The Telling hc-8

by Ursula Le Guin

  But the essential work of the maz, what gave them honor among the people, was telling: reading aloud, reciting, telling stories, and talking about the stories. The more they told, the more they were honored, and the better they told it, the better they were paid. What they talked about depended on what they knew, what they possessed of the lore, what they invented on their own, and, evidently, what they felt like talking about at the moment.

  The incoherence of it all was staggering. During the weeks that Sutty had laboriously learned about the Two and the One, the Tree and the Foliage, she had gone every evening to hear Maz Ottiar Uming tell a long mythico-historical saga about the explorations of the Rumay among the Eastern Isles six or seven thousand years ago, and also gone several mornings a week to hear Maz Imyen Katyan tell the origins and history of the cosmos, name the stars and constellations, and describe the movements of the other four planets in the Akan system, while displaying beautiful, accurate, ancient charts of the sky. How did it all hang together? Was there any relation at all among these disparate things?

  Fed up with the abstractions of philosophy, for which she had little gift and less inclination, Sutty turned to what the maz called body-telling. The healer maz seemed to know a good deal about maintaining health. She asked Sotyu Ang to teach her about medicine. He patiently began to tell her the curative properties of each of the items in the immense herbary he had inherited from Ang Sotyu’s parents, which filled most of the little drawers in his shop.

  He was very pleased that she was recording all he told her in her noter. So far she had met no arcane wisdoms in the Telling, no holy secrets that could be told only to adepts, no knowledge withheld to fortify the authority of the learned, magnify their sanctity, or increase their fees. "Write down what I tell you!" all the maz kept saying. "Memorise it! Keep it to tell other people!" Sotyu Ang had spent his adult life learning the properties of the herbs, and having no disciple or apprentice, he was touchingly grateful to Sutty for preserving that knowledge. "It is all I have to give the Telling," he said. He was not a healer himself but an apothecary and herbalist. He wasn’t strong on theory; his explanations of why this or that herb worked were often mere associative magic or went in pure verbal circles: this bark dispels fever because it is a febrifuge— But the system of medicine that underlay this pharmaceutics was, as well as she could judge, pragmatic, preventive, and effective.

  Pharmacy and medicine were one of the branches of the Great System. There were many, many branches. The endless story-telling of the maz was about many, many things. All things, all the leaves of the immense foliage of the Tree. She could not give up the conviction that there must be some guiding motive, some central concern. The trunk of the Tree. Was it ethics? The right conduct of life?

  Having grown up under Unism, she was not so naive as to think there was any necessary relation between religion and morality, or that if there was a relation it was likely to be a benevolent one.

  But she had begun to discern and learn a characteristic Akan ethic, expressed in all the parables and moral tales she heard in the tellings, and in the behavior and conversation of the people she knew in Okzat-Ozkat. Like the medicine, the ethic was pragmatic and preventive, and seemed to be pretty effective. It chiefly prescribed respect for your own and everybody else’s body, and chiefly proscribed usury.

  The frequency with which excess profit making was denounced in the stories and in public opinion showed that the root of all evil went deep on Aka. In Okzat-Ozkat, crime consisted mostly of theft, cheating, embezzlement. There was little personal violence. Assault and battery, perpetrated by thieves or by enraged victims of theft or extortion getting revenge, was so rare that every case of it was discussed for days or weeks. Crimes of passion were even rarer. They were not glamorised or condoned. In the tales and histories, heroism was not earned by murder or slaughter. Heroes were those who atoned for violent acts, or those who died bravely. The word for murderer was a cognate of the word for madman. Iziezi couldn’t tell Sutty whether murderers were locked up in a jail or in a madhouse, because she didn’t know of any murderers in Okzat-Ozkat. She had heard that in the old days rapists had been castrated, but wasn’t sure how rape was punished now, because she didn’t know of any cases of it either. Akans were gentle with their children, and Iziezi seemed to find the idea of mistreating children almost inconceivable; she knew some folktales of cruel parents, of children left orphaned who starved because nobody took them in, but she said, "Those stories are from long ago, before people were educated."

  The Corporation, of course, had introduced a new ethic, with new virtues such as public spirit and patriotism, and a vast new area of crime: participation in banned activities. But Sutty had yet to meet anybody in Okzat-Ozkat, outside Corporation officials and perhaps some of the students at the Teachers’ College, who thought of the maz or anything they did as criminal. Banned, illicit, illegal, deviant: these new categories redefined behavior, but they were without moral meaning except to their authors.

  Had there been no crimes, then, in the old days, but rape, murder, and usury?

  Maybe there had been no need for further sanctions. Maybe the system had been so universal that nobody could imagine living outside it, and only self-destructive insanity could subvert it. It had been the way of life. It had been the world.

  That ubiquity of the system, its great antiquity, the tremendous force of habit it had acquired through its detailed patterning of daily life, food, drink, hours and aims of work and recreation — all this, Sutty told her noter, might explain modern Aka. At least it might explain how the Corporation of Dovza had achieved hegemony so easily, had been able to enforce uniform, minute control over how people lived, what they ate, drank, read, heard, thought, did. The system had been in place. Anciently, massively in place, all over the Continent and Isles of Aka. All Dovza had done was take the system over and change its goals. From a great consensual social pattern within which each individual sought physical and spiritual satisfaction, they had made it a great hierarchy in which each individual served the indefinite growth of the society’s material wealth and complexity. From an active homeostatic balance they had turned it to an active forward-thrusting imbalance.

  The difference, Sutty told her noter, was between somebody sitting thinking after a good meal and somebody running furiously to catch the bus.

  She was pleased with that image.

  She looked back on her first half year on Aka with incredulity and with pity both for herself and for the consumer-producers of Dovza City. "What sacrifices these people have made!" she told her noter. "They agreed to deny their entire culture and impoverish their lives for the ’March to the Stars’ — an artificial, theoretical goal — an imitation of societies they assumed to be superior merely because they were capable of space flight. Why? There’s a step missing. Something happened to cause or catalyse this enormous change. Was it nothing more than the arrival of the First Observers from the Ekumen? Of course that was an enormous event for a people who’d never known outsiders…"

  An enormous burden of responsibility on the outsiders, too, she thought.

  "Do not betray us!" the Monitor had said. But her people, the starfarers of the Ekumen, the Observers who were so careful not to intervene, not to interfere, not to take control, had brought betrayal with them. A few Spaniards arrive, and the great empires of the Incas, the Aztecs, betray themselves, collapse, let their gods and their very language be denied… So the Akans had been their own conquerors. Bewildered by foreign concepts, by the very concept of foreignness, they had let the ideologues of Dovza dominate and impoverish them. As the ideologues of Communocapitalism in the twentieth century, and the zealots of Unism in her own century, had dominated and impoverished the Earth.

  If indeed this process had begun with first contact, perhaps it was by way of reparation that Tong Ov wanted to learn what could be learned of Aka before the First Observers came. Did he have some hope of eventually restoring to the Akans what they had thrown
away? But the Corporation State would never allow it.

  "Look in the garbage for the gold piece," was a saying she had learned from Maz Ottiar Uming, but she didn’t think the Monitor would agree with it. To him the gold piece was a rotten corpse.

  She had mental conversations with the Monitor quite often during that long winter of learning and listening, reading and practicing, thinking and rethinking. She set him up as her boxing dummy. He didn’t get to answer, only to listen to her. There were things she didn’t want to record in her noter, things she thought in the privacy of her head, opinions that she couldn’t cease to cherish but tried to keep separate from observation. Such as her opinion that if the Telling was a religion it was very different from Terran religions, since it entirely lacked dogmatic belief, emotional frenzy, deferral of reward to a future life, and sanctioned bigotry. All those elements, which the Akans had done so well without, she thought, had been introduced by Dovza. It was the Corporation State that was the religion. And so she liked to summon up the blue-and-tan uniform, the stiff back and cold face of the Monitor, and tell him what a zealot he was, and what a fool, along with all the other bureaucrat-ideologues, for grasping after other people’s worthless goods while tossing his own treasure into the garbage.

  The actual flesh-and-blood Monitor must have left Okzat-Ozkat; she had not met him in the streets for weeks. It was a relief. She much preferred him as a minatory figment.

  She had stopped posing the question about what the maz did. Any four-year-old could have said what they did. They told. They retold, read, recited, discussed, explained, and invented. The infinite matter of their talk was not fixed and could not be defined. And it was still growing, even now; for not all the texts were learned from others, not all the stories were of ancient days, not all the thoughts and ideas had been handed down over the years.

  The first time she met the maz Odiedin Manma was at a telling where he told the story of a young man, a villager up in the foothills of Silong, who dreamed that he could fly. The young man dreamed flying so often and so vividly that it seemed he began to take his dreams for waking life. He would describe the sensations of flight and the things he saw from the air. He drew maps of beautiful unknown lands on the other side of the world that he discovered in his flights. People came to hear him tell about flying and to see the marvelous maps. But one day, climbing down a river gorge after a strayed eberdin, he missed his footing, fell, and was killed.

  That was all the story. Odiedin Manma made no comment, and no one asked questions. The telling was at the house of the maz Ottiar and Uming. Sutty later asked Maz Ottiar Uming about the story, for it puzzled her.

  The old woman said, "Odiedin’s partner Manma was killed in a fall when he was twenty-seven. They had been maz only a year."

  "And Manma used to tell his dreams of flying?"

  Ottiar Uming shook her head. "No," she said. "That is the story, yoz. Odiedin Manma’s story. He tells that one. The rest of his telling is in the body." She meant exercises, gymnastic practice, of which Odiedin was a highly respected teacher.

  "I see," Sutty said, and went away and thought about it.

  She knew one thing, she had learned one thing for sure, here in Okzat-Ozkat: she had learned how to listen. To listen, hear, keep listening to what she’d heard. To carry the words away and listen to them. If telling was the skill of the maz, listening was the skill of the yoz. As they all liked to remark, neither one was any use without the other.

  FIVE

  Winter came without much snow but bitterly cold, winds knifing down out of the immense wilderness of mountains to the west and north. Iziezi took Sutty to a secondhand clothing store to buy a worn but sturdy leather coat lined with its own silky fleece. The hood lining was the feathery fur of some mountain animal of which Iziezi said, "All gone now. Too many hunters." She said the leather was not eberdin, as Sutty had thought, but minule, from the high mountains. The coat came below her knees and was met by light, fleece-lined boots. These were new, made of artificial materials, for mountain sports and hiking. The people of the old way placidly accepted new technologies and products, so long as they worked better than the old ones and so long as using them did not require changing one’s life in any important way. To Sutty this seemed a profound but reasonable conservatism. But to an economy predicated on endless growth, it was anathema.

  Sutty tramped around the icy streets in her old coat and her new boots. In winter in Okzat-Ozkat everybody looked alike in their old leather coats and fleecy hoods, except for the uniformed bureaucrats, who all looked alike in their coats and hoods of artificial fabrics in bright uniform colors, purple, rust, and blue. The merciless cold gave a kind of fellowship of anonymity. When you got indoors the warmth was an unfailing source of relief, pleasure, companionly feeling. On a bitter blue evening, to struggle up the steep streets to some small, stuffy, dim-lit room and gather with the others at the hearth — an electric heater, for there was little wood here near timberline, and all warmth was generated by the ice-cold energy of the Ereha — and to take your mittens off and rub your hands, which seemed so naked and delicate, and look round at the other windburned faces and ice-dewed eyelashes, and hear the little drum go tabatt, tabatt, and the soft voice begin to speak, listing the names of the rivers of Hoying and how each flowed into the next, or telling the story of Ezid and Inamema on the Mountain of Gam, or describing how the Council of Mez raised an army against the western barbarians — that was a solid, enduring, reliable pleasure to Sutty, all winter long.

  The western barbarians, she now knew, were the Dovzans. Almost everything the maz taught, all their legends and history and philosophy, came from the center and east of the great continent, and from past centuries, past millennia. Nothing came from Dovza but the language they spoke; and here that was full of words from the original language of this area, Rangma, and other tongues.

  Words. A world made of words.

  There was music. Some of the maz sang healing chants like those Tong Ov had recorded in the city; some played string instruments, plucked or bowed, to accompany narrative ballads and songs. Sutty recorded them when she could, though her musical stupidity kept her from appreciating them. There had been art, carvings and paintings and tapestries, using the symbols of the Tree and the Mountain and figures and events from the legends and histories. There had been dance, and there were still the various forms of exercise and moving meditation. But first and last there were the words.

  When the maz put the mantle of their office — a flimsy length of red or blue cloth — over their shoulders, they were perceived as owning a sacred authority or power. What they said then was part of the Telling.

  When they took the scarf off they returned to ordinary status, claiming no personal spiritual authority at all; what they said then weighed no more than what anybody said. Some people of course insisted on ascribing permanent authority to them. Like the people of Sutty’s own tribe, many Akans longed to follow a leader, turn earned payment into tribute, load responsibility onto somebody else’s shoulders. But if the maz had one quality in common, it was a stubborn modesty. They were not in the charisma business. Maz Imyen Katyan was as gentle a man as she had ever met, but when a woman called him by a reverent title, munan, used for famous maz in the stories and histories, he turned on her with real rage — "How dare you call me that?" — and then, having regained his calm, "When I’ve been dead a hundred years, yoz."

  Sutty had assumed that since everything the maz did professionally was in defiance of the law, at real personal risk, some of this modest style, this very low profile, was a recent thing. But when she said so, Maz Ottiar Uming shook her head.

  "Oh, no," the old woman said. "We have to hide, to keep everything secret, yes. But in my grandparents’ time I think most of the maz lived the way we do. Nobody can wear the scarf all the time! Not even Maz Elyed Oni… Of course it was different in the umyazu."

  "Tell me about the umyazu, maz."

  "They were places built so the po
wer could gather in them. Places full of being. Full of people telling and listening. Full of books."

  "Where were they?"

  "Oh, everywhere. Here in Okzat-Ozkat there was one up where the High School is now, and one where the pumice works is now. And all the way to Silong, in the high valleys, on the trade roads, there were umyazu for the pilgrims. And down where the land’s rich, there were huge, great umyazu, with hundreds of maz living in them, and visiting from one to another all their lives. They kept books, and wrote them, and made records, and kept on telling. They could give their whole life to it, you see. They could always be there where it was. People would go visit them to hear the telling and read the books in the libraries. People went in processions, with red and blue flags. They’d go and stay all winter, sometimes. Save up for years so they could pay the maz and pay for their lodging. My grandmother told me about going to the Red Umyazu of Tenban. She was eleven or twelve years old. It took them nearly the whole year to go and stay and come back. They were pretty wealthy, my grandmother’s family, so they could ride all the way, the whole family, with eberdin pulling the wagon. They didn’t have the cars and planes then, you know. Nobody did. Most people just walked. But everybody had flags and wore ribbons. Red and blue." Ottiar Uming laughed with pleasure at the thought of those processions. "My mother’s mother wrote the story of that journey. I’ll get it out and tell it sometime."

  Her partner, Uming Ottiar, was unfolding a big, stiff square of paper on the table in the back room of their grocery shop. Ottiar Uming went to help him, setting a polished black stone on each curling corner to keep it flat. Then they invited their five listeners to come forward, salute the paper with the mountain-heart gesture, and study the chart and inscriptions on it. They displayed it thus every three weeks, and Sutty had come each time all winter. It had been her first formal introduction to the thought system of the Tree. The couple’s most precious possession, given them fifty years ago by their teacher-maz, it was a marvelously painted map or mandala of the One that is Two giving rise to the Three, to the Five, to the Myriad, and the Myriad again to the Five, the Three, the Two, the One… A Tree, a Body, a Mountain, inscribed within the circle that was everything and nothing. Delicate little figures, animals, people, plants, rocks, rivers, lively as flickering flames, made up each of the greater forms, which divided, rejoined, transformed each into the others and into the whole, the unity made up of infinite variety, the mystery plain as day.