Powers

idylls of forest liberty.

For the words liberty, freedom, had come to have a presence, a radiance in my mind, dominating it, like the great, bright stars I used to see on summer nights in Vente, and which I often looked up to see, fainter and farther, from the dark city. We were at leisure, evenings in the dormitory, and the priests allowed us oil for our lamps. I read De-nios’ Transformations, which Tadder lent me, and that was a great discovery to me. It was like that dream I had had of finding rooms in a house that I had not known were there, where I was made welcome among wonders, and greeted by a golden animal.

Denios—the greatest of poets, all my companions said—had been born a slave. In his poems he used the word liberty with a tenderness, a reverence, that made me think of my sister when she spoke of her beloved. And Mimen had a battered little pocket manuscript of Caspro’s Cosmologies, which he said went with him everywhere; he encouraged me to read it. I found the poem disturbing and strange and understood very little of it, but sometimes a line would take me by the heart, the way his song had, that first night.

I was allowed to run across the city to see my sister for an hour. It was hot September weather. Sallo did not look very well, her body and legs swollen with her pregnancy, her face drawn and tired. She hugged me and asked all about the priests and the other slaves and our work, and I talked the whole time, and then had to run back to the Shrine.

A few days later Everra sent word to me that Sallo’s child had been born at seven months and had lived only an hour.

We could not bury in the slave cemetery by the river, for it was outside the walls. During the siege, the bodies of slaves who died were burned in the fire towers, as if they were citizens. Their ashes mingled with those of free men in the waters of the Ash Brook, which rose by the fire towers and ran out through a narrow pipe under the walls to join the Nisas, and then the Morr, and then the sea.

I stood in the autumn dawn at the fire towers by the brook with a few of the people of Arcamand. Sallo was not well enough yet to come to the baby’s funeral, but Iemmer said she was in no danger. I was allowed to go see her after a few days. She was thin and tired-looking, and she wept when she hugged me. She said, in her soft tired voice, “If he’d lived, you know, they’d have traded him as soon as they could. If they could. I heard that one House traded a slave baby for a pound of meal. Nobody wants a new mouth in a siege. I think he knew it, Gav. Nobody really wanted him to be alive. Not even me. What…” She didn’t finish her question, but opened her hands in a small, desolate gesture that said, What could he have been to me or I to him?

I was shocked at how my people at Arcamand looked. They were all bone-thin, with the same weary look Sallo had—the siege face. Visiting the schoolroom I found my young pupils pitifully skinny and listless. Children are the first to die in famine. We at the Shrine were eating twice as well as most people in the city.

Sallo was delighted to see my good health, and wanted me to tell her about the food we got, the priests’ fishpond, their carefully guarded flock of chickens that gave us eggs and now and then a bit of meat or a soup, their garden of holy herbs which included a good many lay vegetables, the gifts of grain to the Ancestors which fed the descendants of the Ancestors…. I was ashamed to talk about it, but she said, “I love to hear about it! Do the priests have olives? Oh, I miss olives more than anything!” So I told her we had olives sometimes, though in fact I hadn’t tasted one for months.

I saw Sotur just before I left. She too looked listless, her beautiful hair gone dry and dull. She greeted me gently and I said, without knowing I was going to say it, “Sotur-io, will you give me a quarter-bronze? I want to buy Sallo some olives.”

“Oh, Gav, there haven’t been any olives for months,” she said.

“I know where to get them.”

She looked at me with big eyes. After a moment she nodded. She went off and came back with a coin, which she pressed into my hand. “I wish there was more I could do,” she said. So she made my first begging an easy thing.

For a quarter-bronze, which would have bought a pound of them last year, the black marketer gave me ten wizened olives. I ran back with them to Arcamand and gave them to Iemmer for Sallo, who was in the silk rooms. I was long overdue getting back to the College of Priests, but Reba didn’t say anything, perhaps because he saw I was in tears.

Reba was a gentle man with a serene mind. Sometimes he talked a little with me, telling me about the worship of the Ancestors in the Shrine, which was carried out as much by the priests’ slaves as by the priests. He made me feel the dignity of that life and the peaceful beauty of the ever-repeated round of rites and prayers, on which the welfare, the very being, of the city depended. I think he saw the possibility that I might be given by my House to the College, and it flattered me that he wanted me. I could imagine living there as a priest of the Shrine. But I didn’t want to live anywhere but Arcamand, near my sister, or do anything but what I had been brought up all my life to do—to learn so that I could teach the children of my House.

We were drawing near the end of our job. The ancient documents had been moved to the vaults under the Forefathers’ Shrine, and all we had to do now was sort and store them—work which in fact could be drawn out almost indefinitely, for many of these old scrolls and annals were unidentified, and ought to be read and labeled and listed, as well as cleaned, preserved from insects, and given proper storage. Our Houses weren’t eager to have us back, we were only extra mouths in a famine; and the priests and their slaves were glad to have us do the work. In fact, they couldn’t have done it without us. I’d been surprised to discover that all seven of us, even I, were much better educated than the priests of the College. They knew the ancestral rites, but very little history or anything else, not even the history of the rites. We were finding all kinds of interesting documents, lives of great men of Etra from the earliest days, prophecies, records of civil and foreign wars and alliances with other cities—all of which fascinated me, drawing me back to my dream of writing a history of all the City States. I was content to be burrowing among the old scrolls and parchments down in the silent vaults, under the silent, dying city.

“What a comfort the past is,” Mimen said, “when the future offers none.”

Burning the bodies of those who died of starvation went on night and day now down by the Ash Brook. The smoke of the pyres rose and mixed with the mists of autumn and made a pall over the roofs. Sometimes the smell was the smell of burnt roasting meat and my mouth would water with hunger and sick revulsion.

Outside the north walls the enemy was preparing a huge earthen ramp on which they could bring their siege engines right up to the parapet. The city guardsmen threw paving stones down among the workers, but they swarmed like ants, and their archers shot at any man who showed himself along the walls. Our archers saved those arrows pulled from dying men, and made their own from any tree within the walls, even the old sycamores.

Unrest ran through the Senate and was shouted in the squares by orators: Why had Etra been so unprepared for attack—without weapons stockpiled, without sufficient food stored, her armies far away? Were there traitors among the Senators—lovers of Casicar? Men said the Senate refused to open the gates because they wanted Etra to starve, to die, before it was surrendered. To some this was noble and courageous, to others a vile betrayal. Rumors of unfair distribution of food now ran wild, true or not. Black marketers whose supplies ran out were murdered on the suspicion of withholding food.

A merchants house was attacked and torn down by a mob who believed he was hoarding. They found nothing but a half barrel of dried figs hidden in the slaves’ barrack. There were constant stories of grain being hidden under the Senate House… under the Shrine of the Forefathers… That came too close to home. The priests of the College went in terror for their fishpond, their garden, their poultry, their lives. They begged for guards to be set around the Shrine, and ten men were put on duty. They couldn’t have done much if a mob had stormed the Shrine, but its sanctity still defended it, and us.

It was mid-October. Life hung in a kind of dead lull which we all felt preceded the end. Within a few days, either the assault on the north wall would begin and would be successful, or a mob out of control would open one of the gates, trying to escape before the slaughter and the burning. Or, conceivably, the Senate would vote to surrender the city in hopes of avoiding total destruction.

And then the thing we had lost all hope of happened.

At daybreak, fog and smoke hanging heavy in the streets, over the enemy camp, along the Nisas, there came a sound of alarms, shouting, bugles signaling, the neighing of horses, the clash of arms. The armies of Etra had come home at last.

All morning we heard the noise of battle outside the walls, and those allowed on the walls and roofs could watch it. We slaves were locked into the compound of the Shrine, and could only beg for news from those who ran past the gates. Late in the morning a great troop of city guards marched through the square, stopping before the