Ursula Le Guin - Voices

Anyhow, I still helped Ista with the rough work of the kitchen, and went to the market, with Bomi if she was free to go, alone if not. I stayed short and bony, and by wearing old cut-down men’s clothes I could still look fairly much like a child, or at least an unattractive boy. Street-gang boys sometimes saw I was a girl and threw stones at me—boys of my race, of Ansul, acting like filthy Alds. I hated to pass them and kept away from the places they gathered. And I hated the swaggering Ald guards posted around all the marketplaces to “keep order,” which meant to bully citizens and take whatever they liked from the vendors’ stalls without paying. I tried not to cringe when I passed them. I tried to walk slowly, ignoring them. They stood there puffed up in their blue cloaks and leather cuirasses, with their swords and clubs. They seldom looked as low as me.

Now I have come to the important morning.

It was late spring, four days after my seventeenth birthday. Sosta was to be married in summer and Bomi was helping her sew for her wedding—the green gown and headdress and the groom’s coat and headdress too. It was all Ista and Sosta had talked about for weeks, wedding wedding wedding, sewing sewing sewing. Even Bomi blithered about it. I’d never even tried to learn to sew, or to fall in love and want to marry, either. Some, day. Someday I’d be ready to find out about that kind of love, but it wasn’t time yet. I had to find out who I was, first. I had a promise to keep, and my dear lord to love, and a lot to learn. So I left them chattering, and went out to market alone that morning.

It was a bright sweet day. I went down the steps of the house to the Oracle Fountain. The broad, shallow, green basin was dry and littered, and the pipe from which the water had risen stuck up jagged from the broken, defaced central sculpture. The fountain had been dry all my lifetime and long before that, but I said the blessing to the Lord of the Springs and Waters as I stood beside it. And I wondered, not for the first time, why it was called the Oracle Fountain, and then why Galvamand itself was sometimes called the Oracle House. I should ask the Waylord, I thought.

I looked up from the dead fountain, out over the city, and saw Sul across the straits like a great white rising wave of stone and snow, one banner of mist blown northward from its crest. I thought of Adira and Marra and their ragged soldiers driven up to the icy heights, without food or fire, and how they knelt to praise the god of the mountain and the spirits of the glacier. A crow came flying to them with a spray of leaves in its beak and dropped it before Adira. They thanked the crow, offering it what little bread they had: “In the beak of black iron, the gift of green hope.” My thoughts were always with the heroes.

I spoke praise to Sul and the Seunes, whose white manes I could see just out past the headland. I went on, speaking to the Sill Stone, and touching the street, god’s niche as I passed the corner and turned left to West Street. I’d decided to go to the Harbor Market, which was farther to carry things home from but a better market than Foothill. I was glad to be outdoors, to see the sunlight strike blue-green down into the canal and the bright shadows of the carvings on the bridges.

The sunlight and the sea wind were a joy. As I walked I became quite certain that my gods were with me. I was fearless. I went past the Ald soldiers on guard at the marketplace as if they were wooden posts.

Harbor Market is a broad marble pavement, with the red arcades of the Customs House on the north and east sides and the Tower of the Sea Admirals on the south; to the west it’s open to the harbor and the sea. Long, shallow marble steps with curved, carved banisters go down to the Admiralty boat-houses and the gravel beach. It was all sun and wind and white marble and blue sea that morning, and nearby were the colored awnings and umbrellas of the market stands and all the cheerful racket of the market. I passed by the market god, the round stone that represents the oldest god of the city: Lero, whose name means justice, agreement, doing right. I saluted the god openly, without even thinking of the Ald soldiers.

I had never in my life done that. When I was ten I saw soldiers beat an elderly man and leave him bloody and unconscious on the street under the empty pedestal of a god he had saluted. No one dared go to him while the soldiers were there. I ran away crying and never knew if he had been killed or not. I had not forgotten that, but it did not matter. This was a day without fear for me. A day of blessing. A holy day.

I went on across the square, looking at everything, for I loved the stalls and the goods and the coaxing, insulting vendors. I was heading for the fish market, but went a bit out of the way when I saw they were setting up a large tent in front of the Admirals’ Tower. I asked a boy selling dirty rock-sugar what the tent was for.

“A great storyteller from the Uplands,” he said, “very famous. I can hold a place for you, young master.” Market boys will turn a turd into a penny, as they say.

“I can hold my own place,” I said, and he, “Oh, it’ll be terrible crowded in no time—he’s to be here all day, a terrible famous man—half a penny to hold you a good place right up close?”

I laughed at him and went on.

I was tempted to go over to the tent, though. I felt like doing something foolish, like listening to a storyteller. The Alds are crazy about makers and tellers. Every rich Ald has a storyteller in his retinue, they say, and every company of soldiers too. There hadn’t been many in Ansul, the Waylord told me, before the Alds came, but there were more now that books were banned. A few men of my own people told stories for small change on street corners. I had stopped to listen a couple of times, but they mostly told Ald stories to get pennies from the soldiers. I didn’t like the Ald stories, all about their wars and their warriors and their tyrant god, nothing I cared a straw for.

It was the word “Uplands” that caught me. A man from the Uplands would not be an Ald. The Uplands were far, far to the north. I’d never even heard of them or any of those distant lands until last year, when I read Eronts Great History, with its maps of all the lands of the Western Shore. The market boy repeated the word as he’d heard it spoken, without any meaning for him except somewhere-very-far-away, Even to Eront, the Uplands were mostly hearsay. I didn’t remember anything on that part of his map except a big mountain with a strange name I couldn’t bring to mind, as I made my way on past the potmenders to the fishwives.

I bargained down a big redspot that would feed us all today; even the cats, and make fishhead soup for tomorrow. I went round the stalls and bought a fresh cheese and some coarse greens that looked good. Then before I set off home I wandered over towards the big tent to see if anything was happening yet. The crowds were thick. I saw riders above the people’s heads, and horse’s heads tossing up and down: two Ald officers. The Alds brought no women from their deserts, but they brought their fine, pretty horses, which they treated so well that it was a street joke to call the horses “soldiers’ wives.”

People in the crowd now were trying to get out of the horses’ way, but there was some kind of commotion behind them and a good deal of confusion. Then all at once one of the horses reared up squealing and bolted, bucking stiff-legged like a colt. People in front of me pressed back to get out of its way. It came straight at me. There were people crowding from behind and I couldn’t move. The horse came at me—there was no rider on it, and the flailing reins slapped my hand as if thrown at me. I grabbed and pulled. The horse’s head came down right by my shoulder, its eye rolling wildly. That head seemed huge, it filled the world. But the horse had stopped. I shortened my grip on the rein up to the bridle and stood firm, not knowing what else to do. The horse tried to toss its head, which half lifted me off the ground, but I hung tight out of pure terror. The horse gave a great whuff through its nostrils and stood still—even pushing up against me a little as if for protection.