Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

  White wooden shavings, about three or five breaths apart, floated past her over shallow water floored with red and gray pebbles. She climbed across a log and went round a high slab, gray once more and grooveless.

  The stream changed direction, and the ravine wedged out from four or five meters wide to six or seven times that. Rough with last night’s rain, the water rushed back and forth across the ravine’s floor, winding through the spread of round, gray stones.

  Ahead, where the canyon grew wider still, she could see a man sitting on a large rock—yes, it was Tratsin.

  Holding the leather-covered bowl in both hands, she walked on the sand between the stones. Pryn hesitated at a wide pool, then waded through. Water chilled her to the ankles.

  She could see that Tratsin held a piece of wood in his lap. With a large knife—some bench-carving tool?—he was shaving at it. Near her, another chip floated past, turning over the water.

  Above Tratsin, the stone bridge ran from one ravine lip to the other. Under it, behind him, irregular to the left, with a more or less flat surface to the right, a great rock rose like a squat mountain to form the bridge’s central support. The shallow waters, here and there interrupted by boulders like the one Tratsin sat on, ran around both sides of the immense support.

  The whole seemed like a more modest Bridge of Lost Desire, though at the stone rail it seemed to carry no traffic at all—at least for the present. Still, it was big enough to erase her picture of the little city and resketch a more complex one. To sport such a public work, Enoch had to be more than the few dozen shacks clustered near the river—which, as they were all she’d seen till now, were all she’d assumed there were.

  As Pryn walked forward, Tratsin raised his knife and waved. ‘You been to the huts yet, where you’ll be staying tonight?’

  ‘What?’ Pryn stepped over crumbly ground, where a plant the size and color of rockweed brushed her wet ankle. ‘Oh…no.’ Only its leaves were not the same star shape as rockweed leaves at all, but thin and in tiny bunches. ‘Not yet.’ She looked at Tratsin, who was smiling. Apparently her coming relocation had been discussed at least as far back as the morning, before she’d awakened, if not whispered about on the previous night after she’d gone to sleep. ‘Bragan said you or Kurvan would take me there this evening.’ She came up to the ribbon of water that lay between his boulder and the sand.

  ‘Oh.’ The blade caught under white wood. A chip curled on the metal, fell to hit his toe, then dropped to the water and drifted away. ‘It’s not that far from here. Well, I guess when I get home…’ He laid the wood beside him on the stone and put the darkly mottled blade with its leather-bound handle next to it. ‘Come. Show me what Bragan’s sent me for dinner. You sit here.’ He patted the stone on the other side of the blade, then leaned his sunken chest forward to rest one forearm on his hairy knee. He reached out with his other hand.

  As Pryn held out the bowl, she looked up. The dark stone bridge cut away clouds and blue sky—and the bowl was taken from her hand.

  She looked back at Tratsin, who was pulling aside the cover strap. ‘Wonder what I got.’

  Pryn waded over the pebbly stream bed and climbed to the rock beside him. The great knife—not very different from the broad sword the Liberator had swung in the cellars of the Spur, but turned into a tool by the wood beside it—lay between them.

  Heels against the stone, Pryn put her head back as far as she could, straining her neck to feel her hair crushed against her back, till she could see the bridge, with clouds drifting a-slant it.

  ‘You want some of this?’

  Still looking up, Pryn shook her head. ‘That’s Belham’s bridge?’

  ‘That’s what we call it.’

  She dropped her head—and rubbed her neck; it had developed a sudden crick, which, in moments, drifted away like a wood chip. On the water, she saw the bottom of her own feet and beside them the bottom of Tratsin’s; way below was the bridge’s dark and dripping underside; and below that wavered the blue sky with its drifting clouds. ‘Is this Venn’s Rock we’re sitting on?’

  ‘No…’

  Pryn looked up.

  Tratsin was eating a handful of something oily with onions in it that dribbled down his wrist. ‘Back there, behind us.’ He gestured with his chin over his shoulder, and went back to chewing. ‘That’s Venn’s Rock. The one holding up the bridge.’

  Pryn twisted around, getting up on one knee to see. In the bridge’s shadow, it was gray and irregular to one side; then, just behind her, it slanted back, revealing a red marble face. Running up it were those regular grooves. ‘Did this rock come from back down the stream?’

  ‘It’s supposed to.’

  Pryn looked up the six-meter block, almost as wide and nearly as thick. ‘She must have had some job getting it from there to here!’

  ‘“She” who?’ Tratsin asked.

  ‘Venn,’ Pryn said, surprised. She turned back.

  Tratsin sucked first one finger, then another, watching her and looking almost as puzzled as she remembered him from the boat when all she’d been able to do was cry.

  ‘I mean, if it’s Venn’s Rock, I just thought Venn must have had something to do with putting it here. Just like it’s Belham’s Bridge—’ She looked up again. ‘Didn’t Belham build it?’

  Tratsin looked at her oddly, and ran another finger in his mouth. ‘I don’t know. Was there someone named Belham? And Venn?’

  ‘But you’re from Enoch’ Pryn said, ‘aren’t you?’

  ‘I was born here,’ Tratsin said. ‘So was my father. His father, too.’

  ‘Don’t you know anything about this bridge? I mean who built it and all? Who got the rock up from downstream?’

  ‘I know what we call them,’ Tratsin said. ‘But I never thought they might be people—real people, I mean. And a woman, too, you said?’ He glanced back at the great stone support. ‘No, I don’t think any woman put that there.’ He went digging in the dish on his lap with greasy fingers. ‘It doesn’t seem too likely, no…’

  ‘What do you know about the bridge, then…?’ Pryn looked around and up. Somewhere, out of her aunt’s stories overlaid with Madame Keyne’s revelations, a tale had formed, almost without her knowing it, of some bygone Enoch residents who had called in the great Belham to construct a bridge across their ravine; and, after making his plans and drawings, the barbarian engineer and inventor had at last declared it would be impossible unless there was some support in the middle. But how to get one…? Then the brilliant young woman from the islands had said, shyly, ‘Wait. Here…’ Somehow, through astonishingly ingenious contrivance, the rock had been hewn loose and moved. And a grateful but frustrated Belham had gone on to build his bridge…

  ‘I know lots of things about it,’ Tratsin said. ‘Just not who built it. How come you think you do?’

  ‘Um…’ Pryn felt embarrassed. Whatever hearsay knowledge she had, she felt terribly uneasy about squandering it here. ‘Well, I…I suppose I don’t really know, either. What do you know about it? You tell me.’

  Tratsin looked back at his bowl, empty now, and licked oil from his forearm. ‘I know when I was a boy they called in the soldiers, and they came marching across the bridge up there, to flush out the quarry workers who’d holed up in the hills—and they killed the leaders and carried their bodies, roped to long poles, back down across it, and we hung out watching from the bushes. Everybody thought they were going to put collars back on the rest of us like there used to be in my father’s father’s time. They hanged Kurvan’s uncle and three of the others on ropes from the wall, so that their corpses dangled right down over where we’re sitting. After a couple of days, you couldn’t come down here to play any more, because it stunk too bad. And once—’ he glanced up, then looked at Pryn—‘about six years ago, when the women came over the bridge who worked in the—’

  A breeze moved in Tratsin’s thinning hair as he looked down again over the bowl in his lap. Trying to see his expression, which had ch
anged again, Pryn remembered the Ini’s account of her escape from the western slavers.

  Then Pryn happened to glance at the water.

  Someone was leaning over the rail above them. Broad head, narrow shoulders, the leather bib of an apron—she recognized the dwarf with whom Tratsin had gone off that morning to work. Tratsin was watching him in the water, too. In the rippling surface the little foreman grinned at them, waiting to see how long it would take them to notice they were observed.

  In the silence, Pryn grew uncomfortable, wondering if she ought to look up or not; or whether she ought to go on talking; or—

  ‘Hey, Tratsin…!’ Finally the dwarf reached out his hand and waved. ‘Is that the mountain girl you said was going to move into the huts across the road from the shop?’

  Tratsin looked up now—with an affable enough expression. ‘Hey, Froc! Yes, this is Pryn. Bragan sent her down here with my food.’

  Pryn squinted up at the rail.

  Grinning, the dwarf bobbed his oversized, bald, and bearded head. ‘Pleased to meet you, there. Come on, Tratsin. Let’s get on back to work, now? Marg doesn’t pay you to sit in the shade and flirt with pretty pregnant strangers!’ He waved again and was gone.

  Pryn looked back down, with heat in her cheeks and knees, wondering if everyone in Enoch knew about her and her baby.

  On the other side of the blade, Tratsin was running his thumb along the bowl’s edge for a last bit of food.

  ‘You were talking about things…’ Pryn tried to ignore the discomfort the dwarf’s farewell had called up—‘things that happened up on the bridge…?

  Tratsin sucked his thumb. ‘Nobody wants to remember things like that,’ he said, shortly. ‘Except the soldiers, maybe. The soldiers won, after all.’ He looked at her with a rueful smile that may or may not have held sympathy for her discomfort. ‘But for the rest of us, such things are best forgotten.’ He put the bowl on the leather cover he’d dropped on the rock. ‘You can’t work your best with memories like that plaguing you. Why go over them? I wouldn’t tell such stories to my own girls—nor to a son, either, if I had one. Why should I tell such things to you, eh?’

  ‘Oh, but I want to know about the—’

  ‘Now in the quarries—’ Tratsin looked off toward the ravine wall, where Pryn saw dirt steps, shored with logs, leading to the rim—‘from time to time the men will grumble about what went on in Enoch three or ten or thirty years ago—more often just make a joke of it. I don’t like it when they joke. That’s to mix the worst part of forgetting and remembering both. I come down here at lunch so I don’t have to listen to such grumblings—or jokes—from the other men. They make a lot of them in these times, what with so many people going north to the city. But I just want to do my work, you see, and enjoy it as much as I can. Now Kurvan—’ Tratsin chuckled—‘he says what’s wrong with Enoch is that we forget too much. He says it’s a town with no memory at all, and that’s where all our problems come from.’ Tratsin dropped his head to the side. ‘Though perhaps we have the names, we certainly don’t remember anything about who built the bridge here!’

  Pryn started to say something about memory and writing. But in the same way she knew the alleys and hedges and the people in her great-aunt’s neighborhood in Ellamon, she knew Tratsin and Bragan and Kurvan and Gutryd were illiterate; and she knew from her aunt’s example how much hostility one could create by claiming to know too much among them.

  ‘You know, I used to work in the quarries,’ Tratsin said, suddenly. ‘On the scaffolding crew. But you wouldn’t know anything about that—’

  ‘They put up the scaffolds and wooden walkways for high work…’ Pryn quoted Kurvan from the morning.

  Tratsin nodded, a little surprised. ‘Well, yes. They do. Anyway, in the last year I was working there, they were getting ready to send three crews up on the new cliffs for basalt blocks. We were working down from a ledge that hung over a drop that was, oh, a good three times the height of that wall there.’ He pointed to the ravine’s lip where the bridge joined it. ‘The boys were roping wood together and pegging it into the stone face. The digging crews weren’t up yet. Just us scaffolders. There was a big overhang over the ledge where I’d gone up to take some short-planks so we would have them at work level later on. I was standing on a bushy little outcrop with all day down behind me, when I heard a crack and a rumble. Someone shouted, “Tratsin!” I looked up, and saw big brown rocks tearing away from the mother face and sliding toward me—’

  ‘What did you do?’ Pryn asked.

  ‘There wasn’t anywhere to go left or right. And those falling rocks were pretty large…’ Tratsin paused meaningfully. (Pryn took a breath.) ‘So I jumped—right off the ledge! I remember being in the air and the sun in my right eye as I fell, and wondering what it was going to be like to be dead in a second, and whether I’d feel my bones snap on the rocks below. And then I hit—I felt it all right! But somehow I hit rolling; and balled up real tight. I swear I bounced down that slope! I heard a lot of thumps, but I don’t know if they were me hitting earth or the rocks hitting around me. The next thing I knew I was lying against some tree with my back stinging like I’d been attacked by hornets; and my left thigh, too—I’d scraped both of them all up on small stones and twigs. The guys were running up. Everyone was trying to help me stand, and pointing up the cliff to the ledge I’d jumped from—it was very high, and the rocks piled all over it now looked very heavy. I didn’t break one bone! Other than the scrapes, somehow I was all right!’ Tratsin chuckled. ‘For the rest of the day, everybody kept on talking about “Tratsin’s leap,” and how it was certainly some kind of magic that skinny Tratsin was still alive after falling so far—what I’d looked like in the air, and which one of them had seen it happen, and which one hadn’t, and which ones had seen scaffolders fall to their deaths before over less than half that distance. That kind of thing.’ Tratsin looked at his greasy fingers. ‘For three days they talked about it, pointing up at the ledge when anyone passed it. It was “Tratsin’s leap,” “Tratsin’s leap,” “Tratsin’s leap…” For almost three days. I thought they were going to name the ledge “Tratsin’s leap,” only then they cleared the rocks off it—’ Tratsin pushed himself forward to splash down into the shallow water before the boulder. He plunged his hands in the stream and brought them up covered with mud and sand. With one hand, then the other, he scoured his fingers and forearms. ‘It was just the upper ledge of the basalt face again. “Wasn’t that the one that skinny Tratsin almost got hurt on?” Then nobody even bothered to mention that any more.’ He rinsed his hands again. Mud made its own clouds around his wrists. Mud floated out about his ankles; and Pryn could no longer see the reflected bridge and sky. ‘For a while, though, I thought they were going to name it after me—the ledge, I mean. It would have been nice if they had—for the girls, when they got older. Of course they weren’t born when it happened. But if they knew that their father had jumped from a ledge—and lived. I don’t even have a scar left from it—but then, skinny as I am, I’ve always healed well. Still, I thought it would’ve been a nice thing.’ Tratsin shook water from his hands. Bubbles floated back between his ankles where the hair was wet flat against his calves. ‘But then I guess whoever put up the bridge here might have liked to be remembered too. By more than their names, I mean.’ He squinted up at the stone structure. ‘I mean if those really are names…Well, I want to get back to work.’ He paused a moment, then shook his head. ‘But it doesn’t matter. It was years ago. Why should anybody call it “Tratsin’s leap” today?’ Then he grinned. ‘But they almost did! Hey, take the bowl there back to Bragan for me…?’

  ‘Oh, I will!’

  ‘That’s a good girl.’ He reached up, took the knife, the wood, and started away.

  Watching him, Pryn thought of her great-aunt, who might like to be remembered as something other than an old, odd woman claiming credit for impossible things. Pryn picked up the bowl, put the leather cover inside it, and slid down until her fe
et splashed into the hazed water.

  Starting up the stairs to the ravine rim, Tratsin waved.

  Pryn waved back and walked to the water’s edge. She squatted where the current had cut a finger-deep shelf from the bank, took the leather out, and put it beside her. Digging up a handful of sand, she swished out the bowl with it, swirling the bowl itself in the water. So many things to remember, she thought. So many things to forget. Certainly Enoch, like Ellamon, would have its fables; and, staying here, she would eventually learn them. But fables were the tales a town or a city could bear to recall. Fables taught simple and clear lessons everyone could agree on. Fables were tales that could be put to immediate use, either to instruct or entertain a child, to remind adults of past glories or recurring dangers. But there were always the incidents on the bridge that no one could bear to bring up, or Trat-sin’s leap that, for whatever reason, people just…well, forgot, or women’s talk before the fire, while they carded, cooked, or spun, that no one thought important enough to remember—

  Pryn stopped and kneeled back on the sand. She’d been struck with a vision, clear as sunlight on the water before her. Somewhere in Enoch, she knew, watching over some bunch of digging, screeching, rolling children, Bragan would be saying to another Enoch mother: ‘…this northern girl my Tratsin found upriver, who’s staying with us for a day or so—she’s going to have a baby, poor thing. But do you know what she said about my soup—I mean the double soup we make here? She said that as far away as fabled Ellamon, it’s all that anybody can talk of! Travelers speak of it in the markets! She said she’s actually heard them talking—oh, they must be raving in markets all over Nevèrÿon. Imagine…!’ Pryn rinsed the bowl again. Odd, she thought, how words must leave and return, bearing some trace of their journey, for that sort of memory to fix itself. Well, then, she’d done her part to see that something—at least a soup—was remembered.

  Certainly it was good soup!

  She put the bowl down and began to rinse the leather.