Nebula Awards Showcase 2010

by Bill Fawcett

  Late one afternoon the six or seven tired, dirty, hungry men around the crude hearth in our cabin had run out of anything to talk about. We all sat in a dumb discouragement. It had been raining a cold hard rain almost ceaselessly for four days and nights. Under the cloud that pressed down on the dark forest trees it seemed night all day long. Fog and darkness tangled in the wet, heavy boughs. To go out to get logs for the fire from the dwindling woodpile was to be wet through at once, and indeed some of us went out naked, since skin dries quicker than cloth and leather. One of our mates, Bulec, had a wretched cough that shook him about like a rat in a dog’s mouth. Even Chamry had run out of jokes and tall tales. In that cold, dreary place I was thinking of summer, of the heat and light of summer on the open hills, somewhere. And a cadence came into my mind, a beat, and the words with it, and without any intention I said the words aloud.

  As in the dark of winter night

  The eyes seek dawn,

  As in the bonds of bitter cold

  The heart craves sun,

  So blinded and so bound, the soul

  Cries out to thee:

  Be our light, our fire, our life,

  Liberty!

  “Ah,” Chamry said out of a silence that followed the words, “I’ve heard that. Heard it sung. There’s a tune to it.”

  I sought the tune, and little by little it came to me, with the sound of the beautiful voice that had sung it. I have no singing voice, but I sang it.

  “That’s fine,” Venne said softly.

  Bulec coughed and said, “Speak some more such.”

  “Do that,” Chamry said.

  I looked into my mind for more remembered words to speak to them. Nothing came for a while. What I found at last was a line of writing. I read it: “‘Wearing the white of mourning, the maiden mounted the high steps . . .’” I said it aloud, and in a moment the line led me on to the next, and that to the next. So I told them the part of Garro’s poem in which the prophetess Yurno confronts the enemy hero Rurec. Standing on the walls of Sentas, a girl in mourning, Yurno calls down to the man who killed her warrior father. She tells Rurec how he will die: “Beware of the hills of Trebs,” she says, “for you will be ambushed in the hills. You will run away and hide in the bushes, but they will kill you as you try to crawl away without being seen. They will drag your naked body to the town and display it, sprawled facedown, so all can see that the wounds are in your back. Your corpse will not be burned with prayers to the Ancestors as befits a hero, but buried where they bury slaves and dogs.” Enraged at her prophecy, Rurec shouts, “And this is how you will die, lying sorceress!” and hurls his heavy lance at her. All see it pass through her body just below the breast and fly out, trailing blood, behind her—but she stands on the battlement in her white robes, unharmed. Her brother, the warrior Alira, picks up the lance and hands it up to her, and she tosses it down to Rurec, not hurling it, but end over end, lightly, contemptuously. “When you’re running away and hiding, you’ll want this,” she says, “great hero of Pagadi.”

  As I spoke the words of the poem, in that cold smoky hut in the half-dark with the noise of the rain loud on the low roof, I saw them written in some pupil’s laboured handwriting in the copybook I held as I stood in the schoolroom in Arcamand. “Read the passage, Gavir,” my teacher said, and I read the words aloud.

  A silence followed.

  “Eh, that’s a fool,” Bacoc said, “thro’n a lance at a witch, don’t he know, can’t kill a witch but with fire!”

  Bacoc was a man of fifty by the look of him, though it’s hard to tell the age of men who have lived their life half-starved and under the whip; maybe he was thirty.

  “That’s a good bit of story,” Chamry said. “There’s more? Is there a name to it?”

  I said, “It’s called The Siege and Fall of Sentas. There’s more.”

  “Let’s have it,” said Chamry, and the others all agreed.

  For a time I could not recall the opening lines of the poem; then, as if I had the old copybook in my hand, there they were and I spoke them—

  To the councils and senate of Sentas they came, the envoys in armour, With their swords in their hands, arrogant, striding into the chamber Where the lords of the city sat to give judgment . . .

  It was night, true night, when I finished saying the first book of the poem. Our fire had burned down to embers on the rough hearth, but nobody in the circle of men had moved to build it up; nobody had moved at all for an hour.

  “They’re going to lose that city of theirs,” Bulec said in the dark, in the soft drumming of the rain.

  “They should be able to hold out. The others come too far from home. Like Casicar did, trying to take Etra last year,” said Taffa. It was the most I’d ever heard him say. Venne had told me Taffa had been not a slave but a freeman of a small city-state, conscripted into their army; during a battle he had escaped and made his way to the forest. Sad-faced and aloof, he seldom said anything, but now he was arguing almost volubly: “Stretched out their forces too far, see, Pagadi has, attacking. If they don’t take the town by assault quick, they’ll starve come winter.”

  And they all got into the discussion, all talking exactly as if the siege of Sentas was taking place right now, right here. As if we were living in Sentas.

  Of them all Chamry was the only one who understood that what I had told them was “a poem,” a thing made by a maker, a work of art, part history of long ago, part invention. It was, to them, an event; it was happening as they heard it. They wanted it to go on happening. If I’d been able to, they’d have kept me telling it to them night and day. But after my voice gave out that first evening, I lay in my wooden bunk thinking about what had been given back to me: the power of words. I had time then to think and to plan how and when to use that power—how to go on with the poem, to keep them from exhausting both it and me. I ended by telling it for an hour or two every night, after we ate, for the winter nights were endless and something to make them pass was welcome to all.

  Word got about, and within a night or two most of the men of the band were crowded into our hut for “telling the war,” and for the long passionate discussions and arguments about tactics and motives and morals that followed.

  There were times I couldn’t fully recall the lines as Garro wrote them, but the story was clear in my mind, so I filled in these gaps with tags of the poetry and my own narrative, until I came again to a passage that I had by memory or could “see” written, and could fall back into the harsh rhythm of the lines. My companions didn’t seem to notice the difference between my prose and Garro’s poetry. They listened closest when I was speaking the poetry—but those were also often the most vivid passages of action and suffering.

  When we came again in the course of the tale to the passage I’d recited first, Yurno’s prophecy from the battlements, Bacoc caught his breath; and when Rurec “in a fury uplifts his heavy lance,” Bacoc cried out, “Don’t throw it, man! It’s no good!” The others shouted at him to pipe down, but he was indignant: “Don’t he know it’s no good? He thro’n it before!”

  I was at first merely bemused by my own capacity to recall the poetry and their capacity to listen to it. They didn’t say much to me about it, but it made a difference in the way I was treated, my standing among them. I had something they wanted, and they respected me for that. Since I gave it freely, their respect was ungrudging. “Hey, haven’t you got a fatter rib than that for the kid? He’s got to work tonight, telling the war . . .”

  But every up’s a down, as Chamry said. Brigin and his brother and the men closest to them, their cabin mates, looked in at one time or another on the recital, listened a while standing near the doorway, then left in silence. They said nothing to me, but I heard from others that they said men who listened to fools’ tales were worse fools than those who told them. And Brigin said that a man willing to hear a boy yammer booktalk half the night was no fit Forest Brother.

  Booktalk! Why did Brigin say it in that contemptuous
tone? There were no books in the forest. There had been no books in Brigin’s life. Why did he sneer at them?

  Any of these men might well be jealous of a knowledge that had been jealously kept from them. A farm slave who tried to learn to read could have his eyes put out or be whipped to death. Books were dangerous, and a slave had every excuse to fear them. But fear is one thing, contempt another.

  I resented their sneers as mean-spirited, for I couldn’t see anything unworthy of manhood in the tale I was telling. How was a tale of warfare and heroism weakening the men who listened to it so hungrily every night? Didn’t it draw us together in real brotherhood, when after the telling we listened to one another argue the rights and wrongs of the generals’ tactics and the warriors’ exploits? To sit stupid, mute, night after night under the rain like cattle, bored to mindlessness—was that what made us men?

  Eter said something one morning, knowing he was within my hearing, about great idle fools listening to a boy tell lies. I was fed up. I was about to confront him with what I’ve just said, when my wrist was caught in an iron grip and a deft foot nearly tripped me.

  I broke free and shouted, “What d’you think you’re doing?” to Chamry Bern, who apologised for his clumsiness while renewing his grip on my wrist. “Oh keep your trap shut, Gav!” he whispered desperately, hauling me away from the group of men around Eter. “Don’t you see he’s baiting you?”

  “He’s insulting all of us!”

  “And who’s to stop him? You?”

  Chamry had got me around behind the woodpiles now, away from the others, and seeing I was now arguing with him, not challenging Eter, he let go my wrist.

  “But why—Why—?”

  “Why don’t they love you for having a power they don’t have?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “And they’ve got the hard hand, you know, though you’ve got the soft voice. Oh, Gav. Don’t be smarter than your masters. It costs.”

  In his face now was the sadness I had seen in the face of every one of these men, the mark of the harrow. They had all started with very little, and lost most of that.

  “They’re not my masters,” I said furiously. “We’re free men here!”

  “Well,” Chamry said, “in some ways.”

  NINE

  Eter and Brigin, if they resented my sudden popularity, must have seen that any attempt to break up the evening gathering might rouse real opposition. They contented themselves with sneers at me, and at Chamry and Venne as my mates, but let the other men alone. So I and my fierce audience went on through all The Siege and Fall of Sentas, as the dark winter slowly turned towards spring. We came to the end of it just about the time of the equinox.

  It was hard for some of the men to comprehend that it was over, and why it had to be over. Sentas had fallen, the walls and the great gates were torn down, the citadel burnt to the ground, the men of the city slaughtered, the women and children taken as slaves, and the hero Rurec had set off triumphant with his army and loot to Pagadi—and so, what happened next?

  “Is he going to go by the hills of Trebs now?” Bacoc wanted to know. “After what the witch said?”

  “Sure enough he’ll go by Trebs, if not this day then another,” said Chamry. “A man can’t keep from going where the seer’s eye saw him go.”

  “Well, why don’t Gav tell it, then?”

  “The story stops at the fall of the city, Bacoc,” I said.

  “What—like they all died? But it’s only some of ’em dead!” Chamry tried to explain the nature of a story to him, but he remained dissatisfied; and they were all melancholy. “Ah, it’s going to be dull!” said Taffa. “I’ll miss that sword fighting. It’s a horrible thing when you’re in it, but it’s grand to hear about.”

  Chamry grinned. “You could say that of most things in life, maybe.”

  “Are there more tales like that, Gav?” somebody asked.

  “There are a lot of tales,” I said, cautiously. I wasn’t eager to start another epic. I felt myself becoming the prisoner of my audience.

  “You could tell the one we had all right over,” said one man, and several agreed enthusiastically.

  “Next winter,” I said. “When the nights are long again.”

  They treated my verdict as if it were a priest’s rule of ritual, accepting it without dispute.

  But Bulec said wistfully, “I wish there was short tales for the short nights.” He had listened to the epic with almost painful attention, muffling his cough as well as he could; to the battle scenes he preferred the descriptions of the rooms in the palaces, the touching domestic passages, the love story of Alira and Ruoco. I liked Bulec, and it was painful to see him, a young man, getting sicker and weaker day by day even as the weather brightened and grew warm. I couldn’t withstand his plea.

  “Oh, there’s some short tales,” I said. “I’ll tell you one.” And I thought first to say The Bridge on the Nisas, but I could not. Those words, though they were clear in my mind, bore some weight in them that I could not lift. I could not speak them.

  So I put myself in the schoolroom in my mind, and opened a copybook, and there was one of Hodis Baderi’s fables, “The Man Who Ate the Moon.” I told it to them word for word.

  They listened as intently as ever. The fable got a mixed reception. Some of them laughed and shouted, “Ah, that’s the best yet! That beats all!”—but others thought it silly stuff, “foolery,” Taffa said.

  “Ah, but there’s a lesson in it,” said Chamry, who had listened to the tale with delight. They got to arguing whether the man who ate the moon was a liar or not. They never asked me to settle or even enter these discussions. I was, as it were, their book. I provided the text. Judgment on the text was up to them. I heard as keen moral arguments from them as I was ever to hear from learned men.

  After that they often got a fable or a poem out of me in the evening, but their demand was not so urgent now that we no longer had to cower in our huts from the rain and could live outdoors and be active. Hunting and snaring and fishing went on apace, for we’d lived very thin at the end of winter and beginning of spring. We craved not only meat but the wild onions and other herbs that some of the men knew how to find in the forest. I always missed the grain porridge that had been much of our diet in the city, but there was nothing like that here.

  “I heard the Forest Brothers stole grain from rich farmers,” I said once to Chamry, as we grubbed for wild horseradish.

  “They do, those who can,” he said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Barna’s lot, up north there.”

  The name rang strangely in my head, bringing around it a whole set of fleeting images of young men talking in a crowded, warm dormitory, the face of an old priest . . . but I ignored such images. Words were what I could remember safely.

  “So there really is a man called Barna?”

  “Oh, yes. Though you needn’t mention him around Brigin.”

  I wheedled for more, and Chamry never could resist telling a story. So I found that, as I had suspected, our band was a splinter from a larger group, with which they weren’t on good terms. Barna was the chief of that group. Eter and Brigin had rebelled against his leadership and brought a few men here to the southern part of the forest—the most remote from any settlements and so the safest for runaway slaves, but also the poorest in resources except, as Chamry said, cattle with antlers.

  “Up there, they bag the real thing,” he said. “Fat bullocks. Sheep! Ah! what wouldn’t I give to taste mutton! I hate sheep from the pit of my heart, wily, woolly, wicked brutes. But when one of ’em lies down and turns into roast mutton, I could swallow him whole.”

  “Do Barna’s men raise the cattle and sheep?”

  “Mostly they let other folk do that for them. And then pick out a few choice ones. There’s those who’d call it thieving, but that’s too delicate and legal a word. Tithing, we called it. We tithed the farmers’ flocks.”

  “So you lived there, with Barna’
s band?”

  “A while. Lived well, too.” Chamry sat back on his haunches and looked at me. “That’s where you should be, you know. Not here, with this lot of hard rocks and knotheads.” He knocked the dirt off a horseradish root, wiped it on his shirt, and bit into it. “You and Venne. You should be off. He’ll be welcome for his hunting, you for your golden tongue . . .” He chewed raw horseradish a while, wincing and his eyes watering. “All your tongue will do here is talk you into trouble.”

  “Would you come with us?”

  He spat out fibre and wiped his mouth. “By the Stone, but that’s hot! I don’t know. I came away with Brigin and them because they were my mates. And I was restless . . . I don’t know.”

  He was a restless man. It wasn’t hard for Venne and me to coax him into coming with us, when we made up our minds to go. And we did that soon.

  Brigin and Eter, feeling dissatisfaction among us, tried to repress it with ever harsher demands and commands. Eter told Bulec, who was deathly ill by now, that if he didn’t go out hunting for meat for the camp pot, he’d get nothing to eat from it. Eter may have just been bullying, or may have believed his threat would work; some men who live hard and in good health can’t believe sickness or weakness is anything but laziness, a sham. At any rate Bulec was scared or shamed into insisting that a hunting party take him along. He got a little way out of camp with them and collapsed, vomiting blood. When they carried him back, Venne confronted Eter, shouting that he’d killed Bulec like any slave driver. Venne rushed off in his distress and rage. He found me fishing at a pool up the stream. “We were going to find Bulec a place he could sit down and wait for us, soon as we got clear away from camp, but he couldn’t even walk that far. He’s dying. I can’t stay here, Gav. I can’t take their orders! They think they’re masters and us their slaves. I want to kill that damned Eter! I’ve got to get out.”

  “Let’s talk to Chamry,” I said. We did; he counselled at first that we wait, but when he saw how dangerous Venne’s anger was, he agreed to go that night.