Tales of Neveryon (25 page)

‘Norema,’ Madame Keyne said, when they had seated themselves behind the frayed drapery of a particularly glum red and black weave (and before they had let themselves become too annoyed that, after having been seated for five whole minutes, the waiter, who was joking with three men in the front, had not yet served them), ‘something intrigues me – if you’ll allow me to harp on a subject. Now you hail from the Ulvayns. There, so the stories that come to Kolhari would have it, we hear of nothing except the women who captain those fishing boats like men. We doubtless idealize your freedom, here in the midst of civilization’s repressive toils. Nevertheless, I know that were we sitting outside, and some man
did
come to importune us, you would
not
be that bothered …?’

‘Nor,’ said Norema, ‘am I particularly annoyed by sitting here in our alcove.’ Then she pulled her hands back into her lap and her serious expression for a moment became a frown. ‘I would be annoyed by the bothersome men; and I could ignore the simply trivial ones – which I suspect would be most of those that actually approached us, Madame Keyne.’

‘But for you to ignore, for you to not be bothered, there must be one of two explanations. And, my dear, I am not sure which of them applies. Either you are so content, so
superior to me as a woman, so sure of yourself – thanks to your far better upbringing in a far better land than this – that you truly are above such annoyances, such bothers: which means that art, economics, philosophy, and adventure are not in the least closed to you, but are things you can explore from behind the drapes of our alcove just as easily as you might explore them out in the sun and air. But the other explanation is this: to avoid being bothered, to avoid being annoyed, you have shut down one whole section of your mind, that most sensitive section, the section that responds to even the faintest ugliness precisely because it is what also responds to the faintest nuance of sensible or logical beauty – you must shut it down tight, board it up, and hide the key. And, Norema, if this is what we must do to ourselves to “enjoy” our seat in the sun, then we sit in the shadow not as explorers after art or adventure, but as self-maimed cripples. For those store-chambers of the mind are not opened up and shut down so easily as all that – that is one of the things I
have
learned in fifty years.’ The waiter pushed back the drape, took Madame Keyne’s curt order for cider with an expressionless nod and a half-hearted swipe of his cloth over the varnished grain, that was certainly (if only because it was less used) cleaner already than any of the tables out in the common room. ‘I do not know which applies to you – to us. I don’t think any woman can be sure.’ (The waiter left.) ‘That’s why I choose to worry and gnaw the question like a cantankerous bitch who will not give up what may well be a very worn-out bit of rug – nevertheless, it suits me to worry it. Even if it doesn’t suit you.’

Norema let herself ponder. ‘Well, Madame, even if I’m not out for art or economics, this journey to the south to negotiate for you with Lord Aldamir is certainly an adventure.’

Madame Keyne laughed – a throaty sound that made Norema suspect, more than anything else, that this childless, widowed woman, whose life seemed so circumscribed by the exacting business of the waterfront and the equally exacting social pleasures of Sallese’s monied residents, had truly lived – though, equally true, neither Sallese nor the waterfront seemed, separately, a life that could have totally satisfied Norema, though both had facinated her now for a year.

‘I remember when I was a girl, the little balls would wend their way, somehow, every summer, into Kolhari – in my family, we actually called it Neveryóna, back then. (My dear, there are days when I’m surprised I’m still alive!) Rich children in the fountained gardens of Sallese (and I remember, my dear, when the first fountain was invented; all of a sudden there it was – in the back yard of an obnoxious little neighbor whose parents were ever so much more wealthy than mine were; then, the next thing you know, everybody had to have one, or two, or a dozen, and the barbarian who had invented them grew very wealthy and, later I heard, went quite mad and drank himself to death in some other city, or so the rumor came back), urchins by the fetid cisterns of the Spur, it made no difference: We all bounced our balls and shouted our rhyme – how did it go?

I went down to Babàra’s pit,
for all my Lady’s warning …

‘At any rate, the summer sale of those little balls in the ports along the Nevèrÿon coast are as much a part of our life as the rule of the Child Empress herself, whose reign is marvelous and miraculous.’

‘I’m just surprised –’ Some memory deviled the edge of
Norema’s pensive expression – ‘that nobody ever decided to import them before. I mean in large quantities. Or, else, how did they get here?’

‘Well, there must be a first time for everything. And stranger things than that are happening in our time. Money –’ and here the red ceramic pitcher arrived in the waiter’s hand, along with two mugs on a wet tray, all cooled in the tavern’s ice pit from the great blocks hauled down from the Falthas in winter and stored beneath mounds of sawdust through the hot months – ‘I have my serious doubts, Norema about whether money is a good thing. I heard the other day from a woman who, though she is not at court, is a confidante of Lord Ekoris (who is) that a man approached Her Highness not a month back with a scheme for making money of vellum. The Empress would hold in store all the gold and iron from which we now make coins; the vellum, on which patterns would be embossed in rare inks and of a cleverness so surprising in their design that they could not be imitated by unauthorized means, would be issued to stand for specific amounts of metal, and would be used in place of coins …’ Madame Keyne shook her head, though she noted that expression on her young secretary’s face which had always made her feel that somewhere in Norema’s past the most ingenious of Madame Keyne’s mercantile ideas had been encountered in some other form and that complex comparisons were being made. (But then, Madame Keyne would remind herself, we civilized peoples are always romanticizing the barbaric, and she is really little different from a sensitive, extremely clever, and eager-to-learn barbarian.) ‘The Empress, apparently, discouraged him, quipping that such a plan would be for her unborn granddaughter’s reign. Nevertheless, I still wonder. Each of us, with money, gets
further and further away from those moments where the hand pulls the beet root from the soil, shakes the fish from the net into the basket – not to mention the way it separates us from one another, so that when enough money comes between people, they lie apart like parts of a chicken hacked up for stewing … More cider? This barrel must be from Baron Inige’s apple orchards. That fine, cool tartness – I would know it anywhere, my dear. He has a way of making his apples sweet, that he used to tell my father about when we would visit him in the north, involving cow dung and minerals mined in the southern mountains, that, really, verged on sorcery …’

Bayle stepped around barrels and over coiled rope. The slender woman with the short red hair, strangely costumed (from her brass-linked belt, to her open-work boots; and pants. Of soft leather – Bayle had never seen
anyone
in pants before), rubbed her bare breast absently with a rough hand. (She was probably a little secretary somewhere: secretarying in those days meant mostly the whitening of reed and animal parchments with pumice, the melting of hot wax for wax pads, the sharpening of styluses and the mashing and boiling of berries for juice and the crushing of stones for pigments – it was hard on the hands.) ‘Those boxes,’ she said, frowning. ‘The porters were supposed to have taken those boxes on to the ship this morning. Now the Captain says we’re leaving in ten minutes. And I just see them here now. If they don’t go with me Madame Keyne will have a fit!’

‘Well, then,’ said Bayle, who had just taken his own bundle aboard and had wandered back down on the dock for a last look at the shore, ‘I’ll carry this one on for you.’ As he squatted to hoist up the little crate to his shoulder, someone else said:

‘– and I’ll take these two. There, woman, grab up the fourth and we’ll have them all aboard before they get their sails tied.’

Bayle looked up at the sailor –? No, it was a woman, though those brown arms were knotted as any woodcutting man’s. There were metal and colored stones in the woman’s lank black hair. A shaggy scabbard was belted about the dark cloth she wore around her loins. She hoisted up one crate by its binding rope, and – at the redhead’s confirming nod – swung up the duffle sack on her shoulder. Her hands were broad and worn as any farmwoman’s (a very different kind of wear from a secretary’s) and her bare feet were hard around the rims. She had the lithe, hard back of an active woman not quite thirty. Half-way up the gangplank, when she glanced behind to see if Bayle and the redhead were following her (her skin was red-brown as the darkest terracotta before drying), he saw the black rag mask tied across her face: through frayed holes her eyes were blue as some man-ganese glaze.

‘All passengers go below to their cabins,’ the mate repeated for something like the fifth time, between orders bawled to the sailors rushing about the deck. ‘Please, all passengers to their cabins. Now
couldn’t
you have brought those things on an hour ago when there was less confusion – or simply had the porter bring them on with the regular stores this morning? Never mind. Just get that stuff stowed fast. Once we’re off, you can come up any time you want. But for now, would you please …’

‘Cider on shore, wine on the water. Isn’t that what they say?’ asked the redhead turning from the cabin table. ‘No, please stay – the both of you – and have a cup with me. My name is Norema and I’m secretary to Madame Keyne, of Kolhari port, and bound southward on this ship.’ From the duffle sack she’d already unstrapped, she took out a wax-stoppered wine jar and sat it beside some rough-ware cups (low-fired with softwoods, thought Bayle) on the table against the wall. As she began to pick at the wax with a small knife, Bayle sat down on the box he’d carried in and noted again how sumptuous this so-fashionably garbed secretary’s cabin was. (His berth, the cheapest on the ship, was a storage locker in the forepeak, in which he could just sit up; indeed, he had visited it twice during the afternoon, the first time to see it, the second time to see if, with its smell of old tar, its shavings in the corner, its chips of resin loosening between the boards, it was as grim as his first look had told him – may the nameless gods of craft help him if he were ever ill in it from heaving seas!) The dark woman with the rag mask and the light eyes climbed a few steps up a ladder to some storage cabinet high in the wall, turned, and sat. She looked like some black cousin to the worst waterfront ruffian in the Spur. Her smile, like her eyes, was preternaturally bright as she looked down at the cozily appointed cabin. Bayle wondered where
she
slept, or if she were even a passenger.) ‘My name is Raven,’ the masked woman suddenly announced (almost in answer to Bayle’s thought). ‘I hail from the Western Crevasse. And I have been traveling
three years in your strange and terrible land!’ From her perch, she barked a sharp, shrill laugh. ‘Strange and terrible, yes. I am on a mission for the royal family, and – alas – I can tell you no more about it.’ And she leaned, most unceremoniously, down between her bony knees and took the cup Norema had just filled.

This Raven, thought Bayle, has neither the air of a Kolhari woman, who expects to be served before men, nor the air of a provincial woman who expects to be served after. He looked at the redhead.

Norema, pouring two more cups, had the quiet smile of someone who has just been told a rather obscure joke and is not sure whether she truly understands it. (An island woman, Bayle thought: that hair and those eyes … the moment he placed her foreignness, he also felt a sudden liking for her, despite her odd dress.)

‘Of course there are those,’ said Raven, sitting up and directing her glazed grin (a crescent of small stained teeth) at the cup she turned in her fingers, ‘who would say I have said too much already. Well,’ and her bright eyes came up again, ‘I can speak three languages passably, two badly, and can write numbers and do the calculations that the Mentats invented in the Western Hills for building houses. Him,’ which was addressed directly down to Bayle; ‘who is he and what does he do?’

Bayle took the cup Norema offered, smiled up at Raven and decided he did not like her. ‘I’m Bayle, the Potter – or at any rate, I’m a potter’s assistant, and I go to the south on a journey for my master’s profit.’

Norema, her back to the table, lifted her hip to it and sipped at her own cup. (Bayle looked into his red-black disk to see the wax chips bump the brim.) What had been the gentlest rolling beneath them became a deep-breasted
lurch. The timbre of voices from the deck above filled, deepened –

‘We’ve launched.’ Raven drained half her cup.

– and quieted, after count-ten. ‘Perhaps,’ said Bayle, when, through the portal, something unrecognizable passed in the distance (a far building? a further mountain?), ‘we can go up now? It sounds quieter; we won’t be in the way.’

‘Very well, pretty man. Let’s go up with him,’ which was Raven, of course. She stood and stalked down the ladder on her broad, cracked feet.

Emerging on deck, Raven, before him, Norema behind, Bayle (still holding his cup beneath his chin) saw that the confusion of departure had only abated, not stopped. Should he suggest to the women that they return below? And how to do it tactfully? But Norema and Raven were both already out among the bustling sailors (most of the men naked, all of them sweating) with what Bayle took to be their respective modes of female obliviousness: the redhead seemed certain she could’t possibly be in the way (Bayle flinched when she sidestepped a sailor handling a barrel across the deck by its rim, and was surprised a moment later when she stooped down to pick up a four-legged metal box lying on the deck and set it in a broad capstan rail in which there were, apparently, four little cut-outs for its legs to sit in: ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ called a naked sailor climbing down a rat line, who now started up again as though his job had been done). The black-haired woman with the dull stones in her hair, the rag mask, and her bright smile, turned here and there about the deck, looking for the world as if she were trying to decide which task to lend a hand with (which reminded Bayle, more than anything, of the wealthy provincials who had wandered into Zwon’s shops three days before and, in their
enthusiasm for the wares, had actually volunteered to return and stoke the kilns later that afternoon, much to Bayle’s and Zwon’s embarrassment).