Voices Read Free

Waylord was a man whose knees had been broken with iron bars, his arms dislocated, his family murdered, his people defeated, a man in poverty and pain and shame.
    “I don’t know how to read,” I said. And then, because his smile was fading fast, going back into the shadow, I said, “Can I learn?”
    It saved the smile for a moment. Then he looked away.
    “It’s dangerous, Memer,” he said, not speaking to me as to a child.
    “Because the Alds are afraid of it,” I said.
    He looked back at me. “They are. They ought to be.”
    “It’s not demons or black magic,” I said. “There isn’t any such thing.”
    He did not answer directly. He looked me in the eyes, not like a man of forty looking at a child of nine, but as one soul judging another soul.
    “I’ll teach you, if you like,” he said.

♦ 2 ♦
    S o the Waylord began to teach me, and I learned to read very quickly, as if I had been waiting and more than ready, like a starving person given dinner.
    As soon as I understood what the letters were, I learned them, and began to make out the words, and I don’t remember ever being puzzled or stopped for long, except once. I took down the tall red book with gold designs on it’s cover, which had always been a favorite of mine before I could read, when I called it Shining Red. I just wanted to find out what it was about, to taste it. But when I tried to read it, it made no sense. There were the letters, and they made words, but meaningless words. I could not understand a single one. It was nonsense, garble, garbage. I was furious with it and with myself when the Waylord came in. “What is wrong with this stupid book!” I said.
    He looked at it. “Nothing’s wrong with it. It’s a very beautiful book.” And he read some of the garble out loud. It did sound beautiful, and as if it meant something. I scowled. “It’s in Aritan,” he said, “the language spoken in the world a long time ago. Our language grew out of it. Some of the words aren’t much changed. See, here? and here?” And I recognised parts of the words he pointed to.
    “Can I learn it?” I asked.
    He looked at me the way he often did, slowly: patient, judging, approving. “Yes,” he said.
    So I began to learn the ancient language, at the same time as I began to read the Chamhan in our own language.
    We couldn’t take books out of the secret room, of course. They would endanger us and everyone in Galvamand. The redhat priests of the Alds would come with soldiers to a house where a book was found. They wouldn’t touch the book, because it was demonic, but they’d have slaves take it down to the canal or the sea, bind stones to it to weight it, and throw it in to sink. And they’d do the same with the people who had owned it. They didn’t burn books or people who read them. The god of the Alds is Atth, the Burning God, and death by fire is a grand thing to them. So they drowned books and people, or took them to the mudflats by the sea and pushed them in with shovels and poles and trampled them down until they suffocated, sunk in the deep wet mud.
    People often brought books to Galvamand, at night, in secret. None of them knew of the hidden room—people who’d lived in the house all their life didn’t know of it—but people even outside the city knew that the Waylord Sulter Galva was the man to bring books to, now that it was dangerous to own them, and the House of the Oracle was the place to keep them safe.
    None of us in the household ever entered the Waylord’s rooms without knocking and waiting for his answer, and since he was no longer so ill, if he didn’t answer we didn’t bother him. What he did with his time and where he spent it, Ista and Sosta never inquired. They thought he was always in his apartments or the inner courtyards, I suppose, as I used to think. Galvamand is so big it’s easy to lose people in it. He never left the house, being too lame to walk even a block’s length, but people came to see him, many