Tales of Neveryon (20 page)

The children were gone.

The boat was away.

The docks were empty.

She strolled to the center of the gravel and started forward.

The urge to move nearer to the buildings along the street – or to keep closer to the bales and upturned dinghies along the dock – was almost overpowering. Ambling down the center, she smiled at the discomfort and thought: The threat of the red ship …

And watched, while she walked, the threatened streets.

Half the tangled roots had pulled from the bank. The leafless tree leaned over the twelve-foot semicircle of sand. Norema and Venn had sat there for an hour once and argued whether the little beach, like a giant copper coin tilted half into the water, was growing or shrinking … how many years ago now? And the beach was the same. Norema sat wedged between the two well-anchored trees, looking out through the branches of the leaning third.

The ship, a-top its reflection, made her think of leaves, stacked one on the other, a breeze making the whole leaf column shiver, dance, but never quite topple.

The ship, dark now on dark water, held it down.

She had been sitting there almost two hours. The sky was blue-black; a few stars scattered the east. One twig of the slant tree lay like a shatter-line across the distant hull (Venn had once taken her to see a puddle of lava high on
the mountains, broken by cooling – Venn’s theory – or the mountain goats’ hooves – Dell’s – : some slaggy scar from the fires burning beneath the sea’s floor, whose eruptions – Venn’s theory again – had thrown up all the islands around.) Fire …!

It spurted up the stern. Then it rushed across the waterline. What had happened was that men from the island’s boat (hidden on the opposite bank) had swum up with bladders of oil and smeared the base of the ship (with light oil to the height of an arm), then ringed the ship with a lace (
not
a single wide ribbon) of heavy oil out to fifteen feet from the hull. (Where had she learned to fire a free-anchored ship? From Venn’s old tale of the Three Beetles and the White Bird; which was probably where the men had learned it, too …) Then you took the cover off a floating tinder-dish in which a lighted rag, rolled in sand and soaked in oil, would smolder for an hour – light the ship at the downwind end, and the lace at the upwind end, then swim for all you’re worth.

Bark bit her hand. Her jaw began to throb. She pushed back against the trunk as leaf after leaf down the column caught, all the way to the base of sand below her.

A story … she thought. The Three Beetles and the White Bird was a tale she had hugged her knees at, leaned forward to hear of its hill-skirmishes and sea-chases, its burnings and battles, its brave feats and betrayals. Reflected there on the flickering waters, it all seemed somehow reversed to … not something horrible. The reason she held the branch so tightly, pressed herself back against the tree, was not from any active fear, but rather from a sort of terrible expectation of emotion, waiting for the sound (amidst the faint crackling she could just make out) of screams, waiting to see figures leaping or falling into the ring of flaming waters. All she actually felt (she
loosed her hand from the branch beside her) was numb anticipation.

There are people in there
, she thought, almost to see the result of such thought,
dying
. Nothing.
There are women dying in there
, she tried again (and could hear Venn making the correction): still it was just a curious phrase. Suddenly she raised her chin a little, closed her eyes, and this time tried moving her lips to the words: ‘There are women in there dying and our men are killing them …’ and felt a tickling of terror; because for a moment she was watching two boys and a little girl playing on the docks. And all the waters before her and the forest behind her were a-glitter and a-glimmer with threat.

She opened her eyes: because something moved in the water … twenty feet away? Fifteen? (In the bay’s center, fire fell back to the water’s surface, with things floating in it aflame.) Several largish pieces of flotsam were drifting inland.

The one just in front of the beach stalled on submerged sands: charred and wet, it was some kind of carton, which, as she watched it, suddenly came apart. For a moment, the dozens of things floating out of it actually seemed alive. Taking up the same current, they continued, tiny and dark, into the shore.

After a while she got up and walked down to the sands’ wet edge, stooped, and picked up … a ball of some sort, perhaps as big as her father’s curled-up forefinger. Wet, black, it wasn’t exactly soft. Many, many of them, she saw, were bobbing in the dark water.

Squeezing it, frowning at it (the boat was craggy, dark, blotched with fading embers), she turned back up into the woods.

She walked away on her soft-soled shoes in the loud underbrush, pondering an unresolvable troubling – till
finally, after climbing into the window of her room, and lying on her bed, looking at the shadows on her bare, narrow walls – she slept. The rubber ball was under her pillow.

Shortly after that began a period of some five years, which, were one to have asked her after it was over, she would have no doubt said was the most important of her life. Certainly it obliterated the clear memory of much of what we have recounted. We, however, shall all but omit it – at least we shall condense it mightily: four weeks after the burning she met an affable red-haired man from another island who worked (indeed who was a leader of) a twelve-boat fishing cooperative of ten men and two women. Three months after meeting him she married him and moved to his island. Their first child was a son; then, in what seemed to her much less than eighteen months, she had two daughters. Through those years there were moments which, when they occurred, she thought to remember for the rest of her life (in much the same way that the firelight on the night beach she had thought to drop from her memory forever): sitting on the deck with her husband and her children at dawn the way she had sat with her mother and her sister; moonlit evenings on Willow Scarp – her favorite spot on her new island – looking out over the nets of foam that rippled round the rocky point; the afternoons when her husband would be working on his nets, perched on one of the pilings that stuck up about the rush-matted docks, and she would come up silently behind him and look up to see his
sunburned back, the curls of coppery hair clawing at the translucent shell that was his ear. She had already begun to do some of the things with her own children that Venn, years ago, had done with her and the children of her island; and was both amused and a little proud that she quickly developed, on her new island, the reputation for being both odd and wise – a reputation which she could never quite understand why her husband so disapproved of.

In the fifth year of her marriage came the plague.

It killed her son, five years old now, and had she not been so involved in nursing the island’s ill with one of Venn’s herbal remedies that at least lessened the pains if it did not curb the disease, she would have taken one of the overturned dinghies and put to sea in it until land was out of sight, then sunk it and herself with a knife jammed through the sapped-over rushes.

The plague killed seven fishers in her husband’s fleet.

Then, at the height of the sickness, when the wailing of the children and the coughing of the aged hacked at the walls of her hut from the huts both sides of hers, her husband came in early one afternoon – the time he would have normally returned from a morning with his fishing fleet, though he had told her earlier he was not taking his boat to water that day. For five minutes he paced around the house, picking at the loose staves of a half finished basket, rubbing his big toe in the dirt by the side of the hearthflags: suddenly he turned to her and announced to her he was taking a second wife.

She was astonished, and she protested – more from that simple astonishment than from any real desire actually to rebut him. He argued, and while he argued, memories of Venn’s account of the Rulvyn returned to her – the second wife was apparently the daughter of a wealthy fisherman
who had recently moved to their island, a very beautiful seventeen-year-old girl who had developed a reputation in the village as a spoiled and impossible person. Somewhere in the midst of her arguing, it suddenly struck her what she must do.

So, she agreed.

Her husband looked at her with utmost surprise, seemed about to say several things, then turned and stalked out of the hut.

Two hours later he returned – she was squatting by the cradle of her younger daughter whose breathing was becoming strangely rough over the last hour and was trying to ignore the three-year-old who was asking ‘But why can the fishes swim, Mommy? Why can fishes swim? What do they do under the water when they’re
not
swimming? Mommy, you’re not listening to me. Why do they –’

Her husband grabbed her up by the shoulder, whirled her around, shoved her back against the support pole so that the thatch shook between the ceiling sticks across the hut’s whole roof. The three-year-old’s chatter cut off with an astonished silence into which her husband began to pour the most incredible vituperation:

Did she know that she was a vile woman and a horrible mother? That she had ruined his business, soul, and reputation? That she was in every way a plague to him and all who came near her far worse than the one that wracked the island? That she had murdered his son and was no doubt poisoning his daughters against him even now? And how
dare
she (the while, he was striking her in the chest with the flat of first one hand then the other) think she were fit to share the same hut with the beautiful and sensitive and compassionate woman he was now
determined to leave her for? Even her suggesting they might all share one house was such an obscenity that –

Suddenly he backed away, and pushed through the door’s vine hangings. Seven hours later Norema, her eyes closed, her arms locked across her belly, a shrill and strangled sound seeping from her pursed lips (somehow she had managed to get the three-year-old to an older cousin’s when the infant’s blood-laced, greenish phlegm and raw choking had assured her exactly what it was), sat on the floor of her hut with her baby girl dead and stiff on the dirt at her knees.

Two weeks later some boats came to take her to Nevèrÿon’s Kolhari, with the fifty others, who, from the island village whose population had been close to eight hundred, were the only ones left. (‘In the name of the Child Empress Ynelgo, whose reign is kind and compassionate, all those who can pass before our three physicians and show no stain of plague may have free passage to Her chief port city in Nevèrÿon there to begin a new life for Her honor and glory.’ The captain was a small, hairy man with a verdigrised helmet, a fur jerkin, bloodshot eyes, and tarry hands, with a dumb goodwill that in him had now become a sort of fury about every detail of the evacuation, as his ship plied from stricken island to stricken island.) Once more she looked for some great feeling when she saw that two among the dozen who had been turned away from the boat by the physicians, with their poking at groins and armpits and their pulling back of eyelids and staring down into ears and throats, were her husband and his new woman. No, it had never been anger she’d felt – hurt, once, but grief had obliterated that. (Her remaining daughter had been taken away to a neighboring island a week before on the very day her phlegm had gone green – Norema did not know if her child was alive or
dead … No, she knew.) Rather, it was the exhausted sympathy for the misfortunes of someone who, a long time ago, had been a difficult friend. And so, as she came into Kolhari port, numbed by an experience of rejection and death, she kept telling herself that whomever she might now become, it was
this
experience that would be responsible for anything bad or good that ever befell her again; yet while she was trying to rehearse all the awfulness of the past months, sort it all out in memory as the portscape drew nearer and nearer through the dawn, fragments of it were constantly slipping from memory, and her imagination kept retreating through the years to afternoon walks with Venn, to the night on the tiny beach with flames out on the waters.

– New York
November ’76

And if, tomorrow, all the history on which it is based is found to be defective, the clay tablets wrongly interpreted, or the whole formed out of a mistaken identification of several periods and places, our reading of it will not be affected in the slightest, for the Stranger, the City, the sights, smells and sounds, formed by the poet out of history and human activity, are real now at another level of being.

– Noel Stock
Reading the Cantos

In that brutal and barbaric time he was a real barbarian prince – which meant that his mother’s brother wore women’s jewelry and was consulted about animals and sickness. It meant at fourteen his feet were rough from scurrying up rough-barked palms, and his palms were hard from pulling off the little nodules of sap from the places where new shoots had broken away. Every three or four years the strangers came to trade for them colored stones and a few metal cutting tools; as a prince, he was expected to have collected the most. It meant his hair was matted and that hunger was a permanent condition relieved every two or three days when someone brought in a piece of arduously tracked and killed game, or a new fruit tree was (so rarely) found: for his tribe did not have even the most primitive of agricultural knowledge.