Planting and harvesting ricegrass is the easiest job on earth, I think. You go out in autumn in a boat on the silky blue water over at the north end of the lake where the rice islets are close together, and pole slowly down the tiny channels, tossing handfuls of small, dark, sweet-smelling grain in showers to right and left as you go. Then in late spring you go back, bend the tall grasses down into the boat from right and left, and knock the new seeds off the stems into the boat with a little wooden rake till the boat’s half full of it. I know the women sniggered at the fuss the men made about planting and harvesting ricegrass, as if there were any skill to it; but they always received our bags of rice with praise and honor at the fish-mat exchange, “I’ll stuff you a goose with it!” they said. And it tasted almost as good as Etran grain porridge.
As for reed cutting, that was hard work. We did a great deal of it, in late autumn and early winter, when the weather was often grey and cold or raining. Once I got used to standing all day in water two or three feet deep, and to the angle of the curved scythe and the triple rhythm of cutting and gathering and handing—for you must gather the reeds together before they separate and drift off on the water, and hand the long, heavy bundle up into the boat—I liked it well enough. The young fellows I went out with were good companions, rivalrous about their own prowess as cutters, but kind to me as a novice, and full of jokes and gossip and songs that they shouted across the great reed beds in the rainy wind. Not many of the older men went reed cutting; the rheumatism they had got from doing it as young men kept them from it now.
It was a dull life, I suppose, but it was what I needed. It gave me time to mend. It gave me time to think, and to grow up at my own pace.
Late winter was a pleasant, lazy time. The reeds had been cut and handed over to the women to make into reedcloth, and there wasn’t much for the men to do unless they were boat makers. Nothing bothered me but the damp, foggy cold: our only heat was from a tiny charcoal fire in a ceramic pot. It made a very small sphere of warmth in the hut. If the sun was shining, I went to the shore and watched the boat makers at their work, a refined and exacting skill. Their boats are the finest art of the Rassiu. A war canoe is like a true line of poetry, there is nothing to it that is not necessary, it is purely beautiful. So when I wasn’t huddled over the fire pot dreaming, I watched the boat grow. And I made myself a good set of rods and lines and hooks, and fished if it wasn’t raining hard, and talked to my friends among the young people.
Though women didn’t set foot in the men’s village or men in the women’s village, we had, after all, the rest of the world to meet in. Men and women got to talking at the fish-mat, and out on the lake from boat to boat—for the women fished too, especially for eels—and in the grasslands inland from the villages. My luck in fishing helped me make friends among the girls, eager to trade their cooked food for my catch. They teased me and flirted mildly and were happy to walk along the lakeshore or an inland path, a few of them with a few of us young men. Real pairing off was forbidden until the second initiation. Boys who broke that law were exiled from their village for life. So we young people stayed together as a group. My favorite among the girls was Tisso Betu, called Cricket for her pinched little face and skinny body; she was bright and kind and loved to laugh, and she tried to answer my questions instead of staring at me and saying, “But Gavir, everybody knows that!”
One of the questions I asked Tisso was whether anybody ever told stories. Rainy days and winter evenings were long and dull, and I kept an ear out for any tales or songs, but subjects of talk among the boys and men were limited and repetitive: the day’s events, plans for the next day, food, women, rarely a little news from a man from another village met out on the lake or in the grasslands. I would have liked to entertain them and myself with a tale, as I had Brigin’s band and Bar-na’s people. But no one here did anything like that at all. I knew that foreign ways, attempts to change how things were done, weren’t welcomed by the Marsh people, so I didn’t ask. But with Tisso I wasn’t so afraid of putting a foot wrong, and I asked her if nobody told stories or sang story-songs. She laughed. “We do,” she said.
“Women?”
“Ao.”
“Men don’t?” “Eng.” She giggled.
“Why not?”
She didn’t know. And when I asked her to tell me one of the stories I might have heard if I’d been a little boy growing up in the women’s village, it shocked her. “Oh, Gavir, I can’t,” she said.
“And I can’t tell you any of the stories I learned?”
“Eng, eng, eng,” she murmured. No, no, no.
I wanted to talk to my aunt Gegemer, who could tell me about my mother. But she still held aloof from me. I didn’t know why. I asked the girls about her. They shied away from my questions. Gegemer Aytano was, I gathered, a powerful and not entirely beloved woman in the village. At last, on a winter day when Tisso Betu and I were walking in the pastures behind the rest of the group, I asked her why my aunt didn’t want anything to do with me.
“Well, she’s an ambamer,” Tisso said. The word means marsh-lion’s daughter, but I had to ask what that meant.
Tisso thought about it. “It means she can see through the world. And hear voices from far away.”
She looked at me to see if I knew what she was talking about. I nodded a little uncertainly.
“Gegemer hears dead people talking, sometimes. Or people who aren’t born yet. In the old women’s house, when they do the singing, Ennu-Amba Herself comes into her, and then she can walk all across the world and see what’s happened and what’s going to happen. You know, some of us do some of that kind of seeing and hearing while we’re children, but we don’t understand it. But if Amba makes a girl her daughter, then she goes on seeing and hearing all her life. It makes her kind of strange, you know.” Tisso pondered for a while. “She has to try to tell people what she saw. The men won’t even listen. They say only men can have the power of seeing and an ambamer is just a crazy woman. But Mother says that Gegemer Aytano saw the poison tide, when the people who eat shellfish in the Western Marshes got sick and died, a long time before it happened, when she was just a child… . And she knows when people in the village are going to die. That makes people afraid of her. Maybe it makes her afraid of them… .But sometimes she knows when a girl’s going to have a baby, too. I mean, even before she is. She said, ‘I saw your child laugh, Yenni,’ and Yenni cried and cried, she was so happy, because she wanted a child and she’d never got one. And a year later she did.”
All this gave me a great deal to think about. But it still didn’t answer my question. “I don’t know why my aunt doesn’t like me,” I said.
“I’ll tell you what Mother told me, if you won’t say anything to any of the other men,” Tisso said earnestly. I promised silence, and she told me. “Gegemer tried and tried to see what had happened to her sister Tano and her babies. For years she tried. They had singings for her that went on and on. She even took the drugs, and an ambamer shouldn’t take the drugs. But Amba wouldn’t let her see her sister or the children. And then—then you came walking into the village, and still she didn’t see you. She didn’t see who you were, until you said your name. Then everyone saw. She was ashamed. She thinks she did something wrong. She thinks Amba is punishing her because she let Tano go alone so far south. She thinks it was her fault the soldiers raped Tano and sold you and your sister. And she thinks you know this.”
I was about to protest, but Tisso forestalled me: “Your soul knows it—not your mind. It doesn’t matter what your mind doesn’t know, if your soul knows. So you are a reproach to Gegemer. You darken her heart.”
After a while I said, “That darkens my heart.” “I know,” Tisso said sadly.
It was strange how Tisso made me think of Sotur. Utterly different in everything, they were alike in their quickness to feel pity, to understand grief, and not to say too much about it.
I gave up the idea of trying to approach my aunt through her armor of guilt.
I longed to learn more about her powers, and Tisso’s saying, “Some of us do that kind of seeing when we’re children,” had intrigued me. But the limits drawn around men’s knowledge and women’s knowledge were nearly as clear as the line separating the half villages. Tisso was uneasy about having said so much to me, and I could not press her further. None of the other girls would let me ask about “sacred stuff” at all: they hooted like owls or yattered like kingfishers to drown me out—half alarmed at my transgression and half laughing at me for being, as they said, such a tadpole.
I was reluctant to ask the boys my age what they knew about these powers of seeing, I was different enough already, and talking about such things would only estrange me further. My uncle left all mysteries alone, seeking comfort only where it was easy to find. I didn’t know any of the older men well. Rava was the kindest, but he was an elder, an initiator of his clan, and spent much of his time in South Shore. There was only one man I thought might welcome my questions. Peroc was old, his thick hair quite white, his face seamed and drawn; he was crippled with rheumatism, and lived, I think, in pain. His arthritic hands were not good for much, but he laboriously knotted and mended fishing nets, and though he was slow at the work it was always done perfectly. He lived by himself in a tiny house with a couple of cats. He spoke little, but had a gentle manner. He was often too lame to go to the fish-mat, Tisso’s mother sent food for him, and I offered to take it to him. It became a regular thing that she’d give it to me and I’d take it and set it down on the old man’s deck and say, “From Lali Betu, Uncle Peroc.” We young men called all the old men uncle.
He’d be sitting in the sun if there was any sun, working at a net, or just gazing over the grasslands, humming. He’d thank me, and as soon as I turned away, the soft humming would begin again. Soon half-comprehensible words would enter into the tune, strange song words about the marsh lion, the lords of the fish, the heron king…. They were the only serious songs I had heard in Ferusi, the only ones that hinted at a story behind them. One day I put down his reed box of food and said, “From Lali Betu, Uncle Peroc,” and he thanked me, but I did not turn away; I stood by his deck and said, “Can I ask about the songs you sing, Uncle?”
He glanced up at me and back at his work, then laid the net down and looked at me steadily. “After the second initiation,” he said.
That was what I’d been afraid of. There was no arguing with the rules of the sacred. I said, “Anh,” But he saw I had a second question, and waited for it.
“Are all the stories sacred?”
He gazed at me a minute, thinking, and finally nodded. “Ao.” “So I may not listen to you sing?”
“Eng,” he said, the soft negative. “Later. When you’ve been to the king’s palace.” He looked at me with sympathy. “You’ll learn the songs there, as I did.”
“The heron king?”
He nodded, but murmured, “Eng, eng,” with a gesture to prevent my asking more. “Later,” he said. “Soon.”
“There are no stories that are not sacred?”
“Those the women and children tell. They are not fit for men.”
“But there are tales of heroes—like Hamneda, the great hero who wandered all the length of the Western Shore—”
Peroc gazed at me a while and shook his head. “He did not come here to the Marshes,” he said. And he bent to his work again.
So all my tales and poems remained closed up in my head, silent, as my copy of Caspro’s poem lay closed and wrapped in reedcloth in my uncle’s house, the only book in all Ferusi, unread.
* * *
I WAS FISHING by myself one day in spring; my uncle had gone netting with another man. Old Minki jumped into the boat as a matter of course and sat in the prow like a curly-eared figurehead, I put up the little sail and let the wind carry us slowly up the lake. I didn’t net but fished with the rod and line for ritta, a small bottom fish, sweet and succulent. The ritta were lazy and so was I. I gave up after a while and just sat in the boat, drifting. All around me was the silken blue water, and in the distance a few reed islands, and beyond them the low green shore, and far in the distance a blue hill…
So I had come round to the earliest and oldest of all my rememberings or visions, and was in the memory, the vision itself.
Remembering that, I began all at once to remember other things.
I remembered the streets of cities, the lights of houses crowded over a canal, the dark cobblestones of a steep street in the winter wind—there was the fountain in front of Arcamand and there was a tower over a harbor full of ships and there was a tall house with red rain-beaten walls—all in a rush and tumult of images, dozens of visions all crowded into one another and then sliding away, ungraspable, gone, leaving nothing but the blue sky and water, the low green shore and the distant hill, where I had been, where I had been all my life and was now again, this once, in this one moment.
The visions lessened, faded. Minki looked round, towards home. I sailed slowly back to the village. People were already gathering for the fish-mat. I had only a couple of little ritta to offer, but Tisso and her mother always had something cooked for me. I took my portion and Pe-roc’s and went back to the men’s village, to Peroc’s house, where he sat mending a fine net. I set his portion down and said, “From Lali Betu. May I ask you a question, Uncle?”
“Anh.”
“All my life I’ve seen through the world. I’ve remembered what I had never yet seen, and been where I’ve never yet been.” He had raised his face and was looking at me gravely. I went on, “Is this a power of our people—of the Rassiu? Is it a gift or a curse? Are there any people here who will tell me what my visions are?”
“Yes,” he said. “In South Shore. I think you should go there.”
He got up laboriously and stepped down off his deck. He came with me to Metter’s cabin. My uncle was sitting eating his dinner, with Minki on one side thumping her tail on the deck and Prut on the other with his tail wrapped round his paws. My uncle greeted Peroc and offered him his dinner to share.
“Gavir Aytana in kindness brought me food from the fish-mat,” the old man said. He spoke very formally. “It is well known that there have been great seers in your clan, Metter Aytana. Is this not so?”
“Ao,” my uncle said, staring.
“It may be that Gavir Aytana has the power. It would be well that the keepers of the sacred things be told this.” “Anh,” my uncle said, staring at me now.
“Your net will be ready tomorrow,” the old man said in a different tone of voice, and turned to limp back to his cabin.
I sat down near my uncle and began to eat my own dinner. Tisso’s mother had made excellent fish cakes rolled up in lettuce leaves with a drop of hot pepper sauce.
“I suppose I’d better go to South Shore,” my uncle said. “Or should I talk to Gegemer first, I wonder. But she’s… I suppose I should just go. I don’t know.”
“May I go with you?”
Minki thumped her tail.
“That might be good,” my uncle said, with relief. So next day we sailed to South Shore Village, where I’d been initiated. Metter seemed to have no idea what to do once we got there, so I led off to the Big House, where the sacred things were stored and initiations were held. It was the biggest house I’d seen in the Marshes, with walls of rigid lacquered reed such as they built the war canoes of, and a high reed-bundle roof. The fenced court in front of it was bare earth, with a small pool and a great old weeping willow tree beside it. The building was very dark inside, and awesome with the memories of the initiation rites; we did not dare enter, or even speak. We waited by the pool until a man came into the court. I had been about to suggest that we find some members of our clan, the Aytanu, and ask them for advice or assistance, but my uncle went over to the man and began at once to tell him that he was here with his nephew who had the power of seeing visions. The man was one-eyed and had a rake-broom in his hand; he had evidently come to sweep the courtyard. I tried to prevent Metter from bab
bling to somebody who appeared to be the janitor, but he babbled on. The man nodded, and looked more and more important. At last he said, “I will tell my cousin Dorod Aytana, the seerman of Reed Isles, and he perhaps will find if your nephew is suitable for training. Ennu-Amba has guided your steps to this place. Go with Me!”
“With Me,” Metter said gratefully. “Come along, Gavir. It’s all settled.” He couldn’t wait to get away from that big house with its dark open doorway. We went straight back to the docks and got into our boat, which Minki had been guarding by lying curled up asleep in the stern, and sailed home.
I didn’t put much credit in the one-eyed man’s boasts. I thought that if I wanted to find out anything about my visions, I’d have to do it myself.
So I got up my courage and, at the fish-mat that evening, I approached my aunt Gegemer. I’d traded a good catch of ritta with Kora for a goose he’d shot, a fine fat bird which I cleaned and plucked carefully. I had seen men who were courting women make such an offering, and so I offered it to Gegemer. “I need advice and guidance, Aunt,” I said, more bluntly than I had intended. She was a formidable woman, hard to speak to.
At first she didn’t answer or take the goose from me. I could feel her recoil, her wish to refuse. But she put out her hand at last for the gift and gestured with her head to the gardens, outside which men and women often met to talk. We walked there in silence. I arranged in my mind what I’d say, at least to start with, and when she stopped by a row of old dwarf cherry trees and faced me, I said it.
“I know you’re a woman of power, Aunt. I know you see through the world sometimes, and walk with Ennu-Amba.”
To my great surprise she laughed, a surprised, scornful laugh. “Hah! I never thought to hear that from a man!” she said.
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