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by Ursula K. Le Guin

“That’s the Marshes,” Astano said, looking north, and Sotur said, “Where you and Gav came from, Sallo.”

  Sallo stood beside me and we looked that way for a long time. It gave me a strange, cold thrill to see that vastness, that unknown country where we had been born. All I knew of the people of the Marshes was that they weren’t city people, they were uncivilised, barbarians, natives. We had ancestors there, as free people did. We had been born free. It troubled me to think about that. It was a useless thought. What did it have to do with my life in Etra, with my Family of Arcamand?

  “Do you remember the Marshes at all?” Sotur asked us.

  Sallo shook her head, but I said, to my own surprise, “Sometimes I think I do.”

  “What was it like?”

  I felt foolish describing that simple memory or vision aloud to them. “Just water, and reeds growing in the water, and little islands… and there was a blue hill away far off… Maybe it was this hill.”

  “You were only a baby, Gav,” Sallo said, with just a touch of cautioning in her voice. “I was two or three, and I can’t remember anything.”

  “Not about being stolen?” Sotur asked, disappointed. “That would have been exciting.”

  “I don’t remember anything but Arcamand, Sotur-io,” Sallo said in her soft voice, smiling.

  We spread our feast out on the thin dry grass of the hilltop and ate it as the sun went down in glory, revealing the ocean to us by the gleam of the high horizon where it set. We sat and talked, in all the old ease and companionship of the long summer. The little ones fell asleep. Sallo fell asleep with her head on my lap. Ris brought me a blanket, and I tucked it round my sister as best I could. The stars were coming out. The boy Comy who had sat all evening at a distance, between us and the picketed jenny, facing away from us, began to sing. At first I didn’t know what I was hearing, it was such a thin, strange, sad sound, like the vibrations in the air after a bell has been struck. It rose and trembled and died away.

  “Sing again, Comy,” Sotur murmured. “Please.”

  He was silent for so long we thought he would not sing, but then the faint tremor of sound began again, the thinnest thread of music, the overtones of a tune. It was inexpressibly sad and yet serene, untroubled. Again it died away, and we listened for it, wanting it to return.

  It was utterly silent now up on the wide hill, and the glimmer of starlight was stronger than the last blue-brown light far down in the west.

  The jenny stamped and made a little huh-huh noise in her chest, and we laughed at that, and talked a little more, softly. Then we slept.

  ♦ 4 ♦

  The next couple of years went along without excitement. Sallo and I swept the floors of the great house and went to our lessons daily. Nobody missed Hoby, not even Tib, I think. Torm, mentally practicing the discipline of the swordsman, was sullen, aloof, and obedient in the classroom. Once or twice when his impatience with the lessons or the teacher threatened to overcome him, he excused himself and left. Yaven was mostly away with the army. Etra had no ongoing war at that time, so young officers like Yaven were trained in exercises and drills or put on guard duty at the borders; now and then he was sent home on leave, looking very fit and cheerful. We went both of those summers to the Vente farm, and there too were no great doings, just the lazy, ordinary happiness of being there. Yaven didn’t come with us; he spent the first summer in training, and during the second he accompanied the Father on a diplomatic mission to Gallec. Torm spent both summers at the school of swordsmanship. So Astano was our leader.

  She led us to Sentas Hill the very first evening. That was a shock and a grief at first, for we found it almost in ruins. The moat had silted up with winter rains, the earthwork behind the palisade had slipped; the palisade itself had been torn down in several places and the rock piles that formed the Tower and the Gates had been knocked apart, not by weather, but by human malice.

  “Those filthy peasants,” Tib growled—he could growl now, his voice was changing. We all moped about the dilapidated place a while, feeling the same hateful, shameful contempt for the farm children we’d felt when they threw stones at us, and mourning the defilement of our city of dreams. But Astano and Sotur took heart, discussing how easily we could restore the palisade, and beginning even in the dusk to pile up rocks for the Tower again. So we went back to the house, set out our pallets under the stars, and lay planning the rebuilding of Sentas.

  Sotur said, “You know, if we could get some of them to help, to work on it, they might not hate it.”

  “Ugh! I don’t want any of them around,” said Ris. “They’re foul.”

  “One couldn’t trust them,” said Uter, who was less skinny and bony this summer, but no less prim.

  “The one with the jenny was all right,” his sister Umo said.

  “Comy,” Astano said. “Yes, he was nice. Remember when he sang?”

  We all lay remembering that golden, mysterious evening on the summit of the hills.

  “We’d have to ask the foreman,” Astano said to Sotur, and they briefly discussed the chances of getting any farm slave released to us. “Only if we said they were to work for us,” Sotur said, and Astano replied, “Well, they would. We worked as hard as any of them do! Digging that moat was awful! And we never could have done it without Yaven.”

  “But it would be different,” Sotur said. “Giving orders…”

  Astano said, “Yes.”

  And there they left it. The idea was not mentioned again.

  We rebuilt Sentas, even if not to Yaven’s or Everra’s standards. And when it was rebuilt, we held a ceremony of purification, circling the walls within, not in mockery, but as it was described in Garros poem, with our teacher leading the procession as the high priest and lighting the sacred fire in the citadel. All summer we often went to that hilltop as a group or in pairs or singly, all of us feeling it to be, amid all the wealth of woods and hills and streamside that the farm offered, our dearest place, our fortress and retreat.

  Aside from repairing Sentas, we had no great projects; we put on a few dance-plays, but mostly what I remember is swimming with Tib in pools under the willows and alders, and lazing about in the shade talking, and going on long, desultory explorations of the woods south of the house. We did lessons for a half-morning daily with our teacher, and Ris and Sallo were often kept on for music lessons with Sotur and Umo, for a singing teacher had come from Herramand. Sotur’s little niece Utte had graduated from the “tiny ones” to run around with us, under Oco’s particular care; and sometimes we took a whole batch of the older babies down to the stream and supervised the splashing and screaming and shrieking and sleeping, all through a long, hot afternoon.

  Sotur’s aunts and the Mother often joined us there, and sometimes Uter and Tib and I were sent away because the women and the older girls were going to bathe. Uter was convinced that the farm boys hid in the bushes to spy on them. He would patrol up and down officiously ordering Tib and me to help him “keep the vile brutes away from the women.” Knowing the terrible punishment for such a transgression against the sacredness of the Mother, I was sure the farm slaves would never come anywhere near our bathing pool; but Uter’s mind ran on such things, fascinated by the idea of pollution.

  I was slow in my adolescence. To me Uter’s obsessions were as stupid as Tib’s sniggering attempts at manly remarks about what you might see if you did hide in the bushes. I knew what women looked like. I’d lived in the women’s quarters all my life. Just because Tib had been sent across to the men’s barrack last winter, he acted as if there was something special about a woman with her clothes off. It was, I thought, incredibly childish.

  It had nothing to do with what I felt, lately, when I heard Sotur sing. That was entirely different. It had nothing to do with bodies. It was my soul that listened and was filled with pain and glory and unspeakable yearning….

  Late that summer Yaven and Torm came to Vente with the Father, and the division between Family and slaves was again drawn deep by th
e presence of the Family men. I went out one day seeking solitude. Among the forested hills south of the farmhouse I found a beautiful oak grove in the fold of two hills. A clear stream ran down through it, and there was a strange little structure of rock halfway up the slope: a shrine, certainly, but to what god I did not know. I told Sallo about it, and she wanted to see it.

  So one afternoon I took her and Ris and Tib there. Tib saw nothing to interest him in the place; he was restless, and soon roamed off back to the farm. Ris and Sallo felt as I did that there was some presence or blessing in the grove, the glade, the ruined altar. They settled down in the thin shade of the old oaks, near the small, quick-running creek, on what had once been a lawn around the shrine. Each of them had her drop-spindle and a sack of cloudy wool, for they were at the age now when women were to be seen doing women’s work wherever they were. That they could run off with me, unguarded, not even asking permission, was part of the miraculous ease of life at Vente. Anywhere else, two house-slave girls of fourteen would not have been allowed to leave the house at all. But they were good girls; they took their work with them; and the Mother trusted them as she trusted the benevolence of the place. So we sat on the thin grass of the slope in the hot August shade, feeling the cool breath of the running water, and were silent for a long time, at peace, in freedom.

  “I wonder if it was an altar to Me,” Ris said.

  Sallo shook her head, “It’s not the right shape,” she said.

  “Who, then?”

  “Maybe some god that only lived here.”

  “An oak-tree god,” I said.

  “That would be Iene. No,” Sallo said, with unusual certainty, “it isn’t Iene. It was a god that was here. This place’s god. Its spirit.”

  “What should we leave as an offering?” Ris asked, half serious, half joking.

  “I don’t know,” Sallo said. “We’ll find out.”

  Ris spun a while, the motion of her arm and hand graceful and hypnotic. Ris was not as pretty as Sallo, but calm and charming in her ripening womanhood, with a splendid mane of glossy black hair, and a dreamy look in her long eyes. She heaved a quiet sigh and said, “I don’t ever want to leave here.”

  She would be given in a couple of years, probably to young Odiran Edir, possibly to the heir of Herramand—wherever the interests and allegiances and debts of Arca indicated. We all knew that. The slave girls had been brought up to be given. Ris trusted her House to give her where she would be valued and well treated. She had no dread and a good deal of lively curiosity about where and to whom she would be sent. I’d heard her and Sallo talking about it. Sallo would not be given away from our House; she was destined for Yaven, that was equally well known. But at Arcamand daughters of the Family were not married off early, and slave girls were not given at thirteen or fourteen even if they were physically mature. Iemmer repeated the Mother’s words to our girls—’A woman is healthier and lives longer if she has had time to grow into her womanhood, and does not bear children while she is still a child.” And Everra quoted Trudec in approval: “Let a maiden remain a maiden until she be full grown and have wisdom, for the worship of a virgin daughter is most pleasing to her Ancestors.” And Sem the hostler said, “You don’t breed a yearling filly, do you?”

  So Ris wasn’t speaking in imminent concern about having to leave home and learn how a gift-girl was treated at Edirmand or Herramand, but only in the knowledge that within a few years she’d be sent into a new life, and seldom if ever see us, and almost certainly never know any such freedom as this again.

  Her unprotesting melancholy touched Sallo and me, safe as we were in knowing we would always live with our own Family and people.

  “What would you do, Ris,” my sister asked, looking across the stream into the warm, shadowy depths of the woods, “if you were set free?”

  “They don’t set girls free,” Ris said, practical and accurate, “Only men who do something heroic. Like that tiresome slave who saved his master’s treasure in the Fables."

  “But there are countries where there aren’t any slaves. If you lived there youd be free. Everybody is.”

  “But I’d be a foreigner,” Ris said with a laugh. “How do I know what I’d do? Crazy foreign things!”

  “Well, but pretend. If you did get set free, here, in Etra.”

  Ris set herself to think about it. “If I was a freed-woman, I could get married. So I could keep my own babies… But I’d have to look after them myself whether I wanted to or not, wouldn’t I? I don’t know, I don’t know any freedwomen. I don’t know what it’s like. What would you do?”

  “I don’t know,” Sallo said. “I don’t know why I think about it. But I do.”

  “It would be nice to be married,” Ris said after a while, thoughtful-ly."So that you knew.” I did not know what she meant. “Oh, yes!” Sallo said, heartfelt.

  “But you do know, Sal. Yaven-di wouldn’t ever pass you around.”

  “No, he wouldn’t,” Sallo said, and there was a tenderness in her voice, as always when she spoke of Yaven, and a proud embarrassment.

  I understood now that Ris had meant a master’s power to give away the girl he’d been given, or lend her out to other men, or send her to the women’s quarters to nurse other women’s babies, whatever he pleased—a power she had no part in but must simply submit to. Thinking about that made me feel extremely lucky to be a man. So in turn I was a little embarrassed when Sallo asked me, “What would you do, Gav?”

  “If I was set free?”

  She nodded, looking at me with that same loving tenderness and pride but no embarrassment, only a little teasing.

  I thought a while and said, “Well, I’d like to travel. I’d like to go to Mesun, where the University is. And I’d like to see Pagadi. And maybe the ruins of Sentas. And cities you read about, like Resva of the Towers, and Ansul the Beautiful, with four canals and fifteen bridges…”

  “And then?”

  “Then I’d come back to Arcamand with a lot of new books! Teacher-di won’t even talk about getting any new books. ‘Oldest is safest,’” I mouthed froggily, imitating Everra being pompous. Ris and Sallo giggled. And that was all our conversation on a freedom we could not imagine.

  Nor did we leave any offering to the spirit of that place, unless remembrance is a kind of offering.

  The following summer, our stay at the farm was cut short by rumors of war.

  We arrived there as usual, with the cousins from Herramand, and on the first evening all nine of us went out to Sentas Hill expecting to find it in ruins again. But though the winter rains had damaged the moat and earthworks, the walls and towers stood, and had even been built higher in places. Some of the farm children must have taken it over and made it their own refuge or play fortress. Umo and Uter were indignant, feeling our Sentas had been invaded, polluted, but Astano said, “Maybe it will always be here, now.”

  Oco and Umo were the only ones who worked much that summer at cleaning out the moat and strengthening the earthworks and palisade.

  Astano and Sotur were kept with the women much of the time, and the rest of us dispersed on our own pursuits. Tib and I swam and fished; Sallo and I went back to the oak-grove shrine when she could get away from the house, with Ris or by ourselves. And I made an unexpected friend.

  I had been giving the little girls a hand at bracing up the palisade at Sentas and was coming home through the vineyard in the heat of the day, crickets shrilling and cicadas rasping far and near in the trance of light and heat. A vineyard worker was coming towards me down another row. I glimpsed him now and then between the high vines, on which the grape clusters were just beginning to swell. As we passed each other he stopped and said, “Di.” It was how the country people spoke to a master, not by name, merely with the honorific.

  Surprised, I stopped and peered at him around the long-armed vine. I recognised him, Comy, the boy who had led the jenny when we climbed to the summit of the hills, and who had sung that evening. He looked much older. I would h
ave taken him for a grown man. He had a sparse stubble of beard and his face was hard and bony, I said his name.

  He was clearly surprised and gratified that I knew him. He stood silent a while and then said, “Hope it was all right what we did at the rock place.”

  “It was fine,” I said.

  “It was some of Meriv’s fellows knocked it down last year.”

  “It’s all right. It’s just a game.” I didn’t know what to say to this grim fellow. His accent was hard for me to understand. I could smell his stale sweat though we were four or five feet apart. He was barefoot and his dark calloused feet stood in the earth like the vine roots.

  There was a long silence, and I was about to say goodbye and go on when Comy said, “I can show you a good fishing place.”

  I’d done a lot of fishing that summer. Tib and I heard that there were streams where the farm people caught salmon-trout, though we’d never caught any. I said something to show my interest, and Comy said, “At the rock fort this evening,” and went striding on down between the vines.

  Though I was dubious about the whole venture, I went back to Sen-tas late in the afternoon, telling myself that if Comy didn’t turn up I could do a little more work for Oco and Umo. But I saw him coming through the vineyard not long after I got there. I went down and joined him and we went in silence up the creek at the hill’s foot till it joined a larger stream, and then along that for a half mile or so on a thread of a path through willows and alders and laurels, till at the foot of a hill the water came down into deep basins where it flowed full and still among great smooth boulders. We each had our rudimentary fishing gear. In silence we baited our lines and chose a boulder to stand on and cast out into the dark pools. It was a warm, still evening in the long days of the year, not yet sunset for an hour or so. The light filtered through the trees in soft slanting shafts. Tiny flies dimpled the water’s surface and flitted in the darkness under the banks. Within a minute a fish rose to my line, and I brought it in by instinct or accident—a splendid rosy-spotted creature weighing three or four pounds. I hardly knew what to do with such a catch. I saw Comy’s grin. “Beginner’s luck,” he said, throwing out his line again.