Ursula Le Guin - Powers

I was very sick, vomiting again and again, lying on my belly on the deck vomiting into the mud below, writhing with the pain in my stomach and lungs. Dorod knelt by me, his hand on my back, telling me it was all right, it would be over soon and I could sleep. I slept and my dreams were visions. I woke and remembered what I had never known. He asked me to tell him all I had seen, and I tried, but even as I told him new visions came to me and he and the hut were gone, I was gone, lost among people and places I would never know and could never remember. And then I would be lying in the dark hut, sick and aching and dizzy, hardly able to sit up. He would come and give me water and make me eat a little, talk to me and try to make me talk. “You are a brave man, my Gavir, you will be a great seer,” he told me, and I clung to him, the only face that was not a dream or vision or memory, the only actual face, the only hand I could hold, my guide and savior, my false guide, my betrayer.

There came another face among the dreams and visions. I knew her. I knew her voice. But did I not know all the faces, all the voices? I remembered everything, everything. Cuga stooped over me. Hoby came at me down the corridor. But she was there, I knew her, and I spoke her name: “Gegemer.”

Her crow’s face was grim, her crow’s eyes black and sharp. “Nephew,” she said. “I told you that if I saw you in vision I’d tell you of it. You remember that.”

I remembered everything. She had told me that before. All this had happened before, I was remembering it because it had happened a hundred times, like everything else. I was lying down because I was too tired from journeying to sit up. Dorod was sitting cross-legged near me. The hut was dark and cramped. My aunt was not in the hut, it was a man’s hut and she was a woman: she knelt in the doorway, she must stop at the threshold. She looked at me and spoke to me in her harsh voice.

“I saw you cross a river, carrying a child. Do you understand me, Gavir Aytana? I saw the way you are to go. If you look, you’ll see it. It is the second river you must cross. If you can cross it, you’ll be safe. Across the first river is danger for you. Across the second, safety. Across the first river, death will follow you. Across the second river, you will follow life. Do you understand me? Do you hear me, my sisters son?”

“Take me with you,” I whispered. “Take me with you!” I felt Dorod move forward to come between us.

“You’ve given him eda,” my aunt said to Dorod. “What else have you poisoned him with?”

I managed to sit up, and stand. I staggered to the doorway, though Dorod got up to stop me. “Take me with you,” I cried out to my aunt. She caught the hand I reached out to her and pulled me out of the house. I could barely stay afoot. She put her arm around me.

“Wasn’t one boy enough to kill?” she said to Dorod, savage as the crow that attacks the nest-robbing hawk. “Give me what is his from your hut and let him go with me, or I’ll shame you before the elders of Aytanu and the women of your own village so your shame will never be forgotten!”

“He will be a great seer,” Dorod said, shivering with rage, but not moving from the doorway of the hut. “A man of power. Let him stay with me. I won’t give him the eda again.”

“Gavir,” she said, “choose.”

I did not know what they were saying, but I said to her, “Take me with you.”

“Give me what is his,” she said to Dorod.

Dorod turned away. He came back to the doorway presently with my knife, my fishing gear, the book wrapped in reedcloth, the ragged blanket. He set them down on the decking in front of the doorway. He was sobbing aloud, tears running down his face. “May evil follow you, evil woman,” he cried. “Filth! You know nothing. You have no business with sacred things. You defile all you touch. Filth! Filth! You have polluted my house.”

She said nothing, but helped me pick up my things, helped me get down from the deck and walk out the small pier where she had tied her boat, a woman’s boat, light as a leaf. I clambered down into it, trembling, and crouched in it. All the time I heard Dorod’s voice cursing Gegemer with the foul words men use for women. As she cast off the rope he cried out, howling in rage and grief—“Gavir! Gavir!”

I huddled down with my head in my arms, hiding from him. It was silent then. We were out on the water. It was raining a little. I was too sick and weak and cold to lift my head. I lay huddled against the thwart. The visions came around me, swarming, faces, voices, places, cities, hills, roads, skies, and I began again to journey on and journey on.

For Gegemer to come to Dorod’s house and stand at his very threshold had been an act of transgression barely justified by the urgency of her message to me. She could not bring me into the women’s village of East Lake; she could not enter the men’s village herself. She took me to an unused marriage hut between the villages, made the bed up for me, and left me there, coming to look after me a couple of times a day—a common enough arrangement when a man fell ill and a wife or sister wanted to nurse or visit him.

So I lay in the tiny, flimsy hut, the wind flapping the reedcloth walls, the rain beating on them and dripping between the reed bundles of the roof. I shivered and raved or lay in stupor. I don’t know how long I had stayed with Dorod, or how long my recovery took, but it was summer when I went with him, and when I began to come to myself, be myself again, it was early spring. I was so thin and wasted my arms looked like reed stems. When I tried to walk I panted and got dizzy. It took me a long time to get my appetite back.

My aunt told me something about the drugs Dorod had given me. She spoke of them with hatred, with spite. “I took eda,” she said. “I was determined to know where your mother went. I listened to what the seermen told me, the wise men in the Big House, may they choke on their words, may they eat mud and drown in quicksand. Take eda, they said, and your mind will be free, you will fly where you will! The mind flies, yes, but the belly pays, and the mind too. Fool that I was, I never saw your mother, but I was sick for a month, two months, from a single mouthful. How much did he give you, how often? And bile root, shar-dissu—that makes you dizzy and your heart beats too hard, and your breath comes short—I never took it, but I know it. I know what men do to each other and call it sacred medicine!” She hissed like a cat. “Fools,” she said. “Men. Women. All of us.”

I was sitting in the doorway of the hut and she nearby on a wicker seat she’d brought with her; the women made such light, folding seats of cane and carried them to sit in, anywhere outdoors. The ground was still wet from recent rain, but the sky was pale radiant blue, and there was a new warmth to the sun.

My aunt and I were at ease with each other. I knew she had saved my life, and so did she. I think that knowledge softened her self-reproach for having let my mother go to her death. Gegemer was harsh, hard, with a bitter temper, but her care of me in my illness had been patient, even tender. often she and I didn’t understand each other, but it didn’t matter; there was an understanding beneath words, a likeness of mind beneath all differences. one thing we both knew without ever saying: that when I was well enough, I would leave the Marshes.

I was in no hurry, but she was. She had seen me going north with death pursuing me. I must go. I must cross the second river to be safe. I must go as soon as I could. She said that to me at last.

“No matter when I go,” I said, “death will pursue me.”

“Eng, eng, eng,” she said, shaking her head fiercely, frowning. “If you put off going too long, death will be waiting for you!”