Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities

  Or was it different?

  What she and her cousin had done had been interesting enough. But there had been a side to it that had bothered her—though whether that bother had been physical, emotional, or social, at nine she’d been unable to tease out. Irked by the knottiness of it all, she had, at nine, put those odd, if in themselves oddly pleasant, acts out of memory—though precisely that distress, she could now admit, had made her, as it lingered, tease Fetija so unmercifully till Janina’s punch in the shoulder had stopped it.

  Well, Pryn thought, she was fifteen now and too old to be a tease; besides, she was too curious about what was happening in this strange garden—though once more she found her thoughts drifting toward the notion of putting the obstreperous physicality of it all out of current thought. It made it easier, somehow, to deal with.

  While she frowned and wandered beneath shadowy trees, it suddenly struck her that—Jade, Madame Keyne, Ini, and her sore side notwithstanding—she actually felt about as fine as clear air and carefully tended gardens could make one.

  She stepped across the red brick path, between dark pines, by clustered palms with shaggy scales, beside bushes of red lilies with yellow hearts. She passed a fanged and winged monster, carved in obsidian, dangling a dozen breasts like some aged bitch: for all her fierce face, she looked quite benign. The flowers carpeting about her claws made her the more motherly while her glistening blackness made their violet the more intense.

  Pryn walked onto a stone-sided bridge crossing the stream below a waterfall.

  Four fountains, one at each corner of the bridge, sprayed out into the stream.

  As she reached the bridge’s middle, Pryn looked up at the cascades. Jutting from the water’s streaming face, rocks dangled foamy beards. Some were tipped with moss. Others dripped with grasses. Some of the rocks, she realized, were not natural but carved: the head and tail of a stone fish curved from the water, three feet of falls between them; a stone dolphin arched out near the top. Toward the bottom a great cuttlefish flung stone tentacles from the spume, the whole a living moment rigid in the midst of the unstoppable, inanimate rush.

  Then one fountain’s spray faltered, weakened, became a dribble over its stone lip. Pryn was about to walk over and examine it when she heard, then saw, coming around the curving path ahead, an elderly man with curly white hair thick over chest and belly.

  His brown head was bald.

  Trundling a barrow filled with rakes, hoes, and shovels, he wore around his neck a scarf the same red as the one the cook had worn around her head, or Jade had worn at her waist. He wheeled his barrow straight up to the malfunctioning fountain, set it down, grasped the fountain head—a carved stone shell—and twisted, left, then right. With a great crunch, it came off.

  What had been a defective spray became a defective spill.

  The man put the fountain head on the bridge’s planks. Rummaging in his barrow, he pulled out a stick with a hook at one end. He shoved the hook into the hole from which the water wobbled, prodding about to dislodge any obstruction.

  Pryn stepped nearer to see.

  The man glanced at her. ‘Morning.’ He prodded and turned.

  Pryn smiled. ‘If this Liberator is making your helpers leave,’ she commented, ‘it doesn’t seem to be stopping new helpers from applying for their jobs.’

  The man grunted. ‘A different breed.’

  ‘You don’t think the new people will be as good as the ones who left?’

  ‘Better or worse, I can’t say.’ He pulled the stick free and examined the end. ‘Just different.’

  There was nothing on the hook.

  Nor was the water flow any stronger.

  He thrust the stick back in the spigot and poked some more, both arms wet to hairy shoulders.

  Pryn walked on over the bridge.

  The path took her up—but on a rise different from the one she’d climbed that morning with Madame Keyne. She climbed by hanging banks of fuchsia and honeysuckle; the path moved away from the falls, then back, became a flight of red brick steps between wooden rails beside the splashing water, then became a path again. At last Pryn came to a level stretch, to look across the fall’s rock-punctuated rim. The stream that fed it rushed beside the continuation of the brick. On the other side of the water were high, dank shrubs. Ahead, on her own side of the stream, Pryn saw four brick-edged tributaries leading away into four brick-ringed pools, each pool about five feet in diameter, one set just beyond the other.

  By the far pool, the Wild Ini squatted. With a length of branch, she jammed and prodded something in the pool’s bottom.

  Ini had taken a wooden grate out of the water. It lay by her knee in the wet grass.

  As Pryn’s skirt brushed a bush, Ini looked up, startled. ‘She wanted me to wear the scarf!’ the pale-haired girl hissed. Imagine! She said because I could be one of her employees now, that I should wear her damned red scarf!’ Ini jammed the branch in again. She picked up a handful of leaves and pebbles she had gathered in a pile beside her, pulled the branch out of the water with one hand, thrust the leaves and pebbles in with the other, then fell again to packing and prodding them down into whatever conduit the grate had covered. ‘Me? Ha! That’s where her scarf is now!’

  Pryn had flinched at Ini’s first look; surprise had left her heart pounding. As her heart stilled, it occurred to her that somehow, among all the last days’ frightening experiences, fear itself had somehow become…less fearful. She stood by the pool, watching, not unafraid, but not bothered so much by it.

  The muscles in the Ini’s shoulders knotted and flexed. Her breath came in small gasps. Suddenly she stood and flung the dripping branch down on top of the grate. Somewhere the gardener’s barrow was crunching up a brick slope. Ini blinked at Pryn, then put her wet, dirty hands on Pryn’s arms. ‘We better get out of here before Clyton sees us!’ Her whisper was absolutely frantic.

  Pryn followed Ini off around the pool and behind the trees, brushing leaf-bits, dirt, and droplets from her arms where Ini had touched her and marveling that the little murderess had not bothered to return the grate to the bottom of the pool or to scatter her pile of leaves and pebbles, or even to dispose of her branch—yet at the same time seemed so frightened of discovery.

  Pryn walked beside striding Ini.

  As they came around another bank of flowers, Ini suddenly asked: ‘Do you like this garden?’

  ‘Yes. Very much.’ Pryn’s curiosity at why Ini had asked raised the inflection on her final word.

  Ini snatched a blue blossom from a bush. ‘So do I. It’s beautiful, wild, surprising at all turns. I think that’s why I like to walk around in it. It reminds me of a forest, but with even more color and confusion crammed in.’ Ini did not look at the flower she’d picked. As she walked, she mashed it in her fingers, so that bits of blue petal fell to the brick.

  ‘Have you ever thought,’ Pryn offered, as they turned down another path that took them toward the rock wall, ‘how a garden is like a map of the forests outside it? You can’t read distances and directions on it of course. But the various flowers and trees, arranged so carefully here, are, each of them, like samples of what you can find out in the wild—’

  Ini’s sharp, high laugh cut Pryn off. ‘This garden? A map? What nonsense! This wall, with which that silly old woman, who wants me to wear her silly red scarf, tries to separate her garden from the wildness outside, so that she can pretend there’s order here—do you think it works? Do the people and passions you see inside these walls speak of an ordered household?’ Ini laughed again and flung down the mashed bud. ‘No, it’s all wild! Her mistake is to think that by something as simple as a wall—’ Still walking, she struck the stone beside her with the flat of her hand, hard enough to make Pryn wince—‘she can keep the wildness out!’ Ini grinned. ‘But the very fact that the trees and shrubs and rocks and water and air and the people breathing it are here means that the wildness is in already. And the wall is not all solid, either. There’s an arch
built over the place where the stream comes in for the waterfall. There’re bars along the arch through which the water flows. The bars go down into the water—to keep people out. But I dove down there once. Just below the surface, two of them have rusted away, and anyone could swim through. And down at the other end, at the corner, where the gardener almost never goes because it’s grown up too thick to wheel a barrow, five or six stones have come loose to make a hole that anyone could crawl, from the Liberator’s garden right into ours—though over there at the Liberator’s house nobody ever goes into the garden. I know, because I’ve gone exploring in there, lots of times!’

  ‘You have?’ Pryn asked, impressed. She thought to recount her own adventures with the Liberator. But a second thought decided her to remain as ordinary seeming as possible in the eyes of this most extraordinary young woman. ‘You’re very brave,’ Pryn said, recalling how quickly they’d fled the gardener.

  ‘Yes,’ Ini said. I’m not afraid of anything. Especially the Liberator. Or whatever’s over there. In his garden. I just go over there and walk around in it! All the time. Just like I lived there! And nobody does a thing to me—they wouldn’t dare!’

  Which was when Pryn realized the little murderess’s face practically glittered with fear—and that she was obviously and luminously lying!

  ‘Where are you from?’ Pryn asked.

  ‘What do you want to know for?’

  Pryn shrugged. ‘Because you’re interesting. And I like you.’

  ‘You do?’ Ini grinned at her. (Pryn immediately wondered if, indeed, she did. But she smiled back.) ‘I came from a little farming province. But I got taken by slavers and sold in the desert—do you know what they do with slaves in the desert?’

  ‘No,’ Pryn said to Ini’s eager grin. ‘What?’

  Pryn thought Ini was about to tell her.

  But something happened in the Ini’s face—as though the mind behind it had moved on to some memory that turned the features bitter, then angry. ‘What a stupid question!’ Ini looked away. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  Pryn thought for a moment. ‘Did you escape?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you kill a lot of people when you escaped?’

  Ini looked at her feet as they walked. ‘No. Not when I escaped.’

  ‘After you escaped?’

  ‘No.’ Ini still looked down. ‘Before.’

  ‘You killed people when you were still a slave?’ Pryn was confused. ‘Who did you kill?’

  ‘Other slaves.’ Ini looked up at Pryn with the same startled expression as when she’d first looked up from the pool. ‘It was my job! That’s why I did it! Otherwise they would have killed me—why did you think I did it!’ She turned away sharply and stepped ahead of Pryn. Once she glanced back. ‘You think this garden is like the forest? It is no more like the forests outside it than that—’ She stopped, suddenly, to point to a green leaf caught on the rough bark of a tree-trunk beside the path—‘is like that!’ Her finger moved to indicate another green leaf, among a cluster of leaves, at the tip of a low twig.

  ‘But…’ Stepping up to the trunk, Pryn frowned. ‘But those two leaves are as alike as leaves can be, aren’t they?’

  ‘You think so?’ Ini grinned, suddenly and hugely.

  Pryn bent closer, wondering if this were a joke, or perhaps more of the strange perception that allowed someone to be an Ini. The single leaf stuck to the trunk and the riot of leaves on the branches about them seemed, in themselves, a fine map of the relation between the garden and the greater wilderness around.

  Then, though there was no breeze, the leaf on the bark fluttered. It split down its central vein, revealing an insect body.

  Beating green wings, the moth fluttered from the trunk a few inches, then landed again to compose itself once more into a ‘leaf.’

  Pryn looked at Ini, who seemed again as angry as she’d ever been.

  ‘You see? They’re not the same at all! And I thought you said they were! The similarity is all illusion, a bit of chance—oh, yes, all very well for the moth. But all the illusion does is distract us from the difference! And once you see the differences between them…?’ Ini’s hand, still wet from the pool and dirty, smacked the trunk over the moth as hard as she had struck the wall. ‘Then you can control them—’ She ground her palm, first one way, then back, while, with her other hand, she plucked the leaf from the twig, crushing it—‘both.’

  Her hands fell from the tree.

  The twig was bare.

  On the trunk were a few green bits over a spot slightly darker than the bark around it.

  Ini turned away, grinning again, and started down the red brick steps.

  Pryn hurried behind her.

  The path took them around and down, till they came out between high hedges. Ahead was the little bridge with the four fountains at its corners.

  Madame Keyne walked across it toward them.

  Ini slowed. Pryn caught up with her, slowing too. She wondered what she or Ini would say. Madame Keyne smiled.

  Then they heard the trundling barrow.

  The gardener rolled his tools from another small path. ‘Morning, ma’am.’ He nodded toward Madame Keyne, set his barrow down, and stood.

  ‘Good morning, Clyton,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘You’ve done a fine job with the irises, I see. Such things don’t go unnoticed. Gya has a new assistant waiting for you down at the kitchen. His name is Samo. Things should be back to normal for you—and the rest of us!—once he learns his chores.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’ Bending to rummage through his tools. Clyton pulled loose some piece of wet, wadded, and torn material and turned to the Ini. ‘This yours?’

  ‘That?’ asked the pale-haired young woman.

  Pryn looked from Ini to Clyton to Madame Keyne. The older woman’s brows were raised in the shadow of a question, with, about them as well, the shadow of amusement.

  The gardener held out the ruined, red scarf.

  Ini’s pale eyes were wide, her lips tight. Suddenly she announced: ‘Yes! I think it is mine!’ She stepped forward and took the dripping cloth from the hairy fingers. ‘It must have fallen off into the water when I was exploring the upper stream this morning!’

  The waterfall plashed and cascaded over the stone beasts.

  At either side of the bridge, the four fountains sprayed their even and orderly waters.

  Ini took the ends of the scarf and stretched it out. Wrinkled and ripped, it was still spotted with bits of gravel and leaf from where it had been wadded into the conduit. She raised it, put it behind her neck, brought the ends before her, and knotted it about her throat—as Clyton wore his.

  Then she let her unsettling laugh.

  ‘Well,’ said Madame Keyne. ‘A bit the worse for wear. Still, I’m glad to see you’ve decided to join us. But Pryn—’ (Pryn wondered if Ini were what Clyton had meant by a new breed of servant.)—I was actually looking for you. I’m going into town, down to the New Market. I’d like you to accompany me, if you would…?’

  ‘Yes, Madame.’ Pryn glanced at Ini, who simply stood, watching Clyton pick up the handles of his barrow, to trundle off on another path.

  Madame Keyne turned back across the bridge. Pryn left Ini to hurry after; she caught up with her at the bridge’s far end.

  As they walked along the shrub- and flower-banked path, Pryn imagined Ini following, no more than six steps back—possibly with knife out…

  Pryn looked sharply around.

  The path behind was empty.

  Sighing, Pryn turned back—to see that Madame Keyne was watching her with that same expression of curiosity and amusement. Pryn felt her own face move toward an uncomfortable frown. ‘Madame Keyne, don’t you think that young woman is…strange?’

  ‘Strange?’ Madame Keyne answered. ‘I think she’s quite mad.’

  ‘And do you believe she just—dropped her scarf? In the water, I mean. By accident?’

  ‘Of course she didn’t!’ Madame Keyne ch
uckled. ‘But then, I wouldn’t want to wear it either.’ She chuckled again, more softly. ‘When I was a girl, a young noblewoman came to stay with my family, here at the house—this was before the Child Empress began her joyous and generous reign, so you know how long ago that must have been. The High Court was still under the rule of the Dragon, and the Child Empress herself was still incarcerated somewhere off in the south; and all Kolhari was supposed to be called Neveryóna—though no one ever did. The young noblewoman was ever so much more highly born than we were—once or twice removed, she was a second or third cousin to the Empress herself. She had suffered some terrible ordeal in the south that I didn’t understand and nobody was supposed to mention, and she was being returned to her uncle in the east. While she was passing through Kolhari, we were honored with her presence—because whatever had happened to her meant she couldn’t stay with her relatives over there, on the other side of the wall. At any rate, all her servants—and she came with ever so many—wore red scarfs. I thought it was very elegant, and I resolved that when I grew up and had servants of my own, I would have them wear the same.’ A third time she chuckled, though now there was no voice to it at all. ‘And I have!’ Madame Keyne took Pryn’s arm. ‘The young noblewoman later became the Empress’s vizerine. And of course, at this point she is no more a young woman than I—though when she was our houseguest, the six or seven years that she had on me seemed like all the time in the world. Still, can you imagine a spirited child like our Ini submitting to such a silly, jealousy-founded, and capricious whim from someone like me? Really, I’d think much less of her if she didn’t balk a bit. She has spirit. And I like that.’

  ‘You’re not afraid of her?’