Ursula Le Guin - Voices

Caspro looked at her. His face changed again. He might have given a light answer to her light question and she’d have been satisfied, but that wasn’t in him to do.

“My family’s gift is the unmaking,” he said, and involuntarily put both hands over his eyes for a moment—a strange moment. “But I was given the gift of making. By mistake.” He looked up as if bewildered. I saw Gry watching him across the table, intent, concerned.

“No mistake about it,” said the Waylord with a calm, genial authority that lightened the uncanny mood. “And all you were given you give to us in your poetry. I wish I could come hear you.”

“Don’t encourage him,” Gry said, “he’ll spout you poems till the cows come home.”

Sosta giggled. I think it was the first thing anybody said she understood, and she thought it was funny to say “till the cows come home.”

Caspro laughed too, and told us that he could speak poetry forever. “The only thing I like better than saying is hearing,” he said, “or reading.” In his glance at the Waylord there was a signal or challenge, heavier than the words themselves. But then, reading was a heavy word, in our city under the Alds.

“This was a good house for poetry, once,” my lord said. “Will you have a little more fish, Gry Barre? Ista! Are you coming or not, woman?”

Ista likes it when he raises his voice, when he orders her to sit and eat. She bustled in at once, bobbed to the guests, and, as soon as she had blesed her bread, asked, “What’s Gudit going on about, abut a lion?”

“It’s in the wagon,” Gudit said. “I told you, you godless fool. Don’t go meddle with that wagon, I said. You didn’t, did you?”

“Of course I did nothing of the sort.” Offended by Gudit’s coarseness and his loud voice, Ista became ladylike, almost mincing. “A lion is nothing to me. Will it be staying in the wagon, then?”

“She’ll be best staying with us, if it won’t disturb the household,” Gry said, but seeing the sensation this caused in Sosta and Berni and possibly Ista, she added quickly, “But maybe it’s better she sleeps in the wagon.”

“That sounds cramped. May we meet our other guest?” said the Waylord. I had never seen him like this, genial, forceful. I was seeing Ista’s Vaylord of the good days. “Has she had her dinner? Plese, bring her in.”

“Ohhh,” Sosta said faintly.

“’T won’t be you she eats, Sos,” Ista said. “More likely she’d fancy a bit of fish?” She was not going to be overawed by any lion. “I kept out the head, just for broth you know. She’s more than welcome to it.”

“I thank you, Ista, but she ate early this morning,” Gry said. “And tomorrow’s her fasting day. A fat lion is a terrible thing to see.”

“I have no doubt,” said Ista primly.

Gry excused herself and presently came in with her halflion, led on a short leash. The animal was the size of a large dog but very different in shape and gait—a cat, long-bodied yet compact, lithe, smooth, long-tailed, with the short face and forward-looking jewel eyes of a cat, and a pace between slouching and majestic. She was sand-colored, tawny. The hairs round her face were lighter, long and fine, and the short fur round the mouth and under the chin was white. The long tail ended in a little tawny plume. I was half scared half enchanted. The halflion sat down on her haunches, looked all around at us, opened her mouth to show a broad pink tongue and fearsome white teeth in a yawn, closed her mouth, closed her great topaz eyes, and purred. It was a loud, rumbling, deliberate purr.

“Aw,” Bomi said. “Can I pet her?”

And I followed Bomi. The lion’s fur was lovely, deep and thick. When you scratched around her round, neat ears she leaned into your hand and the purr deepened.

Gry led her to the Waylord. Shetar sat down beside his chair and he put his hand out for her to sniff. She sniffed it thoroughly and then looked up at him, not with the long dog gaze: one keen cat glance. He put his hand on her head. She sat there with half shut eyes, purring, and I saw the big talons of her forepaws working in and out gently against the slate floor.

When dinner was done, the Waylord invited our guests to come with him to his apartments, glancing at me to assure me I was welcome. We made our way at the slow pace of his lameness back through the corridors and past the deserted rooms and inner courts. We sat in the back gallery. The evening light was fading in the windows.

“I think we have a good deal to talk about,” the Waylord said to his guests. He looked at them both, and the flash of opal fire was in his eyes. “Gry Barre says that you came to Ansul in part to find me. And Memer told me that her meeting with you was blessed by Lero. I am sure of that blessing. But may I ask why you sought me?”

“May I tell you all the story?” Caspro asked.

The Waylord laughed and said, “’Shall I allow the sun to shine, or permit the river to run?’” That is what Raniu said when the great harper Moro asked him if he might play his harp in the temple.

Caspro began hesitantly. “Because of what books were to me when I was a boy—because what was written was a light—a light in darkness to me—” He paused. “Then, when I came down to the cities and began to learn how much there was to be learned, I was half in despair—”

“You were a calf in clover,” Gry said.

“Well, yes, that too.” We all laughed, and he went on more easily. “At any rate, as I see it, making poetry is the least of what I do. Finding what other makers made, speaking it, printing it, recovering it from neglect or oblivion, relighting the light of the word—this is the chief work of my life. So when I’m not earning my living in the marketplace, I’m in the library or the bookdealer’s stall or the scholar’s den, asking about books and writings, learning about forgotten makers, those known only in their city or country. And everywhere I’ve been in Bendraman, Urdile, the City States, Vadalva, in every university or library or marketplace, the wisest, most learned people speak of the learning of Ansul and the Library of Ansul.”

“In the past tense,” said the Waylord.

“Waylord, I work with what’s lost, buried, hidden. Lost by time and ill chance, maybe, or hidden from destruction, from the prejudice of a ruler or a priest. In the foundations of the old council halls of Mesun in Urdile we found the earliest of all the testaments of the Life of Raniu , written on calfskin and sealed in an unmarked vault five hundred years ago, in the reign of the tyrant Terensa. He drove out teachers and destroyed temples and writings throughout the city. He ruled for forty years. The Alds have ruled Ansul only seventeen years.”

“Memer’s lifetime,” the Waylord said. “A lot can be lost in seventeen years. A generation learns that knowledge is punished and safety lies in ignorance. The next generation doesn’t know they’re ignorant, because they don’t know what knowledge was. Those who came after Terensa in Mesun didn’t dig up the buried writings. They didn’t know of them.”

“A rumor survived,” Caspro said.

“There are always rumors.”

“I follow them.”

“Was it some particular rumor that brought you here? The name of a lost maker, a lost poem?’

“Mostly the reputation of Ansul as the center of learning and of writing in all the Western Shore. What most drew me was the tale—the rumor—of a great library that was here even before the founding of the University of Ansul. In it were said to be writngs from the days when we still spoke Aritan, and had some memory of the lands beyond the desert, from which we came. Perhaps there were even books brought from the Sunrise, across the desert, in the beginning of our history. I have longed for years to come here, to ask, to seek any knowledge of that library!”