Voices by Ursula K. Le Guin Read Free Book Online Page A

cub in the desert hills south of Vadalva. They kept the mother for their shows, but sold us the cub. She’s a good companion, and trustworthy.”
    “What is her name?” I asked very softly.
    “Shetar.”
    “Where is she now?” the Waylord asked.
    “In our wagon, in your stableyard.”
    “I hope to see her. As I too am unburdened with belief, I am free to offer you the shelter of my roof, Gry Barre—you and your husband, your horses and your lion.”
    She thanked him for his generosity, and he said, “The poor are rich in generosity.” Ever since she had spoken her husband’s name, his face had been alight. “Memer,” he said, “which room—?”
    I’d already decided that and was calculating whether the fish could feed eight if Ista made a stew with it. “The east room,” I said.
    “How about the Master’s room?”
    That startled me a little, for I knew his mother had lived in that beautiful, spacious apartment, upstairs from his rooms in this oldest part of the house. Long ago when Galvamand housed the university and library of Ansul, that apartment had belonged to it’s head, the Master. It’s unbroken, small-paned windows looked over the lower roofs of the house westward to Sul. There was a bedstead in it and nothing much else, now. But I could bring a mattress from the east room, and the chair from mine.
    “I’ll lay a fire there,” I said, for I knew the unused room would be dank and cold.
    The Waylord looked at me with great kindness. He said to Gry Barre, “Memer is my hands and half my head. She is not the daughter of my body, but of my house and heart. Her gods and ancestors are mine.”
    I knew well that I was of the blood of Galva, but it gave me a painful joy to hear him say what he said.
    “In the market,” Gry said, “a horse bolted when it saw my cat. It threw it’s rider and ran straight at Memer. She caught the reins and stopped and held it.”
    “I’ll go get the room ready,” I said, finding praise hard to bear.
    Gry excused herself and came with me, wanting to help me with the room. Once we had made up the bed and got a fire going in the hearth, it was done, and she said she’d go bring her husband here from the Harbor Market. I longed to hear him, and she saw that. “He’ll be nearly done speaking, I think,” she said, “but I’d be glad of your company. I’ll leave Shetar in the wagon. She’s fine there.” As we went out she added, “One lion is enough.”
    How could I not love her?
    So Gry Barre and I went afoot back down to the Harbor Market. There I first heard the maker Orrec Caspro speak.
    The tent was full, and the front and sides had been raised for people to stand outside it, crowded together like trees on a mountainside, all still, listening. He was telling the tale of the Fire-Tailed Bird from Denios’ Transformations. I knew it, and older people of Ansul there knew it, but to the Ald soldiers—and there were many, all in the best places, up close to the platform in the tent—and to most of the young people, it was new, a wonder. All stood with moving lips and gazing eyes, rapt in the story-poem. Caught in it too, hearing the teller’s even, resonant voice and clear northern accent, I hardly saw him himself. I listened, and saw the story happen.
    When he was done, the great crowd stood in silence for a long breath’s space, and then said, “Ah!” And then they began to applaud him, the Alds by hitting their palms together loudly, and we by crying the old praise-word, “Eho, eho!” I saw him then, a handsome, thin, straight, dark man, with a certain defiance in his stance up there on the dais, though he was most gracious with the crowd.
    We could not get near him for a long time. “I should have brought the other lion too,” Gry said, as we tried in vain to pry through the massed backs of the soldiers and officers with their blue cloaks and their sheep hair and their swords and crossbows and bludgeons, all pressing round the speaker, who had