The Telling

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Maz Uming rocked and frowned. "So, without the telling, the rocks and plants and animals go on all right. But the people don't. People wander around. They don't know a mountain from its reflection in a puddle. They don't know a path from a cliff. They hurt themselves. They get angry and hurt each other and the other things. They hurt animals because they're angry. They make quarrels and cheat each other. They want too much. They neglect things. Crops don't get planted. Too many crops get planted. Rivers get dirty with shit. Earth gets dirty with poison. People eat poison food. Everything is confused. Everybody's sick. Nobody looks after the sick people, the sick things. But that's very bad, very bad, eh? Because looking after things, that's our job, eh? Looking after things, looking after each other. Who else would do it? Trees? Rivers? Animals? They just do what they are. But we're here, and we have to learn how to be here, how to do things, how to keep things going the way they need to go. The rest of the world knows its business. Knows the One and the Myriad, the Tree and the Leaves. But all we know is how to learn. How to study, how to listen, how to talk, how to tell. If we don't tell the world, we don't know the world. We're lost in it, we die. But we have to tell it right, tell it truly. Eh? Take care and tell it truly. That's what went wrong. Down there, down there in Dovza, when they started telling lies. Those false maz, those big munan, those boss maz. Telling people that nobody knew the truth but them, nobody could speak but them, everybody had to tell the same lies they told. Traitors, usurers! Leading people astray for money! Getting rich off their lies, bossing people! No wonder the world stopped going around! No wonder the police took over!"

  The old man was dark red in the face, shaking his good hand as if he held a stick in it. His wife got up, came over, and put the drum and drumstick into his hands, all the time going on with her droning recitation. Uming bit his lip, shook his head, fretted a bit, knocked the drum rather hard, and took up the recitation on the next line.

  "I'm sorry," Sutty said to Ottiar as the old woman went with her to the door. "I didn't mean to upset Maz Uming."

  "Oh, it's all right," Ottiar said. "All that was before I/we were born. Down in Dovza."

  "You weren't part of Dovza, up here?"

  "We're mostly Rangma here. My/our people all talked Rangma. The grandparents didn't know how to talk much Dovzan till after the Corporation police came and made everybody talk it. They hated it! They kept the worst accents they could!"

  She had a merry smile, and Sutty smiled back; but she walked down the hill-street in a maze of thoughts. Uming's tirade against the 'boss maz' had been about the period before the Dovzan Corporation ruled the world, before 'the police came,' possibly before the First Observers of the Ekumen came. As he spoke, it had occurred to her that of the hundreds of stories and histories she had heard in the tellings, none had to do with events in Dovza, or any events of the last five or six decades except very local ones. She had never heard a maz tell a tale about the coming of the offworlders, the rise of the Corporation State, or any public event of the last seventy years or more.

  "Iziezi," she said that night, "who were the boss maz?"

  She was helping Iziezi peel a kind of fungus that had just come into season up on the hills where the snow was melting at the edge of thawing drifts. It was called demyedi, first-of-spring, tasted like snow, and was good for balancing the peppery banam shoots and the richness of oilfish, thus keeping the sap thin and the heart easy. Whatever else she had missed and misunderstood in this world, she had learned when, and why, and how to cook its food.

  "Oh, that was a long time ago," said Iziezi. "When they started bossing everybody around, down in Dovza."

  "A hundred years ago?"

  "Maybe that long ago."

  "Who are 'the police'?"

  "Oh, you know. The blue-and-tans."

  "Just them?"

  "Well, I guess we call all those people the police. From down there. Dovzans.... First they used to arrest the boss maz. Then they started to arrest all the maz. When they sent soldiers up here to arrest people in the umyazu, that's when people started calling them police. And people call skuyen the police, too. Or they say, 'They're working for the police."'

  "Skuyen?"

  "People who tell the blue-and-tans about illegal things. Books, tellings, anything.... For money. Or for hatred." Iziezi's mild voice changed on the last words. Her face had closed into its tight look of pain.

  Books, tellings, anything. What you cooked. Who you made love with. How you wrote the word for tree. Anything.

  No wonder the system was incoherent, fragmented. No wonder Uming's world had stopped going around. The wonder was that anything remained of it at all.

  As if her realisations had summoned him out of nothingness, the Monitor passed her on the street next morning. He did not look at her.

  A few days later she went to visit Maz Sotyu Ang. His shop was closed. It had never been closed before. She asked a neighbor sweeping his front step if he would be back soon. "I think the producer-consumer is away," the man said vaguely.

  Maz Elyed had lent her a beautiful old book—lent or given, she was not sure. "Keep it, it's safe with you," Elyed had said. It was an ancient anthology of poems from the Eastern Isles, an inexhaustible treasure. She was deep in studying and transferring it into her noter. Several days passed before she thought to visit her old friend the Fertiliser again. She walked up the steep street that shone blinding black in the sunshine. Spring came late but fast to these foothills of the great range. The air blazed with light. She walked past the shop without recognising it.

  She was disoriented, turned back, found the shop. It was all white: whitewashed, a blank front. All the signs, the bold characters, the old words gone. Silenced. Snowfall.... The door stood ajar. She looked in. The counters and the walls of tiny drawers had been torn out. The room was empty, dirty, ransacked. The walls where she had seen the living words, the breathing words, had been smeared over with brown paint.

  The twice-forked lightning tree....

  The neighbor had come out when she passed. He was sweeping his step again. She began to speak to him and then did not. Skuyen? How did you know?

  She started back home and then, seeing the river glittering at the foot of the streets, turned and went along the hillside out of town to a path that led down to and followed the river. She had hiked that path all one day, one of those days long, long ago in the early autumn when she was waiting for the Envoy to tell her to go back to the city.

  She set off upriver beside thickets of newly leafed-out shrubs and the dwarfed trees that grew here not far from timberline. The Ereha ran milky blue with the first glacier melt. Ice crunched in the ruts of the road, but the sun was hot on her head and back. Her mouth was still dry with shock. Her throat ached.

  Go back to the city. She should go back to the city. Now. With the three record crystals and the noter full of stuff, full of poetry. Get it all to Tong Ov before the Monitor got it.

  There was no way to send it. She must take it. But travel must be authorised. O Ram! where was her ZIL? She hadn't worn it for months. Nobody here used ZILs, only if you worked for the Corporation or had to go to one of the bureaus. It was in her briefcase, in her room. She'd have to use her ZIL at the telephone on Dock Street, get through to Tong, ask him to get her an authorisation to come to the city. By plane. Take the riverboat down to Eltli and fly from there. Do it all out in the open, let them all know, so they couldn't stop her privately, trick her somehow. Confiscate her records. Silence her. Where was Maz Sotyu? What were they doing to him? Was it her fault?

  She could not think about that now. What she had to do was save what she could of what Sotyu had given her. Sotyu and Ottiar and Uming and Odiedin and Elyed and Iziezi, dear Iziezi. She could not think about that now.

  She turned round, walked hurriedly back along the river into town, found her ZIL bracelet in her briefcase in her room, went to Dock Street, and put in a call to Tong Ov at the Ekumenical Office in Dovza City.

  His Dovzan
secretary answered and said superciliously that he was in a meeting. "I must speak to him, now," Sutty said and was not surprised when the secretary said in a meek tone that she would call him.

  When Sutty heard his voice she said, in Hainish, hearing the words as foreign and strange, "Envoy, I've been out of touch for so long, I feel as if we needed to talk."

  "I see," Tong said, and a few other meaningless things, while she and probably he tried to figure out how to say anything meaningful. If only he knew any of her languages, if only she knew his! But their only common languages were Hainish and Dovzan.

  "Nothing devolving in particular?" he inquired.

  "No, no, not really. But I'd like to bring you the material I've been collecting," she said. "Just notes on daily life in Okzat-Ozkat."

  "I was hoping to come see you there, but that seems to be contraindicated at present," Tong said. "With a window just wide enough for one, of course it's a pity to close the blinds. But I know how much you love Dovza City and must have been missing it. I'm equally sure that you've found nothing much interesting up there. So, if your work's all done, by all means come on back and enjoy yourself here."

  Sutty groped and stammered, and finally said, "Well, as you know it's a very, the Corporation State is a very homogeneous culture, very powerful and definitely in control, very successful. So everything here is, yes, is very much the same here as there. But maybe I should stay on and finish the, finish the tapes before I bring them? They're not very interesting."

  "Here, as you know," said Tong, "our hosts share all kinds of information with us. And we share ours with them. Everybody here is getting loads of fresh material, very educational and inspiring. So what you're doing there isn't really all that important. Don't worry about it. Of course I'm not at all uneasy about you. And have no need to be. Do I?"

  "No, yes, of course not," she said. "Honestly."

  She left the telephone office, showing her ZIL at the door, and hurried back to her inn, her home. She thought she had followed Tong's backward talk, but it destroyed itself in her memory. She thought he had been trying to tell her to stay there, not to try to bring what she had to him, because he would have to show it to officials there and it would be confiscated, but she was not sure that was what he had meant. Maybe he truly meant it was not all that important. Maybe he meant he could not help her at all.

  Helping Iziezi prepare dinner, she was sure that she had panicked, had been stupid to call Tong, thus bringing attention to herself and her friends and informants here. Feeling that she must be careful, cautious, she said nothing about the desecrated shop.

  Iziezi had known Maz Sotyu Ang for years, but she said nothing about him either. She showed no sign of anything being wrong. She showed Sutty how to slice the fresh numiem, thin and on the bias, to bring the flavor out.

  It was one of Elyed's teaching nights. After she and Akidan and Iziezi had eaten, Sutty took her leave and went down River Street into the poor part of town, the yurt city, where the Corporation had not brought electric enlightenment and there were only the tiny gleams of oil lamps inside the shacks and tents. It was cold, but not the bone-dry, blade-keen cold of winter. A damp, spring-smelling cold, full of life. But Sutty's heart swelled with dread as she came near Elyed's shop: to find it all whited out, gutted, raped...

  The great-grandnephew was screaming bloody murder as somebody separated him from a screwdriver, and nieces smiled at Sutty as she went through the shop to the back room. She was early for the teaching hour. Nobody was in the little room but the maz and an unobtrusive grandnephew setting up chairs.

  "Maz Elyed Oni, do you know Maz Sotyu Ang—the herbalist—his shop—" She could not keep the words from bursting out.

  "Yes," the old woman said. "He's staying with his daughter."

  "The shop, the herbary—"

  "That is gone."

  "But-"

  Her throat ached. She struggled with tears of rage and outrage that wanted to be cried, here with this woman who could be her grandmother, who was her grandmother.

  "It was my fault."

  "No," Elyed said. "You did no wrong. Sotyu Ang did no wrong. There is no fault. Things are going badly. It's not possible always to do right when things are difficult."

  Sutty stood silent. She looked around the small, high-ceilinged room, its red rug almost hidden by chairs and cushions; everything poor, clean; a bunch of paper flowers stuck in an ugly vase on the low table; the grandnephew gently rearranging floor cushions; the old, old woman lowering herself carefully, painfully onto a thin pillow near the table. On the table, a book. Old, worn, many times read.

  "I think maybe, yoz Sutty, it was the other way round. Sotyu told us last summer that he thought a neighbor had informed the police about his herbary. Then you came, and nothing happened."

  Sutty forced herself to understand what Elyed had said. "I was a safeguard?"

  "I think so."

  "Because they don't want me to see ... what they do? But then why did they—now—?"

  Elyed drew her thin shoulders together. "They don't study patience," she said.

  "Then I should stay here," Sutty said slowly, trying to understand. "I thought it would be better for you if I left."

  "I think you might go to Silong."

  Her mind was clouded. "To Silong?"

  "The last umyazu is there."

  Sutty said nothing, and after a while Elyed added, scrupulous of fact, "The last I know of. Maybe some are left in the east, in the Isles. But here in the west they say the Lap of Silong is the last. Many, many books have been sent there. For many years now. It must be a great library. Not like the Golden Mountain, not like the Red Umyazu, not like Atangen. But what has been saved, most of it is there."

  She looked at Sutty, her head a little on one side, a small old bird, keen-eyed. She had completed her cautious journey down onto the cushion, and now arranged her black wool vest, a bird getting its feathers straight. "You want to learn the Telling, I know that. You should go there," she said. "Here, nothing much is here. Bits and pieces. What I have, what a few maz have. Not much. Always less. Go to Silong, daughter Sutty. Maybe you can find a partner. Be a maz. Eh?" Her face creased up in a sudden, tremendous smile, toothless and radiant. She jiggled gently with laughter. "Go to Silong..."

  Other people were coming in. Elyed put her hands in her lap and began to chant softly, "The two from one, the one from two...."

  SIX

  SHE WENT TO TALK to Odiedin Manma. Despite his enigmatic telling, despite the uncanny event (which she was now quite sure she had merely imagined) in his class, she had found him the most worldly and politically knowledgeable of the maz she knew, and she badly wanted some practical counsel. She waited till after his class and then begged him for advice.

  "Does Maz Elyed want me to go to this place, this umyazu, because she thinks if I go there, my presence will help keep it safe? I think she might be wrong. I think the blue-and-tans are tracking me all the time. It's a secret place, a hidden place, isn't it? If I went, they could just follow me. They may have all kinds of tracking devices."

  Odiedin held up his hand, mild but unsmiling. "I don't think they'll track you, yoz. They have orders from Dovza to let you be. Not to follow and observe you."

  "You know that?"

  He nodded.

  She believed him. She remembered the invisible web she had sensed when she first lived here. Odiedin was one of the spiders.

  "Anyhow, the way to Silong isn't an easy track to follow. And you could leave very quietly." He chewed his lip a little. A hint of warmth, a pleasurable look, had come into his dark, severe face. "If Maz Elyed suggested that you go there, and if you want to go there," he said, "I'd show you the way."

  "You would?"

  "I was at the Lap of Silong once. I was twelve. My parents were maz. It was a bad time then. When the books were burned. A lot of police. A lot of loss, destruction. Arrests. Fear. So we left Okzat, went up into the hills, to the hill towns. And then, in the summe
r, all the way round Zubuam, to the lap of the Mother. I'd like very much to go that way again before I die, yoz."

  ***

  Sutty tried to leave no track, 'no footprints in the dust.' She sent no word to Tong except that she planned to do nothing much the next few months except a little hiking and climbing. She spoke to none of her friends, acquaintances, teachers, except Elyed and Odiedin. She fretted about her crystals—four, now, for she had cleared her noter again. She could not leave them at Iziezi's house, the first place the blue-and-tans would look for them. She was trying to decide where to bury them and how to do it without being seen, when Ottiar and Uming in the most casual way told her that since the police were so busy at the moment, they were storing their mandala away in a safe place for a while, and did she have anything she'd like to stash away with it? Their intuition seemed amazing, until Sutty remembered that they were part of the spiderweb—and had lived their adult lives in secrecy, hiding all that was most precious to them. She gave them the crystals. They told her where the hiding place was. "Just in case," Ottiar said mildly. She told them who Tong Ov was and what to tell him, just in case. They parted with loving embraces.

  Finally she told Iziezi about the long hike she planned to take in the mountains.

  "Akidan is going with you," Iziezi said with a cheerful smile.

  Akidan was out with friends. The two women were eating dinner together at the table in the red-carpeted corner of Iziezi's immaculate kitchen. It was a 'little-feast' night: several small dishes, delicately intense in flavor, surrounding a bland, creamy pile of tuzi. It reminded Sutty of the food of her far-off childhood. "You'd like basmati rice, Iziezi!" she said. Then she heard what her friend had said.

  "Into the mountains? But it—We may be gone a long time."

  "He's been up in the hills several times. He'll be seventeen this summer."

  "But what will you do?" Akidan ran his aunt's errands, did her shopping, sweeping, fetching and carrying, helped her when a crutch slipped.