Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  So I did, round and round, all that year long.

  It brought me back to the spring, in the days before the Water, with a blue clay jar from the heyimas to be filled for the evening singing. As I came back down the path where it crosses Little Buckeye Creek and comes up among the live oaks onto Big Knoll, I saw my cousin Spear sitting on the bank above the creekbed, one leg crossed over the other, trying to get something out of the sole of his foot. He said, “North Owl! can you see this damned thorn?”

  That was the first time he had spoken to me for two years.

  f stood down in the dry creekbed and searched the sole of his heel till I saw the butt of the thorn and worked it out with my nails.

  “What are you doing here on our creek?” I said then.

  “Coming back from patrolling,” he said. “The others went on ahead. I had to get this thorn out. Thanks!” He still sat there, squeezing his foot where it was sore.

  “Why do you go barefoot?” I asked.

  “Oh, we’re supposed to,” he said, unimportantly. He was talking the way he used to when he was Hops, and he looked at me with kind eyes. “Are you dancing the Water?” he asked. It was nine days before the Water, that day. I said yes, and he said, “I’ll come here. Sinshan dances the Water better than Madidinou. Anyhow, all my Blue Clay relatives are here.”

  I said nothing. I was distrustful of him.

  He looked very beautiful in the undyed clothing. The only Warrior thing he wore was a cap of black goatswool. It was peaked like the Condor helmets, but he had squashed it and pushed it back on his head.

  The air over Sinshan Mountain had turned watermelon pink and the wild oats on Big Knoll held a reflection of that color, a faint clear rose. The tarweed was in bloom, smelling strong. I picked a leaf of wild mint from the creekbed and put it on the drop of blood on the hard, dark skin of his heel where the thorn had come out.

  “I have to take this to the heyimas and then go on to the Obsidian,” I said finally. I wanted him to know that I was going to the Blood Lodge for instruction now, and I wanted to go, because I felt so bewildered at his talking to me in the old way, but I also did not want to go.

  This time he did not answer for a little while. When he did he spoke tenderly and thoughtfully. “When will you put on those clothes?” he said, and I told him it would be after the Water, at the next full moon. He said, “I’ll come. I’ll come to High Porch House or the party!” He smiled, and for the first time I thought that there would be a party for my entrance into the Blood Lodge, a party at which I would wear the new clothes belonging to my new way of being.

  I said, “We’ll have plenty of mushroom pastries, then.”

  Once when we were all children at a Sun festival in Madidinou he had eaten a whole tray of mushroom pastries before anybody else got any, and he had been teased about it for years after.

  “Good,” he said, “I’ll eat them. Oh, North Owl! Who will you be, then?”

  I said, “The same I am now, mostly.”

  He said, “Who are you now?” He looked at me until I looked away. He said again, “Oh, North Owl! Sometimes—” Then he said nothing more.

  I thought then, I think now, that the person who looked straight at me had come from inside him, that day, and he had forgotten about being the Warrior who turned away and the Man and the Self. He had sat by the dry creekbed and the soul of the water had come into him. I stopped being afraid of him, and began talking to him, I do not know about what, and he answered, and so we talked for some while, trustfully and quietly. When the madrone grove at the top of Big Knoll looked black against the sky and the color was gone out of the air, we went along the path above Sinshan Creek, I first, he following, side by side where the path widened When we came up onto the dancing place, the evening star was bright and the Wellstar shone above the black eucalyptus. We crossed the Hinge together, and he said, “I’ll come to the dancing,” and went on towards the bridge. I went into High Porch House with a different heart in me than when I left it.

  Spear came to all four nights of the Water in Sinshan, and also he came as he had promised to High Porch House for my Blood singing. It was a small party, since I had only half a family, and that a small one, and not all of them very generous or sociable; but Ninepoint sang the Fathers’ Song for me, and gave me a bowl of porcelain glazed bloodred with mercury from Sinshan Mountain and my grandmother gave me her necklace of turquoise from the Omorn Sea. I wore the undyed clothes my mother had made for me from cotton I had picked and spun the year before, a triple skirt and full-sleeved shirt, and with them an overvest of very delicate plain linen, Shell’s gift to me. I had made a great many mushroom pastries, so many we gave away baskets of them after the dancing. Spear led the linedance with me. He was a lithe and graceful dancer. He looked at me across the line smiling. In my heart I gave him a name I thought better suited to him than the name Spear: I called him Puma Gaze.

  So I came into the house of womanhood with that young lion dancing in my mind. That was a piece of good luck in a bad-luck time, though I would not have said so when Spear turned away from me again, the next year. I thought there was no good in the world at all, then.

  I blamed the Warrior Lodge for taking him away from me, and indeed they did, but his House or his household might well have done the same. We were meeting and talking here and there, not often, but oftener than by chance. I was fifteen years old and he seventeen, half-cousins: it was not the time for us to come inland, nor was it as distant a kinship as could be desired if marriage came into the matter. His sister was jealous of me, and no longer friendly. And some people of his House in Madidinou and in Sinshan did nor approve of me, a half-houseless woman, as head of their kinsman’s household, if we married.

  All that I knew and did not care about at all. I do not think I cared for or thought about anything that year except Spear, but I do not know how to write about it. To try to remember that kind of feeling is to try to remember being very drunk, or to try to go mad sanely. To talk about being in love you have to be in love, and I have not been in love again.

  At the Moon Dance I think all the young Warriors took some kind of vow of abstinence; and after that time Spear did not meet me, nor look at me when we passed, nor answer when I spoke to him, the few times I saw him.

  In despair I followed him into Madidinou Fields, in an afternoon in the end of the dry season. I said, “You don’t come to Sinshan anymore.”

  He turned away and went on working. He was gleaning the last of the Ganais grapes of that great vineyard. The latest grapes make the finest wine, they say.

  I said, “Are brave men afraid to talk to women?”

  He said nothing.

  I said, “Once I gave you a name in my heart. Do you want to know what it was?”

  He said nothing, did not look at me, and went on working.

  I left him there with his cutting knife and basket and walked away between the long-armed, contorted vines. Their large leaves were rust-colored in the dusty light. The wind blew dry and hard.

  Because Spear was a Warrior and I wanted his life and mine to be as close and alike as they could be, I had gone to Lamb Lodge meetings and taken instruction from them all that year. The love in me loved everything he loved. My thoughts and feelings were all swallowed up in that: I was the servant of my love, and served it as my father’s soldiers served him, unquestioning. And I found that that was how it was in the Lamb Lodge: they spoke of love, of service, of obedience, of sacrifice. Such ideas filled up my mind all that year, and my heart was high and hot with them. Nothing that I did or handled or made or knew as I lived the days was of any importance to me compared to those ideas—loving, serving, obeying sacrificing. The Lamb Lodge women told me that we could not know the Warrior rites because the only suitable way for a woman to understand such mysteries was by loving, serving, and obeying the men who understood them. I accepted this, because it was Spear all along who was the idea in my mind and body, and I had no other; the others were reflections of
him, him and nothing else. That whole year I lived in the Lamb Lodge was a lie, a denial of my own knowledge and being, and yet a truth at the same time. Almost everything is double like that for adolescents; their lies are true and their truths are lies, and their hearts are broken by the world. They gyre and fall; they see through everything, and are blind. The Lambs and Warriors were houses for adolescents, people who were not able to choose their own way yet, or unwilling ever to do so.

  Because I was Corruption’s granddaughter and Towhee’s daughter, I had been advanced quickly in the Lamb Lodge. A few days after I spoke to my half-cousin in the vineyard, I was to officiate in one of the seventh-day rites of the lodge. It was a sacrifice.

  I feel that I should not write down what was done. Even though there is no Lamb Lodge now and what I wrote would be a mere curiosity, my hand is not easy, it will not write down what my voice promised to keep secret, the mystery. It was no mystery, but the promise was a promise.

  Everybody knew, however, because they had to see it, that the officiant of that mystery did not wash after sacrificing the bird or animal, but came out of the Lodge House with bloody hands, as a visible sign of the sacred act. So I came back to High Porch House.

  My grandmother Valiant was setting out dinner in the hearthroom on a tablecloth she had woven years ago, white linen with a blue thread every fourth warp and fifth warp alternately; it was worn, fine, and very clean. I was looking at that cloth as she spoke to me. She said, “Go wash your hands, North Owl.”

  She knew I was supposed to leave the blood on my hands until the next day. She hated that rule and all such Lamb and Warrior rules. She was disgusted; her heart was sore that I followed such practices. I knew that. I too was disgusted and heartsore and full of hatred.

  I said, “I can’t.”

  She said, “Then you can’t eat at this table.” Her voice and lips and hands trembled. I could not endure her pain. I said, “I hate you!” and ran down the stairs and across the common place to the bridge. Why I went that way, towards the Valley not towards the hills, I don’t know. I went across the bridge and saw a tall dun horse standing with the calves and donkeys in the creek paddock. I stopped, looking at that horse. My father came up the path from the barns.

  He saw me with tears on my face, with blood on my hands and arms. I saw he did not know me. I said, “I am your daughter!” He came forward then and took my hands in his hands. I began to cry aloud. Some people came by from the fields, coming home, and one of them spoke in greeting to my father, saying, “So you have come home, man of High Porch House, this is a good day you have made.” I controlled my weeping, and my father and I went up onto the terraces of Topknot Hill and sat there on the stone facing-wall of the top terrace of vines, overlooking the lower houses of Sinshan and all Sinshan Fields in the afternoon light. It had been a hot, dry summer. Forest fires were burning over behind the northeast range, and the air was dull and blurred with smoke, so that the hills of the northeast range were like blue lines in the blue air.

  My father had thought that I was injured when he saw me blood-stained, and he tried to ask what was wrong. I could not tell him that everything was wrong. I said I had quarrelled with my grandmother.

  He had lost the ready use of our language and had to think before he spoke. I watched him. He had gone bald in front, so that his face was longer, and he looked very tired. He was still bigger and taller than I had remembered him, though I had grown from a child’s to a woman’s height in the years he had been gone.

  “I came to talk to Willow,” he said.

  I shook my head. My tears came back, and seeing them he thought that she was dead, and made a little sound of pain.

  I said, “She still lives in the Blue Clay house, but she isn’t Willow; she went back to her name Towhee.”

  He said, “She has married.”

  “No,” I said, “she won’t marry. She won’t talk to you.”

  He said, “I could not come. You know that? It was not on the Amaranth Coast but in the north that we had to take the army.” He said where he had been, names of places that I did not know, and said again, “I could not come when I said I would come. I want to tell her that.”

  I shook my head again. All I could say was, “She will not talk to you.”

  He said, “Why should she talk to me? To come again here was stupid.” I could feel the going in him, and I cried out, “I talk to you! I waited, I waited, I waited for you to come!”

  He looked at me then instead of at his thoughts, and said my name, “North Owl.”

  I said, “I am not that person. I am not a child. I am not anybody. I have no name. I am the Condor’s daughter.”

  “You are my daughter,” he said.

  I said, “I want to go with you.”

  He did not understand what I meant at first, and then said, “No, how can I do that? They would keep you. I must go, this day or the next day. They will not let you go away.”

  I said, “I am a woman, and make my own choices. I will go with you.”

  He said, “You must ask people.”

  “I’ll tell them,” I said. “You are the only one I must ask! Will you take me with you?”

  More than anything, I wanted him not to go down to High Porch House to my mother. It was as if I was trading myself for her. I did not understand this then, but I felt it. My father thought for a while, gazing across the Valley to Soul Mountain with its flat, slanting top. The smoke-haze was a pale dull pink color. He said, “I should ask her to let you go with me. Is it true: she will not speak to me?”

  “It is true,” I said truthfully.

  “And it is true you have waited for me,” he said, looking again at me.

  I said, “Give me a name.”

  When he understood, he thought for a long time, and at last said, “Do you want this name: Ayatyu?”

  I said, “My name is Ayatyu.”

  I did not ask the meaning of the name then; to me it was my father’s kindness, my own freedom.

  Later when I spoke his language I knew ayatyu in the Valley language would be “well-born woman” or “woman born above others.” It is a name that was often given in my father’s family. His name was Terter Abhao, and taking his fathers’ name as daughters and sons of a man do among that people, I was Terter Ayatyu.

  “When will you go?” I asked him.

  He asked, “Can you ride?”

  “f ride donkeys,” I said. “I used to ride your horse with you.”

  He looked again at the roofs of the houses of Sinshan and said, “Yes. In the wars I thought of that. Many, many times. The little girl sitting with me in the saddle. Those days, in this place, this valley. Those were my good days. Not ever again!”

  I waited, and he said, “I will bring a horse for you. When the sun rises the day after tomorrow. At that place.” He pointed to the bridge where we had met. “1 will not come into this town,” he said. His sorrow and desire were becoming anger and turning away He had come a long way, with difficulty, to see his wife, yet he did not go to see her. I have thought about that time we sat on the terrace on Topknot Hill, many times, and tried to understand why we spoke and behaved as we did. We were both ill, and our illnesses spoke one to the other. We seemed to choose, but were driven. I clung to him, yet I was the stronger.

  He said, “Tell them that you wish to go with me. If they let you do this, take leave of them rightly And go to your heyimas. This will be a long journey, a long time you will be gone, daughter.”

  He was right to speak so, and I did as he said.

  On the second morning at the earliest return of light my grandmother Valiant went to our heyimas with me. We filled the water basin and sang the Return. She marked the heyiya-if on my cheeks with blue clay from Sinshan Creek. She and I came up from the heyimas in the dawn. My mother was waiting for me at the Hinge of town, and Lark Rising and Cricket also, and they all came to the bridge with me; but we did not squat and piss and laugh before we said farewell, because the Condor was wai
ting there on his tall horse. They stopped at the southeast end of the bridge. I embraced them and ran across the bridge to him. He looked at Towhee, but she had turned away He helped me mount the horse he had brought, and so I rode away with him through Sinshan Fields.

  The Lodge Rejoining, where we learn how to die, was built that year on the planting side where Hechu Creek meets Sinshan Creek. We rode past it as the range across the Valley let the sun go. Singing heya to the sun I rode. We went past the vineyards to the Old Straight Road, and northwest on the road towards Ama Kulkun. The horses strode along fast. My father had brought a sorrel mare for me to ride, shorter and more delicate than his gelding. He kept beside me watchfully, telling me how to hold with my knees and how to use the stirrups and reins. It was much easier than riding donkeys bareback; donkeys have sharp backbones and minds of their own, while the mare was obliging and kindly, and the saddle comfortable. We rode to Telina-na, and passed between Chukulmas and Chumo, and passed Kastoha-na, and still it was bright morning. As we turned to the Mountain Road the Geyser leaped up out of the feathered grasses, shining. My heart turned in me when I saw that. I thought of the old man who had given me a song there. I put the thought and the song away from me. We crossed the River on the Oak Bridge, and I said heya silently. In the foothills of the Mountain five men of the Condor, mounted and with two pack horses, came to meet us, saluting my father. We stopped at the Tembedin Oaks to eat some food and then rode on up into the Mountain on the Clear Lake Road. Where the way to Wakwaha and the Springs of the River went to the left, we went to the right, following the line of the train as far as Metouli, where we took the short-cut road.