Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities

  ‘Madame Keyne…?’

  For the woman, suddenly, lightly, closed her eyes and sat as though she were a moment away from major distress, hands surrounded by bracelets loose in her lap. ‘I have done it!’ Moment followed moment.

  ‘Madame Keyne, are you all right?’

  ‘Leave me,’ Madame Keyne repeated, calm enough but with eyes still closed. ‘Enjoy the gardens, the flowers, the falls, the fountains, the views of the city in all directions. And remember, there is nothing here to hurt you. I would die first before I would let anyone hurt you. I would die. Now go.’

  Pryn started to touch the woman’s arm. But Madame Keyne, whether she sensed it or saw it from beneath lids only half closed, leaned away.

  Pryn withdrew her hand.

  What had begun as confusion had become by now a mental turbulence, like fog a-broil over waters through which she could make out no single wave. Pryn rose, began to walk away, glanced at the woman sitting on the bench, back against the hut’s stone, eyes still closed before the city’s panorama. Pryn, walking, glanced again—till the path’s turning hid the woman, then the hut, with shrubbery, trees, flowers…

  A faint frown on her round, brown face, Pryn, in her new green shift, descended to the lower garden. She wandered about the grounds a while without seeing anyone else. Once she heard voices—more servants? She thought to push through the hedge to see. Then, with decision, she turned in another direction.

  What is this garden other than a miniature forest? she thought. The number of trees, blossoms, and bushes whose names she knew from the mountains was overshadowed by the number whose names were unknown. The main point of it, she decided, was that one would never find such variety in the wild—at least not over such a limited space and laid out in such carefully edged sections. It’s like a map of all the forests, she decided, a map on which you can’t read distance or direction…A feeling of distress interrupted the thought, but she could not find the source of it till she remembered who’d given her those words.

  This garden, this house, are all a part of the city, Pryn reflected. What is it here to teach me? It seemed a question she had been asking of the world from well before she’d mounted the winged beast. The real question, she decided, is not why this woman has brought me here. That, I suspect, is finally her affair. The question is what am I doing here? And I seem to have been doing a great deal lately. She stopped to look at a flower she had never seen before—a yellow and orange cornucopia smudged with black stripes. For a while she watched a stream break into three across a broad stone clearly carved for the purpose of diverting the water to three new paths, each winding off in its respective direction. For a while she walked beside a wall twice as high as she was, marveling at its permanence, its ponderousness, an image of all beyond it playing through her mind—an image which, as she examined it, was not much more than a vague castle in which dwelt a vague empress (whose reign was veiled and voluptuous), a market which was neither old nor new, and a strange house with missing tiles whose roof was patrolled by strolling soldiers. The rest of the city was a blur—oh, not a meaningless blur by any means, but the blur that marks a first encounter with the truly new which has no history to clarify it, to highlight it, to give it context, to keep it from being wholly a presence, instead of a play of more and more greatly deferred origins.

  When she reached the house, Pryn turned to walk along the wall, scuffing her feet in the earth where the grass no longer grew, next to where the wall went into the ground. She passed behind bushes. The building’s front was all large pink and gray stones in gray mortar; but when she turned the corner, she found one section of smaller stones set in flaking yellow mud; then another of a single cement-like substance (with some large cracks in it); and another of irregular black brick, as though this side wall had been built (or repaired) at different times. Perhaps the builder, in the course of constructing it, had experimented with different materials…? Her great-aunt would have found all that interesting in a house; and though, when rebelling against her aunt’s tutelage, Pryn had claimed to be absolutely uninterested in the many such distinctions pointed out to her by the venerable woman in the various houses, streets, and official buildings in their walks around Ellamon, to read them, here, was nevertheless to engage in what was at least a familiar process; and thus, to feel more at home.

  She passed one window with heavy cloth hangings blocking any view within; the next was boarded over, suggesting some window in the Liberator’s headquarters. She turned another corner. Ahead was a wall of wattle; in it was a window whose bottom sill was level with Pryn’s knee.

  The opening was hung with a yellow cloth sheer as the gauze of Madame Keyne’s skirts.

  Light seemed to pour from it.

  Pryn walked up and, moving to the edge, peered through.

  Reddled and waxed, the room’s stone floor was set perhaps two feet below the outside ground. Like some ancient great hall, it was without roof—though it was only of moderate size. The same sun that shadowed Pryn where the wall joined with the main house also fell out through the window over the grass and leaves.

  Several counters inside were piled with square slabs, knives, reeds, splints, brushes, vella, and parchments. The only thing that moved in the room was the tiniest blue flame beneath a small tripod sitting by a few cups. The little fire wavered in the shadow of the long-handled pot above it.

  Three stools stood about the sunken, sunlit chamber.

  Then hinges creaked.

  A shadow fell on maroon stone.

  Someone walked in—

  The woman—no, not last night’s servant—lugged in a cloth sack; wet, it dribbled down her tanned back. She set it on a counter, grunting, and stood.

  Whatever was in it went very flat along its bottom, like grain. Only it seemed heavier than grain. The woman had strong, distinctly muscled arms. There was a bluish scar on her shoulder—but it was too regular for a scar: some sort of tattoo.

  As Pryn watched, the woman stepped back, reached down, and shrugged up her dress (the same green as Pryn’s) over one wet arm. The red scarf was still tied at her waist. She left the other shoulder bare; one breast remained free. Her brown hair was pinned up; something about her carriage—it was the woman whom Pryn had last seen talking in the street with Madame Keyne when the horses had nearly run into them.

  She turned to a curved ceramic mold that looked like a third of a large cylinder lying on the counter and, with her fingertips, lifted out first one, then another curved clay tablet and set each on a curved stand. Then she opened her bag, reached in, gouged, twisted, pulled something inside, took it out: wet clay.

  She slapped the hunk, hard, on the counter; scraped it loose, slapped it down again; then again; and again. When the woman’s arm came up, Pryn could see her breast shake. Finally she broke the clay apart and examined the inner surfaces. (For bubbles…?) She smacked down each hunk separately a few more times, then went to put them in the mold. First with the heel of her hand, then with her fingertips, she pressed these new tablets into the corners.

  At the side of the counter, under the metal tripod on top of which sat the long-handled pot, the flame flicked and fluttered.

  The pot began to boil.

  Bubbles climbed to the bronze rim and broke; a whiff of white whipped above.

  Now the woman took the pot’s handle in clay-grayed fingers and poured amber into one of the ceramic cups sitting near.

  She put the pot down. Holding the little cup just under her chin in both hands, she blew on it, sipped, smiled—Pryn drew back beyond the edge of the window as the woman turned slightly.

  The woman blew again; sipped again. With one hand, she picked up a wooden paddle and smoothed the surface of the clay on the tablet mold. Whatever was in the infusion the woman drank while she worked finally reached through the sunny gauze. It suggested both spices and fruits, but in some odd refinement.

  The woman put down both her cup and her paddle, bent below the counter, and lifted a sm
all jar from a pile of jars. She stood, holding it up to look at the marks scratched on its surface.

  Pryn saw two things about it: First, the jar had no opening. Second, the scratches read:

  se∙ven∙great

  jars∙of∙oat

  en∙flo∙ur∙of

  la∙bor∙er∙qua

  li∙ty

  Above the flo and the ur was the eliding mark Pryn now knew to be part of her own name.

  A shelf on the wall with many compartments held a number of such jars—all too small to be ‘great jars of oaten flour.’ The woman reached out to file hers in one compartment—then paused, looking to the side.

  Pryn pulled back.

  Someone must have been passing beyond the door Pryn couldn’t see.

  The woman called, ‘Oh. Thank you, Gya, for preparing my morning drink.’ Her voice was feathered with the faintest barbarian accent—as startling to Pryn as her speaking at all.

  A voice returned from someone obviously on her way somewhere else. ‘It wasn’t me, Madame Jade. Madame Keyne was in there the moment she got up, to fix it for you herself.’ Yes, that voice belonged to the servant who had bathed her last night. Pryn was sure.

  ‘Oh, she was…!’ Jade called back, surprised and smiling. ‘How nice of Rylla.’

  Clay had dried here and there on her hands in lighter patches. She picked up the cup again, regarded the steaming amber, smiled again, drank again. ‘All her silly talk about that street girl was nonsense, then! I knew it when she left me working late in town at the warehouse yesterday afternoon. I knew it!’ She laughed, secretly, throatily.

  A sound—surely just wind in leaves, Pryn decided as she stepped away—made Pryn think she’d better wander on. If, after all, some passing servant were to see her, it would never do to be caught spying through the curtains. As Pryn glanced back, the woman—surely this was the Radiant Jade whom Ini had spoken of last night—was checking over a handful of writing sticks, setting aside the dull ones for sharpening.

  It was a task Pryn had done many mornings for her aunt.

  She walked out into the garden and looked at more flowers.

  Had anyone seen her, she wondered.

  She walked back around the house.

  Stepping through the arched corner entrance into the open, inner court, she saw the cushions, low stools, and benches on the raked white sand, the blue and green tiles, the fur throws kept marvelously clean. (Pryn recalled the gritty hides in the subterranean hall.) Diagonally across from her, the Ini appeared to have been asleep on a pile of cushions, for she was just sitting up. She punched first one fist overhead, then the other, her mouth twisting in a huge yawn as theatrical in its exaggeration as some mummer miming awakening on a performance wagon in a market skit. Ini’s short, yellow-white hair was every which way, like a heap of feathery down. Her deep-set eyes, tightly closed, looked like bruises on her face.

  Smiling, Pryn prepared to say good morning as soon as the yawn reached the open-eyed point.

  Then two other figures appeared. In her blue gauzes and tinkling bracelets, Madame Keyne stepped through the doorway just down from Pryn and paused, one hand on the jamb. And from the stairs leading to the lower level rooms, the barbarian woman Pryn had just seen in the writing chamber came spiritedly up. She was tall—taller than Pryn expected barbarians to be. And for all her great-aunt’s tales of Belham’s brilliance, Pryn found herself thinking that it was unusual to see barbarians so well attired or even so clean. Jade’s dress was now up on both shoulders, the red scarf neatly round her waist. Only some clay remained about her nails. The four of them, each near her respective corner of the courtyard—Ini on her cushions, Jade at the head of her steps, Madame in her doorway, and Pryn in hers—struck Pryn as an eminently pleasing pattern. She felt her ‘Good morning’ open up to include them all and was even contemplating something such as, ‘Well, here we all are!’ when the sunken-eyed Ini, recovered from her sky-shoving yawn, looked about and let out her hoarsest, most hysterical laugh.

  The laugh twisted up Ini’s face into a howl. She rocked forward to punch the cushions before her, then leaned back as if she would cackle the decorative tiles from the balcony rail.

  Pryn’s own greeting was stifled. The smile on her face suddenly felt awkward. On the steps the secretary had pulled her clay-grayed fist up before her breast, her own look as distressed as Pryn’s, behind her smile, felt.

  Radiant Jade stared at Pryn. Her gaze went to Madame Keyne, to Ini, came back to Pryn, returned to Madame Keyne—as though judging some fine imbalance. ‘You couldn’t have! You wouldn’t have! Rylla, you didn’t really…?’ Suddenly she drew a breath audible through the Ini’s diminishing laughter, grasped the newel, and fled around into some door behind that led to other ground floor chambers.

  Pryn looked at Madame Keyne—as did Ini, chuckling now. Unlike Pryn’s smile, the Ini’s seemed full of happy expectation. It reminded Pryn of the grin of a child who had just built some towering construction of sticks, pots, and stones, the moment before pulling away the lowest support to bring it all toppling.

  Madame Keyne’s hand lowered from the jamb to her side. The faintest shiver crossed her face. She looked after the secretary—Pryn thought for a moment she might even follow.

  Ini’s laugh had become a smile of simple curiosity.

  Madame Keyne sighed. What had begun as a shiver became a small head shake. ‘Pathetic…’ she whispered, then realized Pryn and Ini were watching. ‘…she and I? And the two of you…so ignorant!’ She turned in a swirl of blue to reenter the garden.

  Pryn was surprised to be included in such an epithet, however restrained; the beginnings of anger snarled with the beginnings of embarrassment. Her cheeks heated.

  Another laugh from Ini brought Pryn’s eyes back from the empty doorway. She blinked.

  Ini rolled off the cushions and stood, adjusting straps and buckles on her complex body harness. ‘I like you, little girl,’ she said suddenly, without looking at Pryn.

  Pryn blinked again.

  Ini pulled one strap down over her shoulder and let the buckle tongue slip into a hole two notches further on. ‘That’s lucky for you—because if I didn’t…’ She made a terrible face.

  Pryn actually took a step back—

  —And realized Ini’s grimace was at the strap’s tightness.

  ‘I don’t like killing women as a rule.’ Another tongue slid into another hole. ‘I much prefer men. I don’t understand men. And I don’t like them. They’re much more complacent about misunderstandings. And that’s why.’ She looked up again, deep-socketed eyes showing white above and below the gray irises. ‘There, is that what you wanted to know? Everybody else does—you too.’

  ‘I don’t want to know such things!’ Pryn declared. On top of the moment with Madame Keyne and her secretary, such a statement seemed the purest and most unrelated madness; and she was a bit frightened by this creature. ‘No, I don’t—’

  ‘Now there,’ Ini said. ‘Even though I know you’re lying, I understand everything going on inside you: the fear, the curiosity, the fact that the fear happens, right now, to be greater. If a man were standing where you happen to be—just as afraid as you—he would say, “How interesting!” Or perhaps he would smile and try to agree with me as far as he could, or maybe he would try to change my mind—explain to me that I was illogical, or ill, or evil. Those kind of lies I don’t understand at all. That’s why I don’t want a man standing where you are.’ Her eyes had gone back to the buckles; she finished the last strap and looked up with a faintly puzzled frown. ‘That’s why I stay here. That’s why I’d kill him.’

  Had she been threatened herself, Pryn would probably not have felt nearly as agitated. This odd safety she had been granted, however, was absolutely uncomfortable. Logic and reason were what were needed, and logic and reason seemed precisely what was here being attacked in favor of a kind of honesty that, at this moment, Pryn did not understand in the least. What calm there had been to the mo
rning had, in these last minutes, vanished.

  Just beside the doorway through which the secretary had gone were the stairs that led up to the room Pryn had slept in last night and had woken in that morning. She hurried across to them and started up.

  ‘At least in this house—’

  Pryn glanced back down. The Ini had fallen to readjusting all the straps and buckles to entirely different tensions.

  ‘—there’s less chance that a man would be standing where you are.’ Then she called: ‘You and I, we’re in the same position here, now!’

  Pryn hurried on. She had no notion what the Ini might mean, but the thought of any similarity, known or unknown, with the little murderess made Pryn as frightened as she ever wanted to be. Terror was only a step away.

  A balcony, its heavy newels carved into lions, snakes, bulls, and birds, ran along two walls of the court. Off this balcony were the rooms.

  Pryn had left the plank door to her own wide open when, that morning, she’d gone down to wander the garden.

  It still stood gaping.

  She rushed inside and closed it loudly.

  In the midst of her remarkable adventures, Pryn had woken here not an hour ago and seen nothing remarkable about it. Returning now, however, she saw the entire chamber—its plaster walls, fallen away from the stone in one corner, its rough wooden bed, heaped at the foot with an embroidered quilt worked with golds, reds, and blues, its intricate washstand holding an unglazed bowl with a cracked side—as marked with contradictions, contradictions within which she could read of all that was ominous without, as clearly as if warnings had been scratched across the pale designs on the painted plaster between the ceiling beams or inked over the waxed red floor tiles.

  Some chairs stood along one wall, a few piled one on another. Was this some kind of balcony storeroom in which she’d been housed? Well, it wasn’t a dungeon. All the dungeons Pryn had ever heard of were in basements, not on balconies.

  How to get out? Simply walking through the door again seemed impossible, and the window, from which she could see the garden, was too high to jump.