“An unbeliever should not be permitted to keep a lion of Asudar,” Iddor said to his father, who replied, “But who will take the lion from the master of the lion?”—evidently a proverb, neatly applied. At that, Iddor started to tease Shetar, provoking her by shouting and starting at her as if in attack. Shetar ignored him absolutely. The Gand, when he realised what his son was doing, stood up in a rage, told him he was shaming the hospitality of his house and offending the majesty of the lion, and ordered him to leave.
“The majesty of the lion,” Gry repeated, sitting down with us at last, her face clean, and dressed now in her silk shirt and trousers—“I like that.”
“But I don’t like what went on between the Gand and his son,” Orrec said. “A snake’s nest, as Gudit said. It will take careful treading. The Gand, though, he’s a very interesting man.”
He’s the tyrant that ruined and enslaved us, I thought, but didn’t say.
“The Waylord is right,” Orrec went on. “The Alds are camped in Ansul like soldiers on the march. They seem amazingly ignorant of how people live here, who they are, what they do. And the Gand is bored with ignorance. I think he’s seen that he’ll probably finish out his life here and might as well make the best of it. But on the other hand, the people of the city don’t know anything about the Alds.”
“Why should we?” I said. I couldn’t stop myself.
“We say in the Uplands, it takes a mouse to really know the cat,” said Gry.
“I don’t want to know people who spit on my gods and call us unclean. I call them filth. Look—look at my lord! Look what they did to him! Do you think he was born with his hands broken?”
“Ah, Memer,” Gry said, and she reached out to me, but I pulled away. I said, “You can go to what they call their palace and eat their food if you like and tell them your poetry, but I’d kill every Ald in Ansul if I could.”
Then I turned away and broke into tears, because I had ruined everything and didn’t deserve their confidence.
I tried to leave the room, but Orrec stopped me.
“Memer, listen,” he said, “listen. Forgive our ignorance. We are your guests. We ask your pardon.”
That brought me out of my stupid crying. I wiped my eyes and said, “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry, sorry.” Gry whispered, and I let her take my hand and sit down with me on the windows eat. “We know so little. Of you, of your lord, of Ansul. But I know as you do that we were brought together here by more than chance.”
“By Lero,” I said.
“By a horse, and a lion, and Lero,” she said. “I will trust you, Memer,”
“I will trust you,” I said to them both.
“Tell us who you are, then. We need to know one another! Tell us who the Waylord is—or what he was, before the Alds came. Was he the lord of the city?”
“We didn’t have any lords.”
I tried to pull myself together to answer properly, as I did when the Waylord asked me, “A little further, please, Memer?” I said, “We elected a council to govern the city. All the cities on the Ansul Coast did. The citizens voted for the councillors. And the councils named the waylords. Waylords travelled among the cities and arranged trade so that the towns and the cities got what they needed from each other. And they kept merchants from cheating and usury, if they could.”
“It’s not a hereditary title, then?”
I shook my head. “You were a waylord for ten years. And ten more if your council named you again. Then somebody else took over. Anybody could be a waylord. But you had to have money of your own or from your city. You had to entertain the merchants and the factors and the other waylords, and travel all the time—even down into Sundraman, to talk with the silk merchants and the government there. It cost a lot. But Galvamand was a rich house, then. And people of the city helped. It was an honor, a great honor, being a waylord. So we still call him that. In honor. Although it means nothing now.”
I almost broke out in tears again. My weakness, my lack of control, scared me and made me angry, and the anger helped steady me.
“All that was before I was born. I only know it because people have told me and I’ve read the histories.”
Then my breath went out of me as if I had been hit in the stomach, and I sat paralysed. The habit of my lifetime had hold of me: I should not speak of reading, I should never say to anyone outside my household that I had read something in a book.
But Orrec and Gry, of course, didn’t even notice. To them it was perfectly natural. They nodded. They asked me to go on.
I wasn’t sure what I should and should not tell them, now. “People like me are called siege brats,” I said. I pulled at my pale, fine, crinkly hair. I wanted them to know what I was but I didn’t want to speak of my mother being raped. “You can see… When the Alds took the city. That was when… But we drove them out again, and kept them out almost a year. We can fight. We don’t make wars, but we can fight. But then the new army came from Asudar, twice as many men, and broke into the city. And they took the Waylord to prison and wrecked Galvamand. They tore down the university and threw the books into the canals and the sea. They drowned people in the canals and stoned them to death and buried them alive. The Waylord’s mother, Eleyo Galva—”
She had lived in this room. She had been here when the soldiers broke into the house. I could not go on.
We were all silent.
Shetar paced by, lashing her tail. I reached out to her, to get away from what I’d been talking about, but she ignored me. Her mouth was half open and she looked somehow more lionish than usual.
“She’ll be in a bad mood all night,” Gry said. “She got those rewards, at the Palace, and it reminded her that she hasn’t had a meal,”
“What does she eat?”
“Hapless goat, mostly,” Orrec said.
“Can she ever hunt?”
“She doesn’t really know how,” Gry said. “Her mother would have taught her. Halflions hunt in a clan, like wolves. That’s why she tolerates us. We’re her family.”
Shetar made a long, groaning, growling, singsong remark and paced down the long room again.
“Memer, if it isn’t too hard for you to talk about it Orrec began, and when I shook my head—“You said they destroyed the library of the university? Entirely?” I could tell he hoped I would deny it.
“The soldiers tried to tear down the library building, but it was stone and well built, so they broke the windows and wrecked the rooms, and brought the books out. They didn’t want to touch them, they made citizens carry them and load them on carts and haul them to the canal and dump them in. There were so many books they piled up on the bottom of the canal and began to choke it, so they made people cart them down to the harbor. And unload the books and dump them off the piers. If they didn’t sink right away they pushed people into the water after them. Once I saw a—” but this time I managed to stop myself, before I said that I had seen a book that had been salvaged from the sea.
Itwas in the secret room now, one of the northern scrollbooks, written on coated linen and rolled around wooden rods. The person who had found it cast up on the beach dried it out and brought it here. Though it had been weeks in the water, the beautiful writing could still be read. The Waylord showed it to me when he was working on it to restore the damaged text.
But I could not talk about the books, the old books or the rescued books, in the secret room. Not even to Gry and Orrec,
It was safe, I hoped, to talk about ancient times, and I said, “The university used to be here, long ago, in Galvamand.”