She spoke to it, a shrill, sharp cry—“Come free, Father! Come free!”
The Standing Man rocked again. It leaned as if it was going to fall. The rumbling groan grew louder. Moving the way a boulder is moved by men with ropes and wedges and crowbars, heavily, jerking, it lurched a step or two forward on stiff, hardly separated legs. Clay drew farther back from it. It pivoted slowly. With short, dragging, clumsy, heavy steps it walked to the path, now visible in the pale twilight, and began to labor up out of the valley to the road that led to the great house of Odren. As it walked it made the continual groaning that was not like a sound made with breath but like rocks deep in the ground grinding and grating against each other in earthquake.
“Father,” the young man said faintly. He started after it. Weed caught up with him, and seized his arm—“Stay back! stay back!” she whispered, and he obeyed.
Side by side the son and daughter followed the Standing Man’s slow steps up the road to the house on the cliff top. The road lay plain in the dawn light. The fog had sunk below the edge of the cliff and lay out over the sea in dim levels.
The groaning grew louder again, and louder, with a grinding shrillness in it, as they approached the house. Lurching and pivoting, the Standing Man came to the door, tormenting the air with its noise. It stood there. The door opened.
The Lady of Odren stood in the doorway, a slight figure in a white nightgown, with loose grey hair.
Ash the sorcerer stepped out past her, his hands raised, shouting words in the wizards’ tongue.
The Standing Man ceased its awful groan. It stood silent. It turned around again, lurching, clumsy step by step. Its arms were short, blunt, with no hands. It was searching for something, turning its body that was all one piece with its head. No eyes were in the blank, pitted face, but it looked at Clay.
The sorcerer came out of the house behind the stone figure, speaking. The figure moved toward Clay. The sorcerer followed it. Clay stood motionless, arms at his side, eyes fixed on the Standing Man as it approached him.
Weed let go of Clay’s arm and started forward. She called in a sharp voice, “Mother!”
Ash turned to look at her as she ran past him. The stone stopped and stood motionless. The sorcerer looked back at it and spoke again, controlling it with voice and gesture, ordering it to go forward toward Clay. Doing so, he did not see Weed wheel quickly around behind him raising a long, thin dagger. She drove it into his back through his long, black, shining hair . . .
He dropped to his knees, coughing. He fell forward, and that helped her pull out the dagger. She stooped, pulled his head back with his hair, and cut his throat.
Her mother was beside her, panting and crying, “Ash, Ash, what is it, Ash!”—kneeling over the man, embracing him, her grey hair falling over him. “What did he do? What have you done?” she cried, staring blindly at her daughter.
The Standing Man had turned toward her. It was making its senseless, agonized groaning. The Lady of Odren stood up in panic to run from it. It caught her effortlessly in its blunt arms, crushing her body against itself. Holding her it labored with its clumsy, stiff steps across the ground to the wooden stairs that led down to the stony beach a hundred feet below, walked past the head of the stairs to the cliff’s edge, walked out onto the air, and fell.
The light wind of sunrise blew eastward from the land. The young man crouched shaking and gasping on the path in front of the house. His sister stood gazing at the bright empty air above the sea. The sorcerer lay like a heap of bloody clothes on the pathway. There were people in the doorway, faces at the windows.
Weed threw down the dagger. “That’s yours,” she said to her brother. “It’s all yours, now.”
He looked up at her. His face was blank, his lips trembled. “Where are you going, Lily?”
“Home.”
She walked past the gardens of Odren, across the fields of the domain and the sheep-commons, to Bay’s farmlands. The sun was up when she reached Hill Farm, but no one was about. She went in. The farmer, his daughter, and Hovy were indoors, silent, waiting.
“It’s done. It’s finished,” she said.
They were too shy to question her. The girl, Clover, finally whispered, “The sorcerer?”
“Dead. And my mother is dead. Poor soul.”
No one dared ask more.
“And the stone is broken.” She drew a deep breath. “My brother has come into his inheritance.”
Hovy asked with his eyes if he could go. She nodded.
“Clover, have you let the chickens out?”
The girl slipped out after Hovy.
The farmer stood by his table, his hands hanging at his sides.
“So. You’ll go back there,” he said at last in his deep, timid voice.
“There? What for?” She went to the back of the room and into the scullery. She filled a bowl of water and began to wash her hands. “Why would I leave you and Clover?”
He said nothing.
She came back to the front of the room, dried her hands on a cloth, and stood facing him. “You took me into your house, Bay. You married me. You’ve been kind to me. And I to you. What does the rest matter?”
He stood unconvinced.
“I’m free,” she said.
“A poor freedom.”
She took his thick-fingered hand and put her lips to it, then pushed it back at him. “Go on, go to work. My brother’s the master now. May he be kinder than the last one. I’ll bring lunch to the Low Meadow.”
About the Author
URSULA K. LE GUIN was born in Berkeley, California, in 1929. Among her honors are a National Book Award, five Hugo and five Nebula Awards, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
www.ursulakleguin.com