Flight from Nevèrÿon, page 33
At the far end stood a particularly good looking black guy in a gray Confederate cap; he seemed to be there pretty permanently.
A minute later, I came out to see the kid who’d been horsing around outside look up the steps again, where a tall, rather refined looking white man, with silver hair and an expensive gray suit, his overcoat over one arm and carrying an attaché case, was starting down.
The kid dashed up the steps. ‘Hey, white man!’ he demanded. ‘Where you goin’? You afraid of me? You afraid I’m gonna follow you where you goin’, I’m gonna beat you up, I’m gonna rob you? Now, you don’t have to be afraid of that!’ As the boy came on down the steps beside him, calling out his taunts, the man paid as little attention to him as had the couple.
At the bottom of the steps, among the other boys, an older black kid, maybe seventeen, suddenly called up: ‘Nigger, why you acting like such a fool!’
The boy clowning on the steps didn’t even glance back: ‘Now you don’t have to be afraid of me. I ain’t gonna hurt you, white man!’
As the first kid reached the bottom the second kid stepped up on the stair: ‘Hey, nigger! Why—’
The first boy danced back, grinning. ‘I’m just askin’ these white folks where’re they—’
Suddenly the second grappled the first boy in a headlock. ‘—do you talk like such a fool!’
‘Hey! Let go of me!’ The first, his mouth muffled by a forearm, giggled—‘Let me go, you…crazy nigger!—’ while others, who’d been watching and chuckling themselves, turned away as the kid was dragged off.
I was still standing almost inside the men’s room door. As I stepped away, a nondescript, middle-class black woman in a brown coat and hat absently wandered in. ‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ I said, turning back. ‘That’s the men’s room.’
‘Oh, it is?’ she said. ‘Well, where is the ladies’ room?’
‘About three yards down the hall, ma’am,’ said a Puerto Rican boy from inside, loitering by the basins.
I got my briefcase again and for a while strolled about the Greyhound departure area.
Wearing a ratty thermal vest and looking disheveled and unwashed enough so that it was moot if she were a passenger waiting on a bus or a bum in to keep warm, one teenaged white girl sat by the wall near her knapsack, bound closed with dirty twine. (If she were a derelict, she’d probably taken pains to achieve the ambiguity.) In a cloth coat and a knitted cap, a shopping-bag lady wandered along the far gates with her bundled sacks of paper and cloth, muttering to herself, occasionally spitting, now and again snapping out some curse.
At one point, as the woman passed almost directly in front of her, the girl looked sharply away.
A man perhaps thirty slept on the floor, wedged into the corner by the transparent plastic wall of the north-end waiting area. New black work shoes. Stained and ancient workman’s grays. A middling old pea-jacket fallen open over a shirt with some name stitched in yellow thread, soiled and worn to unreadability, across the torn pocket. His black beard was more or less neatly shaven; his hair was fairly short. When the great cleaning machine, pushed by a black attendant, sudsed over the floor, its spinning brush dangerously close to his face, he sat up suddenly, lurched to his feet, and, one hand out before him, staggered into the waiting area and collapsed on a row of black plastic seats without—as far as I could tell—even opening his eyes.
A bunch of tough Puerto Rican girls in very thick makeup and blue down coats, none over sixteen, kept moving in and out of the ladies’ room, sometimes razzing and sometimes being razzed by the black and Puerto Rican boys lounging about, but more often just in their own, harsh, serious little world.
I hadn’t been in a bus station at that hour for over a year. A clear difference from the last time, however, was the increased number of people sleeping on the seats, floor, or benches who looked as if, three weeks or three months ago, they might have been working—a very different population from the eternal indigents (still there of course) who wander about such places year in and year out.
On line behind me for the Philadelphia bus was a bearded college student on his way to visit friends and family at home. His calculated casualness and studied disarray strangely reflected what ambled and stumbled all round us: his beard and long hair worn that way because he liked it, not because he couldn’t afford to cut it; the clean, pink shirt left out of his old, white corduroy pants because it felt comfortable that way, not because he’d forgotten it was possible to affect your appearance by the exertion of such small energies; the old sneakers worn because they were comfortable, not because he’d found them in a trash can after spending four days with no shoes at all. His wire-framed glasses were clean. His watch was on time—at one point I asked him what time it was, and the next thing you know we were having an astute enough conversation about economic conditions in the country and how they were reflected in what passed around us.
He sat in the seat ahead of me on the bus, listening to the earphones of his silent Walkman, while we rolled through breaking dawn, down to Philadelphia.
Another journal entry, based on notes made that morning in November and written out more fully a day or so later.
Another (very minor) reason the Nevèrÿon series is a document.
9.81 How did I find out where it was? It was rather easy, the Master explained. In every group, no matter how carefully you select them, one or two are always more disreputable than the rest. Even in this school, we have ours. So I went to one and told him: ‘Look, I want to know where they’re holding the Calling of the Amnewor.’ My voice let him know that, while I was serious, I wasn’t accusing him of anything. When he told me, of course, I knew I’d had my suspicions all along.
Where else in Kolhari could they have held it?
By late afternoon, most of the students had gone off for Carnival. At five o’clock, I went out, pausing on the lawn while a cricket, who’d somehow found her way into town, chirrupped in urban isolation and despair. I looked at the infirmary. Another student was laid up, all sadfaced at not being able to attend the merry-making, but—bless her—she’d only sprained an ankle. (Earlier, when I’d visited, she’d made noises about using the time to study.) Walking out toward the Pave, I turned down the slope between the sycamores, some of which I’d replanted and some of which my neighbors had brought in, after my example.
Well, I asked myself, why are you going to this uncivilized affair? Is it for Toplin? Is it for the ill, the harried, the worried, the ground down? But with only the silent street about me, I could not answer a strict yes. Pure curiosity? But I’m of an age to know that little if nothing in this strange and terrible land is pure.
The problem with these practices—and I’ve attended enough, both inside the city and out—is that I frequently know more about them than the benighted jungle bunny hopping up and down performing them.
Doughty old servants when I was a child—with the family how many generations and forbidden to talk of such things—oh, they delighted in terrifying spoiled aristocratic brats, whining for an hour before bedtime, with the very tales and tenors aristocratic parents had fled long ago and wherever.
In the south, of course, it’s Gauine: a great dragon of jewels and gold, long as the land, with a wingspread wide as the sky. She’s supposed to guard some town that doesn’t exist anymore—though I looked for it long enough when I visited the area.
Up north it’s Ropig Crigsbeny: a boar the size of a mountain, who gobbles whole tribes at a mouthful and shits man-high piles of skulls. But there’ve been enough wars around there—and enough hacked-off heads—to understand why nobody wants to talk about him much.
I confess, the Amnewor is new to me. Yes, I’ve heard the name—as a minor fact in some other god’s story. Precisely what it did, though, I can’t remember. That, of course, makes it more intriguing. Death. It was associated with endless, mindless, pointless death. But which of them isn’t? I recall—
9.811 The problem with the ‘suspension of disbelief’ theory of fiction in general and of F&SF in particular is that it makes art (however willingly) a kind of cheat. People who want to preserve art’s privilege of subversion (and of, yes, shock) have said: ‘Fine, let it be a cheat!’ e.g., Picasso: ‘Art is the lie that makes the truth bearable.’ But certainly this is not an enterprise where I want to cheat at all.
As did writers from Flaubert and Baudelaire (who vacillated) to Pater and Wilde, I believe art is wholly a formal enterprise, encompassing almost all the tenets that the nineteenth century spoke of as l’art pour l’art, tenets that have made the twentieth century’s experimentation possible. (What postmodern doesn’t?) How, then, to reconcile that belief with all this topicality?
I think the answer lies in that the writer is always generating meanings (and not organizing references), even the most topical meanings. Reference, after all, is only a particularly limited sort (or better, use) of meaning in a particularly limited context: and that is neither the subject-dominated literary text nor the object-dominated paraliterary text.
(To refer to reference always requires a frame, and is always therefore an act of meaning…)
9.82 Journeying through the city, what I recall (and I always do, whenever I go anyplace where the street noise lowers enough for me to hear myself think, the Master said) is my journey through Nevèrÿon when I was seventeen.
For that was when truly I first learned of monsters.
Nevèrÿon.
Officially, I was crossing it.
What I wanted to do, of course, was flee it—though I couldn’t tell my uncle that.
I could hardly tell myself. But that was my secret plan.
My overt object and itinerary as I presented it to my uncle was, however, of the highest moral and intellectual order. I wanted—I told him—to seek out all the works, monuments, and remaining memorials of the barbarian inventor, Belham. There were enough traces of his handiwork here in Kolhari to excite any boy with a like penchant for invention. Born in southern lands, he’d come up to lay out some of our city’s finest avenues and estates; then he went north…
But his architectural innovations preserve the High Court and make it livable to this day.
Coinpress? Corridor?
He was responsible for both.
And there are a dozen gardens, both in Sallese and Neveryóna, where his fountains still plash among the greenery and flowers. Moving about the city, you think of his as a wholly urban sensibility. But the traditions are clear. He was not born here; he did not die here.
He came from somewhere else.
He left for somewhere else.
And at seventeen, my adolescent obsession, my first mission, my purpose and passion was to reconstruct that journey, that life, from origin to end; for the wonders left in Kolhari alone suggested the most marvelous and misty cross-section among complex endeavors that covered the country.
In preparation for the journey, for almost eight months—a long time for sustained effort from someone seventeen—besides visiting every architectural structure in Kolhari that boasted Belham’s hand, I’d met with every relative I could, resident in the city or visiting, to get information about him as well as a list of locations for whatever of his projects might remain in our nation. (Some, of course, had vanished in small time, but an impressive number endured.) In this wise, I’d constructed a map and with it, made notes, from which I seriously considered writing a detailed account of Belham’s life and works, like those that various councilors were forever proposing to put together about some of our queens and kings, to have them carved on certain walls at the court—and never getting round to it. You must understand that this was before the writing system from the Ulvayns came to the mainland: that fixes specific words to parchment, stone, or papyrus. But in those days, we had only the various commercial scripts, with their signs for amounts, products, ideas, names, and injunctions, and it was in the two of these languages I’d mastered that I intended to write this work.
The ease with which you could write it today makes my adolescent ambition seem a grandiose dream verging on the preposterous. Contemplating it in the light of the newer writing, I am only more impressed than ever with that early and ambitious foolishness.
What do you take on a journey if you are a seventeen-year-old prince who expects to be gone a year? Money, of course. And tents. And provisions; and tools to set them up. Of course a chest of sumptuous gifts for the noble houses at which, from time to time, you will be a guest. And another of bright trinkets for commoners who aid you and require recompense. And two closed carriages to carry it all in. And six armed soldiers, skilled with spear, sword, and bow, to protect you from bandits. And three men to rotate as drivers and general grooms (though they, too, should have weapon experience). And a body servant—some soft souls say two, three, or more. And a caravan steward to coordinate it all. My uncle assured me I would need a companion of my own class and interests, as well. I made noises about stopping off to pick up a young cousin of mine from some castle or other in the west—a move, once we started, I had no intention of making. Very few of my class have my interests; and among those who do, that cousin was not one.
The night before we left, my uncle held a party for me—to which I arrived late: I’d finally gotten a chance to visit a merchant woman in Sallese whose gardens boasted a set of Belham’s finest fountains. The spewing jets played at the four corners of a bridge across the stream at the bottom of the falls foaming behind her house. As I recall, she was quite anxious to show me something else, kept up in a maintenance shack at the top of the garden rise. She said it held Belham’s own garden maquette—but I had seen many like it before—as well as something created by another inventor, a contemporary of, or an assistant to, Belham, when he’d worked there for her father.
She wouldn’t tell me what it was.
But Belham alone was my Great Man, my Hero, and my only Passion—also I was late.
So I thanked her, declined her invitation, examined her handsome fountains and their ingenious tributary pools on the gardens’ upper level; and left for home.
Next morning our caravan pulled out of my uncle’s gates, while the gatekeeper, up later than I at the night’s revels, planted the end of the crossbeam in the dust to lean on it, yawning, as the sky’s deep blue lightened moment by moment toward a gray that threatened rain.
It didn’t break, as I recall, till our third day out from the city.
The outlines of Belham’s story are widely known: born in the south and distinguishing himself there by his mathematical and architectural ability, he soon came to the attention of local nobles, who encouraged him to work at various holds about the land. Finally he was summoned by Queen Olin to Kolhari, and later worked here for various lords and wealthy merchant families. But he was a drinker, a womanizer, and a commoner to boot, as well as a ranging and restless spirit. After Olin was deposed, he traveled even further north, where he finally died from falling down a cliff, while drunk, one cold and rainy evening, near a village just beyond Ellamon.
The map I’d made indicated forts, temples, bridges, roads, and fountains all over Nevèrÿon that Belham’s name was connected with. How did I intend to reconstruct the journey from south to north that was his life? I joined each point on my map by a single line to the point nearest. Certainly that was the most logical path he would have traveled. And one drizzly afternoon, perhaps a week beyond our departure, I sat under a tarpaulin that had been put up for me at our camp. A hickory fire burned near me, from logs that my caravan steward, suspecting rain, had put by in our wagon the day before. I unrolled the map from arm to arm of my lounging chair, now and again sipping a berry drink through a brass straw. The liqueur was local to the town just above which we’d stopped, and my man, Cadmir, born there and boasting of it half the day before, had run down and back to purchase a jar and bring it up for my enjoyment.
Three of my soldiers squatted by a wagon wheel, tossing bones with one of my drivers—for the sprinkle was not so fierce as to distract them from their gambling.
Suddenly they laughed.
The driver had told them, I realized, the perfectly foul joke that, after some deliberation as to whether or not it was meet for one of my station, I’d told to him that morning as we’d sat together on the carriage’s rocking bench. (‘And make sure you tell it to Terek,’ I’d suggested, for the dark, lanky soldier had already struck me as the most sullen among my men, though sometimes he could give out with a startling smile.) I glanced up, to see first Terek (of the dark skin and broken nose), then the others, grin in my direction. I grinned back: of course, the driver had told them what I’d said about Terek as well. But none seemed to have taken offense. Feeling supremely well liked, I went on looking at my map. I still recall the pride I felt, that cool afternoon, as I moved a forefinger over the vellum. Clearly this was the opening of my Great Work. The logic, the order, the sheer reasonableness of it, in the lines that crossed the geographical signs for mountains and rivers and forests, were as beautiful as—I thought then—truth must always be.
There was Belham’s life!
I sat gazing on the totality out of which all Belham’s creations had grown.
Had it occurred to me that perhaps one or two of his marvels had missed my notation? Yes, I knew for a fact I had left out at least two, because though I had their descriptions from several people, no one knew exactly what towns they were in. Did I suspect that perhaps he had not gone quite so directly, now and again, between proximate locations? From stories I’d already gotten from various noble cousins, I was sure there were three places from which he’d gone on to some far place to build before returning to a nearer town to build again. Had it occurred to me that a few of the works bearing his name had probably not been built by him at all, but were imitations by others in his style? I had down three such for certain, since, despite the name, others remembered the true builder. But these bits of special knowledge were what gave me the expert’s sense that spiced my general pleasure.
What did I think, then, of all these mistakes and exceptions? What did they mean for my serpentine pattern winding Nevèrÿon?
