♦ 9 ♦

Eter and Brigin, if they resented my sudden popularity, must have seen that any attempt to break up the evening gathering might rouse real opposition. They contented themselves with sneers at me, and at Chamry and Venne as my mates, but let the other men alone. So I and my fierce audience went on through all The Siege and Fall of Sentas, as the dark winter slowly turned towards spring. We came to the end of it just about the time of the equinox.

It was hard for some of the men to comprehend that it was over, and why it had to be over. Sentas had fallen, the walls and the great gates were torn down, the citadel burnt to the ground, the men of the city slaughtered, the women and children taken as slaves, and the hero Rurec had set off triumphant with his army and loot to Pagadi—and so, what happened next?

“Is he going to go by the hills of Trebs now?” Bacoc wanted to know. “After what the witch said?”

“Sure enough he’ll go by Trebs, if not this day then another,” said Chamry. “A man can’t keep from going where the seer’s eye saw him go.”

“Well, why don’t Gav tell it, then?”

“The story stops at the fall of the city, Bacoc,” I said.

“What—like they all died? But it’s only some of ’em dead!”

Chamry tried to explain the nature of a story to him, but he remained dissatisfied; and they were all melancholy. “Ah, it’s going to be dull!” said Taffa. “I’ll miss that sword fighting. It’s a horrible thing when you’re in it, but it’s grand to hear about.”

Chamry grinned. “You could say that of most things in life, maybe.”

“Are there more tales like that, Gav?” somebody asked.

“There are a lot of tales,” I said, cautiously. I wasn’t eager to start another epic. I felt myself becoming the prisoner of my audience.

“You could tell the one we had all right over,” said one man, and several agreed enthusiastically.

“Next winter,” I said. “When the nights are long again.”

They treated my verdict as if it were a priest’s rule of ritual, accepting it without dispute.

But Bulec said wistfully, “I wish there was short tales for the short nights.” He had listened to the epic with almost painful attention, muffling his cough as well as he could; to the battle scenes he preferred the descriptions of the rooms in the palaces, the touching domestic passages, the love story of Alira and Ruoco. I liked Bulec, and it was painful to see him, a young man, getting sicker and weaker day by day even as the weather brightened and grew warm. I couldn’t withstand his plea.

“Oh, there’s some short tales,” I said. “I’ll tell you one.” And I thought first to say The Bridge on the Nisas, but I could not. Those words, though they were clear in my mind, bore some weight in them that I could not lift. I could not speak them.

So I put myself in the schoolroom in my mind, and opened a copybook, and there was one of Hodis Baderi’s fables, “The Man Who Ate the Moon.” I told it to them word for word.

They listened as intently as ever. The fable got a mixed reception. Some of them laughed and shouted, “Ah, that’s the best yet! That beats all!”—but others thought it silly stuff, “foolery,” Taffa said.

“Ah, but there’s a lesson in it,” said Chamry, who had listened to the tale with delight. They got to arguing whether the man who ate the moon was a liar or not. They never asked me to settle or even enter these discussions. I was, as it were, their book. I provided the text. Judgment on the text was up to them. I heard as keen moral arguments from them as I was ever to hear from learned men.

After that they often got a fable or a poem out of me in the evening, but their demand was not so urgent now that we no longer had to cower in our huts from the rain and could live outdoors and be active. Hunting and snaring and fishing went on apace, for we’d lived very thin at the end of winter and beginning of spring. We craved not only meat but the wild onions and other herbs that some of the men knew how to find in the forest. I always missed the grain porridge that had been much of our diet in the city, but there was nothing like that here.

“I heard the Forest Brothers stole grain from rich farmers,” I said once to Chamry, as we grubbed for wild horseradish.

“They do, those who can,” he said.

“Who’s that?”

“Barna’s lot, up north there.”

The name rang strangely in my head, bringing around it a whole set of fleeting images of young men talking in a crowded, warm dormitory, the face of an old priest…but I ignored such images. Words were what I could remember safely.

“So there really is a man called Barna?”

“Oh, yes. Though you needn’t mention him around Brigin.”

I wheedled for more, and Chamry never could resist telling a story. So I found that, as I had suspected, our band was a splinter from a larger group, with which they weren’t on good terms. Barna was the chief of that group. Eter and Brigin had rebelled against his leadership and brought a few men here to the southern part of the forest—the most remote from any settlements and so the safest for runaway slaves, but also the poorest in resources except, as Chamry said, cattle with antlers.

“Up there, they bag the real thing,” he said. “Fat bullocks. Sheep! Ah! what wouldn’t I give to taste mutton! I hate sheep from the pit of my heart, wily, woolly, wicked brutes. But when one of ’em lies down and turns into roast mutton, I could swallow him whole.”

“Do Barna’s men raise the cattle and sheep?”

“Mostly they let other folk do that for them. And then pick out a few choice ones. There’s those who’d call it thieving, but that’s too delicate and legal a word. Tithing, we called it. We tithed the farmers’ flocks.”

“So you lived there, with Barna’s band?”

“A while. Lived well, too.” Chamry sat back on his haunches and looked at me. “That’s where you should be, you know. Not here, with this lot of hard rocks and knotheads.” He knocked the dirt off a horseradish root, wiped it on his shirt, and bit into it. “You and Venne. You should be off. He’ll be welcome for his hunting, you for your golden tongue…” He chewed raw horseradish a while, wincing and his eyes watering. “All your tongue will do here is talk you into trouble.”

“Would you come with us?”

He spat out fiber and wiped his mouth. “By the Stone, but that’s hot! I don’t know. I came away with Brigin and them because they were my mates. And I was restless…I don’t know.”

He was a restless man. It wasn’t hard for Venne and me to coax him into coming with us, when we made up our minds to go. And we did that soon.

Brigin and Eter, feeling dissatisfaction among us, tried to repress it with ever harsher demands and commands. Eter told Bulec, who was deathly ill by now, that if he didn’t go out hunting for meat for the camp pot, he’d get nothing to eat from it. Eter may have just been bullying, or may have believed his threat would work; some men who live hard and in good health can’t believe sickness or weakness is anything but laziness, a sham. At any rate Bulec was scared or shamed into insisting that a hunting party take him along. He got a little way out of camp with them and collapsed, vomiting blood. When they carried him back, Venne confronted Eter, shouting that he’d killed Bulec like any slave driver. Venne rushed off in his distress and rage. He found me fishing at a pool up the stream. “We were going to find Bulec a place he could sit down and wait for us, soon as we got clear away from camp, but he couldn’t even walk that far. He’s dying. I can’t stay here, Gav. I can’t take their orders! They think they’re masters and us their slaves. I want to kill that damned Eter! I’ve got to get out.”

“Let’s talk to Chamry,” I said. We did; he counseled at first that we wait, but when he saw how dangerous Venne’s anger was, he agreed to go that night.

We ate with the others. Nobody talked. Bulec lay fighting for breath in one of the cabins. I could still hear the slow, gasping drag of his breath in the darkness before dawn when Venne, Chamry, and I stole out of camp with what little we considered ours by right: the clothes we wore, a blanket apiece, our knives, Venne’s bow and arrows, my fishing hooks and rabbit snares, Chamry’s cobbler’s toolkit, and a packet of smoked meat.

It was a couple of months after the equinox, late May, perhaps; a sweet dark night, a slow misty dawn, a morning of birdsong. It was good to be going free, leaving the rivalries and brutalities of the camp behind. I walked all day lightly, lighthearted, wondering why we’d borne Eter and Brigin’s bullying so long. But at evening, as we sat fireless, lying low in case they pursued us, my heart went down low too. I kept thinking of Bulec, and of others: Taffa, who, being a deserter, had also deserted the wife and children he loved and could never go back to them; Bacoc, the simple heart, who didn’t even know the name of the village where he’d been born a slave—“the village” was all he knew…They had been kind to me. And we had sworn a vow together.

“What’s the trouble, Gav?” said Chamry.

“I feel like I’m running out on them,” I said.

“They could run, too, if they liked,” Venne said, so promptly that I knew he’d been thinking along the same lines, justifying our desertion to himself.

“Bulec can’t,” I said.

“He’s gone farther than we’ve gone, by now,” Chamry said. “Never fret for him. He’s home…You’re too loyal, Gav, it’s a fault in you. Don’t look back. Touch and go, it’s best.”

That seemed strange to me; what did he mean? I never looked back. I had nothing to be loyal to, nothing to hold on to. I went where my luck took me. I was like a wisp of cloth twisting and drifting in a river.

Next day we came to a part of the great forest I’d never been to. We were outside our territory from here on. The trees were evergreens, fir and hemlock. They made impenetrable walls and mazes of their fallen trunks and the young trees that sprouted out of them. We had to travel along the streambeds, and that was hard going, scrambling through water, over rocks, and around rapids, in the half darkness of the huge trees overhead. Chamry kept saying we’d be out of it soon, and we did come out of it at last late on the second day, following a stream up to its spring on an open, grassy hillside. As we sat luxuriating in the soft grass and the clear twilight, a line of deer came walking past not twenty feet away downhill; they glanced at us unconcerned and walked on quietly, one after the other, flicking their big ears to and fro. Venne quietly took up his bow and fitted an arrow. There was no sound but the twang of the bowstring, like the sound of a big beetle’s wings. The last deer in line started, went down on its knees, and then lay down, all in that peaceful silence. The others never turned, but walked on into the woods.

“Ah, why’d I do that,” Venne said. “Now we’ve got to clean it.”

But that was soon done, and we were glad to have fresh meat that night and for the next day. As we sat, well fed, by the coals of our fire, Chamry said, “If this was the Uplands I’d have said you called those deer.”

“Called ’em?”

“It’s a gift—calling animals to come. A brantor goes out hunting, well, he takes a caller with him, if he hasn’t the gift himself. Boar, or elk, or deer, whatever they’re after, they’ll come to the caller.”

“I can’t do that,” Venne said after a while in his low voice. “But I can see how it might be. If I know the land, I know pretty much, most times, where the deer are. As they know where I am. And if they’re afraid, I’ll never see them. But if they’re not afraid, they’ll come. They show themselves—‘Here I am, you wanted me.’ They give themselves. A man who doesn’t know that has no business hunting. He’s only a butcher.”

We went on for two days more through rolling, open woods before we came to a good-sized stream. “Across that is Barna’s country,” said Chamry. “And we’d best stay on the path and make noise, let them know we’re here, lest they think we’re sneaking in to spy.” So we came crashing into Barna’s lands like a herd of wild pigs, as Venne said. We came on a path and followed it, still talking loudly. Soon enough there was a shout to halt and hold still. We did that. Two men came striding down the path to meet us. One was tall and thin, one was short and broad-bellied.

“Do you know where you are?” said the short one, false-jovial, not quite menacing. The tall one held his crossbow loaded, though not aimed.

“In the Heart of the Forest,” said Chamry. “Seeking a welcome, Toma. You don’t remember me?”

“Well, by the Destroyer! The bad penny always turns up!” Toma came forward to take Chamry by one shoulder and shake him back and forth with aggressive welcome. “You Upland rat,” he said. “You vermin. Crawled off at night you did, with Brigin and that lot. What did you want to go with them for?”

“It was a mistake, Toma,” said Chamry, getting his footing so Toma could go on shaking him. “Call it a mistake and forgive it, eh?”

“Why not? Won’t be the last thing I forgive you, Chamry Bern.” He let him go at last. “What have you brought with you there? Baby rats, are they?”

“All I took away with me was those pigheads Brigin and his brother,” Chamry said, “and what I’m bringing back with me is two pearls, pearls set in gold for the ears of Barna. Venne, here, who can drop a deer at a thousand paces, and Gav, here, who can tell tales and poetry to make you weep one moment and laugh the next. Take us into the Heart of the Forest, Toma!”

So we went on a mile or so through the forest of oak and alder, and came to that strange place.

The Heart of the Forest was a town, with kitchen gardens and barns and byres and corrals outside the palisade walls, and inside them houses and halls, streets and squares—all of wood. Towns and cities were built of stone and brick, I thought; only barns for cattle and huts for slaves were built of wood. But this was a city of wood. It was swarming with people, men, and women too, and children—everywhere, in the gardens, in the streets. I looked at the women and children with wonder. I looked at the cross-beamed, gable-roofed houses with awe. I looked at the broad central square full of people and stopped, scared. Venne was walking right next to me, pressed up against my shoulder for courage. “I never saw nothing like this, Gav,” he said hoarsely. We followed as close behind Chamry as two little kids behind the she-goat.

Chamry himself was looking about with some amazement. “It wasn’t half this size when I left,” he said. “Look how they’ve built!”

“You’re in luck,” said Toma, our fat guide. “There’s himself.”

Coming across the square towards us was a big, bearded man. Very tall, broad-chested, ample in girth, with dark reddish curly hair and a beard that covered all his cheeks and chin and chest, with large, clear eyes, and a singularly upright, buoyant walk, as if he were borne up a little above the ground—as soon as you saw him you knew he was, as Toma said, himself. He was looking at us with a pleasant, keen curiosity.

“Barna!” Chamry said. “Will you have me back, if I bring you a couple of choice recruits?” Chamry did not quite reverence Barna, but his posture was respectful, despite his jaunty tone. “I’m Chamry Bern of Bernmant, who made the mistake of going off south a few years back.”

“The Uplander,” Barna said, and smiled. He had a broad white smile that flashed in his beard, and a magnificently deep voice. “Oh, you’re welcome back for yourself, man. We’re free to come and free to go here!” He took Chamry’s hand and shook it. “And the lads?”

Chamry introduced us, with a few words about our talents. Barna patted Venne’s shoulder and told him a hunter was always welcome in the Heart of the Forest; at me he looked intently for a minute, and said, “Come see me later today, Gav, if you will. Toma, you’ll find them quarters? Good, good, good! Welcome to freedom, lads!” And he strode on, a head taller than anyone else.

Chamry was beaming. “By the Stone!” he said. “Never a hard word, but welcome back and all’s forgiven! That’s a great man, with a great heart in him!”

We found lodgings in a barrack that seemed luxurious after our ill-built, smoky huts in the forest camp, and ate at the commons, which was open all day to all comers. There Chamry got his heart’s desire: they’d roasted a couple of sheep, and he ate roast mutton till his eyes gleamed with satisfaction above his cheeks shining with mutton fat. After that he took me to Barna’s house, which loomed over the central square, but did not go in with me. “I won’t press my luck,” he said. “He asked you to come, not me. Sing him that song of yours, ‘Liberty,’ eh? That’ll win him.”

So I went in, trying to act as if I wasn’t daunted, and said to the people that Barna had asked me to come. They were all men, but I heard women’s voices farther in the house. That sound, the sound of women’s voices in other rooms of a great house, made my mind stir strangely. I wanted to stop and listen. There was a voice I wanted to hear.

But I had to follow the men who took me to a hall with a big hearth, though there was no fire in it now. There Barna was sitting in a chair big enough for him, a regular throne, talking and laughing with both men and women. The women wore beautiful clothes, of such colors as I had not seen for months and months except in a flower or the dawn sky. You will laugh, but it was the colors I stared at, not the women. Some of the men were well dressed, too, and it was pleasant to see men clean, in handsome clothing, talking and laughing aloud. It was familiar.

“Come here, lad,” said Barna in his deep, grand voice. “Gav, is it? Are you from Casicar, Gav, or Asion?”

Now, in Brigin’s camp you never asked a man where he was from. Among runaway slaves, deserters, and wanted thieves, the question wasn’t well received. Chamry was the only one of us who often talked freely about where he’d run from, and that was because he was so far away from it. Not long ago we’d heard of raids into the forest, slave takers looking for runaways. For all of us it was better to have no past at all, which just suited me. I was so taken aback by Barna’s question that I answered it stiffly and uneasily, sounding even to myself as if I were lying. “I’m from Etra.”

“Etra, is it? Well, I know a city man when I see one. I was born in Asion myself, a slave son of slaves. As you see, I’ve brought the city into the forest. What’s the good of freedom if you’re poor, hungry, dirty, and cold? That’s no freedom worth having! If a man wants to live by the bow or by the work of his hands, let him take his choice, but here in our realm no man will live in slavery or in want. That’s the beginning and the end of the Law of Barna. Right?” he asked the people around him, laughing, and they shouted back, “Right!”

The energy and goodwill of the man, his pure enjoyment in being, were irresistible. He embraced us all in his warmth and strength. He was keen, too; his clear eyes saw quick and deep. He looked at me and said, “You were a house slave, and pretty well treated, right? So was I. What were you trained to do in the great house for your masters?”

“I was educated to teach the children of the house.” I spoke slowly. It was like reading a story in my mind. I was talking about somebody else.

Barna leaned forward, intensely interested. “Educated!” he said. “Writing, reading—all such?”

“Yes.”

“Chamry said you were a singer?”

“A speaker,” I said.

“A speaker. What do you speak?”

“Anything I’ve read,” I said, not as a boast, but because it was true.

“What have you read?”

“The historians, the philosophers, the poets.”

“A learned man. By the Deaf One! A learned man! A scholar! Lord Luck has sent me the man I wanted, the man I lacked!” Barna stared at me with amazed delight, then got up from his huge chair, came to me, and took me into a bear hug. My face was mashed into his curling beard. He squeezed the breath out of me, then held me out at arm’s length.

“You will live here,” he said. “Right? Give him a room, Diero! And tonight, will you speak for us tonight? Will you say us a piece of your learning, Gav-dí the Scholar? Eh?”

I said I would.

“There’s no books for you here,” he said almost anxiously, still holding me by the shoulders. “Everything else a man might need we have, but books—books aren’t what most of my men would bring here with them, they’re ignorant letterless louts, and books are very heavy matters—” He laughed, throwing back his head. “Ah, but now, from now on, we’ll remedy that. We’ll see to it. Tonight, then!”

He let me go. A woman in delicate black and violet robes took me by the hand and led me off. I thought her old, over forty surely, and she had a grave face, and did not smile; but her manner and her voice were gentle, and her dress beautiful, and it was amazing how differently she moved, and walked, and spoke, from how men did. She took me to a loft room, apologising for its being upstairs and small. I stammered something about staying with my mates in the barrack. She said, “You can live there, of course, if you wish, but Barna hopes you will honor his house.” I was unable to disappoint this elegant, fragile person. It seemed everybody was taking my learning very much on trust, but I couldn’t say that.

She left me in the little loft room. It had a small, square window, a bed with a mattress and bedding, a table and chair, an oil lamp. It looked like heaven to me. I did go back to the barrack, but Chamry and Venne had both gone out. I told a man who was lounging on his bunk there to tell them that I’d be staying at Barna’s house. He looked at me at first disbelieving, then with a knowing smirk.

“Living high, eh?” he said.

I put what little gear I had with Chamry’s, for I wouldn’t need fish hooks or my filthy old blanket; but I wore my sheathed knife on my belt, having seen that most men here did. I went back to Barna’s house. I could look at it better now that I was not so overawed. Its facade on the central square was wide and high, with mighty beams and deep gables; it was built of wood, and there was no glass in the small-paned windows, but it was an impressive house.

I sat on the bed in my room—my own room!—and let bewildered excitement flood through me. I was very nervous about reciting to this genial, willful, unpredictable giant and his crowd of people. I felt I must prove myself at once and beyond doubt to be the scholar he wanted me to be. That was a strange thing to be called on to do. Coming out of the silence I’d lived in so long, the silence of the forest, the mute forgetfulness…But I had recited all Sentas to my companions in the silence, hadn’t I? I had called on it, and it came to me. It was mine, it was in me. I remembered all I had learned in the schoolroom with—

I came too near the wall. My mind went numb. Blank, empty.

I lay back and dozed, I think, till the light was growing reddish in the small, deep-framed window. I got up and combed my hair as well as I could with my fingers and tied it back again with an end of fishing line, for it hadn’t been cut for a year. That was all I could do to make myself elegant. I went down the stairs and to the great hall, where thirty or forty people were gathered, chattering like a flock of starlings.

I was made welcome, and the grave, sweet-mannered woman in black and violet, Diero, gave me a cup of wine, which I drank thirstily. It made my head spin. I didn’t have the courage to keep her from refilling the cup, but I did have the wits not to drink any more. I looked at the cup, thin silver chased with a pattern of olive leaves, as beautiful as anything in…as anything I had seen. I wondered if there were silversmiths in the Heart of the Forest, and where the silver came from. Then Barna loomed over me, his grand voice rumbling. He put his arm round my shoulders. He took me in front of the people, called for silence, told his guests he had a treat for them, and nodded at me with a smile.

I wished I had a lyre, as strolling tellers did, to set the tone and mood of their recitation. I had to start off into silence, which is hard. But I had been trained well. Stand straight, Gavir, keep your hands still, bring your voice up from your belly, out from your chest…

I spoke them the old poem The Sea-Farers of Asion. It had come into my head tonight because Barna said he was from that city. And I hoped it might suit the company I was in. It is the tale of a ship carrying treasure up the coast from Ansul to Asion. The ship is boarded by pirates, who kill the officers and order the slaves at the oars to row to Sova Island, the pirates’ haven. The oarsmen obey, but in the night they plot an uprising, unfasten their chains, and kill the pirates. Then they row the ship with all its treasure on to the port of Asion, where the Lords of the City welcome them as heroes and reward them with a share of the treasure and their freedom. The poem has a swing to it like the sea waves, and I saw my audience in their fine clothes following the story with open eyes and mouths, just like my ragged brothers in the smoky hut. I was borne up on the words and on their attention. We were all there in the ship in the great grey sea.

So it ended, and after the little silence that comes then, Barna rose up with a roar—“Set them free! By Sampa the Maker and Destroyer, they set them free! Now there’s a tale I like!” He gave me one of his bear hugs and held me off by the shoulders as his way was, saying, “Though I doubt that it’s a true history. Gratitude to a lot of galley slaves? Not likely! Here, I’ll tell you a better ending for it, Scholar: They never sailed back to Asion at all, but sailed south, far south, back to Ansul where the money came from, and there they shared it out and lived on it the rest of their lives, free men and rich!—How’s that?—But it’s good poetry, grand poetry well spoken!” He clapped me on the back and took me around introducing me to the others, men and women, who praised me and spoke kindly. I drank off my wine and my head went round again. It was very pleasant, but at last I was glad to get away, go up to my loft in amazement at all that had happened this long day, fall onto my soft bed, and sleep.

So began my life in the Heart of the Forest and my acquaintance with its founder and presiding spirit. All I could think was that Luck was with me still, and since I didn’t know what to ask him for, he’d given me what I needed.

Barna’s welcome to me hadn’t been just jovial bluster; there was a bit of that in most of what he said and did, but under it was a driving purpose. He had wanted men of learning in his city of the free, and had none.

He took me into his confidence very quickly. Like me, he’d grown up a slave in a great house where the masters and some of the slaves were educated and there were books to be read. More than that, scholars who came to Asion visited and talked with the learned men of the house; poets stayed there, and the philosopher Denneter lived there for a year. All this had fascinated and impressed the boy, and he in turn had impressed his masters and the visitors with his quickness at learning, especially philosophy. Denneter made much of him, wanted to make a disciple of him; he was to be Denneter’s student and go traveling with him through the world.

But when he was fifteen, the slaves in the great civic barracks of Asion rebelled. They broke into the armory of the city guard, used the armory as a fortress, and killed the guards and others who tried to assault them. They declared themselves free men, demanded that the city recognise them as such, and called on all slaves to join them. Many house slaves did, and for several days Asion was in a state of panic and confusion. A regiment of Asion’s army was sent into the city, the armory was besieged and taken, and the rebels slaughtered. Almost all male slaves were suspect after that. Many were branded to mark them indelibly as unfree. Barna, a boy of fifteen, had escaped branding, but there was no more talk of philosophy and travel. He was drafted to refill the civic barracks, sent to hard labor.

“And so all my education stopped then and there. Not a book have I held in my hands since that day. But I had those few years of learning, and hearing truly wise men talk, and knowing that there’s a life of the mind that’s far above anything else in the world. And so I knew what was missing here. I could make my city of free men, but what’s the good of freedom to the ignorant? What’s freedom itself but the power of the mind to learn what it needs and think what it likes? Ah, even if your body’s chained, if you have the thoughts of the philosophers and the words of the poets in your head, you can be free of your chains, and walk among the great!”

His praise of learning moved me deeply. I had been living among people so poor that knowledge of anything much beyond their poverty had no meaning to them, and so they judged it useless. I had accepted their judgment, because I had accepted their poverty. There had been a long time when I’d never thought of the words of the makers; and when they came back to me, at Brigin’s camp, it seemed a miraculous gift that had nothing to do with my will or intention. Having been so poor, so ignorant myself, I had no heart to say that ignorance cannot judge knowledge.

But here was a man who had proved his intelligence, energy, and courage, raising himself out of poverty and slavery to a kind of kingship, and bringing a whole people with him into independence; and he set knowledge, learning, and poetry above even such achievements. I was ashamed of my weakness, and rejoiced in his strength.

Admiring Barna more as I came to know him, I wanted to be of use to him. But for the time being it seemed all he wanted of me was to be a kind of disciple, going about the city with him and listening to his thoughts—which I was happy to do—and then, in the evening, to recite whatever poetry or tales I wished to his guests and household. I suggested teaching some of his companions to read, but there were no books, he said, to teach from, and though I offered to, he wouldn’t let me waste my time writing out copybooks. Books would be looked for and brought here, he said, and men of education would be found to assist me, and then we’d have a regular school, where all could learn who wanted.

Meanwhile some of Barna’s people coaxed me to teach them, young women who lived in his house seeking a new entertainment; and with his permission I held a little class in writing and reading for a few of them. Barna laughed at me and the girls. “Don’t let ’em fool you, Scholar. They’re not after literature! They just want to sit next to a bit of pretty boy-flesh.” He and his men companions teased the girls about turning into bookworms, and they soon gave it up. Diero was the only one who came more than a few times.

Diero was a beautiful woman, gracious and gentle. She had been trained from girlhood as a “butterfly woman.” The “butterflies” of Asion—an ancient city famous for its ceremony, its luxury, and its women—were schooled in a science of pleasure far more refined and elaborate than anything known in the City States.

But, as Diero herself told me, reading wasn’t one of the arts taught to the “butterflies.” She listened with yearning intensity to the poetry I spoke, and had a great, timid curiosity about it. I encouraged her to let me teach her to write her letters and spell out words. She was humble, self-distrustful, but quick to learn, and her pleasure in learning was a pleasure to me. Barna looked on our lessons with genial amusement.

His older companions, all of whom had been with him for years, were very much his men. They had brought from their years of slavery a habit of accepting orders and not competing to lead, which made them easy company. They treated me as a boy, not a rival to them, telling me what I needed to know and occasionally giving me a warning. Barna would give you the coat off his back, they told me, but if he thinks you’re poaching his girls, look out! They told me Diero had come with Barna from Asion when he first broke free and had been his mistress for many years. She wasn’t that now, but she was the woman of Barna’s House, and a man who didn’t treat Diero with affectionate respect wouldn’t be welcome there.

Barna explained to me one day as we sat up on the watchtower of the Heart of the Forest that men and women should be free to love one another with no hypocritical bonds of promised faithfulness to chain them together. That sounded good to me. All I knew of marriage was that it was for the masters, not for my kind, so I’d thought little about it one way or the other. But Barna thought about such things, and came to conclusions, and had them enacted in the Heart of the Forest. He had ideas about children, too, that they should be entirely free, never punished, allowed to run about as they pleased and find out for themselves what best suited them to do. This seemed admirable to me. All his ideas did.

I was a good listener, sometimes putting a question, but mostly content to follow the endless inventions and generous vistas of his mind. As he said, he thought best out loud. He soon claimed me as a necessity to him: “Where’s Gav-dí? Where’s the Scholar? I need to think!”

I lived at Barna’s house, but I went to see Chamry often. He had joined the cobblers’ guild, where he lived snug and complained of nothing but the scarcity of women and roast mutton. “They’ve got to send the tithing boys out for roasting mutton!” he said.

Venne had soon found that as a hunter he’d have to spend most of his time away off in the woods just as he’d done for Brigin, since all the game near the Heart of the Forest had long since been hunted out. Hunting was not what fed the town these days. One of the groups of “tithing boys” asked him to come with them as a guard when they found what a good shot he was with the short bow, and he joined them. He first went out on the road with them about a month after we came to the Heart of the Forest.

The tithers or raiders went out from our wooden city to meet drovers and wagons on the roads outside the forest. Their goal was to bring back flocks and herds, loaded wagons, drivers and horses, thus increasing our stock of food, vehicles, animals, and men—if the men were willing to join the Brotherhood. If they weren’t, Barna told me, they were left blindfolded with their hands tied, to wander in hope the next passerby would untie them. He laughed his mighty laugh when he told me that some of the drivers had been robbed so often by the Forest Brothers that they meekly stuck their hands out to be tied.

There were also the “netmen” who went singly or in pairs into Asion itself, sometimes to bargain in the market for things we needed, but sometimes as thieves to steal from the houses of the rich and the coffers of wealthy shrines. No money was used among us, but the Brotherhood wanted cash to buy things the raiders could not steal—including the goodwill of towns near the forest, and the silence of colluding merchants in the cities. Barna liked to boast that he sat on a fortune that the great merchants of Asion might envy. Where the gold and silver was kept I never knew. Bronze and copper coins were to be had for the asking by anyone going into a town to buy goods.

Barna and his assistants knew who left the Heart of the Forest. Not many did, and only tried and trusted men. As Barna put it, one fool blabbing in an alehouse might bring the army of Asion down on us. The narrow, intricate woodland paths that led to and from the gate were closely guarded and often changed and obliterated, so that the tracks of wagons or herds of cattle couldn’t easily lead anyone to the wooden city. I remembered the sentries we had met, the challenge and the loaded crossbow. We all knew that if a trail guard saw anyone going away from the gate without permission, he was not to challenge, but to shoot.

They asked Venne to be a trail guard, but he didn’t like the idea of having to shoot a man in the back. Raiding wagon trains or rustling cattle suited him better, and being a raider gave a man great prestige among the Brothers. Barna himself said the raiders and the “justicers” who policed the town were the most valuable members of the community. And every man in the Heart of the Forest should follow his own heart in choosing what he did. So Venne went off cheerily with a band of young men, promising Chamry he’d come back with “a flock of sheep, or failing that, a batch of women.”

In fact there weren’t many women in the Heart of the Forest, and every one of them was jealously guarded by a man or group of men. Those you saw in the streets and gardens seemed all to be pregnant or dragging a gaggle of infants with them, or else they were mere bowed backs sweeping, spinning, digging, milking, like old women slaves anywhere. There were more young women in Barna’s house than anywhere else, the prettiest girls in the town, and the merriest. They dressed in fine clothes the raiders brought in. If they could sing or dance or play the lyre, that was welcome, but they weren’t expected to do any work. They were, Barna said, “to be all a woman should be—free, and beautiful, and kind.”

He loved to have them about him, and they all flirted and flattered and teased him assiduously. He joked and played with them, but his serious talk was always with men.

As time went on, and he kept me his almost constant companion, I felt the honor and the burden of his trust. I tried to be worthy of it. I continued to recite in the evening in his great hall for all who wanted to hear; and because of that and because Barna had me with him so often, most people treated me with respect, though it was often begrudged or puzzled or patronising, since I was after all still a boy. And some of them saw me, I know, as a kind of learned halfwit. They sensed that there was something lacking in me, that for all the endless words at my command, my knowledge of the world was slight and shallow, like a child’s.

I knew that too, but I could not think about it or why it should be so. I turned away from such thoughts, and went about with Barna, following him, needing him. His great fullness of being filled my emptiness.

I wasn’t the only one who felt that. Barna was the heart of the Heart of the Forest. His vision, his decision, was always the point of reference for the others, his will was their fulcrum. He didn’t maintain this mastery by intimidation but through the superiority of his energy and intelligence and the tremendous generosity of his nature: he was simply there before the others, seeing what must be done and how to do it, drawing them to act with him through his passion, activity, and goodwill. He loved people, loved to be among them, with them, he believed in brotherhood with all his heart and soul.

I knew his dreams by now, for he told them to me as we went about the city, he directing, encouraging, and participating in work, I as his listening shadow.

I couldn’t always share his love for the Forest Brothers, and wondered how he could keep any patience at all with some of them. Lodging, food, all the necessities of life were shared as fairly as possible, but it had to be rough justice, and one room will always be bigger than another, one serving of pie will have more raisins than another. The first response of many of the men to any perceived inequity was to accuse another man of hogging, and fight their grudge out with fists or knives. Most of them had been farm or hard-labor slaves, brutalised from childhood, used to getting what little they got by grabbing for it and fighting to keep it. Barna had lived that life too and understood them. He kept the rules very simple and very strict, and his justicers enforced them implacably. But still there were murders now and then, and brawls every night. Our few healers, bonesetters, and tooth pullers worked hard. The ale made by our brewery was kept weak at Barna’s orders, but men could get drunk on it if they had a weak head or drank all night. And when they weren’t drunk and quarreling they were complaining of unfairness, injustice, or the work they were allotted; they wanted less of it, or to do a different kind of work, or to work with one group of mates not another, and so on endlessly. All these complaints ended up with Barna.

“Men have to learn how to be free,” he said to me. “Being a slave is easy. To be a free man you have to use your head, you have to give here and take there, you have to give your orders to yourself. They’ll learn, Gav, they’ll learn!” But even his large good nature was exasperated by the demands on him to settle petty jealousies, and he could be angered by the backbiting and rivalry of the men closest to him, his justicers and the men of his household—our government, in fact, though they had no titles.

He had no title himself, he was simply Barna.

He chose his men, and they chose others to assist them, always with his approval. Election by popular vote was an idea which he knew little about. I was able to tell him that some of the City States had at one time or another been republics or even democracies, although of course only freeborn men of property had the vote. I remembered what I had read of the state and city of Ansul, far to the south, which was governed by officials elected by the entire people, and had no slavery, until they were themselves enslaved by a warlike people from the eastern deserts. And the great country of Urdile, north of Bendile, did not permit any form of bondage; like Ansul, they considered both men and women to be citizens; and every citizen had the vote, electing governing consuls for two years and senators for six. I could tell Barna of these different polities, and he listened with interest, and added elements from them to his plans for the ultimate government of the Free State in the forest.

Such plans were his favorite topic when he was in his good mood. When the bickering and brawling and backbiting and the innumerable, interminable details of provisioning and guard duty and building and everything else that he took responsibility for wore him out and put him in a darker mood, he talked of revolution—the Uprising.

“In Asion there are three slaves, or four, for every free man. All over Bendile, the men who work the farms are slaves. If they could see who they are—that nothing can be done without them! If they could see how many they are! If they could realise their strength, and hold together! The Armory Rebellion, back twenty-five years ago, was just an outburst. No plan, no real leaders. Weapons, but no decisions. Nowhere to go. They couldn’t hold together. What I’m planning here is going to be entirely different. There are two essential elements. First, weapons—the weapons we’re stockpiling here, now. We’ll be met with violence, and we must be able to meet it with insuperable strength.—And then, union. We must act as one. The Uprising must happen everywhere at once. In the city, in the countryside, the towns and villages, the farms. A network of men, in touch with one another, ready, informed, with weapons at hand, each knowing when and how to act—so that when the first torch is lighted the whole country will go up in flames. The fire of freedom! What’s that song of yours? ‘Be our fire…Liberty!’”

His talk of the Uprising disturbed and fascinated me. Without really understanding what was at stake, I liked to hear him make his plans, and would ask him for details. He’d catch fire then and talk with great passion. He said, “You bring me back to my heart, Gav. Trying to keep things running here has been eating me up. I’ve been looking only at what’s to be done next and forgetting why we’re doing it. I came here to build a stronghold where men and arms could be gathered, a center from which men would go back, a network of men in the northern City States and Bendile, working to get all the slaves in Asion with us, and in Casicar, and the countryside. To get them ready for the Uprising, so that when it comes there’ll be nowhere for the masters to fall back to. They’ll bring out their armies, but who will the armies attack—with the masters held hostage in their own houses and farms, and the city itself in the hands of slaves? In every house in the city, the masters will be penned up in the barrack, the way they penned us in when there was threat of war, right?—but now it’s the masters locked up while the slaves run the household, as of course they always did, and keep the markets going, and govern the city. In the towns and the countryside, the same thing, the masters locked up tight, the slaves taking over, doing the work they always did, the only difference is they give the orders…So the army comes to attack, but if they attack, the first to die will be the hostages, the masters, squealing for mercy, Don’t let them slaughter us! Don’t attack, don’t attack! The general thinks, ah, they’re nothing but slaves with pitchforks and kitchen knives, they’ll run as soon as we move in, and he sends in a troop to take the farm. They’re cut to pieces by slaves armed with swords and crossbows, fighting from ambush, trained men fighting on their own ground. They take no prisoners. And they bring out one of the squealing masters, the Father maybe, where the soldiers can see, and say: You attacked: he dies, and slice off his head. Attack again, more of them die. And this will be going on all over the country—every farm, village, town, and Asion itself—the great Uprising! And it won’t end until the masters buy their liberty with every penny they have, and everything they own. Then they can come outside and learn out how the common folk live.”

He threw his head back and laughed, merrier than I’d seen him in days. “Oh, you do me good, Gav!” he said.

The picture he drew was fantastic yet terribly vivid, compelling my belief. “But how will you reach the farm slaves, the city house slaves?” I asked, trying to sound practical, knowledgeable.

“That’s the strategy: exactly. To reach into the houses, into the barracks and the slave villages, send men to talk to them—catch them in our net! Show them what they can do and how to do it. Let them ask questions. Get them to figure it out for themselves, make their own plans—so long as they know they must wait for our signal. It’ll take time to do that, to spread the net, set up the plan all through the city and the countryside. And yet it can’t be too slow in building, because if it goes on too long, word will leak out, fools will begin to blab, and the masters will get jumpy—What’s all this talk in the barrack? What are they whispering in the kitchen? What’s that blacksmith making there?—And then the great advantage of surprise is lost. Timing is everything.”

It was only a tale to me, his Uprising. In his mind it was to take place in the future, a great revenge, a rectification of the past. But in my mind there was no past.

I had nothing left but words—the poems that sang themselves in my head, the stories and histories I could bring before my mind’s eye and read. I did not look up from the words to what had been around them. When I looked away from them I was back in the vivid intensity of the moment, now, here, with nothing behind it, no shadows, no memories. The words came when I needed them. They came to me from nowhere. My name was a word. Etra was a word. That was all; they had no meaning, no history. Liberty was a word in a poem. A beautiful word, and beauty was all the meaning it had.

Always sketching out his plans and dreams of the future, Barna never asked me about my past. Instead, one day, he told me about it. He’d been talking about the Uprising, and perhaps I’d answered without much enthusiasm, for my own sense of emptiness sometimes made it hard for me to respond convincingly. He was quick to see such moods.

“You did the right thing, you know, Gav,” he said, looking at me with his clear eyes. “I know what you’re thinking about. Back there in the city…You think, ‘What a fool I was! To run off and starve, to live in a forest with ignorant men, to slave harder than I ever did in my masters’ house! Is that freedom? Wasn’t I freer there, talking with learned men, reading the books of the poets, sleeping soft and waking warm? Wasn’t I happier there?’—But you weren’t. You weren’t happy, Gav. You knew it in your heart, and that’s why you ran off. The hand of the master was always on you.”

He sighed and looked into the fire for a little; it was autumn, a chill in the air. I listened to him as I listened to him tell all his tales, without argument or question.

“I know how it was, Gav. You were a slave in a great house, a rich house, in the city, with kind masters who had you educated. Oh, I know that! And you thought you should be happy, because you had the power to learn, read, teach—become a wise man, a learned man. They let you have that. They allowed it to you. Oh yes! But though you were given the power to do certain things, you had no power over anyone or anything. That was theirs. The masters. Your owners. And whether you knew it or not, in every bone of your body and fiber of your mind you felt that hand of the master holding you, controlling you, pressing down on you. Any power you had, on those terms, was worthless. Because it was nothing but their power acting through you. Using you…They let you pretend it was yours. You filched a bit of freedom, a scrap of liberty, from your masters, and pretended it was yours and was enough to keep you happy. Right? But you were growing into a man. And for a man, Gav, there is no happiness but in his own freedom. His freedom to do what he wills to do. And so your will sought its full liberty. As mine did, long ago.”

He reached out and clapped me on the knee. “Don’t look so sad,” he said, his white grin flashing in his curly beard. “You know you did the right thing! Be glad of it, as I am!”

I tried to tell him that I was glad of it.

He had to go see about affairs, and left me musing by the fire. What he said was true. It was the truth.

But not my truth.

Turning away from his tale, I looked back for the first time in—how long? I looked across the wall I’d built to keep me from remembering. I looked and saw the truth: I had been a slave in a great house, a rich house, in the city, obedient to my masters, owning no freedom but what they allowed me. And I had been happy.

In the house of my slavery I had known a love so dear to me that I could not bear to think about it, because when I lost it, I lost everything.

All my life had been built on trust, and that trust had been betrayed by the Family of Arcamand.

Arcamand: with the name, with the word, everything I had forgotten, had refused to remember, came back and was mine again, and with it all the unspeakable pain I had denied.

I sat there by the fire, turned away from the room, bent over, my hands clenched on my knees. Someone came near and stood near me at the hearth to warm herself: Diero, a gentle presence in a long shawl of fine pale wool.

“Gav,” she said very quietly, “what is it?”

I tried to answer her and broke into a sob. I hid my face in my arms and wept aloud.

Diero sat down beside me on the stone hearth seat. She put her arms around me and held me while I cried.

“Tell me, tell me,” she said at last.

“My sister. She was my sister,” I said.

And that word brought the sobbing again, so hard I could not take breath.

She held me and rocked me a while, until I could lift my head and wipe my nose and face. Then she said again, “Tell me.”

“She was always there,” I said.

And so one way and another, weeping, in broken sentences and out of order, I told her about Sallo, about our life, about her death.

The wall of forgetting was down. I was able to think, to speak, to remember. I was free. Freedom was unspeakable anguish.

In that first terrible hour I came back again and again to Sallo’s death, to how she died, why she died—all the questions I had refused to ask.

“The Mother knew—she had to know about it,” I said. “Maybe Torm took Sallo and Ris out of the silk rooms without asking, without permission, it sounds as if that’s what he did. But the other women there would know it—they’d go to the Mother and tell her—Torm-dí took Ris and Sallo off, Mother—they didn’t want to go, they were crying—Did you tell him he could take them? Will you send after them?—And she didn’t. She did nothing! Maybe the Father said not to interfere. He always favored Torm. Sallo said that, she said he hated Yaven and favored Torm. But the Mother—she knew—she knew where Torm and Hoby were taking them, to that place, those men, men who used girls like animals, who—She knew that. Ris was a virgin. And the Mother had given Sallo to Yaven herself. And yet she let the other son take her and give her to—How did they kill her? Did she try to fight them? She couldn’t have. All those men. They raped her, they tortured her, that’s what they wanted girls for, to hear them scream—to torture and kill them, drown them—When Sallo was dead. After I saw her. I saw her dead. The Mother sent for me. She called her ‘our sweet Sallo.’ She gave me—she gave me money—for my sister—”

A sound came out of my throat then, not a sob but a hoarse howl. Diero held me close. She said nothing.

I was silent at last. I was mortally tired.

“They betrayed our trust,” I said.

I felt Diero nod. She sat beside me, her hand on mine.

“That’s what it is,” she said, almost inaudibly. “Do you keep the trust, or not. To Barna it’s all power. But it’s not. It’s trust.”

“They had the power to betray it,” I said bitterly.

“Even slaves have that power,” she said in her gentle voice.