They couldn't wait to get out and learn to work. I was being educated to be a teacher, so my work would always be here, in the long schoolroom with its high windows. When Yaven and Torm had children, I would teach those children and the children of their slaves.
Yaven invoked the spirits of his Ancestors to bless our work today, and Everra reproved Sallo and me for not setting out the schoolbooks, and we got to work. Almost immediately Everra had to call up Tib and Hoby for scuffling. They stuck out their hands palm up and he whacked each one once with his yardstick. There was little beating in Arcamand, and no tortures such as we heard of in other Houses. Sallo and I had never even been struck; the shame of being reproved was quite enough to make us behave. Hoby and Tib had no shame, and as far as I could see no fear of punishment either, and hands as hard as leather. They grimaced and grinned and all but sniggered when Everra struck them, and indeed his heart wasn't in it. Like them, he couldn't wait for them to be out of his schoolroom. He asked Astano to hear them recite their daily bit of history from the Acts of the City of Etra, while Oco helped her little brother write his alphabet, and the rest of us got on with reading the Moralities of Trudec.
Old-fashioned, the old ways—those were words we heard often in Arcamand, spoken with absolute approval. I don't think any of us had the faintest idea why we had to memorise tiresome old Trudec, or ever thought to ask. It was the tradition of the House of Arca to educate its people. Education meant learning to read the moralists and the epics and the poets Everra called the Classics, and studying the history of Etra and the City States, some geometry and principles of engineering, some mathematics, music, and drawing. That was the way it had always been. That was the way it was.
Hoby and Tib had never got beyond Nemec's Fables, and Torm and Ris depended a good deal on the rest of us to get them through Trudec; but Everra was an excellent teacher, and had swept Yaven and Sotur and Sallo and me right into the histories and the epics, which we all enjoyed, though none so keenly as Yaven and I. When we'd finally finished discussing the Importance of Self-Restraint as exemplified in the Forty-first Morality, I snapped Trudec shut and reached for the copy of the Siege of Oshir that I shared with Sallo. We had just started reading it last month. I knew every line I'd read by heart.
Our teacher saw me. His long, grey-black eyebrows went up. "Gavir," he said, "will you now please hear Tib and Hoby recite, so that Astano-ío can join us in reading."
I knew why Everra did it. It wasn't meanness; it was Morality. He was training me to do what I didn't want to do and not do what I did want to do, because that was a lesson I had to learn. The Forty-first.
I gave Sallo the book and went over to the side bench. Astano gave me the book of the Acts of the City and a sweet smile. She was fifteen, tall and thin, so light-skinned that her brothers called her the Ald, after the people in the eastern deserts who are said to have white skins and hair like sheep; but "ald" also means stupid. Astano wasn't stupid, but she was shy, and had perhaps learned the Forty-first Morality almost too well. Silent and proper and modest and self-contained, a perfect Senator's daughter: you had to know Astano very well to know how warm-hearted she was and what unexpected thoughts she could think.
It's hard for a boy of eleven to play the teacher to older boys who are used to bossing him around and roughing him up and who normally call him Shrimp, Swamp Rat, or Beaky. And Hoby hated taking orders from me. Hoby had been born on the same day as Torm, the son of the Family. Everybody knew but nobody said he was Torm and Yaven's half brother. His mother had been a slave, he was a slave; he received no special treatment. But he resented any slave who did. He'd always been jealous of my status in the classroom. He stared at me frowning as I stood before him and Tib,