Voices (11 page)

Nobody moved till he was done. And they were silent for a long moment afterwards, just as the crowd in the marketplace had been. Then they were about to clap their hands in praise, but the Gand held up his hand in a sudden gesture—“No,” he said. “Again, Maker! If you will, speak us this marvel once again!”

Orrec looked a little taken aback, but he smiled and bowed his head to the lyre.

Before he touched the strings a man spoke loudly. It was not Iddor but one who stood near him among his troop: he wore a red-and-black robe and a red headdress that came down straight, boxlike, from a high red hat to his shoulders, hiding his head and leaving only his face visible. His beard had been singed off, leaving a burnt frizz along his chin. He carried a long, heavy, black stick as well as a short sword. “Son of the Sun,” he said, “is not once enough and more than enough to hear this blasphemy?”

“Priest,” Chy whispered to me. I knew he was a priest, though we didn’t see them often. Redhats, we called them, and hoped never to see them, for when a citizen was to be stoned to death or buried alive down in the mudflats, it was the redhats who did it.

Ioratth turned to look at the priest. It was like the turn of a hawk’s head, a quick, how-dare-you frown. But he spoke mildly. “Most Blessed of Atth,” he said, “my ears are dull. I heard no blasphemy. I beg you to open my understanding.”

The man in the red headdress spoke with great assurance. “These are godless words, Gand Ioratth. There is in them no knowledge of Atth, no belief in the revelations of his sacred interpreters. It is all blind worship of demons and false gods, talk of base earthly doings, and praise of women.”

“Ah, ah,” Ioratth said, nodding, not contradicting but not seeming shaken by this denunciation. “It is true that the heathen poets are ignorant of Atth and his Burnt Ones. They perceive darkly and in error, yet let us not call them blind. The fire of revelation may yet come to them. Meanwhile, we who were forced to leave our wives long years ago, do you begrudge even our hearing a word about women.? You the Blessed, the Fire-Burnt, are above pollution, but we are only soldiers. To hear is not to have, but it gives some comfort none the less.” He was perfectly solemn saying this, but some of the men about him grinned.

The man in the headdress began to reply, but the Gand abruptly stood up. “In respect for the sacred purity of the Fire-Burnt,” he said, “I will not ask the Blessed Rudde or his brothers to stay and listen longer to words that offend their ears. And any other man who does not wish to hear the heathen poet’s songs may go. Since only he is cursed who hears the curse, as they say, those who have dull ears, like me, may stay and listen safely. Maker, forgive our disputes and our discourtesy.”

He sat down again. Iddor and the redhats—there were four of them—and the rest of Iddor’s group all went back into the great tent, talking loudly, discontented. One man who stood near Ioratth also slunk away as unnoticeably as he could, looking anxious and unhappy. The rest stayed. And Orrec struck the lyre, and spoke the opening of
The Transformations
again.

The Gand let his people applaud at the end, this time. He had another glass of water brought to Orrec (“Fortune in crystal,” Chy hissed to me), and then he dismissed his retinue, saying that he wished to speak with the poet “beneath the fern-palm,” which evidently meant in private.

A couple of guards remained standing at the tent entrance, but the officers and courtiers went back into the big tent or to the barracks, and Chy and I were dismissed by the officious slave with the fan. We went to the stable side of the courtyard, following several men who, I realised now, had come from the stables or elsewhere to hear the poetry and had been standing all along unobtrusively on the fringe of the group. Some were soldiers, others hostlers, a couple of them were boys. Most of them were interested in Shetar. They wanted to get closer to her than Chy would let them get. They tried to strike up conversation, asking all the usual questions—what’s her name, where did you get her, what does she eat, has she killed anybody. Chy’s answers were curt and haughty, as befitted a lion tamer.

“Is he your slave?” a young man asked. I didn’t realise he was talking about me until Chy answered, “Prentice groom.”

The young man fell into step with me, and when I reached the shady wall and sat down on the cobbles, he sat down too. He looked at me several times and finally said, “You’re an Ald.”

I shook my head.

“Your dad was,” he said, looking very shrewd.

What was the use denying it, with my hair, my face? I shrugged.

“You live here? In the city?”

I nodded.

“Do you know any girls?”

My heart went up into my throat. All I could think was that he’d seen I was a girl, that he’d start shouting about pollution, defilement, blasphemy—

“I came here from Dur with my dad last year,” he said in a depressed tone, and then said nothing for a while.

Sneaking a longer glance at him I saw that he was a boy rather than a man, fifteen, sixteen at most. He didn’t wear the blue cloak, but a tunic with a blue knot at the shoulder. He was bare-legged, big-boned, pale-skinned, with a soft face and pimples around his mouth. His frizz of sheep hair was yellowish. He sighed. “The Ansul girls all hate us,” he said. “I thought maybe you had a sister.”

I shook my head.

“What’s your name?”

“Mem.”

“Well, look, Mem, if you knew some girls who, you know, just wanted to be with some men for a while, I have some money. For you, I mean.”

He was graceless, detestable, and pitiful. He didn’t even sound hopeful. I didn’t make any answer at all. For all my fear and contempt of him, he made me want to laugh—I don’t know why—he was so shameless. Like a dog. I couldn’t actually hate him.

He went on about girls, just talking about his daydreams I suppose, and began to say some things that made me feel myself getting red in the face and restless. I said in a flat voice, “I don’t know any girls.” That shut him up for a while. He sighed and scratched his groin and finally said, “I hate it here. I want to go home.”

Then go! I wanted to shout at him. I just said, “Hunh.”

He looked at me again, so closely that it scared me all over again. “Do you ever go with boys?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“I never have either,” he said in his sad, monotonous voice, which was no deeper than mine. “Some of the fellows do.” The idea seemed to depress him so much that he said nothing more, until he said, “Father would kill me.”

I nodded.

We sat in silence. Shetar was pacing up and down the courtyard with Chy in attendance. I wanted to be with them, but thought it would look odd if an apprentice groom walked up and down with the lion and the lion tamer.

“What do fellows do here?” the boy asked.

I shrugged. What did boys do? Scrounged for food and firewood, mostly, like everybody else in my city except the Alds. “Play stickball,” I said finally.

He looked more depressed. Evidently he was not the game-playing type.

“What’s so strange here,” he said, “there’s women everywhere. Out in the open. Women all over the place, but you can’t…They don’t…”

“Aren’t there any women in Asudar?” I asked, playing stupid.

“Of course there’s women. Only they aren’t outside, all over the place,” he said in an aggrieved, accusing tone. “They aren’t always around where you see them all the time. Our women don’t go flaunting around in the street. They stay home where they belong.”

I thought then of my mother, in the street, trying to get home.

A great, hot rage rose up through my body and if I had spoken then it would have been a curse, or I would have spat in his face; but I didn’t speak, and the rage slowly died away to a cold, hollow sickness. I swallowed my saliva and willed myself to be calm.

“Mekke says there’s temple whores,” the boy said. “Anybody could go there. Only the temples were shut down, of course. So they do it in secret somewhere. But they still have them. They do it with anybody. You know anything about that?”

I shook my head.

He sighed.

Very carefully, I stood up. I needed to move, but move slowly.

“My name’s Simme,” he said, looking up at me with a squinting smile, like a child.

I nodded. I moved slowly away—towards Shetar and Chy, for I did not know anywhere else to go. The blood was singing in my ears.

Chy looked me over and said, “The Gand’s about done talking, I think. Go to the stables and ask them to bring the maker’s horse out. Say you want to walk him. All right?”

I nodded and went round into the great stable courtyard. For some reason I was no longer afraid of the men there. I asked after the maker’s horse, and they took me to Branty’s stall. Branty was playing with a taste of oats. “Have him saddled and brought out,” I said, as if they were slaves and I a master. The old man who had taken him from me at first went to obey my orders. I stood with my hands behind my back, looking over the beautiful horses in the long line of stalls. When the old man brought Branty out, I took his bridle without hesitation.

“He’d be about nineteen or twenty?”

“Older,” I said, with the same assurance.

“Good blood,” the old man said. He reached up to part Branty’s forelock with thick, dirty, gentle fingers. “I like big horses,” he said.

I gave a brief nod of approval, and walked away with Branty. Chy and Shetar were just at the entrance to the stable court, and Orrec was coming towards us. I gave him a knee up to mount, and we set off sedately for home. As we went out through the gateway of the Council Square, past the Ald guards in blue cloaks, I was overcome suddenly by tears, they burst hot from my eyes, my mouth quivered and jerked. I went walking on, seeing my city, my beautiful city and the far mountain over the straits and the cloud-swept sky through tears, until they ceased.

I
sta made one of her special dishes that night, what we call uffu, pastries stuffed with a bit of ground lamb or kid, potatoes, greens, and herbs, and fried in oil. They were crisp, greasy, delicious. Ista was grateful to Orrec and Gry not only because they had provided meat for the kitchen—we were sharing Shetar’s dinner, is the fact of it—but because they were our guests, restoring honor and dignity to the house by their presence, and giving her somebody new to cook for. They complimented the uffu, while she shrugged and growled and criticised her pastry for being tough. Can’t get decent oil, she said, like we had in the good days.

After dinner the Waylord took our guests and me to the back gallery, and again we sat and talked. Three of us were very curious to know what the Gand Ioratth had said to Orrec beneath the fern-palm. And Orrec was ready to tell us. He had news indeed.

Dorid, Gand of Gands, high priest and king of Asudar and commander of the Ald armies for nearly thirty years, was dead. He had died of a seizure over a month ago in his palace in the desert city Medron. His successor was a man named Acray, his nephew, or so called. Since the kings of Asudar were high priests, and priests of Atth were officially celibate, a king couldn’t officially have a son, only nephews. Other nephews or claimants to the throne contested Acray’s succession and had been killed in uprisings or behind the scenes. Medron had been in turmoil for some time, but by now Acray had seized firm hold of power as the Gand of Gands of all Asudar.

And this was evidently much to the Gand Ioratth’s liking. From what he said, Orrec gathered that the new priest-king was less the priest and more the king than Dorid had been. The palace factions that had tried to keep Acray from the throne were, like Dorid, followers of the cult of the Thousand True Men—those who had declared a war of good against evil, urging the invasion of heathen Ansul to find and destroy the Night Mouth.

Acray’s followers, it seemed, didn’t put much stock in the existence of the Night Mouth, especially since the invading army had never been able to find it. They considered the occupation of Ansul, though it had brought some profit and luxury goods to Medron, as a drain on the resources of the Ald army and also a spiritually questionable enterprise. For the Alds were a race apart, dwelling in their desert, singularly favored by their single god. They had always kept clear of the pollution of the unbelievers. To continue to live among the heathen was to risk their souls.

What should the Alds in Ansul do, then?

Ioratth, considering these matters aloud to Orrec, had spoken remarkably plainly. The question, as he saw it, was which would be more pleasing to Atth: should the new Gand of Gands recall his soldiers home to Asudar with all the loot they could bring, or should he send settlers to colonise Ansul permanently?

“He put it just about like that,” Orrec said. “Evidently the new ruler has asked Ioratth for his opinion, as a man who’s lived all these years here among the heathen. And Ioratth sees me as disinterested, an impartial observer. But why does he see me so.? And why does he trust me with his damned indecisions? I’m a heathen myself!”

“Because you’re a maker,” the Waylord said. “Therefore, to the Alds, a truth-speaker and a seer.”

“Maybe he has nobody else he can talk to,” Gry said. “And whether or not you’re a seer, you certainly are a good listener.”

“A silent one,” Orrec said, with some bitterness. “What can I say to all this?”

“I don’t know what you can say to Ioratth,” the Waylord said. “But it may help you to know what little I know about him. In the first place, he took a woman of Ansul as a slave, a concubine, but it’s said he treats her honorably. Her name is Tirio Actamo. She’s the daughter of a great family. I knew her before the invasion. She was a beautiful, clever, spirited girl. All I know of her now is servants’ gossip brought to me by others, but the gossip is that Ioratth honors her as a wife, and that she has great influence on him.”

“I wish I could talk with her!” Gry said.

“So do I,” the Waylord said, and his voice was wry and melancholy. After a pause he went on. “Iddor is the Gand’s son by a wife back in Asudar. They say Iddor hates Tirio Actamo. They also say he hates his father.”