13

Reed Isles was the westernmost, the smallest, and the poorest of the five villages of Ferusi. Its houses were scattered on the isles and inlets of a bay in the southwest corner of Ferusi Lake. Dorod lived with his meek and silent cousin Temec in a hut on a muddy, reed-surrounded peninsula. There were fewer women than men in the village, and the women seemed indifferent and aloof. There were forty or so people, but only four marriage huts. The fish-mat was not the sociable, pleasurable event it was in East Lake.

I didn't get to know anyone in this village well but Dorod. He kept me busy and away from the others. I missed the easy, lazy companionship of fishing with my uncle or with the young men, talking with Tisso and other girls, watching the boat builders, cutting reeds, planting ricegrass, the slow day rhythm that I had lived in for a year now, often bored into a kind of trance, but never unhappy.

I went out fishing daily here, and we often kept half the catch for ourselves, for the women provided few vegetables, little meal, no fruit. I certainly would have been willing to fry up our catch or make fish cakes with the coarse meal the women ground, but for a village man to cook would turn society inside out and upside down and make me an outcast from my people forever. As it was, Dorod and I ate a good deal of fish raw, as I'd done with Ammeda, but we didn't have any horseradish to give it a kick. Nobody here shot birds; they were forbidden in this village as sacred creatures—hassa—wild goose, duck, swan, and heron. Little freshwater clams, delicious and very common here, were a staple of the local diet, but they became poisonous at rare, unpredictable intervals; Dorod forbade himself and me to eat them.

Temec told me that Dorod's previous novice, a child, had died of the shellfish poisoning three years ago.

Dorod and I did not get on well. My heart is not naturally rebellious, and I wanted very much to learn what he could teach me about my power, but I'd learned to distrust my own trustfulness. Dorod demanded absolute trust. He gave me arbitrary orders and expected silent obedience. I questioned the reason for each act. He refused to answer. I refused to obey.

This went on for a half month or so. One morning he instructed me to spend the entire day kneeling in the hut with my eyes shut, saying the word erru. Two days earlier I had done just that. I told him I couldn't kneel that long again, my knees were still too painful from the last time. He said, "You must do as I say," and went off.

I'd had enough. I made up my mind to walk back round the lake to East Lake Village.

He came back into the hut and found me knotting up the little bundle of my belongings in the old brown blanket, which my uncle's cat Prut had nearly worn to shreds by kneading it with his claws before he went to sleep on it.

"Gavir, you cannot go," he said, and I said, "What can I learn if you keep me in ignorance?"

"The seerman is the guide. It is his burden and task to carry the mystery for the seer."

He spoke, as he often did, pompously, but I felt he believed what he said.

"Not this seer," I said. "I need to know what I'm doing and why I should do it. You want blind obedience. Why should a seer be blind?"

"The seer of visions must be guided," Dorod said. "How can he guide himself? He gets lost among the visions. He doesn't know whether he lives now or years ago or in years to come! You yourself, though you've barely begun to travel in time, have felt that. No one can walk that path by himself, unguided."

"My aunt Gegemer—"

"An ambamer!" Dorod said. "Women, babbling nonsense, screeching and screaming, seeing useless glimpses of things they don't understand. Phoh! A seer is trained and guided, he serves his clan and people, he is a man of value. I can make you a man of value. I know the secrets, the techniques, the sacred ways. Without a seerman a seer is no better than a woman!"

"Well, maybe I am no better than a woman," I said. "But I'm not a child. You treat me as a child."

New ideas came hard to Dorod, as perhaps they do to most villagers and tribesmen, but he could listen, he could think, and he was extremely, almost unnaturally, sensitive to mood and hint. What I said struck him hard.

He said nothing for a while and finally asked, "How old are you, Gavir?"

"About seventeen."

"Seers are trained young. Ubec, whom I was training, was only twelve when he died. And I took him when he was seven." He spoke slowly, thinking as he spoke. "You are an initiated man. A child can be trained to obey in all things."

"I was well trained in trust and obedience," I said with some bitterness. "As a child. Now I want to know what I'm to put my trust in, and what power I'm obeying."

Again he listened to what I said, and thought before he spoke. "The power of your soul to see truth," he said at last—"that is what both the seer and seerman must follow."

"Since I'm not a child, why can't I learn to do it by myself?"

"But who would read your visions?" he said with blank surprise.

"Read them?" I said as blankly.

"I must learn to read the truth in what you see, so that I can tell people of it. That's my task as your seerman! How can a seer do that for himself?" He saw that I was as perplexed as he was. "Do you know what it is you see, Gavir? Do you know the people, the place, the time, the meaning of the vision?"

"Only after they come to pass," I admitted. "But how can you know?"

"That is my power! You are the eyes of our people, but I am your voice! The seer is not given the gift of reading what he sees. That is for the man trained in the ways of the myriad channels, who knows the roots of the reeds, where Amba walks, where Sua passes, where Hassa flies. You will learn to see and to tell me what you see. To you the visions are mysteries—is that not so? You can tell me only what you see. But I, looking with the eyes of Amba, looking deep within, I will understand the mysteries, and learn to speak the meaning of what is seen, and so give guidance to our people. You need me as I need you. And our kinfolk and all the clans of Ferusi need us both."

"How do you know how to ... read my visions?" I hesitated on the word "read," which was not one I had ever heard before in the Marshes, and which clearly did not have the meaning I knew.

Dorod gave a kind of laugh. "How do you know how to see them?" he asked. He looked at me now with a less lofty expression, almost companionably. "Why does a man have one power and not another? You can't teach me to see visions. I can teach you how to see them, but not how to read them, because that is my power, not yours. I tell you, we need each other."

"You can teach me how to see visions?"

"What do you think I've been trying to do?"

"I don't know! You never say. You say fast every third day, never go barefoot, don't sleep with my head to the south, kneel till my knees break—a hundred rules and do's and don'ts, but what for?"

"You fast to keep your spirit pure and light, so it can travel easily."

"But I'm not getting enough to eat between fasts. My spirit is so pure and light that it thinks about nothing except food. What good is that?" He frowned, and in fact looked a little ashamed. I pressed my advantage: "I don't mind fasting, but I won't starve. Why do I have to wear shoes?"

"To keep your feet from contact with the earth, which draws the spirit down."

"Superstition," I said. He looked blank. I said, "I've had visions both shod and barefoot. I don't need to learn obedience. I've had that lesson. I want to understand my power, and to learn how to use it."

Dorod bowed his head in silence. After a long time he answered me, gravely, without patronising impatience or pompousness, "If you will do as I tell you to do, Gavir, I will try to tell you why seers do these things. Perhaps it is true that such knowledge befits your mind as an initiated man."

I was proud of myself for standing up to him, and pleased with myself for earning some respect from him. I put my things back on the shelf by my cot and stayed on with him in his lonely, rather dirty hut.

I saw well enough that Dorod did indeed need me, since his child pupil, when he died, had taken Dorod's position as seerman with him. But if he'd teach me what he knew, it was a fair bargain, I thought.

It was hard for him to abandon his position as master, to answer my questions, to explain to me why I must do this or that. He was not an ill-natured man, and I think sometimes he found it a pleasure to have, instead of a pupil-slave, a student and companion; but still he never told me anything unless I asked him.

All that he could or would teach me of the songs and the ritual stories I learned quickly. I was at last learning a little of the gods and spirits, the songs and tales of the Rassiu, coming a little closer to the heart of the Marshes.

The gift of memorising hadn't deserted me, for all that I hadn't used it in a long time. So in that way I came along much faster than he had expected. He laughed once and said, of a ritual story I had just repeated to him, "I spent a month trying to hammer that into Ubec's head, and he never got it half right! You learned it in one saying."

"That is half my power, and all my training when I was a slave," I said.

But my power of vision seemed to resist his efforts to bring it forth and train it. I stayed with him a month and another month, and still had no more of those seeings I used to call remembering. I was impatient; he seemed untroubled.

The central practice of his teaching he called waiting for the lion. It was to sit and breathe quietly and bring my thoughts away from all that was around me into a silence within myself: a very difficult thing to do. My knees began to get used to it at last, but it seemed my mind never would.

And he wanted me to tell him every vision I had ever had. This was very hard for me at first. Sallo sat beside me and whispered to me, "Don't talk about it, Gav!" All my life I had obeyed her. Now I was to disobey her to serve the wishes of this strange man. I resisted confiding in Dorod, and yet only he could teach me what I needed to know. I forced myself to speak, haltingly and incompletely describing what I had seen. His patience was inexhaustible: little by little he drew from me everything I could tell him of each "remembering"—the snowfall in Etra, the assault of the Casicaran troop, the cities I walked in, the man in the room with the books, the cave, the terrible dancing figure (which I had seen again when I was initiated), even the first and simplest of them all, the blue water and the reeds. He wanted to hear the visions over and over. "Tell me again," he would say. "You are in a boat."

"What is there to tell? I see the Marshes. Just as they are. Just as I saw them when I was a baby, before I was stolen, no doubt. Blue water, green reeds, a blue hill way off there..."

"To the west?"

"No, south."

How did I know the hill was in the south?

He listened with the same intentness every time, often asking a question but never making any comment. Many words I used evidently meant nothing to him, as when I was trying to describe the cities I saw, or the room full of books where the man turned to me and said my name. Dorod had never seen a city. He used the word "read" but could not read; he had never seen a book. I took my small book, the Cosmologies, out of its silky reedcloth wrappings to show him what the word meant. He glanced at it but was not interested. He did not ask for realities or for meanings, only for the closest, most detailed description I could give him of what I had seen in vision. What he made of all I told him I never knew, because he never said.

I wondered about other seers and seermen. I asked Dorod who the other seers of Ferusi were. He told me two names, one in South Shore, one in Middle Village. I asked if I could talk to one of these men. He looked at me, curious: "Why?"

"To talk with him—to find out if it's like it is for me—"

He shook his head. "They wouldn't talk to you. They speak of their visions only to their seerman."

I insisted a little. He said, "Gavir, these are holy men. They live in seclusion, alone with their visions. Only their seerman talks with them. They don't come out among people. Even if you were fully a seer yourself you wouldn't be allowed to see them."

"Is that how I am to be—secluded, shut away, living among my visions?"

The idea was horrible to me, and I think Dorod felt my horror.

He hesitated and said, "You are different. You began differently. I cannot say how you will live."

"Maybe I'll never have any more visions. Maybe I came back to the beginning there out on the lake, and the beginning was the end."

"You're afraid," Dorod said, with unusual gentleness. "It's hard to know the lion is walking towards you. Don't be afraid. I will be with you."

"Not there," I said.

"Yes, even there. Go wait for the lion on the deck now."

I obeyed, listlessly, kneeling on the little deck of the hut over the mud and stones of the end of the peninsula, looking out at the lake under a calm grey sky. I breathed as he had taught me and tried to keep my thoughts from drifting. Presently I was aware that a black lioness was walking across the ground behind me, but I did not turn round. Whatever it was I had been afraid of, my fear had gone. There were flowers in the narrow garden where I sat. I walked up a cobbled street at night in rain, and saw the rain blown against a high red wall over the street in the faint light from a window across the way. I was in the sunlit courtyard of a house I knew, my house, and a young girl came to greet me, smiling; it gave me great joy to see her face. I stood in a river, the current pushing me nearly off my feet, and on my shoulders was a heavy burden, so heavy I could barely stand up as the water pushed at me, and the sand under my feet slipped and slid. I staggered and took a step forward. I was kneeling on the deck of the hut in Reed Isles. It was evening. A last flight of wild duck passed across the reddish cloud cover where the sun had set.

Dorod's hand was on my shoulder. "Come in," he said in a low voice. "You've made a long journey."

He was silent and gentle with me that night. He asked nothing about what I had seen. He made sure I ate well, and sent me to sleep.

Over the next days I told him my visions, little by little, and over and over. He knew how to draw from me things I would not have thought to tell, things I didn't even know I'd seen until he made me recall the vision again, closer, seeking details, as if studying a picture. In this I felt my two kinds of memory come together into one.

And several times during those days I "journeyed," as he put it, again. It was as if a door stood open that I could go through, not at will, but at the lion's will.

"I don't see how my visions can be of use or guidance to our clan," I said to Dorod one evening. "They're always of other places, other times—almost nothing of the Marshes. What use can they be here?"

We were out fishing. Our contributions to the fish-mat had been rather poor lately, and what the women gave us had been correspondingly meager. We had thrown out the net and were drifting a while before we began to pull it in.

"You are still making the journeys of a child," Dorod said.

"What do you mean."

"The child sees only with his own eyes. He sees what is before him—places he will come to. As he learns to journey as a man, he learns to see more widely. He learns to see what other eyes may see, he sees where others will come. He goes where he will never himself go in his body. All the world, all places, all times are open to the great seer. He walks with Amba and flies with Hassa. He journeys with the Lord of the Waters." He said all this quite matter-of-factly. He looked round at me with a quick, shrewd glance. "Untaught, beginning so late, you see as a child sees. I can teach you how to make the greater journeys. But only if you trust me."

"Do I distrust you."

"Yes," he said calmly.

My aunt had said something to me about remembering myself but going no further. I could have found her words in my memory if I looked for them, but I did not look for them. Dorod was right: if I was to learn from him I must do it his way.

We pulled in our net. We were in luck. We brought two big carp to the fish-mat. I found carp a bony, muddy fish, but the women of Reed Isles were fond of it, and we were given a good dinner that night.

After we'd eaten it, I asked Dorod, "How will you teach me to see beyond the child's visions."

He didn't answer for a long time. "You must be ready," he said at last.

"What will make me ready."

"Obedience and trust."

"Do I disobey you."

"Only in your heart."

"How do you know that. "

He looked at me with something like scorn or pity, and said nothing.

"What must I do, then. How do I prove I trust you."

"Obedience."

"Tell me what to do and I'll do it."

I did not like this battle of wills, I did not want it, but it was what he wanted. And having got what he wanted, he changed his tone. He spoke very seriously. "You need not go on, Gavir," he said. "It is a hard way, the seer's way. Hard and fearful. I will always be with you, but you are the one who makes the journey. I can guide you to the beginning of the way, but after that I can only follow. It is your will that dares, your eye that sees. If you wish not to make the greater journeys, so be it. I will not force you—I cannot. If you want, leave me tomorrow, go back to East Lake. Your child-visions will return sometimes, but they will soon begin to fade; you will lose them, lose the power. Then you can live as an ordinary man. If that is what you want."

Much taken aback, confused, challenged, I said, "No. I told you, I want to know my power."

"You will know it," he said with a quiet exultation.

From that night on he was both gentler with me and even more exacting. I was determined to obey him without question, to find if I could, indeed, learn to know my power. He asked me again to fast every third day. He controlled my diet very strictly, allowing me no milk or grain, but adding certain foods that he said were sacred: the eggs of duck and other wild fowl, a root called shardissu, and eda, a small fungus that sprang up in the willow groves inland—all eaten raw. He spent a great deal of time obtaining these foods. The shardissu and eda were vile-tasting and left me sick and dizzy, but I had to eat only tiny quantities of each.

After some days of this diet, and many hours of kneeling daily, I began to feel a lightness of body and mind, a sense of floating free. As I knelt on the deck of the hut I would say the word "hassa, hassa," over and over, and feel myself lifted on the wings of the wild goose, the swan.

I knelt on the deck and saw all the Marshes beneath me, and the cloud shadows drifting over them. I saw villages on the shores of lakes, and fishing boats out on the water. I saw the faces of children, of women, of men. I crossed a great river with a burden on my shoulders, borne down, heavy laden, and threw off the burden and found my wings again, the heron's wings. I flew and flew ... and landed sick and cold and stiff, my knees afire with pain, my head dull, my belly aching, on the deck of Dorod's house.

He helped me up. He brought me in by the tiny fire in the clay pot, for winter was coming on. He comforted me and praised me. He fed me translucent slices of raw fish and vegetables, beaten egg, a bit of sickening shardissu, a draft of water to take the evil taste out of my mouth. "She gave me milk," I said, remembering the woman in the inn when I first came to the Marshes, longing for the taste of milk. All my memories were with me all night. I lay in Dorod's hut as I sat beside my sister in the schoolroom of Arcamand while the storm destroyed the village called Herru, tearing the roofs and reedcloth walls from the posts in utter darkness full of screaming voices and the howl of wind....

I was very sick, vomiting again and again, lying on my belly on the deck vomiting into the mud below, writhing with the pain in my stomach and lungs. Dorod knelt by me, his hand on my back, telling me it was all right, it would be over soon and I could sleep. I slept and my dreams were visions. I woke and remembered what I had never known. He asked me to tell him all I had seen, and I tried, but even as I told him new visions came to me and he and the hut were gone, I was gone, lost among people and places I would never know and could never remember. And then I would be lying in the dark hut, sick and aching and dizzy, hardly able to sit up. He would come and give me water and make me eat a little, talk to me and try to make me talk. "You are a brave man, my Gavir, you will be a great seer," he told me, and I clung to him, the only face that was not a dream or vision or memory, the only actual face, the only hand I could hold, my guide and savior, my false guide, my betrayer.

There came another face among the dreams and visions. I knew her. I knew her voice. But did I not know all the faces, all the voices? I remembered everything, everything. Cuga stooped over me. Hoby came at me down the corridor. But she was there, I knew her, and I spoke her name: "Gegemer."

Her crow's face was grim, her crow's eyes black and sharp. "Nephew," she said. "I told you that if I saw you in vision I'd tell you of it. You remember that."

I remembered everything. She had told me that before. All this had happened before. I was remembering it because it had happened a hundred times, like everything else. I was lying down because I was too tired from journeying to sit up. Dorod was sitting cross-legged near me. The hut was dark and cramped. My aunt was not in the hut, it was a man's hut and she was a woman: she knelt in the doorway, she must stop at the threshold. She looked at me and spoke to me in her harsh voice.

"I saw you cross a river, carrying a child. Do you understand me, Gavir Aytana? I saw the way you are to go. If you look, you'll see it. It is the second river you must cross. If you can cross it, you'll be safe. Across the first river is danger for you. Across the second, safety. Across the first river, death will follow you. Across the second river, you will follow life. Do you understand me? Do you hear me, my sister's son?"

"Take me with you," I whispered. "Take me with you!"

I felt Dorod move forward to come between us.

"You've given him eda," my aunt said to Dorod. "What else have you poisoned him with?"

I managed to sit up, and stand. I staggered to the doorway, though Dorod got up to stop me. "Take me with you," I cried out to my aunt. She caught the hand I reached out to her and pulled me out of the house. I could barely stay afoot. She put her arm around me.

"Wasn't one boy enough to kill?" she said to Dorod, savage as the crow that attacks the nest-robbing hawk. "Give me what is his from your hut and let him go with me, or I'll shame you before the elders of Aytanu and the women of your own village so your shame will never be forgotten!"

"He will be a great seer," Dorod said, shivering with rage, but not moving from the doorway of the hut. "A man of power. Let him stay with me. I won't give him the eda again."

"Gavir," she said, "choose."

I did not know what they were saying, but I said to her, "Take me with you."

"Give me what is his," she said to Dorod.

Dorod turned away. He came back to the doorway presently with my knife, my fishing gear, the book wrapped in reedcloth, the ragged blanket. He set them down on the decking in front of the doorway. He was sobbing aloud, tears running down his face. "May evil follow you, evil woman," he cried. "Filth! You know nothing. You have no business with sacred things. You defile all you touch. Filth! Filth! You have polluted my house."

She said nothing, but helped me pick up my things, helped me get down from the deck and walk out the small pier where she had tied her boat, a woman's boat, light as a leaf. I clambered down into it, trembling, and crouched in it. All the time I heard Dorod's voice cursing Gegemer with the foul words men use for women. As she cast off the rope he cried out, howling in rage and grief—"Gavir! Gavir!"

I huddled down with my head in my arms, hiding from him. It was silent then. We were out on the water. It was raining a little. I was too sick and weak and cold to lift my head. I lay huddled against the thwart. The visions came around me, swarming, faces, voices, places, cities, hills, roads, skies, and I began again to journey on and journey on.

***

FOR GEGEMER TO COME to Dorod's house and stand at his very threshold had been an act of transgression barely justified by the urgency of her message to me. She could not bring me into the women's village of East Lake; she could not enter the men's village herself. She took me to an unused marriage hut between the villages, made the bed up for me, and left me there, coming to look after me a couple of times a day—a common enough arrangement when a man fell ill and a wife or sister wanted to nurse or visit him.

So I lay in the tiny, flimsy hut, the wind flapping the reedcloth walls, the rain beating on them and dripping between the reed bundles of the roof. I shivered and raved or lay in stupor. I don't know how long I had stayed with Dorod, or how long my recovery took, but it was summer when I went with him, and when I began to come to myself, be myself again, it was early spring. I was so thin and wasted my arms looked like reed stems. When I tried to walk I panted and got dizzy. It took me a long time to get my appetite back.

My aunt told me something about the drugs Dorod had given me. She spoke of them with hatred, with spite. "I took eda," she said. "I was determined to know where your mother went. I listened to what the seer-men told me, the wise men in the Big House, may they choke on their words, may they eat mud and drown in quicksand. Take eda, they said, and your mind will be free, you will fly where you will! The mind flies, yes, but the belly pays, and the mind too. Fool that I was, I never saw your mother, but I was sick for a month, two months, from a single mouthful. How much did he give you, how often? And bile root, shardissu—that makes you dizzy and your heart beats too hard, and your breath comes short—I never took it, but I know it. I know what men do to each other and call it sacred medicine!" She hissed like a cat. "Fools," she said. "Men. Women. All of us."

I was sitting in the doorway of the hut and she nearby on a wicker seat she'd brought with her; the women made such light, folding seats of cane and carried them to sit in, anywhere outdoors. The ground was still wet from recent rain, but the sky was pale radiant blue, and there was a new warmth to the sun.

My aunt and I were at ease with each other. I knew she had saved my life, and so did she. I think that knowledge softened her self-reproach for having let my mother go to her death. Gegemer was harsh, hard, with a bitter temper, but her care of me in my illness had been patient, even tender. Often she and I didn't understand each other, but it didn't matter; there was an understanding beneath words, a likeness of mind beneath all differences. One thing we both knew without ever saying: that when I was well enough, I would leave the Marshes.

I was in no hurry, but she was. She had seen me going north with death pursuing me. I must go. I must cross the second river to be safe. I must go as soon as I could. She said that to me at last.

"No matter when I go," I said, "death will pursue me."

"Eng, eng, eng," she said, shaking her head fiercely, frowning. "If you put off going too long, death will be waiting for you!"

"Then I'll stay here," I said, half joking. "Why should I leave my kin and clan and go running after death? I like my people here. I like to fish..."

I was teasing her, of course, and she knew it and didn't really mind, but she had seen what she had seen and I had not. She couldn't make light of it.

And among all the meaningless, endless swarming of visions that I lived with while I was with Dorod and when I was first back in East Lake, there was one that I remembered with particular exactness and clarity. I am waist deep in a river that tugs at my legs and feet, trying to pull me with its current, and on my back is a heavy weight that constantly unbalances me. I take a step forward, directly towards the riverbank, but it is wrong—I know it at once—the sand is unstable, there is no footing there. I cannot see where to go, through the rush and swirl of the water, but I take a step to the right, and another, and then on that way, as if following some path under the water, one step after the other, against all the force of the current—and that is all. I see no more.

This remembering, this vision, came back to me again as I began to recover my health. It was, I think, the last of the visions of my illness. I told it to Gegemer when she came the next day. She winced and shuddered as I told her.

"It is the same river," she murmured.

I shivered too when she said that.

"I saw you there," she said. "It is a child you carry, riding on your back." After a long time she said, "You will be safe, sister's son. You will be safe." Her voice was low and rough, and she spoke with so much yearning that I took her words not as prophecy but only as her desire.

I had been a fool indeed to go off with Dorod, poor Dorod who had waited for me and wanted me only for his own sake, to make him important among his people, a seerman, a dealer in destiny, a person of power. I had turned my back on Gegemer, who even if she hardly knew it had truly waited for me, truly wanted me, not to make her great, but for love's sake.

I was well enough to go back to my uncle's house by April, though not well enough yet to go any farther. The last day I stayed at the marriage hut, my aunt came by for no reason but to say goodbye. We sat in front of the house in the sunlight, and I said, "Mother's sister, may I tell you of my sister."

"Sallo," she said in a whisper. The name of a child of two or three, a lost child.

"She was my guardian and defender. She was always brave," I said. "She couldn't remember the Marshes, she didn't know anything about our people, but she knew we had powers the others didn't have. She told me never to tell them, the others, of my visions. She was wise. She was beautiful—there isn't a girl in the village as beautiful as Sallo was. Or as kind, and loving, and true-hearted." And seeing how intently my aunt listened, I talked on, trying to tell her what Sallo had looked like, how she had spoken, what she had been to me. It did not take very long. It is hard to say what a person is. And Sallo's life had been too short to make much of a story. She had not lived as long even as I had lived now.

When I fell silent, partly because I could not speak for the tears I wanted to cry, Gegemer said, "Your sister was like my sister." And she laid her dark hand on my dark hand for one moment.

So once more I gathered up my little bundle, blanket, gear, knife, book, and walked back to the men's village, to my uncle's house. Metter welcomed me with calm kindness. Prut came to meet me waving his tail, and as soon as I put my old blanket on my cot he jumped up onto it and began to knead it industriously, purring like a windmill. But there was no courteous greeting from old Minki. She had died in the winter, Metter told me sadly. And old Peroc, too, had died, alone in his house. Metter had gone one morning to give him a net to mend, and found him sitting bent over by his cold fire pot, his work in his cold hands.

"There's a litter of puppies in Rava's house," Metter said after a while. "We might go look them over tomorrow."

We did that, and chose a fine, upstanding, bright-eyed puppy whose black coat curled as tight as lamb's wool. Metter named her Bo, and took her out fishing that same day. Just as he pushed off she leapt into the water and began paddling along beside the boat. He fished her out and spoke to her severely, while she wagged her tail in joyful unrepentance. I wanted to be with them, but I wasn't strong enough to go out fishing yet; just the walk to Rava's house had left me out of breath and shaky. I sat down on the deck in the sunshine and watched the little moth-wing sail of Metter's boat grow smaller and smaller on the silky blue water of the lake. It was good to be here. This house, I thought, was probably as near home as I'd ever come.

But it wasn't my home. I didn't want to live my life here. That was clear to me now. I had been born with two gifts, two powers. One of them belonged here; it was a power the Marsh people knew, knew how to train and use. But my training in it had failed, whether through my teacher's ignorance and impatience, or because my power of vision was in fact not great, but only the gift, common enough here, of seeing, sometimes, a little way ahead. A child's gift, a wild gift, that could not be trained or counted on, and that would grow weaker as I grew older.

And my other power, though reliable, was utterly useless here. What good was a head full of stories and histories and poetry? The less a man of the Rassiu said, the more he was respected. Stories were for women and children. Songs were secrets, sung only at the terrifying sacred rites of initiation. These were not people of the word. They were people of the vision and the moment. All I had learned from books was wasted among them. Was I then to forget it all, betray my memory, and let my mind and spirit, too, dwindle away and grow weaker as I grew older?

The people who stole me from my people had stolen my people from me. I could never wholly be one of them.

To see that was to see that I must go on.

Where to go, then?

North, Gegemer said. She saw me going north. Across two great rivers. The Somulane and the Sensaly, those would be. Asion was north and west of the Somulane, in Bendile; the city of Mesun lay on the north bank of the Sensaly, in Urdile. There was a great university in Mesun. Scholars, poets lived there. The poet Orrec Caspro lived there.

I got up and went into the little house. Prut was working on my old blanket, his eyes half closed and his claws going in and out and in and out and his windmill running. I reached across him and took from the shelf the little reedcloth packet, brought it outside and sat down cross-legged with it. I thought of the hours, days, months I had spent on my knees on Dorod's deck, and swore in my heart that I'd never kneel again. I wished I had one of the women's legless wicker chairs, but men did not use women's things. Women used and did what there was to use and do, but men shunned and despised a great many things, such as wicker chairs and cooking and storytelling, depriving themselves of many skills and pleasures, in order to prove that they weren't women. Wouldn't it be better to prove it by doing, rather than by not doing.

Better for me, not for them. I was not one of them.

I sat cross-legged, then, and unwrapped the silky reedcloth from the book. And for the first time in how long—a year, two years?—I opened it. I opened the book where it opened, letting it choose the page, and read.

In the domain of the Lord of the Waters the rushes grow, the green reeds grow.

Hassa! hassa!

Swans fly over the waters, calling, over the green reeds, the rushes.

Hassa! hassa!

Grey herons fly over the marshes and shadows pass under their wings. Under the clouds pass shadows, over the marshlands, over the islands of reeds and ricegrass. Blessed are the wings of the waterbirds, blessed the realm of the Lord of the Waters, the Lord of the Springs and Rivers.

I closed the book and closed my eyes, leaning back against the doorpost, letting the sunlight flow through my eyelids, through my bones. How did he know? How did he know what it was like here? How did he know the sacred name of the swan and heron? Was Orrec Caspro a Rassiu, a Marshman? Was he a seer?

I fell asleep with the murmur of the lines in my mind. I woke when Bo jumped into my lap and washed my face enthusiastically. Metter was just climbing up onto the deck. "What's that." he said, looking with mild curiosity at the book.

"A box of words," I said. I held it up and showed it to him. He shook his head and said, "Anh, anh."

"Any ritta today?"

"No. Just perch and a pikelet. I need you to go out with me for ritta. Are you coming to the fish-mat?"

I went with him there, and talked with Tisso afterwards. I was glad to see her, and we talked for quite a while, sitting near the gardens. Later that evening, watching the sunset from the deck of our house, I knew with sudden sharp embarrassment and unease that Tisso was ready to fall in love with me, even though I hadn't yet had my second initiation, even though I still looked as if I was made of black sticks, and was a failed seer, a man of no accomplishments.

Metter was shaving. Men of the Marshes don't have much in the way of beards; my uncle shaved by pulling out random hairs with a clamshell as tweezers and a black bowl filled with water as a mirror. He clearly enjoyed the process. When he was done he handed me the clamshell. I was surprised, but when I felt my jaw and peered into the bowl I saw that I had sprouted some curly black beard hairs. I pulled them out one by one. It was, in fact, enjoyable. Almost all small daily acts here were enjoyable. I would miss the peacefulness of sitting here with my peaceful uncle. But I was now all the more sure that I must leave.

I could not go till I had my strength back, that was clear. So for the rest of the spring I kept to a steady regime. I stayed almost entirely in the men's village;I went to the fish-mat and spoke to people there, but did not go walking with the young men and women. When I walked to strengthen my legs and get my wind back, I went alone, miles along the lakeshore. I took up Peroc's craft of mending nets, which I could do sitting down, and though I was not very good at it, the nets I mended were better than nothing, and it gave me some usefulness to my village.

Before long I was able to go line-fishing with Metter and help him train Bo, though the little dog hardly needed training. Retrieving was bred into her brain and bone; the first time a fish, a big perch, took the hook off my line, Bo was into the water, under the water, and bobbed up with the struggling fish held delicately in her jaws, offering it to me, before I even knew I'd lost it.

Every morning and evening I sat out on the deck, under the lifted house wall if it was raining, and read a few pages in my book. Prut, who was getting older and lazier, often took this opportunity to sit on my lap. Then my uncle and I ended the day with the brief reverence-dance and words of praise to the Lord of the Waters, which I had learned when I first lived in the village; and we went to bed.

So the days passed. It was high summer, past the solstice. I didn't think about my need to leave the village. I had no needs. I was content.

My aunt came to me, stalking around the fish-mat, glaring like an angry crow. Little children scattered in fear before her. "Gavir!" she said. "Gavir, I saw a man. A man pursuing you. A man who is your death."

I stared at her.

"You must go, sister's son!"