Ursula K Le Guin

by Powers (2007) (lit)

  Beaky."

  I had to pry her hands loose from my legs, and then she gripped my hands with sparrow-claw fingers, looking up into my face, her face all dust and bone and tears.

  "Melle?"

  She pulled me to her. I picked her up. She weighed nothing, it was like picking up a ghost. She clung to me tightly, just as she used to when I came to Diero's room to teach her letters. She hid her face against my shoulder.

  "Where does she live?" I asked Ater, who had stopped to stare at us. He pointed to a hut nearby. I started to carry her towards it.

  "Don't go there," she whispered, "don't go there,"

  "Where do you live then, Melle?" "Nowhere."

  A man looked from the doorway of the hut that Ater had pointed out. I'd seen him working as a carpenter but had never known his name. He too had the dull look, the siege face.

  "Where's the girl's sister?" I asked him.

  He shrugged.

  "Diero didn't— escape— did she?"

  The man shrugged again, this time with a grinning sneer at the question. Gradually his look sharpened. He said, "You want that one?" I stared at him.

  "Half a bronze for the night," he said. "Or food, if you've got any." He stepped forward, trying to get a look at my backpack.

  I went through a quick, complex set of thoughts. I said, "What I have I keep," and set straight off walking back the way I'd come. Melle clung to my neck, silent, her face hidden.

  The man shouted after me and the dog, barking, set off other dogs in a chorus of barks and howls. I drew my knife, glancing back constantly. But nobody followed us.

  When I'd walked a half mile or so I knew that my little ghost was a great deal more solid than I'd thought, and also that I'd better think what I was doing. Coming across the faint trace of a path, I went along it for some way, then turned aside. Behind a thicket of elderberries that screened us from the path, I set Melle down on her feet and sat down next to her to get my breath. She squatted down beside me. "Thank you for taking me away," she said in a thread of a voice.

  She would be seven or eight years old now, I thought. She hadn't grown very much, and was so thin her joints looked like knobs. I got some dried fruit out of my pack and offered it to her. She ate it with a pitiful and terrible attempt not to be greedy. She held out a piece to me. I shook my head. "I ate a little while ago," I said. She devoured the fruit,

  I cut a piece of my rock-hard bread into little morsels and warned her to suck them to soften them before she chewed. She sat with bread in her mouth, and her dirty, bony face began to relax.

  "Melle," I said, "I'm going north. Away. To a city called Mesun."

  "Please, can I come with you," she whispered, her face tightening again, her eyes getting big, only daring one glance up at me.

  "You don't want to stay there, at— "

  "Oh no, please no." The same whisper. "Please no!"

  "There's nobody there who. . ."

  She shook her head again and again. "No, no, no," she whispered. I didn't know what to do. That is, there was only one thing I could do, but I didn't know how I was going to manage it. "Are you pretty good at walking?"

  "I can walk and walk," she said earnestly. She put another little lump of bread in her mouth, timidly, and sucked it as I had told her to do.

  "Well," I said, "you'll have to."

  "I will, I will. You won't have to carry me. I promise." "That's good. We ought to walk on a way now, because I want to get back to the river before dark. And tomorrow we'll leave the forest. All

  right?"

  "Yes!" she said, and her eyes shone. She stood right up.

  She walked along bravely, but her legs were short, and she didn't have much strength in her little starved body. Fortunately we reached the Somulane again sooner than I expected, coming down an open glade to a long bend in the river. The fishing there wasn't like the wonderful pool farther upstream, but I did catch a trout and a couple of perch, enough for our supper. The grass was soft and the light fell sweetly through the trees across the water, turning it to bronze. "It's pretty here," Melle said. She fell asleep as soon as she had eaten. She lay in a little heap on the grass. My heart turned over at the sight of her

  fragility. How could I take this child with me? But how could I not take her?

  Luck hears prayers only with his deaf ear, but I spoke to him, to the ear that hears the wheels of the chariots of the stars. I said, "You used to be with me, Lord, when I didn't know it. I hope you're with this child now, and not just fooling her." And I spoke in silence also to Ennu, thanking her and asking her to guide us. Then there was nothing to do but roll Melle up with me in my soft reedcloth blanket, and sleep.

  We both woke as dawn was brightening. Melle went off by herself to the riverside, and when she came back she had managed to wash herself quite clean, and was shivering with wet and cold. I wrapped the blanket round her again while we ate a little breakfast. She was shy and solemn.

  "Melle," I said, "your sister. . ."

  She said in a strange, small, even voice, "We tried to hide. Back of the sheep pastures. The soldiers found us. They took Irad away. I don't remember."

  I remembered Barna's raider telling how they had taken the two girls from their village, how Ater had been going to toss the little one aside, but they clung too tight together. . . . They hadn't been able to hold on to each other this time.

  Melle's chin trembled. She looked down and chewed on her bit of hard bread but could not swallow. Neither of us could say anything more about Irad. After a long time I said, "Your village was over on the west side of the forest. Do you want to go back there?"

  "To the village?" She looked up, and thought hard. "I can't remember it much," she said.

  "But you had family there. Your mother— "

  She shook her head. "We didn't have any mother. We belonged to Gan Buli. He hit us a lot. My sister. . ." She didn't finish. Maybe Luck had been with Melle after all.

  But never with Irad.

  "All right, then you'll come with me," I said, in as matter-of-fact a tone as I could manage. "But listen. We'll be going on the roads, into villages, some of the time at least. Among people. I think it might be better if you were my little brother. Can you pretend to be a boy?"

  "Of course," she said, interested in the idea. She thought about it. "I need a name. I can be Miv."

  I almost said, "No!" but stopped myself. She should have the name she chose herself. Like Melle, it was a common name.

  "All right, Miv," I said, with a little effort. "And I'm Avvi."

  "Avvi," she repeated, and then murmured, "Avvi Beaky," with a tiny smile.

  "And who we are is this: we aren't slaves, because there aren't any slaves in Urdile, where we live. I'm a student at the University in Me-sun. I study with a great man there, who's waiting for us. I'm taking you there to be a student too. We come from just east of the Marshes."

  She nodded. It all seemed perfectly convincing to her. But she was eight years old.

  "What I hope is, we can mostly keep off the big roads and just go through the countryside. I have some money. We can buy food in villages and from farmers. But we have to look out for slave takers. Everywhere. If we don't meet any of them, we'll be all right."

  "What is the great man in Mesun's name?" she asked. A good question. I wasn't prepared for it. Finally I said the only name of a great man in Mesun I knew: "Orrec Caspro."

  She nodded.

  There seemed to be one more thing on her mind. She finally said it. "I can't pee like a boy," she said.

  "That's all right. Don't worry. I'll stand guard."

  She nodded. We were ready to go. A short way downstream from the bend of the river it widened and shoaled out, and I said, "Let's cross here. Can you swim — Miv?"

  "No."

  "If it gets too deep I can carry you." We took off our shoes and tied them to my pack. I fastened a length of light rope around Melle's waist and my own, with a few feet of slack between us. We waded out into the riv
er hand in hand. I thought of my vision of crossing a river, and wondered if soon I'd be carrying the child on my shoulders (which were still sore from carrying her yesterday). But this didn't at all look like the river I remembered. By picking a zigzag way on the high point of the shoals I was never more than waist deep, and could hold Melle up well enough, except in one place where the current ran fast and deep alongside an islet of gravel. There I told her to hold tight to the rope around my waist and keep her head up the best she could, and I waded in, swam the few yards to the gravel bar, and wallowed ashore, Melle went under only at the last moment, when she thought she could touch bottom and couldn't. She came up choking and sputtering.

  After that we had only shallow waters to wade, and soon came to the far shore.

  As we sat getting our breath, drying out, and putting on our shoes, I said, "We've crossed the first of the two great rivers we have to cross. This is the land of Bendile."

  "The hero Hamneda had to swim across a river when he was wounded, didn't he?"

  I can't say how much that touched me. It wasn't that she'd learned the story of Hamneda from me. It was that she thought of him, that he was familiar to her mind and heart as he was to mine. We had a common language, this child and I, a language I hadn't spoken with anyone else since I left my own childhood in Etra. I put my arm around her little thin shoulders, and she wriggled against me comfortably.

  "Let's go find a village and buy some food," I said. "Hold on, though. Let me get some money out so I don't wave all of it in people's faces." I dug into my pack and brought out the heavy little silk pouch. A faint, smoky Cuga-reek still clung to it, or maybe it had just been close to the smoked fish from Ferusi. I untied the cord, opened the pouch, and stared. I remembered what it had held: bronzes, and four silver pieces. But along with the bronzes there were now nine silver pieces, four of the gold pieces from Pagadi called dictators, and a broad gold coin from Ansul.

  My Cuga had been a thief as well as a runaway

  "I can't carry this!" I said, I looked at the money with horror. All I saw was the danger it posed us if anyone should get the slightest notion that we carried such a fortune. It was in my mind to simply dump the gold pieces out in the grass and gravel and leave them.

  "Did somebody give it to you?"

  I nodded, speechless.

  "You can sew up money in clothes to hide it," Melle said, handling the dictators with admiring curiosity, "These are pretty, but the big one is the prettiest. Have you got a needle and thread?"

  "Only fish hooks and fishing line."

  "Well, maybe I can get some sewing things in a village. Maybe there'll be a pedlar on the road. I can sew."

  "So can I," I said stupidly. "Well, all I can do now is put it back. I wish I hadn't found it."

  "Is it a lot of money?"

  I nodded.

  She was still studying the coins. "C— I— City of P— A— C— something— "

  "Pagadi," I said,

  "Oh, the words go all the way round. State and City of Pagadi Year 8 something." Her head was bent over the coin just as it had used to bend

  over her reading in Barna's house, in the lamplight in Diero's room. She looked up and smiled at me as she handed it back. Her eyes were luminous.

  I kept out a few quarter- and half-bronzes and hid the pouch away again. We walked on up along the river, for there was a clear path. After we had gone for an hour or more, Melle said, "Maybe when we get to the city where we're going we can find out where my sister is and buy her from the soldiers with the gold."

  "Maybe we can," I said, my heart twisting again.

  Presently I added in my anxiety, "But we can't talk about it. At all."

  "I won't," she said. She never did.

  * * *

  Following the river as it took a sharp turn north we came that afternoon to a fair-sized town. I summoned up my courage to enter it. Melle seemed quite fearless, trusting in my strength and wisdom. We walked boldly into the marketplace and bought ourselves food. I bought a blanket for Melle which she could also wear as a poncho, and haggled for a little case containing a stout needle and a hank of linen thread. People wanted to talk with us, asking us where we were from and where we were bound. I told my story, and "student of the University" was mysterious enough to most people that they didn't know what further questions to ask. The plump, snaggletoothed woman who was demanding a quarter-bronze for the thread and needle looked at Melle with compassion and said, "I can see it must be a terrible hard life for a little fellow, studenting!"

  "He was sick all last winter," I said.

  "Was he then? What's your name, sonny boy?"

  "Miv," Melle said calmly.

  "I'm sure your brother takes good care of you and doesn't let you walk too far," the woman said. And perhaps because she'd seen that I wasn't going to pay such a price as she asked, or for a better reason, she went on, "And this is for you, to keep you safe on your journey— a gift, a gift, I wouldn't ask money of a child for the blessing of Ennu!" She held out a little figure of a cat, carved of dark wood, with a copper wire round its neck to hang it from as a pendant; there were several such little Ennu-Mes on her tray. Melle looked up at me with big eyes. I remembered she and Irad had worn such figures on a necklace, though these were finer than what they'd had. I handed the woman her extortionate price and nodded to Melle to take the carving.

  She clutched it in her hand and held her hand tight to the base of her throat.

  I felt unexpectedly easy and safe in the marketplace. We were strangers among strangers, lost in a crowd, not isolated, solitary travelers in a wilderness. A booth was selling some kind of sweet fried cake that smelled delicious. "Let's have some of that," I said to Melle, and when we each had a hot cake in hand we sat down on the broad edge of a fountain in the shade to eat them. They were greasy and heavy, and Melle got through only about half of hers. I looked at her sidelong, seeing what the snaggletoothed woman had seen: that this was a very thin little child who looked on the point of exhaustion.

  "Are you tired, Miv?" I said.

  After a slight struggle with herself she hunched her shoulders and nodded.

  "Let's stay at an inn. We won't often get a chance to, I expect. This is a nice town," I said, recklessly. "You got cold crossing the river. You walked a long way today You deserve a real bed tonight."

  She hunched up some more and looked down at her greasy cake. She showed it to me. "Can you eat it, Beaky?" she whispered.

  "I can eat anything, Squeaky," I said, proving it. "Now come on. There was an inn back there just off the market square."

  The innkeepers wife took an interest in Melle— evidently my companion was a passport to people's sympathy. We were given a nice little room at the back of the house, with a wide, short bed. Melle climbed up on the bed at once and curled up. She still held her Ennu-Me tight in her hand. She was wearing her new poncho and didn't want to take it off. "It keeps me warm," she said, but I saw she was shivering. I covered her over, and she fell asleep soon. I sat in the chair by the window. It was a long time since I'd sat in a chair, since I'd been in a great, solid house like this, very different from the huts in the Marshes with their walls of reed. I took my book out and read for a while. I knew the Cosmologies pretty well by heart, but just holding the book, letting my eyes follow the printed lines, was reassuring to me. I needed reassurance. I had no real idea what I was doing or where I was going, and now I'd taken on a charge who at best would slow me down very much. Maybe I could leave her in this town with somebody, I thought, and come back for her later. — Leave her? Come back from where? I looked over at her. She was sound asleep. I went out quietly to see about dinner.

  I brought her back a bowl of chicken broth, and she roused up to drink it, but drank very little; she was feverish, I thought. I consulted with the innkeeper's wife, Ameno, who had the hearty, jolly manner of her trade, but underneath it seemed a quiet, serious woman. She came and looked at Melle and said she might have caught something or might just
be very tired. She said, "Go on and have your supper, I'll keep the fire up, and look in at the child." She had persuaded Melle to let her have the little cat figure so she could put it on a necklace, Melle was watching her braid thread for the necklace, and dozing off again. I went to the common room and had an excellent supper of roast mutton, which made me think with affection and pain of Chamry Bern.

  We stayed at the inn in Rami four nights. It didn't take Ameno long to let me know she knew Melle wasn't a boy, but she asked no questions— it was clear enough why a girl might want to travel as a boy— and dropped no hints to anyone else. Melle wasn't sick, but she'd been pretty near giving out. Three days of rest and good food and kind care did wonders for her. She sat in bed and carefully sewed our gold pieces into our clothing, and then slept again, I would have stayed on still longer to build her up for travel if it hadn't been for what I heard the fourth night at the inn.

  Men of the town came in every evening for a glass of beer or cider and to chat with one another and with any guests at the inn who wanted to be sociable. They were a bit cautious and stiff with me at first because I was supposed to be a scholar and a city man, but seeing that I wasn't much more than a boy and spoke little and modestly, they soon ignored me in a friendly fashion. They talked about local affairs, of course, but the travelers among them made conversation about the wider world too, which was interesting to me who had been for so long in the forest and the Marshes, hearing nothing of the City States and Bendile.

  Melle was sleeping sound after a good supper, and I came to sit at the common-room fire. Conversation had fallen on the "Barnavites," Everybody had a story about Barna's men who used to raid the roads and farms and market towns. Some were the old romantic tales I'd heard in Etra, but one man here confirmed them. He said that three years ago, raiders had taken half the flock he was driving to market, but they'd truly taken half his flock, counting them out "one for you, one for us," when they could as well have taken them all, and so, he said, he could only curse them with half a curse. I had the impression that his hearers half believed him, too.