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 — ’