Neveryona

by Delany, Samuel R.

  Kurvan swung the blade and lunged over the grass, heavy and naked in the evening.

  Tratsin said soberly: ‘That’s not what it’s for, Kurvan.’

  Kurvan walked back up the slope, testing the blade with his thumb. ‘So little happens around here, I bet you wish it was a sword, and you could go off with it after brigands and slavers and horrid monsters!’

  Tratsin took it. ‘I need it to work. It’s not for games. Come on.’ He started down the slope toward the road.

  Kurvan gave Pryn a great grin. ‘No sense of play at all, I tell you!’ He took the food bowl from her and, holding it against his hip, followed Tratsin down. ‘Must all the good people in the world be like that?’

  Under twilight, they walked the same road Tratsin had gone off to work on that morning. Tratsin and Kurvan fell into conversation about people Pryn didn’t know, with problems whose backgrounds she didn’t understand. Sometimes strolling beside one of them or the other, sometimes lingering a step or two behind, she realized that, leading neither to the river nor along the ravine, this road was revising her picture of Enoch again simply by passing through the little city itself. Now here was a row of five shacks almost touching. There were two stone houses with three horses tethered under a thatched awning between. Children crossed ahead, two together giggling, one alone dawdling. A man pushed back his door-hanging to shout, ‘Stop your play and come in now, I say!’

  Off among other huts a child answered, ‘I said I’ll be there in a minute!’ while a cart filled with gravel rolled up the street. The drivers made some joke with Kurvan that set all four men laughing. A dog trotted behind the clattering wheels.

  They passed a partially paved area, with a tarpaulin over one section and a well in its corner, which, if Enoch were anything like Ellamon at all, would be the market area on specified days of the week. A few buildings here even had walls around them. Through more houses Pryn could see another length of wall that may once have enclosed a section of the town itself, or at least acted as a partial fortification.

  Pale lightning flickered over the evening. Pryn looked up, remembering rain. When she looked down again, she said, surprised, ‘We’re on the bridge …!

  ‘Belhams Bridge it is,’ said Kurvan, ‘propped on old Venn’s Rock.’

  Pryn looked over the stone rail at the ravine and its wide, shallow stream. No, it wasn’t a large town at all. ‘Kurvan, do you know anything about who built the bridge here?’

  ‘You mean Belham and Venn?’ Kurvan said.

  ‘Now you see,’ said Tratsin, ‘I’ve lived here all my life and I wasn’t even sure they were people’s names.’

  ‘I’m not sure they’re names either,’ Kurvan said. ‘At least not of the bridge builders. I used to think they must be a pair of ancient quarry owners who pooled their money to have it put up – they’d be the only people from here rich enough to do it.’

  ‘Names,’ Tratsin said. ‘Really, that they were names never even occurred to me.’

  ‘They certainly don’t sound like names from around Enoch. But then,’ Kurvan went on, ‘they may just be old barbarian words for animals or stone. “Belham” – now that sounds like it could be a barbarian word. But up here, nobody has really spoken the old language since before the coming of the Child Empress, whose reign –’ Kurvan ducked his head and touched the back of his fist to his forehead – ‘is just and generous. So we’ll probably never know.’

  As they reached the bridge’s center, Pryn stepped to the low wall and leaned over, trying to see the great support beneath. (Perhaps Belham had built the entire bridge first; then, after a few years, when it became apparent that it would soon crack from its own weight, clever Venn came and found a way to drag the supporting monolith from downstream to prop the bridge up … ) What she saw was her own dark head against the darkening sky, reflected on the shallows flowing around the boulders.

  ‘That’s where I work,’ Tratsin said.

  Pryn stood up and looked.

  He was pointing with his carving knife to a low, barracks-like building off beyond the bridge.

  ‘That’s where Tratsin works,’ Kurvan repeated, ‘and that –’ he pointed to the other side of the road – ‘is where you’ll be living.’

  ‘Where?’ Pryn asked. With the bridge, certainly Enoch proper had ended. ‘Where do you mean?’ Beyond were trees, a crossroads, the workshop; and it was at the trees that Kurvan was pointing.

  As they walked on over the bridge’s leaf-scattered flags, Pryn was sure that to live on this side of Enoch, even if the quarry-men passed here in the morning, even if farms were scattered about, or a workshop sat here, or the odd abandoned hut – this was no longer to be within the town, this was no longer to be a part of the village, this was no longer to share in whatever characterized even the tiniest city.

  Rejection had been a personal thing that Pryn had dealt with from a sense of practical strategy. But the feeling now as they came off the bridge was a sense of cutting loose, of disorienting freedom. She rubbed her stomach to knead away the discomfort that, having faded almost to nothing sometime before, returned. Yes, it was anger. But it was a kind of disfocused anger about which she could do nothing. That made her want to cry.

  As they passed beyond the workshop, Pryn peered among the dark trees, still trying to see what Kurvan indicated.

  Tratsin seemed to be having the same trouble, himself, finding these alleged ‘abandoned huts,’ because he laughed now. ‘They were here a couple of days ago, I know! Don’t tell me someone came along and tore them down …’

  ‘Now up there’s the north-south road,’ Kurvan said, as if orienting himself. ‘That direction would take you back north as far at least as Kolhari. Down there would take you into the barbarian lands. Along there, let me see … that’s the long way around to the stone works. But usually we go the short route back along the stream.’

  Pryn suddenly wondered if a joke were being played – if, really, she weren’t summarily being dismissed from the town …

  ‘There they are!’ Tratsin said. He strode over the road, hacked his knife high into a thin tree at the road’s edge, and, leaving it stuck there, stepped in among the bushes. See them, in there? I just didn’t remember them being so far in off the edge.’

  ‘An indication,’ declared Kurvan, ‘of how far the road’s edge has shifted since you and I used to come here as boys!’

  Pryn followed Tratsin in among the saplings. Transferring the food bowl to his other hip, Kurvan followed Pryn.

  Saplings were widely spaced about the brush. Crickets chittered loudly. Without apparent source for the lightning, the sky flickered again.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Kurvan said behind her, ‘in two or three days, what with going for water in the ravine and walking in to market, you’ll wear a natural path here. There was one about a year ago, I remember. But I guess it grew up.’

  Tratsin stopped in front of something that looked like a haystack, or perhaps a pile of leaves. It was about Pryn’s height; and there was a dark hole low down in it. A few meters away was another such structure, and a few meters after that was half a one – part had collapsed in on itself. A little way from the one before which Tratsin stood were fireplace stones. Summer grasses spired between them.

  Pryn looked at the dark hole, her head a little to the side.

  She looked for a long time.

  Once Kurvan stepped beside her, squatted, and put the food bowl down in the grass by the door. He looked up at Pryn, his smile giving way to curiosity. Then he stood and stepped back.

  Tratsin said: ‘Sometimes kids come out here to play. But once they know someone’s living here, they’ll keep off mostly – except the one or two who come to stand across the road and gawk.’

  ‘Gawking doesn’t hurt anyone,’ Kurvan added. ‘That’ll only be at first. And there won’t be much of it.’

  ‘Well.’ Pryn took a breath. ‘At least … it will keep the rain off.’ She stooped and, not wanting to, squat-walked through th
e opening. Inside, the darkness around and above her was prickled with spots of evening light. (So much for the rain, Pryn thought.) She turned awkwardly, scraping her arm on twigs – a branch had fallen loose from the slanted wall. She grasped it and thrust it outside, with rattling leaves.

  She heard Kurvan laugh.

  The ground under her was soft and, save the odd leaf, clean. She’d been expecting mustiness or mushiness; but the enclosure was dry and, astonishingly, odorless. And that, she went on thinking, is what makes it so unlike a home! Could one live here, have a baby here at the edge of the town? Running the words through her mind, she felt her stomach knot and her emotion swell, blurring the spots of light about her on the riddled walls. To keep back tears, she scrambled out the door again and stood. ‘You know, I could put some mud over it. And I have a way to mix the mud with oil, so that if I take a hollow reed and blow lots of bubbles into it –’

  Kurvan stood a few steps away.

  ‘Where’s Tratsin?’ Pryn asked.

  ‘Oh,’ Kurvan said. ‘He’s gone …’ He rubbed the side of his beard with the ham of his thumb. ‘To get some things for you. He’ll be back. Later.’ He took a step toward her and smiled. ‘Well, I suppose it isn’t much. But it’s something.’ (Tratsin must have left running, Pryn thought. She couldn’t have been inside half a minute!) ‘I know it’s not so wonderful, but once you clear the grass from around it – here, I’ll help!’ He grasped some brush, tugged it loose, hurled it away, tugged loose some more.

  ‘No,’ Pryn said. ‘No, you don’t have to …’

  Kurvan stopped and looked at her, a little strangely.

  Pryn looked back at the hut, which was too small to stand up in or stretch out in. To insulate it by her great aunt’s method … ? Would it be worth it? She blinked and thought: No, I’m not going to cry. No, not this time.

  ‘Um …’ Kurvan said, a little closer to her. ‘It won’t be so bad. The quarry workers go by here every morning and evening. There was a woman who worked here for three years, once. She had a couple of children, too. And she was a lot older than you. She didn’t do badly. There’re always one or three men of an evening, with no wives of their own and an extra iron coin or so. You be nice to them, smile, let them stay for an hour – you’ll get enough money to eat, maybe. Maybe even more. I thought –’ Standing naked in the grass, heavy Kurvan looked at the ground and brushed his hands together, freeing them of the dirt from pulling up the brush – ‘Well, you might start by letting me stay for a while. And being nice to me. For just a bit.’ He looked up again, questioning. ‘Of course I don’t have a coin for you. That’s because I’m not working. So you might not want to. With me. I’d understand.’ He reached up and rubbed his beard again, hard. ‘But you’re going to have a baby anyway … so it wouldn’t matter.

  Really, I could help you out around here a little, clearing things out, straightening things up …’

  Pryn stood before the hut, frowning. The realization of what she was being asked to do – what she had been placed here to do – struck the tears from behind her eyes. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. I don’t want to –’

  ‘Oh, I understand,’ Kurvan said, quickly. ‘My not having a job and all.’ He sounded almost relieved, as though some obligation had been lifted. Then he pursed his lips. ‘Are you sure? I mean, maybe you just want me to stay and argue a litle. Some girls, I know, are like that –’

  ‘No!’ Pryn repeated, loudly, ‘I really don’t want to. At all!’ Whatever had struck away the tears had also struck away that partial sentence with which she’d begun to protest that it had nothing to do with his working, that she even liked him, that he misunderstood completely. But Kurvan had turned and started away.

  Then he stopped. ‘Oh …’ he said, looking back. ‘Tratsin will be coming soon. With the things for you. He was going to stay away for about an hour. To give me time. Then he was going to come. Bragan, you know, isn’t very interested in much right through here, so … he’s probably going to ask you too.’ He turned, stepped up on the road, and started back for the bridge.

  When, Pryn wondered, had all these whispering plans been made about where she would go and what she would do when she got there, and who would come to her, and who would wait for whom to finish …

  The same times and places, of course, she answered her own query, that they were made in any other little town!

  It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t embarrassment. It wasn’t even hurt. Rather it was a tingling coldness that settled, nevertheless, in those places where embarrassment’s fires could prickle: her cheeks, her knees, the small of her back. She stood before the hut, feeling terribly cold, till Kurvan had been out of sight for minutes. Then she walked to the road and took a few steps along it.

  She could see the bridge over the ravine, the workshop this side of it, the houses beyond it. After a few moments, she said aloud: ‘But I don’t want this town … !’ Certainly she did not want to be this town’s roadside whore with a dirty baby squalling in the yard. She ran both hands slowly down the stomach of the shift Madame Keyne had given her. First the Fox’s wandering hands, then the pimp on the Bridge of Lost Desire, the coins Madame Keyne had given her for a kiss – the two soldiers at the inn in the night … ! This is not where I want to be, she thought. Why has everything conspired to put me here?

  Yes, this may be the town she had come from. It might even be the town where she would finally live most of her life. But it wasn’t the town she wanted to be in now. Not the town to have a child in. And certainly not here, in these roadside hovels. The only reason, she realized, that she’d even considered staying was that momentary look of interest from Bragan, and she knew enough of Ellamon to know that Tratsin and Bragan (whether Tratsin stayed here another hour on his return or not) would be among the first friends she would lose if she stayed. Tratsin and Bragan? They were good people, kind people, generous people, both of them. But she was here, on this road, at this hut now, because she was a foreign girl about to have a baby, and they could think of no other place for her.

  The thought came like sentences written on some parchment scrap thrust before her eyes to read:

  My father once walked into a town like this.

  My father once walked out of one, too.

  Certainly he had walked into Ellamon, more or less a stranger. He had met her mother and left her with a child – Pryn. He had left, in his case, for the army and death by fever. But he had left, left just such a town as this. Just walked out of it. That was the thing. In her own way, hadn’t Pryn followed him into Enoch? Well, then, she could just as well follow him out again. Of course, she was not leaving a child behind but taking one with her. Very well, she would have her baby where she might. But it would not be in this narrow-minded provincial hold, where all anyone and everyone could think of was labor. Of course there was no army to snatch her conveniently off to adventure – but there was no army to get a fever in, either. What were imaginary fathers for if you couldn’t use them for something … Blinking at the bridge, and the roofs and trees beyond it against the darkening sky, she had a memory of Tratsin that afternoon in the ravine below it: soldiers had once crossed it … ? Perhaps her real father, in the real Imperial Army, had walked into this town! And when he’d died his real death, she wondered, what real and unbearable memories had died with him? Somehow simply asking the question, simply realizing that she didn’t have an imaginary father, but rather that she’d had a real one, real as Bragan or Tratsin or herself, leached all her resolve. Wherever he might have died, her own father – the real man she’d never known – had come from a town much like this, like her mother, like herself. Pryn put her arms across her stomach and turned – crying now – on the road. She was very tired. For all the warm, stormy night, she was cold.

  If I stay, she thought, there must be work I can do other than this – carry water or slops or collect stone chips at the quarry; perhaps find a job with some richer town family in their garden or house; perhaps I might take care o
f other children, teach them my lettering skills. (Her aunt had begun with her at age seven.) But these people who had placed her here would not give her their children, she knew, if only as punishment for having her own child so far from home. The master and mistress of any rich home she might work in would cast hard glances in this direction as surely as poor folk like Tratsin and Bragan. That was the way in such towns. And the path to the quarry would lead by these huts daily. It was not even that they (or Pryn) had any inflated notion of the perniciousness of such work itself. Rather, she thought, it’s that I’ve learned the forces that limit me to it all too well at Ellamon. They’d been cut into her the way so many small droplets running along the same path cut a ravine to the sea, so that once within it – as if caught in a wound slashed across one’s own body – there was no leaving.

  That was what terrified.

  That was what paralyzed.

  Shivering a little, tired, she walked back toward the road’s edge.

  Tratsin would be coming soon. With things for her. Tratsin was a good man, a kind man. Tratsin had certainly borne his wounds from Enoch’s Margs and Malots, if not the soldiers on the bridge, and he seemed as resigned to them as a man might be who’d never considered the possibility of healing. Maybe she could tell him, and maybe he would understand, how lost she felt in this most familiar of cities. And maybe if he stayed a while it would be better than being so alone …

  Once more the sky flickered, this time rumbling.

  And Pryn stopped.

  The shadow flickered on the printed dust, among shadows of sparse leaves and twigs, flickering with the flickering sky.

  It was the shadow of a sword on the ground, there the point, there the hilt. It was as if the weapon itself hung in the air. But the shadow – that was what had made her stop. Because there were two blades running off the hilt, each the same length, and set parallel.

  Pryn looked up – at Tratsin’s knife stuck in the thin tree above her. Not a weapon at all, it was only a carving tool. Still, the light falling through the leaves above it (most obligingly, the lightning flared again – yes, there it was on the road) was refracted through the spare leaves above so that, hitting it at the proper angle, it seemed to come from two sources, doubling the shadow that reached the ground.