Ursula Le Guin - The Eye of the Heron

“You will not be handed back,” Lev said. “You belong to yourself. Come with us if you choose.”

She nodded.

The smelting ring was an ancient ringtree site, south of the Road halfway between Town and City, and centuries older than either; the trees had long ago fallen and decayed, leaving only the round central pond. The City’s first iron-smelting works had been set up there; it too had decayed, when richer ore was found in the South Hills forty years ago. The chimneys and machinery were gone, the old sheds, rotten-planked and crazy, overgrown with bindweed and poison rose, crouched abandoned by the flat shore of the pond.

Andre and Lev had got together a group of twenty as they came. Andre led them around by the old sheds, to make sure no party of guards was hiding in or behind them. They were empty, and there was no other place for a gang to conceal themselves within several hundred meters; it was a flat place, treeless, desolate and miserable-looking in the gloomy end of the daylight. Fine rain fell onto the round gray water that lay unsheltered, defenseless, like a blind, open eye. On the far side of the pond Falco stood waiting for them. They saw him move away from a thicket where he had taken some shelter from the rain, and come walking around the shore to them, alone.

Lev started forward from the others. Andre let him go ahead, but followed a couple of meters behind him, with Sasha, Martin, Luz, and several others. The rest of their group stayed scattered out along the gray pond’s edge and on the slope that led up to the Road, on guard.

Falco stopped, facing Lev. They stood right on the shore of the pond, where the walking was easier. Between them lay a tiny muddy inlet of the water, a bay no wider than the length of a man’s arm, with shores of fine sand, a harbor for a child’s toy boat. In the intense vividness of his perceptions Lev was as aware of that bit of water and sand, and of how a child might play there, as he was of Falco’s erect figure, his handsome face that was Luz’s face and yet wholly different, his belted coat darkened by rain on the shoulders and sleeves.

Falco certainly saw his daughter in the group behind Lev, but he did not look at her nor speak to her; he spoke to Lev, in a soft dry voice, a little hard to hear over the vast whisper of the rain.

“I’m alone, as you see, and unarmed. I speak for myself alone. Not as Councillor.”

Lev nodded. He felt a desire to call this man by his name, not Senhor or Falco, but his own name, Luis; he did not understand the impulse, and did not speak.

“I wish my daughter to come home.”

Lev indicated, with a slight open gesture, that she was there behind him. “Speak to her, Senhor Falco,” he said.

“I came to speak to you. If you speak for the rebels.”

“Rebels? Against what, senhor? I, or any of us, will speak for Shantih, if you like. But Luz Marina can speak for herself.”

“I did not come to argue,” Falco said. His manner was perfectly controlled and polite, his face rigid. The quietness, the stiffness were those of a man in pain. “Listen. There is to be an attack on the Town. You know that, now. I could not prevent it, now, if I wanted to, though I have delayed it. But I want my daughter out of it. Safe. If you’ll send her home with me, I’ll send Senhora Adelson and the other hostages, under guard, to you tonight. I’ll come with them, if you like; let her go back with me then. This is between us alone. The rest of it, the fighting—you started it by your disobedience, I cannot stop it, neither can you, now. This is all we can do. Trade our hostages, and so save them.”

“Senhor, I respect your candor—but I didn’t take Luz Marina from you, and I can’t give her back.”

As he spoke, Luz came up beside him, wrapped in her black shawl. “Father,” she said in a clear, hard voice, not softly as he and Falco had spoken, “you can stop Macmilan’s bullies if you want to.”

Falco’s face did not change; could not change, perhaps, without going to pieces. There was a long silence, full of the sound of rain. The light was heavy, bright only low and far away in the west.

“I can’t, Luz,” he said in that painful quiet voice. “Herman is—he is determined to take you back.”

“And if I came back with you, so that he had no pretext, would you order him not to attack Shantih?”

Falco stood still. He swallowed, hard, as if his throat were very dry. Lev clenched his hands, seeing that, seeing the man stand there in his pride that could endure no humiliation and was humiliated, his strength that must admit to impotence.

“I can’t. Things have gone too far.” Falco swallowed again, and tried again. “Come home with me, Luz Marina,” he said. “I will send the hostages back at once. I give my word.” He glanced at Lev, and his white face said for him what he could not say, that he asked Lev’s help.

“Send them!” Luz said. “You have no right to keep them prisoner.”

“And you’ll come—” It was not quite a question.

She shook her head. “You have no right to keep me prisoner.”

“Not a prisoner, Luz, you are my daughter—” He stepped forward. She stepped back.

“No!” she said. “I will not come when you bargain for me. I will never come back so long as you attack and, and p-persecute people!” She stammered and groped for words. “I’ll never marry Herman Macmilan, or look at him, I de—I detest him! I’ll come when I’m free to come and do what I choose to do and so long as he comes to Casa Falco I will never come home!”

“Macmilan?” the father said in agony. “You don’t have to marry Macmilan—” He stopped, and looked from Luz to Lev, a little wildly. “Come home,” he said. His voice shook, but he struggled for control. “I will stop the attack if I can. We—we’ll talk, with you,” he said to Lev. “We’ll talk.”

“We’ll talk now, later, whenever you want,” Lev said. “It’s all we ever asked, senhor. But you must not ask your daughter to trade her freedom for Vera’s, or for your goodwill, or for our safety. That is wrong. You can’t do it; we won’t accept it.”

Again Falco stood still, but it was a different stillness: defeat, or his final refusal of defeat? His face, white and wet with rain or sweat, was set, inexpressive.

“Then you will not let her go,” he said.

“I will not come,” Luz answered.

Falco nodded once, turned, and walked slowly away along the curving shore of the pond. He passed the thickets that stood blurred and shapeless in the late twilight, and set off up the slight slope to the road that led back to the City. His straight, short, dark figure was quickly lost to sight.

One of the servant girls tapped at Vera’s door, opened it, and said in the half-impertinent, half-timid voice the maids used when “following orders,” “Senhora Vera, Don Luis will see you in the big room, please!”

“Oh dear, oh dear,” Vera sighed. “Is he still in a bad mood?”

“Terrible,” the girl, Teresa, said, at once dropping her “following orders” manner and stooping to scratch a callus on her hard, bare, plump foot. Vera was by now considered a friend, a kind of good luck aunt or elder sister, by all the house girls; even the stern middle-aged cook Silvia had come to Vera’s room the day after Luz’s disappearance, and had discussed it with her, apparently not caring in the least that she was seeking reassurance from the enemy. “Have you seen Michael’s face?” Teresa went on. “Don Luis knocked two of his teeth loose yesterday because Michael was slow taking off his boots, he was grunting and groaning, you know how he does everything, and Don Luis just went whack! with his foot with the boot still on. Now Michael’s all swelled up like a pouchbat, he does look funny. Linda says that Don Luis went to Shanty Town yesterday evening all by himself, Marquez’s Thomas saw him, he was going right up the road. What do you think happened? Was he trying to steal poor Senhorita Luz back, do you think?”