The girls were coming in now; and Torm ran in with Tib and Hoby from the ball court, sweating, and finally Everra entered, tall and grave in his grey robe. We all reverenced the teacher and sat down on the benches. There were eleven of us, four children of the Family and seven children of the House.
Yaven and Torm were the sons of the Arca Family, Astano was the daughter, and Sotur was their cousin.
Among the house slaves, Tib and Hoby were boys of twelve and thirteen, I was eleven, and Ris and my sister Sallo were thirteen. Oco and her little brother Miv were much younger, just learning their letters.
All the girls would be educated till they were grown and given. Tib and Hoby, having learned to read and write and recite bits of the epics, would be let out of school for good, come spring. They couldn’t wait to get out and learn to work. I was being educated to be a teacher, so my work would always be here, in the long schoolroom with its high windows. When Yaven and Torm had children, I would teach those children and the children of their slaves.
Yaven invoked the spirits of his Ancestors to bless our work today, and Everra reproved Sallo and me for not setting out the schoolbooks, and we got to work. Almost immediately Everra had to call up Tib and Hoby for scuffling. They stuck out their hands palm up and he whacked
each one once with his yardstick. There was little beating in Arcamand, and no tortures such as we heard of in other Houses. Sallo and I had never even been struck; the shame of being reproved was quite enough to make us behave. Hoby and Tib had no shame, and as far as I could see no fear of punishment either, and hands as hard as leather. They grimaced and grinned and all but sniggered when Everra struck them, and indeed his heart wasn’t in it. Like them, he couldn’t wait for them to be out of his schoolroom. He asked Astano to hear them recite their daily bit of history from the Acts of the City of Etra, while Oco helped her little brother write his alphabet, and the rest of us got on with reading the Moralities of Trudec.
Old-fashioned, the old ways—those were words we heard often in Arcamand, spoken with absolute approval. I don’t think any of us had the faintest idea why we had to memorise tiresome old Trudec, or ever thought to ask. It was the tradition of the House of Arca to educate its people. Education meant learning to read the moralists and the epics and the poets Everra called the Classics, and studying the history of Etra and the City States, some geometry and principles of engineering, some mathematics, music, and drawing. That was the way it had always been. That was the way it was.
Hoby and Tib had never got beyond Nemec’s Fables, and Torm and Ris depended a good deal on the rest of us to get them through Trudec; but Everra was an excellent teacher, and had swept Yaven and Sotur and Sallo and me right into the histories and the epics, which we all enjoyed, though none so keenly as Yaven and I. When we’d finally finished discussing the Importance of Self Restraint as exemplified in the Forty-first Morality, I snapped Trudec shut and reached for the copy of the Siege of Oshir that I shared with Sallo. We had just started reading it last month. I knew every line I’d read by heart.
Our teacher saw me. His long, grey-black eyebrows went up. “Ga-vir,” he said, “will you now please hear Tib and Hoby recite, so that As-tano-io can join us in reading.”
I knew why Everra did it. It wasn’t meanness; it was Morality. He was training me to do what I didn’t want to do and not do what I did want to do, because that was a lesson I had to learn. The Forty-first.
I gave Sallo the book and went over to the side bench. Astano gave me the book of the Acts of the City and a sweet smile. She was fifteen, tall and thin, so light-skinned that her brothers called her the Ald, after the people in the eastern deserts who are said to have white skins and hair like sheep; but “ald” also means stupid. Astano wasn’t stupid, but she was shy; and had perhaps learned the Forty-first Morality almost too well. Silent and proper and modest and self-contained, a perfect Senator’s daughter: you had to know Astano very well to know how warm-hearted she was and what unexpected thoughts she could think.
It’s hard for a boy of eleven to play the teacher to older boys who are used to bossing him around and roughing him up and who normally call him Shrimp, Swamp Rat, or Beaky. And Hoby hated taking orders from me. Hoby had been born on the same day as Torm, the son of the Family. Everybody knew but nobody said he was Torm and Yaven’s half brother. His mother had been a slave, he was a slave; he received no special treatment. But he resented any slave who did. He’d always been jealous of my status in the classroom. He stared at me frowning as I stood before him and Tib, sitting side by side on the bench.
Astano had closed the book, so I asked, “Where were you?”
“Sitting here all along, Beaky,” Hoby said, and Tib sniggered.
What was hard to take was that Tib was my friend, but whenever he was with Hoby he was Hoby’s friend, not mine.
“Go on reciting from where you left off,” I said, speaking to Hoby, trying to sound cool and stern.
“I don’t remember where it was.”
“Then start over from where you started today. “ “I don’t remember where it was.”
I felt the blood rise in my face and sing in my ears. Unwisely; I asked, “What do you remember?”
“I don’t remember what I remember.” “Then begin at the beginning of the book.”
“I don’t remember it,” Hoby said, carried away with the success of his ploy. That gave me the advantage.
“You don’t remember any of the book at all?” I said, raising my voice a little, and Everra immediately glanced our way. “All right,” I said. “Tib, say the first page for Hob.”
Under our teacher’s eye he didn’t dare not to, and set off gabbling the Origin of the Acts, which they’d both known by heart for months. I stopped him at the end of the page and told Hoby to repeat it. That made Hoby really angry. I’d won. I knew I’d pay for it later. But he muttered the sentences through. I said, “Now go on where you left off with Astano-io,” and he obeyed, droning out the Act of Conscription.
“Tib,” I said, “paraphrase. “ That’s what Everra always had us do, to show we understood what we’d memorised.
“Tib,” Hoby said in a little squeaky murmur, “pawaphwase,”
Tib broke into giggles.
“Go on,” I ordered.
“Go on, pawaphwase,” Hoby whisper-squeaked, and Tib giggled helplessly.
Everra was talking about a passage in the epic, lecturing away, his eyes shining, the others all listening intently; but Yaven, sitting on the second bench, glanced over at us. He gazed at Hoby with a sharp frown. Hoby shrank into himself and looked at the floor. He kicked Tibs ankle. Tib immediately stopped giggling. After some struggle and hesitation he said, “It uh, it uh says, it means that uh, if the City is threatened uh with uh an attack the uh the Senate will uh what is it?”
“Convene,” I said. “Convene and debilitate-”
“Deliberate.”
“Deliberate the conscription of able-bodied freemen. Is deliberate like liberate, only the opposite?”
That was one reason I loved Tib: he heard words, he asked questions, he had a strange, quick mind; but nobody else valued it, so he didn’t either.
“No, it means talk something over.”
“If you pawaphwase it,” Hoby muttered.
We mumbled and stumbled through the rest of their recitation. I was putting away the Acts with great relief when Hoby leaned forward from his bench, staring at me, and said between his teeth, “Master’s pet.”
I was used to being called teacher’s pet. It was inevitable—it was true. But our teacher wasn’t a master, he was a slave, like us. This was different. Master’s pet meant toady; sneak, traitor. And Hoby said it with real hatred.