The Left Hand of Darkness hc-4

by Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

  We left Kurkurast riding elbow-jammed in the cab of a road-packer, one of the big powered vehicles that rolls and packs down the snow on Karhidish roads, the main means of keeping roads open in winter, since to try to keep them plowed clear would take half the kingdom's time and money, and all traffic is on runners in the winter anyway. The packer ground along at two miles an hour, and brought us into the next village south of Kurkurast long after nightfall. There, as always, we were welcomed, fed, and housed for the night; the next day we went on afoot. We were now landward of the coastal hills that take the brunt of the north wind off the Bay of Guthen, in a more heavily settled region, and so went not from camp to camp but from Hearth to Hearth. A couple of times we did get a lift on a power-sledge, once for thirty miles. The roads, despite frequent heavy snowfall, were hard-packed and well-marked. There was always food in our packs, put there by the last night's hosts; there was always a roof and a fire at the end of the day's going.

  Yet those eight or nine days of easy hiking and skiing through a hospitable land were the hardest and dreariest part of all our journey, worse than the ascent of the glacier, worse than the last days of hunger. The saga was over, it belonged to the Ice. We were very tired. We were going the wrong direction. There was no more joy in us.

  "Sometimes you must go against the wheel's turn," Estraven said. He was as steady as ever, but in his walk, his voice, his bearing, vigor had been replaced by patience, and certainty by stubborn resolve. He was very silent, nor would he mindspeak with me much.

  We came to Sassinoth. A town of several thousand, perched up on hills above the frozen Ey: roofs white, walls gray, hills spotted black with forest and rock outcropping, fields and river white; across the river the disputed Sinoth Valley, all white…

  We came there all but empty-handed. Most of what remained of our travel-equipment we had given away to various kindly hosts, and by now we had nothing but the Chabe stove, our skis, and the clothes we wore. Thus unburdened we made our way, asking directions a couple of times, not into the town but to an outlying farm. It was a meager place, not part of a Domain but a single-farm under the Sinoth Valley Administration. When Estraven was a young secretary in that Administration he had been a friend of the owner, and in fact had bought this farm for him, a year or two ago, when he was helping people resettle east of the Ey in hopes of obviating dispute over the ownership of the Sinoth Valley. The farmer himself opened his door to us, a stocky soft-spoken man of about Estraven's age, His name was Thessicher.

  Estraven had come through this region with hood pulled up and forward to hide his face. He feared recognition, here. He hardly needed to; it took a keen eye to see Harth rem ir Estraven in the thin weatherworn tramp. Thessicher kept staring at him covertly, unable to believe that he was who he said he was.

  Thessicher took us in, and his hospitality was up to standard though his means were small. But he was uncomfortable with us, he would rather not have had us. It was understandable; he risked the confiscation of his property by sheltering us. Since he owed that property to Estraven, and might by now have been as destitute as we if Estraven had not provided for him, it seemed not unjust to ask him to run some risk in return. My friend, however, asked his help not in repayment but as a matter of friendship, counting not on Thessicher's obligation but on his affection. And indeed Thessicher thawed after his first alarm was past, and with Karhidish volatility became demonstrative and nostalgic, recalling old days and old acquaintances with Estraven beside the fire half the night. When Estraven asked him if he had any idea as to a hiding place, some deserted or isolated farm where a banished man might lie low for a month or two in hopes of a revocation of his exile, Thessicher at once said, "Stay with me."

  Estraven's eyes lit up at that, but he demurred; and agreeing that he might not be safe so near Sassinoth, Thessicher promised to find him a hideout. It wouldn't be hard, he said, if Estraven would take a false name and hire out as a cook or farmhand, which would not be pleasant, perhaps, but certainly better than returning to Orgoreyn. "What the devil would you do in Orgoreyn? What would you live on, eh?"

  "On the Commensality," said my friend, with a trace of his otter's smile. "They provide all Units with jobs, you know. No trouble. But I'd rather be in Karhide… if you really think it could be managed…"

  We had kept the Chabe stove, the only thing of value left to us. It served us, one way or another, right to the end of our journey. The morning after our arrival at Thessicher's farm, I took the stove and skied into town. Estraven of course did not come with me, but he had explained to me what to do, and it all went well. I sold the stove at the Town Commerce, then took the solid sum of money it had fetched up the hill to the little College of the Trades, where the radio station was housed, and bought ten minutes of "private transmission to private reception." All stations set aside a daily period of time for such shortwave transmissions; as most of them are sent by merchants to their overseas agents or customers in the Archipelago, Sith, or Perunter, the cost is rather high, but not unreasonable. Less, anyway, than the cost of a secondhand Chabe stove. My ten minutes were to be early in Third Hour, late afternoon. I did not want to be skiing back and forth from Thessicher's farm all day long, so I hung around Sassinoth, and bought a large, good, cheap lunch at one of the hot-shops. No doubt that Karhidish cooking was better than Orgota. As I ate, I remembered Estraven's comment on that, when I had asked him if he hated Orgoreyn; I remembered his voice last night, saying with all mildness, "I'd rather be in Karhide…" And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend's voice arises: and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?

  After lunch I wandered about Sassinoth. The business of the town, the shops and markets and streets, lively despite snow-flurries and zero temperature, seemed like a play, unreal, bewildering. I had not yet come altogether out of the solitude of the Ice. I was uneasy among strangers, and constantly missed Estraven's presence beside me.

  I climbed the steep snow-packed street in dusk to the College and was admitted and shown how to operate the public-use transmitter. At the time appointed I sent the wake signal to the relay satellite which was in stationary orbit about 300 miles over South Karhide. It was there as insurance for just a situation as this, when my ansible was gone so that I could not ask Ollul to signal the ship, and I had not time or equipment to make direct contact with the ship in solar orbit. The Sassinoth transmitter was more than adequate, but as the satellite was not equipped to respond except by sending to the ship, there was nothing to do but signal it and let it go at that. I could not know if the message had been received and relayed to the ship. I did not know if I had done right to send it. I had come to accept such uncertainties with a quiet heart.

  It had come on to snow hard, and I had to spend the night in town, not knowing the roads well enough to want to set off on them in the snow and dark. Having a bit of money still, I inquired for an inn, at which they insisted that I put up at the College; I had dinner with a lot of cheerful students, and slept in one of the dormitories. I fell asleep with a pleasant sense of security, an assurance of Karhide's extraordinary and unfailing kindness to the stranger. I had landed in the right country in the first place, and now I was back. So I fell asleep; but I woke up very early and set off for Thessicher's farm before breakfast, having spent an uneasy night full of dreams and wakenings.

  The rising sun, small and cold in a bright sky, sent shadows westward from every break and hummock in the snow. The road lay all streaked with dark and bright. No one moved in all the snowy fields; but away off on the road a small figure came toward me with the flying, gliding gait of the skier. Long before I could see the face I knew it for Estraven.

  "What's up, Therem?"

  "I've got to get to the border," he said, not even stopping as we met. He was already out of breath. I turned and we both went west, I hard put to keep up w
ith him. Where the road turned to enter Sassinoth he left it, skiing out across the unfenced fields. We crossed the frozen Ey a mile or so north of town. The banks were steep, and at the end of the climb we both had to stop and rest. We were not in condition for this kind of race.

  "What happened? Thessicher—?"

  "Yes. Heard him on his wireless set. At daybreak." Estraven's chest rose and fell in gasps as it had when he lay on the ice beside the blue crevasse. "Tibe must have a price on my head."

  "The damned ungrateful traitor!" I said stammering, not meaning Tibe but Thessicher, whose betrayal was of a friend.

  "He is that," said Estraven, "but I asked too much of him, strained a small spirit too far. Listen, Genry. Go back to Sassinoth."

  "I'll at least see you over the border, Therem."

  "There may be Orgota guards there."

  "I'll stay on this side. For God's sake—"

  He smiled. Still breathing very hard, he got up and went on, and I went with him.

  We skied through small frosty woods and over the hillocks and fields of the disputed valley. There was no hiding, no skulking. A sunlit sky, a white world, and we two strokes of shadow on it, fleeing. Uneven ground hid the border from us till we were less than an eighth of a mile from it: then we suddenly saw it plain, marked with a fence, only a couple of feet of the poles showing above the snow, the pole-tops painted red. There were no guards to be seen on the Orgota side. On the near side there were ski-tracks, and, southward, several small figures moving.

  "There are guards on this side. You'll have to wait till dark, Therem."

  "Tibe's Inspectors," he gasped bitterly, and swung aside.

  We shot back over the little rise we had just topped, and took the nearest cover. There we spent the whole long day, in a dell among the thick-growing hemmen trees, their reddish boughs bent low around us by loads of snow. We debated many plans of moving north or south along the border to get out of this particularly troubled zone, of trying to get up into the hills east of Sassinoth, even of going back up north into the empty country, but each plan had to be vetoed. Estraven's presence had been betrayed, and we could not travel in Karhide openly as we had been doing. Nor could we travel secretly for any distance at all: we had no tent, no food, and not much strength. There was nothing for it but the straight dash over the border, no way was open but one.

  We huddled in the dark hollow under dark trees, in the snow. We lay right together for warmth. Around midday Estraven dozed off for a while, but I was too hungry and too cold for sleep; I lay there beside my friend in a sort of stupor, trying to remember the words he had quoted to me once: Two are one, life and death, lying together. … It was a little like being inside the tent up on the Ice, but without shelter, without food, without rest: nothing left but our companionship, and that soon to end.

  The sky hazed over during the afternoon, and the temperature began to drop. Even in the windless hollow it became too cold to sit motionless. We had to move about, and still around sunset I was taken by fits of shuddering like those I had experienced in the prison-truck crossing Orgoreyn. The darkness seemed to take forever coming on. In the late blue twilight we left the dell and went creeping behind trees and bushes over the hill till we could make out the line of the border-fence, a few dim dots along the pallid snow. No lights, nothing moving, no sound. Away off in the southwest shone the yellow glimmer of a small town, some tiny Commensal Village of Orgoreyn, where Estraven could go with his unacceptable identification papers and be assured at least of a night's lodging in the Commensal Jail or perhaps on the nearest Commensal Voluntary Farm. All at once—there, at that last moment, no sooner—I realized what my selfishness and Estraven's silence had kept from me, where he was going and what he was getting into. I said, "Therem—wait—"

  But he was off, downhill: a magnificent fast skier, and this time not holding back for me. He shot away on a long quick curving descent through the shadows over the snow. He ran from me, and straight into the guns of the border-guards. I think they shouted warnings or orders to halt, and a light sprang up somewhere, but I am not sure; in any case he did not stop, but flashed on towards the fence, and they shot him down before he reached it. They did not use the sonic stunners but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a burst. They shot to kill him. He was dying when I got to him, sprawled and twisted away from his skis that stuck up out of the snow, his chest half shot away. I took his head in my arms and spoke to him, but he never answered me; only in a way he answered my love for him, crying out through the silent wreck and tumult of his mind as consciousness lapsed, in the unspoken tongue, once, clearly, "Areck! " Then no more. I held him, crouching there in the snow, while he died. They let me do that. Then they made me get up, and took me off one way and him another, I going to prison and he into the dark.

  20. A Fool's Errand

  Somewhere in the notes Estraven wrote during our trek across the Gobrin Ice he wonders why his companion is ashamed to cry. I could have told him even then that it was not shame so much as fear. Now I went on through the Sinoth Valley, through the evening of his death, into the cold country that lies beyond fear. There I found you can weep all you like, but there's no good in it.

  I was taken back to Sassinoth and imprisoned, because I had been in the company of an outlaw, and probably because they did not know what else to do with me. From the start, even before official orders came from Erhenrang, they treated me well. My Karhidish jail was a furnished room in the Tower of the Lords-Elect in Sassinoth; I had a fireplace, a radio, and five large meals daily. It was not comfortable. The bed was hard, the covers thin, the floor bare, the air cold—like any room in Karhide. But they sent in a physician, in whose hands and voice was a more enduring, a more profitable comfort than any I ever found in Orgoreyn. After he came, I think the door was left unlocked. I recall it standing open, and myself wishing it were shut, because of the chill draft of air from the hall. But I had not the strength, the courage, to get off my bed and shut my prison door.

  The physician, a grave, maternal young fellow, told me with an air of peaceable certainty, "You have been underfed and overtaxed for five or six months. You have spent yourself. There's nothing more to spend. Lie down, rest. Lie down like the rivers frozen in the valleys in winter. Lie still. Wait."

  But when I slept I was always in the truck, huddling together with the others, all of us stinking, shivering, naked, squeezed together for warmth, all but one. One lay by himself against the barred door, the cold one, with a mouth full of clotted blood. He was the traitor. He had gone on by himself, deserting us, deserting me. I would wake up full of rage, a feeble shaky rage that turned into feeble tears.

  I must have been rather ill, for I remember some of the effects of high fever, and the physician stayed with me one night or perhaps more. I can't recall those nights, but do remember saying to him, and hearing the querulous keening note in my own voice, "He could have stopped. He saw the guards. He ran right into the guns."

  The young physician said nothing for a while. "You're not saying that he killed himself?"

  "Perhaps—"

  "That's a bitter thing to say of a friend. And I will not believe it of Harth rem ir Estraven."

  I had not had in mind when I spoke the contemptibility of suicide to these people. It is not to them, as to us, an option. It is the abdication from option, the act of betrayal itself. To a Karhider reading our canons, the crime of Judas lies not in his betrayal of Christ but in the act that, sealing despair, denies the chance of forgiveness, change, life: his suicide. "Then you don't call him Estraven the Traitor?"

  "Nor ever did. There are many who never heeded the accusations against him, Mr. Ai."

  But I was unable to see any solace in that, and only cried out in the same torment, "Then why did they shoot him? Why is he dead?" To this he made no answer, there being none. I was never formally interrogated. They asked how I had got out of Pulefen Farm and into Karhide, and they asked the destination an
d intent of the code message I had sent on their radio. I told them. That information went straight to Erhenrang, to the king. The matter of the ship was apparently held secret, but the news of my escape from an Orgota prison, my journey over the Ice in winter, my presence in Sassinoth, was freely reported and discussed. Estraven's part in this was not mentioned on the radio, nor was his death. Yet it was known. Secrecy in Karhide is to an extraordinary extent a matter of discretion, of an agreed, understood silence—an omission of questions, yet not an omission of answers. The Bulletins spoke only of the Envoy Mr. Ai, but everybody knew that it was Harth rem ir Estraven who had stolen me from the hands of the Orgota and come with me over the Ice to Karhide to give the staring lie to the Commensals' tale of my sudden death from horm-fever in Mishnory last autumn… Estraven had predicted the effects of my return fairly accurately; he had erred mainly in underestimating them. Because of the alien who lay ill, not acting, not caring, in a room in Sassinoth, two governments fell within ten days.

  To say that an Orgota government fell means, of course, only that one group of Commensals replaced another group of Commensals in the controlling offices of the Thirty-Three. Some shadows got shorter and some longer, as they say in Karhide. The Sarf faction that had sent me off to Pulefen hung on, despite the not unprecedented embarrassment of being caught lying, until Argaven's public announcement of the imminent arrival of the Star Ship in Karhide. That day Obsle's party, the Open Trade faction, took over the presiding offices of the Thirty-Three. So I was of some service to them after all.