Free the wind's twelve quarters by Ursula K. Le Guin Page B

gold-robed priest raised his crossed arms in invocation to the Sun that stood, unseen, at noon behind the pall of clouds, and as he lowered his arms torches were set to the stacks of wood round the stake. Smoke curled up, the same grey-yellow as the clouds. Ganil stood with his injured hand in its sling pressed hard against the roll of papers under his.cloak, repeating silently, “Let the smoke suffocate him first....” But the wood was dry and caught quickly. He felt the heat on his face, on his fire-scarred temple. Beside him a young priest tried to draw back, could not because of the pressing, staring, sighing crowd, and stood still, swaying a little and breathing in gasps. The smoke was thick now, hiding the flames and the figure among them. But Ganil could hear his voice, not soft now, loud, very loud. He heard it, he forced himself to hear it, but at the same time he listened in his spirit to a steady voice, soft, continuing: “What is the Sun? Why does it cross the sky?... Do you see how I need your numbers?... For XII, write 12.... This is also a figure, the figure for Nothing.”  
    The screaming had stopped, but the soft voice had not.  
    Ganil raised his head. The crowd was drifting away; the young priest knelt on the pavement by him, praying and sobbing aloud. Ganil glanced up at the heavy sky and then set off alone through the streets of the city and out through the city gate, northward, into exile and towards his home.  

DARKNESS BOX

    When my daughter Caroline was three she came to me with a small wooden box in her small hands and said, “Guess fwat is in this bockus!” I guessed caterpillars, mice, elephants, etc. She shook her head, smiled an unspeakably eldritch smile, opened the box slightly so that I could just see in, and said: “Darkness.”  
    Hence this story.  
     
    On soft sand by the sea’s edge a little boy walked leaving no footprints. Gulls cried in the bright sunless sky, trout leaped from the saltless ocean. Far off on the horizon the sea serpent raised himself a moment in seven enormous arches and then, bellowing, sank. The child whistled but the sea serpent, busy hunting whales, did not surface again. The child walked on casting no shadow, leaving no tracks on the sand between the cliffs and the sea. Ahead of him rose a grassy headland on which stood a four-legged hut. As he climbed a path up the cliff the hut skipped about and rubbed its front legs together like a lawyer or a fly; but the hands of the clock inside, which said ten minutes of ten, never moved.  
    “What’s that you’ve got there, Dicky?” asked his mother as she added parsley and a pinch of pepper to the rabbit stew simmering in an alembic.  
    “A box, Mummy.”  
    “Where did you find it?”  
    Mummy’s familiar leaped down from the onion-festooned rafters and, draping itself like a foxfur round her neck, said, “By the sea.”  
    Dicky nodded. “That’s right. The sea washed it up.”  
    “And what’s inside it?”  
    The familiar said nothing, but purred. The witch turned round to look into her son’s round face. “What’s in it?” she repeated.  
    “Darkness.”  
    “Oh? Let’s see.”  
    As she bent down to look the familiar, still purring, shut its eyes. Holding the box against his chest, the little boy very carefully lifted the lid a scant inch.  
    “So it is,” said his mother. “Now put it away, don’t let it get knocked about. I wonder where the key got to. Run wash your hands now. Table, lay!” And while the child worked the heavy pump-handle in the yard and splashed his face and hands, the hut resounded with the clatter of plates and forks materializing.  
    After the meal, while his mother was having her morning nap, Dicky took down the water-bleached, sand-encrusted box from his treasure shelf and set out with it across the dunes, away from the sea. Close at his heels the black familiar followed him, trotting patiently over the sand through the coarse grass, the only