Voices (6 page)

When he was done, the great crowd stood in silence for a long breath's space, and then said, "Ah!" And then they began to applaud him, the Alds by hitting their palms together loudly, and we by crying the old praise-word, "Eho, eho!" I saw him then, a handsome, thin, straight, dark man, with a certain defiance in his stance up there on the dais, though he was most gracious with the crowd.

We could not get near him for a long time. "I should have brought the other lion too," Gry said, as we tried in vain to pry through the massed backs of the soldiers and officers with their blue cloaks and their sheep hair and their swords and crossbows and bludgeons, all pressing round the speaker, who had come down among them.

When he leapt back up on the platform and scanned the crowd, Gry made her bird's whistle, loud and piercing this time. At once he saw her; she nodded to our left;and a few minutes later he met us by the steps of the Customs.

Now that the soldiers had dispersed, many citizens trailed him, but they were timid, unwilling to press forward. Only one elderly man came up to him, and bowed as we bow in thanks to our gods, deeply, with open hands that hold the gift given and received. "Praise to the maker," he whispered. He straightened up and walked swiftly away. He was in tears. He was a man who had brought books to the Waylord more than once. I didn't know his name.

Orrec Caspro saw us and strode forward. He took both Gry's hands for a moment. "Get me out!" he said. "Where's Shetar?"

"At Galvamant," she said, pronouncing the name northern-wise. "I am with Decalo's daughter Memer of Galvamant. We're to be guests of that house."

His eyes widened. He greeted me courteously and asked no questions, but he looked as if he had some.

"Please excuse me," I said on the spur of the moment, "I forgot something at the market this morning. You know the way. I'll catch up." And I left them. It was true that Ista would need more greens for a stew for eight.

I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for—so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house? The tale tells how the Lords of Manva hunted and gathered roots and cooked their suppers while they were camped in exile in the foothills of Sul, but it doesn't say what their wives and children were living on in their city left ruined and desolate by the enemy. They were finding food too, somehow, cleaning house and honoring the gods, the way we did in the siege and under the tyranny of the Alds. When the heroes came back from the mountain, they were welcomed with a feast. I'd like to know what the food was and how the women managed it.

I saw Gry and her husband at the top of West Street when I started up the hill from the Gelb Bridge. When I came into the kitchen, Sosta and Bomi were all agog, having met the guests, and Ista was on the very edge of a tantrum—"How in the name of Sampa the Destroyer is a woman to feed guests on a scrap of fish and a kale stalk?" The additional greens and celery-root I brought averted disaster. She set to work grating ginger and chopping thessony and ordering Bomi and even Sosta about unmercifully. Galvamand would not scant it's guests or shame it's ancestors if Ista could help it. This is part of what I meant about housework. If it isn't important, what is? If it isn't done honorably, where is honor?

Ista could tell us about the banquets for forty in the great dining hall in the old days, but we always ate in what she called the pantry, a large room full of shelves and counters, between the dining hall and the kitchens. Gudit had built a table of pine scraps, and we had found a chair here and a chair there. The Waylord's longest walk in a day was often from his room, through the corridors, past the staircases and the inner courtyards, to dinner in the pantry. Tonight he came wearing the heavy, stiff, grey robe that was the only fine clothing he had left from the good days. All of us had cleaned up a bit except Gudit, who smelled very much of horse. Gry wore a long red shirt over narrow silk pants, and her husband a white shirt, black coat, and black kilt that left his legs bare below the knee. He was very goodlooking in his black, and Sosta goggled at him like the fish on it's slab in the market.

But the Waylord was a handsome man too for all his lameness, and when he greeted Orrec Caspro I thought again of the heroes Adira and Marra. Both he and Caspro stood very straight, though it must have cost the Waylord more to do so.

We sat to table, Gry at the Waylord's right hand and Caspro at his left, Sosta next to Bomi down the table, Gudit next to me, and the place at the foot empty, because Ista would never sit with us till late in the meal. "A cook at the table, a burnt dinner," she said, which may have been true when there were more people to be served and more dinner to burn. She stood while my lord gave the man's blessing and I the woman's, and then she vanished while we ate her excellent bread and fish stew. I was glad for the honor of our house that the food was so good.

"You of Ansul do as we do in the Uplands," Caspro said. His voice was the most beautiful thing about him; it was like a viol. "The household eats at one table. It makes me feel at home."

"Tell us something of the Uplands," the Waylord said.

Caspro looked about at us, smiling, not knowing where to begin. "Do you know anything of the place at all?"

"It's far to the north," I said, as no one else spoke, "a hilly land, with a great mountain—" and the name came to me then as if I was seeing Eront's map—"the Carrantages? And the people are said to practice wizardry. But that's only what Eront says."

Bomi and Sosta stared, the way they always did when I knew anything they didn't. I thought it very stupid—as if I should stare every time they talked about how to hem a gusset, or gusset a hem, whichever it is. I didn't always understand them, but I didn't stare at them as if they were crazy for knowing what they knew.

Caspro said to me, "The Carrantages is our great mountain, as Sul is yours. The Uplands are all hill and stone, and the farmers poor. Some of them have powers, indeed; but wizardry is a dangerous word. We call them gifts."

"Among the Alds, we called them nothing at all," said Gry in her dry, slightly teasing way. "Not wishing to be stoned to death for the sin of coming from a gifted people."

"What," Bomi began, and then stuck. For once she
was shy. Gry encouraged her, and Bomi asked, "Do you have a gift?"

"I get along with animals, and they with me. The gift is called calling, but it's more like hearing, actually."

"I have no gift," Caspro said with a smile.

"I cannot believe you so ungrateful," the Waylord said, not joking.

Caspro accepted the reproof. "You're right, Waylord, I was indeed given a great gift. But it was ... It was the wrong one." He frowned and sought almost desperately for words, as if it were the most important thing in the world that he should answer honestly. "Not wrong for me. But for my people. So it took me from them, from the Uplands. I have great joy in my art. But there are times—times I'm sick at heart, missing the rocks and bogs and the silence of the hills."

The Waylord looked at him patiently, unjudging, approving. "One can be sick for home in one's own city, in one's own house, Orrec Caspro. You are an exile among exiles here." He raised his glass. There was water in it; we had no wine. "To our homecoming!" he said, and we all drank with him.

"If your gift is the wrong one, what would the right one have been?" asked Bomi, whose shyness once gone is gone forever.

Caspro looked at her. His face changed again. He might have given a light answer to her light question and she'd have been satisfied, but that wasn't in him to do.

"My family's gift is the unmaking," he said, and involuntarily put both hands over his eyes for a moment—a strange moment. "But I was given the gift of making. By mistake." He looked up as if bewildered. I saw Gry watching him across the table, intent, concerned.

"No mistake about it," said the Waylord with a calm, genial authority that lightened the uncanny mood. "And all you were given you give to us in your poetry. I wish I could come hear you."

"Don't encourage him," Gry said, "he'll spout you poems till the cows come home."

Sosta giggled. I think it was the first thing anybody said she understood, and she thought it was funny to say "till the cows come home."

Caspro laughed too, and told us that he could speak poetry forever. "The only thing I like better than saying is hearing," he said, "or reading." In his glance at the Waylord there was a signal or challenge, heavier than the words themselves. But then, reading was a heavy word, in our city under the Alds.

"This was a good house for poetry, once," my lord said. "Will you have a little more fish, Gry Barre? Ista! Are you coming or not, woman?"

Ista likes it when he raises his voice, when he orders her to sit and eat. She bustled in at once, bobbed to the guests, and, as soon as she had blessed her bread, asked, "What's Gudit going on about, about a lion?"

"It's in the wagon," Gudit said. "I told you, you godless fool. Don't go meddle with that wagon, I said. You didn't, did you?"

"Of course I did nothing of the sort." Offended by Gudit's coarseness and his loud voice, Ista became ladylike, almost mincing. "A lion is nothing to me. Will it be staying in the wagon, then?"

"She'll be best staying with us, if it won't disturb the household," Gry said, but seeing the sensation this caused in Sosta and Bomi and possibly Ista, she added quickly, "But maybe it's better she sleeps in the wagon."

"That sounds cramped. May we meet our other guest.?" said the Waylord. I had never seen him like this, genial, forceful. I was seeing Ista's Waylord of the good days. "Has she had her dinner? Please, bring her in."

"Ohhh," Sosta said faintly.

"'Twon't be you she eats, Sos," Ista said. "More likely
she'd fancy a bit of fish?" She was not going to be overawed by any lion. "I kept out the head, just for broth you know. She's more than welcome to it."

"I thank you, Ista, but she ate early this morning," Gry said. "And tomorrow's her fasting day. A fat lion is a terrible thing to see."

"I have no doubt," said Ista primly.

Gry excused herself and presently came in with her halflion, led on a short leash. The animal was the size of a large dog but very different in shape and gait—a cat, long-bodied yet compact, lithe, smooth, long-tailed, with the short face and forward-looking jewel eyes of a cat, and a pace between slouching and majestic. She was sand-colored, tawny. The hairs round her face were lighter, long and fine, and the short fur round the mouth and under the chin was white. The long tail ended in a little tawny plume. I was half scared half enchanted. The halflion sat down on her haunches, looked all around at us, opened her mouth to show a broad pink tongue and fearsome white teeth in a yawn, closed her mouth, closed her great topaz eyes, and purred. It was a loud, rumbling, deliberate purr.

"Aw," Bomi said. "Can I pet her?"

And I followed Bomi. The lion's fur was lovely, deep
and thick. When you scratched around her round, neat ears she leaned into your hand and the purr deepened.

Gry led her to the Waylord. Shetar sat down beside his chair and he put his hand out for her to sniff. She sniffed it thoroughly and then looked up at him, not with the long dog gaze: one keen cat glance. He put his hand on her head. She sat there with half-shut eyes, purring, and I saw the big talons of her forepaws working in and out gently against the slate floor.

When dinner was done, the Waylord invited our guests to come with him to his apartments, glancing at me to assure me I was welcome. We made our way at the slow pace of his lameness back through the corridors and past the deserted rooms and inner courts. We sat in the back gallery. The evening light was fading in the windows.

"I think we have a good deal to talk about," the Waylord said to his guests. He looked at them both, and the flash of opal fire was in his eyes. "Gry Barre says that you came to Ansul in part to find me. And Memer told me that her meeting with you was blessed by Lero.
I am sure of that blessing. But may I ask why you sought me?"

"May I tell you all the story?" Caspro asked.

The Waylord laughed and said, "'Shall I allow the sun to shine, or permit the river to run?'" That is what Raniu said when the great harper Moro asked him if he might play his harp in the temple.

Caspro began hesitantly. "Because of what books were to me when I was a boy—because what was written was a light—a light in darkness to me—" He paused. "Then, when I came down to the cities and began to learn how much there was to be learned, I was half in despair—"

"You were a calf in clover," Gry said.

"Well, yes, that too." We all laughed, and he went on more easily. "At any rate, as I see it, making poetry is the least of what I do. Finding what other makers made, speaking it, printing it, recovering it from neglect or oblivion, relighting the light of the word—this is the chief work of my life. So when I'm not earning my living in the marketplace, I'm in the library or the book-dealer's stall or the scholar's den, asking about books and writings, learning about forgotten makers, those known only in their city or country. And everywhere
I've been in Bendraman, Urdile, the City States, Vadalva, in every university or library or marketplace, the wisest, most learned people speak of the learning of Ansul and the Library of Ansul."

"In the past tense," said the Waylord.

"Waylord, I work with what's lost, buried, hidden. Lost by time and ill chance, maybe, or hidden from destruction, from the prejudice of a ruler or a priest. In the foundations of the old council halls of Mesun in Urdile we found the earliest of all the testaments of the
Life of Raniu,
written on calfskin and sealed in an unmarked vault five hundred years ago, in the reign of the tyrant Terensa. He drove out teachers and destroyed temples and writings throughout the city. He ruled for forty years. The Alds have ruled Ansul only seventeen years."

"Memer's lifetime," the Waylord said. "A lot can be lost in seventeen years. A generation learns that knowledge is punished and safety lies in ignorance. The next generation doesn't know they're ignorant, because they don't know what knowledge was. Those who came after Terensa in Mesun didn't dig up the buried writings. They didn't know of them."