Neveryona

by Delany, Samuel R.

  And inside again, Bragan: ‘You haven’t seen the abandoned huts up near the crossroads yet, have you?’ It was a considered observation. Another mat collapsed between her hands, to be folded, bulkily, again, then again. ‘You can stay in one of them tonight – Kurvan or Tratsin will take you when they get back. But you see how crowded we are here. They’re not as nice as this, of course, but then there’ll only be one of you – as least for a few months more. You can fix it up as nicely as you like.’

  ‘Oh …!’ It struck Pryn with the surprise of the inevitable. ‘Yes …’ Feelings of rejection contended with feelings of gratitude.

  ‘But you see how difficult it would be if you did stay with us. For too long. Oh, I don’t mean you haven’t been helpful.’ Bragan smiled apologetically. But she also looked relieved, as if she’d been contemplating saying this a while. ‘You understand.’

  ‘Oh,’ Pryn said again, ‘I do.’

  ‘It would be best, I think. And it’s not very far away. Believe me, we’d help you just as much as you’ve helped us. Enoch is not a very big town. You don’t get too far away from anyone here. Old, yes. But not big.’

  For the first time Pryn thought of it as an incipient city, a little one with a garbage service and a name and a riverside dock.

  ‘I’ll be honest. They’re not so large.’ Bragan put the mat down – almost on the napping baby; she cried out, moved it aside, laughed, put her hand to her neck, blinked, and went on: ‘But you’ll have a roof over you. That’s better than nothing. You’ll be near the quarry road. And that’s not bad.’

  Which is when Gutryd stepped inside and said: ‘Really, it’s not. From time to time, I’ve thought of moving there myself. Don’t worry.’ (Pryn wondered just how long they’d been discussing her coming move.) ‘It all seems a little strange, I know. But you’re used to the way we do almost everything here. And soon we’ll be used to you.’

  Which made Pryn blink and smile.

  ‘Ah!’ as a memory assailed Bragan. ‘Tratsin didn’t take his dinner – I haven’t even fixed it! Now that’s so like him.’ She sighed. ‘And me.’ She turned to the hearth, where Gutryd already sat on a wooden stump and, with two triple-tined wooden forks, was picking through a bit of wool, teasing it out, by small tugs, to fine fluff, now pausing to pinch loose a twig or leaf-bit, which she tossed viciously into the fireplace before falling back to her carding.

  ‘Are you going to do that whole basketful?’ Bragan asked. ‘Well, I suppose it has to be got through sometime. But once it’s done, someone should spin it – because if it just sits here for three days, with these children, you know the shape it’ll be in – ’

  Against the wool basket lay a flat stone with two irregular holes …

  ‘Oh, I’ll do it.’ Pryn did not like spinning, ‘I mean I can, if you don’t have anything else for me to do …’ Still, she spun well. And Bragan didn’t have any other job for her right then. So Pryn sat at the other side of the hearth from Gutryd, took up a lapful of carded fleece and the spinning stone, and twisted at one corner of the wool till she had a long enough thread to wrap through the spindle’s holes (not a very well-balanced spindle, either) and began to knock its rough side with her palm, letting it twirl the fiber into a fine yarn, which she fed out evenly from her fist between bunched fingers.

  ‘You do that very skillfully,’ Bragan laughed. ‘You’re one of those women who does it so well you’d think you invented it yourself!’ She turned to a wicker onion bin on top of which sat last night’s loaf, still wrapped in a bread cloth, and began to busy herself with food. ‘Now me, when I spin, it’s all thumbs and knots …’

  Thinking of invention, Pryn said: ‘The soup …’

  ‘Mmm?’ Gutryd looked up, picking.

  Pryn glanced at the two empty pots, which had been raised to higher hooks above the fireplace’s ash-banked embers. ‘The soup we had, last night. I was just thinking – ’

  ‘Ah!’ Bragan exclaimed, tugging the outer leaves down from something that looked like a leek. ‘If we had some more, I’d put a ladle of that in a bowl and send you off to Tratsin with it. He doesn’t mind cold soup. But Kurvan eats enough for three. When he stays here, leftovers don’t.’

  ‘What about the soup?’ Gutryd looked back at her flying picks. ‘Do let her talk, Bragan. Get you alone and you’re bad as Kurvan.’

  ‘In my home, in the mountains, in Ellamon, where my great-aunt lives – ’ Pryn brushed her hand at the rock’s edge, its spin finally fast enough to steady its joggling – ‘it’s very much like here. Oh, we knot the edging on our floor mats differently. And we don’t scratch those funny designs into the base of our pots – the food we eat is different. Still, lots in Enoch is very much like home. Except the soup. The double soup, in the two pots, the way you make it.’

  ‘You don’t have soup in the mountains?’ Gutryd picked.

  ‘We don’t have soup like that, made in two pots and served in a single bowl. But you see, back in my town, oh, years ago, my aunt met a traveling woman once – she bought her some autumn apples and talked with her. My aunt always liked to talk to strangers – at least she used to. And the woman told us about your soup.’

  ‘My soup?’ Bragan asked, ‘I learned to make it from my uncle. And Tratsin’s cousin, Mordri, makes it much better than I do – but she won’t tell me exactly what she puts in it. You’d think it was some kind of magic!’

  ‘But that’s just it!’ Pryn spun the rock, ‘It is magic, or at least it almost is, to me. You see, there I was, out in the Ellamon market, sitting in the shade of the dyer’s stall, maybe ten years old, with a little bit of sunlight through a hole in the thatch falling right into my eyes, while my aunt and the traveling woman sat on the benches out under the awnings, leaning together over large plates with a few bits of cut-up fruit. The woman traveled with a little boy, I remember, about my age, who may have been a slave – but I don’t think so, because he wore lots of copper jewelry around his thighs and wrists and squatted out in the sun making patterns in the dust with a pouch full of colored stones. And she said, “If you ever go to the south, I mean into the head of the barbarian lands beyond Kolhari, you must try their double soups – no, you can’t get it at the inns. They think it’s food only for peasants, not tourists. But in the people’s homes, sometimes it’s served. The glory of southern cookery … Vegetables cooked in one pot, and meat boiled almost to pieces in the other and thickened with goats’ cream – ” ’

  ‘That’s what it is!’ Bragan turned suddenly. ‘Of course – that must be what Mordri uses! And the rest of us, mixing a handful of ground wheat to thicken it – but then you can get goat’s cream in Mordri’s village! No one herds goats around here. If I sent Kurvan after some of the wild ones roaming in the hills – ’

  ‘Oh, Bragan,’ Gutryd said, ‘let her finish! She said something about magic!’

  ‘It’s as though on that odd afternoon, while I listened to the traveling woman in her rings and veils and watched her little boy play with his stones, something was fixed in my childhood by her description, that grew and changed and worked on me, worked secretly in the dark places below memory; her description of your soups here began working and working on me there, pulling me and guiding me, first away from my home, then through Kolhari, then on into the south, till I met Tratsin, and at last, in Tratsin’s boat, here to – Enoch? Yes, to this old, old town.’ Pryn knocked the stone, watching it spin as she talked. ‘As if by magic I was led here … led here by the silent strength of that traveling woman’s words – she sold pictures of the stars that she would make for you on pieces of wet clay, and for an extra iron coin, she would tell you what they had to say of you on the day of your birth – that is, if you knew it. If you didn’t, she would guess at what day that must have been from the way you looked and the things you said, according to what the stars might suggest. Something worked and worked from her words to bring me here and finally to taste the soup, your soup, the soup here that she spoke of – ’
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br />   ‘Ah!’ Something in Pryn’s eloquence (or perhaps in Pryn’s spinning) seemed to catch Bragan up; she turned from turnips and green peppers.

  With her own surprise at her recognition of Bragan’s, Pryn thought: There’s something very wrong with all that.

  Trying hard to explain what she might have written (and what is, in a world where many such tales have been read, easy to call ‘her thoughts’), Pryn frowned. ‘But there’s something wrong …’

  Gutryd put her picks down and looked confused.

  Bragan put down her knife and rag, looking both surprised and interested.

  ‘All that happened – ’ Pryn stopped the spinning rock between thumb and forefinger; she lowered thread, spindle, and fluff to her lap – ‘is that a traveling woman in gray veils spoke within my hearing – spoke of something as many men and women have spoken of various things to me or near me – and years later, now, last night, something happened – among the many things that have happened to me … I ate your soup; which made me remember what she said, years ago – made it mean something.’

  ‘Made what the woman was saying into magic …?’ With her confused look, Gutryd suddenly struck Pryn as a woman who’d find anything to do with magic fascinating. ‘Or made the soup magic …?

  ‘Made it into a tale,’ Bragan said, is that what you mean? Made it into a tale you could tell … the tale you just told?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Pryn said, surprised the understanding came from Bragan when she’d expected it from Gutryd. ‘Made it all into a story. I mean –’ Here Pryn laughed and lifted her fleece till the rock rose from her lap; she set it spinning again – ‘sometimes I think there must be nothing to the world except stories and magic!’ (She’d never thought anything like that before in her life!) ‘But I guess stories are more common – while magic is rare, I’m afraid. But until I questioned it, I’d just assumed it was the other way around. Which isn’t to say anything bad of cither one …’

  ‘Well.’ Gutryd sounded disappointed. ‘I know something that certainly isn’t a story. In two months you –’ she nodded toward her cousin –’ and in seven or eight months you –’ she looked at Pryn – ‘will deliver yourselves of children. That’s what’s real. But perhaps it’s magic, too – oh, this is all like Kurvan’s talk – very clever, but I can’t really understand it!’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know …’ Bragan looked quite happy – indeed, the most familiar thing in the whole room to Pryn suddenly seemed Bragan’s expression; because it was the one Pryn used to descry, among all her great-aunt’s wrinkles, years ago, at the advent of an interesting stranger. ‘Well, let me finish this up.’ Bragan nodded toward Pryn. ‘You’d best get back to your spinning – and after you take this to Tratsin at the workshop, you can come back and have something to eat. You’ll eat supper with us here tonight, too, before you go …? Oh, it will be fun to have you living in Enoch. Yes, it is like Kurvan’s talk; and that’s why I like Kurvan! Now the trouble with Tratsin …’ and went on (turning all she’d said of her husband before into a tale, Pryn thought), while Gutryd carded and Pryn spun. Listening to all these familiar complaints, Pryn thought: So many things are thought but never spoken, such as this thought itself – which is exactly when the ache in the hand to hold a stylus comes. She let thread twist through her fingers, feeling the tug in her shoulder.

  Gutryd’s forks flew through the wool in her lap as she gazed at her work intently, just as if she saw some amazing magic in each marvelous, fluffing strand – at least, thought Pryn, that’s the tale I’d tell of it.

  * * *

  ‘ …what rock?’ Pryn took the dinner bowl. ‘What bridge did you say?’

  But Bragan was too preoccupied to notice Pryn’s surprise. ‘… not along the river but up the stream,’ she repeated her instructions. ‘Like I said, you’ll find him sitting under Belham’s Bridge, right by Venn’s Rock.’ Both children were crying. ‘You take the ravine short-cut and you can’t miss him,’ Bragan went on, joggling one baby and looking for the other. ‘He always waits for his food there – to be by himself a while, he says. Oh, it’s just a – well, you go on now. I’ve got to take the girls to play with some friends – where they should have been an hour ago! Venn’s Rock, Belham’s Bridge. I’ll be home in a bit – and Gutryd should be home even sooner …’ So Pryn could only take the clay bowl with the leather cover strapped down over it out into the sunny yard and set off between the shacks. (The bowl reminded her of a mummer’s drum.) And found the stream.

  And started up it.

  Shacks fell away, while trees and stone rose about her either side of the water to make the current into the bright flooring of a sun-splashed gorge. She walked over a slanted stone, matted with moss that became black mush at the water. Twisting here and untwisting there, a brown vine branched above her, beckoning her to climb the six meters to the leafy rim. She would have, too, if she’d been wandering alone in the mountains and not carying dinner to a working man.

  Perhaps she might put Tratsin’s bowl down for a few minutes and explore that cut there where the gray rock turned out and, losing all vegetation, went russet. Nearing, she saw, it was as if some great block, the height of the ravine wall and meters wide, had been quarried away, revealing the earth’s red marble muscle. As Pryn walked before the sheared face that sloped so steeply, she saw several grooves running the height of it, straight enough and clean enough that they must have been tool made. She looked behind for some obvious stone by the stream to set the bowl near …

  Then she saw the wood chips.

  One, the length of her little finger, vaulted in the rush between two foam-lapped granite chunks, flushed against a third, then spun downstream – as another, and seconds later another, followed.

  Pryn frowned; and decided, really, the red marble face was too steep to climb. She’d better go on with her journey. Belham’s Bridge …? Venn’s …?

  White wooden shavings, about three or five breaths apart, floated past her over shallow water floored with red and gray pebbles. She climbed across a log and went round a high slab, gray once more and grooveless.

  The stream changed direction, and the ravine wedged out from four or five meters wide to six or seven times that. Rough with last night’s rain, the water rushed back and forth across the ravine’s floor, winding through the spread of round, gray stones.

  Ahead, where the canyon grew wider still, she could see a man sitting on a large rock – yes, it was Tratsin.

  Holding the leather-covered bowl in both hands, she walked on the sand between the stones. Pryn hesitated at a wide pool, then waded through. Water chilled her to the ankles.

  She could see that Tratsin held a piece of wood in his lap. With a large knife – some bench-carving tool? – he was shaving at it. Near her, another chip floated past, turning over the water.

  Above Tratsin, the stone bridge ran from one ravine lip to the other. Under it, behind him, irregular to the left, with a more or less flat surface to the right, a great rock rose like a squat mountain to form the bridge’s central support. The shallow waters, here and there interrupted by boulders like the one Tratsin sat on, ran around both sides of the immense support.

  The whole seemed like a more modest Bridge of Lost Desire, though at the stone rail it seemed to carry no traffic at all – at least for the present. Still, it was big enough to erase her picture of the little city and resketch a more complex one. To sport such a public work, Enoch had to be more than the few dozen shacks clustered near the river – which, as they were all she’d seen till now, were all she’d assumed there were.

  As Pryn walked forward, Tratsin raised his knife and waved. ‘You been to the huts yet, where you’ll be staying tonight?’

  ‘What?’ Pryn stepped over crumbly ground, where a plant the size and color of rockweed brushed her wet ankle. ‘Oh … no.’ Only its leaves were not the same star shape as rockweek leaves at all, but thin and in tiny bunches. ‘Not yet.’ She looked at Tratsin, who was smiling. Apparently
her coming relocation had been discussed at least as far back as the morning, before she’d awakened, if not whispered about on the previous night after she’d gone to sleep. ‘Bragan said you or Kurvan would take me there this evening.’ She came up to the ribbon of water that lay between his boulder and the sand.

  ‘Oh.’ The blade caught under white wood. A chip curled on the metal, fell to hit his toe, then dropped to the water and drifted away. ‘It’s not that far from here. Well, I guess when I get home …’ He laid the wood beside him on the stone and put the darkly mottled blade with its leather-bound handle next to it. ‘Come. Show me what Bragan’s sent me for dinner. You sit here.’ He patted the stone on the other side of the blade, then leaned his sunken chest forward to rest one forearm on his hairy knee. He reached out with his other hand.

  As Pryn held out the bowl, she looked up. The dark stone bridge cut away clouds and blue sky – and the bowl was taken from her hand.

  She looked back at Tratsin, who was pulling aside the cover strap. ‘Wonder what I got.’

  Pryn waded over the pebbly stream bed and climbed to the rock beside him. The great knife – not very different from the broad sword the Liberator had swung in the cellars of the Spur, but turned into a tool by the wood beside it – lay between them.

  Heels against the stone, Pryn put her head back as far as she could, straining her neck to feel her hair crushed against her back, till she could see the bridge, with clouds drifting a-slant it.