Neveryona by Samuel R. Delany Read Free Book Online Page A

leaned forward disgustedly to pat his horse’s neck. ‘She’s no different from you, boy – a stupid mountain kid run off from home to the city. I’ve a mind to turn you both loose and send you on your ways –’
    Pryn had a momentary image of herself stuck in this confusion with the young dolt.
    But the Fox said, ‘Come on, the two of you, and stop this!’ He turned his horse up the street; the two turned after him.
    Pryn watched them trot off – to be stopped another half-block on by more people crossing. People closed around Pryn. After she had been bumped three times, cursed twice, and ignored by what must have been fifty passers-by in the space of half a minute, she began to walk.
    Everyone else was walking.
    To stay still in such a rush was madness.
    Pryn walked – for hours. From time to time she sat: once on the steps in a doorway, once on a carved log bench beside a building. The tale-teller’s food had been finished the previous night and the package discarded; so far she’d only thought about food (and home!) when she’d passed the back door of a bread shop whose aromatic ovens flooded the alley with the odor of toasted grain.
    Walking, turning, walking, she wondered many times if she were on a street she’d walked before. Occasionally she
knew
she was, but at least five times, now, when she’d set out to rediscover a particular place she’d passedminutes or hours back, it became as impossible to find as if the remembered landmarks had sunk beneath the sea.
    Several workmen with dusty rags around their heads had opened up the street to uncover a great clay trough with planking laid across it, which ran out from under a building where half a dozen women were repairing a wall by daubing mud and straw on the stones with wooden paddles. (Now, she
had
passed them before …) A naked boy dragged along a wooden sledge heaped with laundry. A girl, easily the boy’s young sister and not wearing much more than he, now and again stooped behind to catch up a shirt or shift that flopped over the edge, or to push the wet clothes back in a pile when a rut shook them awry.
    Pryn found herself behind three women with the light hair of southern barbarians, their long dresses shrugged off their shoulders and bunched down at their waists, each with one hand up to steady a dripping water jar. Two carried them on their heads; one held hers on a shoulder.
    They turned in front of her, on to a street that sloped down from the avenue, and, as the shadow from the building moved a-slant terra-cotta jugs, thonged-up hair, and sunburned backs, Pryn followed. (No, she had
never
been on this street …) There were many less people walking these dark cobbles.
    ‘…
vevish nivu hrem’m har memish
…’ Pryn heard one woman say – or something like it.
    ‘…
nivu homyr avra’nos? Cevetaveset
…’ the second quipped. Two of the barbarians laughed.
    Pryn had heard the barbarian language before, in the Ellamon market, but knew little of its meaning. Whenever she heard it, she always wondered if she might get one of them to talk slowly enough to write it down, so that she could study it and learn of its barbaric intent.
    ‘…
hav nivu akra mik har’vor remvush
…’ retorted the second to a line Pryn had lost.
    All three laughed again.
    Two turned down an alley that, Pryn saw as she reached it, was only a shoulder-wide space between red mud walls. With the sun ahead of them, the two swaying silhouettes grew smaller and smaller.
    Ahead, the remaining woman took her jar from her shoulder and pushed through the hanging hide that served for a door in a wood-walled building.
    Pryn walked down the hill. Here, many cobbles were missing; some substance, dark and hard, with small stones stuck all over it, paved a dozen or so feet. A woman overtook her. Pryn turned to watch. The woman wore a dirty skirt, elaborately coiffed hair, and dark paint in two wing shapes around her eyes. It was very striking, the more so because Pryn –