Ursula Le Guin - Tehanu The Last Book of Earthsea

Tenar shook her head.

“I’ll just go tell her,” said the old man, delighted to be first with the news, and he clumped off across the yard. He turned back halfway. “Never would have picked you as useful with a pitchfork!” he shouted to Ged, and slapped his thigh, laughing, and went on.

Ged slipped off the heavy gaiters, took off his muddy shoes and set them on the doorstep, and came over to the fire in his stocking feet. Trousers and jerkin and shirt of homespun wool: a Gontish goatherd, with a canny face, a hawk nose, and clear, dark eyes.

“There’ll be people out soon," he said. “To tell you all about it, and hear what happened here again. They’ve got the two that ran off shut up now in a wine cellar with no wine in it, and fifteen or twenty men guarding them, and twenty or thirty boys trying to get a peek He yawned, shook his shoulders and arms to loosen them, and with a glance at Tenar asked permission to sit down at the fire.

She gestured to the hearthseat. “You must be worn out, she whispered.

“I slept a little, here, last night. Couldn’t stay awake.” He yawned again. He looked up at her, gauging, seeing how she was.

“It was Therru’s mother,” she said. Her voice would not go above a whisper.

He nodded. He sat leaning forward a bit, his arms on his knees, as Flint had used to sit, gazing into the fire. They were very alike and entirely unlike, as unlike as a buried stone and a soaring bird. Her heart ached, and her bones ached, and her mind was bewildered among foreboding and grief and remembered fear and a troubled lightness.

“The witch has got our man,” he said. “Tied down in case he feels lively, With the holes in him stuffed full of spiderwebs and blood-stanching spells. She says he’ll live to hang.”

“To hang.”

“It’s up to the King’s Courts of Law, now that they’re meeting again. Hanged or set to slave-labor.”

She shook her head, frowning.

“You wouldn’t just let him go, Tenar," ‘ he said gently, watching her.

“No.”

“They must be punished,” he said, still watching her.

“Punished." That’s what he said. Punish the child. She’s bad. She must be punished. Punish me, for taking her. For being-’ ‘ She struggled to speak. “I don’t want punishment! - It should not have happened. - I wish you’d killed him!”

“I did my best,” Ged said.

After a good while she laughed, rather shakily. “You certainly did.”

“Think how easy it would have been,” he said, looking into the coals again, “when I was a wizard. I could have set a binding spell on them, up there on the road, before they knew it. I could have marched them right down to Valmouth like a flock of sheep. Or last night, here, think of the fireworks I could have set off! They’d never have known what hit them.”

“They still don’t,” she said.

He glanced at her. There was in his eye the faintest, irrepressible gleam of triumph.

“No,” he said. “They don’t.”

“Useful with a pitchfork,” she murmured.

He yawned enormously.

“Why don’t you go in and get some sleep? The second room down the hall. Unless you want to entertain company. I see Lark and Daisy coming, and some of the children.” She had got up, hearing voices, to look out the window.

“I’ll do that,” he said, and slipped away.

Lark and her husband, Daisy the blacksmith’s wife, and other friends from the village came by all day long to tell and be told all, as Ged had said. She found that their company revived her, carried her away from the constant presence of last night’s terror, little by little, till she could begin to look back on it as something that had happened, not something that was happening, that must always be happening to her.

That was also what Therru had to learn to do, she thought, but not with one night: with her life.

She said to Lark when the others had gone, “What makes me rage at myself is how stupid I was.”

“I did tell you you ought to keep the house locked.”

“No-Maybe-That’s just it. ‘ ‘

“I know,’ ‘ said Lark.

“But I meant, when they were here-I could have run out and fetched Shandy and Clearbrook-maybe I could have taken Therru, Or I could have gone to the lean-to and got the pitchfork myself. Or the apple-pruner. It’s seven feet long with a blade like a razor; I keep it the way Flint kept it. Why didn’t I do that? Why didn’t I do something? Why did I just lock myself in-when it wasn’t any good trying to? If he- If Hawk hadn’t been here- All I did was trap myself and Therru. I did finally go to the door with the butcher knife, and I shouted at them. I was half crazy. But that wouldn’t have scared them off.”

“I don’t know,” Lark said. “It was crazy, but maybe . . . I don’t know. What could you do but lock the doors? But it’s like we’re all our lives locking the doors. It’s the house we live in.”

They looked around at the stone walls, the stone floors, the stone chimney, the sunny window of the kitchen of Oak Farm, Farmer Flint’s house.

“That girl, that woman they murdered,” Lark said, looking shrewdly at Tenar. “She was the same one." Tenar nodded.

“One of them told me she was pregnant. Four, five months along.”

They were both silent.

“Trapped,” Tenar said.

Lark sat back, her hands on the skirt on her heavy thighs, her back straight, her handsome face set. “Fear,” she said. “What are we so afraid of? Why do we let ‘em tell us we’re afraid? What is it they’re afraid of? ‘ ‘ She picked up the stocking she had been darning, turned it in her hands, was silent awhile; finally she said, “What are they afraid of us for?”

Tenar spun and did not answer.

Therru came running in, and Lark greeted her: “There’s my honey! Come give me a hug, my honey girl!”

Therru hugged her hastily. “Who are the men they caught?” she demanded in her hoarse, toneless voice, looking from Lark to Tenar.

Tenar stopped her wheel. She spoke slowly.

“One was Handy. One was a man called Shag. The one that was hurt is called Hake.” She kept her eyes on Therru’s face; she saw the fire, the scar reddening. “The woman they killed was called Senny, I think.”

“Senini,’ ‘ the child whispered.

Tenar nodded.

“Did they kil lher dead?”

She nodded again.

“Tadpole says they were h ere.”

S he nodded again.

The child looked around the room, as the women had done; but her look was utterly unacceptant, seeing no walls.

“Will you kill them?”

“They may be hanged.”

“Dead?”

“Yes.”

Therru nodded, half indifferently. She went out again, rejoining Lark’s children by the wellhouse.

The two women said nothing. They spun and mended, silent, by the fire, in Flint’s house.

After a long time Lark said, “What’s become of the fellow, the shepherd, that followed ‘em here? Hawk, you said he’s called?”

“He’s asleep in there,’ ‘ said Tenar, nodding to the back of the house.

“Ah,” said Lark.

The wheel purred. “I knew him before last night.”

“Ah. Up at Re Albi, did you?”

Tenar nodded. The wheel purred.

“To follow those three, and take ‘em on in the dark with a pitchfork, that took a bit of courage, now. Not a young man, is he?”

“No.” After a while she went on, “He’d been ill, and needed work. So I sent him over the mountain to tell Clear-brook to take him on here. But Clearbrook thinks he can still do it all himself, so he sent him up above the Springs for the summer herding. He was coming back from that.”

“Think you’ll keep him on here, then?" ‘“If he likes,” said Tenar.