Ursula Le Guin - Gifts

He waited some while. He drew breath, and there was some slight change in his stance, an increase of tension, though he still said nothing.

“Will you do it?” he said at last, very softly.

“No,” I said.

Silence between us again. I heard the faint music of the brook and a bird singing away over in the ash grove and a cow lowing down in the home pasture.

“Can you do it?”

“I won’t.”

Silence again, and then he said, “There’s nothing to fear, Orrec.” His voice was gentle. I bit my lip and clenched my hands.

“I’m not afraid,” I said.

“To control your gift you must use it,” Canoc said, still with that gentleness that weakened my resolve.

“I won’t use it.”

“Then it may use you.”

That was unexpected. What had Gry told me about using her gift and being used by it? I could not remember now. I was confused, but I would not admit it.

I shook my head.

Then at last he frowned. His head went back as if he faced an opponent. When he spoke, the tenderness had gone out of his voice.

“You must show your gift, Orrec,” he said. “If not to me, to others. It’s not your choice to make. To have the power is to serve the power. You’ll be Brantor of Caspromant. The people here will depend on you as they do on me now. You must show them they can rely on you. And learn how to use your gift by using it.”

I shook my head.

After another unbearable silence, he said, almost in a whisper, “Is it the killing?”

I didn’t know whether it was that, the idea that my gift was to kill, to destroy, that I rebelled against. I had thought that, but not very clearly, though I had often thought with sick horror of the rat, the adder…. All I knew by now was that I refused to be tested, refused to try out this terrible power, refused to let it be what I was. But Canoc had given me an out, and I took it. I nodded.

At that he gave a deep sigh, his only sign of disappointment or impatience, and turned away. Then he fished in his coat pocket and brought out a bit of lacing. He always carried ends of cord for all the thousand uses of a farmstead. He knotted it and tossed it onto the ground between us. He said nothing, but looked at it and at me.

“I’m not a dog, to do tricks for you!” I burst out in a shrill, loud voice. It left an awful, ringing silence between us.

“Listen, Orrec,” he said. “At Drummant, that’s what you’ll be, if you choose to see it that way. If you don’t show your gift there, what will Ogge think, and say? If you refuse to learn the use of your power, our people will have no one to turn to.” He took a deep breath, and for a moment his voice shook with anger. “Do you think I like killing rats? Am I a terrier?” He stopped, and looked aside, and finally said, “Think of your duty. Of our duty. Think of it, and when you’ve understood it, come to me.”

He stooped and picked up the length of cord, unknotted it with his fingers, put it back in his pocket, and strode away, uphill, towards the ash grove.

When I remember that now, I think of how he saved that bit of lacing, because cord was hard to come by and must not be wasted, and I could cry again; but not with the tears of shame and fury that I wept as I went down the stream valley from that place, that day.

After that nothing could be the same between my father and me, because now there lay between us his demand and my refusal. But his manner to me did not change. He did not return to the matter for several days. When he did it was not to command but to ask almost casually, one afternoon when we were riding back from our eastern boundary: “Are you ready to try your power now?”

But my determination had grown up round me like a wall, a stone tower-keep in which I was protected from his demands, his questions, my own questions. I answered at once: “No.”

My flat certainty must have taken him aback. He said nothing in reply. He said nothing to me as we rode on home. He said nothing to me the rest of that day. He looked tired and stern. My mother saw that, and probably guessed the cause.

The next morning she asked me to come up to her room on the pretext of fitting the coat she was making for me. While she had me standing with my arms stuck out like a straw doll and was going round me on her knees taking out basting stitches and marking buttonholes, she said through the pins in her mouth, “Your father’s worried.”

I scowled and said nothing.

She took the pins out of her mouth and sat back on her heels. “He says he doesn’t know why Brantor Ogge acted as he did. Inviting himself here, and inviting us there, and dropping hints about his granddaughter, and all. He says there’s never been any friendship between Drum and Caspro. I said, ‘Well, better late than never.’ But he just shakes his head. It worries him.”

This was not what I’d expected, and it drew me from my self-absorption. I didn’t know what to say but sought for something wise and reassuring. “Maybe it’s because our domains border now,” was the best I could come up with.

“I think that’s what worries him,” Melle said. She replaced one pin between her lips and set another in the hem of the jacket. It was a man’s coat of black felt, my first.

“So,” she said, removing the pin from her mouth and sitting back again to judge the fit, “I’ll be very glad when this visit’s over with!”

I felt guilt weigh me down, as if the black coat were made of lead.

“Mother,” I said, “he wants me to practice the gift, the undoing, and I don’t want to, and it makes him angry.”

“I know,” she said. She went on adjusting the hang of the jacket, and then stopped and looked at me, up at me, because she was kneeling and I standing. “That’s something I can’t help either of you with. You see that, don’t you, Orrec? I don’t understand it. I can’t meddle in it. I can’t come between you and your father, either. It’s hard, when I see you both unhappy. All I can say to you is, it’s for you, for all of us, that he asks this of you. He wouldn’t ask it if it were wrong. You know that.”

She had to take his part and his side, of course. It was right, and just, but also it was unfair, unfair to me, that all the power should be on his side, all the right, all the reasons, that even she had to be on his side—leaving me alone, a stupid, stubborn boy, unable to use my power, claim my right, or speak my reasons. Because I saw that unfairness, I would not even try to speak. I drew away, into my furious shame, my stone tower, and stood mute inside it.

“Is it because you don’t want to harm creatures that you don’t want to use your power, Orrec?” she asked, quite timidly. Even with me she was timid, humble before this uncanny gift she knew so little of.

But I would not answer her question. I did not nod or shrug or speak. She glanced into my face, then looked back at her work and finished it in silence. She slipped the half-made jacket off my shoulders, held me briefly to her, kissed my cheek, and let me go.

Twice after that, Canoc asked me if I would try my gift. Twice I silently refused. The third time he did not ask, but said, “Orrec, you must obey me now.”

I stood silent. We were not far from the house, but no one else was around. He never tested or shamed me before other people.

“Tell me what you’re afraid of.”

I stood silent.

He faced me, close to me, his eyes blazing, so much pain and passion in his voice that it struck me like the lash of a whip: “Are you afraid of your power or afraid you don’t have the power?”

I caught my breath and cried out, “I am not afraid!”

“Then use your gift! Now! Strike anything!” He flung out his right hand. His left was clenched and held to his side.