Ursula Le Guin - Powers

She would be seven or eight years old now, I thought. She hadn’t grown very much, and was so thin her joints looked like knobs. I got some dried fruit out of my pack and offered it to her. She ate it with a pitiful and terrible attempt not to be greedy. She held out a piece to me. I shook my head. “I ate a little while ago,” I said. She devoured the fruit.

I cut a piece of my rock-hard bread into little morsels and warned her to suck them to soften them before she chewed. She sat with bread in her mouth, and her dirty, bony face began to relax.

“Melle,” I said, “I’m going north. Away. To a city called Mesun.”

“Please, can I come with you,” she whispered, her face tightening again, her eyes getting big, only daring one glance up at me.

“You don’t want to stay there, at—”

“Oh no, please no.” The same whisper. “Please no!”

“There’s nobody there who…”

She shook her head again and again. “No, no, no,” she whispered. I didn’t know what to do. That is, there was only one thing I could do, but I didn’t know how I was going to manage it. “Are you pretty good at walking?”

“I can walk and walk,” she said earnestly. She put another little lump of bread in her mouth, timidly, and sucked it as I had told her to do.

“Well,” I said, “you’ll have to.”

“I will, I will. You won’t have to carry me. I promise.” “That’s good. We ought to walk on a way now, because I want to get back to the river before dark. And tomorrow we’ll leave the forest. All right?”

“Yes!” she said, and her eyes shone. She stood right up.

She walked along bravely, but her legs were short, and she didn’t have much strength in her little starved body. Fortunately we reached the Somulane again sooner than I expected, coming down an open glade to a long bend in the river. The fishing there wasn’t like the wonderful pool farther upstream, but I did catch a trout and a couple of perch, enough for our supper. The grass was soft and the light fell sweetly through the trees across the water, turning it to bronze. “It’s pretty here,” Melle said. She fell asleep as soon as she had eaten. She lay in a little heap on the grass. My heart turned over at the sight of her fragility. How could I take this child with me? But how could I not take her?

Luck hears prayers only with his deaf ear, but I spoke to him, to the ear that hears the wheels of the chariots of the stars. I said, “You used to be with me, Lord, when I didn’t know it. I hope you’re with this child now, and not just fooling her.” And I spoke in silence also to Ennu, thanking her and asking her to guide us. Then there was nothing to do but roll Melle up with me in my soft reedcloth blanket, and sleep.

We both woke as dawn was brightening. Melle went off by herself to the riverside, and when she came back she had managed to wash herself quite clean, and was shivering with wet and cold. I wrapped the blanket round her again while we ate a little breakfast. She was shy and solemn.

“Melle,” I said, “your sister…”

She said in a strange, small, even voice, “We tried to hide. Back of the sheep pastures. The soldiers found us. They took Irad away. I don’t remember.”

I remembered Barna’s raider telling how they had taken the two girls from their village, how Ater had been going to toss the little one aside, but they clung too tight together… . They hadn’t been able to hold on to each other this time.

Melle’s chin trembled. She looked down and chewed on her bit of hard bread but could not swallow. Neither of us could say anything more about Irad. After a long time I said, “Your village was over on the west side of the forest. Do you want to go back there?”

“To the village?” She looked up, and thought hard. “I can’t remember it much,” she said.

“But you had family there. Your mother—”

She shook her head. “We didn’t have any mother. We belonged to Gan Buli. He hit us a lot. My sister…” She didn’t finish. Maybe Luck had been with Melle after all.

But never with Irad.

“All right, then you’ll come with me,” I said, in as matter-of-fact a tone as I could manage. “But listen. We’ll be going on the roads, into villages, some of the time at least. Among people. I think it might be better if you were my little brother. Can you pretend to be a boy?”

“Of course,” she said, interested in the idea. She thought about it. “I need a name. I can be Miv.”

I almost said, “No!” but stopped myself. She should have the name she chose herself. Like Melle, it was a common name.

“All right, Miv,” I said, with a little effort. “And I’m Avvi.”

“Avvi,” she repeated, and then murmured, “Avvi Beaky,” with a tiny smile.

“And who we are is this: we aren’t slaves, because there aren’t any slaves in Urdile, where we live. I’m a student at the University in Me-sun. I study with a great man there, who’s waiting for us. I’m taking you there to be a student too. We come from just east of the Marshes.”

She nodded. It all seemed perfectly convincing to her. But she was eight years old.

“What I hope is, we can mostly keep off the big roads and just go through the countryside. I have some money. We can buy food in villages and from farmers. But we have to look out for slave takers. Everywhere. If we don’t meet any of them, we’ll be all right.”

“What is the great man in Mesun’s name?” she asked. A good question. I wasn’t prepared for it. Finally I said the only name of a great man in Mesun I knew: “Orrec Caspro.”

She nodded.

There seemed to be one more thing on her mind. She finally said it. “I can’t pee like a boy,” she said.

“That’s all right. Don’t worry. I’ll stand guard.”

She nodded. We were ready to go. A short way downstream from the bend of the river it widened and shoaled out, and I said, “Let’s cross here. Can you swim—Miv?”

“No.”

“If it gets too deep I can carry you.” We took off our shoes and tied them to my pack. I fastened a length of light rope around Melle’s waist and my own, with a few feet of slack between us. We waded out into the river hand in hand. I thought of my vision of crossing a river, and wondered if soon I’d be carrying the child on my shoulders (which were still sore from carrying her yesterday). But this didn’t at all look like the river I remembered. By picking a zigzag way on the high point of the shoals I was never more than waist deep, and could hold Melle up well enough, except in one place where the current ran fast and deep alongside an islet of gravel. There I told her to hold tight to the rope around my waist and keep her head up the best she could, and I waded in, swam the few yards to the gravel bar, and wallowed ashore, Melle went under only at the last moment, when she thought she could touch bottom and couldn’t. She came up choking and sputtering.

After that we had only shallow waters to wade, and soon came to the far shore.

As we sat getting our breath, drying out, and putting on our shoes, I said, “We’ve crossed the first of the two great rivers we have to cross. This is the land of Bendile.”

“The hero Hamneda had to swim across a river when he was wounded, didn’t he?”

I can’t say how much that touched me. It wasn’t that she’d learned the story of Hamneda from me. It was that she thought of him, that he was familiar to her mind and heart as he was to mine. We had a common language, this child and I, a language I hadn’t spoken with anyone else since I left my own childhood in Etra. I put my arm around her little thin shoulders, and she wriggled against me comfortably.

“Let’s go find a village and buy some food,” I said. “Hold on, though. Let me get some money out so I don’t wave all of it in people’s faces.” I dug into my pack and brought out the heavy little silk pouch. A faint, smoky Cuga-reek still clung to it, or maybe it had just been close to the smoked fish from Ferusi. I untied the cord, opened the pouch, and stared. I remembered what it had held: bronzes, and four silver pieces. But along with the bronzes there were now nine silver pieces, four of the gold pieces from Pagadi called dictators, and a broad gold coin from Ansul.