Ursula K Le Guin

by Powers (2007) (lit)

  or a tale, and the rest would follow of itself, the poetry saying and singing itself through me, the story renewing itself in itself as a river runs.

  Most of the people there believed that I was improvising, that I was the maker, the poet, incomprehensibly inspired to spout hexameters forever. There wasn't much point in arguing with them about it. People generally know better than the workman how the work is done, and tell him; and he might as well keep his opinions to himself.

  There was little else in the way of entertainment in the Heart of the Forest. Some of the girls and a few men could play or sing. They and I always had a benevolent audience. Barna sat in his great chair, stroking his great curly beard, intent, delighted. Some who had little interest in the tales or the poetry attended either to win favor with Barna or simply because they wanted to be with him and share his pleasure.

  And he still took me with him, talking about his plans. So talking and listening, and having leisure time and comfort in which to think— for thinking goes much quicker when one is warm, dry and not hungry— I spent the end of that winter working through all I'd recovered when I came back at last to my Sallo and could grieve for her, and know my loss, and look at what my life had been and what it might have been.

  It was still hard for me to think at all of the Mother and Father of Arca. My mind would not come to any clarity concerning them. But I thought often of Yaven. I thought he would not have betrayed our trust. I wondered if when he came home, he had exacted vengeance, useless as it might be. Surely he would not forgive Torm and Hoby, however long he must withhold punishment. Yaven was a man of honor, and he had loved Sallo.

  But Yaven might be dead, killed at the siege of Casicar. That war had been as much a disaster for Etra, so people said, as the siege of Etra had been for Casicar. Torm might now be the heir of Arca. That was a thought my mind still flinched away from.

  I could think of Sotur only with piercing grief and pain. She had kept faith with us as best she could. Alone there, what had become of her? She would be, she probably had been, married off into some other household— one where there was no Everra, no library of books, no friendship, no escape.

  Again and again I thought of that night when Sallo and I were talking in the library, and Sotur came in, and they tried to tell me why they were afraid. They had clung to each other, loving, helpless.

  And I hadn't understood.

  It was not only the Family who had betrayed them, I had betrayed them. Not in acts: what could I have done? But I should have understood, I had been unwilling to see. I had blinded my eyes with belief. I had believed that the rule of the master and the obedience of the slave were a mutual and sacred trust. I had believed that justice could exist in a society founded on injustice.

  Belief in the lie is the life of the lie. That line from Caspro's book came back to me, and cut like a razor.

  Honor can exist anywhere, love can exist anywhere, but justice can exist only among people who found their relationships upon it.

  Now, I thought, I understood Barna's plans for the Uprising, now they made sense to me. All that ancient evil ordained by the Ancestors, that prison tower of mastery and slavery, was to be uprooted and thrown down, replaced by justice and liberty. The dream would be made real. And Luck had brought me here to the place where that great change would begin, the home and center of the liberty to come.

  I wanted to be one of those who made it real. I began to dream of going to Asion. Many of the Forest Brothers were from that city, a great city with a large population of freemen and freedmen, merchants and artisans, into which a fugitive slave could mix without being questioned or suspected. Barna's netmen went back and forth often, passing as traders, merchants, cattle buyers, slaves sent on commission by far-

  mers, and so on. I wanted to join them. There were educated people in Asion, both nobles and freemen, people to whom I could present myself as a freeman seeking work copying or reciting or teaching. And so doing I could do Barna's work, laying the foundation of the Uprising among the slaves I would meet there.

  Barna absolutely forbade it. "I want you here," he said. "I need you, Scholar!"

  "You need me more there," I said.

  He shook his head. "Too dangerous. One day they ask, where did you get your learning? And what'll you say?

  I'd already thought that out. "That I went to school in Mesun, where the University is, and came down to Asion because there are too many scholars in Urdile, and the pay's better in Bendile,"

  "There'd be scholars there from the University who'd say no, that boy was never there."

  "Hundreds of people go to the colleges. They can't all know one another."

  I argued hard, but he shook his big curly head, and his laugh changed to a grimmer look. "Listen, Gav, I tell you a learned man stands out. And you're already famous. The lads talk as they go about, you know, winning folk in the villages and towns to come here to join us. They boast of you. We've got a fellow, they say, that can speak any tale or poem that was ever made! And only a boy yet, a wonder of the world! Well, you can't go to Asion with a name like that hanging about you."

  I stared at him. "My name? Do they say my name?"

  "They say the name you gave us," he said, untroubled.

  Of course he, and everyone else but Chamry Bern, assumed that "Gav" was a false name. Nobody here, not even Barna, used the name he'd had as a slave.

  As Barna saw my expression, his changed. "Oh, by the Destroyer," he said. "You kept the name you had in Etra?" I nodded.

  "Well," he said after a minute, "if you ever do leave, take a new one! But that's all the more reason for me to say stay here! Your old masters may have sent word around that their clever slave boy they'd spent so much money educating ran off. They hate to let a runaway escape. It gripes them to the soul. We're a good way from Etra here, but you never know."

  I'd never given a thought to pursuit. When I left the graveyard and walked up the Nisas, it was a death. I had walked away from everything, into nothing, going nowhere. I had no fear, then, because I had no desire. As I began to live again, here, I still had no fear. I'd gone so far in my own mind that it never occurred to me that anyone from the old life would follow me.

  "They think I'm dead," I said at last. "They think I drowned myself that morning."

  "Why would they think that?"

  I was silent.

  I hadn't told Barna anything about my life. I'd never spoken of it to anyone but Diero.

  "You left some clothing on the riverbank, eh?" he said. "Well, they might have fallen for that old trick. But you were a valuable property. If your owners think you might be alive, they'll have their ears open. It's been only a year or two, right? Don't ever think you're safe — except here! And you might tell the lads you came from Pagadi or Piram, so that they don't say Etra if they speak of you, eh?"

  "I will," I said, humbled.

  Had there been no end to my stupidity? No limit to the patience Luck had had with me?

  But I did repeat my request to go into Asion. Barna said, "You're a free man, Gav. I give you no orders! But I tell you, it's not time yet for you to go. You wouldn't be safe. Your being in Asion now could endanger others there, and the whole scheme of the Uprising. When the time comes for you to go there, I'll tell you. Before then, if you go, you go against my heart." I couldn't argue with that.

  In early spring a couple of newcomers arrived, runaways from a household in Asion, who came hidden in a goods wagon driven by netmen. They brought with them, stolen from their masters' house, a good sum of money and a long box. "What's this stuff?" asked one of Barna's men who opened the box, holding up a scroll so that it slipped from the rod and unrolled at his feet. "Cloth, is it?"

  "It's what I asked for, man," said Barna. "It's a book. Now take care with it!" He had indeed requested his netmen to bring books. Nobody had brought any until now, most of our recruits— and recruiters— being illiterate and having no idea where to look for books or even, like this fellow, what a book
looked like.

  The new pair of runaways were educated, one trained in accounting, the other in recitation. The books were a motley lot, some scrolls, some paged and bound; but all could be useful for teaching, and one was a treasure to me— a little, elegantly printed copy of Caspro's Cosmologies, replacing the manuscript copy that Mime had given me, for which I had grieved, once I began to remember what I had lost and left at Arca-mand.

  The new recruits were, as Barna said, a good catch: the accountant assisted him in record keeping, and the reciter could tell fables and Bendili epics by the hour, giving me a vacation.

  I looked forward to talking to these educated men, but that didn't go well. The accountant knew only figures and calculations, while the reciter, Pulter, made it clear that he was older and more accomplished than I was, and that my pretensions to scholarship didn't qualify me to con-

  verse with a truly learned man. It galled him that most of our people liked my recitations better than his, though he soon had a following. I'd been taught to let the words do the work, while he performed in alternate shouts and whispers, with long pauses, dramatic intonations, and quavering tremolos of emotion.

  The copy of the Cosmologies was his, but he had no interest in reading Caspro, saying all the modern poets were obscure and perverse. He gave me the book, and for that alone I would have forgiven him all his snubs and all his quavers. I found the poem difficult, but kept going back to it. Sometimes I read from it to Diero, quiet afternoons in her room.

  Her friendship was like nothing else in my life. Only with her could I speak of my life at Arcamand. When I was with her I felt no wish for revenge, no desire to overturn the social order, no rage at the poor dead impotent Ancestors. I knew what I had lost, and could remember what I had had. Though Diero had never been in Etra, she was my link to it. She hadn't known Sallo, but she brought Sallo to me, and so eased my heart.

  Like most slaves, Diero had been casually mothered and had no brother or sister that she knew; the two children she had borne when she was young were sold as infants. The craving for family relationship was deep in her, as it was in all of us. Barna knew that and called on it to form and strengthen his Brotherhood.

  I was unusual in having had so close a bond to a sister: my loss was specific, my craving acute. It was as an older sister that I loved Diero, while to her I was a younger brother or a son, and also, perhaps, the one man she ever knew who did not want to be her master.

  She loved to hear me tell about Sallo and the others at Arcamand, and our days at the farm; she was curious about the customs of Etra, and also about my origin. The great marshes where the Rassy rises lie not far south of Asion, and she had known me at once for what I was,

  one of the Marshmen, dark-skinned, short and slight, with thick black hair and a high-bridged nose. The Rassiu, she called the Marsh people. They came into Asion, she said, to trade at a certain monthly market; they brought herbs and medicines that were in high demand, and fine basketry and cloth they wove of reeds, to trade for pottery and metal-ware. They came under an ancient religious truce which protected them from slave takers. They were respected as freemen, and some of them had even settled in one quarter of the city. She was shocked to learn that Etra raided the marshes for slaves. "The Rassiu are a sacred people," she said. "They have a covenant with the Lord of the Waters. Your city will suffer for enslaving them, I think."

  Some of the young women of Barna's house treated Diero with servility, fawning, as if she had the kind of power they'd known in woman slave owners. Others were trustfully respectful; others ignored her as they did all old women. She treated them all alike— kind, mild, yielding, with a dignity that set her apart. I think she was very lonely among them. Once I saw her talking with one of the younger girls, letting the girl talk and weep for home, as she had done for me.

  There were no children in Barna's house. When a girl got pregnant she moved to one of the houses where other women lived in the town and had her baby there; she kept it or gave it away as she chose. If she wanted to bring the baby up, that was fine, but if she wanted to come back and live the free life at Barna' s house, she couldn't bring it with her. "This is where we get 'em, not where we keep 'em!" Barna said, to a shout of approval from his men.

  Soon after Pulter and the accountant arrived, a new girl was brought to the household, with a little sister from whom she refused to be parted. Very beautiful, fifteen or sixteen years old, Irad had been taken from a village west of the forest. Barna was immediately smitten with her and made his claim on her clear to the other men. Whether she was already experienced with men or simply had no defenses, she submit-

  ted to everything with no pretense of resistance, until they told her she must let her little sister be taken away. Then she turned into a lion. I didn't see the scene, but the other men told me about it. "If you touch her I'll kill you," she said, whipping out a thin, long, unexpected knife from the seam of her embroidered trousers, and glaring round at Barna and all of them.

  Barna began to reason with her, explaining the rules of the household, and assuring her that the child would be well cared for. Irad stood silent, her knife held ready.

  At this point, Diero interfered. She came forward and stood beside the sisters, putting her hand on the little girl's head as she cowered against Irad. She asked Barna if the girls were slaves. I can imagine her mild, unemphatic voice asking the question.

  He of course proclaimed that they were free women in the City of Freedom,

  "So, if they like, both of them can stay with me," said Diero.

  The men who first told me the story thought that Diero had at last become jealous, Irad being so young and so beautiful. They laughed about it. "The old vixen has a tooth or two left!" one of them said,

  I didn't think it was jealousy that moved her. Diero was without envy or possessiveness. What had made her intervene this time?

  She got her way, to the extent that she went off with the child that night to her rooms. Barna of course took Irad with him for the night. But whenever he didn't call for her, Irad stayed with little Melle in Di-ero's rooms.

  When the women of Barna's house were all together, I was often daunted by the sheer power of their youthful femininity. I got my revenge as a male by feeling contempt for them. They were healthy, plump, mindless, content to lounge about the house all day trying on the latest stolen finery and chattering about nothing. If one or another of them went off to have a baby, it made no difference— there was no

  end of them, others just as young and pretty would arrive with the next convoy of raiders.

  Now it occurred to me to wonder about this endless supply of girls. Were they all runaways? Did they all ask to come here? Were they all seeking freedom?

  Yes, of course they were. They were escaping from masters who forced sex on them.

  Was Barna's house any better than whatever they'd escaped from?

  Yes, of course it was. Here, they weren't raped, they weren't beaten. They were well fed, well clothed, idle.

  Exactly like the women in the silk rooms at Arcamand.

  I cringe, remembering how I cringed when that thought first came to me. I am ashamed now as I was then.

  I thought I was keeping and cherishing Sallo in my memory, but I had forgotten her again, refused to see her, refused to see what her life and her death had shown me. I had run away again.

  I had a hard time making myself go see Diero, then. For several nights I went into town to talk with Venne and Chamry and their friends. When I finally did visit Diero's rooms, my shame kept me tongue-tied. Besides, the little girl was there. "Of course Irad is usually with Barna at night," Diero said, "but then I get to sleep with Melle. And we tell stories, don't we, Melle?"

  The child nodded vigorously. She was about six years old, dark, and extremely small. She sat next to Diero and stared at me. When I looked back, she blinked, but went on staring. "Are you Cly?" she asked.

  "No. I'm Gav."

  "Cly came to the village," the chi
ld said. "He looked like a crow too." "My sister used to call me Beaky," I said.

  After a minute she looked down at last. She smiled. "Beaky-beaky," she murmured,

  "Her village is near the Marshes," Diero said. "Maybe Cly came from there. Melle looks a bit like a Rassiu herself. Look, Gav, what Melle did this morning." She showed me a scrap of the thin, stiffly sized canvas that we used for writing lessons, since we had almost no paper. On it a few letters were written in a large uncertain script,

  "T, M, O, D," I read out. "You wrote that, Melle?"

  "I did like Diero-io did," the child said. She jumped up and brought me Diero's scroll copybook, unrolled to the last few lines of poetry. "I just copied the big ones."

  "That's very good," I said.

  "That one is wobbly," Melle said, examining the D critically.

  "She could learn so much more from you than I can teach her," said Diero. She seldom expressed any wish, and when she did it was so gentle and indirect I often missed it. I caught it this time.

  "It's wobbly, but I can read it quite well," I said to Melle. "It says D. D is how you start writing Diero's name. Would you like to see how to do the rest of it?"

  The little girl said nothing, but leapt up again and fetched the inkstand and the writing brush. I thanked her and carried them over to the table. I found a clean scrap of canvas and wrote out DIERO in big letters, pulled up a stool for Melle to perch on, and gave her the brush.

  She did a pretty good job of copying, and as praised. "I can do it better," she said, and crouched over the table to copy again, eyebrows drawn tight together, brush held tight in the sparrow-claw hand, pink tongue clamped tight between the teeth.

  Again Diero had given me back something I lost when I left Arca-mand. Her eyes were bright as she watched us.

  After that I came by her apartment nearly every day to read with her and to teach little Melle her letters. Often the child's sister was there. Irad was very shy with me at first, and I with her; she was so beautiful, so unguarded, and so clearly Barna's property. But Diero always stayed