Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities Page 6

  The woman flinched.

  Then something very complicated happened.

  The hand stopped.

  One thing making it complicated was that, unlike you and me, Pryn had been watching the woman (who was about Pryn’s age and Pryn’s size). What had first seemed a kind of apathetic paralysis in her, Pryn saw, was actually an intense concentration—and Pryn remembered a moment when, bridling her dragon, the wings had suddenly flapped among the bushes, and for a moment she’d thought she would completely lose control of it; and all she could do was hang on as hard as possible and look as calm as possible, trying to keep her feet from being jerked off the mossy rocks; for Pryn it had worked…

  Another thing making it complicated was that Pryn had not been watching the man she was with.

  And he had not been watching the encounter.

  We’ve spoken of a center the encounter had created. The big man’s course took them within a meter of it. He had not stopped walking; and because Pryn had not been watching him, she had not stopped walking either.

  As they came within the handsome young man’s ken, his hand had halted.

  His head jerked about, his face for a moment truly, excitingly ugly. ‘All right!’ he demanded. (Now they did stop.) ‘What is it, then? You want to be the Liberator of every piece of camel dung on this overground sewer?’

  The woman with the beaded hair did not look at Pryn’s companion, but suddenly stalked off, arms folded across her breasts in what might have been anger, might have been embarrassment. Five other women, waiting outside the circles within circles, closed about her, one holding her shoulder, one leaping to see over the others’ if she were all right—as though they had not seen them either.

  The handsome young man took a step after them, then glanced back at the giant, as if unsure whether he had permission to follow. Apparently he didn’t for he spat again and, making a bright fist by one hip and a soiled one by the other, turned his bleeding breast away and walked off in the other direction.

  People looked away, turned away, walked away; and there were three, half a dozen, a dozen, and then no centers at all to the crowd. Pryn looked at her companion.

  Examining his knuckles, the giant moved his gnawing on to another nail. Once more they began to walk.

  As they passed more onlookers, Pryn demanded, ‘Who was he…’

  ‘Nynx…’ the giant said pensively. ‘I think someone told me that was his name.’ He put his hand to his belly, scratching the hair there with broad nubs. ‘He manages—or, better, terrorizes—some of the younger women too frightened to work here by themselves.’

  ‘You must have beaten him up in a fight, once!’ Pryn declared; she had heard of such encounters between men in her town. ‘You beat him up, and now he’s afraid you might beat him up again…?’

  ‘No.’ The giant sighed. ‘I’ve never touched him. Oh, I suppose if it came to a fight, though he’s less than half my age, I’d probably kill him. But I think he’s been able to figure that out too.’ He gave a snort that ended in the scarred, broken-toothed smile. ‘Myself, I go my way and do what I want. Nynx—if that is his name—reads my passings as he will. But from the way he reads them, I suspect I will not have to kill him. Someone else will do it for me, and within the year I’ll wager. I’ve seen too many of him.’ He gave another snort. ‘Such readings are among the finer things civilized life teaches. You say you can read and write. You’ll learn such readings soon enough if you stay around here.’

  ‘What did he want with me, before?’ Pryn asked.

  ‘Probably the same thing he wanted from the girl. There used to be a prostitutes’ guild when I was a youngster—lasted up until a few years ago, in fact. It retained its own physicians, set prices, kept a few strong-armed fellows under employment for instant arbitration. They rented out rooms in half a dozen inns around here at cheap, hourly rates—today they charge double for an afternoon’s hour what they charge you to spend the night alone. With all the new young folk in from the country, you see, the old guild has moved out to Neveryóna, and its established members have all become successful hetaeras and courtesans. The new lot struggle for themselves, now, here on the bridge with no protection at all.’ The giant went on rubbing his stomach. ‘Beer,’ he remarked pensively after a moment. ‘I hear it was invented not more than seventy-five years back by barbarians in the south. Whoever brought its fermentation up to the cities has doomed us to a thousand years of such bellies as mine—’ He glanced at Pryn—‘and yours!’ He laughed.

  Pryn looked down at herself. She didn’t know the word ‘beer’ and wondered if it could be responsible, whatever it was, for her plumpness.

  As they neared the bridge’s end, the giant said: ‘Here, why don’t I show you through the—’

  The naked boy who ran around the newel to stop just before them, if he were not the barbarian she’d seen before with the portly man in the toga, could well have been one of his fabled brothers. Green eyes blinked, questioning, at the giant, at Pryn, and back.

  The giant said: ‘Not now, little friend. Perhaps later on—I’ll come meet you this evening, if I remember. But not now.’

  The boy held his stance a moment, then ran off.

  ‘Come,’ the slave said, before Pryn could question the encounter. ‘Let me show you around the Spur’s most interesting square—the Old Kolhari Market.’

  For beyond the bridge stretched rows of vending stalls, colorful booths with green and gray awnings, and single- or double-walled thatched-over sheds. Porters pushed between them with baskets of fruit, tools, grain, pots, fabric, fish—some were even filled with smaller baskets. Women wheeled loud barrows over red brick paving. Here and there, brick had worn down till you could see ancient green stone beneath. As they walked into the square—five times the size of the market in Ellamon, at least—the tall slave, whom, till now, Pryn had thought of as friendly but somehow reticent, began to talk, softly, insistently, and with an excitement Pryn found stranger and stranger.

  3. Of Markets, Maps, Cellars, and Cisterns

  Let us bear in mind, however, that a long oral recital made by the central figure of a novel to a willing, silent listener is, after all, a literary device: that the hero should tell his story with such precision of detail and such discursive logic is possible, say, in The Kreutzer Sonata or The Immoralist, but not in real life…Nevertheless, this literary convention once conceded, it depends upon the author of such a récit to put into it the whole of a being, with all his qualities and defects as revealed in his own peculiarities of expression, with his judgments sound or false, his prejudices unknown to him, his lies, his reticences, and even his lapses of memory.

  MARGUERITE YOURCENAR,

  Coup de Grâce

  ‘THE CITY FASCINATES—AS all who come to it expect it to. Do certain country markets necessarily secrete cities about themselves? Must a nation raise markets, and cities around them?’ The giant slowed as they entered between two rows of stalls. Those left held wooden rakes and brass-headed mallets. Those right were filled with leafy green, knobbly yellow, and smooth red vegetables. ‘The city sits in the midst of empire, a miniature of all that surrounds it: a map on which—true—you cannot read distances and directions, but on which you can mark qualities of material existence as well as the structure of certain spiritual interactions. People come from the country to the city with country wares, country skills; you need only look at who walks in its streets, who lives in its hovels and High Courts to know what is abroad in the land. I told you, over there live the barbarians most recently up from the south? A bit west, above the Khora, is a neighborhood of northern valley folk who still wear pastel robes, loose hoods pulled up about the old women’s faces and thrown back from the corn-rowed heads of the men, their hems stained to the knees with brackish streetmuds that would never soil them in their own greenwalled land. Two streets below is an enclave of desert families, the men with copper wires sewn about their ears, the women with tell-tale dots of purple dabbed on their ch
ins. If you walk the unpaved alleys between, you will see desert boys, in moody clusters stalking close to the mud walls, suddenly spot a lone valley dweller in pale, ragged orange crossing at the corner; and you will hear the desert youths call the same taunts that, as grown warriors in the land of their parents, they would cry from their camels as they rode to meet the long-robed invaders.

  ‘But look!

  ‘The Old Market here is only a particularly recomplicated inscription of the nation around it. The woman there, out in the sun, turning her dripping pig on its spit above that pan of coals, where folks gather to buy her good slice on a piece of bread for a coin—her mothers cooked such pigs for holy festivals in a province ninety stades to the west, where, in the proper week of spring, you can still ride by to the smell of hot crackling. Across the crowd from her, you see that bearded man forking baked yams into the trays strapped to the necks of the waiting boys? Those boys will run with them back across the bridge and up through the cobbled streets, by shops and inns and merchants’ offices, selling them for iron coins—just as boys sell them from door to door in the province of Varhesh, where the bearded man hails from. And the yellowing chunks of sugar beet those children coming toward us are munching? The youngsters buy them from a vendor just down the way, who cuts them with a curved copper knife. Once a month, he makes the journey to his home province in Strethi, where he loads his cart full. The knife he uses here in the market is the same sort as the women of the Avila plains use at the beets’ harvesting. What is sold him there, what makes its way here, is part of the harvest that does not go into the great stills of that region in which are fermented its various poisonous rums—which, indeed, one can buy only three stalls away out of the sealed clay jars that stand under the dark red awning. But all those foods so quickly obtained here, those foods one can munch or sip as one wanders from stall to stall, looking for staple purchase, are signs of the great distilleries, piggeries, religious festivals, and diligently hoed fields about the nation, the ease of consumption here murmuring of the vast labors occurring a province, or three provinces, or ten provinces away.

  ‘But see that woman, with the dark rags around her head: on the rug before her are ranged some three-legged cooking pots—she’s from a good family, though she’s fallen on hard times. Many of her pots are chipped. Most of them are second-hand. Such domestic tools tell much of the organization of our nation’s industry, if not its economy.

  ‘Glance at the stand beside hers. When I passed this morning, a man was observing those sharpened sticks which the women in the most uncivil parts of our nation use to break up the soil in their turnip fields—and which the wealthy matrons in the suburbs of Sallese and Neveryóna use in their gardens when a passion for a single bloom compels them to tend a foot of soil with their own hands, draping protective gauzes over it against marauding insects, wrapping the stem in wet fabric, mixing chopped meat and grain with the broken earth, and chanting certain spells to encourage one rare pink and gold orchid to bloom—while acres are left to the gardener. Do you see: the same man is back, trying to sell the vendor his bundle of raking sticks, each of which has a head carved into three prongs. From what we can see of the interchange, it looks as if the vendor will actually take them.

  ‘But come around here, and see the stall that sits just behind them. What a great stack of four-legged cooking pots! Even as we stand here, the barbarian women passing by have bought two; now three more—now another man is running up; and the helper has just sold another at the stall’s far side.

  ‘These challenges of commerce sign the endlessly extended and attenuated conflict of local custom against local custom, national tool against national tool, that progression of making about the land so slow only the oldest can see it, and then usually only to lament the passing of the good old days, the good old ways, the way things used to be, and be done.

  ‘Three-legged pots? Four-legged pots? Single-pronged yam sticks? Three-pronged yam sticks? We observe here stages in a battle that, in one case, may have been going on for decades and, in another, may only be beginning. Only after another decade or three or seven will wanderers in this market, ignorant of its beginnings, be able to see its outcome. But come down this way.

  ‘That’s right, along here. Next to the domestic and agricultural tools, this is my favorite stall. Do you see what’s spread out over this counter before us? This pair of calipers here is locked to a single measure and thus cannot really measure anything. Observe these mirrors, thonged at the four corners so they may be tied to various parts of the body. Those little disks of wood, you’ll see if you pick them up, mimic coins, though no weight or denomination is marked on center or exergue. Unfurl that parchment there; that’s right—the surprise on your face is a double sign, reminding me that you know how to read and at the same time announcing that you cannot read what is inked on that skin. (Yes, put it back, before the old man with the tattooed cheeks sees us—he is one of the touchiest vendors in the market.) The northern sage who went to the cave of Yobikon and sat with his ink block, brush, and vellum in the fumes issuing from the crevices in the cave floor to take the dictation of the goddess of the earth could not read those marks either, be assured. Still, he bears the honor of having been amanuensis to deity. These scripts are its trace. Those wooden carvings, with thongs on them like the mirrors, are tied about the bellies of male children in the tribes of the inner mountains of the outer Ulvayns. They assure prowess, courage, and insight in all dealings with goats and wild turtles. These metal bars? From the markings on them, clearly they are some sort of rule. But like the calipers, the graduations on them are irregular and do not come all the way down to the edge, so that it would be hard, if not impossible, to measure anything with them. But you have guessed by now, if you do not already know such trinkets from your own town market: each of these is magic. The one-eyed woman, the tattooed man’s assistant, back in the corner pretending to sort those bunches of herbs but really watching us, will, if she takes a liking to you, explain in detail the magical tasks each one of these tools is to perform. You would be astonished at the complexities such tasks can encompass or the skill needed to accomplish them—tasks and skills at least as complex as any of the material ones employing the tools we have already seen a single aisle away. But can you follow how such tools map and mirror the material tasks and skills we have left behind? How many of these are concerned with measurement! (Doubtless the scroll is an inventory of spiritual artifacts and astral essences.) Each is the sign of the thirst and thrust to know; each attempts to describe knowledge in a different form, each form characteristic of some place in the national mind: once again, this map does not indicate origins, only existences. But the one-eyed woman has signaled to the tattooed man, who is coming over. We’d best pass on. From fear of contagion, if not true sympathy for the heightened consciousness these tools presuppose and require, he is perhaps the most insistent among these vendors that whoever handles his wares should purchase.

  ‘But you have noticed those barrels there. Have such casks come as far north as Ellamon? They contain the southern beer that so puzzled you a moment back, though in Kolhari it has become the passion of nearly every free and honest laborer. The thirsts it satisfies, you might well mark, not only mirror but mock those spiritual thirsts we’ve been talking of. Certainly the children lugging up their double-handled beer pots, ready to carry them here and there for a working aunt, or father, or uncle, or the houseboys and market maids there with their waxed leather bags, the insides still moist with yesterday’s draught, attest to the materiality of such thirsts, however much our poets try to spiritualize them. Note that young woman, with her pitcher, hesitating behind the crowd lined up at the syphon.

  ‘I shall talk more of her in a moment.

  ‘But have you marked the smaller barrels further down, attended by that wizened little woman with country labor stamped all over the flesh of her hands and in the muscles that band her wrinkled cheeks? Notice how she holds her bristly chin high, wh
ich means her neck once wore an iron collar—wore it many years. The casks she oversees contain a delicate cider from the family estate, high in the northern hills, of the late Baron Inige. Its taste pleased his family and his family’s guests for generations; and in his own lifetime, thanks to his interest in horticulture, that taste reached a piquancy unsurpassed in the nation—at least that’s the claim of those who can afford to pursue such investigations. One or two of our more prosperous waterfront taverns managed to import it only a handful of years ago, making the journey up to the hills and bringing it back in their own carts. In the last year, the estate itself, fallen on hard times since the baron’s death, has let that freed retainer there bring in a few barrels from time to time to sell in the market here.

  ‘But I was speaking of the young woman who hesitates with her pitcher between the two. For, though I have never been inside her home, simply from passing her in the market, seeing her on the street with her mother, watching her run across Black Avenue to greet her father, I have learned a great deal about her—and her situation. Her father is a workman, who loves his beer with the best, but who, some years back, had the notion and the money to hire several of his fellows, specializing in the laying of underground clay pipes; his skill and the skill of the artisans he employs has improved his condition in every way. The girl’s mother was once a washer woman who laundered fine fabrics for the families of Sallese; but when she and her husband built their new home in the prospering tradespeople’s district on the west side of the city, a sense of decorum made her sacrifice her laundering to the very real duties of her newer, larger home. The girl’s brother, as a boy, was apprenticed to a successful pot spinner down in Potter’s Lane to replace an erring youth who disappeared from the same position into the barbaric south with money and franchise orders some years back. The girl is terribly proud of her younger brother, for you know that the very gods of our country are represented as patient, meticulous craftsfolk, who labor at the construction of the world and who may never be named till it is completed.