Voices aotws-2

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  I was both hungry and thirsty after my difficult journey through my city. She brought out what they had to offer: water, a small piece of black bread dried hard, a couple of dried black figs. “Siege rations,” Ialba said with a smile. I ate them with the care and attention poverty’s gift deserves, wasting not a crumb.

  We heard the messenger depart, and soon enough Ioratth shouted, “Come!”

  Are we dogs? I thought. But I came, with Tirio and Ialba.

  Ioratth was sitting up straight, and his sallow, seamed face looked feverish. “By God, by God, Tirio, I think we’re off the hook,” he said. “God be praised! Listen. I want you both to go to the Palace or the Demon House, wherever there’s some kind of chief somebody in charge of the mob, and tell them this: No army has come from Asudar, No army will come from Asudar, so long as the city keeps the peace. Tell them that the Gand of Gands offers to his subjects of Ansul full relief from tribute, to be replaced by taxation paid to the treasury in Medron as a protectorate state of Asudar, The Son of the Sun has honored me with the title of Prince-Legate to the Protectorate. In good time I’ll invite the chief men of Ansul to take counsel with me and hear our orders concerning the government of the city and the terms of trade with Asudar. A number of soldiers will remain here as my personal guard and to protect the city from its own unruly elements and from invasion from Sundraman or elsewhere. The greater part of our troops will return to Medron-when it’s certain that Ansul is in compliance with our orders. Now, is there anybody in this damned city capable of answering that, and acting on it?”

  “I can take the message to the Waylord,” I said.

  “Do it. Better than dragging me through the streets in a cart. Do it and come back with an acceptance. Come back with some men to talk to. Why do they send me children, girls, by God!”

  “Because women and girls are citizens here, not dogs and slaves,” I said. “And if you knew how to write, you could send your so-called orders to the Waylord yourself and read his answers yourself!” I was shaking with fury.

  The Gand gave one sharp glance at me and made a dismissive gesture. “Tirio, will you go!” he said.

  “I’ll go with Memer,” she said. “I think that would be best.”

  Indeed it was best. All I’d heard, all I could hear of the Gand’s message, was that we were ordered to pay taxes to Asudar, submit to be a protectorate not a free state, and do whatever the Alds told us to do.

  I had to listen to what Tirio said to the Waylord, when we got back to Galvamand, and what he said to the people, and what people said about it, all day long, before I was able to understand that in fact Asudar was offering us our freedom―at a price―and that my people saw it clearly and truly as a victory.

  Maybe they could see it so clearly because it did have a price on it, in money and trade agreements, matters my people understand.

  Maybe I had so much trouble seeing it because nobody died bravely for it. No heroes fighting on Mount Sul. No more fiery speeches in the square. Only two middle-aged men, both crippled, sending messages across a city, cautious and wary, working out an agreement. And wrangles in the Council House. And a lot of talking and arguing and complaining in the marketplaces.

  And the fountain running in the forecourt of the House of the Oracle.

  And the temples of Ansul, the little houses of the gods and spirits, the shrines at every street corner and on every bridge, rebuilt, set up again, brought out of hiding, cleaned, carved anew, decorated with flowers. Lero’s Stone was so covered with offerings sometimes you could not see it. On Iene’s Feast, the solstice, men and boys brought garlands of oak and willow into the city in procession through the streets and hung them over the house doors, and women danced in the marketplaces and the square and sang Iene’s songs. The older women taught the girls, like me, who did not know the dance steps or the songs.

  All that summer people kept coming to the city from the rest of Ansul. Often they followed after the troops of Ald soldiers who were being withdrawn from the northern towns and gathered here before they were sent back east over the hills to Asudar, Citizens came to find out what was happening in the capital, and to take part in the elections; merchants and traders followed. In early autumn the Waylord of Tomer came to stay with the Waylord of Ansul. Ista lived in a passion of anxiety for two weeks making sure he was entertained in all ways as befitted the honor of the House of Galva.

  Bythen the Council was meeting regularly; and Galvamand was no longer the center of political planning and decision making. It was just the Waylord’s house, where a lot of talk took place about trade, about hay transport and cattle markets and what you could get in Medron or Dur for dried apricots or olives in brine. The first election held bythe newly elected Council had been that of the Waylord of Ansul, voted unanimously to Sulter Galva; and with the post they allotted funds for entertainment and upkeep of the house. Not lavish funds, but wealth untold to us who ran the household, and a heartening sign of the difference between paying tribute as a subject state of Asudar and paying taxes as a protectorate.

  I had been utterly wrong about the Gand’s message.

  I had misjudged it, and him. I had wanted to refuse patronisation, manipulation, compromise―politics. I had wanted to fling off every bond, to defy the tyrant. I had wanted to hate the Alds, drive them away, destroy them… myvow, mypromise, made when I was eight years old, that I had sworn by all the gods and by mymother’s soul.

  I had broken that promise. I had to break it. Broken mend broken.

  * * *

  THE MESSENGER OF the High Gand returned to Medron a few days after I carried the message to Ioratth. They had an escort of over a hundred soldiers, under the command of Simme’s father, and Simme rode beside him, going home. I had asked Ialba and Tirio to tell me what they could find out about them, and that is what they told me. I never saw Simme after he and I went through the lines together.

  That troop escorting the messenger back to Medron also carried a prisoner in one of the provision carts: Iddor, son of Ioratth. He was in chains, we heard, in slave’s clothing, with his hair and beard grown long, a sign of shame and disgrace to the Alds.

  Tirio told us that Ioratth had not set eyes on his son since his betrayal, had not let anyone ask what should be done with him, would not let his name be spoken. He had, however, ordered that the priests be released from prison, even those who had been captured with his son. Presuming on this leniency, the priests had tried to intercede on Iddor’s behalf, with a tale that they and Iddor had hidden Ioratth in the torture chamber only to save him from the vengeance of the rebel mob. Ioratth told them to be silent and be gone.

  Since their Gand had been through the fire, both burnt and spared, his soldiers saw him as clearly favored by their Burning God, as holy as any priest. Realising their disadvantage, most of the priests chose to go back to Asudar with this first contingent of the army. So Ioratth’s captains, left to their own judgment, decided the best thing to do with their embarrassing prisoner, his son, was send him off too, and let the High Gand decide what to do with him.

  I was disappointed by this ignominious, uncertain outcome. I wanted to know Iddor would be punished as he deserved. The Alds loathed treachery, I knew, and were shocked by the betrayal of a father by a son. Would he be tortured, as he had tortured Sulter Galva? Would he be buried alive, the way so many people in Ansul had been, taken down to the mudflats south of the city and trampled into the wet, salt mud until they suffocated?

  Did I want him to be tortured and buried alive?

  What did I want? Why was I so unhappy through all this bright summer, the first summer of our freedom? Why did I feel that nothing was settled, nothing won?

  * * *

  ORREC WAS SPEAKING in the Harbor Market. It was a golden autumn afternoon, windless. Sul stood white across the dark-blue straits. Everybody in the city was there to hear the maker. He told some of the Chamhan, and they called for more and wouldn’t let him go. I was too far away to hear well, and was res
tless. I left the crowd. I walked up West Street alone. Nobody was in the streets. Everybody was there behind me, together, in the marketplace, listening. I touched the Sill Stone and went into myhouse, clear through it, past the Waylord’s rooms, to the back, to the dark corridors. I wrote the words in the air before the wall and the door opened and I went into the room where the books and the shadows are.

  I had not been there for months. It was as it had always been: the clear, even light from the high skylights, the quiet air, the books in their patient, potent rows, and if I listened, the faint murmur of water in the cave down at the shadow end. No books layout on the table. There was no sign of any presence there. But I knew the room was full of presences.

  I’d intended to read in Orrecs book; but when I stood at the shelves myhand went to the book I had been working on last spring, the night before Gry and Orrec came, a text in Aritan, the Elegies. They are short poems of mourning and praise for people who died a thousand years ago. The names of the authors are mostly not given, and all we know of the people named in the poems is what the poet says.

  One of them reads, “Sullas who kept the house well, so that the patterned pavements shone, now keeps the house of silence. I listen for her step.”

  Another, the one I’d been trying to understand when I stopped reading, is about a horse trainer; the first line is, “Surely where he is, they are around him, the long-maned shadows.”

  I sat down at the table, at my old place, with that book and the wordbook of Aritan, with its notes in the margins written bymany hands over the centuries, and tried to make out what the next lines meant.

  When I’d understood the poem as well as I could, and had it in my memory, the light from the skylights was fading. Leros Day, the equinox, was past, the days were getting short. I closed the book and sat on at the table, not lighting the lamp, just sitting there feeling for the first time in a long time a sense of peace, of being in the right place. I let that feeling come all through me and penetrate me and settle in me. As it did, I was able to think, slowly and clearly; not so much in words as in knowing what matters and seeing what has to be done, which is the way I think. I hadn’t been able to think that way for months.

  That’s why when I got up to leave the room, I took with me a book from it, a thing I had never done before. I took Rostan, the one I called Shining Red when I was a little child building walls and bear’s dens with the books.

  I had heard Orrec speak of it longingly, not long ago, as a lost work of the maker Regali. The Waylord had said nothing in reply.

  He had never said anything to Orrec about the books in the secret room. So far as I knew, he and I alone knew of the room itself.

  That the oracle spoke through books, people knew vaguely, and now they’d actually heard its voice; but they didn’t ask to know more about the mystery, they didn’t want to pry into it, they let it be. After all, for years, books themselves had been accursed and forbidden, dangerous things even to know about. And though we of Ansul live comfortably among the shadows of our dead, we’re not a people with much taste for the uncanny. Sulter Galva the Reader was held in some awe, as was I; but people much preferred to deal with Sulter Galva the Waylord. The oracle had done its work, we’d been set free, and now we could get back to business.

  But my business was a little different. That’s what I’d seen at last, sitting at the reading table, with a closed book in my hands.

  ♦ 16 ♦

  Orrec, Gry, and Shetar had returned from the Harbor Market late in the afternoon, Orrec to collapse and sleep for a while as he always did when he could after a public performance. He was reviving now, roaming about barefoot and disheveled, when I came to the Master’s rooms. He said, “Hello, horse thief,” and Gry said, “There you are! We were just talking about taking a walk in the old park before it gets too dark to see.”

  Shetar did not understand separate words, such as “walk,” as many dogs can do; but she often was aware of intentions before people knew they were intending anything. She was already standing up, and now she paced over with her graceful slouch to the door and sat down to wait for us. The plumed tip of her tail twitched back and forth. I scratched her around the ears and she leaned her head into my hand and purred a little.

  “I brought this for you, Orrec,” I said, and held out the tall book with its gold-printed red cover. He came over, slouching a bit himself and yawning, to take it. When he saw it was a book his mouth snapped shut and his face went taut. When he saw what book it was, he stood motionless, and it was a long moment before he drew breath.

  “Oh, Memer,” he said. “What have you given me?”

  I said, “What I have to give.”

  He looked up from the book then to my face. His eyes were luminous. It gave me great joy to give him joy.

  Gry came to his side and looked at the book; he showed her what it was, handling it with a lover’s care, reading the first line half aloud. “I knew,” he said, “I knew they must be here―some of the books of the great library―But this―!” He looked at me again. “Was this― Are there books here in the house, Memer?”

  I hesitated. Gry, as quickly aware of feeling and intention as Shetar, laid her hand on his arm and said, “Wait, Orrec.”

  I had to think, and quickly, what indeed my intention was, what right I had and what responsibility. Was this book mine to give? And if it was, what of the other books? And the other lovers of books?

  What I saw was that I could not lie to Orrec. And that answered the question of my responsibility. As for the right, I had to claim it.

  “Yes,” I said. “There are books here. But I don’t think I can take you to the place where they are. I’ll ask the Waylord. But I think it’s closed, except to us. To my people. I think our guardians keep it hidden. The spirits of the house, the ancestors. And the ones who were here before us. The ones who told us to stay here.”

  Orrec and Gry had no trouble understanding this. They too had gifts of their lineage. They knew the burdens and chances laid on us by the shadows in our blood and bone, and by the spirits of the place we live in.

  “Orrec, let me tell him I gave you the book,” I said. “I didn’t ask him if I could.” Orrec looked concerned, and I said, “It’ll be all right. But I need to talk to him.”

  “Of course.”

  “He never spoke of the books to you, because it was dangerous to know,” I said. I felt I must defend the Waylord’s silence. “For so long, he had to hide them all. From everybody. The Alds could never find them, here. So they were safe, and people weren’t in danger for having them. But people knew. They brought books here in secret, at night―hidden in packages of candles or old clothes―in firewood, in a haybale-they risked their lives bringing books here, where they knew we could keep them safe. Families who’d hidden their books, like the Cams and the Gelbs, and people we didn’t know, just people who’d found a book or kept it or saved it from the Alds. They knew to bring it here to Galvamand. But now, now we don’t have to hide any more―do we?… Can you―could you ever read to the people, Orrec? Instead of reciting? To let them know, to let them see that books aren’t demons, that our history, our hearts, our freedom’s written in them?”

  He looked at me with a slow, joyful smile that became almost a laugh. “I think it’s you that should read to them, Memer,” he said.

  “Warrawarrroo!” Shetar said, losing patience at last.

  Gry and I left Orrec with his treasure. We let Shetar lead us out and guide us in the twilight up to Denios’ Fountain. There she roamed about through the fallen leaves and rustling shrubbery, hunting mice, while we talked, sitting on the old marble bench by the fountain. Lights were coming on down in the houses of the city. Far out in the straits, under the last dim purple of sunset, we saw the glimmer of the boats of night fishermen. Sul was a pure cone of darkness against the dying light. An owl swooped past near us, and I said, “The good omen to you.”

  “And to you,” Gry said. “You know, in Trundlede they call o
wls bad luck? They’re a gloomy, downhearted lot there. Too much forest, too much rain.”

  “You’ve travelled all over the world,” I said dreamily.

  “Oh, no, not yet. We’ve never been to Sundraman. Or the capes of Manva or Melune. And among the City States we’ve seen only Sentas and Pagadi, and we came only through a corner of Vadalva… And even if you know a land well, there’s always a town or a hill you haven’t seen. I don’t think we’ll run out of world.”

  “When do you think you’ll go on?”

  “Well, until just now, I’d have guessed that Orrec might be thinking of moving on to Sundraman before the winter, or in the spring. He wants to see what kind of poetry they have there, before we go back to Mesun. But now… I doubt he’ll go till he knows every book you can show him.”

  “Are you sorry?”

  “Sorry? Why? You’ve given him a great happiness, and I love to see him happy. It doesn’t come easy to him. Orrec has a difficult heart… You know what he can do with a crowd of people, how easy it seems to come to him and how they love him―and doing it, he’s carried away by it―but afterward, he feels cast down and false. It isn’t me at all, he says, it’s the sacred wind blows through me, and it empties me and leaves me like dry grass… But if he can write, and read, and follow his own heart in silence, he’s a happy man.”

  “That’s why I love him,” I said. “I’m like that.”

  “I know,” she said, and put her arm around me.

  “But you yourself might want to be going on, Gry. Not just sitting here all year with a lot of books and politics.”

  She laughed. “I like it here. I like Ansul. But if we stay through the winter, and I think now we will, I might find somebody who needs a hand training horses.”

  “Surely where he is, they are around him, the long-maned shadows,” I said. I said the rest of the poem for her when she asked.

  “Yes. That poet got it right,” she said. “I like that.”