In early spring a couple of newcomers arrived, runaways from a household in Asion, who came hidden in a goods wagon driven by netmen. They brought with them, stolen from their masters’ house, a good sum of money and a long box. “What’s this stuff?” asked one of Barna’s men who opened the box, holding up a scroll so that it slipped from the rod and unrolled at his feet. “Cloth, is it?”
“It’s what I asked for, man,” said Barna. “It’s a book. Now take care with it!” He had indeed requested his netmen to bring books. Nobody had brought any until now, most of our recruits—and recruiters—being illiterate and having no idea where to look for books or even, like this fellow, what a book looked like.
The new pair of runaways were educated, one trained in accounting, the other in recitation. The books were a motley lot, some scrolls, some paged and bound; but all could be useful for teaching, and one was a treasure to me—a little, elegantly printed copy of Caspro’s Cosmologies, replacing the manuscript copy that Mime had given me, for which I had grieved, once I began to remember what I had lost and left at Arca-mand.
The new recruits were, as Barna said, a good catch: the accountant assisted him in record keeping, and the reciter could tell fables and Bendili epics by the hour, giving me a vacation.
I looked forward to talking to these educated men, but that didn’t go well. The accountant knew only figures and calculations, while the reciter, Pulter, made it clear that he was older and more accomplished than I was, and that my pretensions to scholarship didn’t qualify me to converse with a truly learned man. It galled him that most of our people liked my recitations better than his, though he soon had a following. I’d been taught to let the words do the work, while he performed in alternate shouts and whispers, with long pauses, dramatic intonations, and quavering tremolos of emotion.
The copy of the Cosmologies was his, but he had no interest in reading Caspro, saying all the modern poets were obscure and perverse. He gave me the book, and for that alone I would have forgiven him all his snubs and all his quavers. I found the poem difficult, but kept going back to it. Sometimes I read from it to Diero, quiet afternoons in her room.
Her friendship was like nothing else in my life. Only with her could I speak of my life at Arcamand. When I was with her I felt no wish for revenge, no desire to overturn the social order, no rage at the poor dead impotent Ancestors. I knew what I had lost, and could remember what I had had. Though Diero had never been in Etra, she was my link to it. She hadn’t known Sallo, but she brought Sallo to me, and so eased my heart.
Like most slaves, Diero had been casually mothered and had no brother or sister that she knew; the two children she had borne when she was young were sold as infants. The craving for family relationship was deep in her, as it was in all of us. Barna knew that and called on it to form and strengthen his Brotherhood.
I was unusual in having had so close a bond to a sister: my loss was specific, my craving acute. It was as an older sister that I loved Diero, while to her I was a younger brother or a son, and also, perhaps, the one man she ever knew who did not want to be her master.
She loved to hear me tell about Sallo and the others at Arcamand, and our days at the farm; she was curious about the customs of Etra, and also about my origin. The great marshes where the Rassy rises lie not far south of Asion, and she had known me at once for what I was, one of the Marshmen, dark-skinned, short and slight, with thick black hair and a high-bridged nose. The Rassiu, she called the Marsh people. They came into Asion, she said, to trade at a certain monthly market; they brought herbs and medicines that were in high demand, and fine basketry and cloth they wove of reeds, to trade for pottery and metal-ware. They came under an ancient religious truce which protected them from slave takers. They were respected as freemen, and some of them had even settled in one quarter of the city. She was shocked to learn that Etra raided the marshes for slaves. “The Rassiu are a sacred people,” she said. “They have a covenant with the Lord of the Waters. Your city will suffer for enslaving them, I think.”
Some of the young women of Barna’s house treated Diero with servility, fawning, as if she had the kind of power they’d known in woman slave owners. Others were trustfully respectful; others ignored her as they did all old women. She treated them all alike—kind, mild, yielding, with a dignity that set her apart. I think she was very lonely among them. Once I saw her talking with one of the younger girls, letting the girl talk and weep for home, as she had done for me.
There were no children in Barna’s house. When a girl got pregnant she moved to one of the houses where other women lived in the town and had her baby there; she kept it or gave it away as she chose. If she wanted to bring the baby up, that was fine, but if she wanted to come back and live the free life at Barna’ s house, she couldn’t bring it with her. “This is where we get ’em, not where we keep ’em!” Barna said, to a shout of approval from his men.
Soon after Pulter and the accountant arrived, a new girl was brought to the household, with a little sister from whom she refused to be parted. Very beautiful, fifteen or sixteen years old, Irad had been taken from a village west of the forest. Barna was immediately smitten with her and made his claim on her clear to the other men. Whether she was already experienced with men or simply had no defenses, she submitted to everything with no pretense of resistance, until they told her she must let her little sister be taken away. Then she turned into a lion. I didn’t see the scene, but the other men told me about it. “If you touch her I’ll kill you,” she said, whipping out a thin, long, unexpected knife from the seam of her embroidered trousers, and glaring round at Barna and all of them.
Barna began to reason with her, explaining the rules of the household, and assuring her that the child would be well cared for. Irad stood silent, her knife held ready.
At this point, Diero interfered. She came forward and stood beside the sisters, putting her hand on the little girl’s head as she cowered against Irad. She asked Barna if the girls were slaves. I can imagine her mild, unemphatic voice asking the question.
He of course proclaimed that they were free women in the City of Freedom.
“So, if they like, both of them can stay with me,” said Diero.
The men who first told me the story thought that Diero had at last become jealous, Irad being so young and so beautiful. They laughed about it. “The old vixen has a tooth or two left!” one of them said.
I didn’t think it was jealousy that moved her. Diero was without envy or possessiveness. What had made her intervene this time?
She got her way, to the extent that she went off with the child that night to her rooms. Barna of course took Irad with him for the night. But whenever he didn’t call for her, Irad stayed with little Melle in Di-ero’s rooms.
When the women of Barna’s house were all together, I was often daunted by the sheer power of their youthful femininity. I got my revenge as a male by feeling contempt for them. They were healthy, plump, mindless, content to lounge about the house all day trying on the latest stolen finery and chattering about nothing. If one or another of them went off to have a baby, it made no difference—there was no end of them, others just as young and pretty would arrive with the next convoy of raiders.
Now it occurred to me to wonder about this endless supply of girls. Were they all runaways? Did they all ask to come here? Were they all seeking freedom?