Voices

♦ 10 ♦

When Desac came the next day, I wasn’t with the Waylord, I was helping Ista with the wash. She and Bomi and I had the boilers going soon after dawn, set up the cranked wringer, strung the wash lines, and by noon had filled the kitchen courtyard with clean sheets and table linens blinding white and snapping in the windy, hot sunlight.

In the afternoon, walking in the old park with Shetar, Gry told me what had occurred in the morning.

The Waylord had come to the Master’s room to say that Desac wished to speak with Orrec. Orrec asked Gry to come with him. “I left Shetar behind,” Gry said, “since she seems to dislike Desac,” They went down to the gallery, and there Desac again tried to make Orrec promise to go out and speak to the people of the city, rousing them to drive out the Alds, when the moment came.

Desac was eloquent and urgent, and Orrec was distressed, divided in mind, feeling that this was not his battle, and yet that any battle for freedom must be his. If Ansul rose up against tyranny; how could he stand aside? But he was given no choice in time or place, and also no real knowledge of how this rebellion was to be made. Desac was clearly wise to say so little about it, since its success depended on its being a surprise; yet, as Orrec told her, he didn’t like being used, he’d rather be included.

I asked what the Waylord had said, and Gry said, “Almost nothing. Last night, you know, when Sulter said he’d ‘ask,’ and Desac jumped at it?—Well, nothing at all was said about that. They’d said it before we came down, no doubt.”

I hated not to be able to tell her anything about the oracle; I didn’t want to keep anything from Gry. But I knew it was not mine to speak of, or not yet.

She went on. ‘I think Sulter is worried about numbers. More than two thousand AId soldiers, he said. Most of them near the Palace and the barracks. At least a third armed and on duty, and the others close to their weapons. How can Desac move a large enough force against them without alerting the guards? Even at night? The night guards are mounted. Asudar horses are like dogs, you know, they’re trained to give a signal if they sense anything amiss. I hope that old soldier knows what he’s doing! Because I think he’s going to do it pretty soon.”

My mind moved swiftly, thinking of fighting in the streets. How can we be free of the Alds? With sword, knife, club, stone. With fist, with force, with our rage unleashed at last. We would break them, break their power, their heads, their backs, their bodies… Broken mend broken.

I was standing on a path among great bushes. The sun was hot on my head. My hands were dry, swollen, and sore from hot water and handling linens all the morning. Gry stood near me, watching me with alert concern. She said gently, “Memer? Where were you?”

I shook my head.

Shetar came bounding along the path to us. She halted, holding up her head with a proud and conscious air. She opened her fierce, fanged mouth, and a small blue butterfly came fluttering out and flew off, quite unconcerned.

We both laughed uncontrollably. The lion looked a little embarrassed or confused.

“She’s the girl that spoke blossoms and bells and butterflies!” said Gry. “You know about her—when Cumbelo was King?”

“And her sister spoke lice and lugworms and lumps of mud.”

“Oh, cat, cat,” Gry said, tugging at the fur behind Shetars ears till the lion rolled her head with pleasure, purring.

I could not put it all together. Fighting in the streets, darkness in the cave, terror, laughter, sunlight on my head, starlight in my eyes, a lion who said a butterfly.

“Oh, Gry, I wish I understood something,” I said. “How do you ever make sense out of what happens?”

“I don’t know, Memer. You keep trying, and sometimes it does.”

“Rational thought and impenetrable mystery,” I said.

“You’re as bad as Orrec,” she said. “Come on. Come home.”

That night Orrec and the Waylord talked about the Gand Ioratth, and I found I could listen without closing my mind. Maybe it was because I had seen the Gand twice now, and despite the hateful pomp, and the cringing slaves, and my knowledge that if the whim took him he could have us all buried alive, what I had seen was a man, not a demon. A hard, tough, wily old man who loved poetry with all his heart.

Orrec spoke almost to my thought: “This fear of demons, devilry—it’s unworthy of him. I wonder how much of all that he believes, in fact.”

“He may not fear demons much,” the Waylord said. “But so long as he can’t read, he’ll fear the written word.”

“If I could just take a book there and open it and read from it—the same words I speak without the book—!”

“Abomination,” The Waylord shook his head. “Sacrilege. He’d have no choice but to hand you over to the priests of Atth.”

“But if the Alds decide to stay here, to rule Ansul, to deal with its neighbors, with other lands and nations, they can’t go on abominating what trade is based on—records and contracts. And diplomacy—let alone history, poetry! Did you know that in the City States, ‘ald’ means idiot? ‘No use to talk to him, he’s an ald.’ Surely Ioratth has begun to see the disadvantage they’re at.”

“Let’s hope that he has. And that the new king in Medron sees it.”

But I began to be impatient with this talk. The Alds weren’t going to decide to stay here, rule us, deal with our neighbors. It wasn’t up to them. I found myself saying, “Does it matter?”

They all looked at me, and I said, “They can go be illiterate all they please in Asudar.”

“Yes,” the Waylord said, “if they’ll go.”

“We’ll drive them out.”

“Into the countryside?”

“Yes! Out of the city!”

“Are our farmers able to fight them? And if we chased them clear home to Asudar—won’t the High Gand see it as an insult and threat to his new power, and send more thousands of soldiers against us? He has an army. We do not.”

I didn’t know what to say.

The Waylord went on. “These are considerations which Desac dismisses. He may well be right to do so. ‘Forethought, bane of action.’ But do you see, Memer, now that things are changing among the Alds themselves, I have my first hope of regaining our liberty by persuading them that we’re more profitable to them as allies than as slaves. That would take time. It would end in a compromise not a victory. But if we seek victory now and fail, hope will be hard to find.”

I could say nothing. He was right, and Desac was right. The time to act was upon us, but how to act?

“I could speak for you to Ioratth better than I could speak for Desac to the crowd,” Orrec said. “Tell me, are there people in the city who would talk in these terms to Iorarth, if he agreed to some negotiation?”

“Yes, and outside the city, too. We’ve kept in touch over the years with all the towns of the Ansul Coast, scholars and merchants, people who were waylords and mayors and officers of the festivals and ceremonies. Boys run messages from town to town, wagoners carry them along with the cabbages. The soldiers seldom search for written messages, they’d rather have nothing to do with sacrilege and wizardry.”

“‘O Lord Destroyer, give me an ignorant enemy!’” Orrec quoted.

“In the city, some of the men I’ve talked about this with over the years are with Desac now. They seek any way to get the Ald yoke off our neck. They’re ready to fight. But they might be willing to talk. If the Alds will listen.”

ORREC WAS NOT SUMMONED to the Palace the next day. Late in the morning he went down to the Harbor Market, on foot, with Gry. He didn’t give any advance notice, no tent was set up, but as soon as he walked into the market square people recognised and followed him. They didn’t press very close to him, partly because of Shetar, but they made a moving circle round him, greeted him, called out his name, and shouted, “Recite, recite!” One man shouted, “Read!”

I didn’t walk with them. I was in boy’s clothes, as usual when I went in the streets, and didn’t want to be seen as Mem the groom with Gry, who wasn’t in disguise. I ran round to the raised marble pavement in front of the Admirals’ Tower and climbed up on the base of the horse statue there, from which I had a good view of the whole market. The statue is the work of Redam the sculptor, carved from one great block of stone; the horse stands foursquare, strong and heavy, his head raised and turned to the west, looking out to sea. The Alds had destroyed most statues in the city but left this one untouched, perhaps because it was a horse; certainly they didn’t know that the sea gods, the Seunes, are imagined and worshipped in the form of horses. I touched the Seunes big stone left front hoof and murmured the blessing. The Seune returned the blessing to me in the form of shade. It was a hot day already, and going to get hotter.

Orrec took his position where the tent had been on the first day he spoke here, and the people crowded round him. The pedestal I was on soon filled up with boys and men, but I hung on to my place right between the horse’s front legs, shoving back hard when people shoved me. Many of the stall keepers in the market tossed a cloth over their goods and joined the crowd to listen to the maker, or stood on a stool by their booth to see over the heads of the throng. I saw five or six blue cloaks in the crowd, and soon a troop of mounted Ald soldiers came down the Council Way to the corner of the square, but they stopped without trying to push into the crowd. There was a great hum of noise, talking and laughing and shouting, and it was a shock when all that human commotion ceased at once, dropped into utter silence, at the first note of Orrecs lyre.

He said a poem first, Tetemer’s love poem “The Hills of Dom,” an old favorite all up and down the Ansul Coast. When he had spoken it he sang the refrain with the lyre, and the people sang with him, smiling and swaying.

Then he said, —Ansul is a small land, but her songs are sung and her tales are told through all the Western Shore. I first learned them far to the north, in Bendraman. The makers of Ansul are famous from the farthest south to the River Trend. And there have been heroes here in peaceful Ansul and Manva, brave warriors, and the makers have told of them. Hear the tale of Adira and Marra on the Mountain Sul!”

A great, strange sound went up from the crowd, a kind of moaning roar both of joy and of grief. It was frightening. If Orrec was daunted, if the response he got was more than he’d expected, he didn’t show it. He lifted his head proudly and sent his voice out strong and clear: “In the days of the Old Lord of Sul, an army came from the land of Hish… ” The crowd stood completely motionless. I was fighting tears the whole time. The story, the words, were so dear to me, and I had only known them in silence, in secret, in the hidden room, alone. Now I heard them spoken aloud among a great crowd of my people, in the heart of my city, under the open sky. Across the straits the mountain stood blue in the blue haze, its peak sharp white. I held on to the stone hoof of the Seune and fought my tears.

The tale ended, and in the silence one of the Ald horses gave a loud, ringing whinny, a regular warhorse cry. It broke the spel. The crowd laughed, moved, and began crying out, “Eho! Eho! Praise to the maker! Eho!” Some were shouting, “Praise to the heroes! Praise to Adira!” The mounted troop up at the east edge of the square shifted as if they were forming to ride into the crowd, but the people paid no attention and did not move away from them. Orrec stood quietly, his head bowed, for a long time. The tumult did not die away, and at last he spoke through it, not outshouting the crowd but as if speaking in an ordinary tone, though his voice carried amazingly: “Come on, sing with me.” He raised his lyre, and as they began to quieten, he sang out the first line of his song “Liberty”: “As in the dark of winter night… ”

And we sang it with him, thousands of voices.

Desac was right. The people of Ansul knew that song. Not from books, we had no more books. From the air—from voice to voice, from heart to heart, down through all the western lands.

When it was done and the moment of silence passed, the tumult rose again, cheers and calls for more, but also shouts as of anger, and somewhere in the crowd a deep-voiced man called out, “Lerol Lero! Lero!”—and other voices took it up as a chant, with a fast beat on a mounting tune. I had never heard it, but I knew it must be one of the old chants, the songs of festival, procession, worship, that had been sung in the streets when we were free to praise our gods. I saw the mounted troop pushing their way into the crowd, which caused enough commotion that the chant lost force and died away. I saw Orrec and Gry making their way down the steps to the east, not across the square but behind the Ald troop. The crowd was still resisting the horsemen, though slowly giving way to them—it’s very hard not to get out of the way of a horse coming straight at you, I can testify. I slid down from the pedestal and wriggled through the crowd till I got onto Council Way, ran up it and cut across behind the Customs House, and met my friends on the way up West Street.

A mob of people were following them, but not closely, and most of them didn’t come farther than the bridge over North Canal. The maker, the singer, is sacred, not to be intruded on. While I was still up on the pedestal I saw people touching the place where Orrec had stood on the pavement above the Admiralty steps, touching it for the blessing; and no one would walk across that spot for a while. In the same way, they followed him at a distance, calling out praise and jokes and singing his hymn to liberty. And again for a moment that chant rose up, “Lero! Lero! Lero!”

We said nothing as we climbed the hill to Galvamand. Orrecs brown face was almost grey with fatigue, and he walked blindly; Gry held his arm. He went straight to the Master’s room. Gry said he would rest there a while. I began to see the cost of his gift.

EARLY IN THE EVENING I was down in the stable court playing with a new batch of kittens. Bomi’s cats had been quite shy and retiring ever since Shetar appeared, but kittens have no fear. This lot was just old enough to be wildly funny, chasing one another over and through a woodpile, falling over their tails, stopping to stare with their little, round, intent eyes, and flying off again. Gudit had been exercising Star out on the horse path. He stood watching the kittens with a glum and disapproving air. One got into trouble, scrabbling straight up a post and then sticking there, crying, not knowing how to get back down; Gudit gently picked it off the post, like a burr, and gently put it back on the woodpile, saying, “Vermin.”

We heard the clatter of hoofs, and a blue-cloaked officer rode in and halted his horse in the archway.

“Well?” said Gudit in a loud, belligerent tone, straightening up his hunched back as well as he could and glaring. Nobody rode into his stableyard uninvited.

“A message from the Palace of the Gand of Ansul to the maker Orrec Caspro,” said the officer.

“Well?”

The officer looked curiously at the old man for a moment. “The Gand will have the maker attend him at the Palace late tomorrow afternoon,” he said, politely enough.

Gudit gave a brief nod and turned his back. I also looked away, picking up a kitten as an excuse. I knew that elegant sorrel mare.

“Hey, Mem,” somebody said. I froze. I turned around reluctantly, and there was Simme standing inside the stableyard. The officer was backing his mare out of the archway. He spoke to Simme as he turned the horse, and Simme saluted him.

“That’s my dad,” Simme said to me, with transparent pride. “I asked him if I could come along with him. I wanted to see where you live.” His smile was fading as I stared at him saying nothing. “It’s, it’s really big,” he said. “Bigger than the Palace. Maybe.” I said nothing. “It’s the biggest house I ever saw,” he said.

I nodded. I couldn’t help it.

“What’s that?”

He came closer and bent over to see the kitten, which was squirming in my hands and needling me fiercely.

“Kitten,” I said.

“Oh. Is it, is it from that lion?”

How could anybody be so stupid?

“No, just a house cat. Here!” I passed the kitten to him.

“Ow,” he said, and half dropped it. It scampered off with its tiny tail in the air.

“Claws,” he said, sucking his hand.

“Yes, it’s really dangerous,” I said.

He looked confused. He always looked confused. It was unseemly to take advantage of anybody so confused. But it was almost irresistible.

“Can I see the house?” he asked.

I stood up and dusted my hands. “No,” I said. “You can look at it from outside. But you can’t go in. You shouldn’t have come even this far. Strangers and foreigners stop in the forecourt until they’re invited farther. People with manners dismount in the street and touch the Sill Stone before they come into the forecourt.”

“Well, I didn’t know,” he said, backing away a little.

“I know you didn’t. You Alds don’t know anything about us. All you know is that we can’t come under your roof. You don’t even know that you can’t come under ours. You are ignorant.” I was trying to hold back the flood of shaking, triumphant rage that swelled in me.

“Well, look. I was hoping we could be friends,” Simme said. He said it in his hangdog way. But it took some courage to say it at all.

I walked towards the arch, and he came with me.

“How can we be friends? I’m a slave, remember?”

“No you aren’t. Slaves are… Slaves are eunuchs, you know, and women, and… ” He ran out of definitions.

“Slaves are people who have to do what the master orders. If they don’t, they’re beaten or killed. You say you’re the masters of Ansul. That makes us slaves.”

“You don’t do anything I tell you to do,” he said. “You aren’t any kind of slave.”

He had a point there.

We had come out of the stableyard and were walking under the high north wall of the main house. It was built of massive squared stones for ten feet up from the ground; above that was a story of finer stonework with tall double-arched windows, and high above that carved cornices supported the deep eaves of the slate roof. He glanced up at it several times, quickly, askance, the way a horse eyes something that spooks him.

We came round into the forecourt, which goes the whole width of the house. It’s raised a step above the street and separated from it by a line of arcaded columns. The pavement is of polished stones, grey and black, firtted into a complex geometrical pattern, a maze. Ista told me how they used to dance the maze on the first day of the year, the spring equinox, in the old days, singing to Iene who blesses growing things. The pavement was dirty; dust and leaf litter had blown across it. It was a big job to sweep it. I tried sometimes, but I never could keep it clean. Simme started to walk across the maze.

“Get off that!” I said. He jumped, and followed me down the step between the columns into the street, staring with a startled, innocent look, almost like the kittens.

“Demons,” I said with a grin, a snarl, gesturing to the grey-and-black pattern of the stones. He didn’t even see it.

“What’s that!” he said. He was looking at the stump of the Oracle Fountain.

The fountain is to the right as you face the great doors. The basin is green serpentine—Lero’s stone—ten feet or so across. The water had sprung from a central jet; the bronze spout stuck up, now, out of a marble lump so broken and disfigured you could hardly see that it had once been shaped as an urn and carved with watercress leaves and lilies. Dust and dead leaves lay in the basin.

“A fountain full of demon water,” I said. “It ran dry centuries ago. But your soldiers smashed it all the same, to get the demons out.”

“You don’t have to talk about demons all the time,” he said sullenly.

“Oh but look,” I said, “see, around the base of the urn, those little carvings? Those are words. That’s writing. Writing’s black magic. Written words are all demons, aren’t they? You want to go nearer and read them? Want to see some demons close up?”

“Come on, Mem,” he said. “Layoff.” He glared at me, hurt and resentful, That was what I wanted, wasn’t it?

“All right,” I said after a while. “But look, Simme. There isn’t any way we can be friends. Not till you can read what the fountain says. Not till you can touch that stone and ask blessing on my house.”

He looked at the long, ivory-colored Sill Stone set into the center of the step, worn into a soft hollow by the hands that had touched it over all the centuries. I bent down now and touched it.

He said nothing. He turned at last and went away down Galva Street. I watched him go. There was no triumph in me. I felt defeated.

ORREC CAME TO DINNER that evening, recovered and hungry. We talked first of his recitation, he and Gry and I telling the Waylord what he had said and how the crowd had responded to it.

Sosta had been down to the market to hear him and now was swoonier than ever, gazing at him across the table with her face gone all soft and loose, till he had to take pity on her. He tried to joke, but that didn’t work, so he tried to turn her mind from him to her real future, asking where she would live after she married. She managed to explain that her betrothed had chosen to join our household and be a Galva. Orrec and Gry, who had a great interest in the ways people do things, asked all about our customs of marriage-bargain and chosen kinship. Mostly Sosta gazed, mute with adoration, and the Waylord answered; but when Ista sat down with us at table she had a chance to boast about her son-in-law to be, which she loved to do.

“It seems hard that he and Sosta can’t see each other all this time before the wedding,” Gry said. “Three months!”

“Betrothed couples used to be able to meet at any public occasion,” the Waylord explained. “But now we have no dances or festivals. So the poor things have to catch glances in passing…”

Sosta blushed and smirked. Her betrothed strolled by regularly with his friends every evening, just when Ista and Sosta and Bomi happened to be sitting out in the side court facing Galva Street to take the air.

After dinner the rest of us went to the little north court. We found Desac already there waiting. He came forward and took Orrec’s hands and called blessing on him. “I knew you’d speak for us!” he said. “The fuse is lit.”

“Let’s see what the Gand thinks of my performance,” said Orrec. “I might get a critical commentary.”

“Has he sent for you?” asked Desac, “Tomorrow? What time?”

“Late afternoon—is that right, Memer?”

I nodded.

“Will you go?” the Waylord asked.

“Of course,” said Desac.

“I can scarcely refuse,” Orrec said. “Though I could ask to postpone.” He looked at the Waylord, alert to catch the meaning of his question.

“You must go,” Desac said. “The timing is perfect.” His tone was brusque and military.

I could see Orrec didn’t like being told he must go.

He kept his eyes on the Waylord.

“No profit in postponement, I suppose,” the Waylord said. “But there may be some danger in going.”

“Should I go alone?”

“Yes,” Desac said.

“No,” Gry said in a calm, flat voice.

Orrec looked at me. “Everybody gives orders except us, Memer.”

’’’The gods love poets, for they obey the laws the gods obey,’” the Waylord said.

“Sulter, my friend, there’s danger in any undertaking,” Desac said with a kind of impatient compassion. “You’re walled up here, away from the life of the streets, the doings of the people. You live among shadows of ancient times and share their wisdom. But a time comes when wisdom is in action—when caution becomes destruction.”

“A time comes when the will to act defeats thought,” the Waylord said grimly.

“How long must I wait? There was no answer given!”

“Not to me.” The Waylord glanced very briefly at me.

Desac did not notice that. He was angry now. “Your oracle is not mine. I was not born here. Let books and children tell you what to do. I’ll use my head. If you distrust me as a foreigner you should have told me years ago. The people who are with me trust me. They know I never wanted anything but the freedom of Ansul and the restoration of the bond with Sundraman. Orrec Caspro knows that. He stands with me. I’ll go now. I’llcome back here to Galvamand when the city is free. Surely you’ll trust me then!”

He turned and strode out of the courtyard, not through the house but down the broken steps at the open north end. He turned the corner of the house and was gone. The Waylord stood silent, watching him.

After a long time Orrec asked, “Was I the fool who lit the fire?”

“No,” the Waylord said. “A spark from the flint, maybe. No blame in that.”

“If I go tomorrow I will go alone,” Orrec said, but the Waylord smiled a little and looked at Gry.

“You go, I go,” she said. “You know that.”

After a while Orrec said, “Yes, I do. But,” to the Waylord, “if I went too far today, the Gand may be forced to punish me, to show his power. Is that what you fear?”

The Waylord shook his head. “He’d have sent soldiers here. It’s Desac I fear. He will not wait for Lero.”

Lero is the ancient, sacred soul of the ground where our city stands. Lero is the moment of balance. Lero is a great round stone down in the Harbor Market, so poised that it might move at any time and yet has never moved.

The Waylord soon excused himself from us, saying he was tired. He gave me no sign to follow or come to him later. He went into the house, slow and lame, holding himself upright.

I woke again and again that night seeing the words in the book, Broken mend broken, hearing the voice say them, my mind going over them, over and over them, trying to make them into meaning.