Voices

♦ 16 ♦

Orrec, Gry, and Shetar had returned from the Harbor Market late in the afternoon, Orrec to collapse and sleep for a while as he always did when he could after a public performance. He was reviving now, roaming about barefoot and disheveled, when I came to the Master’s rooms. He said, “Hello, horse thief,” and Gry said, “There you are! We were just talking about taking a walk in the old park before it gets too dark to see.”

Shetar did not understand separate words, such as “walk,” as many dogs can do; but she often was aware of intentions before people knew they were intending anything. She was already standing up, and now she paced over with her graceful slouch to the door and sat down to wait for us. The plumed tip of her tail twitched back and forth. I scratched her around the ears and she leaned her head into my hand and purred a little.

“I brought this for you, Orrec,” I said, and held out the tall book with its gold-printed red cover. He came over, slouching a bit himself and yawning, to take it. When he saw it was a book his mouth snapped shut and his face went taut. When he saw what book it was, he stood motionless, and it was a long moment before he drew breath.

“Oh, Memer,” he said. “What have you given me?”

I said, “What I have to give.”

He looked up from the book then to my face. His eyes were luminous. It gave me great joy to give him joy.

Gry came to his side and looked at the book; he showed her what it was, handling it with a lover’s care, reading the first line half aloud. “I knew,” he said, “I knew they must be here―some of the books of the great library―But this―!” He looked at me again. “Was this― Are there books here in the house, Memer?”

I hesitated. Gry, as quickly aware of feeling and intention as Shetar, laid her hand on his arm and said, “Wait, Orrec.”

I had to think, and quickly, what indeed my intention was, what right I had and what responsibility. Was this book mine to give? And if it was, what of the other books? And the other lovers of books?

What I saw was that I could not lie to Orrec. And that answered the question of my responsibility. As for the right, I had to claim it.

“Yes,” I said. “There are books here. But I don’t think I can take you to the place where they are. I’ll ask the Waylord. But I think it’s closed, except to us. To my people. I think our guardians keep it hidden. The spirits of the house, the ancestors. And the ones who were here before us. The ones who told us to stay here.”

Orrec and Gry had no trouble understanding this. They too had gifts of their lineage. They knew the burdens and chances laid on us by the shadows in our blood and bone, and by the spirits of the place we live in.

“Orrec, let me tell him I gave you the book,” I said. “I didn’t ask him if I could.” Orrec looked concerned, and I said, “It’ll be all right. But I need to talk to him.”

“Of course.”

“He never spoke of the books to you, because it was dangerous to know,” I said. I felt I must defend the Waylord’s silence. “For so long, he had to hide them all. From everybody. The Alds could never find them, here. So they were safe, and people weren’t in danger for having them. But people knew. They brought books here in secret, at night―hidden in packages of candles or old clothes―in firewood, in a haybale-they risked their lives bringing books here, where they knew we could keep them safe. Families who’d hidden their books, like the Cams and the Gelbs, and people we didn’t know, just people who’d found a book or kept it or saved it from the Alds. They knew to bring it here to Galvamand. But now, now we don’t have to hide any more―do we?… Can you―could you ever read to the people, Orrec? Instead of reciting? To let them know, to let them see that books aren’t demons, that our history, our hearts, our freedom’s written in them?”

He looked at me with a slow, joyful smile that became almost a laugh. “I think it’s you that should read to them, Memer,” he said.

“Warrawarrroo!” Shetar said, losing patience at last.

Gry and I left Orrec with his treasure. We let Shetar lead us out and guide us in the twilight up to Denios’ Fountain. There she roamed about through the fallen leaves and rustling shrubbery, hunting mice, while we talked, sitting on the old marble bench by the fountain. Lights were coming on down in the houses of the city. Far out in the straits, under the last dim purple of sunset, we saw the glimmer of the boats of night fishermen. Sul was a pure cone of darkness against the dying light. An owl swooped past near us, and I said, “The good omen to you.”

“And to you,” Gry said. “You know, in Trundlede they call owls bad luck? They’re a gloomy, downhearted lot there. Too much forest, too much rain.”

“You’ve travelled all over the world,” I said dreamily.

“Oh, no, not yet. We’ve never been to Sundraman. Or the capes of Manva or Melune. And among the City States we’ve seen only Sentas and Pagadi, and we came only through a corner of Vadalva… And even if you know a land well, there’s always a town or a hill you haven’t seen. I don’t think we’ll run out of world.”

“When do you think you’ll go on?”

“Well, until just now, I’d have guessed that Orrec might be thinking of moving on to Sundraman before the winter, or in the spring. He wants to see what kind of poetry they have there, before we go back to Mesun. But now… I doubt he’ll go till he knows every book you can show him.”

“Are you sorry?”

“Sorry? Why? You’ve given him a great happiness, and I love to see him happy. It doesn’t come easy to him. Orrec has a difficult heart… You know what he can do with a crowd of people, how easy it seems to come to him and how they love him―and doing it, he’s carried away by it―but afterward, he feels cast down and false. It isn’t me at all, he says, it’s the sacred wind blows through me, and it empties me and leaves me like dry grass… But if he can write, and read, and follow his own heart in silence, he’s a happy man.”

“That’s why I love him,” I said. “I’m like that.”

“I know,” she said, and put her arm around me.

“But you yourself might want to be going on, Gry. Not just sitting here all year with a lot of books and politics.”

She laughed. “I like it here. I like Ansul. But if we stay through the winter, and I think now we will, I might find somebody who needs a hand training horses.”

“Surely where he is, they are around him, the long-maned shadows,” I said. I said the rest of the poem for her when she asked.

“Yes. That poet got it right,” she said. “I like that.”

“Gudit is hoping to get some horses for the Waylord to use.”

“I might train a colt for him. It stands to reason… But, anyhow, we’ll go on, eventually. And sooner or later we’ll go back to Urdile, to take what Orrecs learned to the scholars in Mesun. He’ll be busy copying that book, and anything you give him, from now on.”

“I could help him copy.”

“He’ll wear you out if you offer.”

“I like doing it. I learn the book while I copy it.”

She was silent for a little while and then said, “If we did go back to Urdile, next spring or summer, whenever―would you think of coming with us?”

“Coming with you,” I repeated.

Sometimes, back in early summer, I had made a daydream of the caravan wagon which stood now in our stables: a daydream of Star and Branty pulling it across some long gold plain where the poplars cast shadows, or over a road in the hills, and Orrec driving it, and Gry and Shetar walking with me along the road behind. It had been just a fancy to cheer me, to take my mind away from anxiety, in the time of the fire and the crowds and the fear.

Now she made it real. That road lay before me.

I said, “I would go with you anywhere, Gry.”

She leaned her head against mine for a moment. “We might do that, then,” she said.

I thought, trying to see what it is that matters and what I have to do. I said finally; “I would come back here.”

She listened.

“I couldn’t leave him and not come back.”

She nodded.

“But more than that. I belong to Galvamand. I think I am the Reader. Not he. It’s passed along.” I was speaking out of my own thoughts and I realised she could hardly know what I meant. I tried to explain. “There is a voice here, and it must speak through one who can―who can ask, who can read. He taught me. He gave me that. He kept it for me and passed it to me. It’s not his to carry; but mine. And I have to come back to it. To stay here.”

Again she nodded, gravely; consenting fully.

“But Orrec could teach me, too,” I said, and then, sure I had gone too far and asked too much, I shrank into myself.

“That would complete his happiness,” Gry answered. She said it serenely and as a matter of course. “To have the books he longed for, and you to read them with―oh, you may not have to worryabout leaving Galvamand, Memer! The problem may be getting him to leave… But I think you’d like it, the way we travel, stopping to stay a while in a town or a village, and finding the makers and musicians there. And they’ll speak and sing for us, and Orrec for them. They’ll bring out the books they have to show him, and the little boyswho can recite ‘Hamneda’s Vow,’ and the old women who know old songs and tales… And then we always go back to Mesun. It’s a fine city; all towers on hills. I know Orrec would like to take you there, because he’s said so to me. To meet the scholars he knows there, and read with them. You could take them the learning of Ansul, and bring their learning back with youto Galvamand… But the best part is, I’d have you with me all that time.”

I bent my head to kiss her hard, strong little hand, and she kissed my hair.

Shetar came bounding past us, a wild thing in the darkening night.

“It must be supper time,” Gry said and stood up. Shetar came to her at once, and we went down to the house. Orrec was of course lost in Rostan, and had to be dragged from it bodily, and we three were late to table, arriving about the time Ista finally took her place.

We ate in the dining room now, not in the pantry, for we were generally twelve or more at table, what with the increase to the household, and Sosta’s new husband, and guests. I haven’t told of Sosta’s wedding. We cleaned the great courtyard for it, taking out all the broken stone and rubbish that had been left there since the house was looted and burned, replanting the marble flower boxes and training the trumpet vines that wreathed the walls, sweeping the tessellated pavement of red and yellow stone. The celebration was on a hot afternoon of late summer, a day of Deori. All the friends of both households came. Ista set out a splendid feast, and people danced while the moon crossed the sky above the courtyard. And Ista said, watching the dancers, “It’s like the good times, the old times! Almost.”

This night, we had no guests but Per Actamo, who was as often at our house as his own. He had been elected to the Council, and was valued for his connection with the Gand Ioratth, now the Prince-Legate, through his cousin Tirio Actamo. Tirio herself played a peculiarly difficult part―once slave-concubine to the tyrant, now wife of the legate―victim of the enemy yet his conqueror. There were people in Ansul who still called her whore and shameless, and more who adored her, calling her Lady Freedom. She bore it all with steady mildness, as if there were no such thing as a divided loyalty. Most people ended up believing her to be nothing more than an ill-used, well-bred, sweetnatured woman making the best of her strange fortune. She was that, but she was more. Per was a man of lively intelligence and ambition, and he took counsel with Tirio as often as he did with the Waylord.

He brought a message from her, which he told us after dinner, in the Waylord’s rooms. Thanks to a gift sent by the Waylord of Essangan we had wine after dinner these days, a few drops of the golden brandywine of those vineyards, like fire and honey. One after another we offered our glass to the god-niche and drank the blessing. Then we sat down.

“My cousin has persuaded the Prince-Legate of Asudar to request to visit the Waylord of Ansul, at last,” said Per. “So I am the bearer of that request, couched in the usual incivilities of the Alds. But I think it’s meant civilly.”

“I grant it civilly,” the Waylord said with a bit of a grin.

“Frankly, Sulter, can you stand the sight of him?”

“I hold nothing against Iorarth,” the Waylord said. “He’s a soldier, he followed his orders. A religious man, he obeyed his priests. Till they betrayed him. Who he is himself I have no idea. I’ll be interested to learn. That your cousin holds him dear is strongly in his favor.”

“We can always talk poetry with him,” said Orrec. “He has an excellent ear.”

“But he can’t read,” I said.

The Waylord looked up at me. A girl among grown women and men, I still had the privilege of listening without being expected to talk, and mostly silence was my preference. But I had realised recently that when I did speak, the Waylord listened attentively.

Per Actamo was also looking at me with his bright, dark eyes. Per was fond of me, teased me, pretended to be awed by my learning, often seemed to forget he was thirty and I seventeen and talked to me as to an equal, and sometimes flirted with me without knowing, I think, that he was doing it. He was kind and handsome and I’d always been a little in love with him. I’d often thought that I’d marry Per some day. I thought I could, if I wanted to. But I wasn’t ready for all that yet. I didn’t want to be a woman yet. I’d had great love given me as Galva’s daughter and heir, but I’d never yet had what Gry and Orrec offered me―freedom, the freedom of a child, a younger sister. And I longed for it.

Per asked me now, “Do you want to teach the Gand how to read, Memer?”

His teasing and the Waylord’s attention put me on my mettle. “Would an Ald let a woman teach him anything? But if the Gand’s going to deal with people in Ansul, he’d better learn not to be afraid of books.”

“Maybe this isn’t the best house in which to prove that particular point,” said Per. “There’s at least one book here that would put the fear of the gods into anybody.”

“They said the last priests went back with the troops that left today;” said Gry. The connection of her thought was clear to us all.

“Ioratth kept his house priests,” Per said. “Three or four of them. To say the prayers and lead the ceremonies. And drive out demons when necessary; I suppose. He doesn’t find as many demons here as his son did, though.”

“It takes one to find one,” said Gry.

“The god in the heart sees the god in the stones,” Orrec murmured, a line of Regali, though he said it in our own language.

The Waylord didn’t hear him. He was still brooding, and now he asked me, as if he had been following the idea since Per had jokingly said it, “Would you teach the Gand Ioratth how to read, if he consented to learn, Memer?”

“I’d teach anybody who wanted to learn,” I said. “As you taught me.”

The talk passed on to other things. After arranging that the visit to Galvamand by the Prince-Legate and his consort would take place in four days, Per took his leave. Orrec was yawning hugely, and he and Grysoon went off to sleep. I rose to see that the Waylord had what he needed before I too went to bed.

“Stay a minute, Memer,” he said.

I sat down willingly. Since I’d been back to the secret room and renewed that bond with all my past years there, I felt that things were as they used to be between him and me. Our bond, too, that I’d thought was weakened, held as strong and as easy as ever. He was linked now to many people other than me, and I to some people other than him; we no longer needed each other so urgently for strength and solace; but what difference did that make? Hidden in solitude and poverty,or among people in a rich busy world, he and I were bound by all the shadows of our ancestry, and by the power we shared and the knowledge he’d given me, and by dear love and honor.

“Have you been to the room at all?” he asked me.

We were indeed bound very close.

“Today. For the first time.”

“Good. Every night I think I’ll go there and read a little, but I can’t drag myself. Ah, it was easier in Istas old days, I’ll admit. I could spend all day talking grain prices and half the night reading Regali, then.”

“I gave Rostan to Orrec,” I said.

He looked up, not following at once, and I went on, “I took it out of the room. I thought it was time.”

“Time,” he repeated. He looked away, thinking, and at last said only, “Yes.”

“Is it true, as I think, that only we can enter the room?”

“Yes,” he said again, almost absently.

“Then shouldn’t we bring the books out of hiding? The ordinary books. As we kept them in hiding. For the same reason. So that people would have them.”

“And it’s time,” he said. “Yes. I suppose you’re right. Though… ” He brooded a little longer. “Come, Memer, Let’s go there,” he said, and pushed himself up from his chair. I took up the small lamp and followed him back through the ruined corridors to the wall that seems to be the back wall of the house, the wall that has no door in it. There he wrote in the air the letters that spell the word “open” in the language of our ancestors who came from the Sunrise. The door opened, and we went through. I turned and closed it and it became the wall.

I lighted the big lamp on the reading table. The room bloomed with its soft light, and the gold on the spines of books glimmered a little here and there.

He touched the god-niche and murmured the blessing, and then stood looking about the room. He sat down at the table, rubbing a stiff knee. “What were you reading?” he asked.

“The Elegies.” I brought the book from the shelf and laid it before him.

“How far have you got?”

“The Horse Trainer.’”

He opened the book and found the poem. “Can you say it?”

I recited the ten lines of Aritan.

“And?”

I said my reading of it, as I had to Gry. He nodded. “Very satisfactory,” he said, with a suppressed smile.

I sat down at the table opposite him, and after a little silence he said, “You know, Memer, Orrec Caspro came just in time. He can teach you.You were about to discover that youcan teach me.”

“Oh no! I mostlyjust guess at the Elegies. I still cant read Regali.”

“But now you have a teacher who can.”

“Then―you’re not displeased―it was right to give him Rostan?”

“Yes,” he said, with a deep breath. “I think so. How can we know what’s right, when we can’t understand the powers we have? I am a blind man asked to read the message given him by a god.”

He turned over the pages of the book on the table and closed it softly. He looked down towards the end of the room where the light of the lamps died away. “I told Iddor I was the Reader. What is reading when you don’t know the language? You are the Reader, Memer. Of that at least I have no doubt. Do you doubt it?”

The question was abrupt. I answered it without hesitation: “No.”

“Good. Good. And that being so, this is your room, your domain. Blind as I was, I kept it in trust for you.And for all those who brought their treasure to us here, the books… What shall we do with them, Memer?”

“Make a library,” I said. “Like the old one here.”

He nodded. “It seems to be the will of the house itself. We merely obey it.”

That was how it seemed to me too. But I still had some questions.

“Waylord, that day… The day the fountain ran.”

“The fountain,” he said. “Yes.”

“The miracle,” I said.

With that same hint of a smile, he said, “No.”

I was perhaps surprised, perhaps not.

His smile grew broader and merrier. “The Lord of the Springs showed me the means, some while ago,” he said. “I’ll show you, when you like.”

I nodded. That was not where my mind was.

“Does it grieve you or shock you, Memer, that a miracle may be taken into our own hands, as it were?”

“No,” I said. “Not that one. But the other…”

He watched me and waited.

“You weren’t lame,” I said.

He looked down at his hands, his legs. His face was grave now. “So they tell me,” he said.

“You don’t remember?”

“I remember coming to this room in fear and anguish. As soon as I entered, it came to me that I should let the fountain run, and I hurried to do that, not reasoning why. As if obeying. And next, it came to me that I should take a book from the shelf. And I did that. And there was need for haste, so I… could it be that I ran? I don’t know. It must be that those who silenced me when they needed my silence, needed me then to waken your voice.”

I looked down the room, to the shadow end. So did he.

“You did’t ask the…?”

“There wasn’t time to consult the oracle. And it wouldn’t have answered me. It speaks to you, Memer, not me.”

I didn’t want to hear what he was telling me, even though I had said that I was the Reader. My heart protested in fear, in humiliation. “It doesn’t speak to me!” I said. “It uses me!”

He nodded briefly. “As I was used.”

“It wasn’t even my voice―was it? I don’t know! I don’t understand it. I’m ashamed, I’m afraid! I don’t ever want to go into that darkness again.”

He said nothing for a long time, and finally spoke gently. “They use us, yes, but they do not use us ill… If you must go into the dark, Memer, think, it’s only a mother, a grandmother, trying to tell us something we don’t yet understand. Speaking a language you don’t yet know well, but it can be learned. So I told myself when I had to enter there.”

I thought about that for a while, and it began to give me comfort. It made the darkness of the cave less uncanny, to imagine that my mother’s spirit was there, with all the other mothers of my race, and they wouldn’t seek to frighten me.

But I had one more question.

“The book―the one you had in your hand―is it on the oracle shelves?”

His silence now was different; he was finding difficulty in answering. At last he said, “No. I took the first book I saw.”

He got up, limped to a bookcase nearby, the closest to the door, and took a little volume from a shelf at eye level. I recognised the dun-colored, unlettered binding. He brought it back and held it out to me in silence. I was afraid to take it but I took it, and after a minute I opened it.

I recognised it then. It was a primer, a reading book for children, Tales of the Beasts. I had read it when I was first learning to read, years ago, here, in the secret room.

I turned the pages, my fingers stiff and awkward. I saw the small woodcuts of rabbits and ravens and wild boars. I read the last line of a story, “So the Lion returned home to the desert and told the beasts of the desert that the Mouse was the bravest of all creatures.”

I looked up at the Waylord, and he looked back at me. His face and his slight gesture said: I do not know.

I looked at the little book that had set us free. I thought of Denies’ words, and said them aloud: “‘There is a god in every leaf; you hold what is sacred in your open hand.’”

After a while, I added, “And there are no demons.”

“No,” the Waylord said. “Only us. We do the demon work.” And again he looked down at his crippled hands.

We were silent. I heard the faint sound of the water running in the dark.

“Come,” he said, “it’s late, the dream senders are all around us. Let’s let them have their way.”

I held the small lamp in my left hand and with my right hand wrote the bright letters on the air. We went through the door, and along the dark corridors. Passing his room I bade him sleep well, and he stooped to kiss my forehead, and so we parted with the blessing for the night.