Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Duhe cleaned the wound. Moondog made no protest, and stood still and patient, trembling a little in the hindquarters. When Duhe was done the dog wagged her tail several times.

  “Please lie down now,” the doctor said.

  Moondog looked into her eyes, and lay down with her head on her outstretched front legs.

  Duhe stroked her head behind the ears. Shamsha was inside the room, Fefinum had come near the door to watch. Duhe said to them, “She may have some concussion of the brain. That was a hard blow.”

  Shamsha asked, “Will she go into fits?”

  The doctor said, “She might. More likely she’ll sleep it off, if she’s allowed to stay in a quiet place where she isn’t disturbed. Sleep is a wonderful healer. I didn’t have much of it myself last night!” She came back indoors, bringing the bowl and rags. Fefinum kept her back turned, and started cutting up cucumbers for pickling. Duhe said, “That is the dog who used to go along with Whette, isn’t she? What did Whette call her?”

  Shamsha said, “I don’t remember.”

  Fefinum said without turning round, “My sister called her Moondog.”

  “It seems she came here to find Whette, or to help us find Whette,” said Duhe.

  “She’s deaf, blind, and crazy,” Shamsha said. “She couldn’t find a dead deer if she fell over it. In any case, I don’t understand what you say about finding my daughter. Anybody who wants to talk with her can go up to Wakwaha, they don’t need a dog to show them the way upriver.”

  While the women were talking, Monkeyflower and Kamedan came up the stairs onto the porch, hearing the women’s voices behind the open door. Kamedan looked at the dog and went in without speaking. Monkeyflower stopped and looked at the dog for some time. Moondog lay with her head on her front legs and looked up at him. Her tail thumped on the porch floor quietly. Monkeyflower said in a low voice, “Moondog, do you know where she is?”

  Moondog yawned with anxiety, showing all her yellow teeth, and shut her mouth with a snap, looking at Monkeyflower.

  “Come on, then,” Monkeyflower said. He thought about telling his father that he was going to find his mother, but all the adults were talking inside the house, and he did not want to be in there among them. He wanted to see the doctor again, but was ashamed of having peed on her floor. He did not go in, but went back down the stairs, looking over his shoulder at Moondog.

  Moondog got up, whining a little, trying to do what Duhe had told her to do and what Monkeyflower wanted her to do. She yawned again and then with her tail down and wagging a little, her head down, she followed him. At the foot of the stairs he stopped and stood waiting for her to show him the way to go. She waited awhile too, to see what he wanted, and then set off towards the River. Monkeyflower came along, walking beside her. When she stopped he patted her back and said, “Go on, dog.” So they went on out of town, northwestward, into the willow flats along the River, and along beside the water, going upstream.

  NOTES:

  She never came that night, or since.

  Kamedan’s account differs in several respects from the account of the evening of Whette’s disappearance as recounted by the narrator in the first chapter of the novel.

  Whettez—Whette?

  Sky Mode and Earth Mode: “Whette in a vision, or Whette in the flesh?” The dialogue in this passage is in four-syllable meter.

  This dog’s mother was hechi, her father dui…

  Breeds of dog; see “Some of the Other People of the Valley” in the Back of the Book.

  Pandora Gently to the Gentle Reader

  WHEN I TAKE you to the Valley, you’ll see the blue hills on the left and the blue hills on the right, the rainbow and the vineyards under the rainbow late in the rainy season, and maybe you’ll say, “There it is, that’s it!” But I’ll say, “A little farther.” We’ll go on, I hope, and you’ll see the roofs of the little towns and the hillsides yellow with wild oats, a buzzard soaring and a woman singing by the shallows of a creek in the dry season, and maybe you’ll say, “Let’s stop here, this is it!” But I’ll say, “A little farther yet.” We’ll go on, and you’ll hear the quail calling on the mountain by the springs of the river, and looking back you’ll see the river running downward through the wild hills behind, below, and you’ll say, “Isn’t that it, the Valley?” And all I will be able to say is, “Drink this water of the spring, rest here awhile, we have a long way yet to go, and I can’t go without you.”

  STONE TELLING

  PART THREE

  I HAD THOUGHT Tsaya House in South City very rich and splendid, but it was much less so than Terter House. Because the Condor households keep without giving, their furnishings are numerous and complicated; and because the servants and slaves that work for the household all live there, the people are also numerous, and their relationships complicated. Terter House was a village in itself, a nomad tribe settled down and staying in one place. Since I seldom got outside of its walls, I took it to be as prosperous and thriving as it seemed, once I realised that the Dayao counted wealth as what they had, what they kept.

  The closer a True Condor is by birth to The Condor, the more power and dignity he has and reflects upon his household. The Terters were cousins in the second degree of The Condor through the male line. Terter Gebe had been a chosen companion of The Condor in youth and an adviser to him for many years, and was still in favor with The Condor’s son, who would become the next Condor. But the father had become jealous of his power as that son grew older and had turned against the son and so against Terter Gebe, and the mirror of the Terters’ glory had become clouded.

  As well as I could understand from the talk of the Daughters, some of whom were shrewd and knowledgeable people for all that they were shut inside so many walls, since they had settled in Sai the Condors had purposed to glorify One by increasing their wealth and power by taking land, life, and service from other people. For three generations their armies had done this in the Volcano countries. But the people living there were few and elusive; the coyotes and wild horses, the humans and the rattlesnakes, none of them made very good slaves; and all the land wanted to grow was bunch grass and rabbit brush and sage. So the present Condor had ordered his soldiers to go south and west till they found rich, fertile lands and places worth “winning.” My father, Terter Abhao, was one of the soldiers and then one of the chiefs of those armies that were sent out to discover such places. He had gone the farthest southwest of all, first to Clear Lake and then to the Valley of the Na. His army had not destroyed and made war as they went, but had gone along like traders or like the Pig People, staying here and there for a while, sometimes asking for food and sometimes stealing it, learning the ways and properties of the various countries they went through and stayed in. From his first journey to the Valley, that time when he married my mother, he returned to Sai saying, “The Valley of the Na is the most beautiful place we have seen.” His father, Terter Gebe, went to The Condor and said, “The armies should go south and west, making a way clear, so that soldiers, tyon, and women can be sent to make a new City in the Valley for the glory of One.”

  The Condor followed that plan at first, making war with the people that lived southwest of the Black Lava country; but because the Volcano country people had dispersed rather than stayed to fight and because everyone praised and flattered him continuously, telling him that the Mirror of One could do anything, he believed that his armies could do whatever he told them to do. So he sent one army northwest into the Six Rivers country to subdue the river towns, and another down along the Dark River to bring in tribute from the people there, and then another one, under my father’s command, far to the southwest again to conquer the Valley and bring back cartloads of Valley wine on roads that the enslaved peoples were to make. They were to build a great bridge across the River of the Marshes and another across the Dark River. When they told me that, I thought of my father trying to make that bridge across the little Na.

  Terter Gebe and Terter Abhao had both told The Condo
r that his soldiers and people could not do all this at once and “win” all these vast lands and various peoples, but must move more slowly out from their center; but The Condor took such counsel as offensive to the One-Spirit in himself and paid them no heed. When his son argued for them, he took this as an excuse for anger and had his son locked up in a part of the great house they lived in, the Palace; there he had lived for years, as far as the women knew Some of them believed he had died of poisoning, others that he was alive but had been given poisons that had weakened his wits till he was docile and imbecilic. Terter Zadyaya Bele would hear no such talk, and punished the talkers; The Condor could do no wrong, no could the Son of the Son be in any way defective. She knew perfectly well, however, that the household she had married into was in disgrace.

  Sinshan Mountain

  When my father left the Valley the second time, he had expected to return to it within the year with a very large army, all the True Condors and all the soldiers, to found a new City there. Instead, The Condor had sent him south to conquer the Valley with an army of one hundred and forty men.

  By this time most of the human peoples that lived in the lands between the City and Valley were ready to go to war with the Condor soldiers as soon as they saw them. My father had spent six years getting back to the Valley. When he got to Clear Lake he had made a more or less safe way that far, but he had forty men left of his one hundred and forty. Many had been killed in wars and ambushes, others had run away to become dirt people. My father had gone alone to the Valley, to Sinshan, when he knew that he would never be going there again. He knew that he had to come back to Sai and show The Condor that he had gained little and lost much. Those who take power must take blame, and he was ready to do so.

  At first, things were not so bad as he and the other Terters had feared. The Condor was of course displeased, but the bad news had already come to him little by little through messengers and through the Exchange—which only he, in all the City, was allowed to use: it was in his house, the Palace. Meanwhile his advisers had been putting new plans in his head, and he was intent on these rather than on his defeats.

  1 do not understand why the soldiers allowed him, who never left his house, to make all these plans and arrange for so many people to be killed; but that is how it was there.

  The plans were still all for war, but now instead of sending out men with mere guns, they were to have more destructive and terrible weapons still. I heard about these plans when I lived with my husband.

  1 should tell here about getting married.

  Living in Terter House I became ill. My skin became pale and I could not sleep at night, while in the daytime I was always sleepy and had fits of shivering. If I had been home I would have slept and sung in the heyimas for four or five days, or asked the Doctors Lodge for a bringing-in. If I had been home I would not have been ill. In Sai, I was ill because I was living indoors all the time, outside the world. When I saw my father I would ask him to take me out of the house. Twice he did that: he brought the dear sorrel mare and rode his dun gelding, and we went for the whole day out into the snowy, black wilderness of the lava beds. The second of those times, he took me down into one of the caves in the lava, long tubes where lava had flowed like water through the rock, now cold and black as fear itself. The winds in winter scraped that barren land, but it was beautiful, and even when I was so cold I cried, it was better to be in the wind than in the warm rooms of Terter House. Even in that black desert I was closer to the Valley than I was indoors. Indoors I felt stranger all the time.

  When I was ill, the Condor’s Daughters were kinder, and Terter Zadyaya Bele had a room curtained off where Esiryu and I could stay by ourselves. We talked there while we spun or sewed. I could talk about my home and so be there in the mind. I told Esiryu about Spear, and she told me about a young man who had gone as hostler with the army to the Six Rivers country. We talked often about those young men, telling each other what they were like and what they might be like when we saw them again.

  My illness worried my father, but so did many other things. I knew that he regretted having brought me to the City. My presence was not a good thing for him. Other Condors said, “Men fuck animals, but they don’t bring the cubs home, they don’t bring dirt persons into the house.” Terter Zadyaya told me directly that so long as I lived in it, Terter House could not be as glorious as it had been.

  1 said, “Then send me away. Let me go back to the Valley. I know the way!”

  She said, “Don’t talk foolishness.”

  “Then what is it you want me to do? To die?” I said.

  She said, “I want you to do nothing—to be quiet for once. Let Terter Abhao be. He cannot be troubled with a girl’s wants and follies. He is a great warrior.”

  I had heard that song before.

  She went on, “You are a human person now, not an animal. If you will behave as such, a husband can be found for you.”

  “A husband!” I said, shocked. “But I’m still a virgin!”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said.

  I was entirely confused, and said, “But what does a virgin want a husband for?”

  Then she was shocked. “Be still!” she said. “Dirt!” She went out of the room, and did not speak to me or look at me again for a month.

  My father was sent at about the time of the World Dancing in the Valley to the Six Rivers country to help an army there come back to Sai through hostile regions. It was a dangerous journey and there was no question, I saw, of my going with him. Spring and summer passed and he was still gone.

  The times of the great dances came and passed one by one, and there was no dancing.

  I tried to sing the Two Quail Song and the other songs of the Summer. My voice sounded wrong, alone and in that place. When it came towards the time of the Water I thought about the bowl of blue clay in my heyimas and about the spring of Sinshan Creek under the azalea and sweetshrub on the steep ridge of digger pines and dark firs and red madrone. I tried to sing the Water songs of my House, in that dry land. I thought of the blind woman, now dead, Cave, who had seen me here. I went nearly crazy with grief then. I took out the feather of the great condor that I had kept in my pouch, put it on the tiled hearth of the electric heater of the room, and set fire to it. It burned with a stink, shrivelling. Where it was I saw a man in Condor warrior’s clothing lying head downward in a steep canyon among fireweed and dead thistles, his mouth and eyes open, dead: it was my father. I began to cry with an owl’s hooting, and could not stop.

  A doctor was brought to me, a man, who gave me some poison to make me sleep. When I woke up the next day very tired and confused, he came back and felt my pulse and examined my body. He was half respectful because I was a Condor’s Daughter, and half jokingly contemptuous because I was a woman; and when he found that I was menstruating he became nervous and disgusted, as if I bore some dreadful infection. I was most uncomfortable when he touched me, but I tried to be still. I was so terrified by what I had seen in the Four Houses that I wanted only to be still and hide. I thought I should tell Terter Zadyaya so that she could tell my grandfather, and so I asked to see her. She came and stood across the room in the doorway. The doctor stayed to listen.

  “I saw a very bad thing in the mind’s eye,” I said. She said nothing. I had to go on. I said, “I saw Terter Abhao lying dead in the mountains.” Still she said nothing.

  The doctor spoke to her: “The girl is very nervous; this is mere womb-sickness. Nothing a young husband wouldn’t cure!” And he smiled at her.

  Terter Zadyaya went away without speaking.

  Within that same month, one of the other Daughters told me that Terter Zadyaya was arranging a marriage for me with a True Condor of Retforok House. She praised him to me as a handsome man and of a good disposition. “He never beats his wife,” she said. She wanted me to be happy about the marriage. Another woman, a spiteful one, said, “What kind of man would marry a dirt person to try to get close to The Condor!” She meant that he
was marrying me to become related to the Terters. Esiryu got to work and told me everything she could find out about this man, Retforok Dayat. He was the youngest of four sons, and neither a soldier nor a One-Warrior and so not of great account, but the Retforok family was wealthy. He was thirty-five years old—the Dayao were always particular about people’s ages, because they had a numerical system of lucky and unlucky days that started with your birthday—and had five children. I was to be what they called his pretty wife. After their first wife had had a lot of children, Condor men often took a second wife, a pretty wife. A pretty wife did not have to give the husband’s family goods and money, as a first wife did, and was not expected to have children, or at most one or two. I thought I was lucky Since Zadyaya had spoken of marriage I had been afraid. Condors’ wives were expected to have babies continuously, since that is what One made women for; one of the Daughters of Terter House had seven children, the eldest of them ten years old, and for this incontinence she was praised by men and envied by women. If they could have borne in litters, like himpi, such women would have done so. I suppose this is again part of the Dayao being at war with everyone else. Himpi have big litters, after all, because most of them get killed young.

  If I had to be a wife, then, I was glad to be a pretty wife; and since I had seen my father dead and did not know how to get away from Sai, I thought it best to marry. As a motherless and now fatherless daughter I was entirely without power in Terter House. As a Condor’s wife I might have some strength in Retforok House. Really I did not care very much what I did at that time. Having lived for a year with people who believed that animals and women were contemptible and unimportant, I had begun to feel that what I did was indeed unimportant and could not be mindful or worthy of respect.

  So I was married to that man, as a Condor’s Daughter, wearing all pure white clothes, which the Dayao use to mean that the wife is a virgin. The clothes were beautiful and the wedding was cheerful. It went on all day long, with musicians and round dances and acrobats and masses of good food and drink. I drank honey brandy and got drunk. I was drunk when I went to Retforok House with my husband, and drunk when we went to bed. We stayed in that bedroom five days and nights. My fear and grief and shame and anger all came out into sexual passion. I would not let him go, I filled him up and emptied him out like a pitcher. I learned fucking from him and then taught him his lessons back in forty different ways. He was crazy for me and could not stay away from me for a day, all that year long. Since I had little happiness I wanted pleasure, and took it as often as I could.