Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities

by Samuel R. Delany

  ‘That day we had camped outside a provincial, western hold. Over the previous nights we had freed several gangs of slaves in the area, and I was growing wary that our next strike might be anticipated, since we used basically the same tactics each time. Perhaps we should wait? Or move on? But no, Sarg said; why not strike again—I didn’t want him to wear the collar, he claimed, laughing. Obviously I was jealous of his wearing it. I took the iron to fasten it around Sarg’s neck. He took it from my hands, I recall, and put it on himself. Wearing the leather apron and fur cape many slavers sported in those climes, I led him to the buyers we had singled out: three men who had managed to bring together, through cunning raids and careful bargaining, a gang of men and women whom they were taking off to some killing labor in a desert mogul’s great cave-carving project, where, to create those incredible columns and corridors that are palaces for five or seven generations and then, for the next thousand years, become the haunts of beggars, slaves toil in near-darkness by the hundreds and die by tens and twenties each week. Of course Sarg would not come to the selling board with his head bowed and his shoulders hunched, as most slaves would. Rather he wandered up ahead of me, looking about, grinning and curious—for he claimed, and with some justification, that slaves all observe their masters carefully but that masters pay no attention whatsoever to their slaves. The chief slaver pounded Sarg’s back, ran his thumb under Sarg’s upper and lower lip, now into one cheek, now into the other, to see how many of his teeth were loose. Sarg was a strong lad, with a sound mouth, and well-muscled, the kind of worker they like for gang labor. I received my handful of iron coins and left him there, grumbling over falling prices in flesh—and immediately turned aside to go off behind the rocks and climb to the overhang from which I could look down and coordinate my attack from without with Sarg’s from within. Hidden in the bushes, I watched as he was led back to the other wretches, who stood peg-linked to the plank they carried on their shoulders. Their heads hung. Their feet shuffled in the dust. Sarg was already strutting and laughing. “You think I’m an ordinary slave?” he called, as if—I always felt when he did it—to me. “Ha! You think, just because I wear the iron, I am an ordinary slave. You don’t know who I am at all!” They did not hit him—one shoved him a little, toward the gang. Many times, you must understand, he had explained to me, when I had chided him on such behavior, “If I rave thus, they only think me crazy. And if masters pay little attention to slaves, they ignore completely those slaves they think mad. Besides, it sets an example of defiance to the other slaves, and I get pleasure from it. A pleasure of the mind, not the body! You should see in such taunts that bravery which, if all slaves showed at once and together, would crumble the institution and there would be no need for liberators like us! Given the pleasure that the collar brings you, you would deny me my joy in such outbursts…?” This time I saw the slaver narrow his eyes at Sarg. And I had seen slavers narrow their eyes at him before. The slaver called over one of the others. I had seen slavers point Sarg out before to one another and laugh. This man did not laugh. He nodded at a whispered instruction from his fellow, then turned to leave the encampment. Our plan was to wait for nightfall, when Sarg would have gotten a chance to decide which slaves we could trust to aid us and which would be too frightened. But twenty minutes later, from my vantage, I saw the man returning—with twenty imperial guardsmen. They were down the road, out of the line of sight of the camp. My first thought was to give Sarg our signal—the wail of a wild dog—and at least throw down to him a blade I kept for him under my furs and begin the attack at once. But as I raised my hands to my mouth to howl, there was a rustle in the brush beside me, and three other guardsmen stepped out. I thought they knew who I was and was only a moment from rashness. But seeing my leather apron and cape, one turned to the others and said: “See, they hire us to patrol this campsite till dawn, and already they’ve posted a lookout here against these accursed Liberators,” and nodded to me. “Let’s move further on.” I nodded back, trying to look as much like a lookout as possible. There were other guards, I saw, moving behind the trees. Sarg, down in the campsite, did not see, nor was he even looking. For two men to fight with the help of twenty slaves against three slavers is a viable battle. For two men to fight twenty or more armed guards expecting an attack is not. Should I have thrown him his sword then? He would have fought then—and died. Perhaps he wanted to die. But though all his actions seemed to say so, I still think such a reading of them was not mine to make. What I did, after a moment’s thought, was to turn away and leave the site—leave the west and make my way back toward Kolhari, to redouble my efforts where slavery was already at its weakest, and thus establish a position to move back into those areas where it is still strong. I left Small Sarg, my barbarian prince. I did not even think about returning to the guarded site that night. I do not even know if Sarg ever knew that the guards were there. Or that his own actions had called them in. I left him a true slave, without a weapon. Yet, for the week, for the month, and still sometimes on such moonlit nights as this, I can hear his argument. “You wanted to get rid of me. The guards were only an excuse to abandon me because you did not like my fighting manner, which was no more than high-spirited bravery itself. You wanted to be free of my recriminations in order to pursue your own desires. Your only real objection to my carryings on was that I did not act enough the slave to appease your lustful fantasies. And it was your desire to see me in the collar that made me a slave—that now abandoned me to slavery.”’ The Liberator shrugged. ‘How does one refute such an argument? I’m only glad I had a cause to help me put such recriminations aside.’

  ‘It’s as if,’ Pryn said, suddenly, ‘he felt all those desires secretly that you felt openly! But because his were secret, even from himself, they took control of him and led him to those foolish and dangerous actions, while your desires were known and acknowledged, and so, if anything, you were the better Liberator for it…?’

  Gorgik snorted again. ‘It would be a lie if I said I had not thought the same from time to time. But what I let myself think idly, I do not necessarily believe.’ He lifted the collar on his finger so that it tugged Noyeed’s head to the side. Then he let the iron fall to the little man’s neck. ‘Sarg said he felt no lust within the iron. I say I do. Why should I assume he spoke any less truly of his feelings than I speak of mine? If such a sign can shift so easily from oppression to desire, it can shift in other ways—toward power, perhaps, and aggression, toward the bitterness of misjudged freedoms by one who must work outside the civil structure. We killed many slavers, Sarg and I—he was only a boy, really. I do not think dealing death makes the best life for the young. The chance organization of my inner life and those situations life has thrown me into have taught me, painfully, a sign can slide from meaning to meaning. What prevented it from sliding another way for Sarg? For me, the collar worn against the will meant social oppression, and the collar worn willfully meant desire. For Sarg, the collar was social oppression, as well as all asocial freedom. Nothing in our lives, save my anger, challenged that meaning for him. And my anger was a lover’s anger, which too often feels to the loved one as oppressive as a parent’s. We fought—the two of us—for a vision of society, and yet we lived outside society—like soldiers fighting for a beautiful and wondrous city whose walls they have nevertheless been forbidden to enter. Sarg did not have the meanings I had to help him hold his own meanings stable. That is all. And my desire’s position in this blind and brutal land means only that I know desire’s workings better than some—but it does not make me either a better or a worse Liberator. Only what I do with my understanding changes that. Do you understand a little more now?’

  Pryn nodded. ‘Perhaps. A little.’

  ‘And do you think, now, you might be able to write a clearer account of it?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I—’ Then she realized he meant an account for some absent master of her possible spying. Pryn felt her face heat in the half-dark.

  ‘Well, perhaps I do to
o—now.’ Gorgik snorted again. ‘Perhaps I, too, saw in myself that other meaning, Sarg’s meaning, when I left him. Certainly, when he swung down from that balcony at me, across the cellar, I saw all the dangers of such asocial freedom descending upon me—and they were indeed as terrifying and as paralyzing as the first and sudden discovery in one’s own body of lusts which have no name. You say you’re leaving the city? Probably that’s wise. Tell me, girl, which way are you heading?’

  ‘I came down from the northern mountains,’ Pryn said. ‘I suppose I’ll head…south.’

  ‘Ah, the monstrous and mysterious south! I remember my time there well. I hope you learn as much about the workings of power while you are there as I did.’ The Liberator’s free hand moved absently to his broad chest, where his bronze disk hung. The broad thumb slid over the marked verdigris, as if the hard flesh might read what was inscribed there by touch: certainly the shifting leaf blotches made it impossible to decipher those signs by sight. ‘Tomorrow I have my meeting with Lord Krodar, first minister to the Empress. The denizens of the High Court have little love for the south. I’m afraid this astrolabe is, in its way, a map of just that southern-most peninsula which those now in power have traditionally seen as their nemesis. To enter new territory displaying the wrong map is not the way to learn the present paths that might prove propitious.’ Thick fingers moved from the disk to the chain it hung from. Gorgik suddenly bent his head to loose the links from under his hair. Pryn saw his own collar was gone…and now realized it was the Liberator’s that hung around the bandit’s neck, ludicrously too large and lopsided on the jutting collarbones. ‘When I was a boy in this city—’ the Liberator raised his head—‘half your age, if not younger—oh, much younger than you—my father brought me to visit a house in Sallese. I remember a garden, some statues, I think a fountain…maybe some fountains near running water.’ The Liberator laughed. ‘When I heard this house was for rent, I was told it was in Sallese—and I felt the return of old joy to think I might be taking for my headquarters the very home I had visited as a child. It isn’t in Sallese, you know. It’s right next to Sallese, in the suburb called Neveryóna, where the titled aristocracy have their city homes—those who are not staying at the High Court of Eagles itself. Once, they actually tried to call the whole city Neveryóna, but that never went over very well, and when the Child Empress came to power…’ His mind seemed to reach for that distant time, while moonlight spilled its shadow over his face’s rough landscape. ‘It seems an irony to be here rather than there—though it’s not ironic enough to make me truly laugh. Here, girl.’ Gorgik gestured with his two fists, below which, in moon dapple, the chained disk turned and turned back. ‘If you knew the trouble this has guided me through, you might not take it. Yet I suspect the trouble I have got through under its weight is trouble I have lifted from the neck of all Nevèrÿon—an illusion, perhaps; but then, perhaps the fact that it is an illusion I believe in is why I am signed and sign myself “Liberator.”’

  Pryn stepped forward.

  Gorgik raised the astrolabe.

  Noyeed reached between his legs to scratch—and blinked.

  As she neared them, moonlight flittered over Pryn. She felt a growing sense both of disgust and trust. Had she not just spent the time with Madame Keyne—and the Wild Ini—she might have thought that the trust was all for Gorgik and the disgust all for Noyeed. But in the conflict and complication, the chills, which had never really ceased, resurged. Was this fear? Was it more? It seemed to have lost all boundary; it filled the room, the house, the city the way the flicker and glitter of moonlight filled her very eyeballs.

  Gorgik passed the chain over her head. Tale fragments of the crowning of queens returned to her. Links, warmed through the day against the Liberator’s neck, touched the back and sides of hers—and a memory rose to startle: jerking the twisted vines up over a scaly head…

  Fear was replaced by terror. Pryn had a moment’s vision of herself in a complex and appalling game where Madame Keyne, the Liberator, the Child Empress Ynelgo, perhaps the nameless gods themselves, were all players, while she was as powerless as some wooden doll, set down in the midst of an elaborate miniature garden.

  Something grappled her wrist.

  She looked down—all the motion she could muster. And the moment’s terror was gone. Noyeed held her forearm with hard fingers.

  The eye turned from Pryn to Gorgik—the Liberator was looking down with the same questioning Pryn fancied on her own face.

  ‘She has a knife, master!’ Noyeed’s gappy gums opened over his words like a mask of Pryn’s own former fear: he looked as if he were avoiding a blow. ‘See—at her waist? The spy has a blade! I was only protecting your life, master—protecting it as I have protected it before, as I will always protect it!’

  Pryn wanted to laugh and only waited for the Liberator’s great and generous laughter to release hers.

  ‘Very well then, Blue Heron.’ Gorgik did not laugh. ‘Take my gift, with your blade, into the south.’

  Pryn jerked her arm from Noyeed’s grip. The little man, squatting at their feet, almost lost balance. She stepped back. The chain pulled from the Libertor’s hands. The astrolabe fell against her breasts.

  ‘No one can say for certain what confusion I give you.’ (Gorgik’s perturbation seemed far from her own. And where, a moment back, she had felt at one with him, a oneness inscribed in wonder and fear, now she felt only annoyance inscribed on more annoyance.) ‘Tomorrow I shall go to the High Court of Eagles for…the first time? Does anyone in this strange and terrible land ever go anywhere, without having been there before in myth or dream? The ministers with whom I shall confer will ask me a simple question. Beyond my campaign to free Nevèrÿon’s slaves, whom will I ally myself with next? Will I take up the cause of the workers who toil for wages only a step above slavery? Or will I take up the marginal workless who, without wages at all, live a step below? Shall I ally myself with those women who find themselves caught up, laboring without wages, for the male population among both groups? For they are, all of them—these free men and women—caught in a freedom that, despite the name it bears, makes movement through society impossible, that makes the quality of life miserable, that allows no chance and little choice in any aspect of the human not written by the insertion or elision of the sign for production. This is what Lord Krodar will ask me. And I shall answer…’

  Balancing on the balls of her feet, Pryn felt as unsteady as little Noyeed, crouched and blinking, looked.

  ‘I shall answer that I do not know.’ Gorgik’s hand found the little man’s shoulder; the horny forefinger hooked again over the collar. Noyeed, at any rate, seemed steadied. ‘I shall say that, because I spent my real youth as a real slave in your most real and royal obsidian mines, the machinery of my desire is caught up within the working of the iron hinge. Slavery is, for me, not a word in a string of words, wrought carefully for the voice that will enunciate it for the play of glow and shade it can initiate in the playful mind. I cannot tell this minister what slavery means, for me, beyond slavery—not because desire clouds my judgment, but because I had the misfortune once to be a slave.’