Neveryona (36 page)

Pryn started to say something about memory and writing. But in the same way she knew the alleys and hedges and the people in her great-aunt’s neighborhood in Ellamon, she knew Tratsin and Bragan and Kurvan and Gutryd were illiterate; and she knew from her aunt’s example how much hostility one could create by claiming to know too much among them.

‘You know, I used to work in the quarries,’ Tratsin said, suddenly. ‘On the scaffolding crew. But you wouldn’t know anything about that –’

‘They put up the scaffolds and wooden walkways for high work …’ Pryn quoted Kurvan from the morning.

Tratsin nodded, a little surprised. ‘Well, yes. They do. Anyway, in the last year I was working there, they were getting ready to send three crews up on the new cliffs for basalt blocks. We were working down from a ledge that hung over a drop that was, oh, a good three times the height of that wall there.’ He pointed to the ravine’s lip where the bridge joined it. ‘The boys were roping wood together and pegging it into the stone face. The digging crews weren’t up yet. Just us scaffolders. There was a big overhang over the ledge where I’d gone up to take some short-planks so we would have them at work level later on. I was standing on a bushy little outcrop with all day down behind me, when I heard a crack and a rumble. Someone shouted, “Tratsin!” I looked up, and saw big brown rocks tearing away from the mother face and sliding toward me –’

‘What did you
do
?’ Pryn asked.

‘There wasn’t anywhere to go left or right. And those falling rocks were pretty large …’ Tratsin paused meaningfully. (Pryn took a breath.) ‘So I jumped – right off the ledge! I remember being in the air and the sun in my right eye as I fell, and wondering what it was going to be like to be dead in a second, and whether I’d feel my bones snap on the rocks below. And then I hit – I felt it all right! But somehow I hit rolling; and balled up real tight. I swear I bounced down that slope! I heard a lot of thumps, but I don’t know if they were me hitting earth or the rocks hitting around me. The next thing I knew I was lying against some tree with my back stinging like I’d been attacked by hornets; and my left thigh, too – I’d scraped
both of them all up on small stones and twigs. The guys were running up. Everyone was trying to help me stand, and pointing up the cliff to the ledge I’d jumped from – it was very high, and the rocks piled all over it now looked very heavy. I didn’t break one bone! Other than the scrapes, somehow I was all right!’ Tratsin chuckled. ‘For the rest of the day, everybody kept on talking about “Tratsin’s leap,” and how it was certainly some kind of magic that skinny Tratsin was still alive after falling so far – what I’d looked like in the air, and which one of them had seen it happen, and which one hadn’t, and which ones had seen scaffolders fall to their deaths before over less than half that distance. That kind of thing.’ Tratsin looked at his greasy fingers. ‘For three days they talked about it, pointing up at the ledge when anyone passed it. It was “Tratsin’s leap,” “Tratsin’s leap,” “Tratsin’s leap …” For almost three days. I thought they were going to name the ledge “Tratsin’s leap,” only then they cleared the rocks off it –’ Tratsin pushed himself forward to splash down into the shallow water before the boulder. He plunged his hands in the stream and brought them up covered with mud and sand. With one hand, then the other, he scoured his fingers and forearms. ‘It was just the upper ledge of the basalt face again. “Wasn’t that the one that skinny Tratsin almost got hurt on?” Then nobody even bothered to mention
that
any more.’ He rinsed his hands again. Mud made its own clouds around his wrists. Mud floated out about his ankles; and Pryn could no longer see the reflected bridge and sky. ‘For a while, though, I
thought
they were going to name it after me – the ledge, I mean. It would have been nice if they had – for the girls, when they got older. Of course they weren’t born when it happened. But if they knew that their father had jumped from a ledge – and lived. I don’t even have a scar left from it – but then, skinny as I am, I’ve always
healed well. Still, I thought it would’ve been a nice thing.’ Tratsin shook water from his hands. Bubbles floated back between his ankles where the hair was wet flat against his calves. ‘But then I guess whoever put up the bridge here might have liked to be remembered too. By more than their names, I mean.’ He squinted up at the stone structure, ‘I mean if those really
are
names … Well, I want to get back to work.’ He paused a moment, then shook his head. ‘But it doesn’t matter. It was years ago. Why should anybody call it “Tratsin’s leap” today?’ Then he grinned. ‘But they
almost
did! Hey, take the bowl there back to Bragan for me …?’

‘Oh, I will!’

‘That’s a good girl.’ He reached up, took the knife, the wood, and started away.

Watching him, Pryn thought of her great-aunt, who might like to be remembered as something other than an old, odd woman claiming credit for impossible things. Pryn picked up the bowl, put the leather cover inside it, and slid down until her feet splashed into the hazed water.

Starting up the stairs to the ravine rim, Tratsin waved.

Pryn waved back and walked to the water’s edge. She squatted where the current had cut a finger-deep shelf from the bank, took the leather out, and put it beside her. Digging up a handful of sand, she swished out the bowl with it, swirling the bowl itself in the water. So many things to remember, she thought. So many things to forget. Certainly Enoch, like Ellamon, would have its fables; and, staying here, she would eventually learn them. But fables were the tales a town or a city could bear to recall. Fables taught simple and clear lessons everyone could agree on. Fables were tales that could be put to immediate use, either to instruct or entertain a child, to remind adults of past glories or recurring dangers. But there were always the incidents on the bridge
that no one could bear to bring up, or Tratsin’s leap that, for whatever reason, people just … well, forgot, or women’s talk before the fire, while they carded, cooked, or spun, that no one thought important enough to remember –

Pryn stopped and kneeled back on the sand. She’d been struck with a vision, clear as sunlight on the water before her. Somewhere in Enoch, she knew, watching over some bunch of digging, screeching, rolling children, Bragan would be saying to another Enoch mother: ‘… this northern girl my Tratsin found upriver, who’s staying with us for a day or so – she’s going to have a baby, poor thing. But do you know what she said about my soup – I mean the double soup we make here? She said that as far away as fabled Ellamon, it’s all that anybody can talk of! Travelers speak of it in the markets! She said she’s actually
heard
them talking – oh, they must be raving in markets all over Nevèrÿon. Imagine …!’ Pryn rinsed the bowl again. Odd, she thought, how words must leave and return, bearing some trace of their journey, for that sort of memory to fix itself. Well, then, she’d done her part to see that something – at least a soup – was remembered.

Certainly it was good soup!

She put the bowl down and began to rinse the leather.

Supper that evening verged on the inedible. Bragan made a paste of yesterday’s fish (a dubious notion to Pryn from the beginning; she’d caught trout at home in her strolls along mountain brooks) with various vegetables and breads and oils. Bragan sat in the corner by the fire with her bowl on her lap. Tratsin sat on the bench along the wall, eating his share with his fingers. He’d brought the carving knife home to work on a bench leg; it leaned against the wall. Gutryd and Kurvan sat on the floor, and Pryn sat on the pallet, eating. The babies took the odd
finger full of fishy mush, now from Kurvan, now from their mother. Pear juice bubbled through cracks in the crust of the cobbler cooking at the fire’s edge; now and again Bragan would reach over and turn another side of the bowl to the heat. It smelled quite wonderful. When it was served, though, and Pryn tasted it, she was thrown sharply back to the barbarian eating establishment where she’d worked that night in Kolhari. The spice that had ruined the barbarians’ vegetable stew was all through the fruit. Pryn frowned, said nothing, and tried to eat it anyway.

‘Is Bragan’s cobbler good as her soup?’ Kurvan wanted to know, handing Pryn up a refilled mug that Tratsin, by the beer keg, had just handed him. ‘Maybe her soup will get the same kind of reputation as the fine beers brewed in the south, ’ey?’

Pryn smiled; and drank beer; and nodded; and ate the unpleasant food. The beer, at any rate, she’d begun to enjoy; it made her feel strange and relaxed. There was apparently some joke in the family about Gutryd’s drinking enough to get herself sick at last summer’s Labor Festival. The first three times Kurvan or Bragan made laughing reference to it, Gutryd made jokes in return. But the next time Kurvan spoke of it, Gutryd’s good humor broke, ‘I don’t want some lazy, out-of-work indigent like you saying things like that about
me
! It was years ago, now. Can’t you forget
anything
? Stop it, I say!’ She turned sharply. ⁴Oh, Tratsin,
tell
him to stop!’

‘You don’t have to tease her like that …’ Tratsin said seriously to his unserious and grinning friend. Perhaps it was the tone, but the infant, on a pile of cloth in the corner, woke up at that moment long enough to give one cry in the firelight of the over-warm cabin, sigh, and go back to sleep, while the toddler, with mushy hands and dirty face, sat back on her heels in the middle of the floor
and giggled. But Bragan pushed to her feet. ‘Now you’ve got to take Pryn over there soon,’ she said, looking about, ‘before there’s no light left at all. Here, I’ll put up some food for you, so you’ll have something for the morning.’

‘Oh,’ Pryn said. ‘Yes. I guess we’d better go.’ She stood up, torn between the discomfort, of rejection and the relief at leaving the hot, fishy shack. ‘I’m sure I’ll be all right …’ she added, though no one had suggested otherwise.

Kurvan stood ponderously and picked up Tratsin’s carving knife from against the wall. ‘Yes, we’d best be off.’ He swung it back and forth. ‘You never know what gods, ghosts, and demons we might have to fight, making our way through the ancient and troubled streets of Enoch –’

‘Not in the
house
, Kurvan!’ A bowl in each hand, Bragan looked back and forth between them. With a glance at Pryn, she chose: ‘Because you won’t have to bring this one back so soon,’ and began to fill it from the pot. ‘You’ve been awfully helpful while you were here. That was very nice of you. I mean in your condition – for the first month or so, sometimes, you just don’t feel up to doing a thing!’

Five minutes later, after goodbyes and gratitude, Pryn pushed out the hide hanging where Tratsin and Kurvan had already gone.

Kurvan swung the blade and lunged over the grass, heavy and naked in the evening.

Tratsin said soberly: ‘That’s not what it’s for, Kurvan.’

Kurvan walked back up the slope, testing the blade with his thumb. ‘So little happens around here, I bet you wish it
was
a sword, and you could go off with it after brigands and slavers and horrid monsters!’

Tratsin took it. ‘I need it to work. It’s not for games. Come on.’ He started down the slope toward the road.

Kurvan gave Pryn a great grin. ‘No sense of play at all,
I tell you!’ He took the food bowl from her and, holding it against his hip, followed Tratsin down. ‘Must all the good people in the world be like that?’

Under twilight, they walked the same road Tratsin had gone off to work on that morning. Tratsin and Kurvan fell into conversation about people Pryn didn’t know, with problems whose backgrounds she didn’t understand. Sometimes strolling beside one of them or the other, sometimes lingering a step or two behind, she realized that, leading neither to the river nor along the ravine, this road was revising her picture of Enoch again simply by passing through the little city itself. Now here was a row of five shacks almost touching. There were two stone houses with three horses tethered under a thatched awning between. Children crossed ahead, two together giggling, one alone dawdling. A man pushed back his door-hanging to shout, ‘Stop your play and come in now, I say!’

Off among other huts a child answered, ‘I
said
I’ll be there in a minute!’ while a cart filled with gravel rolled up the street. The drivers made some joke with Kurvan that set all four men laughing. A dog trotted behind the clattering wheels.

They passed a partially paved area, with a tarpaulin over one section and a well in its corner, which, if Enoch were anything like Ellamon at all, would be the market area on specified days of the week. A few buildings here even had walls around them. Through more houses Pryn could see another length of wall that may once have enclosed a section of the town itself, or at least acted as a partial fortification.

Pale lightning flickered over the evening. Pryn looked up, remembering rain. When she looked down again, she said, surprised, ‘We’re on the bridge …!

‘Belhams Bridge it is,’ said Kurvan, ‘propped on old Venn’s Rock.’

Pryn looked over the stone rail at the ravine and its wide, shallow stream. No, it wasn’t a large town at all. ‘Kurvan, do
you
know anything about who built the bridge here?’

‘You mean Belham and Venn?’ Kurvan said.

‘Now you see,’ said Tratsin, ‘I’ve lived here all my life and I wasn’t even sure they were people’s names.’

‘I’m not sure they’re names either,’ Kurvan said. ‘At least not of the bridge builders. I used to think they must be a pair of ancient quarry owners who pooled their money to have it put up – they’d be the only people from here rich enough to do it.’