Neveryona (15 page)

‘I don’t know,’ Pryn said. ‘How could I? Madame, why have you brought me here?’ Pryn was, indeed, thinking of the ruined house behind her. Perhaps because Madame Keyne had suggested it, or perhaps because the suggestion was simply true, the notion of the Liberator had begun to extend for Pryn over the whole of the city, so that, though she was not really sure he was still alive, much less in the dilapidated mansion, he had become a figure of such invasive power that her next question, a moment before she asked it at any rate, seemed logical enough: ‘Does my being here have anything to do with the Liberator?’

Madame Keyne looked surprised. ‘Only insofar as many of the residents of both Sallese and Neveryóna have felt more confined to our own little worlds since he has been about in the great one. You might say one reason you are here is that I am attempting to live my own life more intensely.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Yet there is nothing so strange about it, really. I have frequently taken an interest in the careers of exceptional young women. When I first saw you in the street, riding behind that scarred country gentleman, you struck me immediately as someone who … well, had seen the stars, descried cities in the clouds, ridden dragons, gazed into the ocean and seen through to secrets the tides obscure!’

‘I did?’ asked Pryn.

‘Oh, yes! Such characteristics always show on a woman’s face – if another woman has eyes to read them.’ Madame Keyne sat back and regarded Pryn. ‘You are clearly a young woman who knows her own name.’

‘I am?’ asked Pryn. ‘I mean – oh, I
am
!’

‘I thought so.’ Madame Keyne folded her hands on her lap’s blue. ‘Perhaps, then, you might tell me what it is …?’

‘Oh! Of course.’ Pryn looked around by the bench leg for a twig. She found one and bent down to scratch in the dirt, ‘It’s Pryn.’ She glanced up at Madame Keyne, then turned back (her side
was
still sore) to glyph the syllables, majuscule and minuscule, and add, finally, the diacritical elision. ‘ “Pryn,” ’ she repeated, sitting up and taking a breath. ‘There.’

‘Well!’ Madame Keyne bent forward. ‘Not only do you know your own name, you know how to write it.’ She sat back amid tinkling bracelets. ‘That
does
make you exceptional!’.

Pryn was surprised; she’d thought that was what the woman had been speaking of all along. But the pleasure
of the compliment lingered despite her misreading – as did Madame Keyne’s smile.

‘My aunt taught me,’ Pryn explained. ‘Whenever anything new came to our town, like reading, or figuring, or writing, or a new kind of building, or a new medicine, my aunt was always there to see what it was and how it worked – at least she used to be. But she’s very old, much too old to take care of me now. She’s even older than you.’

‘To be sure,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘You ask why you’re here? Well, shortly after we had our first surprising encounter on Black Avenue, one of my servants, on an errand back in that direction, reported seeing you put down on the street by the men you rode with. Clearly you were a mountain girl, unused to the city. My servant’s account of your indecisions and hesitations over which way to go were sure signs you were on your own. I sent our little Ini to look for you in the three places an unaccompanied woman might end up in Kolhari. She found you, I might add, in the most predictable. Now you are here.’

Pryn looked out at the city. There was no fog this morning – or rather, since they were within the city, the fog was only a general haze about them, and no longer a visible object with location and limit. ‘But certainly, Madame Keyne, many young women must come to Kolhari – many every day; from the mountains, from the deserts, from the islands, from the jungles. You can’t possibly take an interest in the careers of them all …’

‘But my dear, the thought of a poor child, a stranger in our town, without prospects or friends …? It would not have let me sleep for a week! What do you suppose might have happened if our little Ini had
not
been there with her quick blade?’

To Pryn, Madame Keyne’s words seemed more like ones that should have come before her question than after
it. Indeed, trying to locate an answer in this woman’s so sensible protestations was like trying to see the fog that, from here, was only the faintest of dispersions. ‘Madame, my gratitude is real. But so is my confusion. Gratitude doesn’t end it.’

‘But I don’t know if I
can
speak of the reasons you want to hear.’ Madame Keyne suddenly turned to touch Pryn’s shoulder. ‘Say that when your companions nearly ran us down in the street – say that when the horse on which you rode first reared to avoid us, say that when the morning sun caught so in your unkempt hair … when the hooves stamped on the pavement, when you drew a breath so that your eyes widened in a particular way – well, there was a smudge of dirt on your calf, I recall, that I could not shake loose from my memory the whole day. It’s gone, now, brushed from you in your bath last night by one of those marvelous new sponges, only recently imported from the Ulvayns. But it is fair to say that if the smudge, or the angle of your arm about the sweating chest of your rider, or the particular width of your astonished eyes had been other than what, in that instant, they were, you would not be here. There are, alas, no better reasons I can give. Girl – ’ The hand on her shoulder had grown heavier. ‘You are not traditionally beautiful; and you know it. We women do. But what most people mean by beauty is really a kind of aesthetic acceptability, not so much character as a lack of it, a set of features and lineaments that hide their history, that suggest history itself does not exist. But the template by which we recognize the features and forms in the human body that cause the heart to halt, threatening to spill us over into the silence of death – that is drawn on another part of the soul entirely. Such features are different for each of us. For one, it is the toes of the feet turned in rather than out; for another it is the fingers of the hand
thick rather than thin; for still another it is the eyes set wide rather than close together. But all sing, chant, hymn the history of the body, if only because we all know how people regard bodies that deviate from the lauded and totally abnormal norm named beauty. Most of us would rather not recognize such desires in ourselves and thus avoid all contemplation of what the possession of such features means about the lives, the bodies, the histories of others, preferring instead to go on merely accepting the acceptable. But that is not who I am. That is not who I have struggled to be. Have I been struggling just the slightest bit harder since the Liberator has confined me, as it were, to my own garden? Perhaps.’ Madame Keyne lifted her hand. Bracelets clinked toward her elbow. ‘Say that you are simply here by magic. Do you know what magic is? It is power. But power only functions in the context of other powers – which is the secret of magic. The strongest man in the world – even the Liberator, who they say is a giant of a man – may only “liberate” as the play of power about him allows. Set him raging alone in a desert, and he will be as ineffectual as any other isolate, angry child – while the proper word spoken to the proper official of the Empress, whose reign is numinous though knowable, may result in the erection of a granite and basalt temple to the greater glory of our nameless, artisanal gods.

‘Why are you here?

‘The truth is simply that you are a young mountain woman who has come to the city. That is to undertake a kind of education. I, my secretary, the servants of this house, our little Wild Ini, are merely some among the instruments through which part of that education will occur. The city is very different from the country, girl. It is a kind of shared consciousness that begins its work on you as soon as you enter it, if not well before, a
consciousness that begins to separate you from the country possibly even before you decide to journey toward it. It encircles you with forces much greater than the walls and gates which imitate tinier villages or towns. People come to it come seeking the future, not realizing all that will finally affect them in it is their own, only more or less aware, involvement with the past. The way we do things here – really, that’s all there is to be learned in our precincts. But in the paving of every wide, clear avenue, in the turnings of every dark, overhung alley, in the ornaments on every cornice, in the salt-stained stones of each neighborhood cistern, there are traces of the way things
once
were done – which is the key to why they are done as they are today. And you – you wish to know why a woman, knowledgeable in her city’s history of infamies and generosities, would snatch an untutored country girl (of exceptional tutoring, as it now turns out) from the very arms of pain, abuse, and dishonor?

‘Be content with this: It has been done before. No doubt it will be done again.

‘And iteration abolishes the strangeness of any human action, making it merely repetition, while it reveals the purely human – desire – impelling it. Have I done what I was going to do? My girl, leave me a while and walk about the garden on your own. Yes!’

‘Madame Keyne …?’

For the woman, suddenly, lightly, closed her eyes and sat as though she were a moment away from major distress, hands surrounded by bracelets loose in her lap. ‘I have done it!’ Moment followed moment.

‘Madame Keyne, are you all right?’

‘Leave me,’ Madame Keyne repeated, calm enough but with eyes still closed. ‘Enjoy the gardens, the flowers, the falls, the fountains, the views of the city in all directions. And remember, there is nothing here to hurt you. I would
die first before I would let anyone hurt you. I would die. Now go.’

Pryn started to touch the woman’s arm. But Madame Keyne, whether she sensed it or saw it from beneath lids only half closed, leaned away.

Pryn withdrew her hand.

What had begun as confusion had become by now a mental turbulence, like fog a-broil over waters through which she could make out no single wave. Pryn rose, began to walk away, glanced at the woman sitting on the bench, back against the hut’s stone, eyes still closed before the city’s panorama. Pryn, walking, glanced again – till the path’s turning hid the woman, then the hut, with shrubbery, trees, flowers …

A faint frown on her round, brown face, Pryn, in her new green shift, descended to the lower garden. She wandered about the grounds a while without seeing anyone else. Once she heard voices – more servants? She thought to push through the hedge to see. Then, with decision, she turned in another direction.

What is this garden other than a miniature forest? she thought. The number of trees, blossoms, and bushes whose names she knew from the mountains was overshadowed by the number whose names were unknown. The main point of it, she decided, was that one would never find such variety in the wild – at least not over such a limited space and laid out in such carefully edged sections. It’s like a map of
all
the forests, she decided, a map on which you can’t read distance or direction … A feeling of distress interrupted the thought, but she could not find the source of it till she remembered who’d given her those words.

This garden, this house, are all a part of the city, Pryn reflected.
What
is it here to teach me? It seemed a question she had been asking of the world from well
before she’d mounted the winged beast. The real question, she decided, is not why this woman has brought me here. That, I suspect, is finally her affair. The question is what am I
doing
here? And I seem to have been doing a great deal lately. She stopped to look at a flower she had never seen before – a yellow and orange cornucopia smudged with black stripes. For a while she watched a stream break into three across a broad stone clearly carved for the purpose of diverting the water to three new paths, each winding off in its respective direction. For a while she walked beside a wall twice as high as she was, marveling at its permanence, its ponderousness, an image of all beyond it playing through her mind – an image which, as she examined it, was not much more than a vague castle in which dwelt a vague empress (whose reign was veiled and voluptuous), a market which was neither old nor new, and a strange house with missing tiles whose roof was patrolled by strolling soldiers. The rest of the city was a blur – oh, not a meaningless blur by any means, but the blur that marks a first encounter with the truly new which has no history to clarify it, to highlight it, to give it context, to keep it from being wholly a presence, instead of a play of more and more greatly deferred origins.

When she reached the house, Pryn turned to walk along the wall, scuffing her feet in the earth where the grass no longer grew, next to where the wall went into the ground. She passed behind bushes. The building’s front was all large pink and gray stones in gray mortar; but when she turned the corner, she found one section of smaller stones set in flaking yellow mud; then another of a single cement-like substance (with some large cracks in it); and another of irregular black brick, as though this side wall had been built (or repaired) at different times. Perhaps the builder, in the course of constructing it, had experimented with
different materials …? Her great-aunt would have found all that interesting in a house; and though, when rebelling against her aunt’s tutelage, Pryn had claimed to be absolutely uninterested in the many such distinctions pointed out to her by the venerable woman in the various houses, streets, and official buildings in their walks around Ellamon, to read them, here, was nevertheless to engage in what was at least a familiar process; and thus, to feel more at home.

She passed one window with heavy cloth hangings blocking any view within; the next was boarded over, suggesting some window in the Liberator’s headquarters. She turned another corner. Ahead was a wall of wattle; in it was a window whose bottom sill was level with Pryn’s knee.