Voices (2 page)

"Does anybody know you come here?"

Shake head.

"Have you ever spoken of this room?"

Shake head.

"Do you know you must never speak of this room?"

Nod.

He waited.

I saw that I had to say it aloud. I took a breath and said, "I will never speak of this room. Witness my vow all you gods of this house, and you gods of this city, and my mother's soul and all souls who have dwelt in the House of the Oracle."

At that he looked startled again. After a moment he came forward and reached out to touch my lips with his fingers. "I bear witness that this vow was made with a true heart," he said, and turned to touch his fingers to the threshold of the little god-niche between the shelves of books. So I did the same. Then he put his hand lightly on my shoulder, looking down at me. "Where did you learn such a vow?"

"I made it up," I said. "For when I swear that I will always hate the Alds, and I will drive them out of Ansul, and kill them all if I can."

When I had told him that, my own most secret vow, my heart's wish and promise that I had never told to anyone, I burst into tears—not fury tears, but sudden, huge, awful sobs that seemed to pick me up and shake me to pieces.

The Waylord got down somehow on his broken knees so that he could put his arms around me. I wept against his chest. He said nothing, but held me in a strong embrace until at last I could stop sobbing.

I was so tired and ashamed then that I turned away and sat on the floor with my face hidden against my knees.

I heard him haul himself up and go limping down towards the shadow end of the room. He came back with his handkerchief wet with water from the spring that runs there in the darkness. He put the wet cloth in my hand, and I held it to my hot blubbery face. It was lovely and cool. I held it against my eyes for a while and then scrubbed my face with it.

"I'm very sorry, Waylord," I said. I was ashamed to have troubled him with my being there and my tears. I loved and honored him with all my heart and wanted to show my love by helping and serving him, not by worrying and disturbing him.

"There's a good deal to weep about, Memer," he said in his quiet voice. Looking at him then I saw that he had cried, too, when I did. Tears change people's eyes
and mouth. I was abashed to see that I had made him weep, and yet it eased my shame, somehow.

After a while he said, "This is a good place for it."

"Mostly I don't cry, here," I said.

"Mostly you don't cry," he said.

I was proud he'd noticed that.

"What do you do in this room?" he asked.

It was hard to answer. "I just come when I can't bear things," I said. "And I like to look at the books. Is it all right if I look at them? If I look inside them?"

He answered gravely, after a pause, "Yes. What do you find in them.?"

"I look for the things I do to make the door open."

I didn't know the word "letters."

"Show me," he said.

I could have drawn the shapes in the air with my finger as I did when I opened the door, but instead I got up and took the big dark-brown leather-bound book from the bottom shelf, the book I called the Bear. I opened it to the first page with words on it. (I think I did know they were words, but maybe not.) I pointed to the shapes that were the same as the ones that opened the door.

"This one, and this one," I said, whispering. I had
laid the book on the table, very carefully, as I always did with the books when I looked inside them. He stood beside me and watched me point at the letters I recognised, though I didn't know their names or how they sounded.

"What are they, Memer.?"

"Writing."

"So it's writing that opens the door?"

"I think so. Only for the door you do it in the air, in the special place."

"Do you know what the words are?"

I didn't entirely understand what he was asking. I don't think I knew then that the words in writing are the same as the words in speaking, that writing and speaking are different ways of doing the same thing. I shook my head.

"What do you do with a book?" he asked.

I said nothing. I didn't know.

"You read it," he said, and this time he smiled as he spoke, his face lighting up as I had seldom seen it.

Ista was always telling me how happy and hospitable and genial the Waylord was in the old days, how merry his guests in the great dining room used to be, and how he had laughed at Sosta's baby tricks. But my
Waylord was a man whose knees had been broken with iron bars, his arms dislocated, his family murdered, his people defeated, a man in poverty and pain and shame.

"I don't know how to read," I said. And then, because his smile was fading fast, going back into the shadow, I said, "Can I learn?"

It saved the smile for a moment. Then he looked away.

"It's dangerous, Memer," he said, not speaking to me as to a child.

"Because the Alds are afraid of it," I said.

He looked back at me. "They are. They ought to be."

"It's not demons or black magic," I said. "There isn't any such thing."

He did not answer directly. He looked me in the eyes, not like a man of forty looking at a child of nine, but as one soul judging another soul.

"I'll teach you, if you like," he said.

So the Waylord began to teach me, and I learned to read very quickly, as if I had been waiting and more than ready, like a starving person given dinner.

As soon as I understood what the letters were, I learned them, and began to make out the words, and I don't remember ever being puzzled or stopped for long, except once. I took down the tall red book with gold designs on it's cover, which had always been a favorite of mine before I could read, when I called it Shining Red. I just wanted to find out what it was about, to taste it. But when I tried to read it, it made no sense. There were the letters, and they made words, but meaningless
words. I could not understand a single one. It was nonsense, garble, garbage. I was furious with it and with myself when the Waylord came in. "What is wrong with this stupid book!" I said.

He looked at it. "Nothing's wrong with it. It's a very beautiful book." And he read some of the garble out loud. It did sound beautiful, and as if it meant something. I scowled. "It's in Aritan," he said, "the language spoken in the world a long time ago. Our language grew out of it. Some of the words aren't much changed. See, here? and here?" And I recognised parts of the words he pointed to.

"Can I learn it?" I asked.

He looked at me the way he often did, slowly: patient, judging, approving. "Yes," he said.

So I began to learn the ancient language, at the same time as I began to read the
Chamhan
in our own language.

We couldn't take books out of the secret room, of course. They would endanger us and everyone in Galvamand. The redhat priests of the Alds would come with soldiers to a house where a book was found. They wouldn't touch the book, because it was demonic, but they'd have slaves take it down to the canal or the sea, bind stones to it to weight it, and throw it in to sink. And they'd do the same with the people who had owned it. They didn't burn books or people who read them. The god of the Alds is Atth, the Burning God, and death by fire is a grand thing to them. So they drowned books and people, or took them to the mudflats by the sea and pushed them in with shovels and poles and trampled them down until they suffocated, sunk in the deep wet mud.

People often brought books to Galvamand, at night, in secret. None of them knew of the hidden room—people who'd lived in the house all their life didn't know of it—but people even outside the city knew that the Waylord Sulter Galva was the man to bring books to, now that it was dangerous to own them, and the House of the Oracle was the place to keep them safe.

None of us in the household ever entered the Waylord's rooms without knocking and waiting for his answer, and since he was no longer so ill, if he didn't answer we didn't bother him. What he did with his time and where he spent it, Ista and Sosta never inquired. They thought he was always in his apartments or the inner courtyards, I suppose, as I used to think. Galvamand is so big it's easy to lose people in it. He
never left the house, being too lame to walk even a block's length, but people came to see him, many people. They'd spend hours talking with him in the back gallery or, in summer, in one of the courts. They'd come and leave quietly, any time of the day or night, attracting no notice, using the ways through the back part of the house where nobody lived and the rooms were empty and in ruin.

When he had daytime visitors, I'd serve water, or tea when we had any, and sometimes I could stay with them and listen. Some were people I'd known all my life: Desac the Sundramanian, and people of the Four Houses, like the Cams of Cammand, and Per Actamo. Per had been a boy of ten or twelve when the Alds took the city. The people of Actamand put up a hard fight, and when the soldiers took the house they killed all the men and carried off the women as slaves. Per hid from the soldiers in a dry well in a courtyard for three days. He lived now as we did, with a few people in a ruinous house. But he joked with me and was kind, and younger than most of the Waylord's visitors. I was always glad when Per came. Desac was the only visitor who made it clear I was not welcome to stay and listen to the talk.

The people I didn't know who came to see the Waylord were mostly merchants and such from the city; some of them still had good clothes. Often men came who looked as if they'd been on the road a long time, visitors or messengers from other towns of Ansul, maybe from other waylords. After dark, in winter, sometimes women came, though it was dangerous for women to go alone in the city. One who used to come often had long grey hair; she seemed a little mad to me, but he greeted her with respect. She always brought books. I never knew her name. Often the people from other towns had books, too, hidden in their clothing or in parcels containing food. Once he knew I could enter the secret room, the Waylord would give them to me to take there.

He mostly went to the room at night, which was why we'd never met there before. I hadn't gone often, and never at night. I shared a sleeping room in the front part of the house with Ista and Sosta, and couldn't just vanish. And the days were busy; I had my share of the housework to do, and the worship, and most of the shopping too, since I liked doing it and got better bargains than Sosta did.

Ista was always afraid Sosta would meet soldiers and
be taken and raped if she went out alone. She wasn't afraid for me. The Alds wouldn't look at me, she said. She meant they wouldn't like my pale bony face and sheep hair like theirs, because they wanted Ansul girls with round brown cheeks and black sleek hair like Sosta's. "You're lucky to look the way you do," she always told me. And I stayed quite small and slight for a long time, which really was lucky. By order of the Gand of the Alds, women could go in the streets and marketplaces only if they had a man with them. A woman who went alone in the street was a whore, a demon of temptation, and any soldier was free to rape, enslave, or kill her. But the Alds apparently didn't consider old women to be women, and children were mostly though not always ignored. So grannies and children, many of them "siege brats," half-breeds like me, the girls dressed as boys, did most of the shopping and bargaining in the markets.

All the money we had was what an ancestor had hidden long ago when a pirate fleet threatened Ansul; the pirates were driven off, but the family left the luck-hoard, as the Waylord called it, buried out in the woods behind the house; and that was what we lived on now. So I had to look for the best bargains I could, which took time. So did the worship and the housework. Ista got up very early in the morning to make the bread. The only time I could go regularly to the secret room without being missed and rousing a lot of curiosity and questions would be at night when the others had gone to bed. So I told Ista I wanted to move my bed to my mother's room, just down the hall from the room we all shared. That was fine with her. She and Sosta were generally snoring away not long after we'd washed up from supper; they weren't likely to notice if I wasn't in my room. So every night I'd go softly in darkness through the corridors and passages of the great house to the secret door, and go in, and read and learn with my dear teacher.

Nights when he had visitors, he couldn't come to teach me Aritan or help me with my reading, but I could get along on my own well enough. Often I stayed reading, lost in the story or the history till long after he would have sent me off to bed.

When I started growing a little taller and coming into my womanhood, I did get terribly sleepy sometimes, not at night but in the morning. I couldn't make myself get out of bed, and felt heavy as lead and stupid as a sowbug all day. The Waylord spoke to Ista, though I begged him not to, and asked her to hire the street girl
Bomi to do the sweeping and cleaning that I'd been doing. I said to him, "I don't mind sweeping and cleaning! What takes all the time is doing all the altars. We could hire a girl for that, and I'd have lots more time."

That was a mistake. He looked at me slowly: patient, judging, but not approving.

"Your mother's shadow dwells here, with the shadows of our ancestors," he said. "The gods of this house are her gods. She blessed them daily. I do them honor as a man," and it was true, he never missed a day or an offering due, "and you do them honor and receive their blessing as the daughter of our grandmothers." And that was that.

I was ashamed of myself, and also cross. I'd had it in my head that I'd be able to get out of the whole hour it took sometimes to go to all the god-niches, dusting them, giving fresh leaves to Iene, and lighting incense for the Hearthkeepers, and giving and asking blessing of the souls and shadows of the former householders, and thanking Ennu and putting meal and water on her altar on her days, and stopping in the doorways to say the praise of the One Who Looks Both Ways, and remembering when to light the oil lamps for Deori, and all the rest.

We have more gods in Ansul, I think, than anybody else has anywhere. More gods, and closer to us, the gods of our earth and our days, our blood and bone. Of course I was blessed in knowing that the house was full of them, and that I was doing as my mother had done in returning their blessing, and that my own room-spirit dwelt in the little empty niche in the wall by the door and waited for me to return and watched over my sleep. When I was little, I was proud of doing worship, but I'd been doing it for a long time now. I got tired of the gods. They wanted so much looking after.