Voices (27 page)

He brought a message from her, which he told us after dinner, in the Waylord’s rooms. Thanks to a gift sent by the Waylord of Essangan we had wine after dinner these days, a few drops of the golden brandy-wine of those vineyards, like fire and honey. One after another we offered our glass to the god-niche and drank the blessing. Then we sat down.

“My cousin has persuaded the Prince-Legate of Asudar to request to visit the Waylord of Ansul, at last,” said Per. “So I am the bearer of that request, couched in the usual incivilities of the Alds. But I think it’s meant civilly.”

“I grant it civilly,” the Waylord said with a bit of a grin.

“Frankly, Sulter, can you stand the sight of him?”

“I hold nothing against Ioratth,” the Waylord said. “He’s a soldier, he followed his orders. A religious man, he obeyed his priests. Till they betrayed him. Who he is himself, I have no idea. I’ll be interested to learn. That your cousin holds him dear is strongly in his favor.”

“We can always talk poetry with him,” said Orrec. “He has an excellent ear.”

“But he can’t read,” I said.

The Waylord looked up at me. A girl among grown women and men, I still had the privilege of listening without being expected to talk, and mostly silence was my preference. But I had realised recently that when I did speak, the Waylord listened attentively.

Per Actamo was also looking at me with his bright, dark eyes. Per was fond of me, teased me, pretended to be awed by my learning, often seemed to forget he was thirty and I seventeen and talked to me as to an equal, and sometimes flirted with me without knowing, I think, that he was doing it. He was kind and handsome and I’d always been a little in love with him. I’d often thought that I’d marry Per some day. I thought I could, if I wanted to. But I wasn’t ready for all that yet. I didn’t want to be a woman yet. I’d had great love given me as Galva’s daughter and heir, but I’d never yet had what Gry and Orrec offered me—freedom, the freedom of a child, a younger sister. And I longed for it.

Per asked me now, “Do you want to teach the Gand how to read, Memer?”

His teasing and the Waylord’s attention put me on my mettle. “Would an Ald let a woman teach him anything? But if the Gand’s going to deal with people in Ansul, he’d better learn not to be afraid of books.”

“Maybe this isn’t the best house in which to prove that particular point,” said Per. “There’s at least one book here that would put the fear of the gods into anybody.”

“They said the last priests went back with the troops that left today,” said Gry. The connection of her thought was clear to us all.

“Ioratth kept his house priests,” Per said. “Three or four of them. To say the prayers and lead the ceremonies. And drive out demons when necessary, I suppose. He doesn’t find as many demons here as his son did, though.”

“It takes one to find one,” said Gry.

“‘The god in the heart sees the god in the stones,’” Orrec murmured, a line of Regali, though he said it in our own language.

The Waylord didn’t hear him. He was still brooding, and now he asked me, as if he had been following the idea since Per had jokingly said it, “Would you teach the Gand Ioratth how to read, if he consented to learn, Memer?”

“I’d teach anybody who wanted to learn,” I said. “As you taught me.”

The talk passed on to other things. After arranging that the visit to Galvamand by the Prince-Legate and his consort would take place in four days, Per took his leave. Orrec was yawning hugely, and he and Gry soon went off to sleep. I rose to see that the Waylord had what he needed before I too went to bed.

“Stay a minute, Memer,” he said.

I sat down willingly. Since I’d been back to the secret room and renewed that bond with all my past years there, I felt that things were as they used to be between him and me. Our bond, too, that I’d thought was weakened, held as strong and as easy as ever. He was linked now to many people other than me, and I to some people other than him; we no longer needed each other so urgently for strength and solace; but what difference did that make? Hidden in solitude and poverty, or among people in a rich busy world, he and I were bound by all the shadows of our ancestry, and by the power we shared and the knowledge he’d given me, and by dear love and honor.

“Have you been to the room at all?” he asked me.

We were indeed bound very close.

“Today. For the first time.”

“Good. Every night I think I’ll go there and read a little, but I can’t drag myself. Ah, it was easier in Ista’s old days, I’ll admit. I could spend all day talking grain prices and half the night reading Regali, then.”

“I gave
Rostan
to Orrec,” I said.

He looked up, not following at once, and I went on, “I took it out of the room. I thought it was time.”

“Time,” he repeated. He looked away, thinking, and at last said only, “Yes.”

“Is it true, as I think, that only we can enter the room?”

“Yes,” he said again, almost absently.

“Then shouldn’t we bring the books out of hiding? The ordinary books. As we kept them in hiding. For the same reason. So that people would have them.”

“And it’s time,” he said. “Yes. I suppose you’re right. Though…” He brooded a little longer. “Come, Memer. Let’s go there,” he said, and pushed himself up from his chair. I took up the small lamp and followed him back through the ruined corridors to the wall that seems to be the back wall of the house, the wall that has no door in it. There he wrote in the air the letters that spell the word “open” in the language of our ancestors who came from the Sunrise. The door opened, and we went through. I turned and closed it and it became the wall.

I lighted the big lamp on the reading table. The room bloomed with it’s soft light, and the gold on the spines of books glimmered a little here and there.

He touched the god-niche and murmured the blessing, and then stood looking about the room. He sat down at the table, rubbing a stiff knee. “What were you reading?” he asked.

“The
Elegies.
” I brought the book from the shelf and laid it before him.

“How far have you got?”

“‘The Horse Trainer.’”

He opened the book and found the poem. “Can you say it?”

I recited the ten lines of Aritan.

“And?”

I said my reading of it, as I had to Gry. He nodded. “Very satisfactory,” he said, with a suppressed smile.

I sat down at the table opposite him, and after a little silence he said, “You know, Memer, Orrec Caspro came just in time. He can teach you. You were about to discover that you can teach me.”

“Oh no! I mostly just guess at the
Elegies.
I still can’t read Regali.”

“But now you have a teacher who can.”

“Then—you’re not displeased—it was right to give him
Rostan?
”

“Yes,” he said, with a deep breath. “I think so. How can we know what’s right, when we can’t understand the powers we have? I am a blind man asked to read the message given him by a god.”

He turned over the pages of the book on the table and closed it softly. He looked down towards the end of the room where the light of the lamps died away. “I told Iddor I was the Reader. What is reading when you don’t know the language? You are the Reader, Memer. Of that at least I have no doubt. Do you doubt it.?”

The question was abrupt. I answered it without hesitation: “No.”

“Good. Good. And that being so, this is your room, your domain. Blind as I was, I kept it in trust for you. And for all those who brought their treasure to us here, the books…What shall we do with them, Memer?”

“Make a library,” I said. “Like the old one here.”

He nodded. “It seems to be the will of the house itself. We merely obey it.”

That was how it seemed to me too. But I still had some questions.

“Waylord, that day…The day the fountain ran.”

“The fountain,” he said. “Yes.”

“The miracle,” I said.

With that same hint of a smile, he said, “No.”

I was perhaps surprised, perhaps not.

His smile grew broader and merrier. “The Lord of the Springs showed me the means, some while ago,” he said. “I’ll show you, when you like.”

I nodded. That was not where my mind was.

“Does it grieve you or shock you, Memer, that a miracle may be taken into our own hands, as it were?”

“No,” I said. “Not that one. But the other…”

He watched me and waited.

“You weren’t lame,” I said.

He looked down at his hands, his legs. His face was grave now. “So they tell me,” he said.

“You don’t remember?”

“I remember coming to this room in fear and anguish. As soon as I entered, it came to me that I should let the fountain run, and I hurried to do that, not reasoning why. As if obeying. And next, it came to me that I should take a book from the shelf. And I did that. And there was need for haste, so I…could it be that I ran? I don’t know. It must be that those who silenced me when they needed my silence, needed me then to waken your voice.”

I looked down the room, to the shadow end. So did he.

“You didn’t ask the…?”

“There wasn’t time to consult the oracle. And it wouldn’t have answered me. It speaks to you, Memer, not me.”

I didn’t want to hear what he was telling me, even though I had said that I was the Reader. My heart protested in fear, in humiliation. “It doesn’t speak to me!” I said. “It uses me!”

He nodded briefly. “As I was used.”

“It wasn’t even my voice—was it? I don’t know! I don’t understand it. I’m ashamed, I’m afraid! I don’t ever want to go into that darkness again.”

He said nothing for a long time, and finally spoke gently. “They use us, yes, but they do not use us ill…If you must go into the dark, Memer, think, it’s only a mother, a grandmother, trying to tell us something we don’t yet understand. Speaking a language you don’t yet know well, but it can be learned. So I told myself, when I had to enter there.”

I thought about that for a while, and it began to give me comfort. It made the darkness of the cave less uncanny, to imagine that my mother’s spirit was there, with all the other mothers of my race, and they wouldn’t seek to frighten me.

But I had one more question.

“The book—the one you had in your hand—is it on the oracle shelves?”

His silence now was different; he was finding difficulty in answering. At last he said, “No. I took the first book I saw.”

He got up, limped to a bookcase nearby, the closest to the door, and took a little volume from a shelf at eye level. I recognised the dun-colored, unlettered binding. He brought it back and held it out to me in silence. I was afraid to take it but I took it, and after a minute I opened it.

I recognised it then. It was a primer, a reading book for children,
Tales of the Beasts.
I had read it when I was first learning to read, years ago, here, in the secret room.

I turned the pages, my fingers stiff and awkward. I saw the small woodcuts of rabbits and ravens and wild boars. I read the last line of a story, “So the Lion returned home to the desert and told the beasts of the desert that the Mouse was the bravest of all creatures.”

I looked up at the Waylord, and he looked back at me. His face and his slight gesture said:
I do not know.

I looked at the little book that had set us free. I thought of Denios’ words, and said them aloud: “‘There is a god in every leaf; you hold what is sacred in your open hand.’”

After a while, I added, “And there are no demons.”

“No,” the Waylord said. “Only us. We do the demon work.” And again he looked down at his crippled hands.

We were silent. I heard the faint sound of the water running in the dark.

“Come,” he said, “it’s late, the dream senders are all around us. Let’s let them have their way.”

I held the small lamp in my left hand and with my right hand wrote the bright letters on the air. We went through the door, and along the dark corridors. Passing his room I bade him sleep well, and he stooped to kiss my forehead, and so we parted with the blessing for the night.