Read Voices for Free Online Page A

the old man open the spigot and saw the clear water pour into the trough. She looked interested and admiring. "Where do you get the water from?" she asked Gudit, and he started to tell her about the springs of Galvamand.
    As I passed the wagon it shook a little. There was a lion in it. I wondered what Gudit would say about that.
    I ran on into the house.

4
    The Waylord was in the back gallery talking with Desac. Desac was not a native of Ansul but of Sundraman;he had been a soldier in their army. He never brought books or talked of books. He stood very straight, spoke harshly, and seldom smiled. I thought he must have known much grief. He and the Waylord treated each other with respect and friendship. Their long conversations were always private. They both looked at me rather sternly, in silence, as I walked down the room to where they were sitting under the end window in a patch of sunlight. The back part of the house, the oldest part, all of stone and built right up against the hillside, is chilly, and we didn't have much firewood to warm the rooms.
    I greeted them. The Waylord raised his eyebrows, waiting for my message.
    "There are travellers here from the far north who need stabling for their horses. He is a storyteller and she," I paused, "she has a lion. A halflion. I told her I would ask if they may keep their horses here." As I spoke I felt like a person in a tale of the Lords of Manva, bearing a request from a noble visitor to a noble host.
    "Circus people," Desac said. "Nomads."
    Outraged at his contemptuous tone, I said, "No!"
    The Waylord's eyebrows went down at my rudeness.
    "She is Gry of the Barres of Roddmant of the Uplands," I said.
    "And where are these Uplands?" said Desac, speaking to me as to a child.
    "In the far north," I said.
    The Waylord said, "Memer, a little further, please?" That was how he always asked me to go on translating a line of Aritan or explaining anything. He liked me to do it in order, making sense. I tried.
    "Her husband came to tell stories in the Harbor Market. So they were there. Her lion frightened an Ald's
horse. I caught the horse. Then she quieted it. Then when I was coming home I met her with her wagon and she brought me home. She was looking for stabling. The lion is in the wagon. Gudit is watering the horses."
    Only as I mentioned coming home did I realise that the market basket with a ten-pound fish and cheese and greens in it was still weighing down my arm.
    There was a pause.
    "You offered her use of the stables?"
    "I said I'd ask you."
    "Will you ask her to come to me?"
    "Yes," I said, and got away quickly.
    I left the basket in the pantry cooler—Ista and the others were all still sewing in the workroom—and ran back to the stableyard. Gry and Gudit were talking about dogs;that is, Gudit was telling her about the great followhounds of Galvamand in the old days, that ran with the horses and guarded the gates. "Nowadays all it is is cats. Cats everywhere," he said, spitting aside. "No meat for dogs any more, see. It stands to reason. It was meat they were themselves, those dogs, in the siege years."
    "Maybe it's just as well you have no followhounds just now," she said. "They'd be anxious about the contents of our wagon."
    I said, "The Waylord asks if you will be pleased to come into the house. He would come himself but it's hard for him to walk far." I wanted so badly to welcome her rightly, nobly, generously, as the Lords of Manva welcomed strangers to their houses.
    "With pleasure," she said, "but first—"
    "Leave the horses to me," said Gudit. "I'll put 'em both in the loose box and then be off for a bit of hay from Bossti down the way there."
    "There's a truss of hay and a barrel of oats in the wagon," Gry said, going to show him, but he brushed her off—"Na na na, nobody brings their own feed to the Waylord's house. Come along here, then, old lady."
    "She's Star," said Gry, "and he's Branty." At their names both horses looked round at her, and the mare