Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

  Bayle stepped around barrels and over coiled rope. The slender woman with the short red hair, strangely costumed (from her brass-linked belt, to her open-work boots; and pants. Of soft leather—Bayle had never seen anyone in pants before), rubbed her bare breast absently with a rough hand. (She was probably a little secretary somewhere: secretarying in those days meant mostly the whitening of reed and animal parchments with pumice, the melting of hot wax for wax pads, the sharpening of styluses and the mashing and boiling of berries for juice and the crushing of stones for pigments—it was hard on the hands.) ‘Those boxes,’ she said, frowning. ‘The porters were supposed to have taken those boxes on to the ship this morning. Now the Captain says we’re leaving in ten minutes. And I just see them here now. If they don’t go with me, Madame Keyne will have a fit!’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Bayle, who had just taken his own bundle aboard and had wandered back down on the dock for a last look at the shore, ‘I’ll carry this one on for you.’ As he squatted to hoist up the little crate to his shoulder, someone else said:

  ‘—and I’ll take these two. There, woman, grab up the fourth and we’ll have them all aboard before they get their sails tied.’

  Bayle looked up at the sailor—? No, it was a woman, though those brown arms were knotted as any woodcutting man’s. There were metal and colored stones in the woman’s lank black hair. A shaggy scabbard was belted about the dark cloth she wore around her loins. She hoisted up one crate by its binding rope, and—at the redhead’s confirming nod—swung up the duffle sack on her shoulder. Her hands were broad and worn as any farmwoman’s (a very different kind of wear from a secretary’s) and her bare feet were hard around the rims. She had the lithe, hard back of an active woman not quite thirty. Half-way up the gangplank, when she glanced behind to see if Bayle and the redhead were following her (her skin was red-brown as the darkest terracotta before drying), he saw the black rag mask tied across her face: through frayed holes her eyes were blue as some manganese glaze.

  ‘All passengers go below to their cabins,’ the mate repeated for something like the fifth time, between orders bawled to the sailors rushing about the deck. ‘Please, all passengers to their cabins. Now couldn’t you have brought those things on an hour ago when there was less confusion—or simply had the porter bring them on with the regular stores this morning? Never mind. Just get that stuff stowed fast. Once we’re off, you can come up any time you want. But for now, would you please …’

  2

  ‘CIDER ON SHORE, WINE on the water. Isn’t that what they say?’ asked the redhead turning from the cabin table. ‘No, please stay—the both of you—and have a cup with me. My name is Norema and I’m secretary to Madame Keyne, of Kolhari port, and bound southward on this ship.’ From the duffle sack she’d already unstrapped, she took out a wax-stoppered wine jar and sat it beside some rough-ware cups (low-fired with softwoods, thought Bayle) on the table against the wall. As she began to pick at the wax with a small knife, Bayle sat down on the box he’d carried in and noted again how sumptuous this so-fashionably garbed secretary’s cabin was. (His berth, the cheapest on the ship, was a storage locker in the forepeak, in which he could just sit up; indeed, he had visited it twice during the afternoon, the first time to see it, the second time to see if, with its smell of old tar, its shavings in the corner, its chips of resin loosening between the boards, it was as grim as his first look had told him—may the nameless gods of craft help him if he were ever ill in it from heaving seas!) The dark woman with the rag mask and the light eyes climbed a few steps up a ladder to some storage cabinet high in the wall, turned, and sat. She looked like some black cousin to the worst waterfront ruffian in the Spur. Her smile, like her eyes, was preternaturally bright as she looked down at the cozily appointed cabin. Bayle wondered where she slept, or if she were even a passenger. ‘My name is Raven,’ the masked woman suddenly announced (almost in answer to Bayle’s thought). ‘I hail from the Western Crevasse. And I have been traveling three years in your strange and terrible land!’ From her perch, she barked a sharp, shrill laugh. ‘Strange and terrible, yes. I am on a mission for the royal family, and—alas—I can tell you no more about it.’ And she leaned, most unceremoniously, down between her bony knees and took the cup Norema had just filled.

  This Raven, thought Bayle, has neither the air of a Kolhari woman, who expects to be served before men, nor the air of a provincial woman who expects to be served after. He looked at the redhead.

  Norema, pouring two more cups, had the quiet smile of someone who has just been told a rather obscure joke and is not sure whether she truly understands it. (An island woman, Bayle thought: that hair and those eyes … the moment he placed her foreignness, he also felt a sudden liking for her, despite her odd dress.)

  ‘Of course there are those,’ said Raven, sitting up and directing her glazed grin (a crescent of small stained teeth) at the cup she turned in her fingers, ‘who would say I have said too much already. Well,’ and her bright eyes came up again, ‘I can speak three languages passably, two badly, and can write numbers and do the calculations that the Mentats invented in the Western Hills for building houses. Him,’ which was addressed directly down to Bayle; ‘who is he and what does he do?’

  Bayle took the cup Norema offered, smiled up at Raven and decided he did not like her. ‘I’m Bayle, the Potter—or at any rate, I’m a potter’s assistant, and I go to the south on a journey for my master’s profit.’

  Norema, her back to the table, lifted her hip to it and sipped at her own cup. (Bayle looked into his red-black disk to see wax chips bump the brim.) What had been the gentlest rolling beneath them became a deep-breasted lurch. The timbre of voices from the deck above filled, deepened—

  ‘We’ve launched.’ Raven drained half her cup.

  —and quieted, after count-ten. ‘Perhaps,’ said Bayle, when, through the portal, something unrecognizable passed in the distance (a far building? a further mountain?), ‘we can go up now? It sounds quieter; we won’t be in the way.’

  ‘Very well, pretty man. Let’s go up with him,’ which was Raven, of course. She stood and stalked down the ladder on her broad, cracked feet.

  Emerging on deck, Raven, before him, Norema behind, Bayle (still holding his cup beneath his chin) saw that the confusion of departure had only abated, not stopped. Should he suggest to the women that they return below? And how to do it tactfully? But Norema and Raven were both already out among the bustling sailors (most of the men naked, all of them sweating) with what Bayle took to be their respective modes of female obliviousness: the redhead seemed certain she couldn’t possibly be in the way (Bayle flinched when she sidestepped a sailor handling a barrel across the deck by its rim, and was surprised a moment later when she stooped down to pick up a four-legged metal box lying on the deck and set it in a broad capstan rail in which there were, apparently, four little cut-outs for its legs to sit in: ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ called a naked sailor climbing down a rat line, who now started up again as though his job had been done). The black-haired woman with the dull stones in her hair, the rag mask, and her bright smile, turned here and there about the deck, looking for the world as if she were trying to decide which task to lend a hand with (which reminded Bayle, more than anything, of the wealthy provincials who had wandered into Zwon’s shops three days before and, in their enthusiasm for the wares, had actually volunteered to return and stoke the kilns later that afternoon, much to Bayle’s and Zwon’s embarrassment).

  The first mate walked up, a winejug on his shoulder: ‘The Captain wishes me to greet all our passengers and offer them a glass of our best beer—ah, there you are. Oh, but you’ve already got your glasses …?’ (Rushing up behind the mate, in a stained apron of woven grass, a wall-eyed sailor with a tray of cups stopped, looking confused.) ‘But there … has someone poured you a drink already? (Raven, Bayle saw, was grinning at the sailor with the tray; but, thanks to that wall-eye, one couldn’t be sure what he was looking at.) ‘Well, perhaps ?
??’

  Raven solved the dilemma by downing her wine, dashing the dregs over the rail, and proffering her cup. ‘Now we shall have a tasty drink …!’

  Bayle and Norema followed suit; and somehow, as the mate poured, it emerged that all three of them were debarking at the Vygernangx at Garth. The mate had already excused himself to see after some activity involving three sailors and the try-net at the stern, when Norema said, a little drunkenly, with a pleased and embarrassed smile, ‘I am going to the south with an import petition for Lord Aldamir.’

  ‘Are you now?’ asked Bayle, one hand on the rail, a second helping of beer swaying in his cup, a smile on his face and a queasy feel in his gut. ‘I too have business with that southern Lord.’ And while Norema raised a questioning eyebrow, Raven laughed like a barking banshee, clutching her beer in one hand, holding her neck in the other, and bending back and forth. As the deck tilted and reversed its tilts, the horizon tilted opposite; the roofs of Kolhari receded north.

  ‘There.’ Norema rose from her knees among the sailors squatting around the grilling box (for that was what Norema had set upright on the capstan rail earlier). ‘See if the heat doesn’t spread more evenly and your fish cook through faster and more regularly, now it’s stoked all proper.’

  ‘Ay, that’s the way they do it out among the Ulvayns,’ one sailor assured others, who nodded among themselves. Coals glowed through the wires, black between bronzing fish. On the night deck, save for a lantern hung back at the ladder to the upper deck, there was only the grilling box’s red glow and starlight. Bayle stood against a dorry post, beside a half dozen squatting men who were patiently grilling their sea trout and flounders, six at a time.

  Bayle’s queasiness had not turned to full seasickness, but neither had it ceased. When the first mate had again brought them a message from the Captain—he’d asked to be excused from the customary first dinner out with his passengers and might they make do with their own stores for the evening—Bayle had felt relief more than anything. Minutes ago, at a sudden toss of the deck, he’d dropped the (empty) beer cup he’d been holding all this time (sailors had laughed) and was still getting his self-composure back together: the pieces of it had shattered across the deck in rocking ceramic shards.

  Against the post, uneasy and discomforted, he watched Raven amble beneath the lantern, her arms crossed under her small, flat-hanging breasts with their black-brown nipples, her ominous mask and awkward smile.

  Movement in the shadow behind her—two crouching sailors, the one pushing at the other, reached toward the woman’s hip: Raven suddenly whirled to snatch away the handle of the sword one of the sailors had half drawn from her shaggy scabbard. Her laugh crossed the deck for all the night like a seal’s bark. She held the blade up out of the sailor’s reach. The two men cowered back, the one whispering to the other: ‘See, there! I told you, I told you! Look at it! I told you so—!’

  ‘Watch out, men! You are not so pretty that you can handle a woman’s blade!’ But as Raven turned the blade by the lantern (Bayle squinted because two threads of light lanced from the gnarly hilt), she was still grinning. ‘Ah, you men would take everything away from a woman—I’ve been in your strange and terrible land long enough to know that. But you won’t have this. See it, and know that it will never be yours!’ She laughed. (It wasn’t one blade on the hilt, Bayle realized, but two, running parallel, perhaps an inch apart: as she brandished it, the lantern flashed between and either side.) Other sailors had turned; the answering laughter near Bayle had an expectant edge.

  ‘Will you tell the story, Western Woman?’ one sailor called.

  ‘Can you tell the story?’ asked another.

  And another: ‘She is a daughter of the Western Crevasse. She knows the story …’

  Bayle frowned. Raven laughed again: she seemed familiar with all this, though it baffled Bayle.

  ‘Ah,’ called Raven, sliding her double blade back into its hairy scabbard, ‘it is not your sword, and it is not your story.’

  ‘Woman, won’t you tell us the tale—of how your western god made the world and the trees and the flowers and men and women,’ a sailor cajoled.

  ‘But you have your own craft gods in this strange and terrible country, no? Why should you want mine, unless you wished to steal her from me as you would steal my double-bladed sword?’ (To Bayle, Raven seemed to relish the attention.) ‘I am an adventurer, not a storyteller.’

  ‘Tell it! Tell it! Go on …’ they cried.

  ‘Also,’ said Raven, turning now to lean against the capstan rail, ‘it is not a man’s story. It is for women.’

  Which made Bayle, as well as some of the other sailors, glance at Norema. She stood quietly at the edge of the squatting men, her hands in the slits at the hips of her strange leg-coverings—internal storage pouches, apparently, which Bayle found himself insistently thinking of as little extra wombs that Norema, for some reason, had decided to carry about, an amusing thought that had added to his liking of her at the same time as his dislike of the Western Raven had grown.

  ‘If you, Island Woman, would hear a tale of my god, then I will tell it,’ the masked woman said. ‘But for them, there is no need.’ Red fire-spots in Raven’s blue eyes glittered from frayed cloth.

  Norema glanced at Bayle with an embarrassed smile, at the sailors. ‘Well, if the others want—’

  ‘Ah, no.’ Raven raised her hand. With her dark hair and her black rag mask, she was practically a head shorter than Norema—a fact which had somehow escaped Bayle till now. ‘It is not for them to decide.’

  Norema suddenly took her hands from her pockets and folded them behind her. ‘Very well then. Tell me the story.’

  And the sailors, with much shoulder nudging, fell so silent the only sound was the bubbling of fish grease on hot wires.

  ‘Very well, I will.’ Raven gave her raucous laugh. ‘But know that they will try to take it away from us, as men take everything from women in this strange and terrible land—for isn’t that why it is so strange and terrible? At any rate. Listen to me, heathen woman. In the beginning was the act—’

  One sailor coughed. Another shushed him.

  ‘—and the act was within the womb of god. But there was neither flesh nor fiber, neither soil nor stone, neither clear air nor cloudy mists, neither rivers nor rain, to make the act manifest. So god reached into her womb with her own hand and delivered herself of the act, which, outside god’s being, became a handful of fire. And god scattered fire across the night, making stars and—from the bulk of it—the sun itself. Then she breathed the winds from her nostrils and voided her bowels and bladder to make the bitter soil and the salt seas. And she vomited her bile, green and brown, out upon the water and the land, and the shapes in which it fell became models for the animals and trees and fish and flying and crawling insects and birds and worms and mollusks that live about the earth and water and air. And god modeled the animals all from the flesh of her body. And the fingers of god became the ten, great female deities of matter and process; and the toes of god became the ten, minor male deities of emotion and illusion—’

  ‘But that’s much later!’ called the sailor who had unsheathed her sword. ‘You haven’t told how your god made women and men.’

  Raven looked at Norema, who, after a moment, smiled and said: ‘Well, tell me how god made men and women.’

  ‘Very well.’ Raven’s smile suggested she was playing a game. Yet Bayle already sensed stakes far beyond what such a tale might win in either laughter or awe. ‘When god had made her a world of sweet winds and fierce storms, gentle showers and lashing rains, fierce animals and songful birds, she said to her two companions—the great worm and the great eagle—let me make a woman in my own shape, to praise me, to adore me, to hear my words, and to ascertain by inspection and reflection the wonders of the act. And the worm raised her green head and hissed: “Yes, god, that is good. And I will give her left hand and her right hand and her left foot and her right foot dominion over my home, t
he earth.” And the eagle beat her red wings and screeched: “Yes, god, that is good. And I will give her left eye and her right eye and her left ear and her right ear and her left nostril and her right nostril dominion over the sights and sounds and scents that drift through my home, the air.” And so god took of her own flesh and made Jevim, the first woman. And god loved Jevim and suckled her at both breasts—and when Jevim suckled at god’s right breast, the milk dropped from god’s left with love, and that milk became a circle of light that today we call the moon. And Jevim was beloved of both the worm and the eagle. And as Jevim grew in beauty and strength, god gave Jevim the world for her pleasure, and commanded all the animals to obey her and the weather to warm her, and for this Jevim praised and adored god, and heard god’s words, and by inspection and reflection discerned the wonders of the act; and Jevim prospered; and the daughters of Jevim prospered; and the tribes of Jevim filled the world and praised the wonders of god and the act. And there was soil and rock, fiber and flesh, rain and river, clear winds and cloudy mists to manifest the act; and all this Jevim praised, and god was happy.

  ‘Now Jevim asked god, “God, will you make me a companion, that we may praise you in harmony and antiphony. For have you not told me, and have I not ascertained, both by inspection and reflection, that the nature of the act is diversity and difference?” And god was pleased and said: “Go in your loneliness to sleep on nettles spread on burning sand. And when you wake, you will have a companion.” And because Jevim loved god, she could sleep as easily on hot sand and sharp nettles as she could on soft grass and under sweet winds. And while Jevim slept, god made Eif’h. And god loved Eif’h and suckled her at both breasts—and when Eif’h suckled at god’s left breast, the milk flowed from god’s right with love, and that milk became the misty river of light that crosses the night and which, today, we call the milky way. And the daughters of Eif’h prospered; and the tribes of Eif’h spread. And when Eif’h, like Jevim, had been blessed by both the eagle and the worm, god lay Eif’h down to sleep on the sand and nettles next to Jevim. And when Jevim woke, she saw Eif’h and said of her: “God, you have given me a companion. Praise be to you,” and then Jevim said to Eif’h: “Come, my companion, let us sing and praise god together.”