Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 9

…stands,
silent, with empty hands.
A legend who knew how old, from a world incredibly remote, its
words and tune had been part of man's heritage for centuries. Parth sang on
very softly, alone in the great firelit room, snow and twilight darkening the
windows.
There was a sound behind her and she turned to see Falk standing
there. There were tears in his strange eyes. He said, "Parth—stop—"
"Falk, what's wrong?"
"It hurts me," he said, turning away his face that so clearly revealed
the incoherent and defenseless mind.
"What a compliment to my singing," she teased him, but she was
moved, and sang no more. Later that night she saw Falk stand by the table
on which the teanb lay. He raised his hand to it but dared not touch it, as if
fearing to release the sweet relentless demon within it that had cried out
under Perth's hands and changed her voice to music.
"My child learns faster than yours," Parth said to her cousin Garra,
"but yours grows faster. Fortunately."
"Yours is quite big enough," Garra agreed, looking down across the
kitchen-garden to the brookside where Falk stood with Garra's year-old
baby on his shoulder. The early summer afternoon sang with the shrilling
of crickets and gnats. Parth's hair clung in black locks to her cheeks as she
tripped and reset and tripped the catches of her loom. Above her patterning
shuttle rose the heads and necks of a row of dancing herons, silver thread
on gray. At seventeen she was the best weaver among the women. In
winter her hands were always stained with the chemicals of which her
threads and yarns were made and the dyes that colored them, and all
summer she wove at her sunpowered loom the delicate and various stuff of
her imagination.
"Little spider," said her mother nearby, "a joke is a joke. But a man is
a man."
"And you want me to go along with Metock to Kathol's house and
~7~