Voices

♦ 15 ♦

In those days of early summer, it was as if we had forgotten the Alds, as if it didn’t matter that they were still in the city. Armed citizen volunteers kept a close watch night and day on the barracks and the Council House stables, having formed a kind of militia and doing guard duty in relays, but in the Council House itself all the talk was about Ansul, not the Alds. There were daily meetings, large and tumultuous but led by people experienced in government, determined to restore Ansul’s power and polity.

Per Actamo was at the center of these plans and meetings. He wasn’t yet thirty, but he took to leadership as one born to it. His vigor and intelligence kept the older men from too quickly dropping back into “the way we always did it.” He questioned the way we always did it, and asked if it mightn’t be done better; and the constitution of the Council began to take shape freed of many useless traditional perquisites and rulings. I went often to hear him and the others speak in the open meetings, for they were exciting, full of hope. Per was at Galvamand daily to take counsel with the Waylord. Sulsem Cam came with his son Sulter Cam, usually to argue that everything should be done the way we always did it; but his wife Ennulo supported Per’s proposals. So did the Waylord, though more indirectly, always striving to bring about a consensus and not to become locked in a mere debate of opinions.

They were already laying plans for the election day, when one sunny morning, in an hour, the news was all over the city: An Ald army is coming through the Isma Hills.

At first it was only a rumor that could be discounted, some shepherd’s tale of seeing Ald soldiers, but then a boatman coming into the city down the Sundis confirmed it. A troop of soldiers had been seen marching on the east side of the Isma Hills. They were probably already in the pass above the springs of the river,

Then there was panic. People ran past the house crying, “They’re coming! The Alds!” Crowds at the Council Square and in the streets swelled ceaselessly. Weapons were brought out again. Men rushed to the old city wall that runs along outside the East Canal and the gate where the road from the hills comes in. The wall had been half destroyed when the Alds took the city, but the citizens made barricades across the road and at the Isma Bridge.

The people who came to Galvamand that day were frightened, looking for guidance. Too many remembered the fall of the city seventeen years ago. Per and others who might have spoken to them were at the Council House. The Waylord kept calming them, and they listened to him; but soon he called me and talked to me in the corridor alone.

“Memer,” he said, “I need you. Orrec can’t get through the crowd; they’ll stop him and want him to tell them what to do. Can you get through the lines―to Tirio, to Ioratth―and find out what they know about this force of soldiers, and whether the Gand has changed his orders to his troops? And bring word back to me?”

“Yes. Have you any word for them?” I asked.

He looked at me then just as he used to look at me when I happened to get the words of some translation from the Aritan exactly right, not surprised, but deeply pleased, admiring. “You’ll know what to say,” he said.

I put on my boy’s tunic and tied back my hair. People knew me now, and I didn’t want to be recognised and stopped with questions. So I went as Mem the half-breed.

I got along Galva Street all right for a while, dodging and shoving, but after the Goldsmiths’ Bridge it was hopeless―the crowd was solid. I ran down the stairs we’d taken that evening, remembering the clatter of hoofs and the shouting and the smell of smoke. I ran along the canal to the Embankments, crossed there, and back down the east bank to where I could cut across to the exercise grounds and the hippodrome. They were empty, deserted, but I saw the line of Ald soldiers on guard, up on the long, low swell of Council Hill behind the stables. All I could do was climb the hill towards them, my heart beating harder and harder.

The soldiers stood and said nothing. They watched me. A couple of crossbows were aimed at me.

I got to within ten feet of them, stopped, and tried to catch my breath.

They looked more foreign to me, those men, than they had ever looked in all the years I’d seen Ald soldiers, my whole life. Their faces were sallow, their short, pale sheep hair curled out under their helmets, their eyes were pale. They stared at me without expression, without a word.

“Is there a boy named Simme in the Gand’s stablest I said. My voice came out very thin.

None of the six or seven men nearest me in the line moved or spoke for so long I thought they were not going to answer at all. Then the one right in front of me, who had no crossbow, but a sword in his belt and his hand on the hilt, said, “What if there is, youngster?”

“Simme knows me,” I said. He looked his question: So?

“I have a message from my master the Waylord to the Gand Ioratth. I can’t get through the crowds. I can’t get through the lines. It’s urgent. Simme can vouch for me. Tell him it’s Mem.”

The soldiers looked at one another. They conferred a little. “Let the kid through,” one said, but the others said no, and finally the swordsman nearest me said, “I’ll take him in.”

So I followed him on round the long back of the stables. Not every moment of this time is clear in my memory. I was so set on my goal that how I reached it seemed unimportant, details swallowed in the overriding urgency. I do remember some things clearly. I remember Simme coming into the small room where the swordsman had brought me to his officer. Simme saluted the officer and stood stiffly. “Do you know this boy?” the officer asked. Simme’s eyes shifted to me. His head did not turn. His face changed entirely. It went soft, like Sosta’s face when she looked at Orrec. His lips quivered. He said, “Yes sir.”

“Well?”

“He’s Mem. He’s a groom.”

“Whose groom?”

“He belongs to the maker and the lion woman. He came here with them. He lives at the Demon House.”

“Very good,” the officer said.

Simme stood still. His gaze came back to me, beseeching. He looked white and not so pimply. He looked tired, the way so many people of Ansul had looked, all my life. He looked hungry.

“You have a message from Caspro the maker for the Gand Ioratth,” the officer said to me.

I nodded. The name of Caspro the maker might be a safer password than that of Galva the Waylord.

“Say it to me.”

“I can’t. It’s for the Gand. Or for Tirio Actamo,”

“Obarth!” the officer said. After a moment I realised he was swearing. He looked me over again. “You’re an Ald,” he said.

I said nothing.

“What are they saying out there about an Ald force coming over the pass?”

“They say there is one.”

“How large a forcer”

I shrugged.

“Obatth!” he said again. He was a short, worn-faced man, not young, and he too looked hungry. “Listen. I can’t get through to the barracks. The city people are holding the line between us. If you can get through, go ahead. Take a message for me too. Tell the Gand we’vegot ninety men here and all the horses. Plenty of fodder but short of food. Both of you go.― You heard the message, cadet?”

“Yes sir,” Simme said. I could see his chest fill with a deep breath. He saluted again, wheeled round, and strode out. I followed him, and the officer followed me.

The officer got us through the cordon, and then I got us through the line of citizens that faced them. I looked for a face I knew. Marid wasn’t there, but her sister Remi was, and I talked her easily enough into letting us pass. “A message from the Waylord to the Lady Tirio” was what did it.

Once out in the crowd of citizens in the open square, we were on our own. Fortunately Simme had no uniform except the blue knot on his shoulder. Once somebody said, “Are those kids Alds?”―seeing our hair―but we wriggled away into the crowd. We pushed and shoved and got cursed at clear round the east end of the stables, across the steps below the Council Square, and then we had to face the line of citizens again, near the barracks. Again I found a face I knew, Chamer, one of Gudit’s old friends, but how I talked us through I don’t remember. Chamer spoke with the Ald guard facing him, quite a discussion, I do remember that. Then we were through both lines, and a guard was taking us across the parade ground to the barracks, shouting as he went for Simme’s father.

I saw his father come running. Simme stopped and stood still and tried to salute him, but his father took him in his arms.

“Victory is well, Father,” Simme said. He was crying. “I exercised her as much as I could.”

“Good,” his father said, still holding him. “Well done.” Other men and officers came pouring out of the barracks, and we gathered quite an escort walking past the long buildings and outbuildings. Whenever an officer stopped me, Simme and his father were there to affirm that I came from the Demon House, where the maker Orrec Caspro was, with a message from him. Then we went into the last building of the row, and the soldiers and officers dropped back. I saw Simme watching me as I was sent forward alone. I went past a door guard into a long room with long windows overlooking the curve of the East Canal. Tirio Actamo came forward to meet me.

She did not know me at first, and I had to say my name. She took my hands, and then embraced me; and I wasn’t far from crying myself, from sheer relief. But there was my message to be given.

“The Waylord sent me. He needs to know what the Gand knows about the army coming from Asudar.”

“Best you talk to Ioratth yourself, Memer,” Tirio said. Her face was still swollen and discolored and her head bandaged, but the bandage became her, like a little hat; nothing could make her ugly. And she had a sweet, easy way about her, she comforted ones heart just by speaking. So I was less scared than I might have been when she took me across the room to the bed on which the Gand Ioratth lay.

He was propped up on a lot of embroidered pillows. A red cloth had been hung from the ceiling over the head of the bed, so that coming close was like entering a tent. The Gand’s legs and feet were out from under the covers, covered with raw burns and blackscabbed ones, painful-looking. He glared at me like a leashed hawk.

“Who’s this? Are you Ald or Ansul, boy?”

“I am Memer Galva,” I said. “I come to you from the Waylord, Sulter Galva.”

“Hah!” said the Gand. The glare became a gimlet. “I’ve seen you.”

“I came with Orrec Caspro when he recited to you.”

“You’re an Ald.”

“If I’d borne you a child, you might well take it for an Ald,” said Tirio, mild and ladylike.

He grimaced, absorbing this.

“What’s your message then, if the maker sent you?”

“The Waylord sent me,” I said.

“If Ansul has a leader, Ioratth, it is Galva the Waylord,” Tirio said. “Orrec Caspro is a guest of his house. It might be for the best if you and he were in communication,”

He grunted. “Why did he send your” he demanded of me.

“To ask if you know why soldiers are coming from Asudar, and how many, and if you’ll change your orders to your troops when they come.”

“Is that all,” said the Gand. He looked at Tirio. “By God, this is a cool young sprout! One of your family, no doubt.”

“No, my lord. Memer is a daughter of the House of Galvamand.”

“Daughter!” the Gand said. The gimlet became a glare, and finally a blink. “So she is,” he said, almost resignedly. He moved in discomfort, and winced, and rubbed his head with its frizz of half-burnt hair. “And you think I should send her back to Galva with a list of my strategies and intentions, do you?”

“Memer,” Tirio asked, “is the city going to attack the barracks?”

“If they see an army coming down the East Road, I think they will,” I said. I had heard it urged again and again that morning―wipe out the soldiers here before these reinforcements arrive! Take the city back before they take it back!

“It’s not an army,” Ioratth said almost peevishly. “It’s only a messenger from the Gand of Gands. I sent him one two weeks ago.”

“I think the people of the city had better know that,” said Tirio, as mildly as ever, and I added, “Quickly!”

“What, you think my sheep are in revolt, do you?” His tone was caustic, sarcastic, a sarcasm directed at himself perhaps.

“Yes, they are,” I said.

“Turned lions, have they?” he said in the same way, with another glance at me. He brooded a minute and then said, “If it’s that bad, I wish it was an army coming… For all I know it is. But I doubt it.”

“It would be well to know, my lord,” said Tirio.

“I have no way to know! We’re cooped up here. Surely the idiots fortifying the bridge down there could send some scouts up the road on horseback to spy out the size of this army?”

“No doubt they have,” I said, stung. “Maybe the soldiers killed them.”

“Well, we have to gamble till we know,” the Gand said. “And I’ll gamble that it’s no army, but a messenger with a troop of fifteen or twenty guards. Tell your Waylord that. Tell him to keep his lion-sheep from stampeding, if he can. Tell him to come here. To the square. With Caspro the maker, if he will. And I’ll get myself carried out there, and we can talk to the people. Calm them down. I heard what Caspro did the other day, cooling them off with his tale of Ura and Hamneda. By God he’s a clever man!”

I remembered how politely, even ornately, the Gand had spoken in public with Orrec and his officers. He was blunt and coarse now, no doubt because he was in pain, maybe also because he was talking to mere women. I tried to answer with stiff politeness, but fired up as I spoke. “The Waylord is not at your bidding, sir. He keeps to his house. If you want his help keeping the peace, come to him yourself.”

“Suiter Galva is as lame as you are, Ioratth,” said Tirio.

“Is he? Is he?”

“From torture,” I said, “when he was your sons prisoner.”

The old man had been riled by my insolence, but at that he looked at me, a long look, and then away. After a while he said, “Very well then, I’ll go there. Order up a litter, a chair, something. Tell them we want an open parley, there, at what d’ye call it, Galvamand. No use throwing it all away… There’s been enough… ” He did not finish his sentence. He lay back on his pillows, his face colorless and grim.

To arrange a parley was going to require some parleying, given the jittery confusion in the city. Ioratth was talking with several of his officers, giving them instructions, when we heard a trumpet call, sweet and high, far off, eastward, across the canal. It was promptly answered by a trumpet from the barracks here.

Within a few minutes the Ald force was reported in sight: a troop, as the Gand had hoped, of twenty or so, riding out of the hills with banners. We could hear the swelling noise of the crowds up on the Council Hill and in the streets leading to the East Canal. But as no army followed the mounted troop, the crowd noise at least grew no louder.

From the southeast window of the barracks house we could see the River Gate and the Isma Bridge. Tirio and I watched the troop arrive, halt outside the half ruined wall, and talk with the citizens who had been guarding and fortifying the bridge. It took a while. At last, one Ald was allowed through the gate, on foot. Escorted by thirty or forty citizens, he crossed the bridge and came straight along the Eastway towards the cordon guarding the barracks. I saw that he carried a wand of white wood, which I knew from history books was the envoy’s token.

“Here’s your messenger, my lord,” Tirio said to the Gand.

And before long the blue-cloaked officer came striding in, holding the wand, a troop of soldiers escorting him now, and saluted the Gand. “From the Gand of Gands and Son of the Sun, High Priest and King of Asudar, the Lord Acray, a message to the Gand of Ansul, the Lord Ioratth,” he said, in the rolling, measured voice the Alds used for public speaking.

The old Gand got himself up higher on his pillows, gritting his teeth, made a kind of hunch for a bow, and said, “The messenger of the Son of the Sun, our most honored Lord Acray, is welcome. Dismissed, Polle,” he said to the captain of the escort troop. He looked around at Tirio and me and Ialba who was there too, and said, “Out.”

I felt like snarling like Shetar, but I followed Tirio meekly.

“He’ll tell us what the man says as soon as he’s gone,” she said to me. “Now that we have a little time for it, are you hungry?”

I was both hungry and thirsty after my difficult journey through my city. She brought out what they had to offer: water, a small piece of black bread dried hard, a couple of dried black figs. “Siege rations,” Ialba said with a smile. I ate them with the care and attention poverty’s gift deserves, wasting not a crumb.

We heard the messenger depart, and soon enough Ioratth shouted, “Come!”

Are we dogs? I thought. But I came, with Tirio and Ialba.

Ioratth was sitting up straight, and his sallow, seamed face looked feverish. “By God, by God, Tirio, I think we’re off the hook,” he said. “God be praised! Listen. I want you both to go to the Palace or the Demon House, wherever there’s some kind of chief somebody in charge of the mob, and tell them this: No army has come from Asudar, No army will come from Asudar, so long as the city keeps the peace. Tell them that the Gand of Gands offers to his subjects of Ansul full relief from tribute, to be replaced by taxation paid to the treasury in Medron as a protectorate state of Asudar, The Son of the Sun has honored me with the title of Prince-Legate to the Protectorate. In good time I’ll invite the chief men of Ansul to take counsel with me and hear our orders concerning the government of the city and the terms of trade with Asudar. A number of soldiers will remain here as my personal guard and to protect the city from its own unruly elements and from invasion from Sundraman or elsewhere. The greater part of our troops will return to Medron-when it’s certain that Ansul is in compliance with our orders. Now, is there anybody in this damned city capable of answering that, and acting on it?”

“I can take the message to the Waylord,” I said.

“Do it. Better than dragging me through the streets in a cart. Do it and come back with an acceptance. Come back with some men to talk to. Why do they send me children, girls, by God!”

“Because women and girls are citizens here, not dogs and slaves,” I said. “And if you knew how to write, you could send your so-called orders to the Waylord yourself and read his answers yourself!” I was shaking with fury.

The Gand gave one sharp glance at me and made a dismissive gesture. “Tirio, will you go!” he said.

“I’ll go with Memer,” she said. “I think that would be best.”

Indeed it was best. All I’d heard, all I could hear of the Gand’s message, was that we were ordered to pay taxes to Asudar, submit to be a protectorate not a free state, and do whatever the Alds told us to do.

I had to listen to what Tirio said to the Waylord, when we got back to Galvamand, and what he said to the people, and what people said about it, all day long, before I was able to understand that in fact Asudar was offering us our freedom―at a price―and that my people saw it clearly and truly as a victory.

Maybe they could see it so clearly because it did have a price on it, in money and trade agreements, matters my people understand.

Maybe I had so much trouble seeing it because nobody died bravely for it. No heroes fighting on Mount Sul. No more fiery speeches in the square. Only two middle-aged men, both crippled, sending messages across a city, cautious and wary, working out an agreement. And wrangles in the Council House. And a lot of talking and arguing and complaining in the marketplaces.

And the fountain running in the forecourt of the House of the Oracle.

And the temples of Ansul, the little houses of the gods and spirits, the shrines at every street corner and on every bridge, rebuilt, set up again, brought out of hiding, cleaned, carved anew, decorated with flowers. Lero’s Stone was so covered with offerings sometimes you could not see it. On Iene’s Feast, the solstice, men and boys brought garlands of oak and willow into the city in procession through the streets and hung them over the house doors, and women danced in the marketplaces and the square and sang Iene’s songs. The older women taught the girls, like me, who did not know the dance steps or the songs.

All that summer people kept coming to the city from the rest of Ansul. Often they followed after the troops of Ald soldiers who were being withdrawn from the northern towns and gathered here before they were sent back east over the hills to Asudar, Citizens came to find out what was happening in the capital, and to take part in the elections; merchants and traders followed. In early autumn the Waylord of Tomer came to stay with the Waylord of Ansul. Ista lived in a passion of anxiety for two weeks making sure he was entertained in all ways as befitted the honor of the House of Galva.

Bythen the Council was meeting regularly; and Galvamand was no longer the center of political planning and decision making. It was just the Waylord’s house, where a lot of talk took place about trade, about hay transport and cattle markets and what you could get in Medron or Dur for dried apricots or olives in brine. The first election held bythe newly elected Council had been that of the Waylord of Ansul, voted unanimously to Sulter Galva; and with the post they allotted funds for entertainment and upkeep of the house. Not lavish funds, but wealth untold to us who ran the household, and a heartening sign of the difference between paying tribute as a subject state of Asudar and paying taxes as a protectorate.

I had been utterly wrong about the Gand’s message.

I had misjudged it, and him. I had wanted to refuse patronisation, manipulation, compromise―politics. I had wanted to fling off every bond, to defy the tyrant. I had wanted to hate the Alds, drive them away, destroy them… myvow, mypromise, made when I was eight years old, that I had sworn by all the gods and by mymother’s soul.

I had broken that promise. I had to break it. Broken mend broken.

THE MESSENGER OF the High Gand returned to Medron a few days after I carried the message to Ioratth. They had an escort of over a hundred soldiers, under the command of Simme’s father, and Simme rode beside him, going home. I had asked Ialba and Tirio to tell me what they could find out about them, and that is what they told me. I never saw Simme after he and I went through the lines together.

That troop escorting the messenger back to Medron also carried a prisoner in one of the provision carts: Iddor, son of Ioratth. He was in chains, we heard, in slave’s clothing, with his hair and beard grown long, a sign of shame and disgrace to the Alds.

Tirio told us that Ioratth had not set eyes on his son since his betrayal, had not let anyone ask what should be done with him, would not let his name be spoken. He had, however, ordered that the priests be released from prison, even those who had been captured with his son. Presuming on this leniency, the priests had tried to intercede on Iddor’s behalf, with a tale that they and Iddor had hidden Ioratth in the torture chamber only to save him from the vengeance of the rebel mob. Ioratth told them to be silent and be gone.

Since their Gand had been through the fire, both burnt and spared, his soldiers saw him as clearly favored by their Burning God, as holy as any priest. Realising their disadvantage, most of the priests chose to go back to Asudar with this first contingent of the army. So Ioratth’s captains, left to their own judgment, decided the best thing to do with their embarrassing prisoner, his son, was send him off too, and let the High Gand decide what to do with him.

I was disappointed by this ignominious, uncertain outcome. I wanted to know Iddor would be punished as he deserved. The Alds loathed treachery, I knew, and were shocked by the betrayal of a father by a son. Would he be tortured, as he had tortured Sulter Galva? Would he be buried alive, the way so many people in Ansul had been, taken down to the mudflats south of the city and trampled into the wet, salt mud until they suffocated?

Did I want him to be tortured and buried alive?

What did I want? Why was I so unhappy through all this bright summer, the first summer of our freedom? Why did I feel that nothing was settled, nothing won?

ORREC WAS SPEAKING in the Harbor Market. It was a golden autumn afternoon, windless. Sul stood white across the dark-blue straits. Everybody in the city was there to hear the maker. He told some of the Chamhan, and they called for more and wouldn’t let him go. I was too far away to hear well, and was restless. I left the crowd. I walked up West Street alone. Nobody was in the streets. Everybody was there behind me, together, in the marketplace, listening. I touched the Sill Stone and went into myhouse, clear through it, past the Waylord’s rooms, to the back, to the dark corridors. I wrote the words in the air before the wall and the door opened and I went into the room where the books and the shadows are.

I had not been there for months. It was as it had always been: the clear, even light from the high skylights, the quiet air, the books in their patient, potent rows, and if I listened, the faint murmur of water in the cave down at the shadow end. No books layout on the table. There was no sign of any presence there. But I knew the room was full of presences.

I’d intended to read in Orrecs book; but when I stood at the shelves myhand went to the book I had been working on last spring, the night before Gry and Orrec came, a text in Aritan, the Elegies. They are short poems of mourning and praise for people who died a thousand years ago. The names of the authors are mostly not given, and all we know of the people named in the poems is what the poet says.

One of them reads, “Sullas who kept the house well, so that the patterned pavements shone, now keeps the house of silence. I listen for her step.”

Another, the one I’d been trying to understand when I stopped reading, is about a horse trainer; the first line is, “Surely where he is, they are around him, the long-maned shadows.”

I sat down at the table, at my old place, with that book and the wordbook of Aritan, with its notes in the margins written bymany hands over the centuries, and tried to make out what the next lines meant.

When I’d understood the poem as well as I could, and had it in my memory, the light from the skylights was fading. Leros Day, the equinox, was past, the days were getting short. I closed the book and sat on at the table, not lighting the lamp, just sitting there feeling for the first time in a long time a sense of peace, of being in the right place. I let that feeling come all through me and penetrate me and settle in me. As it did, I was able to think, slowly and clearly; not so much in words as in knowing what matters and seeing what has to be done, which is the way I think. I hadn’t been able to think that way for months.

That’s why when I got up to leave the room, I took with me a book from it, a thing I had never done before. I took Rostan, the one I called Shining Red when I was a little child building walls and bear’s dens with the books.

I had heard Orrec speak of it longingly, not long ago, as a lost work of the maker Regali. The Waylord had said nothing in reply.

He had never said anything to Orrec about the books in the secret room. So far as I knew, he and I alone knew of the room itself.

That the oracle spoke through books, people knew vaguely, and now they’d actually heard its voice; but they didn’t ask to know more about the mystery, they didn’t want to pry into it, they let it be. After all, for years, books themselves had been accursed and forbidden, dangerous things even to know about. And though we of Ansul live comfortably among the shadows of our dead, we’re not a people with much taste for the uncanny. Sulter Galva the Reader was held in some awe, as was I; but people much preferred to deal with Sulter Galva the Waylord. The oracle had done its work, we’d been set free, and now we could get back to business.

But my business was a little different. That’s what I’d seen at last, sitting at the reading table, with a closed book in my hands.