Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 34

realized he had nearly driven him too far. As he saw the look of hate and
fear in Argerd's heavy, intelligent face the contagion of it caught him, and
hastily he closed and shouldered his pack, walked past the big man and
started up the grassy rise from the door of the cellars. The light was that of
evening, a little past sunset. He walked towards it. A fine elastic strip of
pure suspense seemed to connect the back of his head to the nose of the
laserpistol Argerd held, stretching out, stretching out as he walked on.
Across a weedy lawn, across a bridge of loose planks over the river, up a
path between the pastures and then between orchards. He reached the top
of the ridge. There he glanced back for one moment, seeing the hidden
valley as he had first seen it, full of a golden evening light, sweet and
peaceful, high chimneys over the sky-reflecting river. He hastened on into
the gloom of the forest, where it was already night.
Thirsty and hungry, sore and downhearted, Falk saw his aimless
journey through the Eastern Forest stretching on ahead of him with no
vague hope, now, of a friendly hearth somewhere along the way to break
the hard, wild monotony. He must not seek a road but avoid all roads, and
hide from men and their dwellingplaces like any wild beast. Only one
thing cheered him up a bit, besides a creek to drink from and some
travel-ration from his pack, and that was the thought that though he had
brought his trouble on himself, he had not knuckled under. He had bluffed
the moral boar and the brutal man on their own ground, and got away with
it. That did hearten him; for he knew himself so little that all his acts were
also acts of self-discovery, like those of a boy, and knowing that he lacked
so much he was glad to learn that at least he was not without courage.
After drinking and eating and drinking again he went on, in a broken
moonlight that sufficed his eyes, till he had put a mile or so of broken
country between himself and the house of Fear, as he thought of the place.
Then, worn out, he lay down to sleep at the edge of a little glade, building
no fire or shelter, lying gazing up at the moon-washed winter sky. Nothing
broke the silence but now and again the soft query of a hunting owl. And
this desolation seemed to him restful and blessed after the scurrying,
voice-haunted, lightless prison-cellar of the house of Fear.
As he pushed on westward through the trees and the days, he kept no
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