Five Ways to Forgiveness

by Ursula K. Le Guin

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  URSULA K. LE GUIN

  Five Ways to Forgiveness

  Brian Attebery, editor

  LIBRARY OF AMERICA E-BOOK CLASSICS

  Five Ways to Forgiveness and the notes and chronology copyright © 2017

  by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y.

  All rights reserved.

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  Published by arrangement with the author.

  eISBN 978–1–59853–571–6

  Contents

  FIVE WAYS TO FORGIVENESS

  Betrayals

  Forgiveness Day

  A Man of the People

  A Woman’s Liberation

  Old Music and the Slave Women

  Notes on Werel and Yeowe

  Chronology

  Note on the Texts

  Notes

  FIVE WAYS TO FORGIVENESS

  Betrayals

  “ON THE planet O there has not been a war for five thousand years,” she read, “and on Gethen there has never been a war.” She stopped reading, to rest her eyes and because she was trying to train herself to read slowly, not gobble words down in chunks the way Tikuli gulped his food. “There has never been a war”: in her mind the words stood clear and bright, surrounded by and sinking into an infinite, dark, soft incredulity. What would that world be, a world without war? It would be the real world. Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality. But my people, she thought, know only how to deny. Born in the dark shadow of power misused, we set peace outside our world, a guiding and unattainable light. All we know to do is fight. Any peace one of us can make in our life is only a denial that the war is going on, a shadow of the shadow, a doubled unbelief.

  So as the cloud-shadows swept over the marshes and the page of the book open on her lap, she sighed and closed her eyes, thinking, “I am a liar.” Then she opened her eyes and read more about the other worlds, the far realities.

  Tikuli, sleeping curled up around his tail in the weak sunshine, sighed as if imitating her, and scratched a dreamflea. Gubu was out in the reeds, hunting; she could not see him, but now and then the plume of a reed quivered, and once a marsh hen flew up cackling in indignation.

  Absorbed in a description of the peculiar social customs of the Ithsh, she did not see Wada till he was at the gate letting himself in. “Oh, you’re here already,” she said, taken by surprise and feeling unready, incompetent, old, as she always felt with other people. Alone, she only felt old when she was overtired or ill. Maybe living alone was the right thing for her after all. “Come on in,” she said, getting up and dropping her book and picking it up and feeling her back hair where the knot was coming loose. “I’ll just get my bag and be off, then.”

  “No hurry,” the young man said in his soft voice. “Eyid won’t be here for a while yet.”

  Very kind of you to tell me I don’t have to hurry to leave my own house, Yoss thought, but said nothing, obedient to the insufferable, adorable selfishness of the young. She went in and got her shopping bag, reknotted her hair, tied a scarf over it, and came out onto the little open porch. Wada had sat down in her chair; he jumped up when she came out. He was a shy boy, the gentler, she thought, of the two lovers. “Have fun,” she said with a smile, knowing she embarrassed him. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours—before sunset.” She went down to her gate, let herself out, and set off the way Wada had come, along the path up to the winding wooden causeway across the marshes to the village.

  She would not meet Eyid on the way. The girl would be coming from the north on one of the bog-paths, having left the village at a different time and in a different direction than Wada, so that nobody would notice that for a few hours every week or so the two young people were gone at the same time. They were madly in love, had been in love for three years, and would have lived in partnership long since if Wada’s father and Eyid’s father’s brother hadn’t quarreled over a piece of reallocated Corporation land and set up a feud between the families that had so far stopped short of bloodshed, but put a love match out of the question. The land was valuable; the families, though poor, each aspired to be leaders of the village. Nothing would heal the grudge. The whole village took sides in it. Eyid and Wada had nowhere to go, no skills to keep them alive in the cities, no tribal relations in another village who might take them in. Their passion was trapped in the hatred of the old. Yoss had come on them, a year ago now, in each other’s arms on the cold ground of an island in the marshes—blundering onto them as once she had blundered onto a pair of fendeer fawns holding utterly still in the nest of grass where the doe had left them. This pair had been as frightened, as beautiful and vulnerable as the fawns, and they had begged her “not to tell” so humbly, what could she do? They were shivering with cold, Eyid’s bare legs were muddy, they clung to each other like children. “Come to my house,” she said sternly. “For mercy sake!” She stalked off. Timidly, they followed her. “I will be back in an hour or so,” she said when she had got them indoors, into her one room with the bed alcove right beside the chimney. “Don’t get things muddy!”

  That time she had roamed the paths keeping watch, in case anybody was out looking for them. Nowadays she mostly went into the village while “the fawns” were in her house having their sweet hour.

  They were too ignorant to think of any way to thank her. Wada, a peat-cutter, might have supplied her fire without anyone being suspicious, but they never left so much as a flower, though they always made up the bed very neat and tight. Perhaps indeed they were not very grateful. Why should they be? She gave them only what was their due: a bed, an hour of pleasure, a moment of peace. It wasn’t their fault, or her virtue, that nobody else would give it to them.

  Her errand today took her in to Eyid’s uncle’s shop. He was the village sweets-seller. All the holy abstinence she had intended when she came here two years ago, the single bowl of unflavored grain, the draft of pure water, she’d given that up in no time. She got diarrhea from a cereal diet, and the water of the marshes was undrinkable. She ate every fresh vegetable she could buy or grow, drank wine or bottled water or fruit juice from the city, and kept a large supply of sweets—dried fruits, raisins, sugar-brittle, even the cakes Eyid’s mother and aunts made, fat disks with a nutmeat squashed onto the top, dry, greasy, tasteless, but curiously satisfying. She bought a bagful of them and a brown wheel of sugar-brittle, and gossiped with the aunts, dark, darting-eyed little women who had been at old Uad’s wake last night and wanted to talk about it. “Those people”—Wada’s family, indicated by a glance, a shrug, a sneer—had misbehaved as usual, got drunk, picked fights, boasted, got sick, and vomited all over the place, greedy upstart louts that they were. When she stopped by the newsstand to pick up a paper (another vow long since broken; she had been going to read only the Arkamye and learn it by heart), Wada’s mother was there, and she heard how “those people”—Eyid’s family—had boasted and picked fights and vomited all over the place at the wake last night. She did not merely hear; she asked for details, she drew the gossip out; she loved it.

  What a fool, she th
ought, starting slowly home on the causeway path, what a fool I was to think I could ever drink water and be silent! I’ll never, never be able to let anything go, anything at all. I’ll never be free, never be worthy of freedom. Even old age can’t make me let go. Even losing Safnan can’t make me let go.

  Before the Five Armies they stood. Holding up his sword, Enar said to Kamye: My hands hold your death, my Lord! Kamye answered: Brother, it is your death they hold.

  She knew those lines, anyway. Everybody knew those lines. And so then Enar dropped his sword, because he was a hero and a holy man, the Lord’s younger brother. But I can’t drop my death. I’ll hold it to the end, I’ll cherish it, hate it, eat it, drink it, listen to it, give it my bed, mourn it, everything but let it go.

  She looked up out of her thoughts into the afternoon on the marshes: the sky a cloudless misty blue, reflected in one distant curving channel of water, and the sunlight golden over the dun levels of the reedbeds and among the stems of the reeds. The rare, soft west wind blew. A perfect day. The beauty of the world, the beauty of the world! A sword in my hand, turned against me. Why do you make beauty to kill us, my Lord?

  She trudged on, pulling her headscarf tighter with a little dissatisfied jerk. At this rate she would soon be wandering around the marshes shouting aloud, like Abberkam.

  And there he was, the thought had summoned him: lurching along in the blind way he had as if he never saw anything but his thoughts, striking at the roadway with his big stick as if he was killing a snake. Long grey hair blowing around his face. He wasn’t shouting, he only shouted at night, and not for a long time now, but he was talking, she saw his lips move; then he saw her, and shut his mouth, and drew himself into himself, wary as a wild animal. They approached each other on the narrow causeway path, not another human being in all the wilderness of reeds and mud and water and wind.

  “Good evening, Chief Abberkam,” Yoss said when there were only a few paces between them. What a big man he was; she never could believe how tall and broad and heavy he was till she saw him again, his dark skin still smooth as a young man’s, but his head stooped and his hair grey and wild. A huge hook nose and the mistrustful, unseeing eyes. He muttered some kind of greeting, hardly slowing his gait.

  The mischief was in Yoss today; she was sick of her own thoughts and sorrows and shortcomings. She stopped, so that he had to stop or else run right into her, and said, “Were you at the wake last night?”

  He stared down at her; she felt he was getting her into focus, or part of her; he finally said, “Wake?”

  “They buried old Uad last night. All the men got drunk, and it’s a mercy the feud didn’t finally break out.”

  “Feud?” he repeated in his deep voice.

  Maybe he wasn’t capable of focusing any more, but she was driven to talk to him, to get through to him. “The Dewis and Kamanners. They’re quarreling over that arable island just north of the village. And the two poor children, they want to be partners, and their fathers threaten to kill them if they look at each other. What idiocy! Why don’t they divide the island and let the children pair and let their children share it? It’ll come to blood one of these days, I think.”

  “To blood,” the Chief said, repeating again like a half-wit, and then slowly, in that great, deep voice, the voice she had heard crying out in agony in the night across the marshes, “Those men. Those shopkeepers. They have the souls of owners. They won’t kill. But they won’t share. If it’s property, they won’t let go. Never.”

  She saw again the lifted sword.

  “Ah,” she said with a shudder. “So then the children must wait . . . till the old people die . . .”

  “Too late,” he said. His eyes met hers for one instant, keen and strange; then he pushed back his hair impatiently, growled something by way of good-bye, and started on so abruptly that she almost crouched aside to make way for him. That’s how a chief walks, she thought wryly, as she went on. Big, wide, taking up space, stamping the earth down. And this, this is how an old woman walks, narrowly, narrowly.

  There was a strange noise behind her—gunshots, she thought, for city usages stay in the nerves—and she turned sharp round. Abberkam had stopped and was coughing explosively, tremendously, his big frame hunched around the spasms that nearly wracked him off his feet. Yoss knew that kind of coughing. The Ekumen was supposed to have medicine for it, but she’d left the city before any of it came. She went to Abberkam and when the paroxysm was over and he stood gasping, grey-faced, she said, “That’s berlot: are you getting over it or are you getting it?”

  He shook his head.

  She waited.

  While she waited she thought, what do I care if he’s sick or not? Does he care? He came here to die. I heard him howling out on the marshes in the dark, last winter. Howling in agony. Eaten out with shame, like a man with cancer who’s been all eaten out by the cancer but can’t die.

  “It’s all right,” he said, hoarse, angry, wanting her only to get away from him; and she nodded and went on her way. Let him die. How could he want to live knowing what he’d lost, his power, his honor, and what he’d done? Lied, betrayed his supporters, embezzled. The perfect politician. Big Chief Abberkam, hero of the Liberation, leader of the World Party, who had destroyed the World Party by his greed and folly.

  She glanced back once. He was moving very slowly or perhaps had stopped, she was not sure. She went on, taking the right-hand way where the causeway forked, going down onto the bog-path that led to her little house.

  Three hundred years ago these marshlands had been a vast, rich agricultural valley, one of the first to be irrigated and cultivated by the Agricultural Plantation Corporation when they brought their slaves from Werel to the Yeowe Colony. Too well irrigated, too well cultivated; fertilizing chemicals and salts of the soil had accumulated till nothing would grow, and the Owners went elsewhere for their profit. The banks of the irrigation canals slumped here and there and the waters of the river wandered free again, pooling and meandering, slowly washing the lands clean. The reeds grew, miles and miles of reeds bowing a little under the wind, under the cloud-shadows and the wings of long-legged birds. Here and there on an island of rockier soil a few fields and a slave-village remained, a few sharecroppers left behind, useless people on useless land. The freedom of desolation. And all through the marshes there were lonely houses.

  Growing old, the people of Werel and Yeowe might turn to silence, as their religion recommended them to do: when their children were grown, when they had done their work as householder and citizen, when as their body weakened their soul might make itself strong, they left their life behind and came empty-handed to lonely places. Even on the Plantations, the Bosses had let old slaves go out into the wilderness, go free. Here in the North, freedmen from the cities had come out to the marshlands and lived as recluses in the lonely houses. Now, since the Liberation, even women came.

  Some of the houses were derelict, and any soulmaker might claim them; most, like Yoss’s thatched cabin, were owned by villagers who maintained them and gave them to a recluse rent-free as a religious duty, a means of enriching the soul. Yoss liked knowing that she was a source of spiritual profit to her landlord, a grasping man whose account with Providence was probably otherwise all on the debit side. She liked to feel useful. She took it for another sign of her incapacity to let the world go, as the Lord Kamye bade her do. You are no longer useful, he had told her in a hundred ways, over and over, since she was sixty; but she would not listen. She left the noisy world and came out to the marshes, but she let the world go on chattering and gossiping and singing and crying in her ears. She would not hear the low voice of the Lord.

  Eyid and Wada were gone when she got home; the bed was made up very tight, and the foxdog Tikuli was sleeping on it, curled up around his tail. Gubu the spotted cat was prancing around asking about dinner. She picked him up and petted his silken, speckled back while he nuzzled under her ear, making his steady roo-roo-roo of pleasure and affection; then
she fed him. Tikuli took no notice, which was odd. Tikuli was sleeping too much. She sat on the bed and scratched the roots of his stiff, red-furred ears. He woke and yawned and looked at her with soft amber eyes, his red plume of tail stirring. “Aren’t you hungry?” she asked him. I will eat to please you, Tikuli answered, getting down off the bed rather stiffly. “Oh, Tikuli, you’re getting old,” Yoss said, and the sword stirred in her heart. Her daughter Safnan had given her Tikuli, a tiny red cub, a scurry of paws and plume-tail—how long ago? Eight years. A long time. A lifetime for a foxdog.

  More than a lifetime for Safnan. More than a lifetime for her children, Yoss’s grandchildren, Enkamma and Uye.

  If I am alive, they are dead, Yoss thought, as she always thought; if they are alive, I am dead. They went on the ship that goes like light; they are translated into the light. When they return into life, when they step off the ship on the world called Hain, it will be eighty years from the day they left, and I will be dead, long dead; I am dead. They left me and I am dead. Let them be alive, Lord, sweet Lord, let them be alive, I will be dead. I came here to be dead. For them. I cannot, I cannot let them be dead for me.

  Tikuli’s cold nose touched her hand. She looked intently at him. The amber of his eyes was dimmed, bluish. She stroked his head, scratched the roots of his ears, silent.

  He ate a few bites to please her, and climbed back up onto the bed. She made her own dinner, soup and rewarmed soda cakes, and ate it, not tasting it. She washed the three dishes she had used, made up the fire, and sat by it trying to read her book slowly, while Tikuli slept on the bed and Gubu lay on the hearth gazing into the fire with round golden eyes, going roo-roo-roo very softly. Once he sat up and made his battlecall, “Hoooo!” at some noise he heard out in the marshes, and stalked about a bit; then he settled down again to staring and roo-ing. Later, when the fire was out and the house utterly dark in the starless darkness, he joined Yoss and Tikuli in the warm bed, where earlier the young lovers had had their brief, sharp joy.