Voices aotws-2 Page 7

  “An unbeliever should not be permitted to keep a lion of Asudar,” Iddor said to his father, who replied, “But who will take the lion from the master of the lion?”—evidently a proverb, neatly applied. At that, Iddor started to tease Shetar, provoking her by shouting and starting at her as if in attack. Shetar ignored him absolutely. The Gand, when he realised what his son was doing, stood up in a rage, told him he was shaming the hospitality of his house and offending the majesty of the lion, and ordered him to leave.

  “The majesty of the lion,” Gry repeated, sitting down with us at last, her face clean, and dressed now in her silk shirt and trousers—“I like that.”

  “But I don’t like what went on between the Gand and his son,” Orrec said. “A snake’s nest, as Gudit said. It will take careful treading. The Gand, though, he’s a very interesting man.”

  He’s the tyrant that ruined and enslaved us, I thought, but didn’t say.

  “The Waylord is right,” Orrec went on. “The Alds are camped in Ansul like soldiers on the march. They seem amazingly ignorant of how people live here, who they are, what they do. And the Gand is bored with ignorance. I think he’s seen that he’ll probably finish out his life here and might as well make the best of it. But on the other hand, the people of the city don’t know anything about the Alds.”

  “Why should we?” I said. I couldn’t stop myself.

  “We say in the Uplands, it takes a mouse to really know the cat,” said Gry.

  “I don’t want to know people who spit on my gods and call us unclean. I call them filth. Look—look at my lord! Look what they did to him! Do you think he was born with his hands broken?”

  “Ah, Memer,” Gry said, and she reached out to me, but I pulled away. I said, “You can go to what they call their palace and eat their food if you like and tell them your poetry, but I’d kill every Ald in Ansul if I could.”

  Then I turned away and broke into tears, because I had ruined everything and didn’t deserve their confidence.

  I tried to leave the room, but Orrec stopped me.

  “Memer, listen,” he said, “listen. Forgive our ignorance. We are your guests. We ask your pardon.”

  That brought me out of my stupid crying. I wiped my eyes and said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry, sorry.” Gry whispered, and I let her take my hand and sit down with me on the windows eat. “We know so little. Of you, of your lord, of Ansul. But I know as you do that we were brought together here by more than chance.”

  “By Lero,” I said.

  “By a horse, and a lion, and Lero,” she said. “I will trust you, Memer,”

  “I will trust you,” I said to them both.

  “Tell us who you are, then. We need to know one another! Tell us who the Waylord is—or what he was, before the Alds came. Was he the lord of the city?”

  “We didn’t have any lords.”

  I tried to pull myself together to answer properly, as I did when the Waylord asked me, “A little further, please, Memer?” I said, “We elected a council to govern the city. All the cities on the Ansul Coast did. The citizens voted for the councillors. And the councils named the waylords. Waylords travelled among the cities and arranged trade so that the towns and the cities got what they needed from each other. And they kept merchants from cheating and usury, if they could.”

  “It’s not a hereditary title, then?”

  I shook my head. “You were a waylord for ten years. And ten more if your council named you again. Then somebody else took over. Anybody could be a waylord. But you had to have money of your own or from your city. You had to entertain the merchants and the factors and the other waylords, and travel all the time—even down into Sundraman, to talk with the silk merchants and the government there. It cost a lot. But Galvamand was a rich house, then. And people of the city helped. It was an honor, a great honor, being a waylord. So we still call him that. In honor. Although it means nothing now.”

  I almost broke out in tears again. My weakness, my lack of control, scared me and made me angry, and the anger helped steady me.

  “All that was before I was born. I only know it because people have told me and I’ve read the histories.”

  Then my breath went out of me as if I had been hit in the stomach, and I sat paralysed. The habit of my lifetime had hold of me: I should not speak of reading, I should never say to anyone outside my household that I had read something in a book.

  But Orrec and Gry, of course, didn’t even notice. To them it was perfectly natural. They nodded. They asked me to go on.

  I wasn’t sure what I should and should not tell them, now. “People like me are called siege brats,” I said. I pulled at my pale, fine, crinkly hair. I wanted them to know what I was but I didn’t want to speak of my mother being raped. “You can see… When the Alds took the city. That was when… But we drove them out again, and kept them out almost a year. We can fight. We don’t make wars, but we can fight. But then the new army came from Asudar, twice as many men, and broke into the city. And they took the Waylord to prison and wrecked Galvamand. They tore down the university and threw the books into the canals and the sea. They drowned people in the canals and stoned them to death and buried them alive. The Waylord’s mother, Eleyo Galva—”

  She had lived in this room. She had been here when the soldiers broke into the house. I could not go on.

  We were all silent.

  Shetar paced by, lashing her tail. I reached out to her, to get away from what I’d been talking about, but she ignored me. Her mouth was half open and she looked somehow more lionish than usual.

  “She’ll be in a bad mood all night,” Gry said. “She got those rewards, at the Palace, and it reminded her that she hasn’t had a meal,”

  “What does she eat?”

  “Hapless goat, mostly,” Orrec said.

  “Can she ever hunt?”

  “She doesn’t really know how,” Gry said. “Her mother would have taught her. Halflions hunt in a clan, like wolves. That’s why she tolerates us. We’re her family.”

  Shetar made a long, groaning, growling, singsong remark and paced down the long room again.

  “Memer, if it isn’t too hard for you to talk about it Orrec began, and when I shook my head—“You said they destroyed the library of the university? Entirely?” I could tell he hoped I would deny it.

  “The soldiers tried to tear down the library building, but it was stone and well built, so they broke the windows and wrecked the rooms, and brought the books out. They didn’t want to touch them, they made citizens carry them and load them on carts and haul them to the canal and dump them in. There were so many books they piled up on the bottom of the canal and began to choke it, so they made people cart them down to the harbor. And unload the books and dump them off the piers. If they didn’t sink right away they pushed people into the water after them. Once I saw a—” but this time I managed to stop myself, before I said that I had seen a book that had been salvaged from the sea.

  Itwas in the secret room now, one of the northern scrollbooks, written on coated linen and rolled around wooden rods. The person who had found it cast up on the beach dried it out and brought it here. Though it had been weeks in the water, the beautiful writing could still be read. The Waylord showed it to me when he was working on it to restore the damaged text.

  But I could not talk about the books, the old books or the rescued books, in the secret room. Not even to Gry and Orrec,

  It was safe, I hoped, to talk about ancient times, and I said, “The university used to be here, long ago, in Galvamand.”

  Orrec asked, and I told him what I knew, mostly as I had heard it from the Waylord, of the four great households of the city of Ansul: Cam, Gelb, Galva, Actamo. From earliest times they were the wealthiest families, with the most power in the Council. They built the finest houses and temples, paid for public rites and festivals, and gathered artists and makers, scholars and philosophers, architects and musicians to live and work in their houses. That was wh
en people began to call the city Ansul the Wise and Beautiful.

  The Galvas had always lived here on the first rise of the hill above the river and the harbor, in the Oracle House.

  “There was an oracle here?” Orrec asked.

  I hesitated. I had given little thought to what the word meant until yesterday, the morning of the day Gry and Orrec came, as I stood by the dry basin of the fountain—the Oracle Fountain.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I started to say more, and did not. It was strange. Why had I never wondered why Galvamand was called the Oracle House? I did not even know what the oracle was, yet knew I must not speak of it—the way I knew, had always known, that I must not speak of the secret room. It was as if a hand was laid across my lips.

  I thought then of what the Waylord had said last night, “The hands of all the givers of dreams were on my mouth.” That frightened me.

  They saw that I was confused and tongue-tied. Orrec changed the subject, asking about the house, and soon got me to telling its story again.

  In those old days, the Galvas prospered, and both the house and the household grew; drawing to it people of art and learning and craft, and especially scholars and makers of poetry and tales. People came from all Ansul and even from other lands to hear them, learn from them, work with them. So over the years the university grew up here at Galvarnand. All this back part of the house, both the upper and lower floors, had been apartments and classrooms and workrooms and libraries; there had been other buildings off the outer courts; and houses farther back on the hilltop had been hostels and domiciles for students and masters, workshops for artists and builders.

  The poet Denios came here from Urdile when he was a young man. Maybe he had studied in the gallery where we sat last night, for that had been part of the Library of Galvamand.

  In the course of time, Luck, the god we call the Deaf One, turned away from the households of Cam, Gelb, and Actamo. As their wealth and well-being declined, their rivalry with Galva became rancorous. Partly in spite and envy, though they called it public spirit, they persuaded the Council to claim the university and its library for the city, taking it away from Galvamand. The Galvas accepted the ruling of the Council, though they warned that the old site was a sacred one and the new site might not be so blessed. The city built new buildings for the university down nearer the harbor. Almost all the great library that had been gathered here over the centuries was moved there. And I told Gry and Orrec what the Waylord had told me: “When they began to take the books out of Galvamand, the Oracle Fountain in the forecourt began to fail. Little by little, as the books were taken out of the house, the water ceased to run. When they were done, it dried up entirely. It hasn’t run for two hundred years… ”

  They opened the new university with ceremonies and festivals, and students and scholars came; but it was never so famous, so much visited, as the old Library of Galvamand. And then after two centuries the desert people came and tore down the stones, dumped the books into the canals and the sea, buried them in the mud.

  Orrec listened to my story with his head in his hands.

  “Nothing was left here at Galvamandt Gry asked.

  “Some books,” I said uncomfortably. “But when the siege was broken the Ald soldiers came here right away, even before they went to the university. Looking for that… that place they believe in. They tore out the wooden parts of the house, and took the books, the furnishings—Whatever they found they took.” I was telling the truth, but I had a strong sense that Gry was aware that it wasn’t the whole truth.

  “This is terrible—terrible,” Orrec said, standing up. “I know the Alds think writing is an evil thing—but to destroy—to waste—” He was grieved and upset beyond words. He strode off down the room and stood at the western windows, where over the roofs of Galvamand and the lower city white Sul floated on the mist above the straits.

  Gry went to Shetar and clipped the leash to her collar. “Come on,” she said softly to me. “She needs a walk.”

  “I’m sorry;” I said, following her, despairing again at having so distressed Orrec, Everything I said was wrong. It was a day without Ennu, without any blessing.

  “Was it you that destroyed the books?”

  “No. But I wish—”

  “If wishes were horses!” said Gry. “Tell me, is there anywhere I could let Shetar off the leash to run? She won’t attack if I’m anywhere near her, but it’s less worrisome to let her go where there aren’t people around.”

  “The old park,” I said, and we went there. It is just above and east of the house, a broad gully in the hillside over the river where the Embankments divide it into the four canals. Trees grow thick on the slopes of the old park. The Alds never go there; they don’t like trees. Nobody much goes there except children hunting rabbits or quail to get a bit of meat for their family.

  I showed Gry what they call Denies’ Fountain, near the entrance, and Shetar had a long drink from the basin.

  There was not a soul about, and Gry let the lion off the leash. She bounded off but not far, and kept corming back to us. Evidently she didn’t much like the trees either, and didn’t want to go far into the thick, neglected undergrowth. She spent a long time sharpening her claws on one tree, then another, and sniffed exhaustively on the tracks of some creature all round a great thicket of brambles. The farthest she got from us was in pursuit of a butterfly, which led her leaping and batting at it down a steep dark path. After she’d been out of sight around a bend for a while, Gry gave a little purring call. In a moment the lion reappeared, loping up at us through the shadows. Gry touched Shetar’s head, and she followed us as we started wandering slowly back up through the woods.

  “What a wonderful gift,” I said, “to be able to call animals to you.”

  “Depends on what you use it for,” Gry said. “It certainly came in handy when we came down out of the Uplands and had to make a living. I trained horses while Orrec got his learning. I like that work… I admire the way the Alds train their horses. For them, beating your horse is worse than beating your wife.” She gave a little snort.

  “How could you stand living in Asudar so long? Weren’t you—didn’t you get angry at them?”

  “I didn’t have the cause for anger you have,” she said. “It was a little like living with wild animals—predators. They’re dangerous, and not reasonable, by our standards. They make life hard. I felt sorry for the Ald men.”

  I said nothing.

  “They’re like stallions or buck rabbits,” she went on, reflectively. “Never a moment they’re not anxious about a rival male, or a female getting loose. They’re never free. They fill their world with enemies… But they’re brave, and keep their word, and honor the guest. Like my people of the Uplands. I liked them well enough. I couldn’t get to know any women, though, because I was pretending to be a man and had to keep away from them. That was tiresome.”

  “I hate everything about them,” I said. “I can’t help it.”

  “Of course you can’t help it. What you’ve told us—how could you see them except as hateful?”

  “I don’t want to see them any other way,” I said.

  I don’t believe Gry ever didn’t hear what people said, but sometimes she ignored it. She walked on a little and then turned to me on the path with a sudden grin. “Listen, Memer! Why don’t you come with us to the Palace? Second groom. You make a fine boy. Fooled me completely. Would you like to? It’s interesting. The Gand’s a kind of king, how many chances do you get to meet a king? And you can hear Orrec—he’s going to tell them the Cosmogonies. That could be risky, they’re so stuck on Atth being the one and only god. But the Gand was asking him for it yesterday.”

  I only shook my head. I longed to hear Orrec speak that poem, but not among a lot of Alds. I wouldn’t say any more about how I hated them, but I certainly wasn’t going to go be polite and meek and slavish to them.

  After dinner the next day, though, Gry brought up the idea again. Evidently she had tal
ked Orrec into it, for he made no objection; and to my dismay, the Waylord didn’t either. He asked how dangerous they thought it might be. When they both said they trusted the Alds’ law of hospitality, he said only, “The hospitality they showed me wasn’t of a kind I want Memer to know. But that our people and theirs know so little of one another, after so many years—that is shameful. For us as well as for them.” He looked at me thoughtfully. “And Memer is a very quick learner.”

  I wanted to protest, to say I refused to go anywhere near the Alds, I didn’t want to learn anything from them or about them. But that would be wilful ignorance, a thing the Waylord despised. And also it would sound like cowardice. If Orrec and Gry were willing to risk going to the Palace, how could I refuse?

  The idea was more frightening the more I thought about it. Yet I was curious about the Palace, the Alds, as Orrec and Gry talked about them. Everything had been the same in my life for so long that I’d wondered if it would always be the same—the housework, the market; the empty rooms of Galvamand, the secret room and its treasures of reading and learning, and the dark strange part of it where I dared not go; no one to teach me anything new but my dear lord, no one but him to be with, to give my love to. Now by the coming of two people the house had come alive. The ancestors were awake, were listening—the souls, the shadows, and the guardians of sill and hearth. The One Who Looks Both Ways had opened the door. I knew that. I knew that our guests had come on the path of Ennu and with Leros blessing, and that to refuse what they offered me was to refuse the gift, the chance, the turning of the way.

  “Do you want to go, Memer?” the Waylord asked me. I knew if I protested he wouldn’t insist. I shrugged, not even speaking, as if it were a matter of no importance to me if I went or not.