Voices

mouth obey me at all.

“Was that the answer?”

“I don’t know,” he murmured.

“Was it—was it the oracle?”

“Yes.”

I took a while longer to bite my lips, which felt stiff

as cardboard, and tried to make my breath come evenly.

“Had you read in that book before?” I asked him.

He shook his head.

“I saw no words,” he said.

“You didn’t see—on the page—?” I gestured, to show that the words had been on the left-hand page, and I saw my fingers begin to write the letters on the air. I made them stop.

He shook his head.

That made it even worse.

“Was—what I said, was it the answer to the question you asked?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Why didn’t it answer you?”

He said nothing for quite a while. At last he said, “Memer, if you had asked the question, what would it have been?”

“How can we be free of the Alds?” I said at once, and saying it I felt that again I was speaking with another voice, a loud deep voice not mine. I closed my mouth, I snapped my teeth shut on the thing that spoke through me, used me.

And yet that was the question I would have asked.

“The true question,” he said, with a half smile.

“The book bled,” I said. I was determined now to speak for myself not to be spoken through—to say what I would say, to take control. “Years and years ago, when I was little. I went down to the shadow end. I told you that, I told you part of it. I told you I thought one of the books made a noise. But I didn’t tell you I saw that one. That white book. And I took it from the shelf and there was blood on the pages. Wet blood. Not words, but blood. And I never went back. Not until tonight. I— If—If there are no demons, all right, there are no demons. But I am afraid of what is in that cave.”

“So am I,” he said.

* * *

WE WERE BOTH TIRED, but there was no question of sleep yet. He relighted the small lantern, I put out the lamp, he drew the words on the air, and we went out of the room, through the corridors, back to the north courtyard where we had sat earlier that evening. A great ceiling of stars stood over it. I blew out the lantern. We sat there in starlight, silent for a long time.

I asked, “What will you tell Desac?”

“My question, and that I received no answer.”

“And—what the book said?”

“That is yours to tell him or not, as you choose.”

“I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what question it was answering. I don’t understand it. Does it make sense at all?”

I felt that I’d been tricked, that I’d been made use of without being told what for, as if I were a mere thing, a tool. I had been frightened. Now I was humiliated and angry.

“It makes the sense we can make of it,” he said.

“That’s like telling fortunes with sand.” There are women in Ansul who, for a few pennies, will take a handful of damp sea sand and drop it on a plate, and from the lumps and peaks and scatters of the sand they foretell good fortune and bad, journeys, money ventures, love affairs, and so on. “It means whatever you want it to mean.”

“Maybe,” he said. After a while he went on, “Dano Galva said that to read the oracle is to bring rational thought to an impenetrable mystery… There are answers in the old books that seemed senseless to those who heard them. How should we difend ourselves from Sundraman? they asked the oracle, when Sundraman first threatened to invade Ansul. The answer was, To keep bees from apple blossoms. The councillors were irate, saying the meaning was so plain it was foolish. They ordered an army to be raised to build a wall along the Ostis and defend it from Sundraman. The southerners crossed the river, knocked down the wall, defeated our army; marched here to Ansul City; killed those who resisted them, and declared all Ansul a protectorate of Sundraman. Ever since then they’ve been excellent neighbors, interfering with us very little, but greatly enriching us with trade. It was not a recommendation but a warning: To keep bees from apple blossoms is to have trees that bear no fruit. Ansul was the blossom and Sundraman the bee. That’s clear now. It was clear to the Reader, Dano Galva; as soon as she read it she said it meant we should offer no resistance to Sundraman. For that she was called a traitor. From that time on the Gelb and Cam and Actamo clans said the Council should not consult the oracle, and pressed for the university and the library to be moved from Galvamand,”

“Much good the oracle did the Reader and her house,” I said.

“’The nail’s hit once, the hammer a thousand times.’”

I thought that over. “What if one doesn’t choose to be a tool?”

“You always have that choice.”

I sat and looked up at the great depths of stars. I thought that the stars were like all the souls who lived in former times in this city, this house, all the thousands of spirits, the forerunners, lives like distant flames, lights far and farther away in the great darkness of time. Lives past, lives to come. How could you tell one from the other?

I had wanted to ask why the oracle couldn’t speak plainly, why it couldn’t just say Don’t resist, or Strike now, instead of cryptic images and obscure words. After looking at the stars, that seemed a foolish question. The oracle was not giving orders but just the opposite: inviting thought. Asking us to bring thought to mystery. The result might not be very satisfactory but it was probably the best we could do.

I gave an enormous yawn, and the Waylord laughed.

“Go to bed, child,” he said, and I did.

Making my way to my room through the dark halls and corridors I expected to lie awake, haunted by the strangeness of the cave and by the words I had read and the voice that had spoken through me saying them:

Broken mend broken. I touched the god-niche by the door, fell into my bed, and slept like a stone.

¦ 10 ¦

When Desac came the next day, I wasn’t with the Waylord, I was helping Ista with the wash. She and Bomi and I had the boilers going soon after dawn, set up the cranked wringer, strung the wash lines, and by noon had filled the kitchen courtyard with clean sheets and table linens blinding white and snapping in the windy, hot sunlight.

In the afternoon, walking in the old park with Shetar, Gry told me what had occurred in the morning.

The Waylord had come to the Master’s room to say that Desac wished to speak with Orrec. Orrec asked Gry to come with him. “I left Shetar behind,” Gry said, “since she seems to dislike Desac,” They went down to the gallery, and there Desac again tried to make Orrec promise to go out and speak to the people of the city, rousing them to drive out the Alds, when the moment came.

Desac was eloquent and urgent, and Orrec was distressed, divided in mind, feeling that this was not his battle, and yet that any battle for freedom must be his. If Ansul rose up against tyranny; how could he stand aside? But he was given no choice in time or place, and also no real knowledge of how this rebellion was to be made. Desac was clearly wise to say so little about it, since its success depended on its being a surprise; yet, as Orrec