The Daughter of Odren (4 page)

“And then, once he's dead—I never thought that Father could be freed of the stone even if Ash was dead—I never thought of that! But if you can free him, then it will all, all be set right! That is more than I could ever think of! I never thought past killing Ash. What does it matter what becomes of her? She was lost long ago. Hollowed out.”

“She is the witch. She betrayed my father and me. I am going to keep the promise. I will set my father free, and he'll punish her as she deserves.”

“But Ash—”

“Sister, I need your help, not your doubts. Living here in this sty, with these people, what can you know of these things? I do know them. As Lord of Odren in my father's stead I tell you that you must trust me, and I trust you to obey me. Do nothing and say nothing to anyone. Keep the farmer and his daughter and Hovy all in the house here tonight. And when evening comes, I'll do what I must do.”

She stood still. She looked at her brother full in the face for a while, then past him at the hill that rose above the farmyard. The dry grass was the color of amber in the afternoon sunlight. A few sheep grazed up near the oak-grove at the crest.

“All these years,” she said—“no, hear me, Clay—I've thought and thought how it was and how it must be. Sometimes thinking gets to be like seeing. I see Father at table in our hall that night he came home, laughing, holding me, holding you to him. Then I see Ash lying across my house floor face down and his blood spreading out like spilled washwater. Then sometimes it all goes thin, like a fog or a wisp of veiling, the farm and the hills and the people, it all fades into the sunlight, and I see strange things. I see the valleys all covered with stones and great houses and crowds and crowds of people, no farms or sheep or anything at all but the faces of people everywhere, and they speak but I can't understand them, and none of them see me though I'm there among them, but they pass and pass and pass not seeing, and their voices are a roar like the sea, and there are great lights among them, flashing and blinding, and still there are more of them, more of them. And I tell myself, the hills are there, the farms are there, they must be, they've always been, and as I say it the blind people begin to fade away, and I come back here at last and hear the little sounds of the animals and birds in the stillness, and the leaves in the wind. And then for a while my thoughts about Father and Mother and how to destroy Ash all shrink away and leave me in peace. But at night they come back. And I think, how many times must this happen?” She fell silent.

Clay, puzzled, impatient, half listening, said nothing.

Bees hummed around the red bean-flowers in the kitchen garden, and the leaves of the willows by the farmhouse stirred.

“Well, then,” he said, “this evening I go to the Standing Man.”

For a while she did not speak. “Go in the morning,” she said, her voice soft, defeated. “Before light. I go there every morning. I take food and water to Father. Ash knows it. He came once years ago to watch me. He laughed and went away. He won't be there, though. They sleep late at Odren. It would be better in the morning.”

Clay resisted, pondered, and at last said, “I'll stay the night here, then.”

His sister nodded and turned toward the house.

 

The fog crept low on the fields in the darkness at about waist height. The lantern Weed carried swung above it sometimes, illuminating the ragged, pale surface around like a dim circle of foam or snow. Where the fog rose higher the light shrank into a misty sphere. Clay had told her not to bring the lantern, but she said, “Best to do as I always do,” and lighted the candle in the lantern of brass and horn. She went first, unhesitant. Her brother followed, sometimes stumbling or pausing to get his footing on ploughland or uneven pasture ground. The glow of the lantern descended before him. He followed it, feeling his way. They came into the small valley and to the standing stone.

“Put it out,” he whispered.

She blew out the light. The fog seemed to darken, then lighten around them. Sky and air were paling to grey. It was silent except for the pulse of the sea below the cliffs.

She stood still, at some distance from the stone. Her brother was also motionless. After a long time she murmured, “It's getting on to day.”

After a time she heard his voice, very low at first. At the sound of the words the hair on her head moved, her whole body shuddered. She stood with her hands clenched, following the spell with all her being, willing it to take hold, to open the stone. Her lips moved silently: “Father, Father, Father . . .”

The valley was full of dimness now, not dark, yet nothing visible.

Clay spoke again, louder. A deep groan broke across the words. The air quivered, rippled, waves of blackness ran through it. There was a cracking, splitting sound and a rattle of broken rock.

Silence followed.

She could see the stone, barely, grey in grey. Her brother stood close to it, motionless.

He raised his hands up and outward. The sister shrank away seeing that remembered gesture. She crouched down in ungovernable fear.

He spoke again, louder, clearly, still louder, and stepping forward put his hands on the stone, pushing and spreading as if to split it open. It groaned again and the groaning grew louder, deeper, with an intolerable shrieking, grinding noise in it. Clay drew back hastily, clenching and unclenching his hands. He stood staring as the hideous noise went on and on and the Standing Man shuddered and lurched and labored, growing dimmer in the dim light and seeming to lose outline, looming up, then shrinking down. Fragments dropped from it, shards of stone. The noise dulled at last to a kind of painful, toneless moaning. The Standing Man stood there, rocking or trembling, stone-shaped, man-shaped.

“Father?” the young man said, his voice hoarse and faint.

Weed stood up. She opened her mouth but said nothing. She saw a bulky body, but if it had a face she could not make out the features. The light of day was growing but the shape and the face were as if still in twilight.

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.”

U
RSULA
K. L
E
G
UIN
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