Voices (15 page)

I looked at once for the white book, the book that had bled. I saw it instantly.

He saw where I was looking. He saw that I could not take my eyes from it. He went forward and took the white book from the shelf.

I stepped back when he did so, I couldn’t help it. I said, “Is it bleeding?”

He looked at me, and at the book; he let it fall open gently in his hands.

“No,” he said. He held it out to me.

I took another step back from it.

“Can you read it, Memer?”

He turned it and held it out to me again, open. I saw the small, square, white pages. The right-hand page was blank. On the left-hand page there were a few words written small.

I took a hard step forward, and a second step, my hands clenched. I read the words aloud:
Broken mend broken.

The sound of my voice was terrible to me, it was not my voice at all but a deep, hollow, echoing sound swelling out all round my head. I cried out, “Put it back, put it away!” and turned and tried to walk back towards the lamp that shone in a sphere of gold far off at the other end of the room, but it was like walking in a dream, I could move my legs only slowly, heavily. He came and took my arm, and together we made our way back. It grew easier for me as we went. We reached the reading table. That was like coming home, coming into firelight out of the night, a haven.

I sat down in the chair with a great, shuddering sigh. He stood a little while stroking my shoulders gently, then went round the table and sat down facing me, as we had been before.

My teeth chattered. I wasn’t cold any longer, but my teeth chattered. It was a while before I could make my mouth obey me at all.

“Was that the answer.?”

“I don’t know,” he murmured.

“Was it—was it the oracle?”

“Yes.”

I took a while longer to bite my lips, which felt stiff as cardboard, and tried to make my breath come evenly.

“Had you read in that book before?” I asked him.

He shook his head.

“I saw no words,” he said.

“You didn’t see—on the page—?” I gestured, to show that the words had been on the left-hand page, and I saw my fingers begin to write the letters on the air. I made them stop.

He shook his head.

That made it even worse.

“Was—what I said, was it the answer to the question you asked?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Why didn’t it answer
you?
”

He said nothing for quite a while. At last he said, “Memer, if you had asked the question, what would it have been?”

“
How can we be free of the Alds?
” I said at once, and saying it I felt that again I was speaking with another voice, a loud deep voice not mine. I closed my mouth, I snapped my teeth shut on the thing that spoke through me, used me.

And yet that was the question I would have asked.

“The true question,” he said, with a half smile.

“The book bled,” I said. I was determined now to speak for myself, not to be spoken through—to say what I would say, to take control. “Years and years ago, when I was little. I went down to the shadow end. I told you that, I told you part of it. I told you I thought one of the books made a noise. But I didn’t tell you I saw that one. That white book. And I took it from the shelf, and there was blood on the pages. Wet blood. Not words, but blood. And I never went back. Not until tonight. I—If—If there are no demons, all right, there are no demons. But I am afraid of what is in that cave.”

“So am I,” he said.

♦ ♦ ♦

W
E WERE BOTH TIRED,
but there was no question of sleep yet. He relighted the small lantern, I put out the lamp, he drew the words on the air, and we went out of the room, through the corridors, back to the north courtyard where we had sat earlier that evening. A great ceiling of stars stood over it. I blew out the lantern. We sat there in starlight, silent for a long time.

I asked, “What will you tell Desac?”

“My question, and that I received no answer.”

“And—what the book said?”

“That is yours to tell him or not, as you choose.”

“I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what question it was answering. I don’t understand it. Does it make sense at all?”

I felt that I’d been tricked, that I’d been made use of without being told what for, as if I were a mere thing, a tool. I had been frightened. Now I was humiliated and angry.

“It makes the sense we can make of it,” he said.

“That’s like telling fortunes with sand.” There are women in Ansul who, for a few pennies, will take a handful of damp sea sand and drop it on a plate, and from the lumps and peaks and scatters of the sand they foretell good fortune and bad, journeys, money ventures, love affairs, and so on. “It means whatever you want it to mean.”

“Maybe,” he said. After a while he went on, “Dano Galva said that to read the oracle is to bring rational thought to an impenetrable mystery…There are answers in the old books that seemed senseless to those who heard them.
How should we defend ourselves from Sundraman?
they asked the oracle, when Sundraman first threatened to invade Ansul. The answer was,
To keep bees from apple blossoms.
The councillors were irate, saying the meaning was so plain it was foolish. They ordered an army to be raised to build a wall along the Ostis and defend it from Sundraman. The southerners crossed the river, knocked down the wall, defeated our army, marched here to Ansul City, killed those who resisted them, and declared all Ansul a protectorate of Sundraman. Ever since then they’ve been excellent neighbors, interfering with us very little, but greatly enriching us with trade. It was not a recommendation but a warning: To keep bees from apple blossoms is to have trees that bear no fruit. Ansul was the blossom and Sundraman the bee. That’s clear now. It was clear to the Reader, Dano Galva; as soon as she read it she said it meant we should offer no resistance to Sundraman. For that she was called a traitor. From that time on the Gelb and Cam and Actamo clans said the Council should not consult the oracle, and pressed for the university and the library to be moved from Galvamand.”

“Much good the oracle did the Reader and her house,” I said.

“‘The nail’s hit once, the hammer a thousand times.’”

I thought that over. “What if one doesn’t choose to be a tool?”

“You always have that choice.”

I sat and looked up at the great depths of stars. I thought that the stars were like all the souls who lived in former times in this city, this house, all the thousands of spirits, the forerunners, lives like distant flames, lights far and farther away in the great darkness of time. Lives past, lives to come. How could you tell one from the other?

I had wanted to ask why the oracle couldn’t speak plainly, why it couldn’t just say
Don’t resist,
or
Strike now,
instead of cryptic images and obscure words. After looking at the stars, that seemed a foolish question. The oracle was not giving orders but just the opposite: inviting thought. Asking us to bring thought to mystery. The result might not be very satisfactory but it was probably the best we could do.

I gave an enormous yawn, and the Waylord laughed.

“Go to bed, child,” he said, and I did.

Making my way to my room through the dark halls and corridors I expected to lie awake, haunted by the strangeness of the cave and by the words I had read and the voice that had spoken through me saying them:
Broken mend broken.
I touched the god-niche by the door, fell into my bed, and slept like a stone.

W
hen Desac came the next day, I wasn’t with the Waylord, I was helping Ista with the wash. She and Bomi and I had the boilers going soon after dawn, set up the cranked wringer, strung the wash lines, and by noon had filled the kitchen courtyard with clean sheets and table linens blinding white and snapping in the windy, hot sunlight.

In the afternoon, walking in the old park with Shetar, Gry told me what had occurred in the morning.

The Waylord had come to the Master’s room to say that Desac wished to speak with Orrec. Orrec asked Gry to come with him. “I left Shetar behind,” Gry said, “since she seems to dislike Desac.” They went down to the gallery, and there Desac again tried to make Orrec promise to go out and speak to the people of the city, rousing them to drive out the Alds, when the moment came.

Desac was eloquent and urgent, and Orrec was distressed, divided in mind, feeling that this was not his battle, and yet that any battle for freedom must be his. If Ansul rose up against tyranny, how could he stand aside? But he was given no choice in time or place, and also no real knowledge of how this rebellion was to be made. Desac was clearly wise to say so little about it, since it’s success depended on it’s being a surprise; yet, as Orrec told her, he didn’t like being used, he’d rather be included.

I asked what the Waylord had said, and Gry said, “Almost nothing. Last night, you know, when Sulter said he’d ‘ask,’ and Desac jumped at it?—Well, nothing at all was said about that. They’d said it before we came down, no doubt.”

I hated not to be able to tell her anything about the oracle; I didn’t want to keep anything from Gry. But I knew it was not mine to speak of, or not yet.

She went on. “I think Sulter is worried about numbers. More than two thousand Ald soldiers, he said. Most of them near the Palace and the barracks. At least a third armed and on duty, and the others close to their weapons. How can Desac move a large enough force against them without alerting the guards? Even at night? The night guards are mounted. Asudar horses are like dogs, you know, they’re trained to give a signal if they sense anything amiss. I hope that old soldier knows what he’s doing! Because I think he’s going to do it pretty soon.”

My mind moved swiftly, thinking of fighting in the streets.
How can we be free of the Alds?
With sword, knife, club, stone. With fist, with force, with our rage unleashed at last. We would break them, break their power, their heads, their backs, their bodies…
Broken mend broken.

I was standing on a path among great bushes. The sun was hot on my head. My hands were dry, swollen, and sore from hot water and handling linens all the morning. Gry stood near me, watching me with alert concern. She said gently, “Memer? Where were you?”

I shook my head.

Shetar came bounding along the path to us. She halted, holding up her head with a proud and conscious air. She opened her fierce, fanged mouth, and a small blue butterfly came fluttering out and flew off, quite unconcerned.

We both laughed uncontrollably. The lion looked a little embarrassed or confused.

“She’s the girl that spoke blossoms and bells and butterflies!” said Gry. “You know about her—when Cumbelo was King?”

“And her sister spoke lice and lugworms and lumps of mud.”

“Oh, cat, cat,” Gry said, tugging at the fur behind Shetar’s ears till the lion rolled her head with pleasure, purring.

I could not put it all together. Fighting in the streets, darkness in the cave, terror, laughter, sunlight on my head, starlight in my eyes, a lion who said a butterfly.

“Oh, Gry, I wish I understood
something,
” I said. “How do you ever make sense out of what happens?”

“I don’t know, Memer. You keep trying, and sometimes it does.”

“Rational thought and impenetrable mystery,” I said.

“You’re as bad as Orrec,” she said. “Come on. Come home.”

That night Orrec and the Waylord talked about the Gand Ioratth, and I found I could listen without closing my mind. Maybe it was because I had seen the Gand twice now, and despite the hateful pomp, and the cringing slaves, and my knowledge that if the whim took him he could have us all buried alive, what I had seen was a man, not a demon. A hard, tough, wily old man who loved poetry with all his heart.

Orrec spoke almost to my thought: “This fear of demons, devilry—it’s unworthy of him. I wonder how much of all that he believes, in fact.”

“He may not fear demons much,” the Waylord said. “But so long as he can’t read, he’ll fear the written word.”

“If I could just take a book there and open it and read from it—the same words I speak without the book—!”

“Abomination.” The Waylord shook his head. “Sacrilege. He’d have no choice but to hand you over to the priests of Atth.”

“But if the Alds decide to stay here, to rule Ansul, to deal with it’s neighbors, with other lands and nations, they can’t go on abominating what trade is based on—records and contracts. And diplomacy—let alone history, poetry! Did you know that in the City States, ‘ald’ means idiot.? ‘No use to talk to him, he’s an ald.’ Surely Ioratth has begun to see the disadvantage they’re at.”

“Let’s hope that he has. And that the new king in Medron sees it.”

But I began to be impatient with this talk. The Alds weren’t going to decide to stay here, rule us, deal with our neighbors. It wasn’t up to them. I found myself saying, “Does it matter?”

They all looked at me, and I said, “They can go be illiterate all they please in Asudar.”

“Yes,” the Waylord said, “if they’ll go.”

“We’ll drive them out.”

“Into the countryside?”

“Yes! Out of the city!”

“Are our farmers able to fight them? And if we chased them clear home to Asudar—won’t the High Gand see it as an insult and threat to his new power, and send more thousands of soldiers against us? He has an army. We do not.”

I didn’t know what to say.

The Waylord went on. “These are considerations which Desac dismisses. He may well be right to do so. ‘Forethought, bane of action.’ But do you see, Memer, now that things are changing among the Alds themselves, I have my first hope of regaining our liberty by persuading them that we’re more profitable to them as allies than as slaves. That would take time. It would end in a compromise not a victory. But if we seek victory now and fail, hope will be hard to find.”

I could say nothing. He was right, and Desac was right. The time to act was upon us, but how to act?

“I could speak for you to Ioratth better than I could speak for Desac to the crowd,” Orrec said. “Tell me, are there people in the city who would talk in these terms to Ioratth, if he agreed to some negotiation?”