Old School Wednesdays: Gifts by Ursula Le Guin

He was lost when he came to us, and I fear the silver spoons he stole from us didn’t save him when he ran away and went up into the high domains. Yet in the end the lost man, the runaway man was our guide.

Orrec grows up hearing tales from his mother and learning how to read them. In them he finds succour in his greatest time of need, when loss, death and grief seem to be all he has to live for. The stories shapes him until he learns how to shape them. And it’s interesting how stories and history intertwine and how tradition and belief are learned things (hello there, Nation). I chose to speak about this thread about storytelling first but Gifts is also a story about the limits of power, the weight of expectations and the pull of family and tradition.

Orrec, is a young man who lives in the Uplands where different clans have varied and fearsome gifts: the ability to summon animals during a hunt, to cast a spell, to make others sick. The most fearsome gift of them all is the gift of undoing and that’s the gift Orrec’s clan traditionally has and the one he is expected to develop. Since Orrec was a young child, his father has told him stories of powerful members of his clan who – with a glance, a hand gesture and a word – can undo living things. Orrec grows up both fearing and hoping his gift will show eventually. It’s not until late that his gift finally shows, only to come boundless and wild. Orrec and his father decide the best way to move forward is to blindfold Orrec – without his sight, he cannot cast his undoing. For the next few years, Orrec lives in a self-imposed darkness in an attempt to control his power. In the meantime, his best friend (and intended wife) Gry, is equally struggling with her own gift and its limitations. And it’s the way that these clans as well as Orrec’s family specifically deal with these gifts (that are more like curses, really, if you think of it) and the power that comes with it that informs most of the story.

And it’s ironic because even with all these gifts and the effective real power it comes with them, life in the Uplands is still harsh, complicated and desolate because the clans live in chequered fear that those gits will be unleashed against each other. Politics, social mores and economics are built on the strengths of these gifts. It’s also interesting to note the choice of naming when addressing them too – all the more important when put in context. Therefore we talk about “gifts”, “undoing”, “calling”, “twisting” which all have possible positive connotations if taken out of the context they actually happen.

And both Orrec and Gry find themselves questioning and confronting the ideas and the gifts in a way that is painful and hopeful and really, really brilliant. And I am just surprised I guess because I never see this series listed on any collection/list/breakdown/best-of YA Fantasy and I wonder why this is. And please excuse me for these meandering thoughts but it’s been a while since I have been so enamoured by a book that I let myself the freedom to simply enjoy writing about it.

Notable quotes/parts:

He was lost when he came to us, and I fear the silver spoons he stole from us didn’t save him when he ran away and went up into the high domains. Yet in the end the lost man, the runaway man was our guide.

Gry called him the runaway man. When he first came, she was sure he’d done some terrible thing, a murder or a betrayal, and was escaping vengeance. What else would bring a Lowlander here, among us?

“Ignorance,” I said. “He knows nothing of us. He’s not afraid of us.”

“He said people down there warned him not to come up among the witches.”

“But he knows nothing about the gifts,” I said. “It’s all just talk, to him. Legends, lies…”

We were both right, no doubt. Certainly Emmon was running away, if only from a well-earned reputation for thievery, or from boredom; he was as restless, as fearless and inquisitive and inconsequential as a hound puppy, trotting wherever his nose led him. Recalling the accent and turns of speech he had, I know now that he came from far in the south, farther than Algalanda, where tales of the Uplands were just that-tales: old rumors of the distant northland, where wicked witchfolk lived in icy mountains and did impossible things.

If he’d believed what they told him down in Danner, he’d never have come up to Caspromant. If he’d believed us, he never would have gone on higher in the mountains. He loved to hear stories, so he listened to ours, but he didn’t believe them. He was a city man, he’d had some education, he’d travelled the length of the Lowlands. He knew the world. Who were we, me and Gry? What did we know, a blind boy and a grim girl, sixteen years old, stuck in the superstition and squalor of the desolate hill farms that we so grandly called our domains? He led us on, in his lazy kindness, to talk about the great powers we had, but while we talked he was seeing the bare, hard way we lived, the cruel poverty, the cripples and backward people of the farms, seeing our ignorance of everything outside these dark hills, and saying to himself, Oh yes, what great powers they have, poor brats!

Gry and I feared that when he left us he went to Geremant. It is hard to think he may still be there, alive but a slave, with legs twisted like corkscrews, or his face made monstrous for Erroy’s amusement, or his eyes truly blinded, as mine were not. For Erroy wouldn’t have suffered his careless airs, his insolence, for an hour.

I took some pains to keep him away from my father when his tongue was flapping, but only because Canoc’s patience was short and his mood dark, not because I feared he’d ever use his gift without good cause. In any case he paid little heed to Emmon or anyone else. Since my mother’s death his mind was all given to grief and rage and rancor. He huddled over his pain, his longing for vengeance. Gry, who knew all the nests and eyries for miles around, once saw a carrion eagle brooding his pair of silvery, grotesque eaglets in a nest up on the Sheer, after a shepherd killed the mother bird who hunted for them both. So my father brooded and starved.

To Gry and me, Emmon was a treasure, a bright creature come into our gloom. He fed our hunger. For we were starving too.

Rating: 9 – Damn Near Perfect

Reading Next: The Daughter Star by Susan Jane Bigelow

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