The Unreal and the Real - Vol 2 - Outer Space, Inner Lands

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  So who was he, this man? this big fellow? this sick old man, this little boy down in the mines in the dark, this bully, thief, and liar who thought he could speak for the Lord?

  “We’re talking too much,” Yoss said, though neither of them had said a word for five minutes. She poured a cup of tea for him and set the kettle off the fire, where she had kept it simmering to keep the air moist. She took up her shawl. He watched her with that same soft look in his face, an expression almost of confusion.

  “It was freedom I wanted,” he said. “Our freedom.”

  His conscience was none of her concern. “Keep warm,” she said.

  “You’re going out now?”

  “I can’t get lost on the causeway.”

  It was a strange walk, though, for she had no lantern, and the night was very black. She thought, feeling her way along the causeway, of that black air he had told her of down in the mines, swallowing light. She thought of Abberkam’s black, heavy body. She thought how seldom she had walked alone at night. When she was a child on Banni Plantation, the slaves were locked in the compound at night. Women stayed on the women’s side and never went alone. Before the War, when she came to the city as a freedwoman, studying at the training school, she’d had a taste of freedom; but in the bad years of the War and even since the Liberation a woman couldn’t go safely in the streets at night. There were no police in the working quarters, no streetlights; district warlords sent their gangs out raiding; even in daylight you had to look out, try to stay in the crowd, always be sure there was a street you could escape by.

  She grew anxious that she would miss her turning, but her eyes had grown used to the dark by the time she came to it, and she could even make out the blot of her house down in the formlessness of the reedbeds. The Aliens had poor night vision, she had heard. They had little eyes, little dots with white all round them, like a scared calf. She didn’t like their eyes, though she liked the colors of their skin, mostly dark brown or ruddy brown, warmer than her greyish-brown slave skin or the blue-black hide Abberkam had got from the owner who had raped his mother. Cyanid skins, the Aliens said politely, and ocular adaptation to the radiation spectrum of the Werelian System sun.

  Gubu danced about her on the pathway down, silent, tickling her legs with his tail. “Look out,” she scolded him, “I’m going to walk on you.” She was grateful to him, picked him up as soon as they were indoors. No dignified and joyous greeting from Tikuli, not this night, not ever. Roo-roo-roo, Gubu went under her ear, listen to me, I’m here, life goes on, where’s dinner?

  The Chief got a touch of pneumonia after all, and she went into the village to call the clinic in Veo. They sent out a practitioner, who said he was doing fine, just keep him sitting up and coughing, the herbal teas were fine, just keep an eye on him, that’s right, and went away, thanks very much. So she spent her afternoons with him. The house without Tikuli seemed very drab, the late autumn days seemed very cold, and anyhow what else did she have to do? She liked the big, dark raft-house. She wasn’t going to clean house for the Chief or any man who didn’t do it for himself, but she poked about in it, in rooms Abberkam evidently hadn’t used or even looked at. She found one upstairs, with long low windows all along the west wall, that she liked. She swept it out and cleaned the windows with their small, greenish panes. When he was asleep she would go up to that room and sit on a ragged wool rug, its only furnishing. The fireplace had been sealed up with loose bricks, but heat came up it from the peat fire burning below, and with her back against the warm bricks and the sunlight slanting in, she was warm. She felt a peacefulness there that seemed to belong to the room, the shape of its air, the greenish, wavery glass of the windows. There she would sit in silence, unoccupied, content, as she had never sat in her own house.

  The Chief was slow to get his strength back. Often he was sullen, dour, the uncouth man she had first thought him, sunk in a stupor of self-centered shame and rage. Other days he was ready to talk; even to listen, sometimes.

  “I’ve been reading a book about the worlds of the Ekumen,” Yoss said, waiting for their bean-cakes to be ready to turn and fry on the other side. For the last several days she had made and eaten dinner with him in the late afternoon, washed up, and gone home before dark. “It’s very interesting. There isn’t any question that we’re descended from the people of Hain, all of us. Us and the Aliens too. Even our animals have the same ancestors.”

  “So they say,” he grunted.

  “It isn’t a matter of who says it,” she said. “Anybody who will look at the evidence sees it; it’s a genetic fact. That you don’t like it doesn’t alter it.”

  “What is a ‘fact’ a million years old?” he said. “What has it to do with you, with me, with us? This is our world. We are ourselves. We have nothing to do with them.”

  “We do now,” she said rather fliply, flipping the bean-cakes.

  “Not if I had had my way,” he said.

  She laughed. “You don’t give up, do you?”

  “No,” he said.

  After they were eating, he in bed with his tray, she at a stool on the hearth, she went on, with a sense of teasing a bull, daring the avalanche to fall; for all he was still sick and weak, there was that menace in him, his size, not of body only. “Is that what it was all about, really?” she asked. “The World Party. Having the planet for ourselves, no Aliens? Just that?”

  “Yes,” he said, the dark rumble.

  “Why? The Ekumen has so much to share with us. They broke the Corporations’ hold over us. They’re on our side.”

  “We were brought to this world as slaves,” he said, “but it is our world to find our own way in. Kamye came with us, the Herdsman, the Bondsman, Kamye of the Sword. This is his world. Our earth. No one can give it to us. We don’t need to share other peoples’ knowledge or follow their gods. This is where we live, this earth. This is where we die to rejoin the Lord.”

  After a while she said, “I have a daughter, and a grandson and granddaughter. They left this world four years ago. They’re on a ship that is going to Hain. All these years I live till I die are like a few minutes, an hour to them. They’ll be there in eighty years—seventy-six years, now. On that other earth. They’ll live and die there. Not here.”

  “Were you willing for them to go?”

  “It was her choice.”

  “Not yours.”

  “I don’t live her life.”

  “But you grieve,” he said.

  The silence between them was heavy.

  “It is wrong, wrong, wrong!” he said, his voice strong and loud. “We had our own destiny, our own way to the Lord, and they’ve taken it from us—we’re slaves again! The wise Aliens, the scientists with all their great knowledge and inventions, our ancestors, they say they are—‘Do this!’ they say, and we do it. ‘Do that!’ and we do it. ‘Take your children on the wonderful ship and fly to our wonderful worlds!’ And the children are taken, and they’ll never come home. Never know their home. Never know who they are. Never know whose hands might have held them.”

  He was orating; for all she knew it was a speech he had made once or a hundred times, ranting and magnificent; there were tears in his eyes. There were tears in her eyes also. She would not let him use her, play on her, have power over her.

  “If I agreed with you,” she said, “still, still, why did you cheat, Abberkam? You lied to your own people, you stole!”

  “Never,” he said. “Everything I did, always, every breath I took, was for the World Party. Yes, I spent money, all the money I could get, what was it for except the cause? Yes, I threatened the Envoy, I wanted to drive him and all the rest of them off this world! Yes, I lied to them, because they want to control us, to own us, and I will do anything to save my people from slavery—anything!”

  He beat his great fists on the mound of his knees, and gasped for breath, sobbing.

  “And there is nothing I can do, O Kamye!” he cried, and hid his face in his arms.

  She s
at silent, sick at heart.

  After a long time he wiped his hands over his face, like a child, wiping the coarse, straggling hair back, rubbing his eyes and nose. He picked up the tray and set it on his knees, picked up the fork, cut a piece of bean-cake, put it in his mouth, chewed, swallowed. If he can, I can, Yoss thought, and did the same. They finished their dinner. She got up and came to take his tray. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It was gone then,” he said very quietly. He looked up at her directly, seeing her, as she felt he seldom did.

  She stood, not understanding, waiting.

  “It was gone then. Years before. What I believed at Nadami. That all we needed was to drive them out and we would be free. We lost our way as the war went on and on. I knew it was a lie. What did it matter if I lied more?”

  She understood only that he was deeply upset and probably somewhat mad, and that she had been wrong to goad him. They were both old, both defeated, they had both lost their child. Why did she want to hurt him? She put her hand on his hand for a moment, in silence, before she picked up his tray.

  As she washed up the dishes in the scullery, he called her, “Come here, please!” He had never done so before, and she hurried into the room.

  “Who were you?” he asked.

  She stood staring.

  “Before you came here,” he said impatiently.

  “I went from the plantation to education school,” she said, “I lived in the city. I taught physics. I administered the teaching of science in the schools. I brought up my daughter.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Yoss. Seddewi Tribe, from Banni.”

  He nodded, and after a moment more she went back to the scullery. He didn’t even know my name, she thought.

  Every day she made him get up, walk a little, sit in a chair; he was obedient, but it tired him. The next afternoon she made him walk about a good while, and when he got back to bed he closed his eyes at once. She slipped up the rickety stairs to the west-window room and sat there a long time in perfect peace.

  She had him sit up in the chair while she made their dinner. She talked to cheer him up, for he never complained at her demands, but he looked gloomy and bleak, and she blamed herself for upsetting him yesterday. Were they not both here to leave all that behind them, all their mistakes and failures as well as their loves and victories? She told him about Wada and Eyid, spinning out the story of the star-crossed lovers, who were, in fact, in bed in her house that afternoon. “I didn’t use to have anywhere to go when they came,” she said. “It could be rather inconvenient, cold days like today. I’d have to hang around the shops in the village. This is better, I must say. I like this house.”

  He only grunted, but she felt he was listening intently, almost that he was trying to understand, like a foreigner who did not know the language.

  “You don’t care about the house, do you?” she said, and laughed, serving up their soup. “You’re honest, at least. Here I am pretending to be holy, to be making my soul, and I get fond of things, attached to them, I love things.” She sat down by the fire to eat her soup. “There’s a beautiful room upstairs,” she said, “the front corner room, looking west. Something good happened in that room, lovers lived there once, maybe. I like to look out at the marshes from there.”

  When she made ready to go he asked, “Will they be gone?”

  “The fawns? Oh yes. Long since. Back to their hateful families. I suppose if they could live together, they’d soon be just as hateful. They’re very ignorant. How can they help it? The village is narrow-minded, they’re so poor. But they cling to their love for each other, as if they knew it…it was their truth…”

  “‘Hold fast to the noble thing,’” Abberkam said. She knew the quotation.

  “Would you like me to read to you?” she asked. “I have the Arkamye, I could bring it.”

  He shook his head, with a sudden, broad smile. “No need,” he said, “I know it.”

  “All of it?”

  He nodded.

  “I meant to learn it—part of it anyway—when I came here,” she said, awed. “But I never did. There never seems to be time. Did you learn it here?”

  “Long ago. In the jail, in Gebba City,” he said. “Plenty of time there…These days, I lie here and say it to myself.” His smile lingered as he looked up at her. “It gives me company in your absence.”

  She stood wordless.

  “Your presence is sweet to me,” he said.

  She wrapped herself in her shawl and hurried out with scarcely a word of good-bye.

  She walked home in a crowd of confused, conflicted feelings. What a monster the man was! He had been flirting with her: there was no doubt about it. Coming on to her, was more like it. Lying in bed like a great felled ox, with his wheezing and his grey hair! That soft, deep voice, that smile, he knew the uses of that smile, he knew how to keep it rare. He knew how to get round a woman, he’d got round a thousand if the stories were true, round them and into them and out again, here’s a little semen to remember your Chief by, and bye-bye, baby. Lord!

  So, why had she taken it into her head to tell him about Eyid and Wada being in her bed? Stupid woman, she told herself, striding into the mean east wind that scoured the greying reeds. Stupid, stupid, old, old woman.

  Gubu came to meet her, dancing and batting with soft paws at her legs and hands, waving his short, end-knotted, black-spotted tail. She had left the door unlatched for him, and he could push it open. It was ajar. Feathers of some kind of small bird were strewn all over the room and there was a little blood and a bit of entrail on the hearthrug. “Monster,” she told him. “Murder outside!” He danced his battle dance and cried Hoo! Hoo! He slept all night curled up in the small of her back, obligingly getting up, stepping over her, and curling up on the other side each time she turned over.

  She turned over frequently, imagining or dreaming the weight and heat of a massive body, the weight of hands on her breasts, the tug of lips at her nipples, sucking life.

  She shortened her visits to Abberkam. He was able to get up, see to his needs, get his own breakfast; she kept his peatbox by the chimney filled and his larder supplied, and she now brought him dinner but did not stay to eat it with him. He was mostly grave and silent, and she watched her tongue. They were wary with each other. She missed her hours upstairs in the western room; but that was done with, a kind of dream, a sweetness gone.

  Eyid came to Yoss’s house alone one afternoon, sullen-faced. “I guess I won’t come back out here,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  The girl shrugged.

  “Are they watching you?”

  “No. I don’t know. I might, you know. I might get stuffed.” She used the old slave word for pregnant.

  “You used the contraceptives, didn’t you?” She had bought them for the pair in Veo, a good supply.

  Eyid nodded vaguely. “I guess it’s wrong,” she said, pursing her mouth.

  “Making love? Using contraceptives?”

  “I guess it’s wrong,” the girl repeated, with a quick, vengeful glance.

  “All right,” Yoss said.

  Eyid turned away.

  “Good-bye, Eyid.”

  Without speaking, Eyid went off by the bog-path.

  “Hold fast to the noble thing,” Yoss thought, bitterly.

  She went round the house to Tikuli’s grave, but it was too cold to stand outside for long, a still, aching, midwinter cold. She went in and shut the door. The room seemed small and dark and low. The dull peat fire smoked and smouldered. It made no noise burning. There was no noise outside the house. The wind was down, the ice-bound reeds were still.

  I want some wood, I want a wood fire, Yoss thought. A flame leaping and crackling, a story-telling fire, like we used to have in the grandmothers’ house on the plantation.

  The next day she went off one of the bog-paths to a ruined house half a mile away and pulled some loose boards off the fallen-in porch. She had a roaring blaz
e in her fireplace that night. She took to going to the ruined house once or more daily, and built up a sizeable woodpile next to the stacked peat in the nook on the other side of the chimney from her bed nook. She was no longer going to Abberkam’s house; he was recovered, and she wanted a goal to walk to. She had no way to cut the longer boards, and so shoved them into the fireplace a bit at a time; that way one would last all the evening. She sat by the bright fire and tried to learn the First Book of the Arkamye. Gubu lay on the hearthstone sometimes watching the flames and whispering roo, roo, sometimes asleep. He hated so to go out into the icy reeds that she made him a little dirt-box in the scullery, and he used it very neatly.

  The deep cold continued, the worst winter she had known on the marshes. Fierce drafts led her to cracks in the wood walls she had not known about; she had no rags to stuff them with and used mud and wadded reeds. If she let the fire go out, the little house grew icy within an hour. The peat fire, banked, got her through the nights. In the daytime often she put on a piece of wood for the flare, the brightness, the company of it.

  She had to go into the village. She had put off going for days, hoping that the cold might relent, and had run out of practically everything. It was colder than ever. The peat blocks now on the fire were earthy and burned poorly, smouldering, so she put a piece of wood in with them to keep the fire lively and the house warm. She wrapped every jacket and shawl she had around her and set off with her sack. Gubu blinked at her from the hearth. “Lazy lout,” she told him. “Wise beast.”

  The cold was frightening. If I slipped on the ice and broke a leg, no one might come by for days, she thought. I’d lie here and be frozen dead in a few hours. Well, well, well, I’m in the Lord’s hands, and dead in a few years one way or the other. Only, dear Lord, let me get to the village and get warm!