Ursula K. le Guin_Chronicles of the Western Shore_01

by Gifts

  My father would come in from his farm work to her room—with clean hands, and in clean shoes, for she held firmly to certain principles new to the Stone House—and he would sit with us, listening. He loved to listen to her. She talked like a little stream running, clearly and merrily, with the Lowland softness and fluency. To people in the cities, talk is an art and a pleasure, not a matter of mere use and need. She brought that art and pleasure to Caspromant. She was the light of my father's eyes.

  4

  Feuds and bonds among the Upland lineages went back before memory, before history, before reason. Caspro and Drum had always been at odds. Caspro, Rodd, and Barre had always been friendly, or friendly enough to mend their feuds after a while.

  While Drum had prospered, largely by sheep stealing and land grabbing, these last three families had come on hard times. Their great days seemed to be behind them, especially the Caspros. Even in Blind Caddard's time the strength and numbers of our line had grown perilously small, though we still held our domain and some thirty families of serfs and farmers.

  A farmer had some ancestral relation to a lineage, though not necessarily the gift; a serf had neither. Both had the obligation of fealty and the right of claim on the chief family of their domain. The family of most serfs and farmers had lived on the land they farmed as long as the brantor's family or longer. The work and management of crops, livestock, forests, and all the rest were allocated by long custom and frequent council. The people of our domain were seldom reminded that the brantor had power of life or death over them. Caddard's gift of two serfs to Tibro had been a rare and reckless assertion of wealth and power, which saved the domain by catching the invaders in the net of his extravagant generosity. The gift's gift was stronger, perhaps, than the gift itself. Caddard had used it wisely. But things had gone far wrong when a brantor used his power against his own people, as Erroy did at Geremant, and Ogge at Drummant.

  The Barre gift had never been very useful for such purposes. To be able to call wild beasts out of the forest, or gentle a colt, or discuss things with a hound, was a gift indeed; but it did not give you dominion over men who could set your haystack afire or kill you and your hound with a glance and a word. The Barres had lost their own domain long ago to the Helvars of the Carrantages. Various families of the lineage had come down the mountain and married into our western domains. They tried to keep their line true so as not to weaken or lose their gift, but of course they could not always do so. Several of our farmers were Barres. Our healers and curers of livestock, our hen keepers and hound trainers, were all farmwives with Barre blood in them. There were still Barres of the true line at Geremant, Cordemant, and Roddmant.

  The Rodds, with their gift of the knife, were well prepared to defend or to attack and to assert dominion if they wished, but they mostly lacked the temper for it. They were not feuders. They were more interested in elk hunts than in forays. Unlike most self-respecting Uplanders, they would rather breed good cattle than steal them. The cream-white oxen Caspromant had once been famous for had in fact been bred by the Rodds. My ancestors stole cows and bull calves from Roddmant till they had a breeding herd of their own. The Rodds worked their land and bred their cattle and throve well enough, but did not increase and grow great. They had intermarried a good deal with Barres, and so it was that when I was a child, Roddmant had two brantors, Gry's mother Parn Barre and her father Ternoc Rodd.

  Our families had been on good terms, as these things go in the Uplands, for generations, and Ternoc and my father were true friends. Ternoc had ridden his droop-lipped farmhorse in the great raid on Dunet. His share of the loot was one of the little serf girls, whom he soon gave to Bata Caspro of Cordemant, who had the other one, because the two were sisters and kept sniveling after each other. The year before the raid, Ternoc and Parn had married. Parn had grown up at Roddmant and had some Rodd blood in her. A month after my mother gave birth to me, Parn bore a daughter, Gry.

  Gry and I were cradle friends. When we were little children our parents visited often, and we ran off and played. I was the first, I think, to see Gry's gift come to power, though I am not certain if it is a memory or the imagination of something she told me. Children can see what they are told. What I see is this: Gry and I are sitting making twig houses in the dirt at the side of Roddmant kitchen gardens, and a bull elk, a great stag, comes out of the little wood that lies behind the house. He walks to us. He is immense, taller than a house, with great, swaying branches of antlers that balance against the sky. He comes slowly and directly to Gry. She reaches up and he puts his nose to her palm as if in salute. "Why did he come here?" I ask, and she says, "I called him." That is all I remember.

  When I told my father the memory, years later, he said it could not have been so. Gry and I had been no more than four, and a gift, he said, scarcely ever shows itself till the child is nine or ten years old,

  "Caddard was three," I said.

  My mother touched the side of my little finger with the side of her little finger: Do not contradict your father. Canoc was tense and anxious, I was careless and bumptious; she protected him from me and me from him, with the most delicate, imperceptible tact.

  Gry was the best of playmates. We got into a lot of mild trouble. The worst was when we let the chickens out. Gry claimed she could teach chickens to do all sorts of tricks—walk across lines, jump up onto her finger. "It is my gift," she said pompously. We were six or seven. We went into the big poultry yard at Roddmant and cornered some half-grown poults and tried to teach them something—anything—anything at all: an occupation so frustrating and absorbing that we never noticed we had left the yard gate wide open until all the hens had followed the rooster right up into the woods. Then everyone had a try at rounding them all back up. Parn, who could have called them, was away on a hunt. The foxes were grateful to us, if no one else was. Gry felt very guilty, the poultry yard being one of her charges. She wept as I never saw her weep again. She roamed in the woods all that evening and the next day, calling the missing hens, "Biddy! Lily! Snowy! Fan!" in a little voice like a disconsolate quail.

  We always seemed to get into mischief at Roddmant. When Gry came with her parents or her father to Caspromant, there were no disasters. My mother was very fond of Gry. She would say suddenly,

  "Stand there, Gry!" Gry would stand still, and my mother would gaze at her till the seven-year-old became self-conscious and began to wriggle and giggle. "Now be still," my mother would say. "I'm learning you, don't you see, so that I can have a girl of my own exactly like you. I want to know how to do it."

  "You could have another boy like Orrec," Gry offered, but my mother said, "No! One Orrec is quite enough. I need a Gry!"

  Gry's mother Parn was a strange, restless woman. Her gift was strong, and she seemed half a wild creature herself. She was much in demand to call animals to hunters, and was often away, half across the Uplands, at a hunt at one domain or another. When she was at Roddmant she seemed always to have a cage around her, to be looking at you through bars. She and her husband Ternoc were polite and wary with each other. She had no particular interest in her daughter, whom she treated like all other children, with impartial indifference.

  "Does your mother teach you how to use your gift?" I asked Gry once, in the self-importance of being taught by my father how to use my gift.

  Gry shook her head. "She says you don't use the gift. It uses you."

  "You have to learn how to control it," I informed her, solemn and severe.

  "I don't," said Gry.

  She was wilful, indifferent—too much like her mother, sometimes. She would not argue with me, would not defend her opinion, would not change it. I wanted words. She wanted silence. But when my mother told stories, Gry listened from her silence, and heard every word, heard, held, treasured, pondered it.

  "You're a listener," Melle said to her. "Not just a caller, a listener too. You listen to mice, don't you?"

  Gry nodded.

  "What do they say?"

 
; "Mouse things," Gry said. She was very shy, even with Melle, whom she loved dearly.

  "I suppose, being a caller, you could call the mice that are nesting in my storeroom and suggest to them that they go live in the stable?"

  Gry thought about it.

  "They would have to move the babies," she said.

  "Ah," said my mother. "I never thought. Out of the question. Besides, there's the stable cat."

  "You could bring the cat to your storeroom," Gry said. Her mind moved unpredictably; she saw as the mice saw, as the cat saw, as my mother saw, all at once. Her world was unfathomably complex. She did not defend her opinions, because she held conflicting opinions on almost everything. And yet she was immovable.

  "Could you tell about the girl who was kind to the ants?" she asked my mother, timidly, as if it were a great imposition.

  "The girl who was kind to the ants," my mother repeated, as if reciting a title. She closed her eyes.

  She had told us that many of her stories came from a book she had had as a child, and that when she told them, she felt as if she were reading from the book. The first time she told us that, Gry asked, "What is a book?"

  So my mother read to us from the book that was not there.

  Long, long ago, when Cumbelo was King, a widow lived in a village with her four daughters. And they went along well enough till the woman fell ill and couldn't get over it. So a wise woman came and looked her over and said, "Nothing can cure you but a drink of the water of the Well of the Sea."

  "Oh me, oh me, then I'll surely die," says the widow, "for how can I go to that well, sick as I am?"

  "Haven't you four daughters?" says the wise woman.

  So the widow begged her eldest daughter to go to the Well of the Sea and fetch a cup of that water. "And you shall have all my love," she said, "and my best bonnet."

  So the eldest girl went out, and she walked a while, and sat down to rest, and where she sat she saw a huddle of ants trying to drag a dead wasp to their nest. "Ugh, the nasty things," she said, and crushed them under her heel, and went on. It was a long way to the shore of the sea, but she trudged along and got there, and there was the sea with its great waves bashing and crashing on the sand. "Oh, that's enough of that!" said the girl, and she dipped her cup into the nearest wave and carried the water home. "Here's the water, Mother," says she, and the mother takes and drinks it. Oh, bitter it was, salt and bitter! Tears came to the mother's eyes. But she thanked the girl and gave her her best bonnet. And the girl went out in the bonnet, and soon enough she caught her a sweetheart.

  But the mother grew sicker than ever, so she asked her second daughter to go fetch her water from the Well of the Sea, and if she did she could have her mother's love and her best lace gown. So the girl went. On the way she sat down to rest, and saw a man plowing with an ox, and saw the yoke was riding wrong, galling a great sore on the ox's neck. But that was nothing to her. She went on and came to the shore of the sea. There it was with its great waves roaring and boring on the sand. "Oh, that's enough of that!" says she, and dips the cup in quick, and home she trots. "Here's the water, Mother, now give me the gown."

  Salt, salt and bitter that water was, so the mother could scarcely swallow it. As soon as she went out in the lace gown the girl found her a sweetheart, but the mother lay as if under the hand of death. She hardly had breath to ask the third girl to go. "The water I drank can't be the water of the Well of the Sea," she said, "for it was bitter brine. Go, and you shall have all my love."

  "I don't care for that, but give me the house over your head and I'll go," says the third daughter.

  And the mother said she would. So the girl set off with a good will, straight to the seashore, never stopping. Just on the sand dunes she met a grey goose with a broken wing. It came to meet her, dragging its wing. "Get away, stupid thing," the girl said, and down to the sea she goes, and sees the great waves thundering and blundering on the sand. "Oh, that's enough of that!" says the girl, and pops her cup in, and back home she goes. And as soon as her mother tasted the bitter cup of salt sea brine, "Now, out you go, Mother," says the girl, "this is my house now."

  "Will you not let me die in my own bed, child?"

  "If you'll be quick about it," says the girl. "But hurry up, for the lad next door wants to marry me for my property, and my sisters and I are going to have a grand wedding here in my house."

  So the mother lay dying, weeping salt and bitter tears. The youngest of her daughters came to her softly and said, "Don't cry, Mother. I'll go get you a drink of that water."

  "It's no use, child. It's too far, you're too young, I have nothing left to give you, and I must die."

  "Well, I'll try all the same," says the girl, and off she goes.

  As she walked along she saw some ants by the roadside, trying to carry the bodies of their comrades, struggling along. "Here, that's easier for me to do," says the girl, and she scooped them all up in her hand and carried them to their ant hill and set them down there.

  She walked along and saw an ox plowing with a yoke that galled it till it bled. "I'll set that yoke straight," she said to the plowman, and she made a pad of her apron to go under the yoke, and set it to ride easier on the ox's neck.

  She walked a long way and came at last to the shore, and there on the dunes of sand stood a grey goose with a broken wing. "Ah, poor bird," says the girl, and she took off her overskirt and tore it up and bound the goose's wing so it might heal.

  Then she went down to the edge of the sea. There the great waves lay shining. She tasted the seawater and it was salt and bitter. Far out over the waters was an island, a mountain on the shining water. "How can I come to the Well of the Sea?" she said. "I can never swim so far." But she took off her shoes and was walking into the sea to swim, when she heard a cloppity, clop, and over the sand came a great white ox with silver horns. "Come," says the ox, "climb up, I'll carry you." So she climbed on the ox's back and held its horns, and into the water they went, and the ox swam till they came to the far island.

  The rocks of the island were steep as walls and smooth as glass. "How shall I come to the Well of the Sea?" she said. "I can never climb so high." But she reached up to try to climb the rocks. A grey goose greater than an eagle came flying down to her. "Come," says the grey goose, "climb up, I'll carry you." So she got up between its wings, and it bore her up to the peak of the island. And there was a deep well of clear water. She dipped her cup in it. And the grey goose bore her back across the sea, while the white ox swam after.

  But when the grey goose set foot upon the sand, he stood up a man, a tall, fine young man. And the strips of her skirt hung from his right arm.

  "I am the baron of the sea," he said, "and I would marry you."

  "First I must carry the water to my mother," the girl said.

  So he and she both mounted the white ox, and they rode back to the village. Her mother lay there in death's hand. But she swallowed one drop of the water, and raised her head. Another drop, and she sat up. Another drop, and she stood up. Another drop, and she danced.

  "It is the sweetest water of all the world," she said. Then she and her youngest daughter and the baron of the sea rode away on the white ox to his palace of silver, where he and the girl were married, and the widow danced at the wedding.

  "But the ants," Gry whispered.

  "Oh, the ants," said my mother. "So, were the ants ungrateful? No! For they came to the wedding too, all crawling along as fast as they could go, and they brought with them a golden ring, which had lain a hundred years under the ground in their ant hill, and with that ring the young man and the youngest daughter were married!"

  "Last time," said Gry.

  "Last time?"

  "Last time, you said...you said the ants went and ate all the cakes and sweet things at the older sisters' wedding."

  "They did. They did that, too. Ants can do a great many things, and they're everywhere at once," my mother said earnestly, and then broke into laughter, and we all laughed, because s
he had forgotten the ants.

  Gry's question, "What is a book?" had made my mother think about some matters that had been neglected or ignored in the Stone House. Nobody at Caspromant could read or write, and we counted sheep with a notched stick. It was no shame to us, but it was to her. I don't know if she ever dreamed of going back home for a visit, or of people of her family coming to the Uplands; it was most unlikely that either should happen; but what about the children? What if her son were to go down into the rest of the world, untaught, as ignorant as a beggar of the city streets? Her pride would not endure it.

  There were no books in the Uplands, so she made them. She glazed fine linen squares and stretched them between rollers. She made ink of oak galls, pens of goose quills. She wrote out a primer for us and taught us to read it. She taught us to write, first with sticks in the dust, then with quills on stretched linen, holding our breath, scratching and spattering horribly. She washed the pale ink out, and we could write again. Gry found it all very hard, and kept to it only through her love for my mother. I found it the easiest thing in the world.