Ursula LeGuin - Coming of Age in Karhide

When Tarry's band of harp, fife, viol, and drum took time off for a breather and a swig, a new group hopped up onto the dance floor. "Hey, there's Labby's band!" cried the pretty girl nearest Diamond. "Come on, they're the best!" Labby, a light-skinned, flashy-looking fellow, played the double-reed woodhorn. With him were a violist, a tabor-player, and Rose, who played fife. Their first tune was a stampy, fast and brilliant, too fast for some of the dancers. Diamond and his partner stayed in, and people cheered and clapped them when they finished the dance, sweating and panting. "Beer!" Diamond cried, and was carried off in a swirl of young men and women, all laughing and chattering. He heard behind him the next tune start up, the viol alone, strong and sad as a tenor voice: "Where My Love Is Going." He drank a mug of beer down in one draft, and the girls with him watched the muscles in his strong throat as he swallowed, and they laughed and chattered, and he shivered all over like a cart horse stung by flies. He said, "Oh! I can't -- !" He bolted off into the dusk beyond the lanterns hanging around the brewer's booth. "Where's he going?" said one, and another, "He'll be back," and they laughed and chattered. The tune ended. "Darkrose," he said, behind her in the dark. She turned her head and looked at him. Their heads were on a level, she sitting crosslegged up on the dance platform, he kneeling on the grass. "Come to the sallows," he said. She said nothing. Labby, glancing at her, set his woodhorn to his lips. The drummer struck a triple beat on his tabor, and they were off into a sailor's jig. When she looked around again Diamond was gone. Tarry came back with his band in an hour or so, ungrateful for the respite and much the worse for beer. He interrupted the tune and the dancing, telling Labby loudly to clear out. "Ah, pick your nose, harp-picker," Labby said, and Tarry took offense, and people took sides, and while the dispute was at its brief height, Rose put her fife in her pocket and slipped away. Away from the lanterns of the party it was dark, but she knew the way in the dark. He was there. The willows had grown, these two years. There was only a little space to sit among the green shoots and the long, falling leaves. The music started up, distant, blurred by wind and the murmur of the

river running. "What did you want, Diamond?" "To talk." They were only voices and shadows to each other. "So," she said. "I wanted to ask you to go away with me," he said. "When?" "Then. When we quarreled. I said it all wrong. I thought .... "A long pause. "I thought I could go on running away. With you. And play music. Make a living. Together. I meant to say that." "You didn't say it." "I know. I said everything wrong. I did everything wrong. I betrayed everything. The magic. And the music. And you." "I'm all right," she said. "Are you?" "I'm not really good on the fife, but I'm good enough. What you didn't teach me, I can fill in with a spell, if I have to. And the band, they're all right. Labby isn't as bad as he looks. Nobody fools with me. We make a pretty good living. Winters, I go stay with Mother and help her out. So I'm all right. What about you, Di?" "All wrong." She started to say something, and did not say it. "I guess we were children," he said.

"Now...." "What's changed?" "I made the wrong choice." "Once?" she said.

"Or twice?" "Twice." "Third time's the charm." Neither spoke for a while. She could just make out the bulk of him in the leafy shadows. "You're bigger than you were," she said. "Can you still make a light, Di? I want to see you." He shook his head. "That was the one thing you could do that I never could. And you never could teach me." "I didn't know what I was doing," he said. "Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't." "And the wizard in South Port didn't teach you how to make it work?" "He only taught me names." "Why can't you do it now?" "I gave it up, Darkrose. I had to either do it and nothing else, or not do it. You have to have a single heart." "I don't see why," she said. "My mother can cure a fever and ease a childbirth and find a lost ring, maybe that's nothing compared to what the wizards and the dragonlords can do, but it's not nothing, all the same. And she didn't give up anything for it. Having me didn't stop her. She had me so that she could learn how to do it! Just because I learned how to play music from you, did I have to give up saying spells? I can bring a fever down now too. Why should you have to stop doing one thing so you can do the other?" "My father," he began, and stopped, and gave a kind of laugh. "They don't go together," he said. "The money and the music." "The father and the witchgirl," said Darkrose. Again there was silence between them. The leaves of the willows stirred. "Would you come back to me?" he said. "Would you go with me, live with me, marry me, Darkrose?" "Not in your father's house,

Di." "Anywhere. Run away." "But you can't have me without the music." "Or the music without you." "I would," she said. "Does Labby want a harper?" She hesitated; she laughed. "If he wants a fife-player," she said. "I haven't practiced ever since I left, Darkrose," he said. "But the music was always in my head, and you .... "She reached out her hands to him. They knelt facing, the willow-leaves moving across their hair. They kissed each other, timidly at first. IN THE YEARS after Diamond left home, Golden made more money than he had ever done before. All his deals were profitable.

It was as if good fortune stuck to him and he could not shake it off. He grew immensely wealthy. He did not forgive his son. It would have made a happy ending, but he would not have it. To leave so, without a word, on his nameday night, to go off with the witchgirl, leaving all the honest work undone, to be a vagrant musician, a harper twanging and singing and grinning for pennies -there was nothing but shame and pain and anger in it for Golden. So he had his tragedy. Tuly shared it with him for a long time, since she could see her son only by lying to her husband, which she found hard to do. She wept to think of Diamond hungry, sleeping hard. Cold nights of autumn were a misery to her. But as time went on and she heard him spoken of as Diamond the sweet singer of the West of Havnor, Diamond who had harped and sung to the great lords in the Tower of the Sword, her heart grew lighter. And once, when Golden was down 'at South Port, she and Tangle took a donkey cart and drove over to Easthill, where they heard Diamond sing the Lay of the Lost Queen, while Rose sat with them, and Little Tuly sat on Tuly's knee. And if not a happy ending, that was a true joy, which may be enough to ask for, after all.

URSULA K. Le GUIN OLDERS The moon slips and shines in the wrinkled mirror before the prow, and from the northern sky the Bright Companions shoot glancing arrows of light along the water. In the stern of the boat the polesman stands in the watchful solemnity of his task. His movements as he poles and steers the boat are slow, certain, august. The long, low channelboat slides on the black water as silently as the reflection it pursues. A few dark figures huddle in it. One dark figure lies full length on the half deck, arms at his sides, closed eyes unseeing that other moon slipping and shining through wisps of fog in the luminous blue night sky. The Husbandman of Sandry is coming home from war. They had been waiting for him on Sandry Island ever since last spring, when he went with seven men, following the messengers who came to raise the Queen's army. In midsummer Four of the men of Sandry brought back the news that he was wounded and was lying in the care of the Queen's own physician. They told of his great valor in battle, and told of their own prowess too, and how they had won the war. Since then there had been no news. With him now in the channelboat were the three companions who had stayed with him, and a physician sent by the Queen, an, assistant to her own doctor. This man, an active, slender person in his forties, cramped by the long night's travel, was quick to leap ashore when the boat slid silently up along the stone quay of Sandry Farm. While the boatmen and the others busied themselves making the boat fast and lifting the stretcher and its burden up from the boat to the quay, the doctor went on up to the house. Approaching the island, as the sky imperceptibly lightened from night-blue to colorless pallor, he had seen the spires of windmills, the crowns of trees, and the roofs of the house, all in black silhouette, standing very high after the miles of endlessly level reedbeds and water channels. "Hello, the people!" he called out as he entered the courtyard. "Wake up! Sandry has come home!" The kitchen was astir already. Lights sprang up elsewhere in the big house.