told her, he didn’t like being used, he’d rather be included.
I asked what the Waylord had said, and Gry said, “Almost nothing. Last night, you know, when Sulter said he’d ‘ask,’ and Desac jumped at it?—Well, nothing at all was said about that. They’d said it before we came down, no doubt.”
I hated not to be able to tell her anything about the oracle; I didn’t want to keep anything from Gry. But I knew it was not mine to speak of, or not yet.
She went on. ‘I think Sulter is worried about numbers. More than two thousand AId soldiers, he said. Most of them near the Palace and the barracks. At least a third armed and on duty, and the others close to their weapons. How can Desac move a large enough force against them without alerting the guards? Even at night? The night guards are mounted. Asudar horses are like dogs, you know, they’re trained to give a signal if they sense anything amiss. I hope that old soldier knows what he’s doing! Because I think he’s going to do it pretty soon.”
My mind moved swiftly, thinking of fighting in the streets.
I was standing on a path among great bushes. The sun was hot on my head. My hands were dry, swollen, and sore from hot water and handling linens all the morning. Gry stood near me, watching me with alert concern. She said gently, “Memer? Where were you?”
I shook my head.
Shetar came bounding along the path to us. She halted, holding up her head with a proud and conscious air. She opened her fierce, fanged mouth, and a small blue butterfly came fluttering out and flew off, quite unconcerned.
We both laughed uncontrollably. The lion looked a little embarrassed or confused.
“She’s the girl that spoke blossoms and bells and butterflies!” said Gry. “You know about her—when Cumbelo was King?”
“And her sister spoke lice and lugworms and lumps of mud.”
“Oh, cat, cat,” Gry said, tugging at the fur behind Shetars ears till the lion rolled her head with pleasure, purring.
I could not put it all together. Fighting in the streets, darkness in the cave, terror, laughter, sunlight on my head, starlight in my eyes, a lion who said a butterfly.
“Oh, Gry, I wish I understood
“I don’t know, Memer. You keep trying, and sometimes it does.”
“Rational thought and impenetrable mystery,” I said.
“You’re as bad as Orrec,” she said. “Come on. Come home.”
That night Orrec and the Waylord talked about the Gand Ioratth, and I found I could listen without closing my mind. Maybe it was because I had seen the Gand twice now, and despite the hateful pomp, and the cringing slaves, and my knowledge that if the whim took him he could have us all buried alive, what I had seen was a man, not a demon. A hard, tough, wily old man who loved poetry with all his heart.
Orrec spoke almost to my thought: “This fear of demons, devilry—it’s unworthy of him. I wonder how much of all that he believes, in fact.”
“He may not fear demons much,” the Waylord said. “But so long as he can’t read, he’ll fear the written word.”
“If I could just take a book there and open it and read from it—the same words I speak without the book —!”
“Abomination,” The Waylord shook his head. “Sacrilege. He’d have no choice but to hand you over to the priests of Atth.”
“But if the Alds decide to stay here, to rule Ansul, to deal with its neighbors, with other lands and nations, they can’t go on abominating what trade is based on—records and contracts. And diplomacy—let alone history, poetry! Did you know that in the City States, ‘ald’ means idiot? ‘No use to talk to him, he’s an ald.’ Surely Ioratth has begun to see the disadvantage they’re at.”
“Let’s hope that he has. And that the new king in Medron sees it.”
But I began to be impatient with this talk. The Alds weren’t going to decide to stay here, rule us, deal with our neighbors. It wasn’t up to them. I found myself saying, “Does it matter?”
They all looked at me, and I said, “They can go be illiterate all they please in Asudar.”
“Yes,” the Waylord said, “if they’ll go.”
“We’ll drive them out.”
“Into the countryside?”
“Yes! Out of the city!”
“Are our farmers able to fight them? And if we chased them clear home to Asudar—won’t the High Gand see it as an insult and threat to his new power, and send more thousands of soldiers against us? He has an army. We do not.”
I didn’t know what to say.
The Waylord went on. “These are considerations which Desac dismisses. He may well be right to do so. ‘Forethought, bane of action.’ But do you see, Memer, now that things are changing among the Alds themselves, I have my first hope of regaining our liberty by persuading them that we’re more profitable to them as allies than as slaves. That would take time. It would end in a compromise not a victory. But if we seek victory now and fail, hope will be hard to find.”
I could say nothing. He was right, and Desac was right. The time to act was upon us, but how to act?
“I could speak for you to Ioratth better than I could speak for Desac to the crowd,” Orrec said. “Tell me, are there people in the city who would talk in these terms to Iorarth, if he agreed to some negotiation?”
“Yes, and outside the city, too. We’ve kept in touch over the years with all the towns of the Ansul Coast, scholars and merchants, people who were waylords and mayors and officers of the festivals and ceremonies. Boys run messages from town to town, wagoners carry them along with the cabbages. The soldiers seldom search for written messages, they’d rather have nothing to do with sacrilege and wizardry.”
“‘O Lord Destroyer, give me an ignorant enemy!’” Orrec quoted.
“In the city, some of the men I’ve talked about this with over the years are with Desac now. They seek any way to get the Ald yoke off our neck. They’re ready to fight. But they might be willing to talk. If the Alds will listen.”
ORREC WAS NOT SUMMONED to the Palace the next day. Late in the morning he went down to the Harbor Market, on foot, with Gry. He didn’t give any advance notice, no tent was set up, but as soon as he walked into the market square people recognised and followed him. They didn’t press very close to him, partly because of Shetar, but they made a moving circle round him, greeted him, called out his name, and shouted, “Recite, recite!” One man shouted, “Read!”
I didn’t walk with them. I was in boy’s clothes, as usual when I went in the streets, and didn’t want to be seen as Mem the groom with Gry, who wasn’t in disguise. I ran round to the raised marble pavement in front of the Admirals’ Tower and climbed up on the base of the horse statue there, from which I had a good view of the whole market. The statue is the work of Redam the sculptor, carved from one great block of stone; the horse stands foursquare, strong and heavy, his head raised and turned to the west, looking out to sea. The Alds had destroyed most statues in the city but left this one untouched, perhaps because it was a horse; certainly they didn’t know that the sea gods, the Seunes, are imagined and worshipped in the form of horses. I touched the Seunes big stone left front hoof and murmured the blessing. The Seune returned the blessing to me in the form of shade. It was a hot day already, and going to get hotter.
Orrec took his position where the tent had been on the first day he spoke here, and the people crowded round him. The pedestal I was on soon filled up with boys and men, but I hung on to my place right between the horse’s front legs, shoving back hard when people shoved me. Many of the stall keepers in the market tossed a cloth over their goods and joined the crowd to listen to the maker, or stood on a stool by their booth to see over the heads of the throng. I saw five or six blue cloaks in the crowd, and soon a troop of mounted Ald soldiers came down
