Planet Of Exile

Planet Of Exile by Ursula K. LeGuin

Book: Planet Of Exile by Ursula K. LeGuin Read Free Book Online
Authors: Ursula K. LeGuin
Tags: SF
Ads: Link
stranger, the foreigner, of alien blood and mind, did not share his power or his conscience or his knowledge or his exile. She shared nothing at all with him, but had met him and joined with him wholly and immediately across the gulf of their great difference: as if it were that difference, the alienness between them, that let them meet, and that in joining them together, freed them.
    They entered his unlocked front door. No light burned in the high narrow house of roughly dressed stone. It had stood here for three Years, a hundred and eighty moon-phases; his great-grandfather had been born in it, and his grandfather, and his father, and himself. It was as familiar to him as his own body. To enter it with her, the nomad woman whose only home would have been this tent or that on one hillside or another, or the teeming burrows under the snow, gave him a peculiar pleasure. He felt a tenderness towards her which he hardly knew how to express. Without intent he said her name not aloud but paraver-bally. At once she turned to him in the darkness of the hall; in the darkness, she looked into his face* The house and city were silent around them.
    In his mind he heard her say his own name, like a whisper in the night, like a touch across the abyss.
    "You bespoke me," he said aloud, unnerved, marveling. She said nothing but once more he heard hi his mind, along his blood and nerves, her mind that reached out to him: Agat, Agat ...

CHAPTER TEN: The Old Chief
    THE OLD CHIEF was tough. He survived stroke, concussion, exhaustion, exposure, and disaster with intact will, and nearly intact intelligence.
    Some things he did not understand, and others were not present to his mind at all times. He was if anything glad to be out of the stuffy darkness of the Kinhouse, where sitting by the fire had made such a woman of him; he was quite clear about that. He liked—he had always liked—this rockfounded, sunlit, windswept city of the farborns, built before anybody alive was born and still standing changeless in the same place. It was a much better built city than Tevar. About Tevar he was not always clear. Sometimes he remembered the yells, the burning roofs, the hacked and disemboweled corpses of his sons and grandsons. Sometimes he did not. The will to survive was very strong in him.
    Other refugees trickled in, some of them from sacked Winter Cities to the north; in all there were now about three hundred of Wold's race in the farborns' town. It was so strange to be weak, to be few, to live on the charity of pariahs, that some of the Tevarans, particularly among the middleaged men, could not take it. They sat in Absence, legs crossed, the pupils of their eyes shrunk to a dot, as if they had been rubbing themselves with gesin oil. Some of the women, too, who had seen their men cut into gobbets in the streets and by the hearths of Tevar, or who had lost children, grieved themselves into sickness or Absence. But to Wold the collapse of the Tevaran world was only part of the collapse of his own life. Knowing that he was very far along the way to death, he looked with great benevolence on each day and on all younger men, human or farborn: they were the ones who had to keep fighting.
    Sunlight shone now in the stone streets, bright on the painted housefronts, though there was a vague dirty smear along the sky above the dunes northward. In the great square, in front of the house called Thiatr where all the humans were quartered, Wold was hailed by a farborn. It took him a while to recognize Jaokob Agat. Then he cackled a bit and said, "Alterra! you used to be a handsome fellow. You look like a Pernmek shaman with his front teeth pulled. Where is ... (he forgot her name) where's my kinswoman?"
    "In my house, Eldest."
    "This is shameful," Wold said. He did not care if he offended Agat. Agat was his lord and leader now, of course; but the fact remained that it was shameful to keep a mistress in one's own tent or house. Farborn or not, Agat should observe

Similar Books

The If Game

Catherine Storr

The Ylem

Tatiana Vila

Wolf Moon

A.D. Ryan

His Lordship's Filly

Nina Coombs Pykare

Huntress

J L Taft