Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 26

speak, then. I will not mindspeak. Go on, go your pig's way."
"Aah, aah, man, bespeak me!"
"Go or I will shoot." Falk stood up, his gun pointing steadily. The
little bright hog-eyes watched the gun.
"It is wrong to take life," said the pig.
Falk had got his wits back and this time made no answer, sure that the
beast understood no words. He moved the gun a little, recentered its aim,
and said, "Go!" The boar dropped its head, hesitated. Then with incredible
swiftness, as if released by a cord breaking, it turned and ran the way it
had come.
Falk stood still a while, and when he turned and went on he kept his
gun ready in his hand. His hand shook again, a little. There were old tales
of beasts that spoke, but the people of Zove's House had thought them only
tales. He felt a brief nausea and an equally brief wish to laugh out loud.
"Parth," he whispered, for he had to talk to somebody, "I just had a lesson
in ethics from a wild pig…Oh, Parth, will I ever get out of the forest? Does
it ever end?"
He worked his way on up the steepening, brushy slopes of the ridge.
At the top the woods thinned out and through the trees he saw sunlight and
the sky. A few paces more and he was out from under the branches, on the
rim of a green slope that dropped down to a sweep of orchards and
plow-lands and at last to a wide, clear river. On the far side of the river a
herd of fifty or more cattle grazed in a long fenced meadow, above which
hayfields and orchards rose steepening towards the tree-rimmed western
ridge. A short way south of where Falk stood the river turned a little
around a low knoll, over the shoulder of which, gilt by the low, late sun,
rose the red chimneys of a house.
It looked like a piece of some other, golden age caught in that valley
and overlooked by the passing centuries, preserved from the great wild
disorder of the desolate forest. Haven, compa nionship, and above all,
order: the work of man. A kind of weakness of relief filled Falk, at the
sight of a wisp of smoke rising from those red chimneys. A hearthfire…He
ran down the long hillside and through the lowest orchard to a path that
wandered along beside the riverbank among scrub alder and golden
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