Free Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin Page B

even toy weapons,” she said. “I like our air bows and arrows. I never miss with them! And they don’t hurt anybody. Anyhow we’re ages from any battles yet, aren’t we? We’d have to do all the envoys’ speeches first. The ditch took so long! We haven’t got the Tower really steady yet. But the rocks are real enough, Torm. You’ll see, when you’ve carried them around and piled them up all day. Even the little ones helped build, Umo and Oco. We’re all Sentans.”
    So she fought, with what weapons she had been given, to defend the city we had built together all that summer, our city of sunlit air.
    Torm shrugged. He finished chewing his bread and cheese in silence. He went down to the stream for a drink; we saw Sallo, Oco, and Sotur shrink back hiding from him among the tall grasses of the bank. He paid them no attention. He waved up at Yaven, shouted something, and set off alone back to the house on the white path by the vineyard, a sturdy, solitary figure, swinging his arms.
    We went back to building for a while, but a shadow had fallen across our make-believe.
    And though during what was left of the summer we all went down to work on Sentas almost daily, it was never quite the same. The Family children were called away often—Yaven and Torm and Uter to go on hunting parties with the Father and neighboring landowners, the girls to entertain the landowners’ wives. Sotur and Umo, who passionately loved our dream-game, escaped these duties and joined us whenever they could, but Astano couldn’t escape; and without her and Yaven we lacked direction, we lacked conviction.
    But all the delights of Vente were still there, swimming and wading in the streams, figs coming ripe (which we didn’t need to steal, because the fig trees were right behind the great house), talking together before we slept out under the stars. And we had one great final day of happiness. Astano proposed that we walk all the way up to the summit of the Ventine Hills. It was farther than we could go and return in a day, so we took food and water and blankets. One of the farm boys followed us with the baggage loaded on a jenny.
    We set off very early; there was a chill in the air now before the sun rose, a foretaste of autumn. The dry grass on the hills was burnt pale gold, the shadows were longer than they had been. We climbed and climbed on an old track, a shepherds’ path that wound among the great round hills. The scattered flocks of mountain sheep had no fear of us, but stared and challenged us with their harsh bleating, almost like roaring. There were no fences up here, since mountain sheep keep to their own pastures without fences or shepherds, but among the flocks were big grey dogs, wolf-guards. These dogs ignored us as we passed by. But if we stopped, a dog would begin to walk forward towards us, silent, very clearly saying,
Now you just move along and everything will be fine.
And we moved along.
    Torm and Uter did not come with us. They had chosen to go wolf hunting down in the pine forests with the uncles Soter and Sodera instead. Oco and Umo, who though ten years old was not very much bigger than Oco at six, stumped along valiantly. Yaven gave Oco a ride on his shoulders now and then, and during the last, long, steep pull, in late afternoon, we took the food and blankets off the jenny and put the two little girls up on her pack saddle. She was a pretty creature, grey as a mouse. I had no idea what a jenny was; she looked like a small horse to me. Sotur explained that if her father had been a donkey and her mother a horse she would have been a mule, but since her mother had been a donkey and her father a horse, she was a jenny. The boy who had been leading her stood listening to this explanation with the dull, glowering expression the farm people seemed always to have.
    “That’s right, isn’t it, Comy?” Sotur asked him. He jerked his head and looked away, scowling. “It’s all in who your ancestors are,” Sotur said to the