Neveryona

by Delany, Samuel R.

  Pryn nodded.

  Trees closed around; trees opened. The sun had burned off the overcast. They came in sight of the crowded wagon ahead. Soon they almost overtook it. Someone there started another song. Some people in Pryn’s wagon joined. Juni got into a conversation with some other women.

  Pryn looked over the rail at passing pines.

  Again trees fell back. On a rocky field where she thought there might easily be the same kind of caves as on Rorkar’s property, Pryn saw a number of long buildings. Beside one stood a dozen plows. Some were small and single-handled; others were large enough to need an animal or a person to haul through the ground.

  ‘Now that,’ Juni said, ‘used to be the site of our weapons manufactory. Armor, swords, helmets – everything for the soldier and the fighting lord. This whole area used to be known for it. But that was years back, when Auntie was a girl.’

  ‘Has it become a farm?’ Pryn asked.

  Juni laughed. ‘No, silly! They make stone hammers and farm equipment now!’

  The wagon rolled.

  Someone told her this beach was called Neveryóna. Yes, there were a few old ruins off in the woods, and some ancient foundations out on the islands she could see from here, but nothing to speak of. Was there ever a city? she asked. No. No – true, some folks said as much. But it couldn’t have been more than a village. No, not a city. But the Festivals had always been held here. Pryn was told this out on the sand by a hefty, tow-headed sunburned man of about twenty-one, who had a barbarian accent so thick she could barely understand him. He worked in the dyeing houses and showed her his hands to prove it, if she didn’t believe him! Yes, this was where they’d had the Festivals in his parents’ time; and in his parents’ parents’.

  Was it sacred to some god, perhaps, Pryn wanted to know.

  No.

  Well, had it ever been sacred to some god – perhaps a great dragon god, guardian of the ruins, who lived among the stars?

  No. He knew of no such gods around here.

  After that she stayed pretty much to herself, sitting at the edge of the grass with her feet on the sand, looking out across the inlet to the gray hills or off at the glittering sea. It wasn’t too hard to be alone. There were a lot more people than just the brewery folk – enough, indeed, to populate a small city!

  She said that to herself several times.

  The friendliness local people can extend to strangers is always, beyond a point, problematic, as Pryn’s stay at Enoch had reminded her. From time to time there had been strangers in Ellamon. From time to time Pryn had made friends with them. But you just couldn’t draw a friend of a week into the alliances, aversions, shared concerns, mutual suspicions, committed bonds and vague acquaintances of a lifetime – not at an affair like this, where any one of those relationships might change in an instant.

  She said that to herself several times, too. (Off with this group, off with that, Juni had not spoken to her for forty minutes.) Pryn felt lonely and thought, really, she ought to go now. She wondered why she stayed.

  Sitting on a rock beside some bushes out of sight of the road where the wagons pulled up, she listened to the neighing horses and pictured them nosing one another. She could hear them beyond the ridge. She also thought about her father, whom she had never seen – who, indeed, had been absent from her speculations almost as long as her aunt.

  What would he have her do?

  Then she thought: Really, her aunt, her mother, Old Rorkar, Yrnik, even Cyka in the eating hall, any real father she might have had, Madame Keyne, the Liberator – even the earl, however vindictive, however despicable. (Was it only power that allowed him to reinterpret reality like that? Pryn suddenly knew: if she’d known what Juni had later told her in the wagon, lost in an attempt to find the nature of the slave’s true guilt or the lord’s true reason, she would never have cut the old woman free). Yes, all of them were authorities for her. She did what they seemed to ask when they confronted her. When they were not there, she found herself still doing what they might want, as though all of them only stood for that obsessive, absent father who was with her always. Oh, he listened to them and modified his concerns in the light of their demands, to be sure. But he was the real enforcer of any submission, overt or intuited. For what, she wondered, did he stand –

  Among the youngsters playing in the shallows, in retaliation to a splashing, one skimmed her forearm over the water, sending up white gold into the sun. On her rock, Pryn started with a momentary image of a gold wing rising from the waters – till it shattered about the girl’s shrieking pursuers; and perspective, with the fixing of attention, returned.

  It still set Pryn’s heart pounding.

  She had a momentary intuition, of all the conflicts between the north and south of all Nevèrÿon contoured by such jeweled eagles, such gilded dragons. But then, what could such fanciful beasts actually do, save finance a bit of the real power wielded by a Rorkar, a Madame Keyne, even a Gorgik, or a provincial earl more powerful than them all. Such power seemed rather paltry before her father not there …

  A kind of madness … ?

  Pryn stood up from her rock, determined to leave that moment – and saw several real and solid reasons to stay.

  Over a rock-walled furnace out on the sand, a man turned a triple spit, each tine set with several trussed fowl. In dull dresses too long for the heat, which had already grown notable, women carried shovels full of smoking coals to a shallow pit a few feet off, over which, on a crusted, blackened grill, two split kids barbecued. At the trees, people rolled out dripping barrels, from where they’d been stored the night in some stream, and set them on rough tables in the shade. A dozen people stood about with mugs, sampling what was clearly Rorkar’s contribution to the Festival. With a long journey ahead and little money, it might be wise to eat first and take a bag of food with her – if she could put one together unobtrusively.

  At another fire lay several sacks of yams. Some children gingerly placed the red, rooty nodules about the flames.

  A grizzled man came down the beach, a net sack over his shoulder filled with what looked like flat, gray stones. A youngster ran from the water to accompany him to a fire, where a large earthen pot had been set to boil. (Save her single afternoon at the Old Market, Pryn, who was after all a mountain girl, had never seen a clam. And despite all auxiliary roastings and grillings, the Labor Festival was essentially a clambake.) The net was dumped into the steaming pot; two women pushed a circular board cover over the top.

  People applauded.

  The net was thrown down on the sand. Pryn thought: Maybe I can get one of those, when they’re finished boiling their rocks …

  Someone was lugging another off toward another pot.

  As the morning went on, the beach became all cooking, all eating, all noise. People with instruments covered with leather heads pounded them. People plucked drawn strings over hollow gourds and shells, yodeling accompaniments.

  Men drank beer, gossiped, and boasted about themselves.

  Women drank beer, gossiped, and boasted about men and women not there.

  Pryn drank beer, ate some roast chicken … and a clam. ‘If you don’t like it,’ Juni said, having turned up at the same fireplace, ‘you don’t have to eat them! Oh, what a face! Here, I’ll take your bucket! There’s lots of other things to try. Weka?’ who was about eleven, all black eyes and freckles. ‘Weka, take Pryn and make sure she gets some baked sweet potato! And don’t forget to let her dip it in the honey!’ So Pryn went with Weka and peeled back the flaking skin from a hot potato and dipped it in a large, messy honey pot with a few leaves and some sand in it, and ate a piece of barbecued goat … and three more steamed clams, which she decided were not that bad. Just … different. Besides, who knew what the fashion in foods might be when she got back to Kolhari.

  The sun burned the fog from the hills. (Was that thing that seemed part of the mountain on the other side of the water his Lordship’s home? Yes, someone said.) It also burned away som
e of her fatigue.

  She managed to find a discarded cloth sack, in which were some bread crumbs, which she carried about wadded up under her arm. For a while, she despaired of getting anything into it, without being obvious. Finally she managed to get in two roasted potatoes; then several cuts from a roasted goat’s leg; and three separate quarters from three roast ducks, from three different fires. It was too full to carry under her arm now; she just dangled it from one hand.

  Ambling round a bend, Pryn now saw the beach was longer than she’d thought. There was as much activity down this stretch as there’d been on the former hundred or so yards. The ground here, she saw as she walked along the muddy sand by the water, split into an upper and lower level. A six-meter earthen slope widened between, its black dirt stuck about with roots, rocks, and small brush. She walked along the lower strip, swinging her sack and looking at the people strolling at the edge of the upper. There was music above, whose source she couldn’t see.

  What stopped her were the tops of two rocks over the upper ledge. Both were chalky white. One was substantially taller than the other. They looked like two giant, aged fingers prodding at blue air …

  Three little girls came barrelling down the slope, shrieking. Pryn began to scramble up. She grasped at roots with her free hand – now she climbed over a weedy tide-line; for a while she went crabwise.

  People were cooking at the rim, right where she came over. Someone offered her a hand at the top, and Pryn thanked her, while the others stood laughing, and did she want a bucket of clams?

  ‘No, no thank you. No. Not right now …’

  Between the two rocks a colorfully painted wagon had parked. One side had been let down into a platform. Drummers and musicians sat at either edge of a stage decorated with fantastic props. A very fat man was just finishing an energetic dance with a tall, supple woman. Breathing heavily, feathers shaking on his shoulders and gold paint in wings about his eyes, he walked to the front of the platform and bowed. ‘Thank you! Thank you, ladies and gentlemen!’ Then he said something in the barbarian language, which may have meant the same thing – but it made one group in the audience standing about laugh loudly. ‘This will be our last show for the day,’ the fat man went on. ‘Afterward, we’ll pack up to head off north. But you’ll see us again next summer, at your wonderful, joyous, generous Labor Festival! But we’re not finished! There’s more to come – so you can be generous with your gifts as our musicians pass among you. Please be generous! And now our show continues … !’ He turned sharply, clapped his hands over his head, and skipped ponderously from the stage.

  People laughed.

  Some of the musicians sitting on the stage’s edge jumped from the platform to move among the audience, collecting small iron coins, either in their cloaks or in the bodies of their actual instruments. Other musicians came out on the platform, already playing a rhythmic melody. A moment later, with her scarfs and bells, diminutive Vatry dashed to the platform’s center and began frenetically to shake her red hair and leap and smile and wink into the audience, now and again turning one of her astonishing flips!

  People were generous!

  Three times Pryn saw gold held up, to be thrust a moment later over the shoulder of another watcher and tossed into some musician’s basket or outstretched cloak.

  To one side of the audience in a loose group stood a dozen or so slaves. Most wore their collars on naked shoulders. None was from the brewery. Pryn saw a few white collar-covers, but not many. Given her coming journey, she did not want to give the mummers any of her coins. But everyone else seemed to be, in laughing, clinking handfuls. The musicians were not asking from the slaves …

  Pryn stood near a grove of pecan trees. Vatry did another flip, and all attention, including the musicians’, went forward. Pryn put down her sack, reached under her bloused-out shift, pulled the iron collar from her sash, and raised it to her neck. She pushed the iron semi-circles closed – a small click.

  Dropping her hands, Pryn looked about.

  She felt a tingling over her entire body. No one seemed to be watching. It struck her for the first time, as she dropped her chin almost to hide it now she wore it, that the collar was not particularly comfortable. She picked up her sack and stepped out from the other side of the trees. She walked, leisurely (she hoped), toward the slaves at the clearing’s side.

  A musician passed her with several different kinds of flutes tied top and bottom with thongs and strung about her shoulder. Her spread cloak sagged with iron coins – and at least as much gold as Pryn had once seen Madame Keyne thrust into the hands of a would-be assassin. With her oddly angled, wide-spaced eyes, the musician only glanced at Pryn. Pryn felt her body heat from ankles to ears. But the musician did not pause for any contribution.

  The slaves she moved next to did not look at her either. While Vatry continued her dance, Pryn looked at them a lot, though – mostly for differences between herself and them which might betray her to some more-practiced eye. Were their hands, as they clapped at Vatry’s next flip, held differently from hers? Was there something special in the way this one beside her carried his sloping shoulders? Or in the way that heavy woman toward the front there kept rubbing her hand back and forth on the print skirt at her thigh? Or the way that one enfolded his cracked mug in both hands with the fingers interlocked at the front? What about the way the one with the collar-cover stood, one sharp hip thrust out? Certainly there must be something that marked them as different, marked them as belonging to the collar – which, now that she had become part of its meaning, was, after all, only a sign.

  For a while Pryn found herself trying to imitate the gesture of one, the stance of another, seeking whatever might give her imposture more authority, till her attention was caught up by the skit that had replaced Vatry on the platform.

  There was a beautiful princess, played by the leading lady, who somehow looked much younger than Pryn knew her to be from the time she’d eaten with the mummers back in the Kolhari market. There was the great and glittering monster, operated from offstage, who wanted to eat the princess. There were several dashing young men, some of whom had mothers and some of whom had girlfriends, and all of whom seemed to be in furious, comic competition; there was also a slave, who seemed, as far as Pryn could tell, to belong to everyone, since everyone gave him orders. He received many comic kicks and beatings, but nevertheless was always getting away with something – now a glass of wine from a fine supper that had erupted into a comic argument, now with a piece of gold from a stupidly mismanaged bargain. Both the slaves on one side and the workers on the other laughed. Indeed, two slaveboys, no older than she and both with brimming mugs, poked each other in the sides and made such loud comments, and seemed so generally tickled at seeing themselves represented on stage at all, it looked to Pryn as if it might grow into a real disturbance. Some of the workers were clearly annoyed; but none of the slaves seemed inclined to stop it. A few musicians still moved about, taking some last coins. In the excited state the collar produced, Pryn grew sweatingly uncomfortable at the rowdiness beside her. Finally she lifted her sack and moved toward the back. At the ledge, she just glanced down at the lower beach –

  Along at the water’s edge, kicking bare feet at the wet sand, were Yrnik and big-eared, gawky-elbowed Tetya! They were laughing about something. Indeed, Tetya did not look like a boy who only that morning had beaten an old woman into insensibility. But then, Pryn thought as she stepped away, she probably did not look like a girl who’d just freed one.

  Certainly they hadn’t seen her. Nor did they look as if they were headed up here.

  The idea had been with her. But at a glimpse of someone from the brewery, idea became movement. Vatry was not in the skit. Two other mummers’ wagons – for props, scenery, and sleeping space – sat either side of the rocks. Pryn took her sack off beyond the wagon she’d recognized as the prop cart in which, when she’d last seen them in the city, Vatry had been housed.

  The side wagons were angled ba
ck to the tree. Some musicians not in this skit stood at the wagon’s end near the horses. The musician who’d passed Pryn with her cloak of coins now cuddled the feedbag around one red muzzle. She stroked the bony forehead while the creature ate. Pryn felt something of the tingle again; she went further along beside the trees. She planned to work her way through the brush into the backstage area. But the further away she was when she started in, the less chance there’d be of someone shooing her off. Sack over one shoulder, she pushed in among saplings and undergrowth. If she’d gotten through here last night, certainly she could get through it today. When she reached the shadow of the larger trees, the undergrowth lessened. She worked her way to where the wagons must be, then started out.

  She saw the rocks; she saw the wagon tops.

  The center one had painted houses hanging on its back. Behind the wagon to the right, five mummers in their costumes hauled away a third of the monster, who’d apparently devoured the slave and just met defeat for it at the hands of the most sympathetic of the young men, who’d been played by a very tall, very beautiful, very black actor. On stage, the young man and some fishermen and the princess were singing about it now –

  There was Vatry!

  The little dancer stood in the door of the nearest wagon, talking to a man with a dark, muscular back. He wore a dark loin-rag wrapped around his hips and between his legs; a shaggy sheath hung at his belt.