Tales of Neveryon (17 page)

‘“Yes,” I said. And I took the wrist of her hand with my other hand and held it tightly; for I felt she was stronger than I, I did. And I wanted to hold on to someone strong when I said this: “There
is
a beauty there. And Arkvid is a good hunter, as well as a very nice man; I am truly fond of him. But his idea is
still
wrong. The story of Mallik is a terrible story, but it says, sadly, far more about the overvaluation I spoke of than about women’s jealousy of rults. You are the wives of our most prestigious hunter and I love you more than sisters. Yet ignorance is ignorance, no matter where you find it – even in our most prestigious hunter himself. And I would betray the love I bear you, as well as dishonor his own prestige, if I said otherwise.” And while I held her wrist and she held mine, I was actually afraid that she would pull her hand away and strike me, for the Rulvyn women were proud, powerful, and honorable women, and it was a point of honor with them that no one dishonor their hunter.

‘But Ii said: “We are all betraying the spirit of the evening.” And she laughed and pushed away the tamarind bowl. “At least we are if we go on talking about such weighty matters as Mallik and rults and right. Women, there’s a naven tonight! And we shall never be dressed for it by the horn’s fifth bleat if we do not hurry up.”

‘“All right,” I said; and Acia let go of my wrist. I let go
of hers. We put away the dishes and pots and the palm fronds, and all was back to a normal that can only be achieved in a place where work is so steady and constant. Nevertheless, I think they had all begun to sense that I was growing dissatisfied with life there.’ Venn sighed. ‘Yes, ignorance is ignorance – and there is as much here at the shore as there is among the Rulvyn in the hills. But our life is easier here, and I can spend my mornings with you children, dispelling what little part of that ignorance I can, and your parents will keep me alive with their gifts while I do – whereas with the Rulvyn there was only turnips, bridges, paints, pots, and babies. So I would rather live here. But in a sense, Norema, Arkvid’s idea was very like yours. I don’t mean just that I feel they are both wrong; rather, they are alike in the way in which they both strive toward rightness and the way in which they manage to take what is real and what might be right, put them in each other’s places, then draw lines between that simply cross no space.’ Venn mulled for a few more steps. ‘I wonder if the Rulvyn men still have ideas like that now that money has come and power has shifted. Today, if a woman crosses a man, it is the woman who must laugh. But they do it with little chuckles, embarrassed snickers, and pleading smiles. They cannot do it openly and generously. They no longer have it in them.’

Again she was silent.

‘Venn,’ Norema asked, ‘what’s a naven?’

Venn raised an eyebrow. ‘Ah, yes. The naven.’ She smiled. ‘It is a celebration ceremony performed when almost any act of social importance is done in the village: when a girl harvests her first turnip crop, when a boy kills his first wild goose, when a house is built, when a yellow deer is sighted wandering through the village, or when a honey tree is found in the forest. Then the men go to the
Men’s House and take two long, fat calabash melons, tuck their gorgis up behind them, and tie the melons between their legs long way, with tufts of dry grass all around them, so that it looks as if they have great, outsized, women’s gorgis, and they put on women’s aprons and headdresses and take up old, broken turnip rakes – meanwhile the women, in their homes, tie a long brown gourd, with two big, hairy, dyll-nut husks behind them, up between their legs, so that it hangs down, and tuck dried grass all around them; and they put a man’s old, split penis sheath around the gourd, and they paint themselves with hunting paint, and put on chin feathers, and they take old, broken and cracked spears, and mangy shoulder furs and put them on; and the older women – though the younger ones may not – tie an old piece of burnt wood to their bellies like a rult. At the sound of five bleats on the sacred gourd – and sometimes it’s only blown two or three times, and everybody starts to the door and, when it stops short of five, all laugh and go back in again – at the sound of five bleats, everybody rushes outside into the square to dance as hard as they can. Uncles get down on all fours and rub their heads on their niece’s knee. People take leafy switches and beat up as much dust into the air as possible. Fires are set blazing and drums are pounded and rattles shaken. There are lots of comic songs and skits performed in which wives refuse to cook for their husbands, who then starve to death, and in which husbands are unfaithful to their wives, who then run about the village pretending to be mountain wolves. The whole thing climaxes in a village feast. And through it all the children, who have woken up with the noise by now, run around pointing and squealing at their mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles, who are all cavorting in each other’s clothes, as though it was the funniest thing in the world.’ And from
the particular look on Venn’s face, though there was no laughter in it, Norema thought that it might indeed be.

Norema said: ‘It’s like a reflection –’

‘– of a reflection,’ Venn said. ‘It doesn’t reverse values. It makes new values that the whole tribe benefits from. Now there’s a custom I wish would work its way down to the shore. Here, girl–’ Venn once more took Norema’s shoulder. ‘I want you to think about what I said before, about reflections, and what you said about men and women, until you see how they aren’t the same. I want you to think about my idea until you see what’s wrong with yours – and indeed you may find out in the process things wrong with mine as well. If, when you finish, you can tell me about them, I will be very grateful. Will you do this for me?’ The horny hand tightened. ‘Will you?’

Norema, who loved wonders (and who had been given many by this woman) said, ‘Yes, I I… all right. I’ll try …’ And wondered how one even began such a task. And in the midst of wondering, realized that Venn, whom she really wanted to talk to some more, was wandering away across the docks.

On a boat an old sailor with a bald, freckled scalp, was laughing and telling a very involved story to a younger man who was scrubbing doggedly at a deck railing, not listening. Was this, she wondered, an image of Venn and herself? On the dock, crumpled against the piling, was Mad Marga, in a man’s ragged jerkin, snoring through loose lips. Sores speckled her large, loose arms, her scaly ankles. Hip flesh pushed through a tear in her rags. Food or something had dried on her chin. Was Marga, wondered Norema, in some way an image of Norema’s own strong, inquiring mind? Or of the naven? Or of all women; or of all women and men? And how to find out?

Along the dock sounded the chang-chang-chang of one
of the new metal hammers recently brought from Nevèrÿon that her mother thought so ill of and her father found ‘interesting.’ What was the relation of the wooden mallet and dowels with which Big lnek fixed down deckboards in her parents’ boat yards and this new, metal-headed engine and the iron spikes it could hold wood together with – as long as you did not use them near water.

And more important, how to tell? And what relation would whatever method she devised to tell bear to the method through which Venn had arrived at her inexpressible principle?

In the boat yards that afternoon, Norema wandered about aimlessly for an hour; then, when Inek made a comment, prepared a cauldron of glue inefficiently for another hour, so that at least it looked as if she were doing something. Thinking: the value of real work and the value of work-just-for-show: couldn’t those be the first two terms in an example of Venn’s principle? And what would the third term be …? But she also began to think of things to do, ways to examine.

That evening she took out a sheaf of reed paper on which were the carefully drawn plans for a boat that already stood half finished in the yard, its ribs rising naked and supported by cut treetrunks, which, over the years of their use, had lost much of their bark but still dangled some, like sea weed. She stood with her weight mostly on one foot and studied the plans. She climbed up through the thick struts, bearing cuts of the smoothing blades like inverted fish scales up their curves; and she studied the boat – not so much to see how one followed the other, but to see what each, as two things that did so follow, was in itself, how each was different.

Soon she got another piece of reed paper and one of the
styluses (which you hung around your neck on a leather thong, and a horn with an inch of berry juice in the bottom that you dipped your stylus into) and began making notes, sketches, more plans.

Next morning she was at the yard early, getting out paint jars, artist’s mirrors, stencils, trimming patterns, and examining them under the porch roof which, as the sun warmed the storage hut, buzzed with the insects that lived in the thatching. Then she left the yard and walked toward the forest. She looked at flowers and seeds. She looked at dead leaves and live ones, holding them close to examine how the pale veins branched through the flat, tough green or the frail, brittle brown, and squinted up at the dark, brown branches, an expanding net in the flakes of green that massed about them. In the midst of all this, various ideas like image, model, example, expression, representation, symbol, and reflection began to separate themselves for her. Her thoughts went back to what Venn had said, as Norema walked back to the boat yard. Inside the gate, she told a quickly made-up story to little Jori, who stared at her through the tale with wide, incredulous eyes, pawing at the sawdust with her bare toes and twisting at a piece of vine, her pale hair matted for all the world like a clutch of pine splinters. Then Norema asked Jori to tell the story to Big Inek. Then she got Big Inek to tell it back to her. He grunted between sentences each time his mallet fell on the thumb-thick dowel which sank more each stroke, its head splintering a little more each hit: at which point she remembered the old and the young sailor she had seen on the docks with Venn, and realized, not as two connected ideas, but as a single idea for which there were no words to express it as a unity: while any situation could be
used
as an image of any other, no thing could
be
an image of another – especially two things as complicated as
two people. And to use them as such was to abuse them and to delude oneself – that it was the coherence and ability of things (especially people) to be their unique and individual selves that allowed the malleability and richness of images to occur at all.

Such was her concentration on Venn’s idea that the only thing she took away from Venn’s morning class next day was a patch of sunlight through a hole in the trap above in the thatch, falling to shape itself to the brown shoulder of the girl who sat in front of her, and the rustle of Venn’s stick in the straw with which the class floor was covered.

Meals at home, where she pondered all Venn had said of the matrix of money and material in which her parents’ business was fixed and which bounded her parents’ so diverse personalities, sometimes approached disaster: her father frowned across the wooden table with its clay and brass settings. The woman who helped her mother with the house and the cooking, clicked her teeth and said Norema must not have put her head on when she’d gotten up that morning. Jori laughed. And Quema asked – so many times that her father told her to stop – if there were anything the matter. Through it all, their words were images of illogic and incomprehension; her soup was the sea and her bread was the island a-float in it. The smell of apples in batter recalled the orchards where she had picked them last week, or run with others to steal them last year. Every sensation led to the memory of myriad others. Any pattern perceived could be set beside any other, the relation between the patterns becoming a pattern of its own, itself to be set beside another and related …

She went to the waterfront and looked at nets and trees. She looked at women and men with rough hands and rags tied around their heads, working on their boat rigs. She looked at fish scales and bird feathers and at a broken length
of boat ribbing, just washed ashore, whose smoothing-blade cuts were invisible on the grainy gray. She looked at three women and a man carrying baskets of fish, roped around their shoulders, up the sand, which clung to their feet high as their ankles, an image of glittering shoes. The baskets were woven from tree branches. She drew on her paper the curve of sand around the water, and beside it, the curve of water up to the sand. Behind a beached snaggle of wood, she heard a sound like a baby, and looked behind it to find Marga, asleep and crying to herself. Later she heard a gull shriek like a mad woman, wailing. And a day later, when she was coming down a narrow alley toward the docks, from the window beside her she heard a baby – for the world like a mewing gull.

In a blade of sunlight a-slant the dust between the shadows of two stone huts, she stopped. While she listened, she remembered, for the first time in a while, the actual walk with Venn down the stream when the idea she had been examining these last days had been first presented to her. She recalled her absurd attempt to construct an example – an image that, because it was constructed of things it simply did not fit, reversed the idea into an idea silly by itself, ridiculous in application – ridiculousness that could easily, she saw, have strayed into the pernicious, the odious, or the destructive, depending how widely one had insisted on applying it. There was Venn’s idea (the baby had stopped crying); there was her image of it, formed of all possible misunderstanding; and there …

Something happened: it happened inside her head; it happened to her mind, and its effect spread through her body like a chill, or a warmth, and was realer than either. She gasped and blinked, looked at the sun, dust, shadow, tried to apprehend what had just changed, and felt a stray thread on her sleeve tickle her arm in the breeze, a leather
crease across her instep from her soft leather shoe, the air passing in through the rims of her nostrils breathing, the moisture at the corners of her eyes.