Dangerous People

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  * Kesh towns were built on the pattern of the heyiya-if, two spiral curves with a common center or Hinge. The Four-House (sacred) arm consisted of the five heyimas or sacred meeting-places, the Five-House (secular) arm consisted of dwelling-houses, spaced out in a curve surrounding a common place or plaza.

  There were so many houses in Telina that the secular arm had become three arms, outer, middle, and inner, each curving around its own plaza.

  (Note that lower-case “house” means a dwelling-house; upper-case “House” refers to the Nine Houses into which the Kesh divided all being.)

  † The largest and most prosperous town of the central Valley, lying between the Old Straight Road and the River Na.

  ‡ A pun both on the meaning of the phrase and on the author’s name, Arravna, River of Words.

  § A familiar literary evasion, understood to mean that though Hardcinder House is a real house, the characters are fictional and the story is a fiction (possibly with some historical or legendary basis).

  ¶ Marai, household, means any number and any combination of blood kin and married-ins living in one house. The Kesh were matrilocal, and house ownership matrilineal, so a mother or grandmother was likely to be at least nominally the head of the family, responsible for the upkeep of the house and the behavior of family members.

  ** Shamsha, the grandmother at the time of the story.

  †† Water was piped into Kesh town-houses, which had interior flush toilets, sinks, and baths. Drinking water was kept cool in summer by various devices, often large earthenware storage jars that cooled by evaporation, fitted with a faucet.

  ‡‡ Many wildflowers had symbolic meaning to the Kesh; chicory signified pregnancy. There are other significations. Hwette is in the morning of her life. The blue chicory flower will live only when growing untouched; if picked, it closes quickly and dies.

  §§ Sou = daughter, -bí attached to a word expresses affection.

  ¶¶ Members of the Madrone Lodge undertook to keep records and archives and write chronicles and history either locally or for the Kesh people as a whole (in the latter case they worked at least part of the time in the Madrone Lodge Archives of Wakwaha). Because it dealt with the past, rather than with actuality, the Lodge was considered to belong to the Houses of Sky. Any person “living in the Sky Houses” was considered to be, to that extent, a “dangerous” person.

  *** Shamsha is also a member of the Oak Society, in the Third House of Earth (Serpentine), made up of people interested in literature, written and oral. Closely connected to both Madrone Lodge and Oak Society was the Book Art, specifically concerned with the manufacture of paper, ink, paints, the tools of writing, printing, and visual art, and books of all kinds.

  ††† Concerning the Kesh attitude towards preservation of documents, etc., see “Pandora Converses with the Archivist of the Library of the Madrone Lodge at Wakwaha-na,” pages 369–372.

  ‡‡‡ One of the seven annual wakwa hedou, great dances, the Moon was a festival of ritual license, the most “dangerous” of all the great dances. It went on for ten nights beginning at the second full moon after the vernal equinox—mid-Spring. The references place the time of the story as late May or June.

  §§§ The computer center at Wakwaha, installed and maintained by the super-terrestrial cybernetic/robotic network known to the Kesh as the City of Mind.

  ¶¶¶ To do research on the computers.

  **** In early or mid-August.

  †††† The noun or verb hinge, íya, is never used lightly; it always hints at further meaning or implication.

  ‡‡‡‡ The town of Chúmo is in these hills.

  §§§§ Souv giyouda, daughter’s husband, so called having formally married Hwette at the Wedding ceremonies of the World Dance.

  ¶¶¶¶ Han es im, the usual Kesh hello; amabí, dear grandmother.

  ***** The physical site of the spiritual center of one’s Earth House (maternal clan—in the case of Shamsha and her daughters the Obsidian). The five heyimas of the Five Houses were one arm of the double spiral formed by all Kesh towns; the other arm consisted of the dwelling houses.

  ††††† The Obsidian House provided the ritual Clowns for several of the great dances. Fefinum and Hwette have joined the Blood Clown Society to learn and perform Clown roles in the women’s dances of the Blood Lodge.

  ‡‡‡‡‡ The Kesh idea of property was complicated. Only sacred things were held entirely in common; only one’s own body was considered entirely one’s inalienable property. Everything else fell between those extremes. They used the possessive pronouns, but their meaning is often very shadowy, and is a kind of shorthand. Speaking carefully, one would not say “my family” “my house,” or “our trees,” but “the people I am related to,” “the house I am living in,” “the trees my family looks after.” The produce of farming and hunting was always shared to a degree determined by complicated traditions and rules. The farm holdings of a Kesh family were usually scattered here and there in a patchwork, cultivated partly by the individual owners and partly as a cooperative enterprise; work and produce were shared according to rule and custom. Shamsha’s family may have had various apricot trees in other orchards.

  §§§§§ Hwette as a child was called Sehoy, Barnswallow; she renamed herself Hwette, scrub oak, when she was adolescent or grown.

  ¶¶¶¶¶ Gift=badab, give=ambad; the two words in Kesh interplay and interlock to the extent that one implies the other; to have a gift is to give it, the gift is in the giving.

  ****** The Doctors Lodge was under the auspices of the Third House, the Serpentine, but people of other Houses could join it. Shamsha is thinking of Duhe as a member of her House, the House of the undomesticated plants such as wildflowers.

  †††††† To the Kesh, a written text was “performed” by reading it aloud, or by hand-copying it, or printing it in letterpress.

  ‡‡‡‡‡‡ Divorce was usually by agreement, but a wife could make a one-sided divorce public and final by putting her husband’s belongings in a pile on the balcony or outside the ground-level door and telling the other people of the household that he did not live there any more. A man refusing to accept such a divorce would face community disapproval and ostracism. Either party of a marriage could request and usually obtain divorce by putting the matter to arbitration by the Councils of his House.

  Chapter Two*

  * * *

  THE DRY SEASON was well along into the heat, and the tarweed was blooming, about a month from ripe. When the moon was near full one night the little boy in Shamsha’s household began talking in the dark. He said, “Take the light away, mamou! Please, mamou, take away the light!” The child’s father went across the room on hands and knees and held him against his body, saying, “Mamou will be home soon, Torippi. Please go to sleep now.” He sang a rocking song, but the child could not sleep; he stared at the moon through the window and then cried and hid his face. Kamedan held him and felt fever coming into him. Whe the day began, Torip was hot and weak and dull-witted.

  Kamedan said to Shamsha, “I think I should go with him to the Doctors Lodge.” She said, “No need of that. Don’t fuss. My grandson will sleep this fever off.” Never able to argue with her, he left the child asleep and went to the weaving lofts. They were warping the ten-foot power loom for canvas that morning, and he worked hard, not having the child in his mind for some while; but as soon as the warping was completed he started back to Hardcinder House, walking fast.

  Near the Hinge of town he saw Modona going towards the hunting side with his deer bow. He said, “So you’re here, Hunter.” Modona said, “So you’re here, Miller,” and was going on, when Kamedan said, “Listen, my wife Hwette is in the hills somewhere on the hunting side, it seems. I keep thinking maybe she got lost. Please be careful when you shoot.” He knew they said Modona would shoot at a falling leaf. He went on, “You might call aloud, in places where you’re not looking for the deer. I keep thinking she’s hurt and not able to ma
ke her way back.”

  The hunter said, “I heard people saying that a person who’d been in Ounmalin said they’d seen Hwette there. No doubt they were mistaken.”

  “I don’t think they could be altogether correct,”† Kamedan said. “Maybe they saw a woman who looked like Hwette.”

  The hunter said with a smile, “Are there women who look like Hwette?”

  Kamedan was at a loss. He did not like Modona. He said, “I have to go home, the child is sick.” He went on, and the hunter went on his way, still grinning.

  Torip lay hot and miserable in the bed when Kamedan came to him. Shamsha said it was a summer cold, there was nothing to worry about, and the other people in the household said the same, but Kamedan stayed around the house. Towards nightfall the fever cooled and the little boy began to talk and smile, and ate some food, and then slept. But in the night, when the moon one day from full shone in the northwest window, he cried out, “Mamou, mamou! come here! come!” Kamedan, sleeping next to him, woke up and reached out to him. He felt the child hot as a coal of fire. He soaked cloths in water and wrapped them around the child’s head and chest and wrists, and gave him sips of cold water in which willowbark extract was infused. The burning lessened a little and the child could sleep. In the morning he lay sleeping soundly, and Shamsha said, “Last night was the worst of it, he’s over the fever. Now all he needs is rest. You go on, you’re not needed here.”

  Kamedan went to the lofts, but his mind would not turn fully to his work.

  Sahelm was helping him that day. Usually he observed and followed Kamedan attentively, learning the art; this day he saw Kamedan making mistakes, and once he had to say, “I think that may not be altogether correct,” to prevent Kamedan from jamming the machine on a miswound bobbin. Kamedan threw the switch to stop the power, and then sat down on the floor with his head between his hands.

  Sahelm sat down not far away from him, crosslegged.

  The sun was at noon. The moon was opposite it, directly opposed, pulling down.‡

  Kamedan said, “Five days ago my wife Hwette left the Obsidian heyimas, where she’d been at Blood Clown practice. In the heyimas they say she said she was going to walk on Spring Mountain. But it was late to go there and get back before dark. In the Blood Lodge some women say she was going to meet some dancers in a clearing on Spring Mountain, but didn’t come. Her mother says she went to Kastoha-na to stay in her brother’s wife’s household for a few days. Her sister says probably she went down the Valley, the way she used to do before she married, walking alone to the seacoast and back. Modona says that people have seen her in Ounmalin.”

  Sahelm listened.

  Kamedan said, “The child wakes in fever under the moon and calls to her. The grandmother says nothing is the matter. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to look for Hwette. I don’t want to leave the child. I must do something and there’s nothing I can do. Thank you for listening to me, Sahelm.”

  He got up and turned the power of the loom back on. Sahelm got up, and they worked together. The thread broke and broke again, a bobbin caught and caught again. Sahelm said, “This isn’t a good day for weavers.”

  Kamedan went on working until the loom jammed and he had to stop. He said then, “Leave me to untangle this mess. Maybe I can do that.”

  Sahelm said, “Let me do it. That kid§ might be glad to see you.”

  Kamedan would not go, and Sahelm thought it better to leave him. He went from the lofts to the herb gardens down by Moon Creek. He had seen Duhe there in the morning, and she was still there. She was sitting under the oak Nehaga¶ eating fresh lettuce. Sahelm came under the shade of the oak and said, “So you’re here, Doctor.” She said, “So you’re here, man of the Fourth House, sit down.” He sat down near her.

  She squeezed lemon juice on lettuce leaves and gave them to him. They finished the lettuce she had washed, and she cut the sweet lemon in quarters and they ate it. They went down to Moon Creek to wash their hands, and returned to the large shade of Nehaga. Duhe had been watering, weeding, pruning, and harvesting herbs. The air was fragrant where she was, and where the baskets she had filled with cutting were in the shade covered with netting, and where she had laid rosemary and catnip and lemon balm and rue on linen cloth in the sunlight to dry. Some cats were hanging around, wanting to get at the catnip as the sun released its scent. She gave a sprig to each cat once, and if the cat came back she threw pebbles at it to keep it off. An old grey woman-cat kept coming back; she was so fat the pebbles did not sting her and so greedy nothing frightened her.

  Duhe asked, “Where has the day taken you on the way here?”

  Sahelm replied, “Into the broadloom lofts, where I’m learning the craft with Kamedan.”

  “Hwette’s husband,” said Duhe. “Has she come back yet?”

  “Where would she come back from?”

  “Some people were saying that she went to the Springs of the River.”

  “I wonder, did she tell them she was going there?”

  “They didn’t say.”

  “Did any of them see her going there, I wonder?”

  “Nobody said so,” Duhe said, and laughed as if puzzled.

  Sahelm said, “Here’s how it is: she went five different ways at the same time. People have told Kamedan that she went to walk alone on Spring Mountain, to meet to dance on Spring Mountain, to Kastoha, to Ounmalin, and to the Ocean. His mind keeps trying to follow her. It seems she said nothing to him about going anywhere before she went.”

  Duhe threw an oakgall at the fat cat, who was coming at the catnip from the southeast. The cat went half a stone’s-throw away, sat down with her back turned to them, and began to wash her hind legs. Duhe watched the cat and said, “That’s strange, that story you tell. Everybody knows where Hwette is and nobody knows.”

  “Kamedan says the child wakes and cries in the night, and the grandmother says nothing is the matter.”

  “Shamsha has brought up three children. Very likely she’s right,” said Duhe, whose mind was not very much on Hwette, but mostly on the catnip and the cat, the hot sunlight and the shade, Sahelm and herself.

  Duhe had lived about forty years in the Third House at that time.** She was a short woman with large breasts, heavy hips, sleek, fine arms and legs, a slow, calm manner, a secretive nature, an intelligent and well-disciplined mind. The Lodge name†† she had given herself was Sleepwalker. A girl, now thirteen, had made her a mother,‡‡ but she had not married the father, an Obsidian man, nor any other man. She and her daughter lived in her sister’s household in After the Earthquake House, but she was mostly outdoors or in the Doctors Lodge.

  She said, “You have a gift, Sahelm.”

  He said, “I have a burden.”

  “Bring it to the Doctors, not the Millers.”

  Sahelm pointed: the old fat cat was approaching the catnip slowly from the southwest. Duhe threw a piece of bark at her, but she made a rush at the catnip nonetheless. Duhe got up and chased her down to the creek, and came back hot and sat down by Sahelm in the shaded grass again.

  He said, “How could a person go five ways at once?”

  “A person could go one way and four people could be mistaken.”

  “Or lying.”

  “What would they be lying for?”

  “Some people are malicious.”

  “Has Kamedan done something to bring malice against him?”

  “No,” Sahelm said. “Kamedan is without malice. But ­Modona . . .”

  They sat in silence for a while.

  “Besides malice,” the doctor said, “there’s laziness. It’s easier to explain than to wonder. . . . And there’s vanity. People don’t like to know they don’t know where she went. So they make up knowledge: She went to Spring Mountain—She went to Wakwaha—She went to the moon! I don’t know where she went, but I know some of the reasons why people who don’t know would say they know.”

  “Why didn’t she herself tell anybody before she went?”

/>   “That I don’t know! Do you know Hwette well?”

  “No.”

  “When they married, people called them Awar and Bulekwe.§§ When they danced on the Wedding Night, they were like those who dance on the rainbow. People watched in wonder.”

  Again they sat in silence. Duhe pointed: the old fat cat was sneaking along in the wild oats above the creekbed, coming back towards the catnip. Sahelm threw an oakgall at her. It rolled between the cat’s front and hind legs, and she leaped in the air and rushed away down the creekbed. Sahelm laughed, and Duhe laughed with him. Up in Nehaga a bluejay screeched and a squirrel yelled back. Bees in the lavender bushes nearby made a noise like always boiling.

  Sahelm said, “I wish you hadn’t said she went to the moon.”

  “I’m sorry I said that. It was spoken without sense. A bubble word.”