Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin

jenny, “isn’t it, Mousie?”
    The boy Comy tugged at the halter and Mousie walked along peaceably, Oco and Umo clinging to the saddle, scared and gleeful. We all trudged along with our light burdens, which we certainly could have carried all day. But we were glad to come up at last onto the very summit of the highest hill and stop climbing and stand gazing at the great view that lay all around us, miles and miles of sunlit land, pale gold fading into blue, the long shadows of August falling in the folds of the hills. There was Etra, remote and tiny in the vast sweep of the plains; we could see farmhouses and villages all along the courses of the streams and the river Morr, and farsighted Yaven said he could make out the walls of Casicar and a tower above them, though I could see only a kind of smudge there on the deep bend of the Morr. East that way and southward the land was hilly and broken, but to the north and west it fell away and widened into immense, dim levels, green fading into the blue of distance.
    “That’s the Daneran Forest,” Yaven said, looking northeast.
    “That’s the Marshes,” Astano said, looking north, and Sotur said, “Where you and Gav came from, Sallo.”
    Sallo stood beside me and we looked that way for a long time. It gave me a strange, cold thrill to see that vastness, that unknown country where we had been born. All I knew of the people of the Marshes was that they weren’t city people, they were uncivilised, barbarians, natives. We had ancestors there, as free people did. We had been born free. It troubled me to think about that. It was a useless thought. What did it have to do with my life in Etra, with my Family of Arcamand?
    “Do you remember the Marshes at all?” Sotur asked us.
    Sallo shook her head, but I said, to my own surprise, “Sometimes I think I do.”
    “What was it like?”
    I felt foolish describing that simple memory or vision aloud to them. “Just water, and reeds growing in the water, and little islands . . . and there was a blue hill away far off . . . Maybe it was this hill.”
    “You were only a baby, Gav,” Sallo said, with just a touch of cautioning in her voice. “I was two or three, and I can’t remember anything.”
    “Not about being stolen?” Sotur asked, disappointed. “That would have been exciting.”
    “I don’t remember anything but Arcamand, Sotur-ío,” Sallo said in her soft voice, smiling.
    We spread our feast out on the thin dry grass of the hilltop and ate it as the sun went down in glory, revealing the ocean to us by the gleam of the high horizon where it set. We sat and talked, in all the old ease and companionship of the long summer. The little ones fell asleep. Sallo fell asleep with her head on my lap. Ris brought me a blanket, and I tucked it round my sister as best I could. The stars were coming out. The boy Comy, who had sat all evening at a distance, between us and the picketed jenny, facing away from us, began to sing. At first I didn’t know what I was hearing, it was such a thin, strange, sad sound, like the vibrations in the air after a bell has been struck. It rose and trembled and died away.
    “Sing again, Comy,” Sotur murmured. “Please.”
    He was silent for so long we thought he would not sing, but then the faint tremor of sound began again, the thinnest thread of music, the overtones of a tune. It was inexpressibly sad and yet serene, untroubled. Again it died away, and we listened for it, wanting it to return.
    It was utterly silent now up on the wide hill, and the glimmer of starlight was stronger than the last blue-brown light far down in the west.
    The jenny stamped and made a little huh-huh noise in her chest, and we laughed at that, and talked a little more, softly. Then we slept.

4
    The next couple of years went along without excitement. Sallo and I swept the floors of the great house and went to our lessons daily. Nobody missed Hoby, not even Tib, I think. Torm, mentally practicing the