Voices aotws-2

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Can you read it, son of Ioratth? No? Then it will be read to you!”

  And then there was a ringing in my ears. I cannot truly say what it was I heard, nor can anyone who was there that morning, but it seemed to me that a voice cried out, a loud, strange voice that rang out all around us, over the forecourt where the fountain leapt, and rang echoing off the walls of Galvamand. Some say it was the book itself that cried out, and I think it was. Some say that it was I,that it was my voice. I know I read no words in that book―I could not see its pages. I don’t know whose voice it was that cried out. I don’t know that it was not mine.

  The words I heard were, Let them set free!

  But others heard other words. And some heard only the crashing water of the fountain in the great silence of the crowd.

  What Iddor heard I don’t know.

  He shuddered away from the book, crouching in the saddle and hunching his shoulders as if against something that struck at him. His hands must have tightened on the reins to urge his horse forward or pull it back, but awkwardly, so that the horse reared up and bucked, unseating him. The shining figure in cloth of gold jerked and slipped and slithered down and staggered on the ground, while the squealing horse backed away and away; half dragging him with it. We stood still on the steps; Gry and Shetar had come to stand with us, and Orrec had joined us.

  The priests closed in around Iddor, some trying to assist him from horseback, others dismounting. Across this knot of confusion the Waylord’s voice rang clearly: “Men of Asudar, soldiers of the Gand Ioratth, your lord is held prisoner in the Palace. Will you go set him free?”

  Then it was Orrec whose voice rang out. “People of Ansul! Shall we see justice done? Shall we go free the prisoner and the slaves? Shall we take freedom into our own hands?”

  A wild yell went up at that, and the crowd began to surge down the street towards the Council House. “Lero! Lero! Lero!”―the deep chant ran through them. They flowed around the cavalrymen like the sea flowing around rocks. The officer shouted out orders, the trumpet blew a brief command, and the horsemen, some moving in a body and some straggling behind, all began to go with the crowd, amid them, borne with them, down Galva Street towards the Council House.

  The red-hatted priests had got Iddor back up on his horse. Shouting to one another, they followed the mass of the crowd. None of the soldiers that had escorted them had waited for them.

  Orrec spoke briefly with Gry and now rejoined Per Actamo and the small group of men who had come to stand with the Waylord and me on the steps. “Go, follow them!” the Waylord said urgently, and Orrec and the others set off after Iddor and the priests.

  Not all the crowd joined in the rush down Galva Street to the Palace. People stayed in the street and on the forecourt, many of them women and older people. They all seemed both drawn to and awed by that high jet of water and the lame man who now hobbled down the steps to the basin and sat down awkwardly on its broad rim.

  He was as I had always known him, not straight and tall but bent and lame, but he was my heart’s lord then and always.

  He looked up at the leap and spray of the jet catching the morning sunlight above the shadow of the house. His face shone with water or tears. He reached down and laid his hand on the water, still rising in the wide stone bowl. I had followed him and stood close by him. He was whispering the praise to Lero and the Lord of the Springs, over and over. People rather timidly gathered at the fountain’s rim, and they too touched the water, and looked up at the sunlit jet, and spoke to the gods of Ansul.

  Gry came to me, holding Shetar now on a close leash, often putting a hand on her head; the lion was still snarling and yawning, still excited and enraged by the noise, the crowds. I saw why Gry had not tried to follow Orrec, though I knew she must long to. I said, “Gry, I can keep Shetar here.”

  “You should go,” she said.

  I shook my head. “I stay here,” I said. Those words came from my own heart, in my own voice, and I smiled with joy as I said them.

  I looked up at the column of water that leapt from the cylinder of bronze and towered high, breaking into a great bright-showering blossom at the top. The silvery crash and racket of its fall were wonderful. I sat down on the broad green lip of the basin and did as the Waylord did: I put my hands on the water and in it, and let the spray fall on my face, and gave thanks and praise to the gods and shadows and spirits of my house and city.

  Gudit came around the corner of the courtyard. He carried a pitchfork. He halted and looked around at the scattered, quiet people.

  “They gone, then?”

  “To the Palace―the Council House,” Gry called back.

  “Stands to reason,” the old man said. He turned and started to trudge back to the stables; then he turned again and stared at the fountain.

  “Merciful Ennu,” he said at last. “She’s running again!” He scratched his cheek, stared a while longer, and went back to his horses.

  ♦ 13 ♦

  I can tell what happened at the Council House as Orrec and Per Actamo told us afterwards. The troop of priests surrounding Iddor forced their way forward through the crowd in Galva Street. Orrec and Per managed to keep directly behind them. When they came to the Council Square, the soldiers guarding it shouted, “Let the Gand Iddor pass!” and began to open the way for the troop of priests. But Iddor and his redhats rode straight past, gaining speed as the crowd thinned out. Orrec thought they were making for the Isma Bridge to escape from the city, but they were circling round the back of the Council House to get to the entrance door on the far side, above the Alds’ barracks. Soldiers guarded the four-foot-high stone wall that marked off the back court. At Iddor’s shouted command, they opened the gate, and the troop of priests galloped in.

  But with them came a mob of citizens, who had joined Orrec and Per following the priests past the entrance to the square. Soldiers attacked the citizens as they came pushing in the open gate and swarming over the wall, and citizens mobbed the soldiers. Iddor and his redhats broke through the confusion, leapt off their horses, and made straight for the back door of the Council House. Orrec and Per kept right behind them through the melee—the tail of the comet, Orrec said.

  Before they knew what was happening they were inside the Council House, still on the heels of Iddor and the priests, who were so intent on getting where they were going that they paid no attention to their pursuers. They all raced through a high hallway and down a flight of stairs. At the foot of the stairs was a basement corridor dimly lit bysmall windows high in the wall at ground level. Where this corridor opened into a large, low guardroom, the priests and Iddor halted, shouting orders—at guards posted there, or at an opposing force coming from the square? Orrec said it was all shouting and confusion for a while, Alds yelling at Alds. He and Per had held back; now they went forward cautiously to the doorway.

  The red-hatted priests and a troop of soldiers stood facing each other, the officers demanding to see the Gand Ioratth, the priests saying, “The Gand is dead! You cannot defile the rites of mourning!” The priests had their backs against a door and stood firm. Iddor was barely visible among them. He had cast off his golden hat and cloak somewhere. A priest advanced on the officers, formidable in his tall red hat and robes, his arms raised, shouting that if they did not disperse he would curse them in the name of Atth. The soldiers drew back from him, cowed.

  Then all at once Orrec strode straight at the priest, shouting, “Ioratrh is alive! He is alive in that room! The oracle has spoken! Open the door of the prison, priests!” Or so Per reported his words. Orrec himself recalled only shouting out that Ioratth was not dead, and then the officers shouting, “Open the door! Open the door!” And then, he told us, “I ducked back out of it,” for swords and daggers flashed out on both sides, the soldiers attacking the priests who defended the door, driving them away and down the farther corridor. An officer sprang forward and unbolted and flung open the door.

  The room beyond was black, unlighted. In the gl
immer of lantern light in the doorway a wraith appeared, a white figure out of the darkness.

  She wore the striped gown of an Ald slave, torn and streaked with filth and blood. Her face was bruised, one eye swollen shut, and her scalp covered with blackened, clotted blood where her hair had been torn out by handfuls. She gripped a broken stake in her hand. She stood there, Orrec said, like a candle flame, luminous, trembling.

  Then she saw the man who stood beside Orrec, Per Actamo, and her face slowly changed. “Cousin,” she said.

  “Lady Tirio,” Per said. “We’re here to set the Gand Ioratth free.”

  “Come in, then,” she said. Orrec said she spoke as gently and civilly as if she were welcoming guests into her home.

  The struggle in the corridor had intensified and then quieted. One of the soldiers brought in a lantern from the guardroom, and light and shadow leapt round the officers as they entered the prison chamber. Per and

  Orrec followed them. It was a large, low room, earthfloored, with a foul, damp, heavy smell. Ioratth lay on a long chest or table, his arms and legs chained. His hair and clothing were blackened and half burnt away, and his legs and feet were bloody and crusted with burns. He reared up his head and said in a voice like a wire brush on brass, “Let me loose!”

  While his officers were busy getting the chains off him, he saw Orrec and stared. “Maker! How did you get here?”

  “Following your son,” Orrec said.

  At that Ioratth glared round and wheezed out in his smoke-ruined voice, “Where is he? Where is he?”

  Orrec, Per, and the officers looked round, ran back to the guardroom. Four priests were being held there by soldiers. The rest were gone, Iddor with them.

  “My lord Gand,” said one of the officers, “we’ll find him. But if now—if you’d show yourself to the troops, my lord—They believe you’re dead—”

  “Hurry up, then!” Iorarth growled.

  As soon as they freed his arms he reached out and caught the hand of the woman who stood silent beside him.

  When they got his legs free he tried to stand up, but his burnt feet would not bear his weight; he cursed and sat back down abruptly, still gripping Tirio Actamo’s hand. The officers grouped round to carry him in a chair hold. “With her,” he said, gesturing impatiently. “With them!” gesturing at Orrec and Per.

  So the whole group stayed together as they went up the stairs to the high gallery that encircles the Council Chamber and along it to the front of the great building, through its anteroom. They came out into blazing sunlight under the columns of the portico, on the speakers’ terrace that looks out over the Council Square.

  The whole vast expanse of the square was a mass of people, and more still were pushing into it from every entrance, a greater number of people than Orrec had ever seen, the citizens outnumbering the Ald forces by thousands.

  When Iddor, the man they thought their new lord and general, had ridden on past the entrance from Council Way with no signal to them, the bewildered soldiers began to heed the growing rumor that the Gand Ioratth was alive. Confused, divided in allegiance, some turning on others as traitors to Ioratth or to Iddor, they had broken ranks. Citizens had pushed into the square, armed with whatever they had. Before real fighting began, realising how outnumbered they were, the officers quickly rallied the soldiers and pulled them together out of the crowd. Most of the Alds now stood on the steps of the Council House and the pavement in front of it. In their blue cloaks, they formed a solid half circle facing the Ansul crowd, their swords bared, not threatening attack directly but not yielding.

  The crowd, though tumultuous, kept back, leaving a ragged no-man’s-land between their front ranks and the soldiers.

  “There was an awful stink of burning,” Orrec told us. “Vile—hard to breathe. The air was full of dust, fine black dust, hanging there, the ash and cinders the crowd had trodden and trampled and kicked into the air. And I saw a strange thing sticking up out of that roil and press of people. It looked like the prow of a wrecked ship. I realised at last it was part of the frame of the great tent, with burnt canvas clinging to it. And there were whirlpools in the sea of people, places where men who’d been killed or wounded in the rush into the square were lying, while some people still pressed on past them and others stopped to protect them. And the noise, I didn’t know human beings could make a noise like that, it was terrifying, it never ceased, a kind of huge howling…”

  He thought he could not force himself to go forward and stand facing that mob. His head swam with panic. The officers he was with were also clearly frightened and uncertain, but they carried their Gand forward staunchly. And they shouted out, “The Gand Ioratth! He lives!”

  The soldiers below turned, stared up, saw him, and began to shout, “He lives!”

  Ioratth was saying irritably to the men carrying him, “Put me down!” and they finally obeyed. He got a firm grip on the arm of one of them with one hand, and on Tirio’s shoulder with the other. He managed to take a step forward, grimacing with pain, and to stand there facing the crowd. The roar of his soldiers’ salute dominated the bellowing of the crowd for a while, but soon the terrible noise was growing again, drowning the shouts of “He lives!” in shouts of “Death to the tyrant! Death to the Alds!”

  Ioratth raised his hand. The authority of that ragged, fire-scarred, shaky figure brought silence. And he spoke—“Soldiers of Asudar, citizens of Ansul!”

  But his smoke-hoarsened voice did not carry. They could not hear him. One of the officers stepped forward, but Ioratth ordered him back. “Him, him!” he said, gesturing Orrec forward. “They’ll listen to him! Talk to them, Maker. Quiet them down.”

  The crowd saw Orrec then, and a roar went up from them. They shouted, “Lero! Lero!” and “Liberty!”

  Amid that tumult, Orrec said to Ioratth, “If I speak to them, I speak for them.”

  The Gand nodded impatiently.

  So Orrec raised his hand for silence, and a rumbling, muttering silence spread out through the huge mob.

  He told us that he’d had no idea what he would say from one word to the next, and couldn’t remember what he said. Others remembered well, and wrote down his words later: “People of Ansul, we have seen the water of the dead fountain run. We have heard the voice that was silent speak. The oracle bade us set free. And so we have done this day. We have set free the master, we have set free the slave. Let the men of Asudar know they have no slaves, let the people of Ansul know they have no masters. Let the Alds keep peace and Ansul will keep peace with them. Let them sue for alliance and we will grant them alliance. In living token of that peace and that alliance, hear Tirio Actamo, citizen of Ansul, wife of the Gand Ioratth!”

  If the Gand was taken aback, it didn’t show on his battered, sooty face; he stood there, not able to do much more than keep standing, holding on to Tirio while she spoke. Her voice was clear and valiant but very frail, and all the crowd in the square went silent to hear her, though there was still a hoarse continual tumult of noise from all the nearby streets.

  “May the gods of Ansul be blessed again, who will bless us with peace,” she said. “This is our city. Let us hold it as we always held it, lawfully. Let us be a free people once again. Luck and Lero and all our gods be with us!”

  The deep chant of “Lero! Lero!” rose up from the crowd following on her words. Then a man broke forward from the crowd, shouting out, “Give us our city! Give us back our Council House!”

  Those who were there said that was the most dangerous moment of all: if the crowd had simply pressed forward in its huge irresistible force to occupy the Council House and had met the army standing firm, they would have fought, and Ald soldiers fight to the death. It was Ioratth who prevented a slaughter, rasping out orders to his officers, who shouted them full voice and relayed them bytrumpet calls, rallying the soldiers and shifting the whole mass of them rapidly over from the Council House steps to the area east of it, clearing the steps for the wild crowd who had begun to flood up a
nd surge into the building. It was the soldiers’ discipline, Orrec said, that saved them and the thousands of citizens who would have died in such a battle. The Gand’s order had been, “Down arms,” and after that not one soldier raised his sword even when shoved, struck, or pushed aside by exultant, vengeful civilians.

  To escape the onrush of the mob, Orrec and Per stayed with the knot of officers, who chair-lifted Ioratth again and ran with him to the east end of the terrace and down the side steps to join the ranks that were reforming there. Tirio, Per, and Orrec followed them. A litter was fetched for the Gand. When they got him settled, he promptly summoned Orrec.

  “Well said, Maker,” he said, half audible, with a kind of grim salute. “But I have no authority to make an alliance with Ansul.”

  “Best obtain it, my lord,” said Tirio Actamo in her silvery voice.

  The old Gand looked up at her. Evidently he saw her bruises, her puffed eye, her torn hair and bloodclotted scalp clearly for the first time. He sat up staring, glaring, shouting in a whisper, “The damned—the damned traitor—Atth strike him dead! Where is her” The officers looked at one another.

  “Find him!” wheezed the Gand, and began to cough. Tirio Actamo knelt beside the litter and put her hand on his. “Ioratth, you must be quiet a while,” she said.

  He laughed through his coughing and gripped her hand. Looking up at Orrec, he said, “Married us, did you?”

  * * *

  IT SEEMED A LONG time before Orrec came back to us at Galvamand, yet it was still early afternoon of that day that had already been as long as a year.

  The Waylord had come in at my urging for some food and a brief rest, but then he returned to the reception hall that ran along the front of the house, called the high gallery. It had never been used in my lifetime and had no furnishings. Its doors, the wide front doors of Galvamand, stood open now. He asked for chairs and benches to be brought, and there were plenty of willing hands to bring them, not only from other rooms but from houses nearby. He sat down there and made himself available to all who came.