Ursula Le Guin - Gifts

While Drum had prospered, largely by sheep stealing and land grabbing, these last three families had come on hard times. Their great days seemed to be behind them, especially the Caspros. Even in Blind Caddard’s time the strength and numbers of our line had grown perilously small, though we still held our domain and some thirty families of serfs and farmers.

A farmer had some ancestral relation to a lineage, though not necessarily the gift; a serf had neither. Both had the obligation of fealty and the right of claim on the chief family of their domain. The family of most serfs and farmers had lived on the land they farmed as long as the brantor’s family or longer. The work and management of crops, livestock, forests, and all the rest were allocated by long custom and frequent council. The people of our domain were seldom reminded that the brantor had power of life or death over them. Caddard’s gift of two serfs to Tibro had been a rare and reckless assertion of wealth and power, which saved the domain by catching the invaders in the net of his extravagant generosity. The gift’s gift was stronger, perhaps, than the gift itself. Caddard had used it wisely. But things had gone far wrong when a brantor used his power against his own people, as Erroy did at Geremant, and Ogge at Drummant.

The Barre gift had never been very useful for such purposes. To be able to call wild beasts out of the forest, or gentle a colt, or discuss things with a hound, was a gift indeed; but it did not give you dominion over men who could set your haystack afire or kill you and your hound with a glance and a word. The Barres had lost their own domain long ago to the Helvars of the Carrantages. Various families of the lineage had come down the mountain and married into our western domains. They tried to keep their line true so as not to weaken or lose their gift, but of course they could not always do so. Several of our farmers were Barres. Our healers and curers of livestock, our hen keepers and hound trainers, were all farmwives with Barre blood in them. There were still Barres of the true line at Geremant, Cordemant, and Roddmant.

The Rodds, with their gift of the knife, were well prepared to defend or to attack and to assert dominion if they wished, but they mostly lacked the temper for it. They were not feuders. They were more interested in elk hunts than in forays. Unlike most self-respecting Uplanders, they would rather breed good cattle than steal them. The cream-white oxen Caspromant had once been famous for had in fact been bred by the Rodds. My ancestors stole cows and bull calves from Roddmant till they had a breeding herd of their own. The Rodds worked their land and bred their cattle and throve well enough, but did not increase and grow great. They had intermarried a good deal with Barres, and so it was that when I was a child, Roddmant had two brantors, Gry’s mother Parn Barre and her father Ternoc Rodd.

Our families had been on good terms, as these things go in the Uplands, for generations, and Ternoc and my father were true friends. Ternoc had ridden his droop-lipped farmhorse in the great raid on Dunet. His share of the loot was one of the little serf girls, whom he soon gave to Bata Caspro of Cordemant, who had the other one, because the two were sisters and kept sniveling after each other. The year before the raid, Ternoc and Parn had married. Parn had grown up at Roddmant and had some Rodd blood in her. A month after my mother gave birth to me, Parn bore a daughter, Gry.

Gry and I were cradle friends. When we were little children our parents visited often, and we ran off and played. I was the first, I think, to see Gry’s gift come to power, though I am not certain if it is a memory or the imagination of something she told me. Children can see what they are told. What I see is this: Gry and I are sitting making twig houses in the dirt at the side of Roddmant kitchen gardens, and a bull elk, a great stag, comes out of the little wood that lies behind the house. He walks to us. He is immense, taller than a house, with great, swaying branches of antlers that balance against the sky. He comes slowly and directly to Gry. She reaches up and he puts his nose to her palm as if in salute. “Why did he come here?” I ask, and she says, “I called him.” That is all I remember.

When I told my father the memory, years later, he said it could not have been so. Gry and I had been no more than four, and a gift, he said, scarcely ever shows itself till the child is nine or ten years old,

“Caddard was three,” I said.

My mother touched the side of my little finger with the side of her little finger: Do not contradict your father. Canoc was tense and anxious, I was careless and bumptious; she protected him from me and me from him, with the most delicate, imperceptible tact.

Gry was the best of playmates. We got into a lot of mild trouble. The worst was when we let the chickens out. Gry claimed she could teach chickens to do all sorts of tricks—walk across lines, jump up onto her finger. “It is my gift,” she said pompously. We were six or seven. We went into the big poultry yard at Roddmant and cornered some half-grown poults and tried to teach them something—anything—anything at all: an occupation so frustrating and absorbing that we never noticed we had left the yard gate wide open until all the hens had followed the rooster right up into the woods. Then everyone had a try at rounding them all back up. Parn, who could have called them, was away on a hunt. The foxes were grateful to us, if no one else was. Gry felt very guilty, the poultry yard being one of her charges. She wept as I never saw her weep again. She roamed in the woods all that evening and the next day, calling the missing hens, “Biddy! Lily! Snowy! Fan!” in a little voice like a disconsolate quail.

We always seemed to get into mischief at Roddmant. When Gry came with her parents or her father to Caspromant, there were no disasters. My mother was very fond of Gry. She would say suddenly,

“Stand there, Gry!” Gry would stand still, and my mother would gaze at her till the seven-year-old became self-conscious and began to wriggle and giggle. “Now be still,” my mother would say. “I’m learning you, don’t you see, so that I can have a girl of my own exactly like you. I want to know how to do it.”

“You could have another boy like Orrec,” Gry offered, but my mother said, “No! One Orrec is quite enough. I need a Gry!”

Gry’s mother Parn was a strange, restless woman. Her gift was strong, and she seemed half a wild creature herself. She was much in demand to call animals to hunters, and was often away, half across the Uplands, at a hunt at one domain or another. When she was at Roddmant she seemed always to have a cage around her, to be looking at you through bars. She and her husband Ternoc were polite and wary with each other. She had no particular interest in her daughter, whom she treated like all other children, with impartial indifference.

“Does your mother teach you how to use your gift?” I asked Gry once, in the self-importance of being taught by my father how to use my gift.

Gry shook her head. “She says you don’t use the gift. It uses you.”

“You have to learn how to control it,” I informed her, solemn and severe.

“I don’t,” said Gry.

She was wilful, indifferent—too much like her mother, sometimes. She would not argue with me, would not defend her opinion, would not change it. I wanted words. She wanted silence. But when my mother told stories, Gry listened from her silence, and heard every word, heard, held, treasured, pondered it.

“You’re a listener,” Melle said to her. “Not just a caller, a listener too. You listen to mice, don’t you?”

Gry nodded.

“What do they say?”

“Mouse things,” Gry said. She was very shy, even with Melle, whom she loved dearly.