Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  He looked ahead again. Off through an arch of trees, water rushed. He glanced at her.

  ‘For one thing,’ she said, her smile coming back, I’ve known my share of criminal gentlemen. You say you haven’t known very many like—well, me. But perhaps you’re exaggerating for effect.’ (He shook his head in wild denial.) ‘Though, it’s true, that’s not the type I would have thought you. Oh, perhaps there’s something about the way I’m taken with marked men that’s a little like what you talk of; but, if only for that part, there’s got to be something about it quite different.’ She took her hand away. ‘But I hope you’re happier now that you’ve told me.’

  He took a breath.

  ‘And I don’t think you’re a fool. Who’s going to think anyone’s a fool for liking them? You shouldn’t feel badly—’

  ‘Oh, I don’t!’ he said. ‘No, I don’t at all—’

  ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘it is the reason I called you over. I’m not going to play about that. I’m too old and you’re too old. I like you. I hope that’s not going to be too terrible for you. You’re certainly better than my gentleman farmer. But, look, now—I just don’t believe, at your age, you’ve never encountered some woman before who liked the fact that you had some spirit to you, that you’d been a few places and—let’s say it out—had gotten your welts in the process!’

  ‘I have!’ Clodon swallowed. ‘Only, I wasn’t ready for that to be you,’ he admitted. ‘I wish we had a drink …!’

  She laughed, like a traveler relaxing on hearing some local saw that, repeated a hundred, a thousand times, now identified which county they’d ended up in. ‘Well, we don’t. So we’ll have to act like real ladies and gentlemen. Do you want to hold my hand? I’d like to hold yours.’

  While he wondered how he was supposed to take hers up in his mutilated fist, she took his. He almost couldn’t feel it. So delicate, it seemed the same temperature as the air.

  She said: ‘There!’

  They stepped through the arch of leaves before the water cutting them off.

  The last waterfall Clodon had seen was one he’d just come across in the forest, maybe three years back: it had been some fifteen or twenty feet high. And that’s what he’d been expecting here. But the water before them was a mazy twenty, even thirty feet wide. It wound away up stream perhaps forty or fifty yards. Then, in a series of boulders, stone platforms, and rocky levels, it rose, and rose, and rose, in glassy sprays and crashes of white, which did not even reach the top of the rocks. Rather, higher than he’d ever imagined a mountain, much less a falls, the whole great scoop out of the stone turned aside and disappeared, while the rock face (a quarter of a mile? a half a mile off?) kept rising, still, to an edge of trees that looked, from this distance, thin as moss.

  ‘The gorge …!’ she whispered.

  Clodon was so surprised that, until she said it, he was not really sure if this were their goal, or just some wonder encountered by the way.

  He looked around. ‘We can climb along some of it,’ he told her.

  A ledge had been cut directly into the stone of the shore that, level, led some feet above the rapids. Ahead, they could see it rise, in several sets of steps, at some places even cut into the wall to form a corridor with a ceiling and sided by squat stone columns.

  ‘That must be what they call Venn’s Stair,’ she said.

  He wondered how she knew so much about the place and he so little.

  The promenade seemed to dwindle, till it was just a line high up the rocks that (a mile off?) disappeared behind the far wall of trees and soaring cliffs.

  ‘How far does it go up?’ she asked, dropping his hand and starting out along it. Clodon followed. ‘Well, you know—’ He came up after her—‘it’s been so long since I’ve been here. I don’t really remember. Pretty far, I’d say …’ He wondered if he should take her hand again. Steps ahead, she started up the second set of uneven, stone stairs, their crevices wedged with leaves.

  Clodon said: ‘I’ve … never been here before!’

  Still climbing, she looked back at him with that particularly interesting smile. ‘I didn’t think you had.’ She reached behind and gave his arm a squeeze. Clumsily he squeezed her hand back.

  Then it didn’t seem to matter if they held hands or not—since, as one swung by her skirted hip or the other raised to press the mossy stone, he could (as he mounted three steps behind her) watch.

  They climbed a long while.

  Distances were not so great as he’d thought.

  But when they’d climbed along twenty minutes, over the low wall beside them they could see what looked like a stade of nothing, with a swirl of froth on green-black water at its bottom, and some water-slicked boulders, some rising spume. Across from them, flecked with trees and vegetation, red-brown rock leaned majestically away. Here and there it was cut with ledges that looked wholly unattainable—till you began to think about the steps they climbed now, which every once in a while became a damp corridor, with a low ceiling and a colonnade of squat columns, some wrapped as high as his shoulders with moss.

  Between them, the gorge …

  They’d gone around a curve so gentle Clodon had not even been aware of it; but the vista had changed completely, opening onto an even higher wedge of rock (the word suggesting something smaller than what was below, but they were looking at something half again as huge as what they’d already seen), down which white water fell, hundreds and hundreds of feet, the wind catching curls of it to blow out on the air.

  Clodon said: ‘I guess the steps end just ahead.’

  Over the waist high wall beside them, where the curve was sharper, a tributary falls roared from a crevice fifty feet on and a little below, to drop and drop and drop, joining the main cascade, measureless rods down. The steps seemed to stop at some sort of observation place—seemed to; because when they reached it, what they actually did were swing around and continue along the side of the tributary’s canyon.

  The far wall here was only twenty feet away. Sky began maybe forty feet up. Again they were on a wide ledge. The water, which, just before, had rushed to spill a quarter of a mile through air, here had a surface so smooth it seemed not to move, save when a twig or a leaf shot along it. Through it, rocky ledges and outcropping were visible to a bed nine feet down. They wound their way, looking above, looking below. The light between the cliffs was luminous. The feat of the stairs’ construction gave way for a few yards to something almost natural, before more steps swung around another bend in the crevice—

  Things darkened about them.

  They looked up. In that second the light returned.

  ‘What was that?’ Alharid asked.

  And Clodon realized how much the water’s roar had subsided. The last time she’d spoken, he hadn’t been able to hear her.

  ‘Isn’t this incredible?’ she said, a few steps further. She’d said it several times before.

  Impressed with the first dozen views, it was beginning to pall for Clodon. But he was glad she still enjoyed it.

  ‘Can you imagine,’ she went on, ‘someone in a tiny town like this, cutting steps through all that stone? And they don’t even have a castle here. It must have taken a hundred years!’

  Quite simply, Clodon could not imagine it; he’d given up trying before they’d turned into this grotto.

  She frowned up. ‘Do you think it was a bird? I mean, that shadow, just before?’

  ‘It was a pretty big one, then.’ Clodon looked at the leafy ledges of the rock walls, now on their side of the water, now on the other.

  She took his hand. ‘Maybe it was a cloud?’

  ‘Then it was a pretty fast one.’

  They started again. The ledge they walked was broad enough for them to go abreast. The water’s surface, at its mossy line, was ten feet down.

  The far wall sloped much lower here—but not the near one. Then, again suggesting unknowns of history and contrivance, the ledge went round another corner to reveal a bridge. It was wood. C
learly it marked the end of the stair. Once it may have been sturdy.

  ‘I don’t think there’re enough people in Narnis to keep something like this in any kind of repair.’ Alharid gave words to a thought that was only a vague discomfort for Clodon.

  He put his foot out on it and leaned. ‘It seems strong.’ He pulled his foot back, then stamped. Nothing even shook. So he stepped out on it. ‘Come on.’

  She glanced up, took a great breath, and started after him.

  On the other side, the road—for it was just a road now, as you might find through any stretch of country—moved away from the water into the trees. Yellowing leaves made the light a gold haze. They looked down a slope that lost itself among slim trunks.

  Once the trees broke, and they looked out across a valley in which, somewhere, the falls must now be hidden. As they walked, Clodon wrinkled his nose. ‘You know what I think it was we saw?’ He sniffed. ‘The thing that crossed the crevice above us?’

  What?’

  ‘A dragon.’

  ‘Oh, that’s silly!’ she declared. ‘Narnis is much too far west of Ellamon for dragons!’

  ‘All those ledges and cliffs and canyons—you saw them. That’s dragon country.’

  ‘Yes, but there aren’t any dragons any more—except at Ellamon. And they’re all in corrals.’

  ‘Smell’ he said. ‘Go on. Take a sniff.’

  She wrinkled her nose, breathed in deeply. ‘That’s not dragons,’ she said. ‘It’s just that funny stink cypress trees give off. When their cones drip.’

  ‘Not the cypresses,’ he said. ‘The smell under them—as if the cypresses were trying to cover it.’

  She frowned. She sniffed. ‘I don’t smell anything.’

  ‘You ever smell a dragon before?’

  She shrugged. ‘Not really. Who ever gets close enough for that …? I don’t really think I’d want to.’ Then she asked: ‘Did you?’

  ‘Wait here a minute.’ Clodon pushed off into the underbrush beside the road. Once the branches eased up, then thickened again about him. A few feet on, there was a drop. He lowered himself to his knee, and leaned over. Down three or four feet was a slope of bare, white stone that extended out in a cliff that ran along, nine or ten feet wide. Beyond that was nothing but sky, cloud, and the valley’s far mountain. Clodon sniffed again.

  He ran his eye back along the ledge: grayish-green, oval, a little larger than good-sized apples, and slightly wrinkled like spoiled fruit, they lay in an uneven depression. He counted five, six, seven of the things!

  ‘Come here!’ he called over his shoulder. ‘You can see! Here!’

  Where are you?’

  He heard her pushing through leaves.

  ‘Over here.’

  ‘What did you find?’

  ‘Look …’

  She came up beside him, standing while he kneeled. ‘Where …?’

  He pointed.

  ‘I don’t see any—’

  ‘There. Those are the flying creature’s eggs.’ (Now she dropped beside him.) ‘Told you I could smell them. The stink’s dragon spoor. Put a lot of them together and it’s something really fierce—even with no cypresses.’

  Her arm was against his. So was her hip. The brush was thick enough that there was no way to be together and not be that close. She said, ‘Oh …’ with real surprise. ‘Do you really think—?’

  When he glanced back at her, though, she was smiling again.

  ‘No …’ she said, suddenly, cajolingly. ‘Those aren’t real dragon eggs!’

  ‘What are they, then?’

  ‘I think they’re dragonfruit.’

  He said: ‘Dragonfruit doesn’t smell like that.’

  ‘Neither do dragon eggs.’

  ‘But the dragons who come to make their nests on the ledges around these parts do—you can believe that!’

  ‘Well, I did see some dragonfruit trees a bit further down.’ She sat back on her heels. ‘And I know all about the way the children pick and dry them in the sun till they get them the proper color with the proper wrinkles, then try to fool you and each other and everybody else into thinking they’re the real thing.’

  ‘There aren’t any dragonfruit trees here.’ Clodon hadn’t seen any at all. But then, he hadn’t been looking for them. ‘Besides, who would pick them and put them out there?’

  ‘One of your local bad boys, here an hour before us. I bet the sullen one you got the directions from beat us here by a short cut, then rolled them along—just so you’d think what you’re thinking!’

  ‘It’s a lot of trouble to go to for a prank.’ Nor, he thought, was it the sort of prank that particular boy would play.

  She said: ‘It’s a lot of trouble for someone to cut that ledge and all those steps and columns. But people do things like that.’ She looked at him, put her hand on his shoulder, and leaned a little. ‘You could just as easily say it was a lot of trouble for us to come all the way up here to get off from those nosy people in that silly little town.’ She looked very serious. Then the seriousness gave way to a smile again. ‘But we did it.’

  He looked back. After moments, he said, a little wildly: ‘I’d have to have a drink …!’

  ‘Come,’ she said, raising her other hand to his beard, touching a knuckle to his heavy under lip. ‘Come. Out of these bushes, now!’

  They didn’t get all the way to the road. In the partial clearing halfway back, there were enough fallen leaves scattered so that when Clodon broke away three or four more shrubs and hurled them off, there was room to stretch out—almost comfortably. He lay on his back with his arms around her, kissing and kissing her hand. Then he kissed her feet. Then he just held them. Finally he lay down again and kissed her face.

  She stroked him and kissed him back.

  ‘Oh …’ he said; ‘Oh …’ with each breath. And wondered if he were going to die right there. Then forgot death as if it were the smallest scar familiar on his body.

  ‘See,’ she said. ‘Now you see? You don’t need a drink!’

  He said: ‘Oh …!’

  13.1 And Clodon was dreaming.

  It was a clear, passionate, complex dream, vivid with voices and colors, actions and artifacts.

  The voice said:

  ‘Lust has made me a slave. But desire has set me free.’ The voice said: ‘Freedom has let me lust. But I am a slave to desire.’

  13.2 Clodon was peering into a cloud or a pool or a fog. A figure came forward, clearing as if lit by a thousand lamps. He was a ponderous man, sort of a giant, though there was more good humor about him than you might have expected.

  He might even, Clodon thought, be a good man.

  Clodon could see that now.

  He wore an iron collar around his neck, like a slave. But on his heavy flanks, confounding all judgments, the ends of the welts showed rigid from where he’d been flogged—like a murderer, like a bandit, like someone with nothing but contempt for all the laws of humanity, with nothing but loathing for the order of the nameless gods.

  The only thing unclear was which of the voices was his and which was Clodon’s.

  Slavery … lust … freedom … desire …?

  Even if it meant the death of him, Clodon couldn’t remember which of the words came first.

  13.3 The voice said:

  ‘Desire has made me a slave. But lust has set me free.’

  The voice said:

  ‘I am a slave to freedom. But desire is slave to lust.’

  14. He woke with leaves beating at his face, thinking, somehow, he, was beside rushing water. Only she was moving, shaking him—and the sound was a kind of roaring, and also a honking, like a donkey in a storm. She whispered: ‘ … We have to go! We must …!’ Then, suddenly, he grabbed her, pushed to his knees, pulling at her, and got his feet under him, to stagger through the brumbles. The leaves on all the trees around roared and roared, loud as the falls so far down. The branches dipped maniacally and rose and thundered around them. He knocked back more branches and r
an. Behind him, her arm tugging in his hand, she called, ‘Clodon …!’ and, for a moment, he was sure they would break out from the brush and go right over a ledge into the empty, empty air—

  They stumbled out on the road, though. He started to sprint along it. Then, frowning, he looked back—to see her looking back.

  The trees, only in that one place, waved and clashed their branches. The trumpeting honk trailed, so slowly, off, as if forced out by a pair of lungs each big as a bullocks. ‘Come …!’ he shouted. And she ran, catching herself against him. They hurried together across the bridge and into the tributary crevice.

  Without slowing, they rushed above glassy water, now glancing up at blue air and cloud, now down at their reflections.

  Ahead, the crevice opened up. The frothing falls spumed out into the gorge, to join the greater cascade.

  ‘Oh, stop …!’ She grabbed his shoulder and leaned her head there, breathing hard. ‘It isn’t protected, once we’re around the corner. Do you think …?’

  He took a breath, shook his head, and said: ‘Dragonfruit …!’

  ‘It could fly right down at us,’ she said, ‘once we’re out on the main part of the stair!’

  He looked up between the leaf-fringed walls. ‘They don’t do that,’ he said. ‘I don’t think.’

  ‘Don’t you think we should wait …?’

  He sucked his teeth. ‘Come on!’

  She managed half a smile. ‘Oh, you are a terrible man!’

  He managed one back. ‘Dragonfruit!’

  They started, reached the corner—where they came out on it now, the gorge was enough to make him sit right down, there on the wet steps.

  But they hurried, only lingering when they were in some corridor with the mossy columns squatting thickly between them and the sky.

  ‘It was, really’ she said, when, an hour later, holding hands, they came down the last steps beside the broad river rushing away along the valley, ‘kind of wonderful. I’ve never seen a dragon before. Not even at Ellamon. I’ve just heard about them.’ Behind them the falls roared, louder than any beast. ‘And don’t say “dragonfruit” to me again!’

  Before the arch of trees covering the big path, they both stopped.