Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  I do not remember much of the days we spent in South City. My father was worried and angry, and I saw him only to greet him once each day. I stayed with the women all the time. I did not know then that Dayao women always stayed together and did not go out. Hearing some talk about war, and having seen the city full of armed soldiers, I thought that there must be a war going on at the walls, and that these women were staying inside their house so that the opponents would not steal them, as the Dayao stole women. I had this all figured out, and then found out that there was no fighting at all going on anywhere near South City. I felt foolish, but in fact I had been right; Dayao women lived under siege all their lives. All I thought then was that they were all crazy. I stayed with them all the time in the close, warm rooms lighted brightly by electricity, trying to learn to talk as they did, and sewing. I was no good at their kind of sewing, and nearly went crazy myself trying to do it hour after hour, when I wanted to be outside in the air, in the light, with my father, or by myself. I was never by myself.

  At last we left that house and that city and started north. I had missed the sorrel mare very much while I was trapped indoors, and had dreamed every day of riding her again and smelling her smell on my hands and clothes; when the women told me to get into a covered cart with them, I refused. One of the older Condor Women ordered me to get into the cart. I said, “Am I dead? Am I a chicken?”—but it seemed that among them, live and healthy people rode in carts on wheels, and she did not know what I meant. She got angry and I got angry. My father came and I began to tell him that I wanted to ride the sorrel mare. He said, “Get in the cart,” and rode on by. He had looked at me as a woman among the other women, a squawking hen among the poultry. He had changed his soul for his power. I stood awhile taking this into myself as best I could while the other chickens peeped and squawked around me, and then I got up into the cart. All that day travelling in that cart I thought, more than I had ever thought before, about how to be a human being.

  We did not go straight north, but turned off on another wide, smooth road towards the northwest. The women with me said we were going to meet the marastso, the army, and travel with them, and after a day we did so. All the soldiers who had been travelling in troops to take food from small-town people, collecting tribute they called it, or staying in camps in the Dark River and Volcano countries giving orders, or as they called it keeping order, were gathering together at a place called Rembonyon, and we too went there. We were all following after several chiefs or generals, one of whom was my father.

  The pieces of the army came with a lot of animals, and a lot of tyon came with the animals and the other hontik. Those camps were where I first met stolen women, ones the Dayao men had taken from their people and raped when they liked. Some, as I said, were coming freely with the soldiers, and the soldier might stay with the woman and their babies; and so I said something in our camp about these hontik wives. The women of the Tsaya Bele household, with whom I travelled, laughed at that, and explained that Condor men did not marry hontik, but only Condor women, the daughters of other Condor men. They were all such daughters themselves, and very positive about what they told me.

  Stupidly, I said, “But my father, the Condor Terter Abhao, is married to my mother in the Valley.”

  “It is not a marriage here,” one of them said kindly. But when I argued, the old woman Tsaya Maya Bele said, “There is no marriage between Man and animal, girl! Be still and know your place. We have treated you as a Condor’s daughter, not a savage. Behave as such.” It was a threat. I heeded it.

  Aside from learning some things such as that, which I had no desire to know, I enjoyed that slow journey to Rembonyon with the Dayao. I did not have to stay in the cart, but could walk beside it if I stayed near it. At night they set up big tents, a whole town of tents appearing in no time at all. Inside the tents it was bright and warm, the women sitting about on thick red rugs, cooking and talking and laughing and drinking strong manzanita-berry tea or honey brandy; outside, the men called out to one another in the cold dusk, the horses neighed at their pickets and the cattle lowed, off where the farmers’ campfires glimmered. When it was dark the people at those fires sang long, lonesome, desolate songs that seemed to have the desert in them.

  Maybe the Dayao should have been always on the move; maybe their health as a people was in being nomads, movers-on, as they had been in the country north of the Omorn Sea and before that on the Plains of Grass. A hundred years or more ago they obeyed one of their Condors who had a vision and said that One had commanded them to build a city and dwell in it. When they did that they locked their energy into the wheel, and so began to lose their souls.

  After Rembonyon the whole great train of animals and humans and carts set off through the high, desolate lands northeast of Kulkun Eraian. Volcanoes smoked before and behind us. It grew cold, and a wind in our faces brought dark clouds across the sky. In falling snow we came across a waste of black, broken lava to the City of the Condor. I had not walked in snow before that day.

  Sai was walled, with a guarded gate of great size and beauty; outside the walls were innumerable barns, stables, shops, and barrack-houses, and inside them the streets were straight and wide like those of South City but still wider and longer. The street that led in from the gate ended in a huge building, window above window above window, and the barrack-houses and family houses were all higher and solider and finer than those of South City. Terter House in Sai had its own wall around its gardens, of polished black stone; its roof was of carved cedar, with decks and walkways on it; and down inside it the rooms seemed endless, apartments and divisions and screened-off corners and nooks and angles, all without windows yet bright, and warm as the silky nest of the wood rat inside her many-tunnelled tall house. The rooms deepest inside were the women’s quarters. My father took me there at once. When he turned to go I held his arm. I said, “I do not wish to stay here, please.”

  He said without anger, “You live here, Ayatyu. This is your house.”

  I said, “You are my father, but this is not my house.”

  He said, “It is my father’s, therefore mine, therefore yours. When you have rested I’ll bring you before him. You should look your best then. Not crying and tired. Go bathe and rest and dress and meet the other girls here. They’ll look after you. I’ll be back for you in the morning.”

  He went off among the people who knocked their foreheads as he passed. I stood in tears among the women.

  In that house the two kinds of women, Condor’s daughters and hontik, were as different as sheep and goats. None of the Condor’s daughters spoke to me, that first night. They left me with the hontik. I was glad of that, since the hontik seemed more like Valley women, but they were even more afraid of me than the South City women had been. I heard them speak about me, but when I spoke to them in their language they stared and did not answer, till I felt like a talking crow. They would not leave me alone, but they would not come close to me. At last a girl came in who looked to be my age or a little younger, and who was quick and courageous. She spoke to me and understood what I answered. She said her name was Esiryu. She took me to have a bath, for I was filthy from travelling, and she found a small room for me to sleep in, and stayed with me there. She talked faster than I could understand, often, but I understood that she wanted me to be her friend and she would be a friend to me; she was as prompt and easy about that as the sorrel mare had been.

  After she had combed out my hair, I said, “Now I’ll comb yours.” She laughed, and said, “No, no, no, Condor’s daughter!”

  Without Esiryu I would not have been able to live in Terter House. I did what she said to do and did not do what she said not to do, all the time I was there. She was my slave, whom I obeyed.

  In the late morning my father came back, dressed in splendid clothing of red-and-black-patterned wool. I went to him and he embraced me, but he shouted past my ear, “Why has Terter Ayatyu Belela not been given suitable clothes to wear?” Then there was a lot o
f scurrying and forehead-knocking by hontik and Daughters alike, and I was very quickly dressed up in the kind of fine skirt and bodice the Daughters wore, with a gauzy head-scarf. Esiryu had already braided up my hair Dayao-style, so that was all right. My father said some more things to the women that made them cower and look away, and then took my hand and hurried me through the rooms and passages. The scarf blew off my head, and he turned back to pick it up, and put it over my head so that it hid my face. I could see through it well enough, but certainly did not want it on, and took it off.

  “Put it on!” he said. It was not just order-shouting, but nervous anger; he was anxious. “Keep it on, over your face! When you come before my father, salute him!” He made the face-knocking movement, and made me show him that I could do it.

  I did all he said. I was frightened by his fear.

  Terter Gebe was an old man, handsome and thin, with much authority in him. It was easy to behave with respect and courtesy in his presence; he was like the officiant in a great wakwa, full of the strength and dignity of the ceremony. But the officiant gives that back, lets it go, at the end of the wakwa; and Terter Gebe had kept it all to himself for sixty years. All that others gave him, he kept; and he believed and they believed that that strength and dignity belonged to him. I did not believe that, but since they were truly there in him I honored them. I did so as a Condor’s Daughter, knocking my forehead. I kept the veil over my face until he lifted it and stared at me awhile. That I found hard to bear, being looked at full on, shamelessly.

  He said, “Etyeharazra puputyela!” which is, “Be welcome, granddaughter!”

  I said in his language, “Thank you, grandfather.”

  He gave me a keen look, very searching. He never smiled. He said something to my father, which I kept in mind till I could ask Esiryu what the syllables meant. They meant, “Better marry this one quickly!”

  My father laughed. He looked relieved and happy now. They talked to each other awhile. I stood there like an image of a person, not talking or moving. I tried to keep looking down, the way hontik women did when they were with Condors, but I wanted to look at my grandfather. Every time I stole a glance, he caught it. At last, carefully and slowly, I pulled the veil back over my face. Through it I could watch him and he could not tell if I were watching him or not. It is easy to learn to be a slave. The tricks of slavery are like fleas hopping from a dead ground squirrel onto your skin; you have the plague before you know it. And all the tools of slavery have two edges.

  Since Terter Gebe had accepted me as his granddaughter, the Daughters of his House had to treat me as one of them and not as an animal or primitive person. Some of them were ready to be friendly as soon as they had permission to be. Their lives inside the women’s rooms were very small and boring, and a new person was a great excitement and interest to them. Others were less well disposed. I wished my father would not order them and bully them as he did; he meant to help and defend me, but every bow and smile and head-knock they gave him turned into a sneer or a snub or a trick against me, when he was gone to give orders to somebody else, and I was left there in the household. All this was the kind of reversal that it seemed to me one would have to expect in a household arranged like a himpi-pen.

  My father’s mother had died many years ago, and his father had not remarried; the widow of my father’s brother was the chief of the women of the house. Everything among the Dayao had to have a chief. If two of them were together, one or the other was chief. Everything they did was war. Even when people worked together one of them was chief of the work, as if working were making war; even when children played together one of them told the others what to do, though at least they quarrelled about it. So my aunt Terter Zadyaya Bele was the general of the women of Terter House, and she was not pleased by my presence there. I thought she was ashamed of me, a hontik, a half-animal; and that was all too familiar to me, who used to be called a half-person, so I hated her. Now I think she was afraid of me. She saw me, foreigner or primitive or animal as I was, the only daughter of the Condor Terter, and feared I would want to take her strength and dignity from her. If we could have worked and talked together and come to know each other I think it would have been better, for she was not a spiteful person. But that was prevented by our misunderstanding, fixed and made incurable by her jealousy of her power, and my shame. In any case, she would not touch me and did not like to approach me, because I was purutik, unclean.

  The mental way, the soul’s way of the Dayao would surely be the most important thing I could tell about them, and some of it I can tell by way of telling my story; but when it comes to their wakwa and rites and all the deepest of their thinking, I learned very little. There were no books. What men were taught I do not know; girls and women were taught nothing but the skills of the household. Women were not allowed into the sacred parts of their heyimas, which they call daharda; we could come no nearer than the vestibule in front of the daharda to listen to the singing inside on certain great festivals. Women have no part in the intellectual life of the Dayao; they are kept in, but left out. It was not men there, but women, who told me that women have no souls. That being the case, naturally they have little interest in learning about the soul’s way. All I learned was picked up here and there, and does not make a whole; this is the best I can make of it:

  One made everything out of nothing. One is a person, immortal. He is all-powerful. Human men are imitations of him. One is not the universe; he made it, and gives it orders. Things are not part of him nor is he part of them, so you must not praise things, but only One. The One, however, reflects himself in the Condor; so the Condor is to be praised and obeyed. And the True Condors and One-Warriors, who are all called Sons of the Condor or Sons of the Son, are reflections of the reflection of One, and therefore also to be praised and obeyed. The tyon are very dim and faint reflections far removed from One, but even so they have enough of his power to be called human beings. No other people are human. The hontik, that is women and foreigners and animals, have nothing to do with One at all; they are purutik, unclean, dirt people. They were made by One to obey and serve the Sons. This is what they say; it seemed to me to get a little complicated, since Condor’s Daughters gave orders to tyon, and talked about them as if they were dirt people; but that discrepancy is kept out of mind, since the Daughters all live in the City and seldom even see the farmers. It must have all been very different when the Dayao were nomads, but it may have started then, too, as a matter of sexual jealousy, the chief men trying to keep their wives and daughters “clean,” and the women holding themselves apart from the strangers they met along their way, and finally all of them coming to think that to be a person at all is to be separate from and apart from everyone and everything.

  They say that as there was a time when One made everything, there will be a time when everything will stop being, when One will unmake everything. Then will begin the Time Outside of Time. He will throw away everything except the True Condors and One-Warriors who obeyed him in every way and were his slaves. They will become part of One then, and be forever. I am sure that there is some sense to be made of this, but I cannot make it.

  Some of the things I learned in the Lamb Lodge in Sinshan were Warrior Lodge teachings learned from Condor soldiers during the years they stayed in the Valley; the Warrior Lodge men thought they were practising True Condor ways. In fact they understood even less than I did. They understood that men were better than women, and that nothing was of any account except One and men, but they got the rest of it and the reasons for it all mixed up. I don’t think most of them ever understood that there was indeed only one One. Their souls and minds were much too dirty That part, about being purutik, about dirt persons, made sense to me, in its way. In order to reflect, a mirror has to be clean. The cleaner and clearer and purer it is, the better it will reflect. True Condor warriors were to be one thing only, reflections of One, setting themselves apart from all the rest of existence, washing it from their minds and souls, killing
the world, so that they could remain perfectly pure. That is why my father was named Kills. He was to live outside the world, killing it, to show the glory of One.

  As I speak of it, this way sounds clownish. That is myself, my voice; I am the clown, since I cannot help the reversals. The Dayao way was without clowns or clowning, without reversal or turning, straight, single, terrible.

  The third part of Stone Telling’s story begins here.

  DRAMATIC WORKS

  A NOTE ON THE VALLEY STAGE.

  The only permanent theater in the Valley was in Wakwaha, on the northwest side of the Great Dancing Place. It was like a heyimas, being underground, with a stepped roof, and an efficient system of natural and artificial ventilation and lighting. The shape of the room was broadly oval; the stage was raised; the audience sat on comfortable backed benches, which seated about two hundred.

  Kastoha and Telina had stages, but no theaters. They kept the stage dismantled in a storage barn till it was wanted for a play. A stage consisted of two big platforms joined in the center by a circular, smaller platform, which might stand a foot or so higher than the others. The left-hand large platform was closer to the audience than the right-hand one. Such a stage was set up on one of the common places, with an awning if necessary.

  The small towns had no stage at all. When a play was put on by a lodge or heyimas or when travelling players came, they marked out the ground on the town common place in a wide heyiya-if figure, the left arm closer to the audience; or similarly marked out the floor of a big barn-loft or workroom.