Ursula Le Guin - Powers

Maybe it was living among the trees, I thought as I walked along the forest road. The infinite trunks and tangling, shadowing branches of the forest kept the eye from seeing far ahead in space or in time. Out in the open, in the level lands, between the blue water and blue sky, maybe I’d be able to look forward again, to see far. Hadn’t Sallo told me long ago, sitting close beside me on the schoolroom bench, that that was a power I had from our people?

“Don’t talk about it,” says her small, soft voice, warm in my ear. “Gavir, listen, truly, you mustn’t talk about it to anybody.”

And I never had. Not among our captors, our masters in Arcamand, who had no such powers, who feared them and would not understand. Not among the escaped slaves in the forest, for there I had had no visions of the future, only Barna’s dreams and plans of revolution and liberation. But if I could go among my own people, a free people, without masters or slaves, maybe I’d find others with such powers, and they could teach me how to bring back those visions, and learn the use of them.

Such thoughts buoyed my spirits. I was in fact glad to be alone again at last. It seemed to me now that all the year I was with Barna, his great, jovial voice had filled my head, controlling my thoughts, ruling my judgment. The power of his being was in itself like a spell, leaving me only corners of my own being, where I hid in shadow. Now, as I walked away from him, my mind could range freely back over all my time in the Heart of the Forest, and with Brigin’s band, and before that, with Cuga, the old mad hermit who had saved the mad boy from death by starvation…. But that thought brought me sharply back to the present moment. I hadn’t eaten since last night. My stomach was beginning to call for dinner, and a pocket full of walnuts wasn’t going to take me far. I decided I wouldn’t eat any until I reached the end of the forest. There I’d have a wood-rat banquet and decide what to do next.

It was still only mid-afternoon when the road came out through a thin stand of alders to meet another, larger road that ran north and south. There were cart ruts on it left from the last rains, many sheep tracks, and some horseshoe tracks, though it lay empty as far as I could see. Across it was open country, scrubby and nondescript, with a few stands of trees.

I sat down behind a screen of bushes and solemnly cracked and ate ten of my walnuts. That left mi twenty-two, and nine acorns, which I kept only as a last resort, I got up, faced left, and walked boldly down the road.

My mind was busy with what I might tell any carter or drover or horseman who overtook me. I decided the one thing I had that might show me as something more than a runaway slave boy was the little book I carried in my pouch. I was a scholar’s slave, sent from Asion to carry this book to a scholar in Etra, who was ill and wished to read it before he died, and had begged his friend in Asion to send it to him, with a boy who could read it to him, for his eyes were failing…I worked on the story diligently for miles. I was so lost in it I didn’t even see the farm cart that turned from a side track into the road a little way behind me until the jingle of harness and the clop-clop of big hoofs woke me up. The horse’s enormous, mild-eyed face was practically looking over my shoulder.

“Howp,” said the driver, a squat man with a wide face, looking me over with no expression at all on his face, I mumbled some kind of greeting.

“Hop up,” the man said more distinctly. “Good ways yet to the crossroads.”

I scrambled up onto the seat. He studied me some more. His eyes were remarkably small, like seeds in his big loaf of a face. “You’ll be going to Shecha,” he said, as an inarguable fact.

I agreed with him. It seemed the best thing to do, “Don’t see you folk much on the road no more,” the driver said. And at that I realised that he had taken me for—that he had recognised me as—one of the Marsh people. I didn’t need my complicated story. I wasn’t a runaway but a native.

It was just as well. This fellow might not have known what a book was.

All the slow miles to the crossroads, through the late afternoon and the immense gold-and-purple sunset, he told me a tale about a farmer and his uncle and some hogs and a piece of land beside Rat Water and an injustice that had been done. I never understood any of it, but I could nod and grunt at the right moments, which was what he wanted. Always like talking with you folk,” he said when he dropped me off at the crossroads. “Keep your counsel, you do. There’s Shecha road.”

I thanked him and set off into the dusk. The side road led off southwest. If Shecha was a place of the Marsh people, I might as well go there.

After a while I stopped and cracked all the rest of the walnuts between two stones, and ate them one by one as I went on, for my hunger had grown painful.

Evening was darkening when I saw a glimmer o lights ahead. As I came closer, the shining of water reflected the last light in the sky. I came through a cow pasture to a tiny village on the shore of a lake. The houses were built up on stilts, and some stood right out over the water at the end of piers; there were boats docked, which I could not make out clearly. I was very tired and very hungry and the yellow glimmer of a lighted window was beautiful in the late dusk. I went to that house, climbed the wooden stairs to the narrow porch, and looked in the open door. It seemed to be an inn or beer house, windowless, with a low counter, but no furniture at all. Four or five men sat on a rug on the floor with clay cups in their hands. They all looked at me and then looked away so as not to stare.

“Well, come in, boy,” one said. They were dark-skinned, slight, short men, all of them. A woman behind the counter turned around, and I saw old Gammy, the piercing bright dark eyes, the eagle nose. “Where d’you come from?” she said.

“The forest.” My voice came out as a hoarse whisper. Nobody said anything. “I’m looking for my people.”

“Who are they then?” the woman asked. “Come in!” I came in, looking hangdog, no doubt. She slapped something on a plate and shoved it across the counter towards me.

“I don’t have money,” I said.

“Eat it,” she said crossly. I took the plate and sat down with it on a seat by the unlighted hearth. It was a kind of cold fish fritter, I think, quite a large one, but it was gone before I knew what it was.

“Who’s your people, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Makes it a bit hard to find ’em,” one of the men suggested. They kept looking at me, not with a steady stare or with hostility, but covertly studying the new thing that had come their way. The instant disappearance of the fritter had caused some silent amusement.

“Around here?” another man asked, rubbing his bald head.

“I don’t know. We were stolen—my sister and I. Slave raiders from Etra. South of here, maybe.”

“When was that?” the innkeeper asked in her sharp voice.

“Fourteen or fifteen years ago.”

“He’s a runaway slave, is he?” the oldest of the men murmured to the one next to him, uneasy.

“So you was a little tad,” said the innkeeper, filling a clay cup with something and bringing it to me. “What name had you?”

“Gavir. My sister was Sallo.”

“No more than that?”

I shook my head.

“How’d you chance to be in the forest?” the bald man asked, mildly enough, but it was a hard question and he knew it. I hesitated a little and said, “I was lost.”

To my surprise, they accepted that as an answer, at least for the moment. I drank the cup of milk the woman had given me. It tasted sweet as honey.

“What other names do you remember?” the woman asked.