In his learning he excelled. His hand was so fine they took him from the scribal class and set him to making manuscripts at the age of twelve. They let him do a new transcription of the prophecies of Prester Cork, and when he finished it they commended him for discovering seven new and hidden meanings in the rhymes and the diagonals. But whenever their praise tempted Orem to be proud, to speak boldly with the other boys, or to presume a friendship with a priest, he felt himself slip helplessly forward into a pool of water, felt his lungs wrench at him in a desperate plea for air, and he could not speak.
So the years passed in the House of God in Banningside, until the day his true father found him.
9
The Man with Golden Eyes
This is how you almost met your son, though you did not know you had a son, and how you set him on the course of life that led him to do the things you wish to kill him for.
THE END OF EDUCATION
Orem sat in tutorial, Halfpriest Dobbick across from him, studying his copy of the Waking of the Wines. He had, on a whim, written the words bud, bloom, blossom, and blood in the castings of the ages of the coops, and other such figures throughout the book. Dobbick frowned now and then, and Orem feared he had laid too many meanings into the book. He wanted to speak, to apologize, to explain. But silence, he knew, was the best policy.
So he looked out the window at the street below. There was deaf Yizzer where he always sat, at the gate of the House of God, shouting in a voice that could be heard in every corner of the building, “Oh sir kind sir you have the gift of God in your face oh sir you are beneficent God smiles at you for giving and God will name your inmost names with a blessing your inmost hidden names,” on and on in an eternal monologue that was singularly effective in drawing coins from passing strangers. The novices were convinced that Yizzer was no more deaf than they were, but no amount of teasing him from the playyard could interrupt his shouting or trick him into anger or laughter; if he was only pretending to be deaf, he was good at it.
If I were hungry enough, would I become a beggar, too?
Dobbick set down the book. “You have excelled yourself.”
Orem did not know how tense he had been until he felt himself relax. “Is it good enough, then?”
“Oh, yes. I will certify it as your masterwork.”
Orem was shocked. “My masterwork. But I’m only fifteen years old.”
Dobbick sat back in silence, forcing Orem to wait patiently for him to speak. At last: “Your education is finished, Orem.”
“It can’t be finished. I’m not half through the library, and my work is still raw—”
“Your work is the best we’ve seen in Banningside since God was first taught in this land. Who do you think wrote the manuscript you copied of the Waking of the Wines?”
“I don’t know. They’re never signed.”
“Prester Abrekem.”
“Himself.”
“The prophet who first taught Palicrovol the ways of God. And you improved on his work. Not slightly—markedly. What more will we teach you in Banningside? The books you have not read contain nothing that you need—you have taken our most difficult books and swallowed them whole.”
Orem had known he was doing well, but he had not conceived, not yet, that his education was through. “I am not a man.”
“You are a man,” said Dobbick. “You’re the tallest creature in the House of God, will we still call you a boy?”
“I am not wise.”
“We never said that we could teach you wisdom. Only that we would teach you what the wise men wrote.”
“I cannot take the vows.”
Ah. There was the thing he had been so afraid to say, that he thought he would not have to say for years yet.
“Why not?” asked Dobbick quietly. “The life is not bad here. You have been happy with us.”
Orem looked out the window.
“Is it the wide world? Is that what draws you? But you need not stay within the House. You could be a mendicant—”
“Not I—”
“Or even an outrider, our purchaser—or we could send you to the Great Temple in Inwit, they’d be glad of you there, and we’d be glad of you upon your return.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Do you think I don’t?” Dobbick said. “You worry because you think you don’t believe enough to be a priest. It’s a disease of the age of fifteen. When the flesh is stirring, the spirit seems unreal.”
“If my flesh stirs I don’t know it,” said Orem. “My problem is not unbelief. My problem is too much belief.”
Dobbick’s eyes narrowed. “You were a child when you came here. Haven’t you broken yourself of foolish superstitions?”
“There is magic in the world. The women who love the Sweet Sisters don’t deny God. Why must Godsmen deny the Sisters and the Hart?”
“The world is more complicated than you think.”
“No, Halfpriest Dobbick. The world is more complicated than you think. I will not live in one-third of the universe when I might wander through it all.”
“So you’ll leave the benison and orison and psalm in order to do obeisance to a household gom?”
Orem laughed. He could not help laughing when Dobbick went into rhyme, and Dobbick knew it.
“Come, Orem. There’s no choice that must be made today. As long as you’re not bored with it, there’s plenty of copywork to be done. When a man is certified a master cleric, he usually takes the vows or leaves, but we can make you a brother unsworn—it’s an honorable role, and it recognizes that you are our equal in education, if not in holiness. But I’ll no longer pretend that I’m your teacher. I don’t read your manuscripts to correct them—I read them to learn what bright new things you have made them mean.”
Orem spoke the blunt truth then, though he knew it would hurt Dobbick. “How can you look at my work and find truth, when I am only playing games? If my jokes and riddles and puzzles look like truth to you, what can I think but that all your other truths are nothing but jokes and riddles and puzzles?”
Dobbick again fell silent, until he finally said, “Or perhaps you are too young to know jokes and riddles are the only truth we have, and so are precious to us.”
Ashamed at having hurt his teacher, Orem again walked to the window and looked outside. There was a stir, a hurry about the people passing back and forth, and it wasn’t even a market day. And then trumpets in the distance, getting closer. Was the army coming early, then? And would King Palicrovol ride in at their head? It was the only thing that really interested Orem much these days; the mere mention of King Palicrovol’s name awakened something in the boy. What sort of man is King, Orem wondered, what sort of man is it who speaks and armies obey, who calls out and a thousand priests pray for him?
“You seem drawn to the window.”
“It’s the banners caught my eye. You can close the window.”
“Which means you want it open. Do you think I don’t know your way?”
You don’t.
“You are not different from other boys. You dream of Palicrovol and his wicked and hopeless quest for a city he stole in the first place.”
“He’s a Godsman, isn’t he?” Orem retorted.
“In name only. He keeps a few priests for show. It’s with wizards that he guards himself against the Queen, more fool he.”
Outside the window, the gate of the town’s stockade was opening—yes, the King was coming, for outside the gate were soldiers ahorse and soldiers afoot, shining with steel breastplates and helmets. It was a dazzling sight, but soldiers held little glamour for Orem. It was the magic that drew his dreams. Not the magic of the Sweet Sisters, but the magic of the hundred-pointed head, the Antler Crown. It was King Palicrovol, whose wizards battled daily with the Queen. And as he thought of the King again, Palicrovol rode through the gate of Banningside, on a high saddle on a tall grey horse, and on his head the gilded Antler Crown of Burland. He looked every inch a king. He turned his head not at all, just
stared straight ahead as the crowd cheered and threw roses at him.
He came closer, and Orem winced as the sun shone brightly, reflected off King Palicrovol’s eyes. Where his eyes should have been there were two gold balls, shining in sunlight, so that the King could not possibly see anything. “The Queen looks through Palicrovol’s eyes today,” said Orem. “Why does she do it, when she has the Searching Eye?”
Dobbick was surprisingly angry when he answered. “If you had ever learned anything of God, you’d know that her Searching Eye can’t penetrate a temple or a House of God, or the seventh circle of the seven circles. So why do you think King Palicrovol doesn’t surround himself with priests to keep her sight out? Because he’s black, too, at heart. Because he’s the kind of man who’d rape a child on the steps of Faces Hall in order to steal the crown that was her only gift to give. God has no part of him, Orem. And God will have no part of you, if you draw yourself to magic the way you—”
But now it was Dobbick who stopped the conversation and turned to look out the window. For the crowd had fallen silent outside, and when Orem looked where the halfpriest was staring, he saw that King Palicrovol had stopped, had taken the Antler Crown from his head and now held it before him.
The King turned his blind eyes from one side to the other, as if he could see to search. “No!” cried a strange, moaning voice, and it took Orem a moment to realize that it was the King who spoke so mournfully. “Oh, Inwit, not here, not through my eyes!” And then the King looked up, and the golden balls seemed to fix on Orem’s face, and the King pointed at Orem’s heart and cried, “Mine! Mine! Mine!”
Soldiers leapt out of line, and suddenly Orem felt himself being jerked back into the House of God. It was Dobbick, and his voice was thick with fear. “O God, O God, O seven times seven the dark days that come from incaution. O God, Orem, he wants you, he wants to have you—”
Orem was confused, but made no resistance as Dobbick dragged him out of the room. Compliance had so long been Orem’s way that he had no strategy to escape the halfpriest’s grip as he pulled him up and down stairs, through doors usually locked, and finally into a trap door leading to a hidden path.
“The House of God is old,” said Dobbick, “from the dark days before God had His victory over all the strangers and all the powers. This path comes out near the river, well outside the stockade. Go home. Go to your father’s farm and bid good-bye to your family, and then get away. Far away, to the sea, to the mountains, wherever the King can’t find you.”
“But what does it mean!”
“It means the King has some use for you in his battle. And you can trust this—it will be to your cost. A man like Palicrovol hasn’t lived his three black centuries by paying his costs himself. In the games of power, there are only two players, and all the rest are pawns. Oh, Orem—” and the halfpriest hugged the boy at the secret postern gate, “Orem, if you had only stepped within the seven circles, just a step, you would have nothing to fear from him. God knows I hate to let you go.”
“What’s happening to me?” Orem asked, frightened as much by Dobbick’s sudden expression of love and regret as by what had happened with the King.
“I don’t know. Whatever it is, you don’t want it.”
But in that instant Orem realized that he did want it. In that instant he knew that the safety of the House of God was itself what he most hated. In the House of God he would never make a name for himself, or find a place, or earn a poem. Here at the postern gate he was at the verge of all three, he could feel it in the fear of his belly and the clarity of his vision.
“You’re fifteen, you’re only a child,” said Dobbick. But Orem knew it was the age when soldiers went into the army, the age when a man could take a wife. Only in the House of God was fifteen young. “Ah, yes,” said Dobbick, drawing the seven circles on Orem’s face with a tender finger, “I was not wrong, you’re no tool of Palicrovol’s war, Orem. You’re God’s tool.”
It made Orem angry. “I’m not a tool.”
“Oh, we’re all a tool, every one. You don’t want to be a servant of God, do you? Well, serve yourself, Orem, and I think you’ll end up serving God anyway.”
And then it was God-be-with-you and gone, the gate closing behind him. Orem tramped down a short run of what looked like sewer but wasn’t, and then clambered out of the end of the pipe, where it was fouled and tangled with silt and shrubbery. He heard the halfpriest call to him down the pipe: “Orem! Anywhere but Inwit!”
Anywhere but Inwit? Oh, no, Orem answered silently. Only Inwit for me. Whatever the King’s pointing finger might have meant, it did mean this: Orem had a poem in him, and he meant to earn it out. And if Inwit was where God’s man thought he must not go, then Orem knew that it was Inwit that called him. First home, as Dobbick had said, to bid good-bye, or his father would grieve. Then Inwit, where the world’s water all flowed.
I am fast as a deer, Orem said to himself as he ran the country roads. He ran untired forever, it seemed, and then walked until the air came back to him, and then he ran again. His legs did not hurt him; the pain in his side came and almost killed him and then went away, abashed. And sooner than he would have thought possible, he was home. All those years that he yearned to come back here, and it was only this far all the time.
“Why not stay here?” asked his aging father. “I’ll be glad of you.”
But it was an empty offer, for Avonap would not live forever. His brothers scowled, and his mother Molly only stared into the fire. Orem laughed. “With you I’d stay forever, Father, but would you stay with me?”
“What will you do, then? I can teach you the way to Scravehold. I went there once, with my father.”
“That’s not the fire I yearn to see.”
Orem’s eldest brother laughed at that. “What does such an ashen one as you know of fire?”
“More than the straw,” retorted Orem, for he was not afraid of his brother, who knew nothing of astronomy and numbers and could not write his name.
“Inwit,” said Orem’s mother.
Orem looked at her in surprise, and for the first time his enthusiasm was paused. What his mother wanted for him could not be good. Or was it possible his mother might actually share a dream with him?
“It is Inwit,” said Molly, “where the tenth child and seventh son must go.”
“Hush, Molly,” said the anguished father.
“Inwit,” said Molly. “Inwit.”
So it was that Orem did not leave flying as he had come home. He walked, and his step was slow and his thoughts deep. What did it mean, that his mother also wished a poem for him?
He stood at the river’s edge, in his mother’s own secret place, waiting for some vessel to come to bear him out, to carry him away and down. As he waited he wrote in the mud of the shore, wondering what his mother would make of the strange signs when she came here again to bathe. He wrote:
Orem at Banningside
Free and flying
Palicrovol
Seeing, sighing
And the numbers added downward to say:
See me be great
He did not notice what Dobbick would have seen, that the numbers added upward to say:
My son dying
He did not know yet that a man could be playing riddles and accidently tell himself the truth.
Near sunset came the raft of a grocer, keeping timidly to the edge of Banning at this treacherous place where the current was far too fast. The grocer was on the far side, struggling and looking afraid. Orem hailed him.
“Do you want a hand to trade for a river trip?”
“Only if you can swim!” came the answering cry.
So Orem hitched his shirt and tied it around his chest, held his burlap bag in his teeth, and swam his backstroke across the surface of the water. He measured well, and his flying hand struck the edge of the raft. He tossed his bag over his head and climbed aboard. The grocer glanced at him, grimaced, and said, “Your voice is a liar. I thought you we
re a man.”
But Orem only laughed and took the little oar while the grocer kept to the pole, and together they fended the raft through the cave of leaves until the river broadened and slowed and it was safe again. Then Orem laid down the oar, unfastened his shirt, and let it fall to cover him again. He turned to face the grocer and said, “Well, if I didn’t do a man’s work, say so and I’ll leave you here.”
The grocer glowered at him, but he did not say to leave. My adventure has begun, thought Orem. I am my own man now, and I can make my name mean whatever I like.
10
The Grocer’s Song
How Orem Scanthips found his way downriver to Inwit, where he would earn his name and his poem, but no place.
HIS FATHER’S WATER
“How far are you going?” Orem asked cheerfully. The grocer only eyed him skeptically for a moment, then turned to study the current, using the long pole to keep the raft to the center of the river. Orem knew from the talk of travelers in Banningside that the currents of Banning were dangerous enough, but where the river was slower the dangers were worse, for there were pirates whenever Palicrovol’s army was far away, and foragers whenever it was close, and both used about the same strategy for about the same purpose, with the difference that Palicrovol’s men didn’t kill half so often.
“The King’s in Banningside,” Orem offered. If the grocer heard, he gave no sign; indeed, he was so silent and surly-looking that Orem wondered that such an unfriendly man would have taken him aboard at all.
Night came quickly from behind the eastern trees, and when the last of the light was going, the grocer slowly poled the raft nearer the shore, though not closer than a hundred yards from the bank. Then he took the three heavy anchor stones in their strong cloth bags and dropped them overboard at the rear of the raft. The current quickly drew them from the stones until the taut lines held them.
Orem watched silently as the grocer crawled into the tent and pulled out a large clay pan. In it the grocer built a fire of sticks and coal. On it he placed a brass bowl, where he made a carrot and onion soup with river water. Orem was not sure whether he would be invited to share, and felt uneasy about asking. After all, if his host chose silence, it was not his place to insist on speech.