Neveryona Read Free

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, soshe 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
every
thing, 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 andscattered 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,