Neveryona (32 page)

Over the stades they rowed downstream, three times Tratsin stopped to fish. In the course of it, Pryn learned he was not really a fisherman, but a benchmaker. He’d taken his two days off for the month to travel north, had rented one of the reed-lined boats, and was fishing downstream over the second day toward home. A man has to get away from the women sometimes, he said – though he seemed happy enough for Pryn’s company. He said: His wife, Bragan, was seven months along toward another child. He
hoped
it might be a boy, but a girl would be all right. Girls could work, too. His younger brother, till only weeks ago, had lived with them – Malot, now he’d been a strange boy. He’d worked at the quarry, but he’d run off to the city. At any rate, that’s what everyone assumed – it was all he’d talked of for the six months before he and Bragan’s household money had disappeared one day. It had wounded Tratsin deeply, his brother’s running away. Wounded him to the heart. They lived, Tratsin and his family, in the town of … but Pryn missed the name; she’d begun to cry again. Probably Malot would come to a bad end, Tratsin went on. (Pryn sniffled and tried to listen.) His wife’s cousin, Gutryd? She lived with them, too. And spoiled the girls and was a silly girl herself. He didn’t understand Gutryd. He didn’t think she was happy.

His boss was good, though.

His working conditions were good.

His wife was a good girl: she let him go fishing on his two days a month off.

He was a happy man, Tratsin reasoned.

With six freshwater perch, one of which Pryn caught herself when Tratsin let her throw in the line, and seven or eight brook trout – they threw back lots of little palm-sized fish he said wouldn’t taste good at all – they came that evening to a bank loud with crickets. They pulled up at a muddy beach where half a dozen boats with woven linings had been tied to branches so that their prows were lifted clear of the water. The sky was deep blue, halfway into night. The air was dry and cool. Now and again the bushes and shacks about them flickered into full daylight with hazy lightning.

‘Come with me, now.’ Tratsin’s bare feet sank in black mud, breaking cracks around in it. ‘Come. You’ll like Bragan. She’s a good girl. And she’ll help you. You’ll see.’ Thunder trundled somewhere in the cool summer sky. Again lightning flickered. ‘Come. This way.’

Pryn did like Bragan, who pushed aside the hanging in the shack doorway and, after Tratsin whispered to her briefly, declared: ‘You’re having a baby!’ She clapped her hands to the sides of her own seven-and-a-half-month belly under the sleeveless brown shift while the hanging fell against her shoulder. ‘Come in, now! Come in! Your first weeks? You must be dead tired. My two girls – oh, I carried both of them easily enough. But
this
one?’ Firelight flickered in her frizzy hair. ‘Well, I was sick as a poisoned dog for the whole first month and a half! That’s why I think it’s going to be a boy – Ah! I want it to be a boy so badly! I had a boy first, but he died, poor little thing. Boys carry harder and higher, they say. Or is it girls? I never can remember! But come in! Come in!’

The shack’s single room was comically crowded, and
Pryn was too tired to remember who was who, other than that the heavy one with the dead black hair and beard – Kurvan – was Tratsin’s best friend.

‘You working yet?’ were Tratsin’s first words to him.

’I wasn’t working yesterday morning when you left’ Leaning against the wall, Kurvan folded his arms over his fleshy chest. ‘What makes you think I’d be working when you got back?’

‘You haven’t been working for almost three weeks’ Bragan stepped around a baby basket on the floor. ‘You should have a job!’

‘Until
he
came home you were happy enough to let me lounge and gossip by your fireplace!’ Kurvan laughed. ‘Now you
both
start in on me!’

‘You
should
have a job,’ Tratsin said, ‘I could get you a job. Since Malot’s gone, they need another man at the stone pit. I could speak to – ’ But that actually seemed to get black-bearded Kurvan annoyed.

So Bragan cried: ‘Let’s get this young woman some soup!’ She put her arm around Pryn, heading her around the end of a bench toward the corner fireplace.

‘Get her some beer,’ Kurvan said. ‘Beer’s good for pregnant women. We have fine beer here. It comes from the breweries down on the coast,’ and he turned to help himself from a dripping barrel set back between two plank beds.

‘Soup!’ protested Bragan, then turned to Pryn. ‘Unless you’d rather not – with this one, I couldn’t eat a thing, night or day, for the first six weeks. Though my sister said that’s only supposed to last for three. Ahh! and in the morning! Everything I tried to get down – ?’ She made a spewing gesture. ‘What a mess!’

A baby began to cry. The other woman in the room – the sister? Gutryd? – went to see about it, while Bragan
ladled soup, thick as stew, first from one pot, then from another, into one red clay bowl and the next.

The stuff in the first cauldron was brown and meaty; the stuff in the second, which Bragan spilled on top of it so that the two made ribbons across one another in the bowl, was creamy and dotted with yellow vegetables. Filled with the two of them, the red clay heated Pryn’s palm to burning as she raised the bowl to her mouth – to be struck by a memory out of childhood:

The gray-veiled woman traveler from the Ellamon market, who wore the wide silver rings, had told her aunt, ‘And their double soups? The glory of southern cookery, I say – though you must know the people to find any. They won’t serve it at the inns.’ And her aunt had said, ‘Chemistry, medicine, alchemy, and the other branches of charlatanry that sap the purse of our Suzerain today at the wheedling of clever men, they’re all forms of the woman’s science of cuisine – especially that part of it concerned with midwifery. Belham told me that. Do you know of Belham, the barbarian inventor from the south? He stayed here in fabled Ellamon – oh, it was many, many years back – ’

Kurvan handed Pryn a piece of bread, burned in spots on the crust but with (as she took the third bite, she realized) dough still raw in it. She ate hungrily, nevertheless, thinking that it was the kind of loaf people had brought back to her cousin in outrage (or begrudging sympathy) during the first months of his bakery. With it she shoveled soup into her mouth.

The soup
was
wonderful!

‘That woman is hungry!’ Holding his own bowl, Kurvan squatted down in a clear spot on the floor mat. ‘She’ll have a fat and healthy youngster, with good bones and a worker’s back, if she eats that way.’

‘You should have a job, Kurvan,’ Gutryd said sitting
on the bench next to Tratsin, who was almost finished with his bowl. ‘Three weeks without work? Bragan’s right. It isn’t good for you or your family.’ She reached down for the loaf leaning against the baby’s basket. ‘You want to be able to marry and have a fine family of healthy children now, like Tratsin and Bragan, don’t you?’

To wake with straw tickling her cheek and ankle and the smell of damp thatch and babies and last night’s cooking, the pallet below the straw hard under one shoulder and water dripping somewhere from the torrents that had poured loud enough to wake her just before sunrise (Pryn did not open her eyes), was to realize that, before she’d started these adventurings, she’d spent most of her life in such a shack. It was to realize that whenever these adventurings were through, no matter how far away they deposited her, unless life for her went very differently from what she or anyone else might expect, she was likely to spend most of her life to come in such a shack – however better insulated she might make it.

A clay top moved on a clay jar. A woman whispered. A man’s bare feet crunched the floor mats. He said, answering a question Pryn hadn’t heard: ‘Well, it was time to get up. Who sleeps when there’s work to do?’

Pryn rolled over, stretched her feet onto the floor, rubbing her hands’ heels on her eyes.

The woman spoke now. ‘I just thought they might like to sleep a
little
more, that’s all. Especially the girl you brought in last night, since she’s … you know.’

Pryn let her hands stay over her eyes.

‘Sleep instead of work?’ The man laughed. ‘Now, who would want to do that – except, well, let’s see … a few I could name!’ His next laugh was louder. ‘Besides, the girl’s not sick. She’s only having a baby! You get her to
help you with the chores. See,
she’s
awake at least. Not like this other lazy good-for-nothing.’

Fingering the corners of her eyes, Pryn looked up.

Squatting naked, with her knees wide and her great belly between them, Bragan was doing something at the fire.

Tratsin was bending over her with his hand on her shoulder, the sides of his narrow buttocks hollow, the ligaments standing out at the backs of his hairy knees. ‘Now don’t be afraid to ask her to help you. She’s a good girl – like you!’

At which point a baby cried.

Like a man reminded of a pressing duty, Tratsin lunged for his loin-rag, winding it about his hips, tucking it in on itself here and there, getting it between his legs, while making for the door. Bragan got even busier poking up the coals under the pot and blowing them to brightness.

The cry ran out of breath; in the pause, Pryn pictured the tiny chest filling itself mightily. She looked around, thinking to go to the baby herself. But Gutryd came in through the back door-hanging. The brush of hemlock twigs on the bottom to keep out insects swung in over the mat. Gutryd’s dress was bunched down around her waist, and her hair was wet. She seized the child’s basket up from the corner, to shake it back and forth. The next cry was notably quieter, with, somewhere in it, a movement toward relief.

At the fire Bragan said: ‘Gutryd, get her! Please!’

‘There, there!’ Gutryd said, though whether it was to child or adults, Pryn was not sure. ‘I have her! I have her!’

Pryn stood up on the rush mats and started forward to volunteer her help to Bragan – as the toddler toddled before her. Pryn stepped wide; her foot landed on the corner of a blanket, largely wrapped around large
Kurvan. Broad, cracked feet stuck from the blanket’s end, confirming what last night Pryn had only suspected: she’d been given the pallet Kurvan usually slept on when he stayed over.

Then, for some reason known only to those under three, the crawling girl sat back on her haunches, twisted up her face, and let a wail that carried within its knife-tones the anguish of a god before a clumsy, foolish, ill-made, skilless, cracked, and useless world. The pain at that cry’s core seemed something that might be looked away from, more likely suppressed, but that could never be assuaged.

‘Oh, little one,’ Kurvan said from under his blanket, ‘
do
shut up!’ He rolled away, tugging more blanket over his black, bushy head.

As the blanket corner pulled from under her heel, Pryn took another ungainly step to avoid the baby’s hand and Kurvan’s feet. At which point Kurvan rolled back, thrust his naked arms out, seized the wailing child, and pulled her to him with all the compassion of a man who’d spent a lifetime in such world-sorrow as she now howled of. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, honey!’ He cuddled and rocked with her on the floor, as if he were personally responsible for the profound and universal disorder by which she had just been shattered. ‘I’m
sorry!’

Pryn started toward Bragan, who had suddenly become very involved with the fire, food, and crockery in much the same way she’d increased her involvement in the ashes when the baby had first cried.

So Pryn veered toward the door, out which Tratsin was leaving.

She caught the hide hanging as it swung across the doorway. Hemlock leaves, from the branch tied for weight and bugs along its bottom, brushed the door stone.

She stepped outside.

Coppery sun burned on wet leaves.

Other shacks stood near; still others stood across the muddy path down the slope.

Through the break in the brush the river looked substantially narrower at dawn than it had in evening’s half-dark.

More shacks sat on the far bank, a few stone huts among them – in short, the farther shore was much like this one. Tratsin stood a little off on some rocks around which the grass had worn away. He scratched at his thinning scalp so that thong and bound hair shook behind his ear.

Down the slope, someone guffawed in the next cottage. A woman yelled. The other person laughed.

Hemlock leaves shushed.

Naked and disheveled, but without the child, Kurvan stepped out.

Branches dipped slowly across the road, then turned up all their whispering leaves to show gray. The breeze reached a tree near the door.

Droplets hit Pryn’s cheek.

And Kurvan said something like, ‘Aargchh …!’ rubbing the splatter from his face and shoulders while Tratsin laughed and pointed. Pryn grinned – as Kurvan’s stubby genitals contracted within the black hair below the crease under his broad belly. ‘That’s right!’ he announced. ‘Everyone else gets a few drops, but Kurvan gets the soaking!’

‘What
you’d
better get,’ said Tratsin, ‘is a job!’ He laughed again.

‘Oh, yes – ’ Suddenly Kurvan’s annoyance and brushing turned into a great, open laugh so that his big chest shook. “I get the soaking? Well, sometimes I think my job is to give you and your family something to laugh at! Oh, it’s not such a bad vocation. The hours are long. The pay is
mostly in kind – ’ Here he leaned toward Pryn in a mocking aside – ‘though he lets me hit him up for an iron coin or two.’ He dropped his hand to his knee to scratch. ‘But I suppose the work has its higher profits – ’