Neveryona (48 page)

Pryn followed, glancing for a moment out between the hills. Lavik had taken a seat at one end of the railing; Jenta sat at the other. Both looked at the inlet. The glimmering gold line had lengthened on the surface with
the falling sun; another glimmering line now crossed it, as if some irregularity beneath the water were creating a difference in the surface ripples that was, over that distant area, brilliantly distinguished by the lowering light.

‘These ceramic tokens here – ’ The earl pointed; and Pryn turned to look – ‘are an old method of account-keeping employed both north and south of Nevèrÿon. This has been used time out of mind and will probably go on long after the wonders of our nation are forgotten. Each clay token represents a different product, just as the more ornate statuettes do, and the amounts are represented by the number of tokens or, sometimes, by special tokens used in conjunction. A non-Nevèrÿon merchant might seal a number of them in a soft clay jar, which then becomes the contract, the order, the invoice. But notice the jar, here.’ The earl lifted an ovoid bulla, definitely dry. He shook it, clinking the tokens within. His hand carried the dull clay from shadow into light. ‘The marks on the surface are where whoever sealed the message inside first pressed the tokens into the surface of the jar while it was still wet, so that we might have a visible list of the contents – as though representation itself were a containable product that might, itself, be represented, ordered, organized as to type and quantity. The list allows us to see some picture of what is within, which picture can always be checked – in a moment of contention – by breaking the jar before witnesses. But again, we are left with the problematics all sculptural writing, whether monumental or amphoral, invoke. What should be called original and what should be called copy? Does the visible list merely confirm the accuracy of the representation within? Or do the tokens, when revealed, prove the accuracy of the list? Is it the visible writing or the invisible writing which merits the privileged status of “originary
truth”? Those so necessary instincts tell us that the copy, whichever it might be, is of the same order of reality as the tools with which it is made – merely an instrument in some representational enterprise. Still, it is only the most unsophisticated and uncritical notion of commercial or judicial time that supports the instinctive, social, uncritical answer.’ The earl stepped on.

Pryn stepped after him. Beyond the columns, the glimmering lines had spread more than halfway across the inlet.

‘Here, a stylus; here the waxed board – the same one I brought down, five years ago, to show Yrnik so that he could make one for the office wall at the brewery. Do you recognize the marks that have been pressed so carefully into the surface? They are from the stylus, but they mimic the impressions from the tokens we just saw on the day jar. With a sharp stick one can do a passable imitation – as well as mark the Ulvayn syllables that allow one to sculpt, to portray, to represent actual words. But one has still not evaded the endlessly deferred question of origin and copy that inheres in all sculptural representations. I see, however, that your gaze has already moved on to the parchment against the wall here; yes, it contains the same class of markings that your astrolabe bears around its edge and that so many of our local monuments carry here and there, like signatures, at their base. Would it surprise you to know that they are an early invention of that Belham who, you tell us, spent some of his later days in your aunt’s cabin in the north? This marking system, which, so the tale goes, he devised when he was no older than you, is the first invention that brought him to our attention – that is, to the attention of the rich and powerful who saw, in Belham’s explanation of the system’s potential, the control of a certain nuance to power that we coveted. Let me translate the basic signs and their meaning for you. This sign here, for example, stands for
the number “one.” This sign stands for the number “two.” The sign following them stands for the number “four.” To create the missing number, three, between them, you merely put the sign for “one” and the sign for “two” together. The next sign, here, is “eight.” By devious combinations of the signs that come before it you can again supply all the missing numbers – five, six, and seven – between it and its predecessor. The next sign is “sixteen,” and the next, “thirty-two.” But let me continue on – ’ the earl pointed to sign after sign – ’ “sixty-four,” “one hundred twenty-eight,” “two hundred fifty-six,” “five hundred twelve” …’

Pryn was about to mention that she recognized the sequence. Was it a part of some ancient tale? She started to say, like a memory,
I see how fast it goes up
…! But at that moment a play of light caught her eye and she looked out between the stone columns again. The sun, lowering still further, had expanded the pattern of glimmerings, which now ran here and there, crossing and recrossing almost the entire inlet. As well, there were squares of gold in which were darker circles, the pattern having extended now across most of the water. Suddenly Pryn caught her breath.

‘… “one thousand twenty-four,” “two thousand forty-eight,” “four thousand ninety-six” ….’

What Pryn saw was a city.

The city: grime, glamor, geometries of glass, steel, and concrete. Intractable, it rises from nature, like proud Babel, only to lie athwart our will, astride our being. Or so it often seems. Yet immanent in that gritty structure is another: invisible, imaginary, made of dreams and desire, agent of all our transformations. It is that other city I want here to invoke … Immaterial, that city in-formed history from the start, molding human space and time ever since time and space molded themselves to the wagging tongue.

I
HAB
H
ASSAN
Cities of Mind, Urban Words

Pryn blinked.

More accurately, what she saw was a map of a city, a map on which one might measure, in rippling gold, gray, and silver, distance and direction. There ran one golden avenue; there another crossed it. There lay a glimmering yard, in the midst of which was a dark circle, the cistern at its center, where, no doubt, long-vanished children had run up to bounce their balls against salt-stained stones. There was the dark rectangle of a large building. That stretch, there, might have been a market square. Several smaller rectangles abutted it, suggesting an irregularly set line of smaller houses. Around and between them all ran glittering alleys, some broad and gently curving, some narrow and straight, some thin and tangled. On one island, green brush continued the line of some bright walkway till, on the differentiated waters, gold ripples took it up again. On another, half covered with shrubs, now Pryn saw two mostly fallen, but real, stone walls that joined: the remains of a building corner among a group
of buildings, the rest of which were only scribed by angular darknesses in the glimmering ripples around.

She started to speak.

Then Pryn saw something else.

‘… “eight thousand one hundred ninety-two,”’ the earl’s voice droned on.

On the column nearest Lavik, clamped in iron top and bottom to the stone, was a sword. Indeed, on each of the dozen columns that rose to the chamber’s roof swords were clamped. The one on the column directly before Pryn, however, like a double bar across the vision, had
two
blades rising from its hilt. They were joined for the first three inches but after that were separate, like a blade and its afterimage an inch to the side, or a blade and its strangely diffracted shadow – though which was which (because both were real metal) was impossible to tell. Pryn looked at the next column. The blade there was single. There was also a single blade on the next. But on the next – and, indeed, on the one after that – there were double blades. On the next, indeed on the rest, were single blades.

But three of the swords displayed on the chamber’s dozen columns were clearly twinned weapons.

Beyond them, the sun touched a hill. One side of the golden city, a spot of blackness formed, a simple shadow intensified by the surrounding glimmer. It spread the water, lightening as it moved. In the shifting angle of the sun, avenues, alleys, big and little buildings lost definition.

A breeze – and half the city was wiped away by copper fire!

Pryn blinked at the ripples, trying to recall their previous form. The earl’s voice continued: ‘… “two hundred sixty-two thousand one hundred forty-four” …’

The city disappeared …

More accurately, the evening’s darknesses and
glitterings spread their more flamboyant, less distinctive illumination over it toward the sea.

‘… “one million forty-eight thousand five hundred seventy-six,”’ the earl intoned. ‘Tell me.’ He turned from the parchment to regard Pryn. ‘Do you notice anything about these signs?’

Pryn had been both dazzled and confused by the pattern the sun had struck so briefly on the water. The swords, however, were clear and real.

‘I’m sorry,’ the earl said. ‘But I asked you: Do you notice anything about these signs?’

With silence ringing over everything she saw, Pryn looked at the parchment.
What was that city?
was the question in her mind. She said: ‘Well, I … the numbers get very big. But the signs for each of them are … all very small, a single mark for each.’

‘Yes!’ the earl’s smile threatened to tear loose from his face and go careening about the chamber. ‘You have noted the profound economy Belham was able to impose on these huge, unwieldy concepts. And in the same manner that one can represent the numbers missing between “four” and “eight” by a unique combination of the signs up to and including “four,” so one can supply the numbers between any sign and any other by a similar and unique recombination.’

Pryn was still wondering at the warning swords clamped to the columns.

‘But an even greater economy suggested itself to Belham,’ the earl went on. ‘He found he could master fractional numbers as well by the use of pairs of numbers from his new system. A “half” was simply
one
divided into
two
equal parts – represented by the sign for “one” with the sign for “two” below it. One-and-a-third was four divided into three equal parts: the sign for “four” subscribed by the sign for “three.” As the earl spoke, his finger moved to other configurations of marks on the
parchment that, as Pryn looked at them, more and more clearly were the same as she had seen on the dragon’s pedestal or that rimmed the disk she wore at her neck. ‘Three-and-a-seventh, for example, was twenty-two divided into seven equal parts: “twenty-two” above “seven.” The young Belham felt he had mastered the entire range of number, from the greatest to the smallest, covering all fractional gradations. With his economical system of signs, he thought, he could express any number, whole or partial, any man or woman might conceive. Now as I said, Belham invented this system when he was not much more than a boy; by the time he could rightly be called a man, he was easily the most famous man in all Nevèrÿon – certainly the most famous from our part of it. So you see, that “writing,” which you have seen here, on our local monuments, represents number, or what can be expressed by number: dates of origin, specific moments of the day or year, costs, measurements, angles of degree – words that mean something in our old language, but little in yours, mainly because Belham happened to be … a barbarian. They are like your commercial script without the pollution of greed and profit that motivate commerce – not that greed and profit are absent from such writing. They are merely elided between its signs, as my little divagation on the nature of all writing should suggest. So.’ The earl’s hands went back beneath his cloak. ‘Now you know the secret of our local writing that graces our monuments – and the rim of your astrolabe.’ He smiled.‘Is there anything else you want to ask? Tell me what you think of it all.’

Pryn pressed her lips together. She wanted to speak as carefully as she might write with only a limited area of waxed board on which to create her thought. ‘I was thinking of – I was
remembering
a morning, not so long ago, when I stood on a hill,
in
the morning, just north of Kolhari, looking down through the dawn fogs at the city.

If I’d never stood there, if I’d never thought the thoughts I thought then, I doubt – I don’t
think
I would ever have seen what I … what I just saw. Yes, there’s something I very much want to ask.’ Pryn looked again out between the sword-bearing columns at the inlet. The sky’s blue had visibly deepened over half its vault. ‘What city was that out in the water?’

From his seat on the end of the railing, Jenta laughed. ‘What city? There’s no city there.’

‘I don’t mean,’ said Pryn, ‘there’s a city there
now
. There
was
a city. Once. Its foundations, its empty cisterns, the broken paving of its streets and the overturned flags of its alleys are under the water now. I want to know: What was the city that
used
to be there?’

‘But there’s
only
water there.’ Lavik turned at her end of the rail. ‘Perhaps there’s a paving stone or two on some of the sand bars. Yes, there are some old foundations along the edge of the inlet, where the children go out looking for old trinkets. But a few ruined huts and stones aren’t a city!’

Pryn said: ‘I’ve stood on the hill north of Kolhari at dawn and gazed down through the fog and
seen
the city, erased and faded till it is only a shape, a plan, a dream. I know a city when I see one! There is – there
was
a city there!’‘Well,’ Lavik retorted sharply, ‘when
I
went to court at Kolhari, I was never let out of the wagon when we stopped on the dawn-fogged hills above it. So I’ve never seen
your
city! There’s
no
city there!’