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

high, lighted by the usual high-set windows, and lined with cabinets full of little drawers. As her eyes adjusted, she saw that a thin old man stood behind a counter to her left. Behind his head two characters stood out quite clearly on the wall. She read them automatically, various of their various meanings arriving more or less at once:
eminent / peak / felt hat / look down / start up,
and
two / duality / sides / loins / join / separate.
    "Yoz and deyberienduin, may I be of use to you?"
    She asked if he had an unguent or lotion for dry skin. The proprietor nodded pleasantly and began seeking among his thousand little drawers with an air of peaceful certainty of eventually finding what he wanted, like Iziezi at her desk.
    This gave Sutty time to read the walls, but that distracting illusion of movement continued, and she could not make much sense of the writings. They seemed not to be advertisements as she had assumed, but recipes, or charms, or quotations. A lot about branches and roots. A character she knew as blood, but written with a different Elemental qualifier, which might make it mean lymph, or sap. Formulas like "the five from the three, the three from the five." Alchemy? Medicine, prescriptions, charms? All she knew was that these were old words, old meanings, that for the first time she was reading Aka's past. And it made no sense.
    To judge by his expression, the proprietor had found a drawer he liked. He gazed into it for some while with a satisfied look before he took an unglazed clay jar out of it and put it down on the counter. Then he went back to seeking gently among the rows of unlabeled drawers until he found another one he approved of. He opened it and gazed into it and, after a while, took out a gold-paper box. With this he disappeared into an inner room. Presently he came back with the box, a small, brightly glazed pot, and a spoon. He set them all down on the counter in a row. He spooned out something from the unglazed pot into the glazed pot, wiped the spoon with a red cloth he took from under the counter, mixed two spoonfuls of a fine, talc-like powder from the gold box into the glazed pot, and began to stir the mixture with the same unhurried patience. "It will make the bark quite smooth," he said softly.
    "The bark," Sutty repeated.
    He smiled and, setting down the spoon, smoothed one hand over the back of the other.
    "The body is like a tree?"
    "Ah," he said, the way Akidan had said, "Ah." It was a sound of assent, but qualified. It was yes but not quite yes. Or yes but we don't use that word. Or yes but we don't need to talk about that. Yes with a loophole.
    "
In the dark cloud descending out of the sky ... the forked ... the twice-forked...
?" Sutty said, trying to read a faded but magnificently written inscription high on the wall.
    The proprietor slapped one hand loudly on the counter and the other over his mouth.
    Sutty jumped.
    They stared at each other. The old man lowered his hand. He seemed undisturbed, despite his startling reaction. He was perhaps smiling. "Not aloud, yoz," he murmured.
    Sutty went on staring for a moment, then shut her mouth.
    "Just old decorations," the proprietor said. "Old-fashioned wallpaper. Senseless dots and lines. Old-fashioned people live around here. They leave these old decorations around instead of painting walls clean and white. White and silent. Silence is snowfall. Now, yoz and honored customer, this ointment permits the skin to breathe mildly. Will you try it?"
    She dipped a finger in the pot and spread the dab of pale cream on her hands. "Oh, very nice. And what a pleasant smell. What is it called?"
    "The scent is the herb immimi, and the ointment is my secret, and the price is nothing."
    Sutty had picked up the pot and was admiring it; it was surely an old piece, enamel on heavy glass, with an elegantly fitted cap, a little jewel. "Oh, no, no, no," she said, but the old man raised his clasped hands as Iziezi had done and bowed his head with such