Ursula K Le Guin

by Powers (2007) (lit)

  Sallo came to see me the evening before I left for the civic barrack. She was several months pregnant, her eyes bright, her brown skin radiant, almost luminous. Though of course we had received no word of Yaven, she had made up her mind that if he came to any harm she would know it. She was certain that all was well with him. "You remember things," she said to me, smiling, hugging me as we sat side by side on the school bench, as we had when we were children. "You remembered the start of this war, the first raid, didn't you? You saw it. I don't see things. But I know things. And I know I know them. Like Gammy always said: We Marsh people, we have our powers..." She laughed and rocked me sideways, bumping me with her hip.

  "Oh, Sal," I said, "did you ever think you'd like to go there, to the Marshes, to see where we came from?"

  "No," she said, laughing again. "I just want to be here, with Yaven-di home, and no siege, and lots to eat!. . .But you, maybe they'll let you travel, when the siege is over, when you're a scholar— they'll let you go buy books, like Mimen did, he went to Pagadi, didn't he? You can travel

  all over the Western Shore, you can go to the Marshes. . .And everybody there will have a big nose just like yours." She stroked my nose. "Like storks. My Beaky. You'll see!"

  Sotur also came by before I left. I was tongue-tied with her. She put a small leather purse in my hand: "It might be useful. We'll be free soon, Gavir!" she said, smiling.

  The freeing of the city meant freedom to all of us in Arcamand, even if we were slaves.

  I found a different mood in the civic barrack. I found a very different life there. I soon understood how childishly foolish my eagerness to go there had been. Nothing in my life in Arcamand had prepared me for the heavy work and the brutal life of a civic slave. The gang I was put in had the job of taking down an old storage building and carrying the building stones to the West Gate for use in repairs to the tower and wall. The stones were massive, weighing a half ton or so. The work required skills which nobody in the group had and tools which we had to improvise. We worked from dawn till night. We lived on the same rations we had received at Arcamand, which were adequate for that life, not for this one. Our gang boss, Cot, was a man whose only qualifications were great strength and indifference to pain. Cot's chief, Haster's assistant for this division of the slaves, was Hoby.

  Hoby was the first person I saw when I came to the civic barrack. He had grown powerfully muscular. His head was shaven, which made his likeness to the Father and Torm less apparent. But there was the scar that split his eyebrow, and his old truculent look. I was about to speak to him when he looked at me directly, a stare of contemptuous hatred, and turned away.

  He never spoke to me for the two months I lived in the civic barrack. It was he who put me on the rock gang, as we were called. He made my life hard in other ways, which he had the power to do. The other men saw that, and some mistreated me in order to curry favor with Hoby,

  while others did what they could to protect me from him. They asked me what "the Chief" had against me, and I answered that I didn't know, except that he blamed me for his scar.

  Haster demanded that we bank any money we had with him, for there were men in the barrack who'd kill you for a penny if they knew you had it. I hated to part with the ten bronze eagles in the leather purse, Sotur's gift, and the only money of my own I have ever had. Has-ter was honest, by his lights, keeping a fifth of whatever he held for you, but doling out the rest in small change on demand. There was a thriving black market in food, which I'd known nothing about at Ar-camand, and I soon learned where to go to get cracked grain or dried meat to fill my empty belly, and which extortioner gave you the best value for your pennies.

  My money gave out before my time was up, and the last half month on the rock gang was the worst. I don't remember it very clearly, partly because hunger and exhaustion put me in a condition where the visions, the rememberings, came on me more and more often, so that sometimes I went from one to another, from the place of the silky blue waters to a stinking bed where I lay gazing up at a roof of dark rock just above my face, then I was standing at a window looking at a white mountain across a shining strait, and then all at once I was back straining to hoist or haul great stones in the summer heat. It was often the fiery sting of Cot's whip on my ribs that brought me back. "Wake up, you staring fool!" he'd shout, and I'd try to understand where I was and what I should be doing, while my workmates cursed me for slacking, letting them down, sometimes putting them in danger. I learned later that Cot had asked Hoby to take me off his crew weeks before. Hoby refused. At last Cot went over his head to Haster, who said, "He's useless, send him home."

  When I was released, it took me an hour to cross the city. I had to sit down at every corner and in every square to catch my breath and gath-

  er strength and try to push away the rememberings, the voices and strange lights and faces that filled my head. Through the branches of a forest I saw the fountain and the broad facade of Arcamand across the sunlit square. Through the darkness of a reeking cave I crossed the square, and went round to the slaves' door, and knocked. Ennumer opened the door. "We haven't anything to give you," she said sharply. I couldn't speak. She recognised me and burst into tears.

  I was taken to the infirmary and put to bed. Old Remen rubbed comfrey salve on my whip cuts and gave me catnip tea; my sister came to hug me, stroke my hair, croon and cry and tease me and sit beside the bed. I remembered how the Mother had come when I was there before, and the memory was so clear it was like the rememberings. I spoke to her, thanking her. "I'm so glad to be home!" I said.

  "Of course you are. Now go to sleep," Sallo said in her hus ky soft voice. "And when you wake up you'll still be home, dear Beaky, dear Gav!" And so I slept.

  As soon as I recovered— and rest and food, though the food was in woefully short supply by now, were all I needed— I went back to the schoolroom and took up my duties with Everra as if I'd never been away.

  When in August I was called to another civic work crew, Everra was so distressed that he went to the Father and protested. He came back to me and said, "The House of Arca is blessed indeed, Gavir. It cares for its children even in the days of war and famine. The Father explained to me that you won't be under Haster's command, nor live in that barrack. The men you'll work with are all educated slaves. The task is to move the sacred prophecies and annals of the Ancients from the old repository under the west wall to the vaults of the Shrine of the Forefathers, where they'll be safe from fire and water and can be hidden in case of invasion. The College of Priests of the Shrine needs literate and intelligent slaves for the task, which must be done with due precaution and

  in accordance with the rituals of the Ancestors. It will take care, but will not be heavy work. It is an honor to our House that you've been chosen." He clearly took it as an honor to himself, too, and was, I think, a little envious of me, longing to see those ancient documents with his own eyes.

  I was glad enough to quit my schoolroom duties for a while, though apprehensive, especially about food. By now we all thought all the time about food. Arcamand had no hoarded supplies, and the city supply of everything but grain was now almost exhausted. The Father and Mother set an example of patient abstinence, and by rigorous supervision of the kitchens whatever food the household got was at least shared out with justice among us all. I dreaded going back to favoritism, unfairness, and bitter rivalry over rations, the cheating and sharp dealing of the black marketeers. But I went as ordered to the slave quarters of the College of the Priests of the Forefathers' Shrine, and when the first meal I had there was a rich chicken broth with succulent barley, such as I hadn't tasted for months, I knew I was in luck.

  The half dozen slaves of the Shrine were all older men, so the priests had asked for assistants from Houses such as Arca, Erre, and Bel, where some slaves were educated. Mimen, Everra's friend from Belmand, was there, and I was very glad to see him. He had brought three younger men with him, his students. The men from Erremand, both in their forties, w
ere called Tadder and Ienter. I had heard Everra speak of them with grudging, suspicious admiration — "very learned men," he said, "very learned, but not sound, not sound." I knew he meant they read "the moderns" — books written in the last century or two. I was right. When we went to the dormitory that night— and it was crowded, with thirteen men sleeping where six had slept, but warm, well lighted, and as comfortable as one could hope— the first thing I saw by one bedside was a copy of the Cosmologies of Orrec Caspro. Everra had spoken of

  this poem once or twice the way a doctor might speak of a ghastly, deadly, infectious disease.

  Tadder, a dry-faced man with keen eyes under heavy black brows, saw my glance. "Have you read it, laddy?" he asked. He had a northern accent, and some unfamiliar turns of speech.

  I shook my head.

  "Take it then," said Tadder, and held it out to me. "Have a look!"

  I didn't know what to do. I couldn't help glancing at Mimen, as if he might report me to Everra for even looking at the book.

  "Everra hasn't let him read the new poets, you know," Mimen said to Tadder. "Or anybody since Trudec. Is Caspro a bit much to start with?"

  "Not at all," said the northerner. "What are you, laddy, fourteen, fifteen? The very age to follow Caspro to glory. Here, d'ye know his song, then?" And he sang out in a fine, pure tenor, "As in the dark of winter

  night— "'

  "Hey, hey there," said the other man from Erremand, Ienter, "don't get us in hot water the first night, brother!"

  "Is that Caspro's hymn, then?" asked the priests' senior slave, a soft-spoken old man with an unassuming air of authority. "I have never heard it sung."

  "Well, there's places one gets hanged for singing it, Reba-di," Ienter said with a smile.

  "Not here," Reba said. "Go on, please. I'd like to hear it." Tadder and Ienter exchanged glances, and then Tadder sang—

  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!

  The beauty of his voice and the sweet, sudden leap of the tune on that last word brought tears into my eyes.

  Ienter saw it and said, "Ah, look what you've done to the boy, Tad-der. Corrupted him with a single verse!"

  Mimen laughed. "Everra will never forgive me," he said.

  "Sing it again, Tadder-di," one of Mimen's students asked, with a glance at Reba for permission; Reba nodded; and this time several voices joined in the singing. And I realised then that I'd heard the tune, fragments of it, in the civic barrack, now and then, whistled, a few notes, like a signal.

  "Enough," the senior slave said in his quiet voice, "we don't want to wake our masters."

  "Oh, no, surely not," said Tadder. "We don't want to do that."

  ♦ 6 ♦

  Working with those men was as pleasant as working on the rock gang had been miserable. The labor was heavy at times, lifting and carrying massive chests and strongboxes full of documents, but we used intelligence to plan the work instead of rushing at it with impatient brutality, and we were patient with one another, too. The work was shared fairly, and rather than whipping and shouted orders there was joking and conversation— sometimes about the ancient scrolls and records we were handling, sometimes about the siege, the latest attack or fire, or anything under the sun. It was an education in itself to work with these men. I knew that. But I was deeply troubled by much they said.

  While we were with Reba and the others our talk was harmless, but most of the day the priests and their slaves were busy with their ritual duties at the Shrine and the Senate, and having seen he could trust us to do the work with scrupulous care, Reba left us unsupervised. So while we were in the old repository under the west wall, figuring out what we had to deal with, how to move the decaying boxes and fragile scrolls without damaging them, we were on our own, seven slaves in an ancient, thick-walled temple, nobody to hear us. There Mimen, Tadder, and Ienter talked as I had never heard men talk. Now I understood why Everra spoke of the modern writers as evil influences. My companions were always quoting Denios, Caspro, Rettaca, and other "new poets" and philosophers I'd never heard of, and everything they quoted,

  though much of the poetry was beautiful beyond any I knew, seemed to be critical, destructive, full of fierce emotions— pain, anger, dissatisfied

  longing.

  It confused me very much. The rock gang were brutal men but they would never question their place in the system, and would think it childish to ask why one man should have power and another none. As if fate and the gods cared for our questions and opinions, as if all the great structure of society the Ancestors had left us could be changed at a whim! My companions here, more refined in their manners than many nobles, and honest and mild in daily life, were in their talk and thought shamelessly disloyal to their Houses and to Etra itself, our city under siege. They talked of their masters disrespectfully, contemptuous of their faults. They had no pride in the soldiers of their House. They speculated about the morals even of the Senators. Tadder and Ienter thought it possible that some Senators, secretly in league with Casicar, had deliberately sent most of the army south so that Casicar could take Etra.

  I listened to days of this kind of talk without saying anything, but protest and anger grew in me. When Tadder, who was not even an Etran but came from north of Asion, began to talk about the fall of our city not as a disaster but as an opportunity, I couldn't stand it any longer. I burst out at him. I don't know what I said— I raged at him as faithless, traitorous, ready to destroy our city from within even as the enemy besieged the walls.

  The other young men, Mimen's students, began to pour indignation and mockery onto me, but Tadder stopped them. "Gavir," he said, "I'm sorry to have offended you, I respect your loyalty. I ask you to consider that I too am loyal, though not to the House that bought me or the city that uses me. My loyalty is to my own people, my own kind. And however I may talk, never think that I'd urge any slave to rebel! I know where that leads."

  Taken aback by his apology and his earnestness, embarrassed by my own outburst, I subsided. We went on with our work. For a while Mi-men's students shunned and snubbed me, but the older men treated me just as before. The next day, when Ienter and I were taking a coffer to the Shrine in a little handcart we had devised to carry the fragile relics, he briefly told me Tadder's history. Born free in a northern village, he had been captured as a boy by raiders and sold to a household in the great city of Asion, where he was educated. When he was twenty, there had been a slave revolt in Asion. It was savagely repressed: hundreds of men and women slaves had been slaughtered, and every suspect branded— "You've seen his arms," Ienter said.

  I had seen the terrible ridged scars, and thought they were from a fire, an accident.

  "When he says his own people," Ienter told me, "he doesn't mean a tribe or a town or a household. He means you and me."

  It made little sense to me, for I couldn't yet conceive of a community greater than the walls of Etra, but I accepted it as a fact.

  Mimen's students continued to ignore me most of the time, but without malice. I was much younger than the youngest of them, in their eyes a half-educated boy. At least they trusted me not to betray them by reporting seditious conversations, for they talked freely in my presence. And though I was shocked by much they said, and silently despised them as hypocrites who feigned loyalty to masters they hated, I found myself listening, just as I had listened, disgusted, repelled, but fascinated, to the sexual talk of some of the men in the barrack at home.

  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.