offend their ears. And any other man who does not wish to hear the heathen poet’s songs may go. Since only he is cursed who hears the curse, as they say, those who have dull ears, like me, may stay and listen safely. Maker, forgive our disputes and our discourtesy.”
He sat down again. Iddor and the redhats—there were four of them—and the rest of Iddor’s group all went back into the great tent, talking loudly, discontented. One man who stood near Ioratth also slunk away as unnoticeably as he could, looking anxious and unhappy. The rest stayed. And Orrec struck the lyre, and spoke the opening of
The Gand let his people applaud at the end, this time. He had another glass of water brought to Orrec (“Fortune in crystal,” Chy hissed to me), and then he dismissed his retinue, saying that he wished to speak with the poet “beneath the fern-palm,” which evidently meant in private.
A couple of guards remained standing at the tent entrance, but the officers and courtiers went back into the big tent or to the barracks, and Chy and I were dismissed by the officious slave with the fan. We went to the stable side of the courtyard, following several men who, I realised now, had come from the stables or elsewhere to hear the poetry and had been standing all along unobtrusively on the fringe of the group. Some were soldiers, others hostlers, a couple of them were boys. Most of them were interested in Shetar. They wanted to get closer to her than Chy would let them get. They tried to strike up conversation, asking all the usual questions—what’s her name, where did you get her, what does she eat, has she killed anybody. Chy’s answers were curt and haughty, as befitted a lion tamer.
“Is he your slave?” a young man asked. I didn’t realise he was talking about me until Chy answered, “Prentice groom.”
The young man fell into step with me, and when I reached the shady wall and sat down on the cobbles, he sat down too. He looked at me several times and finally said, “You’re an Ald.”
I shook my head.
“Your dad was,” he said, looking very shrewd. What was the use denying it, with my hair, my face?
I shrugged.
“You live here? In the city?”
I nodded.
“Do you know any girls?”
My heart went up into my throat. All I could think was that he’d seen I was a girl, that he’d start shouting about pollution, defilement, blasphemy—
“I came here from Dur with my dad last year,” he said in a depressed tone, and then said nothing for a while.
Sneaking a longer glance at him I saw that he was a boy rather than a man, fifteen, sixteen at most. He didn’t wear the blue cloak, but a tunic with a blue knot at the shoulder. He was bare-legged, big-boned, paleskinned, with a soft face and pimples around his mouth.
His frizz of sheep hair was yellowish. He sighed. “The Ansul girls all hate us,” he said. “I thought maybe you had a sister.”
I shook my head.
“What’s your name?”
“Mem.”
“Well, look, Mem, if you knew some girls who, you know, just wanted to be with some men for a while, I have some money. For you, I mean.”
He was graceless, detestable, and pitiful. He didn’t even sound hopeful. I didn’t make any answer at all. For all my fear and contempt of him, he made me want to laugh—I don’t know why—he was so shameless. Like a dog. I couldn’t actually hate him.
He went on about girls, just talking about his daydreams I suppose, and began to say some things that made me feel myself getting red in the face and restless. I said in a flat voice, “I don’t know any girls.” That shut him up for a while. He sighed and scratched his groin and finally said, “I hate it here. I want to go home.”
Then go! I wanted to shout at him. I just said, “Hunh.”
He looked at me again, so closely that it scared me all over again. “Do you ever go with boys?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“I never have either,” he said in his sad, monotonous voice, which was no deeper than mine. “Some of the fellows do.” The idea seemed to depress him so much that he said nothing more, until he said, “Father would kill me.”
I nodded.
We sat in silence. Shetar was pacing up and down the courtyard with Chy in attendance. I wanted to be with them, but thought it would look odd if an apprentice groom walked up and down with the lion and the lion tamer.
“What do fellows do here?” the boy asked.
I shrugged. What did boys do? Scrounged for food and firewood, mostly; like everybody else in my city except the Alds. “Play stickball,” I said finally.
He looked more depressed. Evidently he was not the game-playing type.
“What’s so strange here,” he said, “there’s women everywhere. Out in the open. Women all over the place, but you can’t…They don’t…”
“Aren’t there any women in Asudar?” I asked, playing stupid.
“Of course there’s women. Only they aren’t outside, all over the place,” he said in an aggrieved, accusing tone. “They aren’t always around where you see them all the time. Our women don’t go flaunting around in the street. They stay home where they belong.”
I thought then of my mother, in the street, trying to get home.
A great, hot rage rose up through my body and if I had spoken then it would have been a curse, or I would have spat in his face; but I didn’t speak, and the rage slowly died away to a cold, hollow sickness. I swallowed my saliva and willed myself to be calm.
“Mekke says there’s temple whores,” the boy said. “Anybody could go there. Only the temples were shut down, of course. So they do it in secret somewhere. But they still have them. They do it with anybody. You know anything about that?”
I shook my head.
He sighed.
Very carefully, I stood up. I needed to move, but move slowly.
“My name’s Simme,” he said, looking up at me with a squinting smile, like a child.
I nodded. I moved slowly away—towards Shetar and Chy, for I did not know anywhere else to go. The blood was singing in my ears.
Chy looked me over and said, “The Gand’s about done talking, I think. Go to the stables and ask them to bring the maker’s horse out. Say you want to walk him. All right?”
I nodded and went round into the great stable courtyard. For some reason I was no longer afraid of the men there. I asked after the maker’s horse, and they took me to Branty’s stall. Branty was playing with a taste of oats. “Have him saddled and brought out,” I said, as if they were slaves and I a master. The old man who had taken him from me at first went to obey my orders. I stood with my hands behind my back, looking over the beautiful horses in the long line of stalls. When the old man brought Branty out, I took his bridle without hesitation.
“He’d be about nineteen or twenty?”
“Older,” I said, with the same assurance.
“Good blood,” the old man said. He reached up to part Branty’s forelock with thick, dirty, gentle fingers. “I like big horses,” he said.
I gave a brief nod of approval, and walked away with Branty. Chy and Shetar were just at the entrance to the stable court, and Orrec was coming towards us. I gave him a knee up to mount, and we set off sedately for home. As we went out through the gateway of the Council Square, past the Ald guards in blue cloaks, I was overcome suddenly by tears, they burst hot from my eyes, my mouth quivered and jerked. I went walking on, seeing my city, my beautiful city and the far mountain over the straits and the cloud-swept sky through tears, until they ceased.
