Neveryona

by Delany, Samuel R.

  Having momentarily slowed to watch the activities about her, Pryn hurried to catch up.

  Coming by them now was a thick-set man. His red scarf was partly braided in with his hair – much of it gone from his freckled scalp. Behind him were three older boys and a girl. As they walked, the red-scarfed man instructed, ‘… and, of course, lateness will not be tolerated. You men are here to work, and we will get a day’s work from you. This woman, or one like her, will be by with a bucket for you to drink from every hour; as well, a woman will be by with a bucket, also every hour, into which anyone who has to may relieve himself. Once you are at your work, there should be no need to leave till we say so. Our first crew of barbarian loafers did more sipping and pissing and splashing of water over their heads than they did digging – and expected to get paid for it! But we’ve finally managed to locate a better breed for our wants here …’

  As they passed, the girl looked at Pryn. I wonder, Pryn thought, if she thinks I shall be carrying a water pail or slop bucket?

  Something brushed the front of Pryn’s dress and struck Madame Keyne, a step ahead, full on the thigh. Madame Keyne raised her arm and looked down where the clot of mud – or worse – pulled from her skirt to fall to the dust.Madame Keyne looked off at the fence, beyond which barbarians massed. Someone pulled from the fence to hurry away in the closing crowd. Some of those around where he’d been were laughing.

  Madame Keyne made a face, shook her skirt, and started walking again. ‘I’m afraid that’s one of the inevitable unpleasantnesses of life outside my garden. It’s also why I harbor my dislike of the Liberator.’

  ‘Was that one of the Liberator’s men … ?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘Much more likely it was some disgruntled creature with a mother to support, three sisters he has not yet married off, a wife, and uncountable children – a man whom we just failed to hire or, indeed, just fired for his laxness. Or it could be some mischievous youth, a cousin to our own Wild Ini, who has seen such a man as I described throw his clod (though he understands the reasons no more than a pampered aristocrat’s brat), who merely finds such violations amusing. Unfortunately, though, a growing number of those men over there, including some of the clod throwers, think the Liberator is here for them.’

  ‘But I thought – ‘ for all this seemed as confusing to Pryn as what had been going on within Madame Keyne’s own walls – ‘the Liberator had come to free slaves.’

  ‘Slaves are men and women who labor for no pay. Over there are men who do no labor for no pay. The similarity is enough so that they might make the mistake themselves. If the Liberator makes the same mistake, I may well have reason to pay out a full twelve and six to the next fanatic who asks.’ Madame Keyne sighed, her thoughts drifting somewhere else. Suddenly she announced, ‘The thing Jade does not realize – ‘ startling Pryn – ‘and that her position as my secretary, or perhaps my own love for her itself may prevent her from realizing, so that it is the one thing in our relationship for which I feel guilty, is that as one grows older, one lives more and more off the little signs of whatever community one moves through day to day and less and less off the gifts that fall out of individual relationships. If one does not prepare for this change in youth, then age becomes a bitter time. This is not to disparage the beauty of one’s relationships with lover or friend. It is only to acknowledge what, for so many in the city, is a sad truth. Community can, however awkwardly, replace individual relationships. But individual relationships only grow poisonous and resentful if there is no community to support them. But we are not going to discuss this any more, my girl. Still – ‘ Madame Keyne looked at Pryn without any smile at all – ‘I must tell you, if there was any motivation other than idle curiosity behind the disreputable act you caught me indulging with that clever, disreputable man on Black Avenue – and you are old enough, girl, to know no curiosity is really idle – it is only to protect my sense of that community, which includes, for me, equally the man who flung his clod, you, all those who wear my red scarf, Ini, and Jade, and, yes, the whole of this city … the nation to whom I make my gift, here, as well as those neighbors of mine in Sallese whom I would not dream of inviting to a small, private supper with any of the ones of you I have mentioned, for fear the resultant hostilities and intolerances would render the whole notion of community ludicrous, if not barbaric.’

  Another clod landed a few feet before them.

  Behind the fence was some kind of scuffle. The men ahead of them noticed; one, a great strapping fellow, turned back toward Madame Keyne.

  ‘But what about his sense of community,’ Pryn asked. ‘I mean the Liberator’s – ‘

  ‘The Liberator, ‘ey, Madame Keyne?’ The big man who stepped up had the same green eyes, Pryn realized, as Gorgik. For a moment, Pryn wondered if, under the scarf about his neck, was the Liberator’s collar.

  Pryn blinked.

  The face was unscarred.

  And his forty-five or fifty years sat among the muscles, calluses, and the general heft of his body more easily than they had rested on iron-collared Gorgik’s. ‘Are those dogs acting up again?’ He bawled over the fence: ‘Have you no respect for a woman of Madame Keyne’s standing in this city?’ Shaking his head, he looked back. ‘You may be sure nobody wants any “Liberator” on this side, Madame.’

  ‘Hello, Ergi,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘I’m glad to see my best foreman is on the job.’ She turned again to Pryn. ‘The men who work over here find the idea of the Liberator mildly uncomfortable – no doubt because they make the same mistake as the men outside.’‘These fellows here don’t want to lose their jobs to the men out there,’ declared Ergi. ‘If this Liberator is for the unemployed, then he can’t very well be for the employed, too. Hey, you!’ Ergi bawled again, waving his fist. ‘Over there – over there with that scaffolding! Not there!’ He shook his head. ‘There’s muscle a-plenty around here, Madame Keyne. But I don’t think a man in the place can think two thoughts that follow one from the other. Is this your new secretary?’

  Startled, Pryn looked up to see Madame Keyne at least looked surprised.

  ‘Possibly,’ Madame Keyne replied. ‘And possibly not. I haven’t decided whether I need one. This young woman reads and writes – ‘

  ‘More than I can do!’ Ergi laughed.

  ‘ – and she listens. As for what she thinks about what she hears – ‘ Madame Keyne’s dark, dry face took on its amused and curious smile – ‘that we have yet to determine.’

  ‘Well, you don’t have to worry about what anyone thinks of the Liberator on this site, Madame Keyne! That’s for certain – Hey, there! Hey! I said put it – !’

  ‘Yes,’ Madame Keyne went on. ‘But there are other confusions to be made, just as simple and just as interesting. For example – ‘

  ‘Excuse me, Madame.’ Ergi hurried off to right some confusion ahead, shouting, waving.

  ‘Just as a man who has no work and gets no money for it may think himself a slave, so a man who has work and gets only very little money for it may think himself the same. And that – I have no illusions about it, girl – is very much the workers, men and women, on this side of the fence.’

  They had almost crossed the dust and gravel, which Pryn had finally been able to reread as a thriving market. What they approached now, however, baffled her.

  In an area at least as large as the market proper, there were many more workers than there were roaming the square. Clearly this was where Ergi’s foremanship centered. Pryn glimpsed him off amidst the excavations, hurrying some naked men from one pit to another. Though some scaffolding had indeed been set up, most of the workers (and only the foremen, Pryn saw now, wore Madame Keyne’s scarves) were digging out large, rectangular holes that left two- and three-meter walls of dirt between. ‘What will they be building here?’ Pryn asked, as they started to walk along one.

  ‘Here will be the warehouses, and administration offices, and archives, and market workers’ barracks, and vendors’ storag
e spaces, and … well, all the buildings needed to house the functions that must accrue to any sizable market area. These are the buildings which will be mine! Mine to rent, to allot, to administer! Oh, believe me, though I disparage it, I’ve examined the Old Market as carefully as anyone in Kolhari. And I’ve learned precisely what keeps it so small. I am prepared to see that the New Market is successful, that it grows, and that I profit both by that success and growth.’

  The image of the market as a map of the nation returned to Pryn, to be shattered a moment later by her sudden apprehension of this neighborhood of storage spaces and warehouses beside the market as a map of the market to come. And though none of it had yet been filled in, nevetheless it would control the very shape and pace, the movement and organization of that market as surely as Madame Keyne controlled the comings and goings of her red-scarfed employees.

  As they made their way over the site, one or another worker looked up, to recognize Madame Keyne. The woman seemed to know most of them by name. ‘Morning, Terkin,’ she called as one man paused to grin up. She turned to another. ‘You swing your shovel that hard, Orget, and you’ll wear it out!’ which made Orget, already working furiously, laugh and redouble his effort.

  Pryn looked down into the excavation on their left.

  A young woman climbed, step at a time, up the wide ladder. By rope handles, one in each fist, she held a ceramic bucket, filled with urine and darkened with feces. She gained the wall and put the buckets carefully on the uneven dirt.

  Urine spilled on the sloping clay.

  With similar buckets of clear water, around which bobbed half a dozen cups, hooked over the rim by their handles, another woman stepped between Pryn and Madame Keyne to halt by the ladder top, waiting for the other to move off so she might climb down.

  ‘Over there – ‘ Madame Keyne pointed between the scaffolds and the workers rolling their carts of dirt along the ridges – ‘is the sea … though one can hardly see the waterfront for all the confusion between us and it. Nevertheless, imports from the east and south will have easy access to my warehouses, and thus will have easy access to the entire web of commerce centering here.’

  Pryn looked down into the excavation on their right.

  Dark-haired, dark-skinned, arched backs running with water like the falls in Madame Keyne’s garden, most of the laborers had abandoned all clothes, though two or three still wore a loincloth, a leg band, or a leather bracelet.

  ‘Morning, Silon – and that must be your young barbarian friend Namyuk, who you said you’d bring us today. Work hard as your friend Silon, Namyuk, and you’ll do well by us!’ Madame Keyne stooped to take the wet, callused hand of a sweating man who ran up to tell her some story about his daughter, a lame ox, and a grain jar, to which Madame Keyne nodded and nodded with concern. As she stood, some joke came from the other side of the excavation – a very old joke, too, because Pryn had heard it even in Ellamon. But Madame Keyne tossed a jibe over her shoulder that made the diggers rest their shovels and the water-carrier lower her buckets. All howled – till a foreman, passing on the far wall, shouted them back to work.

  Several times since their early garden encounter, Pryn had told herself she had no complete picture of this woman. Hour by hour that ‘non-picture’ had suffered its changes. But, whoever she is, Pryn thought, here seems her home – no matter how much she enjoys her flowers. She might even swing a pick – or carry a bucket – for Madame Keyne had just stopped a slops carrier who’d been walking before them with a limp; she searched through the folds of her skirt, found her purse, and tucked a small coin into the shift, which was turned down and bunched at the dry-haired woman’s waist. Then she called the foreman over. ‘Take Malika here back to the water cask and put her on the filling detail – where she won’t have to walk on that foot so much.’ As Madame Keyne watched the older water-carrier and the younger foreman walk – and limp – off, Pryn thought: She really seems more comfortable here.

  Madame Keyne paused at a pit to inquire of a balding barrow-pusher after the progress of his wife’s illness; at another she stooped to ask a white-haired worker to show her his bandaged shoulder, ‘If it still pains you, Fenya, I don’t want you straining yourself. The bones of dead laborers are not the proper foundations for these cellars.’

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing, Madame Keyne! Don’t trouble yourself over it!’

  ‘The people who work for you, Madame … ?’

  Standing, Madame Keyne looked around.

  ‘Even when they have problems, they seem so … content!’

  As they turned at the corner of another cellar, Madame Keyne took Pryn’s arm. ‘That’s because they have the discontented example of the barbarians on the other side of the fence to instruct them.’

  ‘You don’t use nearly as many women as you do men.’ Looking over the workers around the site, Pryn pictured herself coming into the city – by some other road, as it were – arriving at the market as a seeker after work rather than as the owner’s guest.

  ‘Jade is always after me to hire more women and barbarians,’ Madame Keyne commented. ‘I’ve actually entertained the notion – certainly I’ve known all too many women who can work as hard as a man and feel twice the drive to prove it. The idea has always struck me, however, as a thrilling transgression. But I’m afraid this side of fifty I react to such thrills as though they were simple stabs of fear – as though, if I did so, something terrible might happen. Even I cannot think what. It is as if I want my construction site to look even more like the sites owned by the powerful men in this city than – well, than those sites do themselves. I am not the most powerful person in Kolhari by any means. Forces other than I have created a customary proportion in the sexual division of our labor, and I fear to deviate from it as though it might evoke some vast and crushing disapproval. That fear, you know, is not the disapproval of those whom I am equal to or whom I am above, but rather some fancied disapproval from those above me – men, and they are almost all men, who would never deign even to notice me and whom, when all is said and done, I do no more than glimpse from year end to year end, now as one passes in an elegant carriage, now as one enters some fine-gated mansion, their very absence vouch safing their powers over my actions far more than any adversary present to voice or hand.’

  ‘But you are a powerful woman!’ Pryn declared, for her attention had wandered. ‘I hadn’t realized you were … well, this powerful! How did you become so? I mean, how did you ever … ?’ (We write, you see, of a more primitive time when civilization’s inhibitions were fewer; so that those delicate questions whose very contemplation might throw the likes of you and me into hot-cheeked stammering or moist-palmed silence were easier to ask, at least for a mountain girl such as Pryn.) ‘You must tell me!’

  ‘Would you like me to? Sometimes I wish it were more complicated than it is.’ Madame Keyne found the purse in her skirts’ folds. Digging inside, first with two fingers, then with three, she removed two coins, then let the purse fall back. She held them up, one in each hand. The larger was a gold piece that flashed and glimmered. ‘Here,’ Madame Keyne said, holding out the gold for Pryn to examine, ‘is the money with which I finance my projects – the money against which I make my loans, the money I cite when I bargain over lands, the money I have at my beck and call when I arrange prices for materials and labor, the money those who know I am a wealthy woman know I possess.’ The gold coin was stamped with a likeness of the Child Empress. ‘While this – ‘ Madame Keyne held out the smaller iron coin – ‘is the money I am actually prepared to pay out for those unavoidable day-to-day expenses, expenses which include the wages for Ergi, for Jade, for Clyton, as well as for those sweating, naked men and women who dig and carry here – not to mention the six and two I spent back on Black Avenue.’ The iron piece bore the face of a man whose name and office Pryn did not know – though his coin was far the more common.

  ‘Where do you keep this money?’ Pryn asked, for she was beginning to sense just how much such a pr
oject as this market and these warehouses must require.

  ‘Ah, it’s hidden!’ replied Madame Keyne, who, rather than taking offense at the question, seemed delighted. ‘It’s hidden, carefully, throughout the city, where it’s protected as much by the accounting acumen of the financially astute as it is by the monetary ignorance of the general populace. Really – ‘ She looked from one coin to the other – ‘there is nothing complicated in it. You know, girl, there’s something I’ve been more or less aware of since I was a child: if events ever struck me from the position of affluence and prestige that, certainly, my family secured for me far more than I did, as long as the world in general and the city in particular are organized along the lines they are today I could climb back, simply because I know where the ladders’ feet are located – though I confess, the thought of having to make such a climb again becomes less and less appealing, if only because of my age and energies. But these smiling, sweating, impoverished creatures below us do not know – so that the ladders themselves will always be comparatively free of traffic for those of my class who require them. The men here love me – oh, by love I mean nothing profound or passionate; only love at that level of community that we must all indulge for a satisfying life – the women, I fear, do not love me quite so much. They are too concerned with how I treat the men and often do not notice my special concern for them: those women in extra need I will often give extra money to directly. I hear the foremen joke about it. But I have been to the homes of many of my workers, men and women – and I know the extra needs of a woman working in this city. I do not claim to hire an equitable number of men from all who need jobs. And I hire less women. But those I hire, I treat well. To do otherwise would be irresponsible to the community which is my concern. Now those men – and women – on the other side of the fence, they are jobless and they hate me – and hate too those that now work. I console myself by remembering that, the odd clod aside, their hate is no more passionate than the love we share over here. Still, if only because I do know how real the one is, I must keep my eye open to the other.