Neveryona

by Delany, Samuel R.

  Pryn started toward Bragan, who had suddenly become very involved with the fire, food, and crockery in much the same way she’d increased her involvement in the ashes when the baby had first cried.

  So Pryn veered toward the door, out which Tratsin was leaving.

  She caught the hide hanging as it swung across the doorway. Hemlock leaves, from the branch tied for weight and bugs along its bottom, brushed the door stone.

  She stepped outside.

  Coppery sun burned on wet leaves.

  Other shacks stood near; still others stood across the muddy path down the slope.

  Through the break in the brush the river looked substantially narrower at dawn than it had in evening’s half-dark.

  More shacks sat on the far bank, a few stone huts among them – in short, the farther shore was much like this one. Tratsin stood a little off on some rocks around which the grass had worn away. He scratched at his thinning scalp so that thong and bound hair shook behind his ear.

  Down the slope, someone guffawed in the next cottage. A woman yelled. The other person laughed.

  Hemlock leaves shushed.

  Naked and disheveled, but without the child, Kurvan stepped out.

  Branches dipped slowly across the road, then turned up all their whispering leaves to show gray. The breeze reached a tree near the door.

  Droplets hit Pryn’s cheek.

  And Kurvan said something like, ‘Aargchh …!’ rubbing the splatter from his face and shoulders while Tratsin laughed and pointed. Pryn grinned – as Kurvan’s stubby genitals contracted within the black hair below the crease under his broad belly. ‘That’s right!’ he announced. ‘Everyone else gets a few drops, but Kurvan gets the soaking!’

  ‘What you’d better get,’ said Tratsin, ‘is a job!’ He laughed again.

  ‘Oh, yes – ’ Suddenly Kurvan’s annoyance and brushing turned into a great, open laugh so that his big chest shook. “I get the soaking? Well, sometimes I think my job is to give you and your family something to laugh at! Oh, it’s not such a bad vocation. The hours are long. The pay is mostly in kind – ’ Here he leaned toward Pryn in a mocking aside – ‘though he lets me hit him up for an iron coin or two.’ He dropped his hand to his knee to scratch. ‘But I suppose the work has its higher profits – ’

  Which made Tratsin laugh again. ‘You mean all the food we let you eat?’ He turned, shaking his head and smiling. ‘What you don’t understand, Kurvan, is the value of work itself. To do work – or any sort, of any kind, under whatever conditions – is important in itself. A body whole, healthy, and able to toil is the most wonderful and carefully crafted of gifts the nameless gods can give. Work is what makes you human. To do, to make, to change something with your hands – ’

  ‘Certainly any slave must feel better for his slaving, eh?’

  ‘Well,’ said Tratsin, ‘that’s what you always say to me when we have this argument. And I will say what I always say back: we have no slaves in Enoch, and because one can work – here – as a free man rather than a slave, we have – here – the final sanding and varnishing on an already beautifully constructed thing: labor itself.’

  Coming up the muddy road, two men carried a wooden bench, one lugging each end. It was very like the bench Pryn had once sat on against the building her first day in the city, or the bench at Madame Keyne’s reproduced in stone at the back of the hut on the rise in her garden, or the one in Tratsin’s hut. Sunlight through the trees splattered and spilled over and off its seat and carved back.

  Running up behind the bench carriers, the knees of his bowed legs knocking forward a leather apron, the leather bib sagging from the strap about his neck, came a third man …

  Man?

  Boy?

  Pryn blinked.

  He was substantially shorter than Pryn, though his face held thirty-five or forty years above that sparse gray beard. His forehead was wider and broader than either Kurvan’s or Tratsin’s. He grabbed up the bench in the middle to help carry. His shoulder was as high as the others’ waists.

  Tratsin said, oddly soft, to Pryn: ‘That’s some of my work there …’

  The dwarf – for it was a dwarf in the leather apron – turned over his shoulder to look up the slope. ‘Hey, Tratsin, come down here and help us carry this back to the shop! That rain last night? They won’t be along the river road to pick this up till evening, now. I don’t want it sitting in that leaky riverside storehouse all day. If it rains again, the roof will cave in on it in that place!’

  ‘Hey, Froc! I haven’t had my breakfast yet!’ Tratsin glanced again at Pryn. ‘And the little man there is my boss – a good boss too.’

  ‘Aw, what’s breakfast to a worker like you? Let your woman bring you an extra apple with dinner. Come on, now! Don’t be like that! We need you!’

  Tratsin chuckled, shaking his head again. ‘Tell Bragan I had to go in early, will you? A worker in Frocsin’s shop sometimes plays the woodpecker – and sometimes the ox. Hey, Bragan …!’

  Inside the hut, the baby cried again.

  ‘You tell her I’m gone!’ Tratsin started down the slope. (Pryn wondered whether the instruction were to Kurvan or to her.) At the bottom he slogged onto the muddy road and grabbed up the bench edge. The dwarf stepped back. ‘There you go – there …! Watch out for it, now!’ They moved on up the road.

  Standing beside Kurvan, Pryn watched them.

  ‘You know,’ Kurvan said after a moment, ‘the cut-down one there isn’t Tratsin’s boss.’

  Pryn glanced at him, frowning.

  ‘Froc is just his foreman. Now Frocsin would probably make a better boss than the one he’s got. But he isn’t the boss, much as Trat would like to think so.’

  Pryn looked at Kurvan, questioning.

  Leaves hissed above them. More drops. But Kurvan did not rub or complain.

  ‘The boss’s name is Marg, and he has a belly bigger than mine and less hair than Tratsin’s father, and he lives two villages away. He rides by to check out the workshop on Tuesdays and Fridays, and says along with everyone else what a little jewel he has in Froc – Marg says it and his workers say it too. But Frocsin’s no more the boss of that shop than I am!’

  Pryn wondered at the bushy bearded man’s insistence. ‘Tratsin seems like a happy man,’ she offered idly. ‘And he’s a good man, too.’

  ‘A good man, yes. They don’t make better. But happy?’ Kurvan grunted. ‘Well, he’s happy now. But he wasn’t happy a year ago. And I don’t know how happy he’ll be in another year.’ Suddenly he snorted and rubbed his thumb knuckle hard under his nose, leaving his moustache a black cloud with no shape at all. ‘Myself, I’m a simple man – simpler than Tratsin, I think. I don’t like work. I like play – and I only do the one when there’s no way else to pay for the other. But I can remember what happened yesterday, and I can figure a little of what’s coming tomorrow … And that’s never the way to be happy, is it?’

  ‘What do you think is going to come?’ Pryn asked. ‘For Tratsin? What was it like for him before – last year, I mean?’

  Kurvan shrugged. ‘Most of the men hereabouts aren’t benchmakers, you know.’ He nodded off toward the hills. ‘They work in the quarries up at Low Pass. Like Malot used to do.’

  Another shout came from the cottage across the road; a man stepped out the door, his head bowed between grizzled shoulders. Two workhammers hung from his leather girdle. Seconds later a boy hurried out after him, overtook him, turned back to wave him on – and became a girl! ‘Come on, Father. Run,’ she called. ‘We’re already late!’

  ‘You run,’ the man called back. ‘I’m walking!’

  ‘Now Wujy, there, is a man like me! Me, off to work before I’d had my breakfast?’ Kurvan laughed. ‘But Wujy there’s been sick. Everyone else has been off to the quarry before sun-up – probably in that rain, too. Wujy goes in with his daughter two or three hours late every day. He’s got permission, because of his age and infirmity. The girl picks up chips and gets paid one ir
on coin for every three days of work she puts in. And they let Wujy come in when he can and work as long or as short as he wants – Tratsin says its humane and just. Myself, I call it murder.’

  Pryn frowned.

  ‘You get paid by the weight of rock you dig out. If a man is too sick to dig any more than a green boy can be expected to come up with on his first week at the job when he’s still learning how to swing his hammer, then it’s a green boy’s wage he gets. Even if he’s an old man sick to death.’

  ‘In the city – ’ Pryn remembered Madame Keyne’s concern for the injured digger – ‘I met someone who was supposed to be a – ’ She began to say ‘a Liberator.’ But then, the Liberator was only interested in slaves …

  ‘You get paid by the load unless you’re part of the scaffolding crew. Then, as Tratsin used to joke when he was a young scaffolder, you don’t get paid at all! The scaffolders put up the wooden walkways and platforms against the rock faces for high work. Oh, they get a steady wage – but it’s lower than the pickers’. And we haven’t gone a year without one or another eighteen- or nineteen-year-old wood roper falling to his death. Till a year ago, Tratsin swung up and down the rock face putting up scaffolds. I was his friend, and I knew he hated the work, was frightened of it, and was scared to make any moves in life because of it.’ Kurvan humphed. ‘Ask him, and hell say, “It taught me the basics of woodworking – without which I couldn’t do the job I do now.” ’ He rubbed his bushy chin. ‘Tratsin has the fine job he has now because a fat old tile-layer had a cousin who was a master woodworker who knew some wealthy families who were building new homes and who had taken a liking for a kind of bench they usually build further north. Marg said: “Why not build them here?” and he had enough initiative to get his cousin and half a dozen carpenters – most of them, I might add, like Tratsin, out-of-work scaffolders – and an old grain storehouse and an industrious dwarf, and put them all together just on the other side of the bridge. And behold, a business!’ Kurvan shook his head again. ‘And a happy Tratsin, for whom the only value in life is labor: profitable, satisfying, challenging – till all the orders are filled. And they will be filled, you know, inside a year. Tratsin, with another couple of squalling babies and maybe even a second wife, will go back to the quarry. But already his scaffolding skills have been refined into the delicate touch of a master bench-maker. But he will no longer be able to live on scaffolders’ wages. He’ll have to work as a common digger. His skills will turn rotten in his hands and arms. Oh, he’ll stop talking of labor like some god among gods discoursing on his craft and begin to curse it like a man among men though he’ll wonder and ponder and fret and try to pretend he’s a god still. For that’s Tratsin. It’s also half the workers in this village. Me, I wonder what Malot’s doing in the city.’

  ‘Malot – ?’

  ‘Tratsin’s crazy brother, who ran off from the quarry three weeks ago – always talking about the city – and who, when I’m thinking like this, doesn’t seem so crazy.’ He laughed again. ‘But you were in Kolhari. And all it seems to have given you was a belly that’ll be poking out even beyond mine in a few months, hey?’ He smiled saying it; she knew he meant no harm with it. She felt her cheeks heat anyway. Pryn clamped her teeth and hoped tears wouldn’t come.

  ‘Well, you’re probably better off than Malot. You’re here; we like you. That’s something. Malot’s there – and he hasn’t Tratsin’s brains or skills. Would you rather be a crudestone worker out of a job in the country or the city?’

  Pryn blinked to find her memory flooded with images of the unhired laborers milling about the New Market.

  ‘But I won’t be surprised in a year when Tratsin and Bragan are off to the city too. That’s the biggest – and the saddest – possibility, I think. Well, I’m off to do a little hunting – not animals. But I know half a dozen wild fruit trees that the local children haven’t stripped yet. If I net together a vine-fiber sack and bring it back filled with pears, Bragan might make us a fine cobbler with supper this evening, and let that stand me for work – though the kids around here would call it play.’ (Pryn thought: You don’t have to twist vines to net a fruit sack. She’d tied together many such sacks in the mountains …) ‘Work makes a human being …?’ This time when Kurvan shook his head it was as though he’d suddenly discovered some notion caught all over his mind, like woodlice on rough fabric. ‘Play makes a human being! Work just means you don’t have to feel guilty about playing, which I don’t feel much anyway. Mainly work means I don’t have to suffer the taunts of my friends who wonder why I’m playing as hard as I do! What’s it like in Kolhari?’

  ‘Oh, it’s …’ Pryn hunched her shoulders, ‘It’s different. Confusing. You can’t understand much of anything there. I didn’t, anyway. Maybe because I don’t know what it used to be like. And I couldn’t figure out what it was going to become.’

  ‘You’re like me,’ Kurvan grinned. ‘You’re not out to be happy either. And you’re serious about your play. That’s what it’s like to be committed to playing. Only the ones who love labor would dare try for happiness. And luckily you’ll be having a little one to take your mind off such difficulties. Well …’ He put his hands on his hips and looked around. ‘I’m into the woods to walk – and think about what’s difficult. That’s a kind of play, too.’ He wandered away, heavy-footed, over the grass.

  Which left Pryn to go in and tell Bragan the men had gone.

  She turned and pushed back the hanging –

  At which point the shack floor rose into the air almost to her chin.

  ‘Oh …!’ which was Bragan. ‘Catch it!’

  Dust puffed from the matting, getting in Pryn’s mouth. She stepped back against the wall.

  ‘Catch it!’ Bragan cried. ‘Catch it …! Catch it!’

  Pryn caught the mat’s edge. Reed-ends rasped her palms. The mat settled heavily against her.

  Wielding a stick lashed at its end with straw, Gutryd swept violently at the stones and dried mud beneath.

  ‘There – no, pull it back further …’ which Pryn did. ‘That’s it – now help me lift the other side …’ which began the morning’s furious housework. Pryn was surprised it took so much energy to keep the little shack and the possessions of its three permanent adults and two children this side of clean and clutter. Amidst the brushing and scrubbing, the pushing and lugging, Pryn told Bragan that Tratsin and Kurvan were off.

  ‘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 black-haired 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.’