Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin Read Free Book Online

But to a boy my age women’s griefs were too troubling to endure. I warded them off, walled them out. “Play Ambush?” I challenged Tib, and we got out the slates and chalk and marked the squares and played Ambush till lights-out.
    Miv died as the sun rose that morning.
     
    T HE DEATH OF a slave child would not ordinarily cause any disturbance to a great House such as Arcamand. The slave women would weep, and the women of the Family would come with kind words and gifts of burial wrappings or money to buy them. Very early in the morning a little troop of slaves in funeral white would carry the litter down to the riverside graveyard, and pray at the grave to Ennu to lead the small soul home, and come back weeping, and get to work.
    But this death was not quite ordinary. Everyone in Arcamand knew why Miv had died, and it was a troubling knowledge. This time, it was the slaves who spoke and the masters who kept silence.
    Of course the slaves spoke only to other slaves.
    But there was talk such as I had never heard: bitter anger, indignation, not from the women only but from men. Metter, the Father’s bodyguard, respected by all for his strength and dignity, said in the barrack that the child’s death was a shame to the Family, for which the Ancestors would demand atonement. The chief hostler, Sem, a clever, vigorous, fearless man, said out loud that Torm was a mad dog. Such sayings were whispered around the courts and corridors and the dormitory. And Remen’s story, too: he told us that the Mother was holding Miv on her lap when he died, and she held him close for a long time and whispered to him, “Forgive me, little one, forgive.”
    He told this in the hope it might console Ennumer, for she was wild with grief, and it did comfort her to know the child had been in tender arms when he died, and that the Mother grieved that she hadn’t been able to save him. But others heard it differently. “She might well ask forgiveness!” Iemmer said, and others agreed. The story of how Miv had innocently laughed at Torm and how Torm had turned on the child and knocked him across the room—Oco had sobbed it out the day it happened, and Tib and Sallo had confirmed it, and as it was retold in the barrack and stables it lost nothing in the telling.
    Hoby defended Torm, saying he’d only meant to slap the child for impertinence and didn’t know his own strength. But Hoby was in ill favor. Nobody openly blamed him for my adventure at the well, since I hadn’t accused him, but nobody admired him for it. And now his loyalty to Torm was held against him; it looked too much like siding with the masters against the slaves. I heard the stableboys call him “Twinny” behind his back. And Metter said to him, “A man who doesn’t know his own strength ought to learn it fighting with men, not beating up babies.”
    This talk of blame and forgiveness was very distressing to me. It seemed to open cracks and faults in the world, to shake things loose. I went to the anteroom of the Ancestors and tried to pray to my guardian there, but his painted eyes looked through me, haughty and uninterested. Sotur was in the room, bowed down in silent worship; she had lighted incense at the altar of the Mothers, and the smoke drifted up into the high, shadowy dome.
    That night after Miv died, I dreamed that I was sweeping one of the inner courts of the House and found leading from it a corridor I had never seen before, which led to rooms I did not know, where strangers turned to greet me as if they knew me. I was frightened of transgressing, but they smiled, and one of them held out a beautiful ripe peach to me. “Take it,” she said, and called me by some name I could not remember when I woke. There was a shining like the trembling of sunlight all round her head. I slept and dreamed again, exploring the new rooms; I met no people now, but heard their voices in other rooms as I followed the high stone corridors. I came to a bright interior courtyard