Voices (25 page)

To arrange a parley was going to require some parleying, given the jittery confusion in the city. Ioratth was talking with several of his officers, giving them instructions, when we heard a trumpet call, sweet and high, far off, eastward, across the canal. It was promptly answered by a trumpet from the barracks here.

Within a few minutes the Ald force was reported in sight: a troop, as the Gand had hoped, of twenty or so, riding out of the hills with banners. We could hear the swelling noise of the crowds up on the Council Hill and in the streets leading to the East Canal. But as no army followed the mounted troop, the crowd noise at least grew no louder.

From the southeast window of the barracks house we could see the River Gate and the Isma Bridge. Tirio and I watched the troop arrive, halt outside the half-ruined wall, and talk with the citizens who had been guarding and fortifying the bridge. It took a while. At last, one Ald was allowed through the gate, on foot. Escorted by thirty or forty citizens, he crossed the bridge and came straight along the Eastway towards the cordon guarding the barracks. I saw that he carried a wand of white wood, which I knew from history books was the envoy's token.

"Here's your messenger, my lord," Tirio said to the Gand.

And before long the blue-cloaked officer came striding in, holding the wand, a troop of soldiers escorting him now, and saluted the Gand. "From the Gand of Gands and Son of the Sun, High Priest and King of Asudar, the Lord Acray, a message to the Gand of Ansul, the Lord Ioratth," he said, in the rolling, measured voice the Alds used for public speaking.

The old Gand got himself up higher on his pillows, gritting his teeth, made a kind of hunch for a bow, and said, "The messenger of the Son of the Sun, our most honored Lord Acray, is welcome. Dismissed, Polle," he said to the captain of the escort troop. He looked around at Tirio and me and Ialba who was there too, and said, "Out."

I felt like snarling like Shetar, but I followed Tirio meekly.

"He'll tell us what the man says as soon as he's gone," she said to me. "Now that we have a little time for it, are you hungry?"

I was both hungry and thirsty after my difficult journey through my city. She brought out what they had to offer: water, a small piece of black bread dried hard, a couple of dried black figs. "Siege rations," Ialba said with a smile. I ate them with the care and attention poverty's gift deserves, wasting not a crumb.

We heard the messenger depart, and soon enough Ioratth shouted, "Come!"

Are we dogs? I thought. But I came, with Tirio and Ialba.

Ioratth was sitting up straight, and his sallow, seamed face looked feverish. "By God, by God, Tirio, I think we're off the hook," he said. "God be praised! Listen. I want you both to go to the Palace or the Demon House, wherever there's some kind of chief, somebody in charge of the mob, and tell them this: No army has come from Asudar. No army will come from Asudar, so long as the city keeps the peace. Tell them that the Gand of Gands offers to his subjects of Ansul full relief from tribute, to be replaced by taxation paid to the treasury in Medron as a protectorate state of Asudar. The Son of the Sun has honored me with the title of Prince-Legate to the Protectorate. In good time I'll invite the chief men of Ansul to take counsel with me and hear our orders concerning the government of the city and the terms of trade with Asudar. A number of soldiers will remain here as my personal guard and to protect the city from it's own unruly elements and from invasion from Sundraman or elsewhere. The greater part of our troops will return to Medron—when it's certain that Ansul is in compliance with our orders. Now, is there anybody in this damned city capable of answering that, and acting on it?"

"I can take the message to the Waylord," I said.

"Do it. Better than dragging me through the streets in a cart. Do it and come back with an acceptance. Come back with some men to talk to. Why do they send me children, girls, by God!"

"Because women and girls are citizens here, not dogs and slaves," I said. "And if you knew how to write, you could send your so-called orders to the Waylord yourself and read his answers yourself!" I was shaking with fury.

The Gand gave one sharp glance at me and made a dismissive gesture. "Tirio, will you go?" he said.

"I'll go with Memer," she said. "I think that would be best."

Indeed it was best. All I'd heard, all I could hear of the Gand's message, was that we were ordered to pay
taxes to Asudar, submit to be a protectorate not a free state, and do whatever the Alds told us to do.

I had to listen to what Tirio said to the Waylord, when we got back to Galvamand, and what he said to the people, and what people said about it, all day long, before I was able to understand that in fact Asudar was offering us our freedom—at a price—and that my people saw it clearly and truly as a victory.

Maybe they could see it so clearly because it did have a price on it, in money and trade agreements, matters my people understand.

Maybe I had so much trouble seeing it because nobody died bravely for it. No heroes fighting on Mount Sul. No more fiery speeches in the square. Only two middle-aged men, both crippled, sending messages across a city, cautious and wary, working out an agreement. And wrangles in the Council House. And a lot of talking and arguing and complaining in the marketplaces.

And the fountain running in the forecourt of the House of the Oracle.

And the temples of Ansul, the little houses of the gods and spirits, the shrines at every street corner and on every bridge, rebuilt, set up again, brought out of hiding, cleaned, carved anew, decorated with flowers. Lero's Stone was so covered with offerings sometimes you could not see it. On Iene's Feast, the solstice, men and boys brought garlands of oak and willow into the city in procession through the streets and hung them over the house doors, and women danced in the marketplaces and the square and sang Iene's songs. The older women taught the girls, like me, who did not know the dance steps or the songs.

All that summer people kept coming to the city from the rest of Ansul. Often they followed after the troops of Ald soldiers who were being withdrawn from the northern towns and gathered here before they were sent back east over the hills to Asudar. Citizens came to find out what was happening in the capital, and to take part in the elections;merchants and traders followed. In early autumn the Waylord of Tomer came to stay with the Waylord of Ansul. Ista lived in a passion of anxiety for two weeks making sure he was entertained in all ways as befitted the honor of the House of Galva.

By then the Council was meeting regularly, and Galvamand was no longer the center of political planning and decision making. It was just the Waylord's house, where a lot of talk took place about trade, about hay transport and cattle markets and what you could
get in Medron or Dur for dried apricots or olives in brine. The first election held by the newly elected Council had been that of the Waylord of Ansul, voted unanimously to Sulter Galva; and with the post they allotted funds for entertainment and upkeep of the house. Not lavish funds, but wealth untold to us who ran the household, and a heartening sign of the difference between paying tribute as a subject state of Asudar and paying taxes as a protectorate.

I had been utterly wrong about the Gand's message. I had misjudged it, and him. I had wanted to refuse patronisation, manipulation, compromise—politics. I had wanted to fling off every bond, to defy the tyrant. I had wanted to hate the Alds, drive them away, destroy them ... my vow, my promise, made when I was eight years old, that I had sworn by all the gods and by my mother's soul.

I had broken that promise. I had to break it.
Broken mend broken.

***

T
HE MESSENGER OF
the High Gand returned to Medron a few days after I carried the message to Ioratth. They had an escort of over a hundred soldiers, under the command of Simme's father, and Simme rode beside him, going home. I had asked Ialba and Tirio to tell me what they could find out about them, and that is what they told me. I never saw Simme after he and I went through the lines together.

That troop escorting the messenger back to Medron also carried a prisoner in one of the provision carts: Iddor, son of Ioratth. He was in chains, we heard, in slave's clothing, with his hair and beard grown long, a sign of shame and disgrace to the Alds.

Tirio told us that Ioratth had not set eyes on his son since his betrayal, had not let anyone ask what should be done with him, would not let his name be spoken. He had, however, ordered that the priests be released from prison, even those who had been captured with his son. Presuming on this leniency, the priests had tried to intercede on Iddor's behalf, with a tale that they and Iddor had hidden Ioratth in the torture chamber only to save him from the vengeance of the rebel mob. Ioratth told them to be silent and be gone.

Since their Gand had been through the fire, both burnt and spared, his soldiers saw him as clearly favored by their Burning God, as holy as any priest. Realising their disadvantage, most of the priests chose to go back to Asudar with this first contingent of the
army. So Ioratth's captains, left to their own judgment, decided the best thing to do with their embarrassing prisoner, his son, was send him off too, and let the High Gand decide what to do with him.

I was disappointed by this ignominious, uncertain outcome. I wanted to know Iddor would be punished as he deserved. The Alds loathed treachery, I knew, and were shocked by the betrayal of a father by a son. Would he be tortured, as he had tortured Sulter Galva? Would he be buried alive, the way so many people in Ansul had been, taken down to the mudflats south of the city and trampled into the wet, salt mud until they suffocated?

Did I want him to be tortured and buried alive?

What did I want.? Why was I so unhappy through all this bright summer, the first summer of our freedom? Why did I feel that nothing was settled, nothing won?

***

O
RREC WAS SPEAKING
in the Harbor Market. It was a golden autumn afternoon, windless. Sul stood white across the dark-blue straits. Everybody in the city was there to hear the maker. He told some of the
Chamhan,
and they called for more and wouldn't let him
go. I was too far away to hear well, and was restless. I left the crowd. I walked up West Street alone. Nobody was in the streets. Everybody was there behind me, together, in the marketplace, listening. I touched the Sill Stone and went into my house, clear through it, past the Waylord's rooms, to the back, to the dark corridors. I wrote the words in the air before the wall and the door opened and I went into the room where the books and the shadows are.

I had not been there for months. It was as it had always been: the clear, even light from the high skylights, the quiet air, the books in their patient, potent rows, and if I listened, the faint murmur of water in the cave down at the shadow end. No books lay out on the table. There was no sign of any presence there. But I knew the room was full of presences.

I'd intended to read in Orrec's book;but when I stood at the shelves my hand went to the book I had been working on last spring, the night before Gry and Orrec came, a text in Aritan, the
Elegies.
They are short poems of mourning and praise for people who died a thousand years ago. The names of the authors are mostly not given, and all we know of the people named in the poems is what the poet says.

One of them reads, "Sullas who kept the house well, so that the patterned pavements shone, now keeps the house of silence. I listen for her step."

Another, the one I'd been trying to understand when I stopped reading, is about a horse trainer; the first line is, "Surely where he is, they are around him, the long-maned shadows."

I sat down at the table, at my old place, with that book and the wordbook of Aritan, with it's notes in the margins written by many hands over the centuries, and tried to make out what the next lines meant.

When I'd understood the poem as well as I could, and had it in my memory, the light from the skylights was fading. Lero's Day, the equinox, was past, the days were getting short. I closed the book and sat on at the table, not lighting the lamp, just sitting there feeling for the first time in a long time a sense of peace, of being in the right place. I let that feeling come all through me and penetrate me and settle in me. As it did, I was able to think, slowly and clearly, not so much in words as in knowing what matters and seeing what has to be done, which is the way I think. I hadn't been able to think that way for months.

That's why when I got up to leave the room, I took
with me a book from it, a thing I had never done before. I took
Rostan,
the one I called Shining Red when I was a little child building walls and bear's dens with the books.

I had heard Orrec speak of it longingly, not long ago, as a lost work of the maker Regali. The Waylord had said nothing in reply.

He had never said anything to Orrec about the books in the secret room. So far as I knew, he and I alone knew of the room itself.

That the oracle spoke through books, people knew vaguely, and now they'd actually heard it's voice; but they didn't ask to know more about the mystery, they didn't want to pry into it, they let it be. After all, for years, books themselves had been accursed and forbidden, dangerous things even to know about. And though we of Ansul live comfortably among the shadows of our dead, we're not a people with much taste for the uncanny. Sulter Galva the Reader was held in some awe, as was I; but people much preferred to deal with Sulter Galva the Waylord. The oracle had done it's work, we'd been set free, and now we could get back to business.

But my business was a little different. That's what I'd seen at last, sitting at the reading table, with a closed book in my hands.

Orrec, Gry and Shetar had returned from the Harbor Market late in the afternoon, Orrec to collapse and sleep for a while as he always did when he could after a public performance. He was reviving now, roaming about barefoot and disheveled, when I came to the Master's rooms. He said, "Hello, horse thief," and Gry said, "There you are! We were just talking about taking a walk in the old park before it gets too dark to see."