Voices

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  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 streets 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.

&nb
sp; 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.

  Late in the afternoon one of the leaders of these troops, a young man, hawk-faced and handsome, Ret­ter Gelb of Gelbmand, urged his plan for the expulsion of the Alds from the city. Meeting some opposition among others there, he turned to the Waylord. "Galva! Did you not hold the book of the oracle in your hand, did we not hear its voice, Set free? How can we set our people free so long as the Alds' very presence here en­slaves us? Can the meaning of the words be clearer?"

  "It might," said the Waylord.

  "If it's not clear, then consult the oracle again, Reader! Ask it if this isn't the moment to seize our liberty!"

  "You may read for yourself' the Waylord said mildly, and taking a book from his pocket, he held it out to Retter Gelb. The gesture was not threatening, but the young man started back and stood staring at the book.

  He was young enough that, like many people of Ansul under the Alds, he had perhaps never touched a book, never seen a book except torn to fragments, thrown into a canal. Or it may have been fear of the un­canny, of the oracle, that came over him. He said at last, hoarsely, "I can't read it." And then, ashamed and trying to regain his challenging tone, he said, with a quick glance at me, "You Galvas are the Readers."

  "Reading was a gift we all shared once," the Waylord said, his voice no longer mild. "Time, maybe, that we all relearn it. In any case, until we understand the answer we got, there's no use asking a new question."

  "What good is an answer we don't understand?"

  "Isn't the water of the fountain clear enough for you?"

  I had never seen him so angry, a cold, knife-edge anger. The young man drew back again; after a pause he bowed his head a little and said, "Waylord, I beg your pardon."

  "Retter Gelb, I beg your patience," he responded, still very coldly. "Let the fountain run water a while be­fore it runs blood."

  He set the book down on the table and stood up. It was a small book bound in dun-colored cloth. I didn't know if it was the book that had given us the oracle or some other.

  Ista and Sosta were coming in with lamps.

  "A good evening to you all, and a peaceful night," the Waylord said, and taking up the book again, limped away from the crowd of people, back towards the shad­owy corridors.

  People left the house, then, bidding me a subdued good night. But many of them stayed to stand about on the maze in the courtyard, talking. There was a sense of unrest, unease, all through the city, a stir in the warm, windy, darkening air.

  Gry came out of the house with Shetar on the leash and said to me, "Let's walk over to Council Hill and see what's doing," and I gladly joined her. Orrec, she said, was in the house, writing; he had mostly kept to their apartments that day. He didn't want to be part of the discussions and debates, she said, not being a citizen of Ansul, yet knowing whatever he said would be grasped at eagerly and given undue weight. "It worries him," she said. "And this feeling that something is about to hap­pen, some violence, something fatal that can never be undone . . ."

  As we walked, people constantly greeted us, and saluted Gry and her lion, the first to face down Iddor and the redhats. She smiled and returned the greetings, but in a quick, shy way that did not lead to further talk. I said, "Does it scare you–being a hero?"

  "Yes," she said. She laughed a little and shot me a glance. "You too," she said.

  I nodded. I led us off Galva Street to a byway where we would meet nobody and could talk quietly as we walked.

  "At least you're used to all these people. Oh, Memer, if you knew where I came from! One street of Ansul has more houses in it than there are in all the Uplands. I used to go months, years, never seeing a new face. I used to go all day never speaking a word. I didn't live with human beings. I lived with dogs, and horses, and wild creatures, and the hills. And Orrec . . . None of us knew how to live with other people. Except his mother. Melle. She came from the lowlands, from Derris Water. She was so lovely. . . I think his gift is from her. She used to tell us stories. . . But it's his father he's most like."

  "How is that?" I asked.

  She pondered and spoke. "Canoe was a beaut
iful, brave man. But he feared his gift, and so he hid his heart. Sometimes I see Orrec do that. Even now. It's hard to take responsibility."

  "It's hard to have it taken from you, too," I said, thinking of the Waylord's life all the years I had known him.

  We came back to the street at Goldsmiths' Bridge and went on up to the Council Square. There were a lot of people there, drifting and swirling about, mostly men, and many of them carrying weapons. Someone was haranguing the crowd from the terrace of the Council House, not too successfully, for people kept coming to listen and drifting away again. Over on the east side of the square was a solid line of both men and women, some afoot and some sitting down, keeping their place side by side and very much on the alert. I spoke to one of the women, a neighbor of ours, Marid; she told us they were there "to keep the kids from get~ ting into trouble." Beyond them, down the hill, torches gave enough light that we could just make out the cor­don of Ald soldiers guarding the barracks. These citi­zens had made themselves a barrier between the crowd and the soldiers, preventing random insults and forays against the Alds by young men looking for a fight or by idle stone-throwers. Anybody trying to provoke the sol­diers into violence would have to break through that line of fellow citizens. It continued on across the square, in front of the stables, where I had sat and talked with Simme.

  "You are a remarkable people," Gry said to me as we went back across the square. "I think you have peace in your bones."

  "I hope so," I said. We were in the center of the square, where the great tent had been. The wreckage was gone now; there was no trace of it except the black­ening of the pavement stones, a slight crunch of ash and cinders under the feet. We were walking where Desac had died, burnt alive in the fire he had set. I shuddered all over, and Shetar, at the same moment, set up a long, strange wail, stretching her head up. I remembered how she had taken against Desac, glared at him. I saw him alive, straight-backed and soldierly, arrogant, passion­ate, talking with the Waylord– "We'll meet again, free men in a free city!" he had said. His shadow was all round us.