Voices (12 page)

Now at last I knew what Desac came to talk about, and why I was always sent away when he met with the Waylord. That sent a rush of anger through me. Why hadn't I been allowed to listen to talk of rebellion, of rising against the Alds, fighting them, driving them out.? Did Desac think I'd be afraid? Or go blabbing about it like a child? Did he think, because I had sheep hair, that I'd betray my people?

Gry wanted to know more about this group, but the Waylord was unable or unwilling to say much about it. Orrec was silent, brooding, till he asked at last, "How many Alds are here in Ansul—in the city? A thousand, two thousand?"

"Over two thousand," the Waylord said.

"They're greatly outnumbered."

"But armed and disciplined," Gry said.

"Trained soldiers," Orrec said. "It gives them an edge ... But still. All these years—"

I burst out, "We fought! We fought them in every street, we held out for a year—till they sent an army twice as large—and then they killed and killed—Ista told me that in the days after the city fell, the canals were so choked with the dead that the water couldn't run—"

"Memer, I know your people were overrun and overmatched," Orrec said. "I didn't mean to question their courage."

"But we're not warriors," said the Waylord.

"Adira and Marra!" I protested.

His gaze rested on me a moment. "I didn't say we
couldn't have heroes," he said. "But for centuries we settled our affairs by talking, arguing, bargaining, voting. Our quarrels were fought with words not swords. We were out of the habit of brutality ... And the Ald armies seemed endless. How much more would they destroy? We lost heart. We have been a crippled people."

He held up his broken hands. His face was strange, wry; his eyes looked very dark.

"As you say, Orrec, they have the edge," he said. "Having one king, one god, one belief, they can act single-mindedly. They're strong. Yet the single can be divided. Our strength embraces multitude. This is our sacred earth. We live here with it's gods and spirits, among them, they among us. We endure with them. We've been hurt, weakened, enslaved. But only if they destroy our knowledge are we destroyed."

***

T
WO DAYS AFTER THAT,
when we went to the Council Square again, I found out why Gry had given me that glance when she said, "We can do some listening." She wanted Mem the apprentice groom to talk to the Ald stableboys and cadet soldiers who hung around to hear Orrec recite. "Keep an ear out," she said. "Ask
about the new Gand in Medron. About the Night Mouth. You were talking for a long time with one of those boys the other day."

"The pimply one," I said.

"He took a shine to you."

"He wanted to know if I'd sell him my sister for sex," I said.

Gry whistled, a soft little down-note,
tiu.

"Endure," she said softly.

The Waylord had used that word. I took it as my guide word, my orders. I would obey. I would endure.

This time, when the Gand came out of the great tent to hear Orrec, Iddor and the priests didn't follow him. Partway through the recitation a noise began inside the tent, a lot of loud chanting and drum banging—evidently the priests performing a ceremony. Some of the courtiers around the Gand looked disturbed, others shrugged and whispered. Ioratth sat imperturbable. Orrec finished the stanza and fell silent.

The Gand gestured to him to go on.

"I would not show disrespect to those who worship," Orrec said.

"It is not worship," Ioratth said. "It is disrespect. Proceed, if you will, Maker."

Orrec bowed and went on with the piece, another Ald hero tale. When it was done, Ioratth had him brought a glass of water and began to talk with him, several of the courtiers joining in. And I, obeying my orders, slipped back towards the group of boys and men in the shade of the stable wall.

Simme was there. He came right over to me. He was bigger than I was, a tall, strong boy. There were fair, fuzzy hairs among the pimples around his mouth—the Alds are hairier than my people, and many have beards. Yet when I saw the way he greeted me, almost cringing, hoping that I liked him, I thought: he's a little boy.

All I knew was my city and my house and books, while he had travelled with an army and was a soldier in training, but I knew that I knew more than he did, and was tougher. He knew it, too.

It made it hard to hate him. There's some virtue in hating people who are stronger than you, but to hate somebody weaker is contemptible and uncomfortable.

He didn't know what to talk about, and at first I thought we wouldn't be able to talk at all, but then I thought to ask him something I really wanted to know. "Where did you hear what you were talking about the
other day," I said, "all that stuff about temples and prostitutes.?"

"Some of the men," he said. "They said you heathens had these temples, where they had these orgies with these priestesses of this goddess, this demoness, that made men, you know, have sex with the priestesses. The demoness possessed them. And they'd have sex with any man. Anybody who came along. All night."

He'd brightened up considerably at the thought.

"We don't have any priestesses," I said flatly. "Or priests. We do our own worship."

"Well, maybe it was just women who went to this temple, and the demoness made them have sex with anybody. All night."

"How could people get inside a temple."

In Ansul, the word "temple" usually means a little shrine on the street or in front of a building or at a crossways—altars, places to worship at. Many of them are just god-niches like the ones inside houses. You touch the sill of the temple to say the blessing, or lay a flower as an offering. Many street temples were wonderful little buildings of marble, two or three feet high, carved and decorated, with gilt roofs. The Alds had knocked those all down. Some temples were hung up in
trees, and the Alds left them, thinking they were bird-houses. In fact if a bird nested in a temple it was a joyful thing, a blessing, and a lot of the old tree temples had swallows and sparrows and thrushes in them year after year. The best luck of all was an owl. The owl is the bird of the Deaf One.

I knew that to the Alds a temple meant a full-sized building. I didn't care.

My question did get his mind off the notion of all-night sex, anyway. He frowned and said, "What do you mean. Everybody goes into temples."

"What for."

"To pray!"

"What do you mean, 'pray'?"

"Worship Atth!" Simme said, staring.

"How do you worship Atth?"

"You go to the ceremony?" he said, in a questioning tone, incredulous that I didn't know what he was talking about. "And the priests sing and drum and dance, and they speak the words of Atth? You know! You're down on your hands and knees? And you knock your head on the ground four times and say the words after the priests."

"What for?"

"Well, if you want something, you pray to Atth, you knock your head on the ground and pray for it."

"Pray
for
it? How do you pray
for
something?"

He was beginning to look at me as if I was feebleminded.

I returned the look. "You don't make sense," I said. I was in fact rather curious to understand his idea of praying, but I didn't want him to start feeling superior to me. "You can't
pray
for things."

"Of course you can! You pray to Atth for life and health and, and, and everything else!"

I did understand him. Everybody cries out to Ennu when they're frightened. Everybody prays to Luck for things they want; that's why he's called the Deaf One. But I said, contemptuously, "That's begging, not praying. We pray for blessing, not for things."

He was both shocked and stymied. He looked sullen. He said, "You can't be blessed. You don't believe in Atth."

Now I was shocked. To say to someone that they couldn't be blessed, that was horrible. Simme didn't seem like a person who could even think such a cruel thing. I finally said, much more cautiously, "What do you mean, 'believe in'?"

He stared at me. "Well, to believe in Atth is—is to believe Atth is god."

"Of course he is. All the gods are god. Why shouldn't Atth be?"

"What you call gods are demons."

I thought about it for a while. "I don't know if I believe there are demons, but I do know the gods. I don't understand why you have to 'believe' in only one god and none of the others."

"Because if you don't believe in Atth you're damned and when you die you'll turn into a demon!"

"Who says so?"

"The priests!"

"And you believe
that?
"

"Yes! The priests know about stuff like that!" He was getting more and more unhappy, and spoke angrily.

"I don't think they know much about Ansul," I said, realising, a little late, that antagonising him was not the best way to get information out of him. "Maybe they know all about Asudar. But things are different here."

"Because you're heathens!"

"Right," I said, nodding, agreeing. "We're heathens. So we have a lot of gods. But we don't have any demons.
Or priests. Or temple prostitutes. Unless they're about six inches high."

He was silent, scowling.

"I heard the army came looking for a specially bad place here," I said after a while, trying to speak in a more friendly way and feeling both devious and exposed. "Some sort of hole in the ground where all the demons are supposed to come from."

"I guess so."

"What for?"

"I don't know," he said. He looked very glum, screwing up his pale eyes and frowning.

We were sitting on the pavement in the shade of the wall. I began scratching criss-cross patterns in the dust on the paving stone.

"Somebody said your king in Medron died," I said, as easily as I could. I used our old word, king, not their word, gand.

He merely nodded. Our discussion had discouraged him. After a long time he said, "Mekke said maybe the new High Gand would order the army back home to Asudar. I guess you'd like that." He glanced at me sullenly.

I shrugged. "Would you?"

He shrugged.

I wanted to make him go on talking, but didn't know how.

"That's fit-fat," he said.

Now I looked at him as if he was crazy, till I saw he was looking down at the pattern I'd made on the dusty stone. He reached over and drew a horizontal line in one square of the criss-cross.

"We call it fool's game," I said, and drew a vertical line in another square. We played to a draw, as you always do in fool's game unless you really are a fool. Then he showed me a game called finding the ambush, where you each have a hidden criss-cross with a square marked off—the ambush—and you guess in turn where the other person's ambush is, and the one who finds the other's ambush first is the winner. Simme won two out of three, which cheered him up and made him talkative.

"I hope the army gets moved back to Asudar," he said. "I want to get married. I can't get married here."

"Gand Ioratth did," I said, and then was afraid I'd gone too far, but Simme just grinned and made a lewd chuckling noise.

"'Queen'Tirio?" he said."Mekke says she was one of those temple prostitutes, to start with, and she put a spell on the Gand."

I'd had enough of him and his temple prostitutes.
"There were never any temples," I said. "We had festivals. All over the city. Processions and dances. But you Alds stopped them. You killed anybody who danced. You were so afraid of your stupid demons." I got up, rubbed out the criss-cross with my foot, and stalked off to the stable.

Once I got to the stables I didn't know what to do. I was ashamed of myself. I had not endured. I had run away. I looked in at Branty, who acknowledged me with a half nicker. He was lipping up a little treat of oats delicately, making them last. The old hostler was perched up on a sawhorse nearby, watching him with what looked to me like adoration. He nodded to me. Branty went on twiddling his oats. I leaned up against a post and folded my arms and hoped I looked aloof and unapproachable.

And here came Simme across the stableyard, slouching and cringing and grinning like a dog that's been yelled at.

"Hey, Mem," he said, as if we'd parted days ago instead of two minutes ago.

I nodded at him.

He looked at me the way the old hostler looked at Branty.

"My father's horse is over there," he said. "Come see her. She's from the royal stables in Medron."

I let him lead me across the yard to the facing stalls to show me a fine, nervous, bright-eyed sorrel mare with a light mane, like the horse that had run at me in the market. Maybe it was that horse. She eyed me sideways over the door of the stall and shook her head.

"She's named Victory," Simme said, trying to pat the mare on the neck;she tossed her head and moved back in the stall. When he tried again, she turned at him, showing her long yellow teeth. Simme drew his hand back quickly. "She's a real warhorse," he said.

I gazed at the horse as if judging it from a deep knowledge and experience of horses, nodded again rather patronisingly, and sauntered back across the yard. To my relief, Chy and Shetar were just looking in the gateway. Several horses, seeing or smelling the lion, neighed and kicked in their stalls. I hurried over to Chy, while behind me Simme called, "See you tomorrow, Mem?"

On our way back to Galvamand I told them of my efforts to cross-examine Simme, which I thought completely foolish and fruitless; but they, and later the Waylord, listened intently. They remarked on Simme's apparent lack of knowledge or interest when I spoke indirectly of the Night Mouth, and on his saying he had heard that the new Gand of Gands might recall the army to Asudar.

"Did he say anything about Iddor?" Gry asked.

"I didn't know how to ask."

"Is he a bright fellow?" the Waylord asked.

I said, "No. He's stupid." But I was ashamed, saying it. Even if it was true.

The day had been very warm, and the evening was mild. Instead of sitting in the gallery after dinner, we went out to the small outer courtyard that opens from it. It is sheltered by the house walls on two sides and marked off on the other two by slender columned arcades. The hill to the east rises immediately behind the house, and the scent of flowering shrubs was in the air. We sat looking north to the open evening sky faintly tinged with green.