all these familiar complaints, Pryn thought: So many things are thought but never spoken, such as this thought itself—which is exactly when the ache in the hand to hold a stylus comes. She let thread twist through her fingers, feeling the tug in her shoulder.

  Gutryd’s forks flew through the wool in her lap as she gazed at her work intently, just as if she saw some amazing magic in each marvelous, fluffing strand—at least, thought Pryn, that’s the tale I’d tell of it.

  ‘…what rock?’ Pryn took the dinner bowl. ‘What bridge did you say?’

  But Bragan was too preoccupied to notice Pryn’s surprise.’…not along the river but up the stream,’ she repeated her instructions. ‘Like I said, you’ll find him sitting under Belham’s Bridge, right by Venn’s Rock.’ Both children were crying. ‘You take the ravine short-cut and you can’t miss him,’ Bragan went on, joggling one baby and looking f
or the other. ‘He always waits for his food there—to be by himself a while, he says. Oh, it’s just a—well, you go on now. I’ve got to take the girls to play with some friends—where they should have been an hour ago! Venn’s Rock, Belham’s Bridge. I’ll be home in a bit—and Gutryd should be home even sooner…’ So Pryn could only take the clay bowl with the leather cover strapped down over it out into the sunny yard and set off between the shacks. (The bowl reminded her of a mummer’s drum.) And found the stream.

  And started up it.

  Shacks fell away, while trees and stone rose about her either side of the water to make the current into the bright flooring of a sun-splashed gorge. She walked over a slanted stone, matted with moss that became black mush at the water. Twisting here and untwisting there, a brown vine branched above her, beckoning her to climb the six meters to the leafy rim. She would have, too, if she’d been wandering alone in the mountains and not carrying dinner to a working man.

  Perhaps she might put Tratsin’s bowl down for a few minutes and explore that cut there where the gray rock turned out and, losing all vegetation, went russet. Nearing, she saw, it was as if some great block, the height of the ravine wall and meters wide, had been quarried away, revealing the earth’s red marble muscle. As Pryn walked before the sheared face that sloped so steeply, she saw several grooves running the height of it, straight enough and clean enough that they must have been tool made. She looked behind for some obvious stone by the stream to set the bowl near…

  Then she saw the wood chips.

  One, the length of her little finger, vaulted in the rush between two foam-lapped granite chunks, flushed against a third, then spun downstream—as another, and seconds later another, followed.

  Pryn frowned; and decided, really, the red marble face was too steep to climb. She’d better go on with her journey. Belham’s Bridge…? Venn’s…?