gets in again and sets fires? We'll roast here like pies in an oven!"
"Shut your fool trap," somebody told him.
"Who's looking after our horses?" said a stable hand.
"Why can't they trust us? What did we ever do but work for 'em?"
"Why should they trust us when they treat us like this?"
"I want to know who's looking after our horses."
It went on like that, on and off, all day. Some of the younger boys were my pupils. They tended to gather around me, out of habit I suppose. In the desperation of boredom I said at last, "Come on, we might as well do our lesson. Pepa! Start off The Bridge on the Nisas!" They'd been learning that fine singsong ballad, and they liked it. Pepa, a good student, was too shy to start reciting among all these grown men, but I started off—"'Beneath the walls of Etra'—come on, Pepa!" He joined in, and pretty soon the boys were passing the stanzas around, one to the next, just as if we were in the schoolroom. Ralli piped out bravely in his thin little voice,
Are we then men of Morva
To flee before the foe,
Or shall we fight for Etra
Like our fathers long ago?
And I realised that around us the men had fallen silent and were listening. Some remembered their own schooling, others were hearing the words, the story, for the first time. And they heard it without irony, simply stirred by the events and the call to patriotic courage. When one of the boys faltered, a couple of men picked up the verse which they'd learned long ago in Everra's schoolroom or maybe from the teacher before him, and passed it round to the next boy. At the rousing climax there was a cheer, and congratulations to the boys, and the first laughter we'd heard all day. "Good stuff, that," said Sem. "Let's have some more!" I saw Everra standing at the entrance to his cubicle, looking frail and grey, but listening.
We said them another of Ferrio's ballads, and they liked it well enough—almost all of them were listening by now—but The Bridge on the Nisas remained the favorite by far. "Let's have that Bridge again," some man would say, and get a boy to start off, "'Beneath the walls of Etra...'" By the end of the day in the barrack many of them had learned the whole thing, with the quickness of memory that we often lose with literacy, and could roar it out in unison.
Sometimes they added verses that would have made Ferrio's hair stand on end. They got scolded by other men—"Hey, keep it decent, there's kids here." And they begged pardon of Everra, for whom most of them had an ungrudging, protective respect. The teacher was one of them and yet not one of them: a slave of value, a learned man, who knew more than most nobles knew. They were proud of him. As order began to be established in the crowded barrack, certain men came to the fore—Sem and Metter chief among them—as the keepers of order and the decision makers. Everra was consulted, but mostly set apart and looked after. And I was fortunate in being his disciple, since I got to sleep on the floor of his cubicle, not in the terrible crowding of the main room and the stink of the walled privies behind it.
The worst thing about those days, for most of us, was being kept in ignorance of what was going on, the city's fate, our fate. Food was prepared and brought to us by women slaves from the kitchen. The women were received, twice daily, when the bolt was shot back and the doors briefly opened, with roars of greeting and indecent proposals, and assailed with questions—Are we fighting? Did Casicar attack? Are they in the city? and so on—to most of which they had no answers, though they had plenty of hearsay. Then the women were herded back to the house, and while we ate, the men would chew over those scraps and rumors along with the bread and meat, and try to work out some sense from them. They generally agreed that there had been fighting outside the walls, probably at the River Gate, and that the attackers had not broken into the city, but had not yet been driven off entirely.
And when, on the fourth day, we were at last released, that proved to be the case. Troops in training, hastily brought up from south of the