Read Online City of Illusions by Ursula K. LeGuin - Free Book Online Page A

blowing downriver, he could faintly hear the sound of their singing.
    They came still nearer, paying no heed to him, still singing.
    As far back as his brief memory went, music had always both drawn him and frightened him, filling him with a kind of anguished delight, a pleasure too near torment. At the sound of a human voice singing he felt most intensely that he was not human, that this game of pitch and time and tone was alien to him. But by that strangeness it drew him, and now unconsciously he slowed the slider to listen. Four or five voices sang, chiming and parting and interweaving in a more artful harmony than any he had heard. He did not understand the words. All the forest, the miles of gray water and gray sky, seemed to him to listen in intense, uncomprehending silence.
    The song died away, chiming and fading into a little gust of laughter and talk. The slider and the boat were nearly abreast now, separated by a hundred yards or more. A tall, very slender man erect in the stern hailed Falk, a clear voice ringing easily across the water. Again he caught none of the words. In the steely winter light the man's hair and the hair of the four or five others in the boat shone fulvent gold, all the same, as if they were all of one close kin, or one kind. He could not see the faces clearly, only the red-gold hair, the slender figures bending forward to laugh and beckon. He could not make sure how many there were. For a second one face was distinct, a woman's face, watching him across the moving water and the wind. He had slowed the slider to a hover, and the boat too seemed to rest motionless on the river.
    "Follow us," the man called again, and this time, recognizing the language, Falk understood. It was the old League tongue, Galaktika. Like all Foresters, Falk had learned it from tapes and books, for the documents surviving from the Great Age were recorded in it, and it served as a common speech among men of different tongues. The Forest dialect was descended from Galaktika, but had grown far from it over a thousand years, and by now differed even from House to House. Travelers once had come to Zove's House from the coast of the Eastern Sea, speaking a dialect so divergent that they had found it easier to speak Galaktika with their hosts, and only then had Falk heard it used as a living tongue; otherwise it had only been the voice of a soundbook, or the murmur of the sleep teacher in his ear in the dark of a winter morning. Dreamlike and archaic it sounded now in the clear voice of the steersman. "Follow us, we go to the city!"
    "To what city?"
    "Our own," the man called, and laughed.
    "The city that welcomes the traveler," another called; and another, in the tenor that had rung so sweetly in their singing, spoke more softly: "Those that mean no harm find no harm among us." And a woman called as if she smiled as she spoke, "Come out of the wilderness, traveler, and hear our music for a night."
    The name they called him meant traveler, or messenger.
    "Who are you?" he asked.
    Wind blew and the broad river ran. The boat and the airboat hovered motionless amid the flow of air and water, together and apart as if in an enchantment.
    "We are men."
    With that reply the charm vanished, blown away like a sweet sound or fragrance in the wind from the east. Falk felt again a maimed bird struggle in his hands crying out human words in its piercing unhuman voice: now as then a chill went through him, and without hesitation, without decision, he touched the silver arc and sent the slider forward at full speed.
    No sound came to him from the boat, though now the wind blew from them to him, and after a few moments, when hesitation had had time to catch up with him, he slowed his craft and looked back. The boat was gone. There was nothing on the broad dark surface of the water, clear back to the distant bend.
    After that Falk played no more loud games, but went on as swiftly and silent as he might; he lit no fire at all that night, and