Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin

startled, stiffening, ready to get up. I think he thought Comy had brought one of the Family boys here, and was terrified. Comy said something that identified me as a house slave and calmed the man down. He stared at me in silence. I felt extremely uncomfortable, but having come this far didn’t want to back out. I said, “May I come in?”
    Comy hesitated and gave his hunching shrug. He led me into the house. It was completely dark inside except for the dim glow of a fire under heavy ashes in the hearth. There were people—women, an old man, some children—dark bulks crowded in the heavy air that smelled of human bodies and dogs and food and wood and earth and smoke. Comy took the big fish from me and gave it and our other catch to a woman whom I could see only as a bulky shadow and the flash of an eye. He and she said a word or two, and she turned to me: “D’you want to eat with us then, dí?” Her voice seemed unfriendly, even sneering, yet she waited for an answer.
    “No, ma-ío, I have to get home, thank you,” I said.
    “It’s a grand fish,” she said, holding up the big one.
    “Thanks, Comy,” I said, backing out. “Luck and Ennu bless the house!” And I made off, intimidated and appalled and glad to get away, yet also glad I had gone so far. At least I had a little to tell Sallo.
    She guessed that it was a family in the cabin, that the man on the steps may have been Comy’s father; she had gathered from talk among the farmhouse women that though of course there was no marriage, these country people commonly lived with their spouse and children, or sometimes spouses and children. It was all to the good of the farm if the slaves bred up more slaves who knew the work and the land and nothing else, whose whole life was in that dark village by the stream.
    “I wish I could meet Comy again,” Sallo said.
    The next time he found me, I said, “Do you know the old altar in the oak grove?”
    He nodded; of course he did; Comy knew every rock and tree and stream and field on the Vente farm and for miles around it.
    “Meet us there this evening,” I said. “Instead of fishing.”
    “Who’s us?”
    “My sister.”
    He thought about it, gave his shrug-nod, and went off.
    Sallo and I were there an hour or so before sunset. She sat with her spinning, the cloudy mass of fine-carded wool endlessly turning under her fingers to a grey-brown, even, endless thread. Comy appeared silently, coming up the little streambed among the willow shrubs. She greeted him, and he nodded and sat down at some distance from us. She asked him if he was a vineyarder and he said yes, and told us a little about the work, haltingly. “Do you still sing, Comy?” she asked, and he shrugged and nodded.
    “Will you?”
    As before, on the hilltop, he made no reply and was silent for a long time; then he sang, that same strange, high, soft singing that seemed to have no source or center, as if it did not come from a human throat but hung in the air like the song of insects, wordless but sad beyond all words.
    I planned to bring Sotur to the oak grove, maybe to hear Comy sing, maybe just to sit there with Sallo and me in the peace of the place. I could imagine what it would be like when Sotur was there, how she would go look at the altar and maybe know what god it belonged to, how she would go down to the little stream and maybe wade in it a bit to get cool, how she and Sallo would sit side by side, spinning and talking softly, laughing sometimes. I decided it would be best if Sallo asked her to come. Lately I wanted very much to talk to Sotur but for some reason found it harder and harder to do so. And I put off asking Sallo to ask Sotur to come with us to the oak grove, I don’t know why, maybe because I had such pleasure in thinking about it, imagining it . . . and then it was too late.
    Sotur’s brothers and Torm came riding from Etra all in haste and full of alarms and orders: We must pack up tonight and leave the farm first