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The first thing I can remember clearly is writing the way into the secret room.

I am so small I have to reach my arm up to make the signs in the right place on the wall of the corridor. The wall is coated with thick grey plaster, cracked and crumbling in places so the stone shows through. It’s almost dark in the corridor. It smells of earth and age, and it’s silent. But I’m not afraid; I’m never afraid there. I reach up and move my writing finger in the motions I know, in the right place, in the air, not quite touching the surface of the plaster. The door opens in the wall, and I go in.

The light in that room is clear and calm, falling from many small skylights of thick glass in the high ceiling. It’s a very long room, with shelves down it’s wall, and books on the shelves. It’s my room, and I’ve always known it. Ista and Sosta and Gudit don’t. They don’t even know it’s there. They never come to these corridors far in the back of the house. I pass the Waylord’s door to come here, but he’s sick and lame and stays in his rooms. The secret room is my secret, the place where I can be alone, and not scolded and bothered, and not afraid.

The memory isn’t of one time I went there, but many. I remember how big the reading table looked to me then, and how high the bookshelves were. I liked to get under the table and build a kind of wall or shelter with some of the books. I pretended to be a bear cub in it’s den. I felt safe there. I always put the books back exactly where they belonged on the shelves; that was important. I stayed in the lighter part of the room, near the door that’s not a door. I didn’t like the farther end, where it grows dark and the ceiling comes down lower. In my mind I called that the shadow end, and I almost always stayed away from it. But even my fear of the shadow end was part of my secret, my kingdom of solitude. And it was mine alone, until one day when I was nine.

Sosta had been scolding me for some stupid thing that wasn’t my fault, and when I was rude back to her she called me “sheep hair,” which put me in a fury. I couldn’t hit her because her arms were longer and she could hold me off, so I bit her hand. Then her mother, my bymother Ista, scolded me and cuffed me. Furious, I ran to the back part of the house, to the dark corridor, and opened the door and went into the secret room. I was going to stay there till Ista and Sosta thought I’d run away and been taken as a slave and was gone forever, and then they’d be sorry for scolding unjustly and cuffing and calling me names. I rushed into the secret room all hot and full of tears and rage—and there, in the strange clear light of that place, stood the Waylord with a book in his hands.

He was startled, too. He came at me, fierce, his arm raised as if to strike. I stood like a stone. I could not breathe.

He stopped short. “Memer! How did you come here.?”

He looked at the place where the door is when it’s open, but of course nothing was there but the wall.

I still couldn’t breathe or speak.

“I left it open,” he said, without believing what he said.

I shook my head.

Finally I was able to whisper, “I know how.”

His face was shocked and amazed, but after a while it changed, and he said, “Decalo.”

I nodded.

My mother’s name was Decalo Galva.

I want to tell of her, but I can’t remember her. Or I do but the memory won’t go into words. Being held tight, jostling, a good smell in the darkness of the bed, a rough red cloth, a voice which I can’t hear but it’s only just out of hearing. I used to think if I could hold still and listen hard enough, I’d hear her voice.

She was a Galva by blood and by house. She was head housekeeper for Sulter Galva, Waylord of Ansul, an honorable and responsible position. In Ansul there were no serfs or slaves then; we were citizens, householders, free people. My mother Decalo was in charge of all the people who worked in Galvamand. My bymother Ista, the cook, liked to tell us about how big the household used to be, back then, how many people Decalo had to look after. Ista herself had two kitchen assistants every day, and three helpers for the big dinners for visiting notables; there were four house-cleaners, and the handyman, and a groom and stable-boy for the horses, eight horses in the stable, some to ride and some to drive. There were quite a few relatives and old people living in the house. Ista’s mother lived up over the kitchens, the Waylord’s mother lived in the Master’s rooms upstairs. The Waylord himself was always travelling up and down the Ansul Coast from town to town to meet with the other waylords, sometimes in the saddle, sometimes in a carriage with a retinue. There was a smithy in the west court in those days, and the driver and postboy lived on the top floor of the carriage house, always ready to go out with the Waylord on his rounds. “Oh it was all busy and abustle,” Ista says. “The old days! The good days!”

When I ran through the silent corridors past the ruined rooms, I used to try to imagine those days, the good days. I used to pretend, when I swept the doorways, that I was making ready for guests who’d come through them wearing fine clothes and shoes. I used to go up to the Master’s rooms and imagine how they’d looked clean and warm and furnished. I’d kneel in the windowseat there to look out through the clear, small-paned window over the roofs of the city to the mountain.

The name of my city and all the coast north of it, Ansul, means “Looking at Sul”—the great mountain, last and highest of the five peaks of Manva, the land across the straits. From the seafront and from all the western windows of the city you can see white Sul above the water, and the clouds it gathers round it as if they were it’s dreams.

I knew the city had been called Ansul the Wise and Beautiful for it’s university and library, it’s towers and arcaded courts, it’s canals and arched bridges and the thousand little marble temples of the street-gods. But the Ansul of my childhood was a broken city of ruins, hunger, and fear.

Ansul was a protectorate of Sundraman, but that great nation was busy fighting over it’s border with Loaman and kept no troops here to defend us. Though rich in goods and farmland, Ansul had long fought no wars. Our well-armed merchant fleet kept pirates from the south from harrying the coast, and since Sundraman enforced an alliance with us long ago, we had had no enemies by land. So when an army of Alds, the people of the deserts of Asudar, invaded us, they swept over the hills of Ansul like wildfire. Their army broke into the city and went through the streets murdering, looting, and raping. My mother Decalo, caught in the street coming from the market, was taken by soldiers and raped. Then the soldiers who had her were attacked by citizens, and in the fighting she managed to get away and get home to Galvamand.

The people of my city fought the invaders street by street and drove them out. The army camped outside the walls. For a year Ansul was besieged. I was born in that year of the siege. Then another, greater army came out of the eastern deserts, assaulted the city, and conquered it.

Priests led the soldiers to this house, which they called the Demon House. They took the Waylord away as a prisoner. They killed any people of the household who resisted them, and the old people. Ista managed to get away and hide at a neighbor’s house with her mother and daughter, but the Waylord’s mother was killed and her body thrown into the canal. Younger women were taken as slaves for the soldiers to use. My mother escaped by hiding with me in the secret room.

I am writing this story in that room.

I don’t know how long she hid here. She must have had some food with her, and there’s water here. The Alds ransacked the house, looting, burning what would burn. Soldiers and priests kept coming back day after day, wrecking the rooms, looking for books or loot or demonry. She had to come out at last. She crept out at night, and found refuge with other women in the basements of Cammand. And she kept herself and me alive, I don’t know where or how, until the Alds ceased looting and wrecking and settled down as masters of the city. Then she came back to her house, to Galvamand.

All the wooden outbuildings had been burned, the furnishings broken or stolen, even the wooden floors torn out in places; but the main part of the house is stone with tile roofs, and it was not much harmed. Though Galvamand is the greatest house in the city, no Ald would live in it, considering it to be full of demons and evil spirits. Little by little Decalo put things in order again as well as she could. Ista came back from hiding, with her daughter Sosta, and the old hunchback handyman Gudit turned up. This was their household, and they were loyal to it and to one another. Their gods were here, their ancestors who gave them their dreams were here, their blessing was here.

After a year had passed the Waylord was released from the Gand’s prison. The Alds put him out into the street naked. He could not walk, because their torture had broken his legs. He tried to crawl down Galva Street from the Council House to Galvamand. People of the city helped him, carried him here, carried him home. And there were people of his household to care for him.

They were very poor. Every citizen of Ansul was poor, stripped bare by the Alds. They lived somehow, and under my mother’s care the Waylord began to regain his strength. But in the cold and hunger of the third winter after the siege, Decalo took ill of a fever, and there was no medicine to cure it. So she died.

Ista declared herself my bymother and looked after my needs. She has heavy hands and a hot temper, but she loved my mother and did her best for me. I learned early to help with the work of the house and liked it well enough. In those years the Waylord was ill much of the time, in pain from the broken limbs and the tortures which had crippled him, and I was proud to be able to wait on him. Even when I was a very young child he’d rather have me wait on him than Sosta, who hated any kind of work, and spilled things.

I knew it was because of the secret room that I was alive, for it had saved me and my mother from the enemy. She must have told me that, and she must have shown me the way to open the door; or I saw her do it and remembered. That’s how it seemed to me: I could see the shapes of the letters being written on the air, though I couldn’t see the hand that wrote them. My hand followed those shapes, and so I would open the door, and come here, where I thought only I ever came.

Until that day when I faced the Waylord, and we stood staring at each other, he with his fist raised to strike.

He lowered his arm.

“You’ve been here before?” he asked.

I was quite terrified. I managed a nod.

He wasn’t angry—he had raised his arm to strike an intruder, an enemy, not me. He’d never shown me anger or impatience, even when he was in pain and I was clumsy and stupid. I trusted him utterly and had never been afraid of him before, but I did hold him in awe. And at this moment he was fierce. His eyes had a fire in them as they did when he spoke the Praise of Sampa the Destroyer. They were dark, but that fire would come into them like the smoulder of opal in dark rock. He stared at me.

“Does anybody know you come here?”

Shake head.

“Have you ever spoken of this room?”

Shake head.

“Do you know you must never speak of this room?”

Nod.

He waited.

I saw that I had to say it aloud. I took a breath and said, “I will never speak of this room. Witness my vow all you gods of this house, and you gods of this city, and my mother’s soul and all souls who have dwelt in the House of the Oracle.”

At that he looked startled again. After a moment he came forward and reached out to touch my lips with his fingers. “I bear witness that this vow was made with a true heart,” he said, and turned to touch his fingers to the threshold of the little god-niche between the shelves of books. So I did the same. Then he put his hand lightly on my shoulder, looking down at me. “Where did you learn such a vow?”

“I made it up,” I said. “For when I swear that I will always hate the Alds, and I will drive them out of Ansul, and kill them all if I can.”

When I had told him that, my own most secret vow, my heart’s wish and promise that I had never told to anyone, I burst into tears—not fury tears, but sudden, huge, awful sobs that seemed to pick me up and shake me to pieces.

The Waylord got down somehow on his broken knees so that he could put his arms around me. I wept against his chest. He said nothing, but held me in a strong embrace until at last I could stop sobbing.

I was so tired and ashamed then that I turned away and sat on the floor with my face hidden against my knees.

I heard him haul himself up and go limping down towards the shadow end of the room. He came back with his handkerchief wet with water from the spring that runs there in the darkness. He put the wet cloth in my hand, and I held it to my hot blubbery face. It was lovely and cool. I held it against my eyes for a while and then scrubbed my face with it.

“I’m very sorry, Waylord,” I said. I was ashamed to have troubled him with my being there and my tears. I loved and honored him with all my heart and wanted to show my love by helping and serving him, not by worrying and disturbing him.

“There’s a good deal to weep about, Memer,” he said in his quiet voice. Looking at him then I saw that he had cried, too, when I did. Tears change people’s eyes and mouth. I was abashed to see that I had made him weep, and yet it eased my shame, somehow.

After a while he said, “This is a good place for it.”

“Mostly I don’t cry, here,” I said.

“Mostly you don’t cry,” he said.

I was proud he’d noticed that.

“What do you do in this room?” he asked.

It was hard to answer. “I just come when I can’t bear things,” I said. “And I like to look at the books. Is it all right if I look at them? If I look inside them?”

He answered gravely, after a pause, “Yes. What do you find in them.?”

“I look for the things I do to make the door open.”

I didn’t know the word “letters.”

“Show me,” he said.

I could have drawn the shapes in the air with my finger as I did when I opened the door, but instead I got up and took the big dark-brown leather-bound book from the bottom shelf, the book I called the Bear. I opened it to the first page with words on it. (I think I did know they were words, but maybe not.) I pointed to the shapes that were the same as the ones that opened the door.

“This one, and this one,” I said, whispering. I had laid the book on the table, very carefully, as I always did with the books when I looked inside them. He stood beside me and watched me point at the letters I recognised, though I didn’t know their names or how they sounded.

“What are they, Memer.?”

“Writing.”

“So it’s writing that opens the door?”

“I think so. Only for the door you do it in the air, in the special place.”

“Do you know what the words are?”

I didn’t entirely understand what he was asking. I don’t think I knew then that the words in writing are the same as the words in speaking, that writing and speaking are different ways of doing the same thing. I shook my head.

“What do you do with a book?” he asked.

I said nothing. I didn’t know.

“You read it,” he said, and this time he smiled as he spoke, his face lighting up as I had seldom seen it.

Ista was always telling me how happy and hospitable and genial the Waylord was in the old days, how merry his guests in the great dining room used to be, and how he had laughed at Sosta’s baby tricks. But my Waylord was a man whose knees had been broken with iron bars, his arms dislocated, his family murdered, his people defeated, a man in poverty and pain and shame.

“I don’t know how to read,” I said. And then, because his smile was fading fast, going back into the shadow, I said, “Can I learn?”

It saved the smile for a moment. Then he looked away.

“It’s dangerous, Memer,” he said, not speaking to me as to a child.

“Because the Alds are afraid of it,” I said.

He looked back at me. “They are. They ought to be.”

“It’s not demons or black magic,” I said. “There isn’t any such thing.”

He did not answer directly. He looked me in the eyes, not like a man of forty looking at a child of nine, but as one soul judging another soul.

“I’ll teach you, if you like,” he said.