Powers

♦ 7 ♦

I am lying in the dark in a strange, strong-smelling bed. Not far above my face is a ceiling, a low vault of raw black rock. Beside me lies something warm, pressing heavily against my leg. It raises its head, a long, grey head, grim black lips, dark eyes that gaze across me: a dog, a wolf? I remembered this many times, remembered waking up with the dog or wolf pressed close beside me, lying among rank-smelling furs in the dark place with a rock ceiling, a cave it must be. I remember it now. I am lying there now. The dog gives a whining groan and gets up, steps over me. Someone speaks to it, then comes and crouches beside me and speaks to me, but I don’t understand what he says. I don’t know who he is, who I am. I can’t lift my head. I can’t lift my hand. I am weak, empty, nothing. I remember nothing.

I will tell you what happened in the order it happened, as historians do, but there is deep untruth in doing so. I did not live my life as history is written. My mind used to leap ahead, remembering what had not yet come to pass; now, what was past was lost to me. What I tell you now, it took me a long time to find again. Memory hid from me and buried itself in darkness, as I lay buried in that dark place, that cave.

It was early in the morning, in the first warmth of spring. The open inner courtyards of Arcamand were cheerful in the sunlight.

“Where’s Sallo? Oh, Sallo and Ris both went off with Torm-di, Gav.” “With Torm-di?”

“Yes. He took them off to the Hot Wells. Last night, pretty late.”

Falli was talking to me. Falli was the gate guard to the silk rooms. She sat in the western court with her spinning, a heavy, slow-spoken woman who had long ago been one of the Father’s gift-girls. She made a reverence whenever she spoke of the Father or the Mother or any of the Family or any other wellborn family. She worshipped them as gods. People used to laugh at her for it—“Falli thinks they’re already Ancestors,” Iemmer said. Falli was a foolish woman. What foolish thing had she just said, bobbing her head when she said “Torm-di"—that Torm had taken Ris and my sister to the Hot Wells?

The Hot Wells belonged to Corric Runda, son of the Senator Granoc Runda, the wealthiest and most powerful man in the government of Etra. Corric had wanted to marry our Astano, and failed, but seemingly he held no grudge; lately he’d become Torm’s friend or patron. Torm was always with him and his circle of young, rich men. Young, rich men could live the high life, now that Etra was free and prosperous again—endless feasts, women, drinking parties that ended up as riots in the city streets…A strange friendship for Torm, it seemed to some of us, with his stiff grim ways and his warrior’s training, but Corric had taken a fancy to him, insisted on having him; and the Father approved of the friendship, encouraging it as a good thing for the Family, for the Arca interest with the House of Runda. Young men would be young men, there would be women and drinking and so on, there was no harm in it, nothing would go really wrong.

Tib, a prentice cook now, followed Hoby about like a dog when Ho-by was at Arcamand. And Tib told us the stories Hoby told him. Corric and his friends liked to get Torm drunk because he went crazy when he was drunk and would do anything they dared him to do—fence with three men at once, fight a bear, tear off his clothes and dance naked on the Senate steps till he fell down in a foaming fit. They thought Torm was wonderful, Hoby said, they all admired him. To some of us it sounded as if they used him as a clown, for entertainment, like the dwarfs Corric kept as wrestlers, or his half-witted, one-eyed, giant bodyguard Hum. But it wasn’t like that at all, according to Hoby as related by Tib. Hoby said that Corric Runda took lessons in swordfighting from Torm, treating him as a master of the art. He said all Corric’s friends respected Torm, They feared his great strength. They liked him to run wild because then everybody feared him and them.

“Torm-di is young,” Everra said. “Let him have his fling while he’s young. He’ll be the wiser for it when he’s older. The Father knows that. He had his wild days too.”

The Runda estate called the Hot Wells was a mile or so from Etra in the rich grainlands west of the city. The Senator built a grand new house there and gave it to his son Corric. Hoby told Tib all about it and Tib told us: the luxurious chambers, the silk rooms full of women, the courts full of flowers, and the wonderful bathing pool in a back court—the water came up from a hot spring and was always the temperature of blood, but it was transparent blue-green, and peacocks spread their plumage beside it on pavements of green and purple marble… Hoby had been there many times as Torm’s bodyguard. All these young noblemen had bodyguards, it was the fashion; Corric had three besides the giant, Torm had bought a second one recently. The bodyguards were invited to share the women in the silk rooms at the Hot Wells, to take their pick of the food and the women, after their masters, of course. Hoby had swum in the warm pool. He told Tib all about the pool, about the women, about the food—minced livers of capon, the tongues of unborn lambs.

So when Falli said to me that Torm had taken Ris and Sallo to the Hot Wells, though my mind seemed blank as if I’d run into a stone wall and been stunned, I went after a little while to the kitchens and looked for Tib. I thought he might know something from Hoby. I don’t know what I thought he might know. He knew nothing. When I told him what Falli had said, he looked taken aback for a moment, dismayed. Then he said, “There are a lot of women there, the Rundas keep dozens of slave women there. Torm just took the girls there to have a good time.”

I don’t know what I answered, but it made Tib go sullen and defensive. “Look, Gav, maybe you’re teacher’s pet and all, but remember, after all, Sal and Ris are gift-girls.”

“They weren’t given to Torm,” I said. I spoke slowly, because my mind was still blank and slow. “Ris is a virgin. Sallo was given to Ya-ven. Torm can’t take them out of the house. He can’t have taken them there. The Mother would never allow it.”

Tib shrugged. “Maybe Falli got the story mixed up,” he said, and turned away to his work.

I went to Iemmer and told her what Falli said. I repeated what I’d said to Tib—that it could not be: the Mother would not allow it.

Iemmer, who like so many people since the siege now looked much older than she was, said nothing at all for a while. Then only a great “Ah,” and shook her head, again and again.

“Oh, this is—This is not good,” she said. “I hope, I hope Falli is wrong. She must be. How could she let him take off the girls without permission? I’ll speak with her. And with other women in the silk rooms. Oh, Sallo!” She had always loved my sister best of all the girls. “No, it can’t be,” she said with more energy. “Of course you’re right, Mother Falimer-io wouldn’t allow it. Never. Yaven-di’s Sallo! And little Ris! No, no, no. That suet-headed Falli has got something mixed up. I’ll go get this straight right now.”

I was used to trusting Iemmer, who generally did get things straight. I went off to the schoolroom and put my young pupils through their drills and recitations. I kept my mind from thinking until the morning was over. I went to the refectory. People were talking, a group of them, men and women. “No,” Tan was saying, “I put the horses in myself. He took them off in the closed car, with Hoby and that lout he bought from the Rundas in with them, and himself driving the horses.”

“Well, if the Mother let them go, there’s no harm in it,” Ennumer said in her high vague voice.

“Of course the Mother let them go!” said another woman, but Tan, who was second hostler now, shook his head and said, “They were bundled up like a lot of washing in sacks. I didn’t know who they were, even, till Sallo pokes out her head and tries to shout out something. Then Hoby pushes her back into the car like a sack of meal and bang goes the door and off they go at a gallop.”

“A prank, like,” one of the older men said.

“A prank that’ll get Sonny-di and Twinny into some trouble with Daddy-di, maybe!” Tan said savagely. He saw me then. His dark eyes locked on mine. “Gav,” he said. “You know anything about it? Did Sallo talk to you?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t speak.

“Ah, it’ll be all right,” Tan said, after a moment. “A prank, like uncle said. A damn fool stupid joke. They’ll be back this evening.”

I stood there with the others, but it was as if everything and everyone moved away from me and I stood alone in a place where there was nothing and no one. I moved through the halls and courts of Arcamand with an emptiness around me. Voices came to me from a distance.

The emptiness closed in and became dark, a low rough roof of black stone, a cave.

“I know things,” Sallo said to me. “And I know I know them. We Marsh people, we have our powers!” And she laughed. Her bright eyes shone.

I knew she was dead before they sent for me, before Everra told me. They thought it proper that Everra should be the one to tell me.

An accident, last night, in the pool at the Hot Wells. A sad accident, a terrible thing, Everra said, tears in his eyes.

“An accident,” I said.

He said Sallo had been drowned—had drowned, he corrected himself—had drowned, as the young men, who had drunk too much and gone past all decency, were playing with the girls in the pool.

“The pool of warm water,” I said, “where there are peacocks on the marble.”

Yes, my teacher said, looking up at me with tear-wet eyes. He seemed to me to have a sly, cringing expression, as if he was ashamed of himself for doing something he should not have done but would not confess, like a schoolboy.

“Ris is home,” he said, “with the women in the silk rooms. She is in a lamentable state, poor girl. Not injured, but… It was madness, madness. We know that Torm-di has always—has always had this frenzy that comes upon him—but to take the girls out of the house! To take them there, among those men! Madness, madness. Oh the shame, the shame, the pity of it, oh, my poor Gavir,” and my teacher bowed his grey head before me, hiding his wet eyes and cringing face. “And what will Yaven-di say!” he cried.

I went through the halls, past the room of the Ancestors, to the library, and sat there a while alone. The emptiness was around me, the silence. I asked Sallo to come to me, but no one came. “Sister,” I said aloud, but I could not hear my voice.

Then I thought, and it was perfectly clear to me, that if she had been drowned she would be lying on the floor of the pool of green water warm as blood. If she was not there, where was she? She could not be there, so she could not have been drowned.

I went looking for her. I went to the silk rooms, to the western court. I said to women I met there, “I’m looking for my sister.”

I had forgotten who the women were, the people that took me to her, but I knew her.

She was lying among white cloths that covered her up. Her face, which was all I could see, was not rosy brown but greyish, with a dark bruise across one cheek. Her eyes were closed, and she looked small and tired. I knelt beside her, and they let me be there.

I remember that they came and said, “The Mother has sent for you, Gavir,” as if this was a solemn, important thing. I kissed Sallo and told her I’d be back soon, I went with them.

They took me through the familiar corridors to the Mother’s apartments, which I knew only from outside; Sallo was allowed in to sweep the Mother’s rooms, but not I; I only swept the hallways there. She was waiting for me, tall in her long robes, the Mother of Arcamand. “We are so sorry, so sorry, Gavir, for your sister’s death,” she said in her beautiful voice. “Such a tragic accident. Such a sweet girl. I do not know how I am ever to tell my son Yaven. It will be a bitter grief to him. I know you loved your sister. I loved her too. I hope the knowledge of that will be some comfort to you. And this.” She put into my hands a small heavy pouch of silk. “I will send my own women to her funeral,” she said, gazing earnestly at me. “Our hearts are broken for our sweet Sallo.”

I reverenced her and stood there. The people came and took me away again.

They would not take me back to Sallo. I never saw her face again, so I had to remember it greyish, bruised, and tired. I didn’t want to remember it that way, so I turned away from the memory, I forgot it.

They took me back to my teacher, but he did. not want me nor I him. As soon as I saw him, words broke out of me—“Will they punish Torm? Will they punish him?”

Everra started back as if afraid of me. “Be calm, Gavir, be calm,” he said placatingly.

“Will they punish him?”

“For the death of a slave girl?”

Around his words silence spread out. Silence enlarged around me, wider and deeper, I was in a pool, at the bottom of a pool, not of water but of silence and emptiness, and it went on to the end of the world. I could not breathe the air, but I breathed that emptiness.

Everra was talking. I saw his mouth open and shut. His eyes glistened. An old grey-haired man opening and shutting his mouth. I turned away.

There was a wall across my mind. On the other side of the wall was what I couldn’t remember because it hadn’t happened. I had never been able to forget, but now I could. I could forget days, nights, weeks. I could forget people. I could forget everything I’d lost, because I’d never had it.

But I remember the burial ground when I stand there, very early the next morning, just as day lightens the sky. I remember it because I’ve remembered it before.

When we buried old Gammy, when we buried little Miv, I remember standing there in the green rain of the willows, just outside the walls, by the river, and wondering who we were burying on this other morning.

It must be someone important, for all the Mother’s personal serving women are there in their white mourning garments, hiding their faces in their long shawls, and the body is wrapped in beautiful white silk, and Iemmer is weeping aloud. She can’t say the prayer to Ennu-Me. When she tries to, she makes a shrieking wail that tears a horrible, raw hole in the silence, so that now other women, weeping too, have gone to her to hold and console her.

I stand near the water and watch how it eats at the riverbank, lapping and gnawing at the earth, undercutting the bank, eating away at it so that the grass overhangs it, the white roots of the grass dangling down into the air above the water. If you looked in the earth of the bank you’d find white bones thin as roots, bones of little children buried there where the water would come and eat their graves.

A woman stood not far from me, not with the other women. A long, ragged shawl was pulled over her head and hid her face, but she looked at me once. It was Sotur. I know that. I remember, for a little while.

When she and the other women were gone, there were some people around me, men, and I asked them if I could stay there in the cemetery. One of them was Tan, the stableman, who was kind to me when we were boys. He was kind to me then. He put his hand on my shoulder. “You’ll be back in a bit, then?”

I nodded.

His lips were pinched together to keep from trembling. He said, “She was the sweetest girl I ever knew, Gav.”

He went off with the others. There was nobody in the cemetery now. They had put the green sod back over the grave as well as they could so that it hardly showed among all the other graves, but it didn’t matter, since the river would wash all the graves away and there would be nothing left but a few white rags twisting in the current going to the sea. I walked away from the grave, upstream along the Nisas, under the willows.

The way narrowed to a path between the city wall and the river, and then I was at the River Gate, I waited for the market traffic coming into the city across the bridge to pass, heavy wagons drawn by white oxen, little carts pulled by a donkey or by a slave. At last there was a space among them so I could cross the roadway. I went on up the west bank of the Nisas.

The path was pleasant, wandering nearer and farther from the river-bank, passing the small gardens that thrifty freemen planted and tended. Some old men were already in their plots, hoeing, weeding, enjoying the mild spring morning, the cloudy sunrise. I walked on into the silence, the empty world. I walked under a low ceiling of raw black rock into the dark.

There is much I will never remember of the days after that day. When at last I learned forgetting, I learned it very quickly and all too well. What fragments I can find of those days may be memories or may not, they may be the other kind of remembering that I do, of times that have not come and places I have not yet been. I lived where I was and where I was not, all those days, all that time, a month, two months. I wasn’t walking away from Arcamand, because there was nothing behind me but a wall, and I’d forgotten most of what lay on the other side of it. There was nothing ahead of me at all.

I walked. Who walked with me? Ennu, who guides us in death? or Luck, who is deaf in the ear you pray to? The way took me. If there was a path I followed it, if there was a bridge I crossed it, if there was a village and I smelled food and was hungry, I went and bought food. In my pocket, ever since it was given to me, I had carried the little silk purse as full and heavy with money as a heart is full and heavy with blood. Six silver pieces, eight eagles, twenty half-bronzes, nine quarter-bronzes. I counted them first as I sat by the Nisas, hidden among flowering shrubs and high grass. In the villages I spent only the quarter-bronzes. Even they were more than many people could change. Villagers and farmers gave me extra food when they could not give me pennies. Few people grudged me food, and some would rather give it than sell it to me. I wore white, the white of mourning, and I spoke as educated men of the city speak, and when they said, “Where are you going, di?” I said, “I am going to bury my sister,”

“Poor boy,” I heard women say. Sometimes little children ran after me shouting, “crazy! crazy!” but they never came close to me.

I wasn’t robbed by the poor people I went among because I had no thought of being robbed, no fear of it. If I had been robbed it wouldn’t have mattered to me at all. When you have nothing to pray for, that’s when Luck hears you.

If Arcamand had sought their runaway slave then, they would have found me easily enough. I didn’t hide. Anyone along the Nisas could have put them on my trail. Probably at Arcamand they said to one another that Gavir had drowned himself that morning at the slave cemetery after the others left, that he had taken a heavy stone in his arms and walked out into the river. Instead I took the Mother’s silken purse heavy with money because it was in my pocket, and walked out into the empty world because it didn’t occur to me to take a stone and walk into the river. It didn’t matter where I walked. The ways were all the same. There was only one way I could not go, and that was back.

I crossed the Nisas somewhere. The little roads between villages took me round and about, one direction then another. One day I saw the heads of high, round, green hills ahead of me. I had wandered onto the Ventine Road. If I kept on it that road would take me up into the hills, to the farm, to Sentas. Those names and places came to me out of the forgetting. I remembered Sentas, the farm, I remembered someone who lived there: the farm slave Comy.

I sat down in the shade of an oak and ate some bread someone had given me. Thinking was a slow business for me then, it took a long time. Comy had been a friend. I thought I could go up to the farm and stay there. All the house slaves knew me, they’d treat me well. Comy would fish with me.

Maybe the farm had been burned to the ground when Casicar invaded, the orchards hacked down, the vines torn out.

Maybe I could live in Sentas, as if it were a real place.

All the slow, stupid thoughts went by and I got up and turned my back on the road to Vente. I walked between two fields on a lane that went northeast.

The lane took me to a road, narrow and rutted, with very few people on it. It kept going, leading away from things I remembered and wanted to forget, and I kept going on it. There was a town where I bought food in the market, enough for several days, and bought a rough brown blanket I could use for a bed at night. Later there was a desolate village where the dogs came out and barked and kept me from stopping there. But there was nothing to stop for.

After that village the road dwindled to a footpath. No crops were planted on the rolling hills. Sheep grazed, scattered out on the slopes, and their tall grey guard dog would stand up and watch me as I passed. Trees grew thick in the dales between the hills. I slept in those groves, drinking from the small streams that ran down among them. When I had no more food, for a while I looked for something to eat. It was too early for anything but a few tiny strawberries, and I did not know what to look for. I gave up looking and went on walking up the path between the hills. Hunger is painful. There was a thought in my head, not a memory, only a thought, that while I ate so well with the priests of the Shrine, there was someone who had not had enough to eat, so that the baby starved in her womb, and so now it was my turn to go hungry. It was only fair.

The distance I walked each day got shorter. I sat down often in the hot sunshine among the wild grasses. The flowering grasses were beautiful in their diversity. I would watch the little flies and bees in the air, or remember what had happened or not happened, as if it were all one dream. The day would pass, the sun would pass on its great path across the sky, before I got up and trudged on looking for a place to sleep. I lost the path one day and after that followed nothing but the folds of the hills.

I was going slowly down a slope to find the stream at the bottom in the early twilight, feeling my legs shake under me, when something came rushing at me from behind and I felt my breath go out of me as the trees whirled around in a burst of light.

Some time after that I was lying in a strange, strong-smelling bed of furs. Not far above my face was a ceiling, a low vault of raw black rock. It was almost dark. Beside me something warm pressed against my leg, a big animal. It raised its head, a dog’s long, grey, heavy head, grim black lips, dark eyes that gazed across me. It made a whining groan and got up and stepped over my legs. Someone spoke to it, then came and crouched down beside me. He spoke to me but I didn’t understand for a long time. I stared at him in the weak light that seemed to glance and reflect off the black rocks on the floor of the cave. I could see the whites of his eyes clearly, and the grey-black hair that stuck out in shaggy clumps around his dark face. He smelled stronger than the dirty, half-cured furs of the bed. He brought me water in a cup made of bark, and helped me drink, for I couldn’t lift my head.

Most of the time I lay in the low cave room, I had no memories of any other place or time. I was there, only there. I was alone, except when the dog was with me, lying by my left leg. Sometimes it raised its head and stared into the dark air. It never looked into my face. When the man came stooping into the room, the dog stood up and went to him, putting its long nose into his hand, and then went out. Later it would come back with him or by itself, step over me, turn round once, and lie down by my leg. Its name was Guard.

The man’s name was Cuga or Cuha. Sometimes he said one, sometimes the other. He talked strangely, deep in his throat, as if something obstructed his voice, which came out as if through rocks. When he came, he would sit down by me, give me fresh water, and offer me food: usually thin strips of smoke-dried meat or fish, sometimes a few berries as they came ripe. He never gave me much at a time. “What were you doing then, starving?” he said. He talked a good deal when he was with me, and often I heard him in the other part of the cave talking to himself or to the dog, the same low gargling broken stream of words never waiting for an answer.

To me he said, “What did you want to go starving for anyhow? There’s food. Food where you find it. What brought you up here? I thought you was from Derram. I thought they was after me again. I followed you, you know. I followed you and watched. I can watch all day. I told Guard, Lay low. You got up and I thought you was going on, but then you come straight down here, straight to my door, what am I to do, man? I’m behind you, I got my stick in hand, and so I hit you on the head, whack!” and he pantomimed a tremendous blow and laughed, showing his brown, wide-spaced teeth. “You never knew I was there, did you? I killed him, I thought, I killed him. You went down like a dead branch, there you was, I killed him. So much for Derram! So then I take a look and it’s a kid. Sampa, Sampa, I gone and killed a kid! No, not dead. Didn’t even break his fool egg head. But he’s down like a dead branch. A kid. I picked you up with one hand like a fawn. I’m strong, you know. They all know that. They don’t come here. What did you come here for, boy? What brought you? What was you starving for? Lying there with ten thousand moneys in your purse! Bronzes, silvers, the faces of gods! Rich as King Cumbelo! What was you starving for? What sort of place is this to come with all those moneys? You going to buy deer from Lady Iene? Are you crazy, boy?”

He nodded. “You are, you are," Then he chuckled and said, “So am I, boy. Crazy Cuga.” He chuckled again and gave me a sliver of sweet fibrous meat, bitter with smoke and ash. I slowly chewed at it, my mouth full of the juices of hunger.

That was all there was for a while, my hunger, the vivid taste of the food he doled out to me, his broken voice talking, the black rock roof above my face, the reek of smoke and fur, the dog pressed against my leg. Then I could sit up. Then I could crawl to the entrance of the rock chamber, and discover that it was the innermost, lowest one of several such chambers in the cave which Cuga had made his house. Slowly I explored them. In some you could stand up, at least in the center, and the largest room was quite spacious, though its floor was a jumble of big stones. The black rock of the cave was porous and cracked, and light came through cracks and crevices from above, making a smoky dimness. When I first went out, the sunlight blinded me with great dazzling bursts of red and gold, and the air smelled sweet as honey.

From outside the cave, even at its very entrance, you could not see it, only a massive slant of rocks like a dry waterfall all overgrown with creepers and fern.

Cuga’s possessions were the deerskins and rabbit furs he had crudely cured; some bark cups; some spoons and other implements he had whittled of alderwood; a roll of fine sinew; and his treasures—a metal box half full of dirty salt crystals, a tinderbox for fire making, and two horn-handled hunter’s knives of good steel, which he kept sharp on a fine-grained river pebble. Of these treasures he was fiercely jealous, suspicious of me, hiding them from me. I never knew where he kept the salt. The first time he had to bring out one of the knives where I could see it, he flourished it at me snarling and said in his choked voice, “Don’t touch it, don’t touch it, or by the Destroyer I’ll cut out your heart with it.”

“I won’t touch it,” I said.

“It’ll turn and cut your throat of itself if you do.” “I never will.”

“You’re a liar,” he said. “Liars, men are liars.” Sometimes he would say a thing like that over and over, and would say nothing else all day: Men are liars, men are liars… Keep away, keep out! Keep away, keep out!… At other times his talk was sane enough.

I had little to say, and that seemed to suit him. He talked to me as he did to the dog, recounting his daily expeditions through the woods to his rabbit snares and fishing holes and berry patches, everything he had caught or seen or smelled or heard. I listened just as the dog did to these long tales, intently, not interrupting.

“You’re a runaway,” he said to me one evening as we sat out looking up through the leaves at the heavy, bright stars of August. “House slave, brought up soft. You run away. You think I’m a slave, don’t you? Oh no. Oh no. You want runaways? You go on north, go on to the forest, that’s where they are. I got nothing to do with them. Liars, thieves. I’m a free man. I was born free. I don’t want to mix with them. Nor the farmers. Nor the townsfolk, Sampa destroy them, liars, cheats, thieves. All of them liars, cheats, thieves.”

“How do you know I’m a slave?” I asked.

“What else could you be?” he said with his dark grin and quick, canny look.

I didn’t know.

“I come here to be free of them, all of them,” Cuga said. “They call me the wild man, the hermit, they’re afraid of me. They leave me be. Cuga the hermit! They keep away. They keep out.”

I said, “You’re the Master of Cugamand.”

He sat for a while in silence and then he broke out in his choked, chuckling laugh, and slapped his thigh with his big, heavy hand. He was a big man, and very strong, though he must have been fifty or more. “Say it again,” he said.

“You’re the Master of Cugamand.”

“That I am! That I am! This is my domain and I’m the master here! By the Destroyer, that’s the truth. I met a man that speaks truth! By the Destroyer! A man that speaks truth! He come here and how do I welcome him? Smash his head in with a stick! How’s that for a greeting? Welcome to Cugamand!” And he laughed for a long time. He would be silent and then laugh again, and then again. At last he looked over at me through the grey starlight and said, “You’re a free man here. Trust me.”

I said, “I trust you.”

Cuga lived in filth and never bathed, and his carelessly tanned hides and furs stank and rotted; but he was meticulous in preserving and storing food. He smoke-dried the meat of all the larger animals he caught—rabbits, hares, the occasional fawn—and hung it from the roof of the fireplace room of the cave. He set snares for the little creatures of the grasslands too, wood rats, even harvest mice, and those he broiled on the fire and ate fresh. His snares were wonderfully clever and his patience endless, but he had no luck with his hooks and lines and seldom caught a fish big enough to be worth smoking. I could help him there. The sinew that was all he had for lines softened in the water; I pulled out some of the linen warp threads from the end of my brown blanket, and using them with the fine bone hooks he carved, I caught some big perch and bass as well as the little brown trout that swarmed in the pools of the stream. He showed me how to dry and smoke the fish. Aside from that I was of little use to him. He did not want me with him on his expeditions. Often he ignored me entirely all day long, lost in his muttered repetitions, but when he ate he always shared his food with me and with Guard.

I never asked him why he’d taken me in and kept me alive. It didn’t occur to me as a question. I never asked him any questions but one. I asked where Guard came from.

“Sheepdog bitch,” he said. “Had her litter up over there east on the rocky slopes. I seen the pups playing. Thought they was wolves, went over there with my knife to dig ’em out and cut their throats. I just got to the den and the bitch come round the hill, and she was going to go for me, but I says hey now, hey there, mother, I’ll kill a wolf but never hurt a dog, will I? And she shows her teeth”—he showed his brown teeth in a grinning snarl—“and goes into the den. And so I go back and back, and we get to know each other, and she brings the pups out, and I watch ’em play. And this one and I got on. So he come away with me. I go back there sometimes. She’s got a litter there now.”

He never asked me any questions at all.

If he had, I would have had no answers. When I found myself remembering anything, I turned away from it to whatever was under my eyes and in my hands and lived in that only. I had none of the rememberings, the visions I used to have. If I dreamed in sleep, I did not remember the dreams when I woke.

The light in the mornings was more golden, the days ending sooner, the nights growing cool. The Master of Cugamand, sitting across a small fire from me in the hearth room of his cave, slid a whole troutlet off the stick into his mouth, chewed a while, swallowed, wiped his hands on his naked, dirt-caked chest, and said, “Cold here in winter. You’d be dead of it.”

I said nothing. He knew what he was talking about.

“You go on.”

After a long time I said, “Nowhere to go, Cuga.”

“Oh yes. Oh yes. The woods, that’s where you go.” He nodded towards the north. “The woods. Daneran. The big forest. No end to it they say. And no slave takers there. Oh no. No slave takers. Just the men of the woods. That’s where to go.”

“No roof,” I said, and put another bit of bark on the fire.

“Oh yes. Oh yes. They live soft there. Roofs and walls and all. Beds and coats and all. They know me, I know them. We don’t trouble each other. They know me. They keep away.” He scowled and went off into one of his mutterings, Keep away, keep out…

Next morning he shook me awake early. On the flat stone in front of the cave entrance he had set out my brown blanket, the silk purse swollen with money, a filthy fur cape he had given me a while ago, and a packet of dried meat. “Come on,” he said.

I stood still. His face went watchful and grim.

“Keep this for me,” I said, holding out the silk purse.

He chewed his lip.

“Don’t want to be killed for it, eh?” he said finally, and I nodded. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe they would. Thieves, cheats… I don’t want this stuff. Where’d I keep it from thieves?” “In your salt box,” I said.

He glared. “Where’s that?” he snapped, fiercely suspicious.

I shrugged again. “I don’t know. I never found it. Nobody could.”

That made him laugh, slowly, opening his mouth wide. “I know,” he said. “I know! All right.”

The heavy, stained, discolored purse was swallowed up in his big hand. He went back into the cave with it and was gone some while. He came out and nodded at me. “Come on,” he said. And he set off at his loping walk that seemed slow but ate up the miles.

I was fit again, and could keep up with him all day, though by evening I was weary and footsore.

At the last stream we came to he told me to drink deep. We crossed it, climbed a long slope, and halted on the top of the hill, the last of the hills. From it the land fell slowly away into vast forest, treetops going on and on into blue dimness, no end to them. The sun had not set, but the shadows were long,

Cuga was busy immediately; he gathered wood and built a fire, a large one, using green wood, not dry. The smoke went curling up into the clear sky. “All right,” he said. “They’ll come.” And he turned to go back as we had come.

“Wait,” I said.

He stopped, impatient. “Just wait,” he said. “They’ll be here.” “I’ll come back, Cuga.”

He shook his head angrily and went off, striding through the dry grass, holding his body in a slight crouch. In a minute he was out of sight through the trees under the crest of the hill. Over the dark tree-tops the sunset flamed.

I slept alone by the fire on the hilltop that night, wrapped in my blanket and the fur cape. The smoky stink of the fur was pleasant to me. I had been healed in that stink.

I waked again and again in the night. Once I built up the fire, as a signal, not for warmth. Towards morning I dreamed: I was sleeping in Sentas, in the fortress of dreams. The others were there with me. I heard their soft voices murmuring in the dark. One of the girls laughed… I woke and remembered the dream. I clung to it, trying to stay in it. But I was thirsty, thirst had waked me. Telling myself I’d go look for water at the foot of the hill as soon as it was light, I lay waiting for the light.

We never slept in Sentas, I thought. We always slept out near the farmhouse, under the trees. We always saw the stars through the leaves. We talked about going out to Sentas to sleep but we never did.

♦ 8 ♦

Four of them were around me before I saw one of them. I was barely awake. I had sat up, on the open hillside by the dead fire, alone. They were around me, without movement, out of the grass, out of the dim grey air of early dawn. I looked from one to the next and sat still.

They were armed, not like soldiers but with short bows and long knives. Two carried five-foot staffs. They looked grim.

One of them finally spoke in a soft, hoarse voice, almost a whisper.

“Fire out?”

I nodded.

He went and kicked at the few half-burnt sticks left, trampled them carefully, felt them with his hands. I got up to help him bury the cold cinders.

“Come on then,” he said. I bundled up my blanket and the last scraps of dried meat to carry. I wore the cape of rabbit and squirrel skins for warmth.

“Stinks,” said one of the men.

“Reeks,” said another. “Bad as old Cuga.”

“He brought me here,” I said.

“Cuga?”

“You was with him?” “All summer.”

One stared, one spat, one shrugged; the fourth, the one who had spoken first, motioned with his head and led us down the long hill towards the forest.

I knelt to drink from the stream at the foot of the hill. The hoarse-voiced leader nudged me with his staff while I was still drinking thirstily. “Thats enough, you’ll be pissing all day,” he said. I scrambled up and followed them across the stream and under the dark eaves of the trees.

He led us all the way. We moved hastily through the woods, often at a trot, until mid-morning, when we stopped in a small clearing. It smelled of stale blood. A pack of vultures flapped up heavily on great black wings from some remnants of guts and skulls. The carcasses of three deer had been butchered and hung, glittering with flies, high from a tree limb. The men brought them down and divided and roped them so each of us could carry a load of meat, and we set off again, but now at an easier pace. I was tormented with thirst and by the flies that kept swarming around us and our burdens. The load I carried was not well balanced, and my feet, sore from the long walk yesterday, blistered in my old shoes. The trail we followed was very slight and winding, seldom visible more than a few paces ahead among the big, dark trees, and often made difficult by tree roots. When we came at last to a stream crossing I went right down again on hands and knees to drink.

The leader turned back to stir me up, saying, “Come on! You can drink when we get there!” But one of the other men was down with his face in the water too, and looked up to say, “Ah, let him drink, Brigin.” The leader said nothing then, but waited for us.

The water bathed my feet with wonderful coolness as we waded across the stream, but then as we went on the blisters grew worse, my wet shoes rubbing them, and I was hobbling with pain by the time we came to the forest camp. We cast down our burdens of venison in an open shed, and I could stand up straight at last and look around.

If I’d come there from where I used to live, it wouldn’t have looked like anything at all—a few low huts, a few men, in a meadow where alders grew by a small stream, dark forest all around. But I came there from the lonesome wilderness. The sight of the buildings was strange

and impressive to me, and the presence of other people even stranger and more frightening.

Nobody paid any attention to me. I got up my courage and went to the stream under the alders, drank my fill at last, then took off my shoes and put my raw, burning, bloody feet in the water. It was warm in the meadow, the autumn sun still pouring into it. Presently I took off my clothes and got into the water entirely. I washed myself, then I washed my clothes as well as I could. They had been white. White clothing is worn by a girl in her betrothal ceremony, and by the dead, and by those who go to bury the dead. There was no telling what color my clothes had been. They were brown and grey, rag-color. I did not think about their whiteness. I laid them on the grass to dry and got back in the stream and put my head under water to wash my hair. When I came up I couldn’t see, for my hair hung down over my eyes, it had grown so long. It was filthv and matted and I washed it again and again. When I came up from the last dip and scrubbing, a man was sitting beside my clothes on the stream bank, watching me.

“It’s an improvement,” he said.

He was the one who’d told the leader to let me drink.

He was short and brown, with high, ruddy cheekbones and narrow, dark eyes; his hair was cut short to his head. He had an accent, a way of talking that came from somewhere else.

I came up out of the water, dried myself as well as I could with the old brown blanket, and pulled on my wet tunic, seeking modesty, though there seemed to be only men around, and also seeking warmth. The sun had left the clearing though the sky was still bright. I shivered. But I didn’t want to put the filthy fur cape on my hard-won cleanness.

“Hey,” he said, “hang on.” He went off and came back with a tunic and some kind of garment I did not recognise. “They’re dry, anyhow,” he said, handing them to me.

I shucked off my limp wet tunic and put on the one he gave me. It was brown linen, much worn, soft, long-sleeved. It felt warm and pleasant on my skin. I held up the other piece of clothing he had brought. It was black and made of some heavy, dense material; it must be a cape, I thought. I tried to put it on over my shoulders. I could not get it to fit.

The man watched me for a little while and then he lay back on the stream bank and began to laugh. He laughed till his eyes disappeared entirely and his face turned dark red. He curled up over his knees and laughed till you could tell it hurt him, and though it wasn’t a noisy laugh, some men heard and came over and looked at him and looked at me, and some of them began laughing too.

“Oh,” he said at last, wiping his eyes and sitting up. “Oh. That did me good. That’s a kilt, young ’un. You wear it—” and he began to laugh again, and doubled up, and wheezed, and finally said, “You wear it on the other end.”

I looked at the thing, and saw it had a waistband, like trousers.

“I’ll do without,” I said. “If you don’t mind.”

“No,” he said, wheezing. “I don’t mind. Give it back, then.”

“Why would the kid want one of your fool skirts, Chamry?” one of the onlookers said. “Here, kid, I’ll get you something decent.” He came back with a pair of breeches that fit me well enough, though loosely. When I had. them on he said, “Keep em, they’re too tight for my belly. So you came in with Brigin and them today? Joining up, are you?

What’ll we call you?”

“Gavir Arca,” I said.

The man who had given me the kilt said, “That’s your name.” I looked at him, not understanding. “Do you want to use it?” he asked.

I had done so little thinking for so long, my mind would not move quickly at all; it needed a lot of time. I said at last, “Gav.”

“Gav it is,” said the man who had given me the kilt. “I’m Chamry Bern of Bernmant, and I use my name, for I’m so far from where I came that no one can track me by name or fame or any game.”

“He’s from where the men wear skirts and the women piss standing,” said one of the onlookers, and got some laughter from the others.

“Lowlanders,” said Chamry Bern, of them, not to them. “They know no better. Come on, you, Gav. You’d better take the oath, if that’s what you came for, and get your share of dinner. I saw you carrying in your share of it and more.”

The god Luck is deaf in one ear, they say, the ear we pray to; he can’t hear our prayers. What he hears, what he listens to, nobody knows. Denios the poet said he hears the wheels of the stars’ great chariots turning on the roads of heaven. I know that while I was sunk far beneath any thought of prayer, with no hope, no trust in anything, no desire, Luck was always with me. I lived, though I took no care to survive. I came to no harm among strangers. I carried money and was not robbed. When I was alone and on the verge of death, an old mad hermit beat me back to life. And now Luck had sent me to these men, and one of them was Chamry Bern.

Chamry went and whacked on a crowbar hung from a post of the largest hut. The signal brought men to gather around the porch of the hut. “Newcomer,” he said. “Gav is his name. He says he’s been living with Cuga the Ogre, which would explain the smell that came with him. And after a bath in our river he seeks to join our company. Right, Gav?”

I nodded. I was intimidated by being the center of what seemed to me a great crowd of men—twenty or more—all looking me over. Most of them were young and had a trim, fit, hard look, like Brigin, the man who’d led me here, though there were several grey or bald heads and a couple of slack bellies.

“Do you know who we are?” one of the bald heads demanded.

I took a deep breath. “Are you the Barnavites?”

That caused some scowling and some laughter. “Some of us used to be,” the man said, “maybe. And what do you know of Barna’s lot, boy?”

I was younger than they were, but I didn’t like being called kid and boy all the time. It put my back up.

“I heard stories. That they lived in the forest as free men, neither masters or slaves, sharing fairly all they had,”

“Well put,” said Chamry. “All in a nutshell.” Several men looked pleased and nodded.

“Well enough, well enough,” the bald man said, keeping up his dignity. Another man came up close to me; he looked very much like Bri-gin, and as I learned later they were brothers. His face was hard and handsome, his eyes clear and cold. He looked me over. “If you live with us you’ll learn what fair sharing means,” he said. “It means what we do, you do. It’s one for all with us. If you think you can do whatever you like, you won’t last here. If you don’t share, you don’t eat. If you’re careless and bring danger on us, you’re dead. We have rules. You’ll take an oath to live with us and keep our rules. And if you break that oath, we’ll hunt you down surer than any slave taker.”

Their faces were grim; they all nodded at what he said.

“You think you can keep that oath?”

“I can try,” I said.

“Try’s not good enough.”

“I’ll keep your oath,” I said, my temper roused by his bullying. “We’ll see,” he said, turning away. “Get the stuff, Modla,” The bald man and Brigin brought out of the hut a knife, a clay bowl, a deer antler, and some meal. I will not tell the ceremony, for those who go through it are sworn to secrecy, nor can I tell the words of the oath I took. They all swore that oath again with me. The rites and the oath-speaking brought them all together in fellow feeling, and when all was done and spoken several of them came to pound my back and tell me

I’d borne the initiation well, and was a brave fellow, and welcome among them.

Chamry Bern had come forward as my sponsor, and a young man called Venne as my hunting mate. They sat on either side of me at the celebration that followed. Meat had already been roasting on spits, but they added more to make a feast of it, and night had fallen by the time we sat to eat—on the ground, or on stumps and crude stools, around the red, dancing fires. I had no knife. Venne took me in to a chest of weapons and told me to choose one. I took a light, keen blade in a leather sheath. With it I cut myself a chunk out of a sizzling, dripping, blackened, sweet-smelling haunch and sat down with it and ate like a starved animal. Somebody brought me a metal cup and poured something into it—beer or mead—sour and somewhat foamy. The men laughed louder as they drank, and shouted, and laughed again. My heart warmed to their good fellowship—the friendship of the Forest Brothers. For that was the name they called themselves, and had given me, since I was one of them.

All around the firelit clearing was the night forest, utter darkness under the trees, high leaf crowns grey in the starlight for miles and miles.

If Chamry Bern hadn’t taken a liking to me and if Venne hadn’t taken me as his hunting partner I would have had a worse time of it that fall and winter than I did. As it was, I was often at the limit of my endurance. I’d lived wild with Cuga, but he’d looked after me, sheltered me, fed me, and that was in summer, too, when it’s easy to live wild. Here my city softness, my lack of physical strength, my ignorance of the skills of survival, were nearly the death of me. Brigin and his brother Eter and several other men had been farm slaves, used to a hard life, tough, fearless, and resourceful, and to them I was a dead loss, a burden. Other men in the group, town-bred, had some patience with my wretched incompetence, and gave and taught me what I needed to get by. As with Cuga, my knack at fishing gave me a way to show I could try at least to be useful. I showed no promise at all in hunting, though Venne took me with him conscientiously and tried to train me with the short bow and in all the silent skills of the hunter.

Venne was twenty or so; at fifteen he had run away from a vicious master in a town of the region of Casicar, and made his way to the forest—for everybody in Casicar, he said, knew about the Forest Brothers, and all the slaves dreamed of joining them. He enjoyed the life in the woods, seemed fully at home in it, and was one of the best hunters of our band; but I soon learned that he was restless. He didn’t get on with Brigin and Eter. “Playing the masters,” he said drily. And after a while, ‘And they won’t have women with us…Well, Barna’s men have women, right? I think of joining them.”

“Think again,” said Chamry, sewing a soft upper to a shoe sole; he was our tanner and cobbler, and made pretty good shoes and sandals for us of elk hide. “You’ll be running back to us begging us to save you. You think Brigin’s bossy? Never was a man could match a woman for giving orders. Men are by nature slaves to women, and women are by nature the masters of men. Hello woman, goodbye freedom!”

“Maybe,” Venne said. “But there’s other things comes with her.”

They were good friends, and included me in their friendship and their conversation. Many of the men of the band seemed to have little use for language, using a grunt or a gesture, or sitting stolid and mute as animals. The silence of the slave had gone so deep in them they could not break it. Chamry on the other hand was a man of words; he loved to talk and listen and tell stories, rhyming and chiming them in a kind of half poetry, and was ready to discuss anything with anybody.

I soon knew his history, or as much of it as he saw fit to tell, and as near or far from the truth as suited him. He came from the Uplands, he said, a region far north and east of the City States. I’d never heard of it and asked him if it was farther than Urdile, and he said yes, far beyond Urdile, beyond even Bendraman. I knew the name of Bendraman only from the ancient tale Chamhan.

“The Uplands are beyond the beyond,” he said, “north of the moon and east of the dawn. A desolation of hill and bog and rock and cliff, and rising over it all a huge vast mountain with a beard of clouds, the Carrantages. Nobody deserves to live in the Uplands but sheep. It’s starving land, freezing land, winter forever, a gleam of sunlight once a year. It’s all cut up into little small domains, farms they’d call them here and poor sorry farms at that, but in the Uplands they’re domains, and each has a master, the brantor, and each brantor has an evil power in him. Witches they are, every one. How’d you like that for a master? A man who could move his hand and say a word and turn you inside out with your guts on the ground and your eyes staring into the inside of your brain? Or a man who could look at you and you’d never think a thought of your own again, but only what he put into your head?”

He liked to go on about these awful powers, the gifts he called them, of the Upland witches, his tales growing ever taller. I asked him once, if he’d had a master, what his master’s power was. That silenced him for a minute. He looked at me with his bright narrow eyes. “You wouldn’t think it much of a power, maybe,” he said. “Nothing to see. He could weaken the bones in a body. It took a while. But if he cast his power on you, in a month you’d be weak and weary, in half a year your legs would bend under you like grass, in a year you’d be dead. You don’t want to cross a man who could do that. Oh, you lowlanders think you know what it is to have a master! In the Uplands we don’t even say slave. The brantor’s people, we say. He may be kin to half of ’em, his servants, his serfs—his people. But they’re more slaves to him than ever the slave of the worst master down here!”

“I don’t know about that,” said Venne. “A whip and a couple of big dogs can do about as well as a spell of magic to destroy a man.” Venne bore terrible scars on his legs and back and scalp, and one ear had been half torn off his head.

“No, no, it’s the fear,” Chamry said. “It’s the awful fear. You didn’t fear the men that beat you and the dogs that bit you, once you’d run clear away from ’em, did you? But I tell you, I ran a hundred miles away from the Uplands and my master, and still I cringed when I felt his thought turn on me. And I felt it! The strength went out of my legs and arms. I couldn’t hold my back up straight. His power was on me! All I could do was go on, go on, go on, till there was mountains and rivers and miles between me and his hand and eye and cruel power. When I crossed the great river, the Trond, I grew stronger. When I crossed the second great river, the Sally, I was safe at last. The power can cross a wide water once but not twice. So a wise woman told me. But I crossed yet another to be sure! I’ll never go back north, never. You don’t know what it is to be a slave, you lowlanders!”

Yet Chamry talked often of the Uplands and the farm where he had been born, and all through his railing at it as a poor, unhappy, wretched place I heard his yearning homesickness. He made of it a vivid picture in my mind, the great barren moorlands and cloudy peaks, the bogs from which at dawn a thousand wild white cranes would rise at once, the stone-walled, slate-roofed farm huddled under the bare curve of a brown hill. As he told about it, I could see it almost as clearly as if I remembered it myself.

And that put me in mind of my own power, or whatever it was, of remembering what was yet to happen. I remembered that I had had such a power, once. But when I thought about that, I began to remember places I didn’t want to remember. Memories made my body hunch up in pain and my mind go blank in fear. I pushed them away, turned away from them. Remembering would kill me. Forgetting kept me alive.

The Forest Brothers were all men who had escaped, run away from something unendurable. They were like me. They had no past. Learning how to get through this rough life, how to endure never being dry or warm or clean, to eat only half-raw, half-burnt venison, I might have gone on with them as I had with Cuga, not thinking beyond the present hour and what was around me. And much of the time I did.

But there were times when winter storms kept us in our drafty, smoky cabins, and Chamry, Venne, and some of the other men gathered to talk in the half dark by the smoldering hearth, and then I began to hear their stories of where they came from, how they’d lived, the masters they’d escaped from, their memories of suffering and of pleasure.

Sometimes into my thoughts would come a clear image of a place: a big room full of women and children; a fountain in a city square; a sunny courtyard surrounded by arches, under which women sat spinning… When I saw such a place I gave it no name, and my mind turned away from it hastily. I never joined the others’ talk about the world outside the forest, and did not like to hear it.

Late one afternoon the six or seven tired, dirty, hungry men around the crude hearth in our cabin had run out of anything to talk about. We all sat in a dumb discouragement. It had been raining a cold hard rain almost ceaselessly for four days and nights. Under the cloud that pressed down on the dark forest trees it seemed night all day long. Fog and darkness tangled in the wet, heavy boughs. To go out to get logs for the fire from the dwindling woodpile was to be wet through at once, and indeed some of us went out naked, since skin dries quicker than cloth and leather. One of our mates, Bulec, had a wretched cough that shook him about like a rat in a dog’s mouth. Even Chamry had run out of jokes and tall tales. In that cold, dreary place I was thinking of summer, of the heat and light of summer on the open hills, somewhere. And a cadence came into my mind, a beat, and the words with it, and without any intention I said the words aloud.

As in the dark of winter night The eyes seek dawn, As in the bonds of bitter cold The heart craves sun, So blinded and so bound, the soul Cries out to thee: Be our light, our fire, our life, Liberty!

“Ah,” Chamry said, out of a silence that followed the words, “I’ve heard that. Heard it sung. There’s a tune to it.”

I sought the tune, and little by little it came to me, with the sound of the beautiful voice that had sung it. I have no singing voice, but I sang it.

“That’s fine,” Venne said softly.

Bulec coughed and said, “Speak some more such.”

“Do that,” Chamry said.

I looked into my mind for more remembered words to speak to them. Nothing came for a while. What I found at last was a line of writing. I read it: “Wearing the white of mourning, the maiden mounted the high steps…” I said it aloud, and in a moment the line led me on to the next, and that to the next. So I told them the part of Garros poem in which the prophetess Yurno confronts the enemy hero Rurec. Standing on the walls of Sentas, a girl in mourning, Yurno calls down to the man who killed her warrior father. She tells Rurec how he will die: “Beware of the hills of Trebs,” she says, “for you will be ambushed in the hills. You will run away and hide in the bushes, but they will kill you as you try to crawl away without being seen. They will drag your naked body to the town and display it, sprawled face down, so all can see that the wounds are in your back. Your corpse will not be burned with prayers to the Ancestors as befits a hero, but buried where they bury slaves and dogs.” Enraged at her prophecy, Rurec shouts, “And this is how you will die, lying sorceress!” and hurls his heavy lance at her. All see it pass through her body just below the breast and fly out, trailing blood, behind her—but she stands on the battlement in her white robes, unharmed. Her brother the warrior Alira picks up the lance and hands it up to her, and she tosses it down to Rurec, not hurling it, but end over end, lightly, contemptuously. “When you’re running away and hiding, you’ll want this,” she says, “great hero of Pagadi.”

As I spoke the words of the poem, in that cold smoky hut in the half dark with the noise of the rain loud on the low roof, I saw them written in some pupil’s labored handwriting in the copybook I held as I stood in the schoolroom in Arcamand. “Read the passage, Gavir,” my teacher said, and I read the words aloud.

A silence followed,

“Eh, that’s a fool,” Bacoc said, “thro’n a lance at a witch, don’t he know, can’t kill a witch but with fire!”

Bacoc was a man of fifty by the look of him, though it’s hard to tell the age of men who have lived their life half starved and under the whip; maybe he was thirty. “That’s a good bit of story,” Chamry said. “There’s more? Is there a name to it?”

I said, “It’s called The Siege and Fall of Sentas. There’s more.”

“Let’s have it,” said Chamry and the others all agreed.

For a time I could not recall the opening lines of the poem; then, as if I had the old copybook in my hand, there they were and I spoke them—

To the councils and senate of Sentas they came, the envoys in armor,

With their swords in their hands, arrogant, striding into the chamber Where the lords of the city sat to give judgment…

It was night, true night, when I finished saying the first book of the poem. Our fire had burned down to embers on the rough hearth, but nobody in the circle of men had moved to build it up; nobody had moved at all for an hour.

“They’re going to lose that city of theirs,” Bulec said in the dark, in the soft drumming of the rain.

“They should be able to hold out. The others come too far from home. Like Casicar did, trying to take Etra last year,” said Taffa. It was the most I’d ever heard him say. Venne had told me Taffa had been not a slave but a freeman of a small city-state, conscripted into their army; during a battle he had escaped and made his way to the forest. Sad -faced and aloof, he seldom said anything, but now he was arguing almost volubly: “Stretched out their forces too far, see, Pagadi has, attacking. If they don’t take the town by assault quick, they’ll starve come winter.”

And they all got into the discussion, all talking exactly as if the siege of Sentas was taking place right now, right here. As if we were living in Sentas.

Of them all Chamry was the only one who understood that what I had told them was “a poem,” a thing made by a maker, a work of art, part history of long ago, part invention. It was, to them, an event; it was happening as they heard it. They wanted it to go on happening. If I’d been able to, they’d have kept me telling it to them night and day. But after my voice gave out that first evening, I lay in my wooden bunk thinking about what had been given back to me: the power of words. I had time then to think and to plan how and when to use that power—how to go on with the poem, to keep them from exhausting both it and me. I ended by telling it for an hour or two every night, after we ate, for the winter nights were endless and something to make them pass was welcome to all.

Word got about, and within a night or two most of the men of the band were crowded into our hut for “telling the war,” and for the long passionate discussions and arguments about tactics and motives and morals that followed.

There were times I couldn’t fully recall the lines as Garro wrote them, but the story was clear in my mind, so I filled in these gaps with tags of the poetry and my own narrative, until I came again to a passage that I had by memory or could “see” written, and could fall back into the harsh rhythm of the lines. My companions didn’t seem to notice the difference between my prose and Garros poetry. They listened closest when I was speaking the poetry—but those were also often the most vivid passages of action and suffering.

When we came again in the course of the tale to the passage I’d recited first, Yurno’s prophecy from the battlements, Bacoc caught his breath; and when Rurec “in a fury uplifts his heavy lance,” Bacoc cried out, “Don’t throw it, man! It’s no good!” The others shouted at him to pipe down, but he was indignant: “Don’t he know it’s no good? He thro’n it before!”

I was at first merely bemused by my own capacity to recall the poetry and their capacity to listen to it. They didn’t say much to me about it, but it made a difference in the way I was treated, my standing among them. I had something they wanted, and they respected me for that. Since I gave it freely, their respect was ungrudging. “Hey, haven’t you got a fatter rib than that for the kid? He’s got to work tonight, telling the war…”

But every up’s a down, as Chamry said. Brigin and his brother and the men closest to them, their cabin mates, looked in at one time or another on the recital, listened a while standing near the doorway, then left in silence. They said nothing to me, but I heard from others that they said men who listened to fools’ tales were worse fools than those who told them. And Brigin said that a man willing to hear a boy yammer booktalk half the night was no fit Forest Brother.

Booktalk! Why did Brigin say it in that contemptuous tone? There were no books in the forest. There had been no books in Brigin’s life. Why did he sneer at them?

Any of these men might well be jealous of a knowledge that had been jealously kept from them. A farm slave who tried to learn to read could have his eyes put out or be whipped to death. Books were dangerous, and a slave had every excuse to fear them. But fear is one thing, contempt another.

I resented their sneers as mean-spirited, for I couldn’t see anything unworthy of manhood in the tale I was telling. How was a tale of warfare and heroism weakening the men who listened to it so hungrily every night? Didn’t it draw us together in real brotherhood, when after the telling we listened to one another argue the rights and wrongs of the generals’ tactics and the warriors’ exploits? To sit stupid, mute, night after night under the rain like cattle, bored to mindlessness—was that what made us men?

Eter said something one morning, knowing he was within my hearing, about great idle fools listening to a boy tell lies. I was fed up, I was about to confront him with what I’ve just said, when my wrist was caught in an iron grip and a deft foot nearly tripped me.

I broke free and shouted, “What d’you think you’re doing?” to Cha-mry Bern, who apologised for his clumsiness while renewing his grip on my wrist. “Oh keep your trap shut, Gav!” he whispered desperately, hauling me away from the group of men around Eter. “Don’t you see he’s baiting you?”

“He’s insulting all of us!”

“And who’s to stop him? You?”

Chamry had got me around behind the woodpiles now, away from the others, and seeing I was now arguing with him, not challenging Eter, he let go my wrist.

“But why—Why—”

“Why don’t they love you for having a power they don’t have?” I didn’t know what to say.

“And they’ve got the hard hand, you know, though you’ve got the soft voice. Oh, Gav. Don’t be smarter than your masters. It costs.”

In his face now was the sadness I had seen in the face of every one of these men, the mark of the harrow. They had all started with very little, and lost most of that.

“They’re not my masters,” I said furiously. “We’re free men here!”

“Well,” Chamry said, “in some ways.”

♦ 9 ♦

Eter and Brigin, if they resented my sudden popularity, must have seen that any attempt to break up the evening gathering might rouse real opposition. They contented themselves with sneers at me, and at Cha-mry and Venne as my mates, but let the other men alone. So I and my fierce audience went on through all The Siege and Fall of Sentas, as the dark winter slowly turned towards spring. We came to the end of it just about the time of the equinox.

It was hard for some of the men to comprehend that it was over, and why it had to be over. Sentas had fallen, the walls and the great gates were torn down, the citadel burnt to the ground, the men of the city slaughtered, the women and children taken as slaves, and the hero Ru-rec had set off triumphant with his army and loot to Pagadi—and so, what happened next?

“Is he going to go by the hills of Trebs now?” Bacoc wanted to know. “After what the witch said?”

“Sure enough he’ll go by Trebs, if not this day then another,” said Chamry. “A man can’t keep from going where the seer’s eye saw him go.”

“Well, why don’t Gav tell it, then?” “The story stops at the fall of the city, Bacoc,” I said. “What—like they all died? But it’s only some of ’em dead!” Chamry tried to explain the nature of a story to him, but he remained dissatisfied; and they were all melancholy. “Ah, it’s going to be dull!” said Taffa. “I’ll miss that sword fighting. It’s a horrible thing when you’re in it, but it’s grand to hear about.”

Chamry grinned. “You could say that of most things in life, maybe.”

“Are there more tales like that, Gav?” somebody asked.

“There are a lot of tales,” I said, cautiously. I wasn’t eager to start another epic. I felt myself becoming the prisoner of my audience.

“You could tell the one we had all right over,” said one man, and several agreed enthusiastically. “Next winter,” I said. “When the nights are long again.”

They treated my verdict as if it were a priest’s rule of ritual, accepting it without dispute.

But Bulec said wistfully, “I wish there was short tales for the short nights,” He had listened to the epic with almost painful attention, muffling his cough as well as he could; to the battle scenes he preferred the descriptions of the rooms in the palaces, the touching domestic passages, the love story of Alira and Ruoco. I liked Bulec, and it was painful to see him, a young man, getting sicker and weaker day by day even as the weather brightened and grew warm. I couldn’t withstand his plea.

“Oh, there’s some short tales,” I said, “I’ll tell you one.” And I thought first to say The Bridge on the Nisas, but I could not. Those words, though they were clear in my mind, bore some weight in them that I could not lift. I could not speak them.

So I put myself in the schoolroom in my mind, and opened a copybook, and there was one of Hodis Baderi’s fables, “The Man Who Ate the Moon.” I told it to them word for word.

They listened as intently as ever. The fable got a mixed reception. Some of them laughed and shouteld,

“Ah, that’s the best yet! That beats all!”—but others thought it silly stuff, “foolery,” Taffa said.

“ Ah, but there’s a lesson in it,” said Chamry, who had listened to the tale with delight. They got to arguing whether the man who ate the moon was a liar or not. They never asked me to settle or even enter these discussions. I was, as it were, their book. I provided the text. Judgment on the text was up to them. I heard as keen moral arguments from them as I was ever to hear from learned men.

After that they often got a fable or a poem out of me in the evening, but their demand was not so urgent now that we no longer had to cower in our huts from the rain and could live outdoors and be active. Hunting and snaring and fishing went on apace, for we’d lived very thin at the end of winter and beginning of spring. We craved not only meat but the wild onions and other herbs that some of the men knew how to find in the forest. I always missed the grain porridge that had been much of our diet in the city, but there was nothing like that here.

“I heard the Forest Brothers stole grain from rich farmers,” I said once to Chamry, as we grubbed for wild horseradish.

“They do, those who can,” he said.

“Who’s that?”

“Barna’s lot, up north there.”

The name rang strangely in my head, bringing around it a whole set of fleeting images of young men talking in a crowded, warm dormitory, the face of an old priest…but I ignored such images. Words were what I could remember safely.

“So there really is a man called Barna?”

“Oh, yes. Though you needn’t mention him around Brigin.”

I wheedled for more, and Chamry never could resist telling a story. So I found that, as I had suspected, our band was a splinter from a larger group, with which they weren’t on good terms. Barna was the chief of that group. Eter and Brigin had rebelled against his leadership and brought a few men here to the southern part of the forest—the most remote from any settlements and so the safest for runaway slaves, but also the poorest in resources except, as Chamry said, cattle with antlers.

“Up there, they bag the real thing,” he said. “Fat bullocks. Sheep! Ah! what wouldn’t I give to taste mutton! I hate sheep from the pit of my heart, wily, woolly, wicked brutes. But when one of ’em lies down and turn into roast mutton, I could swallow him whole.”

“Do Barna’s men raise the cattle and sheep?”

“Mostly they let other folk do that for them. And then pick out a few choice ones. There’s those who’d call it thieving, but that’s too delicate and legal a word. Tithing, we called it. We tithed the farmers’ flocks.”

“So you lived there, with Barna’s band?”

"A while. Lived well, too.” Chamry sat back on his haunches and looked at me. “That’s where you should be, you know. Not here, with this lot of hard rocks and knotheads.” He knocked the dirt off a horseradish root, wiped it on his shirt, and bit into it. “You and Venne. You should be off. He’ll be welcome for his hunting, you for your golden tongue…” He chewed raw horseradish a while, wincing and his eyes watering. “All your tongue will do here is talk you into trouble.”

“Would you come with us?”

He spat out fiber and wiped his mouth, “By the Stone, but that’s hot! I don’t know. I came away with Brigin and them because they were my mates. And I was restless… I don’t know.”

He was a restless man. It wasn’t hard for Venne and me to coax him into coming with us, when we made up our minds to go. And we did that soon.

Brigin and Eter, feeling dissatisfaction among us, tried to repress it with ever harsher demands and commands. Eter told Bulec, who was deathly ill by now, that if he didn’t go out hunting for meat for the camp pot, he’d get nothing to eat from it. Eter may have just been bullying, or may have believed his threat would work; some men who live hard and in good health can’t believe sickness or weakness is anything but laziness, a sham. At any rate Bulec was scared or shamed into insisting that a hunting party take him along. He got a little way out of camp with them and collapsed, vomiting blood. When they carried him back, Venne confronted Eter, shouting that he’d killed Bulec like any slave driver. Venne rushed off in his distress and rage. He found me fishing at a pool up the stream. “We were going to find Bulec a place he could sit down and wait for us, soon as we got clear away from camp, but he couldn’t even walk that far. He’s dying. I can’t stay here, Gav. I can’t take their orders! They think they’re masters and us their slaves. I want to kill that damned Eter! I’ve got to get out.”

“Let’s talk to Chamry,” I said. We did; he counseled at first that we wait, but when he saw how dangerous Venne’s anger was, he agreed to go that night.

We ate with the others. Nobody talked. Bulec lay fighting for breath in one of the cabins. I could still hear the slow, gasping drag of his breath in the darkness before dawn when Venne, Chamry, and I stole out of camp with what little we considered ours by right: the clothes we wore, a blanket apiece, our knives, Venne’s bow and arrows, my fishing hooks and rabbit snares, Chamry’s cobbler’s toolkit, and a packet of smoked meat.

It was a couple of months after the equinox, late May, perhaps; a sweet dark night, a slow misty dawn, a morning of birdsong. It was good to be going free, leaving the rivalries and brutalities of the camp behind, I walked all day lightly, lighthearted, wondering why we’d borne Eter and Brigin’s bullying so long. But at evening, as we sat fire-less, lying low in case they pursued us, my heart went down low too. I kept thinking of Bulec, and of others: Taffa, who, being a deserter, had also deserted the wife and children he loved and could never go back to them; Bacoc, the simple heart, who didn’t even know the name of the village where he’d been born a slave—“the village” was all he knew... They had been kind to me. And we had sworn a vow together.

“What’s the trouble, Gav?” said Chamry.

“I feel like I’m running out on them,” I said.

“They could run, too, if they liked,” Venne said, so promptly that I knew he’d been thinking along the same lines, justifying our desertion to himself.

“Bulec can’t,” I said.

“He’s gone farther than we’ve gone, by now,” Chamry said."Never fret for him. He’s home…You’re too loyal, Gav, it’s a fault in you. Don’t look back. Touch and go, it’s best.”

That seemed strange to me; what did he mean? I never looked back. I had nothing to be loyal to, nothing to hold on to. I went where my luck took me. I was like a wisp of cloth twisting and drifting in a river.

Next day we came to a part of the great forest I’d never been to. We were outside our territory from here on. The trees were evergreens, fir and hemlock. They made impenetrable walls and mazes of their fallen trunks and the young trees that sprouted out of them. We had to travel along the streambeds, and that was hard going, scrambling through water, over rocks, and around rapids, in the half darkness of the huge trees overhead. Chamry kept saying we’d be out of it soon, and we did come out of it at last late on the second day, following a stream up to its spring on an open, grassy hillside. As we sat luxuriating in the soft grass and the clear twilight, a line of deer came walking past not twenty feet away downhill; they glanced at us unconcerned and walked on quietly, one after the other, flicking their big ears to and fro. Venne quietly took up his bow and fitted an arrow. There was no sound but the twang of the bowstring, like the sound of a big beetle’s wings. The last deer in line started, went down on its knees, and then lay down, all in that peaceful silence. The others never turned, but walked on into the woods.

Ah, why’d I do that,” Venne said. “Now we’ve got to clean it.” But that was soon done, and we were glad to have fresh meat that night and for the next day. As we sat, well fed, by the coals of our fire, Chamry said, “If this was the Uplands I’d have said you called those deer.”

“Called ’em?”

“It’s a gift—calling animals to come. A brantor goes out hunting, well, he takes a caller with him, if he hasn’t the gift himself. Boar, or elk, or deer, whatever they’re after, they’ll come to the caller.”

“I can’t do that,” Venne said after a while in his low voice. “But I can see how it might be. If I know the land, I know pretty much, most times, where the deer are. As they know where I am. And if they’re afraid, I’ll never see them. But if they’re not afraid, they’ll come. They show themselves—’Here I am, you wanted me.’ They give themselves. A man who doesn’t know that has no business hunting. He’s only a butcher.”

We went on for two days more through rolling, open woods before we came to a good-sized stream. “Across that is Barna’s country,” said Chamry. “And we’d best stay on the path and make noise, let them know we’re here, lest they think we’re sneaking in to spy.” So we came crashing into Barna’s lands like a herd of wild pigs, as Venne said. We came on a path and followed it, still talking loudly. Soon enough there was a shout to halt and hold still. We did that. Two men came striding down the path to meet us. One was tall and thin, one was short and broad-bellied.

“Do you know where you are?” said the short one, false-jovial, not quite menacing. The tall one held his crossbow loaded, though not aimed.

“In the Heart of the Forest,” said Chamry. “Seeking a welcome, To-ma. You don’t remember me?”

“Well, by the Destroyer! The bad penny always turns up!” Toma came forward to take Chamry by one shoulder and shake him back and forth with aggressive welcome. “You Upland rat,” he said. “You vermin. Crawled off at night you did, with Brigin and that lot. What did you want to go with them for?”

“It was a mistake, Toma,” said Chamry, getting his footing so Toma could go on shaking him. “Call it a mistake and forgive it, eh?”

“Why not? Won’t be the last thing I forgive you, Chamry Bern.” He let him go at last, “What have you brought with you there? Baby rats, are they?”

“All I took away with me was those pigheads Brigin and his brother,” Chamry said, “and what I’m bringing back with me is two pearls, pearls set in gold for the ears of Barna. Venne, here, who can drop a deer at a thousand paces, and Gav, here, who can tell tales and poetry to make you weep one moment and laugh the next. Take us into the Heart of the Forest, Toma!”

So we went on a mile or so through the forest of oak and alder, and came to that strange place.

The Heart of the Forest was a town, with kitchen gardens and barns and byres and corrals outside the palisade walls, and inside them houses and halls, streets and squares—all of wood. Towns and cities were built of stone and brick, I thought; only barns for cattle and huts for slaves were built of wood. But this was a city of wood. It was swarming with people, men, and women too, and children—everywhere, in the gardens, in the streets. I looked at the women and children with wonder, I looked at the cross-beamed, gable-roofed houses with awe, I looked at the broad central square full of people and stopped, scared. Venne was walking right next to me, pressed up against my shoulder for courage. “I never saw nothing like this, Gav,” he said hoarsely. We followed as close behind Chamry as two little kids behind the she-goat.

Chamry himself was looking about with some amazement. “It wasn’t half this size when I left,” he said. “Look how they’ve built!”

“You’re in luck,” said Toma, our fat guide. “There’s himself.”

Coming across the square towards us was a big, bearded man. Very tall, broad-chested, ample in girth, with dark reddish curly hair and a beard that covered all his cheeks and chin and chest, with large, clear eyes, and a singularly upright, buoyant walk, as if he were borne up a little above the ground—as soon as you saw him you knew he was, as Toma said, himself. He was looking at us with a pleasant, keen curiosity.

“Barna!” Chamry said. “Will you have me back, if I bring you a couple of choice recruits?” Chamry did not quite reverence Barna, but his posture was respectful, despite his jaunty tone. “I’m Chamry Bern of Bernmant, who made the mistake of going off south a few years back.”

“The Uplander,” Barna said, and smiled. He hada broad white smile that flashed in his beard, and a magnificently deep voice. “Oh, you’re welcome back for yourself, man. We’re free to come and free to go here!” He took Chamry’s hand and shook it. “And the lads?”

Chamry introduced us, with a few words about our talents. Barna patted Venne’s shoulder and told him a hunter was always welcome in the Heart of the Forest; at me he looked intently for a minute, and said, “Come see me later today, Gav, if you will. Toma, you’ll find them quarters? Good, good, good! Welcome to freedom, lads!” And he strode on, a head taller than anyone else.

Chamry was beaming. “By the Stone!” he said. “Never a hard word, but welcome back and all’s forgiven! That’s a great man, with a great heart in him!”

We found lodgings in a barrack that seemed luxurious after our ill-built, smoky huts in the forest camp, and ate at the commons, which was open all day to all comers. There Chamry got his heart’s desire: they’d roasted a couple of sheep, and he ate roast mutton till his eyes gleamed with satisfaction above his cheeks shining with mutton fat. After that he took me to Barna’s house, which loomed over the central square, but did not go in with me. “I won’t press my luck,” he said, “He asked you to come, not me. Sing him that song of yours, ‘Liberty’ eh? That’ll win him.”

So I went in, trying to act as if I wasn’t daunted, and said to the people that Barna had asked me to come. They were all men, but I heard women’s voices farther in the house. That sound, the sound of women’s voices in other rooms of a great house, made my mind stir strangely. I wanted to stop and listen. There was a voice I wanted to hear.

But I had to follow the men who took me to a hall with a big hearth, though there was no fire in it now. There Barna was sitting in a chair big enough for him, a regular throne, talking and laughing with both men and women. The women wore beautiful clothes, of such colors as I had not seen for months and months except in a flower or the dawn sky. You will laugh, but it was the colors I stared at, not the women. Some of the men were well dressed, too, and it was pleasant to see men clean, in handsome clothing, talking and laughing aloud. It was familiar.

“Come here, lad,” said Barna in his deep, grand voice. “Gav, is it? Are you from Casicar, Gav, or Asion?”

Now, in Brigin’s camp you never asked a man where he was from. Among runaway slaves, deserters, and wanted thieves, the question wasn’t well received. Chamry was the only one of us who often talked freely about where he’d run from, and that was because he was so far away from it. Not long ago we’d heard of raids into the forest, slave takers looking for runaways. For all of us it was better to have no past at all, which just suited me. I was so taken aback by Barna’s question that I answered it stiffly and uneasily, sounding even to myself as if I were lying. “I’m from Etra.”

“Etra, is it? Well, I know a city man when I see one. I was born in Asion myself, a slave son of slaves. As you see, I’ve brought the city into the forest. What’s the good of freedom if you’re poor, hungry, dirty, and cold? That’s no freedom worth having! If a man wants to live by the bow or by the work of his hands, let him take his choice, but here in our realm no man will live in slavery or in want. That’s the beginning and the end of the Law of Barna. Right?” he asked the people around him, laughing, and they shouted back, “Right!”

The energy and goodwill of the man, his pure enjoyment in being, were irresistible. He embraced us all in his warmth and strength. He was keen, too; his clear eyes saw quick and deep. He looked at me and said, “You were a house slave, and pretty well treated, right? So was I. What were you trained to do in the great house for your masters?”

“I was educated to teach the children of the house.” I spoke slowly It was like reading a story in my mind. I was talking about somebody else.

Barna leaned forward, intensely interested. “Educated!” he said. “Writing, reading—all such?”

“Yes.”

“Chamry said you were a singer?”

“A speaker,” I said.

“A speaker. What do you speak?”

“Anything I’ve read,” I said, not as a boast, but because it was true. “What have you read?”

“The historians, the philosophers, the poets.”

“A learned man. By the Deaf One! A learned man! A scholar! Lord Luck has sent me the man I wanted, the man I lacked!” Barna stared at me with amazed delight, then got up from his huge chair, came to me, and took me into a bear hug. My face was mashed into his curling beard. He squeezed the breath out of me then held me out at arm’s length.

“You will live here,” he said. “Right? Give him room, Diero! And tonight, will you speak for us tonight? Will you say us a piece of your learning, Gav-di the Scholar? Eh?”

I said I would.

“There’s no books for you here,” he said almost anxiously, still holding me by the shoulders. “Everything else a man might need we have, but books—books aren’t what most of my men would bring here with them, they’re ignorant letterless louts, and books are very heavy matters—“ He laughed, throwing back his head. “Ah, but now, from now on, we’ll remedy that. We’ll see to it. Tonight, then!”

He let me go. A woman in delicate black and violet robes took me by the hand and led me off. I thought her old, over forty surely, and she had a grave face, and did not smile; but her manner and her voice were gentle, and her dress beautiful, and it was amazing how differently she moved, and walked, and spoke, from how men did. She took me to a loft room, apologising for its being upstairs and small. I stammered something about staying with my mates in the barrack. She said, “You can live there, of course, if you wish, but Barna hopes you will honor his house.” I was unable to disappoint this elegant, fragile person. It seemed everybody was taking my learning very much on trust, but I couldn’t say that.

She left me in the little loft room. It had a small, square window, a bed with a mattress and bedding, a table and chair, an oil lamp. It looked like heaven to me. I did go back to the barrack, but Chamry and Venne had both gone out. I told a man who was lounging on his bunk there to tell them that I’d be staying at Barna’s house. He looked at me at first disbelieving, then with a knowing smirk.

“Living high, eh?” he said.

I put what little gear I had with Chamry’s, for I wouldn’t need fish hooks or my filthy old blanket; but I wore my sheathed knife on my belt, having seen that most men here did. I went back to Barna’s house. I could look at it better now that I was not so overawed. Its facade on the central square was wide and high, with mighty beams and deep

gables; it was built of wood, and there was no glass in the small-paned windows, but it was an impressive house.

I sat on the bed in my room—my own room!- and let bewildered excitement flood through me. I was very nervous about reciting to this genial, willful, unpredictable giant and his crowd of people. I felt I must prove myself at once and beyond doubt to be the scholar he wanted me to be. That was a strange thing to be called on to do. Coming out of the silence I’d lived in so long, the silence of the forest, the mute forgetfulness… But I had recited all Sentas to my companions in the silence, hadn’t I? I had called on it, and it came to me. It was mine, it was in me. I remembered all I had learned in the schoolroom with—

I came too near the wall. My mind went numb. Blank, empty.

I lay back and dozed, I think, till the light was growing reddish in the small, deep-framed window. I got up and combed my hair as well as I could with my fingers and tied it back again with an end of fishing line, for it hadn’t been cut for a year. That was all I could do to make myself elegant. I went down the stairs and to the great hall, where thirty or forty people were gathered, chattering like a flock of starlings.

I was made welcome, and the grave, sweet-mannered woman in black and violet, Diero, gave me a cup of wine, which I drank thirstily. It made my head spin. I didn’t have the courage to keep her from refilling the cup, but I did have the wits not to drink any more. I looked at the cup, thin silver chased with a pattern of olive leaves, as beautiful as anything in… as anything I had seen. I wondered if there were silversmiths in the Heart of the Forest, and where the silver came from. Then Barna loomed over me, his grand voice rumbling. He put his arm round my shoulders. He took me in front of the people, called for silence, told his guests he had a treat for them, and nodded at me with a smile.

I wished I had a lyre, as strolling tellers did, to set the tone and mood of their recitation. I had to start off into silence, which is hard.

But I had been trained well. Stand straight, Gavir, keep your hands still, bring your voice up from your belly, out from your chest…

I spoke them the old poem The Sea-Farers of Asion. It had come into my head tonight because Barna said he was from that city. And I hoped it might suit the company I was in. It is the tale of a ship carrying treasure up the coast from Ansul to Asion. The ship is boarded by pirates, who kill the officers and order the slaves at the oars to row to Sova Island, the pirates’ haven. The oarsmen obey, but in the night they plot an uprising, unfasten their chains, and kill the pirates. Then they row the ship with all its treasure on to the port of Asion, where the Lords of the City welcome them as heroes and reward them with a share of the treasure and their freedom. The poem has a swing to it like the sea waves, and I saw my audience in their fine clothes following the story with open eyes and mouths, just like my ragged brothers in the smoky hut. I was borne up on the words and on their attention. We were all there in the ship in the great grey sea.

So it ended, and after the little silence that comes then, Barna rose up with a roar—"Set them free! By Sampa the Maker and Destroyer, they set them free! Now there’s a tale I like!” He gave me one of his bear hugs and held me off by the shoulders as his way was, saying, “Though I doubt that it’s a true history. Gratitude to a lot of galley slaves? Not likely! Here, I’ll tell you a better ending for it, Scholar: They never sailed back to Asion at all, but sailed south, far south, back to Ansul where the money came from, and there they shared it out and lived on it the rest of their lives, free men and rich!—How’s that?—But it’s good poetry, grand poetry well spoken!” He clapped me on the back and took me around introducing me to the others, men and women, who praised me and spoke kindly. I drank off my wine and my head went round again. It was very pleasant, but at last I was glad to get away, go up to my loft in amazement at all that had happened this long day, fall onto my soft bed, and sleep.

So began my life in the Heart of the Forest and my acquaintance with its founder and presiding spirit. All I could think was that Luck was with me still, and since I didn’t know what to ask him for, he’d given me what I needed,

Barna’s welcome to me hadn’t been just jovial bluster; there was a bit of that in most of what he said and did, but under it was a driving purpose. He had wanted men of learning in his city of the free, and had none.

He took me into his confidence very quickly. Like me, he’ d grown up a slave in a great house where the masters and some of the slaves were educated and there were books to be read. More than that, scholars who came to Asion visited and talked with the learned men of the house; poets stayed there, and the philosopher Denneter lived there for a year. All this had fascinated and impressed the boy, and he in turn had impressed his masters and the visitors with his quickness at learning, especially philosophy, Denneter made much of him, wanted to make a disciple of him; he was to be Denneter’s student and go traveling with him through the world.

But when he was fifteen, the slaves in the great civic barracks of Asion rebelled. They broke into the armory of the city guard, used the armory as a fortress, and killed the guards and others who tried to assault them. They declared themselves free men, demanded that the city recognise them as such, and called on all slaves to join them. Many house slaves did, and for several days Asion was in a state of panic and confusion, A regiment of Asion’s army was sent into the city, the armory was besieged and taken, and the rebels slaughtered. Almost all male slaves were suspect after that. Many were branded to mark them indelibly as unfree. Barna, a boy of fifteen, had escaped branding, but there was no more talk of philosophy and travel. He was drafted to refill the civic barracks, sent to hard labor.

“And so all my education stopped then and there. Not a book have I held in my hands since that day. But I had those few years of learning, and hearing truly wise men talk, and knowing that there’s a life of the mind that’s far above anything else in the world. And so I knew what was missing here. I could make my city of free men, but what’s the good of freedom to the ignorant? What’s freedom itself but the power of the mind to learn what it needs and think what it likes? Ah, even if your body’s chained, if you have the thoughts of the philosophers and the words of the poets in your head, you can be free of your chains, and walk among the great!”

His praise of learning moved me deeply, I had been living among people so poor that knowledge of anything much beyond their poverty had no meaning to them, and so they judged it useless. I had accepted their judgment, because I had accepted their poverty. There had been a long time when I’d never thought of the words of the makers; and when they came back to me, at Brigin’s camp, it seemed a miraculous gift that had nothing to do with my will or intention. Having been so poor, so ignorant myself, I had no heart to say that ignorance cannot judge knowledge.

But here was a man who had proved his intelligence, energy, and courage, raising himself out of poverty and slavery to a kind of kingship, and bringing a whole people with him into independence; and he set knowledge, learning, and poetry above even such achievements. I was ashamed of my weakness, and rejoiced in his strength.

Admiring Barna more as I came to know him, I wanted to be of use to him. But for the time being it seemed all he wanted of me was to be a kind of disciple, going about the city with him and listening to his thoughts—which I was happy to do—and then, in the evening, to recite whatever poetry or tales I wished to his guests and household. I suggested teaching some of his companions to read, but there were no books, he said, to teach from, and though I offered to, he wouldn’t let me waste my time writing out copybooks. Books would be looked for and brought here, he said, and men of education would be found to assist me, and then we’d have a regular school, where all could learn who wanted.

Meanwhile some of Barna’s people coaxed me to teach them, young women who lived in his house seeking a new entertainment; and with his permission I held a little class in writing and reading for a few of them. Barna laughed at me and the girls. “Don’t let ’em fool you, Scholar. They’re not after literature! They just want to sit next to a bit of pretty boy-flesh.” He and his men companions teased the girls about turning into bookworms, and they soon gave it up. Diero was the only one who came more than a few times.

Diero was a beautiful woman, gracious and gentle. She had been trained from girlhood as a “butterfly woman.” The “butterflies” of Asion—an ancient city famous for its ceremony, its luxury, and its women—were schooled in a science of pleasure far more refined and elaborate than anything known in the City States.

But, as Diero herself told me, reading wasn’t one of the arts taught to the “butterflies.” She listened with yearning intensity to the poetry I spoke, and had a great, timid curiosity about it. I encouraged her to let me teach her to write her letters and spell out words. She was humble, self-distrustful, but quick to learn, and her pleasure in learning was a pleasure to me. Barna looked on our lessons with genial amusement.

His older companions, all of whom had been with him for years, were very much his men. They had brought from their years of slavery a habit of accepting orders and not competing to lead, which made them easy company. They treated me as a boy, not a rival to them, telling me what I needed to know and occasionally giving me a warning. Barna would give you the coat off his back, they told me, but if he thinks you’re poaching his girls, look out! They told me Diero had come with Barna from Asion when he first broke free and had been his mistress for many years. She wasn’t that now, but she was the woman of Barna’s House, and a, man who didn’t treat Diero with affectionate respect wouldn’t be welcome there.

Barna explained to me one day as we sat up on the watchtower of the Heart of the Forest that men and women should be free to love one another with no hypocritical bonds of promised faithfulness to chain them together. That sounded good to me. All I knew of marriage was that it was for the masters, not for my kind, so I’d thought little about it one way or the other. But Barna thought about such things, and came to conclusions, and had them enacted in the Heart of the Forest. He had ideas about children, too, that they should be entirely free, never punished, allowed to run about as they pleased and find out for themselves what best suited them to do. This seemed admirable to me. All his ideas did.

I was a good listener, sometimes putting a question, but mostly content to follow the endless inventions and generous vistas of his mind. As he said, he thought best out loud. He soon claimed me as a necessity to him: “Where’s Gav-di? Where’s the Scholar? I need to think!”

I lived at Barna’s house, but I went to see Chamry often. He had joined the cobblers’ guild, where he lived snug and complained of nothing but the scarcity of women and roast mutton. “They’ve got to send the tithing boys out for roasting mutton!” he said.

Venne had soon found that as a hunter he’d have to spend most of his time away off in the woods just as he’d done for Brigin, since all the game near the Heart of the Forest had long since been hunted out. Hunting was not what fed the town these days. One of the groups of “tithing boys” asked him to come with them as a guard when they found what a good shot he was with the short bow, and he joined them. He first went out on the road with them about a month after we came to the Heart of the Forest.

The tithers or raiders went out from our wooden city to meet drovers and wagons on the roads outside the forest. Their goal was to bring back flocks and herds, loaded wagons, drivers and horses, thus increasing our stock of food, vehicles, animals, and men—if the men were willing to join the Brotherhood. If they weren’t, Barna told me, they were left blindfolded with their hands tied, to wander in hope the next passerby would untie them. He laughed his mighty laugh when he told me that some of the drivers had been robbed so often by the Forest Brothers that they meekly stuck their hands out to be tied.

There were also the “netmen” who went singly or in pairs into Asion itself, sometimes to bargain in the market for things we needed, but sometimes as thieveis to steal from the houses of the rich and the coffers of wealthy shrines. No money was used among us, but the Brotherhood wanted cash to buy things the raiders could not steal—including the goodwill of towns near the forest, and the silence of colluding merchants in the cities, Barna liked to boast that he sat on a fortune that the great merchants of Asion might envy. Where the gold and silver was kept I never knew. Bronze and copper coins were to be had for the asking by anyone going into a town to buy goods, Barna and his assistants knew who left the Heart of the Forest. Not many did, and only tried and trusted men. As Barna put it, one fool blabbing in an alehouse might bring the army of Asion down on us.

The narrow, intricate woodland paths that led to and from the gate were closely guarded and often changed and obliterated, so that the tracks of wagons or herds of cattle couldn’t easily lead anyone to the wooden city. I remembered the sentries we had met, the challenge and the loaded crossbow. We all knew that if a trail guard saw anyone going away from the gate without permission, he was not to challenge, but to shoot.

They asked Venne to be a trail guard, but he didn’t like the idea of having to shoot a man in the back. Raiding wagon trains or rustling cattle suited him better, and being a raider gave a man great prestige among the Brothers. Barna himself said the raiders and the “justicers” who policed the town were the most valuable members of the community. And every man in the Heart of the Forest should follow his own heart in choosing what he did. So Venne went off cheerily with a band of young men, promising Chamry he’d come back with “a flock of sheep, or failing that, a batch of women.”

In fact there weren’t many women in the Heart of the Forest, and every one of them was jealously guarded by a man or group of men. Those you saw in the streets and gardens seemed all to be pregnant or dragging a gaggle of infants with them, or else they were mere bowed backs sweeping, spinning, digging, milking, like old women slaves anywhere. There were more young women in Barna’s house than anywhere else, the prettiest girls in the town, and the merriest. They dressed in fine clothes the raiders brought in. If they could sing or dance or play the lyre, that was welcome, but they weren’t expected to do any work. They were, Barna said, “to be all a woman should be—free, and beautiful, and kind.”

He loved to have them about him, and they all flirted and flattered and teased him assiduously! He joked and played with them, but his serious talk was always with men.

As time went on, and he kept me his almost constant companion, I felt the honor and the burden of his trust. I tried to be worthy of it. I continued to recite in the evening in his great hall for all who wanted to hear; and because of that and because Barna had me with him so often, most people treated me with respect, though it was often begrudged or puzzled or patronising, since I was after all still a boy. And some of them saw me, I know, as a kind of learned halfwit. They sensed that there was something lacking in me, that for all the endless words at my command, my knowledge of the world was slight and shallow, like a child’s.

I knew that too, but I could not think about it or why it should be so. I turned away from such thoughts, and went about with Barna, following him, needing him. His great fullness of being filled my emptiness.

I wasn’t the only one who felt that. Barna was the heart of the Heart of the Forest. His vision, his decision, was always the point of reference for the others, his will was their fulcrum. He didn’t maintain this mastery by intimidation but through the superiority of his energy and intelligence and the tremendous generosity of his nature: he was simply there before the others, seeing what must be done and how to do it, drawing them to act with him through his passion, activity, and goodwill. He loved people, loved to be among them, with them, he believed in brotherhood with all his heart and soul.

I knew his dreams by now, for he told them to me as we went about the city, he directing, encouraging, and participating in work, I as his listening shadow.

I couldn’t always share his love for the Forest Brothers, and wondered how he could keep any patience at all with some of them. Lodging, food, all the necessities of life were shared as fairly as possible, but it had to be rough justice, and one room will always be bigger than another, one serving of pie will have more raisins than another. The first response of many of the men to any perceived inequity was to accuse another man of hogging, and fight their grudge out with fists or knives. Most of them had been farm or hard-labor slaves, brutalised from childhood, used to getting what little they got by grabbing for it and fighting to keep it. Barna had lived that life too and understood them. He kept the rules very simple and very strict, and his justicers enforced them implacably. But still there were murders now and then, and brawls every night. Our few healers, bonesetters, and tooth pullers worked hard. The ale made by our brewery was kept weak at Barna’s orders, but men could get drunk on it if they had a weak head or drank all night. And when they weren’t drunk and quarreling they were complaining of unfairness, injustice, or the work they were allotted; they wanted less of it, or to do a different kind of work, or to work with one group of mates not another, and so on endlessly. All these complaints ended up with Barna.

“Men have to learn how to be free,” he said to me. “Being a slave is easy. To be a free man you have to use your head, you have to give here and take there, you have to give your orders to yourself. They’ll learn, Gav, they’ll learn!” But even his large good nature was exasperated by the demands on him to settle petty jealousies, and he could be angered by the backbiting and rivalry of the men closest to him, his justicers and the men of his household—our government, in fact, though they had no titles.

He had no title himself, he was simply Barna.

He chose his men, and they chose others to assist them, always with his approval. Election by popular vote was an idea which he knew little about. I was able to tell him that some of the City States had at one time or another been republics or even democracies, although of course only freeborn men of property had the vote, I remembered what I had read of the state and city of Ansul, far to the south, which was governed by officials elected by the entire people, and had no slavery, until they were themselves enslaved by a warlike people from the eastern deserts. And the great country of Urdile, north of Bendile, did not permit any form of bondage; like Ansul, they considered both men and women to be citizens; and every citizen had the vote, electing governing consuls for two years and senators for six. I could tell Barna of these different polities, and he listened with interest, and added elements from them to his plans for the ultimate government of the Free State in the forest.

Such plans were his favorite topic when he was in his good mood. When the bickering and brawling and backbiting and the innumerable, interminable details of provisioning and guard duty and building and everything else that he took responsibility for wore him out and put him in a darker mood, he talked of revolution—the Uprising.

“In Asion there are three slaves, or four, for every free man. All over Bendile, the men who work the farms are slaves. If they could see who they are—that nothing can be done without them! If they could see how many they are! If they could realise their strength, and hold together! The Armory Rebellion, back twenty-five years ago, was just an outburst. No plan, no real leaders. Weapons, but no decisions. Nowhere to go. They couldn’t hold together. What I’m planning here is going to be entirely different. There are two essential elements. First, weapons—the weapons we’re stockpiling here, now. We’ll be met with violence, and we must be able to meet it with insuperable strength.—And then, union. We must act as one. The Uprising must happen everywhere at once. In the city, in the countryside, the towns and villages, the farms. A network of men, in touch with one another, ready, informed, with weapons at hand, each knowing when and how to act—so that when the first torch is lighted the whole country will go up in flames. The fire of freedom! What’s that song of yours? ‘Be our fire… Liberty!’”

His talk of the Uprising disturbed and fascinated me. Without really understanding what was at stake, I liked to hear him make his plans, and would ask him for details. He’d catch fire then and talk with great passion. He said, “You bring me back to my heart, Gav. Trying to keep things running here has been eating me up. I’ve been looking only at what’s to be done next and forgetting why we’re doing it. I came here to build a stronghold where men and arms could be gathered, a center from which men would go back, a network of men in the northern City States and Bendile, working to get all the slaves in Asion with us, and in Casicar, and the countryside. To get them ready for the Uprising, so that when it comes there’ll be nowhere for the masters to fall back to. They’ll bring out their armies, but who will the armies attack—with the masters held hostage in their own houses and farms, and the city itself in the hands of slaves? In every house in the city, the masters will be penned up in the barrack, the way they penned us in when there was threat of war, right?—but now it’s the masters locked up while the slaves run the household, as of course they always did, and keep the markets going, and govern the city. In the towns and the countryside, the same thing, the masters locked up tight, the slaves taking over, doing the work they always did, the only difference is they give the orders…So the army comes to attack, but if they attack, the first to die will be the hostages, the masters, squealing for mercy, Don’t let them slaughter us! Don’t attack, don’t attack! The general thinks, ah, they’re nothing but slaves with pitchforks and kitchen knives, they’ll run as soon as we move in, and he sends in a troop to take the farm. They’re cut to pieces by slaves armed with swords and crossbows, fighting from ambush, trained men fighting on their own ground. They take no prisoners. And they bring out one of the squealing masters, the Father maybe, where the soldiers can see, and say: You attacked: he dies, and slice off his head. Attack again, more of them die. And this will be going on all over the country—every farm, village, town, and Asion itself—the great Uprising! And it won’t end until the masters buy their liberty with every penny they have, and everything they own. Then they can come outside and learn out how the common folk live.”

He threw his head back and laughed, merrier than I’d seen him in days. “Oh, you do me good, Gav!” he said.

The picture he drew was fantastic yet terribly vivid, compelling my belief. “But how will you reach the farm slaves, the city house slaves?” I asked, trying to sound practical, knowledgeable.

“That’s the strategy: exactly. To reach into the houses, into the barracks and the slave villages, send men to talk to them—catch them in our net! Show them what they can do and how to do it. Let them ask questions. Get them to figure it out for themselves, make their own plans—so long as they know they must wait for our signal. It’ll take time to do that, to spread the net, set up the plan all through the city and the countryside. And yet it can’t be too slow in building, because if it goes on too long, word will leak out, fools will begin to blab, and the masters will get jumpy—What’s all this talk in the barrack? What are they whispering in the kitchen? What’s that blacksmith making there?—And then the great advantage of surprise is lost. Timing is everything.”

It was only a tale to me, his Uprising. In his mind it was to take place in the future, a great revenge, a rectification of the past. But in my mind there was no past.

I had nothing left but words—the poems that sang themselves in my head, the stories and histories I could bring before my mind’s eye and read. I did not look up from the words to what had been around them. When I looked away from them I was back in the vivid intensity of the moment, now, here, with nothing behind it, no shadows, no memories. The words came when I needed them. They came to me from nowhere. My name was a word, Etra was a word. That was all; they had no meaning, no history. Liberty was a word in a poem. A beautiful word, and beauty was all the meaning it had.

Always sketching out his plans and dreams of the future, Barna never asked me about my past. Instead, one day, he told me about it. He’d been talking about the Uprising, and perhaps I’d answered without much enthusiasm, for my own sense of emptiness sometimes made it hard for me to respond convincingly. He was quick to see such moods.

“You did the right thing, you know, Gav,” he said, looking at me with his clear eyes. “I know what you’re thinking about. Back there in the city…You think, ‘What a fool I was! To run off and starve, to live in a forest with ignorant men, to slave harder than I ever did in my masters’ house! Is that freedom? Wasn’t I freer there, talking with learned men, reading the books of the poets, sleeping soft and waking warm? Wasn’t I happier there?’—But you weren’t. You weren’t happy, Gav. You knew it in your heart, and that’s why you ran off. The hand of the master was always on you.”

He sighed and looked into the fire for a little; it was autumn, a chill in the air. I listened to him as I listened to him tell all his tales, without argument or question.

“I know how it was, Gav. You were a slave in a great house, a rich house, in the city, with kind masters who had you educated. Oh, I know that! And you thought you should be happy, because you had the power to learn, read, teach—become a wise man, a learned man. They let you have that. They allowed it to you. Oh yes! But though you were given the power to do certain things, you had no power over anyone or anything. That was theirs. The masters. Your owners. And whether you knew it or not, in every bone of your body and fiber of your mind you felt that hand of the master holding you, controlling you, pressing down on you. Any power you had, on those terms, was worthless. Because it was nothing but their power acting through you. Using you... They let you pretend it was yours. You filched a bit of freedom, a scrap of liberty, from your masters, and pretended it was yours and was enough to keep you happy. Right? But you were growing into a man. And for a man, Gav, there is no happiness but in his own freedom. His freedom to do what he wills to dd. And so your will sought its full liberty. As mine did, long ago.”

He reached out and clapped me on the knee. “Don look so sad,” he said, his white grin flashing in his curly beard. “You know you did the right thing! Be glad of it, as I am!”

I tried to tell him that I was glad of it. He had to go see about affairs, and left me musing by the fire. What he said was true. It was the truth. But not my truth.

Turning away from his tale, I looked back for the first time in—how long? I looked across the wall I’d built to keep me from remembering. I looked and saw the truth: I had been a slave in a great house, a rich house, in the city, obedient to my masters, owning no freedom but what they allowed me. And I had been happy.

In the house of my slavery I had known a love so dear to me that I could not bear to think about it, because when I lost it, I lost everything.

All my life had been built on trust, and that trust had been betrayed by the Family of Arcamand.

Arcamand: with the name, with the word, everything I had forgotten, had refused to remember, came back and was mine again, and with it all the unspeakable pain I had denied.

I sat there by the fire, turned away from the room, bent over, my hands clenched on my knees. Someone came near and stood near me at the hearth to warm herself: Diero, a gentle presence in a long shawl of fine pale wool.

“Gav,” she said very quietly, “what is it?”

I tried to answer her and broke into a sob. I hid my face in my arms and wept aloud.

Diero sat down beside me on the stone hearth seat. She put her arms around me and held me while I cried. “Tell me, tell me,” she said at last. “My sister. She was my sister,” I said.

And that word brought the sobbing again, so hard I could not take breath.

She held me and rocked me a while, until I could lift my head and wipe my nose and face. Then she said again, “Tell me.” “She was always there,” I said.

And so one way and another, weeping, in broken sentences and out of order, I told her about Sallo, about our life, about her death.

The wall of forgetting was down. I was able to think, to speak, to remember. I was free. Freedom was unspeakable anguish.

In that first terrible hour I came back again and again to Sallo’s death, to how she died, why she died - all the questions I had refused to ask.

“The Mother knew—she had to know about it,” I said. “Maybe Torm took Sallo and Ris out of the silk rooms without asking, without permission, it sounds as if that’s what he did. But the other women there would know it—they’d go to the Mother and tell her—Torm-di took Ris and Sallo off, Mother—they didn’t want to go, they were crying—Did you tell him he could take them? Will you send after them?—And she didn’t. She did nothing! Maybe the Father said not to interfere. He always favored Torm. Sallo said that, she said he hated Yaven and favored Torm. But the Mother—she knew—she knew where Torm and Hoby were taking them, to that place, those men, men who used girls like animals, who—She knew that. Ris was a virgin. And the Mother had given Sallo to Yaven herself. And yet she let the other son take her and give her to—How did they kill her? Did she try to fight them? She couldn’t have. All those men. They raped her, they tortured her, that’s what they wanted girls for, to hear them scream—to torture and kill them, drown them—When Sallo was dead. After I saw her. I saw her dead. The Mother sent for me. She called her ‘our sweet Sallo.’ She gave me—she gave me money—for my sister—”

A sound came out of my throat then, not a sob but a hoarse howl. Diero held me close. She said nothing.

I was silent at last. I was mortally tired.

“They betrayed our trust,” I said. I felt Diero nod. She sat beside me, her hand on mine.

“That’s what it is,” she said, almost inaudibly, “Do you keep the trust, or not. To Barna it’s all power. But it’s not. It’s trust.”

“They had the power to betray it,” I said bitterly.

“Even slaves have that power,” she said in her gentle voice.

♦ 10 ♦

For days after that I kept to my room. Diero told Barna I was ill. I was sick indeed with the grief and anger that I hadn’t been able to feel all the uncounted months since I walked away from the graveyard by the Nisas. I had run away then, body and soul. Now at last I’d turned around and stopped running. But I had a long, long way to go back.

I could not go back to Arcamand in my body, though I thought often and often of doing so. But I had run away from Sallo, from all my memory of her, and I had to return to her and let her return to me. I could no longer deny her, my love, my sister, my ghost.

To grieve for her brought me relief, but never for long. Always the pure sorrow became choked thick with anger, bitter blame, self-blame, unforgiving hatred. With Sallo they all came back to me, those faces, voices, bodies I had kept away from me so long, hiding them behind the wall. Often I could not think of Sallo at all but only of Torm, his thick body and lurching walk; of the Mother and the Father of Arca; or of Hoby. Hoby who had pushed Sallo into the chariot while she was crying out for help. Hoby the bastard son of the Father, full of rancorous envy, hating me and Sallo above all. Hoby who had nearly drowned me once. They might have let—At that pool—It might have been Hoby who—I crouched on the floor of my room, stuffing the folds of a cloak into my mouth so that no one could hear me scream.

Diero came up to my room once or twice a day, and though I couldn’t bear to have anyone else see me as I was, she brought me no shame, but even a little dignity. There was in her a bleak, gentle, unmoved calm, which I could share while she was with me. I loved her for that, and was grateful to her.

She made me eat a little and look after myself. She was able to make me think, sometimes, that I had come to this despair in order to find a way through it, a way back to life.

When at last I went downstairs again, it was with her to give me courage.

Barna, having been told I’d had a fever, treated me kindly, and told me I mustn’t recite again till I was perfectly well. So though my days were again mostly spent with him, often in the winter evenings I’d go to Diero’s peaceful rooms and sit and talk with her alone. I looked forward to those hours and cherished them afterwards, thinking of her greeting and her smile and her soft movements, which were professional and mannered like those of an actor or dancer, and yet which expressed her true nature. I knew she welcomed my visits and our quiet talk. Diero and I loved each other, though she never held me in her arms but that once, by the great hearth, when she let me cry.

People joked about us, a little, carefully, looking at Barna to be sure he didn’t take offense. He seemed if anything amused by the idea that his old mistress was consoling his young scholar. He made no jokes or allusions about it, an unusual delicacy in him; but then he always treated Diero with respect. She herself did not care what people thought or said.

As for me, if Barna thought she and I were lovers, it kept him from suspecting me of “poaching” his girls. Though they were so pretty and apparently so available as to drive a boy my age crazy, their availability was a sham, a trap, as men of the household had warned me early on. If he gives you one of the girls, they said, take her, but only for the night, and don’t try sneaking off with any of his favorites! And as they knew me better and came to trust my discretion, they told me dire stories about Barna’s jealousy. Finding a man with a girl he himself wanted, he had snapped the marn’s wrists like sticks, they said, and driven him out into the forest to starve.

I didn’t entirely believe such tales. The men themselves might be a bit jealous of me, after all, and not sorry to scare me off the girls. Young as I was, some of the girls were even younger; and some of them were cautiously flirtatious, praising and petting me as their “Scholar-di,” begging me prettily to make my recital a love story “and make us cry, Gav, break our hearts!” For after a while I became their entertainer again. The words had come back to me.

During the first time of agony, when I regained all that I had cut out of my memory, all I could remember was Sallo, and Sallo’s death, and all my life in Arcamand and Etra. For many days afterwards, I believed that that was all I ever would remember. I didn’t want to remember anything I’d learned there, in the house of the murderers. All my treasure of history and verse and stories was stained with their crime. I didn’t want to know what they’d taught me. I wanted nothing they had given me, nothing that belonged to the masters. I tried to push it all away from me, forget it, as I had forgotten them.

But that was foolish, and I knew it in my heart. Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn’t taking place. Little by little I let all I’d learned return to me, and it was not stained, not spoiled. It didn’t belong to the masters, it wasn’t theirs: it was mine. It was all I ever really had owned. So I stopped the effort to forget, and all my book learning came back to me with the clarity and completeness some people find uncanny, though the gift isn’t that rare. Once again I could go into the schoolroom or the library of Arcamand in my mind, and open a book, and read it. Standing before the people in the high wooden hall, I could open my mouth and speak the first lines of a poem or a tale, and the rest would follow of itself, the poetry saying and singing itself through me, the story renewing itself in itself as a river runs.

Most of the people there believed that I was improvising, that I was the maker, the poet, incomprehensibly inspired to spout hexameters forever. There wasn’t much point in arguing with them about it. People generally know better than the workman how the work is done, and tell him; and he might as well keep his opinions to himself.

There was little else in the way of entertainment in the Heart of the Forest. Some of the girls and a few men could play or sing. They and I always had a benevolent audience. Barna sat in his great chair, stroking his great curly beard, intent, delighted. Some who had little interest in the tales or the poetry attended either to win favor with Barna or simply because they wanted to be with him and share his pleasure.

And he still took me with him, talking about his plans. So talking and listening, and having leisure time and comfort in which to think—for thinking goes much quicker when one is warm, dry and not hungry—I spent the end of that winter working through all I’d recovered when I came back at last to my Sallo and could grieve for her, and know my loss, and look at what my life had been and what it might have been.

It was still hard for me to think at all of the Mother and Father of Arca. My mind would not come to any clarity concerning them. But I thought often of Yaven. I thought he would not have betrayed our trust. I wondered if when he came home, he had exacted vengeance, useless as it might be. Surely he would not forgive Torm and Hoby, however long he must withhold punishment. Yaven was a man of honor, and he had loved Sallo.

But Yaven might be dead, killed at the siege of Casicar. That war had been as much a disaster for Etra, so people said, as the siege of Etra had been for Casicar. Torm might now be the heir of Arca. That was a thought my mind still flinched away from.

I could think of Sotur only with piercing grief and pain. She had kept faith with us as best she could. Alone there, what had become of her? She would be, she probably had been, married off into some other household—one where there was no Everra, no library of books, no friendship, no escape.

Again and again I thought of that night when Sallo and I were talking in the library, and Sotur came in, and they tried to tell me why they were afraid. They had clung to each other, loving, helpless.

And I hadn’t understood.

It was not only the Family who had betrayed them, I had betrayed them. Not in acts: what could I have done? But I should have understood, I had been unwilling to see. I had blinded my eyes with belief. I had believed that the rule of the master and the obedience of the slave were a mutual and sacred trust. I had believed that justice could exist in a society founded on injustice.

Belief in the lie is the life of the lie. That line from Caspro’s book came back to me, and cut like a razor.

Honor can exist anywhere, love can exist anywhere, but justice can exist only among people who found their relationships upon it.

Now, I thought, I understood Barna’s plans for the Uprising, now they made sense to me. All that ancient evil ordained by the Ancestors, that prison tower of mastery and slavery, was to be uprooted and thrown down, replaced by justice and liberty. The dream would be made real. And Luck had brought me here to the place where that great change would begin, the home and center of the liberty to come.

I wanted to be one of those who made it real. I began to dream of going to Asion. Many of the Forest Brothers were from that city, a great city with a large population of freemen and freedmen, merchants and artisans, into which a fugitive slave could mix without being questioned or suspected. Barna’s netmen went back and forth often, passing as traders, merchants, cattle buyers, slaves sent on commission by farmers, and so on. I wanted to join them. There were educated people in Asion, both nobles and freemen, people to whom I could present myself as a freeman seeking work copying or reciting or teaching. And so doing I could do Barna’s work, laying the foundation of the Uprising among the slaves I would meet there.

Barna absolutely forbade it. “I want you here,” he said. “I need you, Scholar!”

“You need me more there,” I said.

He shook his head. “Too dangerous. One day they ask, where did you get your learning? And what’ll you say?

I’d already thought that out. “That I went to school in Mesun, where the University is, and came down to Asion because there are too many scholars in Urdile, and the pay’s better in Bendile,”

“There’d be scholars there from the University who’d say no, that boy was never there.”

“Hundreds of people go to the colleges. They can’t all know one another.”

I argued hard, but he shook his big curly head, and his laugh changed to a grimmer look. “Listen, Gav, I tell you a learned man stands out. And you’re already famous. The lads talk as they go about, you know, winning folk in the villages and towns to come here to join us. They boast of you. We’ve got a fellow, they say, that can speak any tale or poem that was ever made! And only a boy yet, a wonder of the world! Well, you can’t go to Asion with a name like that hanging about you.”

I stared at him. “My name? Do they say my name?”

“They say the name you gave us,” he said, untroubled.

Of course he, and everyone else but Chamry Bern, assumed that “Gav” was a false name. Nobody here, not even Barna, used the name he’d had as a slave.

As Barna saw my expression, his changed. “Oh, by the Destroyer,” he said. “You kept the name you had in Etra?” I nodded.

“Well,” he said after a minute, “if you ever do leave, take a new one! But that’s all the more reason for me to say stay here! Your old masters may have sent word around that their clever slave boy they’d spent so much money educating ran off. They hate to let a runaway escape. It gripes them to the soul. We’re a good way from Etra here, but you never know.”

I’d never given a thought to pursuit. When I left the graveyard and walked up the Nisas, it was a death. I had walked away from everything, into nothing, going nowhere. I had no fear, then, because I had no desire. As I began to live again, here, I still had no fear. I’d gone so far in my own mind that it never occurred to me that anyone from the old life would follow me.

“They think I’m dead,” I said at last. “They think I drowned myself that morning.”

“Why would they think that?”

I was silent.

I hadn’t told Barna anything about my life. I’d never spoken of it to anyone but Diero.

“You left some clothing on the riverbank, eh?” he said. “Well, they might have fallen for that old trick. But you were a valuable property. If your owners think you might be alive, they’ll have their ears open. It’s been only a year or two, right? Don’t ever think you’re safe—except here! And you might tell the lads you came from Pagadi or Piram, so that they don’t say Etra if they speak of you, eh?”

“I will,” I said, humbled.

Had there been no end to my stupidity? No limit to the patience Luck had had with me?

But I did repeat my request to go into Asion. Barna said, “You’re a free man, Gav. I give you no orders! But I tell you, it’s not time yet for you to go. You wouldn’t be safe. Your being in Asion now could endanger others there, and the whole scheme of the Uprising. When the time comes for you to go there, I’ll tell you. Before then, if you go, you go against my heart.” I couldn’t argue with that.

In early spring a couple of newcomers arrived, runaways from a household in Asion, who came hidden in a goods wagon driven by netmen. They brought with them, stolen from their masters’ house, a good sum of money and a long box. “What’s this stuff?” asked one of Barna’s men who opened the box, holding up a scroll so that it slipped from the rod and unrolled at his feet. “Cloth, is it?”

“It’s what I asked for, man,” said Barna. “It’s a book. Now take care with it!” He had indeed requested his netmen to bring books. Nobody had brought any until now, most of our recruits—and recruiters—being illiterate and having no idea where to look for books or even, like this fellow, what a book looked like.

The new pair of runaways were educated, one trained in accounting, the other in recitation. The books were a motley lot, some scrolls, some paged and bound; but all could be useful for teaching, and one was a treasure to me—a little, elegantly printed copy of Caspro’s Cosmologies, replacing the manuscript copy that Mime had given me, for which I had grieved, once I began to remember what I had lost and left at Arca-mand.

The new recruits were, as Barna said, a good catch: the accountant assisted him in record keeping, and the reciter could tell fables and Bendili epics by the hour, giving me a vacation.

I looked forward to talking to these educated men, but that didn’t go well. The accountant knew only figures and calculations, while the reciter, Pulter, made it clear that he was older and more accomplished than I was, and that my pretensions to scholarship didn’t qualify me to converse with a truly learned man. It galled him that most of our people liked my recitations better than his, though he soon had a following. I’d been taught to let the words do the work, while he performed in alternate shouts and whispers, with long pauses, dramatic intonations, and quavering tremolos of emotion.

The copy of the Cosmologies was his, but he had no interest in reading Caspro, saying all the modern poets were obscure and perverse. He gave me the book, and for that alone I would have forgiven him all his snubs and all his quavers. I found the poem difficult, but kept going back to it. Sometimes I read from it to Diero, quiet afternoons in her room.

Her friendship was like nothing else in my life. Only with her could I speak of my life at Arcamand. When I was with her I felt no wish for revenge, no desire to overturn the social order, no rage at the poor dead impotent Ancestors. I knew what I had lost, and could remember what I had had. Though Diero had never been in Etra, she was my link to it. She hadn’t known Sallo, but she brought Sallo to me, and so eased my heart.

Like most slaves, Diero had been casually mothered and had no brother or sister that she knew; the two children she had borne when she was young were sold as infants. The craving for family relationship was deep in her, as it was in all of us. Barna knew that and called on it to form and strengthen his Brotherhood.

I was unusual in having had so close a bond to a sister: my loss was specific, my craving acute. It was as an older sister that I loved Diero, while to her I was a younger brother or a son, and also, perhaps, the one man she ever knew who did not want to be her master.

She loved to hear me tell about Sallo and the others at Arcamand, and our days at the farm; she was curious about the customs of Etra, and also about my origin. The great marshes where the Rassy rises lie not far south of Asion, and she had known me at once for what I was, one of the Marshmen, dark-skinned, short and slight, with thick black hair and a high-bridged nose. The Rassiu, she called the Marsh people. They came into Asion, she said, to trade at a certain monthly market; they brought herbs and medicines that were in high demand, and fine basketry and cloth they wove of reeds, to trade for pottery and metal-ware. They came under an ancient religious truce which protected them from slave takers. They were respected as freemen, and some of them had even settled in one quarter of the city. She was shocked to learn that Etra raided the marshes for slaves. “The Rassiu are a sacred people,” she said. “They have a covenant with the Lord of the Waters. Your city will suffer for enslaving them, I think.”

Some of the young women of Barna’s house treated Diero with servility, fawning, as if she had the kind of power they’d known in woman slave owners. Others were trustfully respectful; others ignored her as they did all old women. She treated them all alike—kind, mild, yielding, with a dignity that set her apart. I think she was very lonely among them. Once I saw her talking with one of the younger girls, letting the girl talk and weep for home, as she had done for me.

There were no children in Barna’s house. When a girl got pregnant she moved to one of the houses where other women lived in the town and had her baby there; she kept it or gave it away as she chose. If she wanted to bring the baby up, that was fine, but if she wanted to come back and live the free life at Barna’ s house, she couldn’t bring it with her. “This is where we get ’em, not where we keep ’em!” Barna said, to a shout of approval from his men.

Soon after Pulter and the accountant arrived, a new girl was brought to the household, with a little sister from whom she refused to be parted. Very beautiful, fifteen or sixteen years old, Irad had been taken from a village west of the forest. Barna was immediately smitten with her and made his claim on her clear to the other men. Whether she was already experienced with men or simply had no defenses, she submitted to everything with no pretense of resistance, until they told her she must let her little sister be taken away. Then she turned into a lion. I didn’t see the scene, but the other men told me about it. “If you touch her I’ll kill you,” she said, whipping out a thin, long, unexpected knife from the seam of her embroidered trousers, and glaring round at Barna and all of them.

Barna began to reason with her, explaining the rules of the household, and assuring her that the child would be well cared for. Irad stood silent, her knife held ready.

At this point, Diero interfered. She came forward and stood beside the sisters, putting her hand on the little girl’s head as she cowered against Irad. She asked Barna if the girls were slaves. I can imagine her mild, unemphatic voice asking the question.

He of course proclaimed that they were free women in the City of Freedom.

“So, if they like, both of them can stay with me,” said Diero.

The men who first told me the story thought that Diero had at last become jealous, Irad being so young and so beautiful. They laughed about it. “The old vixen has a tooth or two left!” one of them said.

I didn’t think it was jealousy that moved her. Diero was without envy or possessiveness. What had made her intervene this time?

She got her way, to the extent that she went off with the child that night to her rooms. Barna of course took Irad with him for the night. But whenever he didn’t call for her, Irad stayed with little Melle in Di-ero’s rooms.

When the women of Barna’s house were all together, I was often daunted by the sheer power of their youthful femininity. I got my revenge as a male by feeling contempt for them. They were healthy, plump, mindless, content to lounge about the house all day trying on the latest stolen finery and chattering about nothing. If one or another of them went off to have a baby, it made no difference—there was no end of them, others just as young and pretty would arrive with the next convoy of raiders.

Now it occurred to me to wonder about this endless supply of girls. Were they all runaways? Did they all ask to come here? Were they all seeking freedom?

Yes, of course they were. They were escaping from masters who forced sex on them.

Was Barna’s house any better than whatever they’d escaped from?

Yes, of course it was. Here, they weren’t raped, they weren’t beaten. They were well fed, well clothed, idle.

Exactly like the women in the silk rooms at Arcamand.

I cringe, remembering how I cringed when that thought first came to me. I am ashamed now as I was then.

I thought I was keeping and cherishing Sallo in my memory, but I had forgotten her again, refused to see her, refused to see what her life and her death had shown me. I had run away again.

I had a hard time making myself go see Diero, then. For several nights I went into town to talk with Venne and Chamry and their friends. When I finally did visit Diero’s rooms, my shame kept me tongue-tied. Besides, the little girl was there. “Of course Irad is usually with Barna at night,” Diero said, “but then I get to sleep with Melle. And we tell stories, don’t we, Melle?”

The child nodded vigorously. She was about six years old, dark, and extremely small. She sat next to Diero and stared at me. When I looked back, she blinked, but went on staring. “Are you Cly?” she asked.

“No. I’m Gav.”

“Cly came to the village,” the child said. “He looked like a crow too.” “My sister used to call me Beaky,” I said.

After a minute she looked down at last. She smiled. “Beaky-beaky,” she murmured.

“Her village is near the Marshes,” Diero said. “Maybe Cly came from there. Melle looks a bit like a Rassiu herself. Look, Gav, what Melle did this morning.” She showed me a scrap of the thin, stiffly sized canvas that we used for writing lessons, since we had almost no paper. On it a few letters were written in a large uncertain script,

“T, M, O, D,” I read out. “You wrote that, Melle?”

“I did like Diero-io did,” the child said. She jumped up and brought me Diero’s scroll copybook, unrolled to the last few lines of poetry. “I just copied the big ones.”

“That’s very good,” I said.

“That one is wobbly,” Melle said, examining the D critically.

“She could learn so much more from you than I can teach her,” said Diero. She seldom expressed any wish, and when she did it was so gentle and indirect I often missed it. I caught it this time.

“It’s wobbly, but I can read it quite well,” I said to Melle. “It says D. D is how you start writing Diero’s name. Would you like to see how to do the rest of it?”

The little girl said nothing, but leapt up again and fetched the inkstand and the writing brush. I thanked her and carried them over to the table. I found a clean scrap of canvas and wrote out DIERO in big letters, pulled up a stool for Melle to perch on, and gave her the brush.

She did a pretty good job of copying, and as praised. “I can do it better,” she said, and crouched over the table to copy again, eyebrows drawn tight together, brush held tight in the sparrow-claw hand, pink tongue clamped tight between the teeth.

Again Diero had given me back something I lost when I left Arca-mand. Her eyes were bright as she watched us.

After that I came by her apartment nearly every day to read with her and to teach little Melle her letters. Often the child’s sister was there. Irad was very shy with me at first, and I with her; she was so beautiful, so unguarded, and so clearly Barna’s property. But Diero always stayed with us, protecting us both. Melle adored Diero and soon attached herself passionately to me too. She’d rush at me when I came into the room, crying, “Beaky! Beaky’s here!” and strangle me with hugging when I picked her up. That made Irad begin to trust me, and talking and playing with the child put us at ease. Melle was serious, funny, and very intelligent. In Irad’s fiercely protective love for her there was an element of admiration, almost awe. She would say, “Ennu sent me to look after Melle.”

They each wore a tiny figure of Ennu-Me, a crudely modeled clay cat’s head, on a cord around the neck.

It wasn’t hard for me to persuade Irad that learning how to read and write along with Melle was a good idea, and so she joined in the lessons. Like Diero, she was doubtful and hesitant in learning. Melle was not, and it was touching to see the little sister coaching the big one.

Lessons with the other girls in the house had never got further than half the alphabet; they always lost interest or were called away. The pleasure of teaching Melle made me think I might gather some of the young children of the town into a class. I tried, but couldn’t make it work. The women wouldn’t trust their girls to any man; the children were needed to go into the fields with their mother, or look after their baby brother; or they were simply unable to sit still long enough to learn a lesson, and their parents had no idea why they should do so. I needed Barna’s backing, his authority.

I approached him with the proposal of establishing a school, a place set aside, with regular hours. I’d teach reading and writing. To flatter his sense of superiority to me, Pulter would be asked to recite and lecture on literature. The accountant might teach a little practical arithmetic. Barna listened, nodded, and approved heartily, but when I began to suggest the place I thought suitable, he had reasons why it would not do. Finally he said, clapping me on the shoulder, “Put it off till next year, Scholar. Things are too busy now, people just can’t spare the time.”

“Children of six or seven can spare the time,” I said.

“Kiddies that age don’t want to be locked up in a classroom! They need to be running about and playing, free as birds!”

“But they aren’t free as birds,” I said. “They’re drudging at field work with their mothers, or lugging their baby sisters and brothers around. When are they going to learn anything else?”

“We’ll see that they do. I’ll talk about this with you again!” And he was off to see about the new additions to the granaries. He was indeed endlessly busy and I made allowance for it, but I was disappointed.

I made up for it to myself by offering to give talks in the room I’d hoped to use as a schoolroom. I told people I’d tell some of the history of the City States and Bendile and other lands of the Western Shore, evenings, if they wanted to come listen. I got an audience of nine or ten grown men; women didn’t go in the streets at night. My hearers mostly came just to hear stories, but a couple of them took a shrewd interest in the variety of customs and beliefs, laughing heartily at outlandish ways of doing and thinking, and ready to talk about whys and wherefores. But they’d worked hard all day, and when I went on long I’d see half my audience asleep. If I were ever to educate the Forest Brothers, I’d have to catch them younger.

My failure to start a school left me all the more time to be with Diero and Melle, and I was happier with them than anywhere else. I still went about with Barna, but his interest was all in immediate projects, the new buildings and planned expansion of the community kitchens. The Heart of the Forest was rapidly becoming more prosperous as the herds and gardens thrived and the raiders brought in goods. When I talked with the netmen who went into Asion, over the weak beer in the beer house Chamry frequented, they spoke only about stealing and trading. It seemed to me they were sent out mostly to get luxuries.

Venne was back from a long trip with his group, and he and some of his mates often joined us at the beer house. He liked his work. It was exciting, and he hadn’t had to shoot anybody, he said. I asked him if people outside the forest knew who they were. Over towards Piram, where he had been, he said the villagers called the raiders “Barna’s boys.” They were willing to barter with them, but were wary, always urging them to go on to the next town and “skin the merchants.”

I asked Venne if the raiders ever talked to people about the Uprising. He’d never heard of it at all. “A revolt? Slaves? How could slaves fight? We’d have to be like an army, to do that, seems like.” His ignorance made me think that only certain men were entrusted with the risky task of spreading the plans for the Uprising; but I didn’t know who they were.

I asked the raiders if slaves in the villages or on the farms often asked to join them. They said sometimes a boy wanted to run off with them, but they usually wouldn’t take him, for not even cattle theft roused such vengeful pursuit as slave stealing. But they all had stories about slaves who’d escaped and followed them on their own. Most of them had been such runaways themselves. “See, we knew we couldn’t get into Barna’s town without we went with Barna’s boys,” said a young man from a village on the Rassy. “And I do keep an eye out for fellows like I was.”

“And that’s how you get the girls you bring in too?” I asked.

That brought on laughter and a babble of stories and descriptions. Some girls were runaways, I gathered, but the raiders had to be careful about accepting them, “because they’ll be followed, like as not, and not know how to hide their tracks, and likely they’re with child”—and another man broke in, “It’s only the pregnant and the ugly ones and maimed and harelips that tries to join us. The ones we want are kept shut up close.”

“So how do you get them to join you?” I asked. More laughter. “Same way we get the cattle and sheep to join us,” said Venne’s leader, a short, rather pudgy man, who Venne told me was a fine hunter and scout. “Round ’em up and drive ’em!”

“But don’t touch, don’t touch,” said another man, “at least not the prettiest one or two. Barna likes ’em fresh.”

They went on telling stories. The men who had taken Irad and Melle were there, and one of them told the tale, rather boastfully, since everybody knew Irad was Barna’s favorite. “They was just out at the edge of the village, the two of ’em, in the fields, and Ater and I come by on horseback. I took one look and give Ater the wink and hopped off and grabbed the beauty, but she fought like a she-bear, I tell you. She was trying to get her hand to that knife of hers, now I know it, and lucky she didn’t, or she’d have had my guts out. And the little one was jabbing at my legs with the little sharp spade she had, cutting ’em to ribbons, so Ater had to come pull her off, and he was going to toss her aside, but the two of ’em hung on to each other so tight, so I said take both the damn little bitches then, and we tied ’em up together and put ’em up in front of me on my big mare. They screeched the whole time, but we was just far enough from the houses nobody heard. That was a lucky haul by Sampa! I doubt they missed those girls till nightfall, and by then we was halfway to the forest.”

“I wouldn’t want a woman that fought like that, with a knife and all,” said Ater, a big, slow man. “I like ’em soft.”

The conversation wandered off, as it often did in the beer house, into comparing kinds of women. Only one of the eight men around our table had a woman of his own, and he was teased remorselessly about what she did while he was off raiding. The others were talking more about what they wanted than what they had. The Heart of the Forest was still a city of men. An army camp, Barna sometimes said. The comparison was apt in many ways.

But if we were soldiers, what war were we fighting?

“He’s gone off broody again,” Venne said, and clucked like a hen. I realised somebody had made a joke about me and I’d missed it. They laughed, good-natured laughter. I was the Scholar, the bookish boy, and they liked me to play my absent-minded role.

I went back to Barna’s house. I was to give a recital that evening. Barna was there, as always, in his big chair, but he had Irad sitting on his lap, and he fondled her as he listened to me tell a tale from the Chamhan.

Though he sometimes caressed his girls in public, he had always done it jokingly, calling a group of them to come around him and “keep me warm on a winter night,” and inviting some of his men to “help themselves.” But that was after feasting and drinking, not during a recitation. Everyone knew he was besotted by Irad, calling her to his bedroom every night, ignoring all his earlier favorites. But this crass display in public was a new thing.

Irad held perfectly still, submitting to his increasingly intimate caresses, her face blank.

I stopped before the end of the chapter. The words had dried up. I’d lost the thread of the story, and so had many of my hearers. I stood silent a minute, then bowed and stepped down.

“That’s not the end, is it?” said Barna in his big voice.

I said, “No. But it seemed enough tonight, Maybe Dorremer would play for us?”

“Finish the tale!” Barna said.

But other people had begun to move about and talk, and several seconded my call for music, and Dorremer came forward with her lyre as she often did after Pulter or I recited. So it passed off, and I made my escape. I went to Diero’s rooms, not my own. I was troubled and wanted to talk with her.

Melle was asleep in the bedroom. Diero was in her sitting room without any light but the moon’s. It was a sweet clear night of early summer. The forest birds they called nightbells were singing away off among the trees, calling and answering, and sometimes a little owl wailed sweetly. Diero’s door was open. I went in and greeted her, and we sat without talking for a while. I wanted to tell her about Barna’s behavior, but I didn’t want to spoil her serenity, which always quietened me. She said at last, “You’re sad tonight, Gav.”

I heard someone run lightly up the stairs. Irad came in. Her hair was loose and she was panting for breath. “Don’t say I’m here!” she whispered, and ran out again.

Diero stood up. She was like a willow, black and silver in the moonlight. She took up the flint and steel and struck a light. The little oil lamp bloomed yellow, changing all the shadows in the room and leaving the moon’s cold radiance out in the sky. I didn’t want to lose our quiet mood, and was about to ask Diero, petulantly, why Irad was playing hide-and-seek. But there was the noise of heavier feet on the staircase, and now Barna stood in the doorway. His face was almost black, swollen, in the tangled mass of his hair and beard. “Where is the bitch?” he shouted. “Is she here?”

Diero looked down. Trained in submissiveness all her life, she was unable to answer him with anything but a shrinking silence. And I too shrank from the big man blind with rage.

He pushed past us, flung open the bedroom door, looked around in the bedroom, and came out again, staring at me. “You! You’re after her! That’s why Diero keeps her here!” He rushed at me like a great, red boar charging, his arm upraised to strike me. Diero came between us crying out his name. He knocked her aside with one hand. He seized me by the shoulders and lifted and shook me as Hoby used to do, slapped my head left and right, and threw me down.

I don’t know what happened in the next minute or two. When I could sit up and see through the dazzling blackness that pulsed in my eyes, I saw Diero huddled on the floor. Barna was gone.

I managed to get to my hands and knees, then get up. I looked into the bedroom. No one was there but a tiny shadow cowering against the wall by one of the beds.

I said, “Don’t be afraid, Melle, it’s all right.” I found it difficult to talk. My mouth was filling with blood and a couple of teeth were loose on the right side. “Diero will be here in a moment,” I said.

I went back to Diero. She had sat up. The lamp was still burning. In its weak pool of light I could see that the soft skin of her cheek was bruised. I could not bear to see that. I knelt down by her.

“He found her,” she whispered. “She hid in your room. He went straight there. Gav, what will you do?” She took my hand. Her hand was cold.

I shook my head, which made it ring and spin again. I kept swallowing blood.

“What will he do to her?” I said. She shrugged.

“He’s angry—he could kill her—”

“He’ll hurt her. He doesn’t kill women. Gav. You can’t stay here.” I thought she meant this room.

“You must go. Leave! She went to your room. She didn’t know where to hide. Oh, poor child. Oh, Gav! I have loved you so much!” She put her face down on my hand, weeping silently for a moment, then raised her head again. “We’ll be all right. We’re not men, we don’t matter. But you have to go.”

“I’ll take you,” I said. “And them—Irad and Melle—“ “No, no, no,” she whispered. “Gav, he’ll kill you. Go now. Now! The girls and I are safe.” She got up, pulling herself up by the table, and stood shakily a minute; then she went into the bedroom. I heard her soft voice talking to the child. She came out carrying her. Melle clung to her, hiding her face.

“Melle-sweet, you must say goodbye to Gav.”

The child turned and held out her arms, and I took her and held her tight. “It will be all right, Melle,” I said. “Do your lessons with Diero. Promise? And help Irad with them. Then you’ll both be wise.” I didn’t know what I was saying. I was in tears. I kissed the child and set her down. I took Diero’s hand and held it against my mouth a moment, and went out.

I went to my room, belted on my knife, put on my coat, and put the small copy of the Cosmologies in the pocket. I looked around the little room with its one high window, the only room of my own I’d ever had.

I left Barna’s house by the back way and went round through the streets to the cobblers’ barrack. In the great’ wash of moonlight the city of wood was a city of silver-blue, shadowed, silent, beautiful.