Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities

  A baby began to cry, The other woman in the room—the sister? Gutryd?—went to see about it, while Bragan ladled soup, thick as stew, first from one pot, then from another, into one red clay bowl and the next.

  The stuff in the first cauldron was brown and meaty; the stuff in the second, which Bragan spilled on top of it so that the two made ribbons across one another in the bowl, was creamy and dotted with yellow vegetables. Filled with the two of them, the red clay heated Pryn’s palm to burning as she raised the bowl to her mouth—to be struck by a memory out of childhood:

  The gray-veiled woman traveler from the Ellamon market, who wore the wide silver rings, had told her aunt, ‘And their double soups? The glory of southern cookery, I say—though you must know the people to find any. They won’t serve it at the inns.’ And her aunt had said, ‘Chemistry, medicine, alchemy, and the other branches of charlatanry that sap the purse of our Suzerain today at the wheedling of clever men, they’re all forms of the woman’s science of cuisine—especially that part of it concerned with midwifery. Belham told me that. Do you know of Belham, the barbarian inventor from the south? He stayed here in fabled Ellamon—oh, it was many, many years back—’

  Kurvan handed Pryn a piece of bread, burned in spots on the crust but with (as she took the third bite, she realized) dough still raw in it. She ate hungrily, nevertheless, thinking that it was the kind of loaf people had brought back to her cousin in outrage (or begrudging sympathy) during the first months of his bakery. With it she shoveled soup into her mouth.

  The soup was wonderful!

  ‘That woman is hungry!’ Holding his own bowl, Kurvan squatted down in a clear spot on the floor mat. ‘She’ll have a fat and healthy youngster, with good bones and a worker’s back, if she eats that way.’

  ‘You should have a job, Kurvan,’ Gutryd said sitting on the bench next to Tratsin, who was almost finished with his bowl. ‘Three weeks without work? Bragan’s right. It isn’t good for you or your family.’ She reached down for the loaf leaning against the baby’s basket. ‘You want to be able to marry and have a fine family of healthy children now, like Tratsin and Bragan, don’t you?’

  To wake with straw tickling her cheek and ankle and the smell of damp thatch and babies and last night’s cooking, the pallet below the straw hard under one shoulder and water dripping somewhere from the torrents that had poured loud enough to wake her just before sunrise (Pryn did not open her eyes), was to realize that, before she’d started these adventurings, she’d spent most of her life in such a shack. It was to realize that whenever these adventurings were through, no matter how far away they deposited her, unless life for her went very differently from what she or anyone else might expect, she was likely to spend most of her life to come in such a shack—however better insulated she might make it.

  A clay top moved on a clay jar. A woman whispered. A man’s bare feet crunched the floor mats. He said, answering a question Pryn hadn’t heard: ‘Well, it was time to get up. Who sleeps when there’s work to do?’

  Pryn rolled over, stretched her feet onto the floor, rubbing her hands’ heels on her eyes.

  The woman spoke now. ‘I just thought they might like to sleep a little more, that’s all. Especially the girl you brought in last night, since she’s…you know.’

  Pryn let her hands stay over her eyes.

  ‘Sleep instead of work?’ The man laughed. ‘Now, who would want to do that—except, well, let’s see…a few I could name!’ His next laugh was louder. ‘Besides, the girl’s not sick. She’s only having a baby! You get her to help you with the chores. See, she’s awake at least. Not like this other lazy good-for-nothing.’

  Fingering the corners of her eyes, Pryn looked up.

  Squatting naked, with her knees wide and her great belly between them, Bragan was doing something at the fire.

  Tratsin was bending over her with his hand on her shoulder, the sides of his narrow buttocks hollow, the ligaments standing out at the backs of his hairy knees. ‘Now don’t be afraid to ask her to help you. She’s a good girl—like you!’

  At which point a baby cried.

  Like a man reminded of a pressing duty, Tratsin lunged for his loin-rag, winding it about his hips, tucking it in on itself here and there, getting it between his legs, while making for the door. Bragan got even busier poking up the coals under the pot and blowing them to brightness.

  The cry ran out of breath; in the pause, Pryn pictured the tiny chest filling itself mightily. She looked around, thinking to go to the baby herself. But Gutryd came in through the back door-hanging. The brush of hemlock twigs on the bottom to keep out insects swung in over the mat. Gutryd’s dress was bunched down around her waist, and her hair was wet. She seized the child’s basket up from the corner, to shake it back and forth. The next cry was notably quieter, with, somewhere in it, a movement toward relief.

  At the fire Bragan said: ‘Gutryd, get her! Please!’

  ‘There, there!’ Gutryd said, though whether it was to child or adults, Pryn was not sure. ‘I have her! I have her!’

  Pryn stood up on the rush mats and started forward to volunteer her help to Bragan—as the toddler toddled before her. Pryn stepped wide; her foot landed on the corner of a blanket, largely wrapped around large Kurvan. Broad, cracked feet stuck from the blanket’s end, confirming what last night Pryn had only suspected: she’d been given the pallet Kurvan usually slept on when he stayed over.

  Then, for some reason known only to those under three, the crawling girl sat back on her haunches, twisted up her face, and let a wail that carried within its knife-tones the anguish of a god before a clumsy, foolish, ill-made, skilless, cracked, and useless world. The pain at that cry’s core seemed something that might be looked away from, more likely suppressed, but that could never be assuaged.

  ‘Oh, little one,’ Kurvan said from under his blanket, ‘do shut up!’ He rolled away, tugging more blanket over his black, bushy head.

  As the blanket corner pulled from under her heel, Pryn took another ungainly step to avoid the baby’s hand and Kurvan’s feet. At which point Kurvan rolled back, thrust his naked arms out, seized the wailing child, and pulled her to him with all the compassion of a man who’d spent a lifetime in such world-sorrow as she now howled of. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, honey!’ He cuddled and rocked with her on the floor, as if he were personally responsible for the profound and universal disorder by which she had just been shattered. ‘I’m sorry!’

  Pryn started toward Bragan, who had suddenly become very involved with the fire, food, and crockery in much the same way she’d increased her involvement in the ashes when the baby had first cried.

  So Pryn veered toward the door, out which Tratsin was leaving.

  She caught the hide hanging as it swung across the doorway. Hemlock leaves, from the branch tied for weight and bugs along its bottom, brushed the door stone.

  She stepped outside.

  Coppery sun burned on wet leaves.

  Other shacks stood near; still others stood across the muddy path down the slope.

  Through the break in the brush the river looked substantially narrower at dawn than it had in evening’s half-dark.

  More shacks sat on the far bank, a few stone huts among them—in short, the farther shore was much like this one. Tratsin stood a little off on some rocks around which the grass had worn away. He scratched at his thinning scalp so that thong and bound hair shook behind his ear.

  Down the slope, someone guffawed in the next cottage. A woman yelled. The other person laughed.

  Hemlock leaves shushed.

  Naked and disheveled, but without the child, Kurvan stepped out.

  Branches dipped slowly across the road, then turned up all their whispering leaves to show gray. The breeze reached a tree near the door.

  Droplets hit Pryn’s cheek.

  And Kurvan said something like, ‘Aargchh…!’ rubbing the splatter from his face and shoulders while Tratsin laughed and pointed. Pryn grinned—as Kurvan’s stubby
genitals contracted within the black hair below the crease under his broad belly. ‘That’s right!’ he announced. ‘Everyone else gets a few drops, but Kurvan gets the soaking!’

  ‘What you’d better get,’ said Tratsin, ‘is a job!’ He laughed again.

  ‘Oh, yes—’ Suddenly Kurvan’s annoyance and brushing turned into a great, open laugh so that his big chest shook. ‘I get the soaking? Well, sometimes I think my job is to give you and your family something to laugh at! Oh, it’s not such a bad vocation. The hours are long. The pay is mostly in kind—’ Here he leaned toward Pryn in a mocking aside—‘though he lets me hit him up for an iron coin or two.’ He dropped his hand to his knee to scratch. ‘But I suppose the work has its higher profits—’

  Which made Tratsin laugh again. ‘You mean all the food we let you eat?’ He turned, shaking his head and smiling. ‘What you don’t understand, Kurvan, is the value of work itself. To do work—of any sort, of any kind, under whatever conditions—is important in itself. A body whole, healthy, and able to toil is the most wonderful and carefully crafted of gifts the nameless gods can give. Work is what makes you human. To do, to make, to change something with your hands—’

  ‘Certainly any slave must feel better for his slaving, eh?’

  ‘Well,’ said Tratsin, ‘that’s what you always say to me when we have this argument. And I will say what I always say back: we have no slaves in Enoch, and because one can work—here—as a free man rather than a slave, we have—here—the final sanding and varnishing on an already beautifully constructed thing: labor itself.’

  Coming up the muddy road, two men carried a wooden bench, one lugging each end. It was very like the bench Pryn had once sat on against the building her first day in the city, or the bench at Madame Keyne’s reproduced in stone at the back of the hut on the rise in her garden, or the one in Tratsin’s hut. Sunlight through the trees splattered and spilled over and off its seat and carved back.

  Running up behind the bench carriers, the knees of his bowed legs knocking forward a leather apron, the leather bib sagging from the strap about his neck, came a third man…

  Man?

  Boy?

  Pryn blinked.

  He was substantially shorter than Pryn, though his face held thirty-five or forty years above that sparse gray beard. His forehead was wider and broader than either Kurvan’s or Tratsin’s. He grabbed up the bench in the middle to help carry. His shoulder was as high as the others’ waists.

  Tratsin said, oddly soft, to Pryn: ‘That’s some of my work there…’

  The dwarf—for it was a dwarf in the leather apron—turned to look over his shoulder up the slope. ‘Hey, Tratsin, come down here and help us carry this back to the shop! That rain last night? They won’t be along the river road to pick this up till evening, now. I don’t want it sitting in that leaky riverside storehouse all day. If it rains again, the roof will cave in on it in that place!’

  ‘Hey, Froc! I haven’t had my breakfast yet!’ Tratsin glanced again at Pryn. ‘And the little man there is my boss—a good boss too.’

  ‘Aw, what’s breakfast to a worker like you? Let your woman bring you an extra apple with dinner. Come on, now! Don’t be like that! We need you!’

  Tratsin chuckled, shaking his head again. ‘Tell Bragan I had to go in early, will you? A worker in Frocsin’s shop sometimes plays the woodpecker—and sometimes the ox. Hey, Bragan…!’

  Inside the hut, the baby cried again.

  ‘You tell her I’m gone!’ Tratsin started down the slope. (Pryn wondered whether the instruction were to Kurvan or to her.) At the bottom he slogged onto the muddy road and grabbed up the bench edge. The dwarf stepped back. ‘There you go—there…! Watch out for it, now!’ They moved on up the road.

  Standing beside Kurvan, Pryn watched them.

  ‘You know’ Kurvan said after a moment, ‘the cut-down one there isn’t Tratsin’s boss.’

  Pryn glanced at him, frowning.

  ‘Froc is just his foreman. Now Frocsin would probably make a better boss than the one he’s got. But he isn’t the boss, much as Trat would like to think so.’

  Pryn looked at Kurvan, questioning.

  Leaves hissed above them. More drops. But Kurvan did not rub or complain.

  ‘The boss’s name is Marg, and he has a belly bigger than mine and less hair than Tratsin’s father, and he lives two villages away. He rides by to check out the workshop on Tuesdays and Fridays, and says along with everyone else what a little jewel he has in Froc—Marg says it and his workers say it too. But Frocsin’s no more the boss of that shop than I am!’

  Pryn wondered at the bushy bearded man’s insistence. ‘Tratsin seems like a happy man,’ she offered idly. ‘And he’s a good man, too.’

  ‘A good man, yes. They don’t make better. But happy?’ Kurvan grunted. ‘Well, he’s happy now. But he wasn’t happy a year ago. And I don’t know how happy he’ll be in another year.’ Suddenly he snorted and rubbed his thumb knuckle hard under his nose, leaving his moustache a black cloud with no shape at all. ‘Myself, I’m a simple man—simpler than Tratsin, I think. I don’t like work. I like play—and I only do the one when there’s no way else to pay for the other. But I can remember what happened yesterday, and I can figure a little of what’s coming tomorrow…And that’s never the way to be happy, is it?’

  ‘What do you think is going to come?’ Pryn asked. ‘For Tratsin? What was it like for him before—last year, I mean?’

  Kurvan shrugged. ‘Most of the men hereabouts aren’t benchmakers, you know.’ He nodded off toward the hills. ‘They work in the quarries up at Low Pass. Like Malot used to do.’

  Another shout came from the cottage across the road; a man stepped out the door, his head bowed between grizzled shoulders. Two workhammers hung from his leather girdle. Seconds later a boy hurried out after him, overtook him, turned back to wave him on—and became a girl! ‘Come on, Father. Run,’ she called. ‘We’re already late!’

  ‘You run,’ the man called back. ‘I’m walking!’

  ‘Now Wujy, there, is a man like me! Me, off to work before I’d had my breakfast?’ Kurvan laughed. ‘But Wujy there’s been sick. Everyone else has been off to the quarry before sun-up—probably in that rain, too. Wujy goes in with his daughter two or three hours late every day. He’s got permission, because of his age and infirmity. The girl picks up chips and gets paid one iron coin for every three days of work she puts in. And they let Wujy come in when he can and work as long or as short as he wants—Tratsin says it’s humane and just. Myself, I call it murder.’

  Pryn frowned.

  ‘You get paid by the weight of rock you dig out. If a man is too sick to dig any more than a green boy can be expected to come up with on his first week at the job when he’s still learning how to swing his hammer, then it’s a green boy’s wage he gets. Even if he’s an old man sick to death.’

  ‘In the city—’ Pryn remembered Madame Keyne’s concern for the injured digger—‘I met someone who was supposed to be a—’ She began to say ‘a Liberator.’ But then, the Liberator was only interested in slaves…

  ‘You get paid by the load unless you’re part of the scaffolding crew. Then, as Tratsin used to joke when he was a young scaffolder, you don’t get paid at all! The scaffolders put up the wooden walkways and platforms against the rock faces for high work. Oh, they get a steady wage—but it’s lower than the pickers’. And we haven’t gone a year without one or another eighteen- or nineteen-year-old wood roper falling to his death. Till a year ago, Tratsin swung up and down the rock face putting up scaffolds. I was his friend, and I knew he hated the work, was frightened of it, and was scared to make any moves in life because of it.’ Kurvan humphed. ‘Ask him, and he’ll say, “It taught me the basics of woodworking—without which I couldn’t do the job I do now.”’ He rubbed his bushy chin. ‘Tratsin has the fine job he has now because a fat old tile-layer had a cousin who was a master woodworker who knew some wealthy families who were building new
homes and who had taken a liking for a kind of bench they usually build further north. Marg said: “Why not build them here?” and he had enough initiative to get his cousin and half a dozen carpenters—most of them, I might add, like Tratsin, out-of-work scaffolders—and an old grain storehouse and an industrious dwarf, and put them all together just on the other side of the bridge. And behold, a business!’ Kurvan shook his head again. ‘And a happy Tratsin, for whom the only value in life is labor: profitable, satisfying, challenging—till all the orders are filled. And they will be filled, you know, inside a year. Tratsin, with another couple of squalling babies and maybe even a second wife, will go back to the quarry. But already his scaffolding skills have been refined into the delicate touch of a master benchmaker. But he will no longer be able to live on scaffolders’ wages. He’ll have to work as a common digger. His skills will turn rotten in his hands and arms. Oh, he’ll stop talking of labor like some god among gods discoursing on his craft and begin to curse it like a man among men—though he’ll wonder and ponder and fret and try to pretend he’s a god still. For that’s Tratsin. It’s also half the workers in this village. Me, I wonder what Malot’s doing in the city.’

  ‘Malot—?’

  ‘Tratsin’s crazy brother, who ran off from the quarry three weeks ago—always talking about the city—and who, when I’m thinking like this, doesn’t seem so crazy.’ He laughed again. ‘But you were in Kolhari. And all it seems to have given you was a belly that’ll be poking out even beyond mine in a few months, hey?’ He smiled saying it; she knew he meant no harm with it. She felt her cheeks heat anyway. Pryn clamped her teeth and hoped tears wouldn’t come.

  ‘Well, you’re probably better off than Malot. You’re here; we like you. That’s something. Malot’s there—and he hasn’t Tratsin’s brains or skills. Would you rather be a crudestone worker out of a job in the country or the city?’

  Pryn blinked to find her memory flooded with images of the un-hired laborers milling about the New Market.