Neveryona

by Delany, Samuel R.

  ‘I don’t want you kicked out,’ Tetya said as they started back up the road, ‘because I’ll never learn to read. Yrnik’s too busy – and stubborn – to teach me.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to work – and think – harder during our session tomorrow morning!’

  ‘Maybe if I learn enough from you,’ Tetya said, ‘I can figure out what those marks mean by myself,’ which struck Pryn first as a silly idea, then as an interesting one.

  Across the road from the brewery was a tavern – if you could call it that. What it most resembled was the barrack-like eating hall in which Pryn had hauled grain and yams for an evening back in Kolhari. The markings on the ceiling beams, the painted ornamentations over the doors and windows, the shaggy bark on the undersides of the benches were so like the place she had worked (back then without really noticing any of them), she realized the city place must have been modeled on the country establishment – probably to make its barbarian clientele feel more at home in the impersonal city. Many of the barbarians who worked in the fields or in the brewery itself ate there, as most of them, Pryn had soon learned, were itinerant workers on their way north. Certainly, here the food was better than Pryn remembered from her night’s scraps in Kolhari. And unlike the city laborers, a good third of the field workers and half the brewery staff were women. Field workers of both sexes frequently had a child or three in tow. The atmosphere was convivial. And though Rorkar owned the place, as he did the brewery itself; and though Yrnik came striding through it from time to time, with loud jokes and cuffings of the shoulders of the men and women passing with bowls and boards; and though Tetya sat at the long corner table with the noisy local boys blowing the foam from the tops of their mugs at one another and slapping at one another’s heads in retaliation and generally indulging a constant hilarity that defeated female intrusion – still Pryn found the hall a place where she could get away from work, if not from the tangle of eating, sleeping, and playing in which work in that part of the land was bound up. She was even getting used to the strange spice, which she’d found out from the kitchen girl, Juni, who worked behind the counter, was called cinnamon.

  Pryn had been presented with the inequities of city life so flamboyantly that she rather romanticized them in memory. The inequities of the rural life around her, of which the urban disparities seemed an intensified version, she could view with a kind of detachment. It only took her the time of one slowly sipped mug of red beer (what Old Rorkar brewed were strong berry ciders and low-proof grain fermentations that were often mixed in a variety of proportions for a variety of flavors – the range, in those days, going by the single term: beer) to see that for all the conviviality, there was only civil intercourse between itinerant barbarians and locals. Barbarian mothers cuffed any of their children who went to gawk at local workers. Local women with bowls held high edged by clusters of barbarian men who, instead of laughing and joking and even assisting them to their seats as they did with their own, ignored them. The two-dozen-odd slaves Rorkar owned, who worked back and forth between the brewery and Rorkar’s own home, came in to deliver messages or baskets of produce. Sometimes a worker would hail one of the iron-collared men or women to stay for a mug or a bowl. After all, they worked side by side in the same fields and orchards and fermentaries, no? But the invitation was always silently ignored, sometimes to the inviter’s laughter, sometimes to his anger. The slaves upset the barbarians particularly – because the slaves were all so clearly barbarian-born themselves. Once a man who Pryn thought was only teasing a slave suddenly attacked him; they had to be separated by onlookers.

  ‘Why don’t they let the slaves eat here?’ Pryn asked Juni, who did many of the jobs in the eating hall Pryn had done back in the hall’s city sister. ‘They could set up a table for them, or let them have a mug of beer after they made their deliveries.’

  ‘Slaves can’t drink.’ Behind the serving counter, Juni wiped her hands on her apron. ‘They get whipped if they’re caught at it. They’d be beaten if they ever ate here, too.’ She turned to pull a large crock, empty now, back across the scarred wood. ‘Besides, the slaves have their own place. They eat on the slave benches out back.’

  It was raining lightly when Pryn, still with half a mug of beer in her fist, pushed out the hide-hung doorway and ambled down by the hall, over wood chips and cinders and pine needles, now looking off at the trees, now gazing down at the rim of her unglazed mug, darkening here and there with raindrops. Inside, the muffled noise of the eaters gave way to the noise of the kitchen workers. Pryn rounded the back corner.

  Somehow, the fact that the benches were of stone surprised her. Twenty, thirty, maybe forty rows of them stretched toward the woods. Many were chipped or broken. Between some of the distant ones, brush had grown up.

  Pryn walked over the wet gravel beside the near ones. Every half-meter along the bench tops, an iron staple had been driven in. Some had broken off. Old tar, used to retard rust, still clotted the iron half-circles.

  On the bench nearest the hall, in the drizzle, hunched over clay bowls, five slaves were eating. Their collars were not chained to the staples. Still, they sobered Pryn. She knew there were no more than two dozen, all told, in the brewery. But how long ago, she wondered, had two hundred, or four hundred, or five hundred, sat, chained, eating in the same posture as the five there, rain salting their backs.

  A gust; and a branch above her added to the sprinkle.

  Pryn walked on and sipped. A thousand years ago? she thought. A hundred? Fifty …?

  The man who walked from behind the far edge of the hall wore a wonderful cloak. It was a blue almost dark enough to be black, yet even at this distance, through the drizzly evening, it was blue, stunning and eye-absorbing. Here and there metallic embroideries glittered in it. The edges were myriad colors. The man was squat, with bushy white hair.

  He carried a beer mug, a large one; it was glazed and decorated with ornate reliefs.

  One slave looked up.

  The cloaked man smiled and raised his hand in a greeting.

  The slave nodded, grinned.

  The cloaked gentleman walked out between the files of benches and stood a moment, sipped from his elegant mug (Was it beer he drank?), and turned. Pryn thought two things as his look swept her. (He had a short white beard that made the puffy hair clouding above his ears look almost comic.) First, his smile was inhumanly, unnaturally, preternaturally radiant. Second, though his eyes had swept by her, Pryn was sure he had not seen her. As he completed his turn and began to walk back toward the hall, she wondered what, indeed, he had seen in the stony traces of such massive servitude.

  He reached the benches where two of the slaves sat, pushed back his cloak, sat beside them, and began talking to the collared old woman hunched next to him; her head turned from time to time in its iron to glance at him or nod. Like all the slaves at the brewery, women or men, her hair was cut off short all over her head; and she was old enough to be somewhat balding anyway. The cloaked man sat very straight in the rain, while the slave hunched to protect her food.

  Pryn chose a path that would take her through the benches and near enough to them to catch a word or two. If she paused to take a sip from her mug as she passed, he might not even suspect she were trying to overhear. Pryn turned among the benches and wandered over the shaly ground. What she heard, however, when she neared, made her pause longer than she’d intended.

  ‘Here,’ the man was saying, holding out his mug before the hunched slave woman, ‘take a drink, Bruka. You’ve worked through this day long and hard – you don’t have to tell me. I know the worker you are. Who deserves a drink more than you?’

  ‘Oh, no, my lord.’ Bruka gave the man a worried grin. Some of the woman’s teeth were gone. ‘We’re not supposed to, and I might get in trouble. It’s not worth the beating, my lord.’

  The man laughed. ‘Now I know – and you know I know – that you folks have your own ways of getting your drink, that Old Rorkar, if he doesn’t know about for
sure, at least suspects. He’s just decided to look the other way. Don’t tell me you’ve never tasted the work of your own hand before, Bruka …? How can a drink with me hurt?’

  ‘If it’s true that we get our own – and I’m not saying it is, my lord – it’s only another reason why I needn’t drink from that!’ The old woman jammed a wooden spoon full of vegetable stew into her mouth, laughing and chewing at once. (It was the same cinnamoned stew Pryn had eaten earlier for supper inside.) ‘Besides, that elegant mug of yours – it’s beautiful work, for sure. Why would a man like you want my dirty mouth on that!’ Bruka laughed again and turned back to her bowl.

  ‘A man like me …?’ mused the white-haired gentleman. ‘The truth is, Bruka, there are very few men like me in this world, lord or slave.’

  ‘That’s true, my lord.’

  ‘And if I were so weak that the touch of a slave’s lips to my cup would topple me from my position, what sort of position could it have been in the first place? You’ve worked hard, and I know the thirst that must be upon you. As a child, didn’t I spend my share of days working in these fields? I know how thirst can crawl into the bones and dry the body out from within. Drink, Bruka.’

  ‘You speak the truth again, my lord.’ The slave shook her head. ‘But my father told me, my lord, when I was a child: “Never drink from the master’s or mistress’s cup. For the slave, such a cup holds only the dregs of disgrace, pain, and death.” ’

  ‘Did he, now, Bruka? And let me tell you: when I was a child – before you were born – I saw my father, with this very mug, go to the slave-barracks where your father lay, sick with the fever that killed off a third of both your family and mine, and give him a drink. Your father took a long, cooling draught from my father’s hands out of this same cup I hold now. Your father drank from it. And you refuse?’

  ‘Did he now?’ The slave woman frowned. ‘I didn’t know my father very long, my lord. He died the same week your late mother sold me and the rest of the orchard gang to Old Rorkar, here. Rorkar’s a good master, my lord. But he’s not your father.’

  ‘I know, Bruka. Murjus, there, was one of that same gang, weren’t you, my man?’ The gentleman gestured to another slave hunched on the bench ahead, who glanced back now and said:

  ‘Yes, my lord. That’s the truth, my lord.’

  Bruka was still looking at the mug. ‘My father, you say?’ Suddenly she put her bowl down on the stone beside her. ‘I think I will take that drink!’ She seized the green-and-red ceramic in both hands. (Two of her nails were deformed from some injury, and another was split to the quick.) Bruka put the mug to her mouth and raised it, while her adam’s apple rose and fell, rose and fell in her red, wrinkled neck.

  Pryn watched – she had stopped only two meters away. All that had really surprised her from the exchange was the realization that the man in the cloak was older than the woman in the iron – though both had almost equal bald spots.

  The adam’s apple still rose and fell. The slave-woman was draining the mug – the gentleman realized it, too. His bushy eyebrows rose. Consternation worked into the lines around his lips and eyes before amusement blurred it.

  ‘That was good, my lord!’ Bruka wiped her mouth with her wrist.

  Shaking his head, the gentleman took the mug back. ‘Well, you certainly were thirsty, old woman!’ That was when he saw Pryn – who suddenly wanted to move off in several directions or bury her face in her own mug, all at once.

  But she stood and looked.

  ‘And hello, young woman!’ The gentleman put his mug on one knee and his large, clean hand on the other, regarding Pryn with a friendly enough look. ‘Now you certainly can’t be from around here. Let me see. I’d say …’ Still smiling, he narrowed his eyes. ‘Mountains … yes, a young woman of the mountains. From somewhere near … Ellamon? Go on, tell me I’m right!’

  Surprised, Pryn nodded.

  His smile broadened. ‘Ever ride a dragon?’

  Mouth open, Pryn nodded again.

  ‘So did I!’ Spreading his elbows, the gentleman leaned forward, so that the wonderful cloak fell down around them. ‘ “Now look at that!” my father cried, on our way down from the high slope where we’d gone to watch the little girls and their trainers put on their fabled performance. “They’ve got one here the kids can ride!” ’ Smiling, the white-haired gentleman dropped his head to the side, as though inviting Pryn into his memories. ‘ “Well, he’s not going to ride it,” declared my mother. But then, you know, nothing would do my father but that I try – I couldn’t have been more than half your age. But I remember it all, just as clearly! Oh, yes, at Ellamon – my father took me up to the bark fence, with mother looking stern, and father reassuring her that it was bound to be perfectly safe, and when would we be back at Ellamon any time soon, and just how often did a boy get a chance to ride through the air on a dragon. It was a very old dragon.’ The gentleman chuckled. ‘The little corral, all decked out with perfectly useless prods and flails and dragon-manacles to look like a real one, was out on a stony ledge. The very bored young woman managing it explained to my father that the dragon took off and flew over that gorge there, landed on the ledge over there (where we could see another young woman sitting), at which point it would turn around, take off again, and fly back here; and, yes, it was a very well-trained dragon and had been doing it for years – all this in a peremptory tone that rather put my father off, I think. He wasn’t used to being spoken to like that, though it pleased my mother, who assumed it was what he deserved for condescending to such foolishness in the first place. Finally my father said, yes, go ahead, and the young woman put a wide belt around me and buckled it – not very tightly, either. It had four metal rings on it. She lifted me onto the dragon’s hard back. The beast wore a leather body-harness, with several straps hanging from it down to the ground. She picked up one and another, and put them through the rings, lashing me on. Then she handed me the reins to hold – I’d already noticed they didn’t go to the dragon’s head, like the reins on the dragons we’d just seen performing; they were tied to the harness’s shoulder strap, so that no matter how hard or in what direction I might pull, they wouldn’t have guided it anywhere. But that, I suppose, was in case I got it into my head, midflight, to take my dragon off somewhere I wasn’t supposed to. “Don’t you think there should be a rope or a chain to the creature from the corral here?” my mother asked in a loud voice. “When it’s flying, I mean. Just as a precaution …?” No one answered her, which only confirmed her notion that the concession was evil, silly, and dangerous. The young woman dashed around to the other side to tie the other straps to the other rings. As she was lashing the last one to the belt, the scaly old thing waddled forward, lifted wide wings – When it went off the edge, I was quite terrified! I mean, it just walked to the cliff and … fell. But then those laboring sails beat, and beat, and beat again; and we began to rise through the late morning, while I tried to lean forward and hug its cool windy neck. I remember glancing behind me. There was my mother, holding on to her chin, and my father, looking like he might leap after me, and the bored young woman, who’d sat down on an upturned barrel, all growing smaller with the swaying mountain. I tried to sit up – and was brave enough to half do it. But we’d already reached our glide’s height. Wings banked for descent to the far ledge … I remember hearing claws scrape rock. My dragon scrambled a few steps over stones. The young woman waiting there wasn’t as bored as the other. I looked down at her as she seized the dragon harness to walk the creature about on the ledge. To this day I can recall how dirty her nails were. Her short hair was wrapped through with some decorative cord. As she came around with us, she tugged one of my straps to make sure it was tight – I guess it usually was. Then she gave me a big grin. I think I fell in love with her. The beast completed its turn. She slapped its haunch –

  ‘And we fell off the cliff again.’ The old gentleman’s eyes blinked above wet cheeks. (Was it raining harder?) ‘No, my parents agreed, this time
in accord, I could not do it again. My father paid with both gold and iron, so it must have been rather expensive, even for those days. And I played at dragons and dragon riders all the way to the aunt’s brother-in-law’s niece’s where we were being hosted for lunch; and where I charmed some of the guests – and bored some others, I’m sure – with my loud version of dragon riding, till one of the servants took me with five or six other children down to the lake by the fountain. After we paddled about a bit, a slave brought our lunch out in several ceramic bowls, one of which had a dragon painted on it – I’m afraid it only got me going again.’ He sighed, smiling. ‘And that’s practically all I remember of the entire Ellamon trip!’

  After moments Pryn said: ‘My dragon was a wild one. I caught her myself.’

  ‘Of course you’re much older than I was,’ the gentleman said.

  Pryn said: ‘I don’t think they have the dragon ride anymore. For children.’ She looked at her mug. ‘The dragon corrals still put on exhibitions for people who come up to see. But some of the corrals have been closed down – they tore down the biggest when I was nine. My cousin was on the work crew … but the rest still put on shows.’ She blinked because of a drop of water on her eyelash. ‘There’re not so many dragons anymore.’

  ‘Never a hearty breed,’ the gentleman said. ‘They’ll probably be extinct in a hundred years. That’s why they were put under Imperial Protection.’

  ‘My aunt said something once about there being a children’s dragon ride, a long time ago. But they … closed it down. Before I was born.’

  ‘This was certainly before you were born!’ The gentleman turned to pick up his mug. ‘Forty years ago, at least – fifty years ago, More than fifty years ago!’ He shook his head. ‘Iam getting on. We are getting on, aren’t we Bruka?’

  Just then the rain doubled, and – in the next breath – tripled.