Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin Page A

discipline of the swordsman, was sullen, aloof, and obedient in the classroom. Once or twice when his impatience with the lessons or the teacher threatened to overcome him, he excused himself and left. Yaven was mostly away with the army. Etra had no ongoing war at that time, so young officers like Yaven were trained in exercises and drills or put on guard duty at the borders; now and then he was sent home on leave, looking very fit and cheerful. We went both of those summers to the Vente farm, and there too were no great doings, just the lazy, ordinary happiness of being there. Yaven didn’t come with us; he spent the first summer in training, and during the second he accompanied the Father on a diplomatic mission to Gallec. Torm spent both summers at the school of swordsmanship. So Astano was our leader.
    She led us to Sentas Hill the very first evening. That was a shock and a grief at first, for we found it almost in ruins. The moat had silted up with winter rains, the earthwork behind the palisade had slipped; the palisade itself had been torn down in several places and the rock piles that formed the Tower and the Gates had been knocked apart, not by weather, but by human malice.
    “Those filthy peasants,” Tib growled—he could growl now, his voice was changing. We all moped about the dilapidated place a while, feeling the same hateful, shameful contempt for the farm children we’d felt when they threw stones at us, and mourning the defilement of our city of dreams. But Astano and Sotur took heart, discussing how easily we could restore the palisade, and beginning even in the dusk to pile up rocks for the Tower again. So we went back to the house, set out our pallets under the stars, and lay planning the rebuilding of Sentas.
    Sotur said, “You know, if we could get some of them to help, to work on it, they might not hate it.”
    “Ugh! I don’t want any of them around,” said Ris. “They’re foul.”
    “One couldn’t trust them,” said Uter, who was less skinny and bony this summer, but no less prim.
    “The one with the jenny was all right,” his sister Umo said.
    “Comy,” Astano said. “Yes, he was nice. Remember when he sang?”
    We all lay remembering that golden, mysterious evening on the summit of the hills.
    “We’d have to ask the foreman,” Astano said to Sotur, and they briefly discussed the chances of getting any farm slave released to us. “Only if we said they were to work for us,” Sotur said, and Astano replied, “Well, they would. We worked as hard as any of them do! Digging that moat was awful! And we never could have done it without Yaven.”
    “But it would be different,” Sotur said. “Giving orders . . .”
    Astano said, “Yes.”
    And there they left it. The idea was not mentioned again.
    We rebuilt Sentas, even if not to Yaven’s or Everra’s standards. And when it was rebuilt, we held a ceremony of purification, circling the walls within, not in mockery, but as it was described in Garro’s poem, with our teacher leading the procession as the high priest and lighting the sacred fire in the citadel. All summer we often went to that hilltop as a group or in pairs or singly, all of us feeling it to be, amid all the wealth of woods and hills and streamside that the farm offered, our dearest place, our fortress and retreat.
    Aside from repairing Sentas, we had no great projects; we put on a few dance-plays, but mostly what I remember is swimming with Tib in pools under the willows and alders, and lazing about in the shade talking, and going on long, desultory explorations of the woods south of the house. We did lessons for a half-morning daily with our teacher, and Ris and Sallo were often kept on for music lessons with Sotur and Umo, for a singing teacher had come from Herramand. Sotur’s little niece Utte had graduated from the “tiny ones” to run around with us, under Oco’s particular care; and sometimes we took a whole batch of the older babies down to the