Voices aotws-2

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  As soon as I understood what the letters were, I learned them, and began to make out the words, and I don’t remember ever being puzzled or stopped for long, except once. I took down the tall red book with gold designs on its cover, which had always been a favorite of mine before I could read, when I called it Shining Red. I just wanted to find out what it was about, to taste it. But when I tried to read it, it made no sense. There were the letters, and they made words, but meaningless words. I could not understand a single one. It was nonsense, garble, garbage. I was furious with it and with myself when the Waylord came in. “What is wrong with this stupid book!” I said.

  He looked at it. “Nothing’s wrong with it. It’s a very beautiful book.” And he read some of the garble out loud. It did sound beautiful, and as if it meant something. I scowled. “It’s in Aritan,” he said, “the language spoken in the world a long time ago. Our language grew out of it. Some of the words aren’t much changed. See, here? and here?” And I recognised parts of the words he pointed to.

  “Can I learn it?” I asked.

  He looked at me the way he often did, slowly: patient, judging, approving. “Yes,” he said.

  So I began to learn the ancient language, at the same time as I began to read the Chamhan in our own language.

  We couldn’t take books out of the secret room, of course. They would endanger us and everyone in Galvamand. The redhat priests of the Alds would come with soldiers to a house where a book was found. They wouldn’t touch the book, because it was demonic, but they’d have slaves take it down to the canal or the sea, bind stones to it to weight it, and throw it in to sink. And they’d do the same with the people who had owned it. They didn’t burn books or people who read them. The god of the Alds is Atth, the Burning God, and death by fire is a grand thing to them. So they drowned books and people, or took them to the mudflats by the sea and pushed them in with shovels and poles and trampled them down until they suffocated, sunk in the deep wet mud.

  People often brought books to Galvamand, at night, in secret. None of them knew of the hidden room—people who’d lived in the house all their life didn’t know of it—but people even outside the city knew that the Waylord Sulter Galva was the man to bring books to, now that it was dangerous to own them, and the House of the Oracle was the place to keep them safe.

  None of us in the household ever entered the Waylord’s rooms without knocking and waiting for his answer, and since he was no longer so ill, if he didn’t answer we didn’t bother him. What he did with his time and where he spent it, Ista and Sosta never inquired. They thought he was always in his apartments or the inner courtyards, I suppose, as I used to think. Galvamand is so big it’s easy to lose people in it. He never left the house, being too lame to walk even a block’s length, but people came to see him, many people. They’d spend hours talking with him in the back gallery or, in summer, in one of the courts. They’d come and leave quietly, any time of the day or night, attracting no notice, using the ways through the back part of the house where nobody lived and the rooms were empty and in ruin.

  When he had daytime visitors, I’d serve water, or tea when we had any, and sometimes I could stay with them and listen. Some were people I’d known all my life: Desac the Sundramanian, and people of the Four Houses, like the Cams of Cammand, and Per Actamo. Per had been a boy of ten or twelve when the Alds took the city. The people of Actamand put up a hard fight, and when the soldiers took the house they killed all the men and carried off the women as slaves. Per hid from the soldiers in a dry well in a courtyard for three days. He lived now as we did, with a few people in a ruinous house. But he joked with me and was kind, and younger than most of the Waylord’s visitors. I was always glad when Per came. Desac was the only visitor who made it clear I was not welcome to stay and listen to the talk.

  The people I didn’t know who came to see the Waylord were mostly merchants and such from the city; some of them still had good clothes. Often men came who looked as if they’d been on the road a long time, visitors or messengers from other towns of Ansul, maybe from other waylords. After dark, in winter, sometimes women came, though it was dangerous for women to go alone in the city. One who used to come often had long grey hair; she seemed a little mad to me, but he greeted her with respect. She always brought books. I never knew her name. Often the people from other towns had books, too, hidden in their clothing or in parcels containing food. Once he knew I could enter the secret room, the Waylord would give them to me to take there.

  He mostly went to the room at night, which was why we’d never met there before. I hadn’t gone often, and never at night. I shared a sleeping room in the front part of the house with Ista and Sosta, and couldn’t just vanish. And the days were busy; I had my share of the housework to do, and the worship, and most of the shopping too, since I liked doing it and got better bargains than Sosta did.

  Ista was always afraid Sosta would meet soldiers and be taken and raped if she went out alone. She wasn’t afraid for me. The Alds wouldn’t look at me, she said. She meant they wouldn’t like my pale bony face and sheep hair like theirs, because they wanted Ansul girls with round brown cheeks and black sleek hair like Sostas. “You’re lucky to look the way you do,” she always told me. And I stayed quite small and slight for a long time, which really was lucky. By order of the Gand of the Alds, women could go in the streets and marketplaces only if they had a man with them. A woman who went alone in the street was a whore, a demon of temptation, and any soldier was free to rape, enslave, or kill her. But the Alds apparently didn’t consider old women to be women, and children were mostly though not always ignored. So grannies and children, many of them “siege brats,” half-breeds like me, the girls dressed as boys, did most of the shopping and bargaining in the markets.

  All the money we had was what an ancestor had hidden long ago when a pirate fleet threatened Ansul; the pirates were driven off, but the family left the luckhoard, as the Waylord called it, buried out in the woods behind the house; and that was what we lived on now. So I had to look for the best bargains I could, which took time. So did the worship and the housework. Ista got up very early in the morning to make the bread. The only time I could go regularly to the secret room without being missed and rousing a lot of curiosity and questions would be at night when the others had gone to bed. So I told Ista I wanted to move my bed to my mother’s room, just down the hall from the room we all shared. That was fine with her. She and Sosta were generally snoring away not long after we’d washed up from supper; they weren’t likely to notice if I wasn’t in my room. So every night I’d go softly in darkness through the corridors and passages of the great house to the secret door, and go in, and read and learn with my dear teacher.

  Nights when he had visitors, he couldn’t come to teach me Aritan or help me with my reading, but I could get along on my own well enough. Often I stayed reading, lost in the story or the history till long after he would have sent me off to bed.

  When I started growing a little taller and coming into my womanhood, I did get terribly sleepy sometimes, not at night but in the morning. I couldn’t make myself get out of bed, and felt heavy as lead and stupid as a sowbug all day. The Waylord spoke to Ista, though I begged him not to, and asked her to hire the street girl Bomi to do the sweeping and cleaning that I’d been doing. I said to him, “I don’t mind sweeping and cleaning! What takes all the time is doing all the altars. We could hire a girl for that, and I’d have lots more time.”

  That was a mistake. He looked at me slowly: patient, judging, but not approving.

  “Your mother’s shadow dwells here, with the shadows of our ancestors,” he said. “The gods of this house are her gods. She blessed them daily. I do them honor as a man,” and it was true, he never missed a day or an offering due, “and you do them honor and receive their blessing as the daughter of our grandmothers.” And that was that.

  I was ashamed of myself and also cross. I’d had it in my head that I’d be able to get out of the whole hour i
t took sometimes to go to all the god-niches, dusting them, giving fresh leaves to Iene, and lighting incense for the Hearthkeepers, and giving and asking blessing of the souls and shadows of the former householders, and thanking Ennu and putting meal and water on her altar on her days, and stopping in the doorways to say the praise of the One Who Looks Both Ways, and remembering when to light the oil lamps for Deori, and all the rest.

  We have more gods in Ansul, I think, than anybody else has anywhere. More gods, and closer to us, the gods of our earth and our days, our blood and bone. Of course I was blessed in knowing that the house was full of them, and that I was doing as my mother had done in returning their blessing, and that my own roomspirit dwelt in the little empty niche in the wall by the door and waited for me to return and watched over my sleep. When I was little, I was proud of doing worship, but I’d been doing it for a long time now. I got tired of the gods. They wanted so much looking after.

  But all it took to make me do my worship cheerfully, with all my heart and soul, was to remember that the Alds called our gods evil spirits, demons, and were afraid of them.

  And it was good to be reminded that my mother had done the woman’s worship in the house. The Waylord had trusted her with that, as he trusted her with the knowledge of the secret room, knowing she was of his own lineage. Thinking about this, I realised clearly for the first time that he and I were the only ones of our lineage left; the few people now in our household were Galvas by choice not by blood. I hadn’t thought much about the difference till then.

  “Did my mother know how to read?” I asked him once, at night, after my lesson in Aritan.

  “Of course,” he said, and then, recollecting, “It wasn’t forbidden then.” He sat back and rubbed his eyes. The torturers had stretched and broken his fingers so that they were twisted and knotted up, but I was used to how his hands looked. I could see that they had been beautiful once.

  “Did she come here to read?” I asked, looking around the room, happy to be there. I had come to love it best at night, when warm shadows stretched up and out from the lamp’s yellow dome of light, and the gilt lettering on the backs of books winked like the stars you could sometimes glimpse through the small, high skylights.

  “She didn’t have much time for reading,” he said. “She kept everything going here. It was a big job. A waylord had to spend a lot of money—entertaining and all the rest of it. Her books were account books, mostly.” He looked at me as if looking back, comparing me with my mother in his mind. “I showed her the door to this room when we first heard that the Alds had sent an army into the Isma Hills. My mother urged me: Decalo was of our blood, and had a right to the secret, she said. She could preserve it, if things went badly. And the room could be a refuge for her.”

  “It was.”

  He said a line from “The Tower,” the Aritan poem we had been translating: Hard is the mercy of the gods.

  I countered with a line from later in the poem: True sacrijice is true heart’s praise. He liked it when I could quote back at him.

  “Maybe when she was hiding here with me, when I was a baby, maybe she read some of the books,” I said. I had thought that before. When I read something that gave my soul joy and strength, I often wondered if my mother had read it, too, when she was in the secret room. I knew he had. He had read all the books.

  “Maybe she did,” he said, but his face was sad.

  He looked at me as if studying me with some question in his mind; finally, coming to a decision, he said, “Tell me, Memer. When you first came here, by yourself—before you could read them, what were the books to you?”

  It took me a while to answer. “Well, I gave some of them names.” I pointed to the large, leather-bound Annals of the Fortieth Consulate of Sundraman. “I called that the Bear. And Rostan was Shining Red. I liked it because of the gold on the cover… And I built houses with some of them. But I always put them back exactly where they’d been.”

  He nodded.

  “And then some of them—” I had not meant to say this, but the words came out of me—“I was afraid of them.”

  “Afraid. Why?”

  I did not want to answer, but again I spoke: “Because they made noises.”

  He made a little noise himself at that: ah. “Which books were they?” he asked.

  “It was one of them. Down at… at the other end. It groaned.”

  Why was I talking about that book? I never thought about it, I didn’t want to think about it, let alone talk about it.

  Dearly as I loved being in the secret room, reading with the Waylord, finding my greatest happiness in the treasure of story and poetry and history that was mine there, still I never went all the way to that end of the room where the floor became a rougher, greyer stone and the ceiling was lower, without skylights, so that the light died away slowly into the dark. I knew there was a spring or fountain there because I could hear the faint sound of it, but I’d never gone far enough to see it. Sometimes I thought the room became larger there in the shadow end, sometimes I thought it must grow smaller, like a cave or a tunnel. I had never been past the shelves where the book that groaned was.

  “Can you show me which book?”

  I sat still at the reading table for a minute and then said, “I was just little. I made up things like that. I pretended the Annals was a bear. It was silly.”

  “You have nothing to fear, Memer,” he said softly. “Some might. Not you.”

  I said nothing. I felt sick and cold. I was afraid. All I knew was that I was going to keep my mouth shut so that nothing else I didn’t want to say could come out of it.

  Again he sat pondering, and again came to some decision. “Time enough for that later. Now, ten more lines, 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 The Transformations, and in story The Tales of the Lords of Manva. I knew the Tales were stories not history, but they gave me truths I needed and wanted: about courage, friendship, loyalty to the death, about fighting the enemies of your people, driving them out of your land. All the winter I was sixteen I came to the secret room and read about the friendship of the heroes Adira and Marra. I longed to have a friend and companion like Adira. To be driven with him up into the snows of Sul, and suffer with him there, and then side by side with him to strike down like eagles on the hordes of Dorven, driving them back to their ships—I read that again and again. When I read of the Old Lord of Sul I saw him like my own lord—dark, crippled, noble, fearless. All about me in my city and my life were fear and distrust. What I saw in the streets daily made my heart shrink and cower. My love for the heroes of Manva was my heart’s blood. It gave me strength.