Neveryona (22 page)

Madame Keyne paused at a pit to inquire of a balding barrow-pusher after the progress of his wife’s illness; at another she stooped to ask a white-haired worker to show her his bandaged shoulder, ‘If it still pains you, Fenya, I don’t want you straining yourself. The bones of dead laborers are not the proper foundations for these cellars.’

‘Oh, it’s nothing, Madame Keyne! Don’t trouble yourself over it!’

‘The people who work for you, Madame … ?’

Standing, Madame Keyne looked around.

‘Even when they have problems, they seem so … content!’

As they turned at the corner of another cellar, Madame Keyne took Pryn’s arm. ‘That’s because they have the discontented example of the barbarians on the other side of the fence to instruct them.’

‘You don’t use nearly as many women as you do men.’ Looking over the workers around the site, Pryn pictured herself coming into the city – by some other road, as it were – arriving at the market as a seeker after work rather than as the owner’s guest.

‘Jade is always after me to hire more women and barbarians,’ Madame Keyne commented. ‘I’ve actually entertained the notion – certainly I’ve known all too many women who can work as hard as a man and feel twice the drive to prove it. The idea has always struck me, however, as a thrilling transgression. But I’m afraid this side of fifty I react to such thrills as though they were simple stabs of fear – as though, if I did so, something terrible might
happen. Even I cannot think what. It is as if I want my construction site to look even
more
like the sites owned by the powerful men in this city than – well, than those sites do themselves. I am not the most powerful person in Kolhari by any means. Forces other than I have created a customary proportion in the sexual division of our labor, and I fear to deviate from it as though it might evoke some vast and crushing disapproval. That fear, you know, is not the disapproval of those whom I am equal to or whom I am above, but rather some fancied disapproval from those above me – men, and they are almost all men, who would never deign even to notice me and whom, when all is said and done, I do no more than glimpse from year end to year end, now as one passes in an elegant carriage, now as one enters some fine-gated mansion, their very absence vouch safing their powers over my actions far more than any adversary present to voice or hand.’

‘But you
are
a powerful woman!’ Pryn declared, for her attention had wandered. ‘I hadn’t realized you were … well,
this
powerful! How did you become so? I mean, how did you ever … ?’ (We write, you see, of a more primitive time when civilization’s inhibitions were fewer; so that those delicate questions whose very contemplation might throw the likes of you and me into hot-cheeked stammering or moist-palmed silence were easier to ask, at least for a mountain girl such as Pryn.) ‘You must tell me!’

‘Would you like me to? Sometimes I wish it were more complicated than it is.’ Madame Keyne found the purse in her skirts’ folds. Digging inside, first with two fingers, then with three, she removed two coins, then let the purse fall back. She held them up, one in each hand. The larger was a gold piece that flashed and glimmered. ‘Here,’ Madame Keyne said, holding out the gold for Pryn to examine, ‘is the money with which I finance my projects
– the money against which I make my loans, the money I cite when I bargain over lands, the money I have at my beck and call when I arrange prices for materials and labor, the money those who know I am a wealthy woman know I possess.’ The gold coin was stamped with a likeness of the Child Empress. ‘While this – ‘ Madame Keyne held out the smaller iron coin – ‘is the money I am actually prepared to pay out for those unavoidable day-to-day expenses, expenses which include the wages for Ergi, for Jade, for Clyton, as well as for those sweating, naked men and women who dig and carry here – not to mention the six and two I spent back on Black Avenue.’ The iron piece bore the face of a man whose name and office Pryn did not know – though his coin was far the more common.

‘Where do you keep this money?’ Pryn asked, for she was beginning to sense just how much such a project as this market and these warehouses must require.

‘Ah, it’s hidden!’ replied Madame Keyne, who, rather than taking offense at the question, seemed delighted. ‘It’s hidden, carefully, throughout the city, where it’s protected as much by the accounting acumen of the financially astute as it is by the monetary ignorance of the general populace. Really – ‘ She looked from one coin to the other – ‘there is nothing complicated in it. You know, girl, there’s something I’ve been more or less aware of since I was a child: if events ever struck me from the position of affluence and prestige that, certainly, my family secured for me far more than I did, as long as the world in general and the city in particular are organized along the lines they are today I could climb back, simply because I know
where
the ladders’ feet are located – though I confess, the thought of having to make such a climb again becomes less and less appealing, if only because of my age and energies. But these smiling,
sweating, impoverished creatures below us do
not
know – so that the ladders themselves will always be comparatively free of traffic for those of my class who require them. The men here love me – oh, by love I mean nothing profound or passionate; only love at that level of community that we must all indulge for a satisfying life – the women, I fear, do not love me
quite
so much. They are too concerned with how I treat the men and often do not notice my special concern for them: those women in extra need I will often give extra money to directly. I hear the foremen joke about it. But I have been to the homes of many of my workers, men and women – and I know the extra needs of a woman working in this city. I do not claim to hire an equitable number of men from all who need jobs. And I hire less women. But those I hire, I treat well. To do otherwise would be irresponsible to the community which is my concern. Now those men – and women – on the other side of the fence, they are jobless and they hate me – and hate too those that now work. I console myself by remembering that, the odd clod aside, their hate is no more passionate than the love we share over here. Still, if only because I
do
know how real the one is, I must keep my eye open to the other.

‘Those men over there, they wait for the Liberator to liberate them – into jobs indistinguishable from the jobs here. I watch them all and find myself smiling.

‘There are ladders all about them that they step over and brush against and push aside. But without the training and – yes – the vision needed to climb them, I suspect they cannot even see them, much less see where they branch, or where one must hurry or halt as one mounts.

‘As I’ve grown older, however, I’ve had my anxious moments. The anxiety arrives along with a kind of alternative dream, the vision of a world arranged very differently, without any such ladders at all, where no privileges
such as mine exist, nor such hardship as theirs: rather it is a dream of an equitable division of goods and services into which all would be born, within which all would be raised, and the paths from one point to the other would be set out by like and dislike, temperament and desire, rather than inscribed on a mystified map whose blotted and improperly marked directions are all plotted between poverty and power, wealth and weakness.

‘The anxiety comes with it, however, when I hear report of some new political upstart, such as – yes – our latest Liberator, who declares his own muzzy dream of equality, freedom, and joy. I have watched governments come and go, some led by liberators, some by despots, and I realize that the workers on this side of the fence and the out-of-work on that side – as well as the Liberator they oppose and support – share, all of them, one common mesconnaissance: they think the enemy is Nevèrÿon, and that Nevèrÿon
is
the system of privileges and powers such as mine that supports it, or the privileges and powers such as the Child Empress’s (whose reign is, after all, benign and bureaucratic) which rule it. As long as they do not realize that the true enemy is what holds those privileges – and the ladders of power to them – in place, that at once anchors them on all sides, keeps the rungs clear, yet assures their bottoms will remain invisible from anywhere other than their tops, then my position in the system is, if not secure, at least always accessible should I, personally, become dislodged.’

‘Then what is this …
their
enemy?’ Pryn asked. ‘I mean the true one?’

‘You really ask me that, girl?’ Madame Keyne laughed sharply. ‘You actually want me to name it – now? here?’ The gesture with which Madame Keyne accompanied the laugh caused the gold coin, which by then was merely lying in her open hand, to fly up into the sun. It soared, it
spun – and landed on the hard ground, rolling along the embankment, where it finally swerved and fell in.

‘Look there, my man!’ Madame Keyne called down to one of the laborers. ‘Bring that back like a good fellow.’

Wiping his forehead, the man blinked up. Looking about, he saw the coin, planted his shovel, and went to get it, then vaulted up to crouch on the embankment’s edge. ‘You dropped this, Madame Keyne?’ The rough hand, with its horny fingers and scarred knuckles (one nail blackened from a recent mishap), held out the gold. ‘There you are.’

‘And this,’ Madame Keyne said as she accepted the gold in her own dark fingers, ‘is for you.’ She handed him the iron coin that had remained with her. ‘For your trouble. Tell me your name. You’re a good worker, I can see that.’

The barbarian – this particular worker was a barbarian – squinted up at his employer, sun and surprise deepening the wrinkles about his ugly eyes. Suddenly he let a muffled guffaw. Pryn heard in it the nervous overtones of a man used to laughing openly. ‘Well, Madame Keyne, Kudyuk will work for you any day! Kudyuk, that’s me!’ His accent was as light as Jade’s, as if he’d been in the city a long while. ‘Yes, I’ll certainly work for you!’ His fist closed on the small iron. Bobbing his bearded head and without ever really standing erect, he dropped back over the embankment and went for his shovel. ‘Yes, Madame Keyne,’ he called up, ‘I certainly will!’

Madame Keyne laughed with him, and walked on.

Coming with her, Pryn only wondered – as Kudyuk seized up his shovel with his free hand – where he would put his coin; he was on of the workers who had already given up all clothing in his pursuit of labor.

‘Do you see?’ Madame Keyne raised the hand, in which she again held the gold, to shield her eyes. The confidence
in her tone was both exciting and confusing. ‘You see how money that goes out comes back to me? And, you must admit, it costs very little. So now you have the whole system of enterprise, profit, and wages laid out for your inspection, girl. No wonder the Empress and the Liberator both decry slavery, when
this
is such a far more efficient system. You know where most of the iron for these little moneys comes from, don’t you? It’s melted down from the old, no-longer-used collars once worn by – ‘

‘But Madame,’ protested Pryn, who was both a logical and excitable young woman, ‘you
lost
money in that transaction! Money went out – and you had to pay to get it back!’

Madame Keyne glanced up at the gold. ‘Little mountain waif – ‘ she seemed intensely amused – ‘if you think I
lost
in that transaction, then you do not know what the enemy is, nor, I doubt, will you ever. But if you can see the real gain on my part, then – perhaps! – you have seen your enemy and may yet again recognize her glittering features.’ She turned the large coin so that sun slid across the likeness of the Empress till the blind-white flare made Pryn look away.

At the same moment a breeze blew some sand grains in Pryn’s face, so that she stopped to rub her eyes. When Pryn looked up. Madame Keyne was walking ahead, now laying her hand on the shoulder of another slops carrier, now nodding to another barrow-pusher. ‘Ergi! Ergi! she called as Pryn came up. ‘Ergi, I want to talk to you!’

Down in an excavation, the foreman finished setting some sweating men to a new mound of rock and dirt, then came across the pebbles and dust, by now as wet himself as any of his workers.

‘Earlier today, Ergi, out on Black Avenue,’ Madame Keyne called down, ‘I saw a woman try to deliver some
very interesting bricks to a slug-a-bed not yet up to receive his shipment. These bricks were yellow – not your usual red. I want you to find out everything you can about them: their manufacture, functionality, durability, cost, maintenance – everything that contours their value, in any and every direction. See if they’d be good for paving. Then report back to me …’

The cart trundled along the tree-shaded avenue by the stone walls of the Sallese estates. It was past the hottest part of the day. Pryn sat beside the older woman, feeling an astonishing exuberance. Commerce and construction? These seemed the centers of life – far more central, certainly, than protest and liberation. On the rumbling cart Pryn could almost let herself think that these, indeed, were what she had taken off on her dragon to find.

Madame Keyne had been pleased and elated since she’d left the New Market. The streets were less crowded, and the drive back easier. By the time they’d reached the suburbs, both had fallen into a pleased silence. Pryn’s, however, contained within it all the excitement of her encounter with project and enterprise. Madame Keyne’s, as she guided the cart along, seemed – to Pryn at any rate – more pensive. In the moments when her own excitement lulled, Pryn wondered if the prospect of returning to her own embattled garden had quieted the older woman.

Suddenly Madame Keyne announced: ‘I know what
he
thinks is his enemy. What I must learn, though, is whom he thinks to be his allies!’