Neveryona

by Delany, Samuel R.

  Then the mountains moved!

  A ripple passed over the glimmering slope – not the shimmer from high to low of tumbling coins, but sideways, over the whole of it; then another ripple, bottom to top. Gold unfolded over gold.

  The building corner struck Pryn, buttock and shoulder blade. (She hadn’t realized she’d been backing away.) Rising, gold articulated along some glittering numismatic pleat, then along another fanning from it, then yet along another. Between, the loose and flashing folds billowed and rose, a wing scaled with coins, taut, spined, darkening a fifth the sky, dragging its shadow over the yard, opaque to all moonlight with its auric load, yet still glittering within its black, become beast, become Gauine herself.

  Beyond the columns, the golden head rolled upright and – looked at her!

  Mouth open, Pryn crouched, back against uneven stone. Somewhere, distant in the ruins, another gold wing rose above roofs.

  The head slid. Some half-standing wall fell before the huge muzzle rose. Black puddles in pits of crumpled foil, the eyes, now one, now the other, lowered slow, brazen lids and lifted them. Hovering above the columns, above the smashed cistern, above Pryn, the long, ragged lip, clotted with gems, lifted from teeth not gold but stained bone, some whole, some split, all hilted in coral gum.

  Pryn pushed back, slipped, almost went sprawling, but got her feet under her. Standing, she looked up. The great wings, first one, then the other, moved.

  She heard wind.

  She heard water.

  She took another breath and called, loud enough to hurt her throat: ‘Oh great Gauine, I have come to give my treasure …!’ She stopped.

  Because the golden head, staring down, that rose and rose above her, now descended!

  Fear? Terror? What she felt was not terror, because the beast above her was terror itself, and to gaze up at it – all jaws and eyes – was to watch, as jaws opened and eyes blinked, terror’s articulations entirely from without. She felt herself in some reckless state where ecstasy and obliviousness, daring and distraction, were one.

  The gesture came from the same place as the words, though – then – she could not have said where that was. She grasped the chain at her neck and pulled it over her head. First it caught under her ear, then in her hair, but she yanked it loose.

  Pryn hurled the astrolabe as high and hard as she could.

  Gauine roared.

  Gauine beat her wings.

  The sea and the winds leapt to answer.

  And Pryn ran.

  Gauine’s roaring didn’t stop.

  Pryn’s feet splashed on streaming flags. She pushed from a slim pillar swaying on its pedestal, dodged shaking driftwood. Water rilled at her ankles, rushing. Pryn went off paving – into mud!

  Mud shook.

  Mud quivered.

  Beating at her, splashing about her, the water wet her knees. She slogged, flailing. Water was at her waist. Pryn fell, grasping foam, but came up spluttering and this time grabbed the root sticking from the embankment, managed to pull herself up, now going crabwise on the slope, coughing and trying to spit the salt from her throat. (Her aunt had never told her the sea was salt!) She didn’t remember gaining the ledge. But she remembered backing through low bushes, her shift dripping down the backs of her thighs.

  Water spilled together over the unbearable city.

  She remembered coming out from trees again, and again, and then again to the edge of the rocks, with the inlet spread before her, a few sand bars interrupting the glitter that the night breeze unraveled over the whole of it.

  The moon was high and small.

  She remembered walking in moon-speckled forest.

  She remembered sitting wide awake with her eyes closed.

  She remembered walking a lot more.

  She remembered blinking, with leaves blocking deep blue.

  Leaning against tree bark, she realized that it was dew-wet, that the leaves against her shins were wet too, and that perhaps it had just rained in the faint dawn-light.

  She squatted by some bare ground, where the sick feeling passed long enough for her to pick up a twig and scratch her name in the wet dirt. Something was wrong with it – it lacked both capital and diacritic! Again the nausea welled, but it was not as strong as it had been for hours now. She stood, temples throbbing, a stinging along the backs of her legs from squatting so long.

  Pryn moved among trees.

  She first realized she was on brewery grounds when, at the hillcrest, she saw Old Rorkar’s house. Up the nearer slope was the workers’ barracks, where she slept. Down there was the office shed. She remembered taking a momentary account: her name was Pryn – she did know how to write it. In the pockets of her dress were … no iron coins? Her blade – Ini’s blade … ? But Tratsin’s carving tool – no, the earl’s carving knife; or some memory that doubled them both … at any rate, it had gone even before the city had risen. Pryn blinked, frowned, and remembered what had occurred. Almost like relief, the nausea welled again, driving it from her mind. She opened her mouth, taking shallow breaths. Her few coins and the Ini’s blade were under her straw in the barracks.

  Pryn felt at her neck.

  The chain and astrolabe were, yes, gone.

  Her hand went to her hair, found a leaf, and pulled it away. I must look like someone who’s slept in the woods! she thought. The nausea passed again, leaving her still unsteady. Her mouth was very dry.

  Standing with a hand on the tree beside her, Pryn felt two conflicting urges. One was to go to her barracks, take her knife, her coins, and strike out on the north road without a word. The other was to go down past the cooling caves, cross the road to the eating hall, take her morning bowl of soup – Rorkar always said, though Pryn had only heard it quoted, ‘A heavy meal in the morning slows the worker till noon’ – and fall into her usual routine, again without a word.

  ‘… a kind of madness,’ she whispered. Someone had said that recently. But she was not sure who or why.

  There was another urge, of course: to go into the barracks, lie down on her straw, and sleep; but because she was fifteen, and because this was a salaried job, and because the job carried a double title that separated her somehow from the others, she dismissed that one as childish – though in five or ten years it might well have been the one she would follow. As it was, while she decided between the first two, the hide-covered planks of the barracks door were set aside and one, then three, then five women came out. (The women usually managed to leave before the men.) A few more came – one waited for a friend who joined her.

  Pryn stepped behind the tree.

  Two barbarian men came out.

  They were all headed for the eating hall.

  Three more women left, two with their children behind and before them. One barbarian shooed the snoring eight-year-old out ahead of her with gestures for which Pryn could hear Tritty saying, ‘Now, Ardra … !’ Would Petal snore when she was older? Would Lavik make such gestures? But Tritty and Ardra, Pryn remembered, weren’t barbarians anyway, were from further north, or east, or west … What Pryn decided, because she was that kind of young woman, was to follow both her first two urges.

  More women came out of the barracks – which meant her end of the dim sleeping hall would be almost deserted.

  She walked forward.

  One man, leaving, looked at her – which made her decide to pick over her hair for more leaves and make sure to wash in the stream behind the building where, each morning, one half or the other of the workers kneeled to splash their faces and arms.

  She went and washed.

  The money was still under the straw. She took it out. And the knife. She put on the green dress Madame Keyne had given her, because it had two sizable internal pockets, whereas the work-dress she’d gotten here had none. She put her money in one. She stuck the knife into the sash on her other hip, then bloused the green shift over it so that the knife was more or less covered, though no one would be surprised at her carrying a blade. Still …
r />   She went outside – should she go back in and sleep?

  Twice she’d thought she might throw up. She’d decided to forgo breakfast.

  Pryn walked down to the office.

  Pushing inside, passing piled barrel staves and nested pots, she realized what she didn’t remember – couldn’t remember – was waking. She had no memory of opening her eyes in the forest, of going from a nothing to a now that would let her locate a discontinuity with some previous thought or feeling, a discontinuity that could be read as containing sleep – a sleep that contained a dream. Equally lacking was any memory of the dream of the golden dragon ending … Had it ended? Could that giant bejeweled fact suddenly peer at her from behind some shack or tree or keg?

  When she stepped into the office cubicle, Yrnik turned from the waxed board with the little erasing lamp flickering in his hand. ‘Pryn …?’ Did he look at her strangely? She wanted to feel her hair for more leaves. ‘Pryn, I think you’ve made a …’ His forehead wrinkled above ivory eyes whose irises looked like circles cut from dead leaves. ‘I’m sure you’ve made a mistake in these figures. The last ones here – only two barrels of fertilizer out of the auxiliary cooling cave for all of yesterday? You must have made an error. It just doesn’t tally with the numbers you’ve written down for the rest of the week.’ He read: ‘ “Nine,” “eight,” “twelve,” “ten” … Now “two”? I mean you can’t just go writing down things like that about those people. That’s why I sent you to watch them. Carefully. And to write down – carefully – what you saw. Two? If I tell that to Rorkar, he’d turn all of the workers in there out on the road. And you must know, they’re the ones that can least afford it.’

  ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t tell him,’ Pryn said.

  Yrnik frowned. He turned back to melt more figures to ghosts. ‘What … ?’

  Pryn took a breath. ‘I must have made a mistake. Yes. I meant to write “twelve.” Only the earl’s cart came for me just then and –’

  ‘Oh,’ Yrnik said. ‘Twelve. That sounds better, certainly. “Twelve” – and while we’re at it, “forty-nine” is a little high for the main cave. We’ll make that “forty” and start over again, all right? And no more mistakes.’

  ‘Yes,’ Pryn said.

  Yrnik pursed his lips, setting the lamp on the shelf below the cleared board. ‘They were looking for you earlier, you know. When you weren’t in the barracks.’

  Pryn’s eyes widened. She tried to relax her whole face. She opened her hands.

  ‘His Lordship and Old Rorkar, this morning. You must have had quite an evening at his Lordship’s. I said you’d probably gotten up early and gone walking.’

  Pryn moved dry lip on dry lip. ‘Yes … I went walking – earlier.’ Had the dream, she wondered, begun at the earl’s? Suddenly she said: ‘I’m going to the eating hall to catch Tetya on his way up. For his writing session.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think –’

  But Pryn turned and sprinted away among staves, pots, leaning tools, hanging baskets and out flapping hide.

  More workers stood in front of the eating hall than usual. Many were climbing into a large, open wagon. Ahead on the road, another wagon full of men and women was just rolling off north. Everybody was in a good mood. Half a dozen men stood at the road side, bending and hooting with laughter at a story from a heavy woman at the wagon’s edge. She gestured and grimaced, making strange growls and grunts – in the narrative, Pryn caught the passing nivu, the casual har’, but understood none of the barbaric comedy.

  She crossed the cool, yellow dirt and turned from the door when a bunch of jabbering men came out followed by several silent women.

  ‘There you are!’ Juni ducked from the door-hanging, drying her hands on her work apron. She wore a dress that was very blue.

  Juni hurried over to her. ‘What in the world happened to you last night?’ (Pryn thought it might be reassuring to take out her knife. But wouldn’t it look odd to Juni …?) ‘His Lordship drove down here this morning, woke up Old Rorkar, and the two of them were in the hall soon as we opened, asking if anyone had seen you.’ Juni’s dress had none of the metallic glitter of the earl’s cloak, but it was definitely the same color.

  Pryn put her palm against the knife and felt it through the doubled cloth.

  ‘The earl said you’d decided to come home by yourself …? He said he’d offered to have you driven back, but there was some misunderstanding … ?’

  Pryn blinked. ‘Yes.’ She thought: I’ll just say ‘yes’ to everything anyone asks until a dragon plucks me up and away and I’m gone …

  ‘it’s an awfully long walk back from his Lordship’s estate,’ Juni said. ‘But then, the moon was full last night. It was still out when I got up to come here this morning. I just wish it hadn’t rained, though … Well, when they went to the barracks, you weren’t there!’

  Pryn nodded.

  Juni took a large breath. ‘Finally they went and got Bruka anyway. And took her out back! It was awful! Afterwards, when his Lordship had driven off, Rorkar came in and sat in the empty hall and kept on saying this wasn’t the way he wanted to begin the Labor Festival. I felt so sorry for him … !’

  ‘Bruka?’ Pryn frowned.

  ‘They should have waited to find you,’ Juni said. ‘That’s what Rorkar told his Lordship. I mean, even a slave has some rights – and there’s supposed to be a witness. But his Lordship got very angry and said I’m sorry, my man, but for all he knew the silly girl – which was you – wouldn’t be back! He said they’d looked for you several hours before they decided you must have made your own way home. And besides, he said, when Bruka was confronted with it, she’d confess.’ Juni tossed her apron hem down. ‘They went and got her and took her out in the back …’ Her dark eyes widened. ‘They used to do it here in front, you know, for everybody to see. Two big logs, sticking out of the ground right there by the road, with manacles hanging on them! I remember, because when I was six or seven, my cousin drove me by and we saw them doing it. It bothered me for days, weeks – oh, it still bothers me … Where are you going?’

  Pryn walked away along the wall.

  She heard Juni come up behind her, stopped when Juni put her hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t go back there …’

  Pryn glanced over her shoulder.

  ‘There’s nothing you can do. I mean there was nothing you could have done, even if they’d found you – since they didn’t wait. They’ll cut her loose when everyone comes back this evening –’

  Pryn walked again.

  ‘Well, don’t stay there too long, then!’ Juni called. ‘I’m going to get in the wagon … I wish you’d come, too; and tell me all the wonderful things that happened last night at his Lordship’s …’

  Pryn turned the back corner of the hall.

  There were some barrels on the eating hall’s back porch. That’s all. It didn’t feel particularly like morning. She looked across the stone benches stretching to the forest.

  She’d expected a stake driven into the ground somewhere and the old woman dangling, chained to it.

  She saw nothing.

  Out in front she heard another wagon pull up. Someone was shouting for someone else to hurry, hurry up! Someone else was laughing very hard about it – or something else entirely.

  Pryn walked out between the benches.

  Reaching the aisle, she crossed over dandelions and sedge. Weeds tufted gravel and fallen leaves. She walked between the next seats. The tarred staples left rusted halos on the stone. In various chipped indentations, water had gathered. A third of the staples had broken off. Many were only nubs.

  At the bench’s end, Pryn walked around the weedy dirt piled against it.

  Five, or six, or seven benches away, a rope was tied round one of the staples. It went over the stone’s edge and down.

  It was moving.

  Pryn frowned.

  She climbed up to stand on the bench nearest. With a long step and a jump, she got to the next; and the next; and the nex
t –

  The woman lay on her side, face against the rock. The vine was lashed half a dozen times around her bony forearms, from her wrists halfway up to her elbows, which were pressed together. The skin above the rope was red. Her dress had been stripped to her waist. She was breathing very quietly.

  As Pryn stood looking down, Bruka opened her eyes. She didn’t look particularly surprised. But after a few moments, she closed her eyes again and shifted her bound arms. The vine rope slid an inch along the stone.

  The first thing Pryn thought was that it wasn’t as horrible as she’d expected.

  It was only rope, not chain; and only along two of the welts on her back had the skin broken enough to bleed – though as Pryn climbed down, she saw a splatter of red on the weeds. And there was a brown smear on the bench’s side.

  Pryn squatted, looking about. There was no one – though later she told herself it wouldn’t have mattered if there were. She would have done the same. She took the knife from her sash under the fold, grabbed one of the lengths of vine rope tied to the staple, and began to saw at it. Getting through it took about two minutes – it was much better rope than she’d been able to make for her dragon bridle.

  She was halfway through the second when Bruka opened her eyes again and said, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Cutting you free.’

  ‘Did he send you? Is the sun down?’

  Pryn shook her head and kept sawing.

  ‘You’re freeing me … !’ Bruka struggled to sit up.

  Pryn grunted; the rope was jerked from her hand. She pulled it back and kept sawing.

  ‘The indignity … !’ Bruka whispered. ‘They wouldn’t do it out front, where people could see. No. They hid me away here in the back – pretending it wasn’t happening! Why do it, then? But they know, now: people won’t tolerate it – not the free ones! Then why do it, I said. Who’s it to be an example to, I asked. Not an old woman like me, an old slave … there won’t be any more slaves, soon. They won’t put up with it … You’re freeing me? You’re mad!’ The old woman narrowed her eyes. ‘You’re mad, you know. You know what they’ll do to you – a lot worse than this! It’s a crime what you re doing –’