The Wild Girls by Ursula K. Le Guin Read Free Book Online Page A

jewelry, her transparent veil like rain about her head. She looked very small in the elaborate draperies, straight-backed, her gaze held down. Ralo ten Bal was resplendent in puffed and sequined velvet. Tudju lighted the wedding fire and began the rites.
    Modh listened, listened, not to the words Tudju chanted. She heard nothing.
    The wedding party was brief, strained, everything done with the utmost formality. The guests left soon after the ceremony, following the bride and groom to Bal House, where there was to be more dancing and music. Tudju and Hehum, Alo and Nata went with them for civility’s sake. Bela stayed home. He and Modh said almost nothing to each other. They took off their finery and lay silent in their bed, taking comfort in each other’s warmth, trying not to listen for the wail of the child. They heard nothing, only the others returning, and then silence.
    Tudju was to return to the Temple the next day. Early in the morning she came to Bela and Modh’s apartments. Modh had just risen.
    “Where is my sword, Modh?”
    “You put it in the box in the dancing room.”
    “Your bronze one is there, not mine.”
    Modh looked at her in silence. Her heart began to beat heavily.
    There was a noise, shouting, beating at the doors of the house.
    Modh ran to the hanan, to the room she and Mal had slept in, and hid in the corner, her hands over her ears.
    Bela found her there later. He raised her up, holding her wrists gently. She remembered how he had dragged her by the wrists up the hill through the trees. “Mal killed Ralo,” he said. “She had Tudju’s sword hidden under her dress. They strangled her.”
    “Where did she kill him?”
    “On her bed,” Bela said bleakly. “He never did keep his promises.”
    “Who will bury her?”
    “No one,” Bela said, after a long pause. “She was a Dirt woman. She murdered a Crown. They’ll throw her body in the butchers’ pit for the wild dogs.”
    “Oh, no,” Modh said. She slipped her wrists from his grip. “No,” she said. “She will be buried.”
    Bela shook his head.
    “Will you throw everything away, Bela?”
    “There is nothing I can do,” he said.
    She leaped up, but he caught and held her.
    He told the others that Modh was mad with grief. They kept her locked in the house, and kept watch over her.
    Bidh knew what troubled her. He lied to her, trying to give her comfort; he said he had gone to the butcher’s pit at night, found Mal’s body, and buried it out past the Fields of the City. He said he had spoken what words he could remember that might be spoken to a spirit. He described Mal’s grave vividly, the oak trees, the flowering bushes. He promised to take Modh there when she was well. She listened and smiled and thanked him. She knew he lied. Mal came to her every night and lay in the silence beside her.
    Bela knew she came. He did not try to come to that bed again.
    All through her pregnancy Modh was locked in Belen House. She did not go into labor until almost ten months had passed. The baby was too large; it would not be born, and with its death killed her.
    Bela ten Belen buried his wife and unborn son with the Belen dead in the holy grounds of the Temple, for though she was only a Dirt woman, she had a dead god in her womb.

“STAYING AWAKE WHILE WE READ”
    L OOK OUT, BOOKS. You’re dodos, again. Or anyhow turkeys. The Associated Press, using an AP-Ipsos poll of 1,003 adults and claiming an error margin of plus or minus 3% points (the kind of solemn statistic meant to silence such questions as which 1,003 adults? and what’s the error margin of your error margin?) has announced that 27% of Americans haven’t read a book all year. * Of those who did read, two-thirds cited the Bible and other religious works and barely half said they’d read anything describable as literature.
    To reinforce the dire news the article refers to a 2004 NEA report that 43% of their respondents had spent a year entirely book-free. The NEA blamed the