Powers (34 page)

My aunt and I were at ease with each other. I knew she had saved my life, and so did she. I think that knowledge softened her self-reproach for having let my mother go to her death. Gegemer was harsh, hard, with a bitter temper, but her care of me in my illness had been patient, even tender. Often she and I didn’t understand each other, but it didn’t matter; there was an understanding beneath words, a likeness of mind beneath all differences. One thing we both knew without ever saying: that when I was well enough, I would leave the Marshes.

I was in no hurry, but she was. She had seen me going north with death pursuing me. I must go. I must cross the second river to be safe. I must go as soon as I could. She said that to me at last.

“No matter when I go,” I said, “death will pursue me.”

“Eng, eng, eng,” she said, shaking her head fiercely, frowning. “If you put off going too long, death will be waiting for you!”

“Then I’ll stay here,” I said, half joking. “Why should I leave my kin and clan and go running after death? I like my people here. I like to fish . . .”

I was teasing her, of course, and she knew it and didn’t really mind, but she had seen what she had seen and I had not. She couldn’t make light of it.

And among all the meaningless, endless swarming of visions that I lived with while I was with Dorod and when I was first back in East Lake, there was one that I remembered with particular exactness and clarity. I am waist deep in a river that tugs at my legs and feet, trying to pull me with its current, and on my back is a heavy weight that constantly unbalances me. I take a step forward, directly towards the riverbank, but it is wrong—I know it at once—the sand is unstable, there is no footing there. I cannot see where to go, through the rush and swirl of the water, but I take a step to the right, and another, and then on that way, as if following some path under the water, one step after the other, against all the force of the current—and that is all. I see no more.

This remembering, this vision, came back to me again as I began to recover my health. It was, I think, the last of the visions of my illness. I told it to Gegemer when she came the next day. She winced and shuddered as I told her.

“It is the same river,” she murmured.

I shivered too when she said that.

“I saw you there,” she said. “It is a child you carry, riding on your back.” After a long time she said, “You will be safe, sister’s son. You will be safe.” Her voice was low and rough, and she spoke with so much yearning that I took her words not as prophecy but only as her desire.

I had been a fool indeed to go off with Dorod, poor Dorod who had waited for me and wanted me only for his own sake, to make him important among his people, a seerman, a dealer in destiny, a person of power. I had turned my back on Gegemer, who even if she hardly knew it had truly waited for me, truly wanted me, not to make her great, but for love’s sake.

I was well enough to go back to my uncle’s house by April, though not well enough yet to go any farther. The last day I stayed at the marriage hut, my aunt came by for no reason but to say goodbye. We sat in front of the house in the sunlight, and I said, “Mother’s sister, may I tell you of my sister.”

“Sallo,” she said in a whisper. The name of a child of two or three, a lost child.

“She was my guardian and defender. She was always brave,” I said. “She couldn’t remember the Marshes, she didn’t know anything about our people, but she knew we had powers the others didn’t have. She told me never to tell them, the others, of my visions. She was wise. She was beautiful—there isn’t a girl in the village as beautiful as Sallo was. Or as kind, and loving, and true-hearted.” And seeing how intently my aunt listened, I talked on, trying to tell her what Sallo had looked like, how she had spoken, what she had been to me. It did not take very long. It is hard to say what a person is. And Sallo’s life had been too short to make much of a story. She had not lived as long even as I had lived now.

When I fell silent, partly because I could not speak for the tears I wanted to cry, Gegemer said, “Your sister was like my sister.” And she laid her dark hand on my dark hand for one moment.

So once more I gathered up my little bundle, blanket, gear, knife, book, and walked back to the men’s village, to my uncle’s house. Metter welcomed me with calm kindness. Prut came to meet me waving his tail, and as soon as I put my old blanket on my cot he jumped up onto it and began to knead it industriously, purring like a windmill. But there was no courteous greeting from old Minki. She had died in the winter, Metter told me sadly. And old Peroc, too, had died, alone in his house. Metter had gone one morning to give him a net to mend, and found him sitting bent over by his cold fire pot, his work in his cold hands.

“There’s a litter of puppies in Rava’s house,” Metter said after a while. “We might go look them over tomorrow.”

We did that, and chose a fine, upstanding, bright-eyed puppy whose black coat curled as tight as lamb’s wool. Metter named her Bo, and took her out fishing that same day. Just as he pushed off she leapt into the water and began paddling along beside the boat. He fished her out and spoke to her severely, while she wagged her tail in joyful unrepentance. I wanted to be with them, but I wasn’t strong enough to go out fishing yet; just the walk to Rava’s house had left me out of breath and shaky. I sat down on the deck in the sunshine and watched the little moth-wing sail of Metter’s boat grow smaller and smaller on the silky blue water of the lake. It was good to be here. This house, I thought, was probably as near home as I’d ever come.

But it wasn’t my home. I didn’t want to live my life here. That was clear to me now. I had been born with two gifts, two powers. One of them belonged here; it was a power the Marsh people knew, knew how to train and use. But my training in it had failed, whether through my teacher’s ignorance and impatience, or because my power of vision was in fact not great, but only the gift, common enough here, of seeing, sometimes, a little way ahead. A child’s gift, a wild gift, that could not be trained or counted on, and that would grow weaker as I grew older.

And my other power, though reliable, was utterly useless here. What good was a head full of stories and histories and poetry? The less a man of the Rassiu said, the more he was respected. Stories were for women and children. Songs were secrets, sung only at the terrifying sacred rites of initiation. These were not people of the word. They were people of the vision and the moment. All I had learned from books was wasted among them. Was I then to forget it all, betray my memory, and let my mind and spirit, too, dwindle away and grow weaker as I grew older?

The people who stole me from my people had stolen my people from me. I could never wholly be one of them.

To see that was to see that I must go on.

Where to go, then?

North, Gegemer said. She saw me going north. Across two great rivers. The Somulane and the Sensaly, those would be. Asion was north and west of the Somulane, in Bendile; the city of Mesun lay on the north bank of the Sensaly, in Urdile. There was a great university in Mesun. Scholars, poets lived there. The poet Orrec Caspro lived there.

I got up and went into the little house. Prut was working on my old blanket, his eyes half closed and his claws going in and out and in and out and his windmill running. I reached across him and took from the shelf the little reedcloth packet, brought it outside and sat down cross-legged with it. I thought of the hours, days, months I had spent on my knees on Dorod’s deck, and swore in my heart that I’d never kneel again. I wished I had one of the women’s legless wicker chairs, but men did not use women’s things. Women used and did what there was to use and do, but men shunned and despised a great many things, such as wicker chairs and cooking and storytelling, depriving themselves of many skills and pleasures, in order to prove that they weren’t women. Wouldn’t it be better to prove it by doing, rather than by not doing.

Better for me, not for them. I was not one of them.

I sat cross-legged, then, and unwrapped the silky reedcloth from the book. And for the first time in how long—a year, two years?—I opened it. I opened the book where it opened, letting it choose the page, and read.

In the domain of the Lord of the Waters

the rushes grow, the green reeds grow.

Hassa! hassa!

Swans fly over the waters, calling,

over the green reeds, the rushes.

Hassa! hassa!

Grey herons fly over the marshes

and shadows pass under their wings.

Under the clouds pass shadows,

over the marshlands, over the islands

of reeds and ricegrass. Blessed

are the wings of the waterbirds,

blessed the realm of the Lord of the Waters,

the Lord of the Springs and Rivers.

I closed the book and closed my eyes, leaning back against the doorpost, letting the sunlight flow through my eyelids, through my bones. How did he know? How did he know what it was like here? How did he know the sacred name of the swan and heron? Was Orrec Caspro a Rassiu, a Marshman? Was he a seer?

I fell asleep with the murmur of the lines in my mind. I woke when Bo jumped into my lap and washed my face enthusiastically. Metter was just climbing up onto the deck. “What’s that.” he said, looking with mild curiosity at the book.

“A box of words,” I said. I held it up and showed it to him. He shook his head and said, “Anh, anh.”

“Any ritta today?”

“No. Just perch and a pikelet. I need you to go out with me for ritta. Are you coming to the fish-mat?”

I went with him there, and talked with Tisso afterwards. I was glad to see her, and we talked for quite a while, sitting near the gardens. Later that evening, watching the sunset from the deck of our house, I knew with sudden sharp embarrassment and unease that Tisso was ready to fall in love with me, even though I hadn’t yet had my second initiation, even though I still looked as if I was made of black sticks, and was a failed seer, a man of no accomplishments.

Metter was shaving. Men of the Marshes don’t have much in the way of beards; my uncle shaved by pulling out random hairs with a clamshell as tweezers and a black bowl filled with water as a mirror. He clearly enjoyed the process. When he was done he handed me the clamshell. I was surprised, but when I felt my jaw and peered into the bowl I saw that I had sprouted some curly black beard hairs. I pulled them out one by one. It was, in fact, enjoyable. Almost all small daily acts here were enjoyable. I would miss the peacefulness of sitting here with my peaceful uncle. But I was now all the more sure that I must leave.

I could not go till I had my strength back, that was clear. So for the rest of the spring I kept to a steady regime. I stayed almost entirely in the men’s village; I went to the fish-mat and spoke to people there, but did not go walking with the young men and women. When I walked to strengthen my legs and get my wind back, I went alone, miles along the lakeshore. I took up Peroc’s craft of mending nets, which I could do sitting down, and though I was not very good at it, the nets I mended were better than nothing, and it gave me some usefulness to my village.

Before long I was able to go line-fishing with Metter and help him train Bo, though the little dog hardly needed training. Retrieving was bred into her brain and bone; the first time a fish, a big perch, took the hook off my line, Bo was into the water, under the water, and bobbed up with the struggling fish held delicately in her jaws, offering it to me, before I even knew I’d lost it.

Every morning and evening I sat out on the deck, under the lifted house wall if it was raining, and read a few pages in my book. Prut, who was getting older and lazier, often took this opportunity to sit on my lap. Then my uncle and I ended the day with the brief reverence-dance and words of praise to the Lord of the Waters, which I had learned when I first lived in the village; and we went to bed.

So the days passed. It was high summer, past the solstice. I didn’t think about my need to leave the village. I had no needs. I was content.

My aunt came to me, stalking around the fish-mat, glaring like an angry crow. Little children scattered in fear before her. “Gavir!” she said. “Gavir, I saw a man. A man pursuing you. A man who is your death.”

I stared at her.

“You must go, sister’s son!”

My aunt told everyone I was obeying her vision and would leave the day after tomorrow. When I went next day to the fish-mat for the last time, Tisso’s mother was waiting to offer me a blanket woven of reed treated so that the fibers were fuzzy and made a thick, soft texture, warm as wool. “My daughter wove it,” Lali Betu said, and I said, “I thank her for it and will think of you both when the nights are cold.” Tisso hung back and did not try to speak to me. I said goodbye to the women and spoke briefly with my aunt. She did not want to talk, she wanted me to be gone, to get across the second river and be safe.

I left early the next morning before my uncle got up. The puppy was sleeping on his feet. Prut was curled up on my old blanket. I whispered, “Go with Mé,” to them all and slipped out of the little house and away from my village. My heart was heavy in me.

I went overland, eastward. My aunt would have disapproved, wanting me to hurry straight to the north. I refused to let her fear drive me. I had no boat, and heading north on foot, I’d have to take a maze of a way through the Marshes, endless days of walking. I had no money with me and no means of earning it while I traveled.

But it was in my mind that I did have money. Blood money, guilt money, the payment for my sister’s death. I had left it with Cuga, hidden in his cave. It would be enough to take me to Mesun, if I lived light, and I was used to living light. I knew the way that I’d walked with Chamry and Venne; I could keep east of the Heart of the Forest, so as not to run into Barna’s guards, when I got that far north. The tricky part would be finding Cuga’s cave, south of the Daneran Forest. I was sure my gift of memory would guide me when I came among the hills and valleys I had known that summer—if I could find them.