Voices

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Returning, we crossed the bridge and paused at the railing from which we had seen a man thrown to his death. We looked down at the dark canal that reflected a glimmer or two of light from the houses on the bridge. Shetar growled a little, informing us that she did not want to go back down there and go swimming again. A band of boys ran past us, shouting a chant I had heard several times in the street that day, "Alds out! Alds out! Alds out!"

  "Let's go down to the Lero Stone," I said, and we did; neither of us wanted to go inside on this strange night, with the city all awake and restless about us, and it was good to walk, too, after sitting still listening to people talk all day. We cut down by the Slant Bridge on Gelb Street to West Street and to the Stone. A good many people were there, quietly waiting and doing as I came to do: to touch the Stone and say the blessing of Lero, who holds the balance.

  We started back up West Street. I said, not know­ing that I was going to say it, "Did you and Orrec never have children, Gry?"

  "Yes. We had a daughter," she answered in her quiet voice. "She died of the fever in Mesun. She lived a half year."

  I could say nothing.

  "She'd be seventeen now. How old are you, Memer?"

  "Seventeen," I said, finding it very hard to say.

  "I thought so," Gry said. She smiled at me. I saw her smile in the faint lamplight of the High Bridge. "Her name was Melle," she said.

  I said the name and felt the touch of the little shadow.

  Gry reached out her free hand to me, and we walked hand in hand.

  "This is Ennu's day," I said, as we came to the turn­ing of Galva Street. "Tomorrow will be a day of Lero. The balance will turn."

  * * *

  IN THE MORNING it seemed that the balance might have turned already: we heard early that there was a great crowd gathering in the Council Square, not yet offering violence but noisy and determined, demanding that the Alds leave the city this same day. The Waylord conferred briefly with Orrec, and they came into the gallery together. Orrec looked tense and strained. He spoke to Gry for a moment, and she went to shut Shetar into the Master's room, while Gudit brought out both horses. Orrec mounted Branty. Gry mounted Star, and I ran with her, following Orrec through the crowds in Galva Street. They willingly parted for us, calling out Orrec's name.

  He rode to the line of citizens still holding firm in the square in front of the line of soldiers. There he asked both the citizens and the soldiers if he might speak with the Gand Ioratth. They let him through at once. He dismounted and ran down the steps towards the Ald barracks.

  I held Branty's bridle now, there in the crowd, like a real groom. He didn't need much holding. He stood solidly, alert but not troubled by the hubbub all round, and I tried to imitate him. Star shook her head often, whuffing and shuffling when people pressed up too close, and I tried not to imitate her. I was glad, though, that the horses kept a little space around us, for the presence of so many people was overwhelming. I could not think clearly, and emotions ran through me–ela­tion, dread, excitement–they ran through us all, like the wind through leaves on a tree before a storm. I held Branty's bridle and watched Gry's face, which was still and calm.

  There was a deep roaring in the crowd nearer the steps of the Council House; everybody turned that way, but I could see nothing over the heads and shoulders. Gry touched my arm and indicated that I should mount Branty. "I can't!" I said, but I couldn't hear myself, and she was making a hand stirrup for me, and a man near us said, "Up you go, girl!"–and I was abruptly sitting in the saddle on Branty's back, bewil­dered. Gry swung up onto Star, right beside me. "Look!" she said, and I looked.

  People stood on the speakers' terrace: a woman in a dun-and-white striped gown, and Orrec in his black coat and kilt. They looked very small and bright to me, like images. The crowd was shouting and chanting. Some people were calling out, "Tirio! Tirio!" A man near us shouted ragefully, "Ald's whore! Gand's whore!" and immediately people turned on him, shouting at him with equal rage, while others tried to hush and separate them. I could not reach the stirrups with my feet and felt most insecure perched way up there on the saddle, but Branty stood like a rock, and I was at least safe from the pushing and trampling of the crowd. Gradually the noise died away; Orrec had raised his right hand. "Let the maker speak," people cried, and silence spread out slowly across the crowd, as the water of the fountain had spread out across the wide basin. When he spoke at last his voice rang out, distant but clear and resonant.

  "This is Lero's day," he said. And said nothing fur­ther for a long time, for the whole crowd took up the deep, slow chant of "Lero, Lero, Lero!"–and my breath caught and tears filled my eyes and I was chanting with them, "Lero, Lero, Lero . . . " At last he raised his hand again, and the chant died away down the streets lead­ing to the square.

  "I who am not of Ansul and not of Asudar–will you let me speak again to you?"

  "Yes!" the crowd roared, and, "Speak! Let the maker speak!"

  "Tirio Actamo, daughter of Ansul and wife of the Gand of the Alds, stands here with me. She and her husband ask me to say this to you: The soldiers of Asu­dar will not attack you, they will not interfere with you, they will not leave their barracks–such are the Gand Ioratth's orders, and his soldiers will obey. But he can­not order the soldiers to leave Ansul without the con­sent of his king in Medron. So he waits to hear from Medron. And he, and Tirio Actamo, and I beg you to be patient, and to take your city back and claim your freedom in peace, not in blood. I who saw the ruler, betrayed and imprisoned, set free–I who with you saw water leap from the fountain that was dry two hundred years, and heard with you the voice that cried aloud from silence–I your guest–while we wait together for Lero to show us how the balance falls, and whether we are to destroy or to rebuild, to fall to war or walk in peace–while we wait, may I offer in return for your hospitality and the grace of the gods of Ansul a story, a story of war and peace, of slavery and freedom? Will you hear the Chamhan? Will you hear the tale of Hamneda when he was made a slave in Ambion?"

  "Yes," the crowd said, and now the sound was like a great, soft wind in grass. We could all feel the tension in us lessening, and we were grateful for it, grateful to the voice that freed us from dread and passion and un­reason, if only for a little while, for the time it takes to tell a story.

  Anywhere else in all the Western Shore, people would have known that story; even here, where the books had been destroyed, many in the crowd knew it, or at least knew the hero's name. But many had never read the story nor heard it told. And to hear it told aloud, among a great throng, openly, asserting our in­heritance as our right and our heroes as our own―that was a great thing to us, a great gift Orrec gave us. He told it as if he himself had never known it before and discovered it as he spoke it, as if the betrayal of Hamneda by Eloc appalled him, as if he were chained and beaten with Hamneda, and wept with him at the torture and death of old Afer, and feared for the slaves who risked their lives to help him escape. He was no longer telling the Chamhan I had read, but his own tale in his own words, when he came to the confrontation in the palace of Ambion, when Hamneda released the tyrant Ura from his chains, bidding him be gone from Ambion, and said to the rebels of the city, "Freedom is a lion let loose, the sun rising: you cannot stop it here or there. Give liberty to have liberty! Set free to be free!"

  Since then I have heard people maintain that that is what the voice of the oracle said on the steps of Galva­mand: Set free to be free. Maybe it was so.

  In any case, when they heard those words, the crowd in the Council Square made the sound a great crowd makes when it hears said what it wants to hear. When Orrec finished the tale they were not silent, but roared praise, and their mood was jubilant, as if they themselves had been freed from constraint or dread. They flooded up around Orrec on the terrace of the Council House, and Gry and I had no chance at all of getting to him.

  We could, however, from our horseback height, see him and Tirio; and we saw the crowd begin to swirl around them
and carry them slowly towards Galva Street. Gry hopped off Star and shortened my stirrups, then swung up again into her saddle. "Hold with your knees and never mind the reins," she called, and we set off, surrounded by our own swirl of praise and jokes and shouting, on my first horseback ride―out of the square, across the three bridges of Galva Street, to Galvamand.

  The people parted and made way for us, so that we soon caught up to Orrec and Tirio. Dismounting at our stable gate, I ran back to the house in time to see Tirio's meeting with the Waylord in the gallery. He stood up, seeing her, and she ran forward with her hands held out, saying his name, "Sulter!" They embraced and held each other, both in tears. They had been friends when they were young, maybe lovers, I don't know; they had known each other in youth and wealth and happiness and then been separated for years of shame and pain. He was crippled. She had been beaten, her hair torn out. I remembered how he had said to me, long ago, tenderly. "There's a good deal to weep about, Memer," I cried then too, for them, for the grief of the world.

  Orrec came beside me, as I stood there inside the doorway trying to hide my tears. His face still had the bewildered brightness of one who has been acclaimed, taken out of himself by the power of the crowd; but he put his arm round my shoulders and said softly. "Hello, horse thief."

  * * *

  IT SEEMED AS IF Orrec and Lero had tipped the balance. That day and the days following, there was still tremendous unrest in the city, but it was less rageful, less threatening. There was a lot of angry talk, but fewer weapons were brandished. The Council House was opened for debate on the planning of an election.

  People kept coming to Galvamand to talk in the gallery and to dance the maze―I saw it at last, I saw women dance the maze. After a day or two, Ista went out among them, scowling, with a dishcloth in her hand, and said, "You've got it all wrong. You turn here, when you sing 'Eho!' and then you turn there." And she showed them how to dance the blessing properly. After that she went back to the kitchen.

  She was working very hard, and so were Bomi and I and even Sosta. People kept bringing gifts to the house, gifts of food, knowing how strained our hospi­tality must be with the endless flow of guests. Ista had brought herself to accept them, not as gifts exactly, or honor, or tribute, but as what was due the Waylord and his house―as debts owing and repaid. So her mind worked, like many minds in Ansul. If we have peace in our bones, we have commerce in them too.

  Ialba went back with Tirio to help her care for Ioratth, whose burns were severe and slow to heal. The next day Tirio sent three women from the barracks to help us keep the house. They were city women who had been taken and kept as slaves for the use of the soldiers, like Tirio. As she won the Gand's favor, she had been able to bring them out of utter subjugation to a more decent servitude. One of them, who had been taken and used by the soldiers as a girl of ten or eleven, was crippled and a little mad, but if we set her at any task of cleaning where she could work alone, she worked hard and contentedly. The others had both been of re­spectable households, knew how to keep a house, and were of great assistance to us.

  Ista was inclined at first to treat them coldly and tried to keep them from talking to Sosta and me―look at what they'd been, after all, no doubt it wasn't their fault, but they were no fit company for young girls of a good house, and so on. They and I paid no attention to that. One of them had a man friend she'd known as a slave; he moved right in and took a hand with the heavy work. Gudit got on pretty well with him, because he had been a cartwright, and could plan how to build a carriage out of the broken-down bits of carts and wag­ons Gudit had been hoarding for years.

  So in a few days there was a great increase of people, of life, in the house, and I liked it. There were more voices and not so many shadows. There was a little more order, a little less dust. Many hands touched the god-niches now in passing worship, not just mine.

  But these days I saw very little of the Waylord. Only in public, among others.

  And I had not been to the secret room since the night the oracle spoke through me.

  My life had been suddenly and wholly changed. I lived in the streets, not in books, and talked to many people all day long instead of to one man alone in the evening, and my heart was full of Orrec and Gry, so that sometimes I didn't even think of him. If I felt shame for that, I could excuse myself: I'd been impor­tant to him when I was the only person close to him, but now he no longer needed me. He was truly the Waylord again. He had the whole city to keep him company. He had no time for me.

  And I had no time to go to the secret room, nights, as I had done for so many years. I was busy all day, tired at night. I kissed my little Ennu and fell asleep. The books in that room had kept me alive while my city was dead, but now it was coming back to life, and I had no need of them. No time, no need.

  If I was afraid to go there, afraid of the room, of the books, I didn't let myself know it.

  ♦ 15 ♦

  In those days of early summer, it was as if we had for­gotten the Alds, as if it didn't matter that they were still in the city. Armed citizen volunteers kept a close watch night and day on the barracks and the Council House stables, having formed a kind of militia and doing guard duty in relays, but in the Council House itself all the talk was about Ansul, not the Alds. There were daily meetings, large and tumultuous but led by people experienced in government, determined to re­store Ansul's power and polity.

  Per Actamo was at the center of these plans and meetings. He wasn't yet thirty, but he took to leadership as one born to it. His vigor and intelligence kept the older men from too quickly dropping back into "the way we always did it." He questioned the way we always did it, and asked if it mightn't be done better; and the constitution of the Council began to take shape freed of many useless traditional perquisites and rulings. I went often to hear him and the others speak in the open meetings, for they were exciting, full of hope. Per was at Galvamand daily to take counsel with the Way­lord. Sulsem Cam came with his son Sulter Cam, usu­ally to argue that everything should be done the way we always did it; but his wife Ennulo supported Per's pro­posals. So did the Waylord, though more indirectly, al­ways striving to bring about a consensus and not to become locked in a mere debate of opinions.

  They were already laying plans for the election day, when one sunny morning, in an hour, the news was all over the city: An Ald army is coming through the Isma Hills.

  At first it was only a rumor that could be dis­counted, some shepherd's tale of seeing Ald soldiers, but then a boatman coming into the city down the Sundis confirmed it. A troop of soldiers had been seen marching on the east side of the Isma Hills. They were probably already in the pass above the springs of the river,

  Then there was panic. People ran past the house crying, "They're coming! The Alds!" Crowds at the Council Square and in the streets swelled ceaselessly. Weapons were brought out again. Men rushed to the old city wall that runs along outside the East Canal and the gate where the road from the hills comes in. The wall had been half destroyed when the Alds took the city, but the citizens made barricades across the road and at the Isma Bridge.

  The people who came to Galvamand that day were frightened, looking for guidance. Too many remem­bered the fall of the city seventeen years ago. Per and others who might have spoken to them were at the Council House. The Waylord kept calming them, and they listened to him; but soon he called me and talked to me in the corridor alone.

  "Memer," he said, "I need you. Orrec can't get through the crowd; they'll stop him and want him to tell them what to do. Can you get through the lines―­to Tirio, to Ioratth―and find out what they know about this force of soldiers, and whether the Gand has changed his orders to his troops? And bring word back to me?"

  "Yes. Have you any word for them?" I asked.

  He looked at me then just as he used to look at me when I happened to get the words of some translation from the Aritan exactly right, not surprised, but deeply pleased, admiring. "You'll know what to say," he said.

>   I put on my boy's tunic and tied back my hair. People knew me now, and I didn't want to be recog­nised and stopped with questions. So I went as Mem the half-breed.

  I got along Galva Street all right for a while, dodg­ing and shoving, but after the Goldsmiths' Bridge it was hopeless―the crowd was solid. I ran down the stairs we'd taken that evening, remembering the clatter of hoofs and the shouting and the smell of smoke. I ran along the canal to the Embankments, crossed there, and back down the east bank to where I could cut across to the exercise grounds and the hippodrome. They were empty, deserted, but I saw the line of Ald soldiers on guard, up on the long, low swell of Council Hill behind the stables. All I could do was climb the hill towards them, my heart beating harder and harder.

  The soldiers stood and said nothing. They watched me. A couple of crossbows were aimed at me.

  I got to within ten feet of them, stopped, and tried to catch my breath.

  They looked more foreign to me, those men, than they had ever looked in all the years I'd seen Ald sol­diers, my whole life. Their faces were sallow, their short, pale sheep hair curled out under their helmets, their eyes were pale. They stared at me without expression, without a word.

  "Is there a boy named Simme in the Gand's stablest I said. My voice came out very thin.

  None of the six or seven men nearest me in the line moved or spoke for so long I thought they were not going to answer at all. Then the one right in front of me, who had no crossbow, but a sword in his belt and his hand on the hilt, said, "What if there is, youngster?"