Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 4

crouched in the sunlight, cowering and shaking with exhaustion and fear.
Though Parth looked straight into his strange eyes no spark of human
recognition met her there. He was deaf to their speech, and did not
understand their gestures.
"Mindless or out of his mind," said Zove. "But also starving; we can
remedy that." At this Kai and young Thurro half led half dragged the
shambling fellow into the house. There they and Parth and Buckeye
managed to feed and clean him, and got him onto a pallet, with a shot of
sleep-dope in his veins to keep him there.
"Is he a Shing?" Parth asked her father.
"Are you? Am I? Don't be naive, my dear," Zove answered. "If I could
answer that question I could set Earth free. However, I hope to find out if
he's mad or sane or imbecile, and where he came from, and how he came
by those yellow eyes. Have men taken to breeding with cats and falcons in
humanity's degenerate old age? Ask Kretyan to come up to the
sleeping-porches, daughter."
Parth followed her blind cousin Kretyan up the stairs to the shady,
breezy balcony where the stranger slept. Zove and his sister Karell, called
Buckeye, were waiting there. Both sat cross-legged and straight-backed,
Buckeye playing with her patterning frame, Zove doing nothing at all: a
brother and sister getting on in years, their broad, brown faces alert and
very tranquil. The girls sat down near them without breaking the easy
silence. Parth was a reddish-brown color with a flood of long, bright, black
hair. She wore nothing but a pair of loose silvery breeches. Kretyan, a little
older, was dark and frail; a red band covered her empty eyes and held her
thick hair back. Like her mother she wore a tunic of delicately woven
figured cloth. It was hot. Midsummer afternoon burned on the gardens
below the balcony and out on the rolling fields of the Clearing. On every
side, so close to this wing of the house as to shadow it with branches full
of leaves and wings, so far in other directions as to be blued and hazed by
distance, the forest surrounded them.
The four people sat still for quite a while, together and separate,
unspeaking but linked. "The amber bead keeps slithering off into the
Vastness pattern," Buckeye said with a smile, setting down her frame with
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