That was a good thought. I would need courage that day.
Sallo and I did the sweeping together and kept together while she did her spinning and I wrote out our geometry lesson. We didn’t see Hoby around at the pantry or in the house. Evening came, and I thought I’d escaped and was wondering if I should go thank the Ancestor, when as I came back from the privies to the women’s court I heard Hoby’s voice behind me, “There he is!” I ran, but he and the big fellows with him caught me at once. I kicked and yelled and fought, but I was a rabbit among the hounds.
They took me to the well behind the barrack, pulled out the bucket, and took turns stuffing me into the well head down, holding my legs and pushing my body down till my head was under water and I was choking and breathing water, then pulling me up just far enough to recover.
Whenever they brought me back up into the air, strangling and writhing and vomiting, Hoby would lean over me and say in a queer flat voice, “That’s for betraying your master, you little traitor. For sucking up to that foul old teacher, you swamp rat. See how you like getting wet, swamp rat.” And they would cram me down into the well again, and no matter how I tried to brace my arms against the stones and hold my head away from the water they would push me down and down till the water flooded into my nostrils and I gasped and choked, drowning. I don’t know how many times they did it till I lost consciousness, but I must have gone limp at last, and that scared them into thinking I was dead.
It’s a capital offense for anyone but his master to kill a slave. They ran off and left me lying there by the well-head.
It was old Remen the slave mender who found me, coming to the back well, which he always said had purer water than the fountains. “Fell over him in the dark,” he would say, telling the story afterwards. “Thought he was a dead cat! No, too big for a cat. Who’s been drowning a dog in the well? No, it’s not a drowned dog, it’s a drowned boy! By Luck! Who’s been drowning boys here?”
That was not a question I ever answered.
I suppose the boys thought their torture would not leave visible injuries, so my claims against them could be denied for lack of evidence; but in fact my arms and hands and head were lacerated and swollen with bruises I got in my struggles down in the narrow well, and even my ankles were black and blue from their merciless hands. Tough-bodied and hardy boys, they probably had no idea that they were doing me real harm, aside from terrifying me.
I came to in Remens little infirmary sometime that night; my chest hurt and my head ached, but I lay peacefully floating in a shallow pool of dim, yellowish light, feeling the silence moving out from me like the rings on quiet water. Gradually I became aware that my sister Sallo was asleep beside me, and that made the wonderful peacefulness sweeter still. I lay that way a long time, sometimes seeing only dim gold and shadows, sometimes remembering things. I remembered the reeds and the still, silky, blue water, and the blue hill away off in the distance.
Then it was just the pool of light and the shadows and Sallo’s breathing again for a while. Then I remembered Hobys voice, “There he is!”—but the terror was like the pain and the headache, remote, untroubling. I turned my head a little and saw the tiny oil lamp that poured out that endless pool of warm, golden light from its grain of fire. And I remembered the man in the high, dark room. He was standing at a big table covered with books and papers, with a lamp and a writing desk on it, under a tall, narrow window; he turned to look at me as I came into the room. I saw him very clearly this time. His hair was turning grey and his face was a little like the Ancestor’s, both fierce and kind; but where the Ancestor was full of pride, he was full of sorrow. Yet seeing me he smiled, and spoke my name, Gavir,
“Gavir” again … and I was in the pool of dim light, looking up a long way, it seemed, at a woman’s face. She wore a night wrapper of white wool drawn partly over her head. Her face was smooth and grave. She looked like Astano but was not Astano. I thought I was remembering her. Slowly I realised that she was the Mother, Falimer Gal-leco Arca, at whose face I had never in my life gazed openly. Now I lay staring at her as if she were a carven image, an Ancestor, dreamily, without fear.
Beside me Sallo, sound asleep, stirred a little.
The Mother laid the back of her hand a moment on my forehead, and nodded a little. “All right?” she murmured. I was too weary and dreamy to speak but I must have nodded or smiled, because she smiled a little, touched my cheek, and went on.
There was a crib bed near my bed; she paused there a while. That would be little Miv, I thought, drifting back into the silence of the pool of light. I remembered when we went to bury Miv, down by the river, how the willows were like green rain in the grey rain of spring. I remembered Miv’s sister Oco standing by the small black grave with a flowering branch in her hand. I looked out across the river dappled with raindrops. I remembered when we all went down to the river to bury old Gammy; that was in winter, the willows were bare over the ri-verbanks, but I wasn’t so sad then because it was like a holiday, a festival, so many people came to bury Gammy, and there was to be a wake-feast after. And I briefly remembered some other time there, in spring again, I did not know who was being buried. Maybe it was myself, I thought. I saw the sorrow in the eyes of the man standing by the lamp at the table in the high, dark room.
And it was morning. Soft daylight instead of the dim golden pooL Sallo had gone. Miv was a little lump in the crib bed nearby. At the end of the room an old man lay in bed: Loter, who had been a cook till he got old, and got sick, and now was here to die. Remen was helping him sit up against a pillow. Loter groaned and moaned. I felt all right, and got up; then my head hurt and went dizzy, and a lot of parts of me hurt, so I sat down on the bed for a while.
“Up, are you, marsh rat?” old Remen said, coming over to me. He felt some of the lumps on my head. He had splinted a dislocated finger on my right hand, and explained the splint to me while he checked it. “You’ll do,” he said. “Tough, you kids are. Who did that to you, anyhow?”
I shrugged.
He glanced at me, nodded shortly, and did not ask again. He and I were slaves, we lived in a complicity of silences.
Remen wouldn’t let me leave the infirmary that morning, saying that the Mother was coming in to look at both me and Miv; so I sat on the bed and examined my lumps and cuts, which were extensive and interesting. When I got bored with them I recited from The Siege and Fall of Sentas, chanting the lines. Along near noon, Miv finally woke up, and I could go over and talk to him. He was very groggy and didn’ t make much sense. He looked at me and asked me why I was two. “Two what?” I said, and he said, “Two Gavs.”
“Seeing double,” said old Remen, coming over. “A whack on the head’ll do that.—Mistress!” and he went down in the reverence, and I did too, as the Mother came into the room.
She checked Miv very thoroughly. His head looked misshapen on the left from the swelling, and she looked into his ear and pressed his skull and cheekbones softly. Her face was concerned, but finally she said, “He is coming back,” in her deep, soft voice, and smiled. She was holding him on her lap, and she spoke tenderly. “Aren’t you, little Miv? You’re coming back to us.”
“It roars,” he said plaintively, squinting and blinking. “Is Oco coming?”