Gifts aotws-1

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  I woke suddenly and was wide awake. A cock was crowing away down in the barnyards. It might be dawn, or long before dawn. There was some small noise in the room, and I said, “Father?”

  “Orrec? Are you awake? It’s dark, I can’t see.” My mother felt her way to my cot and sat down beside me. “Oh, I’m so cold!” she said. She was shivering violently. I tried to put the warm blanket up around her shoulders, and she pulled it around us both.

  “Where’s Father?”

  “He said he had to talk to Parn Barre. He says we’ll leave as soon as there’s light to see by. I told Denno and Daredan we were leaving. They understand. I just said we had been away too long and Canoc was worried about the spring plowing.”

  “What was wrong with the girl?”

  “She gets overtired easily and has spasms, and her mother is frightened by it, poor thing. I sent her off to get some sleep, she doesn’t get much, and sat with the little girl. And then I half fell asleep there, and I don’t know…It seemed…I got so cold, I can’t seem to get warm…” I hugged her, and she snuggled up next to me. “Finally some of the other women came and could stay with the child, and I came back here, and your father went to find Parn. I suppose I should get our things ready to go. But it’s so dark still. I keep looking for the dawn.”

  “Stay and get warm,” I said, and we sat there trying to warm each other until my father came back. He had his flint and steel and could light a candle, and my mother hurried our few things together into the saddlebag. We stole through the halls and passages and down the stairs and out of the house. I could smell dawn in the air, and the cocks were crowing as if they meant it. We went to the stables, where a sleepy, surly fellow roused up and helped us saddle our horses. My mother led Roanie out and held her while I mounted. I sat in the saddle waiting.

  I heard my mother make a little surprised, grieving noise. Hoofs clopped on the cobbles as another of the horses was led out. She said,

  “Canoc, look.”

  “Ach,” he said in disgust.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “The chicks,” my father said, low-voiced. “His people set the basket down where your mother gave it to them. Left it. Left the birds to die.”

  He helped Melle mount Greylag, and then rode Branty out of the stable; the stable boy opened the courtyard gate for us, and we rode out.

  “I wish we could gallop,” I said. My mother in her anxiety thought I meant it and said, “We can’t, dear,” but Canoc, riding close behind me, gave a short laugh. “No,” he said, “we’ll run away at a walk.”

  The birds were all singing now from tree to tree, and I kept thinking, as my mother had, that I would soon see the light of dawn.

  After we had ridden several miles, she said, “It was a stupid gift to bring to a house like that.”

  “Like that?” said my father. “So grand and great, you mean?”

  “In their own eyes,” said Melle Aulitta.

  I said, “Father, will they say we ran away?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we shouldn’t—should we?”

  “If we stayed, Orrec, I’d kill him. And though I’d like to kill him in his own house, I can’t pay the price of that pleasure. He knows it. But I will get a little of my own back.”

  I didn’t know what he meant, nor did my mother, till in the middle of the morning we heard a horse coming up behind us. We were alarmed, but Canoc said, “It’s Parn.”

  She drew up with us and greeted us in her husky voice that was like Gry’s. “So, where are your cattle, Canoc?” she said.

  “Under that hill, ahead there.” And we jogged on. Then we stopped, and my mother and I dismounted. She led me to a grassy place by a stream where I could sit. She took Greylag and Roanie into the water to drink and cool their feet; but Canoc and Parn rode off, and soon I could not hear them at all. “Where are they going?” I asked.

  “Into that meadow. He must have asked Parn to call the heifers.”

  And after what seemed a long time, during which I listened nervously for the sound of pursuit and vengeance coming down the road and heard nothing but birdsong and the distant lowing of cattle, Mother said, “They’re coming,” and soon I heard the grass swishing at the legs of the animals, and Branty s greeting whuff to our horses, and my father’s voice saying something with a laugh to Parn.

  “Canoc,” my mother said, and he replied at once, “It’s all right, Melle. They’re ours. Drum looked after them for us, and now I’m taking them home. It’s all right.”

  “Very well,” she said unhappily.

  And soon we all went on together, she first, then I, then Parn with the two heifers following close behind her, and Canoc bringing up the rear.

  The cattle did not slow us down; young and lively, and of a hauling, plowing breed, they stepped right out with the horses and kept up a good pace all day. We came onto our own domain by mid-afternoon, and cut across the northern part of it, heading for Roddmant. It had been Parn’s suggestion that we take the heifers there and leave them in the Rodd pastures for a while with their old herd. “A little less provocative,” she said, “and a good deal harder for Drum to steal back.”

  “Unless he comes calling on you,” Canoc said.

  “That’s as may be. I’ll have no more to do with Ogge Drum in any way, except that if he wants a feud he’ll have one.”

  “If he has it with you he has it with us,” Canoc said, joyfully fierce.

  I heard my mother whisper, “Ennu, hear and be here.” That was always her prayer when she was worried or frightened. I had asked and she had told me long ago about Ennu, who smoothed the road, blessed the work, and mended quarrels. The cat was Ennu’s creature, and the opal Melle always wore was her stone.

  About the time I ceased to feel the western sun on my back, we came to the Stone House of Roddmant. I had heard barking for a mile before we got there. A sea of dogs came round our horses as we rode in, all welcoming us joyously. And Ternoc came out shouting welcome to us too, and in a moment somebody came and took hold of my leg as I sat on Roanie. It was Gry, pressing her face against my leg.

  “Here then, Gry, let him get off his horse,” Parn said in her dry voice. “Give him a hand.”

  “I don’t need it,” I said. I dismounted creditably, and found Gry holding my arm now instead of my leg, and pressing her face against it, and crying. “Oh, Orrec,” she said. “Oh, Orrec!”

  “It’s all right, Gry, it’s all right, really. It isn’t—I’m not—”

  “I know,” she said, letting me go, and snuffling several times. “Hello, Mother. Hello, Brantor Canoc. Hello,” and I could hear her and Melle having a hug and kiss. Then she was back beside me.

  “Parn says you have a dog,” I said, awkwardly enough, for the guilt of poor Hamneda’s death weighed on me—not only his death, but even the choice of him, the choice that Gry had known to be wrong.

  “Do you want to see her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come on.”

  She took me somewhere—even this house and grounds, that I knew almost as well as my own house, were a labyrinth and a mystery in my blindness—and said, “Wait,” and after a minute or two said, “Coaly, sit. This is Coaly, Orrec. This is Orrec, Coaly.”

  I squatted down. Reaching out a little, I felt warm breath on my hand, and then the delicate touch of whiskers, and a polite wet tongue washing my hand. I felt forward cautiously, afraid of poking the dog’s eye or making some wrong movement, but she sat still and I felt the silky, tightly curled hair of her head and neck, her high-held, soft, flopover ears. “She’s a black herder?” I said in a whisper.

  “Yes. Kinny’s bitch had three pups last spring. This was the best one. The children made her a pet, and he’d started her as a sheepdog. I asked for her when I heard about your eyes. Here’s her lead,” Gry put a short, stiff leather leash in my hand. “Walk with her,” she said.

  I stood up, and felt the dog stand. I took one step, and found the dog right in front
of my legs, immovable. I laughed, though I was embarrassed. “We won’t get far this way!”

  “It’s because if you went that way you’d fall over the lumber Fanno left there. Let her show you.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Say, ‘Walk on’ and her name.”

  “Walk on, Coaly,” I said to the darkness at the end of the leather strap in my hand.

  The strap tugged me gently to the right, then forward.

  I walked as boldly as I could, until the strap pulled me gently to stop.

  “Back to Gry, Coaly,” I said, turning.

  The strap turned me a little farther round and then walked me back and stopped me.

  “I’m here,” said Gry right in front of me. Her voice was hoarse and abrupt.

  I knelt, felt for the dog sitting on her haunches, and put my arm around her. A silky ear was against my face, the whiskers tickled my nose. “Coaly, Coaly,” I said.

  “I didn’t use the calling with her, only at the very beginning, a couple of times,” Gry said. From the location of her voice she was squatting down near me. “She learned as fast as if I had. She’s bright. And steady. But you both need to work together.”

  “Should I leave her here then, and come back?”

  “I don’t think so. I can tell you some things not to do. And try not to ask too many things of her at once for a while. But I can come over and work with her with you. I’d like to do that.”

  “That would be good,” I said. After the threats and passions and cruelties of Drummant, Gry’s clear love and kindness, and the calm, trusting, trustworthy response of the dog, were too much for me. I hid my face in the curly, silky fur. “Good dog,” I said.

  ♦ 12 ♦

  When Gry and I went indoors at last, I was frightened to learn that my mother, dismounting, had fainted in my father’s arms. They had taken her upstairs and put her to bed. Gry and I hung around feeling childish, useless, the way young people do when an adult is taken sick.

  Canoc came down at last. He came straight to me and said, “She’ll be all right.”

  “Is she just tired?”

  He hesitated, and Gry asked, “She didn’t lose the baby?”

  It was part of Gry’s gift to know when there were two lives in one body. It was not part of ours. I am sure Canoc had not known Melle was with child before this day; she may not have known it herself.

  To me the news carried little meaning. A boy of thirteen is at a great remove from that portion of life; pregnancy and childbirth are abstract matters, nothing to do with him at all.

  “No,” Canoc said. He hesitated again and said, “She needs to rest.”

  His tired, toneless voice troubled me. I wanted him to cheer up. I was sick of fear and gloom. We were out of all that, free again, with our friends, safe at Roddmant. “If she’s all right for a while, maybe you could come see Coaly,” I said.

  “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.