the wind's twelve quarters by Ursula K. Le Guin Read Free Book Online

in whom Barry was interested; after lunch they discussed electricity, the atomic theory, physiology, and other matters in which Lenoir was interested, and performed minor chemical and anatomical experiments, usually unsuccessfully; after supper they merely talked. Endless, easy talks that ranged over the centuries but always ended here, in the shadowy room with its window open to the Spring night, in their friendship. After two weeks they might have known each other all their lives. They were perfectly happy. They knew they would do nothing with what they had learned from each other. In 1961 how could Barry ever prove his knowledge of old Paris, in 1482 how could Lenoir ever prove the validity of the scientific method? It did not bother them. They had never really expected to be listened to. They had merely wanted to learn.  
    So they were happy for the first time in their lives; so happy, in fact, that certain desires always before subjugated to the desire for knowledge, began to awaken. “I don’t suppose,” Barry said one night across the table, “that you ever thought much about marrying?”  
    “Well, no,” his friend answered, doubtfully. “That is, I’m in minor orders... and it seemed irrelevant....” “And expensive. Besides, in my time, no self-respecting woman would want to share my kind of life. American women are so damned poised and efficient and glamorous, terrifying creatures....”  
    “And women here are little and dark, like beetles, with bad teeth,” Lenoir said morosely.  
    They said no more about women that night. But the next night they did; and the next; and on the next, celebrating the successful dissection of the main nervous system of a pregnant frog, they drank two bottles of Montrachet ’74 and got soused. “Let’s invoke a woman, Jehan,” Barry said in a lascivious bass, grinning like a gargoyle.  
    “What if I raised a devil this time?”  
    “Is there really much difference?”  
    They laughed wildly, and drew a pentagram. “Haere, haere,” Lenoir began; when he got the hiccups, Barry took over. He read the last words. There was a rush of cold, marshy-smelling air, and in the pentagram stood a wild-eyed being with long black hair, stark naked, screaming.  
    “Woman, by God,” said Barry.  
    “Is it?”  
    It was. “Here, take my cloak,” Barry said, for the poor thing now stood gawping and shivering. He put the cloak over her shoulders. Mechanically she pulled it round her, muttering, “Gratias ago, domine.”  
    “Latin!” Lenoir shouted. “A woman speaking Latin?” It took him longer to get over that shock than it did Bota to get over hers. She was, it seemed, a slave in the household of the Sub-Prefect of North Gaul, who lived on the smaller island of the muddy island town called  
    Lutetia. She spoke Latin with a thick Celtic brogue, and did not even know who was emperor in Rome in her day. A real barbarian, Lenoir said with scorn. So she was, an ignorant, taciturn, humble barbarian with tangled hair, white skin, and clear grey eyes. She had been waked from a sound sleep. When they convinced her that she was not dreaming, she evidently assumed that this was some prank of her foreign and all-powerful master the Sub-Prefect, and accepted the situation without further question. “Am I to serve you, my masters?” she inquired timidly but without sullenness, looking from one to the other.  
    “Not me,” Lenoir growled, and added in French to Barry, “Go on; I’ll sleep in the store-room.” He departed.  
    Bota looked up at Barry. No Gauls, and few Romans, were so magnificently tall; no Gauls and no Romans ever spoke so kindly. “Your lamp” (it was a candle, but she had never seen a candle) “is nearly burnt out,” she said. “Shall I blow it out?”  
    For an additional two sols a year the landlord let them use the store-room as a second bedroom, and Lenoir now slept alone again in the main room of the garret. He observed his friend’s