or bed?”
“Ten more lines,” I said. And we bent over “The Tower” again.
Even now it’s hard for me to admit, to write about my fear. Back then, at fourteen or fifteen, I kept my thoughts away from it, just as I kept myself away from the end of the room that went back into shadow. Wasn’t the secret room the one place where I was free of fear? I wanted it to be only that. I didn’t understand my fear and didn’t want to know what it was. It was too much like what the Alds called devilry and evil spirits and black magic. Those were nothing but ignorant, hateful words for what they didn’t understand—our gods, our books, our ways. I was certain that there were no demons and that the Waylord had no evil powers. Hadn’t they tortured him for a year to make him confess his wicked arts, and let him go because he had nothing to confess?
So what was I afraid of?
I knew the book had groaned when I touched it. I was only about six years old then, but I remembered. I wanted to make myself brave. I dared myself to go all the way to the shadow end. I went, keeping my eyes on the floor right before my feet, until the tiles gave way to rough stone. Then I sidled over to a bookcase, still keeping my eyes down, seeing only that it was low and built into the rock wall, and reached out to touch a book bound in shabby brown leather. When I touched it, it groaned aloud.
I pulled back my hand and stood there. I told myself I hadn’t heard anything. I wanted to be brave, so that I could kill Alds when I grew up. I had to be brave.
I walked five steps more till I came to another bookcase and glanced up quickly. I saw a shelf with one book on it. It was small and had a smooth, pearly white cover. I clenched my right hand and reached out my left hand and took the book from the shelf, telling myself it was safe because the cover was pretty. I let the book fall open. There were drops of blood oozing from the page. They were wet. I knew what blood was. I shut it and shoved it back on the shelf and ran to hide in my bear’s den under the big table.
I hadn’t told the Waylord about that. I didn’t want it to be true. I had never gone back down to those shelves in the shadow end.
I’m sorry, now, for that girl of fifteen who wasn’t as brave as the child of six, although she longed as much as ever for courage, strength, power against what she feared. Fear breeds silence, and then the silence breeds fear, and I let it rule me. Even there, in that room, the only place in the world where I knew who I was, I wouldn’t let myself guess who I might become.
¦ 3 ¦
Even ten years later, it’s hard to write truly about how I lied to myself. It’s as hard to write about my courage as about my cowardice. But I want this book to be as truthful as it can be, to be of use in the records of the House of the Oracle, and to honor my mother Decalo, to whom I dedicate it. I’m trying to put the memories of all those years in order, because I want to get to where I can tell about meeting Gry the first time. But there wasn’t much order in my mind and heart when I was sixteen and seventeen. It was all ignorance and passionate anger and love.
What peace I had, what understanding I had, came from my love for the Waylord and his kindness to me, and from books. Books are at the heart of this book I’m writing. Books caused the danger we were in, the risks we ran, and books gave us our power. The Alds are right to fear them. If there is a god of books it’s Sampa the Maker and Destroyer.
Of all the books the Waylord gave me to read, in poetry I most loved
That was the year we took the street girl Bomi into the household, and the Waylord gave her the name Galva in the old ceremony at the house altars. She moved into the room down the hall from Sosta’s. She worked hard and well, satisfying even Ista most of the time, and was good company too. She was about thirteen; she had no idea when she was born or who her mother was. She was hanging around our street as a beggar for a while, and old Gudit began coaxing her in, luring her like a stray cat. When he’d got her to sleep in the shed in the courtyard, he started making her earn her food by helping him clean the stables, which were full of burned lumber and wrecked furniture and trash. Gudit was determined that the Waylord was going to have horses again. “It stands to reason,” he’d say. “How can a waylord travel his ways without a horse to carry him? Would you have him walk on foot? Clear to Essangan or Dom? Bad as his legs are? Like some common peddler, with no dignity? It won’t do. He needs horses. It stands to reason.”
There never was much to do with Gudit but agree with him. He was crazy, old, hunchbacked, and worked very hard, if not always at the most useful job. He had a foul mouth but a clear heart. When Ista hired Bomi to take my place housecleaning, he was furious, not at Ista but at Bomi for “deserting” him and his precious stable. Every time he saw her for months he cursed her by the shadows of her ancestors, which didn’t bother Bomi much, since she didn’t know any of her ancestors or where their shadows were. Then he got over it, and she went back to helping him after her housework with that terrible job of cleaning out the stable and rebuilding the stalls, because she had a clear heart too. She took in cats, just as Gudit took her in. The stableyard swarmed with kittens that summer. Ista said that Bomi ate like ten girls, but I thought she ate like one girl and twenty cats. Anyhow, the stable was finally clean, which turned out to be fortunate, even if it didn’t exactly stand to reason. And we had no mice.
Ista took a long time to accept the fact that the Waylord had taken me under his particular charge and that I was being “educated,” a word she always spoke very carefully, as if it were in another language. And indeed it was a word to be spoken carefully under the dominion of the Alds, who thought reading a deliberate act of evil. Because of that danger, and because she herself had forgotten, as she said, whatever hen-scratching she was taught as a girl (“And what earthly use would all that be to a cook, I ask you? You just show me how to make a sauce with a pen and ink, will you!”)—Ista wasn’t entirely comfortable with my becoming educated. But it would never have occurred to her to hold it against me, or to question the Waylord’s judgment or his will. Maybe I loved loyalty so dearly because I knew this house was blessed with it.
Anyhow, I still helped Ista with the rough work of the kitchen, and went to the market, with Bomi if she was free to go, alone if not. I stayed short and bony, and by wearing old cut-down men’s clothes I could still look fairly much like a child, or at least an unattractive boy. Street-gang boys sometimes saw I was a girl and threw stones at me—boys of my race, of Ansul, acting like filthy Alds. I hated to pass them and kept away from the places they gathered. And I hated the swaggering Ald guards posted around all the marketplaces to “keep order,” which meant to bully citizens and take whatever they liked from the vendors’ stalls without paying. I tried not to cringe when I passed them. I tried to walk slowly, ignoring them. They stood there puffed up in their blue cloaks and leather cuirasses, with their swords and clubs. They seldom looked as low as me.
Now I have come to the important morning.
It was late spring, four days after my seventeenth birthday. Sosta was to be married in summer and Bomi was helping her sew for her wedding—the green gown and headdress and the groom’s coat and headdress too. It was all Ista and Sosta had talked about for weeks, wedding wedding wedding, sewing sewing sewing. Even Bomi blithered about it. I’d never even tried to learn to sew, or to fall in love and want to marry, either. Some, day. Someday I’d be ready to find out about that kind of love, but it wasn’t time yet. I had to find out who I was, first. I had a promise to keep, and my dear lord to love, and a lot to learn. So I left them chattering, and went out to market alone that morning.
It was a bright sweet day. I went down the steps of the house to the Oracle Fountain. The broad, shallow, green basin was dry and littered, and the pipe from which the water had risen stuck up jagged from the broken,
