…The modality of novelistic enunciation is inferential: it is a process within which the subject of the novelistic utterance affirms a sequence, as conclusion to the inference, based on other sequences (referential—hence narrative, or textual—hence citational), which are the premises of the inference and, as such, considered to be true.
JULIA KRISTEVA,
Desire in Language
SHE WAS FIFTEEN AND she flew.
Her name was pryn—because she knew something of writing but not of capital letters.
She shrieked at clouds, knees clutching scaly flanks, head flung forward. Another peak floated back under veined wings around whose flexing joints her knees bent.
The dragon turned a beaked head in air, jerking reins—vines pryn had twisted in a brown cord before making a bridle to string on the dragon’s clay-colored muzzle. (Several times untwisted vines had broken—fortunately before take-off.) Shrieking and joyful, pryn looked up at clouds and down on streams, off toward returning lines of geese, at sheep crowding through a rocky rift between one green level and another. The dragon jerked her head, which meant the beast was reaching for her glide’s height…
On the ground a bitter, old, energetic woman sat in her shack and mumbled over pondered insults and recalled slights, scratching in ash that had spilled from her fireplace with a stick. That bitter woman, pryn’s great-aunt, had never flown a dragon, nor did she know her great-niece flew one now. What she had done, many years before, was to take into her home an itinerant, drunken barbarian, who’d come wandering through the town market. For nearly five months the soused old reprobate had slept on the young woman’s hearth. When he was not sleeping or incoherent with drink, the two of them had talked; and talked; and talked; and taken long walks together, still talking; then gone back to the shack and talked more. Those talks, the older woman would have assured her great-niece, were as wonderful as any flight.
One of the things the barbarian had done was help her build a wooden rack on which stretched fibers might be woven together. She’d hoped to make some kind of useful covering. But the funny and fanciful notions, the tales and terrifying insights, the world lighted and shadowed by the analytic and synthetic richness the two of them could generate between them—that was the thing!
One evening the barbarian had up and wandered off again to another mountain hold—for no particular reason; nor was the aunt worried. They were the kind of friends who frequently went separate ways—for days, even weeks. But after a month rumor came back that, while out staggering about one winter’s night, he’d fallen down a cliff, broken both legs, and died some time over the next three days from injury and exposure.
The rack had not worked right away.
The marshpool fluff that pryn’s great-aunt had tried to stretch out was too weak to make real fabric, and the sheared fleece from the winter coats of mountain nannies and billies made a fuzzy stuff that was certainly warm but that tore with any violent body movement. Still, the aunt believed in the ‘loom’ (her word for it in that long-ago distant language) and in the barbarian, whose memory she defended against all vilification. For hadn’t he also designed and supervised the construction of the fountains in the Vanar Hold, one of the three great houses around which fabled Ellamon had grown up? And hadn’t the Suzerain of Vanar himself used to nod to him on the street when they’d passed, and hadn’t the Suzerain even taken him into his house for a while—as had she? While her friends in other shacks and huts and cottages felt sorry for the young woman so alone now with her memories, it occurred to the aunt, as she sat before her fireplace on a dim winter’s afternoon, watching smoke spiral from the embers: Why not twist the fibers first before stringing them on the rack? The (also her word) ‘thread’ she twisted made a far smoother, stronger, and—finally!—functional fabric. And the loom, which had been a tolerated embarrassment among those friends to whom she was always showing it, was suddenly being rebuilt all over Ellamon. Women twisted. Women wove. Many women did nothing but twist thread for the weavers, who soon included men. That summer the aunt chipped two holes in a flat stone, wrapped the first few inches of twisted fibers through them, then set the stone to spin, helped on by a foot or a hand, thus using the torque to twist thread ten to twenty times as fast as you could with just your fingers. But with the invention of the spindle (not the aunt’s word, but an amused neighbor’s term for it), a strange thing happened. People began to suggest that neither she nor the long-dead barbarian were really the loom’s inventors; and certainly she could not have thought up thread twisting by herself. And when it became known that there were other towns and other counties throughout Nevèrÿon where weaving and spinning had been going on for years—as it had, by now, been going on for years at fabled Ellamon—then all the aunt’s claims to authorship became a kind of local joke. Even her invention of the spindle was suddenly suspect. And though he never claimed it for himself, the neighbor who’d named it was often credited with at least as much input into that discovery as the barbarian about whom the aunt was always going on must have had into the loom. For the barbarian turned out to have been quite a famous and fabled person all along, at least outside of Ellamon. And the spindle? Surely it was something she had seen somewhere. It was too useful, too simple, and just not the kind of thing you ‘thought up’ all alone. The aunt spun. The aunt wove. The aunt took in abandoned children, now of a younger cousin, now of a wayward niece, and, several years later, the grandson of a nephew. For wasn’t her shack the warmest in the village? When she had made it, she had filled every chink of it with a mixture of oil and mud, into which she had blown hundreds and hundreds of small air bubbles through a hollow reed; it would hold both warm air and cool air for more than twenty-four hours. (She had told the barbarian—whose name had been Belham—about her insulation method that first day in the market; and wasn’t that why he had consented to stay with her when the Suzerain of Vanar had put him out?) From all the looms of fabled Ellamon bolts of goats’ wool and dogs’ hair cloth and sheep wool rolled out, slower than smoke spiraling over winter embers. The great-aunt spoke little with her neighbors, loved her little cousins and great-nieces (and her great-nephew—seven years older than pryn—who had recently become a baker), and grew more bitter. What mountain pasturage there was about the High Hold was slowly given over to sheep, already prized for their thin but nourishing milk. (Sheep wool clearly made the strongest, warmest cloth. But that, alas, was not among the aunt’s particular discoveries.) And more and more milk-less, fleeceless dragons leapt from the pastures’ ledges and cliffs, with their creaking honks, to tear their wings on treetops and brambles decently out of sight.
Because the slopes around Ellamon sported more rockweed than grass, the local shepherds never could raise the best sheep: Ellamon’s fabrics were never particularly fabled.
Today pryn’s great-aunt was over eighty.
The barbarian had slipped drunkenly down the cliff more than fifty years ago.
Bound to the sky by vines twisted the same way her great-aunt still twisted goats’ fleece and marshpool fluff and dogs’ hair into thread that bound that bitter, old, energetic woman to the earth, pryn flew!
Flying, she saw the crazily tilting mountains rise by her, the turning clouds above her, the rocking green, the green-licked rock. Some where below, sheep, bleating, wandered over another rocky rise. Wind rushed pryn’s ears to catch in the cartilages and turn around in them, cackling like a maiden turning from her shuttle to laugh at a companion’s scabrous joke. Air battered her eye sockets, as a wild girl pounds the wall of the room where she has been shut in by a mother terrified her child might, in her wildness, run loose and be taken by slavers. Air rushed pryn’s toes; her toes flexed up, then curled in the joy, in the terror of flight. Wind looped coolly about pryn’s arms, pushed cold palms against her kneecaps.
They glided.
And much of the space between pryn and the ground had gone.
She had launched from a ledge and, through common sense, had expected to land on one. How else to take off once more? Somehow, though, she’d assumed the dragon knew this too.
Trees a-slant the slope rose.
She pulled on the reins, hard. Wings flopped, fluttered, flapped behind her knees; pryn leaned back in wind, searching for ledges in the mountains that were now all around.
She glanced down to see the clearing—without a ledge any side! Treetops veered, neared.
That was where they were going to land…? Leaves a-top a tall tree slapped her toes, stinging. She yanked vines. Dragon wings rose, which meant those green membranes between the long bones would not tear on the branches. But they were falling—no, still gliding. She swallowed air. The dragon tilted, beating back against her own flight—pryn rocked against the bony neck. Reins tight, she knuckled scales. Dragon muscle moved under her legs. A moment’s floating, when she managed to push back and blink. And blinked again—
—because they jarred, stopping, on pebbles and scrub.
A lurch: the dragon stepped forward.
Another lurch: another step.
She pulled on the reins again. The slow creature lurched another step and…halted.
She craned to see the trees behind her. Above them, rock—
‘Hello!’
The dragon took another step; pryn swung forward.
The woman, cross-legged across the clearing by the fireplace, uncrossed and pushed to one knee. ‘Hello, there!’ She stood, putting a hand on the provision cart’s rail. ‘That your dragon?’ The ox bent to tear up ragged rockweed; the cart rumbled for inches. The rail slipped under the woman’s palm.
Swinging her leg over the dragon’s neck, pryn slid down scales, feeling her leather skirt roll up the backs of her thighs. On rough ground she landed on two feet and a fist—‘Yes…!’—and came erect in time to duck the wing that opened, beat once, then folded. ‘I mean—I rode it…’
The woman was middle-aged, some red left in her hair. Her face was sunburned and freckled.
With suspicion and curiosity, pryn blinked. Then, because she had flown, pryn laughed. It was the full, foaming laugh of a loud brown fifteen-year-old with bushy hair. It broke up fear, exploded curiosity, and seemed—to the woman, at any rate—to make the heavy, short girl one with the pine needles and shale chips and long, long clouds pulled sheer enough to see blue through.
That was why the woman laughed too.
The dragon swung her head, opened her beak, and hissed over stained, near-useless teeth, tiny in mottled gum.
The girl stepped up on a mossy rock. ‘Who are you?’
‘Norema the tale-teller,’ the woman said. She put both hands in the pocket of her leggings and took a long step across the burnt-out fireplace. ‘Who are you?’
‘I am pryn, the…adventurer, pryn the warrior, pryn the thief!’ said pryn, who had never stolen anything in her life other than a ground oaten cake from the lip of her cousin’s baking oven three weeks before—she’d felt guilty for days!
‘You’re going to have trouble getting that dragon to take off again.’
The girl’s face moved from leftover laugh to scowl. ‘Don’t I know it!’
The ox took another step. The cart’s plank wheels made brief noises among themselves and on small stones. The ox blinked at the dragon, which stood now, one foreclaw raised.
Dragons sometimes stood like that a long time.
‘You’re not one of the regular dragon grooms—the little girls they keep in the corrals above Ellamon…?’
The ox tore up more rockweed.
The girl shook her head. ‘But I live in Ellamon—just outside Ellamon, actually. With my great-aunt. I’ve seen them, though, flying their dragons with their trainers and guards for the tourists who go out to the hill to watch. They’re all bad girls, you know. Girls who’ve struck their mothers or disobeyed their fathers, stolen things, sometimes even killed people. They’ve been brought from all over Nevèrÿon—’
‘…adventures, warriors,’ Norema suggested, ‘thieves?’
The girl looked at the ground, turning her bare foot on sand. ‘You’re a foreigner. You probably don’t know much about dragons, or the bad girls who ride them.’
‘Oh,’ Norema said, ‘one hears fables. Also, I’ve been through this strange and…well, this strange land before. What were you doing on that dragon?’
‘Flying,’ pryn answered, then wondered if that sounded disingenuous. She bent to brush a dusty hand against a dusty knee. ‘It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. And I’m growing—everyone always tells me how much I’m growing. So I thought: soon I shall be too tall or too fat. I’d better do it now. The girls they use for riders up in the dragon corrals are half starved anyway, till they’re thin as twigs. They’re all twelve and thirteen years old—forever, it seems like.’ She smoothed her overblouse down her waistless stomach. ‘I’m short. But I’m not thin.’
‘True,’ Norema said, ‘you’re not. But you look strong. And I like your laugh.’
‘I don’t know how strong I am either,’ pryn said, ‘but I caught a wild dragon, bridled her, and led her to a ledge.’
‘That seems strong enough.’
‘You’ve been here before…?’ It sounded more suspicious than pryn meant. But suspicion was a habit of tongue picked up from her aunt more than a habit of mind; and, anyway, her laugh belied it. ‘What are you doing here now?’
‘Looking for a friend,’ Norema said. ‘A friend of mine. Years ago she used to be a guard at the dragon corrals and told me all about those…bad girls. My friend wore blue stone beads in her hair and a black rag mask across her eyes; and she killed with a double-bladed sword. We were companions and traveled together several years.’
‘What happened to her?’ pryn asked.
‘Oh,’ Norema said. ‘I told her tales—long, marvelous, fascinating tales. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if they were tales told to me when I was a child, or tales I’d made up. I told her tales, and after a while my masked friend grew more interested in the tales than she was in me. One night, sitting on her side of the campfire, cleaning her double blade, she told me she was going off the next morning to see if one particular tale I told were true. The next day when I woke, she and her bedroll were gone—along with her double-bladed sword. Nor was I worried. We were the kind of friends who frequently went separate ways—for days, even weeks. But weeks became months; and I did not run across my friend’s campfire on the rim of the Menyat canyon, nor did I hear any word of her tramping along the northernmost Faltha escarpments, nor did I meet her taking shade in one of the Makalata caves at the rim of the western desert, nor did I hear rumor of her lean-to set up a mile further down the beach at Sarness.’
Squatting, pryn picked up a stick. ‘So what did you do?’ She scratched at spilled ash.
‘I decided to take my cart and go look for her. I’ve looked many places; no doubt I’ll look many more. But I’ve come to Ellamon because my friend once worked here and was happy.’
‘Mmm,’ pryn said, suspiciously.
The woman looked down to see what pryn had been scratching. ‘“Pyre,”’ she read. ‘“Ynn.” Pyre-ynn?’
‘“…pryn”,’ pryn said. ‘That is my name. In writing.’
The woman stepped around the figures and squatted too. ‘Here.’ She took the stick and added a line above the two syllabics the girl had etched in ash. ‘You, “pryn”. That’s your name. In writing. That line there means you squish the two sounds together into one. Otherwise you’ll have people mispronouncing it every which way.’
In late sunlight pryn squinted at the woman. ‘How do you know?’
‘Actually—’ the woman looked back at pryn with a moment’s uncertainty—‘because I invented it.’
The girl frowned. ‘Invented what?’
‘Writing. A long time ago. I must have been about your age—now I don’t mean I invented every kind of writing. I just added the idea of making written signs stand for particular words, so you could say them. Till then, you know, written signs stood for animals, foods, amounts, tasks, instructions, ideas, even people, even kinds of people—whole complexes of notions. But written words—that’s my innovation.’
‘You did that?’ The girl blinked.
The woman nodded. ‘When I was a girl. I lived on an island—that’s where I invented my system. I taught it to my island friends, many of whom were fishers and sailors. Years later, when I came to Nevèrÿon, I found my writing system had preceded me. With changes, of course. But most of the signs were quite recognizably the ones I had made up when I was a child.’
‘Everyone says this kind of writing came across the sea from the Ulvayns.’ Looking at the tall, middle-aged woman, pryn thought of her own, short, bitter aunt. ‘You invented…my name?’
‘Only the way to write it. Believe me, it comes in very handy if you’re a tale-teller. But you know—‘The woman was apparently not as comfortable squatting as pryn, so she put one leather legging’s knee on the ground. She scratched the name again, this time above what pryn had written.’—I’ve made some changes in my system. About names, for instance. Today I always write a name with a slightly larger version of the initial sign; and I put a little squiggle down under it, like that—‘She added another scratch. ‘That way, if I’m reading it aloud, I can always glance ahead and see a name coming. You speak names differently from the way you speak other words. You mean them differently, too. The size of the initial sign stands for the way you speak it. The squiggle stands for what names mean that’s different. So everything is indicated. These days, you have to indicate everything, or nobody understands.’
The girl looked down at her name’s new version, below and above the old one she herself had glyphed.
‘Really, it’s quite useful,’ Norema went on. ‘My friend, for example, was called Raven. Now there are ravens that caw and fly—much more efficiently than dragons. And there’s my friend, Raven. Since she left, I find that now, more and more, both will enter my stories. The distinction marks a certain convenience, a sort of stability. Besides, I like distinguishing people from things in and of the land. It makes tale-telling make a lot more sense.’
The girl grinned at the woman. ‘I like that!’ She took the stick and traced the syllabics, first the larger with the mark beneath, then the smaller, and last the eliding diacritic.
She read it.
Then Pryn laughed again.
It was much the same laugh she had laughed when she’d dismounted; but it sounded richer—to Pryn, at any rate. Indeed, it sounded almost as rich and wild to Pryn as it had before to Norema—almost as though the mountain, with its foaming falls and piled needles and scattered shale chips (all named ‘Pryn’ by the signs now inscribed thrice on its ashy surface, twice with capitals, enclosing the minuscule version), had itself laughed.
And that is my name, Pryn thought. ‘What tales did you tell?’
‘Would you like to hear one?’
‘Yes,’ Pryn said.
‘Well, then sit here. Oh, don’t worry. It won’t be that long.’
Pryn, feeling very differently about herself, sat.
Norema, who had taken the stick, stood, stepped from the fireplace, turned her back, and lowered her head, as though listening to leaves and dragon’s breath and her ox’s chewing and some stream’s plashing just beyond the brush, as though they all were whispering to the tale-teller the story she was about to tell. Pryn listened too. Then Norema turned and announced, ‘Once upon a time…’ or its equivalent in that long-ago distant language. And Pryn jumped: the words interrupted that unheard flow of natural speech as sharply as a written sign found on a stretch of dust till then marred only by wind and rolling pebbles.
‘Once upon a time there was a beautiful young queen—just about your age. Your height, too. And your size.’
‘People say I’m clever, that I’m young, and that I’m growing,’ Pryn said. ‘They don’t say I’m beautiful.’
‘At this particular time,’ Norema explained, ‘young queens who looked like you were all thought to be ravishing. Standards of beauty change. And this happened many years back. Once upon—’
‘Was your friend my age?’
Norema chuckled. ‘No. She was closer to my age. But it’s part of the story, you see, to say the queen was the age of the hearer. Believe me, I told it the same way to my friend.’
‘Oh.’
‘Once upon a time there was a beautiful queen, about your age and your size. Her name was Olin, and she was queen of all Nevèrÿon—at least she was supposed to be. Her empire extended from the desert to the mountains, from the jungles to the sea. Unfortunately, however, she had an unhappy childhood. Some evil priests shut Olin, her family, and her twenty-three servants in an old monastery on the Garth peninsula, practically from the time she was born until she was, well…’ The woman questioned Pryn with narrowed eyes. ‘Fifteen?’
Pryn nodded.
‘When she was fifteen years old, for arcane political reasons, the evil priests decided to kill her outright. But they were afraid to do it themselves—for more political reasons, equally arcane. They couldn’t get any of her family to do it, so they tried to hire her own servants, one after the other, all twenty-three. But the first servant was the queen’s own nurse, an old woman who loved the girl and came to her young mistress and told her what the priests intended.
‘“What shall I do?” the queen cried.
‘“You can be afraid,” said the old servant. “But don’t be terrified. That’s first. You see, I have a plan, though it’s a sad and sorrowful one. I’ve made a bargain with the priests, which they’ll respect because they think me a great magician. I’ve told them I will betray you if they will pay me one gold piece. And I have also made them promise that if I fail, they will hire the next servant to do the same deed for two gold pieces—twice what they have paid me. And if that servant fails, they will hire the next one to do the deed for four gold pieces, twice again the amount paid the former. And if he fails, the next will be hired for twice the amount paid to the previous one. And so on.” The old woman produced from the folds of her gown a single gold coin—and a knife. “Take my pay and hide it. Then take this knife—and strike me in the heart! For only my death will corroborate my failure.”
‘“Kill you?” demanded the queen.
‘“It’s the only way.”
‘The queen wept and cried and protested. “You are my beloved friend, my faithful bondswoman, and my dear nurse as well. You are closer to me than my own mother!” But the old woman put her arms around the girl and stroked her hair. “Let me explain some of the more arcane politics behind this whole nasty business. These are brutal and barbaric times, and it is either you or I—for even if I do kill you, the wicked priests plan to dispense with me as soon as I stab you. They cannot suffer the murderer of a queen to live, even the murderer of a queen they hate as much as they hate you. If you do what I say, you will have the gold coin as well as your life, whereas I shall lose my life in any case.”
‘And so, after more along the same lines, the queen took the coin, and the knife—which she thrust into her old nurse’s heart.
‘Not so many days later, a second servant came to Queen Olin. “Here are two gold coins and a rope with which I am to garrote you. Take the coins and hide them; then take the rope and strangle me—if you yourself would live. For my life is over in any case.” Again the queen protested, but again the servant prevailed. So the young queen took the rope and strangled him. A few days later a third servant came with four gold pieces and a great rock to smash in the queen’s head. After that a fourth came with eight gold pieces and a draught of corrosive poison. The fifth had sixteen gold pieces. The sixth had thirty-two coins. The next—’
Pryn suddenly laughed. ‘But I’ve heard this story before! Or one just like it—only it was about grains of sand piled on the squares of a gaming board. I don’t remember how many squares there were, but by the end, I remember, all the sand in the world was used up. Am I right about the ending? At the end of the twenty-three servants, she had all the money in the world…?’
Norema smiled. ‘She certainly had all the money in the monastery. And at that particular time, all the money in the monastery was pretty much all the money in Nevèrÿon.’
‘That is an old story. I know, because I’ve heard it before. The version about the sand grains, that is.’
‘That part of the story is old. But there are some new parts too. For example, after she had killed all her servants, the beautiful young queen felt very differently about herself.’
Pryn frowned. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Well,’ Norema said, ‘for one thing, in less than a year she had stabbed, strangled, bashed out the brains, poisoned, beheaded, and done even worse to twenty-two of her most faithful bondsmen and bondswomen, who were also the closest things she’d had to friends. After that she began to act very strangely and behave quite oddly. On and off, she behaved oddly the rest of her life—even for a queen. And in those days queens were expected to be eccentric. Often, after that, she was known as Mad Olin.’
‘I thought you said there were twenty-three servants.’
‘There were. But the last survived. He was not only a servant, but also her maternal uncle—though, alas, I can’t remember his family name. And there’re reasons to remember it, too, but for the life of me I can’t recall what they are. Anyway. Years before, he had fallen on bad times and had indentured himself to the queen’s mother, which was why he was with Olin in the first place. But he had always set himself apart. Along about the queen’s murderings of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first servants—all particularly gruesome—the evil priests were, financially speaking, in rather bad shape. Olin was by then quite well off—though mentally she was a bit shaky. Her maternal uncle, who, like the first servant, was also something of a magician, had, with the help of the rest of the family, managed to engineer an escape for the queen. It took a good deal of the money; and Olin took the rest—to hide lest the wicked priests manage to trick it back, even as her first wise and faithful servant had tricked it from the priests.’ Norema sighed. ‘Raven and I once visited that monastery—it’s still there today. And there are still priests—at least there were when we went. Now, I’m not sure. Anyway, you could certainly tell that the place had seen better times. Clearly they hadn’t gotten their money back.’
‘Are the priests still wicked?’
Reddish brows lowered. ‘Well, I doubt if either my friend or I would ever stop there again—unless we absolutely had to.’
‘What about Olin’s escape?’
‘Ah, the exciting part!’ Norema said. ‘Her uncle spirited her away from the monastery in the middle of the night, with the money in a caravan of six great wagons, each pulled by six horses. It was a lot of money, you see, and took more than one wagon to carry. Also, there was a lot more than gold coins in it by now—jewels and iron trinkets and all sorts of precious and semi-precious stones. The uncle took her to his family home, there in the south, and that evening he went with her up into a tall tower—at least that’s how one version of the story goes. In another version, he took her up on a high rocky slope—’
‘Shouldn’t you choose one or the other for the sake of the telling?’ Pryn asked.
‘For the sake of the story,’ Norema answered, ‘I tell both and let my hearer make her choices.’
‘Oh,’ Pryn said.
‘In the stone chamber at the tower top—or in the rocky cell at the top of the rocky slope—the uncle began to read her the sequence by which the gold coins had come to her: one, two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, one hundred twenty-eight, two hundred fifty-six, five hundred twelve, one thousand twenty-four, two thousand forty-eight, four thousand ninety-six—’
I see how fast it goes up!’ Pryn exclaimed. ‘That’s just halfway through them, and it’s already almost five thousand gold pieces. Two more, and it’ll be over twenty thousand. Twenty thousand gold pieces must be close to all the money in the world!’
‘That’s what you see.’ Norema smiled. ‘What the young queen saw, however, was a city.’
Pryn blinked.
Norema said: ‘The queen blinked.’
‘What city?’ Pryn asked. ‘Where did she see it?’
‘Precisely what the queen wondered too—for she blinked again…It was gone! Through the stone columns at the stone rail, the queen looked down from the tower—or down to the foot of the slope—and saw only some marshy water, an open inlet, rippling out between the hills to the sea. But the queen had seen a city, there among the ripples, as clearly as she now saw the hills on either side of the inlet, or, indeed, as clearly as she saw the swampy growths that splotched the waters where they came in to the land. When she told her uncle what she had seen, immediately he stopped reading the numbers and showed her all sorts of magic wonders, including a circle full of different stars, which he gave her to keep. Then he took her down from the tower—or down from the rocks—to a great dinner that had been prepared for her, where they talked of more magic things. Then he did something terrible.’
‘What?’ Pryn asked. ‘So far, this story sounds more confusing than exciting.’
To the proper hearer,’ Norema said, ‘precisely what seems confusing will be the exciting part. When the queen came back from a stroll in the garden between courses, the uncle gave her a goblet of poison, which she, unknowing, drank.’
Norema was silent a long time.
Finally Pryn asked: ‘Was that the end of the queen? I’m sure her uncle probably wanted the money for himself. This doesn’t sound like a real story to me. What about the “circle of different stars?” I don’t even know what that is! I mean, it doesn’t seem like a story, because it…doesn’t really end.’
‘It certainly doesn’t end there,’ Norema said. ‘It goes on for quite a while, yet. But that always seemed to me an exciting place for a pause.’
‘What did happen, then?’
‘See, you are caught up in the excitement, the action, the suspense! You want to know the outcome—I think it’s very important to alert your listeners to the progress of their own reactions. I can foresee a time, after lots more tales have been told, when that won’t be necessary. But for now it’s a must. Well, the poison didn’t kill the queen. It put her in a trance—and when she woke, if indeed she wasn’t dreaming, she was on a rocky ledge. It was night, and as she pushed herself up on her hands and looked around, she saw she was lying between two white stones, one taller than the other—now here, again, there’s another version that says the queen woke up in a boat which sailed in to a strange shore that morning, and on the shore she found the white stones—one higher than the other; at noon on the longest day of summer, this version says, one stone casts a shadow three times as long as—’
‘But in this version—’ Pryn tried to blot the image of sun and glaring sand that had itself blotted her image of darkness, full moon, and cool air—‘it was night?’
‘Yes,’ Norema said. ‘And the full moon was up.’
Pryn started to ask, But how did you know?, then decided that if she were going to hear the end, she’d best stop interrupting. Besides, it was the teller’s tale; the teller ought to know what happened in it, for all her multiple versions.
‘The remaining money was in huge piles beside the queen, in heaps and bags and bundles, and the circle of different stars lay on the rock near her knee. Down the ledge from her, the water was covered with fog. The moon looked ghastly, a yellow disk hanging over a fuming inlet. Water flickered beneath mists. Olin sat on the rock, hugging her knees in the chill light, biting her inner lip, her chin on her kneecaps. A bird woke up and screeched! The queen looked to see green wings starting from the branches of a pecan tree. She got to her feet unsteadily, still groggy from the poison. She stood on the ledge and cried out across the waters, just as if someone had told her what to say (though none of the versions I know says who): “I am Olin, and I have come to warn the Worm of the Sea of the Northern Eagle’s evil gaze!” Then she took a step back and put her wrist up to her mouth as if she were afraid she had said something blasphemous. She stepped to the ledge’s edge again and looked down toward the foggy water. The mists were a-broil, and now and again splashes geysered up hot silver.
‘There was a rumbling, as of some vast engine, not only from the water, but from the ground. Trees trembled; small stones shook loose to roll down into fog. Below swirling fumes waves swirled even faster.
‘Water surged, now into the land, now away. At each surge away, water lowered; and lowered.
‘Olin saw the first broken building tops cleave mist and waves—three towers and a bridge between, dripping. Waves broke higher than fog; foam fell back, roaring, into the sea. More buildings emerged. Water poured from their roofs. Through fog, water erupted from stone windows. Fog rolled and roiled off. Green and white water lapped away through mud and weeds and clotted alleys. Water rushed from a street where pillars still stood. Water carried weed and mud from patterned blue flags; other pillars were broken. One lay across its square pedestal. At the same time she saw the cleared street, she saw other avenues still silted, dark, and wet. Shapes that might have been buildings were mounded over with mud, glistening, black, and green. To the earth’s rumblings and the water’s ragings, the city rose.
‘The young queen, half running, half falling down the slope, only just managed to get her feet under her—when she plunged shin deep in muck. She staggered on, arms flailing, till she reached the first cracked paving—nowhere near as clean as it had looked from the ledge. Mud clung to the walls beside her. Weeds in windows hung down dripping stones. Fallen masonry, scattered shells, and soaked branches made her progress by the carved pillars almost as slow as it had been in the mud. Dirty-footed, wet-handed, scratches on her shoulders and legs, the young queen pushed between stones and driftwood, making her way by broken walls, their carvings veiled in sea moss.
‘What movement down what alley made her stop, the queen was never sure. Off in the wet green filling another street, something dark as excrement flexed, shifted, slid. The building beside her was heaped over with runnelled mud. That moved too, quivered, rose—not mud at all, but some immense tarpaulin. The sheet shook itself loose.
‘Olin looked up.
‘The moon lit yellow fogs which shifted over roofs. Through them, over them, the wing rose—not a soft, feathered, birdlike wing, but a taut, spined, reptilian wing, sheer enough to let moonlight through its skin, here and there darkened by spine or vein.
‘That wing blotted a fifth the sky!
‘Wind touched the queen’s cheek, her wrist. A second wing, as huge, rose from where it had lain over buildings at the street’s far side. Ahead, beyond the pillars, something slid forward, pulled back.
‘To the extent she had seen it at all, she’d thought it was a toppled carving, a sculpted demon’s head, big as a house and fallen on its chin. A gold and black eye opened; and opened; and opened, wider than the wide moon. Then, perhaps fifteen feet away, from under a rising lid, the other eye appeared. A lip lifted from teeth longer and thicker than the queen’s legs. The head, still wet, rose on its thick neck, clearing the near roofs, rising over the towers, spiring between the wings.
‘The dragon—a giant dragon, a sea dragon many times the size of her mountain cousins—was coiled through the streets. She’d slept with the city beneath the water. But now, as the city rose, the dragon rose above it, to stare down at the young queen with black and gold eyes.
‘Again Olin cried out, loud enough to hurt her throat: “Oh great Gauine—” for that was the dragon’s name, though I don’t know where she learned it—“I have come to hide my treasure with you and warn you of the Eagle’s antics—”’
Squinting silvery eyes in the sun, the ordinary mountain dragon just then put her foot down and hissed at the ox; the ox shied, backing up five steps. The cart trundled and creaked. Norema turned to grab it.
Pryn pushed up to her feet and snatched at the dragon’s swinging reins. Green wings flapped futilely.
Norema calmed her ox. Pryn led her dragon to a tree and lashed it. Norema came over to give her a hand, then walked with Pryn back to the fireplace. Pryn rubbed her hands together. Her palms were sore where the reins, first in landing, then in tethering, had jerked through. ‘The story you were telling?’ Pryn asked. ‘What happened next?’
‘Not much,’ Norema said. ‘Using the magic circle of different stars as a guide, Olin and Gauine hid the money in the city. Then Gauine settled down on top of it to guard it—just in time, too. For water began to roll back through the streets. Once more the city began to sink. The queen clambered up the slope to the ledge, barely managing to escape drowning. And the moon was down.’
Pryn frowned.
‘Oh, Gauine was a very exceptional dragon,’ Norema explained.
They stopped by the cart; the ox nipped more weed.
‘But then, if she hadn’t been,’ Norema went on, ‘I doubt the queen would have entrusted the treasure into her keeping. The next day, wandering half dazed along the beach, Olin was found by a troop of traveling mummers. Fortunately, over the night she’d been gone, the rest of her relatives had managed to defeat the evil priests. The young queen was taken to Kolhari, capital of all Nevèrÿon, where she was crowned queen for real. From all reports, she was never popular and led a horrid life. She went through several kings and a number of children, most of whom ended up frightfully. But she managed to make several arcane political decisions which have always been considered praiseworthy, at least by people who count such things important.’
‘Queen Olin,’ Pryn mused. ‘I’ve heard other stories about her, here in Ellamon. She was the queen who set up the dragon corrals and decided that bad little girls would be condemned to work there.’
‘One of the more interesting fables,’ Norema said. ‘Well, she was always fond of the animal, since it was a giant sea dragon that guarded her sunken treasure on which her power rested.’
‘That was the story your friend set out to find was true or not?’
Norema nodded.
‘She wanted to find Mad Queen Olin’s treasure in the sunken city guarded by the dragon Gauine?’
‘That’s what she said.’
Suddenly Pryn turned around and looked off at her own winged mount swaying at its tree. ‘Brainless, stupid beast! I thought I’d fly you away from home to excitement and adventure—or at least to a ledge from which I could return. But here—’ she turned back to Norema—‘she has landed in this silly clearing and can’t take off again!’
‘You want to leave home for good,’ Norema said seriously.
‘Yes,’ Pryn said. ‘And don’t tell me not to!’
‘You aren’t afraid of slavers?’
Pryn shook her head. ‘You’re traveling alone, and you’re still a free woman.’
‘True,’ Norema said. ‘And I intend to stay one.’ She considered a moment. ‘Let me give you two more gifts—besides my tale.’
Pryn looked perplexed. She hadn’t thought much of the story. It had stopped and started, leaving her anxious and expectant precisely where she had wanted answers and explanations.
‘You can be frightened,’ Norema said. ‘But don’t be terrified. That’s first.’
‘I’m not terrified,’ Pryn said.
‘I know,’ Norema said. ‘But that’s the way with advice. The part you can accept is the part you always already know.’
‘I’m not afraid either,’ Pryn said. Then she frowned again. ‘No, I am afraid. But it doesn’t matter, because I made my mind up to it a long time ago.’
‘Good.’ Norema smiled. ‘I wasn’t going to argue. One of my gifts, then, is a packet of food; that I’ll give you out of my provisions cart. The other is some geographical information about the real world over which you’ve just so cavalierly flown—both are things one cannot trust tales to provide. Oh, yes, and another piece of advice: Untie your dragon and let her wander into the mountains where she belongs. Left to herself, she’ll find the ledges she needs, as you must too—but you can’t be tied down with dragons that won’t fly where you want to go, no matter how much fun the notion of flight. Through those trees, maybe a hundred yards on, you’ll find the junction of two roads, giving you a choice of four directions. The one going—’ Norema glanced at the sun—‘toward the sunset will take you, with three days’ walk, to a white desert with dangerous tribes who sew copper wire up the rims of their ears. Take the road leading in the opposite direction, down between the mountain hills, and with four days’ walk you’ll reach the coast and a brave village of rough-handed men and women who live from the sea. Take the road running to your right as you approach the crossroads, and you’ll be back at the High Hold of fabled Ellamon in no more than three hours. Take the path that runs away from the junction to your left, and seven days’ hike will finally bring you to the grand port of Kolhari, capital city of all Nevèrÿon—like in my story.’ Norema smiled. (That so famous city had not played much of a part in the tale, Pryn thought; though certainly she knew enough of Kolhari by other reports.) ‘Along with my tale, I think my gifts should stand a young woman like you, off to see the world, in good stead.’
‘Thank you,’ Pryn said, because her aunt, for all her bitterness, had taught her to be polite.
Some hours later, when Pryn was several miles along her chosen route, she stopped a minute. Of all the day’s marvels it was neither her own flight, nor the tale of the dragon and the sunken city, nor the food pack tied on her back—with twisted vines—which held her thoughts. She picked up a stick from the highway’s shoulder and scratched her name in its dust, new capital and eliding mark. She put the stick down. Again she read over her name, which seemed so new and wondrous and right.
Then she walked on.
An hour later a dead branch, blown out on the road by a mountain gust, obscured it beyond reading.