horns braying, drums beating, a roar of voices. The noise went on for some while, ceased, began again.
A little boy of seven or eight came running down the street, his feet flying, his hair flying. “It’s the new Gand!” he shouted. “He’s there with all the soldiers! And there’s redhats making speeches!”
Everybody gathered round him. A man took him up on his shoulders and he piped out the message he had heard, which sounded very strange in his thin, sweet voice: “The Gand Ioratth is dead, the Gand Iddor rules! All hail the Son of the Sun, the Sword of Atth, the Lord Iddor, who comes to subdue the enemies of Atth and destroy the demons of Ansul!”
Like an echo, far down the street, trumpets and horns blared out again, voices roared, drums thumped.
From the crowd round Galvamand there was a groaning mutter of response. People shifted uneasily. I saw several groups climb over the low wall into the neglected gardens across the street, getting out of harm’s way.
I turned and ran into the house again, back through court and corridor to the old rooms, where Orrec and the Waylord stood talking with Per Actamo and some other men of the Actamo household. They turned to me. I said, “Orrec, maybe you could come speak to the people.”
They all stared at me.
“The new Gand and the army are on the way here,” I said. “People don’t know what to do.”
“You should go,” the Waylord said to Orrec?not meaning go out to the people, but meaning go up into the hills, escape. “Now.”
“No, no,” Orrec said. He put his hand on the Waylord’s arm.
They both held still, silent, for a moment. Then the Waylord turned away.
“It will all be gone,” he said aloud in utter despair and grief. “The books lost, the makers dead.” He hid his face with his broken hands.
We all stood silent, shaken by that cry.
The Waylord looked up at last; he looked at me.
“Will you come with me, Memer? Can I save you, at least?”
I could not answer. But I could not follow him.
He saw that. He came and kissed my forehead and blessed me. Then he went off walking very lame, to the back of the house, to the hidden room.
“Will he be safe?” Orrec asked me.
“Yes,” I said.
Even inside the walls of Galvamand we could hear the sound of the trumpets now.
With nothing further said, we all went forward through the great courtyard and the high gallery to the front doors of the house, where Gry and Shetar stood like a statue of a woman and a lion.
I went to Gry and put my arm around her, because I had to have somebody to hold. I had let my dear lord go, I had not held him, I had let him walk away alone to be safe, to live, not to be hurt again. But I had to have somebody to hold.
Gryput her arm around me. We stood there in the doorway of the house. Per Actamo and the others went outside, but Orrec kept back, behind us. He knew that if he came out on the steps and the crowd saw him, he must act, he must speak, and he was not ready to act or speak. The time had not come.
People came, still crowding into the street and the gardens across it, people of Ansul, more and more of them. I couldn’t even see the grey-and-black maze of the forecourt; it was a moving pavement of people, alive as it hadn’t been in all mylifetime. The crowd gathered and gathered. Galva Street itself was crowded now both north and south as far as I could see.
The trumpets sounded again, a noise that thrilled in the blood, and the drums beat nearer.
There was a wave in the crowd in the street south of us like a tidal bore driving up a canal, pushing everything before it; people shouted, screamed, clambered up onto curbs and walls, making way for the force that drove them, forced them out of the street, pushed them aside: mounted Ald guards, their curved swords slashing and sweeping the air, their horses rearing and striking out with their hoofs. They came straight through the crowd in the streets and stopped in front of Galvamand, a compact troop of fifty or more horsemen. With them, among them, defended bythem, eight or ten red-clad, red-hatted priests rode close round a man in the broad pointed hat of the Ald nobility, cloaked in flowing gold.
Behind the mounted troop many people were still in panic, trying to get out of the way, while others struggled to go to the help of those who had been struck down or trampled. There was great confusion and great fear. But all the people I could see all the way down the street were men and women of Ansul. If there were more soldiers coming behind the cavalry, they had not made their way through the crowd.
A circle of emptiness had formed all round the cavalry troop in the forecourt, like the space that had been round Gry and Shetar that first morning at the market, but much larger. I could see the figures of the maze on the pavement inside the circle of snorting, fidgeting horses.
The group of redhat priests rode forward to the steps of the house, and the man in gold rode forward from among them. It was the Gand’s son Iddor, the big, handsome man. The cloak he wore shone like the sunlight itself. He stood in the stirrups and raised his sword high. He shouted out words which I could not hear over the shouting of his soldiers and the strange noise of the crowd, the groaning roar.
Then all at once all sounds nearby died out, leaving only the noise of the crowds farther away, who could not see what was happening.
What I saw, what the soldiers and the nearby crowd and Iddor saw, was Gry, who came out of the door with Shetar, unleashed, beside her. Woman and lion paced forward and descended the wide steps slowly, walking straight at Iddor,
And he drew back.
Maybe he couldn’t keep his horse from flinching, maybe he pulled the reins: the white horse and its gold- cloaked, dazzling rider drew back a step, and back a step again.
Gry stood still and the lion stood motionless beside her, snarling.
“You cannot come into this house,” Gry said.
Iddor was silent.
A little, soft, jeering whisper began to run through the crowd.
Down the street, far down, a trumpet sounded. It broke the paralysis. Iddor’s horse backed again and then stood steady. Iddor stood in the stirrups and shouted out in a powerful voice: “The Gand Ioratth is dead, murdered by rebels and traitors! I, his heir, Iddor, Gand of Ansul, claim vengeance. I declare this house accursed. It will be destroyed, its stones will fall, and all its demons will perish with it. The Mouth of Evil will be stopped and silenced. The one God will reign in Ansul! God is with us! God is with us! God is with us!”
The soldiers shouted those last words with him.
But then their shouts went ragged, as another sound began, a murmur that spread and spread through the crowd: “Look! Look! Look at the fountain!”
I was still standing in the doorway, between the crossbowmen who guarded the door of Galvamand, their bows ready to fire, both aimed at Iddor, A man had come to stand beside me there. I thought it was Orrec, then I did not know who it was, a tall man, his hand held out, pointing straight at the Oracle Fountain. The basin with its broken jet was just within the empty circle of the guards.
I saw him then. I saw him, for once, as he had been, and as my heart had always known him: a tall, straight, beautiful man, smiling, with fire in his eyes. I followed his pointing hand and saw what the people below were seeing?a thin jet of water that leapt up into the light. It poised there and fell away to crash with a silvery racket in the dry basin. It sank, leapt up again, higher and stronger, and the voice of the falling water filled the air.
“The fountain,” people cried, “the Oracle Fountain!” There was a movement forward, pressing in on the cavalrymen, as people tried to see better or to reach the fountain itself. An officer shouted an order, and the horsemen began to turn their horses outward to face the crowd. But their close ranks had been broken, and the officer’s voice was lost in a new roar of sound.
The Waylord put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Come with me, Memer.”
Gry and Shetar had drawn aside, on the steps above to the fountain. I went with the Waylord out onto the broad top step, where he halted and spoke.
“Iddor of Medron, son of Ioratth,” the Waylord said, and his voice was like Orrec’s, it filled the air, it commanded the ear, it held the mind, and the great crowd was still? “You lie. Your father lives. You imprisoned
