IV

THREE days later, a guardsman stopped at Gamwyn’s door and announced that he was wanted by the Protector. The boy was puzzled. He wondered, as he walked through the echoing stone hallways, if Garet had told. He was not being taken to the Protector’s room off the Judgment Room, but to her quarters.

He was ushered into a sitting room. The Protector sat at a round table drinking tea. The guardsman stood at attention. She looked at him. “Thank you. You may wait outside, please.” The guardsman left. She did not invite Gamwyn to sit. “I have sent to Threerivers by message bird. They will send guardsmen for you. We will not use our guardsmen. How is your cheek?”

“It—it… not your guardsmen? They will tie me, Protector.”

“Perhaps. I know I would if I wanted to get you all the way there. Now, come here and let me look at your face.”

Gamwyn complied, walking around the table and turning his cheek. Sagan frowned at it. She rose and went to the window, asking him to follow, then turned bis head to the light. “There will be a scar, but not a bad one. Aven has cared for you.”

Gamwyn felt a throb of despair now that it had come over him he was returning. Already the guardsmen were on the river coming for him. Why had Sagan done that? Garet had told her. He must have. The Protector was now leaning on the windowsill, gazing out. Her face was impassive.

“What will become of me, Protector? What will I do?”

“You will have to go through what you will have to go through, Gamwyn.”

“Can’t you help me?”

She turned to him. “You mean we haven’t?”

“Oh, yes, Protector. I am very grateful. But I wouldn’t really like to go back to Threerivers, except for my family. Pelbarigan is not the same at all.”

“I was there once. I remember the inscriptions of Craydor on the walls.”

“Yes.”

“Do you read them? Do you think about them at all?”

“Not much, Protector. They’ve always been there.”

“I remember one statement well: ‘The genius of the past may be of much help, but our real strength comes from our own inspired genius.’ Have you read that one?”

“Yes. It’s on the front-stair hall.”

“I like that one.”

“I have no genius, Protector. I’m only a boy. I have always worked and fetched things.”

“When you go down the river in the canoe, you’ll have time to think. Will you keep saying to yourself what you don’t have? Or what you do?”

“What do I have?”

“Then there’s no help for you, is there? Not because you have little, but because you refuse to see what you do have. Now. I am busy. I’ll probably not see you again. I have two presents for you.” She handed him a little leather bag. Inside he found a bag of white powder and a small length of wood that turned out to be a folding knife.

“The knife is perhaps symbolic. It has a ring, see, so you can get a thong and wear it around your neck. The powder—well, in case you have trouble sleeping, that will put you to sleep. I have had it mixed with salt to make it tasty.”

“But I don’t have trouble sleeping. I don’t understand.”

“Then you don’t want my present?”

“Oh, yes, but I… I…”

“You must not tell anyone that I gave these things to you. No one. After all, you are a reprobate, a ghastly little brat, right? Somebody a Protector has no business chatting with. Now, two more matters. Gamwyn, do you ever lie?”

“Lie? No—only when I’m kidding with Brudoer. Why?”

“Curiosity. I’ve been thinking about it lately. Lying is very complex. Those who hold others by brute force, against reason and justice, often seem shocked when the helpless lie to them, and all the while they are living a lie in the eyes of Aven and never noticing it.”

“I don’t understand, Protector.”

“No matter. If they put you in prison, you’ll have time to think about it. Now, one other thing.” She turned him and put her hands on his shoulders. Her eyes fixed his. “I haven’t lied to you in any particular. I want you to promise to remember everything I’ve ever told you and to think about it. Everything. Every word.” She shook him lightly.

“I promise,” he said. She embraced him. He could hear the steady thump of her heart as his ear pressed against her tunic. She let him go and rang for the guardsman. Gamwyn walked down the hall bewildered, holding his small bag of gifts.

Gamwyn’s remaining time at Pelbarigan passed rapidly. Garet was always with him, and he became less and less sure about whether the boy had told his grandmother. When the boat arrived from Threerivers, it contained two men and a woman from Udge’s own guard. As he had expected, Gamwyn was bound and set in the center of the canoe. A crowd gathered on the bank as it prepared to push off.

The protocol of Pelbarigan’s guardsmen seemed strict, quick and impeccable, until at the last moment a Pelbarigan guardcaptain waded out with a folded sack and snugged it in behind Gamwyn’s back, where he rested against a thwart. Then he turned to the Threerivers guardcaptain. “Take care of the boy. He isn’t wholly strong yet. He may have trouble sleeping. Keep him comfortable.”

The Threerivers guardcaptain merely saluted, while the Pelbarigan guardcaptain shoved the canoe into the river, and the deep voices of the men on the bank took up a short hymn of hope for protection and safety. The Threerivers guardsmen seemed nervous, stroking out into the current quickly and settling into the channel at a pace they could never keep up. When they reached the proper place, the guardsmen’s horn sounded from the city towers, and in reply the paddlers flicked their paddles upward only momentarily.

Gamwyn wormed his hips forward so he could lie down once they had glided well away from Pelbarigan. The morning radiated late-fall chill, and he wanted the slight shelter of the boat. High overhead, a ragged line of ducks moved southward, changing leaders constantly. It all seemed unreal. The last normal thing to happen in his life was his running down the stairs with Brudoer.

Protector Sagan had puzzled him. What had she meant by all she said? Why had she sent for Threerivers guardsmen to take him? Was she washing her hands of him? Then why had she embraced him?

Once the canoe was well downstream, the guardsmen talked with each other occasionally, and even laughed. Gamwyn was left to his own thoughts. Driving downriver with the current, they made good time—too good, he felt, his dread growing. The current would carry them. Why couldn’t they relax? He began to feel that he himself was drifting—allowing natural forces to carry him along to the shame awaiting him. How could he take hold of his life? By relying on his own genius, as Craydor had written? Sagan had quoted that to him. Why that? What had she meant about lying? Why had the guardcaptain made that remark about his having trouble sleeping? The Protector had asked him to trust her, then given him nothing to trust her about.

She had made him promise to remember everything she had told him. He began to go through all those things. In a flash it came to him, and he sat up with a little cry. The guardsman ahead of him turned to look at him, but he simply saw a boy’s startled face. Gamwyn lay down again. She told me to rely on my own genius, he thought. She gave me a knife that doesn’t appear to be a knife until it is used. She told me that was symbolic. She gave me a sleeping drug that tastes like salt. She got guardsmen from Threerivers to take me so that whatever happened on the way, Pelbarigan could not be blamed. I couldn’t really escape from her guardsmen, but I can from Udge’s. Then Garet did tell her. But he didn’t betray me. He knew she would do what she could. She has herself agreed to my traveling to the sea for another shell, but only if I have the strength to do it myself. What about the lying? She admitted that was complex.

At that point the woman behind Gamwyn remarked, “I don’t see why we should do all the paddling while he lies there dreaming. How about a break? Let him paddle.”

“We’ll have to release his hands. And they said he was still weak.”

“We’ll try him.” She poked Gamwyn with her paddle blade. “You. Sit up and paddle.”

Gamwyn sat up and held out his bound wrists. The woman untied them. Gamwyn took up the paddle and began to work, directed and chastised by the guardcaptain. Soon he stroked well enough, in unison with the men ahead. But he tired quickly. At first he thought to stroke on grimly as long as he could, but then asked himself why he should. After no more than five ayas, he rested the paddle across the boat and said, “I am too tired.”

“Tired? You just started. Get going.” The woman thumped him in the back with her foot.

“So your tortures start now. Well, you might as well get on with them.”

“Tortures? All we are asking is a little work. You’ve been trouble enough.”

Gamwyn thought of pitching the paddle out into the water, but decided to be compliant and limp.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m too tired.”

The woman kicked him harder in the back. Gamwyn lurched forward, dropping the paddle in the water. She reached for it as they went by, but missed it. They had to backwater and turn to catch it.

“Guardcaptain,” said the man in the bow. “We might make better progress if you did your own job.”

“You are talking to your superior.”

“I know it. Superior in every way but one. I am paddling and you are not.”

“Watch your tongue.”

“Yes, guardcaptain. But scolding won’t make him stronger. We were ordered to proceed as fast as possible. If you report insubordination, I will report delay.”

“It’s true, Ret,” the middle man said. “We need you and your paddle. I’m nervous on this river.”

The guardcaptain spat in the river, then bumped Gamwyn again and said, “All right, wilted lily, lie down.”

Gamwyn did. They didn’t retie his hands. Was this what a lie was? Were they in a hurry and careless, or did they really regard him as helpless? Thinking about that, he fell asleep, then woke in noon warmth as the middle guardsman shook his leg and handed him a round cake of travel bread. They allowed the canoe to float as they ate and drank from a bottle of cold, honey-sweetened tea. As Gamwyn passed the bottle, he caught a strange look from the man ahead of him. Was it sympathy? He couldn’t tell.

“What’s in your bag?” the man asked.

“A small folding knife they gave me, and—and just some salt.”

“Salt?”

“Yes. They said I should take a pinch with each meal. I don’t know why.” Gamwyn opened the little bag and took some between his thumb and forefinger, then put it on his tongue. The man reached for it and tasted it.

“Nice,” he said. “We’ll borrow some for our stew tonight.” He handed it back.

“Just leave me some, please,” Gamwyn said. “That’s all. Until the Ursana tells me what to do.”

“She’s been replaced.”

“The Ursana? Why?”

“Because of you, disrupter. You’ve changed a number of things.”

“Gind,” the guardcaptain said. “Let the brat be. We’d better be paddling if we’re going to make it to Pigeon Island tonight.”

Gamwyn lay back again, thinking that he now understood the Protector’s whole plan. Ret reached up and took his small knife from the bag, slipping it into her tunic pocket.

Sunset and a chill wind came early, it seemed, and it was dusk before they reached the island. In midafternoon they had put their dried meat to soak, and Gamwyn had been set to work peeling potatoes they had gotten at Pelbarigan. Once on shore, Gamwyn was sent to dig ankleroot and wild onion for the stew. Gind dumped much of the Protector’s sleeping drug into the pot, smiling at Gamwyn and saying, “I’m sure we have enough salt for you at Threerivers—unless you cry too much.”

Gamwyn smiled back and feigned drowsiness. When Gind finally thrust a bowl of steaming stew at him, he seemed reluctant to take it, but did and ate a little, managing to scrape most of the stew out into the dry leaves behind him, covering it with them.

The guardsmen ate hugely, stretched, and settled down, first uttering the standard prayers to Aven. Gind tied Gamwyn’s hands and feet and helped him into his sleep-sack. “Sleep easy, boy, if you have any sleep left in you,” he said.

“Gind, I’ll take the first watch,” Ret said. “I’ll wake you a quarter before high night.”

Gamwyn watched her feed the fire. The men nodded off almost immediately. Ret stood up and shook her head, then wandered down to the water and splashed some on her face. She came back, then, and squatted by the fire, throwing twigs in. Then she sat back, and before long slumped down in a dead sleep. Gamwyn wormed from the sleepsack and rubbed his bonds against the edge of the iron stewpot, which he carried out into the dark, crawling laboriously. He was soon free. Rolling it loosely, he threw his sleepsack into the canoe. He was about to shove it off when he remembered his knife. His heart beating fast, he returned to Ret and slipped it from her pocket. She stirred slightly. He took her sleepsack and gently spread it over her. Again she stirred. Gamwyn took two paddles out of the boat and stuck them in the shore sand, retrieved the salted drug, then shoved the canoe into the river, a raw potato in his mouth. As he paddled, he chewed it slowly. His cheek still radiated dull soreness.

He was still perhaps thirty ayas above Threerivers, and knew he ought to pass the city in the dark, even before false dawn. But after forcing himself as hard as he could, he saw the east grow light before he had come near the city. He continued to paddle well into the daylight, until he recognized a bend above the city. He and his brother had often shagged driftwood for the city from the point there. He hauled the canoe out on the west bank and dragged it back into the woods nearly a quarter of an ayas, then returned to the river and traveled almost a half-ayas upstream, forcing his way into a willow thicket. There he spread his sleepsack and crawled into it exhausted. Chewing another raw potato, he drifted off to sleep.

He was still drowsing, at dusk, when the exhausted guardsmen walked and trotted down the east bank opposite him. Gind had finally awakened near dawn and roused them. They had paddled across to the east bank on a log and set out, angry and chagrined.

That evening, Udge greeted the confession of the guardsmen with rage, especially because it was the guardcaptain, the woman she had sent along to guard against any male treachery, who had slept and allowed the boy to escape.

Before high night, Gamwyn saw boats with torches cruising along the banks and knew the guardsmen had made it back. One came close enough to his thicket to allow him to hear someone say, “This is a fool’s parade. What can we see but our own torches?”

In spite of himself, Gamwyn laughed quietly. But he knew they would come back in daylight and inspect the whole bank with great care, so he groped his way to the canoe, dragged it back to the river, and after the lighted boats eventually departed, glided downstream past the city. He could see small lights in its towers and through several windows. A swirl of fear and longing blew through him as he passed, far toward the west bank, crouched low. He had cut branches and propped them up in the bow, sticking high up, imitating a floating tree.

Unknown to him, two guardsmen, standing on the middle terrace, noticed. “Ssst,” one said. “Look there. There he goes. Go, boy. Hurry.”

“Shhh,” said the other man. “Are any boats below yet?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I hope he has the sense to leave the river.”

“He’s done well enough so far. But don’t tell anybody at all, no matter what you think they feel.”

“Me? Tell them what?”

 

By the following noon guardsmen had retrieved the floating canoe far downstream. It was laden with debris, and a rock tied to the stern with vines dragged in the water behind it, in Gamwyn’s attempt to keep it in the channel and make it track straight. The guardsmen took it ashore and emptied it, finding in the process a long note from Gamwyn to the Protector, written on a flat stick he had shaved white.

It was late in the afternoon before the guardcaptain of the detail reported the findings to Udge, in the Broad Tower, and handed her the note, which she read aloud to the four quadrant counsels:

Protector: I am much better now and am grateful to everyone for sending me to Pelbarigan and takeing such good care of me. I know I am the cause of al the problems. Pleese don’t hurt Brudoer. He didn’t do it. Pleese tell the Sowthcouncel, Bival, how sory I am for what I did. I am going to make it up to her and have thout of a way. Pleese tell her. I hope to see you somtime when I have done this. This is from your divoted citizen, Gamwyn.

Udge set the stick down on a table by her chair. “Guardcaptain,” she said, “see that the contents of this note are not divulged to anyone.”

“Protector, forgive me, but it was not private, being open, and many of the guardsmen read it.”

“Go, then, and see that it is kept confidential.”

“I fear it is too late for that, Protector. They are with their families by now.”

“Try. Go.”

The guardcaptain bowed and backed out hurriedly. Udge stood and walked to the window, muttering, “What sort of muck-heap guardsmen do we have? A gang of food-swilling, drooling carcasses, blind as eggs, waterskins full of swamp ooze. They let a sick child escape from them. A sick servant child.”

“Perhaps it is better, Protector,” Cilia said. “Perhaps we can free Brudoer when his thirty days are up, and let the whole problem die. There are tensions.”

Udge whirled on her. “No. If that is done, we would have lost. I don’t intend to lose. I know authority. It doesn’t work like that. You assert it. If there is opposition, you don’t draw back. You overwhelm them with your power. You strike. All of Threerivers is near cracking. Lax ways did it. My election is proof of a majority desire for the strictness that has kept us orderly. No. It is Brudoer who must make up for this. Let them chuckle a moment about this escape. Brudoer has continued to act outrageously, even in prison. With a little effort we can tempt him into a further attack and then punish him so severely that the point will be made.”

“What point, Protector?”

“That we are not a slack city, smiling at attacks on our counsels, tolerating unruliness in the males.”

Bival looked at Udge, somewhat startled. She hadn’t quite wanted this. Udge seemed fanatical, spitting as she spoke. Bival’s anger had faded long ago. She wished it were all over. She missed Warret and alone in the room, felt his accusation every night. But the Protector had done so much on Bival’s account that she could hardly object now. She felt a rising sense of disaster.

Udge continued. “In two days Brudoer is to be released, yet the scars he left on Bival have barely healed. There were sixteen separate cuts, I believe, several deep. We will complete his punishment with one lash for every two wounds he inflicted. Surely that will be merciful enough. And when we see defiance from him, as I’m sure we will, we’ll place him in the second cell for another thirty days.”

“Protector!—”

Udge held up her hand. “That’s how it will be, West-counsel. Now all of you go and leave me.”

Later, the sense of dread growing on her, Bival wandered into the central Judgment Room of the city, unused now since Udge took office. It stood at the focus of the arcs created by the terraces and occupied four city levels. The floor was perfectly round, divided into quadrants by black, zigzag tiles radiating from a triangle at the center, continuing on up the walls, which rose and curved in elliptically, meeting at the central skylight, which protruded from an upper city level, underneath the Broad Tower. The central triangle, Bival knew, was the tip of Craydor’s sealed tomb, which lay under the floor. A previous Protector had had the jutting pyramidal apex leveled because it was an inconvenience.

The walls were circled with inscriptions from Craydor. Bival’s eye wandered around them idly. One of the longest, “The hawk, which spirals high over us all, split and forgot the egg which warmed him,” was quoted at every wedding, indicating the freedom of the newlywed woman from parental control even while she worked within the family.

Bival felt a flick of recognition. Here was another shell. Craydor was speaking of a different sort of shell. And the room was shaped like a bird’s egg. Even the quadrant patterns could be seen as stylized cracks, illustrating the inscription.

Calling a guardsman, she requested him to bring Warret to the hall—a command from his quadrant counsel, not his wife. She sat alone in the dim light, wondering. This new insight complicated things. Craydor constructed the Broad Tower on the model of the shell those wretches had broken, but here she seemed to advocate the breaking of a shell.

Eventually Bival heard footsteps as the guardsman escorted Warret to the Judgment Room, then bowed and left. Warret stood, arms clasped behind him, facing his wife.

“Please sit down,” she said.

“Is that a command?”

“No. As you wish. Look what I have discovered.” She explained her musings to him.

“Is that what you brought me here for?”

“Warret, don’t you see? What did Craydor mean? She was trying to tell us something. Don’t you see how important the shells are? I am trying to explain to you why I needed that shell so badly. I meant you no personal harm. Can’t you trust me even a little?”

“Aside from your temper, I trust you. But I don’t regard you as very wise, and I can’t trust your limitations.”

Bival clenched her hands, but stifled her anger. “How can you say such a thing to me? Have we shared nothing? I don’t deserve this from you.”

“That all passed away, Bival, like cottonwood fluff floating by.”

She was silent for a long time, finally saying, “Cottonwood fluff? All your eternal promises? Our life together? You can’t deny all of it.”

“Like your precious shell, it was smashed when you wholly disregarded all my hopes. It has been ground to powder by my weeks of lifting water. I see how you had regarded me all along—as a tool, a device for your use.”

“How can—well, then let it be. I will request the council for a formal separation, permanent and complete. I can’t suffer this embarrassment any longer.” Again she fell silent a long time. “Don’t you feel anything?”

“According to your explanation, we are in an egg. Look. The crack runs between us, splitting the whole city, not only us. How can I feel? We all know that one poor child lies in prison and that Udge intends to lash him in public. And the other, still weak and wholly unused to the, outside wilderness, now is struggling to survive so as to make up to you something that he never really owed to you in the first place. No. I am the boys and the boys are me. You are the others. I should have seen it long ago. We have nothing, you and I. What egg of ours ever split? What hawk of ours ever broke free to soar?”

“A child would have only hindered us.”

“Hindered you and your rise to power. It’s over. Now may I go? Let it happen, whatever will. I can do nothing about it. All I can do is lift water to the tower. At least that isn’t cracked.”

“No, and it won’t be. It has a true design. The whole city has a true design. It has worked well. We have to trust it.”

“People are being destroyed in this precious design, Bival. You see the theory. I’m concerned with people.”

“How are your hands? I’m sorry what I did to them.”

“They’re all right.”

“I am afraid for us all.”

“Well you might be.”

“Warret, would you at least… if I waited on the formal separation, might this not pass?”

“You’ll have to decide that yourself. Don’t you see yet? It has already happened. You’re concerned with official things, but the actuality is over with. Done. Finished.”

“Is it? I know you worked long, extra quadrants for your pellute. I’ll make it up to you. In any case I will. I am not a bad person, Warret.”

“What is bad? Things good people do are often horrible. May I go? Aren’t we through?”

“I suppose. I don’t see how—May we not embrace once more at least?”

“If you wish.”

Infuriated by his patronizing tone, then suddenly tired of anger, she walked to him. They embraced formally across one of the black zigzags, and the meaning was lost on neither. Then they came apart, holding hands a moment before dropping them.

“For the sake of us all, you had better help Brudoer.”

“There is nothing now, nothing I can do.”

“You can. You just don’t see that far.”

Her anger rose again, but again she sighed it out. “Well. Leave me now please.” She dropped her eyes for a time, trembling, and when she lifted them again, he was gone. Again she looked around the walls. Had Craydor contradicted herself about this shell? An egg had to break away for life to grow. A shell protected mature life. What did it all mean?

 

Far in the north quadrant, Prope, an elderly family head, again was scolding her servant. “Mall. Look. Again the folds are not sharp. How can I serve when the napkins are so wretchedly arranged? I shall have to put you on wood detail again and use the funds you earn to hire a replacement.”

“Yes, of course,” Mall said, bowing. “But, if you’ll forgive, I think the wood detail will not have me anymore. My hands scarcely grip, I regret to say.”

“Yes. Willfulness. They surely do not grip napkins, or grip thein like a maul or axe. The Protector was right. But I shall have to tolerate you since there seems little alternative. You are not, however, justifying your existence.”

Mall’s eyes blazed momentarily. “No, certainly not, I regret to say,” he murmured.

“Well, all the city is asleep,” said Prope, rising. “Old as I am, I suppose I shall, too. I trust you have turned the bed down properly.” She didn’t wait for an answer. Mall glared at her retreating back.