Everra also came up the hill frequently to oversee the plans and layout of the buildings and defenses according to the chart in his copy of the book; and we’d persuade him to stay and read to us from the epic while we took a break from rock laying and ditch digging. It was, he said, a most excellent educational opportunity, from which we would all profit. He was so enthusiastic about it that he might have been a real nuisance, demanding pedantic improvements and corrections to our architecture; but he’d begin to wilt in the heat by mid-morning and go back down, leaving us on the windy, white-hot hilltop, building up our stones and dreams.
All these months, the great farmhouse had been a household of women and children. The Father stayed in Etra because the Senate was meeting almost daily. Sotur’s older brother Soter rode out to Vente every now and then to spend a night or two with his wife and children, but the other brother, Sodera, a lawyer, was kept in town by what Sotur always called his “suitcases.” Great-Uncle Yaven Herro Arca, in his nineties, had been brought along to sit out under the oak trees. Most of the time, our Yaven was the man of the house, though he chose not to play the role.
Among the farmhouse staff were a few old handymen past much real work, but most of the house people were women. They were used to running things with no masters present and were more independent both in act and manner than the city house people. There was a lack of hierarchy and protocol. Everything seemed to go along quite well without the formalities and rigidities of life at Arcamand, the creaking and straining, the needless complications. When the Mother wanted to make plum jam the way it had been made at Gallecamand when she was a girl, there wasn’t the bowing and scraping there would have been in the great kitchens of Arcamand, nor the suppressed resentment at the interruption; old Acco, the chief cook of the farm, stood over the Mother as she’d stand over a prentice, and was free with her criticisms.
Babies were common property; slave women cared for Family babies, of course, but also the Mother and Soter’s and Sodera’s wives looked after slave children, and all the “tiny ones” crawled and staggered about together and fell asleep in promiscuous heaps, like kittens.
We ate outside at long tables under the oak trees near the kitchen, and though there was a Family table and a slave table, seating wasn’t all by status; Everra usually sat at the Family table at the invitation of the Mother and Yaven, while Sotur and Astano, self-invited, sat with Ris and Sallo at ours. We sorted ourselves out less by rank than by age and preference. This ease, this commonalty, was a great part of the happiness of life at Vente. But it changed, it had to change, when the Father arrived for the last few weeks of the summer, bringing both his nephews with him, and Torm.
The first evening of their arrival seemed to bode ill. The Family table was full of men now. The Family women and girls all sat there, dressed up, looking far more ladylike than they had all summer, in modest silence, while the men talked. Metter and the valets, who had ridden out with the men, sat with us and talked with one another. Everra sat with us, silent. We children were frowned at if we spoke.
Dinner was served formally and went on a long time, and after it the children of the Family—Yaven and Astano, Sotur, Umo, and Uter—all went indoors with the adults of the Family.
We five slave children, left outside, loitered about, disconsolate. It was too late to go down to Sentas, Sallo suggested we walk down the road by the farm village to see if the blackberries in the hedges were ripening. Some of the children there saw us, and hiding behind the brambly hedges, they threw stones at us—not big stones, not to kill, only pebbles, but maybe they had slingshots, for a hit stung like fury and left a small black bruise. Poor little Oco, the first to be hit, shrieked out that there was a hornet, then we all began to get stung. We saw the missiles flying over the hedge, and got a glimpse of our assailants. One, a big boy, leapt up and jeered something in his uncouth dialect. We ran. Not laughing, as we had run from the orcharders, but in real fear. We saw the twilight darkening around us and felt hatred at our backs.
When we got back to the farm, Oco and Ris were both crying, Sallo quieted Oco down. We bathed our bruises, and sat on our hay-filled mattresses as the stars came out, and talked, Sallo said, “They saw there weren’t any Family children with us.”
“But what do they hate us for?” Oco mourned.
Nobody said anything.
“Maybe because we can do a lot of things they can’t,” I said. “And their fathers hate us,” said Sallo. “For the fruit wars.” “I hate them,” Ris said. “I do too,” said Oco.
“Dirty peasants,” Tib said, and I felt the same fierce contempt, and along with it the faint, sweet self-disgust of conscious prejudice, of despising what you’re afraid of.
We were silent for a long time, watching the stars come out above the black crowns of the oaks and the roofs of the house.
“Sallo,” Oco whispered. “Is he going to sleep with us?”
She meant Torm. Oco was utterly terrified of Torm. She had seen him kill her brother.
By “sleep with us” she meant would he come out, as the Family children had been doing all summer, to sleep as we did on hay mattresses under the stars.
“I don’t think so, Oco-sweet,” Sallo said in her soft voice. “I don’t think any of them will, tonight. They have to stay in and be gentlefolk.” But waking before dawn, when the constellations of winter were fading in the brightening eastern sky, I saw Astano and Sotur get up from their mattress, wrapping their light blankets around them, and steal barefoot back to the house.
The Family children came out of the house much later than usual that morning. We hadn’t decided whether we should go down to Sentas Hill without them, and were still discussing it when we saw them. Ya-ven called, “Come on! What are you all sitting around here for?”
Torm was not with him. The girls were in their country clothes, like us, tunics over trousers, ragged and dusty.
We joined the group. Yaven picked up Oco and put her on his shoulders. “Brave charioteer,” he said, “drive your fiery steed to the high walls and gates of Sentas! Onward!” Oco gave a little squeak of a war cry, and Yaven galloped off down the path, neighing. We all galloped after him.
The phrase “a born leader” is a common one. I suppose many men are leaders by nature; there are a lot of ways to lead, and a lot of goals to lead to. The first true leader I knew was this boy of seventeen, Yaven
Altanter Arca, and I have judged others by him. By that standard, leadership means personal magnetism, active intelligence, unquestioning acceptance of responsibility, and something harder to define: a tension between justice and compassion, which is never satisfied by one without the other, and so can seldom be wholly satisfied.
At this moment, Yaven was divided between his allegiance to all of us “Sentans” and the protective loyalty he felt he owed to his younger brother. Along towards noon, when it was time to send a volunteer to fetch bread and cheese and whatever else the kitchen had for us for lunch, he said, “I’ll go.” He came back with the lunch sack, and with Torm.
As soon as she saw Torm climbing the hill, Oco shrank into the maze of rocks behind the Tower of the Ancients. Presently Sallo slipped away with her down to the stream that ran by the foot of our hill.
Yaven showed Torm all over our rock buildings and earthworks, explaining how they followed the historic plans, and telling him of the scenes that would be enacted when we’d finished building Sentas and were ready for the siege and fall. Torm followed him about, saying little, looking stiff and uncomfortable, but he did say some words of praise for the circumvallation—our masterpiece.