Voices by Ursula K. Le Guin

the cities on the Ansul Coast did. The citizens voted for the councillors. And the councils named the waylords. Waylords travelled among the cities and arranged trade so that the towns and the cities got what they needed from each other. And they kept merchants from cheating and usury, if they could."
    "It's not a hereditary title, then?"
    I shook my head. "You were a waylord for ten years. And ten more if your council named you again. Then somebody else took over. Anybody could be a waylord. But you had to have money of your own or from your city. You had to entertain the merchants and the factors and the other waylords, and travel all the time—even down into Sundraman, to talk with the silk merchants and the government there. It cost a lot. But Galvamand was a rich house, then. And people of the city helped. It was an honor, a great honor, being a waylord. So we still call him that. In honor. Although it means nothing now."
    I almost broke out in tears again. My weakness, my lack of control, scared me and made me angry, and the anger helped steady me.
    "All that was before I was born. I only know it because people have told me and I've read the histories."
    Then my breath went out of me as if I had been hit in the stomach, and I sat paralysed. The habit of my lifetime had hold of me: I should not speak of reading, I should never say to anyone outside my household that I had read something in a book.
    But Orrec and Gry, of course, didn't even notice. To them it was perfectly natural. They nodded. They asked me to go on.
    I wasn't sure what I should and should not tell them, now. "People like me are called siege brats," I said. I pulled at my pale, fine, crinkly hair. I wanted them to know what I was but I didn't want to speak of my mother being raped. "You can see ... When the Alds
took the city. That was when ... But we drove them out again, and kept them out almost a year. We can fight. We don't make wars, but we can fight. But then the new army came from Asudar, twice as many men, and broke into the city. And they took the Waylord to prison and wrecked Galvamand. They tore down the university and threw the books into the canals and the sea. They drowned people in the canals and stoned them to death and buried them alive. The Waylord's mother, Eleyo Galva—"
    She had lived in this room. She had been here when the soldiers broke into the house. I could not go on.
    We were all silent.
    Shetar paced by, lashing her tail. I reached out to her, to get away from what I'd been talking about, but she ignored me. Her mouth was half open and she looked somehow more lionish than usual.
    "She'll be in a bad mood all night," Gry said. "She got those rewards, at the Palace, and it reminded her that she hasn't had a meal."
    "What does she eat?"
    "Hapless goat, mostly," Orrec said.
    "Can she ever hunt?"
    "She doesn't really know how," Gry said. "Her
mother would have taught her. Halflions hunt in a clan, like wolves. That's why she tolerates us. We're her family."
    Shetar made a long, groaning, growling, singsong remark and paced down the long room again.
    "Memer, if it isn't too hard for you to talk about it?" Orrec began, and when I shook my head—"You said they destroyed the library of the university.? Entirely?" I could tell he hoped I would deny it.
    "The soldiers tried to tear down the library building, but it was stone and well built, so they broke the windows and wrecked the rooms, and brought the books out. They didn't want to touch them, they made citizens carry them and load them on carts and haul them to the canal and dump them in. There were so many books they piled up on the bottom of the canal and began to choke it, so they made people cart them down to the harbor. And unload the books and dump them off the piers. If they didn't sink right away they pushed people into the water after them. Once I saw a—" but this time I managed to stop myself, before I said that I had seen a book that had been salvaged from the