Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities

by Samuel R. Delany

  ‘Afraid?’ Madame Keyne frowned. ‘Of Ini? No, I’m not afraid of her. Part of me is rather fond of her. Part of me is rather sorry for her. But you see, the Ini is fascinated by power. She wants to see how it works, wants to stand as close as she can to it, to stare down into it and watch it moving, pulsing, actually becoming—right before her! Currently, I have more of it than anyone else she knows. If she hurt me, or even displeased me in any way too severe, she knows she would be denied her favorite pastime: observing me. I don’t believe she’s ready to risk that.’ (Pryn recalled the little murderess’s own assertion of her favorite pastime, and marveled at this woman’s self-confidence—which seemed, somehow, quite as out of touch, in its way, as the behavior of Ini herself lurking somewhere behind them in the garden.) ‘Now if she ever met anyone with more power than I,’ Madame Keyne went on, ‘then I might have reason to fear. Blessedly rare as her sort is, she’s not the first I’ve met. Reading such signs is among the things civilized life teaches. But until she meets such a person—or should I say “personage”—I feel rather secure.’ Madame Keyne pressed Pryn’s arm. ‘Now if I were Radiant Jade, indeed I would fear her. But then, I suppose, precisely that danger is half the fascination, don’t you think?’

  ‘Radiant Jade is fascinated by her?’

  ‘Well—’ Madame Keyne mused—‘one might say that my secretary…’

  ‘—has taken an interest in her?’ Pryn suggested.

  Madame Keyne laughed again. ‘You might say that. Yes, that’s a very good way to put it.’

  Pryn said: ‘Your secretary told me that you hated her.’

  ‘That I hated my secretary?’ Madame Keyne frowned. ‘Or that I hated the Ini?’

  ‘Ini.’

  Again Madame Keyne sighed. ‘The truth is, girl, I love Jade; and for her sake I put up with the little monster—of whom, finally, I do think I have the greater understanding. Though I like to fancy I’m not as mad as Ini, in many ways we’re astonishingly, if not distressingly, alike. If we weren’t, I tell myself, why would Jade be able to move her own—’ Madame Keyne glanced at Pryn—‘interests from one of us to the other so easily?’

  The path, taking them toward the great house, now swung them away toward an outbuilding, in front of which, among some fruit trees, stood a cart—the one Pryn had arrived in last night. It was hitched to the same horse. The hangings, however, had been roped back to the frame so that the inner space, save for the overhead awning, was free.

  Madame Keyne walked up to it. ‘There’s room for two on the driver’s seat. Sit here—’ She patted the board—‘and we can talk.’ She helped Pryn up. Then, pulling in skirts and pushing up bangles, she climbed to the seat, as the black-eyed young man whom Pryn had seen earlier among the new servants came running out of the shed.

  ‘Madame, if you would like me to drive, I’d be happy to—’ he wore a red scarf around his waist.

  ‘Samo,’ Madame Keyne said, ‘I told you before, I am going to drive. If we are all to be happy here, you must learn that this is not like the other houses you have worked in. I shall drive today. Now you run ahead and open the gate. That, today, is your job.’ Madame Keyne picked up the reins and flicked them.

  Nodding, bowing, Samo dashed off down the driveway.

  As Pryn settled on the seat beside Madame Keyne, the horse’s haunches began to move. The cart lurched beneath them. They rolled forward. The trees scattered handfuls of light and shadow in their faces, over their laps.

  Ahead, Samo tugged at the heavy planks in the high wall’s entrance. Pryn felt a surge of comfort to be riding with, and indeed to be sitting so near, Madame Keyne, who, for all her dubiously placed certainty, seemed the most normal person in the household. Summer warmth had worked its way into the morning chill. Pryn looked about at the lawns, the outbuildings, the hedges, now at where some statue poked above a grove of shrubs, now back to the main house—where she saw Radiant Jade.

  The secretary stood just at the house’s corner, one clay-stained hand raised—to wave? No, she had simply raised it to touch the wall. Jade watched them.

  Pryn turned back.

  Samo’s face passed by the cart’s edge as he lugged the metal-studded planks a final foot; and they were out on the road.

  As the cart rolled down the avenue, the widely spaced estates drew closer together, till at last the walls between them vanished and there were only unwalled houses, sitting one by the other, less and less land between. The cart turned. Beside larger buildings stood smaller, shabbier structures. Other carts joined them in the street—which had broken from its straight, tree-lined directness, to bend and branch as if it had become a tree itself.

  Alleys siphoned carts and wagons away from them. Alleys poured porters and pedestrians and more wagons and carts in among them. Merchants, laborers, children—and more carts—filled the streets with noise.

  Once Pryn touched Madame Keyne’s arm. ‘You said we were going to the New Market? I only saw the old one yesterday…’

  Madame Keyne reined the horse again to angle left of another cart piled with sacks. ‘If you think you saw marvels in the Old Market, believe me, girl, in the New Market you will see wonders beyond imagining! Both locations have their advantages and disadvantages, of course—the Old Market is at the upper end of New Pavē and has the wares that can be purchased on the Bridge of Lost Desire as one of its added attractions. But the New Market is only a street away from the Empress’s public park, which seems to be well on the way to fulfilling the same function—and on a somewhat less vulgar level of commerce. Though I swear—’ Madame Keyne wheeled the cart away from some youngsters who ran out into the street—‘if need be, I’ll have that bridge transported to the New Market stone by stone!’

  Pryn laughed at the notion, though she was as unsure just why Madame Keyne had suggested it as she was of any motivation within the Sallese gardens.

  Jouncing along in the sun over a route she’d last traveled draped about in the dark, Pryn felt a reckless pleasure that was, after all, the legacy dragon riding ought to leave one with. ‘Madame Keyne, why did your secretary get so upset when she learned I could write and read?’

  ‘Did she now: Hi, there! Hi!’ which last, with much tugging and pulling, was to get around another cart, piled with bricks of a dirty yellow.

  The brick cart was parked before some thatched awning, and the small, ragged woman who was its driver had climbed down, calling and calling for the shop proprietor to come out and look at the shipment—to no avail.

  ‘She probably thought I wanted you to replace her in her job—as indeed I should!’ Reins flicked again as they rumbled along the boisterous avenue. ‘Toss the two of them out, the ungrateful minx and her odious kitten! That’s what I should do—what I would do if I were some uncivil aristocrat with a host of red-scarfed servants. But I am a poor, hard-working merchant, like my brother and father before me. My red scarves are all, as it were, borrowed from a tradition not mine. And for arcane reasons, which, no doubt, I shall never truly understand, that just doesn’t seem to be the way we do things here. I can’t bring myself to such behavior, nor would I respect anyone who could. So I am used and abused for my sympathies within the walls of my own home, the most helpless victim before the crazed and childish connivances of my inferiors.’ She laughed again, in a way that, for the first time, reminded Pryn of Ini. ‘Has it struck you that way before, girl? I confess, till this minute, it never seemed so to me. Well! Radiant Jade became upset when she learned you could read and write? Imagine! I’ve never heard anything more ridiculous!’ She pulled the horses to the right, the smile still on her face as she strained. ‘But I refuse to discuss it further. After all, didn’t I leave the house this morning to get away from such pettiness? We are going to market—to the New Market, the wonder of Kolhari! And what is the wonder of Kolhari today will be the wonder of the world tomorrow! Mark it on vellum, my girl. For I am not a woman to speak lightly when…’ Madame Keyne had been pulling the horse this way and tha
t, but here traffic suddenly increased. A bare-breasted barbarian, one water-pitcher balanced on her head and another held on her shoulder, passed practically in front of the horse’s nose—indeed, if the animal hadn’t jerked up its muzzle it would have knocked at least one of the pitchers to the asphalt. The cart jarred in its traces. Madame Keyne half rose and hauled back on the reins.

  From the side of the crowded street, a man rushed forward. He had a short red beard and astonishingly dark eyes, between coppery lashes. He grabbed the horse’s bridle and, with a wild little cry, was lifted from the ground, bare feet waving—on his ankles he wore as many clattering and clinking circlets of silver, ivory, and wood as Madame Keyne wore on her arms.

  The horse lowered him, pulling and prancing; the little man finally got the animal calmed, now clucking, now cooing, now patting the great red cheek.

  ‘Well,’ Madame Keyne said, the reins again tight, looking unperturbed, ‘you’re here, exactly where you said you’d be!’

  ‘And I see you’ve kept our appointed meeting, just as you said you would.’ The horse, stepping about, quieted. The little man, with his beard and jangling anklets, grinned up at Madame Keyne from sunburned wrinkles fanning about light lashes. ‘Have you considered my plan for liquidating this Liberator, who plagues our city, our nation, our world with his schemes and plots and treasons?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve reviewed your plan, carefully and in detail. I’ve been impressed by your thoroughness, not to mention the sincerity of your motivation.’ Madame Keyne switched the reins to one hand. With the other, she pulled up a blue bag of more solid cloth from among diaphanous folds and pleats. ‘You outlined the fine points of your expenses, and I completely agree with the rigor of your research and the exactitude of your estimations. You’ve told me—you’ve convinced me your plan will require twelve gold coins and five iron ones to purchase the weapons and hire the men that will insure its success.’ She reached into the purse and drew out some money. ‘Here.’ She thrust coins into the man’s hands—he had to release the bridle to take them. ‘I give you six gold coins and two iron ones—and we shall see what comes to pass.’ She snapped the reins. The horse started.

  ‘But Madame—’ Clutching the coins, the man danced back with jangling ankles to avoid the cart corner.

  ‘That is my decision,’ Madame Keyne called back. ‘I can do no more for you at this moment.’ They moved out into the traffic. Traffic moved between them and the confused, would-be assassin.

  Astonished at the exchange, Pryn looked at Madame Keyne, who guided their cart through the morning crush. A memory of the cellars under the Spur; an image of that accusing barbarian—what was his name…Sarg?—dead on the underground tiles. Who, Pryn, wondered, had financed that attack?

  When they had driven a few more minutes, Pryn asked tentatively, ‘You really want to…liquidate the Liberator?’

  Madame Keyne shrugged—or possibly it was just some motion in her driving.

  ‘I mean…do you think the Liberator’s plan to abolish slavery plagues all Nevèrÿon?’

  ‘All Nevèrÿon? How can I say? But I would be a very foolish woman if I thought it was going to help me.’ Madame Keyne urged the horse through a place where traffic had slowed for street construction. It might have been the place Pryn had been put down yesterday.

  The cart pushed on.

  ‘But if you really wanted to have the Liberator killed, why did you give that man only half of what he needed—less than half! Did you think he was asking for too much?’

  With lightly closed lids, Madame Keyne raised her eyes a moment to the sky. ‘By no means!’ She blinked at the avenue again. ‘That man is very good at planning the kind of thing he plans. And he was very anxious that I not think him excessive in his demands. Truly, he has whittled his budget down to the bare minimum for success. We spent several hours a week ago at an inn in the Spur, while he drew maps of underground passages leading from cisterns to cellars. But you see, I’m afraid that if I gave him his full twelve and five, our Liberator would be dead—it really was a fine plan. But I have not yet decided whether that’s what I want. The little fellow’s terribly well motivated, in that way which only conservative fanatics can be. With six and two, I have no doubt that in desperation he will mount his plan anyway—under-equipped, under-manned. Which means there’s a good chance he will fail. But it will give the Liberator some trouble, which, at this point, is all I am prepared to do. Indeed, if he is any sort of Liberator at all, he should be used to such encounters! But as of now that’s all I’m interested in—at least until I learn more about this Gorgik.’

  ‘But what do you want to know?’ Though Pryn was not about to admit she had fought through such an encounter herself, she would have admitted to anything else she knew about the Liberator. And Madame Keyne’s equanimity over the probable death of the man with the anklets and the possible death of Gorgik made the self-comparison with Ini no longer seem so fanciful.

  Madame Keyne’s attention was ahead of her on the crowds. ‘Girl, this isn’t a pleasant subject. I didn’t intend to bore a new arrival to our city with such tediousness. Besides, did you see that cart full of yellow brick? Myself, I’ve never seen bricks like that before. Very interesting to me, those bricks—’

  ‘But Madame Keyne—’

  ‘Enough, girl. We’re almost at the New Market. What you must do now is prepare your mind for true wonders!’

  The street here was clogged with humanity—most of it male. The cart’s movement among them was quite slow. Many men were ragged. A good number were naked. Curly light hair; narrow shoulders; close-set eyes—the overwhelming majority were barbarians. As the cart rolled among the ambling, occasionally boisterous men, Pryn sensed a quality which she wondered how she might notate in written signs. She had seen poor people before—indeed, she’d never had any reason to think her own aunt anything more than on the upper end of poor. Still, poor for her had always meant a ragged woman or three with two to ten dirty children in a littered yard before a ramshackle hovel on the outskirts of Ellamon. This was the first time she had ever seen so many poor people, and men at that, amassed at a single center.

  Poor men filled the street, building to building; with it and because of it the street seemed filled with poverty itself. (That, Pryn decided, was how she would have written it down.) Holding the cart bench beside her, Pryn leaned toward Madame Keyne. ‘Who are these people…?’

  ‘These—’ Madame Keyne pulled up on the reins again, for they had gone beyond the last building, to approach a sort of railing—‘are the men who do not work in the New Market.’ Madame Keyne halted the horse.

  The cart had come to the fence—a single rail supported just above waist-level by pairs of posts driven into the ground in narrow X’s.

  On this side barbarians milled.

  On the other—a stretch of bare earth—a few people walked.

  ‘And over there—’

  ‘Madame Keyne!’ The man who sprinted up across the clearing was not a barbarian. ‘There you are!’ He wore a red scarf around his sweat-beaded forehead. ‘We never know which direction you’re going to be coming from, or who’s going to be driving!’ He laughed. ‘I had my men stationed down at the Old Pavē waiting for you—’

  ‘—over there,’ Madame Keyne finished, ‘are the men who do.’ She wrapped the reins about the small post at the side of the driver’s seat. ‘I hope you’ll never find me that predictable.’ She stood up as the man ducked under the rail.

  He was a tall man, a young man, and very strong. The wide leathers he wore around his wrists were dark at the edges with perspiration. ‘Here, Madame, let me help you down!’

  Barbarians moved back from the cart.

  Three other men ran up across the field, two of whom also wore scarves. They ducked under the fence. One took Pryn’s hand—his own hot and callused—as she climbed out. Another told the other where to lead the horse.

  Madame Keyne swept blowing blue skirts over jangling wrists and, w
ith some jovial remark, ducked under the rail.

  Pryn went to the rail, ducked, stood—

  The clearing was huge!

  From within the crowd, it had looked practically empty. But now, strolling across it, Pryn could see there were as many as thirty or forty men walking or standing about in it. Glancing at the rail, she looked back at the crowd they’d come through. Big as the clearing was, the herds of men on the other side of the railing went almost all the way around it.

  Ahead of Pryn, Madame Keyne stopped a moment by another group of three, standing together on the bare dirt and looking over parchment plans one held for the others to see. Now and again a man wheeled a barrow past, filled with stones and earth. Over there a foreman was pointing something out to a worker. Over there another, walking alone, stopped to squint up at the sun. Many, Pryn saw, wore the red scarf at head or waist—one man had it tied around his leg.

  As Pryn walked by, Madame Keyne fell into step beside her. ‘Look at it!’ She put her hand on Pryn’s shoulder. ‘Isn’t it wonderful!’

  ‘But what is it?’

  ‘The New Market, of course!’

  ‘But…’ Pryn looked about, searching for stalls, porters, counters, vendors displaying the marvels she’d been promised. Suddenly she turned back to Madame Keyne. ‘But you’re still building it!’

  7. Of Commerce, Capital, Myths, and Missions

  By contrast, the market economy is a constant subject of conversation. It fills page after page in urban archives, private archives of merchant families, judicial and administrative archives, debates of chambers of commerce, and notarial records. So, how can one avoid noticing it? It is continually on stage.

  FERNAND BRAUDEL,

  Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism

  ‘WELL, JUST LOOK AROUND you! You say you’ve seen the Old Market. This one is going to be six times the size of that spread of junk and garbage over in the Spur!’ Madame Keyne’s voice was triumphant. ‘Here there will be air, light, room for commercial growth, the encouragement of true diversity among products, marketing methods, competition and profits!’