Neveryona (55 page)

That was when she saw it, glittering.

The earth rumbled; the water raged. Muddied and weed-streaked, it still gleamed, so much of it as had washed free of mud and refuse. Whatever desires she’d pushed away to give it up surged back, like foam, like wind. She
didn’t
want to take any – only to see it from closer … only perhaps a
few
coins.

There was so
much
of it!

It filled alleys. Glimmering, it spilled into wider avenues. There, that must have been a whole house, or even several small houses, piled over with it.

Half running, half falling down the embankment, Pryn only managed to get her feet under her when they plunged shin-deep in mud. She staggered on, arms wheeling, till she reached the first pavement. Weeds in windows hung on wet stone. Mud clung to the wall beside her. Fallen masonry, broken shells, and soaked branches made her progress by the dripping pillars as slow as it had been in the silt. Dirty-footed, wet-handed, scratches on her shoul-
ders and legs, Pryn edged between cold rocks, pushed away a cool branch of driftwood, moved close along a broken wall, its carvings veiled in moss.

She could
see
gold at that alley’s end!

But the tiny street was too blocked and clotted with some half-fallen building to get through. Did it move …? In the heaps of nuggets, trinkets, coins, did some tremor in the risen seafloor cause that momentary cascade of wet metal?

That’s when she remembered the dragon.

Pryn looked up. Beyond the broken cornice, yellow fogs drifted, luminous before a moon she could no longer see. But I
only
want to see it … Pryn took hold of her astrolabe, as cold as if it, too, had lain in the waters. She moved to the building corner, looked around it …

Six wagon-loads … ?
Only
six? More like six
hundred
… ! Heaping the far side of the yard, most of it was yellow, but a lot was iron dark with tarnish or silver-green with algae. What part of the ruins were under that sloping glimmer?

The heaped treasure was mountainous!

Pryn looked the other way at the half-crumbled cistern, beyond which were more free-standing columns – and started! But the gleaming head, demonic, half on its side, was also gold …

Then the mountains moved!

A ripple passed over the glimmering slope – not the shimmer from high to low of tumbling coins, but sideways, over the whole of it; then another ripple, bottom to top. Gold unfolded over gold.

The building corner struck Pryn, buttock and shoulder blade. (She hadn’t realized she’d been backing away.) Rising, gold articulated along some glittering numismatic pleat, then along another fanning from it, then yet along another. Between, the loose and flashing folds billowed and rose, a wing scaled with coins, taut, spined, darkening
a fifth the sky, dragging its shadow over the yard, opaque to all moonlight with its auric load, yet still glittering within its black, become beast, become Gauine herself.

Beyond the columns, the golden head rolled upright and – looked at her!

Mouth open, Pryn crouched, back against uneven stone. Somewhere, distant in the ruins, another gold wing rose above roofs.

The head slid. Some half-standing wall fell before the huge muzzle rose. Black puddles in pits of crumpled foil, the eyes, now one, now the other, lowered slow, brazen lids and lifted them. Hovering above the columns, above the smashed cistern, above Pryn, the long, ragged lip, clotted with gems, lifted from teeth not gold but stained bone, some whole, some split, all hilted in coral gum.

Pryn pushed back, slipped, almost went sprawling, but got her feet under her. Standing, she looked up. The great wings, first one, then the other, moved.

She heard wind.

She heard water.

She took another breath and called, loud enough to hurt her throat: ‘Oh great Gauine, I have come to give my treasure …!’ She stopped.

Because the golden head, staring down, that rose and rose above her, now descended!

Fear? Terror? What she felt was not terror, because the beast above her
was
terror itself, and to gaze up at it – all jaws and eyes – was to watch, as jaws opened and eyes blinked, terror’s articulations entirely from without. She felt herself in some reckless state where ecstasy and obliviousness, daring and distraction, were one.

The gesture came from the same place as the words, though – then – she could not have said where that was. She grasped the chain at her neck and pulled it over her head. First it caught under her ear, then in her hair, but she yanked it loose.

Pryn hurled the astrolabe as high and hard as she could.

Gauine roared.

Gauine beat her wings.

The sea and the winds leapt to answer.

And Pryn ran.

Gauine’s roaring didn’t stop.

Pryn’s feet splashed on streaming flags. She pushed from a slim pillar swaying on its pedestal, dodged shaking driftwood. Water rilled at her ankles, rushing. Pryn went off paving – into mud!

Mud shook.

Mud quivered.

Beating at her, splashing about her, the water wet her knees. She slogged, flailing. Water was at her waist. Pryn fell, grasping foam, but came up spluttering and this time grabbed the root sticking from the embankment, managed to pull herself up, now going crabwise on the slope, coughing and trying to spit the salt from her throat. (Her aunt had never told her the sea was salt!) She didn’t remember gaining the ledge. But she remembered backing through low bushes, her shift dripping down the backs of her thighs.

Water spilled together over the unbearable city.

She remembered coming out from trees again, and again, and then again to the edge of the rocks, with the inlet spread before her, a few sand bars interrupting the glitter that the night breeze unraveled over the whole of it.

The moon was high and small.

She remembered walking in moon-speckled forest.

She remembered sitting wide awake with her eyes closed.

She remembered walking a
lot
more.

She remembered blinking, with leaves blocking deep blue.

Leaning against tree bark, she realized that it was dew-wet,
that the leaves against her shins were wet too, and that perhaps it had just rained in the faint dawn-light.

She squatted by some bare ground, where the sick feeling passed long enough for her to pick up a twig and scratch her name in the wet dirt. Something was wrong with it – it lacked both capital and diacritic! Again the nausea welled, but it was not as strong as it had been for hours now. She stood, temples throbbing, a stinging along the backs of her legs from squatting so long.

Pryn moved among trees.

She first realized she was on brewery grounds when, at the hillcrest, she saw Old Rorkar’s house. Up the nearer slope was the workers’ barracks, where she slept. Down there was the office shed. She remembered taking a momentary account: her name
was
Pryn – she
did
know how to write it. In the pockets of her dress were … no iron coins? Her blade – Ini’s blade … ? But Tratsin’s carving tool – no, the earl’s carving knife; or some memory that doubled them both … at any rate, it had gone even before the city had risen. Pryn blinked, frowned, and remembered what had occurred. Almost like relief, the nausea welled again, driving it from her mind. She opened her mouth, taking shallow breaths. Her few coins and the Ini’s blade were under her straw in the barracks.

Pryn felt at her neck.

The chain and astrolabe were, yes, gone.

Her hand went to her hair, found a leaf, and pulled it away. I must look like someone who’s slept in the woods! she thought. The nausea passed again, leaving her still unsteady. Her mouth was very dry.

Standing with a hand on the tree beside her, Pryn felt two conflicting urges. One was to go to her barracks, take her knife, her coins, and strike out on the north road without a word. The other was to go down past the cooling caves, cross the road to the eating hall, take her
morning bowl of soup – Rorkar always said, though Pryn had only heard it quoted, ‘A heavy meal in the morning slows the worker till noon’ – and fall into her usual routine, again without a word.

‘… a kind of madness,’ she whispered. Someone had said that recently. But she was not sure who or why.

There was another urge, of course: to go into the barracks, lie down on her straw, and sleep; but because she was fifteen, and because this was a salaried job, and because the job carried a double title that separated her somehow from the others, she dismissed that one as childish – though in five or ten years it might well have been the one she would follow. As it was, while she decided between the first two, the hide-covered planks of the barracks door were set aside and one, then three, then five women came out. (The women usually managed to leave before the men.) A few more came – one waited for a friend who joined her.

Pryn stepped behind the tree.

Two barbarian men came out.

They were all headed for the eating hall.

Three more women left, two with their children behind and before them. One barbarian shooed the snoring eight-year-old out ahead of her with gestures for which Pryn could hear Tritty saying, ‘Now, Ardra … !’ Would Petal snore when she was older? Would Lavik make such gestures? But Tritty and Ardra, Pryn remembered, weren’t barbarians anyway, were from further north, or east, or west … What Pryn decided, because she was that kind of young woman, was to follow both her first two urges.

More women came out of the barracks – which meant her end of the dim sleeping hall would be almost deserted.

She walked forward.

One man, leaving, looked at her – which made her decide to pick over her hair for more leaves and make
sure to wash in the stream behind the building where, each morning, one half or the other of the workers kneeled to splash their faces and arms.

She went and washed.

The money was still under the straw. She took it out. And the knife. She put on the green dress Madame Keyne had given her, because it had two sizable internal pockets, whereas the work-dress she’d gotten here had none. She put her money in one. She stuck the knife into the sash on her other hip, then bloused the green shift over it so that the knife was more or less covered, though no one would be surprised at her carrying a blade. Still …

She went outside –
should
she go back in and sleep?

Twice she’d thought she might throw up. She’d decided to forgo breakfast.

Pryn walked down to the office.

Pushing inside, passing piled barrel staves and nested pots, she realized what she didn’t remember –
couldn’t
remember – was waking. She had no memory of opening her eyes in the forest, of going from a nothing to a now that would let her locate a discontinuity with some previous thought or feeling, a discontinuity that could be read as containing sleep – a sleep that contained a dream. Equally lacking was any memory of the dream of the golden dragon ending …
Had
it ended? Could that giant bejeweled fact suddenly peer at her from behind some shack or tree or keg?

When she stepped into the office cubicle, Yrnik turned from the waxed board with the little erasing lamp flickering in his hand. ‘Pryn …?’ Did he look at her strangely? She wanted to feel her hair for more leaves. ‘Pryn, I think you’ve made a …’ His forehead wrinkled above ivory eyes whose irises looked like circles cut from dead leaves. ‘I’m sure you’ve made a mistake in these figures. The last ones here – only two barrels of fertilizer out of the auxiliary cooling cave for
all
of yesterday? You must have
made an error. It just doesn’t tally with the numbers you’ve written down for the rest of the week.’ He read: ‘ “Nine,” “eight,” “twelve,” “ten” … Now
“two”
? I mean you can’t just go writing down things like that about those people. That’s why I sent you to watch them. Carefully. And to write down – carefully – what you saw.
Two?
If I tell that to Rorkar, he’d turn all of the workers in there out on the road. And you must know, they’re the ones that can least afford it.’

‘Perhaps you shouldn’t tell him,’ Pryn said.

Yrnik frowned. He turned back to melt more figures to ghosts. ‘What … ?’

Pryn took a breath. ‘I must have made a mistake. Yes. I meant to write “twelve.” Only the earl’s cart came for me just then and –’

‘Oh,’ Yrnik said. ‘Twelve. That sounds better, certainly. “Twelve” – and while we’re at it, “forty-nine” is a little high for the main cave. We’ll make that “forty” and start over again, all right? And no more mistakes.’

‘Yes,’ Pryn said.

Yrnik pursed his lips, setting the lamp on the shelf below the cleared board. ‘They were looking for you earlier, you know. When you weren’t in the barracks.’

Pryn’s eyes widened. She tried to relax her whole face. She opened her hands.

‘His Lordship and Old Rorkar, this morning. You must have had quite an evening at his Lordship’s. I said you’d probably gotten up early and gone walking.’

Pryn moved dry lip on dry lip. ‘Yes … I went walking – earlier.’ Had the dream, she wondered, begun at the earl’s? Suddenly she said: ‘I’m going to the eating hall to catch Tetya on his way up. For his writing session.’