The Birthday of the World and Other Stories

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The women were afoot, of course, reverencing, though Kamsa’s reverence had become pretty sketchy. He sat on a curved bench splotched all over with fallen flowers. They sat back down on the flagstone path with the baby. They had unwrapped the little body to the mild sunshine. It was a very thin baby, Esdan thought. The joints in the bluish-dark arms and legs were like the joints in flowerstems, translucent knobs. The baby was moving more than he had ever seen it move, stretching its arms and turning its head as if enjoying the feel of the air. The head was large for the neck, again like a flower, too large a flower on too thin a stalk. Kamsa dangled one of the real flowers over the baby. His dark eyes gazed up at it. His eyelids and eyebrows were exquisitely delicate. The sunlight shone through his fingers. He smiled. Esdan caught his breath. The baby’s smile at the flower was the beauty of the flower, the beauty of the world.

  “What is his name?”

  “Rekam.”

  Grandson of Kamye. Kamye the Lord and slave, huntsman and husbandman, warrior and peacemaker.

  “A beautiful name. How old is he?”

  In the language they spoke that was, “How long has he lived?” Kamsa’s answer was strange. “As long as his life,” she said, or so he understood her whisper and her dialect. Maybe it was bad manners or bad luck to ask a child’s age.

  He sat back on the bench. “I feel very old,” he said. “I haven’t seen a baby for a hundred years.”

  Heo sat hunched over, her back to him; he felt that she wanted to cover her ears. She was terrified of him, the alien. Life had not left much to Heo but fear, he guessed. Was she twenty, twenty-five? She looked forty. Maybe she was seventeen. Usewomen, ill-used, aged fast. Kamsa he guessed to be not much over twenty. She was thin and plain, but there was bloom and juice in her as there was not in Heo.

  “Master did have children?” Kamsa asked, lifting up her baby to her breast with a certain discreet pride, shyly flaunting.

  “No.”

  “A yera yera,” she murmured, another slave word he had often heard in the urban compounds: O pity, pity.

  “How you get to the center of things, Kamsa,” he said. She glanced his way and smiled. Her teeth were bad but it was a good smile. He thought the baby was not sucking. It lay peacefully in the crook of her arm. Heo remained tense and jumped whenever he spoke, so he said no more. He looked away from them, past the bushes, out over the wonderful view that arranged itself, wherever you walked or sat, into a perfect balance: the levels of flagstone, of dun grass and blue water, the curves of the avenues, the masses and lines of shrubbery, the great old tree, the misty river and its green far bank. Presently the women began talking softly again. He did not listen to what they said. He was aware of their voices, aware of sunlight, aware of peace.

  Old Gana came stumping across the upper terrace towards them, bobbed to him, said to Kamsa and Heo, “Choyo does want you. Leave me that baby.” Kamsa set the baby down on the warm stone again. She and Heo sprang up and went off, thin, light women moving with easy haste. The old woman settled down piece by piece and with groans and grimaces onto the path beside Rekam. She immediately covered him up with a fold of his swaddling-cloth, frowning and muttering at the foolishness of his mother. Esdan watched her careful movements, her gentleness when she picked the child up, supporting that heavy head and tiny limbs, her tenderness cradling him, rocking her body to rock him.

  She looked up at Esdan. She smiled, her face wrinkling up into a thousand wrinkles. “He is my great gift,” she said.

  He whispered, “Your grandson?”

  The backward nod. She kept rocking gently. The baby’s eyes were closed, his head lay softly on her thin, dry breast. “I think now he’ll die not long now.”

  After a while Esdan said, “Die?”

  The nod. She still smiled. Gently, gently rocking. “He is two years of age, master.”

  “I thought he was born this summer,” Esdan said in a whisper.

  The old woman said, “He did come to stay a little while with us.”

  “What is wrong?”

  “The wasting.”

  Esdan had heard the term. He said, “Avo?” the name he knew for it, a systemic viral infection common among Werelian children, frequently epidemic in the asset compounds of the cities.

  She nodded.

  “But it’s curable!”

  The old woman said nothing.

  Avo was completely curable. Where there were doctors. Where there was medicine. Avo was curable in the city not the country. In the great house not the asset quarters. In peacetime not in wartime. Fool!

  Maybe she knew it was curable, maybe she did not, maybe she did not know what the word meant. She rocked the baby, crooning in a whisper, paying no attention to the fool. But she had heard him, and answered him at last, not looking at him, watching the baby’s sleeping face.

  “I was born owned,” she said, “and my daughters. But he was not. He is the gift. To us. Nobody can own him. The gift of the Lord Kamye of himself. Who could keep that gift?”

  Esdan bowed his head down.

  He had said to the mother, “He will be free.” And she had said, “Yes.”

  He said at last, “May I hold him?”

  The grandmother stopped rocking and held still a while. “Yes,” she said. She raised herself up and very carefully transferred the sleeping baby into Esdan’s arms, onto his lap.

  “You do hold my joy,” she said.

  The child weighed nothing — six or seven pounds. It was like holding a warm flower, a tiny animal, a bird. The swaddling-cloth trailed down across the stones. Gana gathered it up and laid it softly around the baby, hiding his face. Tense and nervous, jealous, full of pride, she knelt there. Before long she took the baby back against her heart. “There,” she said, and her face softened into happiness.

  That night Esdan sleeping in the room that looked out over the terraces of Yaramera dreamed that he had lost a little round, flat stone that he always carried with him in a pouch. The stone was from the pueblo. When he held it in his palm and warmed it, it was able to speak, to talk with him. But he had not talked with it for a long time. Now he realised he did not have it. He had lost it, left it somewhere. He thought it was in the basement of the embassy. He tried to get into the basement, but the door was locked, and he could not find the other door.

  He woke. Early morning. No need to get up. He should think about what to do, what to say, when Rayaye came back. He could not. He thought about the dream, the stone that talked. He wished he had heard what it said. He thought about the pueblo. His father’s brother’s family had lived in Arkanan Pueblo in the Far South Highlands. In his boyhood, every year in the heart of the northern winter, Esi had flown down there for forty days of summer. With his parents at first, later on alone. His uncle and aunt had grown up in Darranda and were not pueblo people. Their children were. They had grown up in Arkanan and belonged to it entirely. The eldest, Suhan, fourteen years older than Esdan, had been born with irreparable brain and neural defects, and it was for his sake that his parents had settled in a pueblo. There was a place for him there. He became a herdsman. He went up on the mountains with the yama, animals the South Hainish had brought over from O a millennium or so ago. He looked after the animals. He came back to live in the pueblo only in winter. Esi saw him seldom, and was glad of it, finding Suhan a fearful figure — big, shambling, foul-smelling, with a loud braying voice, mouthing incomprehensible words. Esi could not understand why Suhan’s parents and sisters loved him. He thought they pretended to. No one could love him.

  To adolescent Esdan it was still a problem. His cousin Noy, Suhan’s sister, who had become the Water Chief of Arkanan, told him it was not a problem but a mystery. “You see how Suhan is our guide?” she said. “Look at it. He led my parents here to live. So my sister and I were born here. So you come to stay with us here. So you’ve learned to live in the pueblo. You’ll never be just a city man. Because Suhan guided you here. Guided us all. Into the mountains.”

 
“He didn’t really guide us,” the fourteen-year-old argued.

  “Yes, he did. We followed his weakness. His incompleteness. Failure’s open. Look at water, Esi. It finds the weak places in the rock, the openings, the hollows, the absences. Following water we come where we belong.” Then she had gone off to arbitrate a dispute over the usage-rights to an irrigation system outside town, for the east side of the mountains was very dry country, and the people of Arkanan were contentious, though hospitable, and the Water Chief stayed busy.

  But Suhan’s condition had been irreparable, his weakness inaccesible even to the wondrous medical skills of Hain. This baby was dying of a disease that could be cured by a mere series of injections. It was wrong to accept his illness, his death. It was wrong to let him be cheated out of his life by circumstance, bad luck, an unjust society, a fatalistic religion. A religion that fostered and encouraged the terrible passivity of the slaves, that told these women to do nothing, to let the child waste away and die.

  He should interfere, he should do something, what could be done?

  “How long has he lived?”

  “As long as his life.”

  There was nothing they could do. Nowhere to go. No one to turn to. A cure for avo existed, in some places, for some children. Not in this place, not for this child. Neither anger nor hope served any purpose. Nor grief. It was not the time for grief yet. Rekam was here with them, and they would delight in him as long as he was here. As long as his life. He is my great gift. You do hold my joy.

  This was a strange place to come to learn the quality of joy. Water is my guide, he thought. His hands still felt what it had been like to hold the child, the light weight, the brief warmth.

  He was out on the terrace late the next morning, waiting for Kamsa and the baby to come out as they usually did, but the older veot came instead. “Mr. Old Music, I must ask you to stay indoors for a time,” he said.

  “Zadyo, I’m not going to run away,” Esdan said, sticking out his swathed lump of a foot.

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  He stumped crossly indoors after the veot and was locked into a downstairs room, a windowless storage space behind the kitchens. They had fixed it up with a cot, a table and chair, a pisspot, and a battery lamp for when the generator failed, as it did for a while most days. “Are you expecting an attack, then?” he said when he saw these preparations, but the veot replied only by locking the door. Esdan sat on the cot and meditated, as he had learned to do in Arkanan Pueblo. He cleared distress and anger from his mind by going through the long repetitions: health and good work, courage, patience, peace, for himself, health and good work, courage, patience, peace for the zadyo . . . for Kamsa, for baby Rekam, for Rayaye, for Heo, for Tualenem, for the oga, for Nemeo who had put him in the crouchcage, for Alatual who had put him in the crouchcage, for Gana who had bound his foot and blessed him, for people he knew in the embassy, in the city, health and good work, courage, patience, peace. . . . That went well, but the meditation itself was a failure. He could not stop thinking. So he thought. He thought about what he could do. He found nothing. He was weak as water, helpless as the baby. He imagined himself speaking on the holonet with a script saying that the Ekumen reluctantly approved the limited use of biological weapons in order to end the civil war. He imagined himself on the holonet dropping the script and saying that the Ekumen would never approve the use of biological weapons for any reason. Both imaginings were fantasies. Rayaye’s schemes were fantasies. Seeing that his hostage was useless Rayaye would have him shot. How long has he lived? As long as sixty-two years. A much fairer share of time than Rekam was getting. His mind went on past thinking.

  The zadyo opened the door and told him he could come out.

  “How close is the Liberation Army, zadyo?” he asked. He expected no answer. He went out onto the terrace. It was late afternoon. Kamsa was there, sitting with the baby at her breast. Her nipple was in his mouth but he was not sucking. She covered her breast. Her face as she did so looked sad for the first time.

  “Is he asleep? May I hold him?” Esdan said, sitting by her.

  She shifted the little bundle over to his lap. Her face was still troubled. Esdan thought the child’s breathing was more difficult, harder work. But he was awake, and looked up into Esdan’s face with his big eyes. Esdan made faces, sticking out his lips and blinking. He won a soft little smile.

  “The hands say, that army do come,” Kamsa said in her very soft voice.

  “The Liberation?”

  “Enna. Some army.”

  “From across the river?”

  “I think.”

  “They’re assets — freedmen. They’re your own people. They won’t hurt you.” Maybe.

  She was frightened. Her control was perfect, but she was frightened. She had seen the Uprising, here. And the reprisals.

  “Hide out, if you can, if there’s bombing or fighting,” he said. “Underground. There must be hiding places here.”

  She thought and said, “Yes.”

  It was peaceful in the gardens of Yaramera. No sound but the wind rustling leaves and the faint buzz of the generator. Even the burned, jagged ruins of the house looked mellowed, ageless. The worst has happened, said the ruins. To them. Maybe not to Kamsa and Heo, Gana and Esdan. But there was no hint of violence in the summer air. The baby smiled its vague smile again, nestling in Esdan’s arms. He thought of the stone he had lost in his dream.

  He was locked into the windowless room for the night. He had no way to know what time it was when he was roused by noise, brought stark awake by a series of shots and explosions, gunfire or handbombs. There was silence, then a second series of bangs and cracks, fainter. Silence again, stretching on and on. Then he heard a flyer right over the house as if circling, sounds inside the house: a shout, running. He lighted the lamp, struggled into his trousers, hard to pull on over the swathed foot. When he heard the flyer coming back and an explosion, he leapt in panic for the door, knowing nothing but that he had to get out of this deathtrap room. He had always feared fire, dying in fire. The door was solid wood, solidly bolted into its solid frame. He had no hope at all of breaking it down and knew it even in his panic. He shouted once, “Let me out of here!” then got control of himself, returned to the cot, and after a minute sat down on the floor between the cot and the wall, as sheltered a place as the room afforded, trying to imagine what was going on. A Liberation raid and Rayaye’s men shooting back, trying to bring the flyer down, was what he imagined.

  Dead silence. It went on and on.

  His lamp flickered.

  He got up and stood at the door.

  “Let me out!”

  No sound.

  A single shot. Voices again, running feet again, shouting, calling. After another long silence, distant voices, the sound of men coming down the corridor outside the room. A man said, “Keep them out there for now,” a flat, harsh voice. He hesitated and nerved himself and shouted out, “I’m a prisoner! In here!”

  A pause.

  “Who’s in there?”

  It was no voice he had heard. He was good at voices, faces, names, intentions.

  “Esdardon Aya of the embassy of the Ekumen.”

  “Mighty Lord!” the voice said.

  “Get me out of here, will you?”

  There was no reply, but the door was rattled vainly on its massive hinges, was thumped; more voices outside, more thumping and banging. “Axe,” somebody said. “Find the key,” somebody else said; they went off. Esdan waited. He fought down a repeated impulse to laugh, afraid of hysteria, but it was funny, stupidly funny, all the shouting through the door and seeking keys and axes, a farce in the middle of a battle. What battle?

  He had had it backwards. Liberation men had entered the house and killed Rayaye’s men, taking most of them by surprise. They had been waiting for Rayaye’s flyer when it came. They must have had contacts among the fieldhands, informers, guides. Sealed in his room, he had heard only the noisy end of the business. When h
e was let out, they were dragging out the dead. He saw the horribly maimed body of one of the young men, Alatual or Nemeo, come apart as they dragged it, ropy blood and entrails stretching out along the floor, the legs left behind. The man dragging the corpse was nonplussed and stood there holding the shoulders of the torso. “Well, shit,” he said, and Esdan stood gasping, again trying not to laugh, not to vomit.

  “Come on,” said the men with him, and he came on.

  Early morning light slanted through broken windows. Esdan kept looking around, seeing none of the house people. The men took him into the room with the packdog head over the mantel. Six or seven men were gathered around the table there. They wore no uniforms, though some had the yellow knot or ribbon of the Liberation on their cap or sleeve. They were ragged, tough, hard. Some were dark, some had beige or clayey or bluish skin, all of them looked edgy and dangerous. One of those with him, a thin, tall man, said in the harsh voice that had said “Mighty Lord” outside the door: “This is him.”

  “I’m Esdardon Aya, Old Music, of the embassy of the Ekumen,” he said again, as easily as he could. “I was being held here. Thank you for liberating me.”

  Several of them stared at him the way people who had never seen an alien stared, taking in his red-brown skin and deep-set, white-cornered eyes and the subtler differences of skull structure and features. One or two stared more aggressively, as if to test his assertion, show they’d believe he was what he said he was when he proved it. A big, broad-shouldered man, white-skinned and with brownish hair, pure dusty, pure blood of the ancient conquered race, looked at Esdan a long time. “We came to do that,” he said.

  He spoke softly, the asset voice. It might take them a generation or more to learn to raise their voices, to speak free.

  “How did you know I was here? The fieldnet?”

  It was what they had called the clandestine system of information passed from voice to ear, field to compound to city and back again, long before there was a holonet. The Hame had used the fieldnet and it had been the chief instrument of the Uprising.