Ursula Le Guin - Gifts

Sometimes there was a tone in Emmon’s voice as he spoke to Gry that caught my ear; a little added softness, propitiating, almost wheedling. Mostly he spoke to her as a man does to a girl, but sometimes he sounded like a man speaking to a woman.

It didn’t get him far. She answered him as a girl, gruff and plain. She liked Emmon but she didn’t think much of him.

When it rained and blew or the snow flurries swept over our hills, we stayed in the chimney corner. Running short of other matters to talk about, since Emmon was such a poor hand at telling us about life in the Lowlands, one day Gry asked me for a story. She liked the hero tales of the Chamhan , so I told one of the stories about Hamneda and his friend Omnan. Then, seduced by the eager listening of my audience—for the spinning women had stopped their singing, and some had even stopped their wheels to hear the tale—I went on and spoke a poem from the scriptures of the Temple of Raniu, which my mother had written down. There were gaps in it where her memory had failed, and I had filled them in with my own words, keeping to the complex meter.

The language lifted up my heart whenever I read it, and as I spoke it, it possessed me, it sang through me. When I ended, I heard for the first time in my life that silence which is the performer’s sweetest reward.

“By all the names,” Emmon said in an awed voice.

There was a nice little murmur of admiration from the spinning women.

“How do you know that tale, that song?— Ah, of course, through your mother— But she told you all that? And you remember it?”

“She wrote it down for me,” I said, without thinking.

“Wrote it? You can read?— But not with a blindfold on!”

“I can read, but not with a blindfold on.”

“What a memory you must have!”

“Memory is a blind man’s eyes,” I said, with a certain malice, feeling that I was fencing and had best be on the offensive, having nearly dropped my guard.

“And she taught you to read?”

“Gry and me.”

“But what have you got to read, up here? I’ve never seen a book about.”

“She wrote out some for us.”

“By all the names. Listen, I have a book. It was… given me, down in the city. I hauled it about in my pack all this way, thinking there might be some value to it. Not up here, eh? But to you, maybe. Here, let me get the thing.” He soon returned, and put into my hands a small box, no deeper than a finger joint is long. The lid lifted easily. Under it, instead of a hollow space, I felt a surface like silk cloth. Under it were many more cloths, leaves, held at one edge, as in the book my mother had made, fine and thin yet delicately stiff, so that they turned easily My fingers marveled to touch them. And my eyes yearned to see them, but I handed the book back to Emmon. “Read a little,” I said.

“Here, Gry, you read,” Emmon said promptly.

I heard Gry turning the leaves. She spelled out a few words, and gave up. “It looks so different from what Melle wrote,” she said. “It’s small, and black, and more straight up and down, and all the letters look alike.”

“It’s printed,” Emmon said knowledgeably, but when I wanted to know what that meant, he couldn’t tell me much. “The priests do it,” he said vaguely. “They have these wheels, like a wine press, you know…”

Gry described the book for me: the outside of it was leather, she said, probably calfskin, with a hard shiny finish, stamped round the edges with a scroll design in gold leaf, and on the back, where the leaves joined, was more gold leaf and a word stamped in red, and the edges of the leaves were gilt. “It’s very, very beautiful,” she said. “It must be a precious thing.”

And she gave it back to Emmon, as I knew by his saying, “No: it’s for you and Orrec. If you can read it, do. And if you can’t, maybe somebody will happen by someday who can, and they’ll think you great scholars, eh?” He laughed his merry laugh, and we thanked him, and he put the book back in my hands. I held it. It was indeed a precious thing.

In the earliest, greyest light of morning I saw it, the gold leaf, the red word Transformations on the spine; I opened it and saw the paper (which I still took for cloth of incredible fineness), the splendid, bold, large, curling letters of the title page, the small black print thick as ants crawling across every white leaf…Thick as ants. I saw the ant hill by the path above the Ashbrook, the ants crawling in and out about their business, and I struck at them with hand and eye and word and will, and still they crawled on about their business, and I closed my eyes…. I closed my eyes, and opened them. The book lay before me, open. I read a line: So in his heart in silence he foreswore his vow. It was poetry, a story in poetry. I turned the pages slowly back to the first one and began to read.

Coaly shifted position at my feet and looked up. I looked down at her. I saw a middle-sized dog with a close, curly, black coat that grew very short and fine on her ears and face, a long nose, a high forehead, clear, intent, dark-brown eyes looking straight up into mine.

In my excitement of anticipation, I had forgotten to put her out of the room before I took off the blindfold.

She stood up, without ceasing to look into my eyes. She was very much taken aback but far too dignified and responsible to show it in any way except by that intense, puzzled, honest stare.

“Coaly,” I said in a shaky voice, and put out my hand to her muzzle.

She sniffed it. It was me all right.

I knelt down and hugged the dog. We did not go in much for displays of affection, but she pressed her forehead against my chest and kept it there a while.

I said, “Coaly, I will never hurt you.”

She knew that. She looked at the door, however, as if to tell me that though this was much pleasanter, she was willing to go and wait outside, since that was the custom.

I said, “Stay,” and she lay down beside the chair, and I went back to my book.

Emmon left soon after that. Though Canoc’s hospitality would not permit any lapse in courtesy, it was clear that his welcome was wearing thin. And in fact life in the Stone House in late winter and early spring was thin, with the hens not laying, and the sausages and hams long since eaten, and no beef cattle to slaughter. We lived mostly on oat porridge and dried apples; our one meat and luxury was smoked or fresh trout or salmon-trout caught in the Spate or the Ashbrook. Having heard our talk of the great, wealthy domains of the Carrantages, Emmon maybe thought he’d eat better there. I hope he got there. I hope they did not use their gifts on him.

Before he left he talked seriously with Gry and me, as seriously as such a light-souled, light-fingered man could talk. He told us we should leave the Uplands. “What is there here for you?” he said. “Gry, you won’t do as your mother wishes and bring the beasts to the hunters, so you’re considered useless. Orrec, you keep that damned bandage on, so you are useless, for anything to be done on a farm like this. But if you went down into the Lowlands, Gry, with that mare of yours, and showed off her paces, you’d get a job with any horse breeder or stable you liked. And you, Orrec, the way you remember tales and songs, and the way you make tales and songs of your own, that’s a skill of value in all the towns, and in the cities too. People gather to hear tellers and singers, and pay them well, and rich people keep them in their household, to show off with. And if you have to keep your eyes shut all your life, well, some of those poets and singers are blind men. Though if I were you, I’d open my eyes and see what I had within hand’s reach.” And he laughed.