Before she was veiled, she began writing songs of Voorstod, songs of meadows and copses and stony shores, songs of love for uncomplicated things, songs of eagles over the crags and crows among the corn. The flying things in Voorstod were not precisely eagles or precisely crows, the crop was not precisely corn, but the ancient names did well enough, and the prophets commanded that no new words be coined if old ones could be found to fit.
She was fourteen when she first sang for money, a musical background for an information stage diversion, with other female musicians. It was Maire’s voice in such diversions which gave her the name the Voice of Voorstod. The recording was arranged for, and the money was given to her father, not to Maire herself, though he passed on a bit of it to her, “to encourage her,” he said. He liked the money and wanted more. It came in handy for treating his cronies at the tavern or buying more Gharm or having new jeweled coup markers made for his hair. The best coup markers were very expensive, made by craftsmen on Phansure.
It was the first money Maire had ever held in her own hands. She remembered looking at it on her palm, sitting there looking at it as though it might hatch into something else. So peculiar a thing, money. A few coins, three strips. And yet it would buy a dress or a pair of shoes or a ticket to the crowded women’s balcony of the concert hall.
Maire didn’t buy anything, however. Instead, she took the money to Lilla, an older Lilla now, but with her face still unlined and fur still dark on her head and neck.
Maire whispered, “I want to pay for your escape. Yours, and Bel’s, and Bitty’s.”
Lilla stared at her from unfathomable eyes. “Escape?”
“Into Ahabar. Don’t look at me like that, Lilla. I know that Gharm escape into Ahabar. Women go away into Ahabar, too. I hear them talk of it when they don’t know I’m listening.”
“We could be killed trying that.”
Maire wept. “You could be killed staying here. Fess was.”
“My daughter,” said Lilla with great dignity. “My daughter, Fess Salion, of the Green-snake Tchenka.”
Maire didn’t understand the word Tchenka, but she gathered what it signified. “You do have names.”
“Of course we have names. Did you think we had no history, Voorstoder.”
“The men say …”
“The men say lies,” Lilla hissed, going back to her sweeping. “They suck lies into their lungs and breathe them out like smoke!”
They did not speak of it again, but Maire went on saving all the money her father let her have. When she had what she thought was enough and more than enough, she put it into a crock and set the crock on the front stoop of the Gharm quarters. Lilla said nothing, but the crock was gone in the morning. That year, in the spring, all the Gharm at the Manone place vanished.
Dad raged. Mam wept. Maire kept silent, shaking her head as though in dismay.
“Disloyal scum,” Dad screamed. “Traitorous animals.”
“Wise,” whispered Maire to herself, needing desperately to reassure herself. “Courageous.”
Later that summer, her father bought other Gharm, two men and a woman with children. Maire never spoke to one of them, or uttered a single order or instruction. The Gharm could not fail or disobey orders they never got. It was the only way Maire had of rebelling.
Thereafter, she spoke to other women, carefully, taking her time about it. There were those who used the whip, those one didn’t dare speak to. There were those who sympathized and helped. There were Gharm, arriving in the middle of the night, tapping with ghost fingers on the windows. There were Gharm, hidden in cellars and under haystacks, sent on their way again, fed and clothed and provided with money.
“Have you any idea how all these Gharm are getting away?” Dad demanded of her.
“I try not to think of such things,” she told him. “My music takes all my time.”
“They’re our servants, you know,” he’d instructed her. “We have a contract, signed by them, agreeing to serve us for a thousand years, and there’s five hundred yet to go.”
“I’ve heard of it,” she said, for she had heard of it until she was weary of hearing.
“They’re bound to us,” he’d gone on, trying to get something out of her, meeting only a level unseeing gaze and no emotion whatsoever. He wondered aloud to Mam when the last time was she had kissed him and called him Dad, and was reminded of the whip and the little Gharm child, Fess. Well, he said to Mam, she couldn’t still be grudging him that. That had been years ago.
“I don’t know,” Maire’s mother said. “I don’t know anything about it. Her songs take all her time, and she doesn’t talk to me.”
Even with Lilla and her family gone, memories were bitter in Scaery. When Phaed Girat came courting, all the way from Cloud, she thought things might be better in Cloud, or at least different. She was not the first, even among women much older and wiser than she, to marry for such a reason. Seventeen lifeyears old was not too young to marry, and Phaed was a handsome man with glittering eyes and a manner to him like a cock strutting. He loved to hear her singing, so he said, praising her to the skies. She sat in the parlor while he said pretty things to her, she veiled to the eyes and with Mam just outside the door, he on the
