I was slow in my adolescence. To me Uter’s obsessions were as stupid as Tib’s sniggering attempts at manly remarks about what you might see if you did hide in the bushes. I knew what women looked like. I’d lived in the women’s quarters all my life. Just because Tib had been sent across to the men’s barrack last winter, he acted as if there was something special about a woman with her clothes off. It was, I thought, incredibly childish.
It had nothing to do with what I felt, lately, when I heard Sotur sing. That was entirely different. It had nothing to do with bodies. It was my soul that listened and was filled with pain and glory and unspeakable yearning….
Late that summer Yaven and Torm came to Vente with the Father, and the division between Family and slaves was again drawn deep by the presence of the Family men. I went out one day seeking solitude. Among the forested hills south of the farmhouse I found a beautiful oak grove in the fold of two hills. A clear stream ran down through it, and there was a strange little structure of rock halfway up the slope: a shrine, certainly, but to what god I did not know. I told Sallo about it, and she wanted to see it.
So one afternoon I took her and Ris and Tib there. Tib saw nothing to interest him in the place; he was restless, and soon roamed off back to the farm. Ris and Sallo felt as I did that there was some presence or blessing in the grove, the glade, the ruined altar. They settled down in the thin shade of the old oaks, near the small, quick-running creek, on what had once been a lawn around the shrine. Each of them had her drop-spindle and a sack of cloudy wool, for they were at the age now when women were to be seen doing women’s work wherever they were. That they could run off with me, unguarded, not even asking permission, was part of the miraculous ease of life at Vente. Anywhere else, two house-slave girls of fourteen would not have been allowed to leave the house at all. But they were good girls; they took their work with them; and the Mother trusted them as she trusted the benevolence of the place. So we sat on the thin grass of the slope in the hot August shade, feeling the cool breath of the running water, and were silent for a long time, at peace, in freedom.
“I wonder if it was an altar to Me,” Ris said.
Sallo shook her head, “It’s not the right shape,” she said.
“Who, then?”
“Maybe some god that only lived here.”
“An oak-tree god,” I said.
“That would be Iene. No,” Sallo said, with unusual certainty, “it isn’t Iene. It was a god that was here. This place’s god. Its spirit.”
“What should we leave as an offering?” Ris asked, half serious, half joking.
“I don’t know,” Sallo said. “We’ll find out.”
Ris spun a while, the motion of her arm and hand graceful and hypnotic. Ris was not as pretty as Sallo, but calm and charming in her ripening womanhood, with a splendid mane of glossy black hair, and a dreamy look in her long eyes. She heaved a quiet sigh and said, “I don’t ever want to leave here.”
She would be given in a couple of years, probably to young Odiran Edir, possibly to the heir of Herramand—wherever the interests and allegiances and debts of Arca indicated. We all knew that. The slave girls had been brought up to be given. Ris trusted her House to give her where she would be valued and well treated. She had no dread and a good deal of lively curiosity about where and to whom she would be sent. I’d heard her and Sallo talking about it. Sallo would not be given away from our House; she was destined for Yaven, that was equally well known. But at Arcamand daughters of the Family were not married off early, and slave girls were not given at thirteen or fourteen even if they were physically mature. Iemmer repeated the Mother’s words to our girls—’A woman is healthier and lives longer if she has had time to grow into her womanhood, and does not bear children while she is still a child.” And Everra quoted Trudec in approvaclass="underline" “Let a maiden remain a maiden until she be full grown and have wisdom, for the worship of a virgin daughter is most pleasing to her Ancestors.” And Sem the hostler said, “You don’t breed a yearling filly, do you?”
So Ris wasn’t speaking in imminent concern about having to leave home and learn how a gift-girl was treated at Edirmand or Herramand, but only in the knowledge that within a few years she’d be sent into a new life, and seldom if ever see us, and almost certainly never know any such freedom as this again.
Her unprotesting melancholy touched Sallo and me, safe as we were in knowing we would always live with our own Family and people.
“What would you do, Ris,” my sister asked, looking across the stream into the warm, shadowy depths of the woods, “if you were set free?”
“They don’t set girls free,” Ris said, practical and accurate, “Only men who do something heroic. Like that tiresome slave who saved his master’s treasure in the Fables."
“But there are countries where there aren’t any slaves. If you lived there youd be free. Everybody is.”
“But I’d be a foreigner,” Ris said with a laugh. “How do I know what I’d do? Crazy foreign things!”
“Well, but pretend. If you did get set free, here, in Etra.”
Ris set herself to think about it. “If I was a freed-woman, I could get married. So I could keep my own babies… But I’d have to look after them myself whether I wanted to or not, wouldn’t I? I don’t know, I don’t know any freedwomen. I don’t know what it’s like. What would you do?”
“I don’t know,” Sallo said. “I don’t know why I think about it. But I do.”
“It would be nice to be married,” Ris said after a while, thoughtful-ly."So that you knew.” I did not know what she meant. “Oh, yes!” Sallo said, heartfelt.
“But you do know, Sal. Yaven-di wouldn’t ever pass you around.”
“No, he wouldn’t,” Sallo said, and there was a tenderness in her voice, as always when she spoke of Yaven, and a proud embarrassment.
I understood now that Ris had meant a master’s power to give away the girl he’d been given, or lend her out to other men, or send her to the women’s quarters to nurse other women’s babies, whatever he pleased—a power she had no part in but must simply submit to. Thinking about that made me feel extremely lucky to be a man. So in turn I was a little embarrassed when Sallo asked me, “What would you do, Gav?”
“If I was set free?”
She nodded, looking at me with that same loving tenderness and pride but no embarrassment, only a little teasing.
I thought a while and said, “Well, I’d like to travel. I’d like to go to Mesun, where the University is. And I’d like to see Pagadi. And maybe the ruins of Sentas. And cities you read about, like Resva of the Towers, and Ansul the Beautiful, with four canals and fifteen bridges…”
“And then?”
“Then I’d come back to Arcamand with a lot of new books! Teacher-di won’t even talk about getting any new books. ‘Oldest is safest,’” I mouthed froggily, imitating Everra being pompous. Ris and Sallo giggled. And that was all our conversation on a freedom we could not imagine.
Nor did we leave any offering to the spirit of that place, unless remembrance is a kind of offering.
The following summer, our stay at the farm was cut short by rumors of war.
We arrived there as usual, with the cousins from Herramand, and on the first evening all nine of us went out to Sentas Hill expecting to find it in ruins again. But though the winter rains had damaged the moat and earthworks, the walls and towers stood, and had even been built higher in places. Some of the farm children must have taken it over and made it their own refuge or play fortress. Umo and Uter were indignant, feeling our Sentas had been invaded, polluted, but Astano said, “Maybe it will always be here, now.”