Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 68

teased her a little:
"Well, I've seen you at nightfall mumbling to your amulet. Religions
differ…"
"Indeed they do," she said, but she looked subdued.
"Who are they armed against, I wonder?"
"Their Enemy, no doubt. As if they could fight the Shing. As if the
Shing need bother to fight them!"
"You want to go on, don't you?"
"Yes. I don't trust these people. They keep too much hidden."
That evening he went to take his leave of the head of the community,
a gray-eyed man called Hiardan, younger perhaps than himself. Hiardan
received his thanks laconically, and then said in the plain, measured way
the Bee-Keepers had, "I think you have spoken only truth to us. For this I
thank you. We would have welcomed you more freely and spoken to you
of things known to us, if you had come alone."
Falk hesitated before he answered. "I am sorry for that. But I would
not have got this far but for my guide and friend. And…you live here all
together, Master Hiardan. Have you ever been alone?"
"Seldom," said the other. "Solitude is soul's death: man is mankind. So
our saying goes. But also we say, do not put your trust in any but brother
and hive-twin, known Since infancy. That is our rule. It is the only safe
one."
"But I have no kinsmen, and no safety, Master," Falk said, and bowing
soldierly in the Bee-Keepers' fashion, he took his leave, and next morning
at daybreak went on westward with Estrel.
From tune to time as they went they saw other settlements or
encampments, none large, all wide-scattered—five or six of them perhaps
in three or four hundred miles. At some of these Falk left to himself would
have stopped. He was armed, and they looked harmless: a couple of nomad
tents by an ice-rimmed creek, or a little solitary herdboy on a great hillside
watching the half-wild red oxen, or, away off across the rolling land, a
mere feather of bluish smoke beneath the illimitable gray sky. He had left
the Forest to seek, as it were, some news of himself, some hint of what he
was or guide towards what he had been in the years he could not
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