（外文电子版资料）Ursula K. Leguin - Olders.pdfVIP

URSULA K. Le GUIN OLDERS The moon slips and shines in the wrinkled mirror before the prow, and from the northern sky the Bright Companions shoot glancing arrows of light along the water. In the stern of the boat the polesman stands in the watchful solemnity of his task. His movements as he poles and steers the boat are slow, certain, august. The long, low channelboat slides on the black water as silently as the reflection it pursues. A few dark figures huddle in it. One dark figure lies full length on the half deck, arms at his sides, closed eyes unseeing that other moon slipping and shining through wisps of fog in the luminous blue night sky. The Husbandman of Sandry is coming home from war. They had been waiting for him on Sandry Island ever since last spring, when he went with seven men, following the messengers who came to raise the Queens army. In midsummer Four of the men of Sandry brought back the news that he was wounded and was lying in the care of the Queens own physician. They told of his great valor in battle, and told of their own prowess too, and how they had won the war. Since then there had been no news. With him now in the channelboat were the three companions who had stayed with him, and a physician sent by the Queen, an, assistant to her own doctor. This man, an active, slender person in his forties, cramped by the long nights travel, was quick to leap ashore when the boat slid silently up along the stone quay of Sandry Farm. While the boatmen and the others busied themselves making the boat fast and lifting the stretcher and its burden up from the boat to the quay, the doctor went on up to the house. Approaching the island, as the sky imperceptibly lightened from night-blue to colorless pallor, he had seen the spires of windmills, the crowns of trees, and the roofs of the house, all in black silhouette, standing very high after the miles of endlessly level reedbeds and water channels. Hello, the people! he called