“Gav,” she said very quietly, “what is it?”
I tried to answer her and broke into a sob. I hid my face in my arms and wept aloud.
Diero sat down beside me on the stone hearth seat. She put her arms around me and held me while I cried. “Tell me, tell me,” she said at last. “My sister. She was my sister,” I said.
And that word brought the sobbing again, so hard I could not take breath.
She held me and rocked me a while, until I could lift my head and wipe my nose and face. Then she said again, “Tell me.” “She was always there,” I said.
And so one way and another, weeping, in broken sentences and out of order, I told her about Sallo, about our life, about her death.
The wall of forgetting was down. I was able to think, to speak, to remember. I was free. Freedom was unspeakable anguish.
In that first terrible hour I came back again and again to Sallo’s death, to how she died, why she died - all the questions I had refused to ask.
“The Mother knew—she had to know about it,” I said. “Maybe Torm took Sallo and Ris out of the silk rooms without asking, without permission, it sounds as if that’s what he did. But the other women there would know it—they’d go to the Mother and tell her—Torm-di took Ris and Sallo off, Mother—they didn’t want to go, they were crying—Did you tell him he could take them? Will you send after them?—And she didn’t. She did nothing! Maybe the Father said not to interfere. He always favored Torm. Sallo said that, she said he hated Yaven and favored Torm. But the Mother—she knew—she knew where Torm and Hoby were taking them, to that place, those men, men who used girls like animals, who—She knew that. Ris was a virgin. And the Mother had given Sallo to Yaven herself. And yet she let the other son take her and give her to—How did they kill her? Did she try to fight them? She couldn’t have. All those men. They raped her, they tortured her, that’s what they wanted girls for, to hear them scream—to torture and kill them, drown them—When Sallo was dead. After I saw her. I saw her dead. The Mother sent for me. She called her ‘our sweet Sallo.’ She gave me—she gave me money—for my sister—”
A sound came out of my throat then, not a sob but a hoarse howl. Diero held me close. She said nothing.
I was silent at last. I was mortally tired.
“They betrayed our trust,” I said. I felt Diero nod. She sat beside me, her hand on mine.
“That’s what it is,” she said, almost inaudibly, “Do you keep the trust, or not. To Barna it’s all power. But it’s not. It’s trust.”
“They had the power to betray it,” I said bitterly.
“Even slaves have that power,” she said in her gentle voice.
♦ 10 ♦
For days after that I kept to my room. Diero told Barna I was ill. I was sick indeed with the grief and anger that I hadn’t been able to feel all the uncounted months since I walked away from the graveyard by the Nisas. I had run away then, body and soul. Now at last I’d turned around and stopped running. But I had a long, long way to go back.
I could not go back to Arcamand in my body, though I thought often and often of doing so. But I had run away from Sallo, from all my memory of her, and I had to return to her and let her return to me. I could no longer deny her, my love, my sister, my ghost.
To grieve for her brought me relief, but never for long. Always the pure sorrow became choked thick with anger, bitter blame, self-blame, unforgiving hatred. With Sallo they all came back to me, those faces, voices, bodies I had kept away from me so long, hiding them behind the wall. Often I could not think of Sallo at all but only of Torm, his thick body and lurching walk; of the Mother and the Father of Arca; or of Hoby. Hoby who had pushed Sallo into the chariot while she was crying out for help. Hoby the bastard son of the Father, full of rancorous envy, hating me and Sallo above all. Hoby who had nearly drowned me once. They might have let—At that pool—It might have been Hoby who—I crouched on the floor of my room, stuffing the folds of a cloak into my mouth so that no one could hear me scream.
Diero came up to my room once or twice a day, and though I couldn’t bear to have anyone else see me as I was, she brought me no shame, but even a little dignity. There was in her a bleak, gentle, unmoved calm, which I could share while she was with me. I loved her for that, and was grateful to her.
She made me eat a little and look after myself. She was able to make me think, sometimes, that I had come to this despair in order to find a way through it, a way back to life.
When at last I went downstairs again, it was with her to give me courage.
Barna, having been told I’d had a fever, treated me kindly, and told me I mustn’t recite again till I was perfectly well. So though my days were again mostly spent with him, often in the winter evenings I’d go to Diero’s peaceful rooms and sit and talk with her alone. I looked forward to those hours and cherished them afterwards, thinking of her greeting and her smile and her soft movements, which were professional and mannered like those of an actor or dancer, and yet which expressed her true nature. I knew she welcomed my visits and our quiet talk. Diero and I loved each other, though she never held me in her arms but that once, by the great hearth, when she let me cry.
People joked about us, a little, carefully, looking at Barna to be sure he didn’t take offense. He seemed if anything amused by the idea that his old mistress was consoling his young scholar. He made no jokes or allusions about it, an unusual delicacy in him; but then he always treated Diero with respect. She herself did not care what people thought or said.
As for me, if Barna thought she and I were lovers, it kept him from suspecting me of “poaching” his girls. Though they were so pretty and apparently so available as to drive a boy my age crazy, their availability was a sham, a trap, as men of the household had warned me early on. If he gives you one of the girls, they said, take her, but only for the night, and don’t try sneaking off with any of his favorites! And as they knew me better and came to trust my discretion, they told me dire stories about Barna’s jealousy. Finding a man with a girl he himself wanted, he had snapped the marn’s wrists like sticks, they said, and driven him out into the forest to starve.
I didn’t entirely believe such tales. The men themselves might be a bit jealous of me, after all, and not sorry to scare me off the girls. Young as I was, some of the girls were even younger; and some of them were cautiously flirtatious, praising and petting me as their “Scholar-di,” begging me prettily to make my recital a love story “and make us cry, Gav, break our hearts!” For after a while I became their entertainer again. The words had come back to me.
During the first time of agony, when I regained all that I had cut out of my memory, all I could remember was Sallo, and Sallo’s death, and all my life in Arcamand and Etra. For many days afterwards, I believed that that was all I ever would remember. I didn’t want to remember anything I’d learned there, in the house of the murderers. All my treasure of history and verse and stories was stained with their crime. I didn’t want to know what they’d taught me. I wanted nothing they had given me, nothing that belonged to the masters. I tried to push it all away from me, forget it, as I had forgotten them.
But that was foolish, and I knew it in my heart. Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn’t taking place. Little by little I let all I’d learned return to me, and it was not stained, not spoiled. It didn’t belong to the masters, it wasn’t theirs: it was mine. It was all I ever really had owned. So I stopped the effort to forget, and all my book learning came back to me with the clarity and completeness some people find uncanny, though the gift isn’t that rare. Once again I could go into the schoolroom or the library of Arcamand in my mind, and open a book, and read it. Standing before the people in the high wooden hall, I could open my mouth and speak the first lines of a poem or a tale, and the rest would follow of itself, the poetry saying and singing itself through me, the story renewing itself in itself as a river runs.