Return to Neveryon by Delany Samuel R

Author:Delany, Samuel R. [Delany, Samuel R.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780575119277
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2013-07-25T04:00:00+00:00

7. In that age when no mechanical reproduction had standardized the beautiful, in much of his desire Clodon’s wants in women were largely the usual for a male of his epoch, class, and condition. Like most men in Nevèrÿon, he wanted a woman who was young. Like most men in Nevèrÿon, he wanted a woman who was strong. Many men in Nevèrÿon would talk of wanting a woman as well who was submissive. Frequently though these same men hoped that she might have some spirit. Often these men’s brothers would laugh and declare they wished for nothing but a woman with spirit — though, as often, they hoped for one who would bend a bit to masculine directive. Which is to say, as far as spirit or submission went, Clodon felt just as ambiguously as one might expect a man to in such a time, in such a place.

But there were other details to Clodon’s ideal of pleasure that (Clodon was sure) set him aside from many. He could not, for example, say why or when he’d first developed his obsession with women’s hands. And not just the hands: it was something about their nails. You must understand that, in this long-ago distant land, the amount of labor rural life required from both men and women well up into what you and I would call the middle classes was not such as to encourage long nails on either gender. But even as a child, now and again Clodon would find himself watching some woman’s fingers, fascinated, when the nails simply grew forward enough to cover the crowns. Certainly the first woman whose hands had held his silent, if never-articulated, attention had been his cousin the bailiff’s wife. She’d been a shy, dark, gentle thing — and often ill. Clodon had been an intractable boy. But, in his early years, neighbors often noted how she could usually get him to do what she asked, when to his other relatives and friends he was simply and insistently recalcitrant. Clodon’s own treasured memory was, at age six or seven, sitting in her lap, under a tree, in the leafy shadow, playing with her fingers and touching the tips of his to the tips of hers, while she looked out over his head at the sunlight and told him stories of the nameless gods, which he paid no attention to but was happy. When puberty struck Clodon’s body with the hormones none in Nevèrÿon could have named, at eleven somehow the whole process expanded to include … feet! No, this had nothing to do with the nails.

It was the hare-lipped girl’s slatternly aunt on whom he’d first noticed it.

Clodon was loafing among some scrub on the sandy slope above the village, when he saw her come by, barefoot and a little stooped, carrying a basket on her hip with some shucks sticking up above it. As she passed, he found himself watching her naked ankles, and the way her feet, which were uncommonly narrow,

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