Four Ways to Forgiveness

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Havzhiva kept his apparent attention fixed on the ritual, though his mind wandered back a long time, a long way. We teach what we know, he thought, and all our knowledge is local.

  After the inquisition came the marking: a single deep cut from the base of the neck over the point of the shoulder and down the outer arm to the elbow, made with a hard, sharp stake of wood dragged gouging through skin and flesh to leave, when it healed, the furrowed scar that proved the man. Slaves would not have been allowed any metal tools inside the gate, Havzhiva reflected, watching steadily as behooved a visitor and guest. After each arm and each boy, the officiating elders stopped to resharpen the stake, rubbing it on a big grooved stone that sat in the plaza. The boys’ pale blue lips drew back, baring their white teeth; they writhed, half-fainting, and one of them screamed aloud, silencing himself by clapping his free hand over his mouth. One bit on his thumb till blood flowed from it as well as from his lacerated arms. As each boy’s marking was finished the Tribal Chief washed the wounds and smeared some ointment on them. Dazed and wobbling, the boys stood again in line; and now the old men were tender with them, smiling, calling them “tribesman,” “hero.” Havzhiva drew a long breath of relief.

  But now six more children were being brought into the plaza, led across the ditch-bridge by old women. These were girls, decked with anklets and bracelets, otherwise naked. At the sight of them a great cheer went up from the audience of men. Havzhiva was surprised. Women were to be made members of the tribe too? That at least was a good thing, he thought.

  Two of the girls were barely adolescent, the others were younger, one of them surely not more than six. They were lined up, their backs to the audience, facing the boys. Behind each of them stood the veiled woman who had led her across the bridge; behind each boy stood one of the naked elders. As Havzhiva watched, unable to turn his eyes or mind from what he saw, the little girls lay down face up on the bare, greyish ground of the plaza. One of them, slow to lie down, was tugged and forced down by the woman behind her. The old men came around the boys, and each one lay down on one of the girls, to a great noise of cheering, jeering, and laughter and a chant of “ha-ah-ha-ah!” from the spectators. The veiled women crouched at the girls’ heads. One of them reached out and held down a thin, flailing arm. The elders’ bare buttocks pumped, whether in actual coitus or an imitation Havzhiva could not tell. “That’s how you do it, watch, watch!” the spectators shouted to the boys, amid jokes and comments and roars of laughter. The elders one by one stood up, each shielding his penis with curious modesty.

  When the last had stood up, the boys stepped forward. Each lay down on a girl and pumped his buttocks up and down, though not one of them, Havzhiva saw, had had an erection. The men around him grasped their own penises, shouting, “Here, try mine!” and cheering and chanting until the last boy scrambled to his feet. The girls lay flat, their legs parted, like little dead lizards. There was a slight, terrible movement towards them in the crowd of men. But the old women were hauling the girls to their feet, yanking them up, hurrying them back across the bridge, followed by a wave of howls and jeers from the audience.

  “They’re drugged, you know,” said the kind, dark man who had shared Havzhiva’s bed, looking into his face. “The girls. It doesn’t hurt them.”

  “Yes, I see,” said Havzhiva, standing still in his place of honor.

  “These ones are lucky, privileged to assist initiation. It’s important that girls cease to be virgin as soon as possible, you know. Always more than one man must have them, you know. So that they can’t make claims—‘this is your son,’ ‘this baby is the chief’s son,’ you know. That’s all witchcraft. A son is chosen. Being a son has nothing to do with bondswomen’s cunts. Bondswomen have to be taught that early. But the girls are given drugs now. It’s not like the old days, under the Corporations.”

  “I understand,” Havzhiva said He looked into his friend’s face, thinking that his dark skin meant he must have a good deal of owner blood, perhaps indeed was the son of an owner or a Boss. Nobody’s son, begotten on a slave woman. A son is chosen. All knowledge is local, all knowledge is partial. In Stse, in the Schools of the Ekumen, in the compounds of Yeowe.

  “You still call them bondswomen,” he said. His tact, all his feelings were frozen, and he spoke in mere stupid intellectual curiosity.

  “No,” the dark man said, “no, I’m sorry, the language I learned as a boy—I apologize—”

  “Not to me.”

  Again Havzhiva spoke only and coldly what was in his head. The man winced and was silent, his head bowed.

  “Please, my friend, take me to my room now,” Havzhiva said, and the dark man gratefully obeyed him.

  He talked softly into his noter in Hainish in the dark. “You can’t change anything from outside it. Standing apart, looking down, taking the overview, you see the pattern. What’s wrong, what’s missing. You want to fix it. But you can’t patch it. You have to be in it, weaving it. You have to be part of the weaving.” This last phrase was in the dialect of Stse.

  Four women squatted on a patch of ground on the women’s side, which had roused his curiosity by its untrodden smoothness: some kind of sacred space, he had thought. He walked towards them. They squatted gracelessly, hunched forward between their knees, with the indifference to their appearance, the carelessness of men’s gaze, that he had noticed before on the women’s side. Their heads were shaved, their skin chalky and pale. Dust people, dusties, was the old epithet, but to Havzhiva their color was more like clay or ashes. The azure tinge of palms and soles and wherever the skin was fine was almost hidden by the soil they were handling. They had been talking fast and quietly, but went silent as he came near. Two were old, withered up, with knobby, wrinkled knees and feet. Two were young women. They all glanced sidelong from time to time as he squatted down near the edge of the smooth patch of ground.

  On it, he saw, they had been spreading dust, colored earth, making some kind of pattern or picture. Following the boundaries between colors he made out a long pale figure a little like a hand or a branch, and a deep curve of earthen red.

  Having greeted them, he said nothing more, but simply squatted there. Presently they went back to what they were doing, talking in whispers to one another now and then.

  When they stopped working, he said, “Is it sacred?”

  The old women looked at him, scowled, and said nothing.

  “You can’t see it,” said the darker of the young women, with a flashing, teasing smile that took Havzhiva by surprise.

  “I shouldn’t be here, you mean.”

  “No. You can be here. But you can’t see it.”

  He rose and looked over the earth painting they had made with grey and tan and red and umber dust. The lines and forms were in a definite relationship, rhythmical but puzzling.

  “It’s not all there,” he said.

  “This is only a little, little bit of it,” said the teasing woman, her dark eyes bright with mockery in her dark face.

  “Never all of it at once?”

  “No,” she said, and the others said, “No,” and even the old women smiled.

  “Can you tell me what the picture is?”

  She did not know the word “picture.” She glanced at the others; she pondered, and looked up at him shrewdly.

  “We make what we know, here,” she said, with a soft gesture over the softly colored design. A warm evening breeze was already blurring the boundaries between the colors.

  “They don’t know it,” said the other young woman, ashen-skinned, in a whisper.

  “The men?—They never see it whole?”

  “Nobody does. Only us. We have it here.” The dark woman did not touch her head but her heart, covering her breasts with her long, work-hardened hands. She smiled again.

  The old women stood up; they muttered together, one said something sharply to the young women, a phrase Havzhiva did not understand; and they stumped off.

  “They don’t approve of your talking
of this work to a man,” he said.

  “A city man,” said the dark woman, and laughed. “They think we’ll run away.”

  “Do you want to run away?”

  She shrugged. “Where to?”

  She rose to her feet in one graceful movement and looked over the earth painting, a seemingly random, abstract pattern of lines and colors, curves and areas.

  “Can you see it?” she asked Havzhiva, with that liquid teasing flash of the eyes.

  “Maybe someday I can learn to,” he said, meeting her gaze.

  “You’ll have to find a woman to teach you,” said the woman the color of ashes.

  “We are a free people now,” said the Young Chief, the Son and Heir, the Chosen.

  “I haven’t yet known a free people,” Havzhiva said, polite, ambiguous.

  “We won our freedom. We made ourselves free. By courage, by sacrifice, by holding fast to the one noble thing. We are a free people.” The Chosen was a strong faced, handsome, intelligent man of forty. Six gouged lines of scarring ran down his upper arms like a rough mantle, and an open blue eye stared between his eyes, unwinking.

  “You are free men,” Havzhiva said.

  There was a silence.

  “Men of the cities do not understand our women,” the Chosen said. “Our women do not want a man’s freedom. It is not for them. A woman holds fast to her baby. That is the noble thing for her. That is how the Lord Kamye made woman, and the Merciful Tual is her example. In other places it may be different. There may be another kind of woman, who does not care for her children. That may be. Here it is as I have said.”

  Havzhiva nodded, the deep, single nod he had learned from the Yeowans, almost a bow. “That is so,” he said.

  The Chosen looked gratified.

  “I have seen a picture,” Havzhiva went on.

  The Chosen was impassive; he might or might not know the word. “Lines and colors made with earth on earth may hold knowledge in them. All knowledge is local, all truth is partial,” Havzhiva said with an easy, colloquial dignity that he knew was an imitation of his mother, the Heir of the Sun, talking to foreign merchants. “No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is a part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.”

  The Chosen stood like a grey stone. After a while he said, “If we come to live as they live in the cities, all we know will be lost.” Under his dogmatic tone was fear and grief.

  “Chosen One,” Havzhiva said, “you speak the truth. Much will be lost. I know it. The lesser knowledge must be given to gain the greater. And not once only.”

  “The men of this tribe will not deny our truth,” the Chosen said. His unseeing, unwinking central eye was fixed on the sun that hung in a yellow dust-haze above the endless fields, though his own dark eyes gazed downward at the earth.

  His guest looked from that alien face to the fierce, white, small sun that still blazed low above the alien land. “I am sure of that,” he said.

  When he was fifty-five. Stabile Yehedarhed Havzhiva went back to Yotebber for a visit. He had not been there for a long time. His work as Ekumenical Advisor to the Yeowan Ministry of Social Justice had kept him in the north, with frequent trips to the other hemisphere. He had lived for years in the Old Capital with his partner, but often visited the New Capital at the request of a new Ambassador who wanted to draw on his expertise. His partner—they had lived together for eighteen years, but there was no marriage on Yeowe—had a book she was trying to finish, and admitted that she would like to have the apartment to herself for a couple of weeks while she wrote. “Take that trip south you keep mooning about,” she said. “I’ll fly down as soon as I’m done. I won’t tell any damned politicians where you are. Escape! Go, go, go!”

  He went. He had never liked flying, though he had had to do a great deal of it, and so he made the long journey by train. They were good, fast trains, terribly crowded, people at every station swarming and rushing and shouting bribes to the conductors, though not trying to ride the roofs of the cars, not at 130 kmh. He had a private room in a through car to Yotebber City. He spent the long hours in silence watching the landscape whirl by, the reclamation projects, the old wastelands, the young forests, the swarming cities, miles of shacks and cabins and cottages and houses and apartment buildings, sprawling Werel-style compounds with connected houses and kitchen gardens and worksheds, factories, huge new plants; and then suddenly the country again, canals and irrigation tanks reflecting the colors of the evening sky, a bare-legged child walking with a great white ox past a field of shadowy grain. The nights were short, a dark, rocking sweetness of sleep.

  On the third afternoon he got off the train in Yotebber City Station. No crowds. No chiefs No bodyguards. He walked through the hot, familiar streets, past the market, through the City Park. A little bravado, there. Gangs, muggers were still about, and he kept his eye alert and his feet on the main pathways. On past the old Tualite temple. He had picked up a white flower that had dropped from a shrub in the park. He set it at the Mother’s feet. She smiled, looking cross-eyed at her missing nose. He walked on to the big, rambling new compound where Yeron lived.

  She was seventy-four and had retired recently from the hospital where she had taught, practiced, and been an administrator for the last fifteen years. She was little changed from the woman he had first seen sitting by his bedside, only she seemed smaller all over. Her hair was quite gone, and she wore a glittering kerchief tied round her head. They embraced hard and kissed, and she stroked him and patted him, smiling irrepressibly. They had never made love, but there had always been a desire between them, a yearning to the other, a great comfort in touch. “Look at that, look at that grey!” she cried, petting his hair, “how beautiful! Come in and have a glass of wine with me! How is your Araha? When is she coming? You walked right across the city carrying that bag? You’re still crazy!”

  He gave her the gift he had brought her, a treatise on Certain Diseases of Werel-Yeowe by a team of Ekumenical medical researchers, and she seized it greedily. For some while she conversed only between plunges into the table of contents and the chapter on berlot. She poured out the pale orange wine. They had a second glass. “You look fine, Havzhiva,” she said, putting the book down and looking at him steadily. Her eyes had faded to an opaque bluish darkness. “Being a saint agrees with you.”

  “It’s not that bad, Yeron.”

  “A hero, then. You can’t deny that you’re a hero.”

  “No,” he said with a laugh. “Knowing what a hero is, I won’t deny it.”

  “Where would we be without you?”

  “Just where we are now…” He sighed. “Sometimes I think we’re losing what little we’ve ever won. This Tualbeda, in Detake Province, don’t underestimate him, Yeron. His speeches are pure misogyny and anti-immigrant prejudice, and people are eating it up—”

  She made a gesture that utterly dismissed the demagogue. “There is no end to that,” she said. “But I knew what you were going to be to us. Right away. When I heard your name, even. I knew.”

  “You didn’t give me much choice, you know.”

  “Bah. You chose, man.”

  “Yes,” he said. He savored the wine. “I did.” After a while he said, “Not many people have the choices I had. How to live, whom to live with, what work to do. Sometimes I think I was able to choose because I grew up where all choices had been made for me.”

  “So you rebelled, made your own way,” she said, nodding.

  He smiled. “I’m no rebel.”

  “Bah!” she said again. “No rebel? You, in the thick of it, in the heart of our movement all the way?”

  “Oh yes,” he said. “But not in a rebellious spirit That had to be your spirit. My job was acceptance, To keep an acceptant spirit. That’s what I learned growing up. To accept. Not to change the world. Only to change the soul. So that it can be in the world. Be rightly in the world.”


  She listened but looked unconvinced. “Sounds like a woman’s way of being,” she said. “Men generally want to change things to suit.”

  “Not the men of my people,” he said.

  She poured them a third glass of wine. “Tell me about your people. I was always afraid to ask. The Hainish are so old! So learned! They know so much history, so many worlds! Us here with our three hundred years of misery and murder and ignorance—you don’t know how small you make us feel.”

  “I think I do,” Havzhiva said. After a while he said, “I was born in a town called Stse.”

  He told her about the pueblo, about the Other Sky people, his father who was his uncle, his mother the Heir of the Sun, the rites, the festivals, the daily gods, the unusual gods; he told her about changing being; he told her about the historian’s visit, and how he had changed being again, going to Kathhad.

  “All those rules!” Yeron said. “So complicated and unnecessary. Like our tribes. No wonder you ran away.”

  “All I did was go team in Kathhad what I wouldn’t learn in Stse,” he said, smiling. “What the rules are. Ways of needing one another. Human ecology. What have we been doing here, all these years, but trying to find a good set of rules—a pattern that makes sense?” He stood up, stretched his shoulders, and said, “I’m drunk. Come for a walk with me.”

  They went out into the sunny gardens of the compound and walked slowly along the paths between vegetable plots and flower beds. Yeron nodded to people weeding and hoeing, who looked up and greeted her by name. She held Havzhiva’s arm firmly, with pride. He matched his steps to hers.

  “When you have to sit still, you want to fly,” he said, looking down at her pale, gnarled, delicate hand on his arm. “If you have to fly, you want to sit still. I learned sitting, at home. I learned flying, with the historians. But I still couldn’t keep my balance.”