Tales of Nevèrÿon

by Samuel R. Delany

  Bayle was a strong, stocky lad, with an inch of black beard – mostly beneath his chin (no real mustache), with broad shoulders from cutting firewood to fit the open pine fires for the rough rhaku ware, and the elm and hickory kilns for the figured, three-legged pots and glazed animals; his forearms were heavy from holding clay to shape on the turning wheel. A comfortably thick body made him look like a young bear – a thickness that twenty years hence would be fat, but for now simply made him look affable. He stood in the middle of the shadowed shop and laughed his most affable laugh, for he was a well-liked youth and knew it. (And to do well when you are well-liked is usually easy.) Laughing, he turned on soft sandals, their broad straps laced to his knees. He strode over shards to the door, ducked his curly head at the slant lintel. He did not need to; but a year ago an extraordinarily tall and handsome black had worked for a month in the shop, who had needed to duck in order to enter and leave: and Bayle, impressed with the man’s carriage, had taken up the gesture, though the top of his own curly head – and Bayle’s father, a fat man with remnants of the same onyx curls, had been bald at twenty-five – barely brushed the wide-grained plank. With thumb under his belt, Bayle adjusted the cloth, bound once between his legs and twice around his hips, and stepped to the pitted street.

  Half a dozen potter’s shops squeezed between fish stalls, wine sellers, cheap taverns and cramped dwellings – a third the shops that had been there fifty years ago, which had given the waterfront end of the alley its name: Potters’ Lane. An irony: three blocks over, port Kolhari supported some seventeen more potters in a street named, incongruously enough, Netmenders’ Row.

  Lugging his roll on his back, grown quickly sweaty beneath it, Bayle went down the curving alley, its right side a-blaze with white sun (bright, warn-wood buildings), the left a-swim in blue shadows (garbage-clotted puddles still drying about the uneven road). Ships usually departed in the morning or the evening – now it was no more than three hours after noon. The little street emptied him out on Old Pavē, five times as wide, a third as crowded: oxcarts trundled, merchants strolled by with heads hooded or parasols raised against the heat. Bayle’s bundle slid on his back with his striding; the strap was wet on his dribbling shoulder. Fifty yards ahead, the cobbled road shivered before the docks and warehouses, almost deserted now at the hottest part of the day.

  There was his ship!

  And the tavern across from it, with scattered oyster shells before it, had colored stuffs hung out on the poles set in the ground for awnings. Three sailors and a porter sat on their stools, leaning together over the split-log benches, laughing quietly and continuously at some endless round-robin account.

  Bayle walked in under the awning, set his bundle on broken shells, and sat at an empty table, only vaguely aware of the voices of two women that came from the curtained alcove in the back: he did not pay attention to any of their quiet conversation, that had begun before he’d come in, that continued through his three mugs of cool cider, that was still going on after he got up to wander over to the boat to take a look at his berth.

  ‘Come now, dear girl: don’t mind the heat. There’s your ship. Who knows how many hours before it puts out for the Garth. And a tavern, right across from it! Let’s sit out under one of those awnings in the front and drink a toast to your coming adventure and my coming wealth. Who’d have thought, when I struck up a conversation with you in the public garden only a day after you’d arrived in Kolhari, that, a year later, you’d be my most trusted secretary and my missionary to the south to petition Lord Aldamir! Oh, it’s an enterprise we are well bound up in, and rest assured the result will be wealth for us both. Mark it, Norema – for it is inked like writing on vellum that has soaked clear through and will not come off for all your scraping with a writing knife –’ which was an old adage among Kolhari merchants – ‘money draws to money. And we start from a very good position. Ah, ten years ago, when I took over my dear, dead brother’s foundering business – nothing but a mass of papers, names of ships, lists of captains and sailors, and the key to several warehouses in which I found the most terrifying things – I’m sure I felt all the fears that a childless woman of forty, with only the memory of a husband gone out my life before I was thirty, could possibly feel in those hectic and heartless times. But now that I am fifty and have made a go of it for a decade, I have learned some of that fear is actually what men call the thrill of adventure; and I have come to enjoy it, in reasonable doses. Besides, what’s in my warehouses no longer frightens me. Oh, yes, Norema, let us sit here out in the sunlight and drink something heady and hearty!’

  ‘Madame Keyne,’ said the serious-looking young woman with the short red hair, ‘they have a curtained women’s alcove inside …?’

  ‘Would you be more comfortable inside?’ the older woman asked in a swirl of diaphanous blues and greens, bracelets and finger chains and anklets and ear bangles a-clatter – for veils and bangles were the rich and conservative attire in that time and place for a rich and conservative matron. ‘But then –’ blues and greens settled – ‘you really were asking on my behalf, weren’t you?’ She sighed, and her hands disappeared in the folds of her dress. ‘Here I am – here we are – on the threshold of an adventure, nautical for you and economic for us both: I certainly don’t wish to be bothered now by obstreperous men, neither the well-off who, if we sit out under the awnings, will think their attentions flatter us, nor the not so well-off whose attentions would annoy us though they have no other aim than to make us put up a pleased smile before that annoyance, nor the completely destitute – the mad or crippled ones who live in such pathetic incompetence they cannot tell us from their mothers and expect any woman to hand out food and sympathy and money from sheer constitutional maternalism.’

  Norema smiled. ‘But you would be unhappy in the shadowed and curtained women’s alcove, where we could escape such annoyances –’

  ‘– because I wish to sit out in the air and light. Which is precisely where we would not escape them. Well, it is no surprise to you, having worked for me a year. I do not like woman’s place in this society, and that place is nothing so simple as a curtained alcove in the back corner of a waterfront tavern, or a split-log table in the front of one; that place you know is neither my walled garden in Sellese that makes the world bearable for me, nor my warehouses at the back of the Spur, which makes the bearable possible. And while we stand here brooding over why we can be happy neither in the sun nor in the shadow, give a thought too to the brilliant notions on art, economics, or philosophy we are not now having because we are concerned instead with this!’ She beat her hand through her skirts: the blues and greens flew up from layers of indigo and chartreuse. ‘Come, Norema, let us go back into our alcove and enjoy a pitcher of cider!’ The older woman started in among the tables and benches, a faint smile on her face – because she thought the younger woman behind was no doubt smiling too at what that young woman would certainly take to be excessive. The young woman followed with a perfectly serious expression – because, although she felt an almost obsessive compulsion to be honest with her employer, which compulsion grew from the twin motivations that, first, very few other people were, and second, she had an astute awareness of her employer’s rather astonishing business acumen in a world where business was an enterprise not more than three generations old. Norema felt an awe before this woman that had, months ago, decided her that the lightest of Madame Keyne’s pronouncements were worthy of the heaviest consideration – a decision she’d already had many reasons to approve in herself.

  ‘Norema,’ Madame Keyne said, when they had seated themselves behind the frayed drapery of a particularly glum red and black weave (and before they had let themselves become too annoyed that, after having been seated for five whole minutes, the waiter, who was joking with three men in the front, had not yet served them), ‘something intrigues me – if you’ll allow me to harp on a subject. Now you hail from the Ulvayns. There, so the stories that come to Kolhari would have it, we
hear of nothing except the women who captain those fishing boats like men. We doubtless idealize your freedom, here in the midst of civilization’s repressive toils. Nevertheless, I know that were we sitting outside, and some man did come to importune us, you would not be that bothered …?’

  ‘Nor,’ said Norema, ‘am I particularly annoyed by sitting here in our alcove.’ Then she pulled her hands back into her lap and her serious expression for a moment became a frown. ‘I would be annoyed by the bothersome men; and I could ignore the simply trivial ones – which I suspect would be most of those that actually approached us, Madame Keyne.’

  ‘But for you to ignore, for you to not be bothered, there must be one of two explanations. And, my dear, I am not sure which of them applies. Either you are so content, so superior to me as a woman, so sure of yourself – thanks to your far better upbringing in a far better land than this – that you truly are above such annoyances, such bothers: which means that art, economics, philosophy, and adventure are not in the least closed to you, but are things you can explore from behind the drapes of our alcove just as easily as you might explore them out in the sun and air. But the other explanation is this: to avoid being bothered, to avoid being annoyed, you have shut down one whole section of your mind, that most sensitive section, the section that responds to even the faintest ugliness precisely because it is what also responds to the faintest nuance of sensible or logical beauty – you must shut it down tight, board it up, and hide the key. And, Norema, if this is what we must do to ourselves to “enjoy” our seat in the sun, then we sit in the shadow not as explorers after art or adventure, but as self-maimed cripples. For those store-chambers of the mind are not opened up and shut down so easily as all that – that is one of the things I have learned in fifty years.’ The waiter pushed back the drape, took Madame Keyne’s curt order for cider with an expressionless nod and a half-hearted swipe of his cloth over the varnished grain, that was certainly (if only because it was less used) cleaner already than any of the tables out in the common room. ‘I do not know which applies to you – to us. I don’t think any woman can be sure.’ (The waiter left.) ‘That’s why I choose to worry and gnaw the question like a cantankerous bitch who will not give up what may well be a very worn-out bit of rug – nevertheless, it suits me to worry it. Even if it doesn’t suit you.’

  Norema let herself ponder. ‘Well, Madame, even if I’m not out for art or economics, this journey to the south to negotiate for you with Lord Aldamir is certainly an adventure.’

  Madame Keyne laughed – a throaty sound that made Norema suspect, more than anything else, that this childless, widowed woman, whose life seemed so circumscribed by the exacting business of the waterfront and the equally exacting social pleasures of Sallese’s monied residents, had truly lived – though, equally true, neither Sallese nor the waterfront seemed, separately, a life that could have totally satisfied Norema, though both had facinated her now for a year.

  ‘I remember when I was a girl, the little balls would wend their way, somehow, every summer, into Kolhari – in my family, we actually called it Neveryóna, back then. (My dear, there are days when I’m surprised I’m still alive!) Rich children in the fountained gardens of Sallese (and I remember, my dear, when the first fountain was invented; all of a sudden there it was – in the back yard of an obnoxious little neighbor whose parents were ever so much more wealthy than mine were; then, the next thing you know, everybody had to have one, or two, or a dozen, and the barbarian who had invented them grew very wealthy and, later I heard, went quite mad and drank himself to death in some other city, or so the rumor came back), urchins by the fetid cisterns of the Spur, it made no difference: We all bounced our balls and shouted our rhyme – how did it go?

  I went down to Babàra’s pit,

  for all my Lady’s warning …

  ‘At any rate, the summer sale of those little balls in the ports along the Nevèrÿon coast are as much a part of our life as the rule of the Child Empress herself, whose reign is marvelous and miraculous.’

  ‘I’m just surprised –’ Some memory deviled the edge of Norema’s pensive expression – ‘that nobody ever decided to import them before. I mean in large quantities. Or, else, how did they get here?’

  ‘Well, there must be a first time for everything. And stranger things than that are happening in our time. Money –’ and here the red ceramic pitcher arrived in the waiter’s hand, along with two mugs on a wet tray, all cooled in the tavern’s ice pit from the great blocks hauled down from the Falthas in winter and stored beneath mounds of sawdust through the hot months – ‘I have my serious doubts, Norema about whether money is a good thing. I heard the other day from a woman who, though she is not at court, is a confidante of Lord Ekoris (who is) that a man approached Her Highness not a month back with a scheme for making money of vellum. The Empress would hold in store all the gold and iron from which we now make coins; the vellum, on which patterns would be embossed in rare inks and of a cleverness so surprising in their design that they could not be imitated by unauthorized means, would be issued to stand for specific amounts of metal, and would be used in place of coins …’ Madame Keyne shook her head, though she noted that expression on her young secretary’s face which had always made her feel that somewhere in Norema’s past the most ingenious of Madame Keyne’s mercantile ideas had been encountered in some other form and that complex comparisons were being made. (But then, Madame Keyne would remind herself, we civilized peoples are always romanticizing the barbaric, and she is really little different from a sensitive, extremely clever, and eager-to-learn barbarian.) ‘The Empress, apparently, discouraged him, quipping that such a plan would be for her unborn granddaughter’s reign. Nevertheless, I still wonder. Each of us, with money, gets further and further away from those moments where the hand pulls the beet root from the soil, shakes the fish from the net into the basket – not to mention the way it separates us from one another, so that when enough money comes between people, they lie apart like parts of a chicken hacked up for stewing … More cider? This barrel must be from Baron Inige’s apple orchards. That fine, cool tartness – I would know it anywhere, my dear. He has a way of making his apples sweet, that he used to tell my father about when we would visit him in the north, involving cow dung and minerals mined in the southern mountains, that, really, verged on sorcery …’

  Bayle stepped around barrels and over coiled rope. The slender woman with the short red hair, strangely costumed (from her brass-linked belt, to her open-work boots; and pants. Of soft leather – Bayle had never seen anyone in pants before), rubbed her bare breast absently with a rough hand. (She was probably a little secretary somewhere: secretarying in those days meant mostly the whitening of reed and animal parchments with pumice, the melting of hot wax for wax pads, the sharpening of styluses and the mashing and boiling of berries for juice and the crushing of stones for pigments – it was hard on the hands.) ‘Those boxes,’ she said, frowning. ‘The porters were supposed to have taken those boxes on to the ship this morning. Now the Captain says we’re leaving in ten minutes. And I just see them here now. If they don’t go with me Madame Keyne will have a fit!’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Bayle, who had just taken his own bundle aboard and had wandered back down on the dock for a last look at the shore, ‘I’ll carry this one on for you.’ As he squatted to hoist up the little crate to his shoulder, someone else said:

  ‘– and I’ll take these two. There, woman, grab up the fourth and we’ll have them all aboard before they get their sails tied.’

  Bayle looked up at the sailor –? No, it was a woman, though those brown arms were knotted as any woodcutting man’s. There were metal and colored stones in the woman’s lank black hair. A shaggy scabbard was belted about the dark cloth she wore around her loins. She hoisted up one crate by its binding rope, and – at the redhead’s confirming nod – swung up the duffle sack on her shoulder. Her hands were broad and worn as any farmwoman’s (a very different kind of wear from a
secretary’s) and her bare feet were hard around the rims. She had the lithe, hard back of an active woman not quite thirty. Half-way up the gangplank, when she glanced behind to see if Bayle and the redhead were following her (her skin was red-brown as the darkest terracotta before drying), he saw the black rag mask tied across her face: through frayed holes her eyes were blue as some man-ganese glaze.

  ‘All passengers go below to their cabins,’ the mate repeated for something like the fifth time, between orders bawled to the sailors rushing about the deck. ‘Please, all passengers to their cabins. Now couldn’t you have brought those things on an hour ago when there was less confusion – or simply had the porter bring them on with the regular stores this morning? Never mind. Just get that stuff stowed fast. Once we’re off, you can come up any time you want. But for now, would you please …’

  2

  ‘Cider on shore, wine on the water. Isn’t that what they say?’ asked the redhead turning from the cabin table. ‘No, please stay – the both of you – and have a cup with me. My name is Norema and I’m secretary to Madame Keyne, of Kolhari port, and bound southward on this ship.’ From the duffle sack she’d already unstrapped, she took out a wax-stoppered wine jar and sat it beside some rough-ware cups (low-fired with softwoods, thought Bayle) on the table against the wall. As she began to pick at the wax with a small knife, Bayle sat down on the box he’d carried in and noted again how sumptuous this so-fashionably garbed secretary’s cabin was. (His berth, the cheapest on the ship, was a storage locker in the forepeak, in which he could just sit up; indeed, he had visited it twice during the afternoon, the first time to see it, the second time to see if, with its smell of old tar, its shavings in the corner, its chips of resin loosening between the boards, it was as grim as his first look had told him – may the nameless gods of craft help him if he were ever ill in it from heaving seas!) The dark woman with the rag mask and the light eyes climbed a few steps up a ladder to some storage cabinet high in the wall, turned, and sat. She looked like some black cousin to the worst waterfront ruffian in the Spur. Her smile, like her eyes, was preternaturally bright as she looked down at the cozily appointed cabin. Bayle wondered where she slept, or if she were even a passenger.) ‘My name is Raven,’ the masked woman suddenly announced (almost in answer to Bayle’s thought). ‘I hail from the Western Crevasse. And I have been traveling three years in your strange and terrible land!’ From her perch, she barked a sharp, shrill laugh. ‘Strange and terrible, yes. I am on a mission for the royal family, and – alas – I can tell you no more about it.’ And she leaned, most unceremoniously, down between her bony knees and took the cup Norema had just filled.