Neveryóna, or The Tales of Signs and Cities

7. Of Commerce, Capital, Myths, and Missions

‘WELL, JUST LOOK AROUND you! You say you’ve seen the Old Market. This one is going to be six times the size of that spread of junk and garbage over in the Spur!’ Madame Keyne’s voice was triumphant. ‘Here there will be air, light, room for commercial growth, the encouragement of true diversity among products, marketing methods, competition and profits!’

‘But you’re laying the whole thing out!’ Pryn exclaimed. ‘Does that mean the whole New Market will belong to you?’

‘Nonsense! I’m merely financing its construction. You can see, we had to pull down practically a whole neighborhood. It wasn’t easy. The demolition has only been completed for a week or so — ’

‘But you’re going to lease space in your New Market.’ Pryn insisted, ‘so that you’ll get something from everyone who uses it…?’

‘Only the smallest rent!’ Madame Keyne leaned her head confidentially. ‘I am an ambitious woman. But I am neither stupid nor selfish. That lack is one of the traits that distinguishes me and my class from the aristocrats, who have laid so much misery on this nation — the Child Empress (whose reign is politic and permissive) excepted. No, I intend to take only enough to compensate me for my troubles in the building. I think of this market as a gift to the great city of Kolhari, a gesture that will make us worthy of world regard. That is the spirit in which the project was proposed to the Empress’s ministers. That is the spirit in which we are carrying it out. Now — if you want to see what is mine here, you must come this way.’ Madame Keyne started along beside the fence.

Having momentarily slowed to watch the activities about her, Pryn hurried to catch up.

Coming by them now was a thick-set man. His red scarf was partly braided in with his hair — much of it gone from his freckled scalp. Behind him were three older boys and a girl. As they walked, the red-scarfed man instructed,’…and, of course, lateness will not be tolerated. You men are here to work, and we will get a day’s work from you. This woman, or one like her, will be by with a bucket for you to drink from every hour, as well, a woman will be by with a bucket, also every hour, into which anyone who has to may relieve himself. Once you are at your work, there should be no need to leave till we say so. Our first crew of barbarian loafers did more sipping and pissing and splashing of water over their heads than they did digging — and expected to get paid for it! But we’ve finally managed to locate a better breed for our wants here…’

As they passed, the girl looked at Pryn. I wonder, Pryn thought, if she thinks I shall be carrying a water pail or slop bucket?

Something brushed the front of Pryn’s dress and struck Madame Keyne, a step ahead, full on the thigh. Madame Keyne raised her arm and looked down where the clot of mud — or worse — pulled from her skirt to fall to the dust. Madame Keyne looked off at the fence, beyond which barbarians massed. Someone pulled from the rail to hurry away in the closing crowd. Some of those around where he’d been were laughing.

Madame Keyne made a face, shook her skirt, and started walking again. I’m afraid that’s one of the inevitable unpleasantnesses of life outside my garden. It’s also why I harbor my dislike of the Liberator.’

‘Was that one of the Liberator’s men…?’

‘I doubt it,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘Much more likely it was some disgruntled creature with a mother to support, three sisters he has not yet married off, a wife, and uncountable children — a man whom we just failed to hire or, indeed, just fired for his laxness. Or it could be some mischievous youth, a cousin to our own Wild Ini, who has seen such a man as I described throw his clod (though he understands the reasons no more than a pampered aristocrat’s brat), who merely finds such violations amusing. Unfortunately, though, a growing number of those men over there, including some of the clod throwers, think the Liberator is here for them.’

‘But I thought — ’ for all this seemed as confusing to Pryn as what had been going on within Madame Keyne’s own walls — ‘the Liberator had come to free slaves.’

‘Slaves are men and women who labor for no pay. Over there are men who do no labor for no pay. The similarity is enough so that they might make the mistake themselves. If the Liberator makes the same mistake, I may well have reason to pay out a full twelve and six to the next fanatic who asks.’ Madame Keyne sighed, her thoughts drifting somewhere else. Suddenly she announced, ‘The thing Jade does not realize — ’ startling Pryn — ‘and that her position as my secretary, or perhaps my own love for her itself may prevent her from realizing, so that it is the one thing in our relationship for which I feel guilty, is that as one grows older, one lives more and more off the little signs of whatever community one moves through day to day and less and less off the gifts that fall out of individual relationships. If one does not prepare for this change in youth, then age becomes a bitter time. This is not to disparage the beauty of one’s relationships with lover or friend. It is only to acknowledge what, for so many in the city, is a sad truth. Community can, however awkwardly, replace individual relationships. But individual relationships only grow poisonous and resentful if there is no community to support them. But we are not going to discuss this any more, my girl. Still — ’ Madame Keyne looked at Pryn without any smile at all — ‘I must tell you, if there was any motivation other than idle curiosity behind the disreputable act you caught me indulging with that clever, disreputable man on Black Avenue — and you are old enough, girl, to know no curiosity is really idle — it is only to protect my sense of that community, which includes, for me, equally the man who flung his clod, you, all those who wear my red scarf, Ini, and Jade, and, yes, the whole of this city…the nation to whom I make my gift, here, as well as those neighbors of mine in Sallese whom I would not dream of inviting to a small, private supper with any of the ones of you I have mentioned, for fear the resultant hostilities and intolerances would render the whole notion of community ludicrous, if not barbaric.’

Another clod landed a few feet before them.

Behind the fence was some kind of scuffle. The men ahead of them noticed; one, a great strapping fellow, turned back toward Madame Keyne.

‘But what about his sense of community,’ Pryn asked. ‘I mean the Liberator’s — ’

‘The Liberator, ’ey, Madame Keyne?’ The big man who stepped up had the same green eyes, Pryn realized, as Gorgik. For a moment, Pryn wondered if, under the scarf about his neck, was the Liberator’s collar.

Pryn blinked.

The face was unscarred.

And his forty or forty-five years sat among the muscles, calluses, and the general heft of his body more easily than they had rested on iron-collared Gorgik’s. ‘Are those dogs acting up again?’ He bawled over the fence: ‘Have you no respect for a woman of Madame Keyne’s standing in this city?’ Shaking his head, he looked back. ‘You may be sure nobody wants any “Liberator” on this side, Madame.’

‘Hello, Ergi,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘I’m glad to see my best foreman is on the job.’ She turned again to Pryn. ‘The men who work over here find the idea of the Liberator mildly uncomfortable — no doubt because they make the same mistake as the men outside.’

‘These fellows here don’t want to lose their jobs to the men out there,’ declared Ergi. ‘If this Liberator is for the unemployed, then he can’t very well be for the employed, too. Hey, you!’ Ergi bawled again, waving his fist. ‘Over there — over there with that scaffolding! Not there!’ He shook his head. ‘There’s muscle a-plenty around here, Madame Keyne. But I don’t think a man in the place can think two thoughts that follow one from the other. Is this your new secretary?’

Startled, Pryn looked up to see Madame Keyne at least looked surprised.

‘Possibly,’ Madame Keyne replied. ‘And possibly not. I haven’t decided whether I need one. This young woman reads and writes — ’

‘More than I can do!’ Ergi laughed.

‘—and she listens. As for what she thinks about what she hears — ’ Madame Keyne’s dark, dry face took on its amused and curious smile — ‘that we have yet to determine.’

‘Well, you don’t have to worry about what anyone thinks of the Liberator on this site, Madame Keyne! That’s for certain — Hey, there! Hey! I said put it — !’

‘Yes,’ Madame Keyne went on. ‘But there are other confusions to be made, just as simple and just as interesting. For example — ’

‘Excuse me, Madame.’ Ergi hurried off to right some confusion ahead, shouting, waving.

‘Just as a man who has no work and gets no money for it may think himself a slave, so a man who has work and gets only very little money for it may think himself the same. And that — I have no illusions about it, girl — is very much the workers, men and women, on this side of the fence.’

They had almost crossed the dust and gravel, which Pryn had finally been able to reread as a thriving market. What they approached now, however, baffled her.

In an area at least as large as the market proper, there were many more workers than there were roaming the square. Clearly this was where Ergi’s foremanship centered. Pryn glimpsed him off amidst the excavations, hurrying some naked men from one pit to another. Though some scaffolding had indeed been set up, most of the workers (and only the foremen, Pryn saw now, wore Madame Keyne’s scarves) were digging out large, rectangular holes that left two- and three-meter walls of dirt between. ‘What will they be building here?’ Pryn asked, as they started to walk along one.

‘Here will be the warehouses, and administration offices, and archives, and market workers’ barracks, and vendors’ storage spaces, and…well, all the buildings needed to house the functions that must accrue to any sizable market area. These are the buildings which will be mine! Mine to rent, to allot, to administer! Oh, believe me, though I disparage it, I’ve examined the Old Market as carefully as anyone in Kolhari. And I’ve learned precisely what keeps it so small. I am prepared to see that the New Market is successful, that it grows, and that I profit both by that success and growth.’

The image of the market as a map of the nation returned to Pryn, to be shattered a moment later by her sudden apprehension of this neighborhood of storage spaces and warehouses beside the market as a map of the market to come. And though none of it had yet been filled in, nevertheless it would control the very shape and pace, the movement and organization of that market as surely as Madame Keyne controlled the comings and goings of her red-scarfed employees.

As they made their way over the site, one or another worker looked up, to recognize Madame Keyne. The woman seemed to know most of them by name. ‘Morning, Terkin,’ she called as one man paused to grin up. She turned to another. ‘You swing your shovel that hard, Orget, and you’ll wear it out!’ which made Orget, already working furiously, laugh and redouble his effort.

Pryn looked down into the excavation on their left.

A young woman climbed, step at a time, up the wide ladder. By rope handles, one in each fist, she held a ceramic bucket, filled with urine and darkened with feces. She gained the wall and put the buckets carefully on the uneven dirt.

Urine spilled the slopping clay.

With similar buckets of clear water, around which bobbed half a dozen cups, hooked over the rim by their handles, another woman stepped between Pryn and Madame Keyne to halt by the ladder top, waiting for the other to move off so she might climb down.

‘Over there — ’ Madame Keyne pointed between the scaffolds and the workers rolling their carts of dirt along the ridges — ‘is the sea…though one can hardly see the waterfront for all the confusion between us and it. Nevertheless, imports from the east and south will have easy access to my warehouses, and thus will have easy access to the entire web of commerce centering here.’

Pryn looked down into the excavation on their right.

Dark-haired, dark-skinned, arched backs running with water like the falls in Madame Keyne’s garden, most of the laborers had abandoned all clothes, though two or three still wore a loincloth, a leg band, or a leather bracelet.

‘Morning, Silon — and that must be your young barbarian friend Namyuk, who you said you’d bring us today. Work hard as your friend Silon, Namyuk, and you’ll do well by us!’ Madame Keyne stooped to take the wet, callused hand of a sweating man who ran up to tell her some story about his daughter, a lame ox, and a grain jar, to which Madame Keyne nodded and nodded with concern. As she stood, some joke came from the other side of the excavation — a very old joke, too, because Pryn had heard it even in Ellamon. But Madame Keyne tossed a jibe over her shoulder that made the diggers rest their shovels and the water-carrier lower her buckets. All howled — till a foreman, passing on the far wall, shouted them back to work.

Several times since their early garden encounter, Pryn had told herself she had no complete picture of this woman. Hour by hour that ‘non-picture’ had suffered its changes. But, whoever she is, Pryn thought, here seems her home — no matter how much she enjoys her flowers. She might even swing a pick — or carry a bucket — for Madame Keyne had just stopped a slops carrier who’d been walking before them with a limp; she searched through the folds of her skirt, found her purse, and tucked a small coin into the shift, which was turned down and bunched at the dry-haired woman’s waist. Then she called the foreman over. ‘Take Malika here back to the water cask and put her on the filling detail — where she won’t have to walk on that foot so much.’ As Madame Keyne watched the older water-carrier and the younger foreman walk — and limp — off, Pryn thought: She really seems more comfortable here.

Madame Keyne paused at a pit to inquire of a balding barrow-pusher after the progress of his wife’s illness; at another she stooped to ask a white-haired worker to show her his bandaged shoulder. ‘If it still pains you, Fenya, I don’t want you straining yourself. The bones of dead laborers are not the proper foundations for these cellars.’

‘Oh, it’s nothing, Madame Keyne! Don’t trouble yourself over it!’

‘The people who work for you, Madame…?’

Standing, Madame Keyne looked around.

‘Even when they have problems, they seem so…content!’

As they turned at the corner of another cellar, Madame Keyne took Pryn’s arm. ‘That’s because they have the discontented example of the barbarians on the other side of the fence to instruct them.’

‘You don’t use nearly as many women as you do men.’ Looking over the workers around the site, Pryn pictured herself coming into the city — by some other road, as it were — arriving at the market as a seeker after work rather than as the owner’s guest.

‘Jade is always after me to hire more women and barbarians,’ Madame Keyne commented. ‘I’ve actually entertained the notion — certainly I’ve known all too many women who can work as hard as a man and feel twice the drive to prove it. The idea has always struck me, however, as a thrilling transgression. But I’m afraid this side of fifty I react to such thrills as though they were simple stabs of fear — as though, if I did so, something terrible might happen. Even I cannot think what. It is as if I want my construction site to look even more like the sites owned by the powerful men in this city than — well, than those sites do themselves. I am not the most powerful person in Kolhari by any means. Forces other than I have created a customary proportion in the sexual division of our labor, and I fear to deviate from it as though it might evoke some vast and crushing disapproval. That fear, you know, is not the disapproval of those whom I am equal to or whom I am above, but rather some fancied disapproval from those above me — men, and they are almost all men, who would never deign even to notice me and whom, when all is said and done, I do no more than glimpse from year end to year end, now as one passes in an elegant carriage, now as one enters some fine-gated mansion, their very absence vouchsafing their powers over my actions far more than any adversary present to voice or hand.’

‘But you are a powerful woman!’ Pryn declared, for her attention had wandered. ‘I hadn’t realized you were…well, this powerful! How did you become so? I mean, how did you ever…?’ (We write, you see, of a more primitive time when civilization’s inhibitions were fewer; so that those delicate questions whose very contemplation might throw the likes of you and me into hot-cheeked stammering or moist-palmed silence were easier to ask, at least for a mountain girl such as Pryn.) ‘You must tell me!’

‘Would you like me to? Sometimes I wish it were more complicated than it is.’ Madame Keyne found the purse in her skirts’ folds. Digging inside, first with two fingers, then with three, she removed two coins, then let the purse fall back. She held them up, one in each hand. The larger was a gold piece that flashed and glimmered. ‘Here,’ Madame Keyne said, holding out the gold for Pryn to examine, ‘is the money with which I finance my projects — the money against which I make my loans, the money that brings me in its interest, the money I cite when I bargain over lands, the money I have at my beck and call when I arrange prices for materials and labor, the money those who know I am a wealthy woman know I possess.’ The gold coin was stamped with a likeness of the Child Empress. ‘While this — ’ Madame Keyne held out the smaller iron coin — ‘is the money I am actually prepared to pay out for those unavoidable day-to-day expenses, expenses which include the wages for Ergi, for Jade, for Clyton, as well as for those sweating, naked men and women who dig and carry here — not to mention the six and two I spent back on Black Avenue.’ The iron piece bore the face of a man whose name and office Pryn did not know — though his coin was far the more common.

‘Where do you keep this money?’ Pryn asked, for she was beginning to sense just how much such a project as this market and these warehouses must require.

‘Ah, it’s hidden!’ replied Madame Keyne, who, rather than taking offense at the question, seemed delighted. ‘It’s hidden, carefully, throughout the city, where it’s protected as much by the accounting acumen of the financially astute as it is by the monetary ignorance of the general populace. Really — ‘She looked from one coin to the other — ‘there is nothing complicated in it. You know, girl, there’s something I’ve been more or less aware of since I was a child: If events ever struck me from the position of affluence and prestige that, certainly, my family secured for me far more than I did, as long as the world in general and the city in particular are organized along the lines they are today I could climb back, simply because I know where the ladders’ feet are located — though I confess, the thought of having to make such a climb again becomes less and less appealing, if only because of my age and energies. But these smiling, sweating, impoverished creatures below us do not know — so that the ladders themselves will always be comparatively free of traffic for those of my class who require them. The men here love me — oh, by love I mean nothing profound or passionate; only love at that level of community that we must all indulge for a satisfying life — the women, I fear, do not love me quite so much. They are too concerned with how I treat the men and often do not notice my special concern for them: those women in extra need I will often give extra money to directly. I hear the foremen joke about it. But I have been to the homes of many of my workers, men and women — and I know the extra needs of a woman working in this city. I do not claim to hire an equitable number of men from all who need jobs. And I hire less women. But those I hire, I treat well. To do otherwise would be irresponsible to the community which is my concern. Now those men — and women — on the other side of the fence, they are jobless and they hate me — and hate too those that now work. I console myself by remembering that, the odd clod aside, their hate is no more passionate than the love we share over here. Still, if only because I do know how real the one is, I must keep my eye open to the other.

‘Those men over there, they wait for the Liberator to liberate them — into jobs indistinguishable from the jobs here. I watch them all and find myself smiling.

‘There are ladders all about them that they step over and brush against and push aside. But without the training and — yes — the vision needed to climb them, I suspect they cannot even see them, much less see where they branch, or where one must hurry or halt as one mounts.

‘As I’ve grown older, however, I’ve had my anxious moments. The anxiety arrives along with a kind of alternative dream, the vision of a world arranged very differently, without any such ladders at all, where no privileges such as mine exist, nor such hardship as theirs: rather it is a dream of an equitable division of goods and services into which all would be born, within which all would be raised, and the paths from one point to the other would be set out by like and dislike, temperament and desire, rather than inscribed on a mystified map whose blotted and improperly marked directions are all plotted between poverty and power, wealth and weakness.

‘The anxiety comes with it, however, when I hear report of some new political upstart, such as — yes — our latest Liberator, who declares his own muzzy dream of equality, freedom, and joy. I have watched governments come and go, some led by liberators, some by despots, and I realize that the workers on this side of the fence and the out-of-work on that side — as well as the Liberator they oppose and support — share, all of them, one common reconnaissance: they think the enemy is Nevèrÿon, and that Nevèrÿon is the system of privileges and powers such as mine that supports it, or the privileges and powers such as the Child Empress’s (whose reign is, after all, benign and bureaucratic) which rule it. As long as they do not realize that the true enemy is what holds those privileges — and the ladders of power to them — in place, that at once anchors them on all sides, keeps the rungs clear, yet assures their bottoms will remain invisible from anywhere other than their tops, then my position in the system is, if not secure, at least always accessible should I, personally, become dislodged.’

‘Then what is this…their enemy?’ Pryn asked. ‘I mean the true one?’

‘You really ask me that, girl?’ Madame Keyne laughed sharply. ‘You actually want me to name it — now? here?’ The gesture with which Madame Keyne accompanied the laugh caused the gold coin, which by then was merely lying in her open hand, to fly up into the sun. It soared, it spun — and landed on the hard ground, rolling along the embankment, where it finally swerved and fell in.

‘Look there, my man!’ Madame Keyne called down to one of the laborers. ‘Bring that back like a good fellow.’

Wiping his forehead, the man blinked up. Looking about, he saw the coin, planted his shovel, and went to get it, then vaulted up to crouch on the embankment’s edge. ‘You dropped this, Madame Keyne?’ The rough hand, with its horny fingers and scarred knuckles (one nail blackened from a recent mishap), held out the gold. ‘There you are.’

‘And this,’ Madame Keyne said as she accepted the gold in her own dark fingers, ‘is for you.’ She handed him the iron coin that had remained with her. ‘For your trouble. Tell me your name. You’re a good worker, I can see that.’

The barbarian — this particular worker was a barbarian — squinted up at his employer, sun and surprise deepening the wrinkles about his ugly eyes. Suddenly he let a muffled guffaw. Pryn heard in it the nervous overtones of a man used to laughing openly. ‘Well, Madame Keyne, Kudyuk will work for you any day! Kudyuk, that’s me!’ His accent was as light as Jade’s, as if he’d been in the city a long while. ‘Yes, I’ll certainly work for you!’ His fist closed on the small iron. Bobbing his bearded head and without ever really standing erect, he dropped back over the embankment and went for his shovel. ‘Yes, Madame Keyne,’ he called up, ‘I certainly will!’

Madame Keyne laughed with him, and walked on.

Coming with her, Pryn only wondered — as Kudyuk seized up his shovel with his free hand — where he would put his coin; he was one of the workers who had already given up all clothing in his pursuit of labor.

‘Do you see?’ Madame Keyne raised the hand, in which she again held the gold, to shield her eyes. The confidence in her tone was both exciting and confusing. ‘You see how money that goes out comes back to me? And, you must admit, it costs very little. So now you have the whole system of enterprise, profit, and wages laid out for your inspection, girl. No wonder the Empress and the Liberator both decry slavery, when this is such a far more efficient system. You know where most of the iron for these little moneys comes from, don’t you? It’s melted down from the old, no-longer-used collars once worn by — ’

‘But Madame,’ protested Pryn, who was both a logical and excitable young woman, ‘you lost money in that transaction! Money went out — and you had to pay to get it back!’

Madame Keyne glanced up at the gold. ‘Little mountain waif — ’ she seemed intensely amused — ‘if you think I lost in that transaction, then you do not know what the enemy is, nor, I doubt, will you ever. But if you can see the real gain on my part, then — perhaps! — you have seen your enemy and may yet again recognize her glittering features.’ She turned the large coin so that sun slid across the likeness of the Empress till the blind-white flare made Pryn look away.

At the same moment a breeze blew some sand grains in Pryn’s face, so that she stopped to rub her eyes. When Pryn looked up. Madame Keyne was walking ahead, now laying her hand on the shoulder of another slops carrier, now nodding to another barrow-pusher. ‘Ergi! Ergi!’ she called as Pryn came up. ‘Ergi, I want to talk to you!’

Down in an excavation, the foreman finished setting some sweating men to a new mound of rock and dirt, then came across the pebbles and dust, by now as wet himself as any of his workers.

‘Earlier today, Ergi, out on Black Avenue,’ Madame Keyne called down, ‘I saw a woman try to deliver some very interesting bricks to a slug-a-bed not yet up to receive his shipment. These bricks were yellow — not your usual red. I want you to find out everything you can about them: their manufacture, functionality, durability, cost, maintenance — everything that contours their value, in any and every direction. See if they’d be good for paving. Then report back to me…’

The cart trundled along the tree-shaded avenue by the stone walls of the Sallese estates. It was past the hottest part of the day. Pryn sat beside the older woman, feeling an astonishing exuberance. Commerce and construction? These seemed the centers of life — far more central, certainly, than protest and liberation. On the rumbling cart Pryn could almost let herself think that these, indeed, were what she had taken off on her dragon to find.

Madame Keyne had been pleased and elated since she’d left the New Market. The streets were less crowded, and the drive back easier. By the time they’d reached the suburbs, both had fallen into a pleased silence. Pryn’s, however, contained within it all the excitement of her encounter with project and enterprise. Madame Keyne’s, as she guided the cart along, seemed — to Pryn at any rate — more pensive. In the moments when her own excitement lulled, Pryn wondered if the prospect of returning to her own embattled garden had quieted the older woman.

Suddenly Madame Keyne announced: ‘I know what he thinks is his enemy. What I must learn, though, is whom he thinks to be his allies!’

Pryn looked at her questioningly.

For answer, Madame Keyne nodded toward the broad way the cart was just rolling past. At the end of the shaggy pines was the stone wall with its heavy gate, its leather-helmeted guards, and, behind it, the cracked and indifferently patrolled roof. As they passed, Pryn could see a rider had just come clattering up, who now bawled out, so they could hear even at this distance: ‘Go inside and tell your master, the Liberator, Gorgik, that the Iron Hawk has come to join his ranks!’

The rider cantered off toward the city. Pryn had not been able to tell from the voice, raucous and high-pitched as it was, if it were a man’s or a woman’s.

Pryn asked, ‘What do you mean, his allies?’

Madame Keyne flicked the reins. ‘I want to know: when he runs out of slaves to liberate, will he choose the men on my side or on the far side of the fence as his next cause? Whatever his political program, the Liberator’s is an image in our city both sincere and seductive. Whichever side he chooses, he may well succeed.’

Ahead, Pryn could see Madame Keyne’s gate. ‘Do you want me to get the answer?’

Madame Keyne raised an eyebrow. ‘How would you get an answer to that question in this city — ’ the brow lowered — ‘other than by asking?’

‘But you don’t understand,’ Pryn said. Somehow she could no longer repress it. ‘I’ve ridden a dragon! And I — ’

‘Have you now? So — ’ Madame Keyne’s smile took on its familiar ambiguity — ‘you, my dragon-riding ambassador, will lay my anxieties at the Liberator’s feet? Under our present Empress, whose reign is clever and calculating, dragons have not been that popular.’

‘I can find out for you!’ The cart rolled toward the gate. ‘I can!’

‘I believe,’ Madame Keyne said as the studded planks swung in, and, between tugging fingertips, Samo’s face peered around the edge, ‘that you believe you can. And belief is a powerful force in these basic and barbaric times.’ She chuckled as they rolled up the drive. The horse halted under the young fruit trees. Madame Keyne climbed down. Pryn climbed after her.

As she stepped from the bottom rung of the carriage’s ladder, Pryn saw Ini coming from the house. She stalked over the grass with the gleeful smile of a child about to surprise a returning parent.

Then Radiant Jade stepped from behind the house’s corner, one hand up as if to lean against it — the same gesture Pryn had noticed at their departure.

Madame Keyne went forward to pat the horse’s head.

Hands behind her back, Ini reached the first tree. Pryn had a memory of a young cousin coming up to see what present she’d been brought —

Then Radiant Jade ran forward!

She ran with fist-pumping urgency. She ran like a contestant in a year-end festival race. She snatched up her shift in one hand, shouting, ‘No…!’ Steps behind Ini, she flung herself at the cream-haired girl.

Half a dozen feet from Pryn and Madame Keyne, Ini hardly had time to look back. Jade collided with her. Ini staggered, grunted, and fell under Jade’s assault.

The two rolled on the grass…

…and Pryn saw the knife Jade struggled to tear from Ini’s fist. (Pryn remembered Ini’s strength with the rearing horse and caught her breath.) Jade gasped and shouted: ‘No! No — you can’t…We can’t! I’ve changed my mind!..No!…We mustn’t — ’

The knife, Pryn realized, had been drawn behind Ini’s back all through the smiling approach.

Madame Keyne held the bridle in a shock as impassive as the roan’s calm. Suddenly she flung the horse’s head away — so that the beast stepped twice, three times, taking the cart with her — and strode forward. With one hand she yanked the knife from Ini’s hand. With the other she began to strike about at the struggling pair. ‘Stop it! Stop it, I say! You are animals! Now stop it…!’

In a kind of oblivious horror, Pryn stepped — nearer, as it turned out, but it could as easily have been away.

Ini finally rolled from Jade, to sit, brushing grass and dirt from her arms. ‘Oh, all right…!’

On all fours, with head hanging, Jade gasped with the effort of the fight.

Madame Keyne held the knife, awkwardly, above her head. Now that Jade and Ini had stopped, her other hand went to her neck, and her own breathing grew more erratic as Jade’s gasps stilled.

‘Madame Keyne,’ Pryn exclaimed, ‘they were going to kill you…?’

‘My dear — ‘ Madame Keyne took another breath in which Pryn could hear the anger — ‘they were going to kill you. Ah — !’ She brought the knife down sharply to her side. ‘They weren’t going to kill you — they were only going to try and hurt you! But I said I wouldn’t let that happen! I said I — They were only trying to scare you! That was all they were doing!’ She looked at Jade and Ini. ‘Tell me that was all you were doing! Say it!’

‘That’s all we were doing.’ Ini picked a dead leaf from her elbow. ‘Jade just wanted to scare her.’

That was when Pryn realized the four of them were, now, surrounded by a peering circle of women and men, all of whom seemed, at first, strangers. But one was the heavy-set cook in her red scarf; and one was blinking Samo; and the three new kitchen girls; and over there, the gardener Clyton — among another five or six Pryn hadn’t even seen yet on the grounds.

‘I wouldn’t have done it!’ Radiant Jade gasped. ‘I wouldn’t have…I told her to do it! Yes. To scare her. But you see…I wouldn’t have really let her! You see, I stopped her! I stopped her…’

‘Get up!’ Madame Keyne said. ‘Get up, I say!’

Ini stood, bending to brush grass from her knees.

Jade began to cry. Her head sank even lower. ‘I have nothing! Don’t you see, Rylla, I have nothing. You have everything! You have money, a fine home, servants, respect! I, I have nothing — I am nothing! Now you would take even the little I have from me and give it — ’

‘Oh, stop it!’ Madame Keyne declared.

‘You are an empress here; you are a woman of high standing in the city — whereas I am totally at the mercy of your every whim and caprice — ’

‘I — ?’ Madame Keyne declared. In her laugh was anger. ‘I, empress? No, my dear. You rule here, despotically and completely! I loved you — and love you still; and I have been tyrannized for it. You order this room decorated thus, object to the decor in that one. And we all know we must comply, or suffer your sulkings and poutings till we are made miserable with them! You come from your room in the morning, and both servants and houseguests fall silent, waiting to see if you are in a mood or a pet over this or that. If you are, any one of us may be snapped at, snubbed, insulted, or — most mercifully — ignored; which allows us, at least, I suppose, to go on with our day. But sometimes I am silly enough to want something more than to be ignored!’

‘Nothing! Nothing at all!’ Radiant Jade cried. ‘Nothing! I hate myself. I loathe myself. You are right, Rylla. You are right about everything. You are always right! I cannot live with your insufferable rightness — ’

‘Oh, put it up, Jade!’

‘But it is terrible to live with! Yes, I treat you, the servants, everyone, horribly! And you would destroy the one bit of self-esteem I have left by depriving me of my position and giving it to this…this awful girl! She doesn’t belong here! Look at her, she should be in the forests, in the mountains, on the sea — anywhere but here!’ (Pryn frowned at that but was too surprised to question it.) ‘She isn’t worthy of us — of you, Rylla. Oh, why did you bring her here? Why!’

Madame Keyne took a deep breath, the knife out from her side. ‘You silly, silly woman!’ She ordered Ini: ‘Help her up!’

‘I will go,’ Jade declared, still on the ground. ‘I won’t be put out — I couldn’t stand that. But I’ll go of my own accord. You needn’t ask me…’

‘I am not making Pryn my new secretary,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘Your position here is secure.’

Radiant Jade clutched unsteadily at the Ini’s knees as the pale-haired young woman reached down to help.

‘Of course I’m not!’ Madame Keyne went on. ‘Oh, you are silly! I am making Pryn my…my ambassador. She is going to go on a mission — ’

Had it not been for the circle of servants, Pryn might have run off then, somewhere, to hide.

‘A dangerous mission which she has volunteered for and from which she might not return. And if she does return, then…we shall reward her and send her on her way!’

‘You’re sending her away?’ On her knees, Jade lay her head against Ini’s hip; Ini still tried to pull her to her feet. ‘You’re not going to replace me — ’

‘Pryn was not brought here with her own consent. I could no more keep her here than…’ Madame Keyne took another breath — ‘…than you could harm her for no reason.’

Radiant Jade finally got her feet under her. One arm around Ini’s shoulder, her head still hung. Her hair had come partially loose. Pryn, who had always kept her own hair fairly short, was surprised there was so much of it. Jade brushed her hand over her forehead. More hair fell.

‘All right!’ Madame Keyne said. ‘I want to go and walk in my garden. I want you three to come with me — where we can talk.’

‘All right!’ Radiant Jade took a breath that seemed a kind of imitation of Madame Keyne’s. The phrase, Pryn realized, was to the servants. ‘To your jobs now! There’s no reason to stand around gawking at the misery of your masters! Go on with you, I say!’

Glancing at each other, the servants broke their ring.

‘Yes,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘Please, go now. Back to your work. Everything is…all right.’

Her arm tightly about Ini’s shoulder so that she moved the young woman, unsteadily, with her, Radiant Jade began to walk — unsteadily — forward.

In a voice devoid of all the edges Pryn associated with it, Ini said, ‘Why do you lean against me so?’ It was a rather caressing voice. Ini’s arm was firmly about Jade’s shoulders as she helped the barbarian along. ‘I do not like the touch of your body, Jade. I generally do not like the touch of women’s bodies. For touching, I think I would prefer the bodies of men.’ With her free hand Ini reached around to push the straggling hair from Jade’s face. ‘I have told you that, and told you again: I do not love women the way that you — and Madame Keyne — do. For that kind of love, yes, just as with killing, I prefer men.’ Ini laid her cheek against the secretary’s, which was now, Pryn saw, tear-wet. ‘I do not love you. I do not even want to love you — not in the way you want to love me. I’ve told you that, you know. Many times.’ She moved her cheek against the secretary’s. ‘I’ve told you.’

Here Madame Keyne took Pryn’s arm firmly. At another moment the gesture would have seemed simple friendship, but now it seemed protective. Caught up in a political massacre and menaced by a street hoodlum, Pryn could not help thinking that whatever danger still waited for her here was probably intriguingly minuscule. Indeed, it had much the same air about it as the scarred Fox’s straying hand — something that, however unpleasant, could be gotten through, at least with Madame Keyne’s help. Yet once it were gotten through, what might lie beyond it seemed just as great a mystery as the one her initial arrival had presented. For better or for worse, she found herself putting aside fear in favor of curiosity.

The red brick path they walked up was the one Pryn had mounted with Madame Keyne that morning. As they reached the sudden and surprising stone hut at the top, Ini finally shrugged away from Jade. It was only then that Pryn pulled her own arm from Madame Keyne’s and called ahead: ‘But why did you want to kill me?’

With her calm and questioning smile, Ini turned. ‘I saved your life yesterday.’ Suddenly she sat on the grass, locking her arms about her knees, swaying. ‘Today I thought to throw a life away — yours? But why not.’ Ini frowned at Jade. ‘I told you I don’t like to kill women! I told you that. And you wanted me to do it anyway! But I didn’t care.’

Jade’s attention had gone from the Liberator’s headquarters behind them to the cityscape before them. Now she looked back at Ini — whose eyes, over the same seconds, had fixed on some deliquescent city in the clouds, its destruction, before high winds undetectable here at the ground, hugely attenuated by size and distance.

‘I must talk to you,’ Madame Keyne repeated. ‘I must talk to you all. And I don’t believe any of you are listening.’ She lowered herself to the stone bench against the hut’s back wall. ‘But I will talk. It’s my own garden. That’s the least I should be allowed to do in it — to talk.’

Because she felt nervous, Pryn sat, too, on the grass — somewhat away from Ini.

Jade still stood — there was room for her on the bench. Madame Keyne looked as if she expected Jade to sit beside her. But Jade swayed, nervously, looking at Ini, looking at the city again.

‘I am sending you away, Pryn.’ Madame Keyne said. ‘You understand, now, I must.’

‘Yes…’ Pryn nodded.

‘This evening,’ Madame Keyne continued. ‘You must go to the Liberator for me and ask him my question. When you bring me an answer, I shall give you a gold piece — or, at any rate, its equal in small moneys. A girl your age shouldn’t be showing gold about, trying to get it changed. Then I shall put you on the road again to continue your travels. Jade, Ini, do you hear? She is my ambassador to the Liberator — not my new secretary. And when she completes her mission, she shall go!’

‘She will really leave?’ Jade asked. ‘You really will send her away? Why can’t she leave now!’

‘If I do send her away, now — ’ The smile came to Madame Keyne’s face with another emotion that seemed more serious than either curiosity or amusement — ‘will you send away your Ini — ?’

‘Oh, Rylla, will you persist in…Oh, I can’t! I mustn’t! I won’t! You know how I feel about Ini. I would simply die if I had to — ’

‘Cease this!’ Madame Keyne half stood. ‘Cease!’ She took a breath and dropped back to the bench. ‘You do not have to send away your Ini. And I will send away Pryn, I tell you. This evening.’

Radiant Jade blinked about the clearing. ‘Then let me return to the house. I cannot stay here. I am exhausted by all this…’

‘While I, no doubt, am invigorated…! Of course you may go,’ Madame Keyne’s voice had become somewhat shrill. ‘Why should you stay longer? You have everything you want.’

‘I? I have nothing! And you would ask me to give up even that. You have all the power, Rylla. All of it. I? I only want one thing.’ She turned suddenly to Pryn. ‘I want you gone!’ (Pryn flinched — but from surprise; fear, as it seemed to have more and more these days, had almost left.) ‘And I want you gone now…! But I can’t have that, can I?’ She turned, listlessly, away. ‘So. Once again, Rylla, we shall do it your way.’ Jade walked off along the red brick.

‘Oh, yes! I understand!’ Madame Keyne’s voice went even shriller. ‘You are too distraught to hear anything I might have to say now! You’ve heard what you wanted to hear. Now you’ll wander off into your own fantasies which, in spite of all our attempts at sanity, we find ourselves conforming to more and more each day — ’

‘Please, Rylla…’ Jade said, not looking.

‘You have what you want. Why must you do anything else? Now you leave us with the responsibility of carrying out your desires — ’

Jade suddenly drew herself up and turned back angrily. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘What do I want you to do…?’ Then Madame Keyne sighed. ‘I want you to do what you always do: whatever you want. You may go.’

Her anger again losing focus, Jade turned — again — to walk away on the red brick path, between shrubs, flowers, trees…

‘Madame Keyne,’ Pryn said after a moment, uncertainly, glancing at the still seated Ini. ‘I’m happy to do your mission for you. Before, I didn’t know whether you believed I could or not.’ She felt oddly distanced, almost light-headed.

‘Before,’ Madame Keyne said, ‘neither did I.’

Pryn frowned. ‘Are you…really that interested in the answer the Liberator will give about his allies?’

‘I am interested in the answer,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘The question, however — no — does not interest me.’ She sighed. ‘But you must still go. At the far corner of my garden there is a break in the wall. I told Ini about it once, and I believe she has been working up her courage to try it. This evening, when it grows dark — ’

Ini suddenly ceased her rocking, released her knees, and said: ‘She is a silly woman, isn’t she, Madame Keyne?’

‘Jade?’ Madame Keyne turned on her bench to regard the seated murderess. ‘Oh, I call her that in anger. But not really. I don’t think she’s silly at all.’

‘She’s very upset now.’ Ini pulled her feet beneath her. ‘She’s very unhappy and confused.’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Madame Keyne shook her head. ‘No. I rather doubt it.’

‘You know how she feels about me.’ Ini pushed herself to her feet. ‘It would be best if I went to her.’

‘No.’ Madame Keyne mused. ‘Going to her now might not be the worst thing you could do. But it’s definitely not the best.’

Ini brushed grass blades from her hip, then turned off along the red brick. ‘I think, though, I will go to her…’ She strode off down the path.

‘I really think — ’ Madame Keyne picked up the knife from where she’d placed it beside her on the bench and turned it about — ‘our little Ini would like to be a caring person. But it’s so foreign to her nature, she can only imitate the gestures. And she’s bewildered at the idea that one or two such gestures might better serve the impulse behind them by being indulged only after reasonable forethought.’ She looked up. ‘Are you glad to be leaving us?’

‘I…suppose I am. Still, I wish I were leaving with more certainty as to why I had been brought.’

Madame Keyne put the knife down in her lap. ‘I shall make a bargain with you. I’ll tell you why you were brought here if you’ll tell me why you came.’

‘Why I came? But you sent Ini to bring me! And I was on the bridge with that man — ’

Madame Keyne raised her hand. ‘No, my dear. Those brutal and barbaric notions with which my secretary keeps order in my life and in hers may someday overwhelm our peaceful and placid civilization. Till then, however, we can admit that they are only stories.’ Madame Keyne frowned. ‘Or could it be that in the mountains around fabled Ellamon they believe that there are great powers and small powers and that the great ones always win and the small always lose, and thus smallness can be counted for nothing? No. Not if the fables I’ve heard about the weak and wondrous dragons are to be believed. My dear, sometimes I believe we shall soon lose all contact with magic. When that happens, civilization will have to be written of with other signs entirely.’

‘But what is this magic you are talking about again?’ Pryn demanded. ‘You said it was power. But you don’t seem very powerful now…’

‘And yet I speak of magic, claim to know it, claim to have it…’ Madame Keyne sighed. ‘Once I had a friend. Her name was Venn — one of those brilliant women from the Ulvayn islands. I met her here in Nevèrÿon when I was much younger. She had quite the most astonishing mind I’d ever encountered. I was rich and she was poor — but riches or poverty, neither one really concerned Venn. She traveled throughout Nevèrÿon and finally returned to her island. When I was older, I visited her there several times, and she took me around with her to see the tribes that lived in the island’s center, describing to me their ways and customs — she had lived among them once, even borne a son by one of their hunters. She walked with me at night by one of the famous boatyards where they build those ships that are the wonder of Nevèrÿon’s seas, pointing out over the fence which, among the skeletal hulks, were modeled from her own designs. On a rise above the island-edge village, her little shack was a storehouse of marvels. Once, when she was first here, she gave us a marvel to keep. It stays in this hut — oh, but that must have been thirty years ago. No, forty. Ah — !’ She touched her fingertips to her cheek. Bangles jangled to her elbow. ‘More than forty years ago — because I couldn’t have been fourteen yet. Really, she gave it to my father, though I’ve always thought of it as mine. It was back when this was the barbarian inventor Belham’s hut. I keep it in here.’ Madame Keyne suddenly stood. ‘Would you like to see it?’

‘Yes — !’ Pryn said, though it was, of course, the name of her great-aunt’s onetime friend that prompted her answer, rather than the divagation on the unknown island woman. Pryn stood and followed Madame Keyne around the hut’s corner to the inset planks. As Madame Keyne took a metal key out of her purse, Pryn’s mind tumbled with images both about her aunt and from her aunt’s tales. Madame Keyne inserted the key in the lock, turned it, jiggled it back and forth a few times, turned it again. She pulled. Grating on the stone sill, the door slid open. And Pryn, moving behind her, was momentarily sure, if only on the most tenuous evidence of a sign not even written but mentioned, that she would find within something of her home, if not her vanished father!