Voices aotws-2

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  And they came, dozens of people, hundreds. They came to see the Oracle Fountain run, and to hear those who had been there tell how the oracle had spoken and what it had said; that was when I first learned that not all had heard the same words, or that as the words were repeated they were changed and changed again. People came to see the Waylord, Galva the Reader, to greet him, to take counsel with him. Many who came were working men and women, others were or had been merchants, magistrates, mayors of wards of the city and members of the Council. They were all poor because we were all poor, you couldn’t tell shoemakers from ship masters by their clothes. Some of the working people came in only to bless the gods of the house and greet the Reader of the oracle with awed and joyful respect and be gone again, but others stayed along with the mayors and councillors, the merchants and members of great households, to sit and talk about what was happening and air their opinions on what could and should be done. So I first saw what it was to be a citizen, and what it was to be a waylord, too.

  I stayed with him to wait on his needs and because he asked me to be there. I found it difficult, because people looked at me with awe and fear. Some of them made the gesture of worship to me. I felt utterly false and foolish, and had no idea what to say to anybody. But they had the Waylord to talk to. And fortunately I had to go to the kitchen pretty often to give a hand to Ista, who was almost crazy with excitement and anxiety. The house was full again at last—“It’s like the old days!” she said over and over. “The good days.”—but she had no food to offer the guests of the house. “I can’t even offer them water!” she said, tears of rage springing into her eyes. “I haven’t got enough drinking cups!”

  “Borrow them,” said Bomi.

  “No, no,” Ista said, offended at the thought, but I said, “Why nott—and Bomi darted off to extort drinking cups from neighbors. I went back to the reception hall and spoke to Ennulo Cam, the wife of Sulsem Cam who had come last night—a year ago!—and had returned now with his wife and son to sit and talk with the Waylord and the others. I explained our need to her, and very soon a couple of boys from Cammand brought us a half hundred heavy glass goblets, telling Ista, as they had been bidden, “A gift from our house to the blessed House of the Fountain.” It was hard for Ista to take offense at that, though she scowled. From then on she kept Bomi and Sosta frantic, fetching water for every guest and taking back and washing out the goblets. She still wanted to offer food, of course, to everyone, but I did not see my way to begging on that scale. I said to her that the people came to talk not eat. She scowled again, bit her lip, and turned away. I realised then that I had given her an order, and she had taken it.

  I went to her and put my arms round her. She hadn’t cuffed me for years, but she never had been one for hugs. “Bymother,” I said, “don’t fret! Be happy with the spirits and shadows of our house. Our guests want nothing more than the water of the Oracle Fountain.”

  “Ah, Memer! I don’t know what to think!” she said, getting loose from me, with a hasty pat on my shoulder.

  None of us knew what to think, that day.

  When Orrec came back at last, he was the comet not the tail: a stream of people followed him from the Council Square. He was the hero of the city. He stopped at the Oracle Fountain and looked up at the ceaseless silver jet of water with the same laughing amazement I had seen on so many faces. Gry came to meet him there. Shetar was shut away in the Master’s rooms (where, Gry had told me, she was sulking and tearing strips out of the poor mangy old carpet). Orrec and Gry held each other for a long time before they went up the steps and into the reception hall.

  Everybody crowded after them. Once he had greeted the Waylord, Orrec had to tell the whole story that I’ve just written of the morning’s events at the Council House. Some of it we already knew from people who had been back and forth from Galvamand and the square, but the pursuit of Iddor and the priests to the prison chamber and the finding of Ioratth and Tirio was news to us—as was the disappearance of Iddor.

  If Orrec couldn’t tell us what he had said to the crowd, there were plenty of people who could: “He said, ‘Let them beg for alliance and we’ll grant them alliance!’’’ one old man shouted out. “By the Harrow of Sampa, let ’em beg! Let ’em crawl! And we’ll give or not give in our own good time!”

  That was the mood of the city, that day: fiercely joyous, belligerent, barely restrained from vengeance.

  Ioratth had ordered his soldiers to keep off the streets and stay within the barracks area south and east of the Council House, which they surrounded with a cordon of guards. Wanting access to the Council stables where their horses and some of their men were, the soldiers tried to cordon off a passage between the barracks and the stables, but the crowd in the square got ugly; stones were thrown; and the Gand ordered his men to stay where they were, whether in the barracks or the stableyards.

  The Alds were taking care to offer no provocation and show no fear. Their position could too easily become, perhaps already was, a state of siege. Once the habit of fear was broken, the citizens would realise that the conquerors who had mastered them for so long were dependent on them for supplies—and were, however formidable and well armed, vastly outnumbered. If the restraint Iorarth imposed on his men was mistaken for weakness, for unwillingness to fight, there could yet be a massacre.

  They talked about that in the reception hall. And they talked about Desac and his group, what their plan had been and how it had gone wrong. The man who had taken refuge with us, Cader Antro, was there, and his story was confirmed and enlarged by others. The arsonists were Ansul slaves, used as servants and sweepers by Ald courtiers; the idea of burning the great tent had come from one of them to begin with. They had secretly admitted to the tent other conspirators dressed as slaves, but armed, and with them had prepared so that fires would start up in several places at once, engulfing the tent in flame, while Desac’s men, rushing into the square from two directions, would attack the soldiers on guard. All that was to take place at the sunset ceremony; so that Iddor and Ioratth and many officers and courtiers would be in the tent when the fire broke out.

  But, because Iddor wanted to disturb Orrec’s recitation, the priests began the ceremony earlier than planned, and so the time of the assault had to be changed, and word of the change didn’t get to all the conspirators. The ceremony was already ending when the fires were set. Ioratth came late and was still there praying, but Iddor and the chief priests had just left the tent. The fire spread with terrible quickness, and all of Desacs people who were there attacked, but the soldiers were quick to rally and seemed fearless of the fire, the promised embrace of their Burning God. In the fighting and the smoke and contusion, evidently only Iddor and the priests saw Ioratth stagger free of the flames. They seized and carried him to the Council House, while the soldiers drove the conspirators, those who tried to flee and those who tried to attack, into the furnace of the fire to be burned alive. Desac was one of them.

  I could only think of that black foul dust of ash and cinder Orrec had told us of, kicked up by the feet of the crowds.

  The people hearing the story were silent for a while before they began to talk again.

  “So Iddor saw his chance,” one man said, “with the old Gand as good as dead.”

  “Why did he put him in prison? Why not finish him off?”

  “It’s his father, after all,”

  “What’s that to an Ald?”

  I thought of Simme, how proud he was of his father, even of his father’s horse.

  “He was going to get his own back on the old man. Seventeen years he’s been waiting!”

  “And the old man’s Ansul mistress.”

  “Torture them for the pleasure of it.”

  That brought a silence. People glanced uneasily at the Waylord.

  “So where’s he got to, that one, with his redhats?” a woman asked. People hated the Ald priests worse than they hated the soldiers. “I say they’ll find him hiding. They’d never get through the s
treets alive, that lot.”

  She was right. We heard about it later that day, as news was constantly brought down the street to us by dusty, excited, exhausted people coming from the square. The citizens swarming through the Council House, retaking it for the city, throwing out all the goods and furniture of the Ald courtiers and officers who had used it for their quarters, came on Iddor and three priests hiding in a tiny attic room in the base of the dome. They were taken down and locked in the basement room, the torture chamber, where Ioratth and Tirio had been locked for a night. Where Sulter Galva had been locked for a year.

  That news relieved our hearts. We had suffered much from Iddor’s belief that he had been divinely sent to drive out demons and destroy evil, and we all felt now that with him imprisoned, disgraced, the power of that belief was broken. We had to deal with an enemy still, but a human enemy, not a demented god.

  And it was a relief also to know that the wild crowd going through the Council House hadn’t torn the priests to pieces when they found them, but had locked them away to wait for some kind of justice-whether ours or the Alds’.

  “We may treat Iddor better than his father would,” said Sulsem Cam.

  “I doubt he’d be gentle with him,” Orrec said wryly.

  “No gentler than your lady and her lion,” said Per Actamo, who had rejoined Orrec here and helped him retell their exploits and adventures to newcomers wanting to hear it all over again all afternoon. “That was the beginning of the end of Iddor—when he flinched and drew back in front of all the crowd! Where is your lion, Lady Gry? She should be here to be praised.”

  “She’s in a very bad temper,” Gry said. “It’s her fasting day, and I’ve had to keep her indoors. I’m afraid she’s eaten part of the carpet.”

  “Give her a feast, not a fast!” said Per, and people laughed and called for the lion—“The only Ald on our side!” So Gry went and fetched Shetar, who was indeed in a sullen mood. She had not appreciated the swimming and boating of the night before, or the crowd scenes of the morning; she sensed the continuing tension in the city, and like all cats she detested uproar, excitement, change. She paced into the reception hall with a singsong snarling warrawarrawarra and a yellow glare. Everyone made her plenty of room. Gry led her up to the Waylord and had her do her stretching bow; and people laughed again and praised her. They asked for her to do her obeisance again, for Orrec, for Per, for a little boy of three who was there with his parents; and so Shetar got a good many treats, and began to cheer up.

  It was evening. The big room was growing shadowy. Ista, along with Ialba, Tirio’s companion who had brought us such important word at daybreak, came with lighted lamps. Ista had told me that that was always the signal for guests to leave, in the old days. And as if the ways and customs of our people had been given back to us today, all the visitors rose, one after another, and took their leave of the Waylord. They spoke to Orrec and Gry, and to me, and as they passed through the door they spoke to the souls and shadows of the house. As they passed the fountain leaping up into the evening air they blessed the Lord of the Springs and Waters, and as they crossed the Sill Stone they bent down to touch it.

  ♦ 14 ♦

  Lying in bed that night, sleep seemed as far from me as the moon, and I relived all the long day. I saw again Gry and her lion stand facing the priests and soldiers and the gold-cloaked man. I saw the leap of the fountain into the sunlight. I saw the Waylord stride out and down the steps beside me, saw him hold up a book before Iddor and us all, and heard that strange piercing voice, Let them set free… The cry echoed in my mind with the other words I myself had cried out or that had been said through me, Broken mend broken, and for a moment I thought I understood.

  Yet I was mystified again, remembering that when I went to the front of the house with Orrec and the others, the Waylord had gone back to the secret room, seeming in despair, taking refuge. He could not have gone clear back into the cave of the oracle―there had been not time enough for that. He must have gone straight to the shadow end, taken that book from the shelves there, and come back all the way through the rooms and corridors and courts of the great house, to stride forward to face Iddor―not lame, not a broken man, but healed and whole. For that brief time. For the time needed.

  Had he questioned the oracle? Had he known what the book said? What book was it?

  I had seen it only as a small book in his hand. I had not seen its pages. I had not, could not have read from it. Surely it had been the book that spoke, not I. I was no longer certain now even of the words―had they been Let them set free, or Be set free, or only Set free? I could hear the voice in my mind but not the words. That troubled me. I struggled to hear them but they slipped away from me as if through clear water. I saw the fountain, the morning sunlight over the roofs of Galvamand brightening the high blossom of the water… .

  And then it was morning indeed, early daylight dim on the walls of my little room.

  And it was the holiday of Ennu, who makes the way easy for the traveller, speeds the work, mends quarrels, and guides us into death. People say she goes before the dying spirit as a black cat, stopping and looking back if the shadow hesitates, sitting patiently, waiting for it to follow her. Few of our gods are given any figure or image, only Lero in stones, and Iene in the oak and willow; but Ennu is often carved as a little cat, smiling, with opal eyes. I had such a figure that had been my mother’s; it sat in the niche beside my bed, and I kissed it every morning and night. Ennu’s house-shrine in Galvamand is in the old inner courtyard, an in curved shell of stone on a pedestal, with the tracks of a cat carved across the floor of it, very faint, nearly worn away by the fingers that have touched them in blessing over the centuries. I got up and dressed, and took a bowl out to the Oracle Fountain for water, and a handful of meal from the kitchen bin, and went to that shrine to make her offering. The Waylord met me there, and we spoke the praise of Ennu together.

  Ista had breakfast ready for us, and then it was as the day before: the Waylord took his place in the front gallery of the house, and people came to talk to him and to one another all day long. The community of Ansul was knitting itself together, remaking itself, here.

  The Waylord wanted me there with him. He said to me that the people wanted me there. And it was true, though few of them spoke to me except in greeting, a deeply respectful greeting that made me feel as if I were pretending to be somebody important. Sometimes a child was sent forward to give me flowers, dropping them on my lap or at my feet and then running away. After a while I was so flower-bedecked I felt like a roadside shrine.

  I tried to understand what I was to them. They saw in me the mystery of what had happened yesterday―the fountain, the voice of the oracle. I was that mystery. The Waylord was their familiar friend and leader, a link to the old days. I was a new thing among them. He was Galva. I was the daughter of Galva, and through me the gods had spoken.

  But they were quite content for me not to speak. I was to smile and say nothing. Enough mystery is enough.

  They wanted to talk with the Waylord and with one another, to argue, to debate, to break out of seventeen years’ silence, full of words and passion and argument. And they did that.

  Some who came said they ought to be at the Council House, holding their meeting there, and as the idea excited them they were all ready to go off to the House that moment and reclaim it as the seat of our government. Selsem Cam and Per Actamo talked easily and quietly of the need to gather strength before they moved, of the need to plan and act upon plan: how could the Council meet if they had not held elections? Ansul had always been wary, they said, of men who claimed power as their right.

  “In Ansul we don’t take power, we lend it,” said Selsem Cam.

  “And charge interest on the loan,” the Waylord added drily.

  What the older people said carried weight with younger people, who had little or no memory of how Ansul had ruled itself and were uncertain how to begin to restore a government they could not remember. They
listened to Per because he was Orrec’s companion, Adira’s Marra, the second hero of the city. Also I saw that when any man of the Four Houses spoke, people listened with respect, a respect based on nothing but habit, tradition, the known name; but useful now, because it gave some structure and measure to what might otherwise have been a competition in opinion-shouting, Sulter Galva, the most respected of all, in fact said very little, letting the others talk out their passions and their theories, listening intently, the silence at the center.

  Often he looked up at me, or turned to see where I was sitting. He wanted me near him. We joined our silences.

  As the day went on, more of the people who came to Galvamand were armed: troops of men, some with nothing but sticks and cudgels but others with long knives, lances with new-forged heads, Ald swords taken from soldiers in the street battles two nights ago. During a long argument, I went out to breathe fresh air and look at the fountain. I went round to visit Gudit, and found him at the little stable forge hammering out a spearhead, while a young man stood waiting with a long shaft for the lance.

  The talk in the high room at the front of the house when I returned was less of meeting and voting and the rule of law than of assault, attack, plans to slaughter the Alds, though they didn’t say so openly. They spoke only of massing strength, of gathering the forces of the city together, of stockpiling weapons, of issuing an ultimatum.

  I’ve thought often since of what I heard then and the language they used. I wonder if men find it easier than women do to consider people not as bodies, as lives, but as numbers, figures, toys of the mind to be pushed about a battleground of the mind. This disembodiment gives pleasure, exciting them and freeing them to act for the sake of acting, for the sake of rnanipulating the figures, the game pieces. Love of country, or honor, or freedom, then, may be names they give that pleasure to justify it to the gods and to the people who suffer and kill and die in the game. So those words–love, honor, freedom–are degraded from their true sense. Then people may come to hold them in contempt as meaningless, and poets must struggle to give them back their truth.