The Found and the Lost

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  He gave her the gift he had brought her, a treatise on Certain Diseases of Werel-Yeowe by a team of Ekumenical medical researchers, and she seized it greedily. For some while she conversed only between plunges into the table of contents and the chapter on berlot. She poured out the pale orange wine. They had a second glass. “You look fine, Havzhiva,” she said, putting the book down and looking at him steadily. Her eyes had faded to an opaque bluish darkness. “Being a saint agrees with you.”

  “It’s not that bad, Yeron.”

  “A hero, then. You can’t deny that you’re a hero.”

  “No,” he said with a laugh. “Knowing what a hero is, I won’t deny it.”

  “Where would we be without you?”

  “Just where we are now. . . .” He sighed. “Sometimes I think we’re losing what little we’ve ever won. This Tualbeda, in Detake Province, don’t underestimate him, Yeron. His speeches are pure misogyny and anti-immigrant prejudice, and people are eating it up—”

  She made a gesture that utterly dismissed the demagogue. “There is no end to that,” she said. “But I knew what you were going to be to us. Right away. When I heard your name, even. I knew.”

  “You didn’t give me much choice, you know.”

  “Bah. You chose, man.”

  “Yes,” he said. He savored the wine. “I did.” After a while he said, “Not many people have the choices I had. How to live, whom to live with, what work to do. Sometimes I think I was able to choose because I grew up where all choices had been made for me.”

  “So you rebelled, made your own way,” she said, nodding.

  He smiled. “I’m no rebel.”

  “Bah!” she said again. “No rebel? You, in the thick of it, in the heart of our movement all the way?”

  “Oh yes,” he said. “But not in a rebellious spirit. That had to be your spirit. My job was acceptance. To keep an acceptant spirit. That’s what I learned growing up. To accept. Not to change the world. Only to change the soul. So that it can be in the world. Be rightly in the world.”

  She listened but looked unconvinced. “Sounds like a woman’s way of being,” she said. “Men generally want to change things to suit.”

  “Not the men of my people,” he said.

  She poured them a third glass of wine. “Tell me about your people. I was always afraid to ask. The Hainish are so old! So learned! They know so much history, so many worlds! Us here with our three hundred years of misery and murder and ignorance—you don’t know how small you make us feel.”

  “I think I do,” Havzhiva said. After a while he said, “I was born in a town called Stse.”

  He told her about the pueblo, about the Other Sky people, his father who was his uncle, his mother the Heir of the Sun, the rites, the festivals, the daily gods, the unusual gods; he told her about changing being; he told her about the historian’s visit, and how he had changed being again, going to Kathhad.

  “All those rules!” Yeron said. “So complicated and unnecessary. Like our tribes. No wonder you ran away.”

  “All I did was go learn in Kathhad what I wouldn’t learn in Stse,” he said, smiling. “What the rules are. Ways of needing one another. Human ecology. What have we been doing here, all these years, but trying to find a good set of rules—a pattern that makes sense?” He stood up, stretched his shoulders, and said, “I’m drunk. Come for a walk with me.”

  They went out into the sunny gardens of the compound and walked slowly along the paths between vegetable plots and flower beds. Yeron nodded to people weeding and hoeing, who looked up and greeted her by name. She held Havzhiva’s arm firmly, with pride. He matched his steps to hers.

  “When you have to sit still, you want to fly,” he said, looking down at her pale, gnarled, delicate hand on his arm. “If you have to fly, you want to sit still. I learned sitting, at home. I learned flying, with the historians. But I still couldn’t keep my balance.”

  “Then you came here,” she said.

  “Then I came here.”

  “And learned?”

  “How to walk,” he said. “How to walk with my people.”

  A WOMAN’S LIBERATION

  1. Shomeke

  MY DEAR FRIEND HAS ASKED me to write the story of my life, thinking it might be of interest to people of other worlds and times. I am an ordinary woman, but I have lived in years of mighty changes and have been advantaged to know with my very flesh the nature of servitude and the nature of freedom.

  I did not learn to read or write until I was a grown woman, which is all the excuse I will make for the faults of my narrative.

  I was born a slave on the planet Werel. As a child I was called Shomekes’ Radosse Rakam. That is, Property of the Shomeke Family, Granddaughter of Dosse, Granddaughter of Kamye. The Shomeke family owned an estate on the eastern coast of Voe Deo. Dosse was my grandmother. Kamye is the Lord God.

  The Shomekes possessed over four hundred assets, mostly used to cultivate the fields of gede, to herd the saltgrass cattle, to work in the mills, and as domestics in the House. The Shomeke family had been great in history. Our Owner was an important man politically, often away in the capital.

  Assets took their name from their grandmother because it was the grandmother that raised the child. The mother worked all day, and there was no father. Women were always bred to more than one man. Even if a man knew his child he could not care for it. He might be sold or traded away at any time. Young men were seldom kept long on the estates. If they were valuable, they were traded to other estates or sold to the factories. If they were worthless, they were worked to death.

  Women were not often sold. The young ones were kept for work and breeding, the old ones to raise the young and keep the compound in order. On some estates women bore a baby a year till they died, but on ours most had only two or three children. The Shomekes valued women as workers. They did not want the men always getting at the women. The grandmothers agreed with them and guarded the young women closely.

  I say men, women, children, but you are to understand that we were not called men, women, children. Only our owners were called so. We assets or slaves were called bondsmen, bondswomen, and pups or young. I will use those words, though I have not heard or spoken them for many years, and never before on this blessed world.

  The bondsmen’s part of the compound, the gateside, was ruled by the Bosses, who were men, some relations of the Shomeke family, others hired by them. On the inside the young and the bondswomen lived. There two cutfrees, castrated bondsmen, were the Bosses in name, but the grandmothers ruled. Indeed nothing in the compound happened without the grandmothers’ knowledge.

  If the grandmothers said an asset was too sick to work, the Bosses would let that one stay home. Sometimes the grandmothers could save a bondsman from being sold away, sometimes they could protect a girl from being bred by more than one man, or could give a delicate girl a contraceptive. Everybody in the compound obeyed the council of the grandmothers. But if one of them went too far, the Bosses would have her flogged or blinded or her hands cut off. When I was a young child, there lived in our compound a woman we called Great-Grandmother, who had holes for eyes and no tongue. I thought that she was thus because she was so old. I feared that my grandmother Dosse’s tongue would wither in her mouth. I told her that. She said, “No. It won’t get any shorter, because I don’t let it get too long.”

  I lived in the compound. My mother birthed me there, and was allowed to stay three months to nurse me; then I was weaned to cow’s milk, and my mother returned to the House. Her name was Shomekes’ Rayowa Yowa. She was light-skinned like most of the assets, but very beautiful, with slender wrists and ankles and delicate features. My grandmother, too, was light, but I was dark, darker than anybody else in the compound.

  My mother came to visit, the cutfrees letting her in by their ladder-door. She found me rubbing grey dust on my body. When she scolded me, I told her that I wanted to look like the others.

  “Listen, Rakam,” she said to me, “they
are dust people. They’ll never get out of the dust. You’re something better. And you will be beautiful. Why do you think you’re so black?” I had no idea what she meant. “Someday I’ll tell you who your father is,” she said, as if she were promising me a gift. I knew that the Shomekes’ stallion, a prized and valuable animal, serviced mares from other estates. I did not know a father could be human.

  That evening I boasted to my grandmother: “I’m beautiful because the black stallion is my father!” Dosse struck me across the head so that I fell down and wept. She said, “Never speak of your father.”

  I knew there was anger between my mother and my grandmother, but it was a long time before I understood why. Even now I am not sure I understand all that lay between them.

  We little pups ran around in the compound. We knew nothing outside the walls. All our world was the bondswomen’s huts and the bondsmen’s longhouses, the kitchens and kitchen gardens, the bare plaza beaten hard by bare feet. To me, the stockade wall seemed a long way off.

  When the field and mill hands went out the gate in the early morning I didn’t know where they went. They were just gone. All day long the whole compound belonged to us pups, naked in the summer, mostly naked in the winter too, running around playing with sticks and stones and mud, keeping away from the grandmothers, until we begged them for something to eat or they put us to work weeding the gardens for a while.

  In the evening or the early night the workers would come back, trooping in the gate guarded by the Bosses. Some were worn out and grim, others would be cheerful and talking and calling back and forth. The great gate was slammed behind the last of them. Smoke went up from all the cooking stoves. The burning cowdung smelled sweet. People gathered on the porches of the huts and longhouses. Bondsmen and bondswomen lingered at the ditch that divided the gateside from the inside, talking across the ditch. After the meal the freedmen led prayers to Tual’s statue, and we lifted our own prayers to Kamye, and then people went to their beds, except for those who lingered to “jump the ditch.” Some nights, in the summer, there would be singing, or a dance was allowed. In the winter one of the grandfathers—poor old broken men, not strong people like the grandmothers—would “sing the word.” That is what we called reciting the Arkamye. Every night, always, some of the people were teaching and others were learning the sacred verses. On winter nights one of these old worthless bondsmen kept alive by the grandmothers’ charity would begin to sing the word. Then even the pups would be still to listen to that story.

  The friend of my heart was Walsu. She was bigger than I, and was my defender when there were fights and quarrels among the young or when older pups called me “Blackie” and “Bossie.” I was small but had a fierce temper. Together, Walsu and I did not get bothered much. Then Walsu was sent out the gate. Her mother had been bred and was now stuffed big, so that she needed help in the fields to make her quota. Gede must be hand-harvested. Every day as a new section of the bearing stalk comes ripe it has to be picked, and so gede pickers go through the same field over and over for twenty or thirty days, and then move on to a later planting. Walsu went with her mother to help her pick her rows. When her mother fell ill, Walsu took her place, and with help from other hands she kept up her mother’s quota. She was then six years old by owner’s count, which gave all assets the same birthday, new year’s day at the beginning of spring. She might have truly been seven. Her mother remained ill both before birthing and after, and Walsu took her place in the gede field all that time. She never afterward came back to play, only in the evenings to eat and sleep. I saw her then and we could talk. She was proud of her work. I envied her and longed to go through the gate. I followed her to it and looked through it at the world. Now the walls of the compound seemed very close.

  I told my grandmother Dosse that I wanted to go to work in the fields.

  “You’re too young.”

  “I’ll be seven at the new year.”

  “Your mother made me promise not to let you go out.”

  Next time my mother visited the compound, I said, “Grandmother won’t let me go out. I want to go work with Walsu.”

  “Never,” my mother said. “You were born for better than that.”

  “What for?”

  “You’ll see.”

  She smiled at me. I knew she meant the House, where she worked. She had told me often of the wonderful things in the House, things that shone and were colored brightly, things that were thin and delicate, clean things. It was quiet in the House, she said. My mother herself wore a beautiful red scarf, her voice was soft, and her clothing and body were always clean and fresh.

  “When will I see?”

  I teased her until she said, “All right! I’ll ask my lady.”

  “Ask her what?”

  All I knew of my-lady was that she too was delicate and clean, and that my mother belonged to her in some particular way, of which she was proud. I knew my-lady had given my mother the red scarf.

  “I’ll ask her if you can come begin training at the House.”

  My mother said “the House” in a way that made me see it as a great sacred place like the place in our prayer: May I enter in the clear house, in the rooms of peace.

  I was so excited I began to dance and sing, “I’m going to the House, to the House!” My mother slapped me to make me stop and scolded me for being wild. She said, “You are too young! You can’t behave! If you get sent away from the House, you can never come back.”

  I promised to be old enough.

  “You must do everything right,” Yowa told me. “You must do everything I say when I say it. Never question. Never delay. If my lady sees that you’re wild, she’ll send you back here. And that will be the end of you forever.”

  I promised to be tame. I promised to obey at once in everything, and not to speak. The more frightening she made it, the more I desired to see the wonderful, shining House.

  When my mother left I did not believe she would speak to my-lady. I was not used to promises being kept. But after some days she returned, and I heard her speaking to my grandmother. Dosse was angry at first, speaking loudly. I crept under the window of the hut to listen. I heard my grandmother weep. I was frightened and amazed. My grandmother was patient with me, always looked after me, and fed me well. It had never entered my mind that there was anything more to it than that, until I heard her crying. Her crying made me cry, as if I were part of her.

  “You could let me keep her one more year,” she said. “She’s just a baby. I would never let her out the gate.” She was pleading, as if she were powerless, not a grandmother. “She is my joy, Yowa!”

  “Don’t you want her to do well, then?”

  “Just a year more. She’s too wild for the House.”

  “She’s run wild too long. She’ll get sent out to the fields if she stays. A year of that and they won’t have her at the House. She’ll be dust. Anyhow, there’s no use crying about it. I asked my lady, and she’s expected. I can’t go back without her.”

  “Yowa, don’t let her come to harm,” Dosse said very low, as if ashamed to say this to her daughter, and yet with strength in her voice.

  “I’m taking her to keep her out of harm,” my mother said. Then she called me, and I wiped my tears and came.

  It is queer, but I do not remember my first walk through the world outside the compound or my first sight of the House. I suppose I was frightened and kept my eyes down, and everything was so strange to me that I did not understand what I saw. I know it was a number of days before my mother took me to show me to Lady Tazeu. She had to scrub me and train me and make sure I would not disgrace her. I was terrified when at last she took my hand, scolding me in a whisper all the time, and brought me out of the bondswomen’s quarters, through halls and doorways of painted wood, into a bright, sunny room with no roof, full of flowers growing in pots.

  I had hardly ever seen a flower, only the weeds in the kitchen gardens, and I stared and stared at them. My mother had to jerk my hand to make
me look at the woman lying in a chair among the flowers, in clothes soft and brightly colored like the flowers. I could hardly tell them apart. The woman’s hair was long and shining, and her skin was shining and black. My mother pushed me, and I did what she had made me practice over and over: I went and knelt down beside the chair and waited, and when the woman put out her long, narrow, soft hand, black above and azure on the palm, I touched my forehead to it. I was supposed to say “I am your slave Rakam, ma’am,” but my voice would not come out.

  “What a pretty little thing,” she said. “So dark.” Her voice changed a little on the last words.

  “The Bosses came in . . . that night,” Yowa said in a timid, smiling way, looking down as if embarrassed.

  “No doubt about that,” the woman said. I was able to glance up at her again. She was beautiful. I did not know a person could be so beautiful. I think she saw my wonder. She put out her long, soft hand again and caressed my cheek and neck. “Very, very pretty, Yowa,” she said. “You did quite right to bring her here. Has she been bathed?”

  She would not have asked that if she had seen me when I first came, filthy and smelling of the cowdung we made our fires with. She knew nothing of the compound at all. She knew nothing beyond the beza, the women’s side of the House. She was kept there just as I had been kept in the compound, ignorant of anything outside. She had never smelled cowdung, as I had never seen flowers.

  My mother assured her I was clean, and she said, “Then she can come to bed with me tonight. I’d like that. Will you like to come sleep with me, pretty little—” She glanced at my mother, who murmured, “Rakam.” Ma’am pursed her lips at the name. “I don’t like that,” she murmured. “So ugly. Toti. Yes. You can be my new Toti. Bring her this evening, Yowa.”

  She had had a foxdog called Toti, my mother told me. Her pet had died. I did not know animals ever had names, and so it did not seem odd to me to be given an animal’s name, but it did seem strange at first not to be Rakam. I could not think of myself as Toti.