Ursula Le Guin - Powers

As in the dark of winter night The eyes seek dawn, As in the bonds of bitter cold The heart craves sun, So blinded and so bound, the soul Cries out to thee: Be our light, our fire, our life, Liberty!

“Ah,” Chamry said, out of a silence that followed the words, “I’ve heard that. Heard it sung. There’s a tune to it.”

I sought the tune, and little by little it came to me, with the sound of the beautiful voice that had sung it. I have no singing voice, but I sang it.

“That’s fine,” Venne said softly.

Bulec coughed and said, “Speak some more such.”

“Do that,” Chamry said.

I looked into my mind for more remembered words to speak to them. Nothing came for a while. What I found at last was a line of writing. I read it: “Wearing the white of mourning, the maiden mounted the high steps…” I said it aloud, and in a moment the line led me on to the next, and that to the next. So I told them the part of Garros poem in which the prophetess Yurno confronts the enemy hero Rurec. Standing on the walls of Sentas, a girl in mourning, Yurno calls down to the man who killed her warrior father. She tells Rurec how he will die: “Beware of the hills of Trebs,” she says, “for you will be ambushed in the hills. You will run away and hide in the bushes, but they will kill you as you try to crawl away without being seen. They will drag your naked body to the town and display it, sprawled face down, so all can see that the wounds are in your back. Your corpse will not be burned with prayers to the Ancestors as befits a hero, but buried where they bury slaves and dogs.” Enraged at her prophecy, Rurec shouts, “And this is how you will die, lying sorceress!” and hurls his heavy lance at her. All see it pass through her body just below the breast and fly out, trailing blood, behind her—but she stands on the battlement in her white robes, unharmed. Her brother the warrior Alira picks up the lance and hands it up to her, and she tosses it down to Rurec, not hurling it, but end over end, lightly, contemptuously. “When you’re running away and hiding, you’ll want this,” she says, “great hero of Pagadi.”

As I spoke the words of the poem, in that cold smoky hut in the half dark with the noise of the rain loud on the low roof, I saw them written in some pupil’s labored handwriting in the copybook I held as I stood in the schoolroom in Arcamand. “Read the passage, Gavir,” my teacher said, and I read the words aloud.

A silence followed,

“Eh, that’s a fool,” Bacoc said, “thro’n a lance at a witch, don’t he know, can’t kill a witch but with fire!”

Bacoc was a man of fifty by the look of him, though it’s hard to tell the age of men who have lived their life half starved and under the whip; maybe he was thirty. “That’s a good bit of story,” Chamry said. “There’s more? Is there a name to it?”

I said, “It’s called The Siege and Fall of Sentas. There’s more.”

“Let’s have it,” said Chamry and the others all agreed.

For a time I could not recall the opening lines of the poem; then, as if I had the old copybook in my hand, there they were and I spoke them—

To the councils and senate of Sentas they came, the envoys in armor,

With their swords in their hands, arrogant, striding into the chamber Where the lords of the city sat to give judgment…

It was night, true night, when I finished saying the first book of the poem. Our fire had burned down to embers on the rough hearth, but nobody in the circle of men had moved to build it up; nobody had moved at all for an hour.

“They’re going to lose that city of theirs,” Bulec said in the dark, in the soft drumming of the rain.

“They should be able to hold out. The others come too far from home. Like Casicar did, trying to take Etra last year,” said Taffa. It was the most I’d ever heard him say. Venne had told me Taffa had been not a slave but a freeman of a small city-state, conscripted into their army; during a battle he had escaped and made his way to the forest. Sad -faced and aloof, he seldom said anything, but now he was arguing almost volubly: “Stretched out their forces too far, see, Pagadi has, attacking. If they don’t take the town by assault quick, they’ll starve come winter.”

And they all got into the discussion, all talking exactly as if the siege of Sentas was taking place right now, right here. As if we were living in Sentas.

Of them all Chamry was the only one who understood that what I had told them was “a poem,” a thing made by a maker, a work of art, part history of long ago, part invention. It was, to them, an event; it was happening as they heard it. They wanted it to go on happening. If I’d been able to, they’d have kept me telling it to them night and day. But after my voice gave out that first evening, I lay in my wooden bunk thinking about what had been given back to me: the power of words. I had time then to think and to plan how and when to use that power—how to go on with the poem, to keep them from exhausting both it and me. I ended by telling it for an hour or two every night, after we ate, for the winter nights were endless and something to make them pass was welcome to all.

Word got about, and within a night or two most of the men of the band were crowded into our hut for “telling the war,” and for the long passionate discussions and arguments about tactics and motives and morals that followed.

There were times I couldn’t fully recall the lines as Garro wrote them, but the story was clear in my mind, so I filled in these gaps with tags of the poetry and my own narrative, until I came again to a passage that I had by memory or could “see” written, and could fall back into the harsh rhythm of the lines. My companions didn’t seem to notice the difference between my prose and Garros poetry. They listened closest when I was speaking the poetry—but those were also often the most vivid passages of action and suffering.

When we came again in the course of the tale to the passage I’d recited first, Yurno’s prophecy from the battlements, Bacoc caught his breath; and when Rurec “in a fury uplifts his heavy lance,” Bacoc cried out, “Don’t throw it, man! It’s no good!” The others shouted at him to pipe down, but he was indignant: “Don’t he know it’s no good? He thro’n it before!”

I was at first merely bemused by my own capacity to recall the poetry and their capacity to listen to it. They didn’t say much to me about it, but it made a difference in the way I was treated, my standing among them. I had something they wanted, and they respected me for that. Since I gave it freely, their respect was ungrudging. “Hey, haven’t you got a fatter rib than that for the kid? He’s got to work tonight, telling the war…”

But every up’s a down, as Chamry said. Brigin and his brother and the men closest to them, their cabin mates, looked in at one time or another on the recital, listened a while standing near the doorway, then left in silence. They said nothing to me, but I heard from others that they said men who listened to fools’ tales were worse fools than those who told them. And Brigin said that a man willing to hear a boy yammer booktalk half the night was no fit Forest Brother.

Booktalk! Why did Brigin say it in that contemptuous tone? There were no books in the forest. There had been no books in Brigin’s life. Why did he sneer at them?

Any of these men might well be jealous of a knowledge that had been jealously kept from them. A farm slave who tried to learn to read could have his eyes put out or be whipped to death. Books were dangerous, and a slave had every excuse to fear them. But fear is one thing, contempt another.

I resented their sneers as mean-spirited, for I couldn’t see anything unworthy of manhood in the tale I was telling. How was a tale of warfare and heroism weakening the men who listened to it so hungrily every night? Didn’t it draw us together in real brotherhood, when after the telling we listened to one another argue the rights and wrongs of the generals’ tactics and the warriors’ exploits? To sit stupid, mute, night after night under the rain like cattle, bored to mindlessness—was that what made us men?