Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  Yet what I’d found in my five villages of his birth was in its way as disconcerting as my experience of his dying place.

  For the first of the towns simply and wholly no longer existed: we found its foundations, yes, some fallen walls—but not one building still stood. There were signs of fire. We left our mule wagon to tramp about the wreckage. While I speculated aloud as to how many years ago this was likely to have occurred, with his spear Terek turned up a bit of burnt board from the body of a cat, whose wet loins, as he prodded it, spilled out a slough of maggots!

  The destruction was only days—no more than weeks—old, or the carcass would have been all bone…

  But for all we looked about that afternoon, the three of us whispering quietly, or searching about stealthily, skittish as to lurking marauders or even, perhaps, slavers (none of whom materialized), we could learn no more.

  The second barbarian enclave we found was normal enough—though, for all of us, the destruction we’d seen the day before returned and returned to mind, the way sun, flashing on a stream, repeats and repeats in the eye after you’ve moved off into the woods. Yes, the yellow-headed, sun-browned inhabitants knew that Belham had been born there. (They pronounced his name just differently enough to leave a suspicion that we were not talking about the same man, but I’d already learned to put such doubts straight out of mind.) Well, then, did anyone know precisely where? Did his parents’ house, perhaps, still stand? Did relatives still live here who could tell stories that might have come down through the family about what was supposed to be, after all, a most prodigious childhood?

  That drew great laughter from the barbarians who’d gathered to gape at Arly’s crutch, dropping to the dust in place of his leg, or to poke and point at the spear Terek, in his kilt and stained leather chest-guard, leaned on like a staff, or simply to blink at me (at my dark, noble, northern features, I presumed), or our wagon, or our mules. From their lapping chatter I learned that this forest village, like the mountain town he’d died near, had also moved about a bit over the years.

  Well, where had it moved from?

  Astonished, I watched this one point in that direction, while another contradicted him, explaining that the other was thinking of a much more recent time, while an aged woman on a stick pushed ahead of them all to tell us that, no, most of the houses used to be down there, drowning out a gap-toothed boy who had just been saying earnestly, a moment back, how his old grandfather had clearly told him, years before, that over there…

  Terek, Arly, and I looked at each other.

  None of the barbarians truly knew.

  Or, if one did, none of us three could learn from listening—or from any of our further questions through the day—who was right.

  The third town we came to, larger and far more settled looking (perhaps it was the odd stone building, or the wooden fence along one side of a small, partially paved, market area), produced just as many barbarians claiming just as surely that Belham had been born here (part of his family had come from another town, you see; but that emigrant relative had been enough to make the other village—not among my five—try to appropriate his birth). This time my question as to where, then, specifically, young Belham’s home or hut had been led us, after much barbaric chatter, to an elderly man with a cloth wrapped in a kind of turban around his head, who volunteered to walk with us awhile. He would explain.

  He walked.

  We walked with him.

  Other barbarians kept a respectful distance.

  For distressing minutes our man was silent, and I thought either Arly or Terek would soon grow bored and start some jest, for though they had developed a certain respect, neither—when the other was there to clown about with—had developed much patience.

  But finally he spoke.

  ‘You understand,’ he told us, in a shrill, measured voice, as we walked among the huts and houses, ‘none of what you see, stone cabin or thatched hovel, has been here more than twenty-five years. Is that your age, boy?’ he asked Terek, who nodded, even though he was less. ‘Sometimes it’s been slavers who’ve devastated the land. Other times, it’s been soldiers who’ve marched through, killing, burning, destroying. Villages don’t survive that sort of thing. When I was a child, I can remember even earlier slavers, worse than the Imperial soldiers—indeed, in the early days I used to think they were one and the same. They came with the same metal swords, the same leather armor—’ He glanced toward tall Terek’s spear and gear—‘and dealt out much the same destruction. The only difference was that one took prisoners and the other left all as corpses. But I was only six or seven back then. Belham? I’ve heard of him. I’ve heard that he was born here. But I’ve heard that he was born in practically every village in the south—even in some I know for a fact have existed less years than the youngest of you has been alive.’ He glanced at Arly; and I felt proud that I looked so mature. ‘But we have little left to boast of here, my noble visitor.’ He nodded toward me. ‘So you mustn’t be surprised if our various villages share the little we have.’

  Somehow the next two towns we stopped in, looking for the birth of Belham, seemed to offer even less than the first three in terms of certainty. But among them all, at the last of the five, though I did not say it to either Terek or Arly, what I was most struck by was that, in their limited, brutish, and impoverished life, just as I had not been able to imagine a proper inn in the town of his dying, I could not imagine what, here, some hundred years ago, might have inspired a barbarian boy to the discoveries about numbers, circles, triangles, rock cutting, levers, pulleys, and the motions of water and wind that had been attributed to him by the time he left it at the behest of some local noble not much more advanced, I suspected by now (judging by the few who had recently given us shelter), in anything save their brutish power over these common folk who had been their subjects, than the commoners themselves. Yet somehow between then and now, I’d become humble enough to see this lack of imagination as my failure, my want of a comparable genius, the uncrossable distance at which I stood from the accomplishments of the Great Man.

  Despite the failings I’d learned existed in me, however, along with what strengths I’d found as well, I’d learned that Belham’s birth, only a little lifetime before his dying, had somehow become even less specific, even more generalized, than the tenuous fact of his death. Yet now I knew also that, while at (or near) his dying spot I’d seen one town and been able to tell myself, wrong or not, it was probably characteristic of the right one, here at these several places of his birth and better trained to observe by my travels, I’d taken from these five possibilities—though all were southern, barbaric, and small—only a set of extreme and fascinating differences; differences which overturned all certainty that, how long ago now, some haphazard huts I’d stumbled on in the mountains (or in the desert or the forest for that matter) could be truly ‘characteristic’ of any others. All towns were individual. Each was unique. And Belham’s ability to create wonders of abstraction and stone design from what he’d seen in them was just not the same as my little ability to re-create what even then I was becoming more and more wary of calling his ‘life.’

  It was only days after we had left the last of these villages—

  But I have already said:

  We made camp.

  The three of us sat by the fire, in our shell of leafy dark, my most recent meal (rabbit and small wild tubers) not much in the past, sleep not far in the future. Terek had just declined a game of bones with Arly, who sat now, both hands holding his knee, looking about us for (I suspect) the demons of darkness ceded him, along with her knowledge of edible plants, by the crone who’d staunched his stump. Suppose either one of them, I thought, my ‘servant’ or my ‘soldier,’ were asked to reconstruct even this little hour of our history, even as the three of us were enmeshed in it, here and now (there and then)? Suppose they were asked to recall what we’d eaten, to guess at the order of our bedding down? Would either of their accounts be accurate? Would two
tales from any of three of us be recognizably the same? How then could I presume to retrieve the true tale of Belham, as my own story was congruent with his neither in time nor in space?

  For in those old commercial scripts I had to work with, one could write: ‘I saw…’ or ‘She was…’ or ‘He did…’ But those useful and efficient marks gave us little or no way to write: ‘I might have seen something somewhat like…’ or ‘Maybe somebody had been near someplace more or less similar to…’ or ‘It’s conceivable that perhaps somebody who was almost the same as…’ But as far as Belham’s life was concerned, that was the only tale I had. In general, writing is precise and speech is imprecise. But what the unknown genius of the Ulvayns has given us is a tool to render precisely speech’s imprecision. To be a boy in Nevèrÿon before that genius sent his system abroad to us, however, was to have no such tool, and thus to experience precision and imprecision as separated by some un-crossable chasm which Belham could not bridge from his side nor I, I’d finally come to admit, from mine. What came to mind, then, with that firelit realization?

  Do you remember my secret plan?

  As I sat by the fireplace that night, contemplating all the ways that time and the land had smeared my vision of order, the articulation of my wish to move beyond everything about me that confined me silently returned.

  Contemplating what I took to be the wreckage of my quest, I realized I could not make that wreck clear to my two friends—which made them now seem less than friends, but rather some overpowering responsibility I could no longer carry. For while Terek had once called me a boy and a fool, he’d nevertheless assumed from the beginning that I was at least master of the information I’d sought, found, and sifted. And each bit of contradictory confusion Arly had watched me arrive at, he’d simply assumed was what I’d been looking for all along.

  Well, I’d found nothing save a bunch of buildings, roads, and rocks, some of which were where they were supposed to be and some of which weren’t.

  And because I could not tell them I had found nothing, for fear I would lose the little authority I had, I only wished to be free of them.

  As my thoughts came back from the hard peaks, the tangled forests, and the glaring deserts of my own ignorance, this was the fact I returned to. Yet, oddly enough, right here, at this place, on this evening, I felt as if I might also be face to face with something new, something in no way involved with Belham, something not called Nevèrÿon, something wondrous I might see or feel if only I was free, of them, of it. For here was also the possibility of leaving behind all the tangles of humanity and history Nevèrÿon herself seemed to have made hopelessly problematic in these last months:

  Our country is not, you understand, mapped to a precise edge the way some of our central counties have recently been marked out by Imperial surveyors. Still, we were at the southernmost edge of what is called Nevèrÿon.

  I knew it:

  We were at the southernmost edge of my map.

  And that map was Nevèrÿon.

  I had come as close to the points of Belham’s birth and death as I was able. It was not that I had seen all, or so much, or even enough of the life between to abandon my quest. Rather I knew now, that ‘life’ was no longer there to be known, so that my quest was not so much over, or sufficiently completed, or even reasonably begun. Rather, it had been revealed as an impracticality and an impossibility at once.

  On the map a rocky river, which we’d been following for a day between the last two villages, ran off the bottom. If I followed its watery murmur, soon and somewhere, I would be beyond Nevèrÿon.

  The most logical way to go on was, of course, simply to wait till next morning. Then, once we were all up, I could take out my map and announce we would now travel even further south. But somehow I had begun to have suspicions that the authority did not really lie with me, but in the quest itself; and though, with the fiasco of Belham’s ‘birth,’ I knew something terribly important in that quest had irreparably fallen to pieces, my companions didn’t. I wanted to shake myself free of the whole thing the way, I fancied, any of my soldiers who had so long ago deserted me must have felt when they, for whatever reasons, suspected things were not going well with my long-lost caravan.

  Suddenly I stood up, walked away from the fire—at the edge of the bushes I looked to see, sitting back by the provision cart’s wide wheel, Terek glance up at me with only the slightest questioning, then look again at the flame. Certainly he thought I was going off into the woods to relieve myself, or masturbate—as more than once I caught him off doing. Arly yawned at the fire and did not even look. I pushed into the darkening underbrush, stepping slowly, feeling beside and ahead of me. After ten steps it was black enough so that I might have been moving through the trees in a blindfold. Now a branch hit my face, my chest. Now I nearly walked into a tree. I felt my way around a rough trunk. Now my shin came up against a fallen log, and I climbed slowly over, reaching for the ground with my foot and wondering if I weren’t about to go over some slope as steep as the cliff where Belham—or I—had fallen.

  Thirty steps, forty steps, fifty steps on I came out into some bushy clearing.

  There was no moon. But the wide and lucid night was salted with stars as thickly as I’d ever seen. The dusty river of the Milky Way slanted through those cold sparks. I looked down to see that I was at the edge of some fieldwide clearing, scattered with brush and near the river. To my right, I could make out rocks and the foam breaking round them. The air was hugely still. The water whispered like wind.

  Because the nameless gods of craft we nod to in Nevèrÿon are so much like ourselves, no one ever pictures them. It would be redundant. Still, not only servants, but barbarians and even the odd nobleman had, by now, mentioned to me some of the names of those other, older entities—and a few had even taken me out, on the odd evening, to explain how some of their ancestors had pictured this one or that one among those stellar points. That night, standing there, I had a sudden fancy that, so many stars were out, there were now, hanging above me, pictures of all the gods there’d ever been, as well as all the gods there ever would be, named and unnamed, alike and overlapping, all looking down at me, as I made my way across that little meadow, seeking to flee—my gait slow for the night—beyond our odd and undefinable border.

  I tried to mark in the river’s foam-shot black the current’s thrust, to aid my direction when I’d once more entered the woods.

  Another thirty steps, and tickling leaves and prodding twigs received me. I would keep the river’s sound constant by me, I decided, as I moved, slow step by slow step. I wondered whether exhaustion or sunlight would find me first. I felt at once idiotically foolish and amazingly brave. My body seemed to glitter blackly in the midst of this transgression of a boundary all but inarticulable. But not for a second did I think of turning back.

  Now I have told you of the monster I live with, today, here in Kolhari—my ‘reputation’ as a teacher and a wise man. Well, at that time, I had little sense of the reality of the process by which such monsters form, at least as one was to form about me. But in my search for Belham, I had already begun to learn something of the process in the abstract: for all men—famous, infamous, or most extraordinarily ordinary—have such monsters. Didn’t Arly and I sometimes speak of Terek when he was off hunting? Didn’t Terek and I sometimes joke over Arly’s antics when he was not there? No doubt the two of them were talking of me now: making monsters! But as soon as any of us dies, there is only the monster left. What I had been pursuing was not Belham but the monster called Belham. And what my whole journey had taught me was precisely what sort of monster it was: it was made, as all such monsters are, of contradiction, supposition, miscalculation, impossibility, and ignorance. Well, for nearly a year—a long time for sustained effort from one of eighteen—like some fabled hero the mummers might mime on their wagon stage, I had not only pursued this ‘Belham’ monster, but I had fought it and hacked at it, and cut it apart, and pulled it to pieces, and, finally, ha
d tossed away its disparate limbs, till, on that very night, it was truly dispersed, vanquished, gone—all, that is, except the ineluctable force that had first held it together. All that was left was whatever had sought and sucked and gathered and contorted all the fragmentary ‘facts’—whatever had bound them into that monumentally resistant coherence I had begun my journey with, that coherence which, indeed, I had begun by seeking to confirm.

  That force still traveled with me as I stepped into the darkness that night—a force which, now naked, was doubtless even more powerful for what had been yanked apart from it, stripped free, and hurled away.

  As I inched forward, moving among black trees, I heard it, I think, on my left—high up too—like the smallest change in the river’s susurrus. A night bird, perhaps? But almost immediately, I heard it again, not so much as something that had moved closer, but as though another part or limb of it had moved, which was closer.

  I halted.

  Save the river’s whisper, it was very still.

  I started walking once more, hoping my own movement through the brush would be more frightening than attractive to whatever it was.

  Three steps on, again I heard it—now near the ground.

  Had it dropped from the branches?

  Then, while I definitely wasn’t moving, it moved. I swallowed and pulled back, hitting my shoulder against a trunk. Part of it was high, and part of it was on the ground. Whatever it was was simply very large.

  At first I didn’t hear it, but above me a handful of stars between two branches went out as something moved in front of them. Then, slowly, it bent down in the dark and…touched me!

  Reaching for me, it brushed against my arm, wet and crumbling as some rain-soaked mountain slope. At the same time some change in the night breeze came about, so that I smelled something rotten as a week-old cat carcass, its immense body no doubt starred with the same white, wriggling grubs.