As he served himself, Hadri looked around among them for the woman of last night. Had it in fact been Esbuai? He thought not; the height was like, but Esbuai was very thin, and had a particularly arrogant carriage to her head. The woman was not here. Maybe she was First Sedoretu. Which of these women was Duun?
That one, the little one, with Sasni; he recalled her now. She was always with Sasni. He had never spoken to her, because Sasni of them all had snubbed him most hatefully, and Duun was her shadow.
“Come on,” said Suord, and went round the table to sit down beside Sasni, gesturing Hadri to sit beside Duun. He did so. I’m Suord’s shadow, he thought.
“Hadri says he’s never talked to you,” Suord said to Duun. The girl hunched up a bit and muttered something meaningless. Hadri saw Sasni’s face flash with anger, and yet there was a hint of a challenging smile in it, as she looked straight at Suord. They were very much alike. They were well matched.
Suord and Sasni talked — about the fishing, about the locks — while Hadri ate his dinner. He was ravenous after the day on the water. Duun, having finished her meal, sat and said nothing. These people had a capacity for remaining perfectly motionless and silent, like predatory animals, or fishing birds. The dinner was fish, of course; it was always fish. Meruo had been wealthy once and still had the manners of wealth, but few of the means. Dredging out the great canal took more of their income every year, as the sea relentlessly pulled back from the delta. Their fishing fleet was large, but the boats were old, often rebuilt. Hadri had asked why they did not build new ones, for a big shipyard loomed above the drydocks; Suord explained that the cost of the wood alone was prohibitive. Having only the one crop, fish and shellfish, they had to pay for all other food, for clothing, for wood, even for water. The wells for miles around Meruo were salt. An aqueduct led to the seahold from the village in the hills.
They drank their expensive water from silver cups, however, and ate their eternal fish from bowls of ancient, translucent blue Edia ware, which Hadri was always afraid of breaking when he washed them.
Sasni and Suord went on talking, and Hadri felt stupid and sullen, sitting there saying nothing to the girl who said nothing.
“I was out on the sea for the first time today,” he said, feeling the blood flush his face.
She made some kind of noise, mhm, and gazed at her empty bowl.
“Can I get you some soup?” Hadri asked. They ended the meal with broth, here, fish broth of course.
“No,” she said, with a scowl.
“In my farmhold,” he said, “people often bring dishes to each other; it’s a minor kind of courtesy; I am sorry if you find it offensive.” He stood up and strode off to the sideboard, where with shaking hands he served himself a bowl of soup. When he got back Suord was looking at him with a speculative eye and a faint smile, which he resented. What did they take him for? Did they think he had no standards, no people, no place of his own? Let them marry each other, he would have no part of it. He gulped his soup, got up without waiting for Suord, and went to the kitchen, where he spent an hour in the washing-up crew to make up for missing his time in the cooking crew. Maybe they had no standards about things, but he did.
Suord was waiting for him in their room — Suord’s room — Hadri had no room of his own here. That in itself was insulting, unnatural. In a decent hold, a guest was always given a room.
Whatever Suord said — he could not remember later what it was — was a spark to blasting-powder. “I will not be treated this way!” he cried passionately, and Suord firing up at once demanded what he meant, and they had at it, an explosion of rage and frustration and accusation that left them staring grey-faced at each other, appalled. “Hadri,” Suord said, the name a sob; he was shivering, his whole body shaking. They came together, clinging to each other. Suord’s small, rough, strong hands held Hadri close. The taste of Suord’s skin was salt as the sea. Hadri sank, sank and was drowned.
But in the morning everything was as it had been. He did not dare ask for a room to himself, knowing it would hurt Suord. If they do make this sedoretu, then at least I’ll have a room, said a small, unworthy voice in his head. But it was wrong, wrong. . . .
He looked for the woman he had met on the roof, and saw half a dozen who might have been her and none he was certain was her. Would she not look at him, speak to him? Not in daylight, not in front of the others? Well, so much for her, then.
It occurred to him only now that he did not know whether she was a woman of the Morning or the Evening. But what did it matter?
That night the fog came in. Waking suddenly, deep in the night, he saw out the window only a formless grey, glowing very dimly with diffused light from a window somewhere in another wing of the house. Suord slept, as he always did, flat out, lying like a bit of jetsam flung on the beach of the night, utterly absent and abandoned. Hadri watched him with an aching tenderness for a while. Then he got up, pulled on clothes, and found the corridor to the stairs that led up to the roof.
The mist hid even the roof-peaks. Nothing at all was visible over the railing. He had to feel his way along, touching the railing. The wooden walkway was damp and cold to the soles of his feet. Yet a kind of happiness had started in him as he went up the attic stairs, and it grew as he breathed the foggy air, and as he turned the corner to the west side of the house. He stood still a while and then spoke, almost in a whisper. “Are you there?” he said.
There was a pause, as there had been the first time he spoke to her, and then she answered, the laugh just hidden in her voice, “Yes, I’m here. Are you there?”
The next moment they could see each other, though only as shapes bulking in the mist.
“I’m here,” he said. His happiness was absurd. He took a step closer to her, so that he could make out her dark hair, the darkness of her eyes in the lighter oval of her face. “I wanted to talk to you again,” he said.
“I wanted to talk to you again,” she said.
“I couldn’t find you. I hoped you’d speak to me.”
“Not down there,” she said, her voice turning light and cold.
“Are you in the First Sedoretu?”
“Yes,” she said. “The Morning wife of the First Sedoretu of Meruo. My name is An’nad. I wanted to know if you’re still unhappy.”
“Yes,” he said, “no — ” He tried to see her face more clearly, but there was little light. “Why is it that you talk to me, and I can talk to you, and not to anybody else in this household?” he said. “Why are you the only kind one?”
“Is — Suord unkind?” she asked, with a little hesitation on the name.
“He never means to be. He never is. Only he — he drags me, he pushes me, he . . . He’s stronger than I am.”
“Maybe not,” said An’nad, “maybe only more used to getting his way.”
“Or more in love,” Hadri said, low-voiced, with shame.
“You’re not in love with him?”
“Oh yes!”
She laughed.
“I never knew anyone like him — he’s more than — his feelings are so deep, he’s — I’m out of my depth,” Hadri stammered. “But I love him — immensely — ”
“So what’s wrong?”
“He wants to marry,” Hadri said, and then stopped. He was talking about her household, probably her blood kin; as a wife of the First Sedoretu she was part of all the network of relationships of Meruo. What was he blundering into?
“Who does he want to marry?” she asked. “Don’t worry. I won’t interfere. Is the trouble that you don’t want to marry him?”
“No, no,” Hadri said. “It’s only — I never meant to stay here, I thought I’d go home. . . . Marrying Suord seems — more than I, than I deserve — But it would be amazing, it would be wonderful! But . . . the marriage itself, the sedoretu, it’s not right. He says that Sasni will marry him, and Duun will marry me, so that she and Duun can be married.”
“Suord and Sasni,” again the faint pause on the name, “
don’t love each other, then?”
“No,” he said, a little hesitant, remembering that challenge between them, like a spark struck.
“And you and Duun?”
“I don’t even know her.”
“Oh, no, that is dishonest,” An’nad said. “One should choose love, but not that way. . . . Whose plan is it? All three of them?”
“I suppose so. Suord and Sasni have talked about it. The girl, Duun, she never says anything.”
“Talk to her,” said the soft voice. “Talk to her, Hadri.” She was looking at him; they stood quite close together, close enough that he felt the warmth of her arm on his arm though they did not touch.
“I’d rather talk to you,” he said, turning to face her. She moved back, seeming to grow insubstantial even in that slight movement, the fog was so dense and dark. She put out her hand, but again did not quite touch him. He knew she was smiling.
“Then stay and talk with me,” she said, leaning again on the rail. “Tell me . . . oh, tell me anything. What do you do, you and Suord, when you’re not making love?”
“We went out sailing,” he said, and found himself telling her what it had been like for him out on the open sea for the first time, his terror and delight. “Can you swim?” she asked, and he laughed and said, “In the lake at home, it’s not the same,” and she laughed and said, “No, I imagine not.” They talked a long time, and he asked her what she did — “in daylight. I haven’t seen you yet, down there.”
“No,” she said. “What do I do? Oh, I worry about Meruo, I suppose. I worry about my children. . . . I don’t want to think about that now. How did you come to meet Suord?”
Before they were done talking the mist had begun to lighten very faintly with moonrise. It had grown piercingly cold. Hadri was shivering. “Go on,” she said. “I’m used to it. Go on to bed.”
“There’s frost,” he said, “look,” touching the silvered wooden rail. “You should go down too.”
“I will. Good night, Hadri.” As he turned she said, or he thought she said, “I’ll wait for the tide.”
“Good night, An’nad.” He spoke her name huskily, tenderly. If only the others were like her. . . .
He stretched himself out close to Suord’s inert, delicious warmth, and slept.
The next day Suord had to work in the records office, where Hadri was utterly useless and in the way. Hadri took his chance, and by asking several sullen, snappish women, found where Duun was: in the fish-drying plant. He went down to the docks and found her, by luck, if it was luck, eating her lunch alone in the misty sunshine at the edge of the boat basin.
“I want to talk with you,” he said.
“What for?” she said. She would not look at him.
“Is it honest to marry a person you don’t even like in order to marry a person you love?”
“No,” she said fiercely. She kept looking down. She tried to fold up the bag she had carried her lunch in, but her hands shook too much.
“Why are you willing to do it, then?”
“Why are you willing to do it?”
“I’m not,” he said. “It’s Suord. And Sasni.”
She nodded.
“Not you?”
She shook her head violently. Her thin, dark face was a very young face, he realised.
“But you love Sasni,” he said a little uncertainly.
“Yes! I love Sasni! I always did, I always will! That doesn’t mean I, I, I have to do everything she says, everything she wants, that I have to, that I have to — ” She was looking at him now, right at him, her face burning like a coal, her voice quivering and breaking. “I don’t belong to Sasni!”
“Well,” he said, “I don’t belong to Suord, either.”
“I don’t know anything about men,” Duun said, still glaring at him. “Or any other women. Or anything. I never was with anybody but Sasni, all my life! She thinks she owns me.”
“She and Suord are a lot alike,” Hadri said cautiously.
There was a silence. Duun, though tears had spouted out of her eyes in the most childlike fashion, did not deign to wipe them away. She sat straight-backed, cloaked in the dignity of the women of Meruo, and managed to get her lunch-bag folded.
“I don’t know very much about women,” Hadri said. His was perhaps a simpler dignity. “Or men. I know I love Suord. But I . . . I need freedom.”
“Freedom!” she said, and he thought at first she was mocking him, but quite the opposite — she burst right into tears, and put her head down on her knees, sobbing aloud. “I do too,” she cried, “I do too.”
Hadri put out a timid hand and stroked her shoulder. “I didn’t mean to make you cry,” he said. “Don’t cry, Duun. Look. If we, if we feel the same way, we can work something out. We don’t have to get married. We can be friends.”
She nodded, though she went on sobbing for a while. At last she raised her swollen face and looked at him with wet-lidded, luminous eyes. “I would like to have a friend,” she said. “I never had one.”
“I only have one other one here,” he said, thinking how right she had been in telling him to talk to Duun. “An’nad.”
She stared at him. “Who?”
“An’nad. The Morning woman of the First Sedoretu.”
“What do you mean?” She was not scornful, merely very surprised. “That’s Teheo.”
“Then who is An’nad?”
“She was the Morning woman of the First Sedoretu four hundred years ago,” the girl said, her eyes still on Hadri’s, clear and puzzled.
“Tell me,” he said.
“She was drowned — here, at the foot of the Rock. They were all down on the sands, her sedoretu, with the children. That was when the tides had begun not to come in as far as Meruo. They were all out on the sands, planning the canal, and she was up in the house. She saw there was a storm in the west, and the wind might bring one of the great tides. She ran down to warn them. And the tide did come in, all the way round the Rock, the way it used to. They all kept ahead of it, except An’nad. She was drowned. . . .”
With all he had to wonder about then, about An’nad, and about Duun, he did not wonder why Duun answered his question and asked him none.
It was not until much later, half a year later, that he said, “Do you remember when I said I’d met An’nad — that first time we talked — by the boat basin?”
“I remember,” she said.
They were in Hadri’s room, a beautiful, high room with windows looking east, traditionally occupied by a member of the Eighth Sedoretu. Summer morning sunlight warmed their bed, and a soft, earth-scented land-wind blew in the windows.
“Didn’t it seem strange?” he asked. His head was pillowed on her shoulder. When she spoke he felt her warm breath in his hair.
“Everything was so strange then . . . I don’t know. And anyhow, if you’ve heard the tide. . . .”
“The tide?”
“Winter nights. Up high in the house, in the attics. You can hear the tide come in, and crash around the Rock, and run on inland to the hills. At the true high tide. But the sea is miles away. . . .”
Suord knocked, waited for their invitation, and came in, already dressed. “Are you still in bed? Are we going into town or not?” he demanded, splendid in his white summer coat, imperious. “Sasni’s already down in the courtyard.”
“Yes, yes, we’re just getting up,” they said, secretly entwining further.
“Now!” he said, and went out.
Hadri sat up, but Duun pulled him back down. “You saw her? You talked with her?”
“Twice. I never went back after you told me who she was. I was afraid. . . . Not of her. Only afraid she wouldn’t be there.”
“What did she do?” Duun asked softly.
“She saved us from drowning,” Hadri said.
MOUNTAIN WAYS
Note for readers unfamiliar with the planet O:
Ki’O society is divided into two halves or moieties, called (for ancient religious reas
ons) the Morning and the Evening. You belong to your mother’s moiety, and you can’t have sex with anybody of your moiety.
Marriage on O is a foursome, the sedoretu — a man and a woman from the Morning moiety and a man and a woman from the Evening moiety. You’re expected to have sex with both your spouses of the other moiety, and not to have sex with your spouse of your own moiety. So each sedoretu has two expected heterosexual relationships, two expected homosexual relationships, and two forbidden heterosexual relationships.
The expected relationships within each sedoretu are:
The Morning woman and the Evening man (the “Morning marriage”)The Evening woman and the Morning man (the “Evening marriage”)The Morning woman and the Evening woman (the “Day marriage”)The Morning man and the Evening man (the “Night marriage”)
The forbidden relationships are between the Morning woman and the Morning man, and between the Evening woman and the Evening man, and they aren’t called anything, except sacrilege.
It’s just as complicated as it sounds, but aren’t most marriages?
In the stony uplands of the Deka Mountains the farmholds are few and far between. Farmers scrape a living out of that cold earth, planting on sheltered slopes facing south, combing the yama for fleece, carding and spinning and weaving the prime wool, selling pelts to the carpet-factories. The mountain yama, called ariu, are a small wiry breed; they run wild, without shelter, and are not fenced in, since they never cross the invisible, immemorial boundaries of the herd territory. Each farmhold is in fact a herd territory. The animals are the true farmholders. Tolerant and aloof, they allow the farmers to comb out their thick fleeces, to assist them in difficult births, and to skin them when they die. The farmers are dependent on the ariu; the ariu are not dependent on the farmers. The question of ownership is moot. At Danro Farmhold they don’t say, “We have nine hundred ariu,” they say, “The herd has nine hundred.”
The Birthday of the World and Other Stories Page 10
