man.
"Houf!" he said, staring in surprise and then in wonder. For what he saw was two men walking in a snowstorm, one bluelipped and shivering in ragged furs, the other one stark naked. "Ha, Houf!" he said again. He was a tall, bony, bowed, bearded man with a wild look in his dark eyes. "Ha you, there!" he said hi the
Ursula K. LeGuin - The Ekumen 01 - ROCANNON'S WORLD
Olgyior speech, "you'll freeze to death!"
"We had to swim—our boat sank," Yahan improvised promptly. "Have you a house with a fire in it, hunter of pelliunur?"
"You were crossing the sound from the south?" The man looked troubled, and Yahan replied with a vague gesture, "We're from the east—we came to buy pelliunfurs, but all our tradegoods went
down in the water."
"Hanh, hanh," the wild man went, still troubled, but a genial streak in him seemed to win out over his fears. "Come on; I have fire and food," he said, and, turning, he jigged off into the thin, gusting snow. Following, they came soon to his hut, perched on a slope between the forested ridge and the sound. Inside and
out it was like any winter hut of the midmen of the forests and hills of Angien, and Yahan squatter down before the fire with a sigh of frank relief, as if at home. That reassured their host better than any ingenious explanations. "Build up the fire, lad," he said, and he gave Rocannon a homespun cloak to wrap himself in.
Throwing off his own cloak, he set a clay bowl of stew in the ashes to warm, and hunkered down companionably with them, rolling his eyes at one and then the other. "Always snows this time of year, and it'll snow harder soon. Plenty of room for you; there's three of us winter here. The others will be in tonight or tomorrow or soon enough; they'll be staying out this snowfall up on the ridge where they were hunting. Pelliun hunters we are, as you saw by my
Ursula K. LeGuin - The Ekumen 01 - ROCANNON'S WORLD
whistles, eh lad?" He touched the set of heavy wooden panpipes dangling at his belt, and grinned. He had a wild, fierce, foolish look to him, but his hospitality was tangible. He gave them their fill of meat stew, and when the evening darkened, told them to get their rest. Rocannon lost no time. He rolled himself up in the stinking furs of the bed-niche, and slept like a
baby.
In the morning snow still fell, and the ground now was white and featureless. Their host's companions had riot come back. "They'll have spent the night over across the Spine, in Timash village. They'll come along when it clears."
"The Spine—that's the arm of the sea
there?"
Ursula K. LeGuin - The Ekumen 01 - ROCANNON'S WORLD
"No, that's the sound—no villages across it! The Spine's the ridge, the hills up above us here. Where do you come from, anyhow? You talk like us here, mostly, but"
your uncle don't."
Yahan glanced apologetically at Rocannon, who had been asleep while acquiring a nephew. "Oh—he's from the Backlands; they talk differently. We call that water the sound, too. I wish I knew a fellow with a boat to bring us across it."
"You want to go south?"
"Well, now that all our goods are gone, we're nothing here but beggars. We'd better try to get home."
"There's a boat down on the shore, a ways from here. We'll see about that when the
weather clears. I'll tell you, lad, when you talk so cool about going south my blood gets cold. There's no man dwelling between the sound and the great mountains, that ever I heard of, unless it's the Ones not talked of. And that's all old stories, and who's to say if there's any mountains even? I've been over on the other side of the sound—there's not many men can tell you that. Been there myself, hunting, in the hills. There's plenty of pelliunur there, near the water. But no villages. No men. None. And I wouldn't
stay the night."
"We'll just follow the southern shore eastward," Yahan said indifferently, but with a perplexed look; his inventions were forced into further complexity with every
question.
But his instinct to lie had been correct—"At least you didn't sail from the north!" their host, Piai, rambled on, sharpening his long, leaf-bladed knife on a whetstone as he talked. "No men at all across the sound, and across the sea only mangy fellows that serve as slaves to the Yellow-heads. Don't your people know about them? In the north country over the sea there's a race of men with yellow heads. It's true. They say that they live hi houses high as trees, and carry silver swords, and ride between the wings of windsteeds! I'll believe that when I see it. Windsteed fur brings a good price over on the coast, but the beasts are dangerous to hunt, let alone taming one and riding it. You can't believe all people tell in tales. I make a good enough living out of pelliun furs. I can bring the beasts
from a day's flight around. Listen!" He put his panpipes to his hairy lips and blew, very faintly at first, a half-heard, halting plaint that swelled and changed, throbbing and breaking between notes, rising into an almost-melody that was a wild beast's cry. The chill went up Rocannon's back; he had heard that tune in the forests of Hallan.
Yahan, who had been trained as a huntsman, grinned with excitement and cried out as if on the hunt and sighting the quarry, "Sing! sing! she rises there!" He and Piai spent the rest of the afternoon swapping hunting-stories, while outside the snow still fell, windless now and
steady.
The next day dawned clear. As on a morning of cold-year, the sun's ruddy-white brilliance was bunding on the snow-
Ursula K. LeGuin - The Ekumen 01 - ROCANNON'S WORLD
whitened hills. Before midday Piai's two companions arrived with a few of the downy gray pelliun-furs. Black-browed, strapping men like all those southern Olg-yior, they seemed still wilder than Piai, wary as animals of the strangers, avoiding them, glancing at them only sideways.
"They call my people slaves," Yahan said to Rocannon when the others were outside the hut for a minute. "But I'd rather be a man serving men than a beast hunting beasts, like these." Rocannon raised his hand, and Yahan was silent as one of the Southerners came in, glancing sidelong at
them, unspeaking.
"Let's go," Rocannon muttered in the Olgyior tongue, which he had mastered a little more of these last two days. He
Ursula K. LeGuin - The Ekumen 01 - ROCANNON'S WORLD
wished they had not waited till Piai's companions had come, and Yahan also was uneasy. He spoke to Piai, who had
just come in:
"We'll be going now—this fair weather should hold till we get around the inlet. If you hadn't sheltered us we'd never have lived through these two nights of cold. And I never would have heard the pelliun-song so played. May all your hunting be
fortunate!"
But Piai stood still and said nothing. Finally he hawked, spat on the fire, rolled his eyes, and growled, "Around the inlet? Didn't you want to cross by boat? There's a boat. It's mine. Anyhow, I can use it. We'll take you over the water."
"Six days walking that'll save you," the
Ursula K. LeGuin - The Ekumen 01 - ROCANNON'S WORLD
shorter newcomer, Karmik, put in.
"It'll save you six days walking," Piai repeated. "We'll take you across in the boat. We can go now."
"All right," Yahan replied after glancing at Rocannon; there was nothing they could
do.
"Then let's go," Piai grunted, and so abruptly, with no offer of provision for the way, they left the hut, Piai in the lead and his friends bringing up the rear. The wind was keen, the sun bright; though snow remained in sheltered places, the rest of the ground ran and squelched and glittered with the thaw. They followed the shore westward for a long way, and the sun was set when they reached a little cove where a rowboat lay among rocks