Powers

And I hadn’t understood.

It was not only the Family who had betrayed them, I had betrayed them. Not in acts: what could I have done? But I should have understood, I had been unwilling to see. I had blinded my eyes with belief. I had believed that the rule of the master and the obedience of the slave were a mutual and sacred trust. I had believed that justice could exist in a society founded on injustice.

Belief in the lie is the life of the lie. That line from Caspro’s book came back to me, and cut like a razor.

Honor can exist anywhere, love can exist anywhere, but justice can exist only among people who found their relationships upon it.

Now, I thought, I understood Barna’s plans for the Uprising, now they made sense to me. All that ancient evil ordained by the Ancestors, that prison tower of mastery and slavery, was to be uprooted and thrown down, replaced by justice and liberty. The dream would be made real. And Luck had brought me here to the place where that great change would begin, the home and center of the liberty to come.

I wanted to be one of those who made it real. I began to dream of going to Asion. Many of the Forest Brothers were from that city, a great city with a large population of freemen and freedmen, merchants and artisans, into which a fugitive slave could mix without being questioned or suspected. Barna’s netmen went back and forth often, passing as traders, merchants, cattle buyers, slaves sent on commission by farmers, and so on. I wanted to join them. There were educated people in Asion, both nobles and freemen, people to whom I could present myself as a freeman seeking work copying or reciting or teaching. And so doing I could do Barna’s work, laying the foundation of the Uprising among the slaves I would meet there.

Barna absolutely forbade it. “I want you here,” he said. “I need you, Scholar!”

“You need me more there,” I said.

He shook his head. “Too dangerous. One day they ask, where did you get your learning? And what’ll you say?

I’d already thought that out. “That I went to school in Mesun, where the University is, and came down to Asion because there are too many scholars in Urdile, and the pay’s better in Bendile,”

“There’d be scholars there from the University who’d say no, that boy was never there.”

“Hundreds of people go to the colleges. They can’t all know one another.”

I argued hard, but he shook his big curly head, and his laugh changed to a grimmer look. “Listen, Gav, I tell you a learned man stands out. And you’re already famous. The lads talk as they go about, you know, winning folk in the villages and towns to come here to join us. They boast of you. We’ve got a fellow, they say, that can speak any tale or poem that was ever made! And only a boy yet, a wonder of the world! Well, you can’t go to Asion with a name like that hanging about you.”

I stared at him. “My name? Do they say my name?”

“They say the name you gave us,” he said, untroubled.

Of course he, and everyone else but Chamry Bern, assumed that “Gav” was a false name. Nobody here, not even Barna, used the name he’d had as a slave.

As Barna saw my expression, his changed. “Oh, by the Destroyer,” he said. “You kept the name you had in Etra?” I nodded.

“Well,” he said after a minute, “if you ever do leave, take a new one! But that’s all the more reason for me to say stay here! Your old masters may have sent word around that their clever slave boy they’d spent so much money educating ran off. They hate to let a runaway escape. It gripes them to the soul. We’re a good way from Etra here, but you never know.”

I’d never given a thought to pursuit. When I left the graveyard and walked up the Nisas, it was a death. I had walked away from everything, into nothing, going nowhere. I had no fear, then, because I had no desire. As I began to live again, here, I still had no fear. I’d gone so far in my own mind that it never occurred to me that anyone from the old life would follow me.

“They think I’m dead,” I said at last. “They think I drowned myself that morning.”

“Why would they think that?”

I was silent.

I hadn’t told Barna anything about my life. I’d never spoken of it to anyone but Diero.

“You left some clothing on the riverbank, eh?” he said. “Well, they might have fallen for that old trick. But you were a valuable property. If your owners think you might be alive, they’ll have their ears open. It’s been only a year or two, right? Don’t ever think you’re safe—except here! And you might tell the lads you came from Pagadi or Piram, so that they don’t say Etra if they speak of you, eh?”

“I will,” I said, humbled.

Had there been no end to my stupidity? No limit to the patience Luck had had with me?

But I did repeat my request to go into Asion. Barna said, “You’re a free man, Gav. I give you no orders! But I tell you, it’s not time yet for you to go. You wouldn’t be safe. Your being in Asion now could endanger others there, and the whole scheme of the Uprising. When the time comes for you to go there, I’ll tell you. Before then, if you go, you go against my heart.” I couldn’t argue with that.

In early spring a couple of newcomers arrived, runaways from a household in Asion, who came hidden in a goods wagon driven by netmen. They brought with them, stolen from their masters’ house, a good sum of money and a long box. “What’s this stuff?” asked one of Barna’s men who opened the box, holding up a scroll so that it slipped from the rod and unrolled at his feet. “Cloth, is it?”

“It’s what I asked for, man,” said Barna. “It’s a book. Now take care with it!” He had indeed requested his netmen to bring books. Nobody had brought any until now, most of our recruits—and recruiters—being illiterate and having no idea where to look for books or even, like this fellow, what a book looked like.

The new pair of runaways were educated, one trained in accounting, the other in recitation. The books were a motley lot, some scrolls, some paged and bound; but all could be useful for teaching, and one was a treasure to me—a little, elegantly printed copy of Caspro’s Cosmologies, replacing the manuscript copy that Mime had given me, for which I had grieved, once I began to remember what I had lost and left at Arca- mand.

The new recruits were, as Barna said, a good catch: the accountant assisted him in record keeping, and the reciter could tell fables and Bendili epics by the hour, giving me a vacation.

I looked forward to talking to these educated men, but that didn’t go well. The accountant knew only figures and calculations, while the reciter, Pulter, made it clear that he was older and more accomplished than I was, and that my pretensions to scholarship didn’t qualify me to converse with a truly learned man. It galled him that most of our people liked my recitations better than his, though he soon had a following. I’d been taught to let the words do the work, while he performed in alternate shouts and whispers, with long pauses, dramatic intonations, and quavering tremolos of emotion.

The copy of the Cosmologies was his, but he had no interest in reading Caspro, saying all the modern poets were obscure and perverse. He gave me the book, and for that alone I would have forgiven him all his snubs and all his quavers. I found the poem difficult, but kept going back to it. Sometimes I read from it to Diero, quiet afternoons in her room.

Her friendship was like nothing else in my life. Only with her could I speak of my life at Arcamand. When I was with her I felt no wish for revenge, no desire to overturn the social order, no rage at the poor dead impotent Ancestors. I knew what I had lost, and could remember what I had had. Though Diero had never been in Etra, she was my link to it. She hadn’t known Sallo, but she brought Sallo to me, and so eased my heart.

Like most slaves, Diero had been casually mothered and had no brother or sister that she knew; the two children she had borne when she was young were sold as infants. The craving for family relationship was deep in her, as it was in all of us. Barna knew that and called on it to form and strengthen his Brotherhood.

I was unusual in having had so close a bond to a sister: my loss was specific, my craving acute. It was as an older sister that I loved Diero, while to her I was a younger brother or a son, and also, perhaps, the one man she ever knew who did not want to be her master.

She loved to hear me tell about Sallo and the others at Arcamand, and our days at the farm; she was curious about the customs of Etra, and also about my origin. The great marshes where the Rassy rises lie not far south of Asion, and she had known me at once for what I was, one of the Marshmen, dark-skinned, short and slight, with thick black hair and a high-bridged nose. The Rassiu, she called the Marsh people. They came into Asion, she said,