to know. But I think no one here can, or will, except you.”
She turned quite away from me at that and was silent for a long time. At last she turned round and faced me. “I could have taught you, Gavir, if you’d been here as a child in our village,” she said, and I saw she was holding her mouth tight to keep it from quivering. “It’s too late now. Too late. A woman can’t teach a man anything. Wherever you’ve lived, you must have learned that!”
I said nothing, but she must have seen my protest in my face, and that she had hurt me.
“What can I say to you, sister’s son? You come by your gifts truly. Tano could tell any tale she’d heard once, and repeat words she’d heard years before. And I have walked with the lion, as you say—for all the good it’s done me. To bring back the past in memory is a great power. To remember what hasn’t yet come to pass is a great power too. What’s the use of it, you ask me? I don’t know. I’ve never known. Maybe the men know, who look down on women’s visions as meaningless foolishness. Ask them! I can’t tell you. I can only say, hold to the other power, the one your mother Tano had, for it won’t drive you crazy.”
She would not look at me steadily. Her glance was fierce and black as a crow’s. I heard how like my own voice hers was.
“What’s the good of remembering all the stories I ever heard, if men aren’t allowed to tell stories or hear them?” I said, my thwarted anger rising ro meet hers.
“No good,” she said. “You should have been a woman, Gavir Ayta-na. Then one of your powers might have brought you good.”
“But I’m not a woman, Gegemer Aytano,” I said bitterly.
She looked round at me again and her expression changed. “No,” she said. “Nor quite a man yet. But well on the way.” She paused, and drew a deep breath, and finally said, “I’ll give you what advice I can, though I think you won’t take it. So long as you remember yourself, you’re safe. When you begin to remember farther, you begin to lose yourself—you begin to be lost. Don’t lose yourself, Tano Aytano’s son. Hold to yourself. Remember yourself. No one told me to do that. No one but me will tell you to do it. So, take your risks. And if I ever see you when I walk with the lion, I’ll tell you what I see. That’s the only gift I might have to give you. In return for this,” and she swung the dead goose by its webbed red feet, and scowled, and walked away.
A LITTLE LATER in the spring, when the weather was getting very warm, I came back one afternoon with Minki and my uncle from fishing and found two strangers sitting on the deck. One of them was tall and hea-vyset for a Rassiu, dressed in a long narrow robe of fine reedcloth bleached almost white; I thought he must be some kind of priest or official. The other man was shy and silent. The man in the robe introduced himself as Dorod Aytana, and named off a litany of our clan relationship. Metter scurried off with our catch to the fish-mat, since Dorod said it was me they came to talk to, and he was glad to get away from strangers. When he had gone, Dorod said to me, smiling but with authority, “You came to South Shore seeking me.”
“It may be that I didn’t know it,” I said, a fairly common phrase among the Marsh people, who avoid direct negatives and unnecessary commitments.
“You have not seen me in vision?”
“I believe I have not,” I said humbly.
“Our ways have been coming closer for a long time now,” Dorod said. He had a deep, soft voice and an impressive manner. “I know that you were brought up among foreigners and have only been in Ferusi for a year. Our kinsman at the Big House in South Shore sent to tell me that you had come at last. You seek a teacher; you have found him. I seek a seer; I have found him. Come with me to my village, Reed Isles, and we and we will begin your training. For it is late, very late. You should have been learning the way of the visions for years now. But we will make up for lost time—for time is never lost, is it? We will bring you into your power, maybe within a year or two, if you give all your soul to it. Your second initiation then will not be as a mere fisherman or reed cutter, but as a seer of your clan. There is no seer of the Aytanu now. Not for many years. You have been long wanted, long awaited, Gavir Aytana!”
Of all he said, it was those last words that went to my heart. Who had ever waited for me to come? A stolen child, a slave, a runaway, a kind of ghost to my own people, a stranger everywhere else—who wanted or would wait for me?
“I’ll come with you,” I said.
¦ 13 ¦
Reed Isles was the westernmost, the smallest, and the poorest of the five villages of Ferusi. Its houses were scattered on the isles and inlets of a bay in the southwest corner of Ferusi Lake. Dorod lived with his meek and silent cousin Temec in a hut on a muddy, reed-surrounded peninsula. There were fewer women than men in the village, and the women seemed indifferent and aloof. There were forty or so people, but only four marriage huts. The fish-mat was not the sociable, pleasurable event it was in East Lake.
I didn’t get to know anyone in this village well but Dorod. He kept me busy and away from the others. I missed the easy, lazy companionship of fishing with my uncle or with the young men, talking with Tisso and other girls, watching the boat builders, cutting reeds, planting rice-grass, the slow day rhythm that I had lived in for a year now, often bored into a kind of trance, but never unhappy.
I went out fishing daily here, and we often kept half the catch for ourselves, for the women provided few vegetables, little meal, no fruit. I certainly would have been willing to fry up our catch or make fish cakes with the coarse meal the women ground, but for a village man to cook would turn society inside out and upside down and make me an outcast from my people forever. As it was, Dorod and I ate a good deal of fish raw, as I’d done with Ammeda, but we didn’t have any horseradish to give it a kick. Nobody here shot birds; they were forbidden in this village as sacred creatures—hassa—wild goose, duck, swan, and heron. Little freshwater clams, delicious and very common here, were a staple of the local diet, but they became poisonous at rare, unpredictable intervals; Dorod forbade himself and me to eat them.
Temec told me that Dorod s previous novice, a child, had died of the shellfish poisoning three years ago.
Dorod and I did not get on well. My heart is not naturally rebellious, and I wanted very much to learn what he could teach me about my power, but I’d learned to distrust my own trustfulness. Dorod demanded absolute trust. He gave me arbitrary orders and expected silent obedience. I questioned the reason for each act. He refused to answer. I refused to obey.
This went on for a half month or so. One morning he instructed me to spend the entire day kneeling in the hut with my eyes shut, saying the word
I’d had enough. I made up my mind to walk back round the lake to East Lake Village.
He came back into the hut and found me knotting up the little bundle of my belongings in the old brown blanket, which my uncle’s cat Prut had nearly worn to shreds by kneading it with his claws before he went to sleep on it.
“Gavir, you cannot go,” he said, and I said, “What can I learn if you keep me in ignorance?”
“The seerman is the guide. It is his burden and task to carry the mystery for the seer.”
He spoke, as he often did, pompously, but I felt he believed what he said.
“Not this seer,” I said. “I need to know what I’m doing and why I should do it. You want blind obedience. Why should a seer be blind?”
“The seer of visions must be guided,” Dorod said. “How can he guide himself? He gets lost among the visions. He doesn’t know wheth-
er he lives now or years ago or in years to come! You yourself, though you’ve barely begun to travel in time, have felt that. No one can walk that path by himself, unguided.” “My aunt Gegemer—”
“An ambamer!” Dorod said. “Women, babbling nonsense, screeching and screaming, seeing useless glimpses of things they don’t understand. Phoh! A seer is trained and guided, he serves his clan and people, he is a man of value. I can make you a man of value. I know the secrets, the techniques, the sacred ways. Without a
