All this gave me a great deal to think about. But it still didn't answer my question. "I don't know why my aunt doesn't like me," I said.
"I'll tell you what Mother told me, if you won't say anything to any of the other men," Tisso said earnestly. I promised silence, and she told me. "Gegemer tried and tried to see what had happened to her sister Tano and her babies. For years she tried. They had singings for her that went on and on. She even took the drugs, and an ambamer shouldn't take the drugs. But Amba wouldn't let her see her sister or the children. And then—then you came walking into the village, and still she didn't see you. She didn't see who you were, until you said your name. Then everyone saw. She was ashamed. She thinks she did something wrong. She thinks Amba is punishing her because she let Tano go alone so far south. She thinks it was her fault the soldiers raped Tano and sold you and your sister. And she thinks you know this."
I was about to protest, but Tisso forestalled me: "Your soul knows it—not your mind. It doesn't matter what your mind doesn't know, if your soul knows. So you are a reproach to Gegemer. You darken her heart."
After a while I said, "That darkens my heart."
"I know," Tisso said sadly.
It was strange how Tisso made me think of Sotur. Utterly different in everything, they were alike in their quickness to feel pity, to understand grief, and not to say too much about it.
I gave up the idea of trying to approach my aunt through her armor of guilt. I longed to learn more about her powers, and Tisso's saying, "Some of us do that kind of seeing when we're children," had intrigued me. But the limits drawn around men's knowledge and women's knowledge were nearly as clear as the line separating the half villages. Tisso was uneasy about having said so much to me, and I could not press her further. None of the other girls would let me ask about "sacred stuff" at all: they hooted like owls or yattered like kingfishers to drown me out—half alarmed at my transgression and half laughing at me for being, as they said, such a tadpole.
I was reluctant to ask the boys my age what they knew about these powers of seeing. I was different enough already, and talking about such things would only estrange me further. My uncle left all mysteries alone, seeking comfort only where it was easy to find. I didn't know any of the older men well. Rava was the kindest, but he was an elder, an initiator of his clan, and spent much of his time in South Shore. There was only one man I thought might welcome my questions. Peroc was old, his thick hair quite white, his face seamed and drawn; he was crippled with rheumatism, and lived, I think, in pain. His arthritic hands were not good for much, but he laboriously knotted and mended fishing nets, and though he was slow at the work it was always done perfectly. He lived by himself in a tiny house with a couple of cats. He spoke little, but had a gentle manner. He was often too lame to go to the fish-mat. Tisso's mother sent food for him, and I offered to take it to him. It became a regular thing that she'd give it to me and I'd take it and set it down on the old man's deck and say, "From Lali Betu, Uncle Peroc." We young men called all the old men uncle.
He'd be sitting in the sun if there was any sun, working at a net, or just gazing over the grasslands, humming. He'd thank me, and as soon as I turned away, the soft humming would begin again. Soon half-comprehensible words would enter into the tune, strange song words about the marsh lion, the lords of the fish, the heron king. ... They were the only serious songs I had heard in Ferusi, the only ones that hinted at a story behind them. One day I put down his reed box of food and said, "From Lali Betu, Uncle Peroc," and he thanked me, but I did not turn away; I stood by his deck and said, "Can I ask about the songs you sing, Uncle?"
He glanced up at me and back at his work, then laid the net down and looked at me steadily. "After the second initiation," he said.
That was what I'd been afraid of. There was no arguing with the rules of the sacred. I said, "Anh." But he saw I had a second question, and waited for it.
"Are all the stories sacred?"
He gazed at me a minute, thinking, and finally nodded."Ao."
"So I may not listen to you sing?"
"Eng," he said, the soft negative. "Later. When you've been to the king's palace." He looked at me with sympathy. "You'll learn the songs there, as I did."
"The heron king?"
He nodded, but murmured, "Eng, eng," with a gesture to prevent my asking more. "Later," he said. "Soon."
"There are no stories that are not sacred?"
"Those the women and children tell. They are not fit for men."
"But there are tales of heroes—like Hamneda, the great hero who wandered all the length of the Western Shore—"
Peroc gazed at me a while and shook his head. "He did not come here to the Marshes," he said. And he bent to his work again.
So all my tales and poems remained closed up in my head, silent, as my copy of Caspro's poem lay closed and wrapped in reedcloth in my uncle's house, the only book in all Ferusi, unread.
***
I WAS FISHING by myself one day in spring; my uncle had gone netting with another man. Old Minki jumped into the boat as a matter of course and sat in the prow like a curly-eared figurehead. I put up the little sail and let the wind carry us slowly up the lake. I didn't net but fished with the rod and line for ritta, a small bottom fish, sweet and succulent. The ritta were lazy and so was I. I gave up after a while and just sat in the boat, drifting. All around me was the silken blue water, and in the distance a few reed islands, and beyond them the low green shore, and far in the distance a blue hill...
So I had come round to the earliest and oldest of all my rememberings or visions, and was in the memory, the vision itself.
Remembering that, I began all at once to remember other things.
I remembered the streets of cities, the lights of houses crowded over a canal, the dark cobblestones of a steep street in the winter wind—there was the fountain in front of Arcamand and there was a tower over a harbor full of ships and there was a tall house with red rain-beaten walls—all in a rush and tumult of images, dozens of visions all crowded into one another and then sliding away, ungraspable, gone, leaving nothing but the blue sky and water, the low green shore and the distant hill, where I had been, where I had been all my life and was now again, this once, in this one moment.
The visions lessened, faded. Minki looked round, towards home. I sailed slowly back to the village. People were already gathering for the fish-mat. I had only a couple of little ritta to offer, but Tisso and her mother always had something cooked for me. I took my portion and Peroc's and went back to the men's village, to Peroc's house, where he sat mending a fine net. I set his portion down and said, "From Lali Betu. May I ask you a question, Uncle?"
"Anh."
"All my life I've seen through the world. I've remembered what I had never yet seen, and been where I've never yet been." He had raised his face and was looking at me gravely. I went on, "Is this a power of our people—of the Rassiu? Is it a gift or a curse? Are there any people here who will tell me what my visions are?"
"Yes," he said. "In South Shore. I think you should go there."
He got up laboriously and stepped down off his deck. He came with me to Metter's cabin. My uncle was sitting eating his dinner, with Minki on one side thumping her tail on the deck and Prut on the other with his tail wrapped round his paws. My uncle greeted Peroc and offered him his dinner to share.
"Gavir Aytana in kindness brought me food from the fish-mat," the old man said. He spoke very formally. "It is well known that there have been great seers in your clan, Metter Aytana. Is this not so?"
"Ao," my uncle said, staring.
"It may be that Gavir Aytana has the power. It would be well that the keepers of the sacred things be told this."
"Anh," my uncle said, staring at me now.
"Your net will be ready tomorrow," the old man said in a different tone of voice, and turned to limp back to his cabin.
I sat down near my uncle and began to eat my own dinner. Tisso's mother had made excel
lent fish cakes rolled up in lettuce leaves with a drop of hot pepper sauce.
"I suppose I'd better go to South Shore," my uncle said. "Or should I talk to Gegemer first, I wonder. But she's ... I suppose I should just go. I don't know."
"May I go with you?"
Minki thumped her tail.
"That might be good," my uncle said, with relief.
So next day we sailed to South Shore Village, where I'd been initiated. Metter seemed to have no idea what to do once we got there, so I led off to the Big House, where the sacred things were stored and initiations were held. It was the biggest house I'd seen in the Marshes, with walls of rigid lacquered reed such as they built the war canoes of, and a high reed-bundle roof. The fenced court in front of it was bare earth, with a small pool and a great old weeping willow tree beside it. The building was very dark inside, and awesome with the memories of the initiation rites; we did not dare enter, or even speak. We waited by the pool until a man came into the court. I had been about to suggest that we find some members of our clan, the Aytanu, and ask them for advice or assistance, but my uncle went over to the man and began at once to tell him that he was here with his nephew who had the power of seeing visions. The man was one-eyed and had a rake-broom in his hand; he had evidently come to sweep the courtyard. I tried to prevent Metter from babbling to somebody who appeared to be the janitor, but he babbled on. The man nodded, and looked more and more important. At last he said, "I will tell my cousin Dorod Aytana, the seerman of Reed Isles, and he perhaps will find if your nephew is suitable for training. Ennu-Amba has guided your steps to this place. Go with Mé!"
"With Me," Metter said gratefully. "Come along, Gavir. It's all settled." He couldn't wait to get away from that big house with its dark open doorway. We went straight back to the docks and got into our boat, which Minki had been guarding by lying curled up asleep in the stern, and sailed home.
I didn't put much credit in the one-eyed man's boasts. I thought that if I wanted to find out anything about my visions, I'd have to do it myself.
So I got up my courage and, at the fish-mat that evening, I approached my aunt Gegemer. I'd traded a good catch of ritta with Kora for a goose he'd shot, a fine fat bird which I cleaned and plucked carefully. I had seen men who were courting women make such an offering, and so I offered it to Gegemer. "I need advice and guidance, Aunt," I said, more bluntly than I had intended. She was a formidable woman, hard to speak to.
At first she didn't answer or take the goose from me. I could feel her recoil, her wish to refuse. But she put out her hand at last for the gift and gestured with her head to the gardens, outside which men and women often met to talk. We walked there in silence. I arranged in my mind what I'd say, at least to start with, and when she stopped by a row of old dwarf cherry trees and faced me, I said it.
"I know you're a woman of power, Aunt. I know you see through the world sometimes, and walk with Ennu-Amba."
To my great surprise she laughed, a surprised, scornful laugh. "Hah! I never thought to hear that from a man!" she said.
That took me aback, and I hesitated, but managed to go on with what I'd planned to say. "I am a very ignorant person," I said, "but I have two kinds of power, I think. I can remember very clearly what I've heard and seen. And I can remember, sometimes, what I have not yet heard and seen." There I stopped. I waited for her to speak.
She turned away a little and rested her hand on the gnarled, scaly trunk of a little tree. "And what can I do for a man of power?" she asked at last, with the same hostile scorn.
"You can tell me what the visions are. How to use them, how to understand them. Where I was, in the city, in the forest, no one had this power. I thought, if I could come back to my people, maybe they'd tell me what I need to know. But I think no one here can, or will, except you."
She turned quite away from me at that and was silent for a long time. At last she turned round and faced me. "I could have taught you, Gavir, if you'd been here as a child in our village," she said, and I saw she was holding her mouth tight to keep it from quivering. "It's too late now. Too late. A woman can't teach a man anything. Wherever you've lived, you must have learned that!"
I said nothing, but she must have seen my protest in my face, and that she had hurt me.
"What can I say to you, sister's son? You come by your gifts truly. Tano could tell any tale she'd heard once, and repeat words she'd heard years before. And I have walked with the lion, as you say—for all the good it's done me. To bring back the past in memory is a great power. To remember what hasn't yet come to pass is a great power too. What's the use of it, you ask me? I don't know. I've never known. Maybe the men know, who look down on women's visions as meaningless foolishness. Ask them! I can't tell you. I can only say, hold to the other power, the one your mother Tano had, for it won't drive you crazy."
She would not look at me steadily. Her glance was fierce and black as a crow's. I heard how like my own voice hers was.
"What's the good of remembering all the stories I ever heard, if men aren't allowed to tell stories or hear them?" I said, my thwarted anger rising to meet hers.
"No good," she said. "You should have been a woman, Gavir Aytana. Then one of your powers might have brought you good."
"But I'm not a woman, Gegemer Aytano," I said bitterly.
She looked round at me again and her expression changed. "No," she said. "Nor quite a man yet. But well on the way." She paused, and drew a deep breath, and finally said, "I'll give you what advice I can, though I think you won't take it. So long as you remember yourself, you're safe. When you begin to remember farther, you begin to lose yourself—you begin to be lost. Don't lose yourself, Tano Aytano's son. Hold to yourself. Remember yourself. No one told me to do that. No one but me will tell you to do it. So, take your risks. And if I ever see you when I walk with the lion, I'll tell you what I see. That's the only gift I might have to give you. In return for this," and she swung the dead goose by its webbed red feet, and scowled, and walked away.
***
A LITTLE LATER in the spring, when the weather was getting very warm, I came back one afternoon with Minki and my uncle from fishing and found two strangers sitting on the deck. One of them was tall and heavyset for a Rassiu, dressed in a long narrow robe of fine reedcloth bleached almost white;I thought he must be some kind of priest or official. The other man was shy and silent. The man in the robe introduced himself as Dorod Aytana, and named off a litany of our clan relationship. Metter scurried off with our catch to the fish-mat, since Dorod said it was me they came to talk to, and he was glad to get away from strangers. When he had gone, Dorod said to me, smiling but with authority, "You came to South Shore seeking me."
"It may be that I didn't know it," I said, a fairly common phrase among the Marsh people, who avoid direct negatives and unnecessary commitments.
"You have not seen me in vision?"
"I believe I have not," I said humbly.
"Our ways have been coming closer for a long time now," Dorod said. He had a deep, soft voice and an impressive manner. "I know that you were brought up among foreigners and have only been in Ferusi for a year. Our kinsman at the Big House in South Shore sent to tell me that you had come at last. You seek a teacher; you have found him. I seek a seer; I have found him. Come with me to my village, Reed Isles, and we will begin your training. For it is late, very late. You should have been learning the way of the visions for years now. But we will make up for lost time—for time is never lost, is it? We will bring you into your power, maybe within a year or two, if you give all your soul to it. Your second initiation then will not be as a mere fisherman or reed cutter, but as a seer of your clan. There is no seer of the Aytanu now. Not for many years. You have been long wanted, long awaited, Gavir Aytana!"
Of all he said, it was those last words that went to my heart. Who had ever waited for me to come? A stolen child, a slave, a runaway, a kind of ghost to my own people, a stranger everywhere else—who wanted or would wait for me?
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"I'll come with you," I said.
13
Reed Isles was the westernmost, the smallest, and the poorest of the five villages of Ferusi. Its houses were scattered on the isles and inlets of a bay in the southwest corner of Ferusi Lake. Dorod lived with his meek and silent cousin Temec in a hut on a muddy, reed-surrounded peninsula. There were fewer women than men in the village, and the women seemed indifferent and aloof. There were forty or so people, but only four marriage huts. The fish-mat was not the sociable, pleasurable event it was in East Lake.
I didn't get to know anyone in this village well but Dorod. He kept me busy and away from the others. I missed the easy, lazy companionship of fishing with my uncle or with the young men, talking with Tisso and other girls, watching the boat builders, cutting reeds, planting ricegrass, the slow day rhythm that I had lived in for a year now, often bored into a kind of trance, but never unhappy.
I went out fishing daily here, and we often kept half the catch for ourselves, for the women provided few vegetables, little meal, no fruit. I certainly would have been willing to fry up our catch or make fish cakes with the coarse meal the women ground, but for a village man to cook would turn society inside out and upside down and make me an outcast from my people forever. As it was, Dorod and I ate a good deal of fish raw, as I'd done with Ammeda, but we didn't have any horseradish to give it a kick. Nobody here shot birds; they were forbidden in this village as sacred creatures—hassa—wild goose, duck, swan, and heron. Little freshwater clams, delicious and very common here, were a staple of the local diet, but they became poisonous at rare, unpredictable intervals; Dorod forbade himself and me to eat them.
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