Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities

by Samuel R. Delany

  Pryn stepped after him. Beyond the columns, the glimmering lines had spread more than halfway across the inlet.

  ‘Here, a stylus; here the waxed board—the same one I brought down, five years ago, to show Yrnik so that he could make one on the office wall at the brewery. Do you recognize the marks that have been pressed so carefully into the surface? They are from the stylus, but they mimic the impressions from the tokens we just saw on the clay jar. With a sharp stick one can do a passable imitation—as well as mark the Ulvayn syllabics that allow one to sculpt, to portray, to represent actual words. But one has still not evaded the endlessly deferred question of origin and copy that inheres in all sculptural representations. I see, however, that your gaze has already moved on to the parchment against the wall here; yes, it contains the same class of markings that your astrolabe bears around its edge and that so many of our local monuments carry here and there, like signatures, at their base. Would it surprise you to know that they are an early invention of that Belham who, you tell us, spent some of his later days in your aunt’s cabin in the north? This marking system, which, so the tale goes, he devised when he was no older than you, is the first invention that brought him to our attention—that is, to the attention of the rich and powerful who saw, in Belham’s explanation of the system’s potential, the control of a certain nuance to power that we coveted. Let me translate the basic signs and their meaning for you. This sign here, for example, stands for the number “one.” This sign stands for the number “two.” The sign following them stands for the number “four.” To create the missing number, three, between them, you merely put the sign for “one” and the sign for “two” together. The next sign, here, is “eight.” By devious combinations of the signs that come before it you can again supply all the missing numbers—five, six, and seven—between it and its predecessor. The next sign is “sixteen,” and the next, “thirty-two.” But let me continue on—’ the earl pointed to sign after sign—‘“sixty-four,” “one hundred twenty-eight,” “two hundred fifty-six,” “five hundred twelve”…’

  Pryn was about to mention that she recognized the sequence. Was it a part of some ancient tale? She started to say, like a memory, I see how fast it goes up…! But at that moment a play of light caught her eye and she looked out between the stone columns again. The sun, lowering still further, had expanded the pattern of glimmerings, which now ran here and there, crossing and recrossing almost the entire inlet. As well, there were squares of gold in which were darker circles, the pattern having extended now across most of the water. Suddenly Pryn caught her breath.

  ‘…“one thousand twenty-four,” “two thousand forty-eight,” “four thousand ninety-six”…’

  What Pryn saw was a city.

  12. Of Models, Monsters, Night, and the Numinous

  The city: grime, glamor, geometries of glass, steel, and concrete. Intractable, it rises from nature, like proud Babel, only to lie arthwart our will, astride our being. Or so it often seems. Yet immanent in that gritty structure is another: invisible, imaginary, made of dreams and desire, agent of all our transformations. It is that other city I want here to invoke…Immaterial, that city in-formed history from the start, molding human space and time ever since time and space molded them selves to the wagging tongue.

  IHAB HASSAN,

  Cities of Mind, Urban Words

  PRYN BLINKED.

  More accurately, what she saw was a map of a city, a map on which one might measure, in rippling gold, gray, and silver, distance and direction. There ran one golden avenue; there another crossed it. There lay a glimmering yard, in the midst of which was a dark circle, the cistern at its center, where, no doubt, long-vanished children had run up to bounce their balls against salt-stained stones. There was the dark rectangle of a large building. That stretch, there, might have been a market square. Several smaller rectangles abutted it, suggesting an irregularly set line of smaller houses. Around and between them all ran glittering alleys, some broad and gently curving, some narrow and straight, some thin and tangled. On one island, green brush continued the line of some bright walkway till, on the differentiated waters, gold ripples took it up again. On another, half covered with shrubs, now Pryn saw two mostly fallen, but real, stone walls that joined: the remains of a building corner among a group of buildings, the rest of which were only scribed by angular darknesses in the glimmering ripples around.

  She started to speak.

  Then Pryn saw something else.

  ‘…“eight thousand one hundred ninety-two,”’ the earl’s voice droned on.

  On the column nearest Lavik, clamped in iron top and bottom to the stone, was a sword. Indeed, on each of the dozen columns that rose to the chamber’s roof swords were clamped. The one on the column directly before Pryn, however, like a double bar across the vision, had two blades rising from its hilt. They were joined for the first three inches but after that were separate, like a blade and its afterimage an inch to the side, or a blade and its strangely diffracted shadow—though which was which (because both were real metal) was impossible to tell. Pryn looked at the next column. The blade there was single. There was also a single blade on the next. But on the next—and, indeed, on the one after that—there were double blades. On the next, indeed on the rest, were single blades.

  But three of the swords displayed on the chamber’s dozen columns were clearly twinned weapons.

  Beyond them, the sun touched a hill. One side of the golden city, a spot of blackness formed, a simple shadow intensified by the surrounding glimmer. It spread the water, lightening as it moved. In the shifting angle of the sun, avenues, alleys, big and little buildings lost definition.

  A breeze—and half the city was wiped away by copper fire!

  Pryn blinked at the ripples, trying to recall their previous form. The earl’s voice continued: ‘…“two hundred sixty-two thousand one hundred forty-four”…’

  The city disappeared…

  More accurately, the evening’s darknesses and glitterings spread their more flamboyant, less distinctive illumination over it toward the sea.

  ‘…“one million forty-eight thousand five hundred seventy-six,”’ the earl intoned. ‘Tell me.’ He turned from the parchment to regard Pryn. ‘Do you notice anything about these signs?’

  Pryn had been both dazzled and confused by the pattern the sun had struck so briefly on the water. The swords, however, were clear and real.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the earl said. ‘But I asked you: Do you notice anything about these signs?’

  With silence ringing over everything she saw, Pryn looked at the parchment. What was that city? was the question in her mind. She said: ‘Well, I…the numbers get very big. But the signs for each of them are…all very small, a single mark for each.’

  ‘Yes!’ the earl’s smile threatened to tear loose from his face and go careening about the chamber. ‘You have noted the profound economy Belham was able to impose on these huge, unwieldy concepts. And in the same manner that one can represent the numbers missing between “four” and “eight” by a unique combination of the signs up to and including “four,” so one can supply the numbers between any sign and any other by a similar and unique recombination.’

  Pryn was still wondering at the warning swords clamped to the columns.

  ‘But an even greater economy suggested itself to Belham,’ the earl went on. ‘He found he could master fractional numbers as well by the use of pairs of numbers from his new system. A “half” was simply one divided into two equal parts—represented by the sign for “one” with the sign for “two” below it. One-and-a-third was four divided into three equal parts: the sign for “four” subscribed by the sign for “three.”’ As the earl spoke, his finger moved to other configurations of marks on the Parchment that, as Pryn looked at them, more and more clearly were the same as she had seen on the dragon’s pedestal or that rimmed the disk she wore at her neck. ‘Three-and-a-seventh, for example, was twenty-two divided into seven equal parts:
“twenty-two” above “seven.” The young Belham felt he had mastered the entire range of number, from the greatest to the smallest, covering all fractional gradations. With his economical system of signs, he thought, he could express any number, whole or partial, any man or woman might conceive. Now as I said, Belham invented this system when he was not much more than a boy; by the time he could rightly be called a man, he was easily the most famous man in all Nevèrÿon—certainly the most famous from our part of it. So you see, that “writing,” which you have seen here, on our local monuments, represents number, or what can be expressed by number: dates of origin, specific moments of the day or year, costs, measurements, angles of degree—words that mean something in our old language, but little in yours, mainly because Belham happened to be…a barbarian. They are like your commercial script without the pollution of greed and profit that motivate commerce—not that greed and profit are absent from such writing. They are merely elided between its signs, as my little divagation on the nature of all writing should suggest. So.’ The earl’s hands went back beneath his cloak. ‘Now you know the secret of our local writing that graces our monuments—and the rim of your astrolabe.’ He smiled. ‘Is there anything else you want to ask? Tell me what you think of it all.’

  Pryn pressed her lips together. She wanted to speak as carefully as she might write with only a limited area of waxed board on which to create her thought. ‘I was thinking of—I was remembering a morning, not so long ago, when I stood on a hill, in the morning, just north of Kolhari, looking down through the dawn fog at the city. If I’d never stood there, if I’d never thought the thoughts I thought then, I doubt—I don’t think I would ever have seen what I…what I just saw. Yes, there’s something I very much want to ask.’ Pryn looked again out between the sword-bearing columns at the inlet. The sky’s blue had visibly deepened over half its vault. ‘What city was that out in the water?’

  From his seat on the end of the railing, Jenta laughed. ‘What city? There’s no city there.’

  ‘I don’t mean,’ said Pryn, ‘there’s a city there now. There was a city. Once. Its foundations, its empty cisterns, the broken paving of its streets and the overturned flags of its alleys are under the water now. I want to know: What was the city that used to be there?’

  ‘But there’s only water there.’ Lavik turned at her end of the rail. ‘Perhaps there’s a paving stone or two on some of the sand bars. Yes, there are some old foundations along the edge of the inlet, where the children go out looking for old trinkets. But a few ruined huts and stones aren’t a city!’

  Pryn said: ‘I’ve stood on the hill north of Kolhari at dawn and gazed down through the fog and seen the city, erased and faded till it is only a shape, a plan, a dream. I know a city when I see one! There is—there was a city there!’

  ‘Well’ Lavik retorted sharply, ‘when I went to court at Kolhari, I was never let out of the wagon when we stopped on the dawn-fogged hills above it. So I’ve never seen your city! There’s no city there!’

  ‘Do you think she’s a spy from the north?’ Jenta leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. His smile took on a mocking play. ‘You wouldn’t believe the number of spies they do send down here, to ferret out with great stealth what any field girl or dye-house boy would tell them if they only asked.’

  ‘I’m not a spy!’ Pryn turned abruptly. ‘I’m not! I told the roughnecks on the road, I told the Liberator, and I told the Wild Ini! And I tell you!’ Looking down at herself, she picked up the astrolabe. ‘I didn’t even know this was Olin’s “circle of different stars” until that slave, Bruka, told me. I only wore it because Gorgik gave it to me when I snuck into Neveryòna—’

  Jenta’s elbows left his knees and the smile vanished. Lavik got up from the rail, to stand beside it. The earl’s expression underwent some baffling transformation that, Pryn realized, was simply that its animation—a part of the luminous smile—had stilled. ‘Bruka told you…?’ Silence spilled down like the hill fog spilling across the burning bay.

  ‘Come here,’ Lavik said, suddenly, nervously. ‘Yes, over here. Look there—no, not there. Over there. At the hills to our left. Do you see that low stone building, in the mist, now, with the four, stubby stone towers at its corners? That’s the Vygernangx Monastery, once the home of the most powerful priests in Nevèrÿon, when the conflict between the north and south was an open military dispute. For years the north sent spies here—and still sends them!—to learn if there is any power left at the Vygernangx. Let me tell you! Ten years ago there were perhaps ten doddering feyers within its crumbling walls. Today, there are none! The last left or died or simply moved on to another location where priests are more respected. The monastery is deserted. Any local youngster will take you to explore for yourself, let you wander the leaf-strewn chapels where you can kick aside fallen birds’ nests, scare up snakes and beetles from the rubbish on its stone floors. But power, there, is absent. And now you know what the lords of the High Court at Kolhari are still plotting and planning and scheming to learn. There is nothing there—as any barbarian boy who climbs through its ruined windows of an autumn evening can tell you.’

  ‘Here,’ Jenta said from the other end of the rail. ‘Come here. Look out…there.’

  Confused, Pryn moved from Lavik.

  With one foot on the floor now, Jenta leaned a furred hip against the stone rail. ‘No, not down at the inlet—to the right. You can just glimpse the castle, through the trees, sitting on the plain. It’s like a smaller version of the High Court of Eagles itself, isn’t it? It’s the castle of the Dragon Lord Aldamir. If there have been no priests in the Vygernangx for ten years, there has been no lord in the Dragon Castle for twenty. Yet yearly the High Court at Kolhari sends down its spies to check on the extent of the deception by which the power of the lord is maintained. There is no Lord Aldamir! For all the power he ever wielded, there might as well never have been one. There is only an empty castle, where groups of barbarian girls go to lose one another in the roofless halls, leap out at one another from behind crumbling corners and shout “Boo!”, then fall to giggling. At the castle of the Dragon Lord, power also is absent. And now you know what the High Court throws away handful after handful of gold to learn and relearn and learn again—a fact that any tavern maid grown up in these parts could tell them!’

  The sound was sharp, astonishing, unsettling, a single syllable of laughter, for which Pryn realized there was no written sign. She looked at the earl, who’d uttered it. Such a laugh was clearly the extension of that distressing smile. ‘We are, I’m afraid, all of us, very nervously proceeding in a way that tries to allow the possibility that you are, indeed, a spy, while we take you at your word that, indeed, you are not. Let me confess it: such duplicity even informed my initial invitation.

  ‘It did?’ Pryn asked, ‘Oh, it did…I mean, you did invite me here because you saw the astrolabe?’ She let it drop back against the cloth.

  ‘A simple “yes” or a simple “no” would insult my motivations and your intelligence. You have asked a question. Let me—simply—answer it. Out there where the waters lie between the hills was once a great city, the greatest in all Nevèrÿon. Its name was Neveryóna.’

  Pryn frowned. ‘But Neveryóna isn’t a city. It’s a neighborhood, where the noblemen used to live on the edge of Kolhari—’

  ‘And where do you think those noblemen came from when they moved north to the new and thriving village that, even in those days, as it claimed itself capital and High Court, was about to become a city? Oh, the actual streets and avenues of Neveryóna sank below the waters well before the nobles took their wagons out on the once fine highroads that had served it, to leave for the north. But they took with them the memory of a city that had once named the nation. No doubt you know that when they took power at the High Court they even tried to rename Kolhari herself. But place names are tenacious; and they could not affix their displaced dream to that northern town any more than Babàra could affix his to the fields and fore
sts of the Garth.’

  At the railing, Lavik laughed. ‘Oh—you meant the city that once was there. I mean…that isn’t there now. That’s Neveryóna!’

  ‘You meant Neveryóna?’ Jenta cried. ‘But it’s only a memory of a city—you said “ruin,” and it’s not even a ruin, most of it. It’s just a pattern in the water that shows up under the proper light. If I’d known that’s what you’d meant—’ He laughed—‘I would have told you!’

  Looking between them, Pryn again saw the swords clamped to their columns. Swords of heroes, she wondered, men and women come on some task they had failed…? Were they true warnings or was her reading only tale-teller’s stuff? ‘The circle of different stars,’ she said, ‘the sunken city—it was a story I heard, made up by a taleteller from the islands. She told it to me even before I left from my—’