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

they were camped in exile in the foothills of Sul, but it doesn't say what their wives and children were living on in their city left ruined and desolate by the enemy. They were finding food too, somehow, cleaning house and honoring the gods, the way we did in the siege and under the tyranny of the Alds. When the heroes came back from the mountain, they were welcomed with a feast. I'd like to know what the food was and how the women managed it.
    I saw Gry and her husband at the top of West Street when I started up the hill from the Gelb Bridge. When I came into the kitchen, Sosta and Bomi were all agog, having met the guests, and Ista was on the very edge of a tantrum—"How in the name of Sampa the Destroyer is a woman to feed guests on a scrap of fish and a kale stalk?" The additional greens and celery-root I brought averted disaster. She set to work grating ginger and chopping thessony and ordering Bomi and even Sosta about unmercifully. Galvamand would not scant it's guests or shame it's ancestors if Ista could help it. This is part of what I meant about housework. If it isn't important, what is? If it isn't done honorably, where is honor?
    Ista could tell us about the banquets for forty in the great dining hall in the old days, but we always ate in what she called the pantry, a large room full of shelves and counters, between the dining hall and the kitchens. Gudit had built a table of pine scraps, and we had found a chair here and a chair there. The Waylord's longest walk in a day was often from his room, through the corridors, past the staircases and the inner courtyards, to dinner in the pantry. Tonight he came wearing the heavy, stiff, grey robe that was the only fine clothing he had left from the good days. All of us had cleaned up a bit except Gudit, who smelled very much of horse. Gry wore a long red shirt over narrow silk pants, and her husband a white shirt, black coat, and black kilt that left his legs bare below the knee. He was very goodlooking in his black, and Sosta goggled at him like the fish on it's slab in the market.
    But the Waylord was a handsome man too for all his lameness, and when he greeted Orrec Caspro I thought again of the heroes Adira and Marra. Both he and Caspro stood very straight, though it must have cost the Waylord more to do so.
    We sat to table, Gry at the Waylord's right hand and Caspro at his left, Sosta next to Bomi down the table, Gudit next to me, and the place at the foot empty, because Ista would never sit with us till late in the meal. "A cook at the table, a burnt dinner," she said, which may have been true when there were more people to be served and more dinner to burn. She stood while my lord gave the man's blessing and I the woman's, and then she vanished while we ate her excellent bread and fish stew. I was glad for the honor of our house that the food was so good.
    "You of Ansul do as we do in the Uplands," Caspro said. His voice was the most beautiful thing about him; it was like a viol. "The household eats at one table. It makes me feel at home."
    "Tell us something of the Uplands," the Waylord said.
    Caspro looked about at us, smiling, not knowing where to begin. "Do you know anything of the place at all?"
    "It's far to the north," I said, as no one else spoke, "a hilly land, with a great mountain—" and the name came to me then as if I was seeing Eront's map—"the Carrantages? And the people are said to practice wizardry. But that's only what Eront says."
    Bomi and Sosta stared, the way they always did when I knew anything they didn't. I thought it very stupid—as if I should stare every time they talked about how to hem a gusset, or gusset a hem, whichever it is. I didn't always understand them, but I didn't stare at them as if they were crazy for knowing what they knew.
    Caspro said to me, "The Carrantages is our great mountain, as Sul is yours. The Uplands are all hill and stone, and the farmers poor. Some of them have powers, indeed; but wizardry is a