Neveryóna, or The Tales of Signs and Cities

11. Of Family Gatherings, Grammatology, More Models, and More Mysteries

AFTER THE NOON EATING break came an hour when the auxiliary cooling cave produced huge amounts of noise. The chains and pulleys, by which empty barrels were hauled down from the barrel pile, knocked against the stacked containers; the swinging barrels rasped and banged the hauling links.

There was not, however, much work done.

Pryn had discovered the shirkers on her third day at the brewery. She’d wandered around the half-opened wooden gate of the main cavern into the much smaller cave. This is what she’d seen:

One workman lowered a barrel by a chain and pulley, taking as long as ten minutes to do it, while another knocked it back and forth with a guide pole — to make more noise.

On the rocky floor, a dozen workers just…stood.

Then the more industrious ones, usually women, took down the long wooden paddles to skim the fluffy scum off the troughs over the chamber floor, knocking the mess into the barrel. The paddle handles clacking the barrel rim made more noise still — while another barrel got lowered from the barrel stack, and sometimes raised again, then lowered once more. The scum-filled barrel was finally rolled out through the main cooling cave and put with the barrels of scum skimmed from the main cave’s troughs. Set out in a clearing by an oak grove, they stood till local farmers, driving up, carted them off for fertilizer.

During the same hour, the main cooling cavern was a fury of after-lunch activity, with mule carts and paddle cleaners and troops of skimmers and barrel-stackers and barrel-rollers. But anyone passing the half-closed gate of the auxiliary cave heard such a racket knocking and banging within, that they’d surely think twice as much work was taking place inside as in the bustle out here.

It was all acoustics.

On Pryn’s fourth day, Yrnik had assigned her, among her accounting duties, to keep count on the comparative number of scum barrels that came out of the auxiliary cave and out of the main cave. Once stacked outside, the barrels’ origins were indistinguishable; and the farmers were always coming up to pick up a barrel or two of free fertilizer anyway, so that even markings would not have been truly efficient.

Pryn kept count.

Each day the main cave produced between forty and fifty barrels of yellow-green gunk.

The auxiliary cave, Pryn realized as she stood among the men and women along the cave wall, listening to barrels bang, could easily have filled twelve or thirteen, given the number of wide, wooden, first-fermentation settling troughs foaming over the floor.

That afternoon it produced three.

Pryn passed hours watching the whole infinitely delayed operation.

When she went off to the equipment store (the converted barracks that included Yrnik’s office), she stood for a long while before the wax-covered board Yrnik had hung on the wall for temporary notes. On a ledge under it was a seashell in which Yrnik kept the pointed sticks he’d carved for styluses. An oil lamp with a broad wick sat beside the shell. You used it to melt the wax when notes had to be erased over a large area. Pryn picked up a stylus and looked at the board’s translucent yellow.

Once she said out loud: ‘But I’m not a spy…!’

The main cave had put out forty-seven barrels of fertilizer that day.

Pryn took the stick and gouged across a clear space: ‘Main cave, forty-one barrels — auxiliary cave, nine barrels.’

She looked at that a while, rereading it silently, mouthing the words, running them through her mind as she had run her dialogue on the way back to the dormitory last night: ‘Forty-seven?’ ‘Three?’ she said to herself in several tones of voice. ‘Who am I to commit myself to a truth so far from what is expected?’ Over the next few days she could push what she might write closer to what she’d seen. But that would do for now. ‘To write for others,’ she thought, ‘it seems one must be a spy — or a teller of tales.’ She put the stick back in its shell.

The wax was covered almost equally with her own and Yrnik’s markings. (In the bottom corner were some of Tetya’s practicing’s, in signs notably larger.) Bushels of barley, barrels of beer; names of fields, numbers of workers; names of workers, numbers of barrels; names of customers, numbers of orders; comments on qualities of rope, quantities of carrots, amounts of crockery for the cating hall, numbers of pruning hooks for the orchards. Notes Yrnik decided to keep more than a few days, Pryn would transcribe on clay tablets that it was also her job to flatten, carry out to dry, and bring in to stack against the barracks wall. Sometimes she remembered har’Jade, with new sympathy for a secretary’s job — for ‘Yrnik’s secretary/Tetya’s tutor’ was Pryn’s official, double title. When the wax on the board was melted with the lamp and pressed flat, now with the thumb, now with the hand’s heel, frequently it retained ghosts of old characters within its translucence. Still on the board were the half-legible memories of more than a year’s production. Surface and ghosts together waited for new inscriptions.

For the next three days Pryn watched the men and women loitering in the auxiliary cave. For the next three days she adjusted her figures.

This afternoon, however, standing around with the other loiterers, she noticed something — or rather, began to think articulately about something she’d noticed in the days before. Most of the workers gathered here in the auxiliary cave were old. Five were definitely sick — she could imagine Madame Keyne sending them home. A few, like herself, were new or inexperienced. Nobody laughed or joked; it was too loud. The workers stood or leaned on the wall, watching. The first day she’d come, their faces had been strange; but now this aging woman, the other old man, that hare-lipped boy were familiar. For them all she could construct solid reasons why they used this hour’s sham work — a sham that seemed to have grown without conspiracy. Watching, she tried to remember if she had known all this on the first day she’d stumbled on them here, so that she’d altered her figures out of inarticulate knowledge of the greater situation. But no. It had been more the anxiety at writing down something too far from the wanted.

Finally she went back out into the main cave: fifty-one barrels.

The auxiliary cave had filled two.

Returning to the storehouse office, Pryn was wondering whether to adjust that ‘two’ up to a ‘six,’ a ‘seven,’ or an ‘eight,’ when Tetya passed the office door: ‘I saw the earl’s cart drive up — !’

Pryn grabbed a stylus from the seashell, scratched ‘fifty-one’ and ‘two,’ then dashed out.

Would it be a great wagon with six horses like the ones that had rumbled past her the afternoon at the crossroads, when she had first heard the earl’s name? No. She repeated it to herself three times, five times, two more times. No. No. She should expect nothing grander than the canopied cart that had conveyed her to Madame Keyne’s (Might the earl drive himself…?’) and must not be disappointed if it were an open workcart of the sort she had ridden away from Kolhari in, or even the flat wooden-railed kind that rolled up to the oak grove to take off the fertilizer. She came out the storehouse door. His Lordship was the sort of man to value the utility of a common workcart…

Pryn stopped.

Standing on the road — well, it was a cart, because it had three horses at one end. A woman drove it — a slave with a white damasked collar-cover. The object itself, however, made Pryn want to laugh, not from derision, but from inability to take in its opulence! Her first writable thought: it was an oversized reproduction of something yanked from the earth, a rootish knot with all sorts of excrescences, off-shoots, and out-juttings.

She walked toward it. Was it symmetrical? The far side, which she couldn’t see directly, still exhibited the same overall form as the near.

She walked around it.

The slave made a point of not watching.

The back was more ornate than the front. Its sides were intricately carved. Certainly the designs looked regular — though the reason she would have written ‘certainly’ in their description was because, when she was three steps closer, it became clear that they were not; both the ‘certainty’ of their similarity and the ‘clarity’ of their differences were lost in the decorative profusion. Well…

It had wheels. There was a place to climb into it.

Pryn climbed.

The bench was covered with material beneath which was something soft as fresh straw but without straw’s pokes and prickles. Bits of torn fabric? The finest moss? What, she wondered, was under that dark purple? The soft, sloughed scales of baby dragons?

While she wondered, the driver bent forward; the cart started south.

Relinquishing the mystery of the cushion stuffing, she looked over the far side of the cart’s carved wall — the carvings there were completely different from those on the side she’d first seen. Those on the side she had climbed up suggested animals, rocks, and clouds. She immediately slid back over that side to make sure; those on the far side (while she looked at animals, rocks, and clouds she was sure) had suggested plants, birds, and fish. She slid over the wondrously comfortable cushion to make sure: yes (while she looked at plants, birds, and fish), they were clouds, rocks, and animals…

Catching her breath, she threw back her head, because suddenly the cart was the whole world — or an image of it. Blinking, she saw the whole world around her — oh, only a part of it, with any certainty, any clarity. But the trees she passed, the rocks she passed, the clouds she passed under, the animals and birds they might contain very much suggested the whole, in its greater invisibility.

She went back to examining carvings, this time on the cart’s inner rail, so that she hardly noticed the slave swing right at the crossroads. She only glimpsed the lopsided dragon when she happened to glance back at some bird call.

The stone beast disappeared around a bend.

The road ahead was all wonders: rocky streams, shaggy trees, flowering copses — each, a moment later, followed by some artfully made thing, a wooden bridge, some group of winged stone leopards, a marble bench. Culture informed nature with a host of human ghosts, or nature surrounded culture with a field of breath-stopping beauty and unknown history. In concert, astonishment and agnosia abolished their own distinctions. (Was that magic?) The cart slowed.

A woman ran up. ‘You’re here!’

Pryn had never seen her before, but her smile was familiar, though Pryn was too a-quake from the ride to remember from where. The woman wore a shift of a brilliant red Pryn had never yet seen in fabric. The dress was finished at sleeves and hem and scooped neck with bits of something shiny that may have been gold or may have been red. The way they flashed and flickered, Pryn couldn’t tell. The woman’s toes pushed and poked from the glittering hem. Were her nails the wrong color? As she came, they glimmered and teased the eye on the polished terrace flags. Yes, for some reason her toenails were also red!

‘I’m so glad you could come. The earl’s account has left me mad to meet you!’ She reached up, taking Pryn’s hand and, by subtle motions to the left and right, helped Pryn down so that descent did not feel like climbing but floating. ‘I’m the earl’s wife — Lady Nyergrinkuga — but do call me Tritty. Everyone does. His Lordship is waiting for you inside. Did you have a nice ride up from Rorkar’s?’

‘Yes!’ Pryn said. ‘It was wonderful!’

The nameless slave — though she could, just then, have been the nameless god of all travel — drove the cart off among trees.

Tritty took Pryn’s arm. Her sleeve against Pryn’s forearm was shockingly soft.

Noting it, Pryn searched among wonders to compare it to. Tritty smiled, and Pryn told her of the jade-backed flies that had deviled one of the horse’s haunches, the angle of two great trees that had crowded by one bend of the road, the profusion of tiny yellow flowers that had lain out all along the bank at another — things Pryn would not have ordinarily chosen to speak of, but things that would have come back to her had she been writing, say, later; and because she could write, when pressed for talk, such things had become, more and more, what she talked of; for years that would make her, to some listeners, at any rate, an interesting conversationalist. She talked…

At one of Pryn’s silences, Tritty said: ‘You are enthusiastic! That’s charming.’

What had silenced the girl was two stone beasts with raised wings and grasping claws. Eagles? Dragons? They walked between them into a foyer a-flicker with burning bowls of oil set on high tripods.

Tritty spoke now: ‘The earl only told me you were coming this morning, so I didn’t have time to plan.’ They passed hanging cloths with colors as astonishing as, if more delicate than, Tritty’s red. The far wall had defeated the stone dresser. It was as rough as a cooling cave. Firelight flickered over banks of weapons: racks of spears, lapped shields, an overhead beam hung with thirty or forty swords. ‘You’re catching us, I’m afraid, at our most “at home.” A confession: when he invited you, his Lordship hadn’t realized all the children would be descending at once — which they have! Ardra, my boy — he’s not far from your age, I’m sure. He’s fourteen…?

‘I’m fifteen.’

‘Are you? You seem quite a mature young woman — though I was only a year older when I married my first husband. Fortunately, he liked to travel. Otherwise, I’d have seen as little of this wild and wondrous land as any village girl. My first husband was Ardra’s father. The rest of the children are the earl’s by his former wife — now they’re a little older than you. The earl said you were very well traveled.’ They passed through another arch. ‘Where are some of the places you’ve been recently?’

‘Before I came here I was — ’ Pryn looked about the hall. Distantly, she heard free water rushing beyond the ornate rail that crossed the hall’s center. This space was even larger than the Spur’s ancient cellar — ‘in Kolhari. And I was in Enoch too.’ But before such domestic grandeur, Enoch didn’t seem worth mentioning.

They walked out across the dim cavern; here and there in it rose a sculpted pillar. Tritty returned Pryn’s openmouthed and upward stare to ground level with a press on the arm. ‘We’ll be using one of the informal receiving chambers this evening. I know the Large Hall is more impressive, but really — anything less than a hundred guests and you feel simply lost.’ She turned Pryn toward a side door, over which a stone beast arched. ‘Last week the Usurper of Strethi was with us, along with a retinue of thirty-seven. We never even went near it — didn’t even use the Small Hall here!’ Tritty gestured at the cavern as they left it for a corridor. ‘Yes, I thought we’d use one of the receiving chambers this evening.’ She bent nearer. ‘Tell me of Kolhari. I’ve only been there a few times — for six weeks, once, when I was a year younger than you, at the High Court of Eagles — but I never got outside the palace! Though everyone I talked to was filled with tales of the city itself, the Old Market, Potters’ Lane, the Bridge of Lost Desire…’ She sighed. ‘To me, that was Kolhari — the Kolhari I never saw.’

‘I did see those!’ Pryn said. ‘Some of them.’

‘And that’s why I like my husband’s visitors! The Usurper of Strethi comes to pay his respects to me, you understand — while his Lordship drives out in a common cart on the highway and comes back with adventurers, warriors, even — sometimes — merchants. Though, really, traveling merchants tend to talk only about money. It makes for a dull evening. But we love interesting people, my husband and I; and when the choice is yours and you gain a bit of experience as his Lordship has, it’s not too difficult to avoid the bores.’

They turned through a smaller door.

A young man wearing a short leather skirt stood up from a hide hassock.

The same moment, someone shrieked from the corner stairs. A boy with barbaric, nappy hair leap down the last six of them. Laughing hard, a young woman chased him. Both stopped at the steps’ foot.

Standing by a dark fireplace filled with things that could have been for torture as easily as for cooking (though they looked too shiny and polished to have been used much for either), the white-haired earl opened his marvelous blue cloak back from his white robe. ‘Well, you’ve arrived, Pryn! You’ve met her Ladyship, I see. And these, I’m afraid, are my obstreperous children. This is my stepson, Ardra.’ He gestured toward the boy at the stairs’ bottom. The boy wore rough cloth shorts and a sleeveless shirt of the same material that did not come all the way down his thin, heaving belly. Seeing him standing there returned Pryn to a moment in childhood: She was bringing the cloth-covered food bowl to her mother’s kid brother, who had run away from the army to hide for weeks in the tool hut of a neighbor. Ten-year-old Pryn had pulled open the hut door. Her young uncle, waking, had leapt up in sudden sunlight, his armor — some rusted, some gleaming — in the straw about his feet: Ardra wore the traditional undergarments for a light-armed soldier. ‘Hello,’ Pryn said.

‘Ardra, this is our guest for the evening, Pryn.’

Breathing heavily, Ardra just blinked.

Had Pryn not been filled with the ride’s beauty and the house’s size, she might have found the silence rude. But all she could see now was wonder.

‘And this is my daughter, Lavik.’

Lavik was short, no taller than Pryn — and plumper. Her black hair was handsomely braided over one shoulder. Her brown shift looked as though she had picked it up in the brewery commissary where, a week before, Yrnik had issued Pryn the one she now wore. ‘Hello.’ She came down the steps and paused with her hand on her stepbrother’s shoulder. She looked about twenty. ‘Ardra, speak to father’s guest now.’

‘You work at the brewery,’ Ardra said. ‘Father won’t let me. He doesn’t think it’s right.’

The earl raised a bushy white eyebrow, then laughed. ‘I think it’ll be right — when you’re at least as old as this young woman here.’ He looked at Pryn. ‘You’re sixteen now, aren’t you?’

‘Fifteen,’ Pryn said.

‘Oh,’ said the earl. ‘Well. I see nothing wrong with my children working in some local field or orchard. I did it. Lavik did it. So did Jenta. But I simply require that you be of the age of reason.’

Tritty moved to her son. ‘I thought you didn’t want to work in the brewery, dear…?’

‘I don’t.’

‘What do you want to do?’ Pryn asked.

‘I want to be a general in the Imperial Army and go about putting down rebellions in outlying provinces.’

‘Only I’m afraid,’ said the young man who’d first stood before the hassock. ‘Ardra hasn’t quite resigned himself to the fact that he’s now a lord of just such an outlying province — one that’s been, in its time, as rebellious as anyone could wish.’ Everyone laughed, except Ardra, who sat down on the bottom step, elbows on his knees, chin on meshed fingers, watching with bright, rather dazed eyes.

‘Pryn, this is my son, Inige.’ The earl gestured toward the young man standing. ‘He just arrived from the Argini. We weren’t expecting him — ’

‘We were expecting his brother, Jenta,’ the earl’s wife said, ‘actually. Only Jenta sent a message yesterday that he would be arriving today, sometime this evening. You see, we are in a state. Darling — ’ this to Lavik — ‘where’s the baby?’

‘Upstairs,’ Lavik said. ‘Asleep.’

‘Is she all right?’

‘She’s sleeping,’ Lavik said. ‘Hasn’t shit in four hours.’

Tritty took in a relieved breath. ‘Lavik came home three days ago, with Petal — they’d been off somewhere together in the very deep south. The baby picked up a case of dysentery — it’s just been constant diarrhea! When she came, she looked like a sun-shriveled apricot. I thought we were going to lose her. But she’s seemed to rally. And she’s been so good through it all!’

‘How old is she?’ Pryn asked.

‘Three months,’ Lavik said. ‘She’s a wonderful baby. But she’s been so sick — that’s why I brought her back. I know she would have died if I stayed down in that horrid swamp where I was.’

‘Did your husband come, too?’ Pryn asked.

‘Don’t have a husband,’ Lavik said with a great grin. ‘Don’t want one, either. I’ve been trying to get dad used to the idea that this one’s father is actually quite a well-respected warrior in a famous hunting clan. Dad would like him — if he’d consent to meet him. The way I figure it, he’s about the equivalent of a captain in the Imperial Army. That’s the rank Ardra will start at if he ever gets a commission. He’s the youngest son of a warrior who was once the leader of his whole tribe. This particular clan changes leaders every six years, by vote. It’s very different from here.’

‘And I’ve been trying to explain to Lavik — ’ the earl’s white eyebrows lowered — ‘that youngest sons count for very little, even if their fathers are, or have been, noble lords.’

Tritty looked at her stepdaughter. ‘You’re going to upset your father — ’

‘No,’ Lavik said. ‘He isn’t going to be upset.’ She stepped around seated Ardra, smiling at Pryn. ‘Did you ever have a baby?’

Pryn shook her head. ‘No.’

‘It’s scary,’ Lavik said. ‘Though I’m awfully glad I did it. I mean, now that she’s going to live; though I cried all yesterday morning when I thought she wouldn’t…Really, except for the dysentery, the south’s wonderful! You’re a traveler — you must go there someday. It’s beyond Nevèrÿon, and there are times I think life doesn’t even begin until you get outside the very muzzy borders of this tiny and terrified land. Believe me, it’s better than being cooped up in court — oh, dear!’ Lavik put her hand over her mouth. ‘I was about to tell a story! But I can’t. Dad’s always liked it, because it insults the north. But mother — ’ Lavik glanced at her stepmother — ‘hates it, because it insults the court.’

‘Well, yes, I think it’s a funny story,’ the earl said. ‘But I never really liked it that much.’

‘I don’t hate it,’ Tritty said. ‘It’s something that happened, so there’s no reason not to tell it. Do tell it, dear, if you want. I just don’t think it’s…well, as representative as you do. I’m certainly not denying it happened. Go on. I don’t mind.’

‘Well…’ Lavik paused in quizzical concern. Then she asked: ‘Does the idiocy that goes on at the High Court of Eagles interest you at all? I mean, if it doesn’t — ’

‘Oh, yes!’ Pryn declared. ‘Please tell me! You’ve been there too?’

‘All right.’ Plump, braided Lavik smiled (while Pryn suddenly wondered if Lavik assumed the ‘too’ referred to Pryn rather than to Tritty, as Pryn had intended). ‘You know it’s customary for the daughters and the sons of outlying nobility, when they reach age seventeen or eighteen — ’

‘When I was a girl, it was fourteen or fifteen,’ Tritty said. ‘But they expected more of children back then.’

‘—to go to court and spend six weeks, or even three months, meeting people, getting to know other nobles of the realm, learning about power across the nation from people with first-hand experience — ’

‘When I was a girl, a talented youth with real ability might stay at court as long as three years, or even five, working as an attaché to the ambassadorial wing or as a secretary to an older official.’ Tritty sighed. ‘I don’t know why they’ve discontinued that.’

Pryn glanced at Tritty.

Lavik did not. ‘The court, you know, is huge. It’s more like a small city-within-a-city than it is a single castle — ’

‘And we didn’t compare court to things,’ Tritty said, ‘when I was a girl. That, I suppose, is what distresses me most. There were formal ways to speak about things in my day, and believe me, you could say anything you wanted within those formal protocols. But you didn’t say court was like anything. Court was court, origin and end, of all benevolence and all power; and the reign of the Emperor — I was at court before Her present majesty, the Child Empress, you see — was always fine and felicitous. Lord knows, people will say anything of this reign now!’

‘My dear’ the earl said, ‘If you don’t want Lavik to tell her story, we can always talk about something else — ’

‘Oh, no! No!’ Tritty said. ‘I want her to tell it!’

‘Please don’t worry,’ Pryn said, wondering whether it was the stepdaughter’s tale or the husband’s rebuke that brought the distress to Tritty’s mahogany features. ‘I’ll laugh and smile at the right places — but I won’t judge any of what Lavik says until I go to court myself — which is not likely to happen for a long time!’ It didn’t seem to relieve Tritty. Watching her and wondering if they’d caught her oblique confession that, indeed, she hadn’t been to court, Pryn lost the beginning of Lavik’s next sentence.

‘…hundreds of people living there! You could take ten of this house here, pile them together, and you still wouldn’t fill a third of it. There must be twenty-five kitchens. They feed the various suites — so of course when you go, you must go under the patronage of someone already permanently connected, who has a kitchen and staff. Well, Father had arranged for me to go under the patronage of his cousin, the Lesser Lady Esulla — so there I was, all of seventeen, creaking and joggling up the north road to Kolhari, alongside a wagon full of clothes and furniture and…well, once upon a time you had to bring your own servants, but that never worked very well. Now they ask you to bring only one attendant and a driver, for general dressing and carrying. Lady Esulla was very sweet, but she was also very forgetful. And she had six young women and three young men under her patronage that season. Over the first few days, we were presented at various private lunches and suppers, where we reclined on cushions and drank cider — no beer at the High Court of Eagles! — and met all sorts of fascinating people, heard all sorts of fascinating talk. Indeed, I suppose if I’d been listening harder, I might have avoided what happened. But the fourth night, after we’d made just dozens of informal acquaintances, we were presented at a marvelous supper-ball. The Empress sent Lord Krodar himself to make a welcoming statement. We danced, we ate, we met dozens more lords and ladies, some who’d been there a while, and others, like ourselves, who’d just arrived. I’ve no idea what time I got to bed! But the next morning I woke up in my very small, very stony room — the furniture hadn’t been brought up yet, because there were no porters in the lesser lady’s retinue who were free to carry it in through the stades and stades of corridors and up all those narrow little stairs…’ Lavik looked about with wide eyes. ‘Anyway. When I woke up, there wasn’t a sound! Everything was silent! Nothing moved…Now if you’ve ever lived in a castle with a complement of over a hundred, you know how unusual that is! By four o’clock in the morning there’re always servants about in the halls to get things ready so that you may rise comfortably by five. And because I had been up so late, I knew it was at least six-thirty. Finally, I wrapped a day-robe about me and went out into the corridor — no one! I went to the rooms of the other young women recently come under patronage. Their beds were made, their clothes were hung up, and their rooms — empty! The lesser lady’s own rooms were locked. So was the kitchen! You might imagine, I was terrified! Over the course of the day, as I wandered up and down the hall, a thousand dreadful thoughts came to me: there’d been some political coup during the night and everyone had been taken out and executed, while I had been accidentally overlooked; or some sorcerer had put the whole castle under a spell, but thanks to one of Dad’s counterspells I’d been spared — ’

‘Now, Lavik — ’

‘That’s what I thought!’ said wide-eyed Lavik. ‘I went through the whole day with nothing to eat, and when it got dark, I went back to my room and lay down — and woke up the next day, still alone. No food — for another whole day. Do you know, I spent six days in that empty wing without eating, or talking to a soul!’

‘Why didn’t you just leave?’ Pryn asked, quite wide-eyed now herself. ‘Six days! You could have starved to death!’

‘Well,’ Lavik said, ‘you don’t know how big that castle is! I mean, you don’t go “in” and “out” of it just like that — at least not when you’ve been there less than a week! At any one time, half of it’s deserted anyway; there was a whole hive of unlighted and unoccupied rooms between the Lady Esualla’s suite and the next inhabited chambers. I was afraid that once I plunged into those without a guide, I would be lost forever! As far as starving to death, I suppose I wasn’t really afraid of that. Dad goes on fifteen-day fasts periodically, and I had made up my mind not to get upset over that part until at least the tenth day. Still it was terribly bizarre — there I was, with a family name as old as a god’s…really, our family name is a good deal older than the nameless craft-gods they pray to in the north today! I might as well have been a slave from thirty years ago walled up in one of Old Rorkar’s abandoned brewing caves for a week of solitary confinement!’

‘How did you get out?’ Pryn asked.

‘They came back.’ Lavik laughed. ‘Apparently the lesser lady had decided to take the entire suite with her on a mission to consult about taxes in the west. She thought it would be very educational for the new youngsters to see just how such debates are carried on. Only somehow, nobody had mentioned it to me — or somebody had and I hadn’t heard. When I didn’t join them at five in the morning, it was just assumed I had been spirited off by some other lord or lady for the duration.’ Lavik laughed again. ‘But really, that — to me — is life at court: three months of hopelessly complicated intrigues in which, at any moment, you may be toasted at an imperial ball one moment, then turn around and starve for a week! This is the part that mother hates, but it’s true! There isn’t an aristocrat in the land over fifty who hasn’t been clapped into prison for six weeks or six years at one time or another in their lives! Considering what’s happened to some people I know with names a lot less notable than ours, I feel I got off rather light!’

‘Now that’s what I mean,’ Tritty said. ‘I was in prison once, yes. But I was released after less than a year, with full apologies and reparations. They said it was all a mistake — ’

‘The Lesser Lady Esulla said it was a mistake what happened to me, too!’

‘—but when I was at court,’ Tritty said, raising her chin a bit, ‘please believe it, dear, nothing like that happened to me! Your problem, Lavik, is that you haven’t been in prison. The two aren’t comparable.’

‘But Mother, you’ve even said court has gone downhill since you were there.’

‘I certainly have.’

Inige said: ‘We all know you’re not anxious for Ardra to go.’

‘I’m not. But that’s because I don’t think Ardra’s ready. It’s the same reason your father doesn’t want him to take a local job. Certainly when I was at court, there were lots of young hot-heads with no business there. But that’s not what your father and I want for Ardra.’

‘To go to court,’ Ardra said, still sitting, ‘would be the fastest way to get an officer’s commission. Anyone can get a commission at court.’

‘I couldn’t,’ Lavik said.

‘That’s because you’re a girl’ Ardra put his hands between his knees and looked up. ‘I mean anyone who wanted one.’ But he frowned.

‘You know,’ Lavik said, ‘I don’t think what happened to me could have happened to a boy.’

‘Now this — ’ Inige smiled at Pryn — ‘is not a traditional part of the story. The rest we’ve all heard a hundred times before. But that’s the problem with serious discussions.’ He folded his arms and looked at his sister. ‘All right, Lavik. Why couldn’t it have happened to a man?’

‘I said boy. And you know the answer as well as I do — you were at court three years before I was and told me all about it!’

‘Oh, Lavik…’ Apparently it had been said to Tritty.

‘It wouldn’t happen to a boy because the dozen-odd old men who finally rule everything at court are all as mad about talented, sensitive, lonely boys as Old Rorkar, down at the brewery, is — with the exception of Lord Krodar, who was once as mad about the Child Empress apparently…or so I gather from twenty-year-old gossip.’

‘Dear me.’ Inige smiled at Pryn again. ‘I think this is where it becomes dull for anyone who hasn’t been to court herself — or himself.’

‘Really,’ Lavik said. ‘You know, you achieve a kind of inner sensitivity when you become a mother — even of a dying, or an almost dying, daughter.’ She grinned at Pryn. ‘Are you bored with this discussion?’

‘Well,’ Pryn said, ‘I’m learning things from it, but not about court.’

‘What do you think of Old Rorkar?’ Tritty stepped in front of Pryn, shielding her from the rest and shifting the subject with a directness Pryn found awesome. ‘To me, I admit, he’s always seemed an unhappy man. His Lordship and I, we have an annual harvest party for all the local businessmen in the area. I’ve stood in this very room with him, right where we’re standing now — for five autumns in a row — and felt myself overwhelmed with the dissatisfaction from that man! And yet I must say, I think he’s the most complete man I’ve met in this area. But perhaps to be complete, here, means to be dissatisfied. Perhaps it’s a necessity. For example, I think Lavik is the most complete of all my children — though I don’t think I could put my finger exactly on why.’

‘That — ’ Lavik stepped up to put her arm in its rough sleeve around her stepmother’s thin, gleaming red shoulder — ‘is because Tritty really wants people to feel good, and she’ll say anything to make that happen. It’s a sign of real caring; and I think it’s just marvelous!’

‘I’m not a hypocrite,’ Tritty said. ‘But I do care how people feel.’

Lavik smiled with faint amusement, nodding. ‘I know it.’ She gave her stepmother’s shoulder a squeeze.

Pryn had, indeed, located the spot of true boredom for all discussions and digressions about court and such places and peoples of which she knew nothing and was halfway through a strategy that would result, ten or fifteen seconds from now, in her saying something about it, when there were loud footsteps in the corridor and a resounding:

‘Hello…!’

They turned.

Striding in through another arch came a bearded man with furs over his shoulders and a scarred and ragged leather kilt. Certainly he was of the earl’s family. He seemed, if anything, a bigger, rougher Inige. His beard and hair were rumpled enough to make Pryn realize how carefully the slim Inige’s had been cut. He came up and gave Tritty a great squeeze and a kiss, loped off to his father, threw his arms around the earl, and gave him an equally bearlike hug. The gentleman grinned. ‘Hello, Jenta — Jenta, this is our guest for the evening, Pryn.’

Passing the steps, Jenta reached down to rough his stepbrother’s hair. Ardra answered with a complaining grunt. One of Jenta’s hands went to his brother Inige’s shoulder and fell away, while another fell on his sister Lavik’s.

‘This is his Lordship’s oldest son,’ Tritty said. ‘Jenta.’

An affable smile and slightly wrinkled eyes gleamed above the black beard; yes, it was the earl’s smile — and Tritty’s; but it sat firmly among those rough, young features, while on the faces of the older couple it floated with unsettling freedom. Both Jenta’s hands came together to clasp one of Pryn’s. They were as rough and hard as, if cleaner than, the hands of the benchmaker at Enoch, or the young, pock-marked smuggler, or even Yrnik. His large gestures and great grin seemed too big for the big room — though it struck Pryn that he was really no taller than his father or brother. Indeed, the seated Ardra was probably the tallest person there by a head.

Tritty said: ‘Why didn’t you bring Feyatt with you? You know we were all looking forward to seeing her!’

‘Oh, you know Feyatt — she’s scared of Father. She thinks he’ll turn her into a fieldmouse!’

‘Feyatt looks like a fieldmouse already,’ Ardra said from the steps. ‘At least I think she does.’

‘You must tell her we want to see her! We really do!’ Turning, Tritty laid a hand on Pryn’s shoulder. ‘Jenta and his young woman, you see, live very simply. It’s their own decision. They’ve moved to a little farm, where they’ve built everything themselves! It’s very simple, very impressive. His Lordship and I have visited them. They eat only the food they can grow with their own hands in their own garden; they wear only the clothes they can make from animals they catch themselves or from cloth they weave on their own loom — Jenta, here, is quite a weaver! Really, to visit them — I mean to live with them for a time and assume their ways, it’s practically a religious experience.’ Tritty looked at the earl. ‘You said that, dear.’

Pulling his cloak around him, the earl stepped up. ‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘I did say it.’

Did he gaze at the astrolabe?

‘But here we are,’ Tritty said, ‘showering our guest with our entire lives, when we should be asking about hers.’ (Actually Tritty said ‘ours’ by mistake; the intention was clear, however, and no one else seemed to notice; finally it was too small an accident to record without giving it undue attention — which made Pryn feel unduly uncomfortable for the next three minutes.)

‘But I don’t know what to tell you,’ Pryn said. ‘You all seem to have done everything I have, and done it better.’ (They smiled — all except Ardra; it suggested they agreed.) ‘I mean…I know all about myself already anyway. What I want to do is ask you questions. I mean — ’ She turned to furry-shouldered Jenta — ‘your mother says you’re a good weaver. And I wondered if you used the spinning stone my aunt invented…oh, thirty years before I was born — because that makes thread-making go so much faster. And the cloth you’re wearing — ’ She turned to Tritty — ‘doesn’t look as if it could have been woven!’

The earl laughed. ‘Weaving, you know, is one of those practices that’s invented and forgotten and invented again. When I was your age and everything around here was still fiber or furs or tooled leather, we knew a man who talked about the possibility of the loom — said, even then, it was an idea that had been floating around in his head for years. He simply hadn’t run into anyone, back then, interested enough to develop the notion and work until the bugs were out of it. He had too many other things he wanted to pursue himself, he said. Perhaps you’ve heard of him: a genius just from south of here, named Belham. Marvelous man; spewed out brilliant gadgets right, left, and center.’

Inige recited. ‘You must have heard the children’s playing rhyme.’

‘He invented the fountain,’ Lavik said.

‘And the corridor,’ Tritty added. ‘And the coin-press, I believe.’

‘Yes,’ Pryn said. ‘He was a friend of my great-aunt.’

There was a moment’s silence.

‘Your aunt knew Belham?’ Inige asked, with a kind of welcoming warmth that made her suddenly find him much less brittle.

‘She said he was a southern…man — ’ she almost said barbarian, but somehow it didn’t seem appropriate — ‘who drank too much and was half crazy, by the time she knew him, anyway. But he was supposed to be very smart and have invented lots of things. Like the loom — my aunt helped him with it. And it was her idea to spin the fibers into thread before weaving them.’

‘Now I would have thought the idea of spinning thread came before weaving,’ Tritty said. ‘But then, what would be the reason for making any thread at all until one had some cloth already woven, at least to repair, if not to weave afresh.’

‘Feyatt twists thread for me,’ Jenta admitted. ‘But I couldn’t tell you what peasant woman first told us we had to if we wanted the weaving to be strong and hold well.’

‘Well, she must have spoken to someone who had spoken to someone who had spoken to someone who knew my aunt.’ Pryn felt the reckless freedom of assertion. Presenting such facts to strangers who would not contest them, rather than avoiding mention of them in a neighborhood that had snickered over them and distrusted them and doubted them since before Pryn had been born, was elating. ‘My great-aunt said Belham was a brilliant man — he lived in our shack while he was in Ellamon, the same one I live in at home. He must have thought a great deal of my aunt, too. She said they talked and talked and talked about everything — about all the places he’d been, the things he’d done. He told her she was one of the few people he’d ever met who really took the time to understand him.’ At first Pryn read the silence as appreciative; but as it extended, she felt anxiety revoice it. ‘And I wanted to ask you — ’ she said suddenly to overwrite the anxiety — ‘if you knew anything about this.’ She picked up the astrolabe from her chest. ‘I thought perhaps these markings were a kind of writing that maybe you knew how to read.’ The ghost of anxiety remained within the silence’s translucence.

From the steps, Ardra laughed.

‘Now that — ’ The clean-limbed Inige glanced at his father — ‘is an interesting question.’

‘I think what we all want to know,’ the earl said, shrugging under brilliant blue, ‘is whether you can read it.’

‘Why do we all want to know that?’ Ardra asked from his seat on the steps. ‘I don’t.’

Momentarily Pryn considered lying. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t.’

‘Then I’m afraid there isn’t a simple answer to your question,’ the earl said. ‘It isn’t quite writing in the sense of the commercial script you have mastered. Indeed, in the same way that weaving has been invented many times and in several ways, so that it can weave both canvases and silks, so has writing.’

‘Would you like to see some of those ways?’ Inige asked. ‘Father has a fine collection of different kinds. I’m sure he’d like to show them to you. It’s one of his hobbies.’

‘It’s what the locals think of as my “magic”—but I’m sure you are too experienced to be dazzled simply by different kinds of writing.’

‘I would like to!’ Pryn declared. She tried to envision what ‘different kinds’ of writing might be; as her mind went from the writing she knew to the marks on her astrolabe that might be a ‘different’ writing, she felt something which she might have written as ‘my concept of writing was revised’ though she could not have written (without the actual writing of it to clarify, if not create, her thoughts) exactly what it had been revised to become. ‘Yes, if you could show me…?’

‘We’ll begin dinner, dear, when you come down,’ Tritty said. ‘That’ll be all right, won’t it?’ Beside the stair hung an ornate ribbon. Tritty took it and pulled sharply three times.

‘Certainly.’ The earl motioned Pryn toward the steps.

‘Can we come too?’ Lavik asked.

‘Of course you may,’ her father said.

Jenta laughed. ‘I haven’t been up there in years!’ He stepped after them.

‘I’ll stay down here and help Mother,’ Inige said, surprising Pryn a little, since it had been his suggestion. But she was glad the others were coming.

As they crowded to the steps, Pryn had to step around the seated boy —

‘Ardra, move!’ the earl said, loudly.

And the boy was up and off somewhere out an arched door while Pryn, with broad Lavik before, strapping Jenta behind, and the earl beside her, trooped up.

At sounds behind, Pryn looked back —

Tritty’s ribbon had apparently summoned four, five, over half a dozen slaves! They moved about the room below, in their white collar-covers, shifting hassocks, carrying bowls, trays, bringing in new tables.

Where in the house, Pryn wondered turning back, had they come from? Not that the house wasn’t large enough to hide a hundred. She was struck with a vision of dozens upon dozens lurking, just out of sight, lingering behind doorframes, beyond windows, in adjoining rooms — and all the while writing down everything they heard! The earl interrupted with a distressing congruence of topic that made Pryn recall Tritty’s hers/ours, to question the whole notion of the arbitrary. ‘Two things slaves are never allowed to do: learn to write — and drink. Both inflame the imagination. With slaves, that’s to be avoided.’

The stairs rose by several more arched doors into several rough-walled (and two tapestry-covered) rooms.

‘I wonder if I should go check on Petal,’ Lavik said. ‘But I’m sure they’re keeping an eye on her.’ They climbed on.

Ahead, light lapped down the rough wall over bowed steps. Pryn looked up, expecting a window. As they reached the next turn, however, the whole outer wall fell away. Only a waist-high rail of piled stones ran by the continuing steps. She looked out at shaggy hills. Glimmering water lay between them, strewn with rags of algae, and here and there a small island or a great branch caught on a submerged bar, before the inlet joined the darker glimmer of the sea. Pryn caught her breath.

Lavik said: ‘It is a fine view, isn’t it?’

Jenta said: ‘Did you ever get the steps at the turning there recarved?’

‘About a year ago,’ the earl said.

Indeed, the steps that carried them around a turn in the runneled wall were not shallow and bowed like the ones they had been climbing, but high and cleanly angled. ‘It had gotten too dangerous to let the children come up here,’ the earl explained. They passed a rectangular cell cut into the stone beside them, perhaps six feet high and sunk another six feet into the rock face. ‘That — ’ (Inside, Pryn saw some benches, a table, and a pile of armor in the far corner, from which stuck five or six different length spears, their rusted heads against the wall.) ‘—used to be my “observatory.” For about three weeks, as I remember, when I was Ardra’s age — though, as my father was fond of pointing out, there was singularly little to observe from it other than the fog rolling down from the hills at sunset to cover the water. But I saw it as a place to get above his unreasonable sulks and slave-beatings and angry outbursts at what, I can look back from this distance and recognize, was finally just his understandable distress at his ever-dwindling properties. He made me give it up in less than a month when I sprained my ankle, falling on those steps right there — ’ he pointed behind them with a flourish of blue and a happy snort — ‘that I only fixed last year!’

‘Shows how long it’s been since I’ve been back!’ Jenta gazed out to sea.

Pryn looked up.

On the rocky overhang above them, small bushes grew, and moss put its moist green over the undersides of the jutting stone. ‘Where are we…?’

Jenta laughed. ‘It’s still the house. Many of the original rooms were cut into the side of the palisades here. Five or six — the Great Hall, the Small Hall, the Red Chamber, one or two others — were natural caverns. That’s why they chose to build out from them. There’re inner passages where, if you wander down them far enough, you suddenly come to a carved-out suite of rooms, complete with old, dusty furniture, that great-grandfather, or great-great-great, thought there was reason to construct — rooms even we’ve forgotten about!’

‘It plays havoc with the local folklore,’ Lavik said. ‘Some years ago a bunch of very serious people came down from the north to look for remnants of some ancient general who, according to a tale they had traced to this region, had been walled up in some underground pit “at the back of a deep cave.” Now, down in the back of our basement are an awful lot of walled-up chambers, holes, cells and what-have-you — really, it’s creepy down there! Obviously they were looking for somebody some great-great or other had fallen out with back at the dawn of history. After all, our dungeons were caves for an awfully long time. But no, the tale-teller hadn’t said “a castle dungeon”—he had said “at the back of a deep cave.” They had their version and they were going to stick to it. So they went poking about down in the cooling caves Old Rorkar uses at the brewery — as if they’d find anything there except the bones of slaves that had spoken out of turn to some overseer!’

‘And you don’t think Old Rorkar enlightened them, now do you?’ Jenta laughed again. ‘He was tickled silly by the notion that Lord Babàra’s bones might be under one of his beer troughs — that’s who they were looking for, Lord Babàra. He named this whole region after himself once, when he first came down from the north. Though I’m afraid it never stuck — except in the north. In fact, I think by now it’s even died out there. Rorkar must have kept those poor people picking and poking a whole month or more with his own “suddenly remembered” versions of this or that old tale.’

Ahead, the steps ran out — or rather turned, Pryn saw as they neared, into a narrow crevice in the rock. The stone rail ended. Pryn looked down at craggy boulders, grass mortaring them here and there.

The steps leading up into the fissure were much steeper. The opening itself was hardly a foot wide.

The earl stepped aside for Pryn to mount.

At the edge of sunlight, Pryn suddenly frowned. ‘Lord Babàra…’ Pryn looked at the earl ‘You say he named this whole region after himself? Is that why we call you people “barbarians”?’

‘I believe that is that origin of the word,’ his Lordship said.

Pryn laughed. ‘I always assumed it was because you people spoke such a strange sounding language — I mean, of course, strange sounding to us. You know: ba-ba-ba-ba-ba!’ She imitated a child’s version of barbarian chatter.

‘Now that’s silly.’ Jenta put a hard, friendly hand on Pryn’s shoulder. ‘We don’t even have that “ba” sound in our own language. “Ba-ba-ba”—that’s how you people up north sound to us down here!’ and with a movement of only the slightest impatience, he started Pryn edging up the crevice steps.

‘I told you I have mastered some several systems of writing over the years. With a number of others I have teased out the rudiments of their methods, if I have not really gained fluency in their practice. I keep them in this chamber here, have for a number of years. As I am sure you’ll see, though, the question soon becomes what is writing and what is not, The distinction itself, as examples proliferate, becomes more and more problematic.’ The chamber they entered was fairly sizable. On the counters and shelves were seashells in which leaned brushes, styli, and chisels — like the shelf under the wax tablet in the brewery office. The walls were hung with parchments and diagrams. To one side, between a row of thick columns above a waist-high wall, you could look out over hills and water toward the ocean. The sun was low enough so that at one place it put an unnaturally straight line of bright gold over the wide, shallow inlet. ‘Here, for example.’ The earl stepped up to a shelf on the wall. Pryn turned away from the carved balustrade to see what he indicated. ‘I have no idea how old this is, and yet it demonstrates for me the problem with all writing systems. You see these painted statuettes: three cows, followed by two women bent over three pots, followed by those pyramids stippled all over I have it on authority they represent heaps of grain — ’

And those are trees there!’ Pryn pointed. ‘Five, six…seven of them.’

‘The same authority informed me that each tree should be read as an entire orchard. The barrels at the end are most likely lined with resinated wax and filled with beer, much like the brews you help Old Rorkar produce.’

‘It looks like an account from a brewery.’

‘An informed reading,’ said the earl. ‘At least that’s what my authority informed me.’

‘But what about those two pictures beside it?’ Pryn asked. Standing in a frame on either side of the row of statuettes was some sort of picture. ‘Is the one there drawn on fabric?’

‘Actually the one you’re looking at, there to the right, is inked on a vegetable fiber unrolled from a species of swamp reed.’

Pryn looked more closely: simple strokes portrayed three four-legged animals. From the curves at their heads, clearly they were intended to be cattle — no doubt the same cows that the statuettes represented; for next to them were more marks most certainly indicating two schematic, sexless figures bending over three triangular blotches — the pots. Pryn recalled the ceramic buckets from the New Market and wondered, as she had not when looking at the sculpture, whether the original buckets had contained fresh water or excreta. Beside them were more marks picturing trees, grain, barrels…‘And this other picture?’ Left of the sculptures, in the other frame some dry, brownish stuff was stretched. On it were blackened marks, edged with a nimbus that suggested burning. ‘What’s this?’ Asking, she recognized the even clumsier markings as even more schematic animals, people, pots, trees, barrels, grain…

‘The same authority assured me it was flesh once flayed from his own horridly scarred body — he was a successful traveling merchant when I knew him, which lent its own dubiously commercial reading to the three pieces he sold me. Myself, I’m more inclined to suppose it is the branded skin of some slave’s thigh, stripped from the living leg; all too often — five times? six times? seven? — I saw my father oversee the commission of such atrocities on the bodies of the criminals among our own blond, blue-eyed chattels. From even further north than you, that scarred black man had, no doubt, as many reasons for speaking truth as he had for lying. But consider all three — ’

Pryn did; and frowned.

‘All instinct tells us: one of them must be art, the one that demonstrates a clear concern for the detail of what it represents that is finally one with its concern for the detail of its own material construction, so that either concern, whether for representation or just skill in the maneuvering of its own material, might replace the other as justification for our contemplation without the object’s abnegating its claim to a realism including and transcending either accuracy or craft. The same instinct tells us with equal insistence that one must be what we have come to think of uncritically as writing, if only because of its smooth, dispassionate surface that proclaims an enterprise which, even if it were contained in some larger, committed reality — commercial, explorative, vengeful — still, as it is contained, is separate from the container. That instinct also tells us, shrieks at us, rather, that one must be pure ideological imposition, both undeniable accusation and irrevocable sentence carried out with the same terroristic strokes, the trace of an act that is both violation and revelation of the worst that can pass between two persons blinded by the illusion, ensnared in the reality, of what we slight with the word “power” and only observe accurately when we imagine gods beyond language. That you and I, from the north and south, would probably agree on which of the three models corresponds to which of my three descriptions is only, itself, a sign of the unity of our cultures despite the illusory distance between them. But because we have both traveled those distances, you once, and I many times, no doubt we can both conceive of cultures that could read any of the three differently from the way we happen to — which conception itself is merely an ornamentation, a flourish, a personal nuance of handwriting on the common sign of our political commonality, only meaningful in terms of the political difference it might — someday — engender. The problem, however, about which my authority was simply mute, despite his other lies and truths, is: Which of the three came first? For even market mummers could easily construct three different skits, depending. To restate (and so, thoroughly to distort) the question: Which one of the three inspired, which one of the three contaminated, which one of the three first valorized the subsequent two in our cultural market of common conceptions? Suppose the brutal, unitary accusation-and-punishment was the initial construction…and later two unconnected scribes tried to create their later models, one purely beautiful, one purely factual? Certainly, the terroristic origin would haunt both their efforts for the knowledgeable reader, destroying any claim to either responsible beauty or responsible disinterest. But then, suppose it was the disinterested scribe who first realized, in the material under hand, that pure description of fields and fruit and workers, from which, at a later time, some brutal creature, blinded by justice or pride or profit or the subtle interplay between, realized, while contemplating that disinterested account, that a slave had lied, that a crime had been committed, that report and reality between them displayed some incriminating incongruity, and who responded by a brutal reproduction of the disinterested report to convict the slave bodily, a report which, in one of those models, we now — for our awed, if not cringing instruction — possess. Suppose, at the same time, another scribe was dazzled by the coolness of the disinterest enough to realize how beauty burns over and around that rigid, frigid abstraction and so created a scorching rendition of it to tease and terrify us with its ever-proliferating suggestions for further readings? Doesn’t the originary disinterest, however polluted by these later visions, somehow redeem them? As we pursue our readings, aren’t they clearly revealed as misreadings, misreadings that might be judiciously, if not judicially, forbidden as an intolerable abuse at a later, happier hour? Only now suppose the aesthetic construction came first: the beauty of some purely natural process, involving real cows, real pots, real orchards, real grain, and that other reality — of real clay, real papyrus, real ink, real flesh, real fire — came together in a moment uncalled-for by any connivance save its own evanescent intensity; and suppose, later, two scribes made their own copies, one a pure description, a purely memorial schema, a purely critical reduction, the other an angry recognition of some cruel replication in life of what art had suggested, repressed, portrayed, distorted. Again, the initial apprehension of beauty, in an entirely different way from the initial apprehension of disinterest, redeems both modes of later inhumanity it engenders on the grounds that they are, still, misreadings — one an underreading, one an overreading certainly, but nevertheless both misguided, because impoverished, because unappreciative of the mystical, beautiful, originary apprehension which a more generous reader can always reinscribe over what the misguided two chose to inflict in terms of pain or boredom. Observe the three, girl. One of these is at the beginning of writing — the archetrace: but we will never know which. The unanswered and unanswerable question — that undismissible ignorance — signs my authority’s failure. And I foresee the trialogue, now with one voice silenced, now with another overweeningly shrill, now with the three in harmony, now with all in cacophony, continuing as long as people cease to speak — and all speech is, after all, about what is absent in the world, if not to the senses — before the wonder, the mystery, the confusing, enciphered presence of a written text. But certainly you have seen these…?’ The earl stepped along the shelf.

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 on 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 clay jar. With a sharp stick one can do a passable imitation — as well as mark the Ulvayn syllabics 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.