Voices aotws-2

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “What do you mean, ‘pray’?”

  “Worship Atth!” Simme said, staring.

  “How do you worship Atth?”

  “You go to the ceremony?” he said, in a questioning tone, incredulous that I didn’t know what he was talking about. “And the priests sing and drum and dance, and they speak the words of Atth? You know! You’re down on your hands and knees? And you knock your head on the ground four times and say the words after the priests.”

  “What for?”

  “Well, if you want something, you pray to Atth, you knock your head on the ground and pray for it.”

  “Pray for it? How do you pray for something?”

  He was beginning to look at me as if I was feebleminded.

  I returned the look. “You don’t make sense,” I said.

  I was in fact rather curious to understand his idea of praying, but I didn’t want him to start feeling superior to me. “You can’t pray for things.”

  “Of course you can! You pray to Atth for life and health and, and, and everything else!”

  I did understand him. Everybody cries out to Ennu when they’re frightened. Everybody prays to Luck for things they want; that’s why he’s called the Deaf One. But I said, contemptuously, “That’s begging, not praying. We pray for blessing, not for things.”

  He was both shocked and stymied. He looked sullen. He said, “You can’t be blessed. You don’t believe in Atth.”

  Now I was shocked. To say to someone that they couldn’t be blessed, that was horrible. Simme didn’t seem like a person who could even think such a cruel thing. I finally said, much more cautiously, “What do you mean, ‘believe in’?”

  He stared at me. “Well, to believe in Atth is—is to believe Atth is god.”

  “Of course he is. All the gods are god. Why shouldn’t Atth be?”

  “What you call gods are demons.”

  I thought about it for a while. “I don’t know if I believe there are demons, but I do know the gods. I don’t understand why you have to ‘believe’ in only one god and none of the others.”

  “Because if you don’t believe in Atth you’re damned and when you die you’ll turn into a demon!”

  “Who says so?”

  “The priests!”

  “And you believe that?”

  “Yes! The priests know about stuff like thad” He was getting more and more unhappy, and spoke angrily.

  “I don’t think they know much about Ansul,” I said, realising, a little late, that antagonising him was not the best way to get information out of him. “Maybe they know all about Asudar. But things are different here.”

  “Because you’re heathens!”

  “Right,” I said, nodding, agreeing. “We’re heathens. So we have a lot of gods. But we don’t have any demons. Or priests. Or temple prostitutes. Unless they’re about six inches high.”

  He was silent, scowling.

  “I heard the army came looking for a specially bad place here,” I said after a while, trying to speak in a more friendly way and feeling both devious and exposed. “Some sort of hole in the ground where all the demons are supposed to come from.”

  “I guess so.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He looked very glum, screwing up his pale eyes and frowning.

  We were sitting on the pavement in the shade of the wall. I began scratching criss-cross patterns in the dust on the paving stone.

  “Somebody said your king in Medron died,” I said, as easily as I could. I used our old word, king, not their word, gand.

  He merely nodded. Our discussion had discouraged him. After a long time he said, “Mekke said maybe the new High Gand would order the army back home to Asudar, I guess you’d like that.” He glanced at me sullenly.

  I shrugged. “Would your”

  He shrugged.

  I wanted to make him go on talking, but didn’t know how.

  “That’s fit-fat,” he said.

  Now I looked at him as if he was crazy, till I saw he was looking down at the pattern I’d made on the dusty stone. He reached over and drew a horizontal line in one square of the criss-cross.

  “We call it fool’s game,” I said, and drew a vertical line in another square. We played to a draw, as you always do in fool’s game unless you really are a fool. Then he showed me a game called finding the ambush, where you each have a hidden criss-cross with a square marked off—the ambush—and you guess in turn where the other person’s ambush is, and the one who finds the other’s ambush first is the winner. Simme won two out of three, which cheered him up and made him talkative.

  “I hope the army gets moved back to Asudar,” he said. “I want to get married. I can’t get married here.”

  “Gand Ioratth did,” I said, and then was afraid I’d gone too far, but Simme just grinned and made a lewd chuckling noise.

  “’Queen’ Tirio?” he said. “Mekke says she was one of those temple prostitutes, to start with, and she put a spell on the Gand,”

  I’d had enough of him and his temple prostitutes. “There were never any temples,” I said. “We had festivals. All over the city. Processions and dances. But you Alds stopped them. You killed anybody who danced. You were so afraid of your stupid demons.” I got up, rubbed out the criss-cross with my foot, and stalked off to the stable.

  Once I got to the stables I didn’t know what to do. I was ashamed of myself. I had not endured. I had run away. I looked in at Branty, who acknowledged me with a half nicker. He was lipping up a little treat of oats delicately, making them last. The old hostler was perched up on a sawhorse nearby, watching him with what looked to me like adoration. He nodded to me. Branty went on twiddling his oats. I leaned up against a post and folded my arms and hoped I looked aloof and unapproachable.

  And here came Simme across the stableyard, slouching and cringing and grinning like a dog that’s been yelled at.

  “Hey, Mem,” he said, as if we’d parted days ago instead of two minutes ago.

  I nodded at him.

  He looked at me the way the old hostler looked at Branty,

  “My father’s horse is over there,” he said. “Come see her. She’s from the royal stables in Medron,”

  I let him lead me across the yard to the facing stalls to show me a fine, nervous, bright-eyed sorrel mare with a light mane, like the horse that had run at me in the market. Maybe it was that horse. She eyed me sideways over the door of the stall and shook her head.

  “She’s named Victory,” Simme said, trying to pat the mare on the neck; she tossed her head and moved back in the stall. When he tried again, she turned at him, showing her long yellow teeth. Simme drew his hand back quickly. “She’s a real warhorse,” he said.

  I gazed at the horse as if judging it from a deep knowledge and experience of horses, nodded again rather patronisingly, and sauntered back across the yard. To my relief Chy and Shetar were just looking in the gateway. Several horses, seeing or smelling the lion, neighed and kicked in their stalls. I hurried over to Chy, while behind me Simme called, “See you tomorrow, Mem?”

  On our way back to Galvamand I told them of my efforts to cross-examine Simme, which I thought completely foolish and fruitless; but they, and later the Waylord, listened intently. They remarked on Simme’s apparent lack of knowledge or interest when I spoke indirectly of the Night Mouth, and on his saying he had heard that the new Gand of Gands might recall the army to Asudar.

  “Did he say anything about Iddor?” Gryasked. “I didn’t know how to ask.”

  “Is he a bright fellow?” the Waylord asked.

  I said, “No. He’s stupid.” But I was ashamed, saying it. Even if it was true.

  The day had been very warm, and the evening was mild. Instead of sitting in the gallery after dinner, we went out to the small outer courtyard that opens from it. It is sheltered bythe house walls on two sides and marked off on the other two byslender columned arcades. The hill to the east rises immediately behind the house, and
the scent of flowering shrubs was in the air. We sat looking north to the open evening sky faintly tinged with green.

  “The house is built into the hillside, isn’t it?” Orrec said, looking up at the north windows of the Master’s room, above this court, and the walls behind walls and roofs behind roofs of the ancient building.

  “Yes,” the Waylord said, and I don’t know what was in his tone, but the hairs on myneck stirred.

  He went on after a little while, “Ansul is the oldest city of the Western Shore, and this is the oldest house in Ansul.”

  “Is it true that the Aritans came from the desert a thousand years ago, and found all these lands we know empty of humankind?”

  “Longer than a thousand years, and from farther than the desert,” the Waylord said. “From the Sunrise, they said. They were people of a great empire far in the east. They sent explorers into the desert that bordered their lands to the west, and at last a group found a way across the desert—hundreds of miles wide, they say—to the green valleys of the Western Shore. Taramon led that group. Others followed. The books are very old, fragmentary, hard to understand. Many of them are lost, now. But it seemed they said that the people who came here were driven out of the Sunrise lands.” He said a line of verse in Aritan, and then in our tongue: “’The riverless waste that guards the exile’s spring…’ We are the children of those exiles.”

  “And no one has ever come from the east since then?”

  “Nor gone back to the east.”

  “Except the Alds,” said Gry.

  “They went back into the desert, yes, or stayed there, but only the western border of it, where there are springs and rivers. East of Asudar, they say, for a thousand miles the sun is the Gand of Gands and the sand is his people.”

  “We live on the far edge of a world we know nothing of,” Orrec said, gazing at the pale, deep sky.

  “Some scholars think Taramon and the others were driven out because they were sorcerers, people who had uncanny powers. They think gifts such as you in the Uplands have were common among the people who came from the Sunrise, but have died out among us over the centuries.”

  “What do you think?” Gry asked.

  “We have no such gifts as those here now,” the Waylord said rather carefully. “But the earliest records of Ansul tell of people coming to be healed by women of the House of Actamo, who could restore sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf.”

  “Like the Cordemants!” Orrec said to Gry, and Gry said, “Backwards—as I thought!” They were about to explain this to us, when Desac came suddenly from the door of the gallery out into the court where we sat.

  Like all the Waylord’s regular visitors, he let himself into and through the old part of the house, which was never locked. Ista sometimes fretted about the risk, but the Waylord said, “There are no locks on the doors of Galvamand,” and that was that. So Desac appeared now, startling Shetar. The halflion stood up with her head down and her ears flattened in a nasty, snaky way; and glared at him. He stopped short in the doorway.

  Gry hissed a reproof at Shetar, who grunted and sat down, still glaring.

  “Welcome, my friend, come sit with us,” the Waylord said, while I hurried to find a chair. Desac meanwhile took my chair next to the Waylord. That was like him. He did not have bad or coarse manners, but people who did not interest him did not exist for him. To him I was a furniture bringer, about as important as the furniture. He was single-minded, like the Alds. Perhaps soldiers have to be single-minded.

  By the time I’d found a manageable chair and brought it out, he had been introduced to Orrec and Gry, and the Waylord must have told them that this was the leader of the resistance, or Desac had told them so himself for that’s what they were talking about. I sat down to listen.

  Desac took notice of me then. Furniture should not have ears. He looked from me to the Waylord with the plain intent of having me sent away as usual.

  “Memer knows a soldier’s son, who told her that some of the Alds talk of the army being recalled to Asudar,” the Waylord said to Desac. “And the boy called Tirio Actamo Queen Tirio, as a common joke. Have you heard that title?”

  “No,” Desac said stiffly. He shot another glance at me. He looked a little like Shetar glaring with her ears flat (though she by now had decided to ignore him, and was industriously washing a hind paw). “What we say here must go no farther than this courtyard,” he announced.

  “Of course,” said the Waylord. He spoke kindly and easily as ever, but the effect was rather like Gry’s hiss at the lion. Desac looked away from me, cleared his throat, rubbed his chin, and spoke to Orrec.

  “Blessed Ennu sent you here, Orrec Caspro,” he said, “or the Deaf One called you to us, in the very hour of our need.”

  “Need for me?” said Orrec.

  “Who can better call the people to arms than a great maker?”

  Orrec’s face went still and his bearing stiff. After a moment of silence he said, “I’ll do what’s in my power to do. But I’m a foreigner.”

  “Against the invader we are all one people.”

  “I’ve been more at the Palace than in the marketplace. At the Gand’s beck and call. Why should your people trust mer”

  “They do trust you.They speak of your coming as a sign, a portent that the great days of Ansul are about to return.”

  “I’m not a portent, I’m a poet,” Orrec said. His face was hard as rock now. “A city rising against tyranny will find its own speakers.”

  “You’ll speak for us when we call you,” Desac said, with equal certainty. “We’ve sung your poem ‘Liberty’ for ten years now here in Ansul, in hiding, behind doors. How did that song get here, who brought it? From voice to voice, from soul to soul, from land to land. When we sing it aloud at last, in the face of the enemy, do you think you’ll be silent?”

  Orrec said nothing.

  “I’m a soldier,” Desac said, “I know what makes people fight to win. I know what a voice like yours can do. And I know that’s why you came here when you did.”

  “I came because the Gand asked me to come.”

  “He asked you because the gods of Ansul moved his mind. Because our hour is coming. The balance changes!”

  “My friend,” said the Waylord, “the balance may be changing, but are the scales in your hands?”

  Desac held out his empty hands with a dry smile.

  “There’s no sign of unrest among the Ald soldiers which we might take advantage of,” the Waylord said. “We’re not certain if there’s any change yet in Ald policy. And we don’t know what’s going on between Ioratth and Iddor,”

  “Ah, but that we do know,” Desac said. “Ioratth intends to send Iddor back to Medron with a retinue of priests and soldiers. Seemingly to seek guidance from the new Gand Acray, actually to get Iddor and his priests out of Ansul. Tirio Actamo’s servant Ialba passed that word this morning to the slaves we’re in touch with at the Palace. Shes been a faithful informer.”

  “Then you intend to wait till Iddor is gone before you move?”

  “Why wait? Why let the rat escape the trap?”

  “You plan to attack? The barracks?”

  “An attack is planned. Not where or when they might expect it.”

  “I know you have some arms, but have you the men?”

  “Arms we have, and men enough. The people will join with us. We are twenty to one, Sulter! All these years of tyranny, enslavement, insult, defilement, the rage of all these years will burst out like fire in straw, everywhere in the city. All we need is to see how many we are, how few they are! All we need is a voice, a voice to summon us!”

  His passion shook me, and I could see it had shaken Orrec, at whom he was looking now. An uprising, a revolt—to turn on those arrogant men in blue cloaks, drag them off their horses, use them as they had used us, cow them as they had cowed us, drive them out, out, out of our city, out of our lives—Oh! I had wanted that so long! I would follow Desac. I saw him truly now: a leader, a wa
rrior. I would follow him as the people followed the heroes of old, through fire and water, through death.

  But Orrec sat there with his face set, silent.

  And Gry, watchful as her lion, silent.

  In that tense silence the Waylord said, “Desac: if I ask concerning this—if I am answered—would you hear the answer?” He said the word ask with a strange emphasis.

  Desac looked at him, at first evidently not understanding, then with a frown. He began a question, but the Waylord’s expression checked him. Desacs hard, sad, weathered face changed slowly, becoming open, uncertain. “Yes,” he said, hesitant, then again more strongly, “Yes!”

  “Then I will,” the Waylord said.

  “Tonight?”

  “The time is so near?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well.”

  “I’ll come tomorrow morning,” Desac said, standing up, alive with energy. “Sulter, my friend, I thank you from my heart. We will see—you will see—your spirits will speak for us.” He turned to Orrec—“And your voice will call us, you’ll be with us, I know. And we’ll meet here again, free men, in a free city! The blessing of Lero and all the gods of Ansul on you all, and on the souls and shadows of Galvamand who hear us now!” He strode out, soldierly, exultant.

  Orrec, Gry, and I looked at one another. Something important had been said, some promise had been made, which we three did not understand. The Waylord sat not looking at anyone, his face somber. Finally he glanced around at us. His gaze rested on me.

  “Before there was a city here,” he said, “before there was a house built here, the oracle was here.” Then he spoke in Aritan: “‘They came here across the deserts, the weary people, the exiles. They came over the hills above the Western Sea and saw white Sul across the water. In the hillside was a cave, and from the cave ran a spring. On the darkness of the air in the cave they saw words written: Here stay. So they drank the water of that spring, and built their city there.’”

  ♦ 9 ♦

  We parted for the night soon after that, and the Waylord said to me, “Come to the room, Memer,”

  So a little later I went back through the house and drew the letters in the air and entered the hidden room that goes back under the hill in darkness.