An accident, last night, in the pool at the Hot Wells. A sad accident, a terrible thing, Everra said, tears in his eyes.
“An accident,” I said.
He said Sallo had been drowned—had drowned, he corrected himself—had drowned, as the young men, who had drunk too much and gone past all decency, were playing with the girls in the pool.
“The pool of warm water,” I said, “where there are peacocks on the marble.”
Yes, my teacher said, looking up at me with tear-wet eyes. He seemed to me to have a sly, cringing expression, as if he was ashamed of himself for doing something he should not have done but would not confess, like a schoolboy.
“Ris is home,” he said, “with the women in the silk rooms. She is in a lamentable state, poor girl. Not injured, but… It was madness, madness. We know that Torm-di has always—has always had this frenzy that comes upon him—but to take the girls out of the house! To take them there, among those men! Madness, madness. Oh the shame, the shame, the pity of it, oh, my poor Gavir,” and my teacher bowed his grey head before me, hiding his wet eyes and cringing face. “And what will Yaven-di say!” he cried.
I went through the halls, past the room of the Ancestors, to the library, and sat there a while alone. The emptiness was around me, the silence. I asked Sallo to come to me, but no one came. “Sister,” I said aloud, but I could not hear my voice.
Then I thought, and it was perfectly clear to me, that if she had been drowned she would be lying on the floor of the pool of green water warm as blood. If she was not there, where was she? She could not be there, so she could not have been drowned.
I went looking for her. I went to the silk rooms, to the western court. I said to women I met there, “I’m looking for my sister.”
I had forgotten who the women were, the people that took me to her, but I knew her.
She was lying among white cloths that covered her up. Her face, which was all I could see, was not rosy brown but greyish, with a dark bruise across one cheek. Her eyes were closed, and she looked small and tired. I knelt beside her, and they let me be there.
I remember that they came and said, “The Mother has sent for you, Gavir,” as if this was a solemn, important thing. I kissed Sallo and told her I’d be back soon, I went with them.
They took me through the familiar corridors to the Mother’s apartments, which I knew only from outside; Sallo was allowed in to sweep the Mother’s rooms, but not I; I only swept the hallways there. She was waiting for me, tall in her long robes, the Mother of Arcamand. “We are so sorry, so sorry, Gavir, for your sister’s death,” she said in her beautiful voice. “Such a tragic accident. Such a sweet girl. I do not know how I am ever to tell my son Yaven. It will be a bitter grief to him. I know you loved your sister. I loved her too. I hope the knowledge of that will be some comfort to you. And this.” She put into my hands a small heavy pouch of silk. “I will send my own women to her funeral,” she said, gazing earnestly at me. “Our hearts are broken for our sweet Sallo.”
I reverenced her and stood there. The people came and took me away again.
They would not take me back to Sallo. I never saw her face again, so I had to remember it greyish, bruised, and tired. I didn’t want to remember it that way, so I turned away from the memory, I forgot it.
They took me back to my teacher, but he did. not want me nor I him. As soon as I saw him, words broke out of me—“Will they punish Torm? Will they punish him?”
Everra started back as if afraid of me. “Be calm, Gavir, be calm,” he said placatingly.
“Will they punish him?”
“For the death of a slave girl?”
Around his words silence spread out. Silence enlarged around me, wider and deeper, I was in a pool, at the bottom of a pool, not of water but of silence and emptiness, and it went on to the end of the world. I could not breathe the air, but I breathed that emptiness.
Everra was talking. I saw his mouth open and shut. His eyes glistened. An old grey-haired man opening and shutting his mouth. I turned away.
There was a wall across my mind. On the other side of the wall was what I couldn’t remember because it hadn’t happened. I had never been able to forget, but now I could. I could forget days, nights, weeks. I could forget people. I could forget everything I’d lost, because I’d never had it.
But I remember the burial ground when I stand there, very early the next morning, just as day lightens the sky. I remember it because I’ve remembered it before.
When we buried old Gammy, when we buried little Miv, I remember standing there in the green rain of the willows, just outside the walls, by the river, and wondering who we were burying on this other morning.
It must be someone important, for all the Mother’s personal serving women are there in their white mourning garments, hiding their faces in their long shawls, and the body is wrapped in beautiful white silk, and Iemmer is weeping aloud. She can’t say the prayer to Ennu-Me. When she tries to, she makes a shrieking wail that tears a horrible, raw hole in the silence, so that now other women, weeping too, have gone to her to hold and console her.
I stand near the water and watch how it eats at the riverbank, lapping and gnawing at the earth, undercutting the bank, eating away at it so that the grass overhangs it, the white roots of the grass dangling down into the air above the water. If you looked in the earth of the bank you’d find white bones thin as roots, bones of little children buried there where the water would come and eat their graves.
A woman stood not far from me, not with the other women. A long, ragged shawl was pulled over her head and hid her face, but she looked at me once. It was Sotur. I know that. I remember, for a little while.
When she and the other women were gone, there were some people around me, men, and I asked them if I could stay there in the cemetery. One of them was Tan, the stableman, who was kind to me when we were boys. He was kind to me then. He put his hand on my shoulder. “You’ll be back in a bit, then?”
I nodded.
His lips were pinched together to keep from trembling. He said, “She was the sweetest girl I ever knew, Gav.”
He went off with the others. There was nobody in the cemetery now. They had put the green sod back over the grave as well as they could so that it hardly showed among all the other graves, but it didn’t matter, since the river would wash all the graves away and there would be nothing left but a few white rags twisting in the current going to the sea. I walked away from the grave, upstream along the Nisas, under the willows.
The way narrowed to a path between the city wall and the river, and then I was at the River Gate, I waited for the market traffic coming into the city across the bridge to pass, heavy wagons drawn by white oxen, little carts pulled by a donkey or by a slave. At last there was a space among them so I could cross the roadway. I went on up the west bank of the Nisas.
The path was pleasant, wandering nearer and farther from the river-bank, passing the small gardens that thrifty freemen planted and tended. Some old men were already in their plots, hoeing, weeding, enjoying the mild spring morning, the cloudy sunrise. I walked on into the silence, the empty world. I walked under a low ceiling of raw black rock into the dark.
* * *
There is much I will never remember of the days after that day. When at last I learned forgetting, I learned it very quickly and all too well. What fragments I can find of those days may be memories or may not, they may be the other kind of remembering that I do, of times that have not come and places I have not yet been. I lived where I was and where I was not, all those days, all that time, a month, two months. I wasn’t walking away from Arcamand, because there was nothing behind me but a wall, and I’d forgotten most of what lay on the other side of it. There was nothing ahead of me at all.
I walked. Who walked with me? Ennu, who guides us in death? or Luck, who is deaf in the ear you pray to? The way took me. If there was a path I followed it, if there was a bridge I crossed it, if there was a village and I smelled food and was hung
ry, I went and bought food. In my pocket, ever since it was given to me, I had carried the little silk purse as full and heavy with money as a heart is full and heavy with blood. Six silver pieces, eight eagles, twenty half-bronzes, nine quarter-bronzes. I counted them first as I sat by the Nisas, hidden among flowering shrubs and high grass. In the villages I spent only the quarter-bronzes. Even they were more than many people could change. Villagers and farmers gave me extra food when they could not give me pennies. Few people grudged me food, and some would rather give it than sell it to me. I wore white, the white of mourning, and I spoke as educated men of the city speak, and when they said, “Where are you going, di?” I said, “I am going to bury my sister,”
“Poor boy,” I heard women say. Sometimes little children ran after me shouting, “crazy! crazy!” but they never came close to me.
I wasn’t robbed by the poor people I went among because I had no thought of being robbed, no fear of it. If I had been robbed it wouldn’t have mattered to me at all. When you have nothing to pray for, that’s when Luck hears you.
If Arcamand had sought their runaway slave then, they would have found me easily enough. I didn’t hide. Anyone along the Nisas could have put them on my trail. Probably at Arcamand they said to one another that Gavir had drowned himself that morning at the slave cemetery after the others left, that he had taken a heavy stone in his arms and walked out into the river. Instead I took the Mother’s silken purse heavy with money because it was in my pocket, and walked out into the empty world because it didn’t occur to me to take a stone and walk into the river. It didn’t matter where I walked. The ways were all the same. There was only one way I could not go, and that was back.
I crossed the Nisas somewhere. The little roads between villages took me round and about, one direction then another. One day I saw the heads of high, round, green hills ahead of me. I had wandered onto the Ventine Road. If I kept on it that road would take me up into the hills, to the farm, to Sentas. Those names and places came to me out of the forgetting. I remembered Sentas, the farm, I remembered someone who lived there: the farm slave Comy.
I sat down in the shade of an oak and ate some bread someone had given me. Thinking was a slow business for me then, it took a long time. Comy had been a friend. I thought I could go up to the farm and stay there. All the house slaves knew me, they’d treat me well. Comy would fish with me.
Maybe the farm had been burned to the ground when Casicar invaded, the orchards hacked down, the vines torn out.
Maybe I could live in Sentas, as if it were a real place.
All the slow, stupid thoughts went by and I got up and turned my back on the road to Vente. I walked between two fields on a lane that went northeast.
The lane took me to a road, narrow and rutted, with very few people on it. It kept going, leading away from things I remembered and wanted to forget, and I kept going on it. There was a town where I bought food in the market, enough for several days, and bought a rough brown blanket I could use for a bed at night. Later there was a desolate village where the dogs came out and barked and kept me from stopping there. But there was nothing to stop for.
After that village the road dwindled to a footpath. No crops were planted on the rolling hills. Sheep grazed, scattered out on the slopes, and their tall grey guard dog would stand up and watch me as I passed. Trees grew thick in the dales between the hills. I slept in those groves, drinking from the small streams that ran down among them. When I had no more food, for a while I looked for something to eat. It was too early for anything but a few tiny strawberries, and I did not know what to look for. I gave up looking and went on walking up the path between the hills. Hunger is painful. There was a thought in my head, not a memory, only a thought, that while I ate so well with the priests of the Shrine, there was someone who had not had enough to eat, so that the baby starved in her womb, and so now it was my turn to go hungry. It was only fair.
The distance I walked each day got shorter. I sat down often in the hot sunshine among the wild grasses. The flowering grasses were beautiful in their diversity. I would watch the little flies and bees in the air, or remember what had happened or not happened, as if it were all one dream. The day would pass, the sun would pass on its great path across the sky, before I got up and trudged on looking for a place to sleep. I lost the path one day and after that followed nothing but the folds of the hills.
I was going slowly down a slope to find the stream at the bottom in the early twilight, feeling my legs shake under me, when something came rushing at me from behind and I felt my breath go out of me as the trees whirled around in a burst of light.
Some time after that I was lying in a strange, strong-smelling bed of furs. Not far above my face was a ceiling, a low vault of raw black rock. It was almost dark. Beside me something warm pressed against my leg, a big animal. It raised its head, a dog’s long, grey, heavy head, grim black lips, dark eyes that gazed across me. It made a whining groan and got up and stepped over my legs. Someone spoke to it, then came and crouched down beside me. He spoke to me but I didn’t understand for a long time. I stared at him in the weak light that seemed to glance and reflect off the black rocks on the floor of the cave. I could see the whites of his eyes clearly, and the grey-black hair that stuck out in shaggy clumps around his dark face. He smelled stronger than the dirty, half-cured furs of the bed. He brought me water in a cup made of bark, and helped me drink, for I couldn’t lift my head.
Most of the time I lay in the low cave room, I had no memories of any other place or time. I was there, only there. I was alone, except when the dog was with me, lying by my left leg. Sometimes it raised its head and stared into the dark air. It never looked into my face. When the man came stooping into the room, the dog stood up and went to him, putting its long nose into his hand, and then went out. Later it would come back with him or by itself, step over me, turn round once, and lie down by my leg. Its name was Guard.
The man’s name was Cuga or Cuha. Sometimes he said one, sometimes the other. He talked strangely, deep in his throat, as if something obstructed his voice, which came out as if through rocks. When he came, he would sit down by me, give me fresh water, and offer me food: usually thin strips of smoke-dried meat or fish, sometimes a few berries as they came ripe. He never gave me much at a time. “What were you doing then, starving?” he said. He talked a good deal when he was with me, and often I heard him in the other part of the cave talking to himself or to the dog, the same low gargling broken stream of words never waiting for an answer.
To me he said, “What did you want to go starving for anyhow? There’s food. Food where you find it. What brought you up here? I thought you was from Derram. I thought they was after me again. I followed you, you know. I followed you and watched. I can watch all day. I told Guard, Lay low. You got up and I thought you was going on, but then you come straight down here, straight to my door, what am I to do, man? I’m behind you, I got my stick in hand, and so I hit you on the head, whack!” and he pantomimed a tremendous blow and laughed, showing his brown, wide-spaced teeth. “You never knew I was there, did you? I killed him, I thought, I killed him. You went down like a dead branch, there you was, I killed him. So much for Derram! So then I take a look and it’s a kid. Sampa, Sampa, I gone and killed a kid! No, not dead. Didn’t even break his fool egg head. But he’s down like a dead branch. A kid. I picked you up with one hand like a fawn. I’m strong, you know. They all know that. They don’t come here. What did you come here for, boy? What brought you? What was you starving for? Lying there with ten thousand moneys in your purse! Bronzes, silvers, the faces of gods! Rich as King Cumbelo! What was you starving for? What sort of place is this to come with all those moneys? You going to buy deer from Lady Iene? Are you crazy, boy?”
He nodded. “You are, you are," Then he chuckled and said, “So am I, boy. Crazy Cuga.” He chuckled again and gave me a sliver of sweet fibrous meat, bitter with smoke and ash. I slowly chewed at it, my mouth full of the juices of hunger.
That was all there was for a while, my hunger, the vivid taste of the food he doled out to me, his broken voice talking, the black rock roof above my face, the reek of smoke and fur, the dog pressed against my leg. Then I could sit up. Then I could crawl to the entrance of the rock chamber, and discover that it was the innermost, lowest one of several such chambers in the cave which Cuga had made his house. Slowly I explored them. In some you could stand up, at least in the center, and the largest room was quite spacious, though its floor was a jumble of big stones. The black rock of the cave was porous and cracked, and light came through cracks and crevices from above, making a smoky dimness. When I first went out, the sunlight blinded me with great dazzling bursts of red and gold, and the air smelled sweet as honey.
From outside the cave, even at its very entrance, you could not see it, only a massive slant of rocks like a dry waterfall all overgrown with creepers and fern.
Cuga’s possessions were the deerskins and rabbit furs he had crudely cured; some bark cups; some spoons and other implements he had whittled of alderwood; a roll of fine sinew; and his treasures—a metal box half full of dirty salt crystals, a tinderbox for fire making, and two horn-handled hunter’s knives of good steel, which he kept sharp on a fine-grained river pebble. Of these treasures he was fiercely jealous, suspicious of me, hiding them from me. I never knew where he kept the salt. The first time he had to bring out one of the knives where I could see it, he flourished it at me snarling and said in his choked voice, “Don’t touch it, don’t touch it, or by the Destroyer I’ll cut out your heart with it.”
“I won’t touch it,” I said.
“It’ll turn and cut your throat of itself if you do.” “I never will.”
“You’re a liar,” he said. “Liars, men are liars.” Sometimes he would say a thing like that over and over, and would say nothing else all day: Men are liars, men are liars… Keep away, keep out! Keep away, keep out!… At other times his talk was sane enough.
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