10

For days after that I kept to my room. Diero told Barna I was ill. I was sick indeed with the grief and anger that I hadn't been able to feel all the uncounted months since I walked away from the graveyard by the Nisas. I had run away then, body and soul. Now at last I'd turned around and stopped running. But I had a long, long way to go back.

I could not go back to Arcamand in my body, though I thought often and often of doing so. But I had run away from Sallo, from all my memory of her, and I had to return to her and let her return to me. I could no longer deny her, my love, my sister, my ghost.

To grieve for her brought me relief, but never for long. Always the pure sorrow became choked thick with anger, bitter blame, self-blame, unforgiving hatred. With Sallo they all came back to me, those faces, voices, bodies I had kept away from me so long, hiding them behind the wall. Often I could not think of Sallo at all but only of Torm, his thick body and lurching walk; of the Mother and the Father of Arca; or of Hoby. Hoby who had pushed Sallo into the chariot while she was crying out for help. Hoby the bastard son of the Father, full of rancorous envy, hating me and Sallo above all. Hoby who had nearly drowned me once. They might have let—At that pool—It might have been Hoby who—

I crouched on the floor of my room, stuffing the folds of a cloak into my mouth so that no one could hear me scream.

Diero came up to my room once or twice a day, and though I couldn't bear to have anyone else see me as I was, she brought me no shame, but even a little dignity. There was in her a bleak, gentle, unmoved calm, which I could share while she was with me. I loved her for that, and was grateful to her.

She made me eat a little and look after myself. She was able to make me think, sometimes, that I had come to this despair in order to find a way through it, a way back to life.

When at last I went downstairs again, it was with her to give me courage.

Barna, having been told I'd had a fever, treated me kindly, and told me I mustn't recite again till I was perfectly well. So though my days were again mostly spent with him, often in the winter evenings I'd go to Diero's peaceful rooms and sit and talk with her alone. I looked forward to those hours and cherished them afterwards, thinking of her greeting and her smile and her soft movements, which were professional and mannered like those of an actor or dancer, and yet which expressed her true nature. I knew she welcomed my visits and our quiet talk. Diero and I loved each other, though she never held me in her arms but that once, by the great hearth, when she let me cry.

People joked about us, a little, carefully, looking at Barna to be sure he didn't take offense. He seemed if anything amused by the idea that his old mistress was consoling his young scholar. He made no jokes or allusions about it, an unusual delicacy in him; but then he always treated Diero with respect. She herself did not care what people thought or said.

As for me, if Barna thought she and I were lovers, it kept him from suspecting me of "poaching" his girls. Though they were so pretty and apparently so available as to drive a boy my age crazy, their availability was a sham, a trap, as men of the household had warned me early on. If he gives you one of the girls, they said, take her, but only for the night, and don't try sneaking off with any of his favorites! And as they knew me better and came to trust my discretion, they told me dire stories about Barna's jealousy. Finding a man with a girl he himself wanted, he had snapped the man's wrists like sticks, they said, and driven him out into the forest to starve.

I didn't entirely believe such tales. The men themselves might be a bit jealous of me, after all, and not sorry to scare me off the girls. Young as I was, some of the girls were even younger; and some of them were cautiously flirtatious, praising and petting me as their "Scholar-dí," begging me prettily to make my recital a love story "and make us cry, Gav, break our hearts!" For after a while I became their entertainer again. The words had come back to me.

During the first time of agony, when I regained all that I had cut out of my memory, all I could remember was Sallo, and Sallo's death, and all my life in Arcamand and Etra. For many days afterwards, I believed that that was all I ever would remember. I didn't want to remember anything I'd learned there, in the house of the murderers. All my treasure of history and verse and stories was stained with their crime. I didn't want to know what they'd taught me. I wanted nothing they had given me, nothing that belonged to the masters. I tried to push it all away from me, forget it, as I had forgotten them.

But that was foolish, and I knew it in my heart. Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn't taking place. Little by little I let all I'd learned return to me, and it was not stained, not spoiled. It didn't belong to the masters, it wasn't theirs: it was mine. It was all I ever really had owned. So I stopped the effort to forget, and all my book learning came back to me with the clarity and completeness some people find uncanny, though the gift isn't that rare. Once again I could go into the schoolroom or the library of Arcamand in my mind, and open a book, and read it. Standing before the people in the high wooden hall, I could open my mouth and speak the first lines of a poem 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 farmers, 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 Mimen had given me, for which I had grieved, once I began to remember what I had lost and left at Arcamand.

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 converse 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 metalware. 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 submitted 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 Diero'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 child 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-ío 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 was 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 had lost when I left Arcamand. Her eyes were bright as she watched us.

After that I came by her apartment nearly every day ♦ 306 * 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 with us, protecting us both. Melle adored Diero and soon attached herself passionately to me too. She'd rush at me when I came into the room, crying, "Beaky! Beaky's here!" and strangle me with hugging when I picked her up. That made Irad begin to trust me, and talking and playing with the child put us at ease. Melle was serious, funny, and very intelligent. In Irad's fiercely protective love for her there was an element of admiration, almost awe. She would say, "Ennu sent me to look after Melle."

They each wore a tiny figure of Ennu-Mé, a crudely modeled clay cat's head, on a cord around the neck.

It wasn't hard for me to persuade Irad that learning how to read and write along with Melle was a good idea, and so she joined in the lessons. Like Diero, she was doubtful and hesitant in learning. Melle was not, and it was touching to see the little sister coaching the big one.

Lessons with the other girls in the house had never got further than half the alphabet; they always lost interest or were called away. The pleasure of teaching Melle made me think I might gather some of the young children of the town into a class. I tried, but couldn't make it work. The women wouldn't trust their girls to any man; the children were needed to go into the fields with their mother, or look after their baby brother; or they were simply unable to sit still long enough to learn a lesson, and their parents had no idea why they should do so. I needed Barna's backing, his authority.

I approached him with the proposal of establishing a school, a place set aside, with regular hours. I'd teach reading and writing. To flatter his sense of superiority to me, Pulter would be asked to recite and lecture on literature. The accountant might teach a little practical arithmetic. Barna listened, nodded, and approved heartily, but when I began to suggest the place I thought suitable, he had reasons why it would not do. Finally he said, clapping me on the shoulder, "Put it off till next year, Scholar. Things are too busy now, people just can't spare the time."

"Children of six or seven can spare the time," I said.

"Kiddies that age don't want to be locked up in a classroom! They need to be running about and playing, free as birds!"

"But they aren't free as birds," I said. "They're drudging at field work with their mothers, or lugging their baby sisters and brothers around. When are they going to learn anything else?"

"We'll see that they do. I'll talk about this with you again!" And he was off to see about the new additions to the granaries. He was indeed endlessly busy and I made allowance for it, but I was disappointed.

I made up for it to myself by offering to give talks in the room I'd hoped to use as a schoolroom. I told people I'd tell some of the history of the City States and Bendile and other lands of the Western Shore, evenings, if they wanted to come listen. I got an audience of nine or ten grown men; women didn't go in the streets at night. My hearers mostly came just to hear stories, but a couple of them took a shrewd interest in the variety of customs and beliefs, laughing heartily at outlandish ways of doing and thinking, and ready to talk about whys and wherefores. But they'd worked hard all day, and when I went on long I'd see half my audience asleep. If I were ever to educate the Forest Brothers, I'd have to catch them younger.

My failure to start a school left me all the more time to be with Diero and Melle, and I was happier with them than anywhere else. I still went about with Barna, but his interest was all in immediate projects, the new buildings and planned expansion of the community kitchens. The Heart of the Forest was rapidly becoming more prosperous as the herds and gardens thrived and the raiders brought in goods. When I talked with the netmen who went into Asion, over the weak beer in the beer house Chamry frequented, they spoke only about stealing and trading. It seemed to me they were sent out mostly to get luxuries.

Venne was back from a long trip with his group, and he and some of his mates often joined us at the beer house. He liked his work. It was exciting, and he hadn't had to shoot anybody, he said. I asked him if people outside the forest knew who they were. Over towards Piram, where he had been, he said the villagers called the raiders "Barna's boys." They were willing to barter with them, but were wary, always urging them to go on to the next town and "skin the merchants."

I asked Venne if the raiders ever talked to people about the Uprising. He'd never heard of it at all. "A revolt? Slaves? How could slaves fight? We'd have to be like an army, to do that, seems like." His ignorance made me think that only certain men were entrusted with the risky task of spreading the plans for the Uprising; but I didn't know who they were.

I asked the raiders if slaves in the villages or on the farms often asked to join them. They said sometimes a boy wanted to run off with them, but they usually wouldn't take him, for not even cattle theft roused such vengeful pursuit as slave stealing. But they all had stories about slaves who'd escaped and followed them on their own. Most of them had been such runaways themselves. "See, we knew we couldn't get into Barna's town without we went with Barna's boys," said a young man from a village on the Rassy. "And I do keep an eye out for fellows like I was."

"And that's how you get the girls you bring in too?" I asked.

That brought on laughter and a babble of stories and descriptions. Some girls were runaways, I gathered, but the raiders had to be careful about accepting them, "because they'll be followed, like as not, and not know how to hide their tracks, and likely they're with child"—and another man broke in, "It's only the pregnant and the ugly ones and maimed and harelips that tries to join us. The ones we want are kept shut up close."

"So how do you get them to join you?" I asked.

More laughter. "Same way we get the cattle and sheep to join us," said Venne's leader, a short, rather pudgy man, who Venne told me was a fine hunter and scout. "Round 'em up and drive 'em!"

"But don't touch, don't touch," said another man, "at least not the prettiest one or two. Barna likes 'em fresh."

They went on telling stories. The men who had taken Irad and Melle were there, and one of them told the tale, rather boastfully, since everybody knew Irad was Barna's favorite."They was just out at the edge of the village, the two of 'em, in the fields, and Ater and I come by on horseback. I took one look and give Ater the wink and hopped off and grabbed the beauty, but she fought like a she-bear, I tell you. She was trying to get her hand to that knife of hers, now I know it, and lucky she didn't, or she'd have had my guts out. And the little one was jabbing at my legs with the little sharp spade she had, cutting 'em to ribbons, so Ater had to come pull her off, and he was going to toss her aside, but the two of 'em hung on to each other so tight, so I said take both the damn little bitches then, and we tied 'em up together and put 'em up in front of me on my big mare. They screeched the whole time, but we was just far enough from the houses nobody heard. That was a lucky haul, by Sampa! I doubt they missed those girls till nightfall, and by then we was halfway to the forest."

"I wouldn't want a woman that fought like that, with a knife and all," said Ater, a big, slow man. "I like 'em soft."

The conversation wandered off, as it often did in the beer house, into comparing kinds of women. Only one of the eight men around our table had a woman of his own, and he was teased remorselessly about what she did while he was off raiding. The others were talking more about what they wanted than what they had. The Heart of the Forest was still a city of men. An army camp, Barna sometimes said. The comparison was apt in many ways.

But if we were soldiers, what war were we fighting?

"He's gone off broody again," Venne said, and clucked like a hen. I realised somebody had made a joke about me and I'd missed it. They laughed, good-natured laughter. I was the Scholar, the bookish boy, and they liked me to play my absent-minded role.

I went back to Barna's house. I was to give a recital that evening. Barna was there, as always, in his big chair, but he had Irad sitting on his lap, and he fondled her as he listened to me tell a tale from the Chamhan.

Though he sometimes caressed his girls in public, he had always done it jokingly, calling a group of them to come around him and "keep me warm on a winter night," and inviting some of his men to "help themselves." But that was after feasting and drinking, not during a recitation. Everyone knew he was besotted by Irad, calling her to his bedroom every night, ignoring all his earlier favorites. But this crass display in public was a new thing.

Irad held perfectly still, submitting to his increasingly intimate caresses, her face blank.

I stopped before the end of the chapter. The words had dried up. I'd lost the thread of the story, and so had many of my hearers. I stood silent a minute, then bowed and stepped down.

"That's not the end, is it?" said Barna in his big voice.

I said, "No. But it seemed enough tonight. Maybe Dorremer would play for us?"

"Finish the tale!" Barna said.

But other people had begun to move about and talk, and several seconded my call for music, and Dorremer came forward with her lyre as she often did after Pulter or I recited. So it passed off, and I made my escape. I went to Diero's rooms, not my own. I was troubled and wanted to talk with her.

Melle was asleep in the bedroom. Diero was in her sitting room without any light but the moon's. It was a sweet clear night of early summer. The forest birds they called nightbells were singing away off among the trees, calling and answering, and sometimes a little owl wailed sweetly. Diero's door was open. I went in and greeted her, and we sat without talking for a while. I wanted to tell her about Barna's behavior, but I didn't want to spoil her serenity, which always quietened me. She said at last, "You're sad tonight, Gav."

I heard someone run lightly up the stairs. Irad came in. Her hair was loose and she was panting for breath. "Don't say I'm here!" she whispered, and ran out again.

Diero stood up. She was like a willow, black and silver in the moonlight. She took up the flint and steel and struck a light. The little oil lamp bloomed yellow, changing all the shadows in the room and leaving the moon's cold radiance out in the sky. I didn't want to lose our quiet mood, and was about to ask Diero, petulantly, why Irad was playing hide-and-seek. But there was the noise of heavier feet on the staircase, and now Barna stood in the doorway. His face was almost black, swollen, in the tangled mass of his hair and beard. "Where is the bitch?" he shouted. "Is she here?"

Diero looked down. Trained in submissiveness all her life, she was unable to answer him with anything but a shrinking silence. And I too shrank from the big man blind with rage.

He pushed past us, flung open the bedroom door, looked around in the bedroom, and came out again, staring at me. "You! You're after her! That's why Diero keeps her here!" He rushed at me like a great, red boar charging, his arm upraised to strike me. Diero came between us crying out his name. He knocked her aside with one hand. He seized me by the shoulders and lifted and shook me as Hoby used to do, slapped my head left and right, and threw me down.

I don't know what happened in the next minute or two. When I could sit up and see through the dazzling blackness that pulsed in my eyes, I saw Diero huddled on the floor. Barna was gone.

I managed to get to my hands and knees, then get up. I looked into the bedroom. No one was there but a tiny shadow cowering against the wall by one of the beds.

I said, "Don't be afraid, Melle, it's all right." I found it difficult to talk. My mouth was filling with blood and a couple of teeth were loose on the right side. "Diero will be here in a moment," I said.

I went back to Diero. She had sat up. The lamp was still burning. In its weak pool of light I could see that the soft skin of her cheek was bruised. I could not bear to see that. I knelt down by her.

"He found her," she whispered. "She hid in your room. He went straight there. Gav, what will you do?" She took my hand. Her hand was cold.

I shook my head, which made it ring and spin again. I kept swallowing blood.

"What will he do to her?" I said.

She shrugged.

"He's angry—he could kill her—"

"He'll hurt her. He doesn't kill women. Gav. You can't stay here."

I thought she meant this room.

"You must go. Leave! She went to your room. She didn't know where to hide. Oh, poor child. Oh, Gav! I have loved you so much!" She put her face down on my hand, weeping silently for a moment, then raised her head again. "We'll be all right. We're not men, we don't matter. But you have to go."

"I'll take you," I said. "And them—Irad and Melle—"

"No, no, no," she whispered. "Gav, he'll kill you. Go now. Now! The girls and I are safe." She got up, pulling herself up by the table, and stood shakily a minute; then she went into the bedroom. I heard her soft voice talking to the child. She came out carrying her. Melle clung to her, hiding her face.

"Melle-sweet, you must say goodbye to Gav."

The child turned and held out her arms, and I took her and held her tight. "It will be all right, Melle," I said. "Do your lessons with Diero. Promise? And help Irad with them. Then you'll both be wise." I didn't know what I was saying. I was in tears. I kissed the child and set her down. I took Diero's hand and held it against my mouth a moment, and went out.

I went to my room, belted on my knife, put on my coat, and put the small copy of the Cosmologies in the pocket. I looked around the little room with its one high window, the only room of my own I'd ever had.

I left Barna's house by the back way and went round through the streets to the cobblers' barrack. In the great wash of moonlight the city of wood was a city of silver-blue, shadowed, silent, beautiful.