She saw the rocks; she saw the wagon tops.
The center one had painted houses hanging on its back. Behind the wagon to the right, five mummers in their costumes hauled away a third of the monster, who’d apparently devoured the slave and just met defeat for it at the hands of the most sympathetic of the young men, who’d been played by a very tall, very beautiful, very black actor. On stage, the young man and some fishermen and the princess were singing about it now—
There was Vatry!
The little dancer stood in the door of the nearest wagon, talking to a man with a dark, muscular back. He wore a loin-rag wrapped around his hips and between his legs; a shaggy sheath hung at his belt.
Vatry’s hair was wild, unkempt, and there was no red in it.
The man’s was black and tied with a rag. He was handing Vatry a sack, not much larger than Pryn’s.
Vatry took it and thrust it inside behind the wagon’s door jamb.
The man turned to walk away—and became a woman!
Pryn caught her breath.
Of course it had been a woman all along—she’d only thought it was a man! The black rag that held in the thick hair did not go across her forehead, but across her eyes. In it were two eyeholes, though Pryn could not have been more surprised if there’d been three, or five, or seven!
She walked toward Pryn. Her breasts were not large, but they were definitely a woman’s, not just muscular pectorals, for all Pryn tried to read them as such.
She strode into the undergrowth, pushing back leaves. As she passed, she looked at Pryn with only mild surprise.
It was the first anyone had looked directly at her since she’d moved off with the slaves.
Between frayed slits, the eyes were intensely blue.
Pryn thought for an awkward moment: Her hair’s blue, too! But it was only sun-dappling slipping across the blue beads she wore chained in her hair. Sun flaked over terra-cotta shoulders. And she was off among trees; was only a shadow; was a sound in leaves; was—like Bruka—gone.
Pryn stood, astounded.
Beyond the leaves, Vatry lingered in the wagon door, still in her bells and scarfs. Slowly, she stepped back inside.
Pryn swallowed. Then, sack bouncing, she pushed from the undergrowth, crossed the clearing, was up the wagon’s single step, and through the colorful hanging. ‘Vatry…!’
Inside the wagon was a smell of incense and old varnish. Paintings of castles, of waves, of forests, of houses, of mountains leaned against the walls. Ornate armor hung from the ceiling. A trap in the roof let in sunlight. Sitting on a shelf-bed against the back, Vatry pushed away a hanging blanket and peered through dusty sun. ‘Yes? What do you—?’
‘Vatry, who was…’ Pryn lost her question to the strangeness of the wonder-cramped wagon.
Vatry frowned. Her eyes were winged with paint. ‘What do you…? You? Oh, that girl…from the city!’ She stood up, pushing the blanket further back on the rope over which it was strung. ‘It’s Pryn…?’
Excited, Pryn nodded. She’d really thought Vatry might not remember her at all.
‘What are you doing here at this…?’ Suddenly the freckled hand went back against Vatry’s breast. ‘But you’ve been captured!’ she cried in her odd accent. ‘Oh, you’ve been taken! That’s awful! Is there anything anyone can do?’ She leaned forward in complete sincerity.
Which bewildered Pryn—till she remembered the collar. ‘Oh, this…? No, it’s just a…it’s not real. I mean, it’s broken!’ She dropped her sack to the floor, raised her chin, slipped a finger into each side of the iron band, and tugged—of course this would be the moment when the broken lock held…
But the hinge gave.
Pryn took the iron from her neck. ‘I was only pretending—using it, as a disguise.’ Then she said: ‘It’s for you!’
Vatry frowned. ‘What?’
‘I mean for the skits. You do skits with slaves in them. I thought they might use it…for the show.’
Suspicion found its way into Vatry’s voice. ‘Oh…’
‘Vatry, I have to get away from here! I want to get back to Kolhari!’
‘Don’t we all!’
‘When you pull out this evening, could I ride along—?’
‘This evening? Oh, no!’ Vatry shook her head. ‘We don’t hang around these places till evening! These local shindigs get a little rough by sundown. Everyone’s gambled away all their money, or gotten too drunk to follow a skit anyway. Every local hooligan thinks the holiday isn’t complete unless he’s stolen something or other from our props as a souvenir. And any little tramp diddled behind the rocks, who decides she doesn’t like it, always finds it easier to blame it on one of our boys instead of the leering local lout who actually got to her. It makes less trouble for them later. Well, I did it myself once—but I’ve been paid back many times over! No, we don’t hang around these kinds of places. We should be packed up and rolling inside an hour.’
‘That’s even better!’ Pryn said. ‘Oh, please, can’t I come? You see, there’re some people looking for me—at any rate, they may be looking for me. I did something that they won’t like. Of course, I don’t know if they realize it was me, yet—’
‘What did you do? Steal some old geezer’s hard-won hoard?’ Vatry pointed toward Pryn’s sack.
‘Oh, that’s just food I got for the trip.’ Pryn took a breath. ‘What I did was free one of the old geezer’s slaves!’
‘That was noble,’ Vatry said, ‘I suppose—if foolhardy!’
The sack the masked woman had brought lay on rumpled cloth at the foot of Vatry’s bed. ‘What’s in that?’
‘What’s in what?’ Vatry said.
‘That bag the woman gave you?’
Vatry pulled in her small shoulders. Her forehead wrinkled. ‘What woman?’
‘Well, she looked like a man, but I’m sure—I know it was a woman. In that sack there.’
Vatry considered a moment. ‘There wasn’t any woman here—or man.’
‘Of course there was. With a black rag mask.’ Pryn was trying to remember the tale-teller’s tale. Blue Heron…? But that had been her name. ‘She passed right by me when—’
Vatry leaned over, reached into the sack, and pulled out something small and black. ‘What’s this?’ She held out her hand.
Pryn looked. ‘I don’t…know.’
Vatry closed her fingers, turned her hand over, threw the black pellet down on the wagon floor—thack! It bounced back into her hand. She turned her palm up to show Pryn.
‘It’s a ball…?’
‘Yes. A child’s playing ball, that you see the children tossing about on the streets all through Kolhari. It’s nothing special—absolutely not worth a mention.’ Her odd accent gave her a measured tone. ‘It’s not worth any kind of mention at all, is it, now?’
‘Oh, no.’ Pryn shook her head. ‘Of course it’s not!’
Vatry rolled the ball between thumb and forefinger. ‘These come from further south of here. I’ll bring this bag of them with me up to Kolhari. I’ll sell them for a few iron coins to some vendor in the market, who’ll sell them to the passing children for their end-of-summer games. It may keep me from having to break my back carrying sacks of onions for noisy barbarians in the eating halls for a day or two, when the troupe here lets me go. Certainly there’s nothing wrong with that, is there?’
Pryn shook her head again. ‘Of course not.’
‘Certainly it’s not worth any sort of a mention—to anyone. Do you understand?’
Pryn remembered the smugglers she’d come south with, and their cartload of contraband, against which this minuscule enterprise seemed laughable. ‘Vatry, there may be other people after me too. What ancient custom I violated or bit of intrigue I might have tripped over, I don’t begin to understand and don’t want to. But they tried to poison me last night! At least I think they did. They may try again—and maybe they won’t. But they’re bad people. They order slaves to be whipped for nothing. And I don’t want to
stay to find out why—and no, I saw no woman here. Did she give you a sack? I certainly didn’t see it! What was in it? I wouldn’t have a clue!’
Vatry looked serious. She pulled the sack into her lap, put the ball back in it, then pushed it behind some bedding at the bed’s other end. ‘You say they tried to poison you because you freed one of their slaves…?’
It seemed hopelessly complicated to explain right then that it was the other way around. Pryn nodded.
‘Well,’ Vatry said. ‘I’ve heard of stranger things in this strange and terrible land.’ She looked at Pryn a little sideways. ‘I tell you what. We’ll go to the director. I’ll ask—just once, mind you—if you can come along. I won’t insist. I’m not going to make a nuisance of myself just for your sake. If he says yes, fine. But if he says no, you’ve got to promise me you’ll go on about your business as best you can and not make any fuss.’
‘If he’ll just let me ride along with you for fifty stades—’
‘We’ll ask,’ Vatry said. ‘He may say yes; he may say no. Now come on.’ She stood and stepped around Pryn.
On the rumpled bedding, where the sack had lain, was a very long knife. It wasn’t a full sword; but two inches beyond the hilt, the blade became…two blades! Both bore the file marks of sharpening on inner and outer edges.
‘Vatry—Oh, Please…one more question?’
‘What?’
‘That is the kind of blade they use in the west—in the Western Crevasse?’
Vatry looked put out. ‘How would I know such things?’
‘I just thought maybe, with your accent—I mean it isn’t southern, it certainly isn’t northern. And it doesn’t sound like island speech—you might be one of those women from…?’ Pryn suddenly wished she hadn’t spoken. She was overcome with the conviction Vatry would turn on her and accuse her of spying from the bushes. She felt herself start to deny it before the accusation was made, and thought desperately: By all the nameless gods, let me be silent! Let me keep still!
And the real Vatry before her, who after all was as good-hearted and sentimental as it was possible to be in such primitive times and still survive, said: ‘It’s just a prop. For the skits. Like this thing—!’ and she pulled the collar from Pryn’s hand, held it up, then tossed it back on the bed, where it clinked against the twinned sword. ‘Come on. And no more about this silliness or I’ll send you on your way right now!’
Cheeks still rouged, eyelids still gilded, the fat man had doffed his feathers for a cloak of coarse canvas and was directing the loading of the scenery being hauled down from the middle wagon, now the skit was over.
Vatry said: ‘My friend here’s in some trouble, it seems, and needs a ride north. She was wondering if you’d let her come along with us—at least for a while.’
‘I wouldn’t think so!’ the fat man said. ‘We can’t just take up strangers like that. There’s hardly enough room for us.’ He looked at Pryn through his fantastic make-up—then smiled! ‘Oh…the little girl from the Kolhari market! How in the world did you end up in this forsaken backwater?’
The recognition made hope leap. ‘Well, I—’
But the fat man went on: ‘I’m sorry, my puffy little partridge, but we can’t give a ride to every stray we run into—you understand.’
‘I’ll work,’ Pryn said. ‘I’ll do anything!’
The fat man paused, tongue filling one rouged cheek. ‘Well, as I remember, you don’t play the drum very well. You’re obviously not a dancer. Can you sing?’
‘I never—’
‘Then you’re not a singer.’ He turned to Vatry. ‘You know, we’re in enough trouble as it is, what with Alyx taking off like that last week. I’m trying to keep all the accounts in my head, as well as work up dialogue for the new skit, which nobody seems to be able to—or wants to—remember lines for. Once I make them up, I can’t remember them. I’ve got too many other things to think about if I want to keep this troupe together. Now if your friend here could write down words and keep accounts like Alyx—but she’s only an ignorant mountain girl who’s somehow gotten herself lost in the country. My heart goes out to her, but—’
‘But I—!’ Pryn interrupted.
‘But you what?’
This is how, after her days among the changeable mysteries of the barbaric south, Pryn came to be riding with the mummers on the north road at evening. (‘I think she’d better stay out of sight until we’re actually under way,’ Vatry said. The fat man said: ‘Ah, it’s one of those, is it? Well, it’s not the first time for us. I doubt it’ll be the last.’ Besides her dictation, accounting, and dialogue coaching duties, at their next performance stop, the director told her, Pryn would take a few gold coins into the audience. During the collection she would wave one, then another over her head and make a show of tossing them into the passing cloaks or baskets. Pryn said: ‘Oh…!’ And when they were actually rolling down the beach, staring out a chink in the wagon door, she passed as close to Ardra’s face as yours is to this book! He was turning to Lavik, who pulled him aside, laughing, and said, ‘Watch out for the baby—!’ He carried screeching Petal.) They didn’t put her in with Vatry. There were already too many other people sleeping in that wagon.
The bed she got was just above one of the musicians’; yes, the one she’d passed with the coins—who turned out to be as well the third wagon’s driver. When they were a goodly handful of stades along the north road, Pryn climbed up the ladder at the wagon’s end and out the roof-trap. She perched in the corner, dangling her feet inside.
The driver sat forward at the edge, holding the reins and not quite humming.
A wagon joggled ahead, beneath tall trees, toward the hillcrest. Behind fields there was just a sight of sea. Clouds banked before them, silver and iron, walls and pillars, towers and terraces, shape behind shape.
‘It looks like a city,’ Pryn said.
Topping the hill, they started down.
The driver glanced back. She had broad cheekbones under odd, foreign eyes. One of her flutes was strapped behind her shoulder. ‘We still have cities to go through before we reach Kolhari—little cities, to be sure. Towns, is more like it. Villages…’ The wagon joggled. She turned to the horses.
‘That’s the city you must learn to read,’ Pryn said. ‘That’s the city you must write your name on—before you can make progress in a real one; at least I think so!’
The driver laughed without looking back. ‘You’re a strange one.’
Pryn watched the clouds.
‘I hear that you can,’ the driver said. ‘Read and write, I mean.’
‘I do all sorts of thing: read, write, free slaves, ride dragons—kill, if I have to.’ Pryn guessed the driver was about twenty-five.
The foreign musician flipped her reins. ‘I wish someone would figure a way to write down music. That’d be something! Then I could be sure to remember my tunes.’
‘I don’t see why it can’t be done.’ Pryn thought: Now I’ve had all sorts of experiences that might be of use to the Liberator among his causes. (The astrolabe was gone, yes, but she had retrieved the iron collar from Vatry’s bed. Perhaps she could fix the lock.) Perhaps when I get to Kolhari…‘If you can write down words,’ she said, suddenly, ‘I don’t see why we can’t find a way to write down…’ And hadn’t some successful musician been pointed out to her in the Kolhari market? ‘I’ll work on it!’ At Kolhari, she might just stop by to see Madame Keyne—oh, if only for a while…
The driver laughed.
Pryn sat a long time staring at the sky.
Now, old city of dragons and dreams, of doubts and terrors and all wondrous expectation, despite your rule by the absent fathers, it’s between us two!
Montréal—New York
July 1980—November 1981
Appendix A: The Culhar’ Correspondence
[The Neveryón tales, of which Neveryóna (‘The Tale of Signs and Cities’) is the sixth, are based on an ancient text of approximately 900 words known as the Cul
har’ Fragment or, sometimes, the Missolonghi Codex, which has been found translated into numerous ancient languages. Because of the Culhar’s incomplete nature as well as its geographical dissemination among so many cultures, it has been difficult to assign an even reasonably indisputable origin to it, either as to date, land, or language of composition. In 1974, however, a comparative retranslation of the text from the various languages in which various versions have been found was presented by a young, black, American scholar, K. Leslie Steiner, along with an extensive commentary. Steiner’s work is notable not only for its linguistic interest but also because of its mathematical side. The first collection of tales (Tales of Nevèrÿon, Samuel R. Delany, Bantam Books; New York, 1979) was clearly in dialogue with Steiner’s findings. That volume concluded with an Appendix, written by archeologist S. L Kermit, giving a general review of the Culhar’s history as well as the thrusts of both Steiner’s mathematical and interpretive work. Among the responses to both the tales and the appended monograph, one, addressed to Kermit, seems worth publishing (en appendice) along with the engendered correspondence, for the readers of the present (or indeed the absent) text.]
New Haven
February 1981
To S. L. Kermit:
I have just read your comments on the Culhar’, and Steiner’s translation of same, and I feel that some remarks are in order.
I have checked the literature, and the Appendix to Delany’s work seems to be your first foray into archeology or text redaction (unless you are the S. Kermit who wrote the annotations to the most recent edition of Dee’s Necronomicon, in which case my congratulations; it was a solid piece of work). I would suggest that before you make another attempt you learn something about the topics you discuss. Or rather, learn something more; you’re obviously not ignorant, but your knowledge fails you at a number of points. Some examples follow (page numbers from the current edition of Tales of Nevèrÿon, London and Hanover, 1993).