“Oh, I don’t know what for. I’d just like to see something different. It’s always the same here. Nothing happens.”
“All that happens everywhere, begins here,” said Arha.
“Oh, I know. . . . But I’d like to see some of it happening!”
Penthe smiled. She was a soft, comfortable-looking girl. She scratched the soles of her bare feet on the sun-warmed rocks, and after a while went on, “You know, I used to live by the sea when I was little. Our village was right behind the dunes, and we used to go down and play on the beach sometimes. Once I remember we saw a fleet of ships going by, way out at sea. We ran and told the village and everybody came to see. The ships looked like dragons with red wings. Some of them had real necks, with dragon heads. They came sailing by Atuan, but they weren’t Kargish ships. They came from the west, from the Inner Lands, the headman said. Everybody came down to watch them. I think they were afraid they might land. They just went by, nobody knew where they were going. Maybe to make war in Karego-At. But think of it, they really came from the sorcerers’ islands, where all the people are the color of dirt and they can all cast a spell on you easy as winking.”
“Not on me,” Arha said fiercely. “I wouldn’t have looked at them. They’re vile accursed sorcerers. How dare they sail so close to the Holy Land?”
“Oh, well, I suppose the Godking will conquer them someday and make them all slaves. But I wish I could see the sea again. There used to be little octopuses in the tide pools, and if you shouted ‘Boo!’ at them they turned all white.—There comes that old Manan, looking for you.”
Arha’s guard and servant was coming slowly along the inner side of the wall. He would stoop to pull a wild onion, of which he held a large, limp bunch, then straighten up and look about him with his small, dull, brown eyes. He had grown fatter with the years, and his hairless yellow skin glistened in the sun.
“Slide down partway on the men’s side,” Arha hissed, and both girls wriggled lithe as lizards down the far side of the wall until they could cling there just below the top, invisible from the inner side. They heard Manan’s slow footsteps coming by.
“Hoo! Hoo! Potato face!” crooned Arha, a whispering jeer faint as the wind among the grasses.
The heavy tread halted. “Ho there,” said the uncertain voice. “Little one? Arha?”
Silence.
Manan went forward.
“Hoo-oo! Potato face!”
“Hoo, potato belly!” Penthe whispered in imitation, and then moaned, trying to suppress giggles.
“Somebody there?”
Silence.
“Oh well, well, well,” the eunuch sighed, and his slow feet went on. When he was gone over the shoulder of the slope, the girls scrambled back up onto the top of the wall. Penthe was pink with sweat and giggles, but Arha looked savage.
“The stupid old bellwether, following me around everywhere!”
“He has to,” Penthe said reasonably. “It’s his job, looking after you.”
“Those I serve look after me. I please them; I need please nobody else. These old women and half-men, these people should leave me alone. I am the One Priestess!”
Penthe stared at the other girl. “Oh,” she said feebly, “oh, I know you are, Arha—”
“Then they should let me be. And not order me about all the time!”
Penthe said nothing for a while, but sighed, and sat swinging her plump legs and gazing at the vast, pale lands below, that rose so slowly to a high, vague, immense horizon.
“You’ll get to give the orders pretty soon, you know,” she said at last, quietly. “In two more years we won’t be children anymore. We’ll be fourteen. I’ll go into the Godking’s temple, and things will be about the same for me. But you’ll really be the High Priestess then. Even Kossil and Thar will have to obey you.”
The Eaten One said nothing. Her face was set, her eyes under black brows caught the light of the sky in a pale glitter.
“We ought to go back,” Penthe said.
“No.”
“But the weaving mistress might tell Thar. And soon it’ll be time for the Nine Chants.”
“I’m staying here. You stay, too.”
“They won’t punish you, but they will punish me,” Penthe said in her mild way. Arha did not reply. Penthe sighed, and stayed. The sun was sinking into haze high above the plains. Far away on the long, gradual slant of the land, sheep bells clanked faintly and lambs bleated. The spring wind blew in dry, faint gusts, sweet-smelling.
The Nine Chants were nearly over when the two girls returned. Mebbeth had seen them sitting on the “Men’s Wall” and had reported this to her superior, Kossil, High Priestess of the Godking.
Kossil was heavy-footed, heavy-faced. Without expression in face or voice she spoke to the two girls, telling them to follow her. She led them through the stone hallways of the Big House, out the front door, up the knoll to the Temple of Atwah and Wuluah. There she spoke with the High Priestess of that temple, Thar, tall and dry and thin as the legbone of a deer.
Kossil said to Penthe, “Take off your gown.”
She whipped the girl with a bundle of reed canes, which cut the skin a little. Penthe bore this patiently, with silent tears. She was sent back to the weaving room without supper, and the next day also she would go without food. “If you are found climbing over the Men’s Wall again,” Kossil said, “there will be very much worse things than this happen to you. Do you understand, Penthe?” Kossil’s voice was soft, but not kindly. Penthe said, “Yes,” and slipped away, cowering and flinching as her heavy clothing rubbed the cuts on her back.
Arha had stood beside Thar to watch the whipping. Now she watched Kossil clean the canes of the whip.
Thar said to her, “It is not fitting that you be seen climbing and running with other girls. You are Arha.”
She stood sullen and did not reply.
“It is better that you do only what is needful for you to do. You are Arha.”
For a moment the girl raised her eyes to Thar’s face, then to Kossil’s, and there was a depth of hate or rage in her look that was terrible to see. But the thin priestess showed no concern; rather she confirmed, leaning forward a little, almost whispering, “You are Arha. There is nothing left. It was all eaten.”
“It was all eaten,” the girl repeated, as she had repeated daily, all the days of her life since she was six.
Thar bowed her head slightly; so did Kossil, as she put away the whip. The girl did not bow, but turned submissively and left.
After the supper of potatoes and spring onions, eaten in silence in the narrow, dark refectory, after the chanting of the evening hymns, and the placing of the sacred words upon the doors, and the brief Ritual of the Unspoken, the work of the day was done. Now the girls might go up to the dormitory and play games with dice and sticks, so long as the single rushlight burned, and whisper in the dark from bed to bed. Arha set off across the courts and slopes of the Place as she did every night, to the Small House where she slept alone.
The night wind was sweet. The stars of spring shone thick, like drifts of daisies in spring meadows, like the glittering of light on the April sea. But the girl had no memory of meadows or the sea. She did not look up.
“Ho there, little one!”
“Manan,” she said indifferently.
The big shadow shuffled up beside her, starlight glinting on his hairless pate.
“Were you punished?”
“I can’t be punished.”
“No. . . . That’s so. . . .”
“They can’t punish me. They don’t dare.”
He stood with his big hands hanging, dim and bulky. She smelled wild onion, and the sweaty, sagey smell of his old black robes, which were torn at the hem, and too short for him.
“They can’t touch me. I am Arha,” she said in a shrill, fierce voice, and burst into tears.
The big, waiting hands came up and drew her to him, held her gently, smoothed her braided hair. “There, there. Littl
e honeycomb, little girl. . . .” She heard the husky murmur in the deep hollow of his chest, and clung to him. Her tears stopped soon, but she held on to Manan as if she could not stand up.
“Poor little one,” he whispered, and picking the child up carried her to the doorway of the house where she slept alone. He set her down.
“All right now, little one?”
She nodded, turned from him, and entered the dark house.
URSULA K. LE GUIN is one of the most distinguished fantasy and science fiction writers of all time. She has won numerous awards for her work, including the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, the National Book Award, and the Newbery Honor. She lives in Portland, Oregon. Visit her online at ursulakleguin.com.
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