A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “I’ve never actually spoken to Ket,” Shan said to Dalzul.

  It had been a good dinner. He had cooked it, with considerable assistance from Abud, who had prevented him just in time from frying the fezuni. Eaten raw, dipped in fiery pepperjuice, the fezuni had been delicious. Abud had eaten with them, respectfully silent as he always was in Dalzul’s presence, and then excused himself. Shan and Dalzul were now nibbling tipu seeds and drinking nut beer, sitting on little carpets on the terrace in the purple twilight, watching the stars slowly clot the sky with brilliance.

  “All men except the chosen king are taboo to her,” Dalzul said.

  “But she’s married,” Shan said—”isn’t she?”

  “No, no. The princess must remain virgin until the king is chosen. Then she belongs only to him. The sacred marriage, the hierogamy.”

  “They do practice polyandry,” Shan said uncertainly.

  “Her union with him is probably the fundamental event of the kingship ceremonial. Neither has any real choice in the matter. That’s why her defection is so troubling. She’s breaking her own society’s rules.” Dalzul took a long draft of beer. “What made me their choice in the first place—my dramatic appearance out of the sky—may be working against me now. I broke the rules by going away, and then coming back, and not coming back alone. One supernatural person pops out of the sky, all right, but four of them, male and female, all eating and drinking and shitting like everybody else, and asking stupid questions in baby talk all the time? We aren’t behaving in a properly sacred manner. And they respond by impropriety of the same order, rule-breaking. Primitive worldviews are rigid, they break when strained. We’re having a disintegrative effect on this society. And I am responsible.”

  Shan took a breath. “It isn’t your world, sir,” he said. “It’s theirs. They’re responsible for it.” He cleared his throat. “And they don’t seem all that primitive—they make steel, their grasp of the principles of electricity is impressive—and they are literate, and the social system seems to be very flexible and stable, if what Forest and—”

  “I still call her the princess, but as I learn the language better I’ve realized that that’s inaccurate,” Dalzul said, setting down his cup and speaking musingly. “Queen is probably nearer: queen of Ganam, of the Gaman. She is identified as Ganam, as the soil of the planet itself.”

  “Yes,” Shan said. “Riel says—”

  “So that in a sense she is the Earth. As, in a sense, I am Space, the sky. Coming alone to this world, a conjunction. A mystic union: fire and air with soil and water. The old mythologies enacted yet again in living flesh. She cannot turn away from me. It dislocates the very order of things. The father and the mother are joined, their children are obedient, happy, secure. But if the mother rebels, disorder, distress, failure ensue. These responsibilities are absolute. We don’t choose them. They choose us. She must be brought back to her duty to her people.”

  “As Forest and Riel understand it, she’s been married to Aketa for several years, and her second husband is the father of her daughter.” Shan heard the harshness of his voice; his mouth was dry and his heart pounding as if he was afraid, of what? of being disobedient?

  “Viaka says he can bring her back to the palace,” Dalzul said, “but at risk of retaliation from the pretender’s faction.”

  “Dalzul!” Shan said. “Ket is a married woman! She went back to her family. Her duty to you as Earth Priestess or whatever it is is done. Aketa is her husband, not your rival. He doesn’t want the scepter, the crown, whatever it is!”

  Dalzul made no reply and his expression was unreadable in the deepening twilight.

  Shan went on, desperately: “Until we understand this society better, maybe you should hold back—certainly not let Viaka kidnap Ket—”

  “I’m glad you see that,” Dalzul said. “Although I can’t help my involvement, we certainly must try not to interfere with these people’s belief systems. Power is responsibility, alas! Well, I should be off. Thank you for a very pleasant evening, Shan. We can still sing a tune together, eh, shipmates?” He stood up and patted the air on the back, saying, “Good night, Forest; good night, Riel,” before he patted Shan on the back and said, “Good night and thanks, Shan!” He strode out of the courtyard, a lithe, erect figure, a white glimmer in the starlit dark.

  “I think we’ve got to get him onto the ship, Forest. He’s increasingly delusional.” Shan squeezed his hands together till the knuckles cracked. “I think he’s delusional. Maybe I am. But you and Riel and I, we seem to be in the same general reality—fiction—are we?”

  Forest nodded grimly. “Increasingly so,” she said. “And if kesemmas does mean dying, or murder—Riel thinks it’s murder, it involves violence…. I have this horrible vision of poor Dalzul committing some awful ritual sacrifice, cutting somebody’s throat while convinced that he’s pouring out oil or cutting cloth or something harmless. I’d be glad to get him out of this! I’d be glad to get out myself. But how?”

  “Surely if the three of us—”

  “Reason with him?” Forest asked, sardonic.

  When they went to what he called the palace, they had to wait a long time to see Dalzul. Old Viaka, anxious and nervous, tried to send them away, but they waited. Dalzul came out into his courtyard at last and greeted Shan. He did not acknowledge or did not perceive Riel and Forest. If he was acting, it was a consummate performance; he moved without awareness of their physical presence and talked through their speech. When at last Shan said, “Forest and Riel are here, Dalzul—here—look at them!”—Dalzul looked where he gestured and then looked back at Shan with such shocked compassion that Shan lost his own bearings and turned to see if the women were still there.

  Dalzul, watching him, spoke very gently: “It’s about time we went back, Shan.”

  “Yes—Yes, I think so—I think we ought to.” Tears of pity, relief, shame jammed in Shan’s throat for a moment. “We should go back. It isn’t working.”

  “Very soon,” Dalzul said, “very soon now. Don’t worry, Shan. Anxiety increases the perceptual anomalies. Just take it easy, as you did at first, and remember that you’ve done nothing wrong. As soon as the coronation has—”

  “No! We should go now—”

  “Shan, whether I asked for it or not, I have an obligation here, and I will fulfill it. If I run out on them, Aketa’s faction will have their swords out—”

  “Aketa doesn’t have a sword,” Riel said, her voice high and loud as Shan had never heard it. “These people don’t have swords, they don’t make them!”

  Dalzul talked on through her voice: “As soon as the ceremony is over and the kingship is filled, we’ll go. After all, I can go and be back within an hour, if need be. I’ll take you back to Ve Port. In no time at all, as the joke is. So stop worrying about what never was your problem. I got you into this. It’s my responsibility.”

  “How can—” Shan began, but Forest’s long, black hand was on his arm.

  “Don’t try, Shan,” she said. “The mad reason much better than the sane. Come on. This is very hard to take.”

  Dalzul was turning serenely away, as if they had left him already.

  “Either we have to wait for this ceremony with him,” Forest said as they went out into the hot, bright street, “or we knock him on the head and stick him in the ship.”

  “I’d like to knock him on the head,” Riel said.

  “If we do get him onto the ship,” Shan said, “how do we know he’ll take us back to Ve? And if he turns round and comes right back, how do we know what he’ll do? He could destroy Ganam instead of saving it—”

  “Shan!” Riel said, “Stop it! Is Ganam a world? Is Dalzul a god?”

  He stared at her. A couple of women going by looked at them, and one nodded a greeting, “Ha, Foyes! Ha, Yeh!”

  “Ha, Tasasap!” Forest said to her, while Riel, her eyes blazing, faced Shan: “Ganam is one little city-state on a large planet, which the Gaman call Anam, and the
people in the next valley call something else entirely. We’ve seen one tiny corner of it. It’ll take us years to know anything about it. Dalzul, because he’s crazy or because churtening made him crazy or made us all crazy, I don’t know which, I don’t care just now—Dalzul barged in and got mixed up in sacred stuff and maybe is causing some trouble and confusion. But these people live here. This is their place. One man can’t destroy them and one man can’t save them! They have their own story, and they’re telling it! How we’ll figure in it I don’t know—maybe as some idiots that fell out of the sky once!”

  Forest put a peaceable arm around Riel’s shoulders. “When she gets excited she gets excited. Come on, Shan. Aketa certainly isn’t planning to slaughter Viaka’s household. I don’t see these people letting us mess up anything in a big way. They’re in control. We’ll go through this ceremony. It probably isn’t a big deal, except in Dalzul’s mind. And as soon as it’s over and his mind’s at rest, ask him to take us home. He’ll do it. He’s—” She paused. “He’s fatherly,” she said, without sarcasm.

  They did not see Dalzul again until the day of the ceremony. He stayed holed up in his palace, and Viaka sternly forbade them entrance. Aketa evidently had no power to interfere in another sacred jurisdiction, and no wish to. “Tezyeme,” he said, which meant something on the order of “it is happening the way it is supposed to happen.” He did not look happy about it, but he was not going to interfere.

  On the morning of the Ceremony of the Scepter, there was no buying and selling in the marketplace. People came out in their finest kilts and gorgeous vests; all the men of the priesthoods wore the high, plumed, basketry headdresses and massive gold earrings. Babies’ and children’s heads were rubbed with red ocher. But it was not a festivity, such as the Star-Rising ceremony of a few days earlier; nobody danced, nobody cooked tipu-bread, there was no music. Only a large, rather subdued crowd kept gathering in the marketplace. At last the doors of Aketa’s house—Ket’s house, actually, Riel reminded them—swung open, and a procession came forth, walking to the complex, thrilling, somber beat of drums. The drummers had been waiting in the streets behind the house, and came forward to walk behind the procession. The whole city seemed to shake to the steady, heavy rhythms.

  Shan had never seen Ket except on the ship’s tape of Dalzul’s first arrival, but he recognized her at once in the procession: a stern, splendid woman. She wore a headdress less elaborate than most of the men’s, but ornate with gold, balancing it proudly as she walked. Beside her walked Aketa, red plumes nodding above his wicker crown, and another man to her left—”Ketketa, second husband,” Riel murmured. “That’s their daughter.” The child was four or five, very dignified, pacing along with her parents, her dark hair rough and red with ocher. “All the priests in Ket’s volcano lineage are here,” Riel went on. “There’s the Earth-Turner. That old one, that’s the Calendar Priest. There’s a lot of them I don’t know. This is a big ceremony… ” Her whisper was a little shaky.

  The procession turned left out of the marketplace and moved on to the heavy beating of the drums until Ket came abreast of the main entrance of Viaka’s rambling, yellow-walled house. There, with no visible signal, everyone stopped walking at once. The drums maintained the heavy, complex beat; but one by one they dropped out, till one throbbed alone like a heart and then stopped, leaving a terrifying silence.

  A man with a towering headdress of woven feathers stepped forward and called out a summons: “Sem ayatan! Sem Dazu!”

  The door opened slowly. Dalzul stood framed in the sunlit doorway, darkness behind him. He wore his black-and-silver uniform. His hair shone silver.

  In the absolute silence of the crowd, Ket walked forward to face him. She knelt down on both knees, bowed her head, and said, “Dazu, sototiyu!”

  “ ‘Dalzul, you chose,’ “ Riel whispered.

  Dalzul smiled. He stepped forward and reached out his hands to lift Ket to her feet.

  A whisper ran like wind in the crowd, a hiss or gasp or sigh of shock. Ket’s gold-burdened head came up, startled, then she was on her feet, fiercely erect, her hands at her sides. “Sototiyu!” she said, and turned, and strode back to her husbands.

  The drums took up a soft patter, a rain sound.

  A gap opened in the procession just in front of the door of the house. Quiet and self-possessed, walking with great dignity, Dalzul came forward and took the place left open for him. The rain sound of the drums grew louder, turning to thunder, thunder rolling near and far, loud and low. With the perfect unanimity of a school of fish or flock of birds the procession moved forward.

  The people of the city followed, Shan, Riel, and Forest among them.

  “Where are they going?” Forest said as they left the last street and struck out on the narrow road between the orchards.

  “This road goes up Iyananam,” Shan said.

  “Onto the volcano? Maybe that’s where the ritual will be.”

  The drums beat, the sunlight beat, Shan’s heart beat, his feet struck the dust of the road, all in one huge pulse. Entrained. Thought and speech lost in the one great beat, beat, beat.

  The procession had halted. The followers were stopping. The three Terrans kept on until they came up alongside the procession itself. It was re-forming, the drummers drawing off to one side, a few of them softly playing the thunder roll. Some of the crowd, people with children, were beginning to go back down the steep trail beside the mountain stream. Nobody spoke, and the noise of the waterfall uphill from them and the noisy torrent nearby almost drowned out the drums.

  They were a hundred paces or so downhill from the little stone building that housed the dynamo. The plumed priests, Ket and her husbands and household, all had drawn aside, leaving the way clear to the bank of the stream. Stone steps were built down right to the water, and at their foot lay a terrace, paved with light-colored stone, over which the clear water washed in quick-moving, shallow sheets. Amidst the shine and motion of the water stood an altar or low pedestal, blinding bright in the noon sun: gilt or solid gold, carved and drawn into intricate and fantastic figures of crowned men, dancing men, men with diamond eyes. On the pedestal lay a wand, not gold, unornamented, of dark wood or tarnished metal.

  Dalzul began to walk towards the pedestal.

  Aketa stepped forward suddenly and stood at the head of the stone steps, blocking Dalzul’s way. He spoke in a ringing voice, a few words. Riel shook her head, not understanding. Dalzul stood silent, motionless, and made no reply. When Aketa fell silent, Dalzul strode straight forward, as if to walk through him.

  Aketa held his ground. He pointed to Dalzul’s feet. “Tediad!” he said sharply—” ‘Shoes,’“ Riel murmured. Aketa and all the Gaman in the procession were barefoot. After a moment, with no loss of dignity, Dalzul knelt, took off his shoes and stockings, set them aside, and stood up, barefoot in his black uniform.

  “Stand aside now,” he said quietly, and, as if understanding him, Aketa stepped back among the watchers.

  “Ai Dazu,” he said as Dalzul passed him, and Ket said softly, “Ai Dazu!” The soft murmur followed Dalzul as he paced down the steps and out onto the terrace, walking through the shallow water that broke in bright drops around his ankles. Unhesitating, he walked to the pedestal and around it, so that he faced the procession and the watching people. He smiled, and put out his hand, and seized the scepter.

  “No,” Shan said. “No, we had no spy-eye with us. Yes, he died instantly. No, I have no idea what voltage. Underground wires from the generator, we assume. Yes, of course it was deliberate, intentional, arranged. They thought he had chosen that death. He chose it when he chose to have sex with Ket, with the Earth Priestess, with the Earth. They thought he knew; how could they know he didn’t know? If you lie with the Earth, you die by the Lightning. Men come from a long way to Ganam for that death. Dalzul came from a very long way. No, we none of us understood. No, I don’t know if it had anything to do with the churten effect, with perceptual dissonance, with chao
s. We came to see things differently, but which of us knew the truth? He knew he had to be a god again.”

  ANOTHER STORY OR A FISHERMAN OF THE INLAND SEA

  To the Stabiles of the Ekumen on Hain, and to Gvonesh, Director of the Churten Field Laboratories at Ve Port: from Tiokunan’n Hideo, Farmholder of the Second Sedoretu of Udan, Derdan’nad, Oket, on O.

  I shall make my report as if I told a story, this having been the tradition for some time now. You may, however, wonder why a farmer on the planet O is reporting to you as if he were a Mobile of the Ekumen. My story will explain that. But it does not explain itself. Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time, but in the great rapids and the winding shallows, no boat is safe.

  So: once upon a time when I was twenty-one years old I left my home and came on the NAFAL ship Terraces of Darranda to study at the Ekumenical Schools on Hain.

  The distance between Hain and my home world is just over four light-years, and there has been traffic between O and the Hainish system for twenty centuries. Even before the Nearly As Fast As Light drive, when ships spent a hundred years of planetary time instead of four to make the crossing, there were people who would give up their old life to come to a new world. Sometimes they returned; not often. There were tales of such sad returns to a world that had forgotten the voyager. I knew also from my mother a very old story called “The Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” which came from her home world, Terra. The life of a ki’O child is full of stories, but of all I heard told by her and my othermother and my fathers and grandparents and uncles and aunts and teachers, that one was my favorite. Perhaps I liked it so well because my mother told it with deep feeling, though very plainly, and always in the same words (and I would not let her change the words if she ever tried to).

  The story tells of a poor fisherman, Urashima, who went out daily in his boat alone on the quiet sea that lay between his home island and the mainland. He was a beautiful young man with long, black hair, and the daughter of the king of the sea saw him as he leaned over the side of the boat and she gazed up to see the floating shadow cross the wide circle of the sky.