Neveryona (60 page)

Cheeks still rouged, eyelids still gilded, the fat man had doffed his feathers for a cloak of coarse canvas and was directing the loading of the scenery being hauled down from the middle wagon, now the skit was over.

Vatry said: ‘My friend here’s in some trouble, it seems, and needs a ride north. She was wondering if you’d let her come along with us – at least for a while.’

‘I wouldn’t
think
so!’ the fat man said. ‘We can’t just take up strangers like that. There’s hardly enough room for us.’ He looked at Pryn through his fantastic make-up – then smiled! ‘Oh … the little girl from the Kolhari market! How in the world did you end up in this forsaken backwater?’

The recognition made hope leap. ‘Well, I – ’

But the fat man went on: ‘I’m sorry, my puffy little partridge, but we can’t give a ride to every stray we run into – you understand.’

‘I’ll work,’ Pryn said. ‘I’ll do
any
thing!’

The fat man paused, tongue filling one rouged cheek. ‘Well, as I remember, you
don’t
play the drum very well. You’re obviously not a dancer. Can you sing?’

‘I never – ’

‘Then you’re not a singer.’ He turned to Vatry. ‘You know, we’re in enough trouble as it is, what with Alyx taking off like that last week. I’m trying to keep all the accounts in my head, as well as work up dialogue for the new skit, which nobody seems to be able to – or
wants
to – remember lines for. Once I make them up,
I
can’t remember them. I’ve got too many other things to think about if I want to keep this troupe together. Now if your
friend here could write down words and keep accounts like Alyx – but she’s only an ignorant mountain girl who’s somehow gotten herself lost in the country. My heart goes out to her, but – ’

‘But I – !’ Pryn interrupted.

‘But you what?’

This is how, after her days among the changeable mysteries of the barbaric south, Pryn came to be riding with the mummers on the north road at evening. (‘I think she’d better stay out of sight until we’re actually under way,’ Vatry said. The fat man said: ‘Ah, it’s one of those, is it? Well, it’s not the first time for us. I doubt it’ll be the last.’ Besides her dictation, accounting, and dialogue coaching duties, at their next performance stop, the director told her, Pryn would take a few gold coins into the audience. During the collection she would wave one, then another over her head and make a show of tossing them into the passing cloaks or baskets. Pryn said: ‘Oh … !’ And when they were actually rolling down the beach, staring out a chink in the wagon door, she passed as close to Ardra’s face as yours is to this book! He was turning to Lavik, who pulled him aside, laughing, and said, ‘Watch out for the
baby
– !’ He carried screeching Petal.) They didn’t put her in with Vatry. There were already too many other people sleeping in that wagon.

The bed she got was just above one of the musicians; yes, the one she’d passed with the coins – who turned out be as well the third wagon’s driver. When they were a goodly handful of stades along the north road, Pryn climbed up the ladder at the wagon’s end and out the roof-trap. She perched in the corner, dangling her feet inside.

The driver sat forward at the edge, holding the reins and not quite humming.

A wagon joggled ahead, beneath tall trees, toward the
hillcrest. Behind fields there was just a sight of sea. Clouds banked before them, silver and iron, walls and pillars, towers and terraces, shape behind shape.

‘It looks like a city,’ Pryn said.

Topping the hill, they started down.

The driver glanced back. She had broad cheekbones under odd, foreign eyes. One of her flutes was strapped behind her shoulder. ‘We still have cities to go through before we reach Kolhari – little cities, to be sure. Towns, is more like it. Villages …’ The wagon joggled. She turned to the horses.

‘
That’s
the city you must learn to read,’ Pryn said. ‘That’s the city you must write your name on – before you can make progress in a real one; at least
I
think so!’

The driver laughed without looking back. ‘You’re a strange one.’

Pryn watched the clouds.

‘I hear that you can,’ the driver said. ‘Read and write, I mean.’

‘I do all sorts of thing: read, write, free slaves, ride dragons – kill, if I have to.’ Pryn guessed the driver was about twenty-five.

The foreign musician flipped her reins, ‘I wish someone would figure a way to write down music.
That’d
be something! Then I could be sure to remember my tunes.’

‘I don’t see why it can’t be done.’ Pryn thought: Now I’ve had all sorts of experiences that might be of use to the Liberator among his causes. (The astrolabe was gone, yes, but she had retrieved the iron collar from Vatry’s bed. Perhaps she could fix the lock.) Perhaps when I get to Kolhari … ‘If you can write down words,’ she said, suddenly, ‘I don’t see why we can’t find a way to write down …’ And hadn’t some successful musician been pointed out to her in the Kolhari market? ‘I’ll work on it!’ At Kolhari, she might just stop by to see Madame Keyne – oh, if only for a while …

The driver laughed.

Pryn sat a long time staring at the sky.

Now, old city of dragons and dreams, of doubts and terrors and all wondrous expectations, despite your rule by the absent fathers, it’s between us two!

Montreal – New York
July 1980 – November 1981

[The
Nevèrÿon
tales, of which
Neveryóna
(‘The Tale of Signs and Cities’) is the sixth, ate based on an ancient text of approximately 900 words known as the Culhar’ Fragment or, sometimes, the Missolonghi Codex, which has been found translated into numerous ancient languages. Because of the Culhar’s incomplete nature as well as its geographical dissemination among so many cultures, it has been difficult to assign an even reasonably indisputable origin to it, either as to date, land, or language of composition. In 1974, however, a comparative retranslation of the text from the various languages in which various versions have been found was presented by a young, black. American scholar. K. Leslie Steiner, along with an extensive commentary. Steiner’s work is notable not only for its linguistic interest but also because of its mathematical side. The first collection of tales (
Tales of Nevèrÿon
, Samuel R. Delany. Bantam Books; New York. 1979) was clearly in dialogue with Steiner’s findings. That volume concluded with an Appendix, written by archeologist S. L. Kermit, giving a general review of the Culhar’s history as well as the thrusts of both Steiner’s mathematical and interpretive work. Among the responses to both the tales and the appended monograph, one, addressed to Kermit, seems worth publishing (
en appendice
) along with the engendered correspondence, for the readers of the present (or indeed the absent) text.]

New Haven
February 1981

To S. L. Kermit:

I have just read your comments on the Culhar’, and Steiner’s translation of same, and I feel that some remarks are in order.

I have checked the literature, and the Appendix to Delany’s work seems to be your first foray into archeology or text redaction (unless you are the S. Kermit who wrote the annotations to the most recent edition of Dee’s
Necronomicon
, in which case my congratulations; it was a solid piece of work). I would suggest that before you make another attempt you learn something about the topics you discuss. Or rather, learn something more; you’re obviously not ignorant, but your knowledge fails you at a number of points. Some examples follow (page numbers from the Grafton edition of
Tales of Nevèrÿon
, London. 1988).

p. 317: ‘Proto-Latin.’ I haven’t any idea what you are referring to, unless it be archaic Latin. The prefix ‘proto’ is used to refer to reconstructions of early stages of languages, ‘early’ here being sometime before those languages were reduced to writing. Thus, you can’t
have
a text of a proto-language. If you do, it is an attested language, and no longer a construct. The proto-language which is the postulated ancestor of Latin is referred to either as proto-Italic or proto-Italo-Celtic, depending on your theoretical bias.

p. 318: ‘… 4,500
B.C.
, or even 5.000
B.C.
, which put it [the Culhar’ Fragment) practically inside the muzzy boundaries of the neolithic revolution’ The two scholars I asked agreed that the neolithic period was roughly 6500
B.C.
– 3000
B.C.
Thus your dates are about as solidly neolithic as is possible.

p. 319: You mention that Blegan found a Greek version [of the Culhar’] in the fourth level down at Hissarlik,
i.e
., at Troy VI. This is highly interesting, as it is the only evidence I know of that the Trojans spoke Greek. Given the location, an Anatolian language seems more likely. Nor is it possible that it was put there by the Greeks, since the numbering of the cities is done from the bottom
up, and VI is older than VIIa, the historical Ilium. Any text in VI was in Troy before the Greeks got there.

p. 318: ‘The only ancient people who did not, apparently, know of the Culhar’ fragment were, oddly, the Attic Greeks …’ This is indeed odd, since it implies that the Ionic and Doric Greeks did, and if this is so, it is about the only thing the groups didn’t share. Greek culture of that period was a nearly seamless whole; we differentiate among them by the recorded dialect differences.

p. 321: ‘… the young engineer Michael Ventris …’ Ventris would probably be slightly wounded by this, as he was an architect.

p. 321: ‘The parchment itself … most probably dates from the third century
A.D.
, but it is also most probably a copy made from a much older source …’ You’re damned right it is! Linear B ceased to be used around 1200
B.C.
, with the fall of Pylos! This makes it just about dead certain that whoever copied it didn’t know the meaning of the characters. And by the way, Linear B didn’t have ‘letters.’ Letters are those graphic symbols used in an alphabetic system only. You can no more refer to syllabic characters as ‘letters’ than you could hieroglyphs.

p. 321: ‘… written in the same ink …’ How can you tell?

p. 321: ‘… transcriptions of block-letter Greek inscriptions, that sculptural language written on stone in uppercase letters …’ First, I have no idea what ‘block-letter’ is supposed to mean. Are you implying the Greeks also made cursive inscriptions on stone? And what is a ‘sculptural language’? I can give a good metaphorical reading for the phrase, but that doesn’t seem to be what you intend. Do you mean that it was the script used on stone? One presumes that the same script was used on parchment; however, no parchment texts have survived, Greece’s climate
being wetter than Egypt’s. And ‘upper-case letters’? The Greeks had no lower case. No one did. Minuscule letters are a Byzantine development. The phrase ‘upper-case’ is thus empty of content.

p. 323: ‘Indeed, it is the only fragment of Linear B ever to be found outside of Crete.’ Garbage. Linear B is found on Pylos, not to mention at several sites on the mainland.

pp. 323:
Transpoté
. Is this a direct transliteration of the Linear B text? Are you
sure? Trans
- is Latin! If the ancient Greeks (or whoever) were calling something trans-anything, then we are witness to a considerable revolution in archeology. A Greek name with the meaning you want would be
Peripoté
or
Parapoté
. And
poté
does not mean ‘never.’ Never. To do so, it must take a negative particle. And ‘across when’ is not a possible Homeric meaning. Homer simply doesn’t use it in that sense.

p. 324: ‘… Linear B was used only in the very early stages in the history of the neolithic palaces at Cnossos, Phaistos, and Malliá.’ Hold it right there. The phrase ‘neolithic palace’ is oxymoronic. A culture which can build a palace isn’t neolithic. Further, Linear B is from the late period of the palaces.

pp. 333: Steiner retranslates ‘The merchant trades four-legged pots for three-legged pots’ as ‘The merchant (female) ceases to deal in three-legged pots and now deals in four-legged pots.’ Something tickled just over my brow line when I read that reinterpretation. I went and dug out the Culhar’ Fragment in
Inscriptiones Graecae
, where it is referred to as Kolharé. In the passage Steiner cites, the verb translated as ‘trade’ is αλλασσÎιν. This does indeed mean ‘trade.’ I can find, however, no evidence of its ever being used in Steiner’s sense. She might be thinking of µÎταλλασσÎιν. While it would suit Steiner’s translation, however, it wouldn’t suit the earlier one. In short, there.
is no Greek verb which carries the ambiguity which
trade
does in English. I am wondering if Steiner was simply looking at an English version, without bothering to cross-check.

But I have gone on long enough. Your effort is praise-worthy, and with some revision can become a useful commentary.

sincerely,
(signed:) Charles Hoequist, Jr

New York
4 August 1980

Dear Charles Hoequist, Jr

Back in February, when your letter arrived, I dutifully forwarded it to the address for S. L. Kermit that K. Leslie Steiner had left with me before going off to take a guest-teaching position at the University of Bologna.