While he’d leaned toward her, under the table, Pryn noticed, he’d taken the opportunity to work his sandals off. They lay, one rightside up, one upside down, by the table leg. Pryn rubbed the edges of her bare feet together.
‘What uncle really gets mad at,’ Tetya said, ‘is the way his Lordship calls everyone “my man”—just as though we were still his slaves.’
‘Who are you to say what I get mad at and what I don’t!’ snapped the peasant. ‘And I was never his slave! Nor was my father a slave of his father’s…one of my grandmothers, it’s true, was owned by Lord Aldamir. But she escaped and only came back after ten years; she took over a piece of land to farm and was never bothered by his Lordship. At all. That’s the truth. It is true: the earl addresses everyone as “my man.” One day when he comes by, I should simply say, “Well, hello there, my man”—even before he opens his mouth to speak to me at all. Now that would be a joke. Don’t you think?’ Rorkar took another swallow, and elbowed Tetya. ‘A fine joke!’ He settled back and drew bare feet beneath him.
Yrnik turned against his post to gaze at the table with the same moody expression with which he’d been gazing out at the evening.
The naked house slave, whom Pryn had not noticed depart, returned through the hall door. The girl looked about, rubbing at one ear, then stepped in and squatted by the jamb as if awaiting instruction.
‘Of course I shall never do it.’ Rorkar looked into his mug. ‘I’m not a joking man. Never had time for jokes—not with the brewery, here. But it would be a joke, now. If I did it. Nothing serious—he’d pee all over himself, like a drunken slave caught dipping in the barrel!’
Pryn smiled.
No one else did.
Rorkar looked up. Where do you know his Lordship from?’
Pryn’s smile dissolved in puzzlement.
‘Come on. He said he’d already met you. When did you meet him? And where?’
‘I…I only met him outside the hall,’ Pryn said. ‘Minutes before you came in. In the rain.’ Part of her confusion was that she did not want to mention her exploration of the old slave benches. ‘We only spoke a few words.’
‘Only a few words?’ His frown deepened. ‘In the rain?’ Rorkar held his mug against his tunic belly. Small, knobby fingers meshed around it. ‘Now, I didn’t know that. I thought he meant he’d met you at some great house or other, when he was visiting some other important lord. That’s what I thought he meant—back when I asked you up here. Though, of course, you didn’t strike me as that kind of person—you seemed like an ordinary enough girl. Even if you can read and write a little. Yrnik there can read and write, and he’s an ordinary man. Aren’t you—Yrnik, my man!’ Rorkar laughed. ‘But that’s why I want Tetya to learn. There’s nothing that says ordinary folk can’t know a thing or two. I can’t read or write. And you heard his Lordship: even he doesn’t know how to read and write by the system you do…that’s probably because it’s a commercial system. His Lordship knows nothing of commerce. And I still don’t trust him…’
Pryn had a sudden premonition Tetya was about to say something like: Uncle only invited you up here because he thought you were somebody the earl thought was important—and interrupted this Tetya-of-the-mind with: ‘Does this—’ she lifted her astrolabe—‘have anything special about it?’
‘Hey?’ Rorkar squinted. ‘Is what special?’
‘This.’ Pryn had already decided that there was no secret in the astrolabe that she might want to preserve or exploit, even for such a treasure as the tale-teller had spoken of. (That was for non-existent masked warriors with double-bladed swords!) As she lifted it, she saw how much the evening had dimmed. ‘Do you know anything about it? Any of you?’ The sky was as deep a blue as some dahlia at Madame Keyne’s. ‘Tetya already said he didn’t—only that the marks around the edge might be writing. A kind of writing…’
‘Let me see.’ Yrnik stepped forward. ‘That thing you wear around your neck?’ He put his mug on the table and laid thick, dark fingers on the wood, leaning. ‘I’ve seen such marks on old stones around here. But the thing itself is not something I know—a sailor once showed me something like it for finding where you were on the open sea, he said—something to do with different stars. Here, I can hardly make it out…’
‘Let me have a look.’ Rorkar lifted the bolted disks and turned them, squinting. ‘It’s good work. Local work. Old work, too—like something that could well have been made around here, from the marks on it. Like Yrnik said. It’s the kind of thing we might turn up as boys, exploring some old abandoned great house.’
‘Somebody gave it to me in an all but abandoned great house in Neveryóna.’
‘Neveryóna?’ Rorkar frowned. ‘What would a girl like you know of Neveryóna—an ordinary, northern girl?’
Pryn looked at him, puzzled.
‘Well,’ Rorkar went on, ‘I suspect you just happened to be there, that’s all! Before you were here. And you met somebody else who happened to be there who gave it to you. There’s nothing out of the ordinary in that!’ He let the astrolabe fall. (Pryn sat back.) ‘There’s your explanation!’
‘Sir…?’
‘It’s a piece of local work. You were in Neveryóna. You met somebody there who gave it to you. Just like you said. When I was a boy, sometimes when I’d go exploring, I used to find things. Old things. Like that. Sometimes I gave them to people. If I didn’t want them myself. That’s nothing extraordinary.’
Although Pryn didn’t want to protect or exploit the astrolabe, she was wary of mentioning the slaves’ responses. Those responses were now clearly in her mind. ‘And you?’ She leaned forward to look across the table at the girl squatting at the door. ‘Do you know anything about this?’
‘Ah, you see!’ Rorkar cried. ‘She asks the master and the slave, both now that’s his Lordship’s style! I think she wants to be a little like his Lordship. Well, everyone does. It’s a fine style too, as far as it goes at any rate, it makes a fine appearance. Though I still don’t trust him—however it looks! I’m not saying you should or you shouldn’t. He’s invited you for dinner. It’s up to you. What could be special about it, anyway?’
Pryn blinked. The old peasant could switch subjects as abruptly as he could ride one beyond bearing. ‘I really don’t know,’ Pryn said. ‘I just thought you might know something more about it than I did.’
‘Oh,’ Rorkar grunted. ‘Well, I don’t. And it’s getting dark.’ He drained his mug, set it down. ‘No more,’ he said to the squatting slave, who was not about to move toward refilling. ‘This isn’t one of those places like his Lordship’s, where cookfires and nightlamps battle with darkness halfway to sunrise. No, I’m an ordinary man who must toil like all ordinary men.’ He put his palms on his knees.
‘And I’d best get back to the dormitory before all the light’s gone.’ Pryn stood up from the table. She added, just to try switching the subject on her own: ‘I’d heard talk that his Lordship was some kind of magician.’ She stepped around the table’s corner. ‘But it was only chatter from some workers.’
‘A magician?’ Rorkar grunted again. ‘Oh, yes, the barbarians will chatter on about such things—and so will he, from time to time, with his “ways to assist the waning powers.” But I’ve never seen him do any magic. Not that one reserves belief only for what one can see—like some ordinary worker who won’t even believe there’s a town over the hill unless you carry him there in a cart. Still…I wouldn’t trust him.’
Pryn walked towards the door. ‘Well, good night.’
‘Good night,’ Rorkar said. ‘Yes, good night. It was good of you to come. Good night.’
The slave stood.
‘Yes,’ Rorkar said loudly. ‘I forgot. I didn’t mean anything by forgetting.’ He waved his small, knobby hand at the slave. ‘Show her to the door.’
Because the master’s answers had revealed so little, Pryn found herself staring at the back of the slave preceding her along the dark passage. But the slave had answere
d nothing either. In the dark, all the anxiety of Bruka’s outburst and the earl’s—yes—unmotivated invitation swelled. Walking behind this girl, this slave, this faceless sign of the human, this collared node of labor and instruction, Pryn felt a moment of disorientation which imagination answered with an image, not of the Liberator, but of Pryn herself wearing the iron collar. She was astonished to feel before that image a relief as intense as the previous anxiety, an intensity as strong as any desire, sexual or other, she’d ever known.
Outside, it was lighter than she’d expected.
Leaving the house to walk down the hill, she began a silent dialogue, mostly with Old Rorkar, about what an exasperating, embarrassing, and rude man he was; how all his prattle about lack of appearances and doing the ordinary thing had made her, an ordinary girl, as uncomfortable as it was possible to be—what must his nephew have felt! That she didn’t have to ask. She had an aunt, no different from him at all! That terrified pettiness was what she had left! That was what she had abandoned. A good man? Yes—even perhaps a Tratsin when he was twenty or twenty-five. But today, he was Rorkar. And that was not what she had come to the end of the world to find! Throughout this little mummer’s playlet she kept protesting: ‘Sitting there, at your table, you made me feel like a slave!’ Or: ‘Bound in the ordinary restraints of good manners, I might as well have been your slave!’ Sometimes playing through, at this point she would march over and take the collar off the squatting girl by the door and clap it around her own neck. Sometimes she would arrive for the encounter already wearing the shocking iron—that she would get a smith to forge for her from the growing collection of small coins under her straw pallet with which Rorkar was paying her. Well, she didn’t have quite enough just yet…During the ninth or thirteenth time through this skit which gave her such satisfaction—and which she’d all but resolved she would write down sometime tomorrow—it occurred to Pryn: She hadn’t felt all that much embarrassment or discomfort, at least not with the intensity that, in her little drama, she’d been declaring. But she had ridden a dragon; she was extraordinary. That was what freed her to protest—or to take on the collar. After all, she realized, she really wanted to wear it because the slave was the one person in the room whose feelings she had no notion of whatsoever (was she really ignorant? Or did she, like Bruka, know, perhaps, everything?), so that finally it had seemed that within the iron ring was a space of mystery, excitement, and adventure where only an extraordinary person might go without terror (perhaps a little fear, yes), like herself—or the Liberator. Who else would dare? Certainly not his Lordship—not somebody who had ridden a dragon under such tamed conditions it practically didn’t count.
Or did it?
She reached the workers’ barracks, with its slatted door, its vermin-infested roof beams. (Had these once been slave quarters?) She went to the women’s end of the dormitory and found her blanket on its fresh straw, between two barbarian women, one of whom slept with her eight-year-old son who had something wrong up his nose and snored wetly. Well, Old Rorkar had managed to give her one piece of information, however clumsily, that she was glad of. She shouldn’t trust the earl. She shifted the astrolabe on its chain from under her shoulder to a more comfortable position, felt the knife secreted with her sparse moneys beneath Madame Keyne’s washed and folded shift on which her head lay. But of course, she reflected, what was there to trust or not to trust him with, even if the astrolabe were the object of his interest? She envisioned herself removing the chain from her neck and tossing it to him—or presenting it graciously to him as a gift—in either case, the same sort of amusingly arrogant gesture as taking on the collar. And probably as unnecessary.
Pryn slept.
11. Of Family Gatherings, Grammatology, More Models, and More Mysteries
The birth of political power, which seems to be related to the last great technological revolution (cast iron), at the threshold of a period which would not experience profound shocks until the appearance of industry, also marks the moment when blood ties began to dissolve. From then on, the succession of generations leaves the sphere of pure cyclic nature and becomes oriented to events, to the succession of powers. Irreversible time is now the time of those who rule, and dynasties are its first measure. Writing is its weapon. In writing, language attains its full independent reality of mediating between consciousnesses. But this independence is identical to the general independence of separate power as the mediation which forms society. With writing there appears a consciousness which is no longer carried and transmitted directly among the living: an impersonal memory, the memory of the administration of society. ‘Writings are the thoughts of the State; archives are its memory,’ (Novalis).
GUY DEBORD,
Society of the Spectacle
AFTER THE NOON EATING break came an hour when the auxiliary cooling cave produced huge amounts of noise. The chains and pulleys, by which empty barrels were hauled down from the barrel pile, knocked against the stacked containers; the swinging barrels rasped and banged the hauling links.
There was not, however, much work done.
Pryn had discovered the shirkers on her third day at the brewery. She’d wandered around the half-opened wooden gate of the main cavern into the much smaller cave. This is what she’d seen:
One workman lowered a barrel by a chain and pulley, taking as long as ten minutes to do it, while another knocked it back and forth with a guide pole—to make more noise.
On the rocky floor, a dozen workers just…stood.
Then the more industrious ones, usually women, took down the long wooden paddles to skim the fluffy scum off the troughs over the chamber floor, knocking the mess into the barrel. The paddle handles clacking the barrel rim made more noise still—while another barrel got lowered from the barrel stack, and sometimes raised again, then lowered once more. The scum-filled barrel was finally rolled out through the main cooling cave and put with the barrels of scum skimmed from the main cave’s troughs. Set out in a clearing by an oak grove, they stood till local farmers, driving up, carted them off for fertilizer.
During the same hour, the main cooling cavern was a fury of after-lunch activity, with mule carts and paddle cleaners and troops of skimmers and barrel-stackers and barrel-rollers. But anyone passing the half-closed gate of the auxiliary cave heard such a racket knocking and banging within, that they’d surely think twice as much work was taking place inside as in the bustle out here.
It was all acoustics.
On Pryn’s fourth day, Yrnik had assigned her, among her accounting duties, to keep count on the comparative number of scum barrels that came out of the auxiliary cave and out of the main cave. Once stacked outside, the barrels’ origins were indistinguishable; and the farmers were always coming up to pick up a barrel or two of free fertilizer anyway, so that even markings would not have been truly efficient.
Pryn kept count.
Each day the main cave produced between forty and fifty barrels of yellow-green gunk.
The auxiliary cave, Pryn realized as she stood among the men and women along the cave wall, listening to barrels bang, could easily have filled twelve or thirteen, given the number of wide, wooden, first-fermentation settling troughs foaming over the floor.
That afternoon it produced three.
Pryn passed hours watching the whole infinitely delayed operation.
When she went off to the equipment store (the converted barracks that included Yrnik’s office), she stood for a long while before the wax-covered board Yrnik had hung on the wall for temporary notes. On a ledge under it was a seashell in which Yrnik kept the pointed sticks he’d carved for styluses. An oil lamp with a broad wick sat beside the shell. You used it to melt the wax when notes had to be erased over a large area. Pryn picked up a stylus and looked at the board’s translucent yellow.
Once she said out loud: ‘But I’m not a spy…!’
The main cave had put out forty-seven barrels of fertilizer that day.
Pryn took the stick and
gouged across a clear space: ‘Main cave, forty-one barrels—auxiliary cave, nine barrels.’
She looked at that a while, rereading it silently, mouthing the words, running them through her mind as she had run her dialogue on the way back to the dormitory last night: ‘Forty-seven?’ ‘Three?’ she said to herself in several tones of voice. ‘Who am I to commit myself to a truth so far from what is expected?’ Over the next few days she could push what she might write closer to what she’d seen. But that would do for now. ‘To write for others,’ she thought, ‘it seems one must be a spy—or a teller of tales.’ She put the stick back in its shell.
The wax was covered almost equally with her own and Yrnik’s markings. (In the bottom corner were some of Tetya’s practicing’s, in signs notably larger.) Bushels of barley, barrels of beer; names of fields, numbers of workers; names of workers, numbers of barrels; names of customers, numbers of orders; comments on qualities of rope, quantities of carrots, amounts of crockery for the cating hall, numbers of pruning hooks for the orchards. Notes Yrnik decided to keep more than a few days, Pryn would transcribe on clay tablets that it was also her job to flatten, carry out to dry, and bring in to stack against the barracks wall. Sometimes she remembered har’Jade, with new sympathy for a secretary’s job—for ‘Yrnik’s secretary/Tetya’s tutor’ was Pryn’s official, double title. When the wax on the board was melted with the lamp and pressed flat, now with the thumb, now with the hand’s heel, frequently it retained ghosts of old characters within its translucence. Still on the board were the half-legible memories of more than a year’s production. Surface and ghosts together waited for new inscriptions.
Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities Page 33
