Voices

Ald soldiers who were being withdrawn from the northern towns and gathered here before they were sent back east over the hills to Asudar, Citizens came to find out what was happening in the capital, and to take part in the elections; merchants and traders followed. In early autumn the Waylord of Tomer came to stay with the Waylord of Ansul. Ista lived in a passion of anxiety for two weeks making sure he was entertained in all ways as befitted the honor of the House of Galva.

Bythen the Council was meeting regularly; and Galvamand was no longer the center of political planning and decision making. It was just the Waylord’s house, where a lot of talk took place about trade, about hay transport and cattle markets and what you could get in Medron or Dur for dried apricots or olives in brine. The first election held bythe newly elected Council had been that of the Waylord of Ansul, voted unanimously to Sulter Galva; and with the post they allotted funds for entertainment and upkeep of the house. Not lavish funds, but wealth untold to us who ran the household, and a heartening sign of the difference between paying tribute as a subject state of Asudar and paying taxes as a protectorate.

I had been utterly wrong about the Gand’s message.

I had misjudged it, and him. I had wanted to refuse patronisation, manipulation, compromise?politics. I had wanted to fling off every bond, to defy the tyrant. I had wanted to hate the Alds, drive them away, destroy them… myvow, mypromise, made when I was eight years old, that I had sworn by all the gods and by mymother’s soul.

I had broken that promise. I had to break it. Broken mend broken.

* * *

THE MESSENGER OF the High Gand returned to Medron a few days after I carried the message to Ioratth. They had an escort of over a hundred soldiers, under the command of Simme’s father, and Simme rode beside him, going home. I had asked Ialba and Tirio to tell me what they could find out about them, and that is what they told me. I never saw Simme after he and I went through the lines together.

That troop escorting the messenger back to Medron also carried a prisoner in one of the provision carts: Iddor, son of Ioratth. He was in chains, we heard, in slave’s clothing, with his hair and beard grown long, a sign of shame and disgrace to the Alds.

Tirio told us that Ioratth had not set eyes on his son since his betrayal, had not let anyone ask what should be done with him, would not let his name be spoken. He had, however, ordered that the priests be released from prison, even those who had been captured with his son. Presuming on this leniency, the priests had tried to intercede on Iddor’s behalf, with a tale that they and Iddor had hidden Ioratth in the torture chamber only to save him from the vengeance of the rebel mob. Ioratth told them to be silent and be gone.

Since their Gand had been through the fire, both burnt and spared, his soldiers saw him as clearly favored by their Burning God, as holy as any priest. Realising their disadvantage, most of the priests chose to go back to Asudar with this first contingent of the army. So Ioratth’s captains, left to their own judgment, decided the best thing to do with their embarrassing prisoner, his son, was send him off too, and let the High Gand decide what to do with him.

I was disappointed by this ignominious, uncertain outcome. I wanted to know Iddor would be punished as he deserved. The Alds loathed treachery, I knew, and were shocked by the betrayal of a father by a son. Would he be tortured, as he had tortured Sulter Galva? Would he be buried alive, the way so many people in Ansul had been, taken down to the mudflats south of the city and trampled into the wet, salt mud until they suffocated?

Did I want him to be tortured and buried alive?

What did I want? Why was I so unhappy through all this bright summer, the first summer of our freedom? Why did I feel that nothing was settled, nothing won?

* * *

ORREC WAS SPEAKING in the Harbor Market. It was a golden autumn afternoon, windless. Sul stood white across the dark-blue straits. Everybody in the city was there to hear the maker. He told some of the Chamhan, and they called for more and wouldn’t let him go. I was too far away to hear well, and was restless. I left the crowd. I walked up West Street alone. Nobody was in the streets. Everybody was there behind me, together, in the marketplace, listening. I touched the Sill Stone and went into myhouse, clear through it, past the Waylord’s rooms, to the back, to the dark corridors. I wrote the words in the air before the wall and the door opened and I went into the room where the books and the shadows are.

I had not been there for months. It was as it had always been: the clear, even light from the high skylights, the quiet air, the books in their patient, potent rows, and if I listened, the faint murmur of water in the cave down at the shadow end. No books layout on the table. There was no sign of any presence there. But I knew the room was full of presences.

I’d intended to read in Orrecs book; but when I stood at the shelves myhand went to the book I had been working on last spring, the night before Gry and Orrec came, a text in Aritan, the Elegies. They are short poems of mourning and praise for people who died a thousand years ago. The names of the authors are mostly not given, and all we know of the people named in the poems is what the poet says.

One of them reads, “Sullas who kept the house well, so that the patterned pavements shone, now keeps the house of silence. I listen for her step.”

Another, the one I’d been trying to understand when I stopped reading, is about a horse trainer; the first line is, “Surely where he is, they are around him, the long-maned shadows.”

I sat down at the table, at my old place, with that book and the wordbook of Aritan, with its notes in the margins written bymany hands over the centuries, and tried to make out what the next lines meant.

When I’d understood the poem as well as I could, and had it in my memory, the light from the skylights was fading. Leros Day, the equinox, was past, the days were getting short. I closed the book and sat on at the table, not lighting the lamp, just sitting there feeling for the first time in a long time a sense of peace, of being in the right place. I let that feeling come all through me and penetrate me and settle in me. As it did, I was able to think, slowly and clearly; not so much in words as in knowing what matters and seeing what has to be done, which is the way I think. I hadn’t been able to think that way for months.

That’s why when I got up to leave the room, I took with me a book from it, a thing I had never done before. I took Rostan, the one I called Shining Red when I was a little child building walls and bear’s dens with the books.

I had heard Orrec speak of it longingly, not long ago, as a lost work of the maker Regali. The Waylord had said nothing in reply.

He had never said anything to Orrec about the books in the secret room. So far as I knew, he and I alone knew of the room itself.

That the oracle spoke through books, people knew vaguely, and now they’d actually heard its voice; but they didn’t ask to know more about the mystery, they didn’t want to pry into it, they let it be. After all, for years, books themselves had been accursed and forbidden, dangerous things even to know about. And though we of Ansul live comfortably among the shadows of our dead, we’re not a people with much taste for the uncanny. Sulter Galva the Reader was held in some awe, as was I; but people much preferred to deal with Sulter Galva the Waylord. The oracle had done its work, we’d been set free, and now we could get back to business.

But my business was a little different. That’s what I’d seen at last, sitting at the reading table, with a closed book in my hands.

¦ 16 ¦

Orrec, Gry, and Shetar had returned from the Harbor Market late in the afternoon, Orrec to collapse and sleep for a while as he always did when he could after a public performance. He was reviving now, roaming about barefoot and disheveled, when I came to the Master’s rooms. He said, “Hello, horse thief,” and Gry said, “There you are! We were just talking about taking a walk in the old park before it gets too dark to see.”

Shetar did not understand separate words, such as “walk,” as many dogs can do; but she often was aware of intentions before people knew they were intending anything. She was already standing up, and now she paced over with her graceful slouch to the door and sat down to wait for us. The plumed tip of her tail twitched back and forth. I scratched her around the ears and she leaned her head into my hand and purred a little.