Ursula K. le Guin_Chronicles of the Western Shore_01

by Gifts

  "I don't know," she muttered through closed teeth, her chin on the stone, her gaze straight ahead.

  A fine reward, I thought, for my saying no so staunchly to her question. I was ready to give up Drum's granddaughter for Gry, but Gry wasn't willing to give up this Annren Barre for me? That hurt me sorely. I broke out, "I always thought—" Then I stopped.

  "So did I," Gry murmured. And after a while, so softly her words were almost lost in the noise of the falls, "I told Mother I wouldn't be betrothed till I was fifteen. To anybody. Father agreed. She's angry."

  She suddenly turned over onto her back and lay gazing up into the sky. I did the same. Our hands were close, lying on the rock, but did not touch.

  "When you're fifteen," I said.

  "When we're fifteen," she said.

  That was all we said for a long time.

  I lay in the sun and felt happiness like the sunlight shining through me, like the strength of the rock under me.

  "Call the bird," I murmured.

  She whistled three notes, and from the nodding thickets below us came the sweet, prompt reply. After a minute the bird called again, but Gry did not answer.

  She could have called the bird to her hand, to perch on her finger, but she did not. When she began to come into her full power, last year, we used to play all kinds of games with her gift. She would have me wait in a clearing in the woods, not knowing what I was to see, watching with the hunter's strained alertness, till all at once, always startling me, a doe and her fawns would be standing at the edge of the clearing. Or I'd smell fox and look all about till I saw the fox sitting in the grass not six feet from me, demure as a house cat, his tail curled elegantly round his paws. Once I smelled some rank odor that made the hair stand up on my head and arms, and saw a brown bear come across the clearing, heavy-footed, soft-footed, without a glance at me, and vanish into the forest. Gry would slip into the clearing presently, smiling shyly— "Did you like that?" In the case of the bear, I admitted that I thought one was enough. She said only, "He lives on the west spur of Mount Airn. He followed the Spate down here, fishing."

  She could call a hawk down off the wind, or bring the trout of the waterfall pool up to leap in air. She could guide a swarm of bees wherever the beekeeper wanted them. Once, in a mischievous mood, she kept a cloud of gnats pursuing a shepherd all across the bog-lands below Red Cairn. Hidden up in the cairn, watching the poor fellow's swats and starts and windmilling arms and mad rushes to escape, we snorted and wept with heartless laughter.

  But we had been children then.

  Now, as we lay side by side gazing up at the bright sky and the sprays of restless leaves that nodded across it, the warm rock under us and the warm sun on us, through my peaceful happiness crept the thought that I had come with more than one thing to tell Gry. We had spoken of betrothals. But neither I nor she had said anything about my coming into my power.

  That was more than half a month ago now. I had not seen Gry in all that time, first because I had been going out with my father and Alloc to mend the sheep fences, and then because we had had to wait at home for Ogge's visit. If Ogge had heard about the adder, surely Gry had. Yet she had said nothing. And I had said nothing.

  She was waiting for me to speak, I thought. And then I thought maybe she was waiting for me to show my power. To display it, as she had done so simply and easily, whistling to the bird. But I can't, I thought, all the warmth draining out of me, my peacefulness lost. I can't do it. At once I got angry, demanding, Why do I have to do it? Why do I have to kill something, ruin it, destroy it? Why is that my gift? I won't, I won't do it!— But all you have to do is untie a knot, a colder voice said in me. Have Gry tie a hard knot in a bit of ribbon, and then undo it with a glance. Anyone with the gift can do that. Alloc can do that— And the angry voice repeated, I won't, I don't want to, I won't!

  I sat up and put my head in my hands.

  Gry sat up beside me. She scratched at a nearly healed scab on her thin brown leg, and spread out her thin brown toes fanwise for a minute. I was deep in my own sudden fear and anger, yet was aware that she wanted to say something, that she was bringing herself to speak.

  "I went with Mother to Cordemant last time," she said.

  "You saw him then."

  "Who?"

  "That Annren."

  "Oh, I've seen him before," she said, utterly dismissing that subject. "It was for a big hunt. Elk. They wanted us to bring the herd that comes down the Renny from Airnside. They had six crossbowmen. Mother wanted me to come. She wanted me to call the elk. I didn't want to. But she said I had to. She said people wouldn't believe I had the gift if I didn't use it. I said I'd rather train horses. She said anybody can train horses, but they need us to call the elk. She said, 'You can't withhold the gift from need.' So I went with the hunt. And I called the elk." She seemed to be watching the elk come pacing to her through the air, on our high perch. She gave a deep sigh. "They came...The bowmen shot five of them. Three young bulls and an old bull and a cow. Before we left they gave us a lot of meat, and presents—a cask of mead, and yarn, and woven goods. They gave me a beautiful shawl. I'll show it to you. Mother was really happy about the hunt. They gave us a knife, too. It's a beauty. It has an elkhorn handle mounted in silver. Father says it's an old war dagger. They sent it for him, as a kind of joke. Hanno Corde said, 'You give to our need, we give to your not-need!' But Father likes it," Hugging her knees, she sighed again, not unhappily, yet as if something oppressed her.

  I didn't know why she had told me the story. Not that she needed a particular reason; we told each other everything that happened to us, everything we thought. She was not boasting; she never boasted. I did not know what the elk hunt had meant to her, if she was happy about it or proud of it or not. Maybe she didn't know herself, and told the story to find out. Maybe by telling it she was asking for my story, my triumph. But I could not tell it.

  "When you call," I said, and stopped.

  She waited.

  "What does it feel like?"

  "I don't know." She didn't understand my question; I hardly did myself.

  "The first time your gift worked," I said, trying another tack, "did you know it was working? Was it sort of different from, from the times it didn't work?"

  "Oh," she said. "Yes." But nothing more.

  I waited.

  "It just works," she said. She frowned, and wriggled her toes, and thought, and finally said, "It's different from your gift, Orrec. You have to use the eye, and..."

  She hesitated and I filled in, "Eye, hand, word, will."

  "Yes. But with calling, you just have to find where the creature is, and think about it, and of course it's different with each one, but it's just sort of like reaching out, or like calling aloud, only you don't use your hand, or your voice, mostly."

  "But you know when it's working."

  "Yes. Because they're there. You know where they are. You feel it. And they answer. Or they come... It's like a line between you and them. A cord, a string, from here," and she touched her breastbone, "between you and them. Stretched. Like a string on a fiddle—you know? If you just touch it, it calls out?" I must have looked blank. She shook her head. "It's hard to talk about!"

  "But you know you're doing it, when you do it."

  "Oh yes. Even before I could call, sometimes I could feel the string.

  Only it wasn't stretched enough. It wasn't tuned."

  I sat hunched up, despairing. I tried to say something about the adder. No words would come.

  Gry said, "What was it like when you killed the adder?"

  So simply, she gave me my release from silence.

  I could not accept it. I started to speak, and broke into tears. Only for a moment. The tears made me angry, shamed me. "It wasn't like anything," I said. "It was just—just nothing. Easy. Everybody makes this fuss about it. It's stupid!"

  I stood up and walked right to the end of the ledge of rock, put my hands on my knees and stooped far over to look down to the po
ol below the falls. I wanted to do something daring, courageous, foolhardy. "Come on!" I said, turning. "Race you to the pool!" Gry was up and off the rock quick as a squirrel. I won the race, but skinned both knees doing it.

  * * *

  I rode Branty home over the sunlit hills, and walked him to cool him down, toweled him and brushed him, watered him and fed him, left him whuffling at Roanie in his stall, and came in conscious of having fulfilled my responsibilities, as a man should do.

  My father said nothing, and that too was as it should be: he took it for granted that I had done what should be done. After supper Mother told us a story from the Chamhan, the saga of the Bendraman people, which she knew pretty well from beginning to end. She told of the hero Hamneda's raid on the demon city, his defeat by the demon king, his flight into the wasteland. My father listened as intently as I did. I remember that evening as the last—the last of the good days? the last of my childhood? I don't know what came to an end there, but I woke next morning into a different world.

  "Come out with me, Orrec," my father said late in the morning, and I thought he meant we would ride together, but he only walked with me some way towards the ash grove, till we were out of sight of the house, in the lonely, grassy swale of the Ashbrook. He said nothing as we walked. He stopped on the hillside above the brook. "Show me your gift, Orrec," he said.

  I've said that obedience to my father had always been a pleasure to me, though often not an easy pleasure. And it was a very deep habit, a lifelong, unbroken custom. I had simply never thought of disobeying him, never wanted to. What he asked of me, even if difficult, was always possible, and even if incomprehensible, always turned out to be reasonable, to be right. I understood what he was asking of me now, and why he asked it. But I would not do it.

  A flint stone and a steel blade may lie side by side for years, quiet as can be, but strike them together and the spark leaps. Rebellion is an instant thing, immediate, a spark, a fire.

  I stood facing him, the way I always stood when he spoke my name that way, and said nothing.

  He gestured to a ragged clump of grasses and bindweed near us. "Unmake that," he said, his tone not commanding but encouraging.

  I stood still. After one glance at the clump of weeds, I did not look back at it.

  He waited some while. He drew breath, and there was some slight change in his stance, an increase of tension, though he still said nothing.

  "Will you do it?" he said at last, very softly.

  "No," I said.

  Silence between us again. I heard the faint music of the brook and a bird singing away over in the ash grove and a cow lowing down in the home pasture.

  "Can you do it?"

  "I won’t."

  Silence again, and then he said, "There's nothing to fear, Orrec." His voice was gentle. I bit my lip and clenched my hands.

  "I'm not afraid," I said.

  "To control your gift you must use it," Canoc said, still with that gentleness that weakened my resolve.

  "I won't use it."

  "Then it may use you."

  That was unexpected. What had Gry told me about using her gift and being used by it? I could not remember now. I was confused, but I would not admit it.

  I shook my head.

  Then at last he frowned. His head went back as if he faced an opponent. When he spoke, the tenderness had gone out of his voice.

  "You must show your gift, Orrec," he said. "If not to me, to others. It's not your choice to make. To have the power is to serve the power. You'll be Brantor of Caspromant. The people here will depend on you as they do on me now. You must show them they can rely on you. And learn how to use your gift by using it."

  I shook my head.

  After another unbearable silence, he said, almost in a whisper, "Is it the killing?"

  I didn't know whether it was that, the idea that my gift was to kill, to destroy, that I rebelled against. I had thought that, but not very clearly, though I had often thought with sick horror of the rat, the adder.... All I knew by now was that I refused to be tested, refused to try out this terrible power, refused to let it be what I was. But Canoc had given me an out, and I took it. I nodded.

  At that he gave a deep sigh, his only sign of disappointment or impatience, and turned away. Then he fished in his coat pocket and brought out a bit of lacing. He always carried ends of cord for all the thousand uses of a farmstead. He knotted it and tossed it onto the ground between us. He said nothing, but looked at it and at me.

  "I'm not a dog, to do tricks for you!" I burst out in a shrill, loud voice. It left an awful, ringing silence between us.

  "Listen, Orrec," he said. "At Drummant, that's what you'll be, if you choose to see it that way. If you don't show your gift there, what will Ogge think, and say? If you refuse to learn the use of your power, our people will have no one to turn to." He took a deep breath, and for a moment his voice shook with anger. "Do you think I like killing rats? Am I a terrier?" He stopped, and looked aside, and finally said, "Think of your duty. Of our duty. Think of it, and when you've understood it, come to me."

  He stooped and picked up the length of cord, unknotted it with his fingers, put it back in his pocket, and strode away, uphill, towards the ash grove.

  When I remember that now, I think of how he saved that bit of lacing, because cord was hard to come by and must not be wasted, and I could cry again; but not with the tears of shame and fury that I wept as I went down the stream valley from that place, that day.

  8

  After that nothing could be the same between my father and me, because now there lay between us his demand and my refusal. But his manner to me did not change. He did not return to the matter for several days. When he did it was not to command but to ask almost casually, one afternoon when we were riding back from our eastern boundary: "Are you ready to try your power now?"

  But my determination had grown up round me like a wall, a stone tower-keep in which I was protected from his demands, his questions, my own questions. I answered at once: "No."

  My flat certainty must have taken him aback. He said nothing in reply. He said nothing to me as we rode on home. He said nothing to me the rest of that day. He looked tired and stern. My mother saw that, and probably guessed the cause.

  The next morning she asked me to come up to her room on the pretext of fitting the coat she was making for me. While she had me standing with my arms stuck out like a straw doll and was going round me on her knees taking out basting stitches and marking buttonholes, she said through the pins in her mouth, "Your father's worried."

  I scowled and said nothing.

  She took the pins out of her mouth and sat back on her heels. "He says he doesn't know why Brantor Ogge acted as he did. Inviting himself here, and inviting us there, and dropping hints about his granddaughter, and all. He says there's never been any friendship between Drum and Caspro. I said, 'Well, better late than never.' But he just shakes his head. It worries him."

  This was not what I'd expected, and it drew me from my self-absorption. I didn't know what to say but sought for something wise and reassuring. "Maybe it's because our domains border now," was the best I could come up with.

  "I think that's what worries him," Melle said. She replaced one pin between her lips and set another in the hem of the jacket. It was a man's coat of black felt, my first.

  "So," she said, removing the pin from her mouth and sitting back again to judge the fit, "I'll be very glad when this visit's over with!"

  I felt guilt weigh me down, as if the black coat were made of lead.

  "Mother," I said, "he wants me to practice the gift, the undoing, and I don't want to, and it makes him angry."

  "I know," she said. She went on adjusting the hang of the jacket, and then stopped and looked at me, up at me, because she was kneeling and I standing. "That's something I can't help either of you with. You see that, don't you, Orrec? I don't understand it. I can't meddle in it. I can't come between you and your father, either. It's hard,
when I see you both unhappy. All I can say to you is, it's for you, for all of us, that he asks this of you. He wouldn't ask it if it were wrong. You know that."

  She had to take his part and his side, of course. It was right, and just, but also it was unfair, unfair to me, that all the power should be on his side, all the right, all the reasons, that even she had to be on his side—leaving me alone, a stupid, stubborn boy, unable to use my power, claim my right, or speak my reasons. Because I saw that unfairness, I would not even try to speak. I drew away, into my furious shame, my stone tower, and stood mute inside it.

  "Is it because you don't want to harm creatures that you don't want to use your power, Orrec?" she asked, quite timidly. Even with me she was timid, humble before this uncanny gift she knew so little of.