Voices by Ursula K. Le Guin Page A

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 sea.
    It was in the secret room now, one of the northern scrollbooks, written on coated linen and rolled around wooden rods. The person who had found it cast up on the beach dried it out and brought it here. Though it had been weeks in the water, the beautiful writing could still be read. The Waylord showed it to me when he was working on it to restore the damaged text.
    But I could not talk about the books, the old books or the rescued books, in the secret room. Not even to Gry and Orrec.
    It was safe, I hoped, to talk about ancient times, and I said, “The university used to be here, long ago, in Galvamand.”
    Orrec asked, and I told him what I knew, mostly as I had heard it from the Waylord, of the four great households of the city of Ansul: Cam, Gelb, Galva, Actamo. From earliest times they were the wealthiest families, with the most power in the Council. They built the finest houses and temples, paid for public rites and festivals, and gathered artists and makers, scholars and philosophers, architects and musicians to live and work in their houses. That was when people began to call the city Ansul the Wise and Beautiful.
    The Galvas had always lived here on the first rise of the hill above the river and