Powers aotws-3

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  As for Sotur, their orphaned niece, her wishes in marriage wouldn’t count for much. She’d be married to make the most advantageous connection. It was the lot of almost all girls of the Families; not that different from the slave girls. Sometimes the thought of my grave, sweet-voiced Sotur being handed off to some uncaring man drove me to burning, helpless rage, to the point where I thought I longed for it to happen—so that she’d be gone from the House, and I wouldn’t have to see her daily, and be ashamed that I was only a slave and only fourteen years old and only able to write my stupid poems and yearn and yearn to touch her and never be able to touch her…

  Sallo knew how I felt, of course; if I’d wanted to hide anything from Sallo I couldn’t have. She knew that I kept, folded tight in a tiny pouch on a cord about my neck, a note Sotur had written me a year ago when I had a fever—Get well soon dear Gavir, it is as dull as dust without you. Sallo grieved for my impossible longing. She fretted over the injustice that allowed her love full satisfaction and utterly forbade it to mine, even in dream. Of course there were stories of love affairs between noblewomen and slaves, but they were all sad and shameful, ending in mutilation or death for the man, and for the woman maybe not death, these days, but horrible public shame and degradation. Sallo tried to make sense of these hard laws, to understand them as protecting us, and she convinced both me and herself that in fact they did protect us; but she didn’t try to pretend that they were just. Justice is in the hands of the gods, an old poet wrote, mortal hands hold only mercy and the sword. I told her that line, and she liked it, and re-peated it. I think it made her think of Yaven, her kind-hearted, beloved hero who held both mercy and a sword.

  Romantic love and desire was my torment. Sallo was my solace, and so was my work.

  Everra had finally given me free run of the library of Arcamand, which till then I had never entered, even when I was a sweeper boy and went all over the house. Its door was on the corridor past the domed shrine of the Ancestors. When I first entered it, I felt the fear of crossing a sacred threshold almost as I might have done if I had transgressed and gone among the Ancestors. It was a small room, well lighted by high windows of clear glass. There were over two hundred books on its shelves, all carefully arranged and dusted by Everra. The room smelled of books, that subtle smell which to some is stuffy and to others intoxicating, and it was silent. No one ever came down that corridor except to sweep it or to enter the library, and no one entered the library except Everra, Sotur, Sallo, and me.

  The girls were allowed because Sotur had asked our teacher to allow her and Sallo the privilege, and Everra couldn’t refuse her anything. So-tur was the only older child of the Family pursuing her reading or studies, for neither Yaven nor Astano was free to do what they liked any more. She told Everra that he had given her and Sallo the soul’s hunger for books and thoughts, and must not deprive them now that Sallo was starving among the inanities of the silk rooms and she among the pomposities of merchants and the illiteracy of politicians. So, with the permission of the Father and Mother, and with many cautions about indiscriminate reading, he gave them each a key.

  It was hard for me to admit it to myself, and I never talked about it with Sallo or Sotur, but the long-desired library was a disappointment. I already knew more than half the books in it, and the ones I didn’t know, that looked so mysterious and treasurable sitting on the shelves in their dark leather covers or scroll boxes, mostly turned out to be dull—annals of law, compendia, endless epic poems by mediocre poets. They had all been there for at least fifty years, sometimes much longer. Ever-ra was proud of the fact. “No modern trash for Arcamand,” he said. I was willing to believe him that most modern writing was trash, on the evidence that so much old writing was trash; but I didn’t put it that way to him.

  Still, the library became dear to me as a place to be with Sallo, with Sotur, and by myself. It was a place of peace, where I could give myself to the poets I treasured, and the great historians, and my own dreams of adding something to literature.

  My poems to Sotur, written with my heart’s blood, were stiff and stupid. I knew I was no poet, though I loved both poetry and history—the arts that brought some clarity, some hope of meaning, to human emotions and the senseless, cruel record of human wars and governments. History would be my art. I knew I had a lot to learn, but learning was a delight to me, I had grand plans of books I would write. My life’s work, I decided, would be to combine the annals of the various City States into one grand history; thus, incidentally, I would become a grand and famous historian. I made outlines of such a synthesis, ignorant, overambitious, full of errors, but not entirely foolish.

  My great fear was that someone had already written my history of the City States and that I didn’t know it, because Everra wouldn’t buy any new books.

  One morning in early spring he sent me across town to Belmand, a household known as ours was for its books and learning. I liked going there. The teacher, Mimen, a younger man than Everra, was his closest friend. They were always exchanging books and manuscripts, often with me as messenger. I was delighted to be excused from hearing little children drone out their alphabet, to get out of the house into the sunlight of morning. I took the long way round, through the sycamore grove where Torm used to drill us, south along the streets under the city walls, loitering along and enjoying my freedom all the way. At Belmand, Mimen made me welcome. He liked me, and had often talked to me about the works of some modern writers, reciting me poetry by Rettaca, Caspro, and others, whose names Everra wouldn’t even say. Mimen never lent me their books, knowing Everra had forbidden me to read them. This day we talked a little, but only of the rumor of war with Morva. Both Yaven and a son of the Bel Family were with the army there. Mimen had to return to his schoolroom, so he gave me an armload of books, and I set off home.

  I went directly across town this time, because the books were heavy. I was just crossing Long Street when I heard shouting. Looking down the street towards the River Gate I saw smoke—a house afire—or more than one house, for the clouds of smoke billowed up higher every moment. People now were rushing past me across the square behind the Forefathers’ Shrine, some running from the fire, some towards it; those who ran towards it were city guards, and as they ran they drew their swords. I stood and saw, as I had seen before, a troop of soldiers coming up Long Street, mounted and afoot, under a green banner. The soldiers and the city guards met and fought with a shouting and clashing of arms. I could not move until I saw the riderless horse break from that knot and muddle of fighting men and gallop up the street straight at me, lathered with white sweat streaked red, blood running from where its eye should be. The horse screamed, and then I could move.

  I dodged and ran across the square, between the Shrine and the Senate House, by the back streets, to Arcamand. I burst into the slaves’ door shouting, “Invasion! Enemy soldiers inside the city!”

  It was news to the household, for Arcamand is set apart by the quiet squares and broad streets of its neighborhood. There was great panic and dismay as the word spread. Elsewhere in Etra word of the incursion had got about much faster, and probably by the time Ennumer had stopped shrieking, the city guards and off-duty soldiers and citizens had driven the invaders back out the River Gate.

  Cavalrymen from a troop quartered near the Cattle Market went in pursuit of them and caught a few stragglers east of the bridge, but the main body of the enemy got away. None of our soldiers had been killed, though several had been wounded. No damage had been done except the firing of several thatch-roofed storage sheds near the Gate; but the shock to the city was tremendous. How had troops from Casicar been able to approach Etra in broad daylight, let alone ride right in through the River Gate? Was this impudent foray merely the signal of a full-scale assault from Casicar, for which we were utterly unprepared? The incredulous shame, the rage, and the fear we all felt that first day were uncontrollable. I saw the Father, Altan Arca, weep as he spoke to Torm, giving orders for the defense of the house be
fore he left for an emergency meeting of the Senate.

  My heart swelled with the wish to help my Family, my people, to be useful, to stand against the enemies of Etra. I helped collect all the children in the dormitory with Iemmer, and then waited in the schoolroom for orders as to what we house people could do. I wanted very much to be with Sallo, but she was shut up in the silk rooms, where male slaves could not come. Everra, grey and shaken, sat reading in silence; I paced up and down the room. There was a long, strange silence in the great house. Hours passed.

  Torm came by the door of the schoolroom and seeing me, stopped. “What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting to know how we may be of use, Torm-di,” Everra said, getting up hastily.

  Torm shouted to someone, “Two more here,” then strode on without a word to Everra.

  Two young men came in and told us to follow them. They were wearing swords and so must be noblemen, though we did not know them. They took us across the back court to the barrack. The barrack doors had a great outside bolt across them, which I had never seen closed before. The two young men slid it aside and ordered us in. We heard the bolt slam to behind us.

  All the male slaves of Arcamand were there, locked up in the barrack. Even the body servants of the Father, who slept in his anteroom, were there, even the stablemen and Sem the head hostler, who lived and slept in the mews over the stables. It was terribly crowded, for with their various duties day and night not more than half the men would normally be in the barrack, and then only to change clothes or sleep. There were not nearly enough bunks for this crowd, hardly room even to sit down. Many were afoot, talking, excited and disturbed. It was quite dark, because not only were the doors locked but the windows had been shuttered. The close air stank of sweat and bedding.

  My teacher stood bewildered just inside the doors, I got him to come with me to his room, a little cubicle partitioned off from the main dormitory; there were four such cubicles reserved for the older and most highly favored slaves. Three stablemen were sitting on Everra’s cot, but Sem ordered them off—“That’s the Teacher’s room, you stinking sons of horse dung! Get out of there!”

  I thanked Sem, for Everra seemed almost stunned, unable to speak. I got him to sit down on his cot, and he was finally able to tell me that he was all right. I left him there and went to listen to what the other men were saying. When we first came in I heard angry voices, indignant protests, but these died down as some of the older men told the younger ones that this was nothing unusual, they weren’t being punished; it simply was the rule when there was threat of an attack on the city: all male slaves were locked away—“Out of danger,” said old Fell.

  “Out of danger!” said a valet, “What if the enemy gets in again and sets fires? We’ll roast here like pies in an oven!”

  “Shut your fool trap,” somebody told him.

  “Who’s looking after our horses?” said a stable hand.

  “Why can’t they trust us? What did we ever do but work for ’em?”

  “Why should they trust us when they treat us like this?”

  “I want to know who’s looking after our horses.”

  It went on like that, on and off, all day. Some of the younger boys were my pupils. They tended to gather around me, out of habit I suppose. In the desperation of boredom I said at last, “Come on, we might as well do our lesson. Pepa! Start off The Bridge on the Nisas!” They’d been learning that fine singsong ballad, and they liked it. Pepa, a good student, was too shy to start reciting among all these grown men, but I started off—“’Beneath the walls of Etra’—come on, Pepa!” He joined in, and pretty soon the boys were passing the stanzas around, one to the next, just as if we were in the schoolroom. Ralli piped out bravely in his thin little voice,

  ’Are we then men of Morva To flee before the foe,

  Or shall we fight for Etra Like our fathers long ago?’

  And I realised that around us the men had fallen silent and were listening. Some remembered their own schooling, others were hearing the words, the story, for the first time. And they heard it without irony, simply stirred by the events and the call to patriotic courage. When one of the boys faltered, a couple of men picked up the verse which they’d learned long ago in Everra’s schoolroom or maybe from the teacher before him, and passed it round to the next boy. At the rousing climax there was a cheer, and congratulations to the boys, and the first laughter we’d heard all day. “Good stuff, that,” said Sem. “Let’s have some more!” I saw Everra standing at the entrance to his cubicle, looking frail and grey, but listening.

  We said them another of Ferrio’s ballads, and they liked it well enough—almost all of them were listening by now—but The Bridge on the Nisas remained the favorite by far. “Let’s have that Bridge again,” some man would say, and get a boy to start off, “’Beneath the walls of Etra…’” By the end of the day in the barrack many of them had learned the whole thing, with the quickness of memory that we often lose with literacy, and could roar it out in unison.

  Sometimes they added verses that would have made Ferrio’s hair stand on end. They got scolded by other men—“Hey, keep it decent, there’s kids here.” And they begged pardon of Everra, for whom most of them had an ungrudging, protective respect. The teacher was one of them and yet not one of them: a slave of value, a learned man, who knew more than most nobles knew. They were proud of him. As order began to be established in the crowded barrack, certain men came to the fore—Sem and Metter chief among them—as the keepers of order and the decision makers. Everra was consulted, but mostly set apart and looked after. And I was fortunate in being his disciple, since I got to sleep on the floor of his cubicle, not in the terrible crowding of the main room and the stink of the walled privies behind it.

  The worst thing about those days, for most of us, was being kept in ignorance of what was going on, the city’s fate, our fate. Food was prepared and brought to us by women slaves from the kitchen. The women were received, twice daily, when the bolt was shot back and the doors briefly opened, with roars of greeting and indecent proposals, and assailed with questions—Are we fighting? Did Casicar attack? Are they in the city? and so on—to most of which they had no answers, though they had plenty of hearsay. Then the women were herded back to the house, and while we ate, the men would chew over those scraps and rumors along with the bread and meat, and try to work out some sense from them. They generally agreed that there had been fighting outside the walls, probably at the River Gate, and that the attackers had not broken into the city, but had not yet been driven off entirely.

  And when, on the fourth day, we were at last released, that proved to be the case. Troops in training, hastily brought up from south of the city, had joined the cavalry troop that had been nearby, and beat back the attackers. The cavalry was now pursuing the Casicarans across country. The city guard had been able to retire within the walls and man them against forays. Casicar had brought no siege engines, counting on a surprise mass assault on the gate to get them into the city. If one of their captains, hungry for glory, hadn’t led his troop to make that premature raid, we would have had little or no warning, and the city might have been taken and burnt.

  And we locked in the barrack… But there was no use thinking about that. We’d been released, and the joy of release was tremendous, it made up for everything.

  All of us who could ran out that night to cheer the first troops returning across the Nisas. My sister sneaked out of the silk rooms to meet me and, dressed as a boy, went with me to the River Gate to cheer.

  It was a crazy thing to do, for a gift-girl who went out in the streets could be horribly punished; but there was a sense of joyous license that night, and we rode on the flood of it. We cheered the troops with all our heart and soul. Among them, in the wild torchlight, we saw Torm, marching along with his odd gait, swinging his arms, short and grim and soldierly, Sallo looked down at once to hide her face, for it wouldn’t do if Torm saw his brother’s gift-girl out on the loose. She and I slip
ped back to Arcamand after that, laughing and breathless, through the quiet dark streets and courts of our dear city.

  The next day we heard—from Sallo, who heard it from the Mother herself—that Yaven’s regiment was to be brought back to guard the city. Sallo was alight with joy. “He’s coming, he’s coming! I don’t care what happens so long as he’s here!” she said.

  But that was the last good news we had for a while.

  Knowing Etra’s armies were occupied with truce breakers from Morva and Osc, Casicar had sent that first wave of soldiers to make a lightning assault and take the city by surprise if they could. Repelled, they fell back at once, but only to the front lines of a whole army marching through the hills from Casicar, the great city on the Morr.

  Etra was now fast filling up with farmers and country people fleeing from the invaders, some in panic, empty-handed, others bringing all they could in wagons and barrows and driving their cattle before them. But on the third day after our night of rejoicing, the gates were shut. Etra was surrounded by an enemy army.

  From the walls we saw them methodically setting up camp, dragging up timbers, digging earthworks as their defense against our soldiers’ attack. They had come prepared for a long siege. They set up ornate tents for their officers, their wagon trains were loaded high with grain and fodder, they made great pens for the cattle and sheep they’d taken from farms along the way and would slaughter as they needed. We saw another city growing around ours, a city of swords.

  We were sure at first that our armies in the south would sweep in and save us. That hope died hard. Weeks passed before we saw the first Etran troops come to harry the Casicarans and raid their ditch-and-wall defenses. We cheered them from the walls, and shot fire missiles into the tent-city to distract the enemy, but our men always had to fall back. They were small troops, outnumbered ten or twenty to one. Where were the strong regiments that had gone to drive the Morvans and Os-cans back to their own lands? What had happened in the south? Dire rumors ran through the city. There was no way to counter them, since we were cut off from all news.