Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 74

Estrel against him, he had dropped to his knees. "Take the woman," a
man's voice said; another said clearly, "What have we here?—a new pair
of toolmen?" They commanded him to get up, but he resisted, whispering,
"Don't hurt her—she's sick—"
"Come on, then!" Rough and expeditious hands forced him to obey.
He let them take Estrel from him. He was so dizzy with fatigue that he
made no sense of what happened to him and where he was until a good
while had passed. They gave him his fill of cool w ater, that was all he
knew, all that mattered.
He was sitting down. Somebody whose speech he could not
understand was trying to get him to drink a glassful of some liquid. He
took the glass and drank. It was stinging stuff, strongly scented with
juniper. A glass—a little glass of slightly clouded green: he saw that
clearly, first. He had not drunk from a glass since he had left Zove's
House. He shook his head, feeling the volatile liquor clear his throat and
brain, and looked up.
He was in a room, —a very large room. A long expanse of polished
stone floor vaguely mirrored the farther wall, on which or in which a great
disk of light glowed soft yellow. Radiant warmth from the disk was
palpable on his lifted face. Halfway between him and the sunlike circle of
light a tall, massive chair stood on the bare floor; beside it, unmoving,
silhouetted, a dark beast crouched.
"What are you?"
He saw the angle of nose and jaw, the black hand on the arm of the
chair. The voice was deep, and hard as stone. The words were not in the
Galaktika he had now spoken for so long but in his own tongue, the Forest
speech, though a different dialect of it. He answered slowly with the truth.
"I do not know what I am. My self-knowledge was taken from me six
years ago. In a Forest House I learned the way of man. I go to Es Toch to
try to learn my name and nature."
"You go to the Place of the Lie to find out the truth? Tools and fools
run over weary Earth on many errands, but that beats all for folly or a lie.
What brought you to my Kingdom?"
"My companion—"
~ 72 ~