Neveryona

by Delany, Samuel R.

  ‘You want some of this?’

  Still looking up, Pryn shook her head. ‘That’s Belham’s bridge?’

  ‘That’s what we call it.’

  She dropped her head – and rubbed her neck; it had developed a sudden crick, which, in moments, drifted away like a wood chip. On the water, she saw the bottom of her own feet and beside them the bottom of Tratsin’s; way below was the bridge’s dark and dripping underside; and below that wavered the blue sky with its drifting clouds, is this Venn’s Rock we’re sitting on?’

  ‘No …’

  Pryn looked up.

  Tratsin was eating a handful of something oily with onions in it that dribbled down his wrist. ‘Back there, behind us.’ He gestured with his chin over his shoulder, and went back to chewing. ‘That’s Venn’s Rock. The one holding up the bridge.’

  Pryn twisted around, getting up on one knee to see. In the bridge’s shadow, it was gray and irregular to one side; then, just behind her, it slanted back, revealing a red marble face. Running up it were those regular grooves. ‘Did this rock come from back down the stream?’

  ‘It’s supposed to.’

  Pryn looked up the six-meter block, almost as wide and nearly as thick. ‘She must have had some job getting it from there to here!’

  ‘ “She” who?’ Tratsin asked.

  ‘Venn,’ Pryn said, surprised. She turned back.

  Tratsin sucked first one finger, then another, watching her and looking almost as puzzled as she remembered him from the boat when all she’d been able to do was cry.

  ‘I mean, if it’s Venn’s Rock, I just thought Venn must have had something to do with putting it here. Just like it’s Belham’s Bridge –’ She looked up again. ‘Didn’t Belham build it?’

  Tratsin looked at her oddly, and ran another finger in his mouth, ‘I don’t know. Was there someone named Belham? And Venn?’

  ‘But you’re from Enoch,’ Pryn said, ‘aren’t you?’

  ‘I was born here,’ Tratsin said. ‘So was my father. His father, too.’

  ‘Don’t you know anything about this bridge? I mean who built it and all? Who got the rock up from downstream?’

  ‘I know what we call them,’ Tratsin said. ‘But I never thought they might be people – real people, I mean. And a woman, too, you said?’ He glanced back at the great stone support. ‘No, I don’t think any woman put that there.’ He went digging in the dish on his lap with greasy fingers, it doesn’t seem too likely, no …’

  ‘What do you know about the bridge, then …?’ Pryn looked around and up. Somewhere, out of her aunt’s stories overlaid with Madame Keyne’s revelations, a tale had formed, almost without her knowing it, of some bygone Enoch residents who had called in the great Belham to construct a bridge across their ravine; and, after making his plans and drawings, the barbarian engineer and inventor had at last declared it would be impossible unless there was some support in the middle. But how to get one …? Then the brilliant young woman from the islands had said, shyly, ‘Wait. Here …’ Somehow, through astonishingly ingenious contrivance, the rock had been hewn loose and moved. And a grateful but frustrated Belham had gone on to build his bridge …

  ‘I know lots of things about it,’ Tratsin said. ‘Just not who built it. How come you think you do?’

  ‘Um …’ Pryn felt embarrassed. Whatever hearsay knowledge she had, she felt terribly uneasy about squandering it here. ‘Well, I … I suppose I don’t really know, either. What do you know about it? You tell me.’

  Tratsin looked back at his bowl, empty now, and licked oil from his forearm, ‘I know when I was a boy they called in the soldiers, and they came marching across the bridge up there, to flush out the quarry workers who’d holed up in the hills – and they killed the leaders and carried their bodies, roped to long poles, back down across it, and we hung out watching from the bushes. Everybody thought they were going to put collars back on the rest of us like there used to be in my father’s father’s time. They hanged Kurvan’s uncle and three of the others on ropes from the wall, so that their corpses dangled right down over where we’re sitting. After a couple of days, you couldn’t come down here to play any more, because it stunk too bad. And once –’ he glanced up, then looked at Pryn – ‘about six years ago, when the women came over the bridge who worked in the –’

  A breeze moved in Tratsin’s thinning hair as he looked down again over the bowl in his lap. Trying to see his expression, which had changed again, Pryn remembered the Ini’s account of her escape from the western slavers.

  Then Pryn happened to glance at the water.

  Someone was leaning over the rail above them. Broad head, narrow shoulders, the leather bib of an apron – she recognized the dwarf with whom Tratsin had gone off that morning to work. Tratsin was watching him in the water, too. In the rippling surface the little foreman grinned at them, waiting to see how long it would take them to notice they were observed.

  In the silence, Pryn grew uncomfortable, wondering if she ought to look up or not; or whether she ought to go on talking; or –

  ‘Hey, Tratsin …!’ Finally the dwarf reached out his hand and waved. ‘Is that the mountain girl you said was going to move into the huts across the road from the shop?’

  Tratsin looked up now – with an affable enough expression. ‘Hey, Froc! Yes, this is Pryn. Bragan sent her down here with my food.’

  Pryn squinted up at the rail.

  Grinning, the dwarf bobbed his oversized, bald, and bearded head. ‘Pleased to meet you, there. Come on, Tratsin. Let’s get on back to work, now? Marg doesn’t pay you to sit in the shade and flirt with pretty pregnant strangers!’ He waved again and was gone.

  Pryn looked back down, with heat in her cheeks and knees, wondering if everyone in Enoch knew about her and her baby.

  On the other side of the blade, Tratsin was running his thumb along the bowl’s edge for a last bit of food.

  ‘You were talking about things …’ Pryn tried to ignore the discomfort the dwarf’s farewell had called up – ‘things that happened up on the bridge …?

  Tratsin sucked his thumb. ‘Nobody wants to remember things like that,’ he said, shortly. ‘Except the soldiers, maybe. The soldiers won, after all/ He looked at her with a rueful smile that may or may not have held sympathy for her discomfort. ‘But for the rest of us, such things are best forgotten.’ He put the bowl on the leather cover he’d dropped on the rock. ‘You can’t work your best with memories like that plaguing you. Why go over them? I wouldn’t tell such stories to my own girls – nor to a son, cither, if I had one. Why should I tell such things to you, eh?’

  ‘Oh, but I want to know about the –’

  ‘Now in the quarries –’ Tratsin looked off toward the ravine wall, where Pryn saw dirt steps, shored with logs, leading to the rim – ‘from time to time the men will grumble about what went on in Enoch three or ten or thirty years ago – more often just make a joke of it. I don’t like it when they joke. That’s to mix the worst part of forgetting and remembering both. I come down here at lunch so I don’t have to listen to such grumblings – or jokes – from the other men. They make a lot of them in these times, what with so many people going north to the city. But I just want to do my work, you see, and enjoy it as much as I can. Now Kurvan –’ Tratsin chuckled – ‘he says what’s wrong with Enoch is that we forget too much. He says it’s a town with no memory at all, and that’s where all our problems come from.’ Tratsin dropped his head to the side. ‘Though perhaps we have the names, we certainly don’t remember anything about who built the bridge here!’

  Pryn started to say something about memory and writing. But in the same way she knew the alleys and hedges and the people in her great-aunt’s neighborhood in Ellamon, she knew Tratsin and Bragan and Kurvan and Gutryd were illiterate; and she knew from her aunt’s example how much hostility one could create by claiming to know too much among them.

  ‘You know, I used to work in the quarries,’ Tratsin said, suddenly. �
��On the scaffolding crew. But you wouldn’t know anything about that –’

  ‘They put up the scaffolds and wooden walkways for high work …’ Pryn quoted Kurvan from the morning.

  Tratsin nodded, a little surprised. ‘Well, yes. They do. Anyway, in the last year I was working there, they were getting ready to send three crews up on the new cliffs for basalt blocks. We were working down from a ledge that hung over a drop that was, oh, a good three times the height of that wall there.’ He pointed to the ravine’s lip where the bridge joined it. ‘The boys were roping wood together and pegging it into the stone face. The digging crews weren’t up yet. Just us scaffolders. There was a big overhang over the ledge where I’d gone up to take some short-planks so we would have them at work level later on. I was standing on a bushy little outcrop with all day down behind me, when I heard a crack and a rumble. Someone shouted, “Tratsin!” I looked up, and saw big brown rocks tearing away from the mother face and sliding toward me –’

  ‘What did you do?’ Pryn asked.

  ‘There wasn’t anywhere to go left or right. And those falling rocks were pretty large …’ Tratsin paused meaningfully. (Pryn took a breath.) ‘So I jumped – right off the ledge! I remember being in the air and the sun in my right eye as I fell, and wondering what it was going to be like to be dead in a second, and whether I’d feel my bones snap on the rocks below. And then I hit – I felt it all right! But somehow I hit rolling; and balled up real tight. I swear I bounced down that slope! I heard a lot of thumps, but I don’t know if they were me hitting earth or the rocks hitting around me. The next thing I knew I was lying against some tree with my back stinging like I’d been attacked by hornets; and my left thigh, too – I’d scraped both of them all up on small stones and twigs. The guys were running up. Everyone was trying to help me stand, and pointing up the cliff to the ledge I’d jumped from – it was very high, and the rocks piled all over it now looked very heavy. I didn’t break one bone! Other than the scrapes, somehow I was all right!’ Tratsin chuckled. ‘For the rest of the day, everybody kept on talking about “Tratsin’s leap,” and how it was certainly some kind of magic that skinny Tratsin was still alive after falling so far – what I’d looked like in the air, and which one of them had seen it happen, and which one hadn’t, and which ones had seen scaffolders fall to their deaths before over less than half that distance. That kind of thing.’ Tratsin looked at his greasy fingers. ‘For three days they talked about it, pointing up at the ledge when anyone passed it. It was “Tratsin’s leap,” “Tratsin’s leap,” “Tratsin’s leap …” For almost three days. I thought they were going to name the ledge “Tratsin’s leap,” only then they cleared the rocks off it –’ Tratsin pushed himself forward to splash down into the shallow water before the boulder. He plunged his hands in the stream and brought them up covered with mud and sand. With one hand, then the other, he scoured his fingers and forearms. ‘It was just the upper ledge of the basalt face again. “Wasn’t that the one that skinny Tratsin almost got hurt on?” Then nobody even bothered to mention that any more.’ He rinsed his hands again. Mud made its own clouds around his wrists. Mud floated out about his ankles; and Pryn could no longer see the reflected bridge and sky. ‘For a while, though, I thought they were going to name it after me – the ledge, I mean. It would have been nice if they had – for the girls, when they got older. Of course they weren’t born when it happened. But if they knew that their father had jumped from a ledge – and lived. I don’t even have a scar left from it – but then, skinny as I am, I’ve always healed well. Still, I thought it would’ve been a nice thing.’ Tratsin shook water from his hands. Bubbles floated back between his ankles where the hair was wet flat against his calves. ‘But then I guess whoever put up the bridge here might have liked to be remembered too. By more than their names, I mean.’ He squinted up at the stone structure, ‘I mean if those really are names … Well, I want to get back to work.’ He paused a moment, then shook his head. ‘But it doesn’t matter. It was years ago. Why should anybody call it “Tratsin’s leap” today?’ Then he grinned. ‘But they almost did! Hey, take the bowl there back to Bragan for me …?’

  ‘Oh, I will!’

  ‘That’s a good girl.’ He reached up, took the knife, the wood, and started away.

  Watching him, Pryn thought of her great-aunt, who might like to be remembered as something other than an old, odd woman claiming credit for impossible things. Pryn picked up the bowl, put the leather cover inside it, and slid down until her feet splashed into the hazed water.

  Starting up the stairs to the ravine rim, Tratsin waved.

  Pryn waved back and walked to the water’s edge. She squatted where the current had cut a finger-deep shelf from the bank, took the leather out, and put it beside her. Digging up a handful of sand, she swished out the bowl with it, swirling the bowl itself in the water. So many things to remember, she thought. So many things to forget. Certainly Enoch, like Ellamon, would have its fables; and, staying here, she would eventually learn them. But fables were the tales a town or a city could bear to recall. Fables taught simple and clear lessons everyone could agree on. Fables were tales that could be put to immediate use, either to instruct or entertain a child, to remind adults of past glories or recurring dangers. But there were always the incidents on the bridge that no one could bear to bring up, or Tratsin’s leap that, for whatever reason, people just … well, forgot, or women’s talk before the fire, while they carded, cooked, or spun, that no one thought important enough to remember –

  Pryn stopped and kneeled back on the sand. She’d been struck with a vision, clear as sunlight on the water before her. Somewhere in Enoch, she knew, watching over some bunch of digging, screeching, rolling children, Bragan would be saying to another Enoch mother: ‘… this northern girl my Tratsin found upriver, who’s staying with us for a day or so – she’s going to have a baby, poor thing. But do you know what she said about my soup – I mean the double soup we make here? She said that as far away as fabled Ellamon, it’s all that anybody can talk of! Travelers speak of it in the markets! She said she’s actually heard them talking – oh, they must be raving in markets all over Nevèrÿon. Imagine …!’ Pryn rinsed the bowl again. Odd, she thought, how words must leave and return, bearing some trace of their journey, for that sort of memory to fix itself. Well, then, she’d done her part to see that something – at least a soup – was remembered.

  Certainly it was good soup!

  She put the bowl down and began to rinse the leather.

  Supper that evening verged on the inedible. Bragan made a paste of yesterday’s fish (a dubious notion to Pryn from the beginning; she’d caught trout at home in her strolls along mountain brooks) with various vegetables and breads and oils. Bragan sat in the corner by the fire with her bowl on her lap. Tratsin sat on the bench along the wall, eating his share with his fingers. He’d brought the carving knife home to work on a bench leg; it leaned against the wall. Gutryd and Kurvan sat on the floor, and Pryn sat on the pallet, eating. The babies took the odd finger full of fishy mush, now from Kurvan, now from their mother. Pear juice bubbled through cracks in the crust of the cobbler cooking at the fire’s edge; now and again Bragan would reach over and turn another side of the bowl to the heat. It smelled quite wonderful. When it was served, though, and Pryn tasted it, she was thrown sharply back to the barbarian eating establishment where she’d worked that night in Kolhari. The spice that had ruined the barbarians’ vegetable stew was all through the fruit. Pryn frowned, said nothing, and tried to eat it anyway.

  ‘Is Bragan’s cobbler good as her soup?’ Kurvan wanted to know, handing Pryn up a refilled mug that Tratsin, by the beer keg, had just handed him. ‘Maybe her soup will get the same kind of reputation as the fine beers brewed in the south, ’ey?’

  Pryn smiled; and drank beer; and nodded; and ate the unpleasant food. The beer, at any rate, she’d begun to enjoy; it made her feel strange and relaxed. There was apparently some joke in the family about Gutryd�
�s drinking enough to get herself sick at last summer’s Labor Festival. The first three times Kurvan or Bragan made laughing reference to it, Gutryd made jokes in return. But the next time Kurvan spoke of it, Gutryd’s good humor broke, ‘I don’t want some lazy, out-of-work indigent like you saying things like that about me! It was years ago, now. Can’t you forget anything? Stop it, I say!’ She turned sharply. ⁴Oh, Tratsin, tell him to stop!’

  ‘You don’t have to tease her like that …’ Tratsin said seriously to his unserious and grinning friend. Perhaps it was the tone, but the infant, on a pile of cloth in the corner, woke up at that moment long enough to give one cry in the firelight of the over-warm cabin, sigh, and go back to sleep, while the toddler, with mushy hands and dirty face, sat back on her heels in the middle of the floor and giggled. But Bragan pushed to her feet. ‘Now you’ve got to take Pryn over there soon,’ she said, looking about, ‘before there’s no light left at all. Here, I’ll put up some food for you, so you’ll have something for the morning.’

  ‘Oh,’ Pryn said. ‘Yes. I guess we’d better go.’ She stood up, torn between the discomfort, of rejection and the relief at leaving the hot, fishy shack. ‘I’m sure I’ll be all right …’ she added, though no one had suggested otherwise.

  Kurvan stood ponderously and picked up Tratsin’s carving knife from against the wall. ‘Yes, we’d best be off.’ He swung it back and forth. ‘You never know what gods, ghosts, and demons we might have to fight, making our way through the ancient and troubled streets of Enoch –’

  ‘Not in the house, Kurvan!’ A bowl in each hand, Bragan looked back and forth between them. With a glance at Pryn, she chose: ‘Because you won’t have to bring this one back so soon,’ and began to fill it from the pot. ‘You’ve been awfully helpful while you were here. That was very nice of you. I mean in your condition – for the first month or so, sometimes, you just don’t feel up to doing a thing!’

  Five minutes later, after goodbyes and gratitude, Pryn pushed out the hide hanging where Tratsin and Kurvan had already gone.