Gifts by Ursula K. Le Guin Read Free Book Online Page B

rest in her own words. She gave me the book on my ninth birthday: forty squares of glazed linen, covered edge to edge in pale, formal script, sewn with blue-dyed thread along the top. I pored over it. When I knew it all by heart, still I read and reread it, treasuring the written words not only for the story they told but for what I saw hidden in them: all the other stories. The stories my mother told. And the stories no one had ever told.

♦ 5 ♦
    D uring these years, my father also continued my education; but as I showed no signs of being a second Caddard and terrifying the world with my untimely powers, he could only tell me and show me the ways of our gift, and wait in patience till it showed itself in me. He himself had been nine years old, he said, before he could knock a gnat down. He was not a patient man by nature, only by self-discipline, and he was hopeful. He tested me pretty often. I tried my best, glaring and pointing and whispering, summoning up that mysterious thing, my will.
    “What is the will?” I asked him.
    “Well, it’s your intention. You must mean to use your gift. If you used it without willing to, you might do great harm.”
    “But what does it feel like, to use it?”
    He frowned and thought a long time before he spoke.
    “It’s as if something comes all together,” he said. His left hand moved a little, involuntarily. “As if you were a knot at the center of a dozen lines, all of them drawn into you, and you holding them taut. As if you were a bow, but with a dozen bowstrings. And you draw them in tighter, and they draw on you, till you say, ‘Now!’ And the power shoots out like the arrow.”
    “So you will your power to go unmake the thing you’re looking at?”
    He frowned again and thought again. “It’s not a matter you can say in words. There’s no words in it at all.”
    “But you say…How do you know what to say?”
    For I had realised that what Canoc said when he used his gift was never the same word, and maybe not a word at all. It sounded like the hah! or hard outbreath of a man making a great, sudden effort with his whole body, yet there was more in it than that; but I could never imitate it.
    “It comes when…It’s part of the power acting,” was all he could say. A conversation like this troubled him. He could not answer such questions. I should not ask them; I should not have to ask them.
    As I turned twelve, and thirteen, I worried increasingly that my gift had not shown itself. My fear was not only in my thoughts but in my dreams, in which I was always just about to do a great, dreadful act of destruction, to bring a huge stone tower crumbling and crashing down, to unmake all the people of some dark, strange village—or I had just done it, and was struggling among ruins and faceless, boneless corpses to find my way home. But always it was before the act of undoing, or after it.
    I would wake from such a nightmare, my heart pounding like a horse at the gallop, and try to master my terror and gather the power together, as Canoc had said to do. Shivering so that I could scarcely breathe, I would stare at the carved knob at the foot of my bed, just visible in the dawn light, and raise up my left hand and point at it, and determine to destroy that black knob of wood, and push out my breath in a convulsive hah! Then I would shut my eyes hard and pray the darkness that my wish, my will had been granted. But when I opened my eyes at last, the wooden knob stood untouched. My time had not come.
    Before my fourteenth year we had had little to do with the people of Drummant. The neighbor with whom we were on terms of watchful enmity was Erroy of Geremant. Gry and I were utterly forbidden to go anywhere near our border with that domain, which ran through an ash wood. We obeyed. We both knew Bent Gonnen, and the man with his arms on backwards. Brantor Erroy had done that in one of his fits of joking—he called it joking. The man was one of his own serfs. “Took the use