Voices aotws-2

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  We heard the clatter of hoofs, and a blue-cloaked officer rode in and halted his horse in the archway.

  “Well?” said Gudit in a loud, belligerent tone, straightening up his hunched back as well as he could and glaring. Nobody rode into his stableyard uninvited.

  “A message from the Palace of the Gand of Ansul to the maker Orrec Caspro,” said the officer.

  “Well?”

  The officer looked curiously at the old man for a moment. “The Gand will have the maker attend him at the Palace late tomorrow afternoon,” he said, politely enough.

  Gudit gave a brief nod and turned his back. I also looked away, picking up a kitten as an excuse. I knew that elegant sorrel mare.

  “Hey, Mem,” somebody said. I froze. I turned around reluctantly, and there was Simme standing inside the stableyard. The officer was backing his mare out of the archway. He spoke to Simme as he turned the horse, and Simme saluted him.

  “That’s my dad,” Simme said to me, with transparent pride. “I asked him if I could come along with him. I wanted to see where you live.” His smile was fading as I stared at him saying nothing. “It’s, it’s really big,” he said. “Bigger than the Palace. Maybe.” I said nothing. “It’s the biggest house I ever saw,” he said.

  I nodded. I couldn’t help it.

  “What’s that?”

  He came closer and bent over to see the kitten, which was squirming in my hands and needling me fiercely.

  “Kitten,” I said.

  “Oh. Is it, is it from that lion?”

  How could anybody be so stupid?

  “No, just a house cat. Here!” I passed the kitten to him.

  “Ow,” he said, and half dropped it. It scampered off with its tiny tail in the air.

  “Claws,” he said, sucking his hand.

  “Yes, it’s really dangerous,” I said.

  He looked confused. He always looked confused. It was unseemly to take advantage of anybody so confused. But it was almost irresistible.

  “Can I see the house?” he asked.

  I stood up and dusted my hands. “No,” I said. “You can look at it from outside. But you can’t go in. You shouldn’t have come even this far. Strangers and foreigners stop in the forecourt until they’re invited farther. People with manners dismount in the street and touch the Sill Stone before they come into the forecourt.”

  “Well, I didn’t know,” he said, backing away a little.

  “I know you didn’t. You Alds don’t know anything about us. All you know is that we can’t come under your roof. You don’t even know that you can’t come under ours. You are ignorant.” I was trying to hold back the flood of shaking, triumphant rage that swelled in me.

  “Well, look. I was hoping we could be friends,” Simme said. He said it in his hangdog way. But it took some courage to say it at all.

  I walked towards the arch, and he came with me.

  “How can we be friends? I’m a slave, remember?”

  “No you aren’t. Slaves are… Slaves are eunuchs, you know, and women, and… ” He ran out of definitions.

  “Slaves are people who have to do what the master orders. If they don’t, they’re beaten or killed. You say you’re the masters of Ansul. That makes us slaves.”

  “You don’t do anything I tell you to do,” he said. “You aren’t any kind of slave.”

  He had a point there.

  We had come out of the stableyard and were walking under the high north wall of the main house. It was built of massive squared stones for ten feet up from the ground; above that was a story of finer stonework with tall double-arched windows, and high above that carved cornices supported the deep eaves of the slate roof. He glanced up at it several times, quickly, askance, the way a horse eyes something that spooks him.

  We came round into the forecourt, which goes the whole width of the house. It’s raised a step above the street and separated from it by a line of arcaded columns. The pavement is of polished stones, grey and black, firtted into a complex geometrical pattern, a maze. Ista told me how they used to dance the maze on the first day of the year, the spring equinox, in the old days, singing to Iene who blesses growing things. The pavement was dirty; dust and leaf litter had blown across it. It was a big job to sweep it. I tried sometimes, but I never could keep it clean. Simme started to walk across the maze.

  “Get off that!” I said. He jumped, and followed me down the step between the columns into the street, staring with a startled, innocent look, almost like the kittens.

  “Demons,” I said with a grin, a snarl, gesturing to the grey-and-black pattern of the stones. He didn’t even see it.

  “What’s that!” he said. He was looking at the stump of the Oracle Fountain.

  The fountain is to the right as you face the great doors. The basin is green serpentine—Lero’s stone—ten feet or so across. The water had sprung from a central jet; the bronze spout stuck up, now, out of a marble lump so broken and disfigured you could hardly see that it had once been shaped as an urn and carved with watercress leaves and lilies. Dust and dead leaves lay in the basin.

  “A fountain full of demon water,” I said. “It ran dry centuries ago. But your soldiers smashed it all the same, to get the demons out.”

  “You don’t have to talk about demons all the time,” he said sullenly.

  “Oh but look,” I said, “see, around the base of the urn, those little carvings? Those are words. That’s writing. Writing’s black magic. Written words are all demons, aren’t they? You want to go nearer and read them? Want to see some demons close up?”

  “Come on, Mem,” he said. “Layoff.” He glared at me, hurt and resentful, That was what I wanted, wasn’t it?

  “All right,” I said after a while. “But look, Simme. There isn’t any way we can be friends. Not till you can read what the fountain says. Not till you can touch that stone and ask blessing on my house.”

  He looked at the long, ivory-colored Sill Stone set into the center of the step, worn into a soft hollow by the hands that had touched it over all the centuries. I bent down now and touched it.

  He said nothing. He turned at last and went away down Galva Street. I watched him go. There was no triumph in me. I felt defeated.

  * * *

  ORREC CAME TO DINNER that evening, recovered and hungry. We talked first of his recitation, he and Gry and I telling the Waylord what he had said and how the crowd had responded to it.

  Sosta had been down to the market to hear him and now was swoonier than ever, gazing at him across the table with her face gone all soft and loose, till he had to take pity on her. He tried to joke, but that didn’t work, so he tried to turn her mind from him to her real future, asking where she would live after she married. She managed to explain that her betrothed had chosen to join our household and be a Galva. Orrec and Gry, who had a great interest in the ways people do things, asked all about our customs of marriage-bargain and chosen kinship. Mostly Sosta gazed, mute with adoration, and the Waylord answered; but when Ista sat down with us at table she had a chance to boast about her son-in-law to be, which she loved to do.

  “It seems hard that he and Sosta can’t see each other all this time before the wedding,” Gry said. “Three months!”

  “Betrothed couples used to be able to meet at any public occasion,” the Waylord explained. “But now we have no dances or festivals. So the poor things have to catch glances in passing…”

  Sosta blushed and smirked. Her betrothed strolled by regularly with his friends every evening, just when Ista and Sosta and Bomi happened to be sitting out in the side court facing Galva Street to take the air.

  After dinner the rest of us went to the little north court. We found Desac already there waiting. He came forward and took Orrec’s hands and called blessing on him. “I knew you’d speak for us!” he said. “The fuse is lit.”

  “Let’s see what the Gand thinks of my performance,” said Orrec. “I might get a critical commentary.”

  “Has he sent
for you?” asked Desac, “Tomorrow? What time?”

  “Late afternoon—is that right, Memer?”

  I nodded.

  “Will you go?” the Waylord asked.

  “Of course,” said Desac.

  “I can scarcely refuse,” Orrec said. “Though I could ask to postpone.” He looked at the Waylord, alert to catch the meaning of his question.

  “You must go,” Desac said. “The timing is perfect.” His tone was brusque and military.

  I could see Orrec didn’t like being told he must go.

  He kept his eyes on the Waylord.

  “No profit in postponement, I suppose,” the Waylord said. “But there may be some danger in going.”

  “Should I go alone?”

  “Yes,” Desac said.

  “No,” Gry said in a calm, flat voice.

  Orrec looked at me. “Everybody gives orders except us, Memer.”

  ’’’The gods love poets, for they obey the laws the gods obey,’” the Waylord said.

  “Sulter, my friend, there’s danger in any undertaking,” Desac said with a kind of impatient compassion. “You’re walled up here, away from the life of the streets, the doings of the people. You live among shadows of ancient times and share their wisdom. But a time comes when wisdom is in action—when caution becomes destruction.”

  “A time comes when the will to act defeats thought,” the Waylord said grimly.

  “How long must I wait? There was no answer given!”

  “Not to me.” The Waylord glanced very briefly at me.

  Desac did not notice that. He was angry now. “Your oracle is not mine. I was not born here. Let books and children tell you what to do. I’ll use my head. If you distrust me as a foreigner you should have told me years ago. The people who are with me trust me. They know I never wanted anything but the freedom of Ansul and the restoration of the bond with Sundraman. Orrec Caspro knows that. He stands with me. I’ll go now. I’llcome back here to Galvamand when the city is free. Surely you’ll trust me then!”

  He turned and strode out of the courtyard, not through the house but down the broken steps at the open north end. He turned the corner of the house and was gone. The Waylord stood silent, watching him.

  After a long time Orrec asked, “Was I the fool who lit the fire?”

  “No,” the Waylord said. “A spark from the flint, maybe. No blame in that.”

  “If I go tomorrow I will go alone,” Orrec said, but the Waylord smiled a little and looked at Gry.

  “You go, I go,” she said. “You know that.”

  After a while Orrec said, “Yes, I do. But,” to the Waylord, “if I went too far today, the Gand may be forced to punish me, to show his power. Is that what you fear?”

  The Waylord shook his head. “He’d have sent soldiers here. It’s Desac I fear. He will not wait for Lero.”

  Lero is the ancient, sacred soul of the ground where our city stands. Lero is the moment of balance. Lero is a great round stone down in the Harbor Market, so poised that it might move at any time and yet has never moved.

  The Waylord soon excused himself from us, saying he was tired. He gave me no sign to follow or come to him later. He went into the house, slow and lame, holding himself upright.

  I woke again and again that night seeing the words in the book, Broken mend broken, hearing the voice say them, my mind going over them, over and over them, trying to make them into meaning.

  ♦ 11 ♦

  The next morning I did the house worship very early and then went down to both markets, not only to buy the food we needed but to see what was going on in the city. I thought everything would be changed, everybody would be ready for a great thing to happen, as I was. But nobody seemed ready for anything. Everything was just as always, people in the streets hurrying, not looking at one another, keeping out of trouble; Ald guards in blue cloaks swaggering at the corner of the marketplace; vendors in their stalls, children and old women bargaining and buying and creeping home on the byways. No tension, no excitement, nobody saying anything unusual. Only once I thought I heard somebody crossing the Customs Street bridge whistle a few notes of the tune of “Liberty.”

  When Orrec and Chy set off for the Council House late in the afternoon they went on foot. They took Shetar, but not me. There was no reason to have a groom without a horse, and they were concerned that there might be danger. I was relieved. I didn’t want to face Simme, because every time I thought of him my heart sank with shame.

  But as soon as they were gone I knew I couldn’t stay at home. I couldn’t bear to sit in the house waiting. I had to be closer to the Council Hill, where they were. I had to be near them.

  I dressed in mywomen’s clothes, with myhair done up in a knot instead of worn long like a child or a man, so that I was Memer the girl instead of Mem the groom or Nobody the boy. I wanted to wear myown clothes because I needed to be myself. Perhaps I had to put myself into a little danger, to feel that I was with them.

  I walked along Galva Street quickly, not looking up, as women always walked, till I came to Goldsmiths’ Bridge over the Central Canal. The gold of Ansul had mostly gone to enrich Asudar; many of the shops on the bridge had long been closed, but some still sold cheap trinkets and worship-candles and such. I could go into one of the shops, out of the thoroughfare, and keep watch for myfriends.

  Even though nothing had been going on in the markets, and there was no sign of any agitation here at the bridge nearest the Council Hill, and the two Ald foot soldiers on guard duty were lounging on the bridge steps playing dice, I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that something was happening or about to happen—a sense that some great thing overhead was bending and bending, about to break.

  I stood in the shadow of a shop doorway. I’d talked a little with the old man who kept the shop, telling him I was waiting to meet a friend; he nodded knowingly and disapprovingly, but let me stay. Now he dozed behind his counter with its trays of wooden beads, glass bangles, and incense sticks. Not many people went byoutside. There was a little god-niche bythe door frame and I touched the sill of it now and then, whispering the blessing.

  As if in a dream I saw a lion pace by,lashing its tail. I came out of the shop and fell into step with myfriends, who looked only mildly surprised. “I like your hair that way,” Gry said. She was dressed as Chy, but was no longer playing the role.

  “Tell me what happened!”

  “When we get home.”

  “No, please, now.”

  “All right,” Orrec said. We were on the steps at the north end of the bridge. He turned aside at the bottom, where a railed marble pavement projects out over the canal; from it a narrow flight of stairs leads down to a pier for boats and fishermen. We descended those steps to the canal bank, right under the bridge, out of sight of the street. The first thing we did was go down and touch the water, with a word of blessing for Sundis, the river that makes our four canals. Then we all squatted there, watching the brownish-green, half-transparent water run. It seemed to carry urgency away with it. But pretty soon I said, “So?”

  “Well,” Gry said, “the Gand wanted to hear the story Orrec told in the market yesterday.”

  “Adira and Marra?”

  They both nodded.

  “Did he like it?”

  “Yes,” Orrec said. “He said he didn’t know we had warriors like that. But he particularly liked the Old Lord of Sul. He said, ‘There is the courage of the sword and the courage of the word, and the courage of the word is rarer.’ You know, I wish I knew some way to bring him and Sulter Galva together. They’re men who would understand each other.”

  That would have offended me a few days earlier. Now it seemed right.

  “And nothing unusual happened? He didn’t ask you to sing ‘Liberty,’ did he?”

  Orrec laughed. “No. He didn’t. But there was a little commotion.”

  “The priests started a chanting worship in the tent again, just when Orrec started reciting,” Gry said. “Loud. Drums. Lo
ts of cymbals. Ioratth went black as a thundercloud. He asked Orrec to stop, and sent an officer into the tent. And the head priest came right out, all in red with mirrors, very gorgeous he was, but grim as death. He stood there and said the holy worship of the Burning God was not to be interrupted by vile heathen impieties. Ioratth said the ceremony of sacrifice was to be at sunset. The priest said the ceremony had begun. Ioratth said it was two hours yet till sunset. The priest said the ceremony had begun and would continue. So Ioratth said, ‘An impious priest is a scorpion in the kings slipper!’ And he sent for slaves and had a carpet set up on poles to make shade, by the arcade above the East Canal, and we all trooped over, and Orrec went on.”

  “But Iorarth lost the round,” Orrec said. “The priests carried on with their sacrifice. Ioratth finally had to hurry over to the big tent so he wouldn’t miss the whole thing.”

  “Priests are good at making people jump,” Gry said. “There’s a lot of priests in Bendraman. Bossing people about.”

  “Well,” Orrec said, “they’re held in honor, and they perform important rites, so they get to meddling with morals and politics… Ioratth’s going to need support from his High Gand against this lot.”

  “I think he sees you as support,” Gry said. “A way to begin making some kind of link with people here. I wonder if that’s why he sent for you.”

  Orrec looked thoughtful, and sat thinking it over. A horse galloped by on the street high above us, with a loud, hard clackety-clackety of shod hoofs on stone. The sleek surface of the water ruffled and roiled out in the middle of the canal. The sea wind that had blown all day had died away, and this was the first breath of the land wind of evening. Shetar, who had lain down on the dirt, sat up and made a low singsong snarling noise. The fur along her spine was raised a little, making her look fluffy.

  The water rippled against the lowest marble step and the pilings of the pier. There was a smoky tint in the fading, red-gold light on the wooded hills above the city. Everything down here by the water was peaceful, and yet it was as if a breath were being held, as if everything held still, poised. The lion stood up, tense, listening.