Voices

there attacked, but the soldiers were quick to rally and seemed fearless of the fire, the promised embrace of their Burning God. In the fighting and the smoke and contusion, evidently only Iddor and the priests saw Ioratth stagger free of the flames. They seized and carried him to the Council House, while the soldiers drove the conspirators, those who tried to flee and those who tried to attack, into the furnace of the fire to be burned alive. Desac was one of them.

I could only think of that black foul dust of ash and cinder Orrec had told us of, kicked up by the feet of the crowds.

The people hearing the story were silent for a while before they began to talk again.

“So Iddor saw his chance,” one man said, “with the old Gand as good as dead.”

“Why did he put him in prison? Why not finish him off?”

“It’s his father, after all,”

“What’s that to an Ald?”

I thought of Simme, how proud he was of his father, even of his father’s horse.

“He was going to get his own back on the old man. Seventeen years he’s been waiting!”

“And the old man’s Ansul mistress.”

“Torture them for the pleasure of it.”

That brought a silence. People glanced uneasily at the Waylord.

“So where’s he got to, that one, with his redhats?” a woman asked. People hated the Ald priests worse than they hated the soldiers. “I say they’ll find him hiding. They’d never get through the streets alive, that lot.”

She was right. We heard about it later that day, as news was constantly brought down the street to us by dusty, excited, exhausted people coming from the square. The citizens swarming through the Council House, retaking it for the city, throwing out all the goods and furniture of the Ald courtiers and officers who had used it for their quarters, came on Iddor and three priests hiding in a tiny attic room in the base of the dome. They were taken down and locked in the basement room, the torture chamber, where Ioratth and Tirio had been locked for a night. Where Sulter Galva had been locked for a year.

That news relieved our hearts. We had suffered much from Iddor’s belief that he had been divinely sent to drive out demons and destroy evil, and we all felt now that with him imprisoned, disgraced, the power of that belief was broken. We had to deal with an enemy still, but a human enemy, not a demented god.

And it was a relief also to know that the wild crowd going through the Council House hadn’t torn the priests to pieces when they found them, but had locked them away to wait for some kind of justice-whether ours or the Alds’.

“We may treat Iddor better than his father would,” said Sulsem Cam.

“I doubt he’d be gentle with him,” Orrec said wryly.

“No gentler than your lady and her lion,” said Per Actamo, who had rejoined Orrec here and helped him retell their exploits and adventures to newcomers wanting to hear it all over again all afternoon. “That was the beginning of the end of Iddor—when he flinched and drew back in front of all the crowd! Where is your lion, Lady Gry? She should be here to be praised.”

“She’s in a very bad temper,” Gry said. “It’s her fasting day, and I’ve had to keep her indoors. I’m afraid she’s eaten part of the carpet.”

“Give her a feast, not a fast!” said Per, and people laughed and called for the lion—“The only Ald on our side!” So Gry went and fetched Shetar, who was indeed in a sullen mood. She had not appreciated the swimming and boating of the night before, or the crowd scenes of the morning; she sensed the continuing tension in the city, and like all cats she detested uproar, excitement, change. She paced into the reception hall with a singsong snarling warrawarrawarra and a yellow glare. Everyone made her plenty of room. Gry led her up to the Waylord and had her do her stretching bow; and people laughed again and praised her. They asked for her to do her obeisance again, for Orrec, for Per, for a little boy of three who was there with his parents; and so Shetar got a good many treats, and began to cheer up.

It was evening. The big room was growing shadowy. Ista, along with Ialba, Tirio’s companion who had brought us such important word at daybreak, came with lighted lamps. Ista had told me that that was always the signal for guests to leave, in the old days. And as if the ways and customs of our people had been given back to us today, all the visitors rose, one after another, and took their leave of the Waylord. They spoke to Orrec and Gry, and to me, and as they passed through the door they spoke to the souls and shadows of the house. As they passed the fountain leaping up into the evening air they blessed the Lord of the Springs and Waters, and as they crossed the Sill Stone they bent down to touch it.

¦ 14 ¦

Lying in bed that night, sleep seemed as far from me as the moon, and I relived all the long day. I saw again Gry and her lion stand facing the priests and soldiers and the gold-cloaked man. I saw the leap of the fountain into the sunlight. I saw the Waylord stride out and down the steps beside me, saw him hold up a book before Iddor and us all, and heard that strange piercing voice, Let them set free… The cry echoed in my mind with the other words I myself had cried out or that had been said through me, Broken mend broken, and for a moment I thought I understood.

Yet I was mystified again, remembering that when I went to the front of the house with Orrec and the others, the Waylord had gone back to the secret room, seeming in despair, taking refuge. He could not have gone clear back into the cave of the oracle?there had been not time enough for that. He must have gone straight to the shadow end, taken that book from the shelves there, and come back all the way through the rooms and corridors and courts of the great house, to stride forward to face Iddor?not lame, not a broken man, but healed and whole. For that brief time. For the time needed.

Had he questioned the oracle? Had he known what the book said? What book was it?

I had seen it only as a small book in his hand. I had not seen its pages. I had not, could not have read from it. Surely it had been the book that spoke, not I. I was no longer certain now even of the words?had they been Let them set free, or Be set free, or only Set free? I could hear the voice in my mind but not the words. That troubled me. I struggled to hear them but they slipped away from me as if through clear water. I saw the fountain, the morning sunlight over the roofs of Galvamand brightening the high blossom of the water… .

And then it was morning indeed, early daylight dim on the walls of my little room.

And it was the holiday of Ennu, who makes the way easy for the traveller, speeds the work, mends quarrels, and guides us into death. People say she goes before the dying spirit as a black cat, stopping and looking back if the shadow hesitates, sitting patiently, waiting for it to follow her. Few of our gods are given any figure or image, only Lero in stones, and Iene in the oak and willow; but Ennu is often carved as a little cat, smiling, with opal eyes. I had such a figure that had been my mother’s; it sat in the niche beside my bed, and I kissed it every morning and night. Ennu’s house-shrine in Galvamand is in the old inner courtyard, an in curved shell of stone on a pedestal, with the tracks of a cat carved across the floor of it, very faint, nearly worn away by the fingers that have touched them in blessing over the centuries. I got up and dressed, and took a bowl out to the Oracle Fountain for water, and a handful of meal from the kitchen bin, and went to that shrine to make her offering. The Waylord met me there, and we spoke the praise of Ennu together.

Ista had breakfast ready for us, and then it was as the day before: the Waylord took his place in the front gallery of the house, and people came to talk to him and to one another all day long. The community of Ansul was knitting itself together, remaking itself, here.

The Waylord wanted me there with him. He said to me that the people wanted me there. And it was true, though few of them spoke to me except in greeting, a deeply respectful greeting that made me feel as if I were pretending to be somebody important. Sometimes a child was sent forward to give me flowers, dropping them on my lap or at my feet and then running away. After a while I was so flower-bedecked I felt like a roadside shrine.

I tried to understand what I was to them. They saw in me the mystery of what had happened yesterday?the fountain, the voice of the oracle. I was that mystery. The Waylord was their familiar friend and leader, a link to the