When Melle woke I told her we were going to buy some fine new city clothes. She liked that idea. The sour landlady told us how to get to the cloth market at the foot of the hill of the citadel, and there we found booths and booths of used clothing, where we could get decked out decently or even somewhat grandly.
I saw Melle looking with a kind of wistful awe at a robe of worn but beautiful patterned ivory silk. I said, “Squeaky, you don’t have to keep being Miv, you know.”
She hunched up with shyness. “It’s too big,” she murmured. In fact it was a robe for a grown woman. When we had admired it and left it behind she said to me, “It looked like Diero.” She was right.
We both ended up with the trousers, linen shirt, and dark vest or tunic that men and boys in Mesun wore. For Melle I found an elegant small velvet vest with buttons made of copper pennies. She kept looking down at her buttons as we climbed back up to the citadel. “Now I will never not have some money,” she said.
We ate bread with oil and olives at a street vendor’s stall, and then I said, “Now we’ll go and see the great man.” Melle was delighted. She flitted up the steep stone street ahead of me. As for me, I walked in a kind of dogged, blind, frightened resolution. I had stopped back by the inn for the small packet wrapped in reed-cloth which I now carried.
Sampater’s directions had been good; we found what had to be the house, a tall, narrow one set right against the rock of the hill, the last house on the street. I knocked.
A young woman opened the door. Her skin was so pale her face seemed luminous. Melle and I both stared at her hair—I had never seen such hair in my life. It was like the finest gold wire, it was like a sheep’s fleece combed out, a glory of light about her head. “Oh!” Melle said, and I almost did too.
The young woman smiled a little. I imagine that we were rather funny, big boy and little boy, very clean, very stiff, standing staring round-eyed on the threshold. Her smile was kind, and it heartened me.
“I came to Mesun to see Orrec Caspro, if—if that is possible,” I said.
“I think it’s possible,” she said. “May I tell him who…”
“My name is Gavir Aytana Sidoy. This is my—brother—Miv—”
“I’m Melle,” Melle said. “I’m a girl.” She hunched up her shoulders and looked down, frowning fiercely, like a small falcon.
“Please come in,” the young woman said. “I’m Memer Galva. I’ll go ask if Orrec is free—“ And she was off, quick and light, carrying her marvelous hair like a candle flame, a halo of sunlight.
We stood in a narrow entrance hall. There were several doorways to rooms on either side.
Melle put her hand in mine. “Is it all right if I’m not Miv?” she whispered.
“Of course. I’m glad you’re not Miv.”
She nodded. Then she said again, louder, “Oh!”
I looked where she was looking, a little farther down the hall. A lion was crossing the hall.
It paid no attention to us at all, but stood in a doorway lashing its tail and looked back impatiently over its shoulder. It was not a black marsh lion; it was the color of sand, and not very large. I said with no voice, “Ennu!”
“I’m coming,” a woman said, and she appeared, crossing the hallway, following the lion.
She saw us and stopped. “Oh dear,” she said. “Please don’t be afraid. She’s quite tame, I didn’t know anybody was here. Won’t you come on in to the hearth room?”
The lion turned around and sat down, still looking impatient. The woman put her hand on its head and said something to it, and it said, “Aoww,” in a complaining way.
I looked at Melle. She stood rigid, staring at the lion, whether with terror or fascination I couldn’t tell. The woman spoke to Melle: “Her name is Shetar, and she’s been with us ever since she was a kitten. Would you like to pet her? She likes being petted,” The woman’s voice was extraordinarily pleasant, low-pitched, almost hoarse, but with a lulling in it. And she spoke with the Uplands accent, like Chamry Bern.
Melle clutched my hand more strongly and nodded.
I came forward with her, tentatively. The woman smiled at us and said, “I’m Gry.”
“This is Melle, I’m Gavir.”
“Melle! That is a lovely name. Shetar, please greet Melle properly.”
The lion got up quite promptly, and facing us, made a deep bow—that is, she stretched out her forelegs the way cats do, with her chin on her paws. Then she stood up and looked meaningfully at Gry who took something out of her pocket and popped it in the lion’s mouth. “Good lion,” she said.
Very soon Melle was petting the lion’s broad head and neck. Gry talked with her in an easy, reassuring way, answering her questions about Shetar. A halflion, she said it was. Half was quite enough, I thought.
Looking up at me, Gry asked, “Did you come to see Orrec?” “Yes. The—the lady said to wait.”
And just then Memer Galva came back into the hall. “He says to come up to his study,” she said. “I’ll show you up if you like.”
Gry said, “Maybe Melle would like to stay with Shetar and us for a while.”
“Oh yes please,” Melle said, and looked at me to see if it was all right.
“Yes please,” I echoed. My heart was beating so hard I couldn’t think. I followed the pale flame of Memer’s hair up a narrow staircase and into a hall.
As she opened the door I knew where I was. I know it, I remember it. I have been here many times, the dark room, the book-littered table under a tall window, the lamp. I know the face that turns to me, alert, sorrowful, unguarded, I know his voice as he speaks my name—I could not say anything. I stood like a block of stone. He gazed at me intently. “What is it?” he asked, low-voiced.
I managed to say I was sorry, and he got me to sit down, and clearing some books off another chair, sat down facing me, “So?”
I was clutching the packet. I unwrapped it, fumbling at the tightly sealed reedcloth, and held his book out to him, “When I was a slave I was forbidden to read your work. But I was given this book by a fellow slave. When I lost everything, I lost it, but again it was given me. It came with me across the river of death and the river of life. It was the sign to me of where my treasure is. It was my guide. So I—So I followed it to its maker. And seeing you, I knew I have seen you all my life—that I was to come here.”
He took the little book and looked at its battered, water-swollen binding, turning it in his hands. He opened it gently. From the page it opened to, he read, “’Three things that, seeking increase, strengthen souclass="underline" love, learning, liberty.’” He gave a sigh. “I wasn’t much older than you when I wrote that,” he said, a little wryly. He looked up at me. He gave me back the book, saying, “You honor me, Gavir Aytana. You give me the gift only the reader can give the writer. Is there anything I can give you?”
He too spoke like Chamry Bern.
I sat dumb. My burst of eloquence was over, my tongue was tied. “Well, we can talk about that presently,” he said. He was concerned and gentle. “Tell me something about yourself. Where were you in slavery? Not in my part of the world, I know. Slaves in the Uplands have no more book learning than their masters do.”
“In the House of Arca, in the city of Etra,” I said. Tears sprang into my eyes as I said it.
“But your people came from the Marshes, I think?”
“My sister and I were taken by slavers…” And so he drew my story from me, a brief telling of it, but he kept me at it, asking questions and not letting me rush ahead. I said little about how Sallo died, for I could not burden a stranger with my heart’s grief. When I got to my return to the forest, and how Melle and I met there, his eyes flashed. “Melle was my mother’s name,” he said. “And my daughter’s.” His voice dropped, saying that. He looked away. “And you have this child with you—so Memer said?”