Voices (26 page)

I had not been there for months. It was as it had always been: the clear, even light from the high skylights, the quiet air, the books in their patient, potent rows, and if I listened, the faint murmur of water in the cave down at the shadow end. No books lay out on the table. There was no sign of any presence there. But I knew the room was full of presences.

I’d intended to read in Orrec’s book; but when I stood at the shelves my hand went to the book I had been working on last spring, the night before Gry and Orrec came, a text in Aritan, the
Elegies.
They are short poems of mourning and praise for people who died a thousand years ago. The names of the authors are mostly not given, and all we know of the people named in the poems is what the poet says.

One of them reads, “Sullas who kept the house well, so that the patterned pavements shone, now keeps the house of silence. I listen for her step.”

Another, the one I’d been trying to understand when I stopped reading, is about a horse trainer; the first line is, “Surely where he is, they are around him, the long-maned shadows.”

I sat down at the table, at my old place, with that book and the wordbook of Aritan, with it’s notes in the margins written by many hands over the centuries, and tried to make out what the next lines meant.

When I’d understood the poem as well as I could, and had it in my memory, the light from the skylights was fading. Lero’s Day, the equinox, was past, the days were getting short. I closed the book and sat on at the table, not lighting the lamp, just sitting there feeling for the first time in a long time a sense of peace, of being in the right place. I let that feeling come all through me and penetrate me and settle in me. As it did, I was able to think, slowly and clearly, not so much in words as in knowing what matters and seeing what has to be done, which is the way I think. I hadn’t been able to think that way for months.

That’s why when I got up to leave the room, I took with me a book from it, a thing I had never done before. I took
Rostan,
the one I called Shining Red when I was a little child building walls and bear’s dens with the books.

I had heard Orrec speak of it longingly, not long ago, as a lost work of the maker Regali. The Waylord had said nothing in reply.

He had never said anything to Orrec about the books in the secret room. So far as I knew, he and I alone knew of the room itself.

That the oracle spoke through books, people knew vaguely, and now they’d actually heard it’s voice; but they didn’t ask to know more about the mystery, they didn’t want to pry into it, they let it be. After all, for years, books themselves had been accursed and forbidden, dangerous things even to know about. And though we of Ansul live comfortably among the shadows of our dead, we’re not a people with much taste for the uncanny. Sulter Galva the Reader was held in some awe, as was I; but people much preferred to deal with Sulter Galva the Waylord. The oracle had done it’s work, we’d been set free, and now we could get back to business.

But my business was a little different. That’s what I’d seen at last, sitting at the reading table, with a closed book in my hands.

O
rrec, Gry and Shetar had returned from the Harbor Market late in the afternoon, Orrec to collapse and sleep for a while as he always did when he could after a public performance. He was reviving now, roaming about barefoot and disheveled, when I came to the Master’s rooms. He said, “Hello, horse thief,” and Gry said, “There you are! We were just talking about taking a walk in the old park before it gets too dark to see.”

Shetar did not understand separate words, such as “walk,” as many dogs can do; but she often was aware of intentions before people knew they were intending anything. She was already standing up, and now she paced over with her graceful slouch to the door and sat down to wait for us. The plumed tip of her tail twitched back and forth. I scratched her around the ears and she leaned her head into my hand and purred a little.

“I brought this for you, Orrec,” I said, and held out the tall book with it’s gold-printed red cover. He came over, slouching a bit himself and yawning, to take it. When he saw it was a book his mouth snapped shut and his face went taut. When he saw what book it was, he stood motionless, and it was a long moment before he drew breath.

“Oh, Memer,” he said. “What have you given me?”

I said, “What I have to give.”

He looked up from the book then to my face. His eyes were luminous. It gave me great joy to give him joy.

Gry came to his side and looked at the book; he showed her what it was, handling it with a lover’s care, reading the first line half aloud. “I knew,” he said, “I knew they must be here—some of the books of the great library—But this—!” He looked at me again. “Was this—Are there books here in the house, Memer?”

I hesitated. Gry, as quickly aware of feeling and intention as Shetar, laid her hand on his arm and said, “Wait, Orrec.”

I had to think, and quickly, what indeed my intention was, what right I had and what responsibility. Was this book mine to give? And if it was, what of the other books? And the other lovers of books?

What I saw was that I could not lie to Orrec. And that answered the question of my responsibility. As for the right, I had to claim it.

“Yes,” I said. “There are books here. But I don’t think I can take you to the place where they are. I’ll ask the Waylord. But I think it’s closed, except to us. To my people. I think our guardians keep it hidden. The spirits of the house, the ancestors. And the ones who were here before us. The ones who told us to stay here.”

Orrec and Gry had no trouble understanding this. They too had gifts of their lineage. They knew the burdens and chances laid on us by the shadows in our blood and bone, and by the spirits of the place we live in.

“Orrec, let me tell him I gave you the book,” I said. “I didn’t ask him if I could.” Orrec looked concerned, and I said, “It’ll be all right. But I need to talk to him.”

“Of course.”

“He never spoke of the books to you, because it was dangerous to know,” I said. I felt I must defend the Waylord’s silence. “For so long, he had to hide them all. From everybody. The Alds could never find them, here. So they were safe, and people weren’t in danger for having them. But people knew. They brought books here in secret, at night—hidden in packages of candles or old clothes—in firewood, in a haybale—they risked their lives bringing books here, where they knew we could keep them safe. Families who’d hidden their books, like the Cams and the Gelbs, and people we didn’t know, just people who’d found a book or kept it or saved it from the Alds. They knew to bring it here to Galvamand. But now, now we don’t have to hide any more—do we?…Can you—could you ever read to the people, Orrec.? Instead of reciting? To let them know, to let them see that books aren’t demons, that our history, our hearts, our freedom’s written in them?”

He looked at me with a slow, joyful smile that became almost a laugh. “I think it’s you that should read to them, Memer,” he said.

“
Warrawarrroo!
” Shetar said, losing patience at last.

Gry and I left Orrec with his treasure. We let Shetar lead us out and guide us in the twilight up to Denios’ Fountain. There she roamed about through the fallen leaves and rustling shrubbery, hunting mice, while we talked, sitting on the old marble bench by the fountain. Lights were coming on down in the houses of the city. Far out in the straits, under the last dim purple of sunset, we saw the glimmer of the boats of night fishermen. Sul was a pure cone of darkness against the dying light. An owl swooped past near us, and I said, “The good omen to you.”

“And to you,” Gry said. “You know, in Trundlede they call owls bad luck? They’re a gloomy, downhearted lot there. Too much forest, too much rain.”

“You’ve travelled all over the world,” I said dreamily.

“Oh, no, not yet. We’ve never been to Sundraman. Or the capes of Manva or Melune. And among the City States we’ve seen only Sentas and Pagadi, and we came only through a corner of Vadalva…And even if you know a land well, there’s always a town or a hill you haven’t seen. I don’t think we’ll run out of world.”

“When do you think you’ll go on?”

“Well, until just now, I’d have guessed that Orrec might be thinking of moving on to Sundraman before the winter, or in the spring. He wants to see what kind of poetry they have there, before we go back to Mesun. But now…I doubt he’ll go till he knows every book you can show him.”

“Are you sorry?”

“Sorry? Why? You’ve given him a great happiness, and I love to see him happy. It doesn’t come easy to him. Orrec has a difficult heart…You know what he can do with a crowd of people, how easy it seems to come to him and how they love him—and doing it, he’s carried away by it—but afterward, he feels cast down and false. It isn’t me at all, he says, it’s the sacred wind blows through me, and it empties me and leaves me like dry grass…But if he can write, and read, and follow his own heart in silence, he’s a happy man.”

“That’s why I love him,” I said. “I’m like that.”

“I know,” she said, and put her arm around me.

“But you yourself might want to be going on, Gry. Not just sitting here all year with a lot of books and politics.”

She laughed. “I like it here. I like Ansul. But if we stay through the winter, and I think now we will, I might find somebody who needs a hand training horses.”

“
Surely where he is, they are around him, the long-maned shadows
” I said. I said the rest of the poem for her when she asked.

“Yes. That poet got it right,” she said. “I like that.”

“Gudit is hoping to get some horses for the Waylord to use.”

“I might train a colt for him. It stands to reason…But, anyhow, we’ll go on, eventually. And sooner or later we’ll go back to Urdile, to take what Orrec’s learned to the scholars in Mesun. He’ll be busy copying that book, and anything you give him, from now on.”

“I could help him copy.”

“He’ll wear you out if you offer.”

“I like doing it. I learn the book while I copy it.”

She was silent for a little while and then said, “If we did go back to Urdile, next spring or summer, whenever—would you think of coming with us?”

“Coming with you,” I repeated.

Sometimes, back in early summer, I had made a daydream of the caravan wagon which stood now in our stables: a daydream of Star and Branty pulling it across some long gold plain where the poplars cast shadows, or over a road in the hills, and Orrec driving it, and Gry and Shetar walking with me along the road behind. It had been just a fancy to cheer me, to take my mind away from anxiety, in the time of the fire and the crowds and the fear.

Now she made it real. That road lay before me.

I said, “I would go with you anywhere, Gry.”

She leaned her head against mine for a moment. “We might do that, then,” she said.

I thought, trying to see what it is that matters and what I have to do. I said finally, “I would come back here.”

She listened.

“I couldn’t leave him and not come back.”

She nodded.

“But more than that. I belong to Galvamand. I think I am the Reader. Not he. It’s passed along.” I was speaking out of my own thoughts and I realised she could hardly know what I meant. I tried to explain. “There is a voice here, and it must speak through one who can—who can ask, who can read. He taught me. He gave me that. He kept it for me and passed it to me. It’s not his to carry, but mine. And I have to come back to it. To stay here.”

Again she nodded, gravely, consenting fully.

“But Orrec could teach me, too,” I said, and then, sure I had gone too far and asked too much, I shrank into myself.

“That would complete his happiness,” Gry answered. She said it serenely and as a matter of course. “To have the books he longed for, and you to read them with—oh, you may not have to worry about leaving Galvamand, Memer! The problem may be getting him to leave…But I think you’d like it, the way we travel, stopping to stay a while in a town or a village, and finding the makers and musicians there. And they’ll speak and sing for us, and Orrec for them. They’ll bring out the books they have to show him, and the little boys who can recite ‘Hamneda’s Vow,’ and the old women who know old songs and tales…And then we always go back to Mesun. It’s a fine city, all towers on hills. I know Orrec would like to take you there, because he’s said so to me. To meet the scholars he knows there, and read with them. You could take them the learning of Ansul, and bring their learning back with you to Galvamand…But the best part is, I’d have you with me all that time.”

I bent my head to kiss her hard, strong little hand, and she kissed my hair.

Shetar came bounding past us, a wild thing in the darkening night.

“It must be supper time,” Gry said and stood up. Shetar came to her at once, and we went down to the house. Orrec was of course lost in
Rostan,
and had to be dragged from it bodily, and we three were late to table, arriving about the time Ista finally took her place.

We ate in the dining room now, not in the pantry, for we were generally twelve or more at table, what with the increase to the household, and Sosta’s new husband, and guests. I haven’t told of Sosta’s wedding. We cleaned the great courtyard for it, taking out all the broken stone and rubbish that had been left there since the house was looted and burned, replanting the marble flower boxes and training the trumpet vines that wreathed the walls, sweeping the tessellated pavement of red and yellow stone. The celebration was on a hot afternoon of late summer, a day of Deori. All the friends of both households came. Ista set out a splendid feast, and people danced while the moon crossed the sky above the courtyard. And Ista said, watching the dancers, “It’s like the good times, the old times! Almost.”

This night, we had no guests but Per Actamo, who was as often at our house as his own. He had been elected to the Council, and was valued for his connection with the Gand Ioratth, now the Prince-Legate, through his cousin Tirio Actamo. Tirio herself played a peculiarly difficult part—once slave-concubine to the tyrant, now wife of the legate—victim of the enemy yet his conqueror. There were people in Ansul who still called her whore and shameless, and more who adored her, calling her Lady Freedom. She bore it all with steady mildness, as if there were no such thing as a divided loyalty. Most people ended up believing her to be nothing more than an ill-used, well-bred, sweet-natured woman making the best of her strange fortune. She was that, but she was more. Per was a man of lively intelligence and ambition, and he took counsel with Tirio as often as he did with the Waylord.