Ursula Le Guin - Powers

“All right,” Miv said, and curled up and shut his eyes.

“What a lamb,” the Mother said. She looked at me, “Ah, jou’re up, you’re afoot, good for you,” she said. She did look like her slender daughter Astano, but her face, like her body, was full and smooth and powerful. Astano’s glance was shy; the Mother’s gaze was steady. I looked down at once, of course.

“Who hurt you, lad?” she asked.

Not to answer old Remen was one thing. Not to answer the Mother was quite another.

After an awful pause I said the only thing that came to me: “I fell into the well, Mistress.”

“Oh, come,” she said, chiding but amused.

I stood mute.

“You’re a very clumsy boy, Gavir,” said the musical voice. “But a courageous one.” She examined my lumps and bruises. “He looks all right to me, Remen. How’s the hand?” She took my hand and looked at the splinted finger. “That’ll take some weeks,” she said. “You’re the scholar, eh? No writing for you for a while. But Everra will know how to keep you busy. Run along, then.”

I bobbed the reverence to her and said, “Thank you,” to old Remen, and got out. I ran to the pantry, and found Sallo there, and even while we were hugging and she was asking if I was really all right, I was telling her that the Mother knew my name, and knew who I was, and called me the scholar! I didn’t say that she had called me courageous. That was too immense a thing to talk about.

When I tried to eat, it didn’t go down very well, and my head began thumping, so Sallo went with me to the dormitory and left me on our bed there. I spent that afternoon and most of the next day there, doing a lot of sleeping. Then I woke up starving hungry and was all right, except that I looked, as Sotur said, as if I’d been left out on a battlefield for the crows.

It was only two days since I’d been in the schoolroom, but they welcomed me back as if I’d been gone for months, and it felt that way to me too. The teacher took my injured hand in his long, strong-fingered hands and stroked it once. “When it heals, Gavir, I am going to teach you to write well and clearly,” he said. “No more scrawling in the copybook. Right?” He was smiling, and for some reason what he said made me extremely happy. There was a care for me in it, a concern as gentle as his touch.

Hoby was watching. Torm was watching. I turned around and faced them. I reverenced Torm briefly; he turned away. I said, “Hello, Hoby.” He had a sick look. I think seeing all my swellings and bruises in their green and purple glory scared him. But he knew I had not told on him. Everybody knew it. Just as everybody knew who had attacked me. There might be silence, but there were no secrets in our life.

But if I accused nobody, it was nobody’s business, not even the masters’.

Torm had turned from me with a glowering look, but Yaven and As-tano were kind and friendly. As for Sotur, she evidently felt she’d been thoughtless or heartless saying that I looked like I’d been left for the crows, for when she could speak to me without anybody else hearing she said, “Gavir, you are a hero.” She spoke solemnly, and looked near tears.

I didn’t understand yet that the whole matter was more serious than my small part of it.

Sallo had said little Miv was to be kept in the infirmary till he was quite well, and knowing he was in the Mother’s care I thought no more about him or my fever dreams of the burial ground.

But in the dormitory that night, Ennumer, who mothered Miv and Oco, was in tears. All the women and girls gathered about her, Sallo with them. Tib came over to me and whispered what he’d heard: that Miv was bleeding from his ear, and they thought his head had been broken by Torm’s blow. Then I remembered the green willows by the river, and my heart went cold. The next day Miv went into convulsions several times. We heard that the Mother came to the infirmary and stayed with him all that evening and night. I thought of how she had stood by my bed in the golden light. When we were sitting on our mattress in the evening, I said to Tib and Sallo, “The Mother is as kind as Ennu.”

Sallo nodded, hugging me, but Tib said, “She knows who hit him.” “What difference does that make?” Tib made a face.

I was angry at him. “She is our Mother,” I said. “She cares for us all. She’s kind. You don’t know anything about her.”

I felt I knew her, knew her as the heart knows what it loves. She had touched me with her gentle hand. She had said I was courageous.

Tib hunched up and shrugged and said nothing. He had been moody and gloomy since Hoby turned away from him. I was still his friend, but he’d always wanted Hoby’s friendship more than mine. He saw my cuts and bruises now with shame and discomfort, and was shy with me. It was Sallo who got him to come over to our nook and sit and talk with us before the women put the lights out.

“I’m glad she lets Oco stay with Miv,” Sallo said now. “Poor Oco, she’s so scared for him.”

“Ennumer would like to stay with him too,” Tib said.

“The Mother is a healer!” I said. “She’ll look after him. Ennumer couldn’t do anything. She’d just howl. Like now.”

Ennumer was in fact a foolish, noisy young woman, without half as much good sense as six-year-old Oco; but though her mothering had been random, she was truly fond of Oco and Miv, her doll-baby as she called him. Her grief now was real, and loud. “Oh my poor little doll-baby!” she cried out. “I want to see him! I want to hold him!”

The headwoman came over to her and put her hands on Ennumer’s shoulders.

“Hush,” she said. “He is in the Mother’s arms.” And tear-smeared, scared Ennumer hushed.

Iemmer had been headwoman of Arcamand for many years, and had great personal authority. She reported to the Mother and the Family, of course, but she never gained advantage for herself by making trouble for other house people, as she might have done. The Mother had proved that she didn’t like tattlers and toadies, by selling a tattler, and by choosing Iemmer as headwoman. Iemmer played fair. She had favorites—among us all, Sallo was her darling—but she didn’t favor anyone, or pick on anyone either.

To Ennumer, she was an awesome figure, far more immediately powerful than the Mother. Ennumer blubbered a little more, quietly, and let the women around her comfort her.

Ennumer had been sent to us from Herramand five years ago as a birthday gift to Sotur’s older brother Soter. She was then a pretty girl of fifteen, untrained and illiterate, for the Herra Family, like many others, thought it an unnecessary ostentation or even a risk to educate slaves, particularly girl slaves.

I knew Ennumer had had babies, two or three of them. Both Sotur’s older brothers often sent for her; she got pregnant; the baby was given to one of the wet-nurses, and presently traded to another House. Miv and Oco had been part of one of those bargains. Babies were almost always sold off or traded. Gammy used to tell us, “I bore six and mothered none. Didn’t look for any baby to mother, after I nursed Altan-di. And then you two come along to plague me in my old age!”

Very rarely the mother, not the child, was sold off.

That was Hoby’s case. He had been born on the same day as Torm, the son of the Family, and alleging this as a sign or omen, the Father had ordered that he be kept. His mother, a gift-girl, had been sold promptly to prevent the complications of kinship. A mother may believe the child she bore is hers, but property can’t own property; we belong to the Family, the Mother is our mother and the Father is our father. I understood all that.

I understood why Ennumer was crying, too. But to a boy my age women’s griefs were too troubling to endure. I warded them off, walled them out. “Play Ambush?” I challenged Tib, and we got out the slates and chalk and marked the squares and played Ambush till lights-out.