Read Online the wind's twelve quarters by Ursula K. Le Guin - Free Book Online Page A

the city wall, the tall old house peered from leaded windows at the two young Masters down in the street. Sulfurous late-autumn twilight hung over the steep slate roofs shining with rain. “Yin was a Machine-Master like us,” Mede told Ganil as they waited at the iron-barred door, “retired now, you’ll see why. Men from all the Lodges come here, apothecaries, weavers, masons. Even some artisans. One butcher. He cuts up dead cats.” Mede spoke with amused tolerance, as physicists generally speak of biologists. Now the door swung open, and a servant took them upstairs to a room where logs glowed on a great hearth, and a man rose from a high-backed oaken chair to greet them.  
    Ganil thought at once of the Overmaster of his Lodge, the figure that had cried down to him in his grave, “Arise.” Yin too was old and tall, and wore the white cloak of the High Masters. But he stooped, and his face was creased and weary as an old hound’s. He held out his left hand to greet them. His right arm ended in a long healed, shiny stump at the wrist.  
    “This is Ganil,” Mede was saying. “He invented the duodecimal system last night. Get him working on the mathematics of curves for me, Master Yin.”  
    Yin laughed, an old man’s short, soft laugh. “Welcome, Ganil. From now on, come here when you please. We’re all necromancers here, we practice the black arts. Or try to... Come freely, day or night. And go freely. If we’re betrayed, so be it. We must trust one another. Mystery belongs to no man; we’re not keeping a secret, but practicing an art. Does that make sense to you?”  
    Ganil nodded. Words never came easily to him, only numbers. And he found himself very moved, which embarrassed him. This was no solemn symbolic Initiation and Oath, but only an old man talking quietly.  
    “Good,” said Yin, as if Ganil’s nod had been quite sufficient. “Some wine, young Masters, or ale? My dark ale came out first-rate this year. So you like numbers, do you, Ganil?”  
    In early spring Ganil stood in the shop supervising Wanno as the prentice took measurements onto his Comparing Stick from the model of the hauling-cart engine. Ganil’s face was grim. He had changed over these few months, looked older, more resolute, harder. Four hours’ sleep a night plus the invention of algebra might well change a man.  
    “Master Ganil?” said a shy voice.  
    “Repeat that measurement,” he told Wanno, and then turned questioningly to the girl. Lani too had changed. Her face looked a little cross, a little forlorn, and she spoke to Ganil with real timidity. He had taken the second step of courtship, the three evening calls, and then becoming absorbed in his work with Yin, had gone no further. No man had ever dropped Lani in the middle of a courtship. No man had ever looked right through her, as he was doing now. What was it he saw, when he looked through her? She was wild to know that, to get at his secret, to get at him. In a vague, unquantifiable way he knew this, and was sorry for Lani, and a little afraid of her.  
    She was watching Wanno. “Do they... do you ever change those measurements?” she asked, trying to make conversation.  
    “To change a Model is the heresy of Invention.”  
    That ended that. “My father wanted me to tell you the Shop will be shut tomorrow.”  
    “Shut? Why’s that?”  
    “The College has announced there’s a west wind rising, and the Sun may come out tomorrow.”  
    “Good! A good beginning for the spring, eh? Thanks.” And he turned back to the model.  
    The Priests of the College had for once been right. Weather prediction, on which they spent most of their waking hours, was a thankless task. But once in ten tries or so they caught a Sun, and this was one of the times. By noon the rains had ceased and the cloud-cover was paling, beginning to boil and flow slowly eastward. By mid-afternoon all the people of Edun were out on the streets and squares, on chimneypots and