Powers (32 page)

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in the spring, when the weather was getting very warm, I came back one afternoon with Minki and my uncle from fishing and found two strangers sitting on the deck. One of them was tall and heavyset for a Rassiu, dressed in a long narrow robe of fine reedcloth bleached almost white; I thought he must be some kind of priest or official. The other man was shy and silent. The man in the robe introduced himself as Dorod Aytana, and named off a litany of our clan relationship. Metter scurried off with our catch to the fish-mat, since Dorod said it was me they came to talk to, and he was glad to get away from strangers. When he had gone, Dorod said to me, smiling but with authority, “You came to South Shore seeking me.”

“It may be that I didn’t know it,” I said, a fairly common phrase among the Marsh people, who avoid direct negatives and unnecessary commitments.

“You have not seen me in vision?”

“I believe I have not,” I said humbly.

“Our ways have been coming closer for a long time now,” Dorod said. He had a deep, soft voice and an impressive manner. “I know that you were brought up among foreigners and have only been in Ferusi for a year. Our kinsman at the Big House in South Shore sent to tell me that you had come at last. You seek a teacher; you have found him. I seek a seer; I have found him. Come with me to my village, Reed Isles, and we will begin your training. For it is late, very late. You should have been learning the way of the visions for years now. But we will make up for lost time—for time is never lost, is it? We will bring you into your power, maybe within a year or two, if you give all your soul to it. Your second initiation then will not be as a mere fisherman or reed cutter, but as a seer of your clan. There is no seer of the Aytanu now. Not for many years. You have been long wanted, long awaited, Gavir Aytana!”

Of all he said, it was those last words that went to my heart. Who had ever waited for me to come? A stolen child, a slave, a runaway, a kind of ghost to my own people, a stranger everywhere else—who wanted or would wait for me?

“I’ll come with you,” I said.

Reed Isles was the westernmost, the smallest, and the poorest of the five villages of Ferusi. Its houses were scattered on the isles and inlets of a bay in the southwest corner of Ferusi Lake. Dorod lived with his meek and silent cousin Temec in a hut on a muddy, reed-surrounded peninsula. There were fewer women than men in the village, and the women seemed indifferent and aloof. There were forty or so people, but only four marriage huts. The fish-mat was not the sociable, pleasurable event it was in East Lake.

I didn’t get to know anyone in this village well but Dorod. He kept me busy and away from the others. I missed the easy, lazy companionship of fishing with my uncle or with the young men, talking with Tisso and other girls, watching the boat builders, cutting reeds, planting ricegrass, the slow day rhythm that I had lived in for a year now, often bored into a kind of trance, but never unhappy.

I went out fishing daily here, and we often kept half the catch for ourselves, for the women provided few vegetables, little meal, no fruit. I certainly would have been willing to fry up our catch or make fish cakes with the coarse meal the women ground, but for a village man to cook would turn society inside out and upside down and make me an outcast from my people forever. As it was, Dorod and I ate a good deal of fish raw, as I’d done with Ammeda, but we didn’t have any horseradish to give it a kick. Nobody here shot birds; they were forbidden in this village as sacred creatures—hassa—wild goose, duck, swan, and heron. Little freshwater clams, delicious and very common here, were a staple of the local diet, but they became poisonous at rare, unpredictable intervals; Dorod forbade himself and me to eat them.

Temec told me that Dorod’s previous novice, a child, had died of the shellfish poisoning three years ago.

Dorod and I did not get on well. My heart is not naturally rebellious, and I wanted very much to learn what he could teach me about my power, but I’d learned to distrust my own trustfulness. Dorod demanded absolute trust. He gave me arbitrary orders and expected silent obedience. I questioned the reason for each act. He refused to answer. I refused to obey.

This went on for a half month or so. One morning he instructed me to spend the entire day kneeling in the hut with my eyes shut, saying the word
erru.
Two days earlier I had done just that. I told him I couldn’t kneel that long again, my knees were still too painful from the last time. He said, “You must do as I say,” and went off.

I’d had enough. I made up my mind to walk back round the lake to East Lake Village.

He came back into the hut and found me knotting up the little bundle of my belongings in the old brown blanket, which my uncle’s cat Prut had nearly worn to shreds by kneading it with his claws before he went to sleep on it.

“Gavir, you cannot go,” he said, and I said, “What can I learn if you keep me in ignorance?”

“The seerman is the guide. It is his burden and task to carry the mystery for the seer.”

He spoke, as he often did, pompously, but I felt he believed what he said.

“Not this seer,” I said. “I need to know what I’m doing and why I should do it. You want blind obedience. Why should a seer be blind?”

“The seer of visions must be guided,” Dorod said. “How can he guide himself? He gets lost among the visions. He doesn’t know whether he lives now or years ago or in years to come! You yourself, though you’ve barely begun to travel in time, have felt that. No one can walk that path by himself, unguided.”

“My aunt Gegemer—”

“An ambamer!” Dorod said. “Women, babbling nonsense, screeching and screaming, seeing useless glimpses of things they don’t understand. Phoh! A seer is trained and guided, he serves his clan and people, he is a man of value. I can make you a man of value. I know the secrets, the techniques, the sacred ways. Without a seerman a seer is no better than a woman!”

“Well, maybe I am no better than a woman,” I said. “But I’m not a child. You treat me as a child.”

New ideas came hard to Dorod, as perhaps they do to most villagers and tribesmen, but he could listen, he could think, and he was extremely, almost unnaturally, sensitive to mood and hint. What I said struck him hard.

He said nothing for a while and finally asked, “How old are you, Gavir?”

“About seventeen.”

“Seers are trained young. Ubec, whom I was training, was only twelve when he died. And I took him when he was seven.” He spoke slowly, thinking as he spoke. “You are an initiated man. A child can be trained to obey in all things.”

“I was well trained in trust and obedience,” I said with some bitterness. “As a child. Now I want to know what I’m to put my trust in, and what power I’m obeying.”

Again he listened to what I said, and thought before he spoke. “The power of your soul to see truth,” he said at last—“that is what both the seer and seerman must follow.”

“Since I’m not a child, why can’t I learn to do it by myself?”

“But who would read your visions?” he said with blank surprise.

“Read them?” I said as blankly.

“I must learn to read the truth in what you see, so that I can tell people of it. That’s my task as your seerman! How can a seer do that for himself?” He saw that I was as perplexed as he was. “Do you know what it is you see, Gavir? Do you know the people, the place, the time, the meaning of the vision?”

“Only after they come to pass,” I admitted. “But how can
you
know?”

“That is my power! You are the eyes of our people, but I am your voice! The seer is not given the gift of reading what he sees. That is for the man trained in the ways of the myriad channels, who knows the roots of the reeds, where Amba walks, where Sua passes, where Hassa flies. You will learn to see and to tell me what you see. To you the visions are mysteries—is that not so? You can tell me only what you see. But I, looking with the eyes of Amba, looking deep within, I will understand the mysteries, and learn to speak the meaning of what is seen, and so give guidance to our people. You need me as I need you. And our kinfolk and all the clans of Ferusi need us both.”

“How do you know how to . . . read my visions?” I hesitated on the word “read,” which was not one I had ever heard before in the Marshes, and which clearly did not have the meaning I knew.

Dorod gave a kind of laugh. “How do you know how to see them?” he asked. He looked at me now with a less lofty expression, almost companionably. “Why does a man have one power and not another? You can’t teach me to see visions. I can teach you how to see them, but not how to read them, because that is my power, not yours. I tell you, we need each other.”

“You can teach me how to see visions?”

“What do you think I’ve been trying to do?”

“I don’t know! You never say. You say fast every third day, never go barefoot, don’t sleep with my head to the south, kneel till my knees break—a hundred rules and do’s and don’ts, but what for?”

“You fast to keep your spirit pure and light, so it can travel easily.”

“But I’m not getting enough to eat between fasts. My spirit is so pure and light that it thinks about nothing except food. What good is that?” He frowned, and in fact looked a little ashamed. I pressed my advantage: “I don’t mind fasting, but I won’t starve. Why do I have to wear shoes?”

“To keep your feet from contact with the earth, which draws the spirit down.”

“Superstition,” I said. He looked blank. I said, “I’ve had visions both shod and barefoot. I don’t need to learn obedience. I’ve had that lesson. I want to understand my power, and to learn how to use it.”

Dorod bowed his head in silence. After a long time he answered me, gravely, without patronising impatience or pompousness, “If you will do as I tell you to do, Gavir, I will try to tell you why seers do these things. Perhaps it is true that such knowledge befits your mind as an initiated man.”

I was proud of myself for standing up to him, and pleased with myself for earning some respect from him. I put my things back on the shelf by my cot and stayed on with him in his lonely, rather dirty hut.

I saw well enough that Dorod did indeed need me, since his child pupil, when he died, had taken Dorod’s position as seerman with him. But if he’d teach me what he knew, it was a fair bargain, I thought.

It was hard for him to abandon his position as master, to answer my questions, to explain to me why I must do this or that. He was not an ill-natured man, and I think sometimes he found it a pleasure to have, instead of a pupil-slave, a student and companion; but still he never told me anything unless I asked him.

All that he could or would teach me of the songs and the ritual stories I learned quickly. I was at last learning a little of the gods and spirits, the songs and tales of the Rassiu, coming a little closer to the heart of the Marshes.

The gift of memorising hadn’t deserted me, for all that I hadn’t used it in a long time. So in that way I came along much faster than he had expected. He laughed once and said, of a ritual story I had just repeated to him, “I spent a month trying to hammer that into Ubec’s head, and he never got it half right! You learned it in one saying.”

“That is half my power, and all my training when I was a slave,” I said.

But my power of vision seemed to resist his efforts to bring it forth and train it. I stayed with him a month and another month, and still had no more of those seeings I used to call remembering. I was impatient; he seemed untroubled.

The central practice of his teaching he called waiting for the lion. It was to sit and breathe quietly and bring my thoughts away from all that was around me into a silence within myself: a very difficult thing to do. My knees began to get used to it at last, but it seemed my mind never would.

And he wanted me to tell him every vision I had ever had. This was very hard for me at first. Sallo sat beside me and whispered to me, “Don’t talk about it, Gav!” All my life I had obeyed her. Now I was to disobey her to serve the wishes of this strange man. I resisted confiding in Dorod, and yet only he could teach me what I needed to know. I forced myself to speak, haltingly and incompletely describing what I had seen. His patience was inexhaustible: little by little he drew from me everything I could tell him of each “remembering”—the snowfall in Etra, the assault of the Casicaran troop, the cities I walked in, the man in the room with the books, the cave, the terrible dancing figure (which I had seen again when I was initiated), even the first and simplest of them all, the blue water and the reeds. He wanted to hear the visions over and over. “Tell me again,” he would say. “You are in a boat.”

“What is there to tell? I see the Marshes. Just as they are. Just as I saw them when I was a baby, before I was stolen, no doubt. Blue water, green reeds, a blue hill way off there . . .”

“To the west?”

“No, south.”

How did I know the hill was in the south?

He listened with the same intentness every time, often asking a question but never making any comment. Many words I used evidently meant nothing to him, as when I was trying to describe the cities I saw, or the room full of books where the man turned to me and said my name. Dorod had never seen a city. He used the word “read” but could not read; he had never seen a book. I took my small book, the
Cosmologies,
out of its silky reedcloth wrappings to show him what the word meant. He glanced at it but was not interested. He did not ask for realities or for meanings, only for the closest, most detailed description I could give him of what I had seen in vision. What he made of all I told him I never knew, because he never said.

I wondered about other seers and seermen. I asked Dorod who the other seers of Ferusi were. He told me two names, one in South Shore, one in Middle Village. I asked if I could talk to one of these men. He looked at me, curious: “Why?”

“To talk with him—to find out if it’s like it is for me—”

He shook his head. “They wouldn’t talk to you. They speak of their visions only to their seerman.”

I insisted a little. He said, “Gavir, these are holy men. They live in seclusion, alone with their visions. Only their seerman talks with them. They don’t come out among people. Even if you were fully a seer yourself you wouldn’t be allowed to see them.”