Ursula K. LeGuin - The Ekumen 01 - ROCANNON'S WORLD
mountainside, afraid, afraid—A flash of light, a hot shock of pain, pain in his own flesh, intolerable. The mind-contact was broken, blown clean away. He was himself, standing on the ledge pressing his right hand against his chest and gasping, seeing the helicopter creep still closer, its vanes whirring with a dry loud rattle, its laser-mounted nose pointing at him.
From the right, from the chasm of air and cloud, shot a gray winged beast ridden by a man who shouted in a voice like a high, triumphant laugh. One beat of the wide gray wings drove steed and rider forward straight against the hovering machine, full speed, head on. There was a tearing sound like the edge of a great scream, and
then the air was empty.
Ursula K. LeGuin - The Ekumen 01 - ROCANNON'S WORLD
The two on the cliff crouched staring. No sound came up from below. Clouds wreathed and drifted across the abyss.
"Mogien!"
Rocannon cried the name aloud. There was no answer. There was only pain, and
fear, and silence.
IX
Contents - Prev / Epilogue
RAIN PATTERED HARD on a raftered roof. The air of the room was dark and
clear.
Near his couch stood a woman whose
Ursula K. LeGuin - The Ekumen 01 - ROCANNON'S WORLD
face he knew, a proud, gentle, dark face
crowned with gold.
He wanted to tell her that Mogien was dead, but he could not say the words. He lay there sorely puzzled, for new he recalled that Haldre of Hallan was an old woman, white-haired; and the goldenhaired woman he had known was long dead; and anyway he had seen her only once, on a planet eight lightyears away, a long time ago when he had been a man
named Rocannon.
He tried again to speak. She hushed him, saying in the Common Tongue though with some difference in sounds, "Be still, my lord." She stayed beside him, and presently told him in her soft voice, "This is Breygna Castle. You came here with
Ursula K. LeGuin - The Ekumen 01 - ROCANNON'S WORLD
another man, in the snow, from the heights of the mountains. You were near death and still are hurt. There will be time..."
There was much time, and it slipped by vaguely, peacefully in the sound of the
rain.
The next day or perhaps the next, Yahan came in to him, Yahan very thin, a little lame, his face scarred with frostbite. But a less understandable change in him was his manner, subdued and submissive. After they had talked a while Rocannon asked uncomfortably, "Are you afraid of
me, Yahan?"
"I will try not to be, Lord," the young man
stammered.
When he was able to go down to the
Revelhall of the castle, the same awe or dread was in all faces that turned to him, though they were brave and genial faces. Gold-haired, dark-skinned, a tall-people, the old stock of which the Angyar were only a tribe that long ago had wandered north by sea: these were the Liuar, the Earthlords, living since before the memory of any race here in the foothills of the mountains and the rolling plains to the
south.
At first he thought that they were unnerved simply by his difference in looks, his dark hair and pale skin; but Yahan was colored like him, and they had no dread of Yahan. They treated him as a lord among lords, which was a joy and a bewilderment to the ex-serf of Hallan. But Rocannon they treated as a lord above lords, one set apart.
There was one who spoke to him as to a man. The Lady Ganye, daughter-in-law and heiress of the castle's old lord, had been a widow for some months; her brighthaired little son was with her most of the day. Though shy, the child had no fear of Rocannon, but was rather drawn to him, and liked to ask him questions about the mountains and the northern lands and the sea. Rocannon answered whatever he asked. The mother would listen, serene and gentle as the sunlight, sometimes turning smiling to Rocannon her face that he had remembered even as he had seen
it for the first time.
He asked her at last what it was they thought of him in Breygna Castle, and she
Ursula K. LeGuin - The Ekumen 01 - ROCANNON'S WORLD
answered candidly, "They think you are a
god."
It was the word he had noted long since in
Tolen village, pedan.
"I'm not," he said, dour.
She laughed a little.
"Why do they think so?" he demanded. "Do the gods of the Liuar come with gray hair and crippled hands?" The laserbeam from the helicopter had caught him in the right wrist, and he had lost the use of his right hand almost entirely.
"Why not?" said Ganye with her proud, candid smile. "But the reason is that you came down the mountain."
He absorbed this a while. "Tell me, Lady
Ursula K. LeGuin - The Ekumen 01 - ROCANNON'S WORLD
Ganye, do you know of. the guardian of
the well?"
At this her face was grave. "We know tales of that people only. It is very long, nine generations of the Lords of Breygna, since Iollt the Tall went up into the high places and came down changed. We knew you had met with them, with the Most Ancient."
"How do you know?"
"In your sleep in fever you spoke always of the price, of the cost, of the gift given and its price. lollt paid too. The cost was your right hand, Lord Olhor?" she asked with sudden timidity, raising her eyes to his.
"No. I would give both my hands to have
saved what I lost."
He got up and went to the window of the
Ursula K. LeGuin - The Ekumen 01 - ROCANNON'S WORLD
tower-room, looking out on the spacious country between the mountains and the distant sea. Down from the high foothills where Breygna Castle stood wound a river, widening and shining among lower hills, vanishing into hazy reaches where one could half make out villages, fields, castle towers, and once again the gleam of the river among blue rainstorms and shafts
of sunlight.
"This is the fairest land I ever saw," he said. He was still thinking of Mogien, who
would never see it.
"It's not so fair to me as it once was."
"Why, Lady Ganye?"
"Because of the Strangers!"
"Tell me of them, Lady."
"They came here late last winter, many of them riding in great windships, armed with weapons that burn. No one can say what land they come from; there are no tales of them at all. All the land between Viarn River and the sea is theirs now. They killed or drove out all the people of eight domains. We in the hills here are prisoners; we dare not go down even to the old pasturelands with our herds. We fought the Strangers, at first. My husband Canning was killed by their burning weapons." Her gaze went for a second to Rocannon's seared, crippled hand; for a second she paused. "In. in the time of the first thaw he was killed, and still we have no revenge. We bow our heads and avoid their lands, we the Earthlords! And there is no man to make these Strangers
Ursula K. LeGuin - The Ekumen 01 - ROCANNON'S WORLD
pay for Ganhing's death."
O lovely wrath, Rocannon thought, hearing the trumpets of lost Hallan in her voice. "They will pay, Lady Ganye; they will pay a high price. Though you knew I was no god, did you take me for quite a common man?"
"No, Lord," said she. "Not quite."
The days went by, the long days of the yearlong summer. The white slopes of the peaks above Breygna turned blue, the gram-crops in Breygna fields ripened, were cut and re-sown, and were ripening again when one afternoon Rocannon sat down by Yahan in the courtyard where a pair of young windsteeds were being trained. "I'm off again to the south, Yahan. You stay
here.".
Ursula K. LeGuin - The Ekumen 01 - ROCANNON'S WORLD
"No, Olhor! Let me come—"
Yahan stopped, remembering perhaps that foggy beach where in his longing for adventures he had disobeyed Mogien. Rocannon grinned and said, "I'll do best alone. It won't take long, one way or the