Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  They were very tall, very thin, semi-humanoid; hard and delicate, moving rather awkwardly and slowly on the ground, which was not their element. Narrow chests projected between the shoulder-muscles of long, soft wings that fell curving down their backs like gray capes. The legs were thin and short, and the dark, noble heads seemed stooped forward by the upward jut of the wingblades.

  Rocannon’s Handbook lay under the fog-bound waters of the channel, but his memory shouted at him: High Intelligence Life Forms, Unconfirmed Species ?4: Large humanoids said to inhabit extensive towns (?). And he had the luck to confirm it, to get the first sight of a new species, a new high culture, a new member for the League. The clean, precise beauty of the buildings, the impersonal charity of the two great angelic figures who brought water, their kingly silence, it all awed him. He had never seen a race like this on any world. He came to the pair, who were giving Kyo water, and asked with diffident courtesy, “Do you speak the Common Tongue, winged lords?”

  They did not heed him. They went quietly with their soft, slightly crippled ground-gait to Raho and forced water into his contorted mouth. It ran out again and down his cheeks. They moved on to Mogien, and Rocannon followed them. “Hear me!” he said, getting in front of them, but stopped: it came on him sickeningly that the wide golden eyes were blind, that they were blind and deaf. For they did not answer or glance at him, but walked away, tall, aerial, the soft wings cloaking them from neck to heel. And the door fell softly to behind them.

  Pulling himself together, Rocannon went to each of his companions, hoping an antidote to the paralysis might be working. There was no change. In each he confirmed the slow breath and faint heartbeat—in each except one. Raho’s chest was still and his pitifully contorted face was cold. The water they had given him was still wet on his cheeks.

  Anger broke through Rocannon’s awed wonder. Why did the angel-men treat him and his friends like captured wild animals? He left his companions and strode across the courtyard, out the topless gate into the street of the incredible city.

  Nothing moved. All doors were shut. Tall and windowless, one after another, the silvery facades stood silent in the first light of the sun.

  Rocannon counted six crossings before he came to the street’s end: a wall. Five meters high it ran in both directions without a break; he did not follow the circumferential street to seek a gate, guessing there was none. What need had winged beings for city gates? He returned up the radial street to the central building from which he had come, the only building in the city different from and higher than the high silvery houses in their geometric rows. He reentered the courtyard. The houses were all shut, the streets clean and empty, the sky empty, and there was no noise but that of his steps.

  He hammered on the door at the inner end of the court. No response. He pushed, and it swung open.

  Within was a warm darkness, a soft hissing and stirring, a sense of height and vastness. A tall form lurched past him, stopped and stood still. In the shaft of low early sunlight he had let in the door, Rocannon saw the winged being’s yellow eyes close and reopen slowly. It was the sunlight that blinded them. They must fly abroad, and walk their silver streets, only in the dark.

  Facing that unfathomable gaze, Rocannon took the attitude that hilfers called “GCO” for Generalised Communications Opener, a dramatic, receptive pose, and asked in Galactic, “Who is your leader?” Spoken impressively, the question usually got some response. None this time. The Winged One gazed straight at Rocannon, blinked once with an impassivity beyond disdain, shut his eyes, and stood there to all appearances sound asleep.

  Rocannon’s eyes had eased to the near-darkness, and he now saw, stretching off into the warm gloom under the vaults, rows and clumps and knots of the winged figures, hundreds of them, all unmoving, eyes shut.

  He walked among them and they did not move.

  Long ago, on Davenant, the planet of his birth, he had walked through a museum full of statues, a child looking up into the unmoving faces of the ancient Hainish gods.

  Summoning his courage, he went up to one and touched him— her? they could as well be females—on the arm. The golden eyes opened, and the beautiful face turned to him, dark above him in the gloom. “Hassa!” said the Winged One, and, stooping quickly, kissed his shoulder, then took three steps away, refolded its cape of wings and stood still, eyes shut.

  Rocannon gave them up and went on, groping his way through the peaceful, honeyed dusk of the huge room till he found a farther doorway, open from floor to lofty ceiling. The area beyond it was a little brighter, tiny roof holes allowing a dust of golden light to sift down. The walls curved away on either hand, rising to a narrow arched vault. It seemed to be a circular passage-room surrounding the central dome, the heart of the radial city. The inner wall was wonderfully decorated with a pattern of intricately linked triangles and hexagons repeated clear up to the vault. Rocannon’s puzzled ethnological enthusiasm revived. These people were master builders. Every surface in the vast building was smooth and every joint precise; the conception was splendid and the execution faultless. Only a high culture could have achieved this. But never had he met a highly-cultured race so unresponsive. After all, why had they brought him and the others here? Had they, in their silent angelic arrogance, saved the wanderers from some danger of the night? Or did they use other species as slaves? If so, it was queer how they had ignored his apparent immunity to their paralyzing agent. Perhaps they communicated entirely without words; but he inclined to believe, in this unbelievable palace, that the explanations might lie in the fact of an intelligence that was simply outside human scope. He went on, finding in the inner wall of the torus-passage a third door, this time very low, so that he had to stoop, and a Winged One must have to crawl.

  Inside was the same warm, yellowish, sweet-smelling gloom, but here stirring, muttering, susurrating with a steady soft murmur of voices and slight motions of innumerable bodies and dragging wings. The eye of the dome, far up, was golden. A long ramp spiraled at a gentle slant around the wall clear up to the drum of the dome. Here and there on the ramp movement was visible, and twice a figure, tiny from below, spread its wings and flew soundlessly across the great cylinder of dusty golden air. As he started across the hall to the foot of the ramp, something fell from midway up the spiral, landing with a hard dry crack. He passed close by it. It was the corpse of one of the Winged Ones. Though the impact had smashed the skull, no blood was to be seen. The body was small, the wings apparently not fully formed.

  He went doggedly on and started up the ramp.

  Ten meters or so above the floor he came to a triangular niche in the wall in which Winged Ones crouched, again short and small ones, with wrinkled wings. There were nine of them, grouped regularly, three and three and three at even intervals, around a large pale bulk that Rocannon peered at a while before he made out the muzzle and the open, empty eyes. It was a windsteed, alive, paralyzed. The little delicately carved mouths of nine Winged Ones bent to it again and again, kissing it, kissing it.

  Another crash on the floor across the hall. This Rocannon glanced at as he passed at a quiet run. It was the drained withered body of a barilo.

  He crossed the high ornate torus-passage and threaded his way as quickly and softly as he could among the sleep-standing figures in the hall. He came out into the courtyard. It was empty. Slanting white sunlight shone on the pavement. His companions were gone. They had been dragged away for the larvae, there in the domed hall, to suck dry.

  VII

  ROCANNON’S KNEES gave way. He sat down on the polished red pavement, and tried to repress his sick fear enough to think what to do. What to do. He must go back into the dome and try to bring out Mogien and Yahan and Kyo. At the thought of going back in there among the tall angelic figures whose noble heads held brains degenerated or specialized to the level of insects, he felt a cold prickling at the back of his neck; but he had to do it. His friends were in there and he had to get them out. Were the larvae and their nurses i
n the dome sleepy enough to let him? He quit asking himself questions. But first he must check the outer wall all the way around, for if there was no gate, there was no use. He could not carry his friends over a fifteen-foot wall.

  There were probably three castes, he thought as he went down the silent perfect street: nurses for the larvae in the dome, builders and hunters in the outer rooms, and in these houses perhaps the fertile ones, the egglayers and hatchers. The two that had given water would be nurses, keeping the paralyzed prey alive till the larvae sucked it dry. They had given water to dead Raho. How could he not have seen that they were mindless? He had wanted to think them intelligent because they looked so angelically human. Strike Species ?4, he told his drowned Handbook, savagely. Just then, something dashed across the street at the next crossing—a low, brown creature, whether large or small he could not tell in the unreal perspective of identical housefronts. It clearly was no part of the city. At least the angel-insects had vermin infesting their fine hive. He went on quickly and steadily through the utter silence, reached the outer wall, and turned left along it.

  A little way ahead of him, close to the jointless silvery base of the wall, crouched one of the brown animals. On all fours it came no higher than his knee. Unlike most low-intelligence animals on this planet, it was wingless. It crouched there looking terrified, and he simply detoured around it, trying not to frighten it into defiance, and went on. As far as he could see ahead there was no gate in the curving wall.

  “Lord,” cried a faint voice from nowhere. “Lord!”

  “Kyo!” he shouted, turning, his voice clapping off the walls. Nothing moved. White walls, black shadows, straight lines, silence.

  The little brown animal came hopping toward him. “Lord,” it cried thinly, “Lord, O come, come. O come, Lord!”

  Rocannon stood staring. The little creature sat down on its strong haunches in front of him. It panted, and its heartbeat shook its furry chest, against which tiny black hands were folded. Black, terrified eyes looked up at him. It repeated in quavering Common Speech, “Lord . . .”

  Rocannon knelt. His thoughts raced as he regarded the creature; at last he said very gently, “I do not know what to call you.”

  “O come,” said the little creature, quavering. “Lords—lords. Come!”

  “The other lords—my friends?”

  “Friends,” said the brown creature. “Friends. Castle. Lords, castle, fire, windsteed, day, night, fire. O come!”

  “I’ll come,” said Rocannon.

  It hopped off at once, and he followed. Back down the radial street it went, then one side-street to the north, and in one of the twelve gates of the dome. There in the red-paved court lay his four companions as he had left them. Later on, when he had time to think, he realized that he had come out from the dome into a different courtyard and so missed them.

  Five more of the brown creatures waited there, in a rather ceremonious group near Yahan. Rocannon knelt again to minimize his height and made as good a bow as he could. “Hail, small lords,” he said.

  “Hail, hail,” said all the furry little people. Then one, whose fur was black around the muzzle, said, “Kiemhrir.”

  “You are the Kiemhrir?” They bowed in quick imitation of his bow. “I am Rokanan Olhor. We come from the north, from Angien, from Hallan Castle.”

  “Castle,” said Blackface. His tiny piping voice trembled with earnestness. He pondered, scratched his head. “Days, night, years, years,” he said. “Lords go. Years, years, years . . . Kiemhrir ungo.” He looked hopefully at Rocannon.

  “The Kiemhrir . . . stayed here?” Rocannon asked.

  “Stay!” cried Blackface with surprising volume. “Stay! Stay!” And the others all murmured as if in delight, “Stay . . .”

  “Day,” Blackface said decisively, pointing up at this day’s sun, “lords come. Go?”

  “Yes, we would go. Can you help us?”

  “Help!” said the Kiemher, latching onto the word in the same delighted, avid way. “Help go. Lord, stay!”

  So Rocannon stayed: sat and watched the Kiemhrir go to work. Blackface whistled, and soon about a dozen more came cautiously hopping in. Rocannon wondered where in the mathematical neatness of the hive-city they found places to hide and live; but plainly they did, and had storerooms too, for one came carrying in its little black hands a white spheroid that looked very like an egg. It was an eggshell used as a vial; Blackface took it and carefully loosened its top. In it was a thick, clear fluid. He spread a little of this on the puncture-wounds in the shoulders of the unconscious men; then, while others tenderly and fearfully lifted the men’s heads, he poured a little of the fluid in their mouths. Raho he did not touch. The Kiemhrir did not speak among themselves, using only whistles and gestures, very quiet and with a touching air of courtesy.

  Blackface came over to Rocannon and said reassuringly, “Lord, stay.”

  “Wait? Surely.”

  “Lord,” said the Kiemher with a gesture towards Raho’s body, and then stopped.

  “Dead,” Rocannon said.

  “Dead, dead,” said the little creature. He touched the base of his neck, and Rocannon nodded.

  The silver-walled court brimmed with hot light. Yahan, lying near Rocannon, drew a long breath.

  The Kiemhrir sat on their haunches in a half-circle behind their leader. To him Rocannon said, “Small lord, may I know your name?”

  “Name,” the black-faced one whispered. The others all were very still. “Liuar,” he said, the old word Mogien had used to mean both nobles and midmen, or what the Handbook called Species II. “Liuar, Fiia, Gdemiar: names. Kiemhrir: unname.”

  Rocannon nodded, wondering what might be implied here. The word “kiemher, kiemhrir” was in fact, he realized, only an adjective, meaning lithe or swift.

  Behind him Kyo caught his breath, stirred, sat up. Rocannon went to him. The little nameless people watched with their black eyes, attentive and quiet. Yahan roused, then finally Mogien, who must have got a heavy dose of the paralytic agent, for he could not even lift his hand at first. One of the Kiemhrir shyly showed Rocannon that he could do good by rubbing Mogien’s arms and legs, which he did, meanwhile explaining what had happened and where they were.

  “The tapestry,” Mogien whispered.

  “What’s that?” Rocannon asked him gently, thinking he was still confused, and the young man whispered, “The tapestry, at home—the winged giants.”

  Then Rocannon remembered how he had stood with Haldre beneath a woven picture of fair-haired warriors fighting winged figures, in the Long Hall of Hallan.

  Kyo, who had been watching the Kiemhrir, held out his hand. Blackface hopped up to him and put his tiny, black, thumbless hand on Kyo’s long, slender palm.

  “Wordmasters,” said the Fian softly. “Wordlovers, the eaters of words, the nameless ones, the lithe ones, long remembering. Still you remember the words of the Tall People, O Kiemhrir?”

  “Still,” said Blackface.

  With Rocannon’s help Mogien got to his feet, looking gaunt and stern. He stood a while beside Raho, whose face was terrible in the strong white sunlight. Then he greeted the Kiemhrir, and said, answering Rocannon, that he was all right again.

  “If there are no gates, we can cut footholds and climb,” Rocannon said.

  “Whistle for the steeds, Lord,” mumbled Yahan.

  The question whether the whistle might wake the creatures in the dome was too complex to put across to the Kiemhrir. Since the Winged Ones seemed entirely nocturnal, they opted to take the chance. Mogien drew a little pipe on a chain from under his cloak, and blew a blast on it that Rocannon could not hear, but that made the Kiemhrir flinch. Within twenty minutes a great shadow shot over the dome, wheeled, darted off north, and before long returned with a companion. Both dropped with a mighty fanning of wings into the courtyard: the striped windsteed and Mogien’s gray. The white one they never saw again. It might have been the one Rocannon had seen on the ramp in the musty, golden dusk o
f the dome, food for the larvae of the angels.

  The Kiemhrir were afraid of the steeds. Blackface’s gentle miniature courtesy was almost lost in barely controlled panic when Rocannon tried to thank him and bid him farewell. “O fly, Lord!” he said piteously, edging away from the great, taloned feet of the windsteeds; so they lost no time in going.

  An hour’s windride from the hive-city their packs and saddles, and the spare cloaks and furs they used for bedding, lay untouched beside the ashes of last night’s fire. Partway down the hill lay three Winged Ones dead, and near them both Mogien’s swords, one of them snapped off near the hilt. Mogien had waked to see the Winged Ones stooping over Yahan and Kyo. One of them had bitten him, “and I could not speak,” he said. But he had fought and killed three before the paralysis brought him down. “I heard Raho call. He called to me three times, and I could not help him.” He sat among the grassgrown ruins that had outlived all names and legends, his broken sword on his knees, and said nothing else.

  They built up a pyre of branches and brushwood, and on it laid Raho, whom they had borne from the city, and beside him his hunting-bow and arrows. Yahan made a new fire, and Mogien set the wood alight. They mounted the windsteeds, Kyo behind Mogien and Yahan behind Rocannon, and rose spiraling around the smoke and heat of the fire that blazed in the sunlight of noon on a hilltop in the strange land.

  For a long time they could see the thin pillar of smoke behind them as they flew.

  The Kiemhrir had made it clear that they must move on, and keep under cover at night, or the Winged Ones would be after them again in the dark. So toward evening they came down to a stream in a deep, wooded gorge, making camp within earshot of a waterfall. It was damp, but the air was fragrant and musical, relaxing their spirits. They found a delicacy for dinner, a certain shelly, slow-moving water animal very good to eat; but Rocannon could not eat them. There was vestigial fur between the joints and on the tail; they were ovipoid mammals, like many animals here, like the Kiemhrir probably. “You eat them, Yahan. I can’t shell something that might speak to me,” he said, wrathful with hunger, and came to sit beside Kyo.