Powers

“It wasn’t an evil slavery,” I said. “Until—“ I stopped.

Memer said, “Can slavery not be evil?”

“If your masters aren’t cruel people—and if you don’t know there’s anything else,” I said. “If everybody believes it’s the way things are and must be, then you can not know that... that it’s wrong.”

“Can you not know?” she said, not accusing or ar guing, simply asking, and thinking as she asked. She looked at me directly and said, “I was a slave in Ansul. All my people were. But by recent conquest, not by caste. We didn’t have to believe we were slaves by the order of nature. That must be very different.”

I wanted to talk to her but I couldn’t. “It was a slave,” I said to Ca-spro, “who taught me your hymn to Liberty.”

Memer’s smile brightened her grave, quiet face for a moment. Though her complexion was so light, she had dark eyes that flashed like the fire in opal. “We sang that song in Ansul when we drove the Alds out,” she said.

“It’s the tune,” Caspro said. “Good tune. Catchy.” He stretched, enjoying the warmth of the sun, and said, “I want to hear more about Bar-na and his city. It sounds as if there was a bitter tragedy there. Whatever you can tell me. But you said you became his bard, as it were, his reciter. So then, you have a good memory?”

“Very good,” I said. “That’s my power.”

“Ah!” I had spoken with confidence, and he responded to it. “You memorise without difficulty?”

“Without trying,” I said. “It’s part of the reason I came here. What’s the good of having a head full of everything you ever read? People liked hearing the stories, there in the forest. But what could I do with them in the Marshes? Or anywhere else? I thought maybe at the University…”

“Yes, yes, absolutely,” Caspro said. “Or perhaps… Well, we’ll see. Here come mederendefereho en refema—is that right, Memer?—In Aritan it means ‘beautiful women bringing food.’ You’ll want to learn Aritan, Gavir. Think of it, another language—a language different from ours!—not entirely of course, it’s the ancestor of ours, but quite different—and a whole new poetry!” As he spoke, with the unguarded passion that I already saw characterised him, he was careful not to look at Melle, only at his wife, and not to come near Melle as he helped set out the food on an unoccupied bench. They had brought bread and cheese, olives, fruit, and a thin, light cider to drink.

“Where are you staying?” Gry asked, and when I said, “The Quail,” she said, “How are the fleas?”

“Not too bad. Are they, Melle?”

She had come to stand close to me again. She shook her head, and scratched her shoulder.

“Shetar has her own private fleas,” Gry told her. “Lion fleas. She won’t share them with us. And the Quail fleas won’t bite her.” Shetar had opened an eye, found the food uninteresting, and gone back to sleep.

Having eaten a little, Melle sat down on the paving stones in front of me but close to the lion, within petting distance. She and Gry kept up a murmured conversation, while Caspro talked with me and Memer put in a word now and then. What he was doing, in a mild and roundabout fashion, was finding out how much of a scholar I was, what I knew and didn’t know. From the little Memer said, I thought she must know everything there was to know in the way of poetry and tales. But when we came to history she declared ignorance, saying she knew only that of Ansul, and not much of that, because all the books in Ansul had been destroyed by the conquerors of the city. I wanted to hear that hideous story, but Caspro, mildly perseverant, kept on the course of his questions until he’d learned what he wanted to know, and even won from me a confession of my old, foolish ambition to write a history of the City States. “I don’t think I’ll ever do that,” I said, trying to make light of it, “since it would involve going back there.”

“Why not?” said Caspro, frowning.

“I’m a runaway slave.”

“A citizen of Urdile is free,” he said, still frowning. “No one can declare him a slave, no matter where he goes.”

“But I’m not a citizen of Urdile.”

“If you’ll go to the Commons House with me to vouch for you, you can become one tomorrow. There are plenty of ex-slaves here, who freely come and go to Asion and the City States as citizens of Urdile, But as for history, you might find better documents in the library of the University here than in the City States.”

“They don’t know what to do with them,” I said sadly, thinking of the wonderful records and annals I had handled at the Shrine of the Forefathers.

“Perhaps you can show them what to do with them—given time,” Caspro said. “The first thing for you to do is become a citizen. Next, enroll in the University.”

“Caspro-di, I haven’t much money I think the first thing for me to do is find work.”

“Well, I have an idea about that, if Gry agrees. You write good copy-hand, I expect?”

“Oh yes,” I said, remembering Everra’s relentless lessons.

“I need a copyist. And a man with a really good memory would be of great use to me too, since I’ve been having some trouble with my eyes.” He said it easily and his dark eyes seemed clear enough, but there was a wincing in his face as he spoke, and I saw Gry’s quick glance at him. “For instance, now…if I was needing a reference from Denios for a lecture, and couldn’t remember what comes after Let the swan fly to the northlands—?'

I took up the lines—Let grey gander fly beside grey goose, North in the springtime: it is south I go.

“Ah!” Memer said, all alight. “I love that poem!”

“Of course you do,” Caspro said. “But it’s not a well-known one, except to a few homesick southerners.” I thought of the homesick northerner, Tadder, who lent me the volume of Denios where I’d read the poem. Caspro went on, “I was thinking that having a kind of live anthology about the house could be very useful to me. If such work seemed at all attractive to you, Gavir. Anything you didn’t have by heart you could help me look up, of course. I have a good many books. And you could be getting on with your work at the University. What do you think, Gry?”

His wife was sitting down on the pavement with Melle. She reached up and took his hand, and for a moment they gazed at each other with a calm intensity of love. Melle looked from her to him. She looked hard at him, frowning, studying him.

“It seems an excellent idea,” Gry said.

“You see, we have a couple of spare rooms here,” he said to me. “One of them is Memer’s, as long as she’ll let us keep her—through next winter at the very least. There are a couple of rooms up in the attic, where we had two young women from Bendraman living until just lately, students. But they went back to Derris Water to astonish the good priests with their learning, so the rooms are vacant. Waiting for you and Melle.”

“Orrec,” said his wife, “you should give Gavir time to think.”

“Dangerous thing, often, time to think,” he said. He looked at me with a smile that was both apologetic and challenging.

“I would—It would—We would—“ I couldn’t get a finished sentence out.

“To me it would be a great pleasure to have a child in the house,” Gry said. “This child. If it pleased Melle.”

Melle looked at her, then at me. I said, “Melle, our hosts are inviting us to stay with them.”

“With Shetar?”

“Yes.”

“And Gry? And Memer?”

“Yes.”

She said nothing, but nodded and went back to stroking the lion’s thick fur. The lion was faintly but perceptibly snoring.

“Very well, that’s settled,” said Caspro in particularly broad Uplands dialect. “Go get your things out of the Quail and move in.”

I was hesitant, incredulous.

“Did you not see me, half your life ago, in your visions, and I spoke your name? Were you not coming here to me?” he said, quietly but fiercely. “If we’re guided, are we to argue with the guide?”

Gry watched me with a sympathetic eye.

Memer looked at Caspro, smiling, and said to me, “It’s very hard to argue with him.”

“I—I don’t want to argue,” I stammered. “It’s only—” And I stopped again.

Melle got up and sat down by me on the bench, pressing close against me. “Beaky,” she whispered. “Don’t