Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities Read online

  Dragons sometimes stood like that a long time.

  ‘You’re not one of the regular dragon grooms—the little girls they keep in the corrals above Ellamon…?’

  The ox tore up more rockweed.

  The girl shook her head. ‘But I live in Ellamon—just outside Ellamon, actually. With my great-aunt. I’ve seen them, though, flying their dragons with their trainers and guards for the tourists who go out to the hill to watch. They’re all bad girls, you know. Girls who’ve struck their mothers or disobeyed their fathers, stolen things, sometimes even killed people. They’ve been brought from all over Nevèrÿon—’

  ‘…adventures, warriors,’ Norema suggested, ‘thieves?’

  The girl looked at the ground, turning her bare foot on sand. ‘You’re a foreigner. You probably don’t know much about dragons, or the bad girls who ride them.’

  ‘Oh,’ Norema said, ‘one hears fables. Also, I’ve been through this strange and…well, this strange land before. What were you doing on that dragon?’

  ‘Flying,’ pryn answered, then wondered if that sounded disingenuous. She bent to brush a dusty hand against a dusty knee. ‘It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. And I’m growing—everyone always tells me how much I’m growing. So I thought: soon I shall be too tall or too fat. I’d better do it now. The girls they use for riders up in the dragon corrals are half starved anyway, till they’re thin as twigs. They’re all twelve and thirteen years old—forever, it seems like.’ She smoothed her overblouse down her waistless stomach. ‘I’m short. But I’m not thin.’

  ‘True,’ Norema said, ‘you’re not. But you look strong. And I like your laugh.’

  ‘I don’t know how strong I am either,’ pryn said, ‘but I caught a wild dragon, bridled her, and led her to a ledge.’

  ‘That seems strong enough.’

  ‘You’ve been here before…?’ It sounded more suspicious than pryn meant. But suspicion was a habit of tongue picked up from her aunt more than a habit of mind; and, anyway, her laugh belied it. ‘What are you doing here now?’

  ‘Looking for a friend,’ Norema said. ‘A friend of mine. Years ago she used to be a guard at the dragon corrals and told me all about those…bad girls. My friend wore blue stone beads in her hair and a black rag mask across her eyes; and she killed with a double-bladed sword. We were companions and traveled together several years.’

  ‘What happened to her?’ pryn asked.

  ‘Oh,’ Norema said. ‘I told her tales—long, marvelous, fascinating tales. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if they were tales told to me when I was a child, or tales I’d made up. I told her tales, and after a while my masked friend grew more interested in the tales than she was in me. One night, sitting on her side of the campfire, cleaning her double blade, she told me she was going off the next morning to see if one particular tale I told were true. The next day when I woke, she and her bedroll were gone—along with her double-bladed sword. Nor was I worried. We were the kind of friends who frequently went separate ways—for days, even weeks. But weeks became months; and I did not run across my friend’s campfire on the rim of the Menyat canyon, nor did I hear any word of her tramping along the northernmost Faltha escarpments, nor did I meet her taking shade in one of the Makalata caves at the rim of the western desert, nor did I hear rumor of her lean-to set up a mile further down the beach at Sarness.’

  Squatting, pryn picked up a stick. ‘So what did you do?’ She scratched at spilled ash.

  ‘I decided to take my cart and go look for her. I’ve looked many places; no doubt I’ll look many more. But I’ve come to Ellamon because my friend once worked here and was happy.’

  ‘Mmm,’ pryn said, suspiciously.

  The woman looked down to see what pryn had been scratching. ‘“Pyre,”’ she read. ‘“Ynn.” Pyre-ynn?’

  ‘“…pryn”,’ pryn said. ‘That is my name. In writing.’

  The woman stepped around the figures and squatted too. ‘Here.’ She took the stick and added a line above the two syllabics the girl had etched in ash. ‘You, “pryn”. That’s your name. In writing. That line there means you squish the two sounds together into one. Otherwise you’ll have people mispronouncing it every which way.’

  In late sunlight pryn squinted at the woman. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Actually—’ the woman looked back at pryn with a moment’s uncertainty—‘because I invented it.’

  The girl frowned. ‘Invented what?’

  ‘Writing. A long time ago. I must have been about your age—now I don’t mean I invented every kind of writing. I just added the idea of making written signs stand for particular words, so you could say them. Till then, you know, written signs stood for animals, foods, amounts, tasks, instructions, ideas, even people, even kinds of people—whole complexes of notions. But written words—that’s my innovation.’

  ‘You did that?’ The girl blinked.

  The woman nodded. ‘When I was a girl. I lived on an island—that’s where I invented my system. I taught it to my island friends, many of whom were fishers and sailors. Years later, when I came to Nevèrÿon, I found my writing system had preceded me. With changes, of course. But most of the signs were quite recognizably the ones I had made up when I was a child.’

  ‘Everyone says this kind of writing came across the sea from the Ulvayns.’ Looking at the tall, middle-aged woman, pryn thought of her own, short, bitter aunt. ‘You invented…my name?’

  ‘Only the way to write it. Believe me, it comes in very handy if you’re a tale-teller. But you know—‘The woman was apparently not as comfortable squatting as pryn, so she put one leather legging’s knee on the ground. She scratched the name again, this time above what pryn had written.’—I’ve made some changes in my system. About names, for instance. Today I always write a name with a slightly larger version of the initial sign; and I put a little squiggle down under it, like that—‘She added another scratch. ‘That way, if I’m reading it aloud, I can always glance ahead and see a name coming. You speak names differently from the way you speak other words. You mean them differently, too. The size of the initial sign stands for the way you speak it. The squiggle stands for what names mean that’s different. So everything is indicated. These days, you have to indicate everything, or nobody understands.’

  The girl looked down at her name’s new version, below and above the old one she herself had glyphed.

  ‘Really, it’s quite useful,’ Norema went on. ‘My friend, for example, was called Raven. Now there are ravens that caw and fly—much more efficiently than dragons. And there’s my friend, Raven. Since she left, I find that now, more and more, both will enter my stories. The distinction marks a certain convenience, a sort of stability. Besides, I like distinguishing people from things in and of the land. It makes tale-telling make a lot more sense.’

  The girl grinned at the woman. ‘I like that!’ She took the stick and traced the syllabics, first the larger with the mark beneath, then the smaller, and last the eliding diacritic.

  She read it.

  Then Pryn laughed again.

  It was much the same laugh she had laughed when she’d dismounted; but it sounded richer—to Pryn, at any rate. Indeed, it sounded almost as rich and wild to Pryn as it had before to Norema—almost as though the mountain, with its foaming falls and piled needles and scattered shale chips (all named ‘Pryn’ by the signs now inscribed thrice on its ashy surface, twice with capitals, enclosing the minuscule version), had itself laughed.

  And that is my name, Pryn thought. ‘What tales did you tell?’

  ‘Would you like to hear one?’

  ‘Yes,’ Pryn said.

  ‘Well, then sit here. Oh, don’t worry. It won’t be that long.’

  Pryn, feeling very differently about herself, sat.

  Norema, who had taken the stick, stood, stepped from the fireplace, turned her back, and lowered her head, as though listening to leaves and dragon’s breath and her ox’s chewing and some stream’s plashing just
beyond the brush, as though they all were whispering to the tale-teller the story she was about to tell. Pryn listened too. Then Norema turned and announced, ‘Once upon a time…’ or its equivalent in that long-ago distant language. And Pryn jumped: the words interrupted that unheard flow of natural speech as sharply as a written sign found on a stretch of dust till then marred only by wind and rolling pebbles.

  ‘Once upon a time there was a beautiful young queen—just about your age. Your height, too. And your size.’

  ‘People say I’m clever, that I’m young, and that I’m growing,’ Pryn said. ‘They don’t say I’m beautiful.’

  ‘At this particular time,’ Norema explained, ‘young queens who looked like you were all thought to be ravishing. Standards of beauty change. And this happened many years back. Once upon—’

  ‘Was your friend my age?’

  Norema chuckled. ‘No. She was closer to my age. But it’s part of the story, you see, to say the queen was the age of the hearer. Believe me, I told it the same way to my friend.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Once upon a time there was a beautiful queen, about your age and your size. Her name was Olin, and she was queen of all Nevèrÿon—at least she was supposed to be. Her empire extended from the desert to the mountains, from the jungles to the sea. Unfortunately, however, she had an unhappy childhood. Some evil priests shut Olin, her family, and her twenty-three servants in an old monastery on the Garth peninsula, practically from the time she was born until she was, well…’ The woman questioned Pryn with narrowed eyes. ‘Fifteen?’

  Pryn nodded.

  ‘When she was fifteen years old, for arcane political reasons, the evil priests decided to kill her outright. But they were afraid to do it themselves—for more political reasons, equally arcane. They couldn’t get any of her family to do it, so they tried to hire her own servants, one after the other, all twenty-three. But the first servant was the queen’s own nurse, an old woman who loved the girl and came to her young mistress and told her what the priests intended.

  ‘“What shall I do?” the queen cried.

  ‘“You can be afraid,” said the old servant. “But don’t be terrified. That’s first. You see, I have a plan, though it’s a sad and sorrowful one. I’ve made a bargain with the priests, which they’ll respect because they think me a great magician. I’ve told them I will betray you if they will pay me one gold piece. And I have also made them promise that if I fail, they will hire the next servant to do the same deed for two gold pieces—twice what they have paid me. And if that servant fails, they will hire the next one to do the deed for four gold pieces, twice again the amount paid the former. And if he fails, the next will be hired for twice the amount paid to the previous one. And so on.” The old woman produced from the folds of her gown a single gold coin—and a knife. “Take my pay and hide it. Then take this knife—and strike me in the heart! For only my death will corroborate my failure.”

  ‘“Kill you?” demanded the queen.

  ‘“It’s the only way.”

  ‘The queen wept and cried and protested. “You are my beloved friend, my faithful bondswoman, and my dear nurse as well. You are closer to me than my own mother!” But the old woman put her arms around the girl and stroked her hair. “Let me explain some of the more arcane politics behind this whole nasty business. These are brutal and barbaric times, and it is either you or I—for even if I do kill you, the wicked priests plan to dispense with me as soon as I stab you. They cannot suffer the murderer of a queen to live, even the murderer of a queen they hate as much as they hate you. If you do what I say, you will have the gold coin as well as your life, whereas I shall lose my life in any case.”

  ‘And so, after more along the same lines, the queen took the coin, and the knife—which she thrust into her old nurse’s heart.

  ‘Not so many days later, a second servant came to Queen Olin. “Here are two gold coins and a rope with which I am to garrote you. Take the coins and hide them; then take the rope and strangle me—if you yourself would live. For my life is over in any case.” Again the queen protested, but again the servant prevailed. So the young queen took the rope and strangled him. A few days later a third servant came with four gold pieces and a great rock to smash in the queen’s head. After that a fourth came with eight gold pieces and a draught of corrosive poison. The fifth had sixteen gold pieces. The sixth had thirty-two coins. The next—’

  Pryn suddenly laughed. ‘But I’ve heard this story before! Or one just like it—only it was about grains of sand piled on the squares of a gaming board. I don’t remember how many squares there were, but by the end, I remember, all the sand in the world was used up. Am I right about the ending? At the end of the twenty-three servants, she had all the money in the world…?’

  Norema smiled. ‘She certainly had all the money in the monastery. And at that particular time, all the money in the monastery was pretty much all the money in Nevèrÿon.’

  ‘That is an old story. I know, because I’ve heard it before. The version about the sand grains, that is.’

  ‘That part of the story is old. But there are some new parts too. For example, after she had killed all her servants, the beautiful young queen felt very differently about herself.’

  Pryn frowned. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well,’ Norema said, ‘for one thing, in less than a year she had stabbed, strangled, bashed out the brains, poisoned, beheaded, and done even worse to twenty-two of her most faithful bondsmen and bondswomen, who were also the closest things she’d had to friends. After that she began to act very strangely and behave quite oddly. On and off, she behaved oddly the rest of her life—even for a queen. And in those days queens were expected to be eccentric. Often, after that, she was known as Mad Olin.’

  ‘I thought you said there were twenty-three servants.’

  ‘There were. But the last survived. He was not only a servant, but also her maternal uncle—though, alas, I can’t remember his family name. And there’re reasons to remember it, too, but for the life of me I can’t recall what they are. Anyway. Years before, he had fallen on bad times and had indentured himself to the queen’s mother, which was why he was with Olin in the first place. But he had always set himself apart. Along about the queen’s murderings of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first servants—all particularly gruesome—the evil priests were, financially speaking, in rather bad shape. Olin was by then quite well off—though mentally she was a bit shaky. Her maternal uncle, who, like the first servant, was also something of a magician, had, with the help of the rest of the family, managed to engineer an escape for the queen. It took a good deal of the money; and Olin took the rest—to hide lest the wicked priests manage to trick it back, even as her first wise and faithful servant had tricked it from the priests.’ Norema sighed. ‘Raven and I once visited that monastery—it’s still there today. And there are still priests—at least there were when we went. Now, I’m not sure. Anyway, you could certainly tell that the place had seen better times. Clearly they hadn’t gotten their money back.’

  ‘Are the priests still wicked?’

  Reddish brows lowered. ‘Well, I doubt if either my friend or I would ever stop there again—unless we absolutely had to.’

  ‘What about Olin’s escape?’

  ‘Ah, the exciting part!’ Norema said. ‘Her uncle spirited her away from the monastery in the middle of the night, with the money in a caravan of six great wagons, each pulled by six horses. It was a lot of money, you see, and took more than one wagon to carry. Also, there was a lot more than gold coins in it by now—jewels and iron trinkets and all sorts of precious and semi-precious stones. The uncle took her to his family home, there in the south, and that evening he went with her up into a tall tower—at least that’s how one version of the story goes. In another version, he took her up on a high rocky slope—’

  ‘Shouldn’t you choose one or the other for the sake of the telling?’ Pryn asked.

  ‘For the sake of the stor
y,’ Norema answered, ‘I tell both and let my hearer make her choices.’

  ‘Oh,’ Pryn said.

  ‘In the stone chamber at the tower top—or in the rocky cell at the top of the rocky slope—the uncle began to read her the sequence by which the gold coins had come to her: one, two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, one hundred twenty-eight, two hundred fifty-six, five hundred twelve, one thousand twenty-four, two thousand forty-eight, four thousand ninety-six—’

  I see how fast it goes up!’ Pryn exclaimed. ‘That’s just halfway through them, and it’s already almost five thousand gold pieces. Two more, and it’ll be over twenty thousand. Twenty thousand gold pieces must be close to all the money in the world!’

  ‘That’s what you see.’ Norema smiled. ‘What the young queen saw, however, was a city.’

  Pryn blinked.

  Norema said: ‘The queen blinked.’

  ‘What city?’ Pryn asked. ‘Where did she see it?’

  ‘Precisely what the queen wondered too—for she blinked again…It was gone! Through the stone columns at the stone rail, the queen looked down from the tower—or down to the foot of the slope—and saw only some marshy water, an open inlet, rippling out between the hills to the sea. But the queen had seen a city, there among the ripples, as clearly as she now saw the hills on either side of the inlet, or, indeed, as clearly as she saw the swampy growths that splotched the waters where they came in to the land. When she told her uncle what she had seen, immediately he stopped reading the numbers and showed her all sorts of magic wonders, including a circle full of different stars, which he gave her to keep. Then he took her down from the tower—or down from the rocks—to a great dinner that had been prepared for her, where they talked of more magic things. Then he did something terrible.’

  ‘What?’ Pryn asked. ‘So far, this story sounds more confusing than exciting.’

  To the proper hearer,’ Norema said, ‘precisely what seems confusing will be the exciting part. When the queen came back from a stroll in the garden between courses, the uncle gave her a goblet of poison, which she, unknowing, drank.’