The Wind's Twelve Quarters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  It was only the old man coming, with a hunk of dry cheese for him.

  He sat with the astronomer, and talked. Guennar ate up the cheese, for he had no food left, and listened to the old man talk. As he listened the weight seemed to lift a little, he seemed to see a little farther in the dark.

  “You’re no common soldier,” the miner said, and he replied, “No, I was a student once,” but no more, because he dared not tell the miner who he was. The old man knew all the events of the region; he spoke of the burning of the Round House on the hill, and of Count Bord. “He went off to the city with them, with these black-gowns, to be tried, they do say, to come before their council. Tried for what? What did he ever do but hunt boar and deer and foxen? Is it the council of the foxen trying him? What’s it all about, this snooping and soldiering and burning and trying? Better leave honest folk alone. The count was honest, as far as the rich can be, a fair landlord. But you can’t trust them, none of such folk. Only down here. You can trust the men who go down into the mine. What else has a man got down here but his own hands and his mates’ hands? What’s between him and death, when there’s a fall in the level or a winze closes and he’s in the blind end, but their hands, and their shovels, and their will to dig him out? There’d be no silver up there in the sun if there wasn’t trust between us down here in the dark. Down here you can count on your mates. And nobody comes but them. Can you see the owner in his lace, or the soldiers, coming down the ladders, coming down and down the great shaft into the dark? Not them! They’re brave at tramping on the grass, but what good’s a sword and shouting in the dark? I’d like to see ’em come down here. . . .”

  The next time he came another man was with him, and they brought an oil lamp and a clay jar of oil, as well as more cheese, bread, and some apples. “It was Hanno thought of the lamp,” the old man said. “A hempen wick it is, if she goes out blow sharp and she’ll likely catch up again. Here’s a dozen candles, too. Young Per swiped the lot from the doler, up on the grass.”

  “They all know I’m here?”

  “We do,” the miner said briefly. “They don’t.”

  Some time after this, Guennar returned along the lower, west-leading level he had followed before, till he saw the miners’ candles dance like stars; and he came into the stope where they were working. They shared their meal with him. They showed him the ways of the mine, and the pumps, and the great shaft where the ladders were and the hanging pulleys with their buckets; he sheered off from that, for the wind that came sucking down the great shaft smelled to him of burning. They took him back and let him work with them. They treated him as a guest, as a child. They had adopted him. He was their secret.

  There is not much good spending twelve hours a day in a black hole in the ground all your life long if there’s nothing there, no secret, no treasure, nothing hidden.

  There was the silver, to be sure. But where ten crews of fifteen had used to work these levels and there had been no end to the groan and clatter and crash of the loaded buckets going up on the screaming winch and the empties banging down to meet the trammers running with their heavy carts, now one crew of eight men worked: men over forty, old men, who had no skill but mining. There was still some silver there in the hard granite, in little veins among the gangue. Sometimes they would lengthen an end by one foot in two weeks.

  “It was a great mine,” they said with pride.

  They showed the astronomer how to set a gad and swing the sledge, how to go at granite with the finely balanced and sharp-pointed pick, how to sort and “cob,” what to look for, the rare bright branchings of the pure metal, the crumbling rich rock of the ore. He helped them daily. He was in the stope waiting for them when they came, and spelled one or another on and off all day with the shovel work, or sharpening tools, or running the ore-cart down its grooved plank to the great shaft, or working in the ends. There they would not let him work long; pride and habit forbade it. “Here, leave off chopping at that like a woodcutter. Look: this way, see?” But then another would ask him, “Give me a blow here, lad, see, on the gad, that’s it.”

  They fed him from their own coarse meager meals.

  In the night, alone in the hollow earth, when they had climbed the long ladders up “to grass” as they said, he lay and thought of them, their faces, their voices, their heavy, scarred, earth-stained hands, old men’s hands with thick nails blackened by bruising rock and steel; those hands, intelligent and vulnerable, which had opened up the earth and found the shining silver in the solid rock. The silver they never held, never kept, never spent. The silver that was not theirs.

  “If you found a new vein, a new lode, what would you do?”

  “Open her, and tell the masters.”

  “Why tell the masters?”

  “Why, man! We gets paid for what we brings up! D’you think we does this damned work for love?”

  “Yes.”

  They all laughed at him, loud, jeering laughter, innocent. The living eyes shone in their faces blackened with dust and sweat.

  “Ah, if we could find a new lode! The wife would keep a pig like we had once, and by God I’d swim in beer! But if there’s silver they’d have found it; that’s why they pushed the workings so far east. But it’s barren there, and worked out here, that’s the short and long of it.”

  Time stretched behind him and ahead of him like the dark drifts and crosscuts of the mine, all present at once, wherever he with his small candle might be among them. When he was alone now the astronomer often wandered in the tunnels and the old stopes, knowing the dangerous places, the deep levels full of water, adept at shaky ladders and tight places, intrigued by the play of his candle on the rock walls and faces, the glitter of mica that seemed to come from deep inside the stone. Why did it sometimes shine out that way? as if the candle found something far within the shining broken surface, something that winked in answer and occulted, as if it had slipped behind a cloud or an unseen planet’s disc.

  “There are stars in the earth,” he thought. “If one knew how to see them.”

  Awkward with the pick, he was clever with machinery; they admired his skill, and brought him tools. He repaired pumps and windlasses; he fixed up a lamp on a chain for “young Per” working in a long narrow deadend, with a reflector made from a tin candle-holder beaten out into a curved sheet and polished with fine rock-dust and the sheepskin lining of his coat. “It’s a marvel,” Per said. “Like daylight. Only, being behind me, it don’t go out when the air gets bad, and tell me I should be backing out for a breath.”

  For a man can go on working in a narrow end for some time after his candle has gone out for lack of oxygen.

  “You should have a bellows rigged there.”

  “What, like I was a forge?”

  “Why not?”

  “Do ye ever go up to the grass, nights?” asked Hanno, looking wistfully at Guennar. Hanno was a melancholy, thoughtful, soft-hearted fellow. “Just to look about you?”

  Guennar did not answer. He went off to help Bran with a timbering job; the miners did all the work that had once been done by crews of timberers, trammers, sorters, and so on.

  “He’s deathly afraid to leave the mine,” Per said, low.

  “Just to see the stars and get a breath of the wind,” Hanno said, as if he was still speaking to Guennar.

  One night the astronomer emptied out his pockets and looked at the stuff that had been in them since the night of the burning of the observatory: things he had picked up in those hours which he now could not remember, those hours when he had groped and stumbled in the smoldering wreckage, seeking . . . seeking what he had lost. . . . He no longer thought of what he had lost. It was sealed off in his mind by a thick scar, a burn-scar. For a long time this scar in his mind kept him from understanding the nature of the objects now ranged before him on the dusty stone floor of the mine: a wad of papers scorched all along one side; a round piece of glass or crystal; a metal tube; a beautifully worked wooden cogwheel; a bit of twisted blackened
copper etched with fine lines; and so on, bits, wrecks, scraps. He put the papers back into his pocket, without trying to separate the brittle half-fused leaves and make out the fine script. He continued to look at and occasionally to pick up and examine the other things, especially the piece of glass.

  This he knew to be the eyepiece of his ten-inch telescope. He had ground the lens himself. When he picked it up he handled it delicately, by the edges, lest the acid of his skin etch the glass. Finally he began to polish it clean, using a wisp of fine lambswool from his coat. When it was clear, he held it up and looked at and through it at all angles. His face was calm and intent, his light wide-set eyes steady.

  Tilted in his fingers, the telescope lens reflected the lamp flame in one bright tiny point near the edge and seemingly beneath the curve of the face, as if the lens had kept a star in it from the many hundred nights it had been turned toward the sky.

  He wrapped it carefully in the wisp of wool and made a place for it in the rock niche with his tinderbox. Then he took up the other things one by one.

  During the next weeks the miners saw their fugitive less often while they worked. He was off a great deal by himself: exploring the deserted eastern regions of the mine, he said, when they asked him what he did.

  “What for?”

  “Prospecting,” he said with the brief, wincing smile that gave him a very crazy look.

  “Oh, lad, what do you know about that? She’s all barren there. The silver’s gone; and they found no eastern lode. You might be finding a bit of poor ore or a vein of tinstone, but nothing worth the digging.”

  “How do you know what’s in the earth, in the rock under your feet, Per?”

  “I know the signs, lad. Who should know better?”

  “But if the signs are hidden?”

  “Then the silver’s hidden.”

  “Yet you know it is there, if you knew where to dig, if you could see into the rock. And what else is there? You find the metal, because you seek it, and dig for it. But what else might you find, deeper than the mine, if you sought, if you knew where to dig?”

  “Rock,” said Per. “Rock, and rock, and rock.”

  “And then?”

  “And then? Hellfire, for all I know. Why else does it get hotter as the shafts go deeper? That’s what they say. Getting nearer hell.”

  “No,” the astronomer said, clear and firm. “No. There is no hell beneath the rocks.”

  “What is there, then, underneath it all?”

  “The stars.”

  “Ah,” said the miner, floored. He scratched his rough, tallow-clotted hair, and laughed. “There’s a poser,” he said, and stared at Guennar with pity and admiration. He knew Guennar was mad, but the size of his madness was a new thing to him, and admirable. “Will you find ’em then, the stars?”

  “If I learn how to look,” Guennar said, so calmly that Per had no response but to heft his shovel and get back to loading the cart.

  One morning when the miners came down they found Guennar still sleeping, rolled up in the battered cloak Count Bord had given him, and by him a strange object, a contraption made of silver tubing, tin struts and wires beaten from old headlamp-sockets, a frame of pick handles carefully carved and fitted, cogged wheels, a bit of twinkling glass. It was elusive, makeshift, delicate, crazy, intricate.

  “What the devil’s that?”

  They stood about and stared at the thing, the lights of their headlamps centering on it, a yellow beam sometimes flickering over the sleeping man as one or another glanced at him.

  “He made it, sure.”

  “Sure enough.”

  “What for?”

  “Don’t touch it.”

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  Roused by their voices, the astronomer sat up. The yellow beams of the candles brought his face out white against the dark. He rubbed his eyes and greeted them.

  “What would that be, lad?”

  He looked troubled or confused when he saw the object of their curiosity. He put a hand on it protectively, yet he looked at it himself without seeming to recognize it for a while. At last he said, frowning and speaking in a whisper, “It’s a telescope.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A device that makes distant things clear to the eye.”

  “How come?” one of the miners asked, baffled. The astronomer answered him with growing assurance. “By virtue of certain properties of light and lenses. The eye is a delicate instrument, but it is blind to half the universe—far more than half. The night sky is black, we say: between the stars is void and darkness. But turn the telescope-eye on that space between the stars, and lo, the stars! Stars too faint and far for the eye alone to see, rank behind rank, glory beyond glory, out to the uttermost boundaries of the universe. Beyond all imagination, in the outer darkness, there is light: a great glory of sunlight. I have seen it. I have seen it, night after night, and mapped the stars, the beacons of God on the shores of darkness. And here too there is light! There is no place bereft of the light, the comfort and radiance of the creator spirit. There is no place that is outcast, outlawed, forsaken. There is no place left dark. Where the eyes of God have seen, there light is. We must go farther, we must look farther! There is light if we will see it. Not with eyes alone, but with the skill of the hands and the knowledge of the mind and the heart’s faith is the unseen revealed, and the hidden made plain. And all the dark earth shines like a sleeping star.”

  He spoke with that authority which the miners knew belonged by rights to the priests, to the great words priests spoke in the echoing churches. It did not belong here, in the hole where they grubbed their living, in the words of a crazy fugitive. Later on, one talking to another, they shook their heads, or tapped them. Per said, “The madness is growing in him,” and Hanno said, “Poor soul, poor soul!” Yet there was not one of them who did not, also, believe what the astronomer had told them.

  “Show me,” said old Bran, finding Guennar alone in a deep eastern drift, busy with his intricate device. It was Bran who had first followed Guennar, and brought him food, and led him back to the others.

  The astronomer willingly stood aside and showed Bran how to hold the device pointing downward at the tunnel floor, and how to aim and focus it, and tried to describe its function and what Bran might see: all hesitantly, since he was not used to explaining to the ignorant, but without impatience when Bran did not understand.

  “I don’t see nothing but the ground,” the old man said after a long and solemn observation with the instrument. “And the little dust and pebbles on it.”

  “The lamp blinds your eyes, perhaps,” the astronomer said with humility. “It is better to look without light. I can do it because I have done it for so long. It is all practice—like placing the gads, which you always do right, and I always do wrong.”

  “Aye. Maybe. Tell me what you see—” Bran hesitated. He had not long ago realized who Guennar must be. Knowing him to be a heretic made no difference but knowing him to be a learned man made it hard to call him “mate” or “lad.” And yet here, and after all this time, he could not call him Master. There were times when, for all his mildness, the fugitive spoke with great words, gripping one’s soul, times when it would have been easy to call him Master. But it would have frightened him.

  The astronomer put his hand on the frame of his mechanism and replied in a soft voice, “There are . . . constellations.”

  “What’s that, constellations?”

  The astronomer looked at Bran as if from a great way off, and said presently, “The Wain, the Scorpion, the Sickle by the Milky Way in summer, those are constellations. Patterns of stars, gatherings of stars, parenthoods, semblances . . .”

  “And you see those here, with this?”

  Still looking at him through the weak lamplight with clear brooding eyes, the astronomer nodded, and did not speak, but pointed downward, at the rock on which they stood, the hewn floor of the mine.

  “What are they like?” Bran’s voice w
as hushed.

  “I have only glimpsed them. Only for a moment. I have not learned the skill; it is a somewhat different skill . . . But they are there, Bran.”

  Often now he was not in the stope where they worked, when they came to work, and did not join them even for their meal, though they always left him a share of food. He knew the ways of the mine now better than any of them, even Bran, not only the “living” mine but the “dead” one, the abandoned workings and exploratory tunnels that ran eastward, ever deeper, towards the caves. There he was most often; and they did not follow him.

  When he did appear amongst them and they talked with him, they were more timid with him, and did not laugh.

  One night as they were all going back with the last cartload to the main shaft, he came to meet them, stepping suddenly out of a crosscut to their right. As always he wore his ragged sheepskin coat, black with the clay and dirt of the tunnels. His fair hair had gone grey. His eyes were clear. “Bran,” he said, “come, I can show you now.”

  “Show me what?”

  “The stars. The stars beneath the rock. There’s a great constellation in the stope on the old fourth level, where the white granite cuts down through the black.”

  “I know the place.”

  “It’s there: underfoot, by that wall of white rock. A great shining and assembly of stars. Their radiance beats up through the darkness. They are like the faces of dancers, the eyes of angels. Come and see them, Bran!”

  The miners stood there, Per and Hanno with backs braced to hold the cart from rolling: stooped men with tired, dirty faces and big hands bent and hardened by the grip of shovel and pick and sledge. They were embarrassed, compassionate, impatient.

  “We’re just quitting. Off home to supper. Tomorrow,” Bran said.

  The astronomer looked from one face to another and said nothing.

  Hanno said in his hoarse gentle voice, “Come up with us, for this once, lad. It’s dark night out, and likely raining; it’s November now; no soul will see you if you come and sit at my hearth, for once, and eat hot food, and sleep beneath a roof and not under the heavy earth all by yourself alone!”