That is in fact how we tend to answer any question from a stranger. It is amazing that we ever got into the Ekumen. We are near Hain — sidereally near, 4.2 light years — and the Hainish simply kept coming here and talking to us for centuries, until we got used to them and were able to say Yes. The Hainish, of course, are our ancestral race, but the stolid longevity of our customs makes them feel young and rootless and dashing. That is probably why they like us.
UNCHOSEN LOVE
There was a hold down near the mouths of the Saduun, built on a rock island that stands up out of the great tidal plain south of where the river meets the sea. The sea used to come in and swirl around the island, but as the Saduun slowly built up its delta over the centuries, only the great tides reached it, and then only the storm tides, and at last the sea never came so far, but lay shining all along the west.
Meruo was never a farmhold; built on rock in a salt marsh, it was a seahold, and lived by fishing. When the sea withdrew, the people dug a channel from the foot of the rock to the tideline. Over the years, as the sea withdrew farther, the channel grew longer and longer, till it was a broad canal three miles long. Up and down it fishing boats and trading ships went to and from the docks of Meruo that sprawled over the rocky base of the island. Right beside the docks and the netyards and the drying and freezing plants began the prairies of saltgrass, where vast flocks of yama and flightless baro grazed. Meruo rented out those pastures to farmholds of Sadahun Village in the coastal hills. None of the flocks belonged to Meruo, whose people looked only to the sea, and farmed only the sea, and never walked if they could sail. More than the fishing, it was the prairies that had made them rich, but they spent their wealth on boats and on digging and dredging the great canal. We throw our money in the sea, they said.
They were known as a stiff-necked lot, holding themselves apart from the village. Meruo was a big hold, often with a hundred people living in it, so they seldom made sedoretu with village people, but married one another. They’re all germanes at Meruo, the villagers said.
A Morning man from eastern Oket came to stay in Sadahun, studying saltmarsh grazing for his farmhold on the other coast. He chanced to meet a Evening man of Meruo named Suord, in town for a village meeting. The next day, there came Suord again, to see him; and the next day too; and by the fourth night Suord was making love to him, sweeping him off his feet like a storm-wave. The Easterner, whose name was Hadri, was a modest, inexperienced young man to whom the journey and the unfamiliar places and the strangers he met had been a considerable adventure. Now he found one of the strangers wildly in love with him, beseeching him to come out to Meruo and stay there, live there — “We’ll make a sedoretu,” Suord said. “There’s half a dozen Evening girls. Any, any of the Morning women, I’d marry any one of them to keep you. Come out, come out with me, come out onto the Rock!” For so the people of Meruo called their hold.
Hadri thought he owed it to Suord to do what he asked, since Suord loved him so passionately. He got up his courage, packed his bag, and went out across the wide, flat prairies to the place he had seen all along dark against the sky far off, the high roofs of Meruo, hunched up on its rock above its docks and warehouses and boat-basin, its windows looking away from the land, staring always down the long canal to the sea that had forsaken it.
Suord brought him in and introduced him to the household, and Hadri was terrified. They were all like Suord, dark people, handsome, fierce, abrupt, intransigent — so much alike that he could not tell one from the other and mistook daughter for mother, brother for cousin, Evening for Morning. They were barely polite to him. He was an interloper. They were afraid Suord would bring him in among them for good. And so was he.
Suord’s passion was so intense that Hadri, a moderate soul, assumed it must burn out soon. “Hot fires don’t last,” he said to himself, and took comfort in the adage. “He’ll get tired of me and I can go,” he thought, not in words. But he stayed a tenday at Meruo, and a month, and Suord burned as hot as ever. Hadri saw too that among the sedoretu of the household there were many passionate matings, sexual tensions running among them like a network of ungrounded wires, filling the air with the crackle and spark of electricity; and some of these marriages were many years old.
He was flattered and amazed at Suord’s insatiable, yearning, worshipping desire for a person Hadri himself was used to considering as quite ordinary. He felt his response to such passion was never enough. Suord’s dark beauty filled his mind, and his mind turned away, looking for emptiness, a space to be alone. Some nights, when Suord lay flung out across the bed in deep sleep after lovemaking, Hadri would get up, naked, silent; he would sit in the windowseat across the room, gazing down the shining of the long canal under the stars. Sometimes he wept silently. He cried because he was in pain, but he did not know what the pain was.
One such night in early winter his feeling of being chafed, rubbed raw, like an animal fretting in a trap, all his nerve-ends exposed, was too much to endure. He dressed, very quietly for fear of waking Suord, and went barefoot out of their room, to get outdoors — anywhere out from under the roofs, he thought. He felt that he could not breathe.
The immense house was bewildering in the dark. The seven sedoretu living there now had each their own wing or floor or suite of rooms, all spacious. He had never even been into the regions of the First and Second Sedoretu, way off in the south wing, and always got confused in the ancient central part of the house, but he thought he knew his way around these floors in the north wing. This corridor, he thought, led to the landward stairs. It led only to narrow stairs going up. He went up them into a great shadowy attic, and found a door out onto the roof itself.
A long railed walk led along the south edge. He followed it, the peaks of the roofs rising up like black mountains to his left, and the prairies, the marshes, and then as he came round to the west side, the canal, all lying vast and dim in starlight below. The air was soft and damp, smelling of rain to come. A low mist was coming up from the marshes. As he watched, his arms on the rail, the mist thickened and whitened, hiding the marshes and the canal. He welcomed that softness, that slowness of the blurring, healing, concealing fog. A little peace and solace came into him. He breathed deep and thought, “Why, why am I so sad? Why don’t I love Suord as much as he loves me? Why does he love me?”
He felt somebody was near him, and looked round. A woman had come out onto the roof and stood only a few yards away, her arms on the railing like his, barefoot like him, in a long dressing-gown. When he turned his head, she turned hers, looking at him.
She was one of the women of the Rock, no mistaking the dark skin and straight black hair and a certain fine cut of brow, cheekbone, jaw; but which one he was not sure. At the dining rooms of the north wing he had met a number of Evening women in their twenties, all sisters, cousins, or germanes, all unmarried. He was afraid of them all, because Suord might propose one of them as his wife in sedoretu. Hadri was a little shy sexually and found the gender difference hard to cross; he had found his pleasure and solace mostly with other young men, though some women attracted him very much. These women of Meruo were powerfully attractive, but he could not imagine himself touching one of them. Some of the pain he suffered here was caused by the distrustful coldness of the Evening women, always making it clear to him that he was the outsider. They scorned him and he avoided them. And so he was not perfectly certain which one was Sasni, which one was Lamateo, or Saval, or Esbuai.
He thought this was Esbuai, because she was tall, but he wasn’t sure. The darkness might excuse him, for one could barely make out the features of a face. He murmured, “Good evening,” and said no name.
There was a long pause, and he thought resignedly that a woman of Meruo would snub him even in the dead of night on a rooftop.
But then she said, “Good evening,” softly, with a laugh in her voice, and it was a soft voice, that lay on his mind the way the fog did, mild and cool. “Who is that?” she said.
“Had
ri,” he said, resigned again. Now she knew him and would snub him.
“Hadri? You aren’t from here.”
Who was she, then?
He said his farmhold name. “I’m from the east, from the Fadan’n Watershed. Visiting.”
“I’ve been away,” she said. “I just came back. Tonight. Isn’t it a lovely night? I like these nights best of all, when the fog comes up, like a sea of its own . . .”
Indeed the mists had joined and risen, so that Meruo on its rock seemed to float suspended in darkness over a faintly luminous void.
“I like it too,” he said. “I was thinking. . . .” Then he stopped.
“What?” she said after a minute, so gently that he took courage and went on.
“That being unhappy in a room is worse than being unhappy out of doors,” he said, with a self-conscious and unhappy laugh. “I wonder why that is.”
“I knew,” she said. “By the way you were standing. I’m sorry. What do you . . . what would you need to make you happier?” At first he had thought her older than himself, but now she spoke like a quite young girl, shy and bold at the same time, awkwardly, with sweetness. It was the dark and the fog that made them both bold, released them, so they could speak truly.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think I don’t know how to be in love.”
“Why do you think so?”
“Because I — It’s Suord, he brought me here,” he told her, trying to go on speaking truly. “I do love him, but not — not the way he deserves — ”
“Suord,” she said thoughtfully.
“He is strong. Generous. He gives me everything he is, his whole life. But I’m not, I’m not able to . . .”
“Why do you stay?” she asked, not accusingly, but asking for an answer.
“I love him,” Hadri said. “I don’t want to hurt him. If I run away I’ll be a coward. I want to be worth him.” They were four separate answers, each spoken separately, painfully.
“Unchosen love,” she said with a dry, rough tenderness. “Oh, it’s hard.”
She did not sound like a girl now, but like a woman who knew what love is. While they talked they had both looked out westward over the sea of mist, because it was easier to talk that way. She turned now to look at him again. He was aware of her quiet gaze in the darkness. A great star shone bright between the line of the roof and her head. When she moved again her round, dark head occulted the star, and then it shone tangled in her hair, as if she was wearing it. It was a lovely thing to see.
“I always thought I’d choose love,” he said at last, her words working in his mind. “Choose a sedoretu, settle down, some day, somewhere near my farm. I never imagined anything else. And then I came out here, to the edge of the world. . . . And I don’t know what to do. I was chosen, I can’t choose. . . .”
There was a little self-mockery in his voice.
“This is a strange place,” he said.
“It is,” she said. “Once you’ve seen the great tide. . . .”
He had seen it once. Suord had taken him to a headland that stood above the southern floodplain. Though it was only a few miles southwest of Meruo, they had to go a long way round inland and then back out west again, and Hadri asked, “Why can’t we just go down the coast?”
“You’ll see why,” Suord said. They sat up on the rocky headland eating their picnic, Suord always with an eye on the brown-grey mud flats stretching off to the western horizon, endless and dreary, cut by a few worming, silted channels. “Here it comes,” he said, standing up; and Hadri stood up to see the gleam and hear the distant thunder, see the advancing bright line, the incredible rush of the tide across the immense plain for seven miles till it crashed in foam on the rocks below them and flooded on round the headland.
“A good deal faster than you could run,” Suord said, his dark face keen and intense. “That’s how it used to come in around our Rock. In the old days.”
“Are we cut off here?” Hadri had asked, and Suord had answered, “No, but I wish we were.”
Thinking of it now, Hadri imagined the broad sea lying under the fog all around Meruo, lapping on the rocks, under the walls. As it had been in the old days.
“I suppose the tides cut Meruo off from the mainland,” he said, and she said, “Twice every day.”
“Strange,” he murmured, and heard her slight intaken breath of laughter.
“Not at all,” she said. “Not if you were born here. . . . Do you know that babies are born and the dying die on what they call the lull? The low point of the low tide of morning.”
Her voice and words made his heart clench within him, they were so soft and seemed so strange. “I come from inland, from the hills, I never saw the sea before,” he said. “I don’t know anything about the tides.”
“Well,” she said, “there’s their true love.” She was looking behind him. He turned and saw the waning moon just above the sea of mist, only its darkest, scarred crescent showing. He stared at it, unable to say anything more.
“Hadri,” she said, “don’t be sad. It’s only the moon. Come up here again if you are sad, though. I liked talking with you. There’s nobody here to talk to. . . . Good night,” she whispered. She went away from him along the walk and vanished in the shadows.
He stayed a while watching the mist rise and the moon rise; the mist won the slow race, blotting out moon and all in a cold dimness at last. Shivering, but no longer tense and anguished, he found his way back to Suord’s room and slid into the wide, warm bed. As he stretched out to sleep, he thought, I don’t know her name.
Suord woke in an unhappy mood. He insisted that Hadri come out in the sailboat with him down the canal, to check the locks on the side-canals, he said; but what he wanted was to get Hadri alone, in a boat, where Hadri was not only useless but slightly uneasy and had no escape at all. They drifted in the mild sunshine on the glassy side-canal. “You want to leave, don’t you,” Suord said, speaking as if the sentence was a knife that cut his tongue as he spoke it.
“No,” Hadri said, not knowing if it was true, but unable to say any other word.
“You don’t want to get married here.”
“I don’t know, Suord.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I don’t think any of the Evening women want a marriage with me,” he said, and trying to speak true, “I know they don’t. They want you to find somebody from around here. I’m a foreigner.”
“They don’t know you,” Suord said with a sudden, pleading gentleness. “People here, they take a long time to get to know people. We’ve lived too long on our Rock. Seawater in our veins instead of blood. But they’ll see — they’ll come to know you if you — If you’ll stay — ” He looked out over the side of the boat and after a while said almost inaudibly, “If you leave, can I come with you?”
“I’m not leaving,” Hadri said. He went and stroked Suord’s hair and face and kissed him. He knew that Suord could not follow him, couldn’t live in Oket, inland; it wouldn’t work, it wouldn’t do. But that meant he must stay here with Suord. There was a numb coldness in him, under his heart.
“Sasni and Duun are germanes,” Suord said presently, sounding like himself again, controlled, intense. “They’ve been lovers ever since they were thirteen. Sasni would marry me if I asked her, if she can have Duun in the Day marriage. We can make a sedoretu with them, Hadri.”
The numbness kept Hadri from reacting to this for some time; he did not know what he was feeling, what he thought. What he finally said was, “Who is Duun?” There was a vague hope in him that it was the woman he had talked with on the roof, last night — in a different world, it seemed, a realm of fog and darkness and truth.
“You know Duun.”
“Did she just come back from somewhere else?”
“No,” Suord said, too intent to be puzzled by Hadri’s stupidity. “Sasni’s germane, Lasudu’s daughter of the Fourth Sedoretu. She’s short, very thin, doesn’t talk much.”
&nbs
p; “I don’t know her,” Hadri said in despair, “I can’t tell them apart, they don’t talk to me,” and he bit his lip and stalked over to the other end of the boat and stood with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched.
Suord’s mood had quite changed; he splashed about happily in the water and mud when they got to the lock, making sure the mechanisms were in order, then sailed them back to the great canal with a fine following wind. Shouting, “Time you got your sea legs!” to Hadri, he took the boat west down the canal and out onto the open sea. The misty sunlight, the breeze full of salt spray, the fear of the depths, the exertion of working the boat under Suord’s capable directions, the triumph of steering it back into the canal at sunset, when the light lay red-gold on the water and vast flocks of stilts and marshbirds rose crying and circling around them — it made a great day, after all, for Hadri.
But the glory dropped away as soon as he came under the roofs of Meruo again, into the dark corridors and the low, wide, dark rooms that all looked west. They took meals with the Fourth and Fifth Sedoretu. In Hadri’s farmhold there would have been a good deal of teasing when they came in just in time for dinner, having been out all day without notice and done none of the work of it; here nobody ever teased or joked. If there was resentment it stayed hidden. Maybe there was no resentment, maybe they all knew each other so well and were so much of a piece that they trusted one other the way you trust your own hands, without question. Even the children joked and quarrelled less than Hadri was used to. Conversation at the long table was always quiet, many not speaking a word.
The Birthday of the World and Other Stories Page 9
