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

  Walking, turning, walking, she wondered many times if she were on a street she’d walked before. Occasionally she knew she was, but at least five times, now, when she’d set out to rediscover a particular place she’d passed minutes or hours back, it became as impossible to find as if the remembered landmarks had sunk beneath the sea.

  Several workmen with dusty rags around their heads had opened up the street to uncover a great clay trough with planking laid across it, which ran out from under a building where half a dozen women were repairing a wall by daubing mud and straw on the stones with wooden paddles. (Now, she had passed them before…) A naked boy dragged along a wooden sledge heaped with laundry. A girl, easily the boy’s young sister and not wearing much more than he, now and again stooped behind to catch up a shirt or shift that flopped over the edge, or to push the wet clothes back in a pile when a rut shook them awry.

  Pryn found herself behind three women with the light hair of southern barbarians, their long dresses shrugged off their shoulders and bunched down at their waists, each with one hand up to steady a dripping water jar. Two carried them on their heads; one held hers on a shoulder.

  They turned in front of her, on to a street that sloped down from the avenue, and, as the shadow from the building moved a-slant terracotta jugs, thonged-up hair, and sunburned backs, Pryn followed. (No, she had never been on this street…) There were many less people walking these dark cobbles.

  ‘…vevish nivu hrem’m har memish…’ Pryn heard one woman say—or something like it.

  ‘…nivu homyr avra’nos? Cevet aveset…’ the second quipped. Two of the barbarians laughed.

  Pryn had heard the barbarian language before, in the Ellamon market, but knew little of its meaning. Whenever she heard it, she always wondered if she might get one of them to talk slowly enough to write it down, so that she could study it and learn of its barbaric intent.

  ‘…hav nivu akra mik har’vor remvush…’ retorted the second to a line Pryn had lost.

  All three laughed again.

  Two turned down an alley that, Pryn saw as she reached it, was only a shoulder-wide space between red mud walls. With the sun ahead of them, the two swaying silhouettes grew smaller and smaller.

  Ahead, the remaining woman took her jar from her shoulder and pushed through the hanging hide that served for a door in a wood-walled building.

  Pryn walked down the hill. Here, many cobbles were missing; some substance, dark and hard, with small stones stuck all over it, paved a dozen or so feet. A woman overtook her. Pryn turned to watch. The woman wore a dirty skirt, elaborately coiffed hair, and dark paint in two wing shapes around her eyes. It was very striking, the more so because Pryn—looking after her narrow back—had only glimpsed her face. Two boys hurried by on the other side, arms around each other’s shoulders. One had shaved his head completely. Both, Pryn saw, wore the same dark eye-paint—before they, too, became just backs ahead of her.

  Sitting on steps leading up to another street, beggars argued loudly. One was missing an arm and an ear; among them a woman, with a crutch under one shoulder, its splintered end protruding over the stone step’s edge, complained about a jar of wine she had stolen from the dried-up earthworm of an innkeeper. It had been bad, but she had drunk it anyway and gotten sick and lain—sick—in the street three days. The stump of her missing leg was crusted with scab.

  Pryn hurried by.

  On Pryn’s right lay a littered yard between three cracked and yellow buildings. In the middle was a circular stone wall, waist high, long boards over its top. It was about three meters across. Pryn walked up to the enclosure and looked down through the strip of black between the weathered planks. Below, a dark head moved to blot a strip of reflected sky.

  Again she turned down the street.

  Buildings ended; Pryn looked across to an embankment. The bridge entrance had waist-high stone walls either side. A tall woman at the corner newel was fastening a white damasked collar, sewn with metallic threads and set with jewels. It was one of the decorative collar-covers house slaves in wealthier families sometimes used to hide the ugly iron band all slaves wore by law. Having trouble with the clasp, however, the woman removed the cloth to shake it out. Her long neck was bare. She raised the collar-cover again.

  The clasp caught—as halfway over the bridge someone hailed her. Along the bridge’s walkway, in colorful robes and veils (many with painted eyes), young women and men stood, leaned, talked, stared, or ambled slowly.

  The woman with the collar-cover ran to grab the arm of the heavy, hairy man who’d called. He wore a helmet like the ones Pryn had seen outside the Liberator’s headquarters.

  Watching them stroll away, Pryn crossed to the bridge. She reached the post where the woman had stood, put her hand on it, and looked over the stone rail.

  Green water glimmered around moss-blotched rocks, clotted with wood, fruit rinds, broken pottery. Some barbarian children climbed out by the carved stanchion stones. Behind her she heard:

  ‘Twenty!’

  ‘Five—’

  ‘Nineteen!’

  ‘Five!’

  ‘Eighteen?’

  ‘Five, I say!’

  ‘Seventeen!’

  ‘All right, eight!’

  Pryn looked up. Coming forward through the loiterers was a portly, middle-aged man in a smart toga with red ribbon woven about the white sleeves, neck, and hem. His hand held the shoulder of a naked, green-eyed, barbarian boy, a year or so younger than Pryn. The boy was arguing in his odd southern accent and gesticulating with one closed fist and one open hand: ‘You give me sixteen? I go with you and do it for sixteen! All right? You give me sixteen, then!’

  ‘Ten!’

  ‘Sixteen!’

  ‘Ten!’

  ‘Sixteen!’

  ‘Oh, eleven!’

  ‘No, sixteen!’

  ‘Sixteen for a dirty little weasel like you?’ returned the man with a grin. ‘For sixteen, I should have you and your three brothers. I’ll give you twelve!’

  ‘You give me fifteen!’ the barbarian said. ‘You want my brother? Maybe we go find him and he come too. But he don’t do anything, you know? He just watch. For fifteen I go get my brother and—’

  ‘Now what would I want with two of you!’ The man laughed. ‘One of you is bad enough. I’ll take you by yourself, and maybe I’ll give you twelve…’

  A black man in a long skirt led a camel up over the bridge. The high humps, rocking gait, and clopping hooves made the loiterers smile. The creature had just soiled herself and suddenly decided to switch her tail—

  Pryn herself flinched, though no drop struck.

  But the man snatched his hand from the boy’s shoulder and rubbed the flat of his palm, now against his gray beard, now against his splattered shoulder, sucking his teeth and shaking his head.

  The young barbarian cackled. ‘Now who’s dirty, old turd-nose! You smell like camel pee!’ With a disgusted wave he stalked off over the walkway.

  The portly gentleman looked up from his scrubbing, saw the boy leaving, and hurried after. ‘Thirteen! I’ll give you thirteen, but no more!’

  Which halted the boy at the stone rail. ‘Will you give me fourteen? You give me fourteen, and I’ll…’

  Pryn looked over at the water below. Two women, a soldier between, made their way over the rocks. Just before they went under the bridge, the heftier woman, red wooden beads chained through her black braids, began to pull away; the soldier kept pulling her back. Pryn tried to hear their altercation, but though their heads were only fifteen feet below, from the angle and the children’s shoutings echoing beneath, she could not make it out. She leaned, she listened, wondering what she might do if one of them looked up to see their incomprehensible quarrel observed—

  ‘What—!’ came an agitated voice behind her. ‘You again…’

  Pryn stood and turned, slowly so as not to look particularly interested in what might be going on—

  A huge man stood directly behind h
er, heavily veined arms folded high on his stomach. He wore bronze gauntlets, dark with verdigris and busy with relief. On his chest hung a copper chain.

  ‘I saw her first—not you!’ the voice came on—not the giant’s. ‘Get away and leave her, now. She’s not to your taste anyway! Don’t you think all of us around here have seen you enough to know what you’re after?’

  The giant had a scar down one cheek. Rough hair, some salted white, made a thick, clublike braid over one ear—only it had come half undone. Rough hair shook in the breeze.

  Arms still folded, the giant turned his head a little—

  ‘Now go on! Go on, I say! She’s no good to you! The young ones need my guidance if they’re to make a living here.’ The man talking so excitedly stood a few steps off, shaking a finger at the giant. ‘Go on, now! Why do you stay? Go!’

  And Pryn thought: How handsome he is!

  The young man’s eyes, blinking between black lashes, looked startlingly blue. But his skin was as dark as Pryn’s or the giant’s beside her, so that she was not sure, really, if he were barbarian or citizen. He wore only a loincloth, with the thinnest blade at his chain belt. His arms were brown and lithe. ‘You don’t need her!’ he continued his complaint. ‘I do! Come on, now. Give her to me!’ On his extended hand he wore many, many rings, two, three, or more on a finger—even two on his thumb. (The fist by his hip was bare.) Stones and metal flashed in the sun, so that it took Pryn moments to register the hands themselves: the skin was gritty and gray. Below the jeweled freight, his nails, overlong at the ends of long, long fingers, were fouled spikes, as if he’d been down playing like a child in the clotted river’s sludge.

  Arms still folded, the giant turned his head a little more—

  The handsome young man with the beautiful rings and filthy fingers actually jumped. Then he scowled, spat on the flags, turned, and stalked off along the bridge, where a number of loungers and loiterers were still laughing over the camel.

  Pryn looked up as the giant turned back to her. In surprise, she swallowed.

  Around the giant’s tree-trunk of a neck was a hinged iron collar.

  Pryn had always regarded slavers with fear. Perhaps that fear had spread to the notion of slaves themselves. She knew great families sometimes had them. She had seen slaves in the Ellamon market and more recently on the road. But she had never talked to one, nor had she ever heard of anyone who had. To be standing in a strange city, facing one directly—and such a big one! It was quite as frightening as if she were being appraised by a slaver herself!

  ‘What are you doing here, mountain girl?’ the great man asked in a voice that, for all its roughness, bore a city accent.

  ‘Looking…for someone—’ Pryn stammered. It seemed she must answer something. ‘A friend of mine. A woman.’ Later she would think that it was only after she’d started to speak that the image of the tale-teller’s Raven, with her mask and her double blade, leapt into her mind like a protective demon. ‘But she’s not here, and I…’ She looked at the people about the bridge. ‘I was with some men, before; they were looking for someone called the Liberator…a man named Gorgik.’

  The big man leaned his head to the side. ‘Were they, now?’ Shaggy brows drew down.

  ‘They were going to keep me with them at first, because they thought I was a spy. For the Empress. Then they realized how silly that was, and how difficult it would be trying to keep track of me in the city. So they turned me loose.’ She took a breath. ‘But now I don’t know where to go!’ The next thought struck the same way the memory of Raven had a moment back. ‘But I’ve ridden a dragon! My name is Pryn—I can write it, too. I read, and I’ve flown on a dragon’s back above the Faltha mountains!’

  The giant grinned. A third of one front tooth had broken off, but the rest were whole enough. ‘You’ve flown on a dragon above the Falthas, over the narrow-minded, provincial Hold of fabled Ellamon…?’ He unfolded gauntleted arms.

  Each callused finger, Pryn saw, was thicker than three of hers bunched together. She nodded, more because of his grin and his recognition of her home than for his judgment of it.

  ‘And did you bring dried dragonfruit to the market and try to sell it there to unwary tourists as eggs of the fabled beasts themselves, you dragon-riding scamp?’ The grin softened to a smile. ‘You see, I have been through your town.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ Pryn exclaimed. ‘I’d never do that!’ Though she knew of girls and boys who had, she also knew it was precisely these—at least the girls—who ended up imprisoned as grooms in Ellamon’s fabled corrals. ‘If my aunt ever heard I’d done a thing like that, she’d beat me!’

  The man laughed. ‘Come with me, mountain girl.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Pryn blurted. Talking had turned out to be easy enough; but the notion of going with the slave frightened her all over again.

  The shaggy eyebrows raised. ‘I, too, was looking for…a friend.’

  Pryn found herself staring at the collar. Did slaves, she wondered, have friends? Did this slave want to make friends with her?

  The man said: ‘But since I’ve found you instead, I’ll put such friendships off for a while.’

  ‘Are you going to take me to your master?’ Pryn asked.

  The giant looked a little surprised. ‘No.’ Then surprise dissolved back into the scarred smile. ‘No, I wasn’t going to do that. I thought we might walk to the other end of the bridge. Then, if there were someplace you wanted to go, I’d take you there. After that, I’ll leave.’

  Pryn looked down at the slave’s feet: horny, dirty, cracked at the edge, barred with ligaments under tangled veins, the ankle’s hock blocky beneath the bronze greave. Above bronze, calf hair curled over the chased rim. That’s not a foot, Pryn thought. That’s a ham someone’s halved and flung down on the street! She looked at his chest. On the copper chain hung a bronze disk the size of her palm—really it was several disks, bolted one on top of the other, with much cut away from the forward one, so that there were little shapes all over it with holes at their points; and some kind of etching on the disk beneath…Around the rim were markings in some abstract design. She looked at his belly. It was muscular, hairy, with a lot behind it pushing muscle and hair forward. He wore five or six loose belts, a thick one and a thin one of leather, one of braided rope, one of flattened silver links, and one of ordinary chain. They slanted his hips at different angles. From one hung a wide, shaggy sheath; from another, some kind of purse; attached to another was a net of mail that went between his legs (a few links had broken) to pouch the rougher and darker genital flesh. She looked again at his face.

  He had raised his hand to gnaw a thumbnail.

  Pryn thought: Is this how people have looked at him when they purchased him at some auction…? Her cheeks and knees suddenly heated.

  The scarred face moved toward some question, but he dropped his hand and smiled. ‘Come. Let’s walk.’

  And somehow she was walking with him along the bridge.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ he asked.

  ‘In the city?’ She looked up. ‘Since this morning.’

  ‘I thought it couldn’t be longer.’ He chuckled. ‘Do you know where you are?’

  ‘You mean in Kolhari?’

  ‘Do you know where in Kolhari you are?’

  Pryn looked at the men and women loafing and leaning on the bridge’s low wall. She shook her head.

  He pointed with a thick thumb over the side. ‘That muddy ditch there is the Khora Spur. Three-quarters of a mile up, it runs off the Big Khora. Both go down to the sea, to make this neighborhood in front of us into an island in the middle of town. It’s also called the Spur—the oldest and poorest section of the city. Right now it’s mostly inhabited by barbarians, recently from the south. But it tends to house whoever is poor, new, or down on their luck.’

  ‘Do you and…and your master live there?’

  The big man considered a moment. ‘You might say I do,’ which struck Pryn as a complex an
swer for a simple question. ‘This street here, running across the bridge, is the upper end of New Pavē. It runs back up into the commercial part of the city, crosses Black Avenue, and finally turns along the sea to become part of the Kolhari waterfront. Here, at this end, it’s called Old Pavē. The bridge itself? We call it the Bridge of Lost Desire, though it had another name, officially, thirty years ago, when all of Kolhari was known as Neveryóna; but I don’t remember what it was. The Bridge of Lost Desire is the current one. On it, you’ll find working most of the city’s—’

  Ahead, a man shrieked.

  Pryn looked at her companion—who hadn’t looked at all.

  When she looked back, though most people had only moved a step or turned by no more than a small angle, the shriek had created a center:

  At it, the handsome young man buried bare fingers in black braids to shake the heavy young woman’s head—a red wooden bead broke from its chain, fell to the flags, and rolled.

  ‘What do you mean…!’ the young man shouted, shaking his jeweled fist about his shoulder. ‘I don’t want to hear that from you! He didn’t give you enough? No, not from you! What do you mean! Tell me! No, I don’t want to hear it…!’ As he shook, the woman seemed intent on keeping her face blank, her arms limp, and her large feet under her.

  Suddenly the young man threw her head away, stepping back. ‘You don’t think I’ll do anything to you? You don’t?’ He struck his dirty, ringed fist back against his own chest, grinding. ‘Look—’ He shoved his hand on past his shoulder; the beautiful features grimaced—‘if I do that to myself—’ Points and edges had caught the smooth skin as though it were rough fabric, to tear a two-inch cut, from which blood ran, turning aside at his nipple to dribble down his flank—‘what do you think I’ll do to you? Look—’ Suddenly turning, he struck his ringed fist on the arm of the nearest bystander, a boy whose made-up eyes widened as he backed away, blood welling through his fingers where he clutched his arm (someone grabbed the boy and called, ‘Hey, now! What are you doing, now—! Come on…!’)—‘if I do that to him—and I don’t even know the little faggot—what do you think I’ll do to you!’ Working himself up, dancing about, the handsome young man suddenly lunged, ringed hand open and falling toward her face—