“Is he a bright fellow?” the Waylord asked.
I said, “No. He’s stupid.” But I was ashamed, saying it. Even if it was true.
The day had been very warm, and the evening was mild. Instead of sitting in the gallery after dinner, we went out to the small outer courtyard that opens from it. It is sheltered bythe house walls on two sides and marked off on the other two byslender columned arcades. The hill to the east rises immediately behind the house, and the scent of flowering shrubs was in the air. We sat looking north to the open evening sky faintly tinged with green.
“The house is built into the hillside, isn’t it?” Orrec said, looking up at the north windows of the Master’s room, above this court, and the walls behind walls and roofs behind roofs of the ancient building.
“Yes,” the Waylord said, and I don’t know what was in his tone, but the hairs on myneck stirred.
He went on after a little while, “Ansul is the oldest city of the Western Shore, and this is the oldest house in Ansul.”
“Is it true that the Aritans came from the desert a thousand years ago, and found all these lands we know empty of humankind?”
“Longer than a thousand years, and from farther than the desert,” the Waylord said. “From the Sunrise, they said. They were people of a great empire far in the east. They sent explorers into the desert that bordered their lands to the west, and at last a group found a way across the desert—hundreds of miles wide, they say—to the green valleys of the Western Shore. Taramon led that group. Others followed. The books are very old, fragmentary, hard to understand. Many of them are lost, now. But it seemed they said that the people who came here were driven out of the Sunrise lands.” He said a line of verse in Aritan, and then in our tongue: “’The riverless waste that guards the exile’s spring…’ We are the children of those exiles.”
“And no one has ever come from the east since then?”
“Nor gone back to the east.”
“Except the Alds,” said Gry.
“They went back into the desert, yes, or stayed there, but only the western border of it, where there are springs and rivers. East of Asudar, they say, for a thousand miles the sun is the Gand of Gands and the sand is his people.”
“We live on the far edge of a world we know nothing of,” Orrec said, gazing at the pale, deep sky.
“Some scholars think Taramon and the others were driven out because they were sorcerers, people who had uncanny powers. They think gifts such as you in the Uplands have were common among the people who came from the Sunrise, but have died out among us over the centuries.”
“What do you think?” Gry asked.
“We have no such gifts as those here now,” the Waylord said rather carefully. “But the earliest records of Ansul tell of people coming to be healed by women of the House of Actamo, who could restore sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf.”
“Like the Cordemants!” Orrec said to Gry, and Gry said, “Backwards—as I thought!” They were about to explain this to us, when Desac came suddenly from the door of the gallery out into the court where we sat.
Like all the Waylord’s regular visitors, he let himself into and through the old part of the house, which was never locked. Ista sometimes fretted about the risk, but the Waylord said, “There are no locks on the doors of Galvamand,” and that was that. So Desac appeared now, startling Shetar. The halflion stood up with her head down and her ears flattened in a nasty, snaky way; and glared at him. He stopped short in the doorway.
Gry hissed a reproof at Shetar, who grunted and sat down, still glaring.
“Welcome, my friend, come sit with us,” the Waylord said, while I hurried to find a chair. Desac meanwhile took my chair next to the Waylord. That was like him. He did not have bad or coarse manners, but people who did not interest him did not exist for him. To him I was a furniture bringer, about as important as the furniture. He was single-minded, like the Alds. Perhaps soldiers have to be single-minded.
By the time I’d found a manageable chair and brought it out, he had been introduced to Orrec and Gry, and the Waylord must have told them that this was the leader of the resistance, or Desac had told them so himself for that’s what they were talking about. I sat down to listen.
Desac took notice of me then. Furniture should not have ears. He looked from me to the Waylord with the plain intent of having me sent away as usual.
“Memer knows a soldier’s son, who told her that some of the Alds talk of the army being recalled to Asudar,” the Waylord said to Desac. “And the boy called Tirio Actamo Queen Tirio, as a common joke. Have you heard that title?”
“No,” Desac said stiffly. He shot another glance at me. He looked a little like Shetar glaring with her ears flat (though she by now had decided to ignore him, and was industriously washing a hind paw). “What we say here must go no farther than this courtyard,” he announced.
“Of course,” said the Waylord. He spoke kindly and easily as ever, but the effect was rather like Gry’s hiss at the lion. Desac looked away from me, cleared his throat, rubbed his chin, and spoke to Orrec.
“Blessed Ennu sent you here, Orrec Caspro,” he said, “or the Deaf One called you to us, in the very hour of our need.”
“Need for me?” said Orrec.
“Who can better call the people to arms than a great maker?”
Orrec’s face went still and his bearing stiff. After a moment of silence he said, “I’ll do what’s in my power to do. But I’m a foreigner.”
“Against the invader we are all one people.”
“I’ve been more at the Palace than in the marketplace. At the Gand’s beck and call. Why should your people trust mer”
“They do trust you.They speak of your coming as a sign, a portent that the great days of Ansul are about to return.”
“I’m not a portent, I’m a poet,” Orrec said. His face was hard as rock now. “A city rising against tyranny will find its own speakers.”
“You’ll speak for us when we call you,” Desac said, with equal certainty. “We’ve sung your poem ‘Liberty’ for ten years now here in Ansul, in hiding, behind doors. How did that song get here, who brought it? From voice to voice, from soul to soul, from land to land. When we sing it aloud at last, in the face of the enemy, do you think you’ll be silent?”
Orrec said nothing.
“I’m a soldier,” Desac said, “I know what makes people fight to win. I know what a voice like yours can do. And I know that’s why you came here when you did.”
“I came because the Gand asked me to come.”
“He asked you because the gods of Ansul moved his mind. Because our hour is coming. The balance changes!”
“My friend,” said the Waylord, “the balance may be changing, but are the scales in your hands?”
Desac held out his empty hands with a dry smile.
“There’s no sign of unrest among the Ald soldiers which we might take advantage of,” the Waylord said. “We’re not certain if there’s any change yet in Ald policy. And we don’t know what’s going on between Ioratth and Iddor,”
“Ah, but that we do know,” Desac said. “Ioratth intends to send Iddor back to Medron with a retinue of priests and soldiers. Seemingly to seek guidance from the new Gand Acray, actually to get Iddor and his priests out of Ansul. Tirio Actamo’s servant Ialba passed that word this morning to the slaves we’re in touch with at the Palace. Shes been a faithful informer.”
“Then you intend to wait till Iddor is gone before you move?”
“Why wait? Why let the rat escape the trap?”
“You plan to attack? The barracks?”
“An attack is planned. Not where or when they might expect it.”
“I know you have some arms, but have you the men?”