One afternoon, Norema and two others of the favored few rambled with the old woman under the trees alongside the stream. For a while, above the sound of Venn’s stick, shushing through fallen leaves, Norema had been talking on about the trials of working in her parents’ boat yard—indeed, had been talking on for quite some time, and had just begun to wonder if for the last few minutes Venn had really heard. (Dell was arguing softly and intently with Enin, who wasn’t listening.) Venn stopped at a wide rock tabling into the water.
Gnats thrashed out in the sun beyond.
Venn, tapping her stick—rather nervously—said, suddenly and hoarsely: ‘I know something. I know how to tell you about it, but I don’t know how to tell you what it is. I can show you what it does, but I cannot show you the “what” itself. Come here, children. Out to the sunlight.’
Dell stopped talking; Enin started listening.
Norema felt embarrassed at her own prattling and smiled alertly to show she didn’t.
Her stick leaning in the crook of her arm, Venn reached around her many-pocketed orange robe. The shoulders were threadbare. The hem was stained with leaf dirt. ‘Come here.’ She beckoned Norema on to the stone with a sharp, brown chin. ‘What is this?’
A piece of reed paper? Venn’s brown fingers pecked in it and prodded it open. She held it up. The red marks across the paper, left to right, were Venn’s special signs for: a three-horned beetle, three horned lizards, and two crested parrots. Red meant she had observed them before noon.
‘You saw a three-horned beetle, three horned lizards, and two crested parrots in the morning—probably you were at the estuary, on the far bank; because the parrots never come over on this side. And it was probably yesterday morning, because it was raining the night before last and the lizards usually come out in the mornings after rain.’
‘That’s a very good reading.’ Venn smiled. ‘Now, Enin. Come out here, on the rock, and stand just so.’ The tall, short-haired boy stepped out, blinking. The mirror he wore strapped across his stomach flashed light down on Venn’s stained hem. (All the boys, for the last month, had taken to wearing the mirrored stomach plates.) ‘Norema,’ Venn said. ‘Come here and look at this now.’
Norema stepped up beside her old teacher.
‘Here,’ Venn said. ‘Here, girl. Hold the paper up beside your face, crouch down, and look at it in Enin’s belly.’
Norema took the paper and held it open beside her face; she had to stoop to a half-squat to see.
‘Now what is it?’
In the shiny, irregular-shaped plate, topped by Enin’s first chest hair and below which ran his shell belt, she saw her concentrating face and, beside it, in her fingers … ‘Of course, it’s backward,’ Norema said. When they painted the prow designs on her father’s boats, frequently for the more delicate work that could not be done with the cut-out stencils, the painters checked their outlines in mirrors. The reversal of the image made irregularities more apparent. ‘It goes wrong way forward.’
‘Read it,’ Venn said.
‘Um … crested parrots two, horned lizards … four … eh … no, three … a green … fish!’ Norema laughed. ‘But that’s because the sign for green fish is just the sign for horned beetle written reversed. That’s why I hesitated over the others … I think.’ She started to stand.
‘No,’ Venn said. ‘Keep looking. Dell, now you come stand here.’
Dell who was short and wore his hair in three long braids, stepped up beside Norema on the rock.
‘No,’ Venn said. ‘You stand over here behind Norema. Yes, that’s right. Here … Now, Norema, turn around and look at Dell’s mirror, until you can see in it the reflection in Enin’s.’
Norema, in her uncomfortable squat, turned to face the other boy’s stomach, with the bright plate thonged across it. ‘Wait a moment. No, there … Come on, Dell, move your hand …’ She squat-walked to the right, leaned to the left. ‘Enin, you move around that—no, the other way. No, not so much! There …’
‘Read what you see,’ Venn said.
‘But I …’ Norema, of course, had expected to see the message put back left to right, its signs in the proper order. But what, in the frame within a frame, she looked at was the back of her own head. And on the paper, held up beside it, written in black charcoal:
‘That great star clears the horizon two cups of water after the eighth hour.’ Norema stood up, laughed, and turned the paper over. What she had read in the second mirror had been written on the paper’s back. ‘I didn’t even know that was there,’ she said.
‘Which is the point,’ Venn said.
Then, of course, there was much unstrapping and restrapping of mirror thongs and repositioning on the rock, so that Enin and Dell could see the phenomenon of the changing words. When they had, and everyone had on their own clothes again, Venn said: ‘And of course I haven’t told you what I am trying to tell you about. No, not at all. I have just given you an example of it.’ As they walked from the rock, Venn beat in fallen leaves with her stick. ‘Let me give you another.’ She frowned at the ground, and for a few steps her stick was still. ‘Years ago, when I was about your age, girl—oh, maybe a year or two older—I had a fight with a sea monster. To this day I have no idea what kind of monster it was. I mean I’d never heard of it or seen one like it before; nor have I since. It was a moonlit night. I was seventeen, alone on my boat. It rose up between the rocks by which I was sailing from some uninhabited island’s deserted harbor and flung an arm across the boat, taking away the railing and rocking that side of the deck below water. It had as many eyes as arms, and on stalks just as long and as strong; and when one stalk wrapped around my leg, I hacked it off with my fishing knife. The beast slid back into the sea and the boat foundered away from it. The five feet of it just lay there on the deck, wriggling and twisting and coiling and uncoiling—for an hour.
‘I wanted to cut it up and see how its muscles worked once it calmed itself, but I just wasn’t up to catching it and tying it down. And when I came down from tying up part of the rigging that had been torn, it had wriggled between the rail break and fallen into the calm.’ Venn stepped gingerly and unsteadily among the large rocks and small branches fallen by the stream. ‘All through the experience, however, from the moment it hove up between the rocks, till … well, really, dawn next morning, when I was miles away, I did not know if I would live or die … for all I knew, it was following along after me to rise again. Even through all my curiosity about the tentacle, I lived those hours like someone who might be obliterated from the surface of the sea as a patch of foam is dispersed by a passing dolphin’s fluke. Does such fear make everything brighter, more intense, more vivid? I suppose so. It also makes everything exhausting—an exhaustion which, when I had got my boat back to the port here, ached to be filled with … words.’ Venn walked a few more silent steps. ‘So I told about it at the inn (that used to stand where the current one does before that building was blown down in the hurricane two summers before you were born, girl) over a bowl of hot fish broth. I was still getting gooseflesh. I told it to half a dozen, who, as I started to talk, gathered a dozen more around them, all their eyes wide and all their mouths gaping, and all their heads shaking, amazed. I told them how, as my boat passed among these certain rocks, a creature, all wriggling arms and eyes, rose up and flung itself toward me. I told of my broken rail and my flooded deck and my terror and my curiosity. But as I told them, as I watched them, I realized: While for me, the value of the experience I had lived through was that, for its duration, I had not known from moment to moment if I would live or die, for them the value of the telling was that, indeed, I had lived through it, that I had survived it, that here I was, safe and alive, confirmed as much by my solid presence as my stuttering voice and half incoherent account, running on and on about an experience during which I just happened not to have known the outcome.’ Venn laughed. ‘And what did I do with my sudden realization? I went on talking, and they went on listening. The more I tried to re
member the details, remember the moonlight a-slither on freckled scales, remember the fetid smell of cut muscle, remember the trail of bubbled mucus glistening on the planks, the sea water dripping from the splintered rail-end, gray outside with weathering, white splinters within, each detail recounted to convince them of what I had lived through—an experience in which my survival as a fact of it was outside any possible consideration—the more evidence they had, by my onrush of living talk, that I had lived through it, the more certain they were that I had survived something, though the “what” of it, just because of that certainty, was quite beyond them.
‘The innkeeper’s wife gave me blankets and I slept under the stairs that night with a bag of cedar chips for a pillow. And what did I think of, on and off between edgy dozings, till the window above me began to go blue? Another time I would have said I thought about what had happened to me. But it wasn’t that. I thought about what I said had happened to me. And slowly, remembering all my listeners’ reactions, I began to pick pieces from my own ramblings that they had seemed to recognize as true or accurate. And I began to put them in order so that these reactions would build as my reactions to the remembered experience had built. I mortared my descriptions together with explanations and directions for the experience of my listeners. And in the morning, when another group of wide-eyed men and women, who had heard of my adventures from those I had told the previous night, came and asked me what had happened, I told them … well, I told them essentially the story I told you. No stuttering, now; no suddenly remembered details. For now it was a story, like any other tale I have ever amused or frightened you with. And I was now much happier with the reaction of my listeners, for now that it was a story, the telling grew and directed their responses with a certain precision that at least followed the same form as my own experience on that two-days-previous terrifying night. But I will tell you here: For all her fleshy scales and eyes and slime, for all I use the same words to tell you of her, ordered and recalled in calmness, as I first used to babble of her in fear, she is an entirely different monster.’ Venn narrowed her eyes, smiling. ‘Do you understand?’
Norema frowned. ‘I … I think so.’
‘What happened to you,’ Dell said, ‘was like the signs on the paper.’
‘And what you told the first night,’ said Enin, ‘was like what we saw in the first mirror, with its meaning all backward.’
‘And what you told again the next morning,’ Norema said, feeling rather like it was expected of her and terribly uncomfortable with the expectation, ‘was like what we saw in the second mirror. Something else entirely, with its own meaning.’
‘As much as mirrors and monsters can be alike,’ mused Venn, whose sudden distraction seemed one with Norema’s discomfort. ‘Which brings me, girl, to what you were saying about your father.’
Norema blinked; she’d thought the subject abandoned.
‘What came to mind when you were talking about your father, and working in your father’s boat yard, was … well, another example, though perhaps the least illustrative: when we were young—Ah, I used to make plans for beautiful, marvelous, impossible boats. Your father would build models of them, when he was a boy. And once he told me that many of the things he learned from making those models were very important to the success of the real boats he builds today. My plans, his models, and his later boats, you see, are merely another example of what I am talking about. And then, you see, something else came to mind—which may finally tell you something about your father’s business as well as what I am trying to tell you. For it is yet another example: I was thinking about the Rulvyn tribes, back in the island’s hills. They are a very shy, very proud people, and they almost never come down to the shore villages. The men hunt geese and wild goats; the women provide the bulk of the food by growing turnips and other roots, fruits, and a few leaf vegetables; and when one considers the amount of hours actually spent at the various tasks—if one marked down names and made marks for the hours each actually spent working (for I did that once when I was there)—the women do far and above more work than the men toward keeping the tribe alive. But because they do not come much to the sea and they have no fish, meat is an important food to them. Because it is an important food, the hunting men are looked upon as rather prestigious creatures. Groups of women share a single hunter, who goes out with a group of hunters and brings back meat for the women. The women make pots and baskets and clothes and jewelry, which they trade with each other; they build the houses, grow and cook the food; indeed—except for very circumscribed, prestige decisions—the women control the tribe. Or at least they used to. You all have heard the tales from those who have recently gone up into the hills to spend time among the Rulvyn; our shore people come back and shake their heads, look dour, and say things are not well with the mountain folk. When I was last there, not three years ago, I walked and looked and listened and made my signs on reed paper in order to mark and remember what I heard and saw. Up till a few years ago, the Rulvyn were tribes who lived entirely by their women exchanging goods and work with other women for whatever goods and work they needed. Even if meat were part of the exchange, the men would bring it to the women, who would then do the actual bartering. From time to time men would exchange weapons, but this was still part of a prestigious ritual, not the basis of daily life. The Rulvyn were simple, proud, insular—like an island within our island.
‘But our people, here at the shore, with our bigger and bigger boats, for three generations now have been using the coins that come from Nevèrÿon to make our exchanges with. And as more and more of us went back into the hills to trade with the Rulvyn, the Rulvyn began to acquire money; and finally began to use money among themselves in order to make their exchanges. Now one of the prestige tasks of the men is to make trades with strangers to the tribe—whereas the women do all the trading and exchanging within the tribe. Three generations ago, such trading with outsiders might occur once a year, or even once in five. And it was a sumptuous tribal event. But now, perhaps once a month someone from the village travels up into the hills, and once a year at least a small party of Rulvyn men, in their colorful shoulder furs and chin feathers, come down to the port; you have all gathered at the edge of the net houses to peek at them strolling the docks. Because money was exotic as well as part of the prestige process of trading with foreigners, money went primarily to the men of the society; and indeed both the men and women of the tribe at first agreed that money ought to be the province of men, just as hunting was. And the Rulvyn began to use money among themselves.
‘Now money, when it moves into a new tribe, very quickly creates an image of the food, craft, and work there: it gathers around them, molds to them, stays away from the places where none are to be found, and clots near the positions where much wealth occurs. Yet, like a mirror image, it is reversed just as surely as the writing on a piece of paper is reversed when you read its reflection on a boy’s belly. For both in time and space, where money is, food, work, and craft are not: where money is, food, work, and craft either will shortly be, or in the recent past were. But the actual place where the coin sits is a place where wealth may just have passed from or may soon pass into, but where it cannot be now—by the whole purpose of money as an exchange object. When money came among the Rulvyn, something very strange happened: Before money came, a woman with strength, skills, or goods could exchange them directly with another woman for whatever she needed. She who did the most work and did it the best was the most powerful woman. Now, the same woman had to go to someone with money, frequently a man, exchange her goods for money, and then exchange the money for what she needed. But if there was no money available, all her strength and skill and goods gave her no power at all—and she might as well not have had them. Among the Rulvyn before money, a strong woman married a prestigious hunter; then another strong woman would join them in marriage—frequently her friend—and the family would grow. Now that money has come, a prestigious hunter must first amass money—for what
woman would marry a man in such a system who did not have money—and then go looking for good, strong workers to marry … for that is the only way he can amass more money. The women are unhappy, for now the men make them work, pit them against each other, blatantly and subtly chide them with the work of their co-wives. In the Rulvyn before money, the prestige granted the hunter was a compensation for his lack of social power. Now that money has come, prestige has become a sign of social power, as surely as the double stroke I make on the clay jar means that it contains forked ginger roots. And are the men happy? The Rulvyn men are strong, beautiful, proud, and their concerns were the concerns of hunters, the concerns of prestige. But since they have taken over the handling of money—with great diligence and responsibility, I might add, for they are proud men—now, even though the women still do all the work, the men are suddenly responsible for the livelihood of all their wives—rather than several wives sharing the responsibility for the care and feeding of a single hunter. The simple job of supplying their wives with a tri-weekly piece of prestigious food has become much more complex. And another sad truth is simply that the temperament needed to be a good handler of money is frequently the very opposite of the temperament needed to be a good hunter. When I went up into the hills last to talk to my Rulvyn friends, I found that since money has come, the young women are afraid of the men. The women want good hunters; but because they understand real power, they know that they must have good money masters.