House, at least now that the rains had ceased. The tent would be sumptuously furnished, and would have movable, carved screens making rooms of a kind within it—Orrec had been made welcome in such great tents in his travels in Asudar. But here he was not brought under even that cloth roof. He was invited to sit on a light folding stool on a carpet not far from the open doorway of the tent.
Branty had been taken to the stables by a groom who handled him as if he were made of glass. The lion tamer and the lion stood some yards behind Orrec, with Ald officers guarding them. They, like Orrec, were offered paper parasols to protect them from the sun. “I got one on account of Shetar,” Gry called to us from the dressing room. “They respect lions. But they’ll throw away the parasols, because we used them and were unclean.”
They were offered refreshments at once, and a bowl of water was brought for Shetar. After they had waited about half an hour, the Gand emerged from the tent with a retinue of courtiers and officers. He greeted Orrec most graciously, calling him prince of poets and welcoming him to Asudar,
“Asudar!” I burst out. “This is Ansul!” Then I apologised for interrupting.
“Where the Ald is is the desert,” Orrec said mildly; I don’t know whether they were his own words or an Ald saying.
The Gand Ioratth, he said, was a man of sixty or more, splendidly dressed in robes of linen inwoven with gold thread in the fashion of Asudar, with the wide, peaked hat that only Ald noblemen can wear. His manners were affable and his talk was shrewd and lively. He sat with Orrec and conversed about poetry: at first they spoke of the great epics of Asudar, but he also wanted to know about what he called the western makers. His interest was real, his questions intelligent. He invited Orrec to come regularly to the Palace to recite from his own work and that of other makers. It would, he said, give him and his court much pleasure and instruction. He spoke as one prince to another, inviting, not ordering.
Some of the courtiers and officers joined in the conversation after a while, and like the Gand showed a thorough knowledge of their own epics and a curiosity, even a hunger, to hear poetry and story. They complimented Orrec, saying he was a fountain in the desert to them.
Others were less friendly. The Gands son, Iddor, kept noticeably apart, paying no attention to the talk about poetry, standing inside the open tent with a group of priests and officers and chatting with them, until they grew so noisy that the Gand silenced them with a reproof After that Iddor scowled and said nothing.
The Gand asked that the lion be brought to him, so Chy obliged, and Shetar did her useful trick, as Orrec called it: facing the Gand, she stretched out her front paws and bowed her head down between them, as cats do when they stretch—“doing obeisance.” This pleased everybody very much, and Shetar had to do it several times, which was fine with her, since she got a small treat each time, even though it was her fasting day. Iddor came forward and wanted to play with her, dangling his feathered cap, which she ignored, and asking how strong she was, did she kill live prey, had she bitten people, had she killed a man, and so on. Chy the lion tamer answered all his questions respectfully, and had Shetar do obeisance to him. But Shetar yawned at him after doing a rather perfunctory bow.
“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
