Powers aotws-3

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Anso, the eldest of Mimen’s students, liked to tell about the “Barna-vites,” a band of escaped slaves living somewhere in the great forests northeast of Etra. Under the leadership of a man named Barna, a man of immense stature and strength, they had formed a state of their own—a republic, in which all men were equal, all free. Each man had a vote, and could be elected to the government, and diselected too, if he mis-governed. All work was done by all, and all goods and game shared in common. They lived by hunting and fishing and by raiding rich people’s chariots and the traders’ convoys that went to and from Asion. Villagers and farmers in the whole region supported them and refused to betray them to the governments of Casicar and Asion; for the Barna-vites generously shared their loot and bounty with their neighbors in those lonely districts, who, if not slaves, were bondsmen or freedmen living in dire poverty.

  Anso drew a lively picture of the Barnavites’ life in the forests, answerable to no master or senator or king, bound only by freely given allegiance to their community. He knew stories of their daring attacks on guarded wagon convoys on the roads and merchant ships on the Rassy, and the clever disguises they used to go into towns, even into Casicar and Asion, to trade their loot for things they needed in the market. They never killed but in self-defense, Anso said, or, if a man came upon their hidden realm deep in the forest, then he must either pledge his life to live as a free man with them, or die. They never took from the poor, and even from rich farms took only the harvest, never the seed grain. And the women of the farms and villages didn’t fear them, for a woman was welcome among them only if she joined them of her own free will.

  Tadder read a book or left the room when Anso got launched on these stories. Once or twice he burst out, calling the Barnavites a mere band of thieving runaways. His scorn for them made me wonder if they had something to do with the slave revolt for which he and other slaves in Asion had suffered. Ienter derided the stories more mildly as impossible romances. I agreed with him, for the idea that a band of slaves could live as if they were masters, turning the age-old, sacred order upside down, could only be a daydream; but still I liked to hear these idylls of forest liberty.

  For the words liberty, freedom, had come to have a presence, a radiance in my mind, dominating it, like the great, bright stars I used to see on summer nights in Vente, and which I often looked up to see, fainter and farther, from the dark city. We were at leisure, evenings in the dormitory, and the priests allowed us oil for our lamps. I read De-nios’ Transformations, which Tadder lent me, and that was a great discovery to me. It was like that dream I had had of finding rooms in a house that I had not known were there, where I was made welcome among wonders, and greeted by a golden animal.

  Denios—the greatest of poets, all my companions said—had been born a slave. In his poems he used the word liberty with a tenderness, a reverence, that made me think of my sister when she spoke of her beloved. And Mimen had a battered little pocket manuscript of Caspro’s Cosmologies, which he said went with him everywhere; he encouraged me to read it. I found the poem disturbing and strange and understood very little of it, but sometimes a line would take me by the heart, the way his song had, that first night.

  I was allowed to run across the city to see my sister for an hour. It was hot September weather. Sallo did not look very well, her body and legs swollen with her pregnancy, her face drawn and tired. She hugged me and asked all about the priests and the other slaves and our work, and I talked the whole time, and then had to run back to the Shrine.

  A few days later Everra sent word to me that Sallo’s child had been born at seven months and had lived only an hour.

  We could not bury in the slave cemetery by the river, for it was outside the walls. During the siege, the bodies of slaves who died were burned in the fire towers, as if they were citizens. Their ashes mingled with those of free men in the waters of the Ash Brook, which rose by the fire towers and ran out through a narrow pipe under the walls to join the Nisas, and then the Morr, and then the sea.

  I stood in the autumn dawn at the fire towers by the brook with a few of the people of Arcamand. Sallo was not well enough yet to come to the baby’s funeral, but Iemmer said she was in no danger. I was allowed to go see her after a few days. She was thin and tired-looking, and she wept when she hugged me. She said, in her soft tired voice, “If he’d lived, you know, they’d have traded him as soon as they could. If they could. I heard that one House traded a slave baby for a pound of meal. Nobody wants a new mouth in a siege. I think he knew it, Gav. Nobody really wanted him to be alive. Not even me. What…” She didn’t finish her question, but opened her hands in a small, desolate gesture that said, What could he have been to me or I to him?

  I was shocked at how my people at Arcamand looked. They were all bone-thin, with the same weary look Sallo had—the siege face. Visiting the schoolroom I found my young pupils pitifully skinny and listless. Children are the first to die in famine. We at the Shrine were eating twice as well as most people in the city.

  Sallo was delighted to see my good health, and wanted me to tell her about the food we got, the priests’ fishpond, their carefully guarded flock of chickens that gave us eggs and now and then a bit of meat or a soup, their garden of holy herbs which included a good many lay vegetables, the gifts of grain to the Ancestors which fed the descendants of the Ancestors…. I was ashamed to talk about it, but she said, “I love to hear about it! Do the priests have olives? Oh, I miss olives more than anything!” So I told her we had olives sometimes, though in fact I hadn’t tasted one for months.

  I saw Sotur just before I left. She too looked listless, her beautiful hair gone dry and dull. She greeted me gently and I said, without knowing I was going to say it, “Sotur-io, will you give me a quarter-bronze? I want to buy Sallo some olives.”

  “Oh, Gav, there haven’t been any olives for months,” she said.

  “I know where to get them.”

  She looked at me with big eyes. After a moment she nodded. She went off and came back with a coin, which she pressed into my hand. “I wish there was more I could do,” she said. So she made my first begging an easy thing.

  For a quarter-bronze, which would have bought a pound of them last year, the black marketer gave me ten wizened olives. I ran back with them to Arcamand and gave them to Iemmer for Sallo, who was in the silk rooms. I was long overdue getting back to the College of Priests, but Reba didn’t say anything, perhaps because he saw I was in tears.

  Reba was a gentle man with a serene mind. Sometimes he talked a little with me, telling me about the worship of the Ancestors in the Shrine, which was carried out as much by the priests’ slaves as by the priests. He made me feel the dignity of that life and the peaceful beauty of the ever-repeated round of rites and prayers, on which the welfare, the very being, of the city depended. I think he saw the possibility that I might be given by my House to the College, and it flattered me that he wanted me. I could imagine living there as a priest of the Shrine. But I didn’t want to live anywhere but Arcamand, near my sister, or do anything but what I had been brought up all my life to do—to learn so that I could teach the children of my House.

  We were drawing near the end of our job. The ancient documents had been moved to the vaults under the Forefathers’ Shrine, and all we had to do now was sort and store them—work which in fact could be drawn out almost indefinitely, for many of these old scrolls and annals were unidentified, and ought to be read and labeled and listed, as well as cleaned, preserved from insects, and given proper storage. Our Houses weren’t eager to have us back, we were only extra mouths in a famine; and the priests and their slaves were glad to have us do the work. In fact, they couldn’t have done it without us. I’d been surprised to discover that all seven of us, even I, were much better educated than the priests of the College. They knew the ancestral rites, but very little history or anything else, not even the history of the rites. We were finding all kinds of interesting documents, lives of great men of Etra from the
earliest days, prophecies, records of civil and foreign wars and alliances with other cities—all of which fascinated me, drawing me back to my dream of writing a history of all the City States. I was content to be burrowing among the old scrolls and parchments down in the silent vaults, under the silent, dying city.

  “What a comfort the past is,” Mimen said, “when the future offers none.”

  Burning the bodies of those who died of starvation went on night and day now down by the Ash Brook. The smoke of the pyres rose and mixed with the mists of autumn and made a pall over the roofs. Sometimes the smell was the smell of burnt roasting meat and my mouth would water with hunger and sick revulsion.

  Outside the north walls the enemy was preparing a huge earthen ramp on which they could bring their siege engines right up to the parapet. The city guardsmen threw paving stones down among the workers, but they swarmed like ants, and their archers shot at any man who showed himself along the walls. Our archers saved those arrows pulled from dying men, and made their own from any tree within the walls, even the old sycamores.

  Unrest ran through the Senate and was shouted in the squares by orators: Why had Etra been so unprepared for attack—without weapons stockpiled, without sufficient food stored, her armies far away? Were there traitors among the Senators—lovers of Casicar? Men said the Senate refused to open the gates because they wanted Etra to starve, to die, before it was surrendered. To some this was noble and courageous, to others a vile betrayal. Rumors of unfair distribution of food now ran wild, true or not. Black marketers whose supplies ran out were murdered on the suspicion of withholding food.

  A merchants house was attacked and torn down by a mob who believed he was hoarding. They found nothing but a half barrel of dried figs hidden in the slaves’ barrack. There were constant stories of grain being hidden under the Senate House… under the Shrine of the Forefathers… That came too close to home. The priests of the College went in terror for their fishpond, their garden, their poultry, their lives. They begged for guards to be set around the Shrine, and ten men were put on duty. They couldn’t have done much if a mob had stormed the Shrine, but its sanctity still defended it, and us.

  It was mid-October. Life hung in a kind of dead lull which we all felt preceded the end. Within a few days, either the assault on the north wall would begin and would be successful, or a mob out of control would open one of the gates, trying to escape before the slaughter and the burning. Or, conceivably, the Senate would vote to surrender the city in hopes of avoiding total destruction.

  And then the thing we had lost all hope of happened.

  At daybreak, fog and smoke hanging heavy in the streets, over the enemy camp, along the Nisas, there came a sound of alarms, shouting, bugles signaling, the neighing of horses, the clash of arms. The armies of Etra had come home at last.

  All morning we heard the noise of battle outside the walls, and those allowed on the walls and roofs could watch it. We slaves were locked into the compound of the Shrine, and could only beg for news from those who ran past the gates. Late in the morning a great troop of city guards marched through the square, stopping before the Shrine for the blessing of the Ancestors. They were all afoot—every horse in the city had been slaughtered for food long since—and there was a poor, lank look about them, their arms, their clothes, their gaunt faces, as if they were beggars pretending to be soldiers, or were the ghosts of soldiers. But the Ancestors blessed them through the priests’ voices, and they marched on down Long Street to the River Gate. They marched in silence, no sound but the rhythmic clink of their weapons. Then for the first time in six months the gate was flung open, and the Etran guard burst forth in a sortie, surprising the besiegers from the rear as they faced our armies. This much we heard as people shouted word from roof to roof, and then we heard a great roar and shouts of victory. “We’ve got the bridge!” the watchers shouted. “Etra has taken the bridge!”

  The rest of the day, though there were alarms and setbacks, was a long turn of the tide, the Casicarans giving way under Etran assaults, trying to regroup, getting knocked apart again, seeking ways to retreat and finding them blocked, until by evening the whole besieging army had become a horde of scattered men running for their lives through all the country between Etra and the Morr and the farmlands across the Nisas, chased by our mounted troops, hunted, cut down—the pig hunt, it was called later. Outside the walls, corpses were strewn thick over the earthworks and through the ravaged camp, thousands of dead men, many already naked, stripped of arms and clothing by our soldiers. The Nisas was dammed in places by dead bodies.

  We were released after sunset. I went up on the parapet by the North Gate and saw the live men moving among the corpses, heaving them about like dead sheep to get at their armor and weapons, sometimes slashing a throat if the man seemed not certainly dead. Soon a call went out for slaves to bring the Etran dead into the city to our pyres by the Ash Brook. We seven were sent on that duty, and worked all night by moonlight and torchlight carrying corpses. It was an unearthly business. What I chiefly remember of it was that each time Anso and I, working together, laid a body down in the burning-grounds, I thought of Sallo’s baby, Yaven’s son, my nephew, who had lived an hour in the starving city. And each time I asked Ennu to guide, not the soldier, but that tiny, unmade soul, into the fields of darkness and the fields of light.

  Many of the bodies we carried were those of city guards. They had paid a high cost for their brave foray.

  All that night there was a kind of feeble riot, as both citizens and slaves poured out the open gates to plunder the food stores of the Casi-caran army, and the Etran soldiers posted to guard them gave way before the pleas and the press of starving people, many of whom they knew. Some soldiers even brought up supply wagons to bring grain into the city. People fought over the supplies, mobbing the grain carts. Order was established only when daylight came, and then only by the use of violence—whips, cudgels, swords. In the morning light I saw the horror on the soldiers’ faces as they looked at their people, the men and women of their city, swarming over a rack of sheep carcasses like maggots on a dead rat.

  Slaves were ordered to their owner’s house by noon, on pain of death. So I left the Shrine of the Forefathers with only time to thank old Reba and to accept from Mimen his little handwritten copy of Caspro’s poem.

  “Don’t let Everra see it,” he said with his wry smile, and not knowing how to thank him I only stammered, “No, no, I won’t…”

  It was the first book I’d ever owned. It was the first thing I’d ever owned. I called what I wore my clothes, the desk I used in the schoolroom I called my desk, but in fact they were not mine, they were the property of the House of Arca, as I was. But this book, this was mine.

  * * *

  When Yaven came home he greeted the Father and Mother with suitable affection and decorum and headed straight for the silk rooms. It was wonderful to see how Sallo bloomed and shone, now that he was back. Yaven wasn’t as thin as most city people were, but he’d been through hard times too, and was weathered and toughened and tired. He told us about the campaign, me and Sallo and Sotur and Astano and Oco, all back in the schoolroom with Everra, like the old days… .The forces of Morva had been reinforced by an army from Gallec, the Votusans and Oscans had joined them; Etra’s army had been hard put to withstand attackers on so many fronts. There had been, Yaven thought, some mistakes, some confusion in command, but no betrayal. The Etrans could not come to the relief of their city till they defeated the enemies who would have followed them right to the walls. Then they came as fast as they could. They crossed the Morr at night, making a boat bridge, so as to take the besieging army by surprise from the east, the unexpected direction.

  “But we had no real idea how hard it was for you here,” he said. “I still can’t imagine what it was like…” Astano showed him a piece of “famine bread” she had kept: a brownish wafer like a chip of wood, made from a little barley or wheat meal, sawdust, earth, and salt. “We had plenty of
salt,” she said. “All we needed was something to put it on.”

  Yaven smiled, but the grim lines were set in his face. “We’ll make Casicar pay for this,” he said.

  “Oh,” said Sotur, “pay… Are we merchants, then?” “No, little cousin. We’re soldiers.”

  “And the wives of soldiers, and the lovers and mothers and sisters and cousins of soldiers… And what is it Casicar will pay us?”

  “It’s how it is,” Yaven said gently. His hand was on Sallo’s hand, as they sat side by side on the schoolroom bench.

  Everra spoke of the honor of the city, the insult to the power of the Ancestors, the vengeance due. Yaven listened to him with us, but said nothing more of such matters. Presently he asked me about my time at the Shrine, and the ancient documents that we had been rescuing. As I was telling him, I saw in his absorbed face the face of the boy who loved the epics and the ballads, who had led us to build Sentas on those summer afternoons. It came into my head to wonder what Yaven would make of the “new poets.” Maybe someday, when he was Father of Arcamand and I was the teacher in this classroom, I would give him The Transformations to read and he would discover that new world…but I couldn’t quite imagine it. Still, the thought moved me to tell him how we’d recited The Bridge on the Nisas in the barrack, early in the siege, how all the men had roared it out together—“Beneath the walls of Etra"—We ended up, all of us in the schoolroom, reciting the ballads, with Yaven the lead voice; and some of my skinny little pupils crept in to listen, round-eyed and wondering at the tall soldier laughing as he declaimed, “Then fled the Morvan soldiers, the men of Morva ran…”