Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities

by Samuel R. Delany

  Pryn glanced at Tritty.

  Lavik did not. ‘The court, you know, is huge. It’s more like a small city-within-a-city than it is a single castle—’

  ‘And we didn’t compare court to things,’ Tritty said, ‘when I was a girl. That, I suppose, is what distresses me most. There were formal ways to speak about things in my day, and believe me, you could say anything you wanted within those formal protocols. But you didn’t say court was like anything. Court was court, origin and end, of all benevolence and all power; and the reign of the Emperor—I was at court before Her present majesty, the Child Empress, you see—was always fine and felicitous. Lord knows, people will say anything of this reign now!’

  ‘My dear’ the earl said, ‘If you don’t want Lavik to tell her story, we can always talk about something else—’

  ‘Oh, no! No!’ Tritty said. ‘I want her to tell it!’

  ‘Please don’t worry,’ Pryn said, wondering whether it was the stepdaughter’s tale or the husband’s rebuke that brought the distress to Tritty’s mahogany features. ‘I’ll laugh and smile at the right places—but I won’t judge any of what Lavik says until I go to court myself—which is not likely to happen for a long time!’ It didn’t seem to relieve Tritty. Watching her and wondering if they’d caught her oblique confession that, indeed, she hadn’t been to court, Pryn lost the beginning of Lavik’s next sentence.

  ‘…hundreds of people living there! You could take ten of this house here, pile them together, and you still wouldn’t fill a third of it. There must be twenty-five kitchens. They feed the various suites—so of course when you go, you must go under the patronage of someone already permanently connected, who has a kitchen and staff. Well, Father had arranged for me to go under the patronage of his cousin, the Lesser Lady Esulla—so there I was, all of seventeen, creaking and joggling up the north road to Kolhari, alongside a wagon full of clothes and furniture and…well, once upon a time you had to bring your own servants, but that never worked very well. Now they ask you to bring only one attendant and a driver, for general dressing and carrying. Lady Esulla was very sweet, but she was also very forgetful. And she had six young women and three young men under her patronage that season. Over the first few days, we were presented at various private lunches and suppers, where we reclined on cushions and drank cider—no beer at the High Court of Eagles!—and met all sorts of fascinating people, heard all sorts of fascinating talk. Indeed, I suppose if I’d been listening harder, I might have avoided what happened. But the fourth night, after we’d made just dozens of informal acquaintances, we were presented at a marvelous supper-ball. The Empress sent Lord Krodar himself to make a welcoming statement. We danced, we ate, we met dozens more lords and ladies, some who’d been there a while, and others, like ourselves, who’d just arrived. I’ve no idea what time I got to bed! But the next morning I woke up in my very small, very stony room—the furniture hadn’t been brought up yet, because there were no porters in the lesser lady’s retinue who were free to carry it in through the stades and stades of corridors and up all those narrow little stairs…’ Lavik looked about with wide eyes. ‘Anyway. When I woke up, there wasn’t a sound! Everything was silent! Nothing moved…Now if you’ve ever lived in a castle with a complement of over a hundred, you know how unusual that is! By four o’clock in the morning there’re always servants about in the halls to get things ready so that you may rise comfortably by five. And because I had been up so late, I knew it was at least six-thirty. Finally, I wrapped a day-robe about me and went out into the corridor—no one! I went to the rooms of the other young women recently come under patronage. Their beds were made, their clothes were hung up, and their rooms—empty! The lesser lady’s own rooms were locked. So was the kitchen! You might imagine, I was terrified! Over the course of the day, as I wandered up and down the hall, a thousand dreadful thoughts came to me: there’d been some political coup during the night and everyone had been taken out and executed, while I had been accidentally overlooked; or some sorcerer had put the whole castle under a spell, but thanks to one of Dad’s counterspells I’d been spared—’

  ‘Now, Lavik—’

  ‘That’s what I thought!’ said wide-eyed Lavik. ‘I went through the whole day with nothing to eat, and when it got dark, I went back to my room and lay down—and woke up the next day, still alone. No food—for another whole day. Do you know, I spent six days in that empty wing without eating, or talking to a soul!’

  ‘Why didn’t you just leave?’ Pryn asked, quite wide-eyed now herself. ‘Six days! You could have starved to death!’

  ‘Well,’ Lavik said, ‘you don’t know how big that castle is! I mean, you don’t go “in” and “out” of it just like that—at least not when you’ve been there less than a week! At any one time, half of it’s deserted anyway; there was a whole hive of unlighted and unoccupied rooms between the Lady Esualla’s suite and the next inhabited chambers. I was afraid that once I plunged into those without a guide, I would be lost forever! As far as starving to death, I suppose I wasn’t really afraid of that. Dad goes on fifteen-day fasts periodically, and I had made up my mind not to get upset over that part until at least the tenth day. Still it was terribly bizarre—there I was, with a family name as old as a god’s…really, our family name is a good deal older than the nameless craft-gods they pray to in the north today! I might as well have been a slave from thirty years ago walled up in one of Old Rorkar’s abandoned brewing caves for a week of solitary confinement!’

  ‘How did you get out?’ Pryn asked.

  ‘They came back.’ Lavik laughed. ‘Apparently the lesser lady had decided to take the entire suite with her on a mission to consult about taxes in the west. She thought it would be very educational for the new youngsters to see just how such debates are carried on. Only somehow, nobody had mentioned it to me—or somebody had and I hadn’t heard. When I didn’t join them at five in the morning, it was just assumed I had been spirited off by some other lord or lady for the duration.’ Lavik laughed again. ‘But really, that—to me—is life at court: three months of hopelessly complicated intrigues in which, at any moment, you may be toasted at an imperial ball one moment, then turn around and starve for a week! This is the part that mother hates, but it’s true! There isn’t an aristocrat in the land over fifty who hasn’t been clapped into prison for six weeks or six years at one time or another in their lives! Considering what’s happened to some people I know with names a lot less notable than ours, I feel I got off rather light!’

  ‘Now that’s what I mean,’ Tritty said. ‘I was in prison once, yes. But I was released after less than a year, with full apologies and reparations. They said it was all a mistake—’

  ‘The Lesser Lady Esulla said it was a mistake what happened to me, too!’

  ‘—but when I was at court,’ Tritty said, raising her chin a bit, ‘please believe it, dear, nothing like that happened to me! Your problem, Lavik, is that you haven’t been in prison. The two aren’t comparable.’

  ‘But Mother, you’ve even said court has gone downhill since you were there.’

  ‘I certainly have.’

  Inige said: ‘We all know you’re not anxious for Ardra to go.’

  ‘I’m not. But that’s because I don’t think Ardra’s ready. It’s the same reason your father doesn’t want him to take a local job. Certainly when I was at court, there were lots of young hot-heads with no business there. But that’s not what your father and I want for Ardra.’

  ‘To go to court,’ Ardra said, still sitting, ‘would be the fastest way to get an officer’s commission. Anyone can get a commission at court.’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ Lavik said.

  ‘That’s because you’re a girl’ Ardra put his hands between his knees and looked up. ‘I mean anyone who wanted one.’ But he frowned.

  ‘You know,’ Lavik said, ‘I don’t think what happened to me could have happened to a boy.’

  ‘Now this—’ Inige smiled at Pryn—‘is not a traditional p
art of the story. The rest we’ve all heard a hundred times before. But that’s the problem with serious discussions.’ He folded his arms and looked at his sister. ‘All right, Lavik. Why couldn’t it have happened to a man?’

  ‘I said boy. And you know the answer as well as I do—you were at court three years before I was and told me all about it!’

  ‘Oh, Lavik…’ Apparently it had been said to Tritty.

  ‘It wouldn’t happen to a boy because the dozen-odd old men who finally rule everything at court are all as mad about talented, sensitive, lonely boys as Old Rorkar, down at the brewery, is—with the exception of Lord Krodar, who was once as mad about the Child Empress apparently…or so I gather from twenty-year-old gossip.’

  ‘Dear me.’ Inige smiled at Pryn again. ‘I think this is where it becomes dull for anyone who hasn’t been to court herself—or himself.’

  ‘Really,’ Lavik said. ‘You know, you achieve a kind of inner sensitivity when you become a mother—even of a dying, or an almost dying, daughter.’ She grinned at Pryn. ‘Are you bored with this discussion?’

  ‘Well,’ Pryn said, ‘I’m learning things from it, but not about court.’

  ‘What do you think of Old Rorkar?’ Tritty stepped in front of Pryn, shielding her from the rest and shifting the subject with a directness Pryn found awesome. ‘To me, I admit, he’s always seemed an unhappy man. His Lordship and I, we have an annual harvest party for all the local businessmen in the area. I’ve stood in this very room with him, right where we’re standing now—for five autumns in a row—and felt myself overwhelmed with the dissatisfaction from that man! And yet I must say, I think he’s the most complete man I’ve met in this area. But perhaps to be complete, here, means to be dissatisfied. Perhaps it’s a necessity. For example, I think Lavik is the most complete of all my children—though I don’t think I could put my finger exactly on why.’

  ‘That—’ Lavik stepped up to put her arm in its rough sleeve around her stepmother’s thin, gleaming red shoulder—‘is because Tritty really wants people to feel good, and she’ll say anything to make that happen. It’s a sign of real caring; and I think it’s just marvelous!’

  ‘I’m not a hypocrite,’ Tritty said. ‘But I do care how people feel.’

  Lavik smiled with faint amusement, nodding. ‘I know it.’ She gave her stepmother’s shoulder a squeeze.

  Pryn had, indeed, located the spot of true boredom for all discussions and digressions about court and such places and peoples of which she knew nothing and was halfway through a strategy that would result, ten or fifteen seconds from now, in her saying something about it, when there were loud footsteps in the corridor and a resounding:

  ‘Hello…!’

  They turned.

  Striding in through another arch came a bearded man with furs over his shoulders and a scarred and ragged leather kilt. Certainly he was of the earl’s family. He seemed, if anything, a bigger, rougher Inige. His beard and hair were rumpled enough to make Pryn realize how carefully the slim Inige’s had been cut. He came up and gave Tritty a great squeeze and a kiss, loped off to his father, threw his arms around the earl, and gave him an equally bearlike hug. The gentleman grinned. ‘Hello, Jenta—Jenta, this is our guest for the evening, Pryn.’

  Passing the steps, Jenta reached down to rough his stepbrother’s hair. Ardra answered with a complaining grunt. One of Jenta’s hands went to his brother Inige’s shoulder and fell away, while another fell on his sister Lavik’s.

  ‘This is his Lordship’s oldest son,’ Tritty said. ‘Jenta.’

  An affable smile and slightly wrinkled eyes gleamed above the black beard; yes, it was the earl’s smile—and Tritty’s; but it sat firmly among those rough, young features, while on the faces of the older couple it floated with unsettling freedom. Both Jenta’s hands came together to clasp one of Pryn’s. They were as rough and hard as, if cleaner than, the hands of the benchmaker at Enoch, or the young, pock-marked smuggler, or even Yrnik. His large gestures and great grin seemed too big for the big room—though it struck Pryn that he was really no taller than his father or brother. Indeed, the seated Ardra was probably the tallest person there by a head.

  Tritty said: ‘Why didn’t you bring Feyatt with you? You know we were all looking forward to seeing her!’

  ‘Oh, you know Feyatt—she’s scared of Father. She thinks he’ll turn her into a fieldmouse!’

  ‘Feyatt looks like a fieldmouse already,’ Ardra said from the steps. ‘At least I think she does.’

  ‘You must tell her we want to see her! We really do!’ Turning, Tritty laid a hand on Pryn’s shoulder. ‘Jenta and his young woman, you see, live very simply. It’s their own decision. They’ve moved to a little farm, where they’ve built everything themselves! It’s very simple, very impressive. His Lordship and I have visited them. They eat only the food they can grow with their own hands in their own garden; they wear only the clothes they can make from animals they catch themselves or from cloth they weave on their own loom—Jenta, here, is quite a weaver! Really, to visit them—I mean to live with them for a time and assume their ways, it’s practically a religious experience.’ Tritty looked at the earl. ‘You said that, dear.’

  Pulling his cloak around him, the earl stepped up. ‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘I did say it.’

  Did he gaze at the astrolabe?

  ‘But here we are,’ Tritty said, ‘showering our guest with our entire lives, when we should be asking about hers.’ (Actually Tritty said ‘ours’ by mistake; the intention was clear, however, and no one else seemed to notice; finally it was too small an accident to record without giving it undue attention—which made Pryn feel unduly uncomfortable for the next three minutes.)

  ‘But I don’t know what to tell you,’ Pryn said. ‘You all seem to have done everything I have, and done it better.’ (They smiled—all except Ardra; it suggested they agreed.) ‘I mean…I know all about myself already anyway. What I want to do is ask you questions. I mean—’ She turned to furry-shouldered Jenta—‘your mother says you’re a good weaver. And I wondered if you used the spinning stone my aunt invented…oh, thirty years before I was born—because that makes thread-making go so much faster. And the cloth you’re wearing—’ She turned to Tritty—‘doesn’t look as if it could have been woven!’

  The earl laughed. ‘Weaving, you know, is one of those practices that’s invented and forgotten and invented again. When I was your age and everything around here was still fiber or furs or tooled leather, we knew a man who talked about the possibility of the loom—said, even then, it was an idea that had been floating around in his head for years. He simply hadn’t run into anyone, back then, interested enough to develop the notion and work until the bugs were out of it. He had too many other things he wanted to pursue himself, he said. Perhaps you’ve heard of him: a genius just from south of here, named Belham. Marvelous man; spewed out brilliant gadgets right, left, and center.’

  ‘…no one found a place to sit

  ‘and Belham’s key no longer fit…’ Inige recited. ‘You must have heard the children’s playing rhyme.’

  ‘He invented the fountain,’ Lavik said.

  ‘And the corridor,’ Tritty added. ‘And the coin-press, I believe.’

  ‘Yes,’ Pryn said. ‘He was a friend of my great-aunt.’

  There was a moment’s silence.

  ‘Your aunt knew Belham?’ Inige asked, with a kind of welcoming warmth that made her suddenly find him much less brittle.

  ‘She said he was a southern…man—’ she almost said barbarian, but somehow it didn’t seem appropriate—‘who drank too much and was half crazy, by the time she knew him, anyway. But he was supposed to be very smart and have invented lots of things. Like the loom—my aunt helped him with it. And it was her idea to spin the fibers into thread before weaving them.’

  ‘Now I would have thought the idea of spinning thread came before weaving,’ Tritty said. ‘But then, what would be the reason for making any thread at all until
one had some cloth already woven, at least to repair, if not to weave afresh.’

  ‘Feyatt twists thread for me,’ Jenta admitted. ‘But I couldn’t tell you what peasant woman first told us we had to if we wanted the weaving to be strong and hold well.’

  ‘Well, she must have spoken to someone who had spoken to someone who had spoken to someone who knew my aunt.’ Pryn felt the reckless freedom of assertion. Presenting such facts to strangers who would not contest them, rather than avoiding mention of them in a neighborhood that had snickered over them and distrusted them and doubted them since before Pryn had been born, was elating. ‘My great-aunt said Belham was a brilliant man—he lived in our shack while he was in Ellamon, the same one I live in at home. He must have thought a great deal of my aunt, too. She said they talked and talked and talked about everything—about all the places he’d been, the things he’d done. He told her she was one of the few people he’d ever met who really took the time to understand him.’ At first Pryn read the silence as appreciative; but as it extended, she felt anxiety revoice it. ‘And I wanted to ask you—’ she said suddenly to overwrite the anxiety—‘if you knew anything about this.’ She picked up the astrolabe from her chest. ‘I thought perhaps these markings were a kind of writing that maybe you knew how to read.’ The ghost of anxiety remained within the silence’s translucence.

  From the steps, Ardra laughed.

  ‘Now that—’ The clean-limbed Inige glanced at his father—‘is an interesting question.’

  ‘I think what we all want to know,’ the earl said, shrugging under brilliant blue, ‘is whether you can read it.’

  ‘Why do we all want to know that?’ Ardra asked from his seat on the steps. ‘I don’t.’

  Momentarily Pryn considered lying. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Then I’m afraid there isn’t a simple answer to your question,’ the earl said. ‘It isn’t quite writing in the sense of the commercial script you have mastered. Indeed, in the same way that weaving has been invented many times and in several ways, so that it can weave both canvases and silks, so has writing.’