Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 46

really warm. His little camp-fires were strictly cookingfires. There was not
enough dry wood in the whole Eastern Forest, probably, for a real fire,
after the long days of rain, wet snow, mist, and rain again.
He became adept at slapping the slider downriver in a series of long,
loud fish-leaps, diagonal bounces ending in a whack and a jet of spray.
The noisiness of the process pleased him sometimes as a break in the
smooth silent monotony of sliding along above the water between the trees
and hills. He came whacking around a bend, banking his curves with
delicate flicks of the control-arcs, then braked to a sudden soundless halt in
mid-air. Far ahead down the steely-shining reach of the river a boat was
coming towards him.
Each craft was in full view of the other; there was no slipping past in
secret behind screening trees. Falk lay flat on the slider, gun in hand, and
steered down the right bank of the river, up at ten feet so he had height
advantage on the people in the boat.
They were coming along easily with one little triangular sail set. As
they drew nearer, though the wind was blowing downriver, he could
faintly hear the sound of their singing.
They came still nearer, paying no heed to him, still singing.
As far back as his brief memory went, music had always both drawn
him and frightened him, filling him with a kind of anguished delight, a
pleasure too near torment. At the sound of a human voice singing he felt
most intensely that he was not human, that this game of pitch and time and
tone was alien to him. But by that strangeness it drew him, and now
unconsciously he slowed the slider to listen. Four or five voices sang,
chiming and parting and interweaving in a more artful harmony than any
he had heard. He did not understand the words. All the forest, the miles of
gray water and gray sky, seemed to him to listen in intense,
uncomprehending silence.
The song died away, chiming and fading into a little gust of laughter
and talk. The slider and the boat were nearly abreast now, separated by a
hundred yards or more. A tall, very slender man erect in the stern hailed
Falk, a clear voice ringing easily across the water. Again he caught none of
the words. In the steely winter light the man's hair and the hair of the four
~ 44 ~