Neveryona (18 page)

Pryn had thought they’d emerged. To insert a clear and comfortable fact, Pryn said: ‘ I write – and read – too.’ She’d thought the statement a pleasantry, a sign of shared experience far less spectacular than their mutual experience of slavers, an emblem about which civility might flourish, if not a friendship grow. From Jade’s expression, however, Pryn realized that discomfort had intensified, if not purified.

‘You …!’

Fear joined the emotions struggling on Jade’s face, a fear Pryn herself had been fending off and which seemed equally divided between them.

‘You – ?’

Pryn stood up from the sill, then sat again when the secretary stood up from the bed.

Jade’s fingers jerked about, now toward her face (without touching it), now toward her hips (without touching there either). ‘
You!
‘ She stepped unsteadily forward. ‘I should have known – the traitorous vixen! You can read – and
write
!’ She turned and fled the room.

To use one of Kula’s metaphors, one must keep looking down into the well, into the deepest water, down into material life, which is related to market prices but is not always affected or changed by them. So, any economic history that is not written on two levels – that of the well’s rim and that of the depths – runs the risk of being appallingly incomplete … English historians have shown that as of the fifteenth century the traditional public market was accompanied by what they have called the private market (I would prefer to stress the difference and call it the
countermarket
). For indeed, did it not try to free itself from the rules imposed upon the traditional market, rules that were often paralyzing in their excessiveness?

F
ERNAND
B
RAUDEL
Afterthoughts on Material
Civilization and Capitalism

The alternation between ease and unease in Pryn’s recent life had become so frequent she no longer felt the need to name it. She wandered around the room a while longer, now looking out the window at the garden, now looking through the door along the courtyard balcony. She examined corners, looked under chair bottoms. On one circuit she decided
not
to eat the grapes – the only untasted fruit remaining on the tray. A circuit later, she picked one, bit it: juice and sweetness exploded over her tongue. She devoured the bunch, one after one, till the little stems, their maroon crowns surrounding yellow nubs where the fruit had pulled free, prickled above the blue glaze between the brown pear with its white wound and the red pit with its remaining bite of pith.

Licking sticky fingers, Pryn thought she heard sounds
in another part of the house. She stepped out the door. Yes, somewhere on another floor, someone was shouting at someone who was trying to quiet her. She looked over the rail at the inner court. Statuary, plants, benches were arranged, she saw now, in separate groupings, a low, inlaid table at the center of each.

She went to the stairway and started down.

The muffled yelling stopped.

There were not even wrinkles in the cushions where the Ini had lain.

Pryn crossed toward the door – the one Madame Keyne had stood in. A metal gate, it stood ajar. At its sides heavy drapes were tied back, no doubt to be closed in breezier weather.

Pryn pushed through as the heavy-set woman, with a scarf around her head, came along by the house, three young women and a young man behind her. Pryn recognized the cook. She had lugged in the bathtub last night, but Pryn had not seen the others before.

As they walked, the red-scarfed woman instructed: ‘… and, of course, lateness will not be tolerated. Your duties among the chickens and pigeons are not arduous, Larla, but they are exacting; and you will be expected to take care of the swans and peafowl as well. Samo, you will learn most of your gardening duties from Clyton, who has been here for many years now; but you will also be expected to precede Madame to the country home in Ka’hesh by at least a week to help with the heavy cleaning there – the place is always a shambles at the end of winter, because she
will
rent it out to the local young nabobs when she is not using it; and they are none too careful, though it’s a finer home than any of their own draughty piles …’

As they drew abreast of her, among the house girls Pryn saw the new gardener’s assistant, a dark-haired
youth, rather too thin, a bit round-shouldered; still, he glanced at her with heavily lashed, very black eyes. I wonder, thought Pryn, moving the waist about on her new shift, does he think
I’m
a woman of the house? which made her smile at herself. (And perhaps my father is alive … ?) No, I am not traditionally beautiful. Still …

She’d been trying to remember details of her distress at the Ini and her confusion over Radiant Jade. But when behavior seemed so completely without reason, especially when all around was new as well, it was hard even to think about it, much less hold on to the feelings it evoked – unless that behavior was directly before you. What
was
directly before her now? More trees, more rocks, moreflowers …

She frowned over her memories of the morning.

The interests of these women, Pryn realized, were far stronger than she’d thought. But what, exactly, did they
do
? Since Pryn had done it with boys on several occasions (and rather enjoyed it), she fancied that she should know most of what there was to know, at least about that part of it. Certainly it couldn’t be much different, she reflected, from what, only a year or so back, she’d come upon her girl friends Janina and Fetija doing behind the storage shed at the back of her cousin’s bakery. She’d teased them about it for three days, till Fetija had cried and Janina had punched her. And what Fetija and Janina had done was finally not much different from what she herself had done once when she was nine with an older girl cousin – at the older girl’s behest, of course.

Or was it different?

What she and her cousin had done had been interesting enough. But there had been a side to it that had bothered her – though whether that bother had been physical, emotional, or social, at nine she’d been unable to tease out. Irked by the knottiness of it all, she had, at nine, put
those odd, if in themselves oddly pleasant, acts out of memory – though precisely that distress, she could now admit, had made her, as it lingered, tease Fetija so unmercifully till Janina’s punch in the shoulder had stopped it.

Well, Pryn thought, she was fifteen now and too old to be a tease; besides, she was too curious about what was happening in this strange garden – though once more she found her thoughts drifting toward the notion of putting the obstreperous physicality of it all out of current thought. It made it easier, somehow, to deal with.

While she frowned and wandered beneath shadowy trees, it suddenly struck her that – Jade, Madame Keyne, Ini, and her sore side notwithstanding – she actually
felt
about as fine as clear air and carefully tended gardens could make one.

She stepped across the red brick path, between dark pines, by clustered palms with shaggy scales, beside bushes of red lilies with yellow hearts. She passed a fanged and winged monster, carved in obsidian, dangling a dozen breasts like some aged bitch: for all her fierce face, she looked quite benign. The flowers carpeting about her claws made her the more motherly while her glistening blackness made their violet the more intense.

Pryn walked onto a stone-sided bridge crossing the stream below a waterfall.

Four fountains, one at each corner of the bridge, sprayed out into the stream.

As she reached the bridge’s middle, Pryn looked up at the cascades. Jutting from the water’s streaming face, rocks dangled foamy beards. Some were tipped with moss. Others dripped with grasses. Some of the rocks, she realized, were not natural but carved: the head and tail of a stone fish curved from the water, three feet of falls between them; a stone dolphin arched out near the
top. Toward the bottom a great cuttlefish flung stone tentacles from the spume, the whole a living moment rigid in the midst of the unstoppable, inanimate rush.

Then one fountain’s spray faltered, weakened, became a dribble over its stone lip. Pryn was about to walk over and examine it when she heard, then saw, coming around the curving path ahead, an elderly man with curly white hair thick over chest and belly.

His brown head was bald.

Trundling a barrow filled with rakes, hoes, and shovels, he wore around his neck a scarf the same red as the one the cook had worn around her head, or Jade had worn at her waist. He wheeled his barrow straight up to the malfunctioning fountain, set it down, grasped the fountain head – a carved stone shell – and twisted, left, then right. With a great crunch, it came off.

What had been a defective spray became a defective spill.

The man put the fountain head on the bridge’s planks. Rummaging in his barrow, he pulled out a stick with a hook at one end. He shoved the hook into the hole from which the water wobbled, prodding about to dislodge any obstruction.

Pryn stepped nearer to see.

The man glanced at her. ‘Morning.’ He prodded and turned.

Pryn smiled. ‘If this Liberator is making your helpers leave,’ she commented, ‘it doesn’t seem to be stopping new helpers from applying for their jobs.’

The man grunted. ‘A different breed.’

‘You don’t think the new people will be as good as the ones who left?’

‘Better or worse, I can’t say.’ He pulled the stick free and examined the end. ‘Just different.’

There was nothing on the hook.

Nor was the water flow any stronger.

He thrust the stick back in the spigot and poked some more, both arms wet to hairy shoulders.

Pryn walked on over the bridge.

The path took her up – but on a rise different from the one she’d climbed that morning with Madame Keyne; She climbed by hanging banks of fuchsia and honeysuckle; the path moved away from the falls, then back, became a flight of red brick steps between wooden rails beside the splashing water, then became a path again. At last Pryn came to a level stretch, to look across the fall’s rock-punctuated rim. The stream that fed it rushed beside the continuation of the brick. On the other side of the water were high, dank shrubs. Ahead, on her own side of the stream, Pryn saw four brick-edged tributaries leading away into four brick-ringed pools, each pool about five feet in diameter, one set just beyond the other.

By the far pool, the Wild Ini squatted. With a length of branch, she jammed and prodded something in the pool’s bottom.

Pryn walked up.

Ini had taken a wooden grate out of the water. It lay by her knee in the wet grass.

As Pryn’s skirt brushed a bush, Ini looked up, startled. ‘She wanted me to wear her scarf!’ the pale-haired girl hissed. ‘Imagine! She said because I could be one of her employees now, that I should wear her damned red scarf!’ Ini jammed the branch in again. She picked up a handful of leaves and pebbles she had gathered in a pile beside her, pulled the branch out of the water with one hand, thrust the leaves and pebbles in with the other, then fell again to packing and prodding them down into whatever conduit the grate had covered. ‘Me? Ha!
That’s
where her scarf is now!’

Pryn had flinched at Ini’s first look; surprise had left
her heart pounding. As her heart stilled, it occurred to her that somehow, among all the last days’ frightening experiences, fear itself had somehow become … less fearful. She stood by the pool, watching, not unafraid, but not bothered so much by it.

The muscles in the Ini’s shoulders knotted and flexed. Her breath came in small gasps. Suddenly she stood and flung the dripping branch down on top of the grate. Somewhere the gardener’s barrow was crunching up a brick slope. Ini blinked at Pryn, then put her wet, dirty hands on Pryn’s arms. ‘We better get out of here before Clyton sees us!’ Her whisper was absolutely frantic.

Pryn followed Ini off around the pool and behind the trees, brushing leaf-bits, dirt, and droplets from her arms where Ini had touched her and marveling that the little murderess had not bothered to return the grate to the bottom of the pool or to scatter her pile of leaves and pebbles, or even to dispose of her branch – yet at the same time seemed so frightened of discovery.

Pryn walked beside striding Ini.

As they came around another bank of flowers, Ini suddenly asked: ‘Do you like this garden?’

‘Yes. Very much.’ Pryn’s curiosity at why Ini had asked raised the inflection on her final word.

Ini snatched a blue blossom from a bush. ‘So do I. It’s beautiful, wild, surprising at all turns. I think that’s why I like to walk around in it. It reminds me of a forest, but with even more color and confusion crammed in.’ Ini did not look at the flower she’d picked. As she walked, she mashed it in her fingers, so that bits of blue petal fell to the brick.

‘Have you ever thought,’ Pryn offered, as they turned down another path that took them toward the rock wall, ‘how a garden is like a map of the forests outside it? You can’t read distances and directions on it of course. But the
various flowers and trees, arranged so carefully here, are, each of them, like samples of what you can find out in the wild – ‘

Ini’s sharp, high laugh cut Pryn off. ‘
This
garden? A map? What nonsense! This wall, with which that silly old woman, who wants me to wear her silly red scarf, tries to separate her garden from the wildness outside, so that she can pretend there’s order here – do you think it works? Do the people and passions you see inside these walls speak of an ordered household?’ Ini laughed again and flung down the mashed bud. ‘No, it’s all wild!
Her
mistake is to think that by something as simple as a wall – ‘ Still walking, she struck the stone beside her with the flat of her hand, hard enough to make Pryn wince – ‘she can keep the wildness out!’ Ini grinned. ‘But the very fact that the trees and shrubs and rocks and water and air and the people breathing it are here
means
that the wildness is in already. And the wall is not all solid, either. There’s an arch built over the place where the stream comes in for the waterfall. There’re bars along the arch through which the water flows. The bars go down into the water – to keep people out. But I dove down there once. Just below the surface, two of them have rusted away, and anyone could swim through. And down at the other end, at the corner, where the gardener almost never goes because it’s grown up too thick to wheel a barrow, five or six stones have come loose to make a hole that anyone could crawl, from the Liberator’s garden right into ours – though over there at the Liberator’s house nobody ever goes
into
the garden. I know, because I’ve gone exploring in there,
lots
of times!’