Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Going with the little quail’s legs, ten miles was a good day’s journey for us. We came on down to the rope-and-boat ferry at Ikul and crossed the River of the Marshes there with some Amaranth people taking gold home from the high mining country. We three went west across the marshes, then south along the foothills to the place called Utud where the Chiryan Road begins, and came through the hills on that road. That is wild country. Not a human person was on that road but ourselves. Coyotes sang all night, the crazy-old-woman songs and the high-moon songs, up on the high hillsides; the grass was full of mice; deer sprang aside, or watched us from the thickets, all day long; mourning doves called continually, and the air at evening would darken with the vast flocks of pigeons and other birds; always at noon we looked up to see the redwing hawk circling. I picked up feathers on that way as we went and saved them, feathers of nine kinds of bird. As we walked there the first rain fell. I walked singing a song that came to me out of the rain and the feathers, the words given to me:

  “There is no knowing,

  only going on,

  only going by, ah ya hey.

  I am the great being,

  the grass bowing.”

  When I came back into the Valley of my being I brought this song and the feathers of nine birds from the wilderness, the coyote’s way; and from the seven years I lived in the City of Man I brought my womanhood, the child Ekwerkwe, and my friend Shadow.

  We came down Buda Creek into Deep Valley, then down Hana-if Creek to the River, singing heya at every step. We were very hungry, having lived off seeds and gatherings up in the hills, and I had not been willing to use our time in gathering, which is slow work even when there is plenty; I had hurried us along. We turned downriver and came past the Geyser and the Baths to Kastoha-na.

  We went to the Blue Clay heyimas there. I said to the people there, “I am Woman Coming Home, from Sinshan, of this House. This is Ekwerkwe, from the Condor’s City, of this House. This is Esiryu, from the Condor’s City, of no House, our friend.” They made us welcome in that heyimas.

  While we stayed there I spoke of the men we had met at Loklatso, and was told that there had been a meeting of the Valley people about the Warriors, and that that lodge had stopped being. Maggot and the others had said nothing about this.

  The scholars of my heyimas in Kastoha said that I might do well to go up to Wakwaha and give to the Libraries and to the Exchange what I knew about the doings and intentions of the Dayao people. I said I would do that, but first I wanted to go to my own town.

  So we walked down the southwest bank of the River along the Old Straight Road to beautiful Telina. There we slept at the heyimas and went on very early in the morning. It was raining thick, fine rain. We could hardly make out the grey hills across the Valley, and on our right the hills nearby coming down from the Spring Mountain, Sow Mountain, and Sinshan Mountain looked vast in the mist and moving rain.

  Going there, going there,

  Going where we went

  Dying into the Valley.

  Going there, going there,

  The rainclouds down the Valley.

  We turned onto the Amiou path through Sinshan Fields, and came past Blue Rock and the outer paddocks, and crossed Hechu Creek on the cattle-bridge. The creek was already running lively in the rain. I saw the rocks, paths, trees, hills, fields, barns, fences, gates, stiles, groves, places that my heart knew. I told Ekwerkwe and Shadow their names, and said heya to each one. We came to the bridge over Sinshan Creek under the high alder and the oaks at the side of Adobe Hill. I said to Ekwerkwe, “There, do you see, in the path by the paddock gate, that place is where your grandfather, my father, Terter Abhao, stands for us now. There he came once on foot to me. There he came again for me, riding a great horse, leading a mare for me. Passing this place may we have him in mind in the days to come.”

  “There he is,” Ekwerkwe said, watching. She saw what my memory saw. Shadow saw nothing.

  We walked across the bridge into the town. It is only four steps long, that bridge.

  As we turned right along Hard Canyon Creek, some children came by: I did not know them. That was strange! That made me go cold through my body and soul. But Ekwerkwe, who had learned to greet all strangers, let go my hand and looked at the children, greeting them in a small voice in their language. She said, “So you are here, children of the Valley.”

  Two of them ran away behind the smithy. Two were courageous and stood to face the foreigners. One of them said, in an even smaller voice than Ekwerkwe’s, “So you are here,” but she did not know what to call us.

  “In what household do you live, children of the Valley?” I said and after a while the boy, who was eight or nine, motioned with his head to Chimbam House. Then I thought of Ready’s baby, born the summer before I left Sinshan. I said, “Perhaps you are a brother of my House, and live in Ready’s household?” He nodded yes. I said, “Tell me, please, brother, are there Blue Clay people living now in High Porch House?”

  He nodded yes again, but was still too shy to speak. So we went on, I with my new fear inside me. Why had I not thought that seven years had passed in Sinshan as well as in Sai? I had not asked Maggot nor the people in the heyimas in Kastoha and Telina about my household, because I had not been willing to think that any change had come to them.

  We came to the foot of the northeast staircase that leads up to the balcony of the first floor. I looked at my companions: the little wet quail ragged and shining in the rain, the thin, bright-eyed Shadow standing wrapped, as I was, in a black cloak. My father had given us these cloaks the night we left; they were such as the soldiers wore. They were the color of the lava beds, the color of the Condor, the color of the night we left that City. I took mine off and folded it on my arm before I went up the stairs of my house. My feet knew the distance between the treads. My hand knew the rain-wet railing. My whole mind knew the smell of that rain-wet wood. My eyes knew the door frame and the door of oakwood standing ajar for the rainy wind to enter. The Bear had gone before me. The Coyote came with me. I said, “I was born in this house and have come back to it. Shall I come in?”

  For many breaths no one replied. Then my mother, Towhee, came and opened the door wide, looking at us with frightened eyes. She had become small and strange-looking. Her clothes were not clean.

  I said, “So you are here, my mother. Look here, this Ekwerkwe has made me her mother and you her grandmother!”

  She said, “Valiant is dead. She has been dead a long time now.”

  She let us come in, but she did not touch me, and drew back when I would have touched her. For some while I think she did not understand who Ekwerkwe was, and that she was now the grandmother, for when I used the word, again she spoke of Valiant. She did not look at Shadow or ask about her; it was as if she did not see her at all.

  Soul Mountain

  My grandmother had died two summers after I left. My grandfather had gone back to Chumo after that, and had died not long after, people told me. Towhee had lived alone in the household for five years. Since the Lamb Lodge had stopped having meetings and wakwa, she had stayed much alone, not coming to the heyimas, not dancing the great dances. In summer she went no longer to Gahheya meadow, but farther up the ridges, staying by herself. My grandmother’s old friend Shell and my side-grandfather, Nine-point, had been mindful of her, but she did not want to be with people, neither human nor the sheep of our family nor even the old trees on Sinshan Ridge, the grey-leaved olives. Her souls had shrunk away and unmade themselves. That is the danger of going backward in the way she had done when she took back her child-name. She had not gyred, but had closed the circle. She was like the sticks of a fire put out by the rain. She neither wanted us to live with her in the household nor wanted us not to be there; everything was much the same to her. She would not let things change any more for her. I gave her a last name in my mind: Ashes. But I never spoke it until all her names were given to the fire in the Night of Mourning of the World Dance in the year she died.

/>   Some people of Sinshan came to greet me with much kindness. Turning, who had been Cricket and had played the games of Shikashan with me, came hurrying and weeping to meet me, and later she made a song of my journey and return and gave it to me. Garnet, who had been Lark Rising when he played with us, had married an Ounmalin woman, but he came over to talk to me. Old Dada who never learned how to think kept giving me feathers to tell me he was glad I had come back; for days, whenever I went to the heyimas he was waiting around with his head down, holding out a chicken feather a little way towards me, and when I took it and spoke he would smile with his head bent down and go on along. Some of the older dogs remembered me and greeted me as a friend. But among the human people, there were some who were afraid of infection and would not come anywhere near me and Shadow, or even Ekwerkwe. Some very superstitious men blew at us whenever we passed them, so that they could not breathe in our outbreath. They believed their heads would turn backwards on their necks if they caught the Sickness of Man from us. Sinshan is indeed a small town. People in small towns have beliefs the way caves have bats. But there were also people of generous understanding in that small town, and what they offered me I was now able to take, without the fear and false pride of my adolescence.

  My father was a no-House person, and my daughter’s father also, so only through one grandmother was Ekwerkwe of the Valley and the Blue Clay. But nothing was said of that in the heyimas, and the children did not call her half-person. Truly I think some illness had gone out of the Valley that had been there when the Condor was there. There were people there who had been crippled, like my mother; but they were no longer sick.

  Esiryu would not be called Esiryu, but took Shadow for her name, and for a long time it seemed she wanted to be a shadow, there and not there. She was tense and distrustful of herself and all other people. She did not know how to stroke the cat, and the sheep might as well have been wild dogs, to her; she took a long time to learn our Valley language, and she was bewildered by our ways. “I am an outsider, I come from outside, and you are all inside your world!” she said to me, when they were singing the Sun, and all around the common place and the dancing place the trees stood wonderfully flowering in winter with feathers, shells, gilt oakgalls, and carven birds. “Why are there children in the trees tying wooden flowers to them? Why do people in white clothes come to the windows to frighten Ekwerkwe at night? Why don’t you eat beefsteak? How can Jay and Stag Alone be married if they’re both men? I will never understand anything here!”

  But she was in fact quick to understand; and though a number of people returned her distrust, many came to like her for her good humor and honest generosity, and some even valued her because she was a woman of the Dayao, not in spite of it, saying, “This is the only woman of the Condor that came to us; she is her own gift.” After she had lived a year in High Porch House she said to me one day, “It’s easy to live in Sinshan. It’s easy being here. In Sai it was hard; everything was hard; being was hard. Here it’s soft.”

  I said, “The work here is hard.” We were weeding cotton in Amhechu Field when she said that. “You never worked this hard in Sai. And I never worked at all there, except for that damned sewing.”

  “Not that kind of hard and soft,” she said. “Animals live softly. They don’t make it hard to live. Here people are animals.”

  I said, “Hontik.”

  “Yes. Here even the men are animals. Here everybody belongs to everybody. A Dayao man belongs to himself. He thinks everything else belongs to him, women, animals, things, the world.”

  I said, “We call that living outside the world.”

  “It’s hard to live there,” she said. “For the men, and the others.”

  I said, “But what about Valley men?”

  She said, “Soft.”

  “Soft like jellied eels,” I said, “or soft like pumas walking?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “They’re strange. I’ll never understand any of the men here!”

  That, too, was not strictly true.

  All the years I lived in Sai, before I was married to Dayat and after, from time to time my mind would turn to my cousin Spear, not with pain and anger as when I left the Valley, but with a kind of aching that was welcome to me because it was not like anything I felt there in Sai or ever would feel there. Although Spear had turned away from me, yet as children and again as adolescents we had sought each other’s company, and our hearts had chosen each other, and even when he was so far away and I could not expect ever to see him again, still he was part of myself and Valley, he was in my soul and familiar to my mind. Sometimes in the latter months of my pregnancy I had thought about dying, as a woman occupied with giving birth must do; and when I had thought about my own dying, that I might die there in the foreign place, outside the Valley, and go to that earth, such a dreariness would come into me that my heart sinks even now recalling it. At such bad times my help was sometimes to think of Gahheya meadow, the shadows of the wild oats against the rock, and sometimes to think of my cousin sitting on the bank of little Buckeye Creek looking for the thorn in his foot, saying to me, “North Owl! can you see this damned thorn?” And those thoughts were life to me.

  Spear’s sister who had been Pelican when we were children and now was Lily lived in their household in Madidinou with an Obsidian husband, but Spear had gone to live in Chukulmas at the time the Warrior Lodge stopped being. Late in the dry season, that year I came home, he came back to Madidinou to his sister’s house. We met when he came to Sinshan to dance the Water.

  I danced that year. I was dancing the deer-hoof music, the Water Shaking. I saw him standing with some Blue Clay people and Shadow and Ekwerkwe. After the dance I went over there. He greeted me, saying, “That’s a good middle name that came to you, Woman Coming Home. Do you have to go away again so that it can go on being true?”

  “No,” I said, “I’m learning to be my name.”

  I saw that he had in his mind the last words I had said to him in the vineyards in the evening in late autumn years ago: that I had given him a name in my heart. He did not ask for that name now, nor did I give it to him.

  After that night he came often to Sinshan. He was a member of the Wine Art, a skilled vintner, and worked in the wineries of both towns.

  He had lived some years with a woman in Chukulmas, but they had not married. In Madidinou he lived as his sister’s brother. When I kept meeting him in Sinshan, I saw that he was beginning to think about making our old friendship into a new one. That touched me, for I was grateful to him for having given me the memory to help me when I was afraid of dying in a strange country; and also it pleased my self-esteem. That had been hurt badly by his turning away from me, and it still craved satisfaction. But aside from that, I did not want him very much as a friend or lover. He was a handsome man with a straight back and a lithe walk, but I felt the Warrior still in him. He was too much like a Dayao man. Not like my father, who though a True Condor and soldier all his life was in mind and heart no warrior at all; Spear was more like my husband Dayat, who though he never fought with his body or weapons made all life into war, a matter of victory or defeat. Most men who had been in the Warrior Lodge and had stayed in the Valley had let a new name come to them, but Spear had kept his. When I looked at him now I saw that his eyes were restless and troubled; he did not look clearly at the world, as the puma gazes. That had not been the right name for him; Spear was better.

  After I had made it clear that I was not interested in him except as my old friend and cousin, he still kept coming around, and Shadow was always glad to see him. That worried me a little. Bold, restive, strong-willed Esiryu, often in trouble for disobedience or insolence with her “superiors” in Sai, was the gentle Shadow in Sinshan, always hanging back and looking down. It was that behavior which suited Spear. Perhaps he was trying to make me jealous, but also he liked talking with Shadow. People who make life into a war fight it first with people of the other sex, I think, striving to defeat them, to win a
victory. Shadow was too intelligent and too generous of soul to want to defeat Spear or any man, but all her education among the Dayao had fitted her to play the already-defeated one, the loving enemy. I did not like the way Spear began to strut when he walked with her. But she was growing stronger; there was more of the puma in her eyes than in his. I thought he might end up her hontik and never know it.

  If Esiryu became another person as Shadow, so Ayatyu was becoming another person as Coming Home, but, as I had said to my cousin, I had to learn how to do that. It took me a long time.

  In Sai I had been restless, longing for work to do. In Sinshan I found it. There was a great deal to do for the household. My mother had not kept up the house or the spinning or the gardens, and had let the family sheep go with the town flock. The pleasure of doing and making had died out of her with all other fires.

  Maybe it was because I had seen what the passion of love did to my parents’ lives that I kept shy of any man who might have brought such passion to my life. I was just beginning to learn to see and I did not want to be blinded. Neither of my parents had ever truly seen the other. To Abhao, Willow of Sinshan had been a dream—waking life was all elsewhere. To Willow, the Condor Abhao had been all the world—nothing had mattered but him. So they gave their great passion and their fidelity to no one, not truly to one another but to people who did not exist, a dream-woman, a god-man, and it was wasted, a gift to no one. My mother had gone out of her own being after that nonbeing, had spent all passion on nothing. Now nothing was left of it or of her. She was empty, cold, poor.