Their faces were grim; they all nodded at what he said.
“You think you can keep that oath?”
“I can try,” I said.
“Try’s not good enough.”
“I’ll keep your oath,” I said, my temper roused by his bullying. “We’ll see,” he said, turning away. “Get the stuff, Modla,” The bald man and Brigin brought out of the hut a knife, a clay bowl, a deer antler, and some meal. I will not tell the ceremony, for those who go through it are sworn to secrecy, nor can I tell the words of the oath I took. They all swore that oath again with me. The rites and the oath-speaking brought them all together in fellow feeling, and when all was done and spoken several of them came to pound my back and tell me
I’d borne the initiation well, and was a brave fellow, and welcome among them.
Chamry Bern had come forward as my sponsor, and a young man called Venne as my hunting mate. They sat on either side of me at the celebration that followed. Meat had already been roasting on spits, but they added more to make a feast of it, and night had fallen by the time we sat to eat—on the ground, or on stumps and crude stools, around the red, dancing fires. I had no knife. Venne took me in to a chest of weapons and told me to choose one. I took a light, keen blade in a leather sheath. With it I cut myself a chunk out of a sizzling, dripping, blackened, sweet-smelling haunch and sat down with it and ate like a starved animal. Somebody brought me a metal cup and poured something into it—beer or mead—sour and somewhat foamy. The men laughed louder as they drank, and shouted, and laughed again. My heart warmed to their good fellowship—the friendship of the Forest Brothers. For that was the name they called themselves, and had given me, since I was one of them.
All around the firelit clearing was the night forest, utter darkness under the trees, high leaf crowns grey in the starlight for miles and miles.
* * *
If Chamry Bern hadn’t taken a liking to me and if Venne hadn’t taken me as his hunting partner I would have had a worse time of it that fall and winter than I did. As it was, I was often at the limit of my endurance. I’d lived wild with Cuga, but he’d looked after me, sheltered me, fed me, and that was in summer, too, when it’s easy to live wild. Here my city softness, my lack of physical strength, my ignorance of the skills of survival, were nearly the death of me. Brigin and his brother Eter and several other men had been farm slaves, used to a hard life, tough, fearless, and resourceful, and to them I was a dead loss, a burden. Other men in the group, town-bred, had some patience with my wretched incompetence, and gave and taught me what I needed to get by. As with Cuga, my knack at fishing gave me a way to show I could try at least to be useful. I showed no promise at all in hunting, though Venne took me with him conscientiously and tried to train me with the short bow and in all the silent skills of the hunter.
Venne was twenty or so; at fifteen he had run away from a vicious master in a town of the region of Casicar, and made his way to the forest—for everybody in Casicar, he said, knew about the Forest Brothers, and all the slaves dreamed of joining them. He enjoyed the life in the woods, seemed fully at home in it, and was one of the best hunters of our band; but I soon learned that he was restless. He didn’t get on with Brigin and Eter. “Playing the masters,” he said drily. And after a while, ‘And they won’t have women with us…Well, Barna’s men have women, right? I think of joining them.”
“Think again,” said Chamry, sewing a soft upper to a shoe sole; he was our tanner and cobbler, and made pretty good shoes and sandals for us of elk hide. “You’ll be running back to us begging us to save you. You think Brigin’s bossy? Never was a man could match a woman for giving orders. Men are by nature slaves to women, and women are by nature the masters of men. Hello woman, goodbye freedom!”
“Maybe,” Venne said. “But there’s other things comes with her.”
They were good friends, and included me in their friendship and their conversation. Many of the men of the band seemed to have little use for language, using a grunt or a gesture, or sitting stolid and mute as animals. The silence of the slave had gone so deep in them they could not break it. Chamry on the other hand was a man of words; he loved to talk and listen and tell stories, rhyming and chiming them in a kind of half poetry, and was ready to discuss anything with anybody.
I soon knew his history, or as much of it as he saw fit to tell, and as near or far from the truth as suited him. He came from the Uplands, he said, a region far north and east of the City States. I’d never heard of it and asked him if it was farther than Urdile, and he said yes, far beyond Urdile, beyond even Bendraman. I knew the name of Bendraman only from the ancient tale Chamhan.
“The Uplands are beyond the beyond,” he said, “north of the moon and east of the dawn. A desolation of hill and bog and rock and cliff, and rising over it all a huge vast mountain with a beard of clouds, the Carrantages. Nobody deserves to live in the Uplands but sheep. It’s starving land, freezing land, winter forever, a gleam of sunlight once a year. It’s all cut up into little small domains, farms they’d call them here and poor sorry farms at that, but in the Uplands they’re domains, and each has a master, the brantor, and each brantor has an evil power in him. Witches they are, every one. How’d you like that for a master? A man who could move his hand and say a word and turn you inside out with your guts on the ground and your eyes staring into the inside of your brain? Or a man who could look at you and you’d never think a thought of your own again, but only what he put into your head?”
He liked to go on about these awful powers, the gifts he called them, of the Upland witches, his tales growing ever taller. I asked him once, if he’d had a master, what his master’s power was. That silenced him for a minute. He looked at me with his bright narrow eyes. “You wouldn’t think it much of a power, maybe,” he said. “Nothing to see. He could weaken the bones in a body. It took a while. But if he cast his power on you, in a month you’d be weak and weary, in half a year your legs would bend under you like grass, in a year you’d be dead. You don’t want to cross a man who could do that. Oh, you lowlanders think you know what it is to have a master! In the Uplands we don’t even say slave. The brantor’s people, we say. He may be kin to half of ’em, his servants, his serfs—his people. But they’re more slaves to him than ever the slave of the worst master down here!”
“I don’t know about that,” said Venne. “A whip and a couple of big dogs can do about as well as a spell of magic to destroy a man.” Venne bore terrible scars on his legs and back and scalp, and one ear had been half torn off his head.
“No, no, it’s the fear,” Chamry said. “It’s the awful fear. You didn’t fear the men that beat you and the dogs that bit you, once you’d run clear away from ’em, did you? But I tell you, I ran a hundred miles away from the Uplands and my master, and still I cringed when I felt his thought turn on me. And I felt it! The strength went out of my legs and arms. I couldn’t hold my back up straight. His power was on me! All I could do was go on, go on, go on, till there was mountains and rivers and miles between me and his hand and eye and cruel power. When I crossed the great river, the Trond, I grew stronger. When I crossed the second great river, the Sally, I was safe at last. The power can cross a wide water once but not twice. So a wise woman told me. But I crossed yet another to be sure! I’ll never go back north, never. You don’t know what it is to be a slave, you lowlanders!”
Yet Chamry talked often of the Uplands and the farm where he had been born, and all through his railing at it as a poor, unhappy, wretched place I heard his yearning homesickness. He made of it a vivid picture in my mind, the great barren moorlands and cloudy peaks, the bogs from which at dawn a thousand wild white cranes would rise at once, the stone-walled, slate-roofed farm huddled under the bare curve of a brown hill. As he told about it, I could see it almost as clearly as if I remembered it myself.
And that put me in mind of my own power, or whatever it was, of remembering what was yet to happen. I remembered that I had had such a power, once. Bu
t when I thought about that, I began to remember places I didn’t want to remember. Memories made my body hunch up in pain and my mind go blank in fear. I pushed them away, turned away from them. Remembering would kill me. Forgetting kept me alive.
The Forest Brothers were all men who had escaped, run away from something unendurable. They were like me. They had no past. Learning how to get through this rough life, how to endure never being dry or warm or clean, to eat only half-raw, half-burnt venison, I might have gone on with them as I had with Cuga, not thinking beyond the present hour and what was around me. And much of the time I did.
But there were times when winter storms kept us in our drafty, smoky cabins, and Chamry, Venne, and some of the other men gathered to talk in the half dark by the smoldering hearth, and then I began to hear their stories of where they came from, how they’d lived, the masters they’d escaped from, their memories of suffering and of pleasure.
Sometimes into my thoughts would come a clear image of a place: a big room full of women and children; a fountain in a city square; a sunny courtyard surrounded by arches, under which women sat spinning… When I saw such a place I gave it no name, and my mind turned away from it hastily. I never joined the others’ talk about the world outside the forest, and did not like to hear it.
Late one afternoon the six or seven tired, dirty, hungry men around the crude hearth in our cabin had run out of anything to talk about. We all sat in a dumb discouragement. It had been raining a cold hard rain almost ceaselessly for four days and nights. Under the cloud that pressed down on the dark forest trees it seemed night all day long. Fog and darkness tangled in the wet, heavy boughs. To go out to get logs for the fire from the dwindling woodpile was to be wet through at once, and indeed some of us went out naked, since skin dries quicker than cloth and leather. One of our mates, Bulec, had a wretched cough that shook him about like a rat in a dog’s mouth. Even Chamry had run out of jokes and tall tales. In that cold, dreary place I was thinking of summer, of the heat and light of summer on the open hills, somewhere. And a cadence came into my mind, a beat, and the words with it, and without any intention I said the words aloud.
As in the dark of winter night The eyes seek dawn, As in the bonds of bitter cold The heart craves sun, So blinded and so bound, the soul Cries out to thee: Be our light, our fire, our life, Liberty!
“Ah,” Chamry said, out of a silence that followed the words, “I’ve heard that. Heard it sung. There’s a tune to it.”
I sought the tune, and little by little it came to me, with the sound of the beautiful voice that had sung it. I have no singing voice, but I sang it.
“That’s fine,” Venne said softly.
Bulec coughed and said, “Speak some more such.”
“Do that,” Chamry said.
I looked into my mind for more remembered words to speak to them. Nothing came for a while. What I found at last was a line of writing. I read it: “Wearing the white of mourning, the maiden mounted the high steps…” I said it aloud, and in a moment the line led me on to the next, and that to the next. So I told them the part of Garros poem in which the prophetess Yurno confronts the enemy hero Rurec. Standing on the walls of Sentas, a girl in mourning, Yurno calls down to the man who killed her warrior father. She tells Rurec how he will die: “Beware of the hills of Trebs,” she says, “for you will be ambushed in the hills. You will run away and hide in the bushes, but they will kill you as you try to crawl away without being seen. They will drag your naked body to the town and display it, sprawled face down, so all can see that the wounds are in your back. Your corpse will not be burned with prayers to the Ancestors as befits a hero, but buried where they bury slaves and dogs.” Enraged at her prophecy, Rurec shouts, “And this is how you will die, lying sorceress!” and hurls his heavy lance at her. All see it pass through her body just below the breast and fly out, trailing blood, behind her—but she stands on the battlement in her white robes, unharmed. Her brother the warrior Alira picks up the lance and hands it up to her, and she tosses it down to Rurec, not hurling it, but end over end, lightly, contemptuously. “When you’re running away and hiding, you’ll want this,” she says, “great hero of Pagadi.”
As I spoke the words of the poem, in that cold smoky hut in the half dark with the noise of the rain loud on the low roof, I saw them written in some pupil’s labored handwriting in the copybook I held as I stood in the schoolroom in Arcamand. “Read the passage, Gavir,” my teacher said, and I read the words aloud.
A silence followed,
“Eh, that’s a fool,” Bacoc said, “thro’n a lance at a witch, don’t he know, can’t kill a witch but with fire!”
Bacoc was a man of fifty by the look of him, though it’s hard to tell the age of men who have lived their life half starved and under the whip; maybe he was thirty. “That’s a good bit of story,” Chamry said. “There’s more? Is there a name to it?”
I said, “It’s called The Siege and Fall of Sentas. There’s more.”
“Let’s have it,” said Chamry and the others all agreed.
For a time I could not recall the opening lines of the poem; then, as if I had the old copybook in my hand, there they were and I spoke them—
To the councils and senate of Sentas they came, the envoys in armor,
With their swords in their hands, arrogant, striding into the chamber Where the lords of the city sat to give judgment…
It was night, true night, when I finished saying the first book of the poem. Our fire had burned down to embers on the rough hearth, but nobody in the circle of men had moved to build it up; nobody had moved at all for an hour.
“They’re going to lose that city of theirs,” Bulec said in the dark, in the soft drumming of the rain.
“They should be able to hold out. The others come too far from home. Like Casicar did, trying to take Etra last year,” said Taffa. It was the most I’d ever heard him say. Venne had told me Taffa had been not a slave but a freeman of a small city-state, conscripted into their army; during a battle he had escaped and made his way to the forest. Sad -faced and aloof, he seldom said anything, but now he was arguing almost volubly: “Stretched out their forces too far, see, Pagadi has, attacking. If they don’t take the town by assault quick, they’ll starve come winter.”
And they all got into the discussion, all talking exactly as if the siege of Sentas was taking place right now, right here. As if we were living in Sentas.
Of them all Chamry was the only one who understood that what I had told them was “a poem,” a thing made by a maker, a work of art, part history of long ago, part invention. It was, to them, an event; it was happening as they heard it. They wanted it to go on happening. If I’d been able to, they’d have kept me telling it to them night and day. But after my voice gave out that first evening, I lay in my wooden bunk thinking about what had been given back to me: the power of words. I had time then to think and to plan how and when to use that power—how to go on with the poem, to keep them from exhausting both it and me. I ended by telling it for an hour or two every night, after we ate, for the winter nights were endless and something to make them pass was welcome to all.
Word got about, and within a night or two most of the men of the band were crowded into our hut for “telling the war,” and for the long passionate discussions and arguments about tactics and motives and morals that followed.
There were times I couldn’t fully recall the lines as Garro wrote them, but the story was clear in my mind, so I filled in these gaps with tags of the poetry and my own narrative, until I came again to a passage that I had by memory or could “see” written, and could fall back into the harsh rhythm of the lines. My companions didn’t seem to notice the difference between my prose and Garros poetry. They listened closest when I was speaking the poetry—but those were also often the most vivid passages of action and suffering.
When we came again in the course of the tale to the passage I’d recited first, Yurno’s prophecy from the battlements, Bacoc caught h
is breath; and when Rurec “in a fury uplifts his heavy lance,” Bacoc cried out, “Don’t throw it, man! It’s no good!” The others shouted at him to pipe down, but he was indignant: “Don’t he know it’s no good? He thro’n it before!”
I was at first merely bemused by my own capacity to recall the poetry and their capacity to listen to it. They didn’t say much to me about it, but it made a difference in the way I was treated, my standing among them. I had something they wanted, and they respected me for that. Since I gave it freely, their respect was ungrudging. “Hey, haven’t you got a fatter rib than that for the kid? He’s got to work tonight, telling the war…”
But every up’s a down, as Chamry said. Brigin and his brother and the men closest to them, their cabin mates, looked in at one time or another on the recital, listened a while standing near the doorway, then left in silence. They said nothing to me, but I heard from others that they said men who listened to fools’ tales were worse fools than those who told them. And Brigin said that a man willing to hear a boy yammer booktalk half the night was no fit Forest Brother.
Booktalk! Why did Brigin say it in that contemptuous tone? There were no books in the forest. There had been no books in Brigin’s life. Why did he sneer at them?
Any of these men might well be jealous of a knowledge that had been jealously kept from them. A farm slave who tried to learn to read could have his eyes put out or be whipped to death. Books were dangerous, and a slave had every excuse to fear them. But fear is one thing, contempt another.
I resented their sneers as mean-spirited, for I couldn’t see anything unworthy of manhood in the tale I was telling. How was a tale of warfare and heroism weakening the men who listened to it so hungrily every night? Didn’t it draw us together in real brotherhood, when after the telling we listened to one another argue the rights and wrongs of the generals’ tactics and the warriors’ exploits? To sit stupid, mute, night after night under the rain like cattle, bored to mindlessness—was that what made us men?
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