Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  ‘I haven’t seen anyone,’ the old woman said shortly. She looked down at her shuttles. ‘I haven’t seen anyone and I’m not going to. I told you there was no one up there. This girl here went up last night. She said it was empty, too.’

  ‘Oh, now—’ The tall woman turned to look at the pig girl hugging the cat.

  The pig girl concentrated very hard on the warm ridges behind the cat’s ears and did not look at either woman. She wondered if the old woman would at least admit to the barbarian—though she didn’t seem inclined to. The cat purred, moved its head, then twisted a little.

  ‘Morning.’

  The pig girl looked up.

  ‘What are you three gossiping about at the start of a working day?’ Laughing, the man came into the yard. He was thickset, not so tall as the tall woman, but quite as brown as the pig girl. For the last half dozen years, he’d been the tall woman’s husband, though, in his way, he was related to all three—not that all three of them knew it. As a boy of nine, he’d lived at the old woman’s house for more than a year (when she was not so old). He’d even taken to calling her mother awhile—though, today, neither of them mentioned that long-ago distant time. Thanks to his wilder years, over a decade back, there was a good chance he was the pig girl’s father. But neither the pig girl nor the tall woman suspected that. And the pig girl’s mother had been a sad, ignorant, gangling woman who’d died some years before. But many nights (in those wilder years) he’d spent out behind the shack in which the old woman, back then, lived, so that she, among the three, had her suspicions. Indeed, this heavy-armed, thick-thighed man had always had a penchant for women taller than he, which, when he’d been younger and thinner, had made him the brunt of much teasing by the other village boys. Since he had been married to the tall woman, however, by and large he’d lived the quieter and quieter life of a good and honest laborer. ‘I just saw someone at the market, down from the Avila—’ he fingered one ear—‘who tells me the funeral procession’s no more than an hour away.’ Then he frowned. ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’

  For the cat had just jumped down from the pig girl’s arms to run across the grass.

  ‘Yes,’ said the tall woman, ‘what is that nasty thing?’ which was unusual, for mostly when her husband was about she was very quiet.

  ‘I don’t know.’ The pig girl shrugged. ‘It’s nothing. I found it in the castle.’ But there was no hiding it under the animal any longer.

  ‘Give it here.’ The man reached out a broad, workhardened hand for the collar. As he took it, the lock, which was broken, clicked. The iron semicircles swung apart on their hinge.

  ‘See,’ the pig girl said, ‘it doesn’t even work.’

  ‘Where did you get this?’ the man asked.

  ‘I told you’ the pig girl said. ‘I found it. When I was playing. Up at the castle.’

  ‘There’re none of these in the castle’ the man said.

  With her full dish and her empty basket, the tall woman watched her husband.

  The old woman finished another line and, with her stick, tamped the threads.

  ‘We cleaned them out years ago.’ The man frowned harder. ‘A whole bunch of us went up there, when I was a boy. The ones who went up were men, of course and we—well, they—hunted out all these old things—the broken slave collars, the funny swords with double blades, the sacks of gaming balls no one knew where they’d come from, the astrolabes showing no recognizable stars. They—we—went through the whole place, from the basement dungeons to the littlest tower room; we looked all over the roof and around the foundation besides. We cleared out all of those things. We threw them away, too. We threw them way away, much too far for you to go finding them up there. Believe me, there shouldn’t be any of them in the castle at all.’

  ‘Well—’ the old woman did not look up from her loom—‘you could have missed one. And she found it. You, or they, could have overlooked one. It would have been very easy, back then, the way you all used to carry on.’

  ‘No’ the man said firmly, ‘we didn’t overlook any. We got them all.’ He looked seriously at the pig girl. ‘Now you must leave these things—and all things like them—alone, young woman. They’re dangerous; and they can get you into real trouble!’

  ‘But it’s broken,’ the pig girl protested. ‘It doesn’t mean anything anymore—!’

  ‘And it’s all those strange things with no meaning that any meaning at all can rush in to fill.’ The man lowered thick brows. ‘You leave them alone, now.’ He turned and, with a gesture of astonishing violence, hurled the collar in among the leaves on the other side of the path. Just then, a breeze chose to shake and rustle those and all the leaves around them.

  It made the pig girl start.

  ‘He’s right,’ the tall woman said, quietly. ‘Those aren’t things to play with, especially not for children. I know you’ve got work to do. So do we all. Now why don’t you just run along and—’

  The hooves’ cloppings came to them down the path. The tall woman looked up. So did the man. Seconds later, a fine, high-stepping mare, with trappings of beaten brass and braided leather, came down the slope. The man astride her was no ordinary Imperial officer. His armor was more elaborate than any soldier that might pass through this part of Nevèrÿon. A packsack, in two halves, hung over the mare’s haunches behind the saddle; and his cloak was embroidered like the richest of lords’. From within the helmet, the scarred face glanced at them as they stood in the yard.

  With dazed excitement, the thick man and the tall woman raised the backs of their right fists to their foreheads, dropped their heads, and backed up three steps. It was very awkward for the woman, too, because she still had the dish of fruit on her hip and the empty basket hung from the hand she saluted with.

  The old woman went on weaving.

  The pig girl watched the rider on his horse, but she was thinking about the leaves across the road beyond. If she went in there (when would be the best time …?), she might recover the collar. But the gesture? As she’d never been taught it, she did not make it now.

  The great man rode down the path, which, three quarters of a mile on, would join the Royal Road.

  ‘There, did you see …?’ The tall woman stepped back again. ‘You see, I told you!’—for, once the horse had passed, her husband, with the excitement of a boy, had run a dozen steps after the rider: even that much distance between them let the tall woman become her other self.

  ‘See what?’ the old woman said.

  ‘Oh, don’t be—!’ The tall woman turned so sharply she almost spilled pears and apricots.

  But the old woman, busy with her shuttles, was smiling.

  The tall woman began to laugh. ‘That’s the man I told you about—yesterday! The one who was at the castle. And now, just as I said, he’s going to the funeral!’

  ‘You hear those drums …?’ her husband called back. But it was only a boy’s expectation. They’d not begun to sound.

  The pig girl looked down to see a shuttle pulled from between the strings, ending another multicolored line.

  ‘Well—’ the old woman reached for the tamping stick, still grinning, but at her work—‘no one is in the castle now.’

  —New York

  October 1985

  The Tale of Rumor and Desire

  … Reflection is the structure and the process of an operation that, in addition to designating the action of a mirror reproducing an object, implies that mirror’s mirroring itself, by which process the mirror is made to see itself. [But] Such a minimal definition, apart from the formal problems it poses, can hardly explain all the different theories or philosophies of reflection throughout the history of philosophy, although they may share a common optic metaphor predominant in the concept of reflection.

  —RODOLPHE GASCHÉ, The Tain of the Mirror

  Chronologically, in the greater Nevèrÿon series, ‘The Tale of Rumor and Desire’ comes after Neveryóna, or: The Tale of Signs and Cities and before ‘The Tale of
Fog and Granite.’

  0.1 on the tables the corpses lay out in the cool dark, scattered over with sweetened leaves, here and there a tripod the lamp in the man’s hand ahead spilled red light on the porter’s barkish face. ‘You’ve brought a friend with you, sir?’ The glow pooled under the ceiling beams. Nodding, the man walked the pool flowed

  0.2 at the Bridge of Lost Desire, he

  0.3 by the restaurant the tall poles either side the door the red and blue hangings the terrace near the pool under yellowing cloud

  1. He had more good humor about him than most who might have followed him along such a path, often intricate in its individual turnings, wholly predictable in its grosser direction, would have expected.

  It had not been a happy life.

  In a village by low scrub, set among tangled ravines that flattened into desert, Clodon had spent a childhood in which he’d been mostly hungry or angry. Often he said (not that it was true) the only day he’d been really happy was the one, three years after his mother died, when he’d stolen the roast goat—and the rum cask and the leather purse in which there were nine iron coins someone had left on the stone bench—from the yard of the tax collector who’d just been appointed one of the Empress’s customs inspectors. They’d caught him, with three of his friends, out by the sunken oasis under the sparse palms as the first stars pierced the evening like knife points through blue cloth. By then he and his friends were sick drunk. They took the coins back too: in the tiny town, there’d been nothing he could have spent them on anyway without revealing the theft.

  His cousin, the bailiff, tied him up by his wrists to the metal ring at the corner of the grain storage building and left him standing—sometimes hanging—three nights. At dawn, he came back and, while a dozen dirty boys stood gawking, flogged Clodon six strokes with a knotted horsehide whip. The welts came out on his back and flanks like gutted garter snakes left to bleed. Then his cousin cut him down. Clodon fell on the blood speckled dirt, clamping his teeth in rage, pain, and exhaustion. The boys ran away then, leaving two girls, as young and as dirty, watching from a dozen feet further off.

  Several times in the next week, while he walked slowly through the village, Clodon would start to cry—it always happened while some urchin stared. But what struck him at these moments, with the totality of its unfairness (Clodon was only a month beyond his sixteenth year), was that the reason he’d been flogged—and his friends let free—the reason the trial before the elders had gone so summarily, the reason his own excuses had been dismissed with an immediacy only a step away from a violation of village custom and law, was all the other things in town it was an open secret that he’d done, from his repeated near-rape of the half-witted hare-lipped girl who lived at the village edge with her aunt, no better than a prostitute and who was even now having his, or somebody’s, baby, to a string of petty (and some not so petty) thefts, at least one of which he hadn’t been responsible for at all.

  Imrog the smith’s apprentice had done that one but had said nothing when everyone in the village thought it was Clodon.

  As well, there were various assaults on various youngsters—all infractions that, till then, he’d felt supremely smug about having gotten away with.

  Clodon boasted to a few of his friends he was going to run away to the city, to Kolhari, to the capital port of Nevèrÿon, to the source of all advance and adventure, to the node from which all wondrous tales wound out to every village in the nation. His friends said it was a good idea. But no one wanted to come with him. That night, Clodon crawled from under the straw and the old leather robe he’d been sleeping in, blinked at a sliver of moon caught in cloud and branches, then started for the road. But he stopped at his cousin’s first, stood outside the hut awhile, at last picked up a clod, and hurled it—hard—at the wall. Then he turned and ran.

  For the highway.

  Stupid! he thought. He will know it was me. He will know I’ve left! (Hours later Clodon sat by the road, while the sky went smoky copper beyond the birches. He wanted to cry, but he held it in with his teeth set and his eyes blinking.) And he will not care.

  A week later Clodon was in Kolhari.

  He did not like the city.

  A cynical observer might say that, while the boy was always in some minor scrape—now fleeing an angry cart driver from whose wagon he’d snatched a cabbage to eat, later, raw, in an alley, now in a fight with another gamin over a piece of fruit fallen beside a market stall both had spotted at the same time—it was simply too hard, there in the city, for Clodon to get into serious trouble. The bailiffs and guards who patrolled Kolhari’s squares and alleys were too concerned with crimes that grew out of planning as well as hunger, of felonies that came from intricate connivance as well as mute anger before a system in which a few had so much while so many had nothing. They simply could not bother with what was, after all, the largely unpremeditated mischief of a boy. Soon Clodon was anxious to get back to a place where people paid some attention to him when he fell down drunk in the street or went yowling through the night, flinging broken pottery at window shutters edged with lamplight.

  A more careful observer, however, might tell a tale such as ours.

  Clodon left after three months, catching a ride with a market driver to an outlying village, where things were on a more familiar scale and life’s intricacies were easier to negotiate: people were more trusting, doors were less likely to be barred, folk were less wary about mine and thine, and more inclined to leave both lying about unguarded. Clodon was able to make his way a little better there than he had in the port—not that he stayed at the town long, either.

  It says something about his time at Kolhari, however, that a few years later Clodon had convinced himself his three months in the city had been nearly a full twelve. And sometimes, if the anecdote he was telling to this village simpleton or that town drunk or some other local ne’er-do-well warranted it, he’d refer to his ‘years’ in the great port, back when he was young.

  But the flogging and the flight to the capital were more than twenty years past. For the last five weeks, Clodon had been staying in a village called Narnis over fifty miles from the one he’d been born at. Lush pines grew to the west, and an hour’s walk up the crumbling rocks beyond the cypresses a waterfall crashed down a stony gorge.

  Once Clodon had been a lean-hipped youth. Now he was a ponderous man with a permanent thirst and a bad stomach.

  2. And Clodon was dreaming (pole, pool, bridge … ), cloud, metal, water, or … something into which he peered, squinting, at an unclear figure. A black tendril raddled and resolved into rising thread above the lamp flame. He turned: straw stuck his shoulder. There were flies under the lean-to’s edge. In his sleep he kept trying to see …

  He opened his eyes in the heat, moving his head back and forth in straw. Sunlight made little knife cuts in the thatching over him.

  3. Because of the dream, Clodon was not sure where he was. The dream, you see, had not been vivid with voices and colors, with faces and passions, with actions and artifacts you could haul back through sleep’s black currents into wakeful sun, then to ponder them like a full story, smiling over its absurdities, wondering at its glories, now and again this part or that falling away as you recognized what had been loaned it by past adventure or future hope. Rather it had been a gray, lazy, hazy froth of recall and fancy just under the film of consciousness, so that waking was like that thinnest of surface’s parting, at which drowsing and waking merged. For moments Clodon could not tell if the straw under his neck and the light through the chinks and the smell of the thatching were distortions of the dream’s limpid foam, or if the drift and shift in gray had merely been an extension of this clarity. The confusion was very similar to a feeling he’d had several mornings about this village in which he’d been only five weeks and the town in which he’d been born and lived sixteen years: save one was at the desert’s edge and one was in the mountains, both, in so many ways, were so much alike, it was easier sometimes to think t
he two sets of hide hovels, thatched shacks, with the stone buildings down by the highway end (in one of which lived another customs inspector) were really one, so that the questioning in his mind, whose banal expression was, ‘Where am I …?’ came from an awareness that though this was, indeed, not the town of his birth, for seconds he could not remember why.

  4. ‘Hey—’ Something tickled Clodon’s side and something chattered on wood. ‘Wake up, old bandit!’

  ‘Why are you …? Who do …?’ Clodon shifted; gas shifted inside him. So he let it out. ‘That’s for you, Funig.’

  Outside, Funig laughed—‘Hey—!’ and threw more gravel. ‘Wake up, old man! You want to work today?’

  Clodon sat up, scrubbing his forehead with the heel of his hand. ‘I want to get some money.’ He brushed at his belly and flank, where the hard welts felt as familiar as your finger held in your fist. (Clodon was missing a finger now. It had gone ten years ago in a job as a quarryman.) ‘But I don’t want to work for it—unless I have to. Does Teren want me to head his digging crew and foreman them through that foundation?’ He pushed himself up to a squat with burning bladder, then crawled from under the lean-to thatch, standing and narrowing his eyes against bright overcast. ‘Was I drunk again last night, Funig—no, more’s the pity. I wasn’t! Sometimes, boy, it’s easier to wake up the morning after a drunk than it is from unassisted sleep. Your eyes open early, and though you shake a little, you’re still alert and have your mind about you.’

  ‘A drunk?’ Funig was tall and hard. ‘The last time you were drunk, you didn’t get up out of your own piss and vomit for two days! You’re a pig, old man.’

  ‘And what are you?’ Clodon snuffled, then spat.

  But Funig’s shoulders were not the same size. Half of Funig’s face was flattened; one of Funig’s eyes never looked at anything. And without really limping Funig always lurched to one side and favored one arm. Sometimes he said it hurt him.