“I don’t think so,” I said. Before we ate, I had gone down to the shore and, concealed in the thickets, scanned the river and the snores for a long time. Reason told me I should fear, reason said that Hoby might well have swum across and be hiding near; but all the time unreason told me, You’re safe; he’s gone; the link is broken.
Melle was watching me, with a child’s trust. “We’re in Urdile now,” I said, “where there are no slaves. And no slave takers. And…” But I didn’t know whether she’d even seen Hoby behind us in the river, and didn’t know how to speak of him. “And I think we’re free,” I said.
She pondered this for a while.
“Can I call you Gav again?”
“My whole name is Gavir Aytana Sidoy,” I said. “But I like Beaky.”
“Beaky and Squeaky,” Melle murmured, looking down, with her small, half-circle smile. “Can I go on being Miv?”
“It might be a good idea. If you want to.”
“Now are we going to see the great man in the city?”
“Yes,” I said. And so when our things had dried out we set off.
Our journey to Mesun was easy enough, as indeed all our journey had been, but wonderfully freed from the dread that had dogged and darkened my way between the rivers. I had no idea what I was going to do when I got to Mesun, how we were to live; but to ask too many questions seemed ungrateful to Lord Luck and Lady Ennu. They’d been with us so far, they wouldn’t leave us now. I sang Caspro’s hymn to them under my breath as we walked.
“You don’t sing quite as well as some people,” my companion remarked, with some diplomacy “I know I don’t. You sing, then.”
She lifted up a sweet, unsteady little voice in a love song she’d heard in Barna’s house. I thought of her beautiful sister, and wondered if Melle too would be beautiful. I found myself thinking, “Let her be spared that!” But surely that was a slave’s thought. I must learn to think with a free mind.
Urdile was a pleasant country of apple orchards and poplar-bordered roads, rising up slowly from the river to the blue hills I’d seen from far away. We walked, and sometimes got a lift on a cart, and bought food at village markets, or were offered milk by a farm woman who saw us pass and pitied the dusty child. I got scolded for dragging my little brother out to tramp the roads, but when my little brother clung to me and glared loyal defiance, the scolder would melt and offer us food or a hayloft to sleep in, after five days, returning towards the river, which had curved away from our road, we came to the city of Mesun.
Built on steep hills right above the river, with roofs of slate and red tile, and towers, and several ornate bridges, Mesun was a city of stone, but it was not walled.
That seemed strange to me. There were no gates, no guard towers, no guards. I saw no soldiers anywhere. We walked into a great city as into a village.
The houses towered up three and four stories over streets full of people, carts, wagons, horses. The din and commotion and crowding seemed tremendous to us. Melle was holding my hand tightly, and I was glad of it. We passed a marketplace near the river that made Etra’s market seem a very small affair. I thought the best thing to do was find some modest inn where we could put down our packs and clean ourselves up a bit, for we were a frowzy, filthy pair by now. As we went on past the market, looking for inn signs, I saw two young men come swinging down a steep street, wearing long, light, grey-brown cloaks and velvet caps that squashed out over the ears. They were exactly like a picture in a book in Everra’s library: Two Scholars of the University of Mesun. They saw me staring at them, and one of them gave me a slight wink. I stepped forward and said, “Excuse me, would you tell us how to get to the University?”
“Right up the hill, friend,” the one who’d winked said. He looked at us curiously. I didn’t know what to ask him. I finally said, “Are there lodging houses up there?” and he nodded: “The Quail’s the cheapest.” His friend said, “No, the Barking Dog,” and the first one said, “All d e-pends on your taste in insects: fleas at the Quail, bugs at the Dog.” And they went on down the street laughing.
We climbed up the way they had come down. Before long the cobblestone way became steps. I saw that we were climbing around a great wall of stones. Mesun had been a fortified city, long ago, and this was the wall of the citadel. Over the wall loomed palaces of silver-grey stone with steep-pitched roofs and tall windows. The steps brought us up at last onto a little curving street lined with smaller houses, and Melle whispered, “There they are.” They stood side by side, two inns, with their signs of the quail and the savagely barking dog. “Fleas or bedbugs?” I asked Melle, and she said, “Fleas.” So we took lodgings at the Quail.
We had a most welcome bath and gave what spare clothing we had to the sour-faced landlady to be cleaned. We were on the watch for fleas, but there seemed to be less than in most haylofts. After a scanty and not very good dinner, Melle was ready to go to bed. She had borne the journey well, but every day of it had taken her to about the limit of her small strength. The last couple of days she had had spells of tears and snappishness, like any tired child. I was pretty stretched myself, but I felt a nervous energy in me, here in the city, that would not let me rest. I asked Melle if she’d be worried if I went out for a while. She was lying holding her Ennu figure against her chest, her beloved poncho pulled up over the bedcover. “No,” she said, “I won’t worry, Beaky.” But she looked a little sad and tremulous. I said, “Oh, maybe I won’t go.”
“Go on,” she said crossly. “Go awayl I am just going to sleep!” And she shut her eyes, frowning, her mouth pulled tight.
“All right. I’ll be back before dark.”
She ignored me, squeezing her eyes shut. I went out.
As I came out into the street the same two young men were coming by, a bit out of breath from the climb up, and the one who’d winked saw me. “Chose the fleas, eh?” he said. He had a pleasant smile and was openly curious about me. I took this second meeting as an omen or sign which I should follow. I said, “You’re students of the University?”
He stopped and nodded; his companion stopped less willingly.
“I’d like to know how to become a student.”
“I thought that might be the case.”
“Can you tell me—at all—how I should—Whom I should ask—“ “Nobody sent you here? A teacher, a scholar you worked with?” My heart sank. “No,” I said.
He cocked his head with its ridiculous but dashing velvet cap. “Come on to the Gross Tun and have a drink with us,” he said, “I’m Sampater Yille, this is Gola Mederra. He’s law, I’m letters.”
I said my name, and, “I was a slave in Etra.”
I had to say that before anything else, before they were shamed by finding they had offered their friendship to a slave.
“In Etra? Were you there in the siege?” said Sampater, and Gola said, “Come on, I’m thirsty!”
We drank beer at the Gross Tun, a crowded beer hall noisy with students, most of them about my age or a little older. Sampater and Go-la were principally interested in putting away as much beer as possible as fast as possible and in talking to everybody else at the beer hall, but they introduced me to everyone, and everyone gave me advice about where to go and whom to see about taking classes in letters at the University. When it turned out I knew not one of the famous teachers they mentioned, Sampater asked, “There was nobody you came here wanting to study with, then, a name you knew?” “Orrec Caspro.”
“Ha!” He stared at me, laughed, and raised his mug. “You’re a poet,
then!”
“No, no. I only—“ I didn’t know what I was. I didn’t know enough to know what I was, or wanted to do or be. I’d never felt so ignorant,
Sampater drained his mug and cried, “One more round, on me, and I’ll take you to his house ”
“No, I can’t—”
“Why not? He’s not a professor, you know, he keeps no state. You don’t have to approach him on your knees. We’ll go right there, it�
��s no distance.”
I managed to get out of it by insisting that I must be going back to my little brother. I paid for our beer, which endeared me to them both, and Sampater told me how to get to Caspro’s house, just up another street or two and around the corner. “Go see him, go see him tomorrow,” he said. “Or, listen, I’ll come by for you.” I assured him I’d go, and would use his name as a password, and so I got away from the Gross Tun and back to the Quail, with my head spinning.
Waking early, lying thinking as the daylight grew in the low room, I made up my mind. My vague plans of becoming a student at the University had dissolved. I didn’t have enough money, I didn’t have enough training, and I didn’t think I could become one of those ligh-thearted fellows at the Gross Tun. They were my age, but we’d reached our age by different roads.
What I wanted was work, to support myself and Melle. In a city this size, without slaves, there must be work to do, I knew the name of only one person in Mesun: so, to him I would go. If he couldn’t give me work, I’d find it elsewhere.
When Melle woke I told her we were going to buy some fine new city clothes. She liked that idea. The sour landlady told us how to get to the cloth market at the foot of the hill of the citadel, and there we found booths and booths of used clothing, where we could get decked out decently or even somewhat grandly.
I saw Melle looking with a kind of wistful awe at a robe of worn but beautiful patterned ivory silk. I said, “Squeaky, you don’t have to keep being Miv, you know.”
She hunched up with shyness. “It’s too big,” she murmured. In fact it was a robe for a grown woman. When we had admired it and left it behind she said to me, “It looked like Diero.” She was right.
We both ended up with the trousers, linen shirt, and dark vest or tunic that men and boys in Mesun wore. For Melle I found an elegant small velvet vest with buttons made of copper pennies. She kept looking down at her buttons as we climbed back up to the citadel. “Now I will never not have some money,” she said.
We ate bread with oil and olives at a street vendor’s stall, and then I said, “Now we’ll go and see the great man.” Melle was delighted. She flitted up the steep stone street ahead of me. As for me, I walked in a kind of dogged, blind, frightened resolution. I had stopped back by the inn for the small packet wrapped in reed-cloth which I now carried.
Sampater’s directions had been good; we found what had to be the house, a tall, narrow one set right against the rock of the hill, the last house on the street. I knocked.
A young woman opened the door. Her skin was so pale her face seemed luminous. Melle and I both stared at her hair—I had never seen such hair in my life. It was like the finest gold wire, it was like a sheep’s fleece combed out, a glory of light about her head. “Oh!” Melle said, and I almost did too.
The young woman smiled a little. I imagine that we were rather funny, big boy and little boy, very clean, very stiff, standing staring round-eyed on the threshold. Her smile was kind, and it heartened me.
“I came to Mesun to see Orrec Caspro, if—if that is possible,” I said.
“I think it’s possible,” she said. “May I tell him who…”
“My name is Gavir Aytana Sidoy. This is my—brother—Miv—”
“I’m Melle,” Melle said. “I’m a girl.” She hunched up her shoulders and looked down, frowning fiercely, like a small falcon.
“Please come in,” the young woman said. “I’m Memer Galva. I’ll go ask if Orrec is free—“ And she was off, quick and light, carrying her marvelous hair like a candle flame, a halo of sunlight.
We stood in a narrow entrance hall. There were several doorways to rooms on either side.
Melle put her hand in mine. “Is it all right if I’m not Miv?” she whispered.
“Of course. I’m glad you’re not Miv.”
She nodded. Then she said again, louder, “Oh!”
I looked where she was looking, a little farther down the hall. A lion was crossing the hall.
It paid no attention to us at all, but stood in a doorway lashing its tail and looked back impatiently over its shoulder. It was not a black marsh lion; it was the color of sand, and not very large. I said with no voice, “Ennu!”
“I’m coming,” a woman said, and she appeared, crossing the hallway, following the lion.
She saw us and stopped. “Oh dear,” she said. “Please don’t be afraid. She’s quite tame, I didn’t know anybody was here. Won’t you come on in to the hearth room?”
The lion turned around and sat down, still looking impatient. The woman put her hand on its head and said something to it, and it said, “Aoww,” in a complaining way.
I looked at Melle. She stood rigid, staring at the lion, whether with terror or fascination I couldn’t tell. The woman spoke to Melle: “Her name is Shetar, and she’s been with us ever since she was a kitten. Would you like to pet her? She likes being petted,” The woman’s voice was extraordinarily pleasant, low-pitched, almost hoarse, but with a lulling in it. And she spoke with the Uplands accent, like Chamry Bern.
Melle clutched my hand more strongly and nodded.
I came forward with her, tentatively. The woman smiled at us and said, “I’m Gry.”
“This is Melle, I’m Gavir.”
“Melle! That is a lovely name. Shetar, please greet Melle properly.”
The lion got up quite promptly, and facing us, made a deep bow—that is, she stretched out her forelegs the way cats do, with her chin on her paws. Then she stood up and looked meaningfully at Gry who took something out of her pocket and popped it in the lion’s mouth. “Good lion,” she said.
Very soon Melle was petting the lion’s broad head and neck. Gry talked with her in an easy, reassuring way, answering her questions about Shetar. A halflion, she said it was. Half was quite enough, I thought.
Looking up at me, Gry asked, “Did you come to see Orrec?” “Yes. The—the lady said to wait.”
And just then Memer Galva came back into the hall. “He says to come up to his study,” she said. “I’ll show you up if you like.”
Gry said, “Maybe Melle would like to stay with Shetar and us for a while.”
“Oh yes please,” Melle said, and looked at me to see if it was all right.
“Yes please,” I echoed. My heart was beating so hard I couldn’t think. I followed the pale flame of Memer’s hair up a narrow staircase and into a hall.
As she opened the door I knew where I was. I know it, I remember it. I have been here many times, the dark room, the book-littered table under a tall window, the lamp. I know the face that turns to me, alert, sorrowful, unguarded, I know his voice as he speaks my name—I could not say anything. I stood like a block of stone. He gazed at me intently. “What is it?” he asked, low-voiced.
I managed to say I was sorry, and he got me to sit down, and clearing some books off another chair, sat down facing me, “So?”
I was clutching the packet. I unwrapped it, fumbling at the tightly sealed reedcloth, and held his book out to him, “When I was a slave I was forbidden to read your work. But I was given this book by a fellow slave. When I lost everything, I lost it, but again it was given me. It came with me across the river of death and the river of life. It was the sign to me of where my treasure is. It was my guide. So I—So I followed it to its maker. And seeing you, I knew I have seen you all my life—that I was to come here.”
He took the little book and looked at its battered, water-swollen binding, turning it in his hands. He opened it gently. From the page it opened to, he read, “’Three things that, seeking increase, strengthen soul: love, learning, liberty.’” He gave a sigh. “I wasn’t much older than you when I wrote that,” he said, a little wryly. He looked up at me. He gave me back the book, saying, “You honor me, Gavir Aytana. You give me the gift only the reader can give the writer. Is there anything I can give you?”
He too spoke like Chamry Bern.
I sat dumb. My burst of eloquence was over, my tongue was tied. “W
ell, we can talk about that presently,” he said. He was concerned and gentle. “Tell me something about yourself. Where were you in slavery? Not in my part of the world, I know. Slaves in the Uplands have no more book learning than their masters do.”
“In the House of Arca, in the city of Etra,” I said. Tears sprang into my eyes as I said it.
“But your people came from the Marshes, I think?”
“My sister and I were taken by slavers…” And so he drew my story from me, a brief telling of it, but he kept me at it, asking questions and not letting me rush ahead. I said little about how Sallo died, for I could not burden a stranger with my heart’s grief. When I got to my return to the forest, and how Melle and I met there, his eyes flashed. “Melle was my mother’s name,” he said. “And my daughter’s.” His voice dropped, saying that. He looked away. “And you have this child with you—so Memer said?”
“I couldn’t leave her there,” I said, feeling that her presence required apology.
“Some could.”
“She’s very gifted—I never had so quick a pupil. I hope that here…” But I stopped. What did I hope, for Melle or myself?
“Here certainly she can be given what she needs,” Orrec Caspro said promptly and firmly “How did you travel with a young child all the way from the Daneran Forest to Mesun? That can’t have been easy”
“It was easy enough till I learned my… my enemies in Arcamand were still hunting for me, on my track.” But I had not named Torm and Hoby till then. I had to go back and say who they were, and to tell that my sister’s death had been at their hands.
When I told him of how Hoby had hunted me and followed us, and of crossing the Sensaly, he listened the way the fellows in Brigin’s camp listened to The Siege and Fall of Sentas, holding his breath.
“You saw him drown?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I saw the horse with no rider. Nothing else. The river’s wide, and I couldn’t see along the near shore. He may have drowned. He may not. But I think…” I didn’t know how to say it. “It’s as if a chain has broken.”
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