Powers - Ursula k . Le Guin

PART ONE

1

"Don't talk about it," Sallo tells me.

"But what if it's going to happen? Like when I saw the snow?"

"That's why not to talk about it."

My sister puts her arm around me and rocks us sideways, left and right, as we sit on the schoolroom bench. The warmth and the hug and the rocking ease my mind and I rock back against Sallo, bumping her a little. But I can't keep from remembering what I saw, the dreadful excitement of it, and pretty soon I burst out, "But I ought to tell them! It was an invasion! They could warn the soldiers to be ready!"

"And they'd say—when?"

That stumps me. "Well, just ready."

"But what if it doesn't happen for a long time. They'd be angry at you for giving a false alarm. And then if an army did invade the city, they'd want to know how you knew."

"I'd tell them I remembered it!"

"No," Sallo says. "Don't ever tell them about remembering the way you do. They'll say you have a power. And they don't like people to have powers."

"But I don't! Just sometimes I remember things that are going to happen!"

"I know. But Gavir, listen, truly, you mustn't talk about it to anybody. Not anybody but me."

When Sallo says my name in her soft voice, when she says, "Listen, truly," I do truly listen to her. Even though I argue.

"Not even Tib."

"Not even Tib." Her round, brown face and dark eyes are quiet and serious.

"Why."

"Because only you and I are Marsh people."

"So was Gammy!"

"It was Gammy that told me what I'm telling you. That Marsh people have powers, and the city people are afraid of them. So we never talk about anything we can do that they can't. It would be dangerous. Really dangerous. Promise, Gav."

She puts up her hand, palm out. I fit my grubby paw against it to make the vow. "I promise," I say as she says, "I hear."

In her other hand she's holding the little Ennu-Mé she wears on a cord around her neck.

She kisses the top of my head and then bumps me so hard I nearly fall off the end of the bench. But I won't laugh;I'm so full of what I remembered, it was so awful and so frightening, I want to talk about it, to tell everybody, to say, "Look out, look out! Soldiers are coming, enemies, with a green flag, setting the city on fire!" I sit swinging my legs, sullen and mournful.

"Tell me about it again," Sallo says. "Tell all the bits you left out."

That's what I need. And I tell her again my memory of the soldiers coming up the street.

Sometimes what I remember has a secret feeling about it, as if it belongs to me, like a gift that I can keep and take out and look at when I'm by myself, like the eagle feather Yaven-dí gave me. The first thing I ever remembered, the place with the reeds and the water, is like that. I've never told anybody about it, not even Sallo. There's nothing to tell; just the silvery-blue water, and reeds in the wind, and sunlight, and a blue hill way off. Lately I have a new remembering: the man in the high room in shadows who turns around and says my name. I haven't told anybody that. I don't need to.

But there's the other kind of remembering, or seeing, or whatever it is, like when I remembered seeing the Father come home from Pagadi, and his horse was lame; only he hadn't come home yet and didn't until next summer, and then he came just as I remembered, on the lame horse. And once I remembered all the streets of the city turning white, and the roofs turning white, and the air full of tiny white birds all whirling and flying downward. I wanted to tell everybody about that, it was so amazing, and I did. Most of them didn't listen. I was only four or five then. But it snowed, later that winter. Everybody ran outside to see the snowfall, a thing that happens in Etra maybe once in a hundred years, so that we children didn't even know what it was called. Gammy asked me, "Is this what you saw? Was it like this." And I told her and all of them it was just what I'd seen, and she and Tib and Sallo believed me. That must have been when Gammy told Sallo what Sallo had just told me, not to talk

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