Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities

by Samuel R. Delany

  Charles Hoequist, Jr, has entered into the spirit of Nevèrÿon scholarship so good-heartedly that his contribution must be grateful acknowledged.

  Teresa de Lauretis introduced me, among her many generosities, to Umberto Eco’s work in semiotics; his essay ‘On the Possibility of Generating an Aesthetic Message in an Edenic Language’ (in The Role of the Reader, Umberto Eco, Indiana University Press; Bloomington, 1979) was directly stimulating.

  Camilla Decarnin read, reread, and criticized the text in a detail for which any writer must be grateful.

  Loren MacGregor added some mechanical corrections to Decarnin’s list for which I am most thankful.

  Bernard Kay took time in his convalescence from a bout with lung cancer to make copious and useful marginal notes for which I thank him sincerely, and in light of which I have tried to make intelligent repairs.

  Robert S. Bravard, of the Stevenson Library at Lock Haven State College, most graciously sent me two pages of cogent comments, which have been the occasion for much thought and—hopefully—some meaningful changes.

  Marilyn Hacker read the manuscript and offered a number of useful suggestions. Once again, I am grateful.

  My copy editor, David Harris, besides the usual haggling over commas and restrictive and non-restrictive modifiers, offered a number of suggestions for fine tuning to the content. I thank him for them.

  Karen Haas, my Bantam editor, has been as supportive as an editor can be throughout the production of a long and often difficult book.

  And Grafton Books’ Nick Austin is simply and wholly the hero of the corrected edition.

  Thanks is also due to Frederic Reynolds, Pat Califia, Lavada June Roberts, Mischa Adams, Luise White, Sally Hassan, Gregory Renault, Catherine McClenahan, and, indeed, a number of others who escape memory this sitting, but all of whom, now and again, added a twist to the thread from which this text is woven.

  Anne McCaffrey shares an April 1st birthday with me. For years I have wanted to write something touching on dragons that could serve as a kind of joint birthday present to us both. Happy birthday, Annie.

  As the beautiful Hispanic pop song, ‘Eres tu’ borrows the opening notes of Mozart’s Zauberflöte, Act II, this text may be read, by some readers, as borrowing not only from those sources directly acknowledged but also from Albee, Bédier, Kafka, Balzac, or Baudrillard. If such readings initiate dialogue, so much the better; if they close dialogue off, so much the worse. With that in mind, I must add that any reader who normally skips footnotes may skip the headnotes with which the various chapters begin with—certainly—no greater loss. (‘While we sit discussing the word,’ quoted Christine Brooke-Rose at an MLA meeting some years back, ‘power works in silence…’) They only attempt to begin, by assertion, what Diderot attempted to begin by denial when he entitled a story Ceci n’est pas un conte, or what Magritte attempted when he entitled a picture of an upright brier Ceci n’est pas une pipe, or—indeed—what Guilden attempted when he made a colored poster in which scarlet letters proclaimed across a rose field (after having made one in jade and kelly portraying the same text) This is Not a Green Sign.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Return to Nevèrÿon series

  The Tale of Fog and Granite

  It can hardly be an accident that the debate proliferates around a crime story—a robbery and its undoing. Somewhere in each of these texts the economy of justice cannot be avoided. For in spite of the absence of mastery, there is no lack of effects of power.

  —BARBARA JOHNSON,

  The Critical Difference

  1

  LATER, THE BIG MAN slept—peacefully for a dozen breaths. Then, under the moon, a drop, three drops, twenty drops broke on his face. Inside the nostrils loud air snagged. Lashes shook. His head rocked on stone. Dragging a heel back, he raised a hand, first to rub at his cheek, then to drop at his chest. ‘Get away! One-eyed beast! Get away, you little…’ His hand rose again—to beat at something. But the fingers caught in chain.

  Curled with his back against the big man’s side, the little man—either because of the big one’s rocking or the neck chain’s rattle or the barkings out of sleep like shouts from a full-flooded cistern—rolled over and was on his knees.

  Green eyes beat open.

  The little man grabbed the great wrist, while heavy fingers, untangling from brass, caught the small shoulders.

  ‘Calm yourself, master!’ the little one whispered. ‘You are my breath, my light, my—’

  ‘I was dreaming, Noyeed—’

  ‘—my love, my lord, and my life!’

  ‘No, Noyeed! I was only dreaming—’

  ‘Of what, master? What dream?’

  ‘I was dreaming of…’

  The little man’s skull blocked the moon, leaving only the lunar halo by which farmers predict rain in three days—though one out of five such predictions brings only overcast.

  ‘I was dreaming of you, Noyeed!’

  ‘Me, master?’

  ‘But I was where you are, now, leaning above me. And you—a much younger you, a boy, Noyeed, with your blind eye and your dirty hair—you lay on the ground where I am, like this, terrified. And, with the others, I…’

  ‘Master?’

  ‘Noyeed—’ Holding the man, no taller than a boy, up against the night, Gorgik’s arms relaxed; the small face fell—‘either you know something I can never understand and you will not tell me. Or I know something that, for all my struggles toward freedom, I’m still terrified to say.’

  ‘Master…’ Noyeed turned his forehead against Gorgik’s chest.

  Gorgik’s fingers slid to the little man’s neck, touching iron. ‘Just a moment.’ He slipped his forefingers under the collar, centimeters too big for the one-eyed man against him. ‘You needn’t wear this any longer.’ He pulled open the hinge. ‘It’s time to give it back to me.’

  Noyeed grappled the heavy wrists. ‘No!’ Through thin skin and thick, bone felt bone.

  ‘What is it?’ Gorgik moved his chin in Noyeed’s hair. It smelled of dogs and wet leaves.

  ‘Don’t take it from me!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You told me you or I must wear it…?’

  ‘Yes. Here, yes.’ The night was cool, dry. ‘But by day only I need to, as a sign of the oppression throughout Nevèrÿon—’

  ‘Don’t!’

  Gorgik looked down, moving Noyeed to the side.

  The single eye blinked.

  A breeze crossed the moonlit roof, while a crisp leaf beat at the balustrade as if, after an immense delay, it would topple the stone onto someone below, who even now might be gazing up. ‘Don’t what?’

  The little man thought: He looks at me as if he were hearing all the others who have begged him for his collar.

  The big man thought: I could leap up, seize that leaf from the wind, and wrest it from its endless, minuscule damages.

  Noyeed said: ‘Don’t encumber yourself with such ornaments, master.’ (The leaf turned, blew back, then up and over the wall.) ‘Let me wear your collar! Let me be your lieutenant and the bearer of your standard! And this…?’ Noyeed reached across Gorgik’s chest to rattle the chain on which hung a verdigrised astrolabe. ‘You go to meet with Lord Krodar tomorrow at the High Court. Why wear something like this?’ He reached down to touch the knife at Gorgik’s side. ‘Or this. Go naked, master. Your bare body will serve much better than armor or ornament to speak of who you are.’

  ‘Why do you say—?’

  ‘Look, master!’ The little man rolled to his belly. ‘Look!’

  Turning to his side, Gorgik pushed up on an elbow.

  Part of the crenellation near their heads had fallen. Between broken stones, by craning, they could see down into the yard. Near an outbuilding armed and unarmed figures stood at a small, flapping fire.

  ‘Here we are on the roof of your headquarters. There are your supporters. After today’s victory you are only a shadow away from being the most powerful man in all Nevèrÿ
on.’

  ‘No, Noyeed.’ Gorgik chuckled. ‘No. My power is nothing in Kolhari, in Nevèrÿon. It was a precarious victory, and I would be the most unfortunate of rebels if I let such delusion take hold.’

  ‘But you may become the most powerful man in Nevèrÿon. And if you would, to further your cause, someone—perhaps me—must think it possible. Go naked, master. Let your fearlessness be your protection. In the meantime, let me carry your—no, let me be your sign!’

  ‘Noyeed, I don’t understand.’

  ‘Look, master.’ The little man elbowed forward, staring through the break. ‘Just look!’ He pointed, not at the milling men and women below but at the horizon’s hills black under moon-dusted dark. ‘Already you can see fog gathering in the mountain peaks outside the city. By dawn it will roll down over all Kolhari, where it will lie till sunlight burns it off. Naked, you will ascend into that fog, meet it, become one with it. Abandon the signs by which men and women know you, and you will become invisible—or at least as insubstantial to them as that mist. Your power—now small, but growing—will, at whatever degree, be marked at no limit. Without clear site, it will seem everywhere at once. That’s what such invisibility can gain you. That’s what you can win if you shrug off all signs. You will be able to move into, out of, and through the cities of empire like fog, without hindrance, while I—’

  ‘What nonsense, Noyeed!’ Gorgik laughed. Has your harried childhood and hunted youth wounded you to where you can only babble—’

  ‘Not babble, master! Listen! Unencumbered, you can be as the all-pervasive fog. And if you need now or again to be at a specific place and time, use me! Wearing your collar as the mark of your anger and authority, I can stand on the city’s stones wherever you would place me, leaving you free for greater movement, while I serve you, visible to all, your incorporated will. Oh, among slaves the collar will make me invisible to their masters as it has already made you. Among nobles, it will make me at least as much a reminder of injustice as you were. And among the good men and women who do their daily work it will transform me into the oddity and outrage intruding on them the reality of evils they would rather forget. Though, master—’ and Noyeed laughed—‘with my missing eye and skulking ways have I ever been anything else? You wear the collar because you were once a slave. Well, so was I. You require the collar to motivate the engines of desire. Well, as you have seen, for me it’s much the same. We are much alike, master. Why not let me stand in your place? Why not move me as you would move a piece in the game of power and time, sending me here and there, your servant and marked spy? Let me be your manifestation in the granite streets of the cities, leaving you free for all unencumbered missions. I will be your mark. You will be my meaning. I will be your sign. You will be my signification. You will be the freer, relieved of the mark I carry, to move more fully, further, faster.’

  ‘Noyeed, I’m afraid to—because I know what I know, and you are in ignorance of it. Or because you know what you know—and I am the deceived.’

  ‘Oh, master, I will always be your finger and your foot, your belt and your blade, your word and your wisdom, made real in the open avenue and the closed courtyard. Only I beg you, let me do it wearing your sign—’

  ‘I say no, Noyeed! I say nonsense!’

  ‘As you have seen how I love your body, master, your hand, your mouth, your ear, your eye, your knee, your foot, what I speak is a bandit’s, a wanderer’s, a one-eyed murderer’s long-thought wisdom—’

  ‘You babble! And yet…as I visit the court tomorrow, perhaps there’s something in what you say about the way I should go. Perhaps for just a little I might…’

  And still later, when the big man and the one-eyed man came from the dark mansion into the yard among the men and women at the fire, Noyeed still wore the collar, while Gorgik no longer wore either the chain with the astrolabe, nor any sword, nor clout, nor dagger—as if all had been discarded or given away during the descent through the empty building.

  2

  SOME YEARS LATER, AT the ear of his ox, ahead of his half-empty provisions cart, a young smuggler walked through the outer streets of Kolhari.

  A gibbous moon still shone.

  Call him stocky rather than thin. At some angles he looked even loutish: there’d been little enough in his life to refine him since he’d first run away from the farm for the city. At others, however, he was passably handsome, if you ignored the healed-over pockmarks from an acne that, though now long finished with, had been more severe than most and whose traces still roughened his forehead and marred his cheeks above the thinner hairs edging his beard. Peasant or prince could have had that face as easily, but the hard hands, the cracked feet, and the cloth bound low on a belly already showing its beer were trustable signs, in those days, he was not the latter.

  The cart wheels rumbled onto the road generally considered the division between Sallese, a neighborhood of wealthy merchants and successful importers, lucky businessmen and skillful entrepreneurs, and Neveryóna, a neighborhood of titled estates and hereditary nobles with settled connections—though lately the boundary had become blurred. Today there were any number of business families who’d dwelt in the same mansion for three generations, some of whom had even acquired a title or two by deft marriage of this youngest daughter to that eldest son; and more than one noble family had been forced by the times to involve itself in entrepreneurial speculation.

  The young smuggler squinted.

  Moonlight leached all green from the leaves, all brown from the trunks.

  Was it two hours till dawn?

  Something moved by an estate wall’s turning, way along the crossroad. Something pale, something slow, something huge as a dragon coiled the suburban avenue.

  Overspilling the hills above the city, fog had crawled down through wide streets and narrow alleys, till, across the whole town, it kissed the sea with an autumn kiss.

  The cart rolled; the smuggler looked left.

  Certainly the last time he’d come to Neveryóna by moonlight, he’d been able to see three times as many mansion roofs, even to the High Court of Eagles. Ordinarily such a moon would light the black peaks, which till an hour ago had held back the mist. But now both mansions and mountains were over-pearled, moondusted, veiled.

  The cart rolled; the smuggler looked right.

  More fog had moved in, as if, rippling in from the waterfront to the road’s end there, a phantom ocean collapsed toward him.

  He looked over his shoulder. The young smuggler had traveled many roads, you understand, and had often looked back at the way winding to the horizon, while he’d thought: Is it possible I’ve come so far? both fearful at, and proud with, his ignorance of the distance a moment before. Behind him, however, the pavement looked less like a road than like a yard—say one from the inner city with a neighborhood cistern sunk in it and closed round by haze. As fog cut away the distance ahead and behind, so it cut away pride and fear, or any other feeling of accomplishment in his journey. What was left him was dull, small, and isolate.

  His bare foot squashed damp leaves.

  He looked forward.

  Visible above the wall, its crenelations irregular in moon-mist, the mansion he neared now slowed his gait. Not his destination, it was, he knew, deserted—as were several walled estates near here. But there was a story to this one, and he angled away to see better where tiles had fallen from the façade, and terra-cotta castings had dropped from the cornice to crash—how many years before?—onto the lawns, behind silent stone.

  The mansion had once been a lesser town house of a southern baron, Lord Aldamir, who, as his power had eroded in the south, had leased this home in the north to a series of minor nobles. They had not treated it well, had finally abandoned it. Then the political upstart, Gorgik the Liberator, had rented the building as headquarters for his campaign to abolish slavery throughout Nevèrÿon. The Liberator’s armed men had patrolled its roof and stood guard at its deep-set gate. Horses had cantered to the studded entranc
e, their riders bawling messages for the leader within.

  The Liberator was a giant of a man, so people said, and had once been a slave himself in the empress’s obsidian mines at the foot of the Faltha Mountains. Gaining his freedom, he’d continued to wear his slave collar, declaring it would stay round his neck till, whether by armed force or political mandate, slavery itself was obliterated from the land.

  Later, people noted that it was not the radicalness of his program that had so upset the country, for, in truth, slavery as an economic reality had been falling away from Nevèrÿon ever since the Dragon had been expelled from the High Court twenty-five years before, when the Eagle—or her manifestation in the Child Empress Ynelgo—had commenced her just and generous reign. Rather it was the radicalness of his appearance that had bothered the nobles, merchants, and their conservative employees—not the Liberator’s practice so much as his potential; for appearances are signs of possibilities, at least when one remembers that what appears may be a sign by masking as easily as by manifesting.

  Several armed and surprise attacks on the Liberator had been financed from various sources. Gorgik had repelled them. But once a rabble of unemployed and impoverished workers, supplemented by soldiers from the private guard of nobles close to the court (despite their aid, the contributors had managed to remain as nameless as the gods), gathered on a misty night in the month of the Weasel, when the fog lapped late over the mountains and rolled down through the moonlight to obscure the city’s corners and crevices.

  They’d stormed the Liberator’s house.

  Here, however, the story crumbled into conflicting versions. Some said that, on hearing the approaching horde, the Liberator had fled with his supporters to the hills around Kolhari and up into the Falthas. Others said, no, that was impossible. The gang had been too stealthy, too quick. It was far more likely that, in the fog, they had simply raided the wrong mansion and the Liberator, hearing of it a mansion or two away, had had time to escape. Still others claimed they’d got the proper house all right—the very building that rose behind the wall before the smuggler now—but the information that this was the Liberator’s headquarters had been, itself, misdirection. The home here had never belonged to the Liberator at all; the true headquarters were a close and careful secret.