Three Hainish Novels by Ursula Le Guin

Author:Ursula Le Guin [Guin, Ursula Le]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nelson Doubleday
Published: 1978-04-12T21:00:00+00:00

12

The Siege of the Square

THE HIGH, NARROW SEA GATE clashed to, the bolts shot home. The battle in the storm was over. But the men of the city turned and saw, over the red-stained drifts in the street and through the still-falling snow, shadows running.

They took up their dead and wounded hastily and returned to the Square. In this blizzard no watch could be kept against ladders, climbers; you could not see along the walls more than fifteen feet to either hand. A Gaal or a group of them had slipped in, right under the noses of the guards, and opened the Sea Gate to the assault. That assault had been driven out, but the next one could come anywhere, at any time, in greater force.

“I think,” Umaksuman said, walking with Agat towards the barricade between the Thiatr and the College, “that most of the Gaal went on south today.”

Agat nodded. “They must have. If they don’t move on they starve. What we face now is an occupying force left behind to finish us off and live on our stores. How many do you think?”

“Not more than a thousand were there at the gate,” the native said doubtfully. “But there may be more. And they’ll all be inside the walls—There!” Umaksuman pointed to a quick cowering shape that the snow-curtains revealed for a moment halfway up the street. “You that way,” the native muttered and vanished abruptly to the left. Agat circled the block from the right, and met Umaksuman in the street again. “No luck,” he said.

“Luck,” the Tevaran said briefly, and held up a bone-inlaid Gaal ax which he had not had a minute ago. Over their heads the bell of the Hall tower kept sending out its soft dull clanging through the snow: one, two—one, two—one, two—Retreat to the Square, to the Square…All who had fought at the Sea Gate, and those who had been patrolling the walls and the Land Gate, or asleep in their houses or trying to watch from the roofs, had come or were coming to the city’s heart, the Square between the four great buildings. One by one they were let through the barricades. Umaksuman and Agat came along at last, knowing it was folly to stay out now in these streets where shadows ran. “Let’s go, Alterra!” the native urged him, and Agat came, but reluctantly. It was hard to leave his city to the enemy.

The wind was down now. Sometimes, through the queer complex hush of the storm, people in the Square could hear glass shattering, the splintering of an ax against a door, up one of the streets that led off into the falling snow. Many of the houses had been left unlocked, open to the looters: they would find very little in them beyond shelter from the snow. Every scrap of food had been turned in to the Commons here in the Hall a week ago. The water mains and the natural-gas mains to all buildings except the four around the Square had been shut off last night.

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