on the Nisas in the barrack, early in the siege, how all the men had roared it out together—"Beneath the walls of Etra"—We ended up, all of us in the schoolroom, reciting the ballads, with Yaven the lead voice; and some of my skinny little pupils crept in to listen, round-eyed and wondering at the tall soldier laughing as he declaimed, "Then fled the Morvan soldiers, the men of Morva ran..."
"Again and again," Sotur whispered. "And back and forth." She was not saying the poems with us. She looked wretched and bewildered. She saw me gazing at her with concern, and turned her head sharply away.
Those autumn weeks after the siege we enjoyed what may be the sweetest of all pleasures: relief from incessant, intense strain and fear. That relief, that release, is freedom made manifest. It lets the heart soar. A mood of lenience and kindness filled Arcamand. People were grateful to one another that they had survived together. They could laugh together, and they did.
Early in the winter, Torm came back to the House to live. He had been in the city all through the siege, but not at Arcamand. The Dictator had levied a special troop of cadets, soldiers invalided home, and veterans as an auxiliary to the city guard, doing sentry duty, manning the walls and gates, and serving as firemen and civic police. These men had done good service in defense and fighting fires and had at first been popular heroes, but their increasing role in punishing black marketers, hoarders, and suspected traitors had led people to fear their investigations and accuse them of using their power arbitrarily. They had been disbanded a few days after liberation, when the Dictator resigned, restoring full power to the Senate.
Torm was seventeen now but looked much older, carrying himself and behaving like a grown man, grim, self-contained, and silent.
He brought Hoby back to Arcamand with him. As his own reward for service, he had requested that Hoby be released from the civic workforce to serve as his bodyguard. Like Metter, the Father's bodyguard, Hoby slept outside his master's door. Though he still shaved his head, and was a bigger man than Torm, their resemblance was clear to see.
The occasion of Torm's return was Astano's betrothal ceremony. The Mother had not approved her marriage with Corric Beltomo Runda, but instead had chosen for her a relative of that House through the female line, Renin Beltomo Tarc. Tarcmand was an ancient though not a wealthy House, and Renin a promising young Senator; he was a good-looking fellow and a pleasant talker, though, according to Sallo, our principal informant, he didn't know anything—"not even Trudec! Maybe he knows politics."
Sotur said nothing about the betrothal to us. We saw little of her. It seemed she hadn't felt the release from fear as we did. She hadn't regained her weight and looks as we all were doing. She still had the siege face. When I found her in the library at the table with a book, she would greet me kindly but wouldn't talk much and very soon would slip away. My ache of desire for her was gone, turned to an ache of pity, with a tinge of impatience—why must she go on moping in these good days of freedom?
Everra was to deliver an address at the betrothal ceremony. He spent days getting all his quotations from the classics ready. In the benign mood of that autumn, I felt it mean and dishonorable to hide from my old teacher what I'd learned from Mimen and the others at the Shrine. I told him I'd read Denios and that Mimen had given me his copy of Caspro's Cosmologies. My teacher shook his head gravely, but didn't go into a tirade. That encouraged me to ask him how Denios' poems could corrupt a reader, since they were noble in both language and meaning.
"Discontent," Everra answered. "Noble words to teach you how to be unhappy. Such poets refuse the gifts of the Ancestors. Their work is a bottomless pit. Once you remove the firm foundation of belief on which all our lives are built, there is nothing. Only words! Gorgeous, empty words. You can't live on words, Gavir. Only belief gives life and peace. All morality is founded upon belief."
I tried to say what I thought I had glimpsed in Denios, a morality larger than the one we knew, but my ideas were mere gropings, and Everra demolished them with his certainty. "He teaches nothing