They talked about the next step in the dyeing process, and then Temly said, looking off over the low stone wall of the yard to the huge purple slant of the Farren, “You know Enno, don’t you?”
The question seemed innocent and Akal almost answered automatically with some kind of deceit—“The scholar that was here . . . ?”
But there was no reason why Akal the fleecer should know Enno the scholar. And Temly had not asked, Do you remember Enno, or did you know Enno, but, “You know Enno, don’t you?” She knew the answer.
“Yes.”
Temly nodded, smiling a little. She said nothing more.
Akal was amazed by her subtlety, her restraint. There was no difficulty in honoring so honorable a woman.
“I lived alone for a long time,” Akal said. “Even on the farm where I grew up I was mostly alone. I never had a sister. I’m glad to have one at last.”
“So am I,” said Temly.
Their eyes met briefly, a flicker of recognition, a glance planting trust deep and silent as a tree-root.
“She knows who I am, Shahes.”
Shahes said nothing, trudging up the steep slope.
“Now I wonder if she knew from the start. From the first water-sharing. . . . ”
“Ask her if you like,” Shahes said, indifferent.
“I can’t. The deceiver has no right to ask for the truth.”
“Humbug!” Shahes said, turning on her, halting her in midstride. They were up on the Farren looking for an old beast that Asbi had reported missing from the herd. The keen autumn wind had blown Shahes’ cheeks red, and as she stood staring up at Akal she squinted her watering eyes so that they glinted like knifeblades. “Quit preaching! Is that who you are? ‘The deceiver?’ I thought you were my wife!”
“I am, and Otorra’s too, and you’re Temly’s—you can’t leave them out, Shahes!”
“Are they complaining?”
“Do you want them to complain?” Akal shouted, losing her temper. “Is that the kind of marriage you want?—Look, there she is,” she added in a suddenly quiet voice, pointing up the great rocky mountainside. Farsighted, led by a bird’s circling, she had caught the movement of the yama’s head near an outcrop of boulders. The quarrel was postponed. They both set off at a cautious trot towards the boulders.
The old yama had broken a leg in a slip from the rocks. She lay neatly collected, though the broken foreleg would not double under her white breast but stuck out forward, and her whole body had a lurch to that side. Her disdainful head was erect on the long neck, and she gazed at the women, watching her death approach, with clear, unfathomable, uninterested eyes.
“Is she in pain?” Akal asked, daunted by that great serenity.
“Of course,” Shahes said, sitting down several paces away from the yama to sharpen her knife on its emery-stone. “Wouldn’t you be?”
She took a long time getting the knife as sharp as she could get it, patiently retesting and rewhetting the blade. At last she tested it again and then sat completely still. She stood up quietly, walked over to the yama, pressed its head up against her breast and cut its throat in one long fast slash. Blood leaped out in a brilliant arc. Shahes slowly lowered the head with its gazing eyes down to the ground.
Akal found that she was speaking the words of the ceremony for the dead, Now all that was owed is repaid and all that was owned, returned. Now all that was lost is found and all that was bound, free. Shahes stood silent, listening till the end.
Then came the work of skinning. They would leave the carcase to be cleaned by the scavengers of the mountain; it was a carrion-bird circling over the yama that had first caught Akal’s eye, and there were now three of them riding the wind. Skinning was fussy, dirty work, in the stink of meat and blood. Akal was inexpert, clumsy, cutting the hide more than once. In penance she insisted on carrying the pelt, rolled as best they could and strapped with their belts. She felt like a grave robber, carrying away the white-and-dun fleece, leaving the thin, broken corpse sprawled among the rocks in the indignity of its nakedness. Yet in her mind as she lugged the heavy fleece along was Shahes standing up and taking the yama’s beautiful head against her breast and slashing its throat, all one long movement, in which the woman and the animal were utterly one.
It is need that answers need, Akal thought, as it is question that answers question. The pelt reeked of death and dung. Her hands were caked with blood, and ached, gripping the stiff belt, as she followed Shahes down the steep rocky path homeward.
“I’m going down to the village,” Otorra said, getting up from the breakfast table.
“When are you going to card those four sacks?” Shahes said.
He ignored her, carrying his dishes to the washer-rack. “Any errands?” he asked of them all.
“Everybody done?” Madu asked, and took the cheese out to the pantry.
“No use going into town till you can take the carded fleece,” said Shahes.
Otorra turned to her, stared at her, and said, “I’ll card it when I choose and take it when I choose and I don’t take orders at my own work, will you understand that?”
Stop, stop now! Akal cried silently, for Shahes, stunned by the uprising of the meek, was listening to him. But he went on, firing grievance with grievance, blazing out in recriminations. “You can’t give all the orders, we’re your sedoretu, we’re your household, not a lot of hired hands, yes it’s your farm but it’s ours too, you married us, you can’t make all the decisions, and you can’t have it all your way either,” and at this point Shahes unhurriedly walked out of the room.
“Shahes!” Akal called after her, loud and imperative. Though Otorra’s outburst was undignified it was completely justified, and his anger was both real and dangerous. He was a man who had been used, and he knew it. As he had let himself be used and had colluded in that misuse, so now his anger threatened destruction. Shahes could not run away from it.
She did not come back. Madu had wisely disappeared. Akal told Shest to run out and see to the pack-beasts’ feed and water.
The three remaining in the kitchen sat or stood silent. Temly looked at Otorra. He looked at Akal.
“You’re right,” Akal said to him.
He gave a kind of satisfied snarl. He looked handsome in his anger, flushed and reckless. “Damn right I’m right. I’ve let this go on for too long. Just because she owned the farmhold—”
“And managed it since she was fourteen,” Akal cut in. “You think she can quit managing just like that? She’s always run things here. She had to. She never had anybody to share power with. Everybody has to learn how to be married.”
“That’s right,” Otorra flashed back, “and a marriage isn’t two pairs. It’s four pairs!”
That brought Akal up short. Instinctively she looked to Temly for help. Temly was sitting, quiet as usual, her elbows on the table, gathering up crumbs with one hand and pushing them into a little pyramid.
“Temly and me, you and Shahes, Evening and Morning, fine,” Otorra said. “What about Temly and her? What about you and me?”
Akal was now completely at a loss. “I thought . . . When we talked . . . ”
“I said I didn’t like sex with men,” said Otorra.
She looked up and saw a gleam in his eye. Spite? Triumph? Laughter?
“Yes. You did,” Akal said after a long pause. “And I said the same thing.”
Another pause.
“It’s a religious duty,” Otorra said.
Enno suddenly said very loudly in Akal’s voice, “Don’t come onto me with your religious duty! I studied religious duty for twenty years and where did it get me? Here! With you! In this mess!”
At this, Temly made a strange noise and put her face in her hands. Akal thought she had burst into tears, and then saw she was laughing, the painful, helpless, jolting laugh of a person who hasn’t had much practice at it.
“There’s nothing to laugh about,” Otorra said fiercely, but then had no more to say; his anger had blown up
leaving nothing but smoke. He groped for words for a while longer. He looked at Temly, who was indeed in tears now, tears of laughter. He made a despairing gesture. He sat down beside Temly and said, “I suppose it is funny if you look at it. It’s just that I feel like a chump.” He laughed, ruefully, and then, looking up at Akal, he laughed genuinely. “Who’s the biggest chump?” he asked her.
“Not you,” she said. “How long. . . . ”
“How long do you think?”
It was what Shahes, standing in the passageway, heard: their laughter. The three of them laughing. She listened to it with dismay, fear, shame, and terrible envy. She hated them for laughing. She wanted to be with them, she wanted to laugh with them, she wanted to silence them. Akal, Akal was laughing at her.
She went out to the workshed and stood in the dark behind the door and tried to cry and did not know how. She had not cried when her parents were killed; there had been too much to do. She thought the others were laughing at her for loving Akal, for wanting her, for needing her. She thought Akal was laughing at her for being such a fool, for loving her. She thought Akal would sleep with the man and they would laugh together at her. She drew her knife and tested its edge. She had made it very sharp yesterday on the Farren to kill the yama. She came back to the house, to the kitchen.
They were all still there. Shest had come back and was pestering Otorra to take him into town and Otorra was saying, “Maybe, maybe,” in his soft lazy voice.
Temly looked up, and Akal looked round at Shahes—the small head on the graceful neck, the clear eyes gazing.
Nobody spoke.
“I’ll walk down with you, then,” Shahes said to Otorra, and sheathed her knife. She looked at the women and the child. “We might as well all go,” she said sourly. “If you like.”
First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 1996.
About the Author
Ursula K. Le Guin is probably one of the best-known and most universally respected SF writers in the world today, having won, in addition to many Hugo and Nebula Awards, the National Book Award, a Pushcart Prize, The Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Newbury Honor, and the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. Her famous novel The Left Hand of Darkness may have been the most influential SF novel of its decade, and shows every sign of becoming one of the enduring classic of the genre. Le Guin’s other novels include The Dispossessed, Planet of Exile, The Lathe of Heaven, City of Illusions, Rocannon’s World, The Beginning Place, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, Tehanu, The Farthest Shore, Searoad, and Always Coming Home. She has had six collections: The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Orsinian Tales, The Compass Rose, Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, and Four Ways to Forgiveness. She’s also written many novels for children as well as much non-fiction. Her most recent books are a novel trilogy, Gifts, Voices, and Powers, and two big retrospective collections, Where On Earth: Selected Stories, Volume One and Outer Le Guin, Mountain Ways, 28 Space, Inner Lands: Selected Stories, Volume Two. She lives with her husband in Portland, Oregon.
A Sympathy of Light and Shadow:
Science Fiction, Gothic Horror and How They Met
Mark Cole
The decade started well enough.
We boldly set out into the stars, confident we could conquer every peril. We faced unknown hazards, unexpected consequences of our own actions, beings vastly more powerful than us, and even the darkest corners of our own psyche. Yet we knew the universe would open all its secrets to us.
But then the darkness came. Evil creatures of the night fell upon us. Terrible things stirred in the depths of the earth. Graves burst open, releasing madness, plague and all the monsters of the dead past.
. . . And then the audience bought their popcorn and watched Vincent Price and Christopher Lee, forgetting the aliens, spaceships and distant worlds they’d flocked to see only a few years earlier.
Public taste is notoriously fickle. Nor is it ever easy to explain why it changed. What is certain is that when Hammer films released The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957, it proved so successful that other studios rushed to get their own Gothics into the theaters. The fifties SF boom had already peaked—its audience had grown far more discerning, demanding better effects and writing. Many of those who had churned out low budget SF in the Fifties turned to Gothic horror in the Sixties.
It is also clear that these two competing cinematic visions were very different: one bright, clean and evenly-lit; the other shadowy and expressionistic with garish splashes of color: one looking towards the future; the other haunted by the past: one rational even in the face of the unknown; the other feverish and demon-haunted, with madness lurking in the dark.
Which makes it even stranger that a few filmmakers tried to combine the two.
It isn’t as if SF hadn’t appeared in Gothic fiction before.
Some call Frankenstein science fiction, although a lot of people disagree: the novel spends little time on the creation of the monster, focusing instead on its consequences. A few versions put the SF into clearer focus—as in James Whale’s bravura 1931 creation scene (suspiciously similar to the demonstrations of real-life “mad scientist” Nicola Tesla) but even his sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, mixes in the supernatural.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote about underground races living in the hollow earth; Jules Verne’s one Gothic story throws in a device that records and plays back images; and H.P. Lovecraft’s stories offer a more satisfying mix, with ancient aliens, brains in tanks and even fish-men.
Which doesn’t change the fact that the mere notion of Gothic SF suggests the mad jumble of clichés in Plan 9 from Outer Space.
It was probably inevitable that someone would try to film Lovecraft in an age of Gothic horror films. While he arrived far too late to qualify as Gothic, his stories are filled with enough ancient secrets, crumbling manors and irrational terrors for five Gothic authors. In 1963, Roger Corman made the first attempt with a version of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
Corman convinced AIP to fund a series of color Edgar Allan Poe movies with higher budgets than they’d given him before (which admittedly wasn’t much). The final products, thanks to Corman’s gift for working within a tight budget, look very much like the Hammer films he is ripping off.
After making the first five, though, he wanted a break. AIP disagreed: they’d turned their Poe films into a recognizable brand and didn‘t want to risk making a film by another, lesser-known author. They insisted that he borrow the title of a minor poem, The Haunted Palace, and bill it as yet another Poe film (Vincent Price reads a snatch of it at the end, which is Poe’s only contribution).
Charles Dexter Ward returns to his ancestral home, Arkham, and finds the town haunted by the monstrous mutations caused by a curse left on it by his ancestor, Joseph Curwen (also Price). Curwen’s spirit takes over Ward’s body, and takes up where he left off with his experiments with the monstrous creature in a pit under the house. It is a decidedly Lovecraftian elder god, and there are the expected references to the Necronomicon, Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.
Unfortunately, when we finally glimpse the creature, instead of an unspeakable alien monstrosity it looks like the Creature from the Black Lagoon with an extra pair of arms (one suspects a Paul Blaisdell creation leftover from one of Corman’s SF films).
Two years later, AIP made the first movie that openly admitted to being a Lovecraft film, Die, Monster, Die! Based on The Colour out of Space—a rather slight story about a meteor that crashes to earth on a distant farm—it is far more SF than its predecessor. Unfortunately it also has little to do with the original. In the story, the meteor carries a “colour” not part of our spectrum, which corrupts the land around it in an unthinkable way. Here it becomes merely radioactive. An aging Boris Karloff plays a wheelchair-bound scientist who wants to use the power of the meteorite to grow better vegetables. Unfortunately, it has all the usual effects we associate with rad
iation (well, at least in the movies . . . ): killer plants, people reduced to dust, and glowing, axe-wielding maniacs.
Despite its modern setting, the film does manage to create a Gothic mood. Unfortunately, it has little to do with Lovecraft.
Lovecraft has fared poorly in the theaters. The earliest attempts all tried to cram his stories into Corman’s Poe framework. Stuart Gordon’s 1985 splatter comedy Re-Animator, the most successful adaptation to date, broke the formula. It has little in common with his work, however, and was based on a series of short-shorts that Lovecraft himself disdained. Its success, unfortunately, meant that most Lovecraft films after it have been excuses for throwing gore at the screen.
Perhaps the best Lovecraft films to date have been the HPLHS’s The Call of Cthulhu (2005) and The Whisperer in Darkness (2011). While remaining remarkably faithful to the original stories, they offer a heady mix of SF and horror: The Whisperer in Darkness even adds an aerial duel between a biplane and a swarm of mechanized alien creatures. However neither film much resembles Hammer’s Gothics. Instead they look to the Expressionist silent films, and to King Kong and Universal’s horror films from the Forties, respectively, for their inspirations.
By the late Sixties, the Gothic craze was already fading, with a wave of more realistic horrors (like Rosemary’s Baby) ready to take their place. Hammer responded with more blood and more bare flesh (and a number of oddities, like the first Kung Fu Dracula movie). For some reason, though, despite the great SF films they’d made in the fifties, Hammer never tried adding SF to their Gothic horrors. However, they did bring more than a touch of the Gothic to their version of Nigel Kneale’s SF classic, Quatermass and the Pit (1967).
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 90 Page 12
