The Telling

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  "They'll come," people said. She did not ask who. She was so tired, she thought she could lie forever in the stone house, like one of the inhabitants of the little white stone houses in the cities of the dead she had seen in South America, resting in peace. Her own people burned their dead. She had always dreaded fire. This was better, the cold silence.

  On the third morning she heard bells, a long way off, a faint jangling of little bells. "Come see, Sutty," Kieri said, and coaxed her to get up and stand in the door of the stone house and look out.

  People were coming up from the south, winding among the grey boulders that stood higher than they did, people leading minule laden with packs on high saddles. There were poles fixed to the saddles, and from them long red and blue ribbons snapped in the wind. Clusters of little bells were tied into the white neck wool of the young animals that ran beside their mothers.

  The next day they started down with the people and the animals to their summer village. It took them three days, but the going was mostly easy. The villagers wanted Sutty to ride one of the minule, but nobody else was riding. She walked. At one place they had to round a cliff under a precipice that continued vertically down from the narrow ledge of the pathway. The path was level, but no wider than a foot's breadth in places, and the snow on it was softened and loosened by the summer thaw. There they let the minule loose and instead of leading them followed them. They showed Sutty that she should put her feet in the animals' tracks. She followed one minule meticulously, step by step. Its woolly buttocks swaying nonchalantly, it sauntered along, pausing now and then to look down the sheer drop into the hazy depths with a bored expression. Nobody said anything till they were all off the cliff path. Then there was some laughter and joking, and several villagers made the mountain-heart gesture to Silong.

  Down in the village the horned peak could not be seen, only the big shoulder of a nearer mountain and a glimpse of the barrier wall closing off the northwestern sky. The village was in a green place, open to north and south, good summer pasturage, sheltered, idyllic. Trees grew by the river: Odiedin showed them to her. They were as tall as her little finger. Down in Okzat-Ozkat such trees were the shrubs beside the Ereha. In the parks of Dovza City she had walked in their deep shade.

  There had been a death among the people, a young man who had neglected a cut on his foot and died of blood poisoning. They had kept the body frozen in snow till the maz could come and perform his funeral. How had they known Odiedin's group was coming? How had these arrangements been made? She didn't understand, but she didn't think about it much. Here in the mountains there was much she didn't understand. She went along in the moment, like a child. "Tumble and spin and be helpless, like a baby...." Who had said that to her? She was content to walk, content to sit in the sun, content to follow in the footsteps of an animal. Where my guides lead me in kindness, I follow, follow lightly...

  The two young maz told the funeral. That was how the people spoke of it. Like all the rites, it was a narrative. For two days Siez and Tobadan sat with the man's father and aunt, his sister, his friends, a woman who had been married to him for a while, hearing everybody who wanted to talk about him tell them who he had been, what he had done. Now the two young men retold all that, ceremonially and in the formal language, to the soft batt-tabatt of the drum, passing the word one to the other across the body wrapped in white, thin, still-frozen cloth: a praise-song, gathering a life up into words, making it part of the endless telling.

  Then Siez recited in his beautiful voice the ending of the story of Penan Teran, a mythic hero couple dear to the Rangma people. Penan and Teran were men of Silong, young warriors who rode the north wind, saddling the wind from the mountains like an eberdin and riding it down to battle, banners flying, to fight the ancient enemy of the Rangma, the sea people, the barbarians of the western plains. But Teran was killed in battle. And Penan led his people out of danger and then saddled the south wind, the sea wind, and rode it up into the mountains, where he leapt from the wind and died.

  The people listened and wept, and there were tears in Sutty's eyes.

  Then Tobadan struck the drum as Sutty had never heard it struck, no soft heartbeat but a driving urgent rhythm, to which people lifted up the body and carried it away in procession, swiftly away from the village, always with the drum beating.

  "Where will they bury him?" she asked Odiedin.

  "In the bellies of the geyma," Odiedin said. He pointed to distant rock spires on one of the mighty slopes above the valley. "They'll leave him naked there."

  That was better than lying in a stone house, Sutty thought. Better far than fire.

  "So he'll ride the wind," she said.

  Odiedin looked up at her and after a while quietly assented.

  Odiedin never said much, and what he said was often dry; he was not a mild man; but she was by now altogether at ease with him and he with her. He was writing on the little slips of blue and red paper, of which he had a seemingly endless supply in his pack: writing the name and family names of the man who had died, she saw, for those who mourned him to take home and keep in their telling boxes.

  "Maz," she said. "Before the Dovzans became so powerful ... before they began changing everything, using machinery, making things in factories instead of by hand, making new laws—all that—" Odiedin nodded. "It was after people from the Ekumen came here that they began that. Only about a lifetime ago. What were the Dovzans before that?"

  "Barbarians."

  He was a Rangma; he hadn't been able to resist saying it, saying it loud and clear. But she knew he was also a thoughtful, truthful man.

  "Were they ignorant of the Telling?"

  A pause. He set his pen down. "Long ago, yes. In the time of Penan Teran, yes. When The Arbor was written, yes. Then the people from the central plains, from Doy, began taming them. Trading with them, teaching them. So they learned to read and write and tell. But they were still barbarians, yoz Sutty. They'd rather make war than trade. When they traded, they made a war of it. They allowed usury, and sought great profits. They always had headmen to whom they paid tribute, men who were rich, and passed power down to their sons. Gobey—bosses. So when they began to have maz, they made the maz into bosses, with the power to rule and punish. Gave the maz the power to tax. They made them rich. They made the sons of maz all maz, by birth. They made the ordinary people into nothing. It was wrong. It was all wrong."

  "Maz Uming Ottiar spoke of that time once. As if he remembered it."

  Odiedin nodded. "I remember the end of it. It was a bad time. Not as bad as this," he added, with his brief, harsh laugh.

  "But this time came from that time. Grew out of it. Didn't it?"

  He looked dubious, thoughtful.

  "Why don't you tell of it?"

  No response.

  "You don't tell it, maz. It's never part of all the histories and tales you tell about the whole world all through the ages. You tell about the far past. And you tell things from your own years, from ordinary people's lives—at funerals, and when children speak their tellings. But you don't tell about these great events. Nothing about how the world has changed in the last hundred years."

  "None of that is part of the Telling," Odiedin said after a tense, pondering silence. "We tell what is right, what goes right, as it should go. Not what goes wrong."

  "Penan Teran lost their battle, a battle with Dovza. It didn't go right, maz. But you tell it."

  He looked up and studied her, not aggressively or with resentment, but from a very great distance. She had no idea what he was thinking or feeling, what he would say.

  In the end he said only, "Ah."

  The land mine going off? or the soft assent of the listener? She did not know.

  He bent his head and wrote the name of the dead man, three bold, elegant characters across the slip of faded red paper. He had ground his ink from a block he carried, mixed it with river water in a tiny stoneware pot. The pen he was using for this writing was a geyma feather, ash-grey. He mi
ght have sat here cross-legged on the stony dust, writing a name, three hundred years ago. Three thousand years ago.

  She had no business asking him what she had asked him. Wrong, wrong.

  But the next day he said to her, "Maybe you've heard the Riddles of the Telling, yoz Sutty?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Children learn them. They're very old. What children tell is always the same. What's the end of a story? When you begin telling it. That's one of them."

  "More a paradox than a riddle," Sutty said, thinking it over. "So the events must be over before the telling begins?"

  Odiedin looked mildly surprised, as the maz generally did when she tried to interpret a saying or tale.

  "That's not what it means," she said with resignation.

  "It might mean that," he said. And after a while, "Penan leapt from the wind and died: that is Teran's story."

  She had thought he was answering her question about why the maz did not tell about the Corporation State and the abuses that had preceded it. What did the ancient heroes have to do with that?

  There was a gap between her mind and Odiedin's so wide light would need years to cross it.

  "So the story went right, it's right to tell it; you see?" Odiedin said.

  "I'm trying to see," she said.

  ***

  They stayed six days in the summer village in the deep valley, resting. Then they set off again with new provisions and two new guides, north and up. And up, and up. Sutty kept no count of the days. Dawn came, they got up, the sun shone on them and on the endless slopes of rock and snow, and they walked. Dusk came, they camped, the sound of water ceased as the little thaw streams froze again, and they slept.

  The air was thin, the way was steep. To the left, towering over them, rose the scarps and slopes of the mountain they were on. Behind them and to the right, peak after far peak rose out of mist and shadow into light, a motionless sea of icy broken waves to the remote horizon. The sun beat like a white drum in the dark blue sky. It was midsummer, avalanche season. They went very soft and silent among the unbalanced giants. Again and again in the daytime the silence quivered into a long, shuddering boom, multiplied and made sourceless by echoes.

  Sutty heard people say the name of the mountain they were on, Zubuam. A Rangma word: Thunderer.

  They had not seen Silong since they left the deep village. Zubuam's vast, deeply scored bulk closed off all the west. They inched along, north and up, north and up, in and out of the enormous wrinkles of the mountain's flank.

  Breathing was slow work.

  One night it began to snow. It snowed lightly but steadily all the next day.

  Odiedin and the two guides who had joined them at the deep village squatted outside the tents that evening and conferred, sketching out lines, paths, zigzags on the snow with gloved fingers. Next morning the sun leapt brilliant over the icy sea of the eastern peaks. They inched on, sweating, north and up.

  One morning as they walked, Sutty realised they were turning their backs to the sun. Two days they went northwest, crawling around the immense shoulder of Zubuam. On the third day at noon they turned a corner of rock and ice. Before them the immense barrier faced them across a vast abyss of air: Silong breaking like a white wave from the depths to the regions of light. The day was diamond-bright and still. The tip of the horned peak could be seen above the ramparts. From it the faintest gossamer wisp of silver trailed to the north.

  The south wind was blowing, the wind Penan had leapt from to die.

  "Not far now," Siez said as they trudged on, southwestward and down.

  "I think I could walk here forever," Sutty said, and her mind said, I will....

  During their stay in the deep village, Kieri had moved into her tent. They had been the only women in the group before the new guides joined them. Until then Sutty had shared Odiedin's tent. A widowed maz, celibate, silent, orderly, he had been a self-effacing, reassuring presence. Sutty was reluctant to make the change, but Kieri pressed her to. Kieri had tented with Akidan till then and was sick of it. She told Sutty, "Ki's seventeen, he's in rut all the time. I don't like boys! I like men and women! I want to sleep with you. Do you want to? Maz Odiedin can share with Ki."

  Her use of the words was specific: share meant share the tent, sleep meant join the sleeping bags.

  When she realised that, Sutty was more hesitant than ever; but the passivity she had encouraged in herself during the whole of this journey was stronger than her hesitations, and she agreed. Nothing about sex had mattered much to her since Pao's death. Sometimes her body craved to be touched and roused. Sex was something people wanted and needed. She could respond physically, so long as that was all they asked.

  Kieri was strong, soft, warm, and as clean as any of them could be in the circumstances. "Let's heat up!" she said every night as she got into their joined sleeping bags. She made love to Sutty briefly and energetically and then fell asleep pressed up close against her. They were like two logs in a glowing campfire, burning down, Sutty thought, sinking asleep in the deep warmth.

  Akidan had been honored to share the tent with his master and teacher, but he was miffed or frustrated by Kieri's desertion. He moped around her for a day or two, and then became attentive to the woman who had joined them in the village. The new guides were a brother and sister, a long-legged, round-faced, tireless pair in their twenties, named Naba and Shui. After a day or so Ki moved in with Shui. Odiedin, patient, invited Naba to share his tent.

  What had Diodi the barrow man said, years ago, light-years away, back down there in the streets where people lived? "Sex for three hundred years! After three-hundred-year sex anybody can fly!"

  I can fly, Sutty thought, plodding on, southward and down. There's nothing really in the world but stone and light. All the other things, all the things, dissolve back into the two, the stone, the light, and the two back into the one, the flying.... And then it will all be born again, it is born again, always, in every moment it's being born, but all the time there's only the one, the flying.... She plodded on through glory.

  They came to the Lap of the Earth.

  Though she knew it was implausible, impossible, foolish, Sutty's imagination had insisted all along that the goal of their journey was a great temple, a mysterious city hidden at the top of the world, stone ramparts, flags flying, priests chanting, gold and gongs and processions. All the imagery of lost Lhasa, Dragon-Tiger Mountain, Machu Picchu. All the ruins of the Earth.

  They came steeply down the western flanks of Zubuam for three days in cloudy weather, seldom able to see the barrier wall of Silong across the vast gulf of air where the wind chased coiling clouds and ghostly snow flurries that never came to earth. They followed the guides all one day through cloud and fog along an arête, a long spine of snow-covered rock with a steep drop to either side.

  The weather cleared suddenly, clouds gone, sun blazing at the zenith. Sutty was disoriented, looking up for the barrier wall and not finding it. Odiedin came beside her. He said, smiling, "We're on Silong."

  They had crossed over. The enormous mass of rock and ice behind them in the east was Zubuam. An avalanche went curling and smoking down a slanting face of the rock far up on the mountain. A long time later they heard the deep roar of it, the Thunderer telling them what it had to tell.

  Zubuam and Silong, they were two and one, too. Old maz mountains. Old lovers.

  She looked up at Silong. The heights of the barrier wall loomed directly over them, hiding the summit peak. Sky was a brilliant, jagged-edged slash from north to south.

  Odiedin was pointing to the south. She looked and saw only rock, ice, the glitter of thaw water. No towers, no banners.

  They set off, trudging along. They were on a path, level and quite clear, marked here and there with piles of flat stones. Often Sutty saw the dry, neat pellets of minule dung beside the way.

  In mid-afternoon she made out a pair of rock spires that stuck up from a projecting corner of the mountain ahead like tusks from the l
ower jaw of a skull. The path narrowed as they got closer to this corner, becoming a ledge along a sheer cliff. When they got to the corner, the two reddish tusks of rock stood before them like a gateway, the path leading between them.

  Here they stopped. Tobadan brought out his drum and patted it, and the three maz spoke and chanted. The words were all in Rangma and so old or so formalised that Sutty could not follow their meaning. The two guides from the village and their own guides delved into their packs and brought out little bundles of twigs tied with red and blue thread. They gave them to the maz, who received them with the mountain-heart gesture, facing toward Silong. They set them afire and fixed them among rocks by the pathway to burn down. The smoke smelled like sage, a dry incense. It curled small and blue and lazy among the rocks and along the path. The wind whistled by, a river of turbulent air rushing through the great gap between the mountains, but here in this gateway Silong sheltered them and there was no wind at all.

  They picked up their packs and fell into line again, passing between the saber-tooth rocks. The path now bent back inward toward the slope of the mountain, and Sutty saw that it led across a cirque, a level-floored half-moon bay in the mountainside. In the nearly vertical, curving inner wall, still a half kilo or so distant, were black spots or holes. There was some snow on the floor of the cirque, trodden in an arabesque of paths leading to and from these black holes in the mountain.

  Caves, scarred Adien, the ex-miner, who had died of the jaundice in the winter, whispered in her mind. Caves full of being.

  The air seemed to thicken like syrup and to quiver, to shake. She was dizzy. Wind roared in her ears, deep and shrill, terrible. But they were out of the wind, here in the sunlit air of the cirque. She turned back in confusion, then in terror looked upward for the rockslide clattering down upon her. Black shadows crossed the air, the roar and rattle were deafening. She cowered, covering her head with her arms.