Ursula K. le Guin_Chronicles of the Western Shore_01

by Gifts

  "Later," he said. He touched my shoulder and went off. Gry took me round to the kitchen, for in the commotion nothing had been done about supper, and I was ravenous. The cook stuffed us with rabbit pie.

  Gry said I was a disgusting sight with gravy all over my face, and I said let her try eating what she couldn't see, and she said she had tried it—she had blindfolded herself for a full day, to find what it was like for me. When we had eaten we went back outdoors, and Coaly took me for a walk in the dark. There was a half moon that gave Gry some light to see her way by, but she said Coaly and I were getting on better than she was, and fell over a root to prove it.

  When we were children together at Roddmant, Gry and I used to sleep wherever we fell asleep, like any young animals; but since then there had been talk of betrothals and such matters. We said goodnight like adults. Ternoc took me to my parents' room. Roddmant had no such array of bedrooms and beds as Drummant. Ternoc whispered to me that my mother was asleep in the bed, my father in the chair; he gave me a blanket, and I rolled myself up on the floor and slept there.

  In the morning my mother insisted she was quite well. She had taken a little chill, nothing more. She was ready to go home. "Not on horseback," Canoc said, and Parn seconded him. Ternoc offered us a hay cart and the daughter of the droop-lipped mare that had borne him into battle at Dunet. So Mother and Coaly and I traveled to Caspromant in luxury, on rugs spread on straw in the cart, while Canoc rode Branty, and Greylag and Roanie followed willingly behind, all of us glad to be going home.

  Coaly seemed to accept her change of house and owner with a tranquil heart, though she had to do an immense amount of sniffing around the house, and pissed her mark on various bushes and stones outside it. She politely greeted the few old hounds we had, but kept aloof from them. Her sheep-herding breed wasn't sociable and democratic as they were, but reserved and intent. She was like my father: she took her responsibilities seriously. I was her chief responsibility.

  Gry soon rode over to continue our training, and came every few days. She rode a colt called Blaze, who belonged to the Barres of Cordemant. They had asked Parn to break him, and Parn was training both the colt and her daughter in horsebreaking. Callers use that word, though it has little to do with how they train a young horse. Nothing is broken in that education; rather something is made one, made whole. It's a long process. Gry explained it to me thus: we ask a horse to do things which the horse would by nature rather not do; and a horse doesn't submit its will to ours the way a dog does, being a herd animal not a pack animal, and preferring consensus to hierarchy. The dog accepts; the horse agrees. All this Gry and I discussed at length, while Coaly and I went about learning our duties to each other. And we talked about it when we went riding, Gry and Blaze learning and teaching their duties to each other, and I on Roanie, who had long since learned all she needed to know. Coaly came along with us, off her leash, on holiday, free to trot, stop, sniff, take side trails, and start rabbits without worrying about me. But if I said her name, she was there.

  Coaly and Gry made such a difference to my life that I remember that summer, the first I spent in darkness, as a bright one. There had been so much trouble and stress before it, I had been in such perplexity and terror concerning my gift. Now, with my eyes sealed, I had no possibility of using it or misusing it, and need not torment myself or be tormented. Once the nightmare of Drummant was past, I was among my own people. And the awe I inspired in some of the simpler ones was a compensation, though I didn't admit it, for my helplessness. While you're groping and blundering your way across a room, it can hearten you to hear somebody whispering, "What if he lifted his blindfold! I'd die of fear!"

  My mother was unwell for a while after we got home and kept to her bed. Then she got up and began to go about the house as before; but one night at supper I heard her rise and say something in a frightened voice, and there was a commotion, and she and my father both left the room. I sat at table bereft, confused. I had to ask the women of the house what had happened. At first no one would tell me, but then one of the girls said, "Oh, she's bleeding, her skirts were all bloody." I was terrified. I went to the hall and sat in the hearth seat alone in a kind of daze. My father found me there at last. All he could say was that it was a miscarriage, and she was doing well enough. He spoke calmly, and I was reassured.

  I grasped at reassurance.

  Gry came over on Blaze the next day. We went up to see my mother in her small tower room. There was a cot-bed there, and the room was warmer than the bedroom. A fire burned on the hearth, though it was full summer. Melle had her warmest shawl round her shoulders, as I knew from her embrace. Her voice was a little weak and hoarse but she sounded entirely herself. "Where's Coaly?" she said. "I need a visit from Coaly." Coaly was of course there in the room, for she and I were inseparable now; and she was invited up onto the bed, where she lay tensely alert, apparently believing my mother needed a guard dog. Mother asked about our lessons at guiding and being guided, and about Gry's horsebreaking, and we chatted along just as usual. But Gry got up before I was ready to go. She said we must be going, and as she kissed my mother she whispered, "I'm sorry about the baby."

  Melle murmured to her, "I have you two."

  My father was gone from daybreak to evening every day at the work of the domain. I had begun to be of use to him, but was useless now. Alloc took my place at his side. Alloc was a clear-hearted man, without ambitions or pretensions; he thought of himself as stupid, and some people agreed with him, but though slow to think, he often grasped an idea without thinking about it, and his judgment was usually sound. He and Canoc worked together, and he was what I could not be. I was both jealous and envious of him. I had the self-respect not to show it; for it would have hurt Alloc, angered my father, and done me no good.

  When my uselessness and helplessness carked me, when my own resolution weakened and I yearned to untie my blindfold and take back my whole lost inheritance of light, I came up against the immovable figure of my father. Seeing, I was a mortal danger to Canoc and to all his people. With my eyes sealed, I was his shield and support. My blindness was my use.

  He had talked to me a little about the visit to Drummant, saying that he thought Ogge Drum had feared us both, but me most, and that his cruel teasing and scoffing had been a bluff, a show, to save face among his people. "What he most wanted was to drive us away. He was longing to test you, all right, but every time he was about to force you to act, he drew back. He didn't dare. And he didn't challenge me, for fear of you."

  "But that girl—he was using her to humiliate us!"

  "He'd set that up before we knew of your wild gift. Caught himself in his own trap. He had to go through with it, to show he didn't fear us. But he does, Orrec. He does."

  Our two white heifers were back at Caspromant, in with the herd in the high pastures, a long way from the borders of Drummant. Drum had said nothing about them and had made no retaliatory move on us or Roddmant. "I gave him his out, and he took it," Canoc said with the vindictive glee that seemed to be his only cheer these days. He was always tense, always grim. With me and with my mother he was tender and cautious, but he never was with us for long, out at his work, or coming in silent with weariness, heavy with sleep.

  Melle grew stronger slowly. There was a meek, patient note in her voice when she was unwell that I hated to hear. I wanted to hear her clear laugh, her quick step through the rooms. She went about the house now, but tired easily, and whenever there was a rainy day or the wind coming down from the Carrantages chilled the summer evening, she had a fire in the tower room and sat huddled by it in the heavy shawl of undyed brown wool that my father's mother had woven for her. Once, sitting there with her, I said without thinking about it, "You've been cold ever since Drummant."

  "Yes," she said. "I have. That last night. When I went to sit with the little girl. That was so strange. I don't think I ever told you about it, did I? Denno had gone downstairs to try to stop her sons from quarreling. Poor Daredan was so wor
n out, I told her to go sleep a while, I'd stay with Vardan. The poor little thing was asleep, but she always seemed to be just about to wake up, with the twitches and spasms that ran through her. So I put out the light and was drowsing along beside her, and after a while I thought I heard somebody whispering or chanting. A kind of droning. I thought I was in our house in Derris and Father was leading a service downstairs. I must have been nearly asleep myself. And it went on and on and then it died away And I realised that I wasn't back home but at Drummant, and the fire had burned nearly out, and I was so cold I could hardly move. Cold to the bone. And the little girl was lying still as death. That scared me, and I got up to look at her, but she was breathing. And then Denno came in, and gave me a candle to come back to our room with. And Canoc wanted to go find Parn, so he left, and the door closing blew out the candle. And the fire was out. You woke, so I sat there in the dark with you, and I couldn't get warm. You remember that. And the whole ride home, my feet and hands were like lumps of ice. Ah! I wish we'd never gone there, Orrec!"

  "I hate them."

  "The women were kind to me."

  "Father says Ogge was afraid of us."

  "I return the compliment," Melle said with a little shudder.

  When I told this tale to Gry—for I told Gry everything but the things I kept secret from myself—I could ask her what I hadn't wanted to ask my mother: Could Ogge Drum have come into that room while she was there? "Father says the Drums work their power with words, spells, as well as eye and hand. Maybe what she heard..."

  Gry did not like that idea at all, and resisted it. "But why would he use it on her, not on you or Canoc? Melle couldn't do him any harm!"

  I thought of Canoc saying, "Wear your red gown, so he can see the gift he gave me." That was the harm. But I hardly knew how to say it. All I could say was, "He hated us all."

  "Did she tell your father about that night?"

  "I don't know. I don't know if she thinks it's important. You know, she doesn't... she doesn't think about the gifts, the powers, very much. I don't know even what she thinks about me, now. About the wild gift. She knows why we sealed my eyes. But I don't think she believes..." I stopped, unsure of what I was saying and feeling myself on dangerous ground. Automatically I put my hand out to Coaly's warm curly back as she lay stretched out beside my leg. But even Coaly couldn't guide me in this darkness.

  "Maybe you should tell Canoc," Gry said.

  "It would be better if Mother did."

  "You told me."

  "But you're not Canoc," I said, an obvious fact which contained a great deal of unsaid meaning. Gry understood it.

  "I'll ask Parn if there's anything people can do... about that power," she said.

  "No, don't." Telling Gry was all right, but if the story went further I would have betrayed my mother's confidence.

  "I won't say why I'm asking."

  "Parn will know why."

  "Maybe she already does... When you came to our place, that night. When Melle fainted. Mother said to Father, 'He may have touched her.' I didn't know what she meant, then. I thought maybe she meant Ogge had tried to rape Melle, and hurt her."

  We sat brooding. The idea that Ogge had cast a wasting spell on my mother was hideous yet vague, hard to contemplate. My mind slid away from it, drifting to other things.

  "She hasn't said anything about Annren Barre since she was at Drummant," Gry remarked, meaning her mother not mine.

  "They're still quarreling at Cordemant. Raddo said it's an open feud between the brothers. They're living at opposite ends of the domain, they won't get within eyesight of each other for fear of going blind or deaf."

  "Father says neither of the brothers has the full gift, but their sister Nanno does. Nanno says if they go on quarreling she'll make them both into mutes, so they can't speak the curse." She laughed, and so did I. Such grotesque cruelties were funny to us. And I was suddenly light-hearted, too, because Parn was no longer talking of betrothing Gry to the boy at Cordemant.

  "Mother says wild gifts are sometimes just very strong gifts. And it takes years to learn to use them." Gry's voice was husky as it always was when she said something important.

  I made no answer. None was needed. If Parn had meant that she believed my gift to be strong and to be ultimately controllable, she was saying that I might, in time, be a fit match for Gry. That was enough for us.

  "I want to try the Ashbrook path," I said, jumping up. Sitting and talking was all very well, but getting outside and riding was much better. I was full of hope and energy now, because Parn Barre who was wise had said I would be able to use my eyes again, and marry Gry, and kill Ogge Drum with a glance if he ever dared come near Caspromant....

  We rode along the Ashbrook. I asked Gry to tell me when we came to the destroyed hillside. We reined in the horses there. Coaly went running on ahead. When Gry called her back she came, but with a whimper, which was eloquent, since she very seldom said anything at all. "Coaly doesn't like it here," Gry said.

  I asked her to describe the place. The grass was growing back, she said, but it still had a strange look. "All crumbled. Just lumps and dust. Nothing has any shape."

  "Chaos."

  "What's Chaos?"

  "It's in Mother's story about the beginning of the world. At first there was stuff floating around, but none of it had any shape or form. It was all just bits and crumbs and blobs, not even rocks or dirt, just stuff. With no forms or colors, and no ground or sky, or up and down, or north and south. No sense to anything. No direction. Nothing connected or related. It wasn't dark, it wasn't light. A mess. Chaos."

  "Then what happened?"

  "Nothing ever would have happened if bits of stuff hadn't stuck together a little, here and there. So the stuff began to make shapes. First just clods and lumps of dirt. Then stones. And the stones rubbed together and made sparks of fire, or melted one another till they ran as water. The fire and the water met and made steam, fog, mist, air—air the Spirit could breathe. Then the Spirit gathered itself together and drew breath, and spoke. It said everything that was to be. It sang to the earth and fire and water and air, singing all the creatures into being. All the shapes of mountains and rivers, the shapes of trees, and animals, and men. Only it took no shape itself, and gave itself no name, so that it could remain everywhere, in all things and between all things, in every relation and every direction. When everything is unmade at the end and Chaos returns, the Spirit will be in it as it was in the beginning."

  After a while Gry asked, "But it won't be able to breathe?"

  "Not until it all happens over again."

  Enlarging it, going into detail, and supplying an answer to Gry's question, I had gone somewhat beyond the bounds of my mother's story I often did so. I had no sense of the sacredness of a story, or rather they were all sacred to me, the wonderful word-beings which, so long as I was hearing or telling them, made a world I could enter seeing, free to act: a world I knew and understood, that had its own rules, yet was under my control as the world beyond the stories was not. In the boredom and inactivity of my blindness, I lived increasingly in these stories, remembering them, asking my mother to tell them, and going on with them myself, giving them form, speaking them into being as the Spirit did in Chaos.

  "Your gift is very strong," Gry said in her husky voice.

  I remembered then where we were. And I was ashamed of bringing Gry here, as if I'd wanted her to see what my power had done. Why had I wanted to bring her here?

  "That tree," I said, "there was a tree—" And I blurted out, "I thought it was my father. I thought I'd— I didn't even know what I was looking at—"

  I could say no more. I signaled Roanie to go on, and we left the ruined place. After a while Gry said, "It's starting to grow back, Orrec. The weeds and the grass. I guess the Spirit is still in it."

  13

  Autumn went along much as summer had, with no great events to mark it. We heard that ever since our visit the quarrel between Brantor Ogge and his elder son
Harba, that began on the boar hunt, had grown into enmity. Harba had taken his wife and people down to Rimmant and was living there, while the younger son, Sebb, was ensconced in the Stone House of Drummant, treated as the heir and brantor-to-be. But Sebb and Daredan's daughter Vardan had been ill all summer and was wasting away, going from seizure to convulsion to paralysis, and such mind as she had ever had was gone. We heard all about this from a travelling blacksmith's wife. Such people are great and useful gossips, carrying news from one domain to the other all over the Uplands, and we listened eagerly, though the woman's callous relish of details of the child's illness disgusted me. I didn't want to hear all that. I felt that I was in some way responsible for the girl's misery.

  When I asked myself how that could possibly be, I saw in my mind's eye the face of Ogge Drum, pouched and creased, with drooping eyelids and an adder's gaze.

  Gry couldn't come to visit me often while the work of harvest was going on and every hand was needed every day. And there was no need for her to give Coaly and me further training; we were by now, as my mother said, a six-legged boy with an unusually keen sense of smell.