“You don’t sing quite as well as some people,” my companion remarked, with some diplomacy “I know I don’t. You sing, then.”
She lifted up a sweet, unsteady little voice in a love song she’d heard in Barna’s house. I thought of her beautiful sister, and wondered if Melle too would be beautiful. I found myself thinking, “Let her be spared that!” But surely that was a slave’s thought. I must learn to think with a free mind.
Urdile was a pleasant country of apple orchards and poplar-bordered roads, rising up slowly from the river to the blue hills I’d seen from far away. We walked, and sometimes got a lift on a cart, and bought food at village markets, or were offered milk by a farm woman who saw us pass and pitied the dusty child. I got scolded for dragging my little brother out to tramp the roads, but when my little brother clung to me and glared loyal defiance, the scolder would melt and offer us food or a hayloft to sleep in, after five days, returning towards the river, which had curved away from our road, we came to the city of Mesun.
Built on steep hills right above the river, with roofs of slate and red tile, and towers, and several ornate bridges, Mesun was a city of stone, but it was not walled.
That seemed strange to me. There were no gates, no guard towers, no guards. I saw no soldiers anywhere. We walked into a great city as into a village.
The houses towered up three and four stories over streets full of people, carts, wagons, horses. The din and commotion and crowding seemed tremendous to us. Melle was holding my hand tightly, and I was glad of it. We passed a marketplace near the river that made Etra’s market seem a very small affair. I thought the best thing to do was find some modest inn where we could put down our packs and clean ourselves up a bit, for we were a frowzy, filthy pair by now. As we went on past the market, looking for inn signs, I saw two young men come swinging down a steep street, wearing long, light, grey-brown cloaks and velvet caps that squashed out over the ears. They were exactly like a picture in a book in Everra’s library: Two Scholars of the University of Mesun. They saw me staring at them, and one of them gave me a slight wink. I stepped forward and said, “Excuse me, would you tell us how to get to the University?”
“Right up the hill, friend,” the one who’d winked said. He looked at us curiously. I didn’t know what to ask him. I finally said, “Are there lodging houses up there?” and he nodded: “The Quail’s the cheapest.” His friend said, “No, the Barking Dog,” and the first one said, “All d e-pends on your taste in insects: fleas at the Quail, bugs at the Dog.” And they went on down the street laughing.
We climbed up the way they had come down. Before long the cobblestone way became steps. I saw that we were climbing around a great wall of stones. Mesun had been a fortified city, long ago, and this was the wall of the citadel. Over the wall loomed palaces of silver-grey stone with steep-pitched roofs and tall windows. The steps brought us up at last onto a little curving street lined with smaller houses, and Melle whispered, “There they are.” They stood side by side, two inns, with their signs of the quail and the savagely barking dog. “Fleas or bedbugs?” I asked Melle, and she said, “Fleas.” So we took lodgings at the Quail.
We had a most welcome bath and gave what spare clothing we had to the sour-faced landlady to be cleaned. We were on the watch for fleas, but there seemed to be less than in most haylofts. After a scanty and not very good dinner, Melle was ready to go to bed. She had borne the journey well, but every day of it had taken her to about the limit of her small strength. The last couple of days she had had spells of tears and snappishness, like any tired child. I was pretty stretched myself, but I felt a nervous energy in me, here in the city, that would not let me rest. I asked Melle if she’d be worried if I went out for a while. She was lying holding her Ennu figure against her chest, her beloved poncho pulled up over the bedcover. “No,” she said, “I won’t worry, Beaky.” But she looked a little sad and tremulous. I said, “Oh, maybe I won’t go.”
“Go on,” she said crossly. “Go awayl I am just going to sleep!” And she shut her eyes, frowning, her mouth pulled tight.
“All right. I’ll be back before dark.”
She ignored me, squeezing her eyes shut. I went out.
As I came out into the street the same two young men were coming by, a bit out of breath from the climb up, and the one who’d winked saw me. “Chose the fleas, eh?” he said. He had a pleasant smile and was openly curious about me. I took this second meeting as an omen or sign which I should follow. I said, “You’re students of the University?”
He stopped and nodded; his companion stopped less willingly.
“I’d like to know how to become a student.”
“I thought that might be the case.”
“Can you tell me—at all—how I should—Whom I should ask—“ “Nobody sent you here? A teacher, a scholar you worked with?” My heart sank. “No,” I said.
He cocked his head with its ridiculous but dashing velvet cap. “Come on to the Gross Tun and have a drink with us,” he said, “I’m Sampater Yille, this is Gola Mederra. He’s law, I’m letters.”
I said my name, and, “I was a slave in Etra.”
I had to say that before anything else, before they were shamed by finding they had offered their friendship to a slave.
“In Etra? Were you there in the siege?” said Sampater, and Gola said, “Come on, I’m thirsty!”
We drank beer at the Gross Tun, a crowded beer hall noisy with students, most of them about my age or a little older. Sampater and Go-la were principally interested in putting away as much beer as possible as fast as possible and in talking to everybody else at the beer hall, but they introduced me to everyone, and everyone gave me advice about where to go and whom to see about taking classes in letters at the University. When it turned out I knew not one of the famous teachers they mentioned, Sampater asked, “There was nobody you came here wanting to study with, then, a name you knew?” “Orrec Caspro.”
“Ha!” He stared at me, laughed, and raised his mug. “You’re a poet,
then!”
“No, no. I only—“ I didn’t know what I was. I didn’t know enough to know what I was, or wanted to do or be. I’d never felt so ignorant,
Sampater drained his mug and cried, “One more round, on me, and I’ll take you to his house ”
“No, I can’t—”
“Why not? He’s not a professor, you know, he keeps no state. You don’t have to approach him on your knees. We’ll go right there, it’s no distance.”
I managed to get out of it by insisting that I must be going back to my little brother. I paid for our beer, which endeared me to them both, and Sampater told me how to get to Caspro’s house, just up another street or two and around the corner. “Go see him, go see him tomorrow,” he said. “Or, listen, I’ll come by for you.” I assured him I’d go, and would use his name as a password, and so I got away from the Gross Tun and back to the Quail, with my head spinning.
Waking early, lying thinking as the daylight grew in the low room, I made up my mind. My vague plans of becoming a student at the University had dissolved. I didn’t have enough money, I didn’t have enough training, and I didn’t think I could become one of those ligh-thearted fellows at the Gross Tun. They were my age, but we’d reached our age by different roads.
What I wanted was work, to support myself and Melle. In a city this size, without slaves, there must be work to do, I knew the name of only one person in Mesun: so, to him I would go. If he couldn’t give me work, I’d find it elsewhere.