for courtship and marriage. There was talk (so Sallo told me) of betrothing Astano to Corric Beltomo Runda, the son of the richest and most powerful Senator of Etra, a man to whom our Father Altan Arca owed a good deal of his own power and influence. Sallo heard a lot of gossip of this kind in the silk rooms. She brought whatever she heard to me and we talked it over. Corric Runda, they said, had never done any military service; his particular friends were a group of young, rich freedmen and minor nobles who led a wild life; he was said to be handsome but inclined to fat. We wondered how our gentle, gallant Astano felt about Corric Runda, and whether she wanted to be betrothed to him, and how far the Father and Mother would be swayed by what she wanted.
As for Sotur, their orphaned niece, her wishes in marriage wouldn't count for much. She'd be married to make the most advantageous connection. It was the lot of almost all girls of the Families; not that different from the slave girls. Sometimes the thought of my grave, sweet-voiced Sotur being handed off to some uncaring man drove me to burning, helpless rage, to the point where I thought I longed for it to happen—so that she'd be gone from the House, and I wouldn't have to see her daily, and be ashamed that I was only a slave and only fourteen years old and only able to write my stupid poems and yearn and yearn to touch her and never be able to touch her...
Sallo knew how I felt, of course; if I'd wanted to hide anything from Sallo I couldn't have. She knew that I kept, folded tight in a tiny pouch on a cord about my neck, a note Sotur had written me a year ago when I had a fever—Get well soon dear Gavir, it is as dull as dust without you. Sallo grieved for my impossible longing. She fretted over the injustice that allowed her love full satisfaction and utterly forbade it to mine, even in dream. Of course there were stories of love affairs between noblewomen and slaves, but they were all sad and shameful, ending in mutilation or death for the man, and for the woman maybe not death, these days, but horrible public shame and degradation. Sallo tried to make sense of these hard laws, to understand them as protecting us, and she convinced both me and herself that in fact they did protect us; but she didn't try to pretend that they were just. Justice is in the hands of the gods, an old poet wrote, mortal hands hold only mercy and the sword. I told her that line, and she liked it, and repeated it. I think it made her think of Yaven, her kind-hearted, beloved hero who held both mercy and a sword.
Romantic love and desire was my torment. Sallo was my solace, and so was my work.
Everra had finally given me free run of the library of Arcamand, which till then I had never entered, even when I was a sweeper boy and went all over the house. Its door was on the corridor past the domed shrine of the Ancestors. When I first entered it, I felt the fear of crossing a sacred threshold almost as I might have done if I had transgressed and gone among the Ancestors. It was a small room, well lighted by high windows of clear glass. There were over two hundred books on its shelves, all carefully arranged and dusted by Everra. The room smelled of books, that subtle smell which to some is stuffy and to others intoxicating, and it was silent. No one ever came down that corridor except to sweep it or to enter the library, and no one entered the library except Everra, Sotur, Sallo, and me.
The girls were allowed because Sotur had asked our teacher to allow her and Sallo the privilege, and Everra couldn't refuse her anything. Sotur was the only older child of the Family pursuing her reading or studies, for neither Yaven nor Astano was free to do what they liked any more. She told Everra that he had given her and Sallo the soul's hunger for books and thoughts, and must not deprive them now that Sallo was starving among the inanities of the silk rooms and she among the pomposities of merchants and the illiteracy of politicians. So, with