Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  One day early in the autumn of Ekwerkwe’s third year it was possible for me to visit Terter House with another Retforok woman who had relatives there. We had asked to do this many times, and at last the Retforok men gave us permission and ordered several slave men to accompany us. Ekwerkwe walked beside me from Retforok House between the blind walls of the City street to Terter House. That was the only time she ever walked that way.

  Terter Gebe had died the year before, and my father was the chief of his household, but he had been living hidden indoors like a Dayao woman so as to remain forgotten by The Condor and the One-Warriors, who were executing people called enemies of the Condor every day now, tearing out their own bowels. Terter Abhao had not seen his daughter’s daughter for two years.

  He was in the room where I had been taken to see Terter Gebe years ago. He looked old, being very pale and entirely bald, and stooped in his bearing. My heart sank when I saw him, for I had hoped that he might not be as sick as all the other men in this place. He looked sick, but when he looked at Ekwerkwe his smile was from the Valley, it seemed to me.

  “So this is Danaryu Belela,” he said when she went to him. She was not afraid of him; she liked all men, as little girls often do.

  I said, “This is Danaryu to Da,” that is One, “but also she has a first name of her own, Ekwerkwe. That’s the quail that calls its name when it sees danger, and then the covey runs, or rises up and flies.”

  He looked at me.

  The child patted his hand to get his attention and said, “I’m Ekwerkwe.”

  “That is a good name,” he said. “You, Ayatyu, how is it with you?”

  “I’m bored,” I said. “There’s nothing to read here.” I used our Valley word for read.

  He looked at me again awhile. “Owl,” he said, in the Valley language, and smiled again. “Do you get enough to eat? You’re very thin.”

  “My stomach can fast, but my mind is starving,” I said. “Father, we made half a journey together, once.”

  He nodded his head very slightly. He watched the child for a while, and talked to the other people in the room, Condors and Daughters of his house and Retforok House. Presently he said to me, no one else hearing, “When they remember me, you might be remembered too.”

  I saw that place in front of the Palace in his face, the stakes and the bloody pavement.

  “After all, the child!” he said.

  My heart gave a great leap, and I said, “You will come—?”

  He shook his head and said, “Wait.”

  Presently, when the Retforok people were making ready to leave, he said, “This night Ayatyu Bele will sleep here; I have not seen my grandchild for so long.”

  The Retforok women were uneasy, and fussed; the eldest of them said, “Great Condor, the woman’s husband the Condor Retforok Dayat might be displeased, since he did not give permission for her to stay,” and another of them said, “It is only a granddaughter,” and another one, malicious, said, “The Great Condor Terter Abhao might ennoble Retforok House by visiting it sometimes.”

  There is no way that men could make women into slaves and dependents if the women did not choose to be so. I had hated the Dayao men for always giving orders, but the women were more hateful for taking them. I felt as if all the anger of all my years in Sai was swelling up in me, and that I could no longer keep it back; but fortunately my father—always a good general—said, “Well, the Great Condor Retforok Dayat will not be displeased with the woman if she stays here a few hours longer. I will have her sent home after dinner tonight.” They could not argue much over that, and so they left me, and Esiryu with me. The moment they were gone my father sent for this man and that woman and made us ready to depart. In the little time we had, all he could do was send two men of his household with me and Ekwerkwe and Esiryu; he could not take us himself or send soldiers with us as he had hoped to do. I said, “Will they send men after us?” and he said, “Early in the morning I will go out with a patrol, and they will follow me, thinking I took you as I brought you.”

  We had dressed as tyon, and were standing in the hallway of Terter House. I said to my father, “Will you come ever?”

  He was holding the child in his arms. She was sleepy and rested her head against his neck. He spoke with his head bowed to the child’s head, so that I do not know if he spoke to her or to me. “Tell your mother not to wait, not to wait for me,” he said. Then he stroked Ekwerkwe’s hair with his big hand and carefully gave her to me to carry.

  I said, “But you will be punished—you will be—” I could not say that word, the stakes and the ropes and the blood.

  He said, “No, no. You ran away when you left my house. And I won’t be here for punishment. I was ordered to take a patrol west to White Mountain; we’ll leave a little early, that’s all. I’ll be out of trouble, over there.”

  Then I knew he was going to the canyon where I had seen him lying. But that is the kind of knowledge that cannot be said or used; so I embraced him and he held me and the child closely for a little while, and then we left him in that house.

  We went out the back gate quietly in the early dark.

  One of the men with us had been with us when I came from the Valley with my father, a capable, grave man named Arda. I did not know the other, Dorabadda, who had served with my father in the Six Rivers wars. They had the loyalty prized by the Dayao; they were like sheepdogs, trustworthy, tense, brave, and mindless, doing what another person thought, minding him.

  The gate of the City was always guarded and people entering or leaving were questioned, but there was no trouble there. Dorabadda said that Esiryu and I were tyon belonging to some high official at the Palace, being sent back to the farms because “they’re no good anymore, both pregnant,” and there was a lot of joking about the One-Warriors, who are supposed to be lifelong celibates and whom the soldiers detest and fear. Dorabadda talked easily and got us out without suspicion or delay. So we left Sai. The light of the City glittered brilliant in the black plain and the dark air, wonderful shining. All that night as we went slowly across the lava desert the City shone behind us. We passed the sleeping child among us; sometimes she woke for a while and looked into the darkness, watching. She had seldom seen the stars.

  At the first lightening we left the great road and struck off across the lava plain, and at day’s coming we took shelter in a cave and slept there all day long. We talked, and I learned a great deal I had not known living in Retforok House. Arda said that we would have to stay away from the villages and farms of the tyon, because they would very likely attack us to rob us or to kill the men and rape the women. I said, “But you’re Condors, you give orders to tyon!” He said, “We did.” So I found out that outside the walls of the City all that giving and taking of orders had ceased and there was only disorder. We travelled at night through all the Dayao lands, hiding, going on the desert ways.

  Then it was, as they say, from the meat grinder into the chopping bowl. Leaving the farmlands of the Dayao, we came into the countries of the victims and enemies of the Dayao.

  When we came to Dark River, Arda said we could travel by day, and I said, “Then you should go home, Arda, Dorabadda. Go tell Terter Abhao that you left his daughter on the way to her home, and all was well with her.”

  Arda said, “He ordered us to take you there.”

  I said, “Listen. You are good friends of mine now, but if you stay with me you’ll do me harm. With you, Esiryu and Ekwerkwe and I are Dayao. Without you, we are two women and a baby, not having a war with anybody.”

  The men, following their orders, refused to go back. I refused to go on with them. I did not want them killed for us, or to be killed because I was with them. Since I would not even get up from where we had camped by the river, they had to talk about it, and we talked about it for hours. They found it very hard to disobey my father, or listen to a woman; but they saw it was true that their presence put us in more danger than their absence. At last they decided, on Dorabadda’s sug
gestion, to follow us, an hour or so behind us, as if they were pursuing us. It was a good solution to the disagreement, except for one fault: it left them still in danger. They would not count that as of any weight in the matter; so we embraced them and left them by the river. We went on, Esiryu and Ekwerkwe and I, following along the northern shore of the Dark River towards the high hills.

  We came into the country of the people who call themselves Fennen. We were careful now to do just the opposite of what we had done at first: we travelled in broad daylight and in the most open ways, and if we came near any human place we made noise and spoke aloud so they would hear and see us coming. We spoke with people by sign language and the little TOK that I had learned in Sinshan; Ekwerkwe’s prattle was better than ours, since babies all speak the same language and everybody understands it. On the fourth evening after we had parted from Arda and Dorabadda, a family living in a wooden house by the great springs at Wallwell took us in for the night, sharing sweet milk and acorn mush with us and giving us warm beds. I slept sound and well for the first time since we had begun travelling, but in the morning waking I heard the people of the household talking outside and by the sound of their voices knew something bad had happened. By TOK and signs I found what it was. They had killed one of our friends from ambush; hearing them talk Dayao, they had shot without waiting to hear more. One was dead, the other had escaped them. I do not know whether it was Arda or Dorabadda that was killed, nor do I know whether the other got back safe to Sai. When I left that City of The Condor no word, nothing ever came to me from that place again.

  I could not help crying for the grief and guilt I felt, and Esiryu tried to make me stop, fearing that the Fennen people would guess that we were Dayao women; Esiryu lived in great fear every hour of our journey. But the mother of the Fennen household, seeing my tears, wept too, and said to me in signs and words that there was too much war, too much killing going on, that the young men of her house were sick and carried guns, like crazy people.

  We went on, very slowly, for Ekwerkwe’s legs were very short. Though it was autumn, it seemed that the days grew brighter as we went.

  Down near the confluence of the Dark River with River of the Marshes, at a hilly place that is called Loklatso on the maps in the heyimas, we met some people coming non saw a person on the side of a hill, and thought he was a dream, a ghost, a Four-House person: I knew his face. He was my cousins’ stepfather, Changing Always of Madidinou, who had taken the Warrior Lodge name Maggot. I had known this man all my life. I did not know the men with him, but they were dressed in Valley clothes, and were short and slight and round-limbed, with round faces, Valley faces, and wore their hair in Warrior Lodge braids; and one of them called back to the others in my language, the language I had heard only my own souls speak in dream for seven years: “Some women are coming!”

  I came on towards them and called out, “Changing Always! So you are here, my cousin’s husband! How is it in Madidinou?” I did not care if they were ghosts or living, Warriors or friends—they were from the Valley, from my home, and I ran to them and embraced Maggot. He was so amazed that, Warrior though he was, he let me do so, and then peering into my face said, “North Owl?”

  I said, “Oh, no, no, no longer—I am Woman Coming Home!”

  So my name for the middle of my life came to me.

  We camped that night with the men from the Valley in a willow grove of the hills of Loklatso, and talked a long time. I asked them to tell me all they could about Sinshan and the Valley, and they asked me to tell them all I could about the Dayao, for they were going to Sai. The slave mind that I had learned to have in Sai was still in my head, thinking like a slave, and after we had been talking awhile I began to lie to them. I was afraid they might force us to go with them as guides and translators. They asked me to do so once, and I said no, and that was all right, but then they asked me again, and then again, and by then I distrusted and feared them as I did Dayao men, and as I had never distrusted or feared Valley men.

  At first I had told them plainly what I knew: that the way to Sai might get more dangerous for them every step, and that the Dayao people were living in great disorder, in violence and hunger.

  Maggot listened with a Warrior face, that expression that had always exasperated me, of one who has superior knowledge; and he told me, “The Condor have great weapons. Flying engines and fire-bombs. They have great power, the greatest in this part of the world.”

  I said, “That is true, but also they are killing each other and starving!”

  One of the others, a man from Telina-na whose name I do not remember, said to Maggot, “A woman; running away,” and shrugged.

  A younger man, that one’s son, wearing undyed clothes, asked me, “Have you seen the Great Condor One fly?”

  I said, “There is a man called The Condor, but he doesn’t fly, he doesn’t even walk. He never comes out of the house he lives in.”

  I did not know whether the young man meant The Condor or was trying to talk about the Nestlings, but it did not matter. They did not want to hear what I could tell them, any more than I wanted to hear why they were going to Sai. But I saw that Maggot, for all his superior look, was beginning to be uneasy; and I stopped telling them that the Dayao were a sick people destroying themselves. I began to behave the way Dayao women behaved with men, smiling and agreeing with everything and pretending not to know about anything except their own bodies and babies. The thought of taking one step back on the road to the City made me act this lie. So Maggot would ask, “Are there any Condor armies on this road along Dark River?” and I would answer, “I don’t know, I think we did see some soldiers somewhere but I don’t know the names of places. Maybe we were in some pine forests then? Or near the volcanoes? But maybe they weren’t Condor soldiers, maybe they were somebody else. And you know, we came onto this road just by luck, we were wandering for a month eating roots and berries, that’s why we’re so thin. I don’t really know where we’ve been.” All this so they would not take me with them for a guide.

  When they asked about Esiryu, again I lied without plan or hesitation. Esiryu had kept as much out of sight as she could; she was in terror of the men. I said, “She left her husband, and had to run away. So did I,” and then I said, “You know the Condor kill women who leave their husbands. And they kill the men they find with such women.”

  That was my best lie, because it was true. It did the trick. Next morning the Valley Warriors went on their way towards the City and let us go on southwestwards. When we parted I said to them, “Go carefully, be mindful, men of the Valley!” To the young man, who was of my House, I said, “My brother, in the dry land, think of the creek running. My brother, in the dark house, think of the bowl of blue clay.” Those words Cave had given me were all I had to give him. Maybe they would be of use to him, as they had been to me.

  I do not know what became of those men after we parted at Loklatso.

  From Loklatso on, we were coming through countries that had not been much infected by the City’s sickness. When I had come through them with my father and the soldiers years ago we had kept away from human settlements and travelled like coyotes. This time I travelled like a human person. At each town or farmstead we came to, they would speak to us. I knew very little TOK, and many of the people living in those places spoke only their own languages, but with signs and expressions everything needful can be said, and hospitality is the flowing of the River itself. Not all of them were generous of heart, but not one of them turned us away hungry. The children of the farmsteads and small villages were excited to meet a new child, one they did not know, and sometimes they were shy and hid away. But Ekwerkwe, meeting strangers every day and playing with children she had never seen, had become bold, and would go looking for them. They all shouted their different languages at her, and she shouted back words of Dayao and Kesh and Fennen and Klatwish, and they taught one another songs that they did not understand the words of. It was a very different journey with her from the journ
ey north with my father! Only Esiryu found it hard. She was leaving home, not going towards it, and she was afraid of people: not cautious and mindful of difference, but afraid like a stray dog, expecting to be hurt. To a Dayao woman outside the walls of her father’s or her husband’s house all men are dangerous, because to Dayao men all women unprotected by a man are victims; they call them not women or people, but cunts. Esiryu thought of herself that way, as something to be raped, and so she could not give any trust to these strangers we stayed with. She always stood behind me, and I called her Shadow Woman. Often I thought that she should not have come, and that I had done wrong to bring her with me; but she would not have let me go without her; on that evening that we left Terter House, she had said she would sooner die than live there without me and Ekwerkwe. And her companionship was a great comfort and help to me on our journey. Though her fear sometimes infected and troubled my feelings, sometimes it made me braver than I really was, when I had to say to her, “See, there’s nothing to fear from these people!” and go forward to meet them.