Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities

by Samuel R. Delany

  ‘Come,’ the giant repeated. He started to leave the market by a narrow street.

  ‘Shouldn’t we go back across the bridge and up into the city?’ Pryn asked. ‘The men who brought me into town stopped at a great house out in the suburbs, where the Liberator stays—’

  The man half snorted, half laughed. ‘If you want the Liberator, come with me!’

  Tossing away the fig stem, Pryn hurried up to reach the giant’s side. ‘He…isn’t in the house in the suburbs?’

  The giant looked at her, considering. ‘It’s a trick I learned when I worked as a messenger for a great southern ruler, the Dragon Lord Aldamir. Many people are curious as to the whereabouts of the Liberator. I make sure there are endless loud voices answering that curiosity. There have been no open conflicts as of yet directly traceable to the High Court—but there have been spies.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘It’s a good idea, when people are curious, to give them something to sustain that curiosity—and direct it.’

  ‘You’re not really a slave,’ and it was much easier to say than Pryn had thought it would be, ‘are you?’

  ‘I’ve sworn that while a man or woman wears the iron collar in Nevèrÿon, I shall not take the one I wear from my neck.’

  They turned a corner.

  ‘The opposition says that the only reason I exist is because the reign of the Child Empress is itself lenient and liberating,’ he went on. ‘But though the slave population in urban centers has always been low—and is getting lower—there are still road-, mine-, and agricultural slaves by the gangload, as well as a whole host of house workers and estate slaves, owned largely by hereditary royalty. Do you see that old tavern building three streets down?’ He stopped to point. ‘In the basement of that inn are the real headquarters of Gorgik the Liberator.’

  When Pryn glanced up, the giant again wore his scarred smile. ‘But, like all things concerning the Liberator, one approaches it by a somewhat devious route. Come along here.’

  The alley he led her down certainly didn’t go toward the indicated inn but in a completely oblique direction. The sense of adventure that had dissolved into a kind of quivering anomie when the riders had left her on the street was now rewritten across the field of its own dissolution without really reforming it. She felt excitement; she also felt discomfort. Earlier, she definitely hadn’t wanted an adventure—but would have accepted it. Now, dragons notwithstanding, she was unsure if she wanted an adventure at all and was equally unsure what accepting one might mean.

  ‘This way, girl.’

  Off the alley was another yard. In it stood another cistern. The stone wall came up to Pryn’s waist. The man walked to it, grabbed one of the split birch logs lying across it, and swung it back. Frayed bits of rope were tied to it, as though a canvas had once been lashed there.

  The man picked up a bit of white mortar from the wall’s top and tossed it in.

  Moments later, its clatter on the rock floor echoed up. ‘You see?’ He grinned. ‘No water.’ Turning to sit his naked buttock on the wall, he swung one leg over, then the other. ‘Follow me down.’ He grasped some handhold within, moved to stand on it, and dropped, by stages. His head vanished; his hand disappeared from the ledge.

  Had Pryn read, or even heard of, those tales we have mentioned, she would doubtless have used this opportunity to flee—as indeed I would advise any of my readers to do who might find themselves in a similar situation. But this was a long time ago. She could not have heard such stories. More to the point, the great slave who was not a slave could not have heard them either. And bridling, positioning, and urging her dragon from its ledge had been unpleasant, angering, and frustrating.

  Feeling unpleasant, angry, and frustrated, Pryn climbed over the wall at the same spot as the man, to find, inside, immense, rusty staples set in the inner stone, making a kind of ladder. As she climbed down by lichen-flecked rock, as shadow slid up over her eyes like water, Pryn wondered briefly, as well might you, what if this man were not who he implied he was, but rather some strange and distressing creature who would hack her to pieces once she set foot on the bottom. (Though most of those tales had not been told, a few, of course, had.) She stumbled—the last rung was missing—to be grasped at her shoulder by his great hand. ‘Watch yourself. This way.’

  If the water was gone from the cistern, the bottom was still pitted and puddled. In sunlit bands falling between the overhead logs, she saw half a dozen broken pots on the wet flooring, a few pieces of wood, some bricks, and a number of small, round things too smooth to be stones. At one place the wall had fallen away to form a…cave?

  ‘In here.’ He had to bend nearly double to enter it—head and knees first, huge hand lingering in a slant of sunlight on the stone jamb, an elbow jutting in shadow. Then elbows and buttocks were gone; then the hand. Pryn followed them into the dark, feeling the moist walls beside her with her palms, vaguely able to see him ahead; feeling along beside herself; then unable to see at all. (Well, she thought, if he does turn around and try to cut me to pieces, I’ll be able to get out faster than he will.) She could hear her own breath; she could hear his breath too; a pebble clicked against a pebble on the ground. After a long while she heard him stumble, grunt, and call back: ‘Step down.’

  Five steps later, Pryn stumbled. And stepped down. She moved her toes to the next ledge, and down, still going along the wall with her fingers. Exactly when she noticed the orange flicker on the damp wall, she wasn’t sure. But soon she was walking on level dirt and blinking a lot—and she could make out his dark shape, walking upright.

  Here the ceiling was very high between the close-set stones. At first Pryn thought the great pile of darkness before them was dirt; but when she stepped around it, it turned out to be sacks with rope-lashed corners. The wall to the left had, by now, fallen back.

  The man paused below a torch burning in a niche high in the rock. Pryn came up beside him. The flickering banked at his scar, pulsing and failing and threatening to overspill onto his cheek. He smiled at her—turning his face, with its broken tooth, into a mask a mummer might wreck terror with. There was a flat glow on his shoulder. Despite the demon look, Pryn breathed easier for the first time since they’d entered the alley.

  He started ahead through a vaulted arch into a room with half a dozen torches about, shadowing and brightening the dirty mosaic floor. As she followed him in, a man and a woman carrying a split log bench between them came in by another wide entrance, glanced at them (the woman smiled), set the bench on a pile of benches by the wall, and nodded to Pryn’s companion. The smile and the nod, if not simply the couple’s presence, somehow abolished the momentary demonic image and moved friendship from a possibility to be gambled on to a probable fact. Then they went.

  Pryn followed the giant into the next room with even more torches on the walls—these in iron cages. Perhaps twenty-five men were there; and half a dozen women. Some who had been sitting on benches now stood. All looked. Most standing stepped back. One man called: ‘So, our Liberator has returned from his survey of the city! How did you find it, Gorgik?’

  The big man did not answer, but only raised a hand, smiling.

  One woman turned to another near her and said something like: ‘…vabemesh har’norko nivu shar…’

  Gorgik’s response was an outright laugh. ‘Ah—! Which reminds me,’ he called to her. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you something for a while now —’

  Another man interrupted. ‘The others are waiting for you, down in the receiving hall, Gorgik.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Gorgik nodded and walked.

  As the others moved after him, Pryn wondered if she should fall back among them; but one man stood back to let her go forward just as, a few feet ahead, Gorgik looked at her and beckoned her to him.

  She hurried up. This time his hand fell on her shoulder, reminding her for all the world of the portly gentleman in the toga and the naked barbarian boy she’d seen on the bridge—quite ludicrously, though she could not have writ
ten why unless she invented new signs.

  This archway was hung with heavy drapes. A man before them pushed the hangings aside, and she and Gorgik went through, to start down wide steps.

  Pryn blinked.

  So many more flares and torches along the walls of this hall, yet it seemed so much darker—it was dozens of times as big! Distantly she heard free water. Because she associated the sound with outside vastness, this inside seemed even larger.

  All the hall’s center, a metal brazier, wider across than Gorgik was tall, flickered over its coals with low flame. As they descended, Pryn looked up to see half a dozen balconies at different heights about the walls. One corner of the hall looked as if it were still being dug out. Earth and large stones were still heaped there. On another wall she saw a carved dragon, three times a man’s height—though from the rubble piled low against it, it, too, had only recently been dug free. Overhead, large beams jutted beneath the ceiling, from which, here and there, hung tangles of rope.

  As they came down the steps, someone called: ‘The Liberator!’

  A roar rose from the fifty, seventy-five, possibly hundred fifty people about the hall. (Pryn, unused to crowds, had little experience by which to judge such numbers.) It quieted, but did not die. The whispers and comments of so many, echoing under the high roof, joined with the sound of falling waters.

  Pryn looked aside as she reached the bottom step.

  Water poured between squat columns beside one of the balconies, the falls spewing fog that wet the rock behind it, to rush, foaming and glimmering, along a two-meter-wide ditch. The conduit ran between carved balustrades; after going beneath one bridge of stone and one of wood that looked as if it had been recently built between the remains of a stone one which had fallen in, it ran off through an arched culvert in the dragon-carved wall.

  Some of the floor was tiled, but most was dirt, scattered with loose stones. As they walked, Gorgik bent to whisper, ‘Yes, that stream is part of the system that feeds the public fountain…’

  ‘Oh,’ Pryn said, ‘yes,’ as if she had been pondering precisely the question he had answered. Was that the way one began to think like a Liberator? she wondered. It’s as though all of Nevèrÿon makes sense to him! At least all of this city.

  They crossed the wooden bridge and passed near enough to the brazier to feel heat from its beaten, black walls. Ahead were more steps, five or six. They led up to a large seat, half covered with skins. A stone wing rose at one side from under a tiger’s pelt. From the other, a sculpted bird’s head, beak wide in a silent screech, stuck from black fur.

  The others halted. Hand still on Pryn’s shoulder, Gorgik went to the steps. At the first one, he bent again. ‘Sit at the foot here.’

  The third step from the bottom was covered with white hide. Pryn turned and sat on it, running her hand over it. She felt grit. White cow? Horse? (Who, she wondered, had charge of cleaning them?) She put her heels on the edge of the step below, while Gorgik mounted to the seat.

  Pryn looked out at the people waiting about the hall. She looked up at Gorgik—his horny toes with their cracked edges and thickened nails pressed the black and white hair of a zebra skin four steps up and level with her nose.

  ‘My friends—!’ The Liberator’s voice echoed under high vaults. (Pryn glanced at the ceiling and thought of the tavern above. Had it been anywhere near the size of this subterranean vastness?) ‘It’s good to see so many familiar faces—and good to see so many new ones!’ The foot moved a little. Firelight shifted on tarnished bronze: Gorgik sat on the hide covering the seat. (Was it as dusty as the one under her own heel?) ‘Still, it reassures me that our number is small enough that I can address you informally, that I can gather you together so that my voice reaches all of you at once, that I can walk among you and recognize which of you has been with us a while and which of you is new. Soon, our growing numbers may abolish that informality.’

  Pryn again looked over the faces that had, at least a moment back, seemed numberless.

  She started!

  Beyond those standing nearest, she saw, in his ragged headdress, the scarred Fox turn to whisper to the bearded Badger, while just behind him the squat Western Wolf frowned—at her!

  ‘That so many of my friends are here in the city warms me. That so many of you have come here to the city to offer me your support speaks to me of the unrest throughout Nevèrÿon because of the injustices marring our nation. The difference between the number of you here yesterday and the number of you here today tells me of the growing power that informs our cause. Yesterday, I left you with a question: Would I be able to get a hearing at the High Court to present my case? Today, I bring you a gratifying answer: Yes.’ A murmur rose over the water’s rush, then fell. ‘I received the news earlier this afternoon—and went to walk in the city. While it rang in my head, while it afflicted my eyes, till the city itself seemed wondrous and new, and the market, where I so frequently go to hear the harmonies of labor and commerce, seemed a new market, ringing with new music, a market in which I had never walked before.’ Again Pryn turned to look up. Mostly what she could see was a large knee obscuring the face and a rough elbow that moved behind its gesturing hand. ‘The High Court has agreed to give me an audience with one of its most powerful ministers, Lord Krodar!’

  Amidst the approbations, one woman called, ‘Why won’t they let you speak to the Child Empress herself?’

  ‘—whose reign is monstrous and monotonous!’ called a man.

  Coming from a place where such things just weren’t said, Pryn was as startled as she had been by the sight of the Fox and the Wolf. But others laughed. Hearing that laughter, she decided she liked the feeling of freedom it gave—and remembered flying.

  ‘My plans are prudent and practical,’ Gorgik countered, which brought more laughter with it, ‘monstrosity notwithstanding. I am satisfied with this as a beginning. You come from all over Nevèrÿon,’ Gorgik’s voice echoed on. ‘You come with your different reasons, your different gifts. This young woman at my feet comes with no more than curiosity.’ Pryn looked up again. The face—what she could see of it beyond the knee—smiled before it looked back up. ‘I accept that; and I am as happy to have her with us as I am anyone here. You there—’ Over Pryn’s head the great hand went out. ‘You hail from the foothills of the Argini, am I right? I can tell by the leather braiding about your arm. Once, when I passed through your province, I saw a low stone building with seven sharply pointed triangular doors, the stone head of a different animal at each apex. When I asked what the building was, I was told a phrase in your language…?’

  ‘“Ya’Kik ya Kra Kyk!”’ a heavy man with close-cropped hair called out.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Gorgik. ‘That’s it! And can you tell me what it means?’

  ‘It means the House of the Goddess who Weaves Baskets to Carry Grain to Women, Children, and Animals.’

  ‘And is she a goddess of freedom or slavery?’

  The man frowned. ‘She’s a goddess of prosperity…’ He raised a hand to tug self-consciously at the leather braids looped on his fleshy biceps. ‘She’s a goddess of labor. So I guess she’s a goddess of freedom…’

  ‘Good!’ called Gorgik. ‘Then she might smile on us and our cause, here, even though there are few women among us and, today at any rate, only one child…’

  The laughter, friendly enough, made Pryn look up. Beyond his blocky knee, the Liberator looked down at her, while Pryn wondered at her demotion from young woman to child. She looked out again at the Red Badger, who, with his big mouth, missing teeth, and new beard, had gotten her into the first trouble of her journey.

  ‘It is important for all of us to learn about, and learn to respect, the customs over all our land. You there—’ This time he pointed toward the barbarian woman who, again, had leaned to whisper to a neighbor.

  She looked up.

  ‘When I was a youngster, running in the streets of this city, I used to hear the women from the south talking the southern
language together. The word that again and again fell out of those lingering, liquid sentences was nivu. When I first began to learn a few words of the tongue from your men, it never came from their mouths. Yet even today, walking in our streets, one hears you southern women talking of nivu this and nivu that. Tell me; what does it mean? I know enough of your language to ask for food and lodging and to tell when a man is saying he’s full-fed and content or when he’s saying he’s sick and hungry. But I still don’t know the significance of this word.’

  The woman’s rough yellow hair, tied behind her neck, clearly bespoke barbaric origins. ‘My Liberator,’ she called out in a friendly enough voice, but with the thickest barbarian accent Pryn had ever heard, ‘if you knew anything of our life and language, you would know that nivu is not a man’s word.’

  Gorgik laughed. ‘So I was told once before. But we are all friends here, men and women, with a common cause that will benefit us both. We work for justice; and justice should have no secrets. Tell me the meaning of the word.’

  ‘Very well, my Liberator. Nivu is an old barbarian term that means­—’

  ‘FOOLS—!’

  Later Pryn realized she had seen the man—squatting on the rough stone balcony by the falling water—some minutes before he stood up, arms out from his sides, belly jerking visibly with the breath he heaved into each word:

  ‘YOU FOOLS—the lot of you!’

  4. Of Fate, Fortune, Mayhem, and Mystery

  …The psychoanalytic notion of sexuality, says Freud, comprises both more and less than the literal sex act. But how are we to understand an extension of meaning which includes not only more but also less than the literal meaning? This apparent paradox, indeed, points to the specific complication which, in Freud’s view, is inherent in human sexuality as such. The question here is less that of the meaning of sexuality than that of a complex relationship between sexuality and meaning; a relationship which is not a simple deviation from literal meaning, but rather, a problematization of literality as such.