Gifts by Ursula K. Le Guin Page A

cool him down, toweled him and brushed him, watered him and fed him, left him whuffling at Roanie in his stall, and came in conscious of having fulfilled my responsibilities, as a man should do. My father said nothing, and that too was as it should be: he took it for granted that I had done what should be done. After supper Mother told us a story from the Chamhan, the saga of the Bendraman people, which she knew pretty well from beginning to end. She told of the hero Hamneda’s raid on the demon city, his defeat by the demon king, his flight into the wasteland. My father listened as intently as I did. I remember that evening as the last—the last of the good days? the last of my childhood? I don’t know what came to an end there, but I woke next morning into a different world.
    “Come out with me, Orrec,” my father said late in the morning, and I thought he meant we would ride together, but he only walked with me some way towards the ash grove, till we were out of sight of the house, in the lonely, grassy swale of the Ashbrook. He said nothing as we walked. He stopped on the hillside above the brook. “Show me your gift, Orrec,” he said.
    I’ve said that obedience to my father had always been a pleasure to me, though often not an easy pleasure. And it was a very deep habit, a lifelong, unbroken custom. I had simply never thought of disobeying him, never wanted to. What he asked of me, even if difficult, was always possible, and even if incomprehensible, always turned out to be reasonable, to be right. I understood what he was asking of me now, and why he asked it. But I would not do it.
    A flint stone and a steel blade may lie side by side for years, quiet as can be, but strike them together and the spark leaps. Rebellion is an instant thing, immediate, a spark, a fire.
    I stood facing him, the way I always stood when he spoke my name that way, and said nothing.
    He gestured to a ragged clump of grasses and bindweed near us. “Unmake that,” he said, his tone not commanding but encouraging.
    I stood still. After one glance at the clump of weeds, I did not look back at it.
    He waited some while. He drew breath, and there was some slight change in his stance, an increase of tension, though he still said nothing.
    “Will you do it?” he said at last, very softly.
    “No,” I said.
    Silence between us again. I heard the faint music of the brook and a bird singing away over in the ash grove and a cow lowing down in the home pasture.
    “Can you do it?”
    “I won’t.”
    Silence again, and then he said, “There’s nothing to fear, Orrec.” His voice was gentle. I bit my lip and clenched my hands.
    “I’m not afraid,” I said.
    “To control your gift you must use it,” Canoc said, still with that gentleness that weakened my resolve.
    “I won’t use it.”
    “Then it may use you.”
    That was unexpected. What had Gry told me about using her gift and being used by it? I could not remember now. I was confused, but I would not admit it.
    I shook my head.
    Then at last he frowned. His head went back as if he faced an opponent. When he spoke, the tenderness had gone out of his voice. “You must show your gift, Orrec,” he said. “If not to me, to others. It’s not your choice to make. To have the power is to serve the power. You’ll be Brantor of Caspromant. The people here will depend on you as they do on me now. You must show them they can rely on you. And learn how to use your gift by using it.”
    I shook my head.
    After another unbearable silence, he said, almost in a whisper, “Is it the killing?”
    I didn’t know whether it was that, the idea that my gift was to kill, to destroy, that I rebelled against. I had thought that, but not very clearly, though I had often thought with sick horror of the rat, the adder…All I knew by now was that I refused to be tested, refused to try out this terrible power, refused to let it be what I was. But Canoc had given me an out, and I took it. I nodded.
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