Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 13

air-cushion sliders in the East Wing, but again they featured mainly in the
boys' games. They were hard to handle in the woods, on wilderness trails.
When people went to visit and trade at another House they went afoot,
perhaps on horseback if the way was very long.
The work of the House and farm was light, no hard burden to anyone.
Comfort did not rise above warmth and cleanliness, and the food was
sound but monotonous. Life in the House had the drab levelness of
communal existence, a clean, serene frugality. Serenity and monotony rose
from isolation. Forty-four people lived here together. Kathol's House, the
nearest, was nearly thirty miles to the south. Around the Clearing mile
after mile uncleared, unexplored, indifferent, the forest went on. The wild
forest, and over it the sky. There was no shutting out the inhuman here, no
narrowing man's life, as in the cities of earlier ages, to within man's scope.
To keep anything at all of a complex civilization intact here among so few
was a singular and very perilous achievement, though to most of them it
seemed quite natural: it was the way one did; no other way was known.
Falk saw it a little differently than did the children of the House, for he
must always be aware that he had come out of that immense unhuman
wilderness, as sinister and solitary as any wild beast that roamed it, and
that all he had lea rned in Zove's House was like a single candle burning in
a great field of darkness.
At breakfast—bread, goat's-milk cheese and brown ale—Metock
asked him to come with him to the deer-blinds for the day. That pleased
Falk. The Elder Brother was a very skillful hunter, and he was becoming
one himself; it gave him and Metock, at last, a common ground. But the
Master intervened: "Take Kai today, my son. I want to talk with Falk."
Each person of the household had his own room for a study or
workroom and to sleep in in freezing weather; Zove's was small, high, and
light, with windows west and north and east. Looking across the stubble
and fallow of the autumnal fields to the forest the Master said, "Parth first
saw you there, near that copper beech, I think. Five and a half years ago. A
long time! Is it time we talked?"
"Perhaps it is, Master," Falk said, diffident.
"It's hard to tell, but I guessed you to be about twenty-five when you
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