Word got about, and within a night or two most of the men of the band were crowded into our hut for “telling the war,” and for the long passionate discussions and arguments about tactics and motives and morals that followed.
There were times I couldn’t fully recall the lines as Garro wrote them, but the story was clear in my mind, so I filled in these gaps with tags of the poetry and my own narrative, until I came again to a passage that I had by memory or could “see” written, and could fall back into the harsh rhythm of the lines. My companions didn’t seem to notice the difference between my prose and Garros poetry. They listened closest when I was speaking the poetry—but those were also often the most vivid passages of action and suffering.
When we came again in the course of the tale to the passage I’d recited first, Yurno’s prophecy from the battlements, Bacoc caught his breath; and when Rurec “in a fury uplifts his heavy lance,” Bacoc cried out, “Don’t throw it, man! It’s no good!” The others shouted at him to pipe down, but he was indignant: “Don’t he know it’s no good? He thro’n it before!”
I was at first merely bemused by my own capacity to recall the poetry and their capacity to listen to it. They didn’t say much to me about it, but it made a difference in the way I was treated, my standing among them. I had something they wanted, and they respected me for that. Since I gave it freely, their respect was ungrudging. “Hey, haven’t you got a fatter rib than that for the kid? He’s got to work tonight, telling the war…”
But every up’s a down, as Chamry said. Brigin and his brother and the men closest to them, their cabin mates, looked in at one time or another on the recital, listened a while standing near the doorway, then left in silence. They said nothing to me, but I heard from others that they said men who listened to fools’ tales were worse fools than those who told them. And Brigin said that a man willing to hear a boy yammer booktalk half the night was no fit Forest Brother.
Booktalk! Why did Brigin say it in that contemptuous tone? There were no books in the forest. There had been no books in Brigin’s life. Why did he sneer at them?
Any of these men might well be jealous of a knowledge that had been jealously kept from them. A farm slave who tried to learn to read could have his eyes put out or be whipped to death. Books were dangerous, and a slave had every excuse to fear them. But fear is one thing, contempt another.
I resented their sneers as mean-spirited, for I couldn’t see anything unworthy of manhood in the tale I was telling. How was a tale of warfare and heroism weakening the men who listened to it so hungrily every night? Didn’t it draw us together in real brotherhood, when after the telling we listened to one another argue the rights and wrongs of the generals’ tactics and the warriors’ exploits? To sit stupid, mute, night after night under the rain like cattle, bored to mindlessness—was that what made us men?
Eter said something one morning, knowing he was within my hearing, about great idle fools listening to a boy tell lies. I was fed up, I was about to confront him with what I’ve just said, when my wrist was caught in an iron grip and a deft foot nearly tripped me.
I broke free and shouted, “What d’you think you’re doing?” to Cha-mry Bern, who apologised for his clumsiness while renewing his grip on my wrist. “Oh keep your trap shut, Gav!” he whispered desperately, hauling me away from the group of men around Eter. “Don’t you see he’s baiting you?”
“He’s insulting all of us!”
“And who’s to stop him? You?”
Chamry had got me around behind the woodpiles now, away from the others, and seeing I was now arguing with him, not challenging Eter, he let go my wrist.
“But why—Why—”
“Why don’t they love you for having a power they don’t have?” I didn’t know what to say.
“And they’ve got the hard hand, you know, though you’ve got the soft voice. Oh, Gav. Don’t be smarter than your masters. It costs.”
In his face now was the sadness I had seen in the face of every one of these men, the mark of the harrow. They had all started with very little, and lost most of that.
“They’re not my masters,” I said furiously. “We’re free men here!”
“Well,” Chamry said, “in some ways.”
♦ 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 Cha-mry 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 Ru-rec 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 shouteld,
“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.