Voices (16 page)

“Yes, and outside the city, too. We’ve kept in touch over the years with all the towns of the Ansul Coast, scholars and merchants, people who were waylords and mayors and officers of the festivals and ceremonies. Boys run messages from town to town, wagoners carry them along with the cabbages. The soldiers seldom search for written messages, they’d rather have nothing to do with sacrilege and wizardry.”

“‘O Lord Destroyer, give me an ignorant enemy!’” Orrec quoted.

“In the city, some of the men I’ve talked about this with over the years are with Desac now. They seek any way to get the Ald yoke off our neck. They’re ready to fight. But they might be willing to talk. If the Alds will listen.”

♦ ♦ ♦

O
RREC WAS NOT SUMMONED
to the Palace the next day. Late in the morning he went down to the Harbor Market, on foot, with Gry. He didn’t give any advance notice, no tent was set up, but as soon as he walked into the market square people recognised and followed him. They didn’t press very close to him, partly because of Shetar, but they made a moving circle round him, greeted him, called out his name, and shouted, “Recite, recite!” One man shouted, “Read!”

I didn’t walk with them. I was in boy’s clothes, as usual when I went in the streets, and didn’t want to be seen as Mem the groom with Gry, who wasn’t in disguise. I ran round to the raised marble pavement in front of the Admirals’ Tower and climbed up on the base of the horse statue there, from which I had a good view of the whole market. The statue is the work of Redam the sculptor, carved from one great block of stone; the horse stands foursquare, strong and heavy, his head raised and turned to the west, looking out to sea. The Alds had destroyed most statues in the city but left this one untouched, perhaps because it was a horse; certainly they didn’t know that the sea gods, the Seunes, are imagined and worshipped in the form of horses. I touched the Seune’s big stone left front hoof and murmured the blessing. The Seune returned the blessing to me in the form of shade. It was a hot day already, and going to get hotter.

Orrec took his position where the tent had been on the first day he spoke here, and the people crowded round him. The pedestal I was on soon filled up with boys and men, but I hung on to my place right between the horse’s front legs, shoving back hard when people shoved me. Many of the stall keepers in the market tossed a cloth over their goods and joined the crowd to listen to the maker, or stood on a stool by their booth to see over the heads of the throng. I saw five or six blue cloaks in the crowd, and soon a troop of mounted Ald soldiers came down the Council Way to the corner of the square, but they stopped without trying to push into the crowd. There was a great hum of noise, talking and laughing and shouting, and it was a shock when all that human commotion ceased at once, dropped into utter silence, at the first note of Orrec’s lyre.

He said a poem first, Tetemer’s love poem “The Hills of Dom,” an old favorite all up and down the Ansul Coast. When he had spoken it he sang the refrain with the lyre, and the people sang with him, smiling and swaying.

Then he said, “Ansul is a small land, but her songs are sung and her tales are told through all the Western Shore. I first learned them far to the north, in Bendraman. The makers of Ansul are famous from the farthest south to the River Trond. And there have been heroes here in peaceful Ansul and Manva, brave warriors, and the makers have told of them. Hear the tale of Adira and Marra on the Mountain Sul!”

A great, strange sound went up from the crowd, a kind of moaning roar both of joy and of grief. It was frightening. If Orrec was daunted, if the response he got was more than he’d expected, he didn’t show it. He lifted his head proudly and sent his voice out strong and clear: “In the days of the Old Lord of Sul, an army came from the land of Hish…” The crowd stood completely motionless. I was fighting tears the whole time. The story, the words, were so dear to me, and I had only known them in silence, in secret, in the hidden room, alone. Now I heard them spoken aloud among a great crowd of my people, in the heart of my city, under the open sky. Across the straits the mountain stood blue in the blue haze, it’s peak sharp white. I held on to the stone hoof of the Seune and fought my tears.

The tale ended, and in the silence one of the Ald horses gave a loud, ringing whinny, a regular warhorse cry. It broke the spell. The crowd laughed, moved, and began crying out, “Eho! Eho! Praise to the maker! Eho!” Some were shouting, “Praise to the heroes! Praise to Adira!” The mounted troop up at the east edge of the square shifted as if they were forming to ride into the crowd, but the people paid no attention and did not move away from them. Orrec stood quietly, his head bowed, for a long time. The tumult did not die away, and at last he spoke through it, not outshouting the crowd but as if speaking in an ordinary tone, though his voice carried amazingly: “Come on, sing with me.” He raised his lyre, and as they began to quieten, he sang out the first line of his song “Liberty”: “As in the dark of winter night…”

And we sang it with him, thousands of voices. Desac was right. The people of Ansul knew that song. Not from books, we had no more books. From the air—from voice to voice, from heart to heart, down through all the western lands.

When it was done and the moment of silence passed, the tumult rose again, cheers and calls for more, but also shouts as of anger, and somewhere in the crowd a deep-voiced man called out, “Lero! Lero! Lero!”—and other voices took it up as a chant, with a fast beat on a mounting tune. I had never heard it, but I knew it must be one of the old chants, the songs of festival, procession, worship, that had been sung in the streets when we were free to praise our gods. I saw the mounted troop pushing their way into the crowd, which caused enough commotion that the chant lost force and died away. I saw Orrec and Gry making their way down the steps to the east, not across the square but behind the Ald troop. The crowd was still resisting the horsemen, though slowly giving way to them—it’s very hard not to get out of the way of a horse coming straight at you, I can testify. I slid down from the pedestal and wriggled through the crowd till I got onto Council Way, ran up it and cut across behind the Customs House, and met my friends on the way up West Street.

A mob of people were following them, but not closely, and most of them didn’t come farther than the bridge over North Canal. The maker, the singer, is sacred, not to be intruded on. While I was still up on the pedestal I saw people touching the place where Orrec had stood on the pavement above the Admiralty steps, touching it for the blessing; and no one would walk across that spot for a while. In the same way, they followed him at a distance, calling out praise and jokes and singing his hymn to liberty. And again for a moment that chant rose up, “Lero! Lero! Lero!”

We said nothing as we climbed the hill to Galvamand. Orrec’s brown face was almost grey with fatigue, and he walked blindly; Gry held his arm. He went straight to the Master’s room. Gry said he would rest there a while. I began to see the cost of his gift.

♦ ♦ ♦

E
ARLY IN THE EVENING
I was down in the stable court playing with a new batch of kittens. Bomi’s cats had been quite shy and retiring ever since Shetar appeared, but kittens have no fear. This lot was just old enough to be wildly funny, chasing one another over and through a woodpile, falling over their tails, stopping to stare with their little, round, intent eyes, and flying off again. Gudit had been exercising Star out on the horse path. He stood watching the kittens with a glum and disapproving air. One got into trouble, scrabbling straight up a post and then sticking there, crying, not knowing how to get back down; Gudit gently picked it off the post, like a burr, and gently put it back on the woodpile, saying, “Vermin.”

We heard the clatter of hoofs, and a blue-cloaked officer rode in and halted his horse in the archway.

“Well?” said Gudit in a loud, belligerent tone, straightening up his hunched back as well as he could and glaring. Nobody rode into his stableyard uninvited.

“A message from the Palace of the Gand of Ansul to the maker Orrec Caspro,” said the officer.

“Well?”

The officer looked curiously at the old man for a moment. “The Gand will have the maker attend him at the Palace late tomorrow afternoon,” he said, politely enough.

Gudit gave a brief nod and turned his back. I also looked away, picking up a kitten as an excuse. I knew that elegant sorrel mare.

“Hey, Mem,” somebody said. I froze. I turned around reluctantly, and there was Simme standing inside the stableyard. The officer was backing his mare out of the archway. He spoke to Simme as he turned the horse, and Simme saluted him.

“That’s my dad,” Simme said to me, with transparent pride. “I asked him if I could come along with him. I wanted to see where you live.” His smile was fading as I stared at him saying nothing. “It’s, it’s really big,” he said. “Bigger than the Palace. Maybe.” I said nothing. “It’s the biggest house I ever saw,” he said.

I nodded. I couldn’t help it.

“What’s that?”

He came closer and bent over to see the kitten, which was squirming in my hands and needling me fiercely.

“Kitten,” I said.

“Oh. Is it, is it from that lion?”

How could anybody be so stupid?

“No, just a house cat. Here!” I passed the kitten to him.

“Ow,” he said, and half dropped it. It scampered off with it’s tiny tail in the air.

“Claws,” he said, sucking his hand.

“Yes, it’s really dangerous,” I said.

He looked confused. He always looked confused. It was unseemly to take advantage of anybody so confused. But it was almost irresistible.

“Can I see the house?” he asked.

I stood up and dusted my hands. “No,” I said. “You can look at it from outside. But you can’t go in. You shouldn’t have come even this far. Strangers and foreigners stop in the forecourt until they’re invited farther. People with manners dismount in the street and touch the Sill Stone before they come into the forecourt.”

“Well, I didn’t know,” he said, backing away a little.

“I know you didn’t. You Alds don’t know anything about us. All you know is that we can’t come under your roof. You don’t even know that you can’t come under ours. You are ignorant.” I was trying to hold back the flood of shaking, triumphant rage that swelled in me.

“Well, look. I was hoping we could be friends,” Simme said. He said it in his hangdog way. But it took some courage to say it at all.

I walked towards the arch, and he came with me.

“How can we be friends? I’m a slave, remember?”

“No you aren’t. Slaves are…Slaves are eunuchs, you know, and women, and…” He ran out of definitions.

“Slaves are people who have to do what the master orders. If they don’t, they’re beaten or killed. You say you’re the masters of Ansul. That makes us slaves.”

“You don’t do anything I tell you to do,” he said. “You aren’t any kind of slave.”

He had a point there.

We had come out of the stableyard and were walking under the high north wall of the main house. It was built of massive squared stones for ten feet up from the ground; above that was a story of finer stonework with tall double-arched windows, and high above that carved cornices supported the deep eaves of the slate roof. He glanced up at it several times, quickly, askance, the way a horse eyes something that spooks him.

We came round into the forecourt, which goes the whole width of the house. It’s raised a step above the street and separated from it by a line of arcaded columns. The pavement is of polished stones, grey and black, fitted into a complex geometrical pattern, a maze. Ista told me how they used to dance the maze on the first day of the year, the spring equinox, in the old days, singing to Iene who blesses growing things. The pavement was dirty; dust and leaf litter had blown across it. It was a big job to sweep it. I tried sometimes, but I never could keep it clean. Simme started to walk across the maze.

“Get off that!” I said. He jumped, and followed me down the step between the columns into the street, staring with a startled, innocent look, almost like the kittens.

“Demons,” I said with a grin, a snarl, gesturing to the grey-and-black pattern of the stones. He didn’t even see it.

“What’s that.?” he said. He was looking at the stump of the Oracle Fountain.

The fountain is to the right as you face the great doors. The basin is green serpentine—Lero’s stone—ten feet or so across. The water had sprung from a central jet; the bronze spout stuck up, now, out of a marble lump so broken and disfigured you could hardly see that it had once been shaped as an urn and carved with watercress leaves and lilies. Dust and dead leaves lay in the basin.

“A fountain full of demon water,” I said. “It ran dry centuries ago. But your soldiers smashed it all the same, to get the demons out.”

“You don’t have to talk about demons all the time,” he said sullenly.

“Oh but look,” I said, “see, around the base of the urn, those little carvings. Those are words. That’s writing. Writing’s black magic. Written words are all demons, aren’t they. You want to go nearer and read them. Want to see some demons close up.”

“Come on, Mem,” he said. “Lay off.” He glared at me, hurt and resentful. That was what I wanted, wasn’t it.

“All right,” I said after a while. “But look, Simme. There isn’t any way we can be friends. Not till you can read what the fountain says. Not till you can touch that stone and ask blessing on my house.”

He looked at the long, ivory-colored Sill Stone set into the center of the step, worn into a soft hollow by the hands that had touched it over all the centuries. I bent down now and touched it.

He said nothing. He turned at last and went away down Galva Street. I watched him go. There was no triumph in me. I felt defeated.

♦ ♦ ♦

O
RREC CAME TO DINNER
that evening, recovered and hungry. We talked first of his recitation, he and Gry and I telling the Waylord what he had said and how the crowd had responded to it.

Sosta had been down to the market to hear him and now was swoonier than ever, gazing at him across the table with her face gone all soft and loose, till he had to take pity on her. He tried to joke, but that didn’t work, so he tried to turn her mind from him to her real future, asking where she would live after she married. She managed to explain that her betrothed had chosen to join our household and be a Galva. Orrec and Gry, who had a great interest in the ways people do things, asked all about our customs of marriage-bargain and chosen kinship. Mostly Sosta gazed, mute with adoration, and the Waylord answered; but when Ista sat down with us at table she had a chance to boast about her son-in-law to be, which she loved to do.