Voices

I lighted the big lamp on the reading table. The room bloomed with its soft light, and the gold on the spines of books glimmered a little here and there.

He touched the god-niche and murmured the blessing, and then stood looking about the room. He sat down at the table, rubbing a stiff knee. “What were you reading?” he asked.

“The Elegies.” I brought the book from the shelf and laid it before him.

“How far have you got?”

“The Horse Trainer.’”

He opened the book and found the poem. “Can you say it?”

I recited the ten lines of Aritan.

“And?”

I said my reading of it, as I had to Gry. He nodded. “Very satisfactory,” he said, with a suppressed smile.

I sat down at the table opposite him, and after a little silence he said, “You know, Memer, Orrec Caspro came just in time. He can teach you.You were about to discover that youcan teach me.”

“Oh no! I mostlyjust guess at the Elegies. I still cant read Regali.”

“But now you have a teacher who can.”

“Then?you’re not displeased?it was right to give him Rostan?”

“Yes,” he said, with a deep breath. “I think so. How can we know what’s right, when we can’t understand the powers we have? I am a blind man asked to read the message given him by a god.”

He turned over the pages of the book on the table and closed it softly. He looked down towards the end of the room where the light of the lamps died away. “I told Iddor I was the Reader. What is reading when you don’t know the language? You are the Reader, Memer. Of that at least I have no doubt. Do you doubt it?”

The question was abrupt. I answered it without hesitation: “No.”

“Good. Good. And that being so, this is your room, your domain. Blind as I was, I kept it in trust for you.And for all those who brought their treasure to us here, the books… What shall we do with them, Memer?”

“Make a library,” I said. “Like the old one here.”

He nodded. “It seems to be the will of the house itself. We merely obey it.”

That was how it seemed to me too. But I still had some questions.

“Waylord, that day… The day the fountain ran.”

“The fountain,” he said. “Yes.”

“The miracle,” I said.

With that same hint of a smile, he said, “No.”

I was perhaps surprised, perhaps not.

His smile grew broader and merrier. “The Lord of the Springs showed me the means, some while ago,” he said. “I’ll show you, when you like.”

I nodded. That was not where my mind was.

“Does it grieve you or shock you, Memer, that a miracle may be taken into our own hands, as it were?”

“No,” I said. “Not that one. But the other…”

He watched me and waited.

“You weren’t lame,” I said.

He looked down at his hands, his legs. His face was grave now. “So they tell me,” he said.

“You don’t remember?”

“I remember coming to this room in fear and anguish. As soon as I entered, it came to me that I should let the fountain run, and I hurried to do that, not reasoning why. As if obeying. And next, it came to me that I should take a book from the shelf. And I did that. And there was need for haste, so I… could it be that I ran? I don’t know. It must be that those who silenced me when they needed my silence, needed me then to waken your voice.”

I looked down the room, to the shadow end. So did he.

“You did’t ask the…?”

“There wasn’t time to consult the oracle. And it wouldn’t have answered me. It speaks to you, Memer, not me.”

I didn’t want to hear what he was telling me, even though I had said that I was the Reader. My heart protested in fear, in humiliation. “It doesn’t speak to me!” I said. “It uses me!”

He nodded briefly. “As I was used.”

“It wasn’t even my voice?was it? I don’t know! I don’t understand it. I’m ashamed, I’m afraid! I don’t ever want to go into that darkness again.”

He said nothing for a long time, and finally spoke gently. “They use us, yes, but they do not use us ill… If you must go into the dark, Memer, think, it’s only a mother, a grandmother, trying to tell us something we don’t yet understand. Speaking a language you don’t yet know well, but it can be learned. So I told myself when I had to enter there.”

I thought about that for a while, and it began to give me comfort. It made the darkness of the cave less uncanny, to imagine that my mother’s spirit was there, with all the other mothers of my race, and they wouldn’t seek to frighten me.

But I had one more question.

“The book?the one you had in your hand?is it on the oracle shelves?”

His silence now was different; he was finding difficulty in answering. At last he said, “No. I took the first book I saw.”

He got up, limped to a bookcase nearby, the closest to the door, and took a little volume from a shelf at eye level. I recognised the dun-colored, unlettered binding. He brought it back and held it out to me in silence. I was afraid to take it but I took it, and after a minute I opened it.

I recognised it then. It was a primer, a reading book for children, Tales of the Beasts. I had read it when I was first learning to read, years ago, here, in the secret room.

I turned the pages, my fingers stiff and awkward. I saw the small woodcuts of rabbits and ravens and wild boars. I read the last line of a story, “So the Lion returned home to the desert and told the beasts of the desert that the Mouse was the bravest of all creatures.”

I looked up at the Waylord, and he looked back at me. His face and his slight gesture said: I do not know.

I looked at the little book that had set us free. I thought of Denies’ words, and said them aloud: “‘There is a god in every leaf; you hold what is sacred in your open hand.’”

After a while, I added, “And there are no demons.”

“No,” the Waylord said. “Only us. We do the demon work.” And again he looked down at his crippled hands.

We were silent. I heard the faint sound of the water running in the dark.

“Come,” he said, “it’s late, the dream senders are all around us. Let’s let them have their way.”

I held the small lamp in my left hand and with my right hand wrote the bright letters on the air. We went through the door, and along the dark corridors. Passing his room I bade him sleep well, and he stooped to kiss my forehead, and so we parted with the blessing for the night.