Voices by Ursula K. Le Guin

stood up in a rage, told him he was shaming the hospitality of his house and offending the majesty of the lion, and ordered him to leave.
    “The majesty of the lion,” Gry repeated, sitting down with us at last, her face clean, and dressed now in her silk shirt and trousers—“I like that.”
    “But I don’t like what went on between the Gand and his son,” Orrec said. “A snake’s nest, as Gudit said. It will take careful treading. The Gand, though, he’s a very interesting man.”
    He’s the tyrant that ruined and enslaved us, I thought, but didn’t say.
    “The Waylord is right,” Orrec went on. “The Alds are camped in Ansul like soldiers on the march. They seem amazingly ignorant of how people live here, who they are, what they do. And the Gand is bored with ignorance. I think he’s seen that he’ll probably finish out his life here and might as well make the best of it. But on the other hand, the people of the city don’t know anything about the Alds.”
    “Why should we?” I said. I couldn’t stop myself.
    “We say in the Uplands, it takes a mouse to really know the cat,” said Gry.
    “I don’t want to know people who spit on my gods and call us unclean. I call them filth. Look—look at my lord! Look what they did to him! Do you think he was born with his hands broken?”
    “Ah, Memer,” Gry said, and she reached out to me, but I pulled away. I said, “You can go to what they call their palace and eat their food if you like and tell them your poetry, but I’d kill every Ald in Ansul if I could.”
    Then I turned away and broke into tears, because I had ruined everything and didn’t deserve their confidence.
    I tried to leave the room, but Orrec stopped me.
    “Memer, listen,” he said, “listen. Forgive our ignorance. We are your guests. We ask your pardon.”
    That brought me out of my stupid crying. I wiped my eyes and said, “I’m sorry.”
    “Sorry, sorry,” Gry whispered, and I let her take my hand and sit down with me on the windowseat. “We know so little. Of you, of your lord, of Ansul. But I know as you do that we were brought together here by more than chance.”
    “By Lero,” I said.
    “By a horse, and a lion, and Lero,” she said. “I will trust you, Memer.”
    “I will trust you,” I said to them both.
    “Tell us who you are, then. We need to know one another! Tell us who the Waylord is—or what he was, before the Alds came. Was he the lord of the city?”
    “We didn’t have any lords.”
    I tried to pull myself together to answer properly, as I did when the Waylord asked me, “A little further, please, Memer?” I said, “We elected a council to govern the city. All 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