Free Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin Page A

and whatever else the kitchen had for us for lunch, he said, “I’ll go.” He came back with the lunch sack, and with Torm.
    As soon as she saw Torm climbing the hill, Oco shrank into the maze of rocks behind the Tower of the Ancients. Presently Sallo slipped away with her down to the stream that ran by the foot of our hill.
    Yaven showed Torm all over our rock buildings and earthworks, explaining how they followed the historic plans, and telling him of the scenes that would be enacted when we’d finished building Sentas and were ready for the siege and fall. Torm followed him about, saying little, looking stiff and uncomfortable, but he did say some words of praise for the circumvallation—our masterpiece.
    Our rock buildings were small and shaky and required the eye of love to see much resemblance to towers and gates in them, but our earthworks were, on their small scale, perfectly real. We had built a palisade right around the summit of the hill, with a steep-sided ditch, the circumvallation, outside it, piling up the earth against the inner side of the palisade to brace it and give foothold to the defenders. You really could not get into Sentas except by a long single-plank bridge across the ditch and through the single gate in the palisade. Torm still didn’t say much but he was clearly impressed by the size and extent of our labors.
    “Here,” Yaven said, “I’ll lead a surprise assault—Men of Sentas! to the walls! to the gate! The enemy comes! Defend our homes!” He went off down the hill a bit while we closed the gate and ran its big wooden bolt into the socket and swarmed up onto the slanting earth inside the palisade or atop the wobbly rock walls of the inner “citadel.” Then Yaven came charging up the hill and across the plank, and we all yelled defiance and rained down invisible arrows and spears upon him. He rattled the gate mightily and then sank down and died in front of it while we cheered.
    Torm watched it all, not part of our game but clearly drawn to it by its nature and by our excitement.
    We opened the gate and welcomed Yaven in and sat down in whatever shade we could find to eat lunch. Sotur slipped off with some food for Sallo and Oco down at the creek.
    “So what do you think of Sentas?” Yaven asked.
    Torm said, “It’s fine. Very good.” His voice had deepened; he sounded like the Father. “Only . . . It’s sort of foolish. People going
biwang
. . .” He imitated the way we pretended, with empty hands, to draw a bow and shoot.
    “I suppose it does look silly. You’ve been using real weapons all summer,” Yaven said with his easy, honest courtesy.
    Torm nodded, condescending.
    “This is just play. A play. It did get us out of lessons, though,” said Yaven. And this was true. Everra had given up any pretense of holding class, once the building of Sentas had got under way. He assured the Mother and himself that it had actually been his idea, a means of teaching us the epic poem, the history of the war between Pagadi and Sentas, and the architecture of defense.
    “If you didn’t use the others, you could have swords and bows,” Torm said. “There’d be six of us.”
    “They’d still be toy weapons,” Yaven said, after the slightest pause. “Not like what you’ve been learning. Ho! I wouldn’t give Sotur a sword with an edge, she’d have my liver out before I knew it!”
    “But you couldn’t give slaves weapons,” Uter said, not having understood what Torm meant by “the others.” Uter was always coming out with rules and prohibitions and moralisms; Sotur called him Trudec. “It’s against the law.”
    Torm went black-browed. He said nothing. I glanced at Tib, who was cringing, like me, at the memory of our punishment for playing soldiers for Torm. And I saw Yaven glance over at his sister Astano. “Get us out of this!” his glance said, and she did, promptly, speaking fluently and almost at random, as women are trained to do.
    “I’d hate to have