“It roars,” he said plaintively, squinting and blinking. “Is Oco coming?”
Remen, shocked, tried to get him to address the Mother properly, but she waved him away. “He’s only a baby” she said. “I’m glad you decided to come back, little one.” She held him a while, her cheek against his hair; then she put him back in his crib and said, “Now go to sleep again, and when you wake up your sister will be here.”
“All right,” Miv said, and curled up and shut his eyes.
“What a lamb,” the Mother said. She looked at me, “Ah, jou’re up, you’re afoot, good for you,” she said. She did look like her slender daughter Astano, but her face, like her body, was full and smooth and powerful. Astano’s glance was shy; the Mother’s gaze was steady. I looked down at once, of course.
“Who hurt you, lad?” she asked.
Not to answer old Remen was one thing. Not to answer the Mother was quite another.
After an awful pause I said the only thing that came to me: “I fell into the well, Mistress.”
“Oh, come,” she said, chiding but amused.
I stood mute.
“You’re a very clumsy boy, Gavir,” said the musical voice. “But a courageous one.” She examined my lumps and bruises. “He looks all right to me, Remen. How’s the hand?” She took my hand and looked at the splinted finger. “That’ll take some weeks,” she said. “You’re the scholar, eh? No writing for you for a while. But Everra will know how to keep you busy. Run along, then.”
I bobbed the reverence to her and said, “Thank you,” to old Remen, and got out. I ran to the pantry, and found Sallo there, and even while we were hugging and she was asking if I was really all right, I was telling her that the Mother knew my name, and knew who I was, and called me the scholar! I didn’t say that she had called me courageous. That was too immense a thing to talk about.
When I tried to eat, it didn’t go down very well, and my head began thumping, so Sallo went with me to the dormitory and left me on our bed there. I spent that afternoon and most of the next day there, doing a lot of sleeping. Then I woke up starving hungry and was all right, except that I looked, as Sotur said, as if I’d been left out on a battlefield for the crows.
It was only two days since I’d been in the schoolroom, but they welcomed me back as if I’d been gone for months, and it felt that way to me too. The teacher took my injured hand in his long, strong-fingered hands and stroked it once. “When it heals, Gavir, I am going to teach you to write well and clearly,” he said. “No more scrawling in the copybook. Right?” He was smiling, and for some reason what he said made me extremely happy. There was a care for me in it, a concern as gentle as his touch.
Hoby was watching. Torm was watching. I turned around and faced them. I reverenced Torm briefly; he turned away. I said, “Hello, Hoby.” He had a sick look. I think seeing all my swellings and bruises in their green and purple glory scared him. But he knew I had not told on him. Everybody knew it. Just as everybody knew who had attacked me. There might be silence, but there were no secrets in our life.
But if I accused nobody, it was nobody’s business, not even the masters’.
Torm had turned from me with a glowering look, but Yaven and As-tano were kind and friendly. As for Sotur, she evidently felt she’d been thoughtless or heartless saying that I looked like I’d been left for the crows, for when she could speak to me without anybody else hearing she said, “Gavir, you are a hero.” She spoke solemnly, and looked near tears.
I didn’t understand yet that the whole matter was more serious than my small part of it.
Sallo had said little Miv was to be kept in the infirmary till he was quite well, and knowing he was in the Mother’s care I thought no more about him or my fever dreams of the burial ground.
But in the dormitory that night, Ennumer, who mothered Miv and Oco, was in tears. All the women and girls gathered about her, Sallo with them. Tib came over to me and whispered what he’d heard: that Miv was bleeding from his ear, and they thought his head had been broken by Torm’s blow. Then I remembered the green willows by the river, and my heart went cold. The next day Miv went into convulsions several times. We heard that the Mother came to the infirmary and stayed with him all that evening and night. I thought of how she had stood by my bed in the golden light. When we were sitting on our mattress in the evening, I said to Tib and Sallo, “The Mother is as kind as Ennu.”
Sallo nodded, hugging me, but Tib said, “She knows who hit him.” “What difference does that make?” Tib made a face.
I was angry at him. “She is our Mother,” I said. “She cares for us all. She’s kind. You don’t know anything about her.”
I felt I knew her, knew her as the heart knows what it loves. She had touched me with her gentle hand. She had said I was courageous.
Tib hunched up and shrugged and said nothing. He had been moody and gloomy since Hoby turned away from him. I was still his friend, but he’d always wanted Hoby’s friendship more than mine. He saw my cuts and bruises now with shame and discomfort, and was shy with me. It was Sallo who got him to come over to our nook and sit and talk with us before the women put the lights out.
“I’m glad she lets Oco stay with Miv,” Sallo said now. “Poor Oco, she’s so scared for him.”
“Ennumer would like to stay with him too,” Tib said.
“The Mother is a healer!” I said. “She’ll look after him. Ennumer couldn’t do anything. She’d just howl. Like now.”
Ennumer was in fact a foolish, noisy young woman, without half as much good sense as six-year-old Oco; but though her mothering had been random, she was truly fond of Oco and Miv, her doll-baby as she called him. Her grief now was real, and loud. “Oh my poor little doll-baby!” she cried out. “I want to see him! I want to hold him!”
The headwoman came over to her and put her hands on Ennumer’s shoulders.
“Hush,” she said. “He is in the Mother’s arms.” And tear-smeared, scared Ennumer hushed.
Iemmer had been headwoman of Arcamand for many years, and had great personal authority. She reported to the Mother and the Family, of course, but she never gained advantage for herself by making trouble for other house people, as she might have done. The Mother had proved that she didn’t like tattlers and toadies, by selling a tattler, and by choosing Iemmer as headwoman. Iemmer played fair. She had favorites—among us all, Sallo was her darling—but she didn’t favor anyone, or pick on anyone either.
To Ennumer, she was an awesome figure, far more immediately powerful than the Mother. Ennumer blubbered a little more, quietly, and let the women around her comfort her.
Ennumer had been sent to us from Herramand five years ago as a birthday gift to Sotur’s older brother Soter. She was then a pretty girl of fifteen, untrained and illiterate, for the Herra Family, like many others, thought it an unnecessary ostentation or even a risk to educate slaves, particularly girl slaves.
I knew Ennumer had had babies, two or three of them. Both Sotur’s older brothers often sent for her; she got pregnant; the baby was given to one of the wet-nurses, and presently traded to another House. Miv and Oco had been part of one of those bargains. Babies were almost always sold off or traded. Gammy used to tell us, “I bore six and mothered none. Didn’t look for any baby to mother, after I nursed Altan-di. And then you two come along to plague me in my old age!”
Very rarely the mother, not the child, was sold off.
That was Hoby’s case. He had been born on the same day as Torm, the son of the Family, and alleging this as a sign or omen, the Father had ordered that he be kept. His mother, a gift-girl, had been sold promptly to prevent the complications of kinship. A mother may believe the child she bore is hers, but property can’t own property; we belong to the Family, the Mother is our mother and the Father is our father. I understood all that.
I understood why Ennumer was crying, too. But to a boy my age women’s griefs were too troubling to endure. I warded them off, walled them out. “Play Ambush?”
I challenged Tib, and we got out the slates and chalk and marked the squares and played Ambush till lights-out.
Miv died as the sun rose that morning.
* * *
THE DEATH OF a slave child would not ordinarily cause any disturbance to a great House such as Arcamand. The slave women would weep, and the women of the Family would come with kind words and gifts of burial wrappings or money to buy them. Very early in the morning a little troop of slaves in funeral white would carry the litter down to the riverside graveyard, and pray at the grave to Ennu to lead the small soul home, and come back weeping, and get to work.
But this death was not quite ordinary. Everyone in Arcamand knew why Miv had died, and it was a troubling knowledge. This time, it was the slaves who spoke and the masters who kept silence.
Of course the slaves spoke only to other slaves.
But there was talk such as I had never heard: bitter anger, indignation, not from the women only but from men. Metter, the Father’s bodyguard, respected by all for his strength and dignity, said in the barrack that the child’s death was a shame to the Family, for which the Ancestors would demand atonement. The chief hostler, Sem, a clever, vigorous, fearless man, said out loud that Torm was a mad dog. Such sayings were whispered around the courts and corridors and the dormitory. And Remen’s story, too: he told us that the Mother was holding Miv on her lap when he died, and she held him close for a long time and whispered to him, “Forgive me, little one, forgive.”
He told this in the hope it might console Ennumer, for she was wild with grief, and it did comfort her to know the child had been in tender arms when he died, and that the Mother grieved that she hadn’t been able to save him. But others heard it differently. “She might well ask forgiveness!” Iemmer said, and others agreed. The story of how Miv had innocently laughed at Torm and how Torm had turned on the child and knocked him across the room—Oco had sobbed it out the day it happened, and Tib and Sallo had confirmed it, and as it was retold in the barrack and stables it lost nothing in the telling.
Hoby defended Torm, saying he’d only meant to slap the child for impertinence and didn’t know his own strength. But Hoby was in ill favor. Nobody openly blamed him for my adventure at the well, since I hadn’t accused him, but nobody admired him for it. And now his loyalty to Torm was held against him; it looked too much like siding with the masters against the slaves, I heard the stableboys call him “Twinny” behind his back. And Metter said to him, “A man who doesn’t know his own strength ought to learn it fighting with men, not beating up babies.”
This talk of blame and forgiveness was very distressing to me. It seemed to open cracks and faults in the world, to shake things loose. I went to the anteroom of the Ancestors and tried to pray to my guardian there, but his painted eyes looked through me, haughty and uninterested. Sotur was in the room, bowed down in silent worship; she had lighted incense at the altar of the Mothers, and the smoke drifted up into the high, shadowy dome.
That night after Miv died, I dreamed that I was sweeping one of the inner courts of the House and found leading from it a corridor I had never seen before, which led to rooms I did not know, where strangers turned to greet me as if they knew me. I was frightened of transgressing, but they smiled, and one of them held out a beautiful ripe peach to me. “Take it,” she said, and called me by some name I could not remember when I woke. There was a shining like the trembling of sunlight all round her head. I slept and dreamed again, exploring the new rooms; I met no people now, but heard their voices in other rooms as I followed the high stone corridors, I came to a bright interior courtyard where a small fountain ran and a golden animal came to me trustingly and let me stroke its fur. When I woke I went on thinking about those rooms, that house. It was Arcamand and not Arcamand. “My house,” I called it in my mind, because I had the freedom of it. The sunlight there was brighter.
Whether it was a memory or a dream, I longed to dream it again. But the green willows by the river, that had been a memory of what was to be.
We went down to the river that morning to bury Miv. Light was just coming into the world, a long time yet till sunrise. Sparse grey rain fell among the willows and drifted over the river. I remembered it and saw it at the same time.
A great crowd of people followed the mourners in white and the white-draped litter, as great a crowd as had come to Gammy’s burial, almost all the slaves of Arcamand. Only those were missing whose absence from their duties, even so early in the morning, even for a burial, was not permitted. It was unusual to see so many men at a child’s funeral. Ennumer wept and wailed aloud, and so did some of the other women, but the men were silent, and we children were silent.
They covered the little white bundle in the shallow grave with black earth. Miv’s sister Oco came forward, tremulous and bewildered by grief, and laid on it a long spray of willow with delicate yellow catkin flowers. Iemmer took her hand and standing by the grave said the prayer to Ennu, the guide of the soul into death. To keep from crying I watched the river and the speckle of raindrops on its surface. We stood quite near it. Not far from us, where the bank was lower, I could see where old graves were being washed away by the current as it worked against the curve of the land. The whole outer edge of the great slave cemetery was flooded by the river running high in spring. Willows stood far out in the water, trailing their new green leaves. I thought of the water coming up here to the new grave, oozing into the dirt around Miv wrapped up in white cloth, rising and filling the grave, washing him away with the dirt and the leaves, the white cloth trailing in the current like smoke. Sallo took my hand and I pressed close to her side. Everything was washing and drifting and trailing away with the water, except my sister Sallo, except her. She was here. With me.
We went back to the House and to work. Everra did not hold class that day. Sallo and I did our sweeping. When we were sweeping the silk-room court she came and took hold of my hand suddenly. She was in tears. She said, “Oh, Gav, I keep thinking about Oco—If I lost my little brother I would die!” She hugged me fiercely, and then seeing I was crying too, she hugged me again, whispering, “You won’t ever go away, will you, Gav?”
I said, “Never. I promise.”
“I hear,” she said, trying to smile.
We both knew well enough what a slave’s promise is worth, but still it comforted us both.
When we finished sweeping, she went with Ris to the spinning room, I went to the pantry and found Tib, and we loitered out to the back court. Some of the big boys were there. I held back—I had never been sure which ones had helped Hoby dunk me—but they spoke to us mildly. They were playing toss, and one of them lobbed the ball to me. I only had one hand to catch with, but caught and passed it creditably, and then stood back and watched them throw and catch. One of them asked, “Where’s Hoby?” and another, Tan, said, “In trouble.”
“What for?”
“Sucking up,” Tan said, with a high loft of the ball to Tib. Tib fumbled it, another boy retrieved it and lobbed it back to Tan. He caught it, tossed it high and caught it, and turned to me. Tan was a stableboy, sixteen or seventeen years old, a short, thin fellow almost as dark-skinned as me. “You had the right idea, young Gav,” he said. “Stick to your own. Don’t go looking for gratitude up there.” He glanced at the windowed wall of Arcamand towering over the courtyard and back at me, and winked. He had a keen, bright face. I’d always liked Tan, and was flattered by his notice. As the older boys left, another of them slapped me lightly on the shoulder, the kind of comradely notice that looks like nothing and means a lot. It brought a warmth to me I needed. I’d been down at the river in my head all morning, in the grey rain and the silence and the cold.
Tib ran off to the kitchen to his work. I had nothing to do. I went to the schoolroom because there was nowhere else to go. And because if any room in Arcamand was my room, it was that one. It was dear to me, with its four high north windows, its carved and grimy benches and desks and tables, the teacher’s lectern, the bookshelves
and stacked-up copybooks and slates, the big glass ink jug from which we filled our inkwells. Sallo and I were in charge of keeping it swept, dusted, and orderly, and though it looked quite neat and peaceful, I set to sorting and straightening out the books on the long shelves. All work was made awkward by the splint on my finger. Often I stopped and had a look into a book I hadn’t read yet. Sitting on the floor by the shelves, I opened Saltoc Asper’s History of the City State of Trehs, and got to reading about the long war between Hill Trebs and Carvol, which ended in the rebellion of the slaves in Hill Trebs and the utter destruction of the city. It was an exciting story, and troubling because it was about what I had glimpsed through those cracks in the walls. I was completely lost in it when Everra said, “Gavir?”
I leapt up and reverenced him and apologised. He smiled. “What’s the book?”
I showed him.
“Read it if you like,” he said, “though it might be better to read Asham first. Asper is political. Asham is above opinion.” He went over to his lectern and looked through some papers, then sat on the long-legged stool and looked at me again. I was rearranging books.
“This is a heavy day,” he said.
I nodded.
“I attended on Father Altan-di this morning. I have some news that may lighten the day for you a little.” He rubbed his hand over his mouth and jaw. “The Family will be going to the country early this year, at the beginning of May, I will go with them, and all my pupils, except for Hoby. He is henceforth excused from school and will serve under Haster. And Torm-di has been granted leave to stay in the city and learn swordsmanship from a master teacher. He will join us in the country only at the end of summer.”
This was a lot of news to absorb all at once, and at first I saw only the promise of a long country summer at the farm in the Ventine Hills. Then I saw the bonus—without Hoby! without Torm!—That was a moment of bliss. It was quite a while before I began to think about it in any other terms.
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