Four Ways to Forgiveness

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “One of them had a stick,” she said, seeing it in a flash in the jumble of her memories—“a priest’s staff. You jumped the other one.”

  “They took my gun,” he said. “Festival.” He kept his eyes closed.

  “I got tangled in those damn clothes. I couldn’t help you at all. Listen. Was there a noise, an explosion?”

  “Yes. Diversion, maybe.”

  “Who do you think these boys are?”

  “Revolutionaries. Or…”

  “You said you thought the Gatayan government was in on it.”

  “I don’t know,” he murmured.

  “You were right, I was wrong, I’m sorry,” she said with a sense of virtue at remembering to make amends.

  He moved his hand very slightly in an it-doesn’t-matter gesture.

  “Are you still seeing double?”

  He did not answer; he was phasing out again.

  She was standing, trying to remember Selish breathing exercises, when the door crashed and clanged, and the same three men were there, two with guns, all young, black-skinned, short-haired, very nervous. The lead one stooped to set a tray down on the floor, and without the least premeditation Solly stepped on his hand and brought her weight down on it. “You wait!” she said. She was staring straight into the faces and gun muzzles of the other two. “Just wait a moment, listen! He has a head injury, we need a doctor, we need more water, I can’t even clean his wound, there’s no toilet paper, who the hell are you people anyway?”

  The one she had stomped was shouting, “Get off! Lady to get off my hand!” but the others heard her. She lifted her foot and got out of his way as he came up fast, backing into his buddies with the guns. “All right. Lady, we are sorry to have trouble,” he said, tears in his eyes, cradling his hand. “We are Patriots. You send messish to this Pretender, like our messish. Nobody is to hurt. All right?” He kept backing up, and one of the gunmen swung the door to. Crash, rattle.

  She drew a deep breath and turned. Teyeo was watching her. “That was dangerous,” he said, smiling very slightly.

  “I know it was,” she said, breathing hard. “It was stupid. I can’t get hold of myself. I feel like pieces of me. But they shove stuff in and run, damn ill We have to have some water!” She was in tears, the way she always was for a moment after violence or a quarrel. “Let’s see, what have they brought this time.” She lifted the tray up onto the mattress; like the other, in a ridiculous semblance of service in a hotel or a house with slaves, it was covered with a cloth. “All the comforts,” she murmured. Under the cloth was a heap of sweet pastries, a little plastic hand mirror, a comb, a tiny pot of something that smelled like decayed flowers, and a box of what she identified after a while as Gatayan tampons.

  “It’s things for the lady,” she said, “God damn them, the stupid Goddamn pricks! A mirror!” She flung the thing across the room. “Of course I can’t last a day without looking in the mirror! God damn them!” She flung everything else but the pastries after the mirror, knowing as she did so that she would pick up the tampons and keep them under the mattress and, oh. God forbid, use them if she had to, if they had to stay here, how long would it be? ten days or more—“Oh, God,” she said again. She got up and picked everything up, put the mirror and the little pot, the empty water jug and the fruit skins from the last meal, onto one of the trays and set it beside the door. “Garbage,” she said in Voe Dean. Her outburst, she realised, had been in another language; Alterran, probably. “Have you any idea,” she said, sitting down on the mattress again, “how hard you people make it to be a woman? You could turn a woman against being one!”

  “I think they meant well,” Teyeo said. She realised that there was not the faintest shade of mockery, even of amusement in his voice. If he was enjoying her shame, he was ashamed to show her that he was. “I think they’re amateurs,” he said.

  After a while she said, “That could be bad.”

  “It might.” He had sat up and was gingerly feeling the knot on his head. His coarse, heavy hair was blood-caked all around it. “Kidnapping,” he said. “Ransom demands. Not assassins. They didn’t have guns. Couldn’t have got in with guns I had to give up mine.”

  “You mean these aren’t the ones you were warned about?”

  “I don’t know.” His explorations caused him a shiver of pain, and he desisted. “Are we very short of water?”

  She brought him another cupful. “Too short for washing. A stupid Goddamn mirror when what we need is water!”

  He thanked her and drank and sat back, nursing the last swallows in the cup. “They didn’t plan to take me,” he said.

  She thought about it and nodded. “Afraid you’d identify them?”

  “If they had a place for me, they wouldn’t put me in with a lady.” He spoke without irony. “They had this ready for you. It must be somewhere in the city.”

  She nodded. “The car ride was half an hour or less. My head was in a bag, though.”

  “They’ve sent a message to the Palace. They got no reply, or an unsatisfactory one. They want a message from you.”

  “To convince the government they really have me? Why do they need convincing?”

  They were both silent.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I can’t think.” He lay back. Feeling tired, tow, edgy after her adrenaline rush, she lay down alongside him. She had rolled up the Goddess’s skirt to make a pillow; he had none. The blanket lay across their legs.

  “Pillow,” she said. “More blankets. Soap. What else?”

  “Key,” he murmured.

  They lay side by side in the silence and the faint unvarying light.

  Next morning about eight, according to Solly’s watch, the Patriots came into the room, four of them. Two stood on guard at the door with their guns ready; the other two stood uncomfortably in what floor space was left, looking down at their captives, both of whom sat cross-legged on the mattress. The new spokesman spoke better Voe Dean than the others. He said they were very sorry to cause the lady discomfort and would do what they could to make it comfortable for her, and she must be patient and write a message by hand to the Pretender King, explaining that she would be set free unharmed as soon as the King commanded the Council to rescind their treaty with Voe Deo.

  “He won’t,” she said. “They won’t let him.”

  “Please do not discuss,” the man said with frantic harshness. “This is writing materials. This is the message.” He set the papers and a stylo down on the mattress, nervously, as if afraid to get close to her.

  She was aware of how Teyeo effaced himself, sitting without a motion, his head lowered, his eyes lowered; the men ignored him.

  “If I write this for you, I want water, a lot of water, and soap and blankets and toilet paper and pillows and a doctor, and I want somebody to come when I knock on that door, and I want some decent clothes. Warm clothes. Men’s clothes,”

  “No doctor!” the man said. “Write it! Please! Now!” He was jumpy, twitchy, she dared push him no further. She read their statement, copied it out in her large, childish scrawl—she seldom handwrote anything—and handed both to the spokesman. He glanced over it and without a word hurried the other men out. Clash went the door.

  “Should I have refused?”

  “I don’t think so,” Teyeo said. He stood up and stretched, but sat down again looking dizzy. “You bargain well,” he said.

  “We’ll see what we get. Oh, God. What is going on?”

  “Maybe,” he said slowly, “Gatay is unwilling to yield to these demands. But when Voe Deo—and your Ekumen—get word of it, they’ll put pressure on Gatay.”

  “I wish they’d get moving I suppose Gatay is horribly embarrassed, saving face by trying to conceal the whole thing—is that likely? How long can they keep it up? What about your people? Won’t they be hunting for you?”

  “No doubt,” he said, in his polite way.

  It was curious how his stiff manner, his manners, which had always shunted her aside, cut h
er out, here had quite another effect: his restraint and formality reassured her that she was still part of the world outside this room, from which they came and to which they would return, a world where people lived long lives.

  What did long life matter? she asked herself, and didn’t know. It was nothing she had ever thought about before. But these young Patriots lived in a world of short lives. Demands, violence, immediacy, and death, for what? for a bigotry, a hatred, a rush of power.

  “Whenever they leave,” she said in a low voice, “I get really frightened.”

  Teyeo cleared his throat and said, “So do I.”

  Exercises.

  “Take hold—no, take hold, I’m not made of glass!—Now—”

  “Ha!” he said, with his flashing grin of excitement, as she showed him the break, and he in turn repeated it, breaking from her.

  “All right, now you’d be waiting—here”—thump—“see?”

  “Ai!”

  “I’m sorry—I’m sorry, Teyeo—I didn’t think about your head—Are you all right? I’m really sorry—”

  “Oh, Kamye,” he said, sitting up and holding his black, narrow head between his hands. He drew several deep breaths. She knelt penitent and anxious.

  “That’s.” he said, and breathed some more, “that’s not, not fair play.”

  “No of course it’s not, it’s aiji—all’s fair in love and war, they say that on Terra—Really, I’m sorry, I’m terribly sorry, that was so stupid of me!”

  He laughed, a kind of broken and desperate laugh, shook his head, shook it again. “Show me,” he said. “I don’t know what you did.”

  Exercises.

  “What do you do with your mind?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You just let it wander?”

  “No. Am I and my mind different beings?”

  “So…you don’t focus on something? You just wander with it?”

  “No.”

  “So you don’t let it wander.”

  “Who?” he said, rather testily.

  A pause.

  “Do you think about—”

  “No,” he said “Be still.”

  A very long pause, maybe a quarter hour.

  “Teyeo, I can’t. I itch. My mind itches. How long have you been doing this?”

  A pause, a reluctant answer: “Since I was two.”

  He broke his utterly relaxed motionless pose, bent his head to stretch his neck and shoulder muscles. She watched him.

  “I keep thinking about long life, about living long,” she said. “I don’t mean just being alive a long time, hell, I’ve been alive about eleven hundred years, what does that mean, nothing. I mean…Something about thinking of life as long makes a difference. Like having kids does. Even thinking about having kids. It’s like it changes some balance It’s funny I keep thinking about that now, when my chances for a long life have kind of taken a steep fall…”

  He said nothing. He was able to say nothing in a way that allowed her to go on talking. He was one of the least talkative men she had ever known. Most men were so wordy. She was fairly wordy herself. He was quiet. She wished she knew how to be quiet.

  “It’s just practice, isn’t it?” she asked. “Just sitting there.”

  He nodded.

  “Years and years and years of practice…Oh, God. Maybe…”

  “No, no,” he said, taking her thought immediately.

  “But why don’t they do something? What are they waiting for? It’s been nine days!”

  From the beginning, by unplanned, unspoken agreement, the room had been divided in two: the line ran down the middle of the mattress and across to the facing wall. The door was on her side, the left; the shit-hole was on his side, the right. Any invasion of the other’s space was requested by some almost invisible cue and permitted the same way. When one of them used the shit-hole the other unobtrusively faced away. When they had enough water to take cat-baths, which was seldom, the same arrangement held. The line down the middle of the mattress was absolute. Their voices crossed it, and the sounds and smells of their bodies. Sometimes she felt his warmth; Werelian body temperature was somewhat higher than hers, and in the dank, still air she felt that faint radiance as he slept. But they never crossed the line, not by a finger, not in the deepest sleep.

  Solly thought about this, finding it, in some moments, quite funny. At other moments it seemed stupid and perverse. Couldn’t they both use some human comfort? The only time she had touched him was the first day, when she had helped him get onto the mattress, and then when they had enough water she had cleaned his scalp wound and little by little washed the clotted, stinking blood out of his hair, using the comb, which had after all been a good thing to have, and pieces of the Goddess’s skirt, an invaluable source of washcloths and bandages. Then once his head healed, they practiced aiji daily; but aiji had an impersonal, ritual purity to its clasps and grips that was a long way from creature comfort. The rest of the time his bodily presence was clearly, invariably un-invasive and untouchable.

  He was only maintaining, under incredibly difficult circumstances, the rigid restraint he had always shown. Not just he, but Rewe, too; all of them, all of them but Batikam; and yet was Batikam’s instant yielding to her whim and desire the true contact she had thought it? She thought of the fear in his eyes, that last night. Not restraint, but constraint.

  It was the mentality of a slave society: slaves and masters caught in the same trap of radical distrust and self-protection.

  “Teyeo,” she said, “I don’t understand slavery. Let me say what I mean,” though he had shown no sign of interruption or protest, merely civil attention. “I mean, I do understand how a social institution comes about and how an individual is simply part of it—I’m not saying why don’t you agree with me in seeing it as wicked and unprofitable, I’m not asking you to defend it or renounce it. I’m trying to understand what it feels like to believe that two-thirds of the human beings in your world are actually, rightfully your property. Five-sixths, in fact, including women of your caste.”

  After a while he said, “My family owns about twenty-five assets.”

  “Don’t quibble.”

  He accepted the reproof.

  “It seems to me that you cut off human contact. You don’t touch slaves and slaves don’t touch you, in the way human beings ought to touch, in mutuality. You have to keep yourselves separate, always working to maintain that boundary. Because it isn’t a natural boundary—it’s totally artificial, manmade. I can’t tell owners and assets apart physically. Can you?”

  “Mostly.”

  “By cultural, behavioral clues—right?”

  After thinking a while, he nodded.

  “You are the same species, race, people, exactly the same in every way, with a slight selection towards color. If you brought up an asset child as an owner it would be an owner in every respect, and vice versa. So you spend your lives keeping up this tremendous division that doesn’t exist. What I don’t understand is how you can fail to see how appallingly wasteful it is. I don’t mean economically!”

  “In the war,” he said, and then there was a very long pause; though Solly had a lot more to say, she waited, curious. “I was on Yeowe,” he said, “you know, in the civil war.”

  That’s where you got all those scars and dents, she thought; for however scrupulously she averted her eyes, it was impossible not to be familiar with his spare, onyx body by now, and she knew that in aiji he had to favor his left arm, which had a considerable chunk out of it just above the bicep.

  “The slaves of the Colonies revolted, you know, some of them at first, then all of them. Nearly all. So we Army men there were all owners. We couldn’t send asset soldiers, they might defect. We were all veots and volunteers. Owners fighting assets. I was fighting my equals. I learned that pretty soon. Later on I learned I was fighting my superiors. They defeated us.”

  “But that—” Solly said, and stopped; she did not know what to say.

  “
They defeated us from beginning to end,” he said. “Partly because my government didn’t understand that they could. That they fought better and harder and more intelligently and more bravely than we did.”

  “Because they were fighting for their freedom!”

  “Maybe so,” he said in his polite way.

  “So…”

  “I wanted to tell you that I respect the people I fought.”

  “I know so little about war, about fighting,” she said, with a mixture of contrition and irritation. “Nothing, really. I was on Kheakh, but that wasn’t war, it was racial suicide, mass slaughter of a biosphere. I guess there’s a difference…That was when the Ekumen finally decided on the Arms Convention, you know. Because of Orint and then Kheakh destroying themselves. The Terrans had been pushing for the Convention for ages Having nearly committed suicide themselves a while back. I’m half-Terran. My ancestors rushed around their planet slaughtering each other. For millennia. They were masters and slaves, too, some of them, a lot of them…But I don’t know if the Arms Convention was a good idea If it’s right. Who are we to tell anybody what to do and not to do? The idea of the Ekumen was to offer a way. To open it. Not to bar it to anybody.”

  He listened intently, but said nothing until after some while. “We learn to…close ranks. Always. You’re right, I think, it wastes…energy, the spirit. You are open.”

  His words cost him so much, she thought, not like hers that just came dancing out of the air and went back into it. He spoke from his marrow. It made what he said a solemn compliment, which she accepted gratefully, for as the days went on she realized occasionally how much confidence she had lost and kept losing: self-confidence, confidence that they would be ransomed, rescued, that they would get out of this room, that they would get out of it alive.

  “Was the war very brutal?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I can’t…I’ve never been able to—to see it—Only something comes like a flash—” He held his hands up as if to shield his eyes. Then he glanced at her, wary. His apparently cast-iron, self-respect was, she knew now, vulnerable in many places.

  “Things from Kheakh that I didn’t even know I saw, they come that way,” she said. “At night.” And after a while, “How long were you there?”