exultant.
Orrec, Gry, and I looked at one another. Something important had been said, some promise had been made, which we three did not understand. The Waylord sat not looking at anyone, his face somber. Finally he glanced around at us. His gaze rested on me.
“Before there was a city here,” he said, “before there was a house built here, the oracle was here.” Then he spoke in Aritan: “‘They came here across the deserts, the weary people, the exiles. They came over the hills above the Western Sea and saw white Sul across the water. In the hillside was a cave, and from the cave ran a spring. On the darkness of the air in the cave they saw words written:
¦ 9 ¦
We parted for the night soon after that, and the Waylord said to me, “Come to the room, Memer,”
So a little later I went back through the house and drew the letters in the air and entered the hidden room that goes back under the hill in darkness.
He came in some while later. I had lighted the oil lamp on the reading table. He set down the small lantern he carried but did not blow it out. He saw I had Orrecs book open on the table, and smiled a little.
“You like his poetry?”
“Above any other. Above Denies!”
He smiled again more broadly, teasingly. “Ah, they’re all very well, these moderns, but none of them is a match for Regali.”
Regali lived a thousand years ago, here in Ansul, writing in Aritan; the language is difficult and the poetry is difficult and I had not got very far with Regali, though I knew how well the Waylord loved her.
“In time,” he said, seeing my expression. “In time… Now, I have a good deal to tell and to ask, my Memer. Let me talk to you a while.” We sat at the table facing each other in the soft sphere of light the lamp made. Around it the high, long room darkened away; here and there shone the glimmer of a gold-stamped word on the spine of a book, and the books themselves were a silent gathering, a dark multiplicity.
He had said my name with such tenderness that it almost frightened me. But his face was grim as it was when he was in pain. Whetn he spoke, it was with difficulty. He said, “I have not done well by you, Memer.”
I began to protest, wanting to say he had given me all the treasures of my life—love, loyalty, learning—but he stopped me, gently, though still with that grim look. “You were my comfort,” he said, “my dear comfort. And I looked only for comfort. I let hope go. I did not pay my debt to those who gave me life. I taught you to read, but I never let you know that there was more to read than tales and poetry… Here. I gave you what was easy to give. I told myself, She’s only a child, why should I burden her… ”
I was aware of the darkness of the room behind my back; I felt it as a presence.
He went on, doggedly. “We were talking of gifts that run in the blood, in a lineage, like Gry’s family, the Barres, who can speak with animals, or the Actamos, who could heal. We Galvas, whose ancestors inhabit this house as souls and shadows, we have—not a gift, maybe, but a responsibility. A bond. We are the people who live in this place. Here stay. We stay here. Here, this house. This room. We guard what is here. We open the door and close it. And we read the words of the oracle.”
As he said the word, I knew he was going to say it. It was the word he had to say and I had to hear.
But my heart went cold and heavy in me.
“In my cowardice,” he said, “I told myself it was unnecessary to speak of it to you. The time of oracles was past. It was an old story that was no longer true… Truth can go out of stories, you know. What was true becomes meaningless, even a lie, because the truth has gone into another story. The water of the spring rises in another place. The Fountain of the Oracle has been dry for two hundred years… But the spring that fed it still runs. Here. Within.”
He sat facing me and that end of the room where it stretches into shadow, becoming darker and lower; he was no longer looking at me, but into that darkness. When he was silent I listened for the faint voice of the running water.
“I saw my duty and clung to it: to keep and guard what little was left—the books here, the books people brought me to preserve, the last of our treasure, the last of the glory of Ansul. And when you came here, into this room, that day, and we spoke of letters, of reading—you remember?”
“I remember,” I said, and the memory warmed me a little. I looked at the shelves of books I had read and knew and loved, my friends.
“I told myself you were born to do the same, to take my place, to keep the one lamp burning. And I clung to that comfort, denying that I had any other duty to carry out, anything else to teach you.
“When your body is broken the way mine was, the mind too becomes misshapen, weak—” He held out his hands. “I can’t trust myself. I am too full of fear. But I should have trusted you.”
I wanted to say, to plead with him, “No, don’t, you can’t trust me, I’m weak, I’m afraid too!” but the words wouldn’t come out.
He had spoken harshly. After a while he went on, and the tenderness was back in his voice. “So,” he said, “a little more history. All the history you’ve patiently learned, you so young—all this weight of years on you, obligations undertaken by people dead for centuries! You’ve borne it all, you’ll bear this too.
“Your house is the House of the Oracle, and we are the readers of the oracle. It is here, in this room. You learned to write the words that let you enter, before you knew what writing was. And so you’ll know how to read the words that are written.
“The first were those I spoke just now:
“In the early times, all the people of the Four Houses could read the oracle. That was their power, their sacredness. As the exiles of Aritan settled the coast and began to make towns elsewhere, still they came back to Ansul, to the Oracle House. They’d bring their questions: Is it right to do this? If we do that, what will happen? They’d come to the fountain and drink of it, and ask the blessing, and ask their question there. Then the readers of the oracle would go into the house, into the cave, into the dark. And if the question was accepted, they would read the answer written on the air.
“Sometimes, also, when they went into the darkness they would see words shining, though no question had been asked.
“Allthese words of the oracle were written down. The books they were written in were called the Galvan Books. Over the years the Galvas, who built their house at the oracle cave, became the sole keepers of the books, interpreters of the words, the voice of the oracle—the Readers.
“That led to jealousy and rivalry, in the end. It might have been better if we’ed shared our power. But I think we weren’t able to. The gift gives itself.
“The Galvan Books themselves weren’t only records of the oracles. Sometimes the writing in them altered though no hand had touched it, or a Reader would open a book and find in it words no one had written there. More and more often the oracle spoke on the pages of the books, not on the darkness of the cave.
“But often the words themselves were dark. Interpretation was needed. And there were the answers to questions that had not been asked… So the great Reader Dano Galva said, ‘We do not seek true answers. The strayed sheep we seek is the true question. The answer follows it as the tail follows the sheep,”
He had been watching his thoughts in the air behind me; now he looked back at me, and was silent.
“Have you—have you read the oracle?” I asked at last. I felt as if I hadn’t spoken for a month; my throat was dry and my voice thready.
He answered slowly. “I began to read the Galvan Books when I was twenty, with my mother as my guide. The most ancient of them first. The words in those are fixed, they no longer change. But the oldest are the most obscure, because they didn’t write the question with the answer, and so you have to guess the sheep from the tail… Then there are many books from later centuries, both questions and answers. Often both are obscure, but they repay study. And then, after they moved the library out of Galvamand, there were fewer questions. And the answers may change, or vanish, or appear with no question asked. Those are the books you cannot read twice, any more than you could drink the same water twice from the Oracle Spring.”
