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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Now Umaksuman spoke: “Listen, Elders of Tevar! You say this, you say that, but you have nothing left to say. The Gaal are coming: within three days they are here. Be silent and go sharpen your spears, go look to our gates and walls, because the enemy comes, they come down on us—see!” He flung out his arm to the north, and many turned to stare where he pointed, as if expecting the hordes of the Southing to burst through the wall that moment, so urgent was Umaksuman’s rhetoric.

  “Why didn’t you look to the gate your kinswoman went out of, Umaksuman?”

  Now it was said.

  “She’s your kinswoman too, Ukwet,” Umaksuman said wrathfully.

  One of them was Wold’s son, the other his grandson; they spoke of his daughter. For the first time in his life Wold knew shame, bald, helpless shame before all the best men of his people. He sat moveless, his head bowed down.

  “Yes, she is; and because of me, no shame rests on our Kin! I and my brothers knocked the teeth out of the dirty face of that one she lay with, and I had him down to geld him as he-animals should be gelded, but then you stopped us, Umaksuman. You stopped us with your fool talk—”

  “I stopped you so that we wouldn’t have the farborns to fight along with the Gaal, you fool! She’s of age to sleep with a man if she chooses, and this is no—”

  “He was no man, kinsman, and I am no fool.”

  “You are a fool, Ukwet, for you jumped at this as a chance to make quarrel with the farborns, and so lost us our one chance to turn aside the Gaal!”

  “I do not hear you, liar, traitor!”

  They met with a yell in the middle of the circle, axes drawn. Wold got up. Men sitting near him looked up expecting him, as Eldest and clan-chief, to stop the fight. But he did not. He turned away from the broken circle and in silence, with his stiff, ponderous shuffle, went down the alley between the high slant roofs, under projecting eaves, to the house of his Kin.

  He clambered laboriously down earthen stairs into the stuffy, smoky warmth of the immense dug-out room. Boys and womenfolk came asking him if the Stone-Pounding was over and why he came alone. “Umaksuman and Ukwet are fighting,” he said to get rid of them, and sat down by the fire, his legs right in the firepit. No good would come of this. No good would come of anything any more. When crying women brought in the body of his grandson Ukwet, a thick path of blood dropping behind them from the ax-split skull, he looked on without moving or speaking. “Umaksuman killed him, his kinsman, his brother,” Ukwet’s wives shrilled at Wold, who never raised his head. Finally he looked around at them heavily like an old animal beset by hunters, and said in a thick voice, “Be still. . . . Can’t you be still. . . .”

  It snowed again next day. They buried Ukwet, the first-dead of the Winter, and the snow fell on the corpse’s face before the grave was filled. Wold thought then and later of Umaksuman, outlawed, alone in the hills, in the snow. Which was better off?

  His tongue was very thick and he did not like to talk. He stayed by the fire and was not sure, sometimes, whether outside it was day or night. He did not sleep well; he seemed somehow always to be waking up. He was just waking up when the noise began outside, up above ground.

  Women came shrieking in from the side-rooms, grabbing up their little Fall-born brats. “The Gaal, the Gaal!” they screeched. Others were quiet as befitted women of a great house, and put the place in order and sat down to wait.

  No man came for Wold.

  He knew he was no longer a chief; but was he no longer a man? Must he stay with the babies and women by the fire, in a hole in the ground?

  He had endured public shame, but the loss of his own self-respect he could not endure, and shaking a little he got up and began to rummage in his old painted chest for his leather vest and his heavy spear, the spear with which he had killed a snowghoul singlehanded, very long ago. He was stiff and heavy now and all the bright seasons had passed since then, but he was the same man, the same that had killed with that spear in the snow of another winter. Was he not the same man? They should not have left him here by the fire, when the enemy came.

  His fool womenfolk came squealing around him, and he got mixed up and angry. But old Kerly drove them all off, gave him back his spear that one of them had taken from him, and fastened at his neck the cape of gray korio-fur she had made for him in autumn. There was one left who knew what a man was. She watched him in silence and he felt her grieving pride. So he walked very erect. She was a cross old woman and he was a foolish old man, but pride remained. He climbed up into the cold, bright noon, hearing beyond the walls the calling of foreign voices.

  Men were gathered on the square platform over the smokehole of the House of Absence. They made way for him when he hoisted himself up the ladder. He was wheezing and trembling so that at first he could see nothing. Then he saw. For a while he forgot everything in the unbelievable sight.

  The valley that wound from north to south along the base of Tevar Hill to the river-valley east of the forest was full—full as the river in the flood-time, swarming, overrunning with people. They were moving southward, a sluggish, jumbled, dark flood, stretching and contracting, stopping and starting, with yells, cries, calls, creaking, snapping whips, the hoarse bray of harm, the wail of babies, the tuneless chanting of travois-pullers; the flash of color from a rolled-up red felt tent, a woman’s painted bangles, a red plume, a spearhead; the stink, the noise, the movement—always the movement, moving southward, the Southing. But in all timepast there had never been a Southing like this, so many all together. As far as eye could follow up the widening valley northward there were more coming, and behind them more, and behind them more. And these were only the women and the brats and the baggage-train. . . . Beside that slow torrent of people the Winter City of Tevar was nothing. A pebble on the edge of a river in flood.

  At first Wold felt sick; then he took heart, and said presently, “This is a wonderful thing. . . .” And it was, this migration of all the nations of the north. He was glad to have seen it. The man next to him, an Elder, Anweld of Siokman’s Kin, shrugged and answered quietly, “But it’s the end of us.”

  “If they stop here.”

  “These won’t. But the warriors come behind.”

  They were so strong, so safe in their numbers, that their warriors came behind. . . .

  “They’ll need our stores and our herds tonight, to feed all those,” Anweld went on. “As soon as these get by, they’ll attack.”

  “Send our women and children out into the hills to the west, then. This City is only a trap against such a force.”

  “I listen,” Anweld said with a shrug of assent.

  “Now—quickly—before the Gaal encircle us.”

  “This has been said and heard. But others say we can’t send our women out to fend for themselves while we stay in the shelter of the walls.”

  “Then let’s go with them!” Wold growled. “Can the Men of Tevar decide nothing?”

  “They have no leader,” Anweld said. “They follow this man and that man and no man.” To say more would be to seem to blame Wold and his kinsmen; he said no more except, “So we wait here to be destroyed.”

  “I’m going to send my womenfolk off,” Wold said, irked by Anweld’s cool hopelessness, and he left the mighty spectacle of the Southing, to lower himself down the ladder and go tell his kinfolk to save themselves while there was some chance. He meant to go with them. For there was no fighting such odds, and some, some few of the people of Tevar must survive.

  But the younger men of his clan did not agree and would not take his orders. They would stand and fight.

  “But you’ll die,” said Wold, “and your women and children might go free—if they’re not here with you.” His tongue was thick again. They could hardly wait for him to finish.

  “We’ll beat off the Gaal,” said a young grandson. “We are warriors!”

  “Tevar is a strong city, Eldest,” another said, persuasive, flattering. “You told us and taught us to build it well.”

/>   “It will stand against Winter,” Wold said. “Not against ten thousand warriors. I would rather see my women die of the cold in the bare hills, than live as whores and slaves of the Gaal.” But they were not listening, only waiting for him to be done talking.

  He went outside again, but was too weary now to climb the ladders to the platform again. He found himself a place to wait out of the way of the coming and going in the narrow alleys: a niche by a supporting buttress of the south wall, not far from the gate. If he clambered up on the slanting mud-brick buttress he could look over the wall and watch the Southing going by; when the wind got under his cape he could squat down, chin on knees, and have some shelter in the angle. For a while the sun shone on him there. He squatted in its warmth and did not think of much. Once or twice he glanced up at the sun, the Winter sun, old, weak in its old age.

  Winter grasses, the short-lived hasty-flowering little plants that would thrive between the blizzards until Mid-Winter when the snow did not melt and nothing lived but the rootless snowcrop, already were pushing up through the trampled ground under the wall. Always something lived, each creature biding its time through the great Year, flourishing and dying down to wait again.

  The long hours went by.

  There was crying and shouting at the northwest corner of the walls. Men went running by through the ways of the little city, alleys wide enough for one man only under the overhanging eaves. Then the roar of shouting was behind Wold’s back and outside the gate to his left. The high wooden slide-gate, that lifted from inside by means of long pulleys, rattled in its frame. They were ramming a log against it. Wold got up with difficulty; he had got so stiff sitting there in the cold that he could not feel his legs. He leaned a minute on his spear, then got a footing with his back against the buttress and held his spear ready, not with the thrower but poised to use at short range.

  The Gaal must be using ladders, for they were already inside the city over at the north side, he could tell by the noise. A spear sailed clear over the roofs, overshot with a thrower. The gate rattled again. In the old days they had had no ladders and rams, they came not by thousands but in ragged tribes, cowardly barbarians, running south before the cold, not staying to live and die on their own Range as true men did. . . . There came one with a wide, white face and a red plume in his horn of pitch-smeared hair, running to open the gate from within. Wold took a step forward and said, “Stop there!” The Gaal looked around, and the old man drove his six-foot iron-headed spear into his enemy’s side under the ribs, clear in. He was still trying to pull it back out of the shivering body when, behind him, the gate of the city began to split. That was a hideous sight, the wood splitting like rotten leather, the snout of a thick log poking through. Wold left his spear in the Gaal’s belly and ran down the alley, heavily, stumbling, towards the House of his Kin. The peaked wooden roofs of the city were all on fire ahead of him.

  8

  In the Alien City

  THE STRANGEST THING in all the strangeness of this house was the painting on the wall of the big room downstairs. When Agat had gone and the rooms were deathly still she stood gazing at this picture till it became the world and she the wall. And the world was a network: a deep network, like interlacing branches in the woods, like inter-running currents in water, silver, gray, black, shot through with green and rose and a yellow like the sun. As one watched the network one saw in it, among it, woven into it and weaving it, little and great patterns and figures, beasts, trees, grasses, men and women and other creatures, some like farborns and some not; and strange shapes, boxes set on round legs, birds, axes, silver spears and feathers of fire, faces that were not faces, stones with wings and a tree whose leaves were stars.

  “What is that?” she asked the farborn woman whom Agat had asked to look after her, his kinswoman; and she in her way that was an effort to be kind replied, “A painting, a picture—your people make pictures, don’t they?”

  “Yes, a little. What is it telling of?”

  “Of the other worlds and our home. You see the people in it. . . . It was painted long ago, in the first Year of our exile, by one of the sons of Esmit.”

  “What is that?” Rolery pointed, from a respectful distance.

  “A building—the Great Hall of the League on the world called Davenant.”

  “And that?”

  “An erkar.”

  “I listen again,” Rolery said politely—she was on her best manners at every moment now—but when Seiko Esmit seemed not to understand the formality, she asked, “What is an erkar?”

  The farborn woman pushed out her lips a little and said indifferently, “A . . . thing to ride in, like a . . . well, you don’t even use wheels, how can I tell you? You’ve seen our wheeled carts? Yes? Well, this was a cart to ride in, but it flew in the sky.”

  “Can your people make such cars now?” Rolery asked in pure wonderment, but Seiko took the question wrong. She replied with rancor, “No. How could we keep such skills here, when the Law commanded us not to rise above your level? For six hundred years your people have failed to learn the use of wheels!”

  Desolate in this strange place, exiled from her people and now alone without Agat, Rolery was frightened of Seiko Esmit and of every person and every thing she met. But she would not be scorned by a jealous woman, an older woman. She said, “I ask to learn. But I think your people haven’t been here for six hundred years.”

  “Six hundred home-years is ten Years here.” After a moment Seiko Esmit went on, “You see, we don’t know all about the erkars and many other things that used to belong to our people, because when our ancestors came here they were sworn to obey a law of the League, which forbade them to use many things different from the things the native people used. This was called Cultural Embargo. In time we would have taught you how to make things—like wheeled carts. But the Ship left. There were few of us here, and no word from the League, and we found many enemies among your nations in those days. It was hard for us to keep the Law and also to keep what we had and knew. So perhaps we lost much skill and knowledge. We don’t know.”

  “It was a strange law,” Rolery murmured.

  “It was made for your sakes—not ours,” Seiko said in her hurried voice, in the hard distinct farborn accent like Agat’s. “In the Canons of the League, which we study as children, it is written: No Religion or Congruence shall be disseminated, no technique or theory shall be taught, no cultural set or pattern shall be exported, nor shall paraverbal speech be used with any non-Communicant high-intelligence life-form, or any Colonial Planet, until it be judged by the Area Council with the consent of the Plenum that such a planet be ready for Control or for Membership. . . . It means, you see, that we were to live exactly as you live. In so far as we do not, we have broken our own Law.”

  “It did us no harm,” Rolery said. “And you not much good.”

  “You cannot judge us,” Seiko said with that rancorous coldness; then controlling herself once more, “There’s work to be done now. Will you come?”

  Submissive, Rolery followed Seiko. But she glanced back at the painting as they left. It had a greater wholeness than any object she had ever seen. Its somber, silvery, unnerving complexity affected her somewhat as Agat’s presence did; and when he was with her, she feared him, but nothing else. Nothing, no one.

  The fighting men of Landin were gone. They had some hope, by guerilla attacks and ambushes, of harrying the Gaal on southward towards less aggressive victims. It was a bare hope, and the women were working to ready the town for siege. Seiko and Rolery reported to the Hall of the League on the great square, and there were assigned to help round up the herds of hann from the long fields south of town. Twenty woman went together; each as she left the Hall was given a packet of bread and hann-milk curd, for they would be gone all day. As forage grew scant the herds had ranged far south between the beach and the coastal ridges. The women hiked about eight miles south and then beat back, zigzagging to and fro, collecting and driving the little, silent,
shaggy beasts in greater and greater numbers.

  Rolery saw the farborn women in a new light now. They had seemed delicate, childish, with their soft light clothes, their quick voices and quick minds. But here they were out in the ice-rimmed stubble of the hills, in furs and trousers like human women, driving the slow, shaggy herds into the north wind, working together, cleverly and with determination. They were wonderful with the beasts, seeming to lead rather than drive them, as if they had some mastery over them. They came up the road to the Sea Gate after the sun had set, a handful of women in a shaggy sea of trotting, high-haunched beasts. When Landin walls came in sight a woman lifted up her voice and sang. Rolery had never heard a voice play this game with pitch and time. It made her eyes blink and her throat ache, and her feet on the dark road kept the music’s time. The singing went from voice to voice up and down the road; they sang about a lost home they had never known, about weaving cloth and sewing jewels on it, about warriors killed in war; there was a song about a girl who went mad for love and jumped into the sea, “O the waves they roll far out before the tide . . .” Sweet-voiced, making song out of sorrow, they came with the herds, twenty women walking in the windy dark. The tide was in, a soughing blackness over the dunes to their left. Torches on the high walls flared before them, making the city of exile an island of light.

  All food in Landin was strictly rationed now. People ate communally in one of the great buildings around the square, or if they chose took their rations home to their houses. The women who had been herding were late. After a hasty dinner in the strange building called Thiatr, Rolery went with Seiko Esmit to the house of the woman Alla Pasfal. She would rather have gone to Agat’s empty house and been alone there, but she did whatever she was asked to do. She was no longer a girl, and no longer free. She was the wife of an Alterran, and a prisoner on sufferance. For the first time in her life, she obeyed.

  No fire burned in the hearth, yet the high room was warm; lamps without wicks burned in glass cages on the wall. In this one house, as big as a whole Kinhouse of Tevar, one old woman lived by herself. How did they bear the loneliness? And how did they keep the warmth and light of summer inside the walls? And all Year long they lived in these houses, all their lives, never wandering, never living in tents out on the Range, on the broad Summerlands, wandering. . . . Rolery pulled her groggy head erect and stole a glance at the old one, Pasfal, to see if her sleepiness had been seen. It had. The old one saw everything; and she hated Rolery.