Tortall (8 page)

I did not say more than that. I had to be careful. I had to let them think about the words, and I had to leave time for them to concentrate on forming the letters. I also knew that I could not press them too hard. Four years ago a woman had complained to her husband that I was trying to turn the women against the men. That was when my mother was still alive. She was too shy to teach, but she had whipped me over the woman’s complaint.

“Our lives are on the razor’s edge!” she had scolded me after the beating. “Because you are clever, because you are the pearl of his eye, your father trusted you, but you go too far! You cannot bully people into change, Teky! We are like our land, with the very stones to serve us for veils. Rain change on us too much, too fast, and we do not drink it up. We flood, destroying everything in our way. Your lectures will bring death on us, on your father and me, and on you. Now. Will you teach them to read, just read, or will I tell your father you cannot be trusted with our lives?”

But don’t you
see
? I had wanted to ask her then, and I still asked her ghost. Don’t you see that the women need to know what is there? That The Book of the Sword already holds rights that the temple priests have to respect? I could show the women how to stand up for their rights.

But I bowed to my mother and told myself I would just take more time to make the women see how to do it, that was all. Not push them. Not lecture them. Only read to them what was in the Book and trust them to think about it, as my father trusted me to teach them to read. As even my mother trusted me to teach them again, after a while. As she trusted me to look after my father.

I crouched to help a girl perfect her writing of the word “law.” My problem was that I wanted to help them
all
, my father, the women, the girls. They would have laughed at me, had they known. One sixteen-year-old girl, not even married, they would say. You can’t even look after yourself!

Fadal would say that. Fadal, who thought my veils were chains. Poor Fadal, whose only way to deal with being a woman was to try to be something she was not.

As the shock of the temple’s destruction grew in the town, the attendance at my father’s lessons grew every day, and so did the attendance at mine. A week passed, then two. We had never stayed so long in one place. It worried and pleased me. A longer stay meant the chances were greater that those who ruled the temple priests in distant Kenibupur might hear of our activities. At the same time, the healer was able to banish most of that cough from my father’s chest, which was all to the good. For the first time I saw the girls who started their first letters under my eye master their first short sentences. We could celebrate my oldest cousin’s betrothal. I even dreamed of attending her wedding, but that was not to be. As the winds began to scour the mountain passes, word came that new temple priests were coming
to serve the town again. My father took it as a sign to be on our way.

We left better provided for than we had been in years, three weeks after the day I talked to Fadal. Our donkey’s packs were heavy. I carried my share of the weight, too. One of the men who had studied with us sent us to his family’s village, where we would be welcome. He told us as well of caves along the road where we could shelter at night. It was like settling into a shabby, familiar pair of sandals.

I built the fire at the mouth of the cave that first night. Once it was going, my father helped me to cook supper, and he cleaned our dishes in the nearby stream. Afterward we sat in silence, watching the flames. Finally I asked him what I had so often asked as a child, “Do you see the God in the Flame?”

He sounded amused when he said, “I see the god in your bright eyes, Teky.” After a while he sighed and remarked, “It is strange, to be traveling again, is it not?”

I nodded. “My aunt’s home is a good place to live.”

“I have been thinking. If something happens to me …”

I started to protest. Father held up his hand, his old signal for me to be silent. I hated it when he talked that way; he knew I hated it.

“If something happens to me, return to your aunt’s house. She will arrange a good match for you, every bit as good as the one she arranged for your cousin.” My father nodded as if he agreed with himself. “We talked about it. She knows what to do.”

“Now, see here, my boy,” I began in Omi Heza’s old voice, thinking to joke him out of his decision.

He raised a hand. “Hush, Teky. This is no laughing matter.” He took up The Book of the Distaff and began to read.

I continued to watch the fire, but instead of warmth, a creeping veil of cold eased up my back, my shoulders, and over my head and face. Go to my aunt’s house, and wait to be married? When all I had done for the last five years of my life was this? Walk the roads of our country, talk to women and girls, men and boys, hear their stories, cook and eat with them, visit their homes, sew and weave with them, change their babies, and hold the hands of their grandfathers and grandmothers? I had cobbled sandals, made round bread, collected honey, milked cows and goats and sheep and even mares. In one village I had twisted rope; in others I helped to bring animals in from dust storms. In the mountains in the spring I had waded up to my waist in floodwater to save a child who had strayed. In stick huts in forests I had brewed medicines. In three cities I sold fruit and honey in the marketplace. In a hundred marketplaces, big and small, I studied with my parents and learned to dicker with merchants on my own. In my short sixteen years I had eaten hummus made at least thirty different ways. Sitting by this small fire with my back to a hollow in a hill, I could feel my world shrink to the size of a sun-dried brick house, of a village wall. To know only the same faces for the rest of my life, with only a light seasoning of new ones …

I think I slept where I sat, because the flames parted at their bases, opening like a teardrop to reveal orange coals
that rippled with heat and bits of blue fire. Dreaming, I knew the god had come.

“Did you hear?” I asked the god as if he, she, were one of my cousins who had been sitting close by. “He just … he decided. He didn’t ask me; he just decided. Why didn’t he even tell me what he was thinking?”

“He is a man,” said both halves of the god, woman and man. “He has never been stripped of his voice, so he does not know how it feels to be stripped of it, even a little. Now I, I understand it very well. I have been stripped of half of my voice for centuries of your time. My man voice thunders clearly—wrongly, sometimes, thanks to the priests who decided which words of my Oracle they would repeat—but clearly. But no one hears my woman voice anymore. I would like my woman voice back. You would like
your
voice back. And this man who loves you will never realize it. Don’t you ever wonder who
will
realize it, Tekalimy?”

“Teky, Teky.” My father was shaking my shoulder. “You are sleeping where you sit. Go to bed. I will bank the fire.”

I looked up at him, blinking, my eyes hot and dry. They felt as if I had never closed them. “What if I do not want to go to my aunt and have a husband, Father?” I asked, my voice very tiny.

“Don’t be silly,” he said, kissing my cheek. “What else would you do? Go to bed.”

I looked at the fire. If the flames had parted, they were joined again now.

As I unrolled my blankets and covered myself up, I admitted he had made a good point. What else would I do?

The next village already knew of the destruction of the
Hartunjur temple. As soon as the priest finished each night’s lesson and banked the fire, many of the men who heard him came to the man who housed my father and me, to hear my father teach, to hear me read, and to talk with my father about what the reading meant. That first night, as I did in a strange town, I went to our host’s wife. As always, I found her in her kitchen, having tea with friends. Hurriedly they fastened their veils. Among strangers, even women, we all kept our veils on during these meetings. We needed only one weak or frightened soul to report our true names and faces to the priests for there to be a burning that would be remembered for centuries.

“Excuse me,” I said politely, keeping my eyes down, “but I know it is hard to hear at the windows and doors. There is no reason why your thirst should go unslaked while men drink. Would you like for me to read more of the Books to you?”

Someone gasped. They all drew back as if I were a viper.

“How did you know we listened?” my hostess demanded. She trembled all over.

I passed my hand across the veil over my mouth, the sign that showed I was smiling. “We survive in a man’s world by learning all we can,” I reminded them, just as I had reminded my father in my grandmother’s voice. This was an old, old ritual for me. I followed it in every new village. “Knowledge keeps us ahead of them and better able to guide them, is it not true, my sisters? Will you not drink more from the Oracle’s well of knowledge?” I asked, and raised the Books in my hand.

And so we fell back into our routine, which was the
same, but changed. The story of Qiom and Fadal raced ahead of us. It was autumn, then winter, but people traveled, just as my father and I traveled. Temple priests were more suspicious of newcomers as the story grew in its spreading. We no longer dared stay for more than a few days in each village, though those who came to hear us grew in numbers. For my father, the change was noticeable, though not startling. But for me …

For every three new men who came to hear my father, I met five new women and girls. In some villages, it might be seven and eight more women than I might have seen before. In December we stayed in a town for ten days, the longest stay since Hartunjur. I remembered it not only because a man and five boys came to hear
me
, leaving my father’s lesson when I did, but because it was there that my father’s cough returned.

We left the town because a delegation from the temple court at Kenibupur was expected to arrive within days, to honor the town by celebrating the Longest Night festival there. We dared not stay with so many temple priests on their way. Instead, despite my father’s worsening health, we took the road to the next village. I had thought the boys in that place would be different. They would not be so bored, or so used to following their mothers, as to be curious about my lessons. I was wrong. Two grown men from that tiny village joined three boys to hear my teaching on the Oracle’s law concerning their wives and daughters.

We traveled on three days later, with the priest practically snuffling at our host’s door. My father’s voice was ragged and cracked from coughing, despite the good healer
who had attended him there. Putting her herbs and medicines away, she had shaken her head at my father. When he glanced over to see if I had seen, I pretended to do something else. He
must
get well, I told the god. Who will teach them if he dies?

That night I heard the god’s voices again and saw the field of veiled women. “What do you see?” asked the god.

“People who can do nothing for my father,” I said in bitterness, and turned my back on them.

“Then you are blind,” said the god.

Two villages later, I was teaching the women, all of their children, and an old man about a daughter’s right of inheritance when a boy came to fetch me. My father had lost his voice as he was teaching. “You will answer the questions for me, Teky,” he whispered in my ear.

“I think you should stop!” I whispered back, frightened. His chest clattered softly like dried leaves stirred by the wind. “You are ill, you should rest.”

“When will another of us wandering priests come?” he whispered. “You will tell them my answers
now
.”

“Why do the temple priests keep The Book of the Distaff from us?” a man wanted to know when my father made a sign for another question. “Why risk offending the God in the Flame and the Oracle’s spirit?”

“Because people who are ignorant are more easily led,” I replied, making my voice as strong as I could. They could not see me waver. “The god has not punished them, so they believe the god will never punish them. And they know that fear makes people easily led. If they teach you that your women are devilish forces, mysterious and not to be trusted,
you will fear them, and you will turn to your priests to protect you from these veiled creatures.”

“Is that your father who speaks?” an old man demanded angrily. “Or is it you, taking advantage of a sick man?”

My father raised his hands. He pointed to himself.

“My father says that the words are his.
I
tell you that I have heard this answer many dozens of times,” I replied as the other men chuckled. “Many men have asked it.”

I had to give my lesson in reading and the law during the noon hour the next day. My father’s voice came back for a short time that night, then failed. Once again he needed me to speak for him. The same was true of the third night.

The god came back and showed me the veiled women. “Wake up, Teky!” she said, he said, as one. “There are your sisters, your mothers, your aunts, your cousins. What do you see?”

“People I can barely snatch the time to teach!” I cried. “People who have rights under The Book of the Sword that is in every temple! People who don’t have to show the priests a Book they will get burned for possessing if they want justice!”

“So this is progress,” the god told me. “But you have yet to give the simplest answer of all. It is truly there, in what you told Fadal, Teky. Only speak the answer that matters, and I will take you into my service. You will become my new Oracle, the one to speak my truth completely.”

“I don’t want to be an Oracle,” I muttered. “I just want to teach my sisters their rights under the law.”

A hand on my shoulder joggled me awake. “I am sorry,”
our host whispered. He did not have to say more. Somehow the temple priest suspected what we did in his village. Each night I packed our bags in readiness. As our host helped my father to dress, I pulled on the rest of my clothes and loaded our donkey. Our host led us out a hidden gate, giving us directions to the next village.

We walked until the sun was up, then stopped to drink hot tea from our flasks. My father turned his face up to the sun and smiled. “Blessed is the flame,” he said. “Blessed are we who can see by its light.” Then he began to cough, until he couldn’t walk. In the end, I took a number of our belongings on my back, and he rode our donkey, to save his strength.