♦ 15 ♦

The town passed out of view behind us around the bend of the river. We drifted easily downstream in the hot sunlight. As we stood at the rail of the barge I told Melle that I’d seen a man I knew, who might know me.

“From Barna’s house?” she asked, still whispering.

I shook my head. “From longer ago. When I was a slave in the city.”

“Is he bad?” she asked, and I said, “Yes.”

I didn’t think he’d seen me, but that was small reassurance; he had only to ask people on the dock, or the host of the Black Cat, if they’d seen a young man, dark skin, big nose, looks like a Marshman.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “We’re on the boat, he’s on foot.”

But that wasn’t very reassuring, either. The barge went at the pace of the river, steered with a long sweep and rudder at the stern. It put into every town and village on the riverbank, taking on and putting off cargo and passengers. On its upriver journey it would be pulled by horses on the towpath by the river and would go even slower, the master told me. That was hard to believe. The Ambare, taking its course through great level plains, didn’t exactly run; it wandered and meandered, it moseyed along, in places it oozed. Drovers used the towpath to move their cattle; sometimes we’d slowly come up to a herd of brown and brindle cows clopping along at a cow’s pace, headed downstream like us, and it would take us a long, long time to draw ahead of them.

The days on the water were sweet and dull and calm, but every time we drew into the wharf of a village my fear rose up again and I scanned every face on shore. Over and over I debated with myself whether it would be wiser to debark at some town on the eastern bank and make our way afoot to the Sensaly, avoiding all towns and villages. But though Melle was by now in much better shape than she’d been when I found her, she still couldn’t walk far or fast. It seemed best to float, at least until we were within a day’s journey of the Sensaly. The end of the barge journey, at the rivermeet, was a town called Bemette, and that town I resolved at all costs to avoid. There was a ferry across the Sensaly there, the barge master told me. A ferry was what we needed, but that’s where Hoby would be waiting for us. I only hoped he would not be waiting for us sooner than that. On horseback or by wagon or even walking hard, he could certainly outpace the barge and arrive before we did at any of the villages on the western bank.

Pedri the barge master paid us little heed and didn’t want his assistant to waste time talking to us. We were cargo, along with the boxes and bales and chickens and also, between village and village, the goats and grandmothers, and once a young colt who tried, the whole time he was on the barge, to commit suicide by drowning. Pedri and his assistant slept in the houseboat, taking watch and watch while the barge was afloat. We made our own meals, buying food at villages where we stopped. Melle made friends with the chickens, who were being sent all the way to Bemette; they were some kind of prize breeding stock with fancy tails and feathered legs, all hens. They were perfectly tame, and I bought Melle a bag of birdseed to entertain them with. She named them all, and would sit with them for hours. Sitting with her, I found their mild, continual conversation soothing. Only when a hawk circled up in the sky over the river, all the busy little cluckings and talkings stopped, and they huddled under their perches, hiding in their ruffled feathers, silent. “Don’t worry, Reddy,” Melle would soothe them. “It’s all right, Little Pet. Don’t worry, Snappy. It can’t get you. I won’t let it.”

Don’t worry, Beaky.

I read in my book. I said old poems to Melle, and she learned to recite The Bridge on the Nisas. We went on with the Chamhan.

“I wish I was really your brother, Gav,” she murmured to me one night on the dark river under the stars. I murmured back, “You really are my sister.”

We put ashore at a wharf on the eastern bank. Pedri and his hand were busy at once unloading hay bales. There was no town as such, but a kind of warehouse-barn and a couple of old cowboys guarding it. “How far is it to Bemette from here?” I asked one of them, and he said, “Two, three hours on a good horse.”

I went back aboard and told Melle to gather up her things. My pack was always ready, filled with all the food I could carry. I’d paid the fare before we started. We slipped ashore, and as I passed Pedri I said, “We’ll walk from here, our farm’s just back that way,” pointing southeast. He grunted and went on shifting bales. We walked away from the Ambare the way I’d pointed till we were out of sight, then turned left to bear northeast, towards the Sensaly. The country was very flat, mostly tall grass, with a few groves of trees. Melle walked along beside me stoutly. As she walked she muttered a soft litany, “Goodbye Snappy, goodbye Rosy, goodbye Gold-eye, goodbye Little Pet…”

We walked on no path. The country did not change and there were no landmarks, except, very far off northward, a blue line that might be clouds or might be hills across the river. I had nothing but the sun to tell me the direction to go. It came on to evening. We stopped at a grove of trees to eat supper, then rolled up in our blankets and slept there. We had seen no sign of anyone following us, but I was certain that Hoby was on our track, that he might even be waiting for us. The dread of seeing him never left me, and filled my restless sleep. I was awake long before dawn. We set off in the twilight of morning, still heading, as well as I could steer us, northeast. The sun came up red and huge over the plains.

The ground began to get boggy, and there were low places of marsh and reed. About midday we saw the Sensaly.

It was wide—a big river. Not deep, I thought, for there were shoals and gravel bars out in midstream, and more than one channel; but from the shore you can’t tell where the current quickens and has dug deep places in such a stream.

“We’ll go east along the river,” I said to Melle and to myself. “We’ll come to a ford. Or a ferry. Mesun is still a long way upriver from here, so we’re going the right direction for sure, and when we can get across, we will.”

“All right,” Melle said. “What’s the river’s name?”

“Sensaly.”

“I’m glad rivers have names. Like people.” She made a song of the name and I heard the thin little chant as we walked, Sen-sally, sen-sallee…Going was hard in the willow thickets above the shore, and so we soon went down to walk on the river beach, wide floodplains of mud, gravel, and sand.

We could be seen more easily there; but if he was on our track there was no way to hide. This was an open, desolate country. There were no signs of humankind. We saw only deer and a few wild cattle.

When we stopped for Melle to rest I tried fishing, but had little luck, a few small perch. The river was very clear, and as far as I waded out in it, the current was not strong. I saw a couple of places I thought might be fordable, but there were tricky-looking bits on the far side; we went on.

We walked so for three days. We had food for about two more and after that must live by fishing. It was evening, and Melle was tired. I was too. The sense of being pursued wore me down, and I had little sleep, waking again and again all night. I left her sitting on a sandy bit under a willow and went up the rise of the bank, scouting as always for a ford. I saw faint tracks coming down across the beach, ahead of us; indeed there looked to be a ford there in the wide, shoal-broken river.

I looked back, and saw a single horseman coming along beside the water.

I ran down to Melle and said, “Come,” picking up my pack. She was frightened and bewildered, but took up her little blanket pack at once. I caught her hand and brought her along as fast as she could go to the track I had seen. Horses and wagons had crossed the river here. I led Melle into the water, saying to her, “When it gets deep I’ll carry you.”

The way to go was plain at first, the clear water showing me the shallows between shoals. Out in the middle of the water I looked back once. The horseman had seen us. He was just riding into the river, the water splashing up about his horse’s legs. It was Hoby. I saw his face, round, hard, and heavy, Torm’s face, the Father’s, the face of the slave owner and the slave. He was scowling, urging on his horse, shouting at me, words I could not hear.

I saw all that in a glance and waded on, crosscurrent, pulling the child with me as best I could. When I saw she was getting out of her depth I said, “Climb up on my shoulders, Melle. Don’t hold me by the throat, but hold tight.” She obeyed.

I knew where I was then. I had been in this river with this burden on my shoulders. I did not look around because I do not look around, I go forward, almost out of my depth, but still touching bottom, and there is the place that looks like the right way to go, straight up to the shore, but I don’t go that way, the sand gives way beneath my foot. I must go to the right, and farther still to the right. Then the current seizes me with sudden terrific power and I’m off my feet, trying to swim, and sinking, floundering, sinking—but I have foothold again, the child clinging to me hard, I can climb against that terrible current, fight my way up into the shallows, scramble gasping up among the willows whose roots are in the river, and from there, only from there, I can look back.

The horse was struggling out in the deep current, riderless.

I could see how all the force of the river gathered in that channel, just downstream from where we had found our way.

Melle slipped down from my back and pressed up tight against me, shuddering. I held her close, but I could not move. I crouched staring at the river, at the horse being carried far down the river, swimming desperately. Now it began to find footing. I watched it make its way, plunging and slipping, back to the other shore. I scanned the water, the islets, the gravel bars, upriver and down, again and again. Sand, gravel, shining water.

“Gav, Gav, Beaky,” the child was sobbing, “come on. Come on. We have to go on. We have to get away.” She tugged at my legs.

“I think maybe we have,” I tried to say, but I had no voice. I staggered after Melle for a few steps up into the willow grove, out of the water, onto dry land. There my legs gave way and I pitched down. I tried to tell Melle that I was all right, that it was all right, but I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t get air enough. I was in the water again, under the water. The water was clear and bright all round me, then clear and dark.

♦ ♦ ♦

WHEN I CAME to myself it was night, mild and overcast. The river ran black among its pale shoals and bars. The little damp hot bundle pressed against my side was Melle. I roused her, and we groped and crawled up through the thickets to a kind of hollow that seemed to offer shelter. I was too clumsy to make a fire. Everything in our packs was damp, but we took off our wet clothes, rubbed ourselves hard, and rolled up in our damp blankets. We huddled together again and fell asleep at once.

My fear was gone. I had crossed the second river. I slept long and deep.

We woke to sunlight. We spread out all our damp things to dry and ate damp stale bread there in the hollow among the willow thickets. Melle seemed to have taken no harm, but was silent and watchful. She said at last, “Don’t we have to run away any more?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. Before we ate, I had gone down to the shore and, concealed in the thickets, scanned the river and the shores for a long time. Reason told me I should fear, reason said that Hoby might well have swum across and be hiding near; but all the time unreason told me, You’re safe; he’s gone; the link is broken.

Melle was watching me, with a child’s trust.

“We’re in Urdile now,” I said, “where there are no slaves. And no slave takers. And…” But I didn’t know whether she’d even seen Hoby behind us in the river, and didn’t know how to speak of him. “And I think we’re free,” I said.

She pondered this for a while.

“Can I call you Gav again?”

“My whole name is Gavir Aytana Sidoy,” I said. “But I like Beaky.”

“Beaky and Squeaky,” Melle murmured, looking down, with her small, half-circle smile. “Can I go on being Miv?”

“It might be a good idea. If you want to.”

“Now are we going to see the great man in the city?”

“Yes,” I said. And so when our things had dried out we set off.

Our journey to Mesun was easy enough, as indeed all our journey had been, but wonderfully freed from the dread that had dogged and darkened my way between the rivers. I had no idea what I was going to do when I got to Mesun, how we were to live; but to ask too many questions seemed ungrateful to Lord Luck and Lady Ennu. They’d been with us so far, they wouldn’t leave us now. I sang Caspro’s hymn to them under my breath as we walked.

“You don’t sing quite as well as some people,” my companion remarked, with some diplomacy.

“I know I don’t. You sing, then.”

She lifted up a sweet, unsteady little voice in a love song she’d heard in Barna’s house. I thought of her beautiful sister, and wondered if Melle too would be beautiful. I found myself thinking, “Let her be spared that!” But surely that was a slave’s thought. I must learn to think with a free mind.

Urdile was a pleasant country of apple orchards and poplar-bordered roads, rising up slowly from the river to the blue hills I’d seen from far away. We walked, and sometimes got a lift on a cart, and bought food at village markets, or were offered milk by a farm woman who saw us pass and pitied the dusty child. I got scolded for dragging my little brother out to tramp the roads, but when my little brother clung to me and glared loyal defiance, the scolder would melt and offer us food or a hayloft to sleep in. So after five days, returning towards the river, which had curved away from our road, we came to the city of Mesun.

Built on steep hills right above the river, with roofs of slate and red tile, and towers, and several ornate bridges, Mesun was a city of stone, but it was not walled. That seemed strange to me. There were no gates, no guard towers, no guards. I saw no soldiers anywhere. We walked into a great city as into a village.

The houses towered up three and four stories over streets full of people, carts, wagons, horses. The din and commotion and crowding seemed tremendous to us. Melle was holding my hand tightly, and I was glad of it. We passed a marketplace near the river that made Etra’s market seem a very small affair. I thought the best thing to do was find some modest inn where we could put down our packs and clean ourselves up a bit, for we were a frowzy, filthy pair by now. As we went on past the market, looking for inn signs, I saw two young men come swinging down a steep street, wearing long, light, grey-brown cloaks and velvet caps that squashed out over the ears. They were exactly like a picture in a book in Everra’s library: Two Scholars of the University of Mesun. They saw me staring at them, and one of them gave me a slight wink. I stepped forward and said, “Excuse me, would you tell us how to get to the University?”

“Right up the hill, friend,” the one who’d winked said. He looked at us curiously. I didn’t know what to ask him. I finally said, “Are there lodging houses up there?” and he nodded: “The Quail’s the cheapest.” His friend said, “No, the Barking Dog,” and the first one said, “All depends on your taste in insects: fleas at the Quail, bugs at the Dog.” And they went on down the street laughing.

We climbed up the way they had come down. Before long the cobblestone way became steps. I saw that we were climbing around a great wall of stones. Mesun had been a fortified city, long ago, and this was the wall of the citadel. Over the wall loomed palaces of silver-grey stone with steep-pitched roofs and tall windows. The steps brought us up at last onto a little curving street lined with smaller houses, and Melle whispered, “There they are.” They stood side by side, two inns, with their signs of the quail and the savagely barking dog. “Fleas or bedbugs?” I asked Melle, and she said, “Fleas.” So we took lodgings at the Quail.

We had a most welcome bath and gave what spare clothing we had to the sour-faced landlady to be cleaned. We were on the watch for fleas, but there seemed to be less than in most haylofts. After a scanty and not very good dinner, Melle was ready to go to bed. She had borne the journey well, but every day of it had taken her to about the limit of her small strength. The last couple of days she had had spells of tears and snappishness, like any tired child. I was pretty stretched myself, but I felt a nervous energy in me, here in the city, that would not let me rest. I asked Melle if she’d be worried if I went out for a while. She was lying holding her Ennu figure against her chest, her beloved poncho pulled up over the bedcover. “No,” she said, “I won’t worry, Beaky.” But she looked a little sad and tremulous.

I said, “Oh, maybe I won’t go.”

“Go on,” she said crossly. “Go away! I am just going to sleep!” And she shut her eyes, frowning, her mouth pulled tight.

“All right. I’ll be back before dark.”

She ignored me, squeezing her eyes shut. I went out.

As I came out into the street the same two young men were coming by, a bit out of breath from the climb up, and the one who’d winked saw me. “Chose the fleas, eh?” he said. He had a pleasant smile and was openly curious about me. I took this second meeting as an omen or sign which I should follow. I said, “You’re students of the University?”

He stopped and nodded; his companion stopped less willingly.

“I’d like to know how to become a student.”

“I thought that might be the case.”

“Can you tell me—at all—how I should—Whom I should ask—”

“Nobody sent you here? A teacher, a scholar you worked with?”

My heart sank. “No,” I said.

He cocked his head with its ridiculous but dashing velvet cap. “Come on to the Gross Tun and have a drink with us,” he said. “I’m Sampater Yille, this is Gola Mederra. He’s law, I’m letters.”

I said my name, and, “I was a slave in Etra.”

I had to say that before anything else, before they were shamed by finding they had offered their friendship to a slave.

“In Etra? Were you there in the siege?” said Sampater, and Gola said, “Come on, I’m thirsty!”

We drank beer at the Gross Tun, a crowded beer hall noisy with students, most of them about my age or a little older. Sampater and Gola were principally interested in putting away as much beer as possible as fast as possible and in talking to everybody else at the beer hall, but they introduced me to everyone, and everyone gave me advice about where to go and whom to see about taking classes in letters at the University. When it turned out I knew not one of the famous teachers they mentioned, Sampater asked, “There was nobody you came here wanting to study with, then, a name you knew?”

“Orrec Caspro.”

“Ha!” He stared at me, laughed, and raised his mug. “You’re a poet, then!”

“No, no. I only—” I didn’t know what I was. I didn’t know enough to know what I was, or wanted to do or be. I’d never felt so ignorant.

Sampater drained his mug and cried, “One more round, on me, and I’ll take you to his house.”

“No, I can’t—”

“Why not? He’s not a professor, you know, he keeps no state. You don’t have to approach him on your knees. We’ll go right there, it’s no distance.”

I managed to get out of it by insisting that I must be going back to my little brother. I paid for our beer, which endeared me to them both, and Sampater told me how to get to Caspro’s house, just up another street or two and around the corner. “Go see him, go see him tomorrow,” he said. “Or, listen, I’ll come by for you.” I assured him I’d go, and would use his name as a password, and so I got away from the Gross Tun and back to the Quail, with my head spinning.

Waking early, lying thinking as the daylight grew in the low room, I made up my mind. My vague plans of becoming a student at the University had dissolved. I didn’t have enough money, I didn’t have enough training, and I didn’t think I could become one of those lighthearted fellows at the Gross Tun. They were my age, but we’d reached our age by different roads.

What I wanted was work, to support myself and Melle. In a city this size, without slaves, there must be work to do. I knew the name of only one person in Mesun: so, to him I would go. If he couldn’t give me work, I’d find it elsewhere.

When Melle woke I told her we were going to buy some fine new city clothes. She liked that idea. The sour landlady told us how to get to the cloth market at the foot of the hill of the citadel, and there we found booths and booths of used clothing, where we could get decked out decently or even somewhat grandly.

I saw Melle looking with a kind of wistful awe at a robe of worn but beautiful patterned ivory silk. I said, “Squeaky, you don’t have to keep being Miv, you know.”

She hunched up with shyness. “It’s too big,” she murmured. In fact it was a robe for a grown woman. When we had admired it and left it behind she said to me, “It looked like Diero.” She was right.

We both ended up with the trousers, linen shirt, and dark vest or tunic that men and boys in Mesun wore. For Melle I found an elegant small velvet vest with buttons made of copper pennies. She kept looking down at her buttons as we climbed back up to the citadel. “Now I will never not have some money,” she said.

We ate bread with oil and olives at a street vendor’s stall, and then I said, “Now we’ll go and see the great man.” Melle was delighted. She flitted up the steep stone street ahead of me. As for me, I walked in a kind of dogged, blind, frightened resolution. I had stopped back by the inn for the small packet wrapped in reedcloth which I now carried.

Sampater’s directions had been good; we found what had to be the house, a tall, narrow one set right against the rock of the hill, the last house on the street. I knocked.

A young woman opened the door. Her skin was so pale her face seemed luminous. Melle and I both stared at her hair—I had never seen such hair in my life. It was like the finest gold wire, it was like a sheep’s fleece combed out, a glory of light about her head. “Oh!” Melle said, and I almost did too.

The young woman smiled a little. I imagine that we were rather funny, big boy and little boy, very clean, very stiff, standing staring round-eyed on the threshold. Her smile was kind, and it heartened me.

“I came to Mesun to see Orrec Caspro, if—if that is possible,” I said.

“I think it’s possible,” she said.“May I tell him who…”

“My name is Gavir Aytana Sidoy. This is my—brother—Miv—”

“I’m Melle,” Melle said. “I’m a girl.” She hunched up her shoulders and looked down, frowning fiercely, like a small falcon.

“Please come in,” the young woman said. “I’m Memer Galva. I’ll go ask if Orrec is free—”And she was off, quick and light, carrying her marvelous hair like a candle flame, a halo of sunlight.

We stood in a narrow entrance hall. There were several doorways to rooms on either side.

Melle put her hand in mine. “Is it all right if I’m not Miv?” she whispered.

“Of course. I’m glad you’re not Miv.”

She nodded. Then she said again, louder, “Oh!”

I looked where she was looking, a little farther down the hall. A lion was crossing the hall.

It paid no attention to us at all, but stood in a doorway lashing its tail and looked back impatiently over its shoulder. It was not a black marsh lion; it was the color of sand, and not very large. I said with no voice, “Ennu!”

“I’m coming,” a woman said, and she appeared, crossing the hallway, following the lion.

She saw us and stopped. “Oh dear,” she said. “Please don’t be afraid. She’s quite tame. I didn’t know anybody was here. Won’t you come on in to the hearth room?”

The lion turned around and sat down, still looking impatient. The woman put her hand on its head and said something to it, and it said, “Aoww,” in a complaining way.

I looked at Melle. She stood rigid, staring at the lion, whether with terror or fascination I couldn’t tell. The woman spoke to Melle: “Her name is Shetar, and she’s been with us ever since she was a kitten. Would you like to pet her? She likes being petted.” The woman’s voice was extraordinarily pleasant, low-pitched, almost hoarse, but with a lulling in it. And she spoke with the Uplands accent, like Chamry Bern.

Melle clutched my hand more strongly and nodded.

I came forward with her, tentatively. The woman smiled at us and said, “I’m Gry.”

“This is Melle. I’m Gavir.”

“Melle! That is a lovely name. Shetar, please greet Melle properly.”

The lion got up quite promptly, and facing us, made a deep bow—that is, she stretched out her forelegs the way cats do, with her chin on her paws. Then she stood up and looked meaningfully at Gry, who took something out of her pocket and popped it in the lion’s mouth. “Good lion,” she said.

Very soon Melle was petting the lion’s broad head and neck. Gry talked with her in an easy, reassuring way, answering her questions about Shetar. A halflion, she said it was. Half was quite enough, I thought.

Looking up at me, Gry asked, “Did you come to see Orrec?”

“Yes. The—the lady said to wait.”

And just then Memer Galva came back into the hall. “He says to come up to his study,” she said. “I’ll show you up if you like.”

Gry said, “Maybe Melle would like to stay with Shetar and us for a while.”

“Oh yes please,” Melle said, and looked at me to see if it was all right.

“Yes please,” I echoed. My heart was beating so hard I couldn’t think. I followed the pale flame of Memer’s hair up a narrow staircase and into a hall.

As she opened the door I knew where I was. I know it, I remember it. I have been here many times, the dark room, the book-littered table under a tall window, the lamp. I know the face that turns to me, alert, sorrowful, unguarded, I know his voice as he speaks my name—

I could not say anything. I stood like a block of stone. He gazed at me intently. “What is it?” he asked, low-voiced.

I managed to say I was sorry, and he got me to sit down, and clearing some books off another chair, sat down facing me. “So?”

I was clutching the packet. I unwrapped it, fumbling at the tightly sealed reedcloth, and held his book out to him. “When I was a slave I was forbidden to read your work. But I was given this book by a fellow slave. When I lost everything, I lost it, but again it was given me. It came with me across the river of death and the river of life. It was the sign to me of where my treasure is. It was my guide. So I—So I followed it to its maker. And seeing you, I knew I have seen you all my life—that I was to come here.”

He took the little book and looked at its battered, water-swollen binding, turning it in his hands. He opened it gently. From the page it opened to, he read, “‘Three things that, seeking increase, strengthen soul: love, learning, liberty.’” He gave a sigh. “I wasn’t much older than you when I wrote that,” he said, a little wryly. He looked up at me. He gave me back the book, saying, “You honor me, Gavir Aytana. You give me the gift only the reader can give the writer. Is there anything I can give you?”

He too spoke like Chamry Bern.

I sat dumb. My burst of eloquence was over, my tongue was tied.

“Well, we can talk about that presently,” he said. He was concerned and gentle. “Tell me something about yourself. Where were you in slavery? Not in my part of the world, I know. Slaves in the Uplands have no more book learning than their masters do.”

“In the House of Arca, in the city of Etra,” I said. Tears sprang into my eyes as I said it.

“But your people came from the Marshes, I think?”

“My sister and I were taken by slavers…” And so he drew my story from me, a brief telling of it, but he kept me at it, asking questions and not letting me rush ahead. I said little about how Sallo died, for I could not burden a stranger with my heart’s grief. When I got to my return to the forest, and how Melle and I met there, his eyes flashed. “Melle was my mother’s name,” he said. “And my daughter’s.” His voice dropped, saying that. He looked away. “And you have this child with you—so Memer said?”

“I couldn’t leave her there,” I said, feeling that her presence required apology.

“Some could.”

“She’s very gifted—I never had so quick a pupil. I hope that here…” But I stopped. What did I hope, for Melle or myself?

“Here certainly she can be given what she needs,” Orrec Caspro said promptly and firmly. “How did you travel with a young child all the way from the Daneran Forest to Mesun? That can’t have been easy.”

“It was easy enough till I learned my…my enemies in Arcamand were still hunting for me, on my track.” But I had not named Torm and Hoby till then. I had to go back and say who they were, and to tell that my sister’s death had been at their hands.

When I told him of how Hoby had hunted me and followed us, and of crossing the Sensaly, he listened the way the fellows in Brigin’s camp listened to The Siege and Fall of Sentas, holding his breath.

“You saw him drown?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I saw the horse with no rider. Nothing else. The river’s wide, and I couldn’t see along the near shore. He may have drowned. He may not. But I think…” I didn’t know how to say it. “It’s as if a chain has broken.”

Caspro sat brooding over my story a while. “I want Memer and Gry to hear this. I want to hear more about what you call the remembering—your visions—Seeing me!” He looked up and laughed, gazing at me with amused and wondering sympathy. “And I want to meet your companion. Shall we go down?”

There was a garden beside the house, a narrow one, wedged between house walls and the cliff that towered up behind. It was bright with late morning sun and late summer flowers. For an instant I remembered the flowers. There was a very small fountain, which dribbled rather than ran. On the flagstones and marble benches around it the two women, the girl, and the lion sat talking—that is, the lion had gone to sleep, while Melle stroked her dreamily, and the women were talking.

“You met my wife, Gry Barre,” Caspro said to me as we came into the garden. “She and I are Uplanders. Memer Galva came with us from her home, the city of Ansul; she’s our guest this year. I teach her the modern poets, and she teaches me Aritan, the ancient tongue of our people. Now introduce me to your companion, if you will.”

But as we approached, Melle scrambled up and hid her face against me, clinging to me. It was unlike her, and I didn’t know what to do. “Melle,” I said, “this is our host—the great man we came to see.”

She clung to my legs and would not look.

“Never mind,” Caspro said. His face was grim for a moment. Then, not looking at Melle or coming close to her, he said pleasantly, “Gry, Memer, we must keep our guests a while so you can hear their story.”

“Melle told us about the chickens on the boat,” Memer said. The sunlight on her hair was marvelous, radiant. I couldn’t look at her and couldn’t look away from her. Caspro sat down on the bench beside Memer, so I sat down on another bench and got Melle to stand beside my legs, in the circle of my arms, thus defending both her and myself.

“I think it’s time for a bite to eat,” Gry said. “Melle, come with me and give me a hand, will you? We’ll be back in a moment.” Melle let herself be led away, still turning her face away from Caspro as she went.

I apologised for her behavior. Caspro said simply, “How could she do otherwise?” And as I thought back on our journey I realised that the only men Melle had spoken to or even looked at were the dwarf innkeeper, whom she may have thought a strange kind of child, and the cowboy, who had slowly earned her trust. She had kept clear away, always, from the bargemen, and any other men. I had not seen it. It wrung my heart.

“You’re from the Marshlands?” Memer asked me. All these people had beautiful voices; hers was like running water.

“I was born there,” was all I could get out in reply.

“And stolen by slavers, when he was a baby, with his sister,” Caspro said, “and taken to Etra. And they brought you up there to be an educated man, did they? Who was your teacher?”

“A slave. Everra was his name.”

“What did you have by way of books? I don’t think of the City States as homes of learning—although in Pagadi there are certainly some fine scholars, and fine poets too. But one thinks of soldiers more than scholars there.”

“All the books Everra had were old,” I said. “He wouldn’t let us read the moderns—what he called the moderns—”

“Like me,” Caspro said with his brief, broad smile. “I know, I know. Nema, and the Epics, and Trudec’s Moralities…That’s what they started me on in Derris Water! So, you were educated so that you could teach the children of the household. Well, that much is good. Though to keep a teacher as a slave…”

“It wasn’t an evil slavery,” I said. “Until—” I stopped.

Memer said, “Can slavery not be evil?”

“If your masters aren’t cruel people—and if you don’t know there’s anything else,” I said. “If everybody believes it’s the way things are and must be, then you can not know that…that it’s wrong.”

“Can you not know?” she said, not accusing or arguing, simply asking, and thinking as she asked. She looked at me directly and said, “I was a slave in Ansul. All my people were. But by recent conquest, not by caste. We didn’t have to believe we were slaves by the order of nature. That must be very different.”

I wanted to talk to her but I couldn’t. “It was a slave,” I said to Caspro, “who taught me your hymn to Liberty.”

Memer’s smile brightened her grave, quiet face for a moment. Though her complexion was so light, she had dark eyes that flashed like the fire in opal. “We sang that song in Ansul when we drove the Alds out,” she said.

“It’s the tune,” Caspro said. “Good tune. Catchy.” He stretched, enjoying the warmth of the sun, and said, “I want to hear more about Barna and his city. It sounds as if there was a bitter tragedy there. Whatever you can tell me. But you said you became his bard, as it were, his reciter. So then, you have a good memory?”

“Very good,” I said. “That’s my power.”

“Ah!” I had spoken with confidence, and he responded to it. “You memorise without difficulty?”

“Without trying,” I said. “It’s part of the reason I came here. What’s the good of having a head full of everything you ever read? People liked hearing the stories, there in the forest. But what could I do with them in the Marshes? Or anywhere else? I thought maybe at the University…”

“Yes, yes, absolutely,” Caspro said. “Or perhaps…Well, we’ll see. Here come mederende fereho en refema—is that right, Memer?—In Aritan it means ‘beautiful women bringing food.’ You’ll want to learn Aritan, Gavir. Think of it, another language—a language different from ours!—not entirely of course, it’s the ancestor of ours, but quite different—and a whole new poetry!” As he spoke, with the unguarded passion that I already saw characterised him, he was careful not to look at Melle, only at his wife, and not to come near Melle as he helped set out the food on an unoccupied bench. They had brought bread and cheese, olives, fruit, and a thin, light cider to drink.

“Where are you staying?” Gry asked, and when I said, “The Quail,” she said, “How are the fleas?”

“Not too bad. Are they, Melle?”

She had come to stand close to me again. She shook her head, and scratched her shoulder.

“Shetar has her own private fleas,” Gry told her. “Lion fleas. She won’t share them with us. And the Quail fleas won’t bite her.” Shetar had opened an eye, found the food uninteresting, and gone back to sleep.

Having eaten a little, Melle sat down on the paving stones in front of me but close to the lion, within petting distance. She and Gry kept up a murmured conversation, while Caspro talked with me and Memer put in a word now and then. What he was doing, in a mild and roundabout fashion, was finding out how much of a scholar I was, what I knew and didn’t know. From the little Memer said, I thought she must know everything there was to know in the way of poetry and tales. But when we came to history she declared ignorance, saying she knew only that of Ansul, and not much of that, because all the books in Ansul had been destroyed by the conquerors of the city. I wanted to hear that hideous story, but Caspro, mildly perseverant, kept on the course of his questions until he’d learned what he wanted to know, and even won from me a confession of my old, foolish ambition to write a history of the City States. “I don’t think I’ll ever do that,” I said, trying to make light of it, “since it would involve going back there.”

“Why not?” said Caspro, frowning.

“I’m a runaway slave.”

“A citizen of Urdile is free,” he said, still frowning. “No one can declare him a slave, no matter where he goes.”

“But I’m not a citizen of Urdile.”

“If you’ll go to the Commons House with me to vouch for you, you can become one tomorrow. There are plenty of ex-slaves here, who freely come and go to Asion and the City States as citizens of Urdile. But as for history, you might find better documents in the library of the University here than in the City States.”

“They don’t know what to do with them,” I said sadly, thinking of the wonderful records and annals I had handled at the Shrine of the Forefathers.

“Perhaps you can show them what to do with them—given time,” Caspro said. “The first thing for you to do is become a citizen. Next, enroll in the University.”

“Caspro-dí, I haven’t much money. I think the first thing for me to do is find work.”

“Well, I have an idea about that, if Gry agrees. You write good copy-hand, I expect?”

“Oh yes,” I said, remembering Everra’s relentless lessons.

“I need a copyist. And a man with a really good memory would be of great use to me too, since I’ve been having some trouble with my eyes.” He said it easily, and his dark eyes seemed clear enough, but there was a wincing in his face as he spoke, and I saw Gry’s quick glance at him. “For instance, now…if I was needing a reference from Denios for a lecture, and couldn’t remember what comes after Let the swan fly to the northlands—?”

I took up the lines—

Let grey gander fly beside grey goose,

North in the springtime: it is south I go.

“Ah!” Memer said, all alight. “I love that poem!”

“Of course you do,” Caspro said. “But it’s not a well-known one, except to a few homesick southerners.” I thought of the homesick northerner, Tadder, who lent me the volume of Denios where I’d read the poem. Caspro went on, “I was thinking that having a kind of live anthology about the house could be very useful to me. If such work seemed at all attractive to you, Gavir. Anything you didn’t have by heart you could help me look up, of course. I have a good many books. And you could be getting on with your work at the University. What do you think, Gry?”

His wife was sitting down on the pavement with Melle. She reached up and took his hand, and for a moment they gazed at each other with a calm intensity of love. Melle looked from her to him. She looked hard at him, frowning, studying him.

“It seems an excellent idea,” Gry said.

“You see, we have a couple of spare rooms here,” he said to me. “One of them is Memer’s, as long as she’ll let us keep her—through next winter at the very least. There are a couple of rooms up in the attic, where we had two young women from Bendraman living until just lately, students. But they went back to Derris Water to astonish the good priests with their learning, so the rooms are vacant. Waiting for you and Melle.”

“Orrec,” said his wife, “you should give Gavir time to think.”

“Dangerous thing, often, time to think,” he said. He looked at me with a smile that was both apologetic and challenging.

“I would—It would—We would—” I couldn’t get a finished sentence out.

“To me it would be a great pleasure to have a child in the house,” Gry said. “This child. If it pleased Melle.”

Melle looked at her, then at me. I said, “Melle, our hosts are inviting us to stay with them.”

“With Shetar?”

“Yes.”

“And Gry? And Memer?”

“Yes.”

She said nothing, but nodded and went back to stroking the lion’s thick fur. The lion was faintly but perceptibly snoring.

“Very well, that’s settled,” said Caspro in particularly broad Uplands dialect. “Go get your things out of the Quail and move in.”

I was hesitant, incredulous.

“Did you not see me, half your life ago, in your visions, and I spoke your name? Were you not coming here to me?” he said, quietly but fiercely. “If we’re guided, are we to argue with the guide?”

Gry watched me with a sympathetic eye.

Memer looked at Caspro, smiling, and said to me, “It’s very hard to argue with him.”

“I—I don’t want to argue,” I stammered. “It’s only—” And I stopped again.

Melle got up and sat down by me on the bench, pressing close against me. “Beaky,” she whispered. “Don’t cry. It’s all right.”

“I know,” I said, putting my arm around her. “I know it is.”