♦ 8 ♦

Ista made one of her special dishes that night, what we call uffu, pastries stuffed with a bit of ground lamb or kid, potatoes, greens, and herbs, and fried in oil. They were crisp, greasy, delicious. Ista was grateful to Orrec and Gry not only because they had provided meat for the kitchen—we were sharing Shetar’s dinner, is the fact of it—but because they were our guests, restoring honor and dignity to the house by their presence, and giving her somebody new to cook for. They complimented the uffu, while she shrugged and growled and criticised her pastry for being tough. Can’t get decent oil, she said, like we had in the good days.

After dinner the Waylord took our guests and me to the back gallery, and again we sat and talked. Three of us were very curious to know what the Gand Ioratth had said to Orrec beneath the fern-palm. And Orrec was ready to tell us. He had news indeed.

Dorid, Gand of Gands, high priest and king of Asudar and commander of the Ald armies for nearly thirty years, was dead. He had died of a seizure over a month ago in his palace in the desert city Medron. His successor was a man named Acray, his nephew, or so called. Since the kings of Asudar were high priests, and priests of Atth were officially celibate, a king couldn’t officially have a son, only nephews. Other nephews or claimants to the throne contested Acray’s succession and had been killed in uprisings or behind the scenes. Medron had been in turmoil for some time, but by now Acray had seized firm hold of power as the Gand of Gands of all Asudar.

And this was evidently much to the Gand Ioratth’s liking. From what he said, Orrec gathered that the new priest-king was less the priest and more the king than Dorid had been. The palace factions that had tried to keep Acray from the throne were, like Dorid, followers of the cult of the Thousand True Men—those who had declared a war of good against evil, urging the invasion of heathen Ansul to find and destroy the Night Mouth.

Acray’s followers, it seemed, didn’t put much stock in the existence of the Night Mouth, especially since the invading army had never been able to find it. They considered the occupation of Ansul, though it had brought some profit and luxury goods to Medron, as a drain on the resources of the Ald army and also a spiritually questionable enterprise. For the Alds were a race apart, dwelling in their desert, singularly favored by their single god. They had always kept clear of the pollution of the unbelievers. To continue to live among the heathen was to risk their souls.

What should the Alds in Ansul do, then?

Ioratth, considering these matters aloud to Orrec, had spoken remarkably plainly. The question, as he saw it, was which would be more pleasing to Atth: should the new Gand of Gands recall his soldiers home to Asudar with all the loot they could bring, or should he send settlers to colonise Ansul permanently?

“He put it just about like that,” Orrec said. “Evidently the new ruler has asked Ioratth for his opinion, as a man who’s lived all these years here among the heathen. And Ioratth sees me as disinterested, an impartial observer. But why does he see me so.? And why does he trust me with his damned indecisions? I’m a heathen myself!”

“Because you’re a maker,” the Waylord said. “Therefore, to the Alds, a truth-speaker and a seer.”

“Maybe he has nobody else he can talk to,” Gry said. “And whether or not you’re a seer, you certainly are a good listener.”

“A silent one,” Orrec said, with some bitterness. “What can I say to all this?”

“I don’t know what you can say to Ioratth,” the Waylord said. “But it may help you to know what little I know about him. In the first place, he took a woman of Ansul as a slave, a concubine, but it’s said he treats her honorably. Her name is Tirio Actamo. She’s the daughter of a great family. I knew her before the invasion. She was a beautiful, clever, spirited girl. All I know of her now is servants’ gossip brought to me by others, but the gossip is that Ioratth honors her as a wife, and that she has great influence on him.”

“I wish I could talk with her!” Gry said.

“So do I,” the Waylord said, and his voice was wry and melancholy. After a pause he went on. “Iddor is the Gand’s son by a wife back in Asudar. They say Iddor hates Tirio Actamo. They also say he hates his father.”

“He taunts and defies him,” Orrec said, “but seems to obey him.”

The Waylord sat silent for a while, then got up, went over to the god-niche, and stood before it. “Blessed spirits of this house,” he murmured, “help me speak truly.” He bowed his head and touched the worn sill of the niche, stood a moment longer, and came back to us. He spoke standing.

“It was Iddor and the priests who led the soldiers here to find their Night Mouth. They tortured the people of the house to make them reveal the entrance to the cave or sewer or whatever the Night Mouth might be. Some died in torture. The Alds kept me alive. They had—” he halted a moment and then went on, “they had the most hope of me, since they perceived me as a witch. A priest, in their terms, but a priest of their anti-god. But I wasn’t able to tell them what they wanted to know. Ennu laid her hand on my mouth and would not let me lie. Sampa stopped my tongue and would not let me speak the truth. All the souls of Galvamand came round me. The priests knew it. They were afraid of me, even while they…Not afraid of me but of the sacredness that came into me, the gathering of souls around me, the blessing of the gods and spirits of my house, my city, my land.

“After a while the priests didn’t want to have anything to do with me, so Iddor himself was my only questioner. He feared me too, I think, but also he prided himself on his daring, since he believed me a great sorcerer and yet he could do what he liked with me. I proved his power, by being a toy for his cruelty. I had to listen to him. He talked and talked, always explaining to me, telling me over and over how the demon that filled me would come forth at last and tell him where to find the Night Mouth. When the demon came forth and spoke I would be allowed to die. All evil would die. Righteousness would rule the earth, and he, Iddor, would sit by the throne of the King of Kings, burning in glory. He talked and talked. I tried to lie to him, and I tried to tell him the truth. But they would not let me.”

He had not sat down as he spoke, and now he went back to the god-niche, put his hands on the sill of it, and stood there in silence a while. I heard him whisper blessing on Ennu and the house-gods. Then he turned to us again.

“All that time, all the time Iddor held me prisoner, I never saw his father. Ioratth kept away from the prison cells and had no part in the witch hunts. Iddor constantly complained to me about his father, railed at him, saying he was impious, contemptuous of priests and prophecies, and flouted the order of the Gand of Gands to find the Night Mouth. ‘I obey my god and my king, he does not,’ he said. But in the end, whether at Ioratth’s order or not, I was let go. The hunts for caves and demons died down. Now and then Iddor or the priests would raise up a scare, finding a book to destroy or a scholar to torture. Ioratth let them do it, I suppose to satisfy the Gand of Gands that the quest was still going on. He had to walk carefully, since his son was of the king’s party and he was not.

“But now, it looks as if Ioratth has a king of his own kind, and the power Iddor and the priests had will be suddenly reduced. This could be a dangerous moment.”

He sat down with us again. Though he had spoken painfully, he did not seem troubled now, only grave and weary; and as he looked around at us, a gentleness came into his face, as if, returned from a journey, he saw people he loved.

“Dangerous because…,” Gry said, and Orrec finished her half question: “Because Iddor, seeing his faction losing power, might try to seize power?”

The Waylord nodded. “I wonder where the Ald soldiers stand on this,” he said. “No doubt they’d like to go home to Asudar. But they respect their priests. If Iddor defied his father, and the priests were with Iddor, which of them would the soldiers obey?”

“We can do some listening at the Palace,” Gry said. She glanced at me, I didn’t know why.

“There’s another element of danger, or hope, or both,” the Waylord said, “which I tell you of, asking you for your silence. There’s a group of people who hope to rouse Ansul against the Alds. A group that for a long time now has been laying plans for rebellion. I know of it only through friends. I don’t take part in making it’s plans, I don’t even know with any certainty how strong it is. But it exists. Seeing a power struggle in the Palace, such a group might try to act.”

Now at last I knew what Desac came to talk about, and why I was always sent away when he met with the Waylord. That sent a rush of anger through me. Why hadn’t I been allowed to listen to talk of rebellion, of rising against the Alds, fighting them, driving them out.? Did Desac think I’d be afraid? Or go blabbing about it like a child? Did he think, because I had sheep hair, that I’d betray my people?

Gry wanted to know more about this group, but the Waylord was unable or unwilling to say much about it. Orrec was silent, brooding, till he asked at last, “How many Alds are here in Ansul—in the city? A thousand, two thousand?”

“Over two thousand,” the Waylord said.

“They’re greatly outnumbered.”

“But armed and disciplined,” Gry said.

“Trained soldiers,” Orrec said. “It gives them an edge…But still. All these years—”

I burst out, “We fought! We fought them in every street, we held out for a year—till they sent an army twice as large—and then they killed and killed—Ista told me that in the days after the city fell, the canals were so choked with the dead that the water couldn’t run—”

“Memer, I know your people were overrun and overmatched,” Orrec said. “I didn’t mean to question their courage.”

“But we’re not warriors,” said the Waylord.

“Adira and Marra!” I protested.

His gaze rested on me a moment. “I didn’t say we couldn’t have heroes,” he said. “But for centuries we settled our affairs by talking, arguing, bargaining, voting. Our quarrels were fought with words not swords. We were out of the habit of brutality…And the Ald armies seemed endless. How much more would they destroy? We lost heart. We have been a crippled people.”

He held up his broken hands. His face was strange, wry; his eyes looked very dark.

“As you say, Orrec, they have the edge,” he said. “Having one king, one god, one belief, they can act single-mindedly. They’re strong. Yet the single can be divided. Our strength embraces multitude. This is our sacred earth. We live here with it’s gods and spirits, among them, they among us. We endure with them. We’ve been hurt, weakened, enslaved. But only if they destroy our knowledge are we destroyed.”

♦ ♦ ♦

TWO DAYS AFTER THAT, when we went to the Council Square again, I found out why Gry had given me that glance when she said, “We can do some listening.” She wanted Mem the apprentice groom to talk to the Ald stableboys and cadet soldiers who hung around to hear Orrec recite. “Keep an ear out,” she said. “Ask about the new Gand in Medron. About the Night Mouth. You were talking for a long time with one of those boys the other day.”

“The pimply one,” I said.

“He took a shine to you.”

“He wanted to know if I’d sell him my sister for sex,” I said.

Gry whistled, a soft little down-note, tiu.

“Endure,” she said softly.

The Waylord had used that word. I took it as my guide word, my orders. I would obey. I would endure.

This time, when the Gand came out of the great tent to hear Orrec, Iddor and the priests didn’t follow him. Partway through the recitation a noise began inside the tent, a lot of loud chanting and drum banging—evidently the priests performing a ceremony. Some of the courtiers around the Gand looked disturbed, others shrugged and whispered. Ioratth sat imperturbable. Orrec finished the stanza and fell silent.

The Gand gestured to him to go on.

“I would not show disrespect to those who worship,” Orrec said.

“It is not worship,” Ioratth said. “It is disrespect. Proceed, if you will, Maker.”

Orrec bowed and went on with the piece, another Ald hero tale. When it was done, Ioratth had him brought a glass of water and began to talk with him, several of the courtiers joining in. And I, obeying my orders, slipped back towards the group of boys and men in the shade of the stable wall.

Simme was there. He came right over to me. He was bigger than I was, a tall, strong boy. There were fair, fuzzy hairs among the pimples around his mouth—the Alds are hairier than my people, and many have beards. Yet when I saw the way he greeted me, almost cringing, hoping that I liked him, I thought: he’s a little boy.

All I knew was my city and my house and books, while he had travelled with an army and was a soldier in training, but I knew that I knew more than he did, and was tougher. He knew it, too.

It made it hard to hate him. There’s some virtue in hating people who are stronger than you, but to hate somebody weaker is contemptible and uncomfortable.

He didn’t know what to talk about, and at first I thought we wouldn’t be able to talk at all, but then I thought to ask him something I really wanted to know. “Where did you hear what you were talking about the other day,” I said, “all that stuff about temples and prostitutes.?”

“Some of the men,” he said. “They said you heathens had these temples, where they had these orgies with these priestesses of this goddess, this demoness, that made men, you know, have sex with the priestesses. The demoness possessed them. And they’d have sex with any man. Anybody who came along. All night.”

He’d brightened up considerably at the thought.

“We don’t have any priestesses,” I said flatly. “Or priests. We do our own worship.”

“Well, maybe it was just women who went to this temple, and the demoness made them have sex with anybody. All night.”

“How could people get inside a temple.”

In Ansul, the word “temple” usually means a little shrine on the street or in front of a building or at a crossways—altars, places to worship at. Many of them are just god-niches like the ones inside houses. You touch the sill of the temple to say the blessing, or lay a flower as an offering. Many street temples were wonderful little buildings of marble, two or three feet high, carved and decorated, with gilt roofs. The Alds had knocked those all down. Some temples were hung up in trees, and the Alds left them, thinking they were bird-houses. In fact if a bird nested in a temple it was a joyful thing, a blessing, and a lot of the old tree temples had swallows and sparrows and thrushes in them year after year. The best luck of all was an owl. The owl is the bird of the Deaf One.

I knew that to the Alds a temple meant a full-sized building. I didn’t care.

My question did get his mind off the notion of all-night sex, anyway. He frowned and said, “What do you mean. Everybody goes into temples.”

“What for.”

“To pray!”

“What do you mean, ‘pray’?”

“Worship Atth!” Simme said, staring.

“How do you worship Atth?”

“You go to the ceremony?” he said, in a questioning tone, incredulous that I didn’t know what he was talking about. “And the priests sing and drum and dance, and they speak the words of Atth? You know! You’re down on your hands and knees? And you knock your head on the ground four times and say the words after the priests.”

“What for?”

“Well, if you want something, you pray to Atth, you knock your head on the ground and pray for it.”

“Pray for it? How do you pray for something?”

He was beginning to look at me as if I was feeble-minded.

I returned the look. “You don’t make sense,” I said. I was in fact rather curious to understand his idea of praying, but I didn’t want him to start feeling superior to me. “You can’t pray for things.”

“Of course you can! You pray to Atth for life and health and, and, and everything else!”

I did understand him. Everybody cries out to Ennu when they’re frightened. Everybody prays to Luck for things they want; that’s why he’s called the Deaf One. But I said, contemptuously, “That’s begging, not praying. We pray for blessing, not for things.”

He was both shocked and stymied. He looked sullen. He said, “You can’t be blessed. You don’t believe in Atth.”

Now I was shocked. To say to someone that they couldn’t be blessed, that was horrible. Simme didn’t seem like a person who could even think such a cruel thing. I finally said, much more cautiously, “What do you mean, ‘believe in’?”

He stared at me. “Well, to believe in Atth is—is to believe Atth is god.”

“Of course he is. All the gods are god. Why shouldn’t Atth be?”

“What you call gods are demons.”

I thought about it for a while. “I don’t know if I believe there are demons, but I do know the gods. I don’t understand why you have to ‘believe’ in only one god and none of the others.”

“Because if you don’t believe in Atth you’re damned and when you die you’ll turn into a demon!”

“Who says so?”

“The priests!”

“And you believe that?”

“Yes! The priests know about stuff like that!” He was getting more and more unhappy, and spoke angrily.

“I don’t think they know much about Ansul,” I said, realising, a little late, that antagonising him was not the best way to get information out of him. “Maybe they know all about Asudar. But things are different here.”

“Because you’re heathens!”

“Right,” I said, nodding, agreeing. “We’re heathens. So we have a lot of gods. But we don’t have any demons. Or priests. Or temple prostitutes. Unless they’re about six inches high.”

He was silent, scowling.

“I heard the army came looking for a specially bad place here,” I said after a while, trying to speak in a more friendly way and feeling both devious and exposed. “Some sort of hole in the ground where all the demons are supposed to come from.”

“I guess so.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He looked very glum, screwing up his pale eyes and frowning.

We were sitting on the pavement in the shade of the wall. I began scratching criss-cross patterns in the dust on the paving stone.

“Somebody said your king in Medron died,” I said, as easily as I could. I used our old word, king, not their word, gand.

He merely nodded. Our discussion had discouraged him. After a long time he said, “Mekke said maybe the new High Gand would order the army back home to Asudar. I guess you’d like that.” He glanced at me sullenly.

I shrugged. “Would you?”

He shrugged.

I wanted to make him go on talking, but didn’t know how.

“That’s fit-fat,” he said.

Now I looked at him as if he was crazy, till I saw he was looking down at the pattern I’d made on the dusty stone. He reached over and drew a horizontal line in one square of the criss-cross.

“We call it fool’s game,” I said, and drew a vertical line in another square. We played to a draw, as you always do in fool’s game unless you really are a fool. Then he showed me a game called finding the ambush, where you each have a hidden criss-cross with a square marked off—the ambush—and you guess in turn where the other person’s ambush is, and the one who finds the other’s ambush first is the winner. Simme won two out of three, which cheered him up and made him talkative.

“I hope the army gets moved back to Asudar,” he said. “I want to get married. I can’t get married here.”

“Gand Ioratth did,” I said, and then was afraid I’d gone too far, but Simme just grinned and made a lewd chuckling noise.

“‘Queen’ Tirio?” he said.“Mekke says she was one of those temple prostitutes, to start with, and she put a spell on the Gand.”

I’d had enough of him and his temple prostitutes. “There were never any temples,” I said. “We had festivals. All over the city. Processions and dances. But you Alds stopped them. You killed anybody who danced. You were so afraid of your stupid demons.” I got up, rubbed out the criss-cross with my foot, and stalked off to the stable.

Once I got to the stables I didn’t know what to do. I was ashamed of myself. I had not endured. I had run away. I looked in at Branty, who acknowledged me with a half nicker. He was lipping up a little treat of oats delicately, making them last. The old hostler was perched up on a sawhorse nearby, watching him with what looked to me like adoration. He nodded to me. Branty went on twiddling his oats. I leaned up against a post and folded my arms and hoped I looked aloof and unapproachable.

And here came Simme across the stableyard, slouching and cringing and grinning like a dog that’s been yelled at.

“Hey, Mem,” he said, as if we’d parted days ago instead of two minutes ago.

I nodded at him.

He looked at me the way the old hostler looked at Branty.

“My father’s horse is over there,” he said. “Come see her. She’s from the royal stables in Medron.”

I let him lead me across the yard to the facing stalls to show me a fine, nervous, bright-eyed sorrel mare with a light mane, like the horse that had run at me in the market. Maybe it was that horse. She eyed me sideways over the door of the stall and shook her head.

“She’s named Victory,” Simme said, trying to pat the mare on the neck; she tossed her head and moved back in the stall. When he tried again, she turned at him, showing her long yellow teeth. Simme drew his hand back quickly. “She’s a real warhorse,” he said.

I gazed at the horse as if judging it from a deep knowledge and experience of horses, nodded again rather patronisingly, and sauntered back across the yard. To my relief, Chy and Shetar were just looking in the gateway. Several horses, seeing or smelling the lion, neighed and kicked in their stalls. I hurried over to Chy, while behind me Simme called, “See you tomorrow, Mem?”

On our way back to Galvamand I told them of my efforts to cross-examine Simme, which I thought completely foolish and fruitless; but they, and later the Waylord, listened intently. They remarked on Simme’s apparent lack of knowledge or interest when I spoke indirectly of the Night Mouth, and on his saying he had heard that the new Gand of Gands might recall the army to Asudar.

“Did he say anything about Iddor?” Gry asked.

“I didn’t know how to ask.”

“Is he a bright fellow?” the Waylord asked.

I said, “No. He’s stupid.” But I was ashamed, saying it. Even if it was true.

The day had been very warm, and the evening was mild. Instead of sitting in the gallery after dinner, we went out to the small outer courtyard that opens from it. It is sheltered by the house walls on two sides and marked off on the other two by slender columned arcades. The hill to the east rises immediately behind the house, and the scent of flowering shrubs was in the air. We sat looking north to the open evening sky faintly tinged with green.

“The house is built into the hillside, isn’t it?” Orrec said, looking up at the north windows of the Master’s room, above this court, and the walls behind walls and roofs behind roofs of the ancient building.

“Yes,” the Waylord said, and I don’t know what was in his tone, but the hairs on my neck stirred.

He went on after a little while, “Ansul is the oldest city of the Western Shore, and this is the oldest house in Ansul.”

“Is it true that the Aritans came from the desert a thousand years ago, and found all these lands we know empty of humankind?”

“Longer than a thousand years, and from farther than the desert,” the Waylord said. “From the Sunrise, they said. They were people of a great empire far in the east. They sent explorers into the desert that bordered their lands to the west, and at last a group found a way across the desert—hundreds of miles wide, they say—to the green valleys of the Western Shore. Taramon led that group. Others followed. The books are very old, fragmentary, hard to understand. Many of them are lost, now. But it seemed they said that the people who came here were driven out of the Sunrise lands.” He said a line of verse in Aritan, and then in our tongue: “‘The riverless waste that guards the exile’s spring…’ We are the children of those exiles.”

“And no one has ever come from the east since then?”

“Nor gone back to the east.”

“Except the Alds,” said Gry.

“They went back into the desert, yes, or stayed there, but only the western border of it, where there are springs and rivers. East of Asudar, they say, for a thousand miles the sun is the Gand of Gands and the sand is his people.”

“We live on the far edge of a world we know nothing of,” Orrec said, gazing at the pale, deep sky.

“Some scholars think Taramon and the others were driven out because they were sorcerers, people who had uncanny powers. They think gifts such as you in the Uplands have were common among the people who came from the Sunrise, but have died out among us over the centuries.”

“What do you think?” Gry asked.

“We have no such gifts as those here now,” the Waylord said rather carefully. “But the earliest records of Ansul tell of people coming to be healed by women of the House of Actamo, who could restore sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf.”

“Like the Cordemants!” Orrec said to Gry, and Gry said, “Backwards—as I thought!” They were about to explain this to us, when Desac came suddenly from the door of the gallery out into the court where we sat.

Like all the Waylord’s regular visitors, he let himself into and through the old part of the house, which was never locked. Ista sometimes fretted about the risk, but the Waylord said, “There are no locks on the doors of Galvamand,” and that was that. So Desac appeared now, startling Shetar. The halflion stood up with her head down and her ears flattened in a nasty, snaky way, and glared at him. He stopped short in the doorway.

Gry hissed a reproof at Shetar, who grunted and sat down, still glaring.

“Welcome, my friend, come sit with us,” the Waylord said, while I hurried to find a chair. Desac meanwhile took my chair next to the Waylord. That was like him. He did not have bad or coarse manners, but people who did not interest him did not exist for him. To him I was a furniture bringer, about as important as the furniture. He was single-minded, like the Alds. Perhaps soldiers have to be single-minded.

By the time I’d found a manageable chair and brought it out, he had been introduced to Orrec and Gry, and the Waylord must have told them that this was the leader of the resistance, or Desac had told them so himself, for that’s what they were talking about. I sat down to listen.

Desac took notice of me then. Furniture should not have ears. He looked from me to the Waylord with the plain intent of having me sent away as usual.

“Memer knows a soldier’s son, who told her that some of the Alds talk of the army being recalled to Asudar,” the Waylord said to Desac. “And the boy called Tirio Actamo Queen Tirio, as a common joke. Have you heard that title?”

“No,” Desac said stiffly. He shot another glance at me. He looked a little like Shetar glaring with her ears flat (though she by now had decided to ignore him, and was industriously washing a hind paw). “What we say here must go no farther than this courtyard,” he announced.

“Of course,” said the Waylord. He spoke kindly and easily as ever, but the effect was rather like Gry’s hiss at the lion. Desac looked away from me, cleared his throat, rubbed his chin, and spoke to Orrec.

“Blessed Ennu sent you here, Orrec Caspro,” he said, “or the Deaf One called you to us, in the very hour of our need.”

“Need for me?” said Orrec.

“Who can better call the people to arms than a great maker?”

Orrec’s face went still and his bearing stiff. After a moment of silence he said, “I’ll do what’s in my power to do. But I’m a foreigner.”

“Against the invader we are all one people.”

“I’ve been more at the Palace than in the marketplace. At the Gand’s beck and call. Why should your people trust me?”

“They do trust you. They speak of your coming as a sign, a portent that the great days of Ansul are about to return.”

“I’m not a portent, I’m a poet,” Orrec said. His face was hard as rock now. “A city rising against tyranny will find it’s own speakers.”

“You’ll speak for us when we call you,” Desac said, with equal certainty. “We’ve sung your poem ‘Liberty’ for ten years now here in Ansul, in hiding, behind doors. How did that song get here, who brought it? From voice to voice, from soul to soul, from land to land. When we sing it aloud at last, in the face of the enemy, do you think you’ll be silent?”

Orrec said nothing.

“I’m a soldier,” Desac said, “I know what makes people fight to win. I know what a voice like yours can do. And I know that’s why you came here when you did.”

“I came because the Gand asked me to come.”

“He asked you because the gods of Ansul moved his mind. Because our hour is coming. The balance changes!”

“My friend,” said the Waylord, “the balance may be changing, but are the scales in your hands?”

Desac held out his empty hands with a dry smile.

“There’s no sign of unrest among the Ald soldiers which we might take advantage of,” the Waylord said. “We’re not certain if there’s any change yet in Ald policy. And we don’t know what’s going on between Ioratth and Iddor.”

“Ah, but that we do know,” Desac said. “Ioratth intends to send Iddor back to Medron with a retinue of priests and soldiers. Seemingly to seek guidance from the new Gand Acray, actually to get Iddor and his priests out of Ansul. Tirio Actamo’s servant Ialba passed that word this morning to the slaves we’re in touch with at the Palace. She’s been a faithful informer.”

“Then you intend to wait till Iddor is gone before you move?”

“Why wait? Why let the rat escape the trap?”

“You plan to attack? The barracks?”

“An attack is planned. Not where or when they might expect it.”

“I know you have some arms, but have you the men?”

“Arms we have, and men enough. The people will join with us. We are twenty to one, Sulter! All these years of tyranny, enslavement, insult, defilement, the rage of all these years will burst out like fire in straw, everywhere in the city. All we need is to see how many we are, how few they are! All we need is a voice, a voice to summon us!”

His passion shook me, and I could see it had shaken Orrec, at whom he was looking now. An uprising, a revolt—to turn on those arrogant men in blue cloaks, drag them off their horses, use them as they had used us, cow them as they had cowed us, drive them out, out, out of our city, out of our lives—Oh! I had wanted that so long! I would follow Desac. I saw him truly now: a leader, a warrior. I would follow him as the people followed the heroes of old, through fire and water, through death.

But Orrec sat there with his face set, silent.

And Gry, watchful as her lion, silent.

In that tense silence the Waylord said, “Desac: if I ask concerning this—if I am answered—would you hear the answer.?” He said the word ask with a strange emphasis.

Desac looked at him, at first evidently not understanding, then with a frown. He began a question, but the Waylord’s expression checked him. Desac’s hard, sad, weathered face changed slowly, becoming open, uncertain. “Yes,” he said, hesitant, then again more strongly, “Yes!”

“Then I will,” the Waylord said.

“Tonight?”

“The time is so near?”

“Yes.”

“Very well.”

“I’ll come tomorrow morning,” Desac said, standing up, alive with energy. “Sulter, my friend, I thank you from my heart. We will see—you will see—your spirits will speak for us.” He turned to Orrec—“And your voice will call us, you’ll be with us, I know. And we’ll meet here again, free men, in a free city! The blessing of Lero and all the gods of Ansul on you all, and on the souls and shadows of Galvamand who hear us now!” He strode out, soldierly, exultant.

Orrec, Gry, and I looked at one another. Something important had been said, some promise had been made, which we three did not understand. The Waylord sat not looking at anyone, his face somber. Finally he glanced around at us. His gaze rested on me.

“Before there was a city here,” he said, “before there was a house built here, the oracle was here.” Then he spoke in Aritan: “‘They came here across the deserts, the weary people, the exiles. They came over the hills above the Western Sea and saw white Sul across the water. In the hillside was a cave, and from the cave ran a spring. On the darkness of the air in the cave they saw words written: Here stay. So they drank the water of that spring, and built their city there.’”