Ursula Le Guin - Powers

“Here certainly she can be given what she needs,” Orrec Caspro said promptly and firmly “How did you travel with a young child all the way from the Daneran Forest to Mesun? That can’t have been easy”

“It was easy enough till I learned my… my enemies in Arcamand were still hunting for me, on my track.” But I had not named Torm and Hoby till then. I had to go back and say who they were, and to tell that my sister’s death had been at their hands.

When I told him of how Hoby had hunted me and followed us, and of crossing the Sensaly, he listened the way the fellows in Brigin’s camp listened to The Siege and Fall of Sentas, holding his breath.

“You saw him drown?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I saw the horse with no rider. Nothing else. The river’s wide, and I couldn’t see along the near shore. He may have drowned. He may not. But I think…” I didn’t know how to say it. “It’s as if a chain has broken.”

Caspro sat brooding over my story a while. “I want Memer and Gry to hear this. I want to hear more about what you call the remembering—your visions—Seeing me!” He looked up and laughed, gazing at me with amused and wondering sympathy. “And I want to meet your companion. Shall we go down?”

There was a garden beside the house, a narrow one, wedged between house walls and the cliff that towered up behind. It was bright with late morning sun and late summer flowers. For an instant I remembered the flowers. There was a very small fountain, which dribbled rather than ran. On the flagstones and marble benches around it the two women, the girl, and the lion sat talking—that is, the lion had gone to sleep, while Melle stroked her dreamily, and the women were talking.

“You met my wife, Gry Barre,” Caspro said to me as we came into the garden. “She and I are Uplanders. Memer Galva came with us from her home, the city of Ansul; she’s our guest this year. I teach her the modern poets, and she teaches me Aritan, the ancient tongue of our people. Now introduce me to your companion, if you will.”

But as we approached, Melle scrambled up and hid her face against me, clinging to me. It was unlike her, and I didn’t know what to do. “Melle,” I said, “this is our host—the great man we came to see.”

She clung to my legs and would not look.

“Never mind.” Caspro said. His face was grim for a moment. Then, not looking at Melle or coming close to her, he said pleasantly, “Gry, Memer, we must keep our guests a while so you can hear their story.”

“Melle told us about the chickens on the boat,” Memer said. The sunlight on her hair was marvelous, radiant. I couldn’t look at her and couldn’t look away from her. Caspro sat down on the bench beside Memer, so I sat down on another bench and got Melle to stand beside my legs, in the circle of my arms, thus defending both her and myself.

“I think it’s time for a bite to eat,” Gry said. “Melle, come with me and give me a hand, will you? We’ll be back in a moment.” Melle let herself be led away, still turning her face away from Caspro as she went.

I apologised for her behavior. Caspro said simply, “How could she do otherwise?” And as I thought back on our journey I realised that the only men Melle had spoken to or even looked at were the dwarf innkeeper, whom she may have thought a strange kind of child, and the cowboy, who had slowly earned her trust. She had kept clear away, always, from the bargemen, and any other men. I had not seen it. It wrung my heart.

“You’re from the Marshlands?” Memer asked me.

All these people had beautiful voices; hers was like running water.

“I was born there,” was all I could get out in reply.

“And stolen by slavers, when he was a baby, with his sister,” Caspro said, “and taken to Etra. And they brought you up there to be an educated man, did they? Who was your teacher?”

“A slave. Everra was his name.”

“What did you have by way of books? I don’t think of the City States as homes of learning—although in Pagadi there are certainly some fine scholars, and fine poets too. But one thinks of soldiers more than scholars there.”

“All the books Everra had were old,” I said. “He wouldn’t let us read the moderns—what he called the moderns—”

“Like me,” Caspro said with his brief, broad smile. “I know, I know. Nema, and the Epics, and Trudec’s Moralities… That’s what they started me on in Derris Water! So, you were educated so that you could teach the children of the household. Well, that much is good. Though to keep a teacher as a slave…”

“It wasn’t an evil slavery,” I said. “Until—“ I stopped.

Memer said, “Can slavery not be evil?”

“If your masters aren’t cruel people—and if you don’t know there’s anything else,” I said. “If everybody believes it’s the way things are and must be, then you can not know that... that it’s wrong.”

“Can you not know?” she said, not accusing or ar guing, simply asking, and thinking as she asked. She looked at me directly and said, “I was a slave in Ansul. All my people were. But by recent conquest, not by caste. We didn’t have to believe we were slaves by the order of nature. That must be very different.”

I wanted to talk to her but I couldn’t. “It was a slave,” I said to Ca-spro, “who taught me your hymn to Liberty.”

Memer’s smile brightened her grave, quiet face for a moment. Though her complexion was so light, she had dark eyes that flashed like the fire in opal. “We sang that song in Ansul when we drove the Alds out,” she said.

“It’s the tune,” Caspro said. “Good tune. Catchy.” He stretched, enjoying the warmth of the sun, and said, “I want to hear more about Bar-na and his city. It sounds as if there was a bitter tragedy there. Whatever you can tell me. But you said you became his bard, as it were, his reciter. So then, you have a good memory?”

“Very good,” I said. “That’s my power.”

“Ah!” I had spoken with confidence, and he responded to it. “You memorise without difficulty?”

“Without trying,” I said. “It’s part of the reason I came here. What’s the good of having a head full of everything you ever read? People liked hearing the stories, there in the forest. But what could I do with them in the Marshes? Or anywhere else? I thought maybe at the University…”

“Yes, yes, absolutely,” Caspro said. “Or perhaps… Well, we’ll see. Here come mederendefereho en refema— is that right, Memer?—In Aritan it means ‘beautiful women bringing food.’ You’ll want to learn Aritan, Gavir. Think of it, another language—a language different from ours!—not entirely of course, it’s the ancestor of ours, but quite different—and a whole new poetry!” As he spoke, with the unguarded passion that I already saw characterised him, he was careful not to look at Melle, only at his wife, and not to come near Melle as he helped set out the food on an unoccupied bench. They had brought bread and cheese, olives, fruit, and a thin, light cider to drink.

“Where are you staying?” Gry asked, and when I said, “The Quail,” she said, “How are the fleas?”

“Not too bad. Are they, Melle?”

She had come to stand close to me again. She shook her head, and scratched her shoulder.

“Shetar has her own private fleas,” Gry told her. “Lion fleas. She won’t share them with us. And the Quail fleas won’t bite her.” Shetar had opened an eye, found the food uninteresting, and gone back to sleep.

Having eaten a little, Melle sat down on the paving stones in front of me but close to the lion, within petting distance. She and Gry kept up a murmured conversation, while Caspro talked with me and Memer put in a word now and then. What he was doing, in a mild and roundabout fashion, was finding out how much of a scholar I was, what I knew and didn’t know. From the little Memer said, I thought she must know everything there was to know in the way of poetry and tales. But when we came to history she declared ignorance, saying she knew only that of Ansul, and not much of that, because all the books in Ansul had been destroyed by the conquerors of the city. I wanted to hear that hideous story, but Caspro, mildly perseverant, kept on the course of his questions until he’d learned what he wanted to know, and even won from me a confession of my old, foolish ambition to write a history of the City States. “I don’t think I’ll ever do that,” I said, trying to make light of it, “since it would involve going back there.”