Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The Lodges

  The Bay Laurel Lodge and the Finders Lodge are under the auspices of all Five Houses of the Earth.

  The Blood Lodge

  The Blood Clown Society

  The Hunters Lodge

  The Fishers Lodge

  The Doctors Lodge

  The Oak Society

  The Planting Lodge

  The Green Clown Society

  The White Clown Society

  The Salt Lodge

  The Olive Society

  The Lamb Society

  The Arts

  The Glass Art

  The Tanning Art

  The Cloth Art

  The Potting Art

  The Water Art

  The Book Art

  The Wood Art

  The Drum Art

  The Wine Art

  The Smith Art

  THE FOUR HOUSES OF THE SKY

  The Sixth House

  The Seventh House

  The Eight House

  The Ninth House

  RAIN

  CLOUD

  WIND

  STILL AIR

  The directions of all Four Houses of the Sky are towards the nadir and towards the zenith. The colors of all Four Houses of the Sky are the spectrum of the rainbow, and white.

  bear

  death

  down

  puma

  dream

  up

  coyote

  wilderness

  across

  hawk

  eternity

  out

  The Inhabitants

  Those who live in the Four Houses of the Sky are most birds, sea fish, shellfish, wild animals that are not hunted for food (puma, wildcat, feral cat, coyote, wild dog, bear, ringtail, mouse, vole, rat, woodrat, squirrel, groundsquirrel, chipmunk, mole, gopher, skunk, porcupine, otter, fox, bat), reptiles, amphibians, insects; any plant or animal considered as the species or in general; human beings as the species, people, tribe, or nation; the dead, the unborn; all beings in stories or dreams; the oceans, the sun, the stars.

  The Festivals

  The inhabitants of the Four Houses dance the Earth Dances of the World Ceremony, and the Sun Dance.

  The Lodges

  The Black Adobe Lodge and the Madrone Lodge are under the auspices of all Four Houses of the Sky.

  The Arts

  The Milling Art is under the auspices of all Four Houses of the Sky.

  In a Valley town everybody had two houses: the house you lived in, your dwelling-place, in the Left Arm of the double-spiral-shaped town; and in the Right Arm, your House, the heyimas. In the household, you lived with your kinfolk by blood or by marriage; in the heyimas you met with your greater and permanent family. The heyimas was a center of worship, instruction, training, and study, a meetinghouse, a political forum, a workshop, a library, archive, and museum, a clearinghouse, an orphanage, hotel, hospice, refuge, resource center, and the principal center of economic control and management for the community, both internally and in regard to trade with other Kesh towns or outside the Valley.

  In the smaller towns the heyimas was a large, five-sided, underground chamber, subdivided with partitions, with a low, four-sided, pyramidal roof showing aboveground. Stairways went up the roof at the corners, and the entrance was by skylight and ladder. In Telina and Kastoha both the underground rooms and the ornamented roofs were very much larger; and in Wakwaha, on the Mountain, the five heyimas were great underground complexes, their splendid roof-pyramids surrounded by secondary buildings and plazas. The public area within the curve of dwelling-houses was called the common place; that within the curve of the five heyimas was called the dancing place. The map of the town of Sinshan (here) shows how a Kesh town was laid out.

  Some further discussion of the affiliation of the Lodges and Arts with the Houses is in the section “Lodges, Societies, Arts,” (here). As the chart shows, the Millers, whose professions included responsibility for watermills, windmills, and generators, various kinds of engineering, and the construction, operation, and maintenance of machines, held a distinguished yet anomalous position, having no House among the living responsible for them.

  Other apparent anomalies are a function of charting and translating. In English one can say that a quail lives in the Second House, but it begins to sound odd to say that a tomato vine lives in the Fifth House, and it is very odd to say that the dead and the unborn live in the Houses of the Sky. The Kesh might say that this is because we do not live in the Houses ourselves, but remain outside.

  Coyote

  The heyimas buildings are, as you please, the Five Houses, or material manifestations of them, or representations of them. Of the Four Houses, the principal material manifestations are meteorological: rain for the Sixth House, clouds, fog, and mist for the Seventh, wind for the Eighth, and for the Ninth House still air, thin air, which is also called breath. The other great symbols of the Four Houses, Bear, Puma, Coyote, Hawk, may be seen as mythological devices, imaginative configurations, not to be taken literally; yet one cannot discount the literal aspect. To go into Coyote’s House is to be changed. Again, the Four Houses are the Houses of Death, Dream, Wilderness, Eternity All these aspects interconnect, so that rain, the bear, and death may each symbolise either of the others; verbal and iconographic imagery flourish with this interlinking. The whole system is profoundly metaphorical. To limit it to any other mode would be, in the judgment of the people of the Valley, superstition.

  It is for this reason that I do not refer to the system of the Nine Houses as a religion or the heyimas as religious houses, despite the obvious and continuous relation of Valley living and thinking with the sacred. They had no god; they had no gods; they had no faith. What they appear to have had is a working metaphor. The idea that comes nearest the center of the vision is the House; the sign is the hinged spiral or heyiya-if; the word is the word of praise and change, the word at the center, heya!

  Hawk

  Where It Is

  THE MOUNTAINS of the Valley’s parallel framing ranges aren’t high; even the Grandmother, Ama Kulkun, the old volcano at which the ranges meet in a tangled knot, isn’t much over four thousand feet. The Valley floor is a flat river plain, but the hills come up steep-sided from it and the ranges are rugged, deep-cut with creek canyons. On slopes that face the east and are sheltered from the sea wind, trees and shrubs grow thick: digger pine, fir, redwood, madrone, and manzanita; scrub and live and tan and white and black oak and the great Valley oak; buckeye, bay laurel, willow and ash and alder. Where it’s dryer, the chaparral: a low, dense scrub of buckbrush or wild lilac that flowers sweet blue and violet as the rains end, and white-flowering chamise, and chaparral pea, deerwood, toyon, coffeeberry, coyote bush, and always the scrub oak, and always the poison oak. Along the creeks grow sweetshrub and oceanspray and yellow azalea, and the wild rose and the wild vine of California; on the west-facing, windy hillsides and the round hills of serpentine, only the wild grasses and the wild flowers.

  It was always an austere land, generous but not lush, not soft, not gentle. It always had two season: one wet, one dry. The rains and the heat can be fierce, frightening. Growing things go through their sweet slow steady order of flowering, ripening, resting as they do anywhere, but the turn from one season to the other is less transition than reversal. A few dark-grey, pouring days when the burnt and sodden brown hills brighten suddenly into the aching, piercing green of the new grass…A few cloud-flurried, shining days when the orange poppies, the blue lupine, the vetch, clover, wild lilac, brodiaea, blue-eyed grass, daisies, lilies are all in bloom, whole hillsides white and purple and blue and gold, but at the same moment the grass is drying, turning pale, and the wild oats have already sown their seed. Those are the times of change: the greening into winter, the dying into summer.

  The fog comes in. It comes up from the vast flat mudlands, the sea marshes and reed beds, the estuaries and endless tules southeastward, the sea beaches over the southwest range. Aro
und Sinshan Mountain and She Watches and Spring Mountain, hard, dark, depthless silhouettes on the dry sky, the fog comes moistening and blurring and rubbing things out. The mountains all go quietly away. Under a low roof the hills are dim. Every leaf beads and drips. The little brown birds of the chaparral flit uncertainly and say tsp, tkk, somewhere nearby but never seen. A Valley oak looms huge, you can’t see where its arms are reaching to. If you went up from Wakwaha on such a morning you’d come out of the fog somewhere on the road, come right through that roof, and turning, look back on a white fog-sea breaking in brilliant silence on the hills. It has done that for a long time. They are old hills, but fog is older.

  The dirt of the Valley is black or brown adobe clay or the red dirt that blue-green serpentine rock breaks down into, with streaks of volcanic ash; not a rich, openminded, amenable soil, but poor, opinionated, cranky dirt. It spits wheat out. What it has to say to the farmer is grapevine, olive, rose, lemon, plum. Tough stuff, sweet-smelling, strong-tasting, long-lived. And corn, beans, squashes, melons, potatoes, carrots, greens, what have you, whatever you want, if you work hard enough, and dig when it’s like wet cement and water when it’s like dry cement. A difficult dirt.

  In our day the River of the Valley barely trickles through a drought year, when by September all but the biggest creeks are dry; but the Na will have been a bigger, though a shorter, stream. When the Great Valley as a whole subsides, the rifting along the fault lines and probably some magma pockets under Ama Kulkun will have sent the Valley’s elevation up; the watertable under it would also rise; and what with the hot summers of the Great Valley much tempered by the Inland Sea and the vast marshlands, and the sea fogs flowing over the sea currents through a far broader Gate, the climate will have been modified. The dry season not so intensely dry; the creeks fuller; the river statelier, more considerable, more worshipful. But still less than thirty miles from spring to sea.

  Thirty miles can be a short or a long way. It depends on the way you go them; what the Kesh called wakwaha.

  With ceremony, with forms of politeness and reassurance, they borrowed the waters of the River and its little confluents to drink and be clean and irrigate with, using water mindfully, carefully. They lived in a land that answers greed with drought and death. A difficult land: aloof yet sensitive. Like the deer who live there, who will steal your food and be your food, skinny little deer, thief and prey, neighbor and watcher and watched, curious, un-frightened, untrusting, and untamable. Never anything but wild.

  The roots and springs of the Valley were always wild. The patterns of the grapestakes and the pruned vines, the rows of grey olive trees and the formal splendor of flowering almond orchards, the sharp-footed sheep and the dark-eyed cattle, the wineries of stone, the old barns, the mills down by the water, the little shady towns, these are beautiful, humane, endearing, but the roots of the Valley are the roots of the digger pine, the scrub oak, the wild grasses careless and uncared for, and the springs of those creeks rise among the rifts of earthquake, among rocks from the floors of seas that were before there were human beings and from the fires inside the earth. The roots of the Valley are in wildness, in dreaming, in dying, in eternity. The deer trails there, the footpaths and the wagon tracks, they pick their way around the roots of things. They don’t go straight. It can take a lifetime to go thirty miles, and come back.

  Pandora Worries About What She Is Doing: The Pattern

  PANDORA DOESN’T WANT to look into the big end of the telescope and see, jewel-bright, distinct, tiny, and entire, the Valley. She shuts her eyes, she doesn’t want to see, she knows what she will see: Everything Under Control. The dolls’ house. The dolls’ country.

  Pandora rushes out of the observatory with her eyes shut, grabbing, grabbing with her hands.

  What does she get, besides cut hands? Bits, chunks, fragments, Shards. Pieces of the Valley, lifesize. Not at a distance, but in the hand, to be felt and held and heard. Not intellectual, but mental. Not spiritual, but heavy. A piece of madrone wood, a piece of obsidian. A piece of blue clay. Even if the bowl is broken (and the bowl is broken), from the clay and the making and the firing and the pattern, even if the pattern is incomplete (and the pattern is incomplete), let the mind draw its energy. Let the heart complete the pattern.

  Some Stories Told Aloud

  Some Stories Told Aloud

  One Evening in the

  Dry Season at a

  Summer Place Above Sinshan

  Well, Coyote was going along inside the world, you know, and she met old man Bear.

  “I’ll come with you,” Coyote said.

  Bear said, “No, please don’t come with me. I don’t want you. I’m going to get all the bears together and make a war on the human beings. I don’t want you along.”

  Coyote said, “Oh, that’s terrible, a terrible thing to do. You’ll all destroy each other. You’ll be killed, they’ll be killed. Don’t make war, please don’t make war! We should all live in peace and love each other!” All the time she was talking, Coyote was stealing Bear’s balls, cutting them off with an obsidian knife she had stolen from the Doctor’s Lodge, a knife so sharp he never felt it cutting.

  When she was done she ran away with Bear’s balls in a pouch. She went to where the human people were. They were smoking tobacco and singing, making gunpowder and bullets, cleaning their guns, getting ready for the war with the bears. Coyote went to their war general and said, “Oh, how brave you are, you men of valor, you true warriors! What courage you have, going to war against the bears with only guns for your weapons!”

  The man got worried and said, “What kind of weapons have they got?”

  Coyote said, “They have secret weapons. I can’t tell you.” But when he was really worried, she told him, “They have huge guns that shoot magic bullets that turn human people into bears. I brought a couple of the bullets.” And she showed him the bear’s testicles.

  All the warriors came and looked and said, “What can we do?”

  Coyote said, “Well, what you ought to do is this. Your general should shoot his magic bullets at the bears, and turn them human.”

  But the general said, “No. Get that coyote out of here, she only makes trouble!” They started shooting at Coyote, and she ran away.

  The war began. The bears had their hearts and claws, the humans had tobacco smoke and guns. The humans shot and killed all the bears one after another, all but a few, just four or five who had come late to the war and could get away. They ran away and hid in the wilderness.

  There they met Coyote.

  “What did you do that for, Coyote?” they said. “Why didn’t you help us? All you did was steal the balls off our best warrior!”

  Coyote said, “If I could have got the balls off that human man, everything would have been all right. Listen. Those people fuck too often and think too fast. You bears only fuck once a year and sleep too much. You haven’t got a chance against them. Stay here with me. I don’t think war is the way to live with those people.”

  So the bears stayed in the wilderness. Most animals stayed in the wilderness with Coyote. Not the ants, though. They wanted to make war with the humans, and they did, and they’re still at it.

  [Another speaker:] That’s right, that’s right. And Flea Woman, she’s an old friend of Coyote’s, you know, they live together. She sends all her little children out on raids into the humans’ houses. She says, “Go make ’em itch, go make the children itch a little, itch a little!” [A child listening is tickled by the speaker, and yelps.]

  [A third speaker:] That’s right, yes. Then, you know, there was that time also in the world, Coyote said to Dog, “I’m angry about those human people winning the war with the bear people. You go to their town and kill that one, that general of theirs.”

  So Dog agreed. He went to the human town. But the women there in the household where that warrior lived, they gave the dog meat, they took the ticks out of his ears, they patted his head and tamed him. When they said lie down he lay down
, when they said come he came. That dog let Coyote down. He joined the human people.

  [The conversation drifts for a while, and the young children are getting sleepy. After they are bedded down on the porch of the summerhouse an elderly man sings a two-note chant for a while. This is followed by silence and cricket-song. Then the first speaker begins again.]

  That man, you know, that war general who killed the bears, well, he wanted his sons to be war generals like himself, heroes. He thought his hero-soul was in his balls. Maybe he got that idea from Coyote. So he cut them off himself, and put each one into a copper case he’d made, a sphere in two halves threaded to screw together. Then he gave one of these to each of his two sons. He said, “Even if you are half the man I was, it is enough. You will be fearless, you will conquer, you will kill your enemies,” he said to them.

  But the sons didn’t believe that. Each one thought he needed both the balls.

  One of them went to the other’s house at night with a knife. The other one was waiting for him there with a knife. They fought, they went on fighting and cutting each other until they bled to death. In the morning both of them were dead. The old man came out of his house, he saw blood on the pathways, blood on the steps, people crying, his sons crouched over stiff, dead. He was enraged, he was furious, he shouted, “Give me back my balls!”

  But the sons’ wives had taken them out. They had put them up on the buzzards’ hill with the butchers’ leavings, because they had begun to stink. So when the old man was shouting, they said to each other, “What’ll we do?” And they washed out the copper holders he’d made, and soldered them shut, or maybe stuck them together with glue, and then gave them to the old man.