Voices

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Before they knew what was happening they were inside the Council House, still on the heels of Iddor and the priests, who were so intent on getting where they were going that they paid no attention to their pursuers. They all raced through a high hallway and down a flight of stairs. At the foot of the stairs was a basement corridor dimly lit by small windows high in the wall at ground level. Where this corridor opened into a large, low guardroom, the priests and Iddor halted, shouting orders—at guards posted there, or at an opposing force coming from the square? Orrec said it was all shouting and confusion for a while, Alds yelling at Alds. He and Per had held back; now they went forward cautiously to the doorway.

  The red-hatted priests and a troop of soldiers stood facing each other, the officers demanding to see the Gand Ioratth, the priests saying, "The Gand is dead! You cannot defile the rites of mourning!" The priests had their backs against a door and stood firm. Iddor was barely visible among them. He had cast off his golden hat and cloak somewhere. A priest advanced on the officers, formidable in his tall red hat and robes, his arms raised, shouting that if they did not disperse he would curse them in the name of Atth. The soldiers drew back from him, cowed.

  Then all at once Orrec strode straight at the priest, shouting, "Ioratrh is alive! He is alive in that room! The oracle has spoken! Open the door of the prison, priests!" Or so Per reported his words. Orrec himself recalled only shouting out that Ioratth was not dead, and then the officers shouting, "Open the door! Open the door!" And then, he told us, "I ducked back out of it," for swords and daggers flashed out on both sides, the soldiers attacking the priests who defended the door, driving them away and down the farther corridor. An officer sprang forward and unbolted and flung open the door.

  The room beyond was black, unlighted. In the glim­mer of lantern light in the doorway a wraith appeared, a white figure out of the darkness.

  She wore the striped gown of an Ald slave, torn and streaked with filth and blood. Her face was bruised, one eye swollen shut, and her scalp covered with blackened, clotted blood where her hair had been torn out by handfuls. She gripped a broken stake in her hand. She stood there, Orrec said, like a candle flame, luminous, trembling.

  Then she saw the man who stood beside Orrec, Per Actamo, and her face slowly changed. "Cousin," she said.

  "Lady Tirio," Per said. "We're here to set the Gand Ioratth free."

  "Come in, then," she said. Orrec said she spoke as gently and civilly as if she were welcoming guests into her home.

  The struggle in the corridor had intensified and then quieted. One of the soldiers brought in a lantern from the guardroom, and light and shadow leapt round the officers as they entered the prison chamber. Per and

  Orrec followed them. It was a large, low room, earth­floored, with a foul, damp, heavy smell. Ioratth lay on a long chest or table, his arms and legs chained. His hair and clothing were blackened and half burnt away, and his legs and feet were bloody and crusted with burns. He reared up his head and said in a voice like a wire brush on brass, "Let me loose!"

  While his officers were busy getting the chains off him, he saw Orrec and stared. "Maker! How did you get here?"

  "Following your son," Orrec said.

  At that Ioratth glared round and wheezed out in his smoke-ruined voice, "Where is he? Where is he?"

  Orrec, Per, and the officers looked round, ran back to the guardroom. Four priests were being held there by soldiers. The rest were gone, Iddor with them.

  "My lord Gand," said one of the officers, "we'll find him. But if now—if you'd show yourself to the troops, my lord—They believe you're dead—"

  "Hurry up, then!" Iorarth growled.

  As soon as they freed his arms he reached out and caught the hand of the woman who stood silent beside him.

  When they got his legs free he tried to stand up, but his burnt feet would not bear his weight; he cursed and sat back down abruptly, still gripping Tirio Actamo's hand. The officers grouped round to carry him in a chair hold. "With her," he said, gesturing impatiently. "With them!" gesturing at Orrec and Per.

  So the whole group stayed together as they went up the stairs to the high gallery that encircles the Council Chamber and along it to the front of the great building, through its anteroom. They came out into blazing sun­light under the columns of the portico, on the speakers' terrace that looks out over the Council Square.

  The whole vast expanse of the square was a mass of people, and more still were pushing into it from every entrance, a greater number of people than Orrec had ever seen, the citizens outnumbering the Ald forces by thousands.

  When Iddor, the man they thought their new lord and general, had ridden on past the entrance from Council Way with no signal to them, the bewildered soldiers began to heed the growing rumor that the Gand Ioratth was alive. Confused, divided in allegiance, some turning on others as traitors to Ioratth or to Iddor, they had broken ranks. Citizens had pushed into the square, armed with whatever they had. Before real fighting began, realising how outnumbered they were, the officers quickly rallied the soldiers and pulled them together out of the crowd. Most of the Alds now stood on the steps of the Council House and the pavement in front of it. In their blue cloaks, they formed a solid half circle facing the Ansul crowd, their swords bared, not threatening attack directly but not yielding.

  The crowd, though tumultuous, kept back, leaving a ragged no-man's-land between their front ranks and the soldiers.

  "There was an awful stink of burning," Orrec told us. "Vile—hard to breathe. The air was full of dust, fine black dust, hanging there, the ash and cinders the crowd had trodden and trampled and kicked into the air. And I saw a strange thing sticking up out of that roil and press of people. It looked like the prow of a wrecked ship. I realised at last it was part of the frame of the great tent, with burnt canvas clinging to it. And there were whirlpools in the sea of people, places where men who'd been killed or wounded in the rush into the square were lying, while some people still pressed on past them and others stopped to protect them. And the noise, I didn't know human beings could make a noise like that, it was terrifying, it never ceased, a kind of huge howling . . . "

  He thought he could not force himself to go for­ward and stand facing that mob. His head swam with panic. The officers he was with were also clearly fright­ened and uncertain, but they carried their Gand for­ward staunchly. And they shouted out, "The Gand Ioratth! He lives!"

  The soldiers below turned, stared up, saw him, and began to shout, "He lives!"

  Ioratth was saying irritably to the men carrying him, "Put me down!" and they finally obeyed. He got a firm grip on the arm of one of them with one hand, and on Tirio's shoulder with the other. He managed to take a step forward, grimacing with pain, and to stand there facing the crowd. The roar of his soldiers' salute domi­nated the bellowing of the crowd for a while, but soon the terrible noise was growing again, drowning the shouts of "He lives!" in shouts of "Death to the tyrant! Death to the Alds!"

  Ioratth raised his hand. The authority of that ragged, fire-scarred, shaky figure brought silence. And he spoke—"Soldiers of Asudar, citizens of Ansul!"

  But his smoke-hoarsened voice did not carry. They could not hear him. One of the officers stepped for­ward, but Ioratth ordered him back. "Him, him!" he said, gesturing Orrec forward. "They'll listen to him! Talk to them, Maker. Quiet them down."

  The crowd saw Orrec then, and a roar went up from them. They shouted, "Lero! Lero!" and "Liberty!"

  Amid that tumult, Orrec said to Ioratth, "If I speak to them, I speak for them."

  The Gand nodded impatiently.

  So Orrec raised his hand for silence, and a rum­bling, muttering silence spread out through the huge mob.

  He told us that he'd had no idea what he would say from one word to the next, and couldn't remember what he said. Others remembered well, and wrote down his words later: "People of Ansul, we have seen the water of the dead fountain run. We have heard the voice that was silent speak. The oracle b
ade us set free. And so we have done this day. We have set free the master, we have set free the slave. Let the men of Asu­dar know they have no slaves, let the people of Ansul know they have no masters. Let the Alds keep peace and Ansul will keep peace with them. Let them sue for alliance and we will grant them alliance. In living token of that peace and that alliance, hear Tirio Actamo, cit­izen of Ansul, wife of the Gand Ioratth!"

  If the Gand was taken aback, it didn't show on his battered, sooty face; he stood there, not able to do much more than keep standing, holding on to Tirio while she spoke. Her voice was clear and valiant but very frail, and all the crowd in the square went silent to hear her, though there was still a hoarse continual tumult of noise from all the nearby streets.

  "May the gods of Ansul be blessed again, who will bless us with peace," she said. "This is our city. Let us hold it as we always held it, lawfully. Let us be a free people once again. Luck and Lero and all our gods be with us!"

  The deep chant of "Lero! Lero!" rose up from the crowd following on her words. Then a man broke for­ward from the crowd, shouting out, "Give us our city! Give us back our Council House!"

  Those who were there said that was the most dan­gerous moment of all: if the crowd had simply pressed forward in its huge irresistible force to occupy the Council House and had met the army standing firm, they would have fought, and Ald soldiers fight to the death. It was Ioratth who prevented a slaughter, rasping out orders to his officers, who shouted them full voice and relayed them by trumpet calls, rallying the soldiers and shifting the whole mass of them rapidly over from the Council House steps to the area east of it, clearing the steps for the wild crowd who had begun to flood up and surge into the building. It was the soldiers' disci­pline, Orrec said, that saved them and the thousands of citizens who would have died in such a battle. The Gand's order had been, "Down arms," and after that not one soldier raised his sword even when shoved, struck, or pushed aside by exultant, vengeful civilians.

  To escape the onrush of the mob, Orrec and Per stayed with the knot of officers, who chair-lifted Ioratth again and ran with him to the east end of the terrace and down the side steps to join the ranks that were re­forming there. Tirio, Per, and Orrec followed them. A litter was fetched for the Gand. When they got him settled, he promptly summoned Orrec.

  "Well said, Maker," he said, half audible, with a kind of grim salute. "But I have no authority to make an al­liance with Ansul."

  "Best obtain it, my lord," said Tirio Actamo in her silvery voice.

  The old Gand looked up at her. Evidently he saw her bruises, her puffed eye, her torn hair and blood­clotted scalp clearly for the first time. He sat up staring, glaring, shouting in a whisper, "The damned—the damned traitor—Atth strike him dead! Where is her" The officers looked at one another.

  "Find him!" wheezed the Gand, and began to cough. Tirio Actamo knelt beside the litter and put her hand on his. "Ioratth, you must be quiet a while," she said.

  He laughed through his coughing and gripped her hand. Looking up at Orrec, he said, "Married us, did you?"

  * * *

  IT SEEMED A LONG time before Orrec came back to us at Galvamand, yet it was still early afternoon of that day that had already been as long as a year.

  The Waylord had come in at my urging for some food and a brief rest, but then he returned to the recep­tion hall that ran along the front of the house, called the high gallery. It had never been used in my lifetime and had no furnishings. Its doors, the wide front doors of Galvamand, stood open now. He asked for chairs and benches to be brought, and there were plenty of willing hands to bring them, not only from other rooms but from houses nearby. He sat down there and made him­self available to all who came.

  And they came, dozens of people, hundreds. They came to see the Oracle Fountain run, and to hear those who had been there tell how the oracle had spoken and what it had said; that was when I first learned that not all had heard the same words, or that as the words were repeated they were changed and changed again. People came to see the Waylord, Galva the Reader, to greet him, to take counsel with him. Many who came were working men and women, others were or had been merchants, magistrates, mayors of wards of the city and members of the Council. They were all poor because we were all poor, you couldn't tell shoemakers from ship masters by their clothes. Some of the working people came in only to bless the gods of the house and greet the Reader of the oracle with awed and joyful re­spect and be gone again, but others stayed along with the mayors and councillors, the merchants and mem­bers of great households, to sit and talk about what was happening and air their opinions on what could and should be done. So I first saw what it was to be a citi­zen, and what it was to be a waylord, too.

  I stayed with him to wait on his needs and because he asked me to be there. I found it difficult, because people looked at me with awe and fear. Some of them made the gesture of worship to me. I felt utterly false and foolish, and had no idea what to say to anybody. But they had the Waylord to talk to. And fortunately I had to go to the kitchen pretty often to give a hand to Ista, who was almost crazy with excitement and anxi­ety. The house was full again at last—"It's like the old days!" she said over and over. "The good days."—but she had no food to offer the guests of the house. "I can't even offer them water!" she said, tears of rage springing into her eyes. "I haven't got enough drinking cups!"

  "Borrow them," said Bomi.

  "No, no," Ista said, offended at the thought, but I said, "Why nott—and Bomi darted off to extort drink­ing cups from neighbors. I went back to the reception hall and spoke to Ennulo Cam, the wife of Sulsem Cam who had come last night—a year ago!—and had returned now with his wife and son to sit and talk with the Waylord and the others. I explained our need to her, and very soon a couple of boys from Cammand brought us a half hundred heavy glass goblets, telling Ista, as they had been bidden, "A gift from our house to the blessed House of the Fountain." It was hard for Ista to take offense at that, though she scowled. From then on she kept Bomi and Sosta frantic, fetching water for every guest and taking back and washing out the goblets. She still wanted to offer food, of course, to everyone, but I did not see my way to begging on that scale. I said to her that the people came to talk not eat. She scowled again, bit her lip, and turned away. I re­alised then that I had given her an order, and she had taken it.

  I went to her and put my arms round her. She hadn't cuffed me for years, but she never had been one for hugs. "Bymother," I said, "don't fret! Be happy with the spirits and shadows of our house. Our guests want nothing more than the water of the Oracle Fountain."

  "Ah, Memer! I don't know what to think!" she said, getting loose from me, with a hasty pat on my shoulder.

  None of us knew what to think, that day.

  When Orrec came back at last, he was the comet not the tail: a stream of people followed him from the Council Square. He was the hero of the city. He stopped at the Oracle Fountain and looked up at the ceaseless silver jet of water with the same laughing amazement I had seen on so many faces. Gry came to meet him there. Shetar was shut away in the Master's rooms (where, Gry had told me, she was sulking and tearing strips out of the poor mangy old carpet). Orrec and Gry held each other for a long time before they went up the steps and into the reception hall.

  Everybody crowded after them. Once he had greeted the Waylord, Orrec had to tell the whole story that I've just written of the morning's events at the Council House. Some of it we already knew from people who had been back and forth from Galvamand and the square, but the pursuit of Iddor and the priests to the prison chamber and the finding of Ioratth and Tirio was news to us—as was the disappearance of Iddor.

  If Orrec couldn't tell us what he had said to the crowd, there were plenty of people who could: "He said, 'Let them beg for alliance and we'll grant them al­liance!''' one old man shouted out. "By the Harrow of Sampa, let 'em beg! Let 'em crawl! And we'll give or not give in our own good time!"

  That was the mood of the city, that d
ay: fiercely joy­ous, belligerent, barely restrained from vengeance.

  Ioratth had ordered his soldiers to keep off the streets and stay within the barracks area south and east of the Council House, which they surrounded with a cordon of guards. Wanting access to the Council stables where their horses and some of their men were, the sol­diers tried to cordon off a passage between the barracks and the stables, but the crowd in the square got ugly; stones were thrown; and the Gand ordered his men to stay where they were, whether in the barracks or the stableyards.

  The Alds were taking care to offer no provocation and show no fear. Their position could too easily be­come, perhaps already was, a state of siege. Once the habit of fear was broken, the citizens would realise that the conquerors who had mastered them for so long were dependent on them for supplies—and were, how­ever formidable and well armed, vastly outnumbered. If the restraint Iorarth imposed on his men was mistaken for weakness, for unwillingness to fight, there could yet be a massacre.

  They talked about that in the reception hall. And they talked about Desac and his group, what their plan had been and how it had gone wrong. The man who had taken refuge with us, Cader Antro, was there, and his story was confirmed and enlarged by others. The ar­sonists were Ansul slaves, used as servants and sweepers by Ald courtiers; the idea of burning the great tent had come from one of them to begin with. They had secretly admitted to the tent other conspirators dressed as slaves, but armed, and with them had prepared so that fires would start up in several places at once, en­gulfing the tent in flame, while Desac's men, rushing into the square from two directions, would attack the soldiers on guard. All that was to take place at the sun­set ceremony; so that Iddor and Ioratth and many officers and courtiers would be in the tent when the fire broke out.