Voices

Did he think, because I had sheep hair, that I’d betray my people?

Gry wanted to know more about this group, but the Waylord was unable or unwilling to say much about it. Orrec was silent, brooding, till he asked at last, “How many Alds are here in Ansul—in the city? A thousand, two thousand?”

“Over two thousand,” the Waylord said.

“They’re greatly outnumbered.”

“But armed and disciplined,” Gry said.

“Trained soldiers,” Orrec said. “It gives them an edge… But still. All these years—”

I burst out, “We fought! We fought them in every street, we held out for a year—till they sent an army twice as large—and then they killed and killed—Ista told me that in the days after the city fell, the canals were so choked with the dead that the water couldn’t run—”

“Memer, I know your people were overrun and overmatched,” Orrec said. “I didn’t mean to question their courage.”

“But we’re not warriors,” said the Waylord.

“Adira and Marra!” I protested.

His gaze rested on me a moment. “I didn’t say we couldn’t have heroes,” he said. “But for centuries we settled our affairs by talking, arguing, bargaining, voting. Our quarrels were fought with words not swords. We were out of the habit of brutality… And the Ald armies seemed endless. How much more would they destroy? We lost heart. We have been a crippled people.”

He held up his broken hands. His face was strange, wry; his eyes looked very dark.

“As you say; Orrec, they have the edge,” he said. “Having one king, one god, one belief they can act single- rnindedly They’re strong. Yet the single can be divided. Our strength embraces multitude. This is our sacred earth. We live here with its gods and spirits, among them, they among us. We endure with them. We’ve been hurt, weakened, enslaved. But only if they destroy our knowledge are we destroyed.”

* * *

TWO DAYS AFTER THAT, when we went to the Council Square again, I found out why Gry had given me that glance when she said, “We can do some listening.” She wanted Mem the apprentice groom to talk to the Ald stableboys and cadet soldiers who hung around to hear Orrec recite. “Keep an ear out,” she said. “Ask about the new Gand in Medron. About the Night Mouth. You were talking for a long time with one of those boys the other day.”

“The pimply one,” I said.

“He took a shine to you.”

“He wanted to know if I’d sell him my sister for sex,” I said.

Gry whistled, a soft little down-note, tiu.

“Endure,” she said softly.

The Waylord had used that word. I took it as my guide word, my orders. I would obey. I would endure.

This time, when the Gand came out of the great tent to hear Orrec, Iddor and the priests didn’t follow him. Partway through the recitation a noise began inside the tent, a lot of loud chanting and drum banging—evidently the priests performing a ceremony. Some of the courtiers around the Gand looked disturbed, others shrugged and whispered. Ioratth sat imperturbable. Orrec finished the stanza and fell silent.

The Gand gestured to him to go on.

“I would not show disrespect to those who worship,” Orrec said.

“It is not worship,” Ioratth said. “It is disrespect. Proceed, if you will, Maker.”

Orrec bowed and went on with the piece, another Ald hero tale. When it was done, Ioratth had him brought a glass of water and began to talk with him, several of the courtiers joining in. And I, obeying my orders, slipped back towards the group of boys and men in the shade of the stable wall.

Simme was there. He came right over to me. He was bigger than I was, a tall, strong boy. There were fair, fuzzy hairs among the pimples around his mouth—the Alds are hairier than mypeople, and many have beards. Yet when I saw the way he greeted me, almost cringing, hoping that I liked him, I thought: he’s a little boy.

All I knew was my city and my house and books, while he had travelled with an army and was a soldier in training, but I knew that I knew more than he did, and was tougher. He knew it, too.

It made it hard to hate him. There’s some virtue in hating people who are stronger than you,but to hate somebody weaker is contemptible and uncomfortable.

He didn’t know what to talk about, and at first I thought we wouldn’t be able to talk at all, but then I thought to ask him something I really wanted to know. “Where did you hear what you were talking about the other day,” I said, “all that stuff about temples and prostitutes?”

“Some of the men,” he said. “They said you heathens had these temples, where they had these orgies with these priestesses of this goddess, this demoness, that made men, you know, have sex with the priestesses. The demoness possessed them. And they’d have sex with any man. Anybody who came along. All night.”

He’d brightened up considerably at the thought.

“We don’t have any priestesses,” I said flatly. “Or priests. We do our own worship.”

“Well, maybe it was just women who went to this temple, and the demoness made them have sex with anybody. All night.”

“How could people get inside a temple?”

In Ansul, the word “temple” usually means a little shrine on the street or in front of a building or at a crossways—altars, places to worship at. Many of them are just god-niches like the ones inside houses. You touch the sill of the temple to say the blessing, or lay a flower as an offering. Many street temples were wonderful little buildings of marble, two or three feet high, carved and decorated, with gilt roofs. The Alds had knocked those all down. Some temples were hung up in trees, and the Alds left them, thinking they were birdhouses. In fact if a bird nested in a temple it was a joyful thing, a blessing, and a lot of the old tree temples had swallows and sparrows and thrushes in them year after year. The best luck of all was an owl. The owl is the bird of the Deaf One.

I knew that to the Alds a temple meant a full-sized building. I didn’t care.

My question did get his mind off the notion of allnight sex, anyway. He frowned and said, “What do you mean? Everybody goes into temples.”

“What for?”

“To pray!”

“What do you mean, ‘pray’?”

“Worship Atth!” Simme said, staring.

“How do you worship Atth?”

“You go to the ceremony?” he said, in a questioning tone, incredulous that I didn’t know what he was talking about. “And the priests sing and drum and dance, and they speak the words of Atth? You know! You’re down on your hands and knees? And you knock your head on the ground four times and say the words after the priests.”

“What for?”

“Well, if you want something, you pray to Atth, you knock your head on the ground and pray for it.”

“Pray for it? How do you pray for something?”

He was beginning to look at me as if I was feebleminded.

I returned the look. “You don’t make sense,” I said.

I was in fact rather curious to understand his idea of praying, but I didn’t want him to start feeling superior to me. “You can’t pray for things.”

“Of course you can! You pray to Atth for life and health and, and, and everything else!”

I did understand him. Everybody cries out to Ennu when they’re frightened. Everybody prays to Luck for things they want; that’s why he’s called the Deaf One. But I said, contemptuously, “That’s begging, not praying. We pray for blessing, not for things.”

He was both shocked and stymied. He looked sullen. He said, “You can’t be blessed. You don’t believe in Atth.”

Now I was shocked. To say to someone that they couldn’t be blessed, that was horrible. Simme didn’t seem like a person who could even think such a cruel thing. I finally said, much more cautiously, “What do you mean,