Ursula Le Guin - The Beginning Place

There were candles in the windows of the inn, as if they were expecting her. No one was in the street. It must be late, suppertime or past. At the thought of supper, of soup, bread, stew, porridge, anything, anything at all to eat, she felt her head spin; and when Sofir opened the inn door to her and there was warmth and light and the smell of cooking and the sound of his deep voice, she found it difficult to keep standing up. “Oh, Sofir,” she said, “I am so hungry!”

At the sound of her voice Palizot came, and though she was a woman not lavish of gesture, she kissed Irene and held her for a moment.

“We have been afraid for you,” Sofir said. He steered her in to sit by the fire. It was late indeed: the company of the inn had all gone home, the fire had sunk down. Sofir and Palizot bustled about getting water for her to wash in, food for her to eat, talking away. “And you know he’s come!” Palizot said, and Irene said, “Who has come?”

The two well-known, well-loved faces turned to her in the jubilant firelight; Palizot looked to Sofir smiling, giving him the word for them both. “It’s him,” Sofir said, “he’s here now. Things will go better now!”—with such warmth of pleasure and such certainty of Irene’s sharing in that pleasure that she was unable to say anything. “There now, it’s hot,” said Palizot, serving up a plate for her, at sight of which Irene ceased to care about anything else whatever. Lapped in present bliss, food, rest, firelight, friendship, she ate; and then Sofir had her room ready for her, the room that looked out over the dark drop and reach of the forests to the eastern ridge.

Sofir was out and Palizot occupied, so she breakfasted alone. There was not much to breakfast on: a little thin milk, a pot of cheese, and a loaf so hard and small, compared to the round brown splendors of Sofir’s baking in other days, that she hardly had the heart to cut a slice off the poor wizened thing. Clearly, no wheat had come up the mountain from the merchants of the King’s City.

She had thought as she woke that when Sofir and Palizot said “he,” last night, “he has come,” they meant the King. A little wider awake, she had thought they had not meant the King himself, but a messenger from the King, somebody sent with the power to open the roads. Awake, she knew they had meant nothing of the kind.

“You’ll be going up to the Master’s house,” said Palizot, coming through the kitchen with an armload of clothing from the wash lines. “I freshened up your red dress a bit; it gets so creased lying in the chest. Have you got clean stockings? Look, how do you like these?”

“I suppose he’s there,” Irene said. Since “he” was not staying at the inn, he must have been invited, as she had never been, to stay at the Master’s house. Her pain, a sore one however petty its cause, and her determination not to show it, so preoccupied her that for a minute she did not absorb Palizot’s reply: “He? Oh, no, he’s at the manor. But the Master asked us a long time ago to tell you to come to him as soon as you could, whenever you came again.”

That was balm. “He” could stay at the manor all he pleased.

“They’re beautiful,” she said, admiring the fine-striped stockings Palizot was exhibiting atop the load of clothes. “You just knitted them?”

“From the good wool in four old pairs I unraveled,” Palizot said with the satisfaction of the canny artisan. “Wear them today, levadja. They’re for you.”

In the handsome stockings and the red dress Irene went out into the twilight of the street, and climbed the hiccuping steps to the Master’s house. The geese in the pen by the south wall, big creatures, their white necks and bodies vague and as if luminous, shifted and hissed; one beat its wings for an instant. She had always been a little afraid of the geese. She knocked at the twelve-paneled door and Fimol, calm as always, admitted her and took her across the hall, between the mournful stare of the ancestress and the scowl of the one-armed ancestor, to the door of the Master’s office. “Irena has come,” Fimol said in her clear, subdued voice. He turned from his desk, holding out his hands with open gladness: “Irena, Irenadja! Welcome! We have longed for you!”

I have longed for you, she wanted to say, but could not. Her tongue never would obey her, in the Master’s presence. It obeyed him.

“Come and sit down,” he said. His smile made him look young. His voice was kind. “Tell me, how was it for you coming here? Was the way clear? Was it hard for you?” His dark gaze was directly on her now. “I’ve been afraid you would not be able to come,” he said, speaking lower and hurriedly, and looked away.

“The gate was closed—until last night. I wanted—I tried to come!”

He nodded, grave and gentle.

She tried to get the right words. “I saw nothing, when the way opened—nothing was different. But I felt—There was a noise, maybe I didn’t hear it. There was something that I know I didn’t see—”

As she spoke, now, in this quiet room, the terror she had not allowed herself to feel yesterday coming through the forests on the mountainside came running through her body in one long, cold shockwave: she crouched and shuddered in her chair. Her voice went thin and dry. “I was never afraid in the forest before!”

She looked up into the Master’s dark face, wanting the reassurance of his strength. He said nothing for a while; then at last, his voice still muted. “Yet you came.”

“Someone else—Sofir said—someone else has come, a man—”

The Master nodded. He was concealing or constrained by some intensity of emotion. Finally he said a word or name Irene did not know, hiuradja , and met her gaze again, intense, questioning.

“Did he come from the north—from the City?” she asked, though she knew the answer.

“From the south. Like you. On the south road. As you first came, not knowing the land or language.”

Curiosity, the wish to know the full flatness of the truth, was stronger than disappointment or resentment. “Is he—” She did not know the word for blond or fair; they were a dark people. “Has he straw hair, and he’s fat?”

The Master gave his brief nod.

“We are summoned to the manor to meet him,” he said, and something in his voice alerted Irene, a hint of irony, of anger-resentment? “Come.”

“Now?”

“As soon as may be, Lord Horn said.” Again that hint of dryness, or sarcasm; but he exchanged no glance of complicity with her, and impenetrable as ever led her out of his house and across the top of the street to the high, delicate, open gates that led to the manor. He did not speak as they walked between the lawns and groves. To their right the slopes of the mountain rose up, darkly forested, yielding one glimpse of the slanting rock faces of the distant summit. Before them stood the great house, built of a tawny stone in which a warmth lingered like the light of sunset, the afterglow.

An old man let them in and took them through cold, half-furnished, stately rooms, and upstairs to a many-windowed gallery. The windows looked east, over the great downward slope to the distant eastern ridges distinct against the sky. A fire burned in a marble fireplace at the far end of the gallery, and there Lord Horn and his daughter stood with the stranger.

It was him, of course, the dough face, the heavy hands.

She glanced at the man beside her: the dark, hard, fine profile, controlled, contained, vigorous. The Master said nothing, made no least gesture, but she knew his hatred as clearly as she knew her own.

Lord Horn had come forward in his stiff, slow way to greet them. The daughter was smiling pallidly. She was blonde, Irene had forgotten that; they were not all dark-haired after all. This girl’s hair was pale and fleecy like sheep’s wool.