Gifts aotws-1

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Go on,” Melle murmured. And I went on.

  But now I come to a place in this story I do not want to go through. A desert. No whirlwind to pick me up and carry me across it. Every day was one step farther into it.

  There came a day when my mother put away the canvas and ink and said she was too tired to write any more for a while. There came a day when she asked me to tell a story, but shivered and dozed through it, not hearing it, only hearing my voice. “Don’t stop,” she said, when, thinking I was only making her more wretched, I tried to let my voice die away so she could sleep. “Don’t stop.”

  At the edge of the desert you think it may be wide. You think it could take a month, maybe, to cross it. And two months go by, and three, and four, every day a step farther into the dust.

  Rab and Sosso were kind and strong, but when Melle grew too weak to look after herself at all, Canoc told them that he would see to her needs. He did so with the most delicate patience, caring for her, lifting her, cleaning her, soothing her, trying to keep her warm. For two months he scarcely left the tower room. Coaly and I were there most of the day, if only to keep him silent company. At night he kept vigil alone.

  He fell asleep sometimes in the daytime, beside her on the narrow bed; weak as she was, she would whisper, “Lie down, love. You must be tired. Keep me warm. Come under the shawl with me.” And he would lie beside her, holding her close to him, and I would listen to their breathing.

  May came. One morning I sat in the window seat, feeling the sunlight on my hands; I smelled the fragrances of spring, and heard the sound of the light wind moving in young leaves. Canoc lifted Melle so Sosso could change the sheet. She weighed so little now, he could pick her up in his arms like a little child. She cried out sharply. I did not know then what had happened. Her bones had grown so fragile that when he lifted her, they broke; her collarbone and thighbone snapped like sticks.

  He set her down on the bed. She had fainted. Sosso hurried out to fetch help. It was the only time in all those months that Canoc gave way. He crouched down at the bedside and wept, loudly, gasping with a terrible sound, hiding his face in the sheets. I huddled in the window seat, hearing him.

  They came with some idea of tying splints to her limbs to keep them in place, but he would not let them touch her.

  The next day I was out at the gate of the courtyard, letting Coaly have a run, when Rab called me. Coaly came as quickly as I did. We went up to the tower room. Mother was lying among pillows, her old brown shawl about her shoulders; I felt it under my hand when I went to kiss her. Her hand and cheek were icy cold, but she returned my kiss.

  “Orrec,” she whispered. “I want to see your eyes.” And when she felt me resist, “You can’t hurt me now, love,” she whispered.

  I still hesitated.

  “Go on,” Canoc said, across the bed from me, his voice quiet, as it always was in this room.

  So I tugged the blindfold down and pulled the two pads away from my eyes, and tried to open my eyes. At first I thought I could not. I had to push up the lids with my fingers, and when I did, I saw nothing but a flashing, lancing, painful dazzle, a jumble, a chaos of light.

  Then my eyes remembered their skill, and I saw my mother’s face.

  “There, there,” she said, “that’s right.” Her eyes looked up into mine out of the little sunken ruin of her face and body, the tangle of black hair. “That’s right,” she said again quite strongly. “You keep this for me.” She opened her hand. Her opal and the silver chain lay in it. She could not lift her hand to give it to me. I took it and put the chain over my head. “Ennu, hear and be here,” she murmured. Then she closed her eyes.

  I looked up at my father. His face was hard and set. He nodded very slightly.

  I kissed my mother’s cheek again, and put the pads over my eyes, and pulled up my blindfold.

  Coaly tugged slightly at the leash, and I let her lead me out of the room.

  That day a little after sunset my mother died.

  * * *

  GRIEVING, LIKE BEING blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone. How you bear it is up to you. Or so it seems to me. Maybe in saying so I’m ungrateful to Gry, and to the people of the house and domain, my companions, without whom I might not have carried my burden through the dark year.

  So I call it in my mind: the dark year.

  To try to tell it is like trying to tell the passage of a sleepless night. Nothing happens. One thinks, and dreams briefly, and wakes again; fears loom and pass, and ideas won’t come clear, and meaningless words haunt the mind, and the shudder of nightmare brushes by, and time seems not to move, and it’s dark, and nothing happens.

  Canoc and I were not companions in our grief. We could not be. However untimely and cruel my loss, I had lost only what time must take and can replace. For him there was no replacement; the sweetness of his life was gone.

  Because he was left solitary, and because he blamed himself, his sorrow was hard, and angry, and found no relief.

  After Melle’s death some of the people of the domain went in fear of Canoc as well as me. I had the wild gift, and now what might not he do in his bitter grief? We were the descendants of Caddard. And we had legitimate cause for anger. Every soul in Caspromant believed as a certainty that Ogge Drum had killed Melle Aulitta. She died a year and a day after the night we left Drummant. There was no need of the story she had told me and I had told Gry of that last night there, the whispering and the cold. We had told it to no one; I never knew whether she told it to Canoc. All he or anyone needed to know was that she had gone to Drummant a beautiful and radiant woman, and had come back ill, to lose the child she carried, and waste away, and die.

  Canoc was a strong man, but the last months had taken a hard toll on both his body and mind. He was worn out. For the first halfmonth he slept a great deal—in her room, in the bed where he had held her as she died. He spent hours alone there. Rab and Sosso and the others were afraid for him and afraid of him. They used me as go-between. “Just slip up there, will you, and make sure the brantor’s not needing anything,” the women would say, and Alloc or one of the other men would say, “Just go up and ask the brantor does he want the horse to have bran or oats?”—for old Greylag was off his feed, and they were concerned about him. Coaly and I would go up the curving stone stairs to the tower room, and I would get up my nerve and knock. Sometimes he answered, sometimes not. When he did open the door, his voice was cold and flat. “Tell them no,” he would say, or, “Tell Alloc to use his wits,” and he would close the door again.

  I dreaded to come where I was not wanted, but I had no physical fear of him. I knew he would never use his power against me, as Melle had known I would never use mine against her.

  When I realised that, when I thought of it that way, a shock ran through me. This was no mere belief, it was knowledge. I knew he would not hurt me. I knew I would not have hurt her. So I could have taken off my blindfold, when I was with her. I could have seen her, all that last year. I could have cared for her, been useful to her, read to her, as well as telling my foolish stories. I could have seen her dear face not that once, but all year, all year long!

  That idea brought me not tears, but a surge of anger that must have been something like what my father was feeling—a dry fury of impotent regret.

  There was no one to punish for it but myself, or him.

  On the night she died I had clung to him, and he had held me against him, my head on his chest. Since then he had scarcely touched me, and spoken very little to me; he had shut himself up in her room and held aloof. He wants his grief all to himself, I thought with a bitter heart.

  ♦ 14 ♦

  All spring, Ternoc and Parn had come back and forth from Roddmant as often as they could. Ternoc was a kindly man, a
follower not a leader, who was not very happy with his wilful wife but never complained of her. He had looked up to my father all his life; he had loved my mother dearly and mourned her now. Late in June he came over, went up to the tower room, and talked with Canoc for a long time. Canoc came downstairs to supper with him that evening, and from that day on ceased to lock himself away, returning to his work and duties, though he slept always in the tower room. He spoke to me, stiffly and with effort, as in duty bound. I responded the same way.

  I had hoped Parn might know how to help my mother in her illness, but Parn was a hunter not a healer. She was uneasy in a sickroom, impatient, not of much use. At my mother’s funeral, Parn had led the lament, the sobbing howl that Upland women raise over the grave. It is a hideous shrill clamor, going on and on and on, unbearable, the noise of animals in pain. Coaly raised her head and howled with the women, shuddering all over, and I too stood shuddering and fighting my tears. When it was over at last I was spent, exhausted, relieved. Canoc had stood through the lament unmoving, enduring it, like a rock in the rain.

  Soon after Melle’s death, Parn went up to the Carrantages. The people of Borremant had heard of her skill in calling to the hunt and sent for her to come. She wanted Gry to come with her, to begin to practice her gift. It was a rare chance to go among the wealthy highlanders and gain renown there. Gry refused. Parn got angry with her. Once again mild Ternoc intervened: “You go and come as you please,” he said to his wife, “so let your daughter do the same.” Parn saw the justice in that, though it didn’t suit her. She went off the next day, without Gry, not bidding anyone goodbye.

  The colt Blaze had been returned, fully trained, to Cordemant. When Gry came to us, she rode a plow horse, if one was free; if not she walked, a long walk to go and return in a day. It was too far for me to go alone on Roanie or to walk with Coaly. And Roanie was getting old, and though Greylag got over his distemper he too was an old horse now. Branty was a splendid four-year-old, much in demand as a stud, which suited him very well indeed, though it interfered with his other duties. Our stable was pretty thin. I said one night, gathering up my nerve as I always did when I spoke to my father now, “We should get a new colt.”

  “I’d thought of asking Danno Barre what he’d want for that grey mare.”

  “She’s old. If we got a colt or a filly, Gry could train her.”

  When you cannot see the speaker, his silence is a mystery. I waited, not knowing if Canoc was considering what I said or had rejected it already.

  “I’ll look about,” he said.

  “Alloc says there’s a lovely filly over at Callemmant. He heard about her from the smith.”

  This time the silence went on. I had to wait a month for the answer.

  It arrived in the shape of Alloc shouting at me to come out and see the new filly. I couldn’t do that, but I could come and feel her coat, and scratch her topknot, and swing up in the saddle for a short led walk round the courtyard, Alloc praising her manners and beauty all the way. She was just a year old, he said, a bright bay, with a star, for which she was named. “Can Gry come and work with her?” I asked, and Alloc said, “Oh, she’s to stay there at Roddmant for a year or so and learn her job. She’s too young a lass for your father and me, see.”

  When Canoc came in that night, I wanted to thank him. I wanted to go to him and put my arms around him. But I was afraid of blundering in my blindness, afraid of making a clumsy move, afraid he did not want me to touch him.

  I said, “I rode the filly, Father,” and he said, “Good,” and bade me goodnight, and I heard his weary tread on the stairs up to the tower room.

  * * *

  SO THROUGH the dark time, Gry could come to me riding Star, two or three or four times in a halfmonth, sometimes even oftener.

  When she came we would go out riding together and she would tell me what she and Star were doing. The filly was as sweet as new bread, and as a riding horse needed little teaching, so she was learning fancy gaits and tricks, to show off the trainer, Gry said, as well as the horse. We seldom rode far, for Roanie was getting rheumatic. Then we’d come back to the Stone House, and if it was warm we’d sit out in the kitchen gardens, or in cold or rainy weather in the corner of the great hearth, to talk.

  There were many times in the first year after my mother died that though I was glad Gry was there, I could not talk. I had nothing to say. There was a blankness, a deadness around me I could not get through with words.

  Gry would talk a little, telling me what news she had, and then fall into silence with me. It was as easy to sit in silence with her as it was with Coaly. I was grateful to her for that.

  I cannot remember much of that year. I had sunk into the black blankness. There was nothing for me to do. My only use was to be useless. I would never learn to use my gift: only not to use it. I would sit here in the hall of the Stone House and people would be afraid of me, and that was all my purpose in life. I might as well be an idiot like the poor child at Drummant. It would make no difference. I was a bogey in a blindfold.

  For days at a time I said nothing to anyone. Sosso and Rab and the other people about the house tried to talk to me, cheer me; they brought me tidbits from the kitchen; Rab was brave enough to offer me tasks to do in the household, things I needed no eyes to do and had done for her gladly when I was first blinded. Not now. Alloc would come in with my father at day’s end, and they would talk a little, and I would sit with them in silence. Alloc would try to draw me into the conversation. I would not be drawn. Canoc would say to me, stiffly, “Are you well, Orrec?” or, “Did you ride today?” And I would say yes.

  I think now he suffered as much as I did from our estrangement. All I knew then was that he was not paying the price I paid for our gift.

  All through that winter, I made plans of how I could get to Drummant, get within sight of Ogge, and destroy him. I would have to take off the blindfold, of course. Over and over I imagined it: I would go out before daylight, taking Branty, for the older horses were not fast or strong enough. I’d ride all day to Drummant, and wait hidden somewhere till night, and wait till Ogge came out. No, better, I might disguise myself. The people at Drummant had only seen me with the blindfold, and I was growing taller, my voice had begun to deepen. I’d wear a serf’s cloak, not the coat and kilt. They wouldn’t know me. I’d leave Branty hidden in the woods, for he was a horse people would recognise, and I’d stroll in on foot, like a roving farmer lad from the Glens, and wait till Ogge appeared: and then, with one look, one word— And as they all stood in horror and amazement, I’d slip out, back to the woods, back to Branty, gallop home, and say to Canoc, “You were afraid to go kill him, so I did it.”

  But I did not do it. I believed the story as I told it to myself, but not when it was over.

  I told it to myself so often that I wore it out, and then I had no story to tell at all.

  I went far into the dark, that year.

  Somewhere in the dark at last I turned around, not knowing I was doing so. It was Chaos, there was no forward and back, no direction; but I turned, and the way I went then was back, towards the light. Coaly was my companion in the dark and the silence. Gry was my guide on the way back.

  She came once when I was sitting in the hearth seat. There was no fire, it was May or June, and only the kitchen fire was lighted; but the hearth seat was where I sat most of the day, most days. I heard her come, the light clatter of Star’s hoofs in the courtyard, Gry’s voice, Sosso greeting her and saying, “He’s where he always is”—and then her hand on my shoulder; but more, this time; she leaned down and kissed my cheek.

  I had not been kissed, I had scarcely been touched, by any human being since my mother’s death. The touch ran through my body like lightning through a cloud. I caught my breath with the shock and sweetness of it.

  “Ash-Prince,” Gry said. She smelled of horse sweat and grass, and her voice was the wind in the leaves. She sat down beside me. “Do you remember that?”

  I shook my hea
d.

  “Oh, you must. You remember all the stories. But that one was a long time ago. When we were little.”

  I still said nothing. The habit of silence is lead on the tongue. She went on, “The Ash-Prince was the boy who slept in the hearth corner because his parents wouldn’t let him have a bed—”

  “Foster parents.”

  “That’s right. His parents lost him. How do you lose a boy? They must have been very careless.”

  “They were a king and queen. A witch stole him.”

  “That’s right! He went outdoors to play, and the witch came out of the forest—and she held out a sweet ripe pear—and as soon as he bit into it she said, Ah, ha, sticky-chin, you’re mine!’” Gry laughed with delight as she recovered this. “So they called him Stickychin! But then what happened?”

  “The witch gave him to a poor couple who already had six children and didn’t want a seventh. But she paid them with a gold piece to take him in and bring him up.” The language, the rhythm of the words, brought the story I had not thought of for ten years straight to my mind, and with it the music of my mother’s voice as she told it. “So he became their serf and servant, at their beck and call, and it was, ‘Stickychin, do this!’ and ‘Stickychin, do that!’ and never a free moment for him till late at night when all the work was done and he could creep into the hearth corner and sleep in the warm ashes.”

  I stopped.

  “Oh, Orrec, go on,” Gry said very low.

  So I went on and told the tale of the Ash-Prince, and how he came into his kingdom at last.

  When I was done there was a little silence. Gry blew her nose. “Think of crying over a fairy tale,” she said. “But it made me think of Melle…Coaly, you have ashy paws. Give me your paw. Yes.” Some cleaning operation ensued, and Coaly stood up and shook herself with great vigor. “Let’s go out,” said Gry, and she too stood up, but I sat still.

  “Come see what Star can do,” she coaxed.