Voices aotws-2

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Ialba was small, slight, a delicate woman in her thirties, with keen eyes. She wore the pale striped dress of the Palace slaves. We greeted each other cautiously.

  “Ialba brings us news from the Palace,” Gry said. “Tirio Actamo sends me,” the woman said. “I bring word of the Gand Iorarrh,”

  “He’s dead?”

  She shook her head. “He is not. He was hurt in the attack and the fire. His son had him carried into the Palace and told the soldiers he was dying. We think he’ll announce his death. But he’s not dead! The priests took him to the prison there. With my lady. She’s with him there. If Iddor kills him, she’ll die with him. If the officers knew he was alive they might rescue them. But there’s no one I can speak to there―I hid all night, I came here by the hill paths― My lady said to go to the Waylord, tell the Waylord he is not dead.” Her voice was level, light, and even, but I realised that she was shaking, her whole body shivering, quivering, as she spoke.

  “You’re cold,” I said. “You’ve been out all night. Come to the kitchen.”

  And she came meekly with me.

  When I said her name to Isra, Ista looked her over and said, “You’re Benem’s daughter. I was at your mother’s wedding. We were friends, your mother and I. You were always Lady Tirio’s favorite, when you were just a child, I remember that. Sit down, sit down, I’ll have something hot here in just a moment. Why, your clothes are all wet! Memer! Take the girl to my room and find her some dry clothes!”

  While I did that, Gry ran back to give Ialba’s news to the Waylord and Orrec; and I rejoined them soon, leaving Ialba in good hands. I brought with me a basket of bread and cheese, for I was hungry and thought the others might be too. We sat and ate and talked―what did the news Ialba carried mean, what could we do? “We need to know what is going on!” the Waylord said in frustration, and Orrec said, “I’ll go and find out.”

  “Don’t you show your nose in the streets,” Gry said fiercely. “Everybody knows you! I’ll go.”

  “They know you, too,” he said.

  “Nobody knows me,” I said. I swallowed a last mouthful of bread and cheese and stood up.

  “Everybody in this city knows everybody else,” Orrec said, which was more or less true. But my being recognised as the half-blood boy or girl who did the shopping for Galvamand was no great danger, and to the Ald soldiers I was completely insignificant.

  “Memer, you should be here,” the Waylord said.

  If he had commanded me to stay I would have obeyed, but it was a protest rather than a command, or so I took it. “I will be careful, and I’ll be back in an hour,” I said. I had already changed into boy’s clothing, and now I let my hair down and tied it back and started out, leaving by the north courtyard. Gry followed me and gave me a hug. “Be careful, lion,” she murmured.

  ♦ 12 ♦

  I looked in at the stables. Gudit was walking Branty round the court, scowling; he nodded to me. He had set out pitchforks and other tools ready to use as weapons. He would die defending the stable, the horses, Galvamand. As I crossed the forecourt, still shadowed by the house and the rise of the hills, my breath stuck in my throat, because I saw the old man with his bald head and his hunched back and his pitchfork facing a cavalry troop with lances and bare swords, and I saw him cut down, I saw him die. Like the heroes of old. Like the warriors of Sul.

  Galva Street lay empty before and behind me as I crossed the North Canal Bridge. The city seemed very silent. Again my breath caught: was it a deathly silence, despite the sweet morning sunlight and the scent of flowering trees? Where were my people?

  I turned and cut through the back ways past Gelbmand and over by Old Street, heading for the Harbor Market. I didn’t dare go towards Council Hill. I was nearly at the marketplace, and still spooked by the silence of the city, when I heard shouting, some way off, towards Council Way, and then the repeated summons of a shrill Ald trumpet. I ran back up West Street, out in the open, since there was no one about, until I got back to Gelb Street. Down it came a couple of Ald horsemen, just as Bomi had described them, riding at a canter, waving bared swords, shouting, “Clear the streets! Into your, houses!”

  I ducked behind a broken shrine of Ennu, and they didn’t see me. They rode on, and soon I heard the hoofbeats and the distant shouts on the Downway, passing the Foothill Market. I touched the sill of the shrine and said the blessing and went on the byways between houses back up to Galvamand. I had hoped to join a crowd and be invisible and learn what was going on, but there were no crowds. Only soldiers. That was all I had learned, and it was heavy news.

  Gry and Shetar were waiting for me at the front door of Galvamand. Four men had come to the back of the house, she said, all of them known to the Waylord, all of them members of Desac’s conspiracy. They had been posted, yesterday, on the East Canal with a force that was to attack the Alds in the Council House courtyard when the great tent was set afire; but not all of them had got there when the fire started, earlier than planned. The Ald soldiers had been very quick to gather and defend themselves, and soon took the offensive. The rebel force was broken apart and men were cut down as they tried to escape. They had scattered out over the city. These four spent the night first hiding in the ruins of the university, then making guerrilla attacks on Ald troops. They made their way to Galvamand because the word was all over the city that whoever wanted to fight for Ansul should go there, to the Waylord’s house, the House of the Oracle.

  “For refuge? Or to make a stand?” I asked Gry.

  “I don’t know. They don’t know,” she said. “Look.” A troop of seven or eight men came running round the corner from West Street towards us. They were citizens, not Alds. One of them had a bandaged arm and they all looked fairly desperate. I went out on the steps and faced them. “Are you coming here?” I called.

  “The Alds are coming here,” the one in the lead answered. He stopped at the Sill Stone and touched it. “Blessing on the souls of the household, living and having lived. The soldiers at the Council House-they’ll be here soon. So we’re told. Tell the Waylord to lock his doors!”

  “I doubt he will,” I said. “Will you help us guard them?”

  “That’s what we’re here for,” he said. The others were coming up and touching the Sill Stone. One of them said, “There’s the lion, look.”

  “Will you come in?” I said.

  “No, we’ll stay here and wait for them, I think,” the leader said. He was a dark-faced fellow; he had lost his hair tie, and his mane of long black hair made him look wild, but he spoke quietly. “There’ll be others coming. Ifyou had any water, though… ” He looked wistfully at the dry basin of the broken fountain.

  “Go around to the side, there, to the stable,” I said. “There’s running water. Ask Gudit to let you in.”

  “I know Gudit,” one of the men said. “He’s my dad’s friend. Come on.” They trotted on round to the stable. Already another, larger group was coming along the street from the other direction, from the Downway, twenty men or more, some of them armed with edge-tools, one brandishing an Ald saber. We made them welcome, and they too were thirsty, after what one of them called a hot night’s work, so we sent them around to get a drink at the stables.

  At least Gudit wouldn’t be standing there alone with his pitchfork, as I had imagined him.

  I ran in to tell the Waylord I was back safe and report to him that the city seemed empty, but that the forecourt of Galvamand was now getting rather crowded, and the rumor was that Ald soldiers were coming here.

  This was confirmed by all the people who came. They kept arriving, a few at a time, members of Desacs conspiracy, or men and boys who had joined them after the aborted coup at the Council Square. They all said Desac and the Gand had both died in the fire. Some said hundreds of soldiers had been killed in the square, others said the dead were almost all citizens and the Alds were as strong as ever.

  As the morning went on, there were more and more women among the people who came to Galvaman
d, walking in groups, some with a distaff in hand, a few with a baby in a sling. One group of five old women came, all carrying stout sticks and looking about grimly. Four stooped to touch the Sill Stone; the fifth, who was crippled with arthritis and couldn’t stoop, just swept her stick across it with a short and testy blessing that sounded more like a swearword.

  I stood in the doorway of the house, at the top of the steps, thinking it was like a market fair, or a recitation, or a festival―a sacred ceremony of the old days, such as I had never seen―the people of the city gathering, talking, chatting, idling, waiting, excited yet patient…. But they would have worn finer clothes to a festival. They would have brought flowering branches to a festival, not swords, knives, daggers, pruning hooks, sticks.

  Two men with crossbows had posted themselves one on each side of the door.

  There was a great noise, southward down Galva Street, in the direction of the Council House: trumpets and horns braying, drums beating, a roar of voices. The noise went on for some while, ceased, began again.

  A little boy of seven or eight came running down the street, his feet flying, his hair flying. “It’s the new Gand!” he shouted. “He’s there with all the soldiers! And there’s redhats making speeches!”

  Everybody gathered round him. A man took him up on his shoulders and he piped out the message he had heard, which sounded very strange in his thin, sweet voice: “The Gand Ioratth is dead, the Gand Iddor rules! All hail the Son of the Sun, the Sword of Atth, the Lord Iddor, who comes to subdue the enemies of Atth and destroy the demons of Ansul!”

  Like an echo, far down the street, trumpets and horns blared out again, voices roared, drums thumped.

  From the crowd round Galvamand there was a groaning mutter of response. People shifted uneasily. I saw several groups climb over the low wall into the neglected gardens across the street, getting out of harm’s way.

  I turned and ran into the house again, back through court and corridor to the old rooms, where Orrec and the Waylord stood talking with Per Actamo and some other men of the Actamo household. They turned to me. I said, “Orrec, maybe you could come speak to the people.”

  They all stared at me.

  “The new Gand and the army are on the way here,” I said. “People don’t know what to do.”

  “You should go,” the Waylord said to Orrec―not meaning go out to the people, but meaning go up into the hills, escape. “Now.”

  “No, no,” Orrec said. He put his hand on the Waylord’s arm.

  They both held still, silent, for a moment. Then the Waylord turned away.

  “It will all be gone,” he said aloud in utter despair and grief. “The books lost, the makers dead.” He hid his face with his broken hands.

  We all stood silent, shaken by that cry.

  The Waylord looked up at last; he looked at me.

  “Will you come with me, Memer? Can I save you, at least?”

  I could not answer. But I could not follow him.

  He saw that. He came and kissed my forehead and blessed me. Then he went off walking very lame, to the back of the house, to the hidden room.

  “Will he be safe?” Orrec asked me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Even inside the walls of Galvamand we could hear the sound of the trumpets now.

  With nothing further said, we all went forward through the great courtyard and the high gallery to the front doors of the house, where Gry and Shetar stood like a statue of a woman and a lion.

  I went to Gry and put my arm around her, because I had to have somebody to hold. I had let my dear lord go, I had not held him, I had let him walk away alone to be safe, to live, not to be hurt again. But I had to have somebody to hold.

  Gryput her arm around me. We stood there in the doorway of the house. Per Actamo and the others went outside, but Orrec kept back, behind us. He knew that if he came out on the steps and the crowd saw him, he must act, he must speak, and he was not ready to act or speak. The time had not come.

  People came, still crowding into the street and the gardens across it, people of Ansul, more and more of them. I couldn’t even see the grey-and-black maze of the forecourt; it was a moving pavement of people, alive as it hadn’t been in all mylifetime. The crowd gathered and gathered. Galva Street itself was crowded now both north and south as far as I could see.

  The trumpets sounded again, a noise that thrilled in the blood, and the drums beat nearer.

  There was a wave in the crowd in the street south of us like a tidal bore driving up a canal, pushing everything before it; people shouted, screamed, clambered up onto curbs and walls, making way for the force that drove them, forced them out of the street, pushed them aside: mounted Ald guards, their curved swords slashing and sweeping the air, their horses rearing and striking out with their hoofs. They came straight through the crowd in the streets and stopped in front of Galvamand, a compact troop of fifty or more horsemen. With them, among them, defended bythem, eight or ten red-clad, red-hatted priests rode close round a man in the broad pointed hat of the Ald nobility, cloaked in flowing gold.

  Behind the mounted troop many people were still in panic, trying to get out of the way, while others struggled to go to the help of those who had been struck down or trampled. There was great confusion and great fear. But all the people I could see all the way down the street were men and women of Ansul. If there were more soldiers coming behind the cavalry, they had not made their way through the crowd.

  A circle of emptiness had formed all round the cavalry troop in the forecourt, like the space that had been round Gry and Shetar that first morning at the market, but much larger. I could see the figures of the maze on the pavement inside the circle of snorting, fidgeting horses.

  The group of redhat priests rode forward to the steps of the house, and the man in gold rode forward from among them. It was the Gand’s son Iddor, the big, handsome man. The cloak he wore shone like the sunlight itself. He stood in the stirrups and raised his sword high. He shouted out words which I could not hear over the shouting of his soldiers and the strange noise of the crowd, the groaning roar.

  Then all at once all sounds nearby died out, leaving only the noise of the crowds farther away, who could not see what was happening.

  What I saw, what the soldiers and the nearby crowd and Iddor saw, was Gry, who came out of the door with Shetar, unleashed, beside her. Woman and lion paced forward and descended the wide steps slowly, walking straight at Iddor,

  And he drew back.

  Maybe he couldn’t keep his horse from flinching, maybe he pulled the reins: the white horse and its gold-cloaked, dazzling rider drew back a step, and back a step again.

  Gry stood still and the lion stood motionless beside her, snarling.

  “You cannot come into this house,” Gry said.

  Iddor was silent.

  A little, soft, jeering whisper began to run through the crowd.

  Down the street, far down, a trumpet sounded. It broke the paralysis. Iddor’s horse backed again and then stood steady. Iddor stood in the stirrups and shouted out in a powerful voice: “The Gand Ioratth is dead, murdered by rebels and traitors! I, his heir, Iddor, Gand of Ansul, claim vengeance. I declare this house accursed. It will be destroyed, its stones will fall, and all its demons will perish with it. The Mouth of Evil will be stopped and silenced. The one God will reign in Ansul! God is with us! God is with us! God is with us!”

  The soldiers shouted those last words with him.

  But then their shouts went ragged, as another sound began, a murmur that spread and spread through the crowd: “Look! Look! Look at the fountain!”

  I was still standing in the doorway, between the crossbowmen who guarded the door of Galvamand, their bows ready to fire, both aimed at Iddor, A man had come to stand beside me there. I thought it was Orrec, then I did not know who it was, a tall man, his hand held out, pointing straight at the Oracle Fountain. The basin with its broken jet was just within the empty circle of the guards.

&nbs
p; I saw him then. I saw him, for once, as he had been, and as my heart had always known him: a tall, straight, beautiful man, smiling, with fire in his eyes. I followed his pointing hand and saw what the people below were seeing―a thin jet of water that leapt up into the light. It poised there and fell away to crash with a silvery racket in the dry basin. It sank, leapt up again, higher and stronger, and the voice of the falling water filled the air.

  “The fountain,” people cried, “the Oracle Fountain!” There was a movement forward, pressing in on the cavalrymen, as people tried to see better or to reach the fountain itself. An officer shouted an order, and the horsemen began to turn their horses outward to face the crowd. But their close ranks had been broken, and the officer’s voice was lost in a new roar of sound.

  The Waylord put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Come with me, Memer.”

  Gry and Shetar had drawn aside, on the steps above to the fountain. I went with the Waylord out onto the broad top step, where he halted and spoke.

  “Iddor of Medron, son of Ioratth,” the Waylord said, and his voice was like Orrec’s, it filled the air, it commanded the ear, it held the mind, and the great crowd was still― “You lie. Your father lives. You imprisoned him and falsely claimed his power. You betray your father, you betray your soldiers who serve you faithfully, you betray your god. Atth is not with you. He abhors the traitor. And this house will not fall. This is the House of the Fountain, and the Lord of the Springs protects it, sending it the blessing of his waters. This is the House of the Oracle, and in the books of this house your fate and ours is written!”

  He had in his left hand a book, a small one, and he held it up now as he strode down the steps. He was not lame, he was lithe and quick. I went beside him. I saw Shetar’s laughing snarl as we passed her. We stopped a few steps above the pavement, so our faces were on a level with Iddors as he sat on his nervous horse. The Waylord held the book up, open, right in Iddors face. I could see the man in the shining cloak control himself force himself not to flinch away from it.