Annals of the Western Shore 2 - Voices by Ursula K. Le Guin

Author:Ursula K. Le Guin
Language: es
Format: mobi
Published: 2010-11-13T11:40:30+00:00

* * *

WE WERE BOTH TIRED, but there was no question of sleep yet. He relighted the small lantern, I put out the lamp, he drew the words on the air, and we went out of the room, through the corridors, back to the north courtyard where we had sat earlier that evening. A great ceiling of stars stood over it. I blew out the lantern. We sat there in starlight, silent for a long time.

I asked, "What will you tell Desac?"

"My question, and that I received no answer."

"And—what the book said?"

"That is yours to tell him or not, as you choose."

"I don't know what it means. I don't know what question it was answering. I don't understand it. Does it make sense at all?"

I felt that I'd been tricked, that I'd been made use of without being told what for, as if I were a mere thing, a tool. I had been frightened. Now I was humiliated and angry.

"It makes the sense we can make of it," he said.

"That's like telling fortunes with sand." There are women in Ansul who, for a few pennies, will take a handful of damp sea sand and drop it on a plate, and from the lumps and peaks and scatters of the sand they foretell good fortune and bad, journeys, money ventures, love affairs, and so on. "It means whatever you want it to mean."

"Maybe," he said. After a while he went on, "Dano Galva said that to read the oracle is to bring rational thought to an impenetrable mystery . . . There are answers in the old books that seemed senseless to those who heard them. How should we difend ourselves from Sundraman? they asked the oracle, when Sundraman first threatened to invade Ansul. The answer was, To keep bees from apple blossoms. The councillors were irate, saying the meaning was so plain it was foolish. They ordered an army to be raised to build a wall along the Ostis and defend it from Sundraman. The southerners crossed the river, knocked down the wall, defeated our army; marched here to Ansul City; killed those who resisted them, and declared all Ansul a protectorate of Sundraman. Ever since then they've been excellent neighbors, interfering with us very little, but greatly enriching us with trade. It was not a recommendation but a warning: To keep bees from apple blossoms is to have trees that bear no fruit. Ansul was the blossom and Sundraman the bee. That's clear now. It was clear to the Reader, Dano Galva; as soon as she read it she said it meant we should offer no resistance to Sundraman. For that she was called a traitor. From that time on the Gelb and Cam and Actamo clans said the Council should not consult the oracle, and pressed for the university and the library to be moved from Galvamand,"

"Much good the oracle did the Reader and her house," I said.

"'The nail's hit once, the hammer a thousand times.'"

I thought that over.

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