Gifts aotws-1

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “What is the will?” I asked him.

  “Well, it’s your intention. You must mean to use your gift. If you used it without willing to, you might do great harm.”

  “But what does it feel like, to use it?”

  He frowned and thought a long time before he spoke.

  “It’s as if something comes all together,” he said. His left hand moved a little, involuntarily. “As if you were a knot at the center of a dozen lines, all of them drawn into you, and you holding them taut. As if you were a bow, but with a dozen bowstrings. And you draw them in tighter, and they draw on you, till you say, ‘Now!’ And the power shoots out like the arrow.”

  “So you will your power to go unmake the thing you’re looking at?”

  He frowned again and thought again. “It’s not a matter you can say in words. There’s no words in it at all.”

  “But you say… How do you know what to say?”

  For I had realised that what Canoc said when he used his gift was never the same word, and maybe not a word at all. It sounded like the hah! or hard outbreath of a man making a great, sudden effort with his whole body, yet there was more in it than that; but I could never imitate it.

  “It comes when… It’s part of the power acting,” was all he could say. A conversation like this troubled him. He could not answer such questions. I should not ask them; I should not have to ask them.

  As I turned twelve, and thirteen, I worried increasingly that my gift had not shown itself. My fear was not only in my thoughts but in my dreams, in which I was always just about to do a great, dreadful act of destruction, to bring a huge stone tower crumbling and crashing down, to unmake all the people of some dark, strange village—or I had just done it, and was struggling among ruins and faceless, boneless corpses to find my way home. But always it was before the act of undoing, or after it.

  I would wake from such a nightmare, my heart pounding like a horse at the gallop, and try to master my terror and gather the power together, as Canoc had said to do. Shivering so that I could scarcely breathe, I would stare at the carved knob at the foot of my bed, just visible in the dawn light, and raise up my left hand and point at it, and determine to destroy that black knob of wood, and push out my breath in a convulsive hah!Then I would shut my eyes hard and pray the darkness that my wish, my will had been granted. But when I opened my eyes at last, the wooden knob stood untouched. My time had not come.

  Before my fourteenth year we had had little to do with the people of Drummant. The neighbor with whom we were on terms of watchful enmity was Erroy of Geremant. Gry and I were utterly forbidden to go anywhere near our border with that domain, which ran through an ash wood. We obeyed. We both knew Bent Gonnen, and the man with his arms on backwards. Brantor Erroy had done that in one of his fits of joking—he called it joking. The man was one of his own serfs. “Took the use right out of him,” our farmers said, “a strange way to do.” That was about as far as criticism of a brantor went. Erroy was mad, but nobody said so. They kept quiet and steered clear.

  And Erroy kept away from Caspromant. True, he had twisted our serf Gonnen’s back, but Gonnen, whatever he said, had almost certainly been over the line, stealing wood from Geremant. It was, by the code of the Uplands, justification of a sort. My father took no revenge, but went up to the ash wood and waited till Erroy came by and could see what he did. Then Canoc summoned up his power and drew a line of destruction straight across the wood, following the border line, as if a lightning bolt had run parallel to the ground destroying everything in its path, leaving a fence of dead, ashen, black-leaved trees. He said nothing to Erroy, who was lurking in the upper edge of the wood, watching. Erroy said nothing, but he was never seen near the boundary wood again.

  Since the raid on Dunet, my father’s reputation as a dangerous man was secure. It did not need this spectacular act of warning to confirm it. “Quick with the eye is Caspro,” people said. I was savagely proud when I heard them say it. Proud of him, of us, of our line, our power.

  Geremant was a poor, misrun domain, not much to worry about; but Drummant was something else. Drummant was wealthy and growing wealthier. The Drums fancied themselves to be brantors of the Carrantages, people said, with all their airs and arrogance, demanding protection payment here and tribute there—tribute, as if they were overlords of the Uplands! Yet weaker domains ended up buying them off, paying the tribute of sheep or cattle or wool or even serfs that Drum extorted; for the gift of that line was a fearful one. It was slow to act, invisible in action, it lacked the drama of the knife, the undoing, the fire; but Ogge of Drummant could walk across your field and pasture, and next year the corn would wither in the ground, and no grass would grow again for years. He could lay the blight on a flock of sheep, a herd of cattle, a household.

  They had all died at Rimmant, a little domain that lay along the southwest border of Drummant. Brantor Ogge had gone there with his demands. The Brantor of Rimm had met him at the door, defiant, ready to use his power of fire throwing, and told him to begone. But Ogge crept round their house at night and made his spells, so they said—for his power was not a matter of a glance and a word, but of whispering and naming and passes of the hands, that took some time to weave. And from that time, every soul of the family of Rimm had sickened, and in four years all were dead.

  Canoc doubted this story as it was commonly told. “Drum couldn’t do that, in darkness, he outdoors and they in,” he said with certainty. “His power is like ours, it works through the seeing eye. Maybe he left some poison there. Maybe they died of illness that was nothing to do with him.” But however it happened, Ogge was seen as the cause of it, and certainly got the profit of it, adding Rimmant to his properties.

  All this did not concern us directly for a long time. Then the two Corde brothers fell to feuding over who was heir and true brantor of their domain, and Ogge moved some of his people into the southern half of Cordemant, claiming that he was protecting it. The brothers went on quarreling and making claims, fools that they were, while Ogge took over the best part of their land. And that brought Drummant right up against Caspromant, along our southwest border. Now Ogge was our neighbor.

  From that time on my father’s temper took a turn towards darkness. He felt that we, all the people of his domain, were at risk, and that we had only him to defend us. His sense of responsibility was strong, perhaps exaggerated. To him, privilege was obligation; command was service; power, the gift itself, entailed a heavy loss of freedom. If he had been a young man without wife or child, I think he might have mounted a foray against Drummant, running all the risks at once, staking himself on one free act; but he was a householder, a burdened man, full of the cares of managing a poor estate and looking after its people, with a defenseless wife and no kinsman of his gift to stand with him, except, perhaps, his son.

  There was the screw that tightened his anxiety. His son was thirteen years old now and still had shown no sign of his gift.

  I had been trained perfectly in the use of it, but I had nothing to use. It was as if I had been taught to ride without ever getting up on a horse’s back.

  That this worried Canoc sharply and increasingly I knew, for he could not hide it. In this matter, Melle could not be the help and solace to him that she was in everything else, nor could she mediate between the two of us or lessen the load we laid on each other. For what did she know of the gift and the ways it took? It was entirely foreign to her. She was not of Upland blood. She had never seen Canoc use his power but that once, in the marketplace of Dunet, when he killed one attacker and maimed another. He had no wish to show her his power to destroy, and no call to. It frightened her; she did not understand it, perhaps only half believed it.

  After he left the line of dead trees in the ash wood to warn Erroy, he had used his power only in small ways to show me how it was done and the cost of doing it. He never used it to hunt game, for the disruption and collapse of the animal’s flesh and bones and organs left a horror no one would think of eati
ng. In any event, to his mind, the gift was not for commonplace usage but for real need only. So Melle could more or less forget he had it, and saw no great reason to worry if I didn’t have it.

  Indeed, it was only when—at last—she heard that I had shown my power that she was alarmed.

  And so was I.

  * * *

  I WAS OUT RIDING with my father, he on the old grey stallion and I on Roanie. With us came Alloc, a young farmer. Alloc was of Caspro lineage through his father, and had “a touch of the eye”—he could unknot knots and a few such tricks. Maybe he could kill a rat if he stared long enough, he said, but he’d never found a rat willing to stay around long enough for him to make sure. He was a good-natured man with a love of horses and a hand with them, the trainer my father had long hoped for. He was on Roanie’s last colt. We were training that two-year-old carefully, for my father saw reborn in him the tall red horse he rode to Dunet.

  We were out on the southwestern sheep grazings of our domain, keeping an eye out, though Canoc didn’t say so, for any sign of men from Drummant straying on our land, or their sheep mixed in among our flocks so that Drum’s shepherds could “reclaim” some of ours when they rounded up theirs—a trick we had been warned of by the Cordes, who had long had Drum for a neighbor. We did indeed spot some strangers in among our wiry, rough-wooled Upland ewes. Our shepherds put a spot of yellow-onion stain on the woolly ear so we could tell our sheep from Erroy’s, who used to let Gere sheep stray onto our grazing and then claim we had stolen them—though he had not done so since my father marked the ash grove.

  We turned south to find our shepherd and his dogs and tell him to cut the Drum sheep out and send them back where they belonged. Then we rode west again to find the break in the fence and get it mended. A black frown was on Canoc’s face. Alloc and I came along meek and silent behind him. We were going a pretty good gait along the hillside when Greylag put a forefoot onto slick slate rock hidden by grass and slipped, making a great lurch. The horse recovered, and Canoc kept his seat. He was swinging off to see if Greylag had strained his leg, when I saw on the slanting stone where his foot would touch down an adder poised to strike. I shouted and pointed, Canoc paused half off the horse, looked at me, at the snake, swung his left hand free and towards it, and recovered his seat on the horse, all in a moment. Greylag made a big, four-footed hop away from the adder.

  It lay on the stone like a cast-off sock, limp and misshapen.

  Alloc and I both sat on our horses staring, frozen, our left hands out stiffly pointing at the snake.

  Canoc quieted Greylag and dismounted carefully. He looked at the ruined thing on the rock. He looked up at me. His face was strange: rigid, fierce.

  “Well done, my son,” he said.

  I sat in my saddle, stupid, staring.

  “Well done indeed!” said Alloc, with a big grin. “By the Stone, but that’s a wicked great poisonous pissant of a snake and it might have bit the Brantor to the bone!”

  I stared at my father’s muscular, brown, bare legs.

  Alloc dismounted to look at the remains of the adder, for the red colt wouldn’t go near it. “Now that’s destroyed,” he said. “A strong eye did that! Look there, that’s its poison fangs. Foul beast,” and he spat. “A strong eye,” he said again.

  I said, “I didn’t—”

  I looked at my father, bewildered.

  “The snake was unmade when I saw it,” Canoc said.

  “But you—”

  He frowned, though not in anger. “It was you that struck it,” he said.

  “It was,” Alloc put in. “I saw you do it, Young Orrec. Quick as lightning.”

  “But I—”

  Canoc watched me, stern and intent.

  I tried to explain. “But it was like all the other times, when I tried—when nothing happened.” I stopped. I wanted to cry, with the suddenness of the event, and my confusion, for it seemed I had done something I did not know I had done. “It didn’t feel any different,” I said in a choked voice.

  My father continued to gaze at me for a moment; then he said, “It was, though.” And he swung up onto Greylag again. Alloc had to catch the red colt, which didn’t want to be remounted. The strange moment passed. I did not want to look at what had been the snake.

  We rode on to the line fence and found where the Drum sheep had crossed; it looked as if stones had been pulled out of the wall recently. We spent the morning rebuilding the wall there and in nearby places where it could use a bit of mending.

  I was still so incredulous of what I had done that I could not think about it, and was taken by surprise when, that evening, my father spoke of it to my mother. He was brief and dry, as was his way, and it took her a little while to understand that he was telling her that I had shown my gift and maybe saved his life by doing so. Then she, like me, was too bewildered to respond with pleasure or praise, or anything but anxiety.

  “Are they so dangerous then, these adders?” she said more than once. “I didn’t know they were so venomous. They might be anywhere on the hills where the children run about!”

  “They are,” Canoc said. “They always have been. Not many of them, fortunately.”

  That our life was imminently and continually in danger was something Canoc knew as a fact, and something Melle had to struggle reluctantly, against her heart, to believe. She was no fool of hope, but she had always been sheltered from physical harm. And Canoc sheltered her, though he never lied to her.

  “They gave the old name to our gift,” he said now. “’The adder,’ people used to call it.” He glanced at me, just the flick of an eye, grave and hard as he had been ever since the instant on the hillside. “Their venom and our stroke act much the same way.”

  She winced. After a while she said to him, “I know you’re glad the gift has run true.” It took courage for her to say it.

  “I never doubted that it did,” he replied. That was said as reassurance to her and to me also, but I am not sure either of us was able to accept it.

  I lay awake that night as long as a boy that age can lie awake, going over and over what had happened when I saw the adder, becoming more and more confused and troubled. I slept at last, to dream confused and troubled dreams, and woke very early. I got up and went down to the stables. For once I was there before my father; but he soon came, yawning, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. “Hello, Orrec,” he said.

  “Father,” I said, “I want to— About the snake.”

  He cocked his head a bit.

  “I know I used my hand and eye. But I don’t think I killed it. My will— It wasn’t any different. It was just like all the other times.” I began to feel an aching pressure in my throat and behind my eyes.

  “You don’t think Alloc did it?” he said. “It’s not in him.”

  “But you— You struck it—”

  “It was unmade when I saw it,” he said as he had said the day before, but some flicker of consciousness or question or doubt passed through his voice and eyes as he spoke. He considered. The hardness had come back into his face, which had been soft with sleep when I first saw him at the stable doors.

  “I struck the snake, yes,” he said. “But after you did. I am sure you struck first. And with a quick, strong hand and eye.”

  “But how will I know when I use my power, if it— if it seems just the same as all the times I tried to and didn’t?”

  That brought him up short. He stood there, frowning, pondering. Finally he said, almost hesitantly, “Would you try it out, the gift, Orrec, now—on a small thing— on that bit of a weed there?” He pointed to a little clump of dandelions between the stones of the courtyard near the stable door.

  I stared at the dandelions. The tears swelled up in me and I could not hold them back. I put my hands over my face and wept. “I don’t want to, I don’t want to!” I cried. “I can’t, I can’t, I don’t want to!”

  He came and knelt and put an arm round me. He let me cry.

  “It’s all right, my dear,�
� he said when I grew quieter. “It’s all right. It is a heavy thing.” And he sent me in to wash my face.

  We spoke no more about the gift then, or for some while.

  ♦ 6 ♦

  We went back with Alloc for several days after that to mend and build up the fence along our southwest sheep pastures, making it clear to the shepherds on the other side that we knew every stone of those walls and would be aware if one were moved. Along on the third or fourth day of the work, a group of horsemen came towards us up the long falling pastures below the Little Sheer, land that had been the Corde domain and now was Drummant. Sheep trotted away from the riders, blatting hoarsely. The men rode straight at us, their pace increasing as the hilltop leveled. It was a low, misty day. We were sodden with the fine rain that drifted over the hills, and dirty from handling the wet and muddy stones.

  “Oh, by the Stone, that’s the old adder himself,” Alloc muttered. My father shot him a glance that silenced him, and spoke out in a quiet, clear voice as the horsemen cantered right up to the wall—“A good day to you, Brantor Ogge.”

  All three of us eyed their horses with admiration, for they were fine creatures. The brantor rode a beautiful honey-colored mare who looked too delicate for his bulk. Ogge Drum was a man of about sixty, barrel-girthed and bull-necked. He wore the black kilt and coat, but of fine woven wool, not felt, and his horse’s bridle was silver-mounted.

  His bare calves bulged with muscle. I saw them, mostly, and little of his face, because I did not want to look up into his eyes. All my life I had heard ill of Brantor Ogge; and the way he had ridden straight at us as if in assault, reining in hard just short of the wall, was not reassuring.

  “Mending your sheep fence, Caspro?” he said in a big, unexpectedly warm and jovial voice. “A good job too. I have some men good at laying drystone. I’ll send them up to help you.”

  “We’re just finishing up today, but I thank you,” Canoc said.

  “I’ll send them up anyhow. Fences have two sides, eh?”