The Wind's Twelve Quarters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Argaven looked at them, face after face, the bowed heads and the unbowed.

  “I am Argaven,” she said. “I was king. Who reigns now in Karhide?”

  “Emran,” one answered.

  “My child Emran?”

  “Yes, my liege,” old Bannith said; most of the faces were blank; but Ker said in her fierce shaking voice, “Argaven, Argaven reigns in Karhide! I have lived to see the bright days return. Long live the king!”

  One of the younger ones looked at the others, and said resolutely, “So be it. Long live the king!” And all the heads bowed low.

  Argaven took their homage unperturbed, but as soon as a moment came when she could address Horrsed the Plenipotentiary alone she demanded, “What is this? What has happened? Why was I misled? I was told I was to come here to assist you, as an aide, from the Ekumen—”

  “That was twenty-four years ago,” said the Ambassador, apologetically. “I’ve only lived here five years, my lord. Things are going very ill in Karhide. King Emran broke off relations with the Ekumen last year. I don’t really know what the Stabile’s purpose in sending you here was at the time he sent you; but at present, we’re losing Winter. So the Agents on Hain suggested to me that we might move out our king.”

  “But I am dead,” Argaven said wrathfully. “I have been dead for sixty years!”

  “The king is dead,” said Horrsed. “Long live the king.”

  As some of the Karhiders approached, Argaven turned from the Ambassador and went over to the rail. Grey water bubbled and slid by the ship’s side. The shore of the continent lay now to their left, grey patched with white. It was cold: a day of early winter in the Ice Age. The ship’s engine purred softly. Argaven had not heard that purr of an electric engine for a dozen years now, the only kind of engine Karhide’s slow and stable Age of Technology had chosen to employ. The sound of it was very pleasant to her.

  She spoke abruptly without turning, as one who has known since infancy that there is always someone there to answer: “Why are we going east?”

  “We’re making for Kerm Land.”

  “Why Kerm Land?”

  It was one of the younger ones who had come forward to answer. “Because that part of the country is in rebellion against the—against King Emran. I am a Kermlander: Perreth ner Sode.”

  “Is Emran in Erhenrang?”

  “Erhenrang was taken by Orgoreyn, six years ago. The king is in the new capital, east of the mountains—the Old Capital, actually, Rer.”

  “Emran lost the West Fall?” Argaven said, and then turning full on the stout young noble, “Lost the West Fall? Lost Erhenrang?”

  Perreth drew back a step, but answered promptly, “We’ve been in hiding behind the mountains for six years.”

  “The Orgota are in Erhenrang?”

  “King Emran signed a treaty with Orgoreyn five years ago, ceding them the Western Provinces.”

  “A shameful treaty, your majesty,” old Ker broke in, fiercer and shakier than ever. “A fool’s treaty! Emran dances to the drums of Orgoreyn. All of us here are rebels, exiles. The Ambassador there is an exile, in hiding!”

  “The West Fall,” Argaven said. “Argaven I took the West Fall for Karhide seven hundred years ago—” She looked round on the others again with her strange, keen, unheeding gaze. “Emran—” she began, but halted. “How strong are you in Kerm Land? Is the Coast with you?”

  “Most Hearths of the South and East are with us.”

  Argaven was silent a while. “Did Emran ever bear an heir?”

  “No heir of the flesh, my liege,” Bannith said. “She sired six.”

  “She has named Girvry Harge rem ir Orek as her heir,” said Perreth.

  “Girvry? What kind of name is that? The kings of Karhide are named Emran,” Argaven said, “and Argaven.”

  Now at last comes the dark picture, the snapshot taken by firelight—firelight, because the power plants of Rer are wrecked, the trunk lines cut, and half the city is on fire. Snow flurries heavily down above the flames and gleams red for a moment before it melts in mid air, hissing faintly.

  Snow and ice and guerrilla troops keep Orgoreyn at bay on the west side of the Kargav Mountains. No help came to the Old King, Emran, when her country rose against her. Her guards fled, her city burns, and now at the end she is face to face with the usurper. But she has, at the end, something of her family’s heedless pride. She pays no attention to the rebels. She stares at them and does not see them, lying in the dark hallway, lit only by mirrors that reflect distant fires, the gun with which she killed herself near her hand.

  Stooping over the body Argaven lifts up that cold hand, and starts to take from the age-knotted forefinger the massive, carved, gold ring. But she does not do it. “Keep it,” she whispers, “keep it.” For a moment she bends yet lower, as if she whispered in the dead ear, or laid her cheek against that cold and wrinkled face. Then she straightens up, and stands a while, and presently goes out through dark corridors, by windows bright with distant ruin, to set her house in order: Argaven, Winter’s king.

  THE GOOD TRIP

  This story was published when the drug scene was big in the media, and one response to it was that I was trying to cash in on a hot topic. That struck me as funny, given my infallible talent for missing whatever boat all the fashionable people are on—and also in view of the fact that, in a way, the point of the little story is that Lewis doesn’t take the chemical trip, but gets there on his own . . . with a little help from his friend.

  But it’s not an anti-drug story either. My only strong opinion about drugs (pot, hallucinogens, alcohol) is anti-prohibition and pro-education. I have to admit that people who expand their consciousness by living instead of by taking chemicals usually come back with much more interesting reports of where they’ve been. But I’m an addict myself (tobacco), and it would be plain silly in me to celebrate or to condemn anybody else for a similar dependence.

  As he swallowed the stuff he knew he shouldn’t swallow the stuff, knew it for sure, knew it as a driver knows the truck coming straight at him at 70 mph: suddenly, intimately, finally. His throat shut, his solar plexus knotted up like a sea anemone, but too late. Down the hatch it went, the bit of bitter candy, the acid-drop, the sourball, the peppy packet of power, etching a little corroded trail of terror behind it all the way down his esophagus like a poisoned snail swallowed whole. It was the terror that was wrong. He was afraid and hadn’t known it, and now it was too late. You can’t afford to be afraid. Fear fouls it all up, and sends those few, those unhappy few, a very small percentage, to the loony bin to cower in corners not saying anything. . . .

  You have nothing to fear but fear itself.

  Yes sir. Yes sir Mr. Roosevelt sir.

  The thing to do is relax. Think good thoughts. If rape inevitable—

  He watched Rich Harringer open up his little packet (accurately compounded and hygienically wrapped by a couple of fellows putting themselves through grad school in chemistry by the approved American method of free enterprise, illegitimate to be sure but this is not unusual in America where so little is legal that even a baby can be illegitimate) and swallow the small sour snail with formal and deliberate enjoyment. If rape inevitable, relax and enjoy. Once a week.

  But is anything inevitable besides death? Why relax, why enjoy? He would fight. He would not go on a bad trip. He would fight the drug consciously and purposefully, not in panic but with intent, and we’ll see who wins. In this corner LSD/alpha, 100 micrograms, plain wrapper, the Tibetan Whirlwind; and in this corner, ladies and junglemen, L.S.D./B.A., M.A., 166 lbs, the Sonoma Sniveller, wearing white trunks, and red suitcases, and blue cheekpouches. Let me out of here, let me out of here! Clang.

  Nothing happened.

  Lewis Sidney David, the man with no last name, the Jewish Kelt, cornered in this corner, stared warily around him. His three companions all looked normal, in focus if out of touch. They did not have auras. Jim was lying on the verminous sofa-bed reading Ramparts, a
trip to Vietnam he wanted maybe, or to Sacramento. Rich looked torpid, he always looked torpid even when serving free lunch in the park, and Alex was nitpicking around on his guitar. The infinite satisfaction of the chord. The silver cord. Sursum corda. If he carries a guitar around why can’t he play a tune on it? No. Irritability is a symptom of loss of self-control: suppress it. Suppress everything. Censor, censor. Fight, team, fight!

  Lewis got up, observing with pleasure the ready ease of his responses and the perfection of his sense of balance, and filled a glass of water at the vile sink. Beard hairs, spat-out Colgate, rust and radish droppings, a sink of iniquity. A small sink, but mine own. Why did he live in this dump? Why had he asked Jim and Rich and Alex to come share their sugarlumps with him here? It was lousy enough without being an opium den too. Soon it would be littered with inert bodies, eyes dropping out like marbles and rolling under the bed to join the dust and ruin lurking there. Lewis carried the glass of water over to the window, drank half of it, and began to pour the rest gently around the roots of a seedling olive tree in a mended ten-cent pot. “Have a drink on me,” he said, looking closely at the tree.

  It was five inches high but looked very like an olive tree, gnarled and durable. A bonsai. Banzai! But where’s satori? Where’s the significance, the enhancement, all the shapes and colors and meanings, the intensification of the perception of reality? How long does it take the damned stuff to work? There sat his olive tree. No less, no more. Unenhanced, insignificant. Men cry Peace, peace, but there is no peace. Not enough olive trees to go around, due to population explosion of human species. Was that a Perception? No, any un-drugged meat-head could have perceived it. O come on, poison, poison me. Come, hallucination, come, so that I may fight you, reject you, refuse you, lose the fight and go mad, silently.

  Like Isobel.

  That was why he lived in this dump, and that was why he had asked Jim and Rich and Alex here, and that was why he was off on a trip with them, a pleasure-cruise, a holiday in picturesque Old Erewhon. He was trying to catch up with his wife. What is most difficult about watching your wife go insane is that you can’t go with her. Farther and farther away she walks, not looking back, a long trip down into silence. The lyre falls dumb, and the psychiatrists are liars too. You stand behind the glass wall of your sanity like one at an airport watching a crash. You shout, “Isobel!” She never heard. The plane crashed in silence. She could not hear him call her name. Nor could she speak to him. Now the walls that divided him from her were brick, very solid, and he could do what he liked with his own glass house of sanity. Throw stones. Throw alphas. Tinkle, crash.

  LSD/alpha did not drive you insane, of course. It did not even unravel your chromosomes. It simply opened the door to the higher reality. So did schizophrenia, he gathered, but the trouble there was that you couldn’t speak, you couldn’t communicate, you couldn’t say what.

  Jim had lowered his Ramparts. He was sitting in a noticeable fashion, inhaling. He was going to get with reality the right way, like a lama, man. He was a true believer and his life now centered upon the LSD/a experience as a religious mystic’s upon his mystical discipline. Could you keep it up once a week for years, though? At thirty? At forty-two? At sixty-three? There is a terrible monotony and adversity to life; you’d need a monastery. Matins, nones, vespers, silence, walls around, big solid brick walls. To keep the lower reality out.

  Come on, hallucinogen, get with it. Hallucinogenate, hallucinogenize. Smash the glass wall. Take me on a trip where my wife went. Missing person, age 22, ht 5’3”, wt 105 lbs, hair brown, race human, sex female. She never was a fast walker. I could catch up with her with one foot tied behind me. Take me where she walked to. . . . No.

  I’ll walk there by myself, said Lewis Sidney David. He finished pouring the water in little dribbles around the roots of the olive tree, and looked up, out the window. There through smeary glass was Mount Hood, forty miles away, two miles high, a volcanic cone possessing the serene symmetry peculiar to volcanic cones, dormant but not officially extinct, full of sleepy fires and surrounded by its own atmosphere and climate different from that of lower altitudes: snow and a clear light. That was why he lived in this dump. Because when you looked out the window of it, you saw the higher reality. Eleven thousand feet higher.

  “I’ll be damned,” Lewis said aloud, feeling that he was on the edge and verge of perceiving something really important. But he had that feeling fairly often, without chemical assistance. Meanwhile there was the mountain.

  A lot of muck, freeways and disposable office buildings and high-rises and urban renewal bombsites and neon elephants washing neon cars with dotted showes of neon, lay in between him and the mountain, and the base of it was hidden along with its foothills in a pale smog, so that the peak floated.

  Lewis felt a strong impulse to cry and to say his wife’s name aloud. He repressed this impulse, as he had been doing for three months, ever since May when he had tanen her to the sanitarium, after the silent months. In January, before the silence began, she had cried a great deal, all day long some da)s, and he had become frightened of tears. First tears, then silence. No good. O God get me out of this! Lewis let go, quit fighting the impalpable enemy, and begged for release. He implored the drug in his bloodstream to work, to do something, to let him cry, or see colors, or go off his rocker, anything.

  Nothing happened.

  He finished pouring the water in little dribbles around the roots of the olive tree, and looked up, at the room. It was a dump, but big, and it had a good view of Mount Hood, and the wisdom-tooth crest of Mount Adams on clear days too. But nothing would happen here. This was the waiting room. He picked up his coat off a broken chair and went out.

  It was a good coat, lambswool lining and a hood and all that; his sister and mother had clubbed to get it for him for Christmas, making him feel like R. R. Raskolnikov. But he was not going to murder any old pawnbrokers today. Not even a pseudocide. On the stairs he passed the painters and plasterers with their ladders and buckets, three of them, going up to do his room over, peaceful-looking, fresh-faced men in their forties and fifties. Poor bastards, what would they do with the sink? with the three alphies, Rich and Jim and Alex, who on honeydew had fed and drunk the milk of Paradise? with his notes on LeNotre, Olmsted and McLaren, with his fourteen pounds of photographs of Japanese domestic architecture, with his drawing board and fishing tackle, his Collected Works of Theodore Sturgeon bound in sensational cardboard, the 8’ x 10’ unfinished oil of an ataxic nude by a painter friend whose auto loan co. had attached his paintings, Alex’s guitar, the olive tree, the dust and eyeballs under the bed? That was their problem. He went on down the rooming-house stairs that smelled of old tomcat, and heard his hiking boots clomping heartily. He felt that all this had happened once before.

  It took him a long time to get out of the city. Since public transportation was forbidden to people in his condition, of course, he couldn’t get on the Gresham bus which would have saved a lot of time, taking him through the suburbs and halfway there. But there was plenty of time. The summer evening would stay light; he could count on it. Lenient and sweet in their length are the twilights of a latitude halfway between equator and pole: no tropic monotonies, no arctic absolutes, but a winter of long shadows and a summer of long dusks: gradations and accommodations of brightness, attenuations of clarity, subtleties and leisures of the light. Children scuttered in the green parks of Portland and down long side streets, all at one great game over all the city, the game of Young. Only here and there a kid went alone, playing Solitude, for higher stakes. Some kids are gamblers born. Bits of trash scraped along the gutters moved by a warm wind now and then. There was a great, sad sound far off over the city as if lions were roaring in cages, walking and lashing their gold sides with gold-tasselled tails and roaring, roaring. Sun set, somewhere west over roofs, but not for the mountain that still burned with a white fire away up high. As Lewis left the last of the city and went through a pleasant land, hilly and well farm
ed, the wind began to smell of wet earth, cool, complex, as it will as night comes on; and past Sandy there was darkness under great increasing forests on the rising slopes. But there was plenty of time. Above and ahead the peak stood white, faintly tinged with apricot, in sunlight. As he climbed the long, steep road he came out again and then again from the dark forests into gulfs of yellow clarity. He went on until he was up above the forests and up above the darkness, on heights where there was only snow and stone and air and the vast, clear, enduring light.

  But he was alone.

  That wasn’t right. He hadn’t been alone when this had happened. He had to meet with— He had been with— Where?

  No skis no sled no snowshoes not even an inner tube. If I had got the commission for this landscape, God, I would have put a path along here. Sacrificing grandeur for convenience? But only a little path. No harm. Only a little crack in the Liberty Bell. Only a little leak in the dike, fuse on the bomb, maggot in the brain. O my mad girl, my silent love, my wife whom I sold into bedlam because you would not hear me speak, Isobel, come save me from yourself! I’ve climbed after you up above all the paths and now I stand here alone: there isn’t any way to go.

  Daylight died away and the white of the snow went somber. In the east, above endless darkening ranges and forests and pale, hill-enfolded lakes, Saturn shone, bright and saturnine.

  Lewis did not know where the lodge was; somewhere on the timberline, but he was above timberline. He would not go down. To the heights, to the heights. Excelsior! A youth who bore mid snow and ice a banner with this strange device HELP HELP I AM A PRISONER OF THE HIGHER REALITY. He climbed. He climbed un-clomben slopes, unkempt, and as he climbed he wept. His tears crawled down over his face and he crawled up over the mountain’s face.