Neveryona (31 page)

The young men thought it was a fine idea.

The story would tell how the night before they actually left – several days after they’d planned to, which gave Pryn a chance to practice her ‘strategy,’ and find that, more or less, it worked – there was some festival in a neighborhood of the city Pryn had never been in before, but where the younger one (with the comic accent – though he was getting easier for her to follow each day, if not hour, she spent in the city) said he had some friends. That night people crowded the streets. Bonfires blazed over a small square; and the smell of roasted pig and barbecued goat drifted down every alley.

Pryn and the two youths walked through the throng, passing under high-held torches. And though they never did find the younger man’s friends, twice they were taken into people’s houses and given lots of beer and, once,
some roasted pork. The elder now and again met several people he knew; once Pryn thought she glimpsed the man she’d cut. But that was better than the first day, when she’d seen him every twenty minutes, now turning this corner, now standing in that doorway – which finally was what was wrong with strategy, since it didn’t cover that. Still later, over the heads of the crowds, Pryn caught sight of the mummers’ wagon, with its raised stage and torches flaming along its upper edge. Yes, there was Vatry, turning her cartwheels and doing her backflips and, indeed, looking better than she had in her audition, because, for one thing, she now wore lots of small bells around her wrists and trailed green and yellow scarves from her waist and neck. At Pryn’s urging, the three of them tried to work closer to the stage. Pryn was sure Vatry had smiled at her – indeed, the little dancer was always moving stage front and winking here or waving there. Certainly, Pryn maintained, someone like Vatry would have many friends all over Kolhari, all over Nevèrÿon! But the elder youth just laughed and said that was the way with mummers. And he had known his share. Besides, the crowd was too thick to get any nearer. And so was Pryn, quipped the younger one in his Kolhari twang. (He had dull dark hair and was extremely thin.) Pryn smiled and wished he hadn’t said it. Finally they found a place by one of the fires, beside which some orange-robed women stood together singing a mournful song in a strange language.

The three young people felt mildly embarrassed – but happy. They all thought the song was moving, even though they didn’t know what it was about. And Pryn, for herself, decided night in the city was not so bad after all. But why, she wondered, were they leaving tomorrow at sunrise?

The story would certainly tell how the elder of the two
youths had, till six months ago, worked on a farm half a day’s ride from town. He was twenty-three and, despite his bearded, pock-marked face and huge, apparently uncleanable farmer’s hands, seemed to Pryn the sweetest, gentlest, funniest person she had ever met.

With his comic drawl, nineteen and still no beard yet – and a slight cast in one eye that sometimes reminded Pryn of Noyeed – the scrawny youngster, dirty and dank-haired, had not so long back been a pipe-fitter’s apprentice in a shop off Bronzesmith Row.Both youths had left their jobs under ignominious circumstances, of which they seemed, nevertheless, quite proud. Both would sit for hours, in company or just with Pryn, alternating anecdotes that dramatized, in the case of the younger, his complete detestation of, and, in the case of the elder his complete incompetence at, anything resembling work. Yet Pryn soon saw, when their canvas-covered cart came to any stream or stretch of rough road, however much he claimed to detest it, the scrawny, walleyed one labored with an energetic earnestness that should have shamed his bigger, bearded, pit-cheeked companion. In the evening around their campfire, the elder’s arm about her shoulder, Pryn also learned that the younger had the most repugnant ideas about women and sex she’d encountered since the late Nynx. She leaned against the elder, while across the fire the younger outlined interminable schemes involving women and money, women and money, the one taking the place of the other in his discourse more rapidly even than they might on the Bridge of Lost Desire. At first Pryn tried to argue with him. Later she only half listened, or tried not to listen at all. Also, now, the elder did not talk as much, nor tell his funny, self-deprecating tales, but sat, staring into the flames, while, in the orange flicker, Pryn looked back and forth between the fire and his ruined, romantic face,
trying to imagine what he saw – trying also to shut out the other’s droning on about wealth and parts of women’s bodies; for he seemed truly incapable, Pryn finally decided, of talking of women at any one time as other than breasts or eyes or legs or genitals or knees or buttocks or arms or hair. (He had this thing about women’s knees, which he was always explaining.) Occasionally she mustered an amused tolerance for him and his more grotesque strategies. (For every one he had to acquire quick money or avoid urban danger, he had six to start conversations with strange women – each of which he seemed unshakably convinced was as fascinating to Pryn as to himself.) More often, however, she felt simply a quiet disgust. She was thankful that he was only nineteen and had not yet found opportunity to try out any of his more bizarre plans – at least not on the scale he envisioned. She wondered how the elder, whose shoulder she leaned so sleepily against, could tolerate, much less cherish, this distressing youth’s friendship. When she mention it during some rare minute when they were alone, he shrugged it off, saying that his friend was really a good sort and worked hard.

The last, certainly, was true.

On the third evening out, when the mutton and dried fruit prepared back in Kolhari for the first two days was gone, Pryn waited to see how the cooking duties would be divided. At her great-aunt’s, she’d done a good deal of it, and after they made camp she was ready to volunteer. But the wall-eyed one had already taken out crocks and pots and had apparently, earlier in the afternoon, put salted cod to soak in a jar at the back of the wagon, and was now cutting turnips and already quite efficiently into the preparation of the food they had brought for later meals. So Pryn horsed about with the bearded elder, who didn’t seem inclined to help at all – until the wall-eyed
one made his third (twangy, nearly incomprehensible, but definitely dirty) joke about women too lazy to cook. Pryn said angrily: ‘Why do you say that! I was
going
to help …’ The elder took her part – while the younger went on cooking and grinning his disfocused grin. The next evening, however, Pryn insisted on helping, and after a few (disfocused) protests that her help wasn’t needed, the wall-eyed one accepted her aid. This became their pattern of food preparation for all the meals they fixed outdoors. Pryn and the younger chopped and soaked and sauteed and fried, Pryn muttering
nivu
under her breath like an unknown word from a poem overheard in another language. The elder would sit, not watching – once he fixed something on the cart. Sometimes he would get wood. More often he just lounged or ambled about. No one complained. But one reason Pryn kept at it was because when the wall-eyed one cooked was the only time he wasn’t talking about women’s bodies, and Pryn had decided that if they were to be any sort of friends, she’d best do something with him then.

The story would doubtless tell how Pryn finally made love to the elder youth, several times over several days, ‘I love you, and I know that you love me,’ she told him – several times through that glorious season. He liked hearing it, too: it made him smile. (The younger one, when he overheard her once or twice, seemed to like it just as much and smiled just as broadly.) ‘That is all I know. That is all I need to know,’ she would finish; but when she had, she always felt caught up in some play of preposterous contradictions, as if it were a line from a mummer’s skit she could never read aloud with the proper inflection. That was probably why, she decided later, she said it as many times as she did. Still, with sunlight on his bearded, broken face, the elder would smile at her, or
nuzzle her neck, or walk with her among the trees, his arm about her shoulder.

He never, however, said much of anything back.

As we have noted, it wasn’t the first time Pryn had had sex, for in mountain towns of the sort she’d grown up in such intercourse was frequently accomplished at an even earlier age than in the cities. But it was not yet her tenth time, either; and it was certainly her first time with someone only two weeks away from a total stranger – and without the support of a society ready with rituals, traditions, and the coercive wisdom necessary to turn the passing pleasure of adolescence straightway into a family at any sign of natal consequence. The story would also tell how, nights later, when they’d decided to stay over at an inn, the wall-eyed one brought back to Pryn’s room two of the Empress’s soldiers from a garrison housed in an old barracks outside the town and argued with her for a solid hour, not loudly but with the same earnest perseverance she’d seen him use to free a cart wheel in a stream when it had caught on a submerged root. Finally she agreed to make love to them.

Synopsized, the hour’s whispered conclave had run:

The elder youth had spent too much money on beer in the inn’s tavern that evening, so that now, even with Pryn’s remaining coins, they did not have enough to pay for their rooms; nor was this civilized Kolhari, where they might be turned out with a scolding on account of their youth or made to stay and work off the debt. It was a backwater province where everyone was related to everyone else and where the locals had proved themselves hostile to strangers in a dozen ways already.

Anything might happen here.

The money the soldiers would give her was the only way the three of them would have enough to pay for their lodging next morning.

It wasn’t – quite.

But the innkeeper finally agreed – angrily – to forfeit the small difference and sent them off. Clearly he did not wish to see them return.

Certainly the story would tell how, some three hours after they were on the road, Pryn managed to get into an angry and perfectly ridiculous argument with the elder – indeed, the argument was so idiotic that, after she’d stalked off in a rage, leaving both of them for good, she was sure, she could now even reconstruct what its points had been. (It wasn’t because of the soldiers.
He
didn’t even know about
them
, having been sleeping too soundly because of the beer. And the wall-eyed one had
promised
…!) She only knew she was glad to leave him, glad to leave the both of them! Then, after tramping for two more hours along the sun-dappled, dusty road, Pryn began to cry.

She was thinking about being pregnant.

Indeed, Pryn now admitted to herself, she had been thinking about almost nothing else for several days, though before last night it had seemed a hazy daydream involving going back to Kolhari, or even Ellamon, with the elder friend, while the younger, in the dream, remained in the south – or vanished!

But now, somehow, there was nothing pleasant left to it. The pock-marked youth from the farm was lazy and the wall-eyed one from the city impossible; and she knew they would not cease their smuggling or dissolve their friendship over some child by her.

The story would tell how, over the next three days, practically every six hours Pryn broke out crying – suddenly and surprisingly, whether she was by herself walking in the woods or passing a yard with people in it.

Once a man said she could ride downriver with him in his boat if she would help him with the fishing. She got
into the shallow skiff and sat, looking at the woven reed lining. His hair thinning in front and tied with a thong behind one ear, the fisherman pulled on the wide wooden oars. Pryn looked about the boat’s floor at the coils and tangles of line, the bone hooks stuck along a piece of branch, the woven nets heaped around; suddenly she felt a surge of uselessness and a second surge of exhaustion, which surges battled, burning, in her eyes – tears, for the tenth or the hundredth time, spilled her puffy cheeks.She sat in the boat, crying, while the fisherman, with his big-knuckled, pitch-stained hands, rowed and watched her, saying nothing.

Finally Pryn coughed, pulled her own hands back into her lap, and blinked. ‘My name is Pryn’ she got out, ‘and I can … I’m going to have a
baby!’

Despite his thinning hair, the fisherman looked no more than twenty-four. He pulled and leaned, pulled and leaned, pulled and leaned. With three bronze claws fastened to the rag wrapped around his waist and between his very hairy legs, the wide strap over his right shoulder went taut, then slack, taut, then slack, over the sunken well in his narrow, near-bald chest, ‘My name is Tratsin,’ he said after a while. ‘I’m going to have one, too.’

Pryn looked quite startled.

Tratsin pulled on the oars. ‘My wife,’ he added, by way of explanation, ‘I mean. She’s having it. For me.’ Taut; slack, ‘It’s been all girls so far – this will be my third. Well, four, actually. The first was a boy, but she lost him. That was even before she would live with me. In these parts they say it’s a curse to have girls. But you know who takes in the aged parents? The girls, that’s who. My parents lived with my sisters. My wife wouldn’t live with me until after her father passed – though my boy died only a month later. I think that’s because he needed his
own father – me. And when I get too old to work, I’ll live with one or the other of my girls, I’ll bet you. And I’ll be a father they’ll
want
to have live with them. That’s important. Come home with me, girl. Come home. My wife’s name is Bragan. She’s a good girl. About your age, I’d bet. But skinnier. At least she used to be. Certainly no more than two or three years older. Come home, now …’

Somewhere in all this Pryn started crying again.