Most of the people there believed that I was improvising, that I was the maker, the poet, incomprehensibly inspired to spout hexameters forever. There wasn’t much point in arguing with them about it. People generally know better than the workman how the work is done, and tell him; and he might as well keep his opinions to himself.
There was little else in the way of entertainment in the Heart of the Forest. Some of the girls and a few men could play or sing. They and I always had a benevolent audience. Barna sat in his great chair, stroking his great curly beard, intent, delighted. Some who had little interest in the tales or the poetry attended either to win favor with Barna or simply because they wanted to be with him and share his pleasure.
And he still took me with him, talking about his plans. So talking and listening, and having leisure time and comfort in which to think—for thinking goes much quicker when one is warm, dry and not hungry—I spent the end of that winter working through all I’d recovered when I came back at last to my Sallo and could grieve for her, and know my loss, and look at what my life had been and what it might have been.
It was still hard for me to think at all of the Mother and Father of Arca. My mind would not come to any clarity concerning them. But I thought often of Yaven. I thought he would not have betrayed our trust. I wondered if when he came home, he had exacted vengeance, useless as it might be. Surely he would not forgive Torm and Hoby, however long he must withhold punishment. Yaven was a man of honor, and he had loved Sallo.
But Yaven might be dead, killed at the siege of Casicar. That war had been as much a disaster for Etra, so people said, as the siege of Etra had been for Casicar. Torm might now be the heir of Arca. That was a thought my mind still flinched away from.
I could think of Sotur only with piercing grief and pain. She had kept faith with us as best she could. Alone there, what had become of her? She would be, she probably had been, married off into some other household—one where there was no Everra, no library of books, no friendship, no escape.
Again and again I thought of that night when Sallo and I were talking in the library, and Sotur came in, and they tried to tell me why they were afraid. They had clung to each other, loving, helpless.
And I hadn’t understood.
It was not only the Family who had betrayed them, I had betrayed them. Not in acts: what could I have done? But I should have understood, I had been unwilling to see. I had blinded my eyes with belief. I had believed that the rule of the master and the obedience of the slave were a mutual and sacred trust. I had believed that justice could exist in a society founded on injustice.
Belief in the lie is the life of the lie. That line from Caspro’s book came back to me, and cut like a razor.
Honor can exist anywhere, love can exist anywhere, but justice can exist only among people who found their relationships upon it.
Now, I thought, I understood Barna’s plans for the Uprising, now they made sense to me. All that ancient evil ordained by the Ancestors, that prison tower of mastery and slavery, was to be uprooted and thrown down, replaced by justice and liberty. The dream would be made real. And Luck had brought me here to the place where that great change would begin, the home and center of the liberty to come.
I wanted to be one of those who made it real. I began to dream of going to Asion. Many of the Forest Brothers were from that city, a great city with a large population of freemen and freedmen, merchants and artisans, into which a fugitive slave could mix without being questioned or suspected. Barna’s netmen went back and forth often, passing as traders, merchants, cattle buyers, slaves sent on commission by farmers, and so on. I wanted to join them. There were educated people in Asion, both nobles and freemen, people to whom I could present myself as a freeman seeking work copying or reciting or teaching. And so doing I could do Barna’s work, laying the foundation of the Uprising among the slaves I would meet there.
Barna absolutely forbade it. “I want you here,” he said. “I need you, Scholar!”
“You need me more there,” I said.
He shook his head. “Too dangerous. One day they ask, where did you get your learning? And what’ll you say?
I’d already thought that out. “That I went to school in Mesun, where the University is, and came down to Asion because there are too many scholars in Urdile, and the pay’s better in Bendile,”
“There’d be scholars there from the University who’d say no, that boy was never there.”
“Hundreds of people go to the colleges. They can’t all know one another.”
I argued hard, but he shook his big curly head, and his laugh changed to a grimmer look. “Listen, Gav, I tell you a learned man stands out. And you’re already famous. The lads talk as they go about, you know, winning folk in the villages and towns to come here to join us. They boast of you. We’ve got a fellow, they say, that can speak any tale or poem that was ever made! And only a boy yet, a wonder of the world! Well, you can’t go to Asion with a name like that hanging about you.”
I stared at him. “My name? Do they say my name?”
“They say the name you gave us,” he said, untroubled.
Of course he, and everyone else but Chamry Bern, assumed that “Gav” was a false name. Nobody here, not even Barna, used the name he’d had as a slave.
As Barna saw my expression, his changed. “Oh, by the Destroyer,” he said. “You kept the name you had in Etra?” I nodded.
“Well,” he said after a minute, “if you ever do leave, take a new one! But that’s all the more reason for me to say stay here! Your old masters may have sent word around that their clever slave boy they’d spent so much money educating ran off. They hate to let a runaway escape. It gripes them to the soul. We’re a good way from Etra here, but you never know.”
I’d never given a thought to pursuit. When I left the graveyard and walked up the Nisas, it was a death. I had walked away from everything, into nothing, going nowhere. I had no fear, then, because I had no desire. As I began to live again, here, I still had no fear. I’d gone so far in my own mind that it never occurred to me that anyone from the old life would follow me.
“They think I’m dead,” I said at last. “They think I drowned myself that morning.”
“Why would they think that?”
I was silent.
I hadn’t told Barna anything about my life. I’d never spoken of it to anyone but Diero.
“You left some clothing on the riverbank, eh?” he said. “Well, they might have fallen for that old trick. But you were a valuable property. If your owners think you might be alive, they’ll have their ears open. It’s been only a year or two, right? Don’t ever think you’re safe—except here! And you might tell the lads you came from Pagadi or Piram, so that they don’t say Etra if they speak of you, eh?”
“I will,” I said, humbled.
Had there been no end to my stupidity? No limit to the patience Luck had had with me?
But I did repeat my request to go into Asion. Barna said, “You’re a free man, Gav. I give you no orders! But I tell you, it’s not time yet for you to go. You wouldn’t be safe. Your being in Asion now could endanger others there, and the whole scheme of the Uprising. When the time comes for you to go there, I’ll tell you. Before then, if you go, you go against my heart.” I couldn’t argue with that.