Ursula K. LeGuin - Chronicles of the Western Shore 01 - Gifts.pdf - Ursula K. LeGuin - widez2

Rejecting the Gift

It's a queerbusiness, making oneself blind.

To cheat, to look, one glance, only a glance—the temptations of course were endless. Every step, every

act that was now so immensely difficult and complicated and awkward could become easy and natural so

easily and naturally. Just lift the blindfold, just for a moment, just from one eye, just take one peek....

I did not lift the blindfold, but it did slip several times, and my eyes would dazzle with all the brightness of

the world's day before I could close them.

Learning to be blind was a queer business, yes, and a hard one, but I kept to it. The more impatient I

was with the helplessness and dreariness of being sightless the more I raged against the blindfold, the

more I feared to lift it. It saved me from the horror of destroying what I did not mean to destroy. While I

wore it, I could not kill what I loved. I remembered what my fear and anger had done. I remembered the

moment when I thought I had destroyed my father.

If I could not learn to use my power, I could learn how not to use it.

He was lost when he came to us, and I fear the silver spoons he stole from us didn't save him when he

ran away and went up into the high domains. Yet in the end the lost man, the runaway man was our

guide.

Gry called him the runaway man. When he first came, she was sure he’d done some terrible thing, a

murder or a betrayal, and was escaping vengeance. What else would bring a Lowlander here, among us?

"Ignorance," I said. "He knows nothing of us. He's not afraid of us."

"He said people down there warned him not to come up among the witches."

"But he knows nothing about the gifts," I said. "It's all just talk, to him. Legends, lies..."

We were both right, no doubt. Certainly Emmon was running away, if only from a well-earned

reputation for thievery, or from boredom; he was as restless, as fearless and inquisitive and

inconsequential as a hound puppy, trotting wherever his nose led him. Recalling the accent and turns of

speech he had, I know now that he came from far in the south, farther than Algalanda, where tales of the

Uplands were just that—tales: old rumors of the distant northland, where wicked witch-folk lived in icy

mountains and did impossible things.

If he'd believed what they told him down in Danner, he'd never have come up to Caspromant. If he'd

believed us, he never would have gone on higher in the mountains. He loved to hear stories, so he

listened to ours, but he didn't believe them. He was a city man, he'd had some education, he'd travelled

the length of the Lowlands. He knew the world. Who were we, me and Gry? What did we know, a blind

boy and a grim girl, sixteen years old, stuck in the superstition and squalor of the desolate hill farms that

we so grandly called our domains? He led us on, in his lazy kindness, to talk about the great powers we

had, but while we talked he was seeing the bare, hard way we lived, the cruel poverty, the cripples and

backward people of the farms, seeing our ignorance of everything outside these dark hills, and saying to

himself, Oh yes, what great powers they have, poor brats!

Gry and I feared that when he left us he went to Germant. It is hard to think he may still be there, alive

but a slave, with legs twisted like corkscrews, or his face made monstrous for Erroy's amusement, or his

eyes truly blinded, as mine were not. For Erroy wouldn't have suffered his careless airs, his insolence, for

an hour.

I took some pains to keep him away from my father when his tongue was flapping, but only because

Canoc's patience was short and his mood dark, not because I feared he'd ever use his gift without good

cause. In any case he paid little heed to Emmon or anyone else. Since my mother’s death his mind was all

given to grief and rage and rancor. He huddled over his pain, his longing for vengeance. Gry, who knew

all the nests and eyries for miles around, once saw a carrion eagle brooding his pair of silvery, grotesque

eaglets in a nest up on the Sheer, after a shepherd killed the mother bird who hunted for them both. So

my father brooded and starved.

To Gry and me, Emmon was a treasure, a bright creature come into our gloom. He fed our hunger. For

we were starving too.

He would never tell us enough about the Lowlands. He'd give an answer of some kind to every question

I asked, but often a joking answer, evasive or merely vague. There was probably a good deal about his

past life that he didn't want us to know, and anyhow he wasn't a keen observer and clear reporter, as

Gry was when she was my eyes. She could describe exactly how the new bull calf looked, his bluish coat

and knobby legs and little furry hornbuds, so that I could all but see him. But if I asked Emmon to tell

about the city of Derris Water, all he said was that it wasn't much of a city and the market was dull. Yet I

knew, because my mother had told me, that Derris Water had tall red houses and deep streets, that steps

of slate led up from the docks and moorages where the river traffic came and went, that there was a

market of birds, and a market of fish, and a market of spices and incense and honey, a market for old

clothes and a market for new ones, and the great pottery fairs to which people came from all up and

down the Trond River, even from the far shores of the ocean.

Maybe Emmon had had bad luck with his thieving in Derris Water.

Whatever the reason, he preferred to ask us the questions and sit back at ease to listen to us—to me,

mostly. I was always a talker, if there was anybody to listen. Gry had a long habit of silence and

watchfulness, but Emmon could draw her out.

I doubt he knew how lucky he'd been in finding us two, but he appreciated our making him welcome

and keeping him comfortable through a bitter, rainy winter. He was sorry for us. He was bored, no

doubt. He was inquisitive.

"So what is it this fellow up at Geremant does that's so fearsome?" he'd ask, his tone just skeptical

enough that I'd try as hard as I could to convince him of the truth of what I said. But these were matters

that were not much talked about, even among people with the gift. It seemed unnatural to speak of them

aloud.

"The gift of that lineage is called the twisting," I said at last.

"Twisting? Like a sort of dancing?"

"No." The words were hard to find, and hard to say. "Twisting people."

"Making them turn around?"

"No. Their arms, legs. Necks. Bodies." I twisted my own body a bit with discomfort at the subject.

Finally I said, "You saw old Gonnen, that woodsman, up over Knob Hill. We passed him yesterday on

the cart road. Gry told you who he was."

"All bent over like a nutcracker."

"Brantor Erroy did that to him."

"Doubled him up like that? What for?"

"A punishment. The brantor said he came on him picking up wood in Gere Forest."

After a little, Emmon said, "Rheumatism will do that to a man."

Ursula K. LeGuin - Chronicles of the Western Shore 01 - Gifts.pdf

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