Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 67

offered no violence and proved willing to take them in for a day or two,
Falk was glad of it, for walking and camping in that rain had been a
miserable business.
This tribe or people called themselves the Bee-Keepers.
A strange lot, literate and laser-armed, all clothed alike, men and
women, in long shifts of yellow wintercloth marked with a brown cross on
the breast, they were hospitable and uncommunicative. They gave the
travelers beds in their barrack-houses, long, low, flimsy buildings of wood
and clay, and plentiful food at their common table; but they spoke so little,
to the strangers and among themselves, that they seemed almost a
community of the dumb. "They're sworn to silence. They have vows and
oaths and rites, no one knows what it's all about," Estrel said, with the
calm uninterested disdain which she seemed to feel for most kinds of men.
The Wanderers must be proud people, Falk thought. But the Bee-Keepers
went her scorn one better: they never spoke to her at all. They would talk
to Falk, "Does your she want a pair of our shoes?"—as if she were his
horse and they had noticed she wanted shoeing. Their own women used
male names, and were addressed and referred to as men. Grave girls, with
clear eyes and silent lips, they lived and worked as men among the equally
grave and sober youths and men. Few of the Bee-Keepers were over forty
and none were under twelve. It was a strange community, like the winter
barracks of some army encamped here in the midst of utter solitude in the
truce of some unexplained war; strange, sad, and admirable. The order and
frugality of their living reminded Falk of his Forest home, and the sense of
a hidden but flawless, integral dedication was curiously restful to him.
They were so sure, these beautiful sexless warriors, though what they were
so sure of they never told the stranger.
"They recruit by breeding captured savage women like sows, and
bringing up the brats in groups. They worship something called the Dead
God, and placate him with sacrifice—murder. They are nothing but the
vestige of some ancient superstition," Estrel said, when Falk had said
something in favor of the Bee-Keepers to her. For all her submissiveness
she apparently resented being treated as a creature of a lower species.
Arrogance in one so passive both touched and entertained Falk, and he
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