The visions lessened, faded. Minki looked round, towards home. I sailed slowly back to the village. People were already gathering for the fish-mat. I had only a couple of little ritta to offer, but Tisso and her mother always had something cooked for me. I took my portion and Pe-roc’s and went back to the men’s village, to Peroc’s house, where he sat mending a fine net. I set his portion down and said, “From Lali Betu. May I ask you a question, Uncle?”
“Anh.”
“All my life I’ve seen through the world. I’ve remembered what I had never yet seen, and been where I’ve never yet been.” He had raised his face and was looking at me gravely. I went on, “Is this a power of our people—of the Rassiu? Is it a gift or a curse? Are there any people here who will tell me what my visions are?”
“Yes,” he said. “In South Shore. I think you should go there.”
He got up laboriously and stepped down off his deck. He came with me to Metter’s cabin. My uncle was sitting eating his dinner, with Minki on one side thumping her tail on the deck and Prut on the other with his tail wrapped round his paws. My uncle greeted Peroc and offered him his dinner to share.
“Gavir Aytana in kindness brought me food from the fish-mat,” the old man said. He spoke very formally. “It is well known that there have been great seers in your clan, Metter Aytana. Is this not so?”
“Ao,” my uncle said, staring.
“It may be that Gavir Aytana has the power. It would be well that the keepers of the sacred things be told this.” “Anh,” my uncle said, staring at me now.
“Your net will be ready tomorrow,” the old man said in a different tone of voice, and turned to limp back to his cabin.
I sat down near my uncle and began to eat my own dinner. Tisso’s mother had made excellent fish cakes rolled up in lettuce leaves with a drop of hot pepper sauce.
“I suppose I’d better go to South Shore,” my uncle said. “Or should I talk to Gegemer first, I wonder. But she’s… I suppose I should just go. I don’t know.”
“May I go with you?”
Minki thumped her tail.
“That might be good,” my uncle said, with relief. So next day we sailed to South Shore Village, where I’d been initiated. Metter seemed to have no idea what to do once we got there, so I led off to the Big House, where the sacred things were stored and initiations were held. It was the biggest house I’d seen in the Marshes, with walls of rigid lacquered reed such as they built the war canoes of, and a high reed-bundle roof. The fenced court in front of it was bare earth, with a small pool and a great old weeping willow tree beside it. The building was very dark inside, and awesome with the memories of the initiation rites; we did not dare enter, or even speak. We waited by the pool until a man came into the court. I had been about to suggest that we find some members of our clan, the Aytanu, and ask them for advice or assistance, but my uncle went over to the man and began at once to tell him that he was here with his nephew who had the power of seeing visions. The man was one-eyed and had a rake-broom in his hand; he had evidently come to sweep the courtyard. I tried to prevent Metter from babbling to somebody who appeared to be the janitor, but he babbled on. The man nodded, and looked more and more important. At last he said, “I will tell my cousin Dorod Aytana, the seerman of Reed Isles, and he perhaps will find if your nephew is suitable for training. Ennu-Amba has guided your steps to this place. Go with Me!”
“With Me,” Metter said gratefully. “Come along, Gavir. It’s all settled.” He couldn’t wait to get away from that big house with its dark open doorway. We went straight back to the docks and got into our boat, which Minki had been guarding by lying curled up asleep in the stern, and sailed home.
I didn’t put much credit in the one-eyed man’s boasts. I thought that if I wanted to find out anything about my visions, I’d have to do it myself.
So I got up my courage and, at the fish-mat that evening, I approached my aunt Gegemer. I’d traded a good catch of ritta with Kora for a goose he’d shot, a fine fat bird which I cleaned and plucked carefully. I had seen men who were courting women make such an offering, and so I offered it to Gegemer. “I need advice and guidance, Aunt,” I said, more bluntly than I had intended. She was a formidable woman, hard to speak to.
At first she didn’t answer or take the goose from me. I could feel her recoil, her wish to refuse. But she put out her hand at last for the gift and gestured with her head to the gardens, outside which men and women often met to talk. We walked there in silence. I arranged in my mind what I’d say, at least to start with, and when she stopped by a row of old dwarf cherry trees and faced me, I said it.
“I know you’re a woman of power, Aunt. I know you see through the world sometimes, and walk with Ennu-Amba.”
To my great surprise she laughed, a surprised, scornful laugh. “Hah! I never thought to hear that from a man!” she said.
That took me aback, and I hesitated, but managed to go on with what I’d planned to say. “I am a very ignorant person,” I said, “but I have two kinds of power, I think. I can remember very clearly what I’ve heard and seen. And I can remember, sometimes, what I have not yet heard and seen.” There I stopped. I waited for her to speak.
She turned away a little and rested her hand on the gnarled, scaly trunk of a little tree. “And what can I do for a man of power?” she asked at last, with the same hostile scorn.
“You can tell me what the visions are. How to use them, how to understand them. Where I was, in the city, in the forest, no one had this power. I thought, if I could come back to my people, maybe they’d tell me what I need to know. But I think no one here can, or will, except you.”
She turned quite away from me at that and was silent for a long time. At last she turned round and faced me. “I could have taught you, Gavir, if you’d been here as a child in our village,” she said, and I saw she was holding her mouth tight to keep it from quivering. “It’s too late now. Too late. A woman can’t teach a man anything. Wherever you’ve lived, you must have learned that!”
I said nothing, but she must have seen my protest in my face, and that she had hurt me.
“What can I say to you, sister’s son? You come by your gifts truly. Tano could tell any tale she’d heard once, and repeat words she’d heard years before. And I have walked with the lion, as you say—for all the good it’s done me. To bring back the past in memory is a great power. To remember what hasn’t yet come to pass is a great power too. What’s the use of it, you ask me? I don’t know. I’ve never known. Maybe the men know, who look down on women’s visions as meaningless foolishness. Ask them! I can’t tell you. I can only say, hold to the other power, the one your mother Tano had, for it won’t drive you crazy.”
She would not look at me steadily. Her glance was fierce and black as a crow’s. I heard how like my own voice hers was.
“What’s the good of remembering all the stories I ever heard, if men aren’t allowed to tell stories or hear them?” I said, my thwarted anger rising ro meet hers.
“No good,” she said. “You should have been a woman, Gavir Ayta-na. Then one of your powers might have brought you good.”
“But I’m not a woman, Gegemer Aytano,” I said bitterly.
She looked round at me again and her expression changed. “No,” she said. “Nor quite a man yet. But well on the way.” She paused, and drew a deep breath, and finally said, “I’ll give you what advice I can, though I think you won’t take it. So long as you remember yourself, you’re safe. When you begin to remember farther, you begin to lose yourself—you begin to be lost. Don’t lose yourself, Tano Aytano’s son. Hold to yourself. Remember yourself. No one told me to do that. No one but me will tell you to do it. So, take your risks. And if I ever see you when I walk with the lion, I’ll tell you what I see. That’s the only gift I might have to give you. In return for this,” and she swung the dead goose by its webbed red feet, and scowled, and walked away.