The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin Read Free Book Online Page A

before, Alder’s dream or vision, Alder’s voyaging soul had drawn him with it to the edge of the dark land.
    He was wide awake now. He sat gazing at the greyish square of the west window, full of stars.
    The grass under the wall . . . It did not grow farther down where the hill leveled out into the dim, dry land. He had said to Alder that down there was only dust, only rock. He saw that black dust, black rock. Dead stream beds where no water ever ran. No living thing. No bird, no field mouse cowering, no glitter and buzz of little insects, the creatures of the sun. Only the dead, with their empty eyes and silent faces.
    But did birds not die?
    A mouse, a gnat, a goat—a white-and-brown, clever-hoofed, yellow-eyed, shameless goat, Sippy who had been Tehanu’s pet, and who had died last winter at a great age—where was Sippy?
    Not in the dry land, the dark land. She was dead, but she was not there. She was where she belonged, in the dirt. In the dirt, in the light, in the wind, the leap of water from the rock, the yellow eye of the sun.
    Then why, then why . . .
    ***
    H E WATCHED A LDER MEND THE pitcher. Fat-bellied and jade green, it had been a favorite of Tenar’s; she had carried it all the way from Oak Farm, years ago. It had slipped from his hands the other day as he took it from the shelf. He had picked up the two big pieces of it and the little fragments with some notion of gluing them back together so it could sit out for looks, if never for use again. Every time he saw the pieces, which he had put into a basket, his clumsiness had outraged him.
    Now, fascinated, he watched Alder’s hands. Slender, strong, deft, unhurried, they cradled the shape of the pitcher, stroking and fitting and settling the pieces of pottery, urging and caressing, the thumbs coaxing and guiding the smaller fragments into place, reuniting them, reassuring them. While he worked he murmured a two-word, tuneless chant. They were words of the Old Speech. Ged knew and did not know their meaning. Alder’s face was serene, all stress and sorrow gone: a face so wholly absorbed in time and task that timeless calm shone through it.
    His hands separated from the pitcher, opening out from it like the sheath of a flower opening. It stood on the oak table, whole.
    He looked at it with quiet pleasure.
    When Ged thanked him, he said, “It was no trouble at all. The breaks were very clean. It’s a well-made piece, and good clay. It’s the shoddy work that costs to mend.”
    “I had a thought how you might find sleep,” Ged said.
    Alder had waked at first light and had got up, so that his host could go to his bed and sleep sound till broad day; but clearly the arrangement would not do for long.
    “Come along with me,” the old man said, and they set off inland on a path that skirted the goats’ pasture and wound between knolls, little, half-tended fields, and inlets of the forest. Gont was a wild-looking place to Alder, ragged and random, the shaggy mountain always frowning and looming above.
    “It seemed to me,” Sparrowhawk said as they walked, “if I could do as well as the Master Herbal did, keeping you from the hill of the wall only by putting my hand on you, that there might be others who could help you. If you have no objection to animals.”
    “Animals?”
    “You see,” Sparrowhawk began, but got no further, interrupted by a strange creature bounding down the path towards them. It was bundled in skirts and shawls, feathers stuck out in all directions from its head, and it wore high leather boots. “O Mastawk, O Mastawk!” it shouted.
    “Hello, then, Heather. Gently now,” said Sparrowhawk. The woman stopped, rocking her body, her head-feathers waving, a large grin on her face. “She knowed you was a-coming!” she bawled. “She made that hawk’s beak with her fingers like this, see, she did, and she told me go, go, with her hand! She knowed you was a-coming!”
    “And so I am.”
    “To see us?”
    “To see you. Heather,