Ursula K. Le Guin

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Say what you mean.”

  “I mean her. Ekata. What do you want her for anyhow? You don’t need her. You don’t need anything. You’re the big tin god.”

  “You shut your mouth.”

  “Don’t give me orders! By God I can give orders too. You just stay away from her. I’ll get her and you won’t, I’ll get her under your nose, under your eyes—” Kostant’s big hands took hold of his shoulders and shook him till his head snapped back and forth on his neck. He broke free and drove his fist straight at Kostant’s face, but as he did so he felt a jolt as when a train-car is coupled to the train. He fell down backwards across the heap of dirty clothes. His head hit the floor with a dead sound like a dropped melon.

  Kostant stood with his back against the stove. He looked at his right-hand knuckles, then at Stefan’s face, which was dead white and curiously serene. Kostant took a pillowcase from the pile of clothes, wet it at the sink, and knelt down by Stefan. It was hard for him to kneel, the right leg was still stiff. He mopped away the thin dark line of blood that had run from Stefan’s mouth. Stefan’s face twitched, he sighed and blinked, and looked up at Kostant, gazing with vague, sliding recognition, like a young infant.

  “That’s better,” Kostant said. His own face was white.

  Stefan propped himself up on one arm. “I fell down,” he said in a faint, surprised voice. Then he looked at Kostant again and his face began to change and tighten.

  “Stefan—”

  Stefan got up on all fours, then onto his feet; Kostant tried to take his arm, but he stumbled to the door, struggled with the catch, and plunged out. At the door, Kostant watched him vault the fence, cut across the Katalny yard, and run down Gulhelm Street with long, jolting strides. For several minutes the elder brother stood in the doorway, his face rigid and sorrowful. Then he turned, went to the front door and out, and made off down Gulhelm Street as fast as he could. The black cloud-front had covered all the sky but a thin band of blue-green to the south; the moon and star were gone. Kostant followed the track over the plain to the West Pit. No one was ahead of him. He reached the lip of the quarry and saw the water quiet, dim, reflecting snow that had yet to fall. He called out once, “Stefan!” His lungs were raw and his throat dry from the effort he had made to run. There was no answer. It was not his brother’s name that need be called there at the lip of the ruined quarry. It was the wrong name, and the wrong time. Kostant turned and started back towards Gulhelm Street, walking slowly and a little lame.

  “I’ve got to ride to Kolle,” Stefan said. The livery-stable keeper stared at his blood-smeared chin.

  “It’s dark. There’s ice on the roads.”

  “You must have a sharp-shod horse. I’ll pay double.”

  “Well . . .”

  Stefan rode out of the stable yard, and turned right down Ardure Street towards Verre instead of left towards Kolle. The keeper shouted after him. Stefan kicked the horse, which fell into a trot and then, where the pavement ceased, into a heavy run. The band of blue-green light in the southwest veered and slid away, Stefan thought he was falling sideways, he clung to the pommel but did not pull the reins. When the horse ran itself out and slowed to a walk it was full night, earth and sky all dark. The horse snorted, the saddle creaked, the wind hissed in frozen grass. Stefan dismounted and searched the ground as best he could. The horse had kept to the wagon road and stood not four feet from the ruts. They went on, horse and man; mounted, the man could not see the ruts; he let the horse follow the track across the plain, himself following no road.

  After a long time in the rocking dark something touched his face once, lightly.

  He felt his cheek. The right side of his jaw was swollen and stiff, and his right hand holding the reins was locked by the cold so that when he tried to change his grip he did not know if his fingers moved or not. He had no gloves, though he wore the winter coat he had never taken off when he came into the house, when the lamp broke, a long time ago. He got the reins in his left hand and put the right inside his coat to warm it. The horse jogged on patiently, head low. Again something touched Stefan’s face very lightly, brushing his cheek, his hot sore lip. He could not see the flakes. They were soft and did not feel cold. He waited for the gentle, random touch of the snow. He changed hands on the reins again, and put the left hand under the horse’s coarse, damp mane, on the warm hide. They both took comfort in the touch. Trying to see ahead, Stefan knew where sky and horizon met, or thought he did, but the plain was gone. The ceiling of sky was gone. The horse walked on darkness, under darkness, through darkness.

  Once the word “lost” lit itself like a match in the darkness, and Stefan tried to stop the horse so he could get off and search for the wheel-ruts, but the horse kept walking on. Stefan let his numb hand holding the reins rest on the pommel, let himself be borne.

  The horse’s head came up, its gait changed for a few steps. Stefan clutched at the wet mane, raised his own head dizzily, blinked at a spiderweb of light tangled in his eyes. Through the splintery blur of ice on his lashes the light grew square and yellowish: a window. What house stood out alone here on the endless plain? Dim blocks of pallor rose up on both sides of him—storefronts, a street. He had come to Verre. The horse stopped and sighed so that the girths creaked loudly. Stefan did not remember leaving Sfaroy Kampe. He sat astride a sweating horse in a dark street somewhere. One window was alight in a second storey. Snow fell in sparse clumps, as if hurled down in handfuls. There was little on the ground, it melted as it touched, a spring snow. He rode to the house with the lighted window and called aloud, “Where’s the road to Lotima?”

  The door opened, snow flickered whirling in the shaft of light. “Are ye the doctor?”

  “No. How do I get on to Lotima?”

  “Next turn right. If ye meet the doctor tell him hurry on!”

  The horse left the village unwillingly, lame on one leg and then the other. Stefan kept his head raised looking for the dawn, which surely must be near. He rode north now, the snow blowing in his face, blinding him even to the darkness. The road climbed, went down, climbed again. The horse stopped, and when Stefan did nothing, turned left, made a couple of stumbling steps, stopped again shuddering and neighed. Stefan dismounted, falling to hands and knees because his legs were too stiff at first to hold him. There was a cattle-guard of poles laid across a side-road. He let the horse stand and felt his way up the side-road to a sudden house lifting a dark wall and snowy roof above him. He found the door, knocked, waited, knocked; a window rattled, a woman said frightened to death over his head, “Who’s that?”

  “Is this the Sachik farm?”

  “No! Who’s that?”

  “Have I passed the Sachiks’?”

  “Are ye the doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s the next but one on the left side. Want a lantern, doctor?”

  She came downstairs and gave him a lantern and matches; she held a candle, which dazzled his eyes so that he never saw her face.

  He went at the horse’s head now, the lantern in his left hand and the reins in his right, held close to the bridle. The horse’s docile, patient, stumbling walk, the liquid darkness of its eye in the gleam of the lantern, grieved Stefan sorely. They walked ahead very slowly and he looked for the dawn.

  A farmhouse flickered to his left when he was almost past it; snow, wind-plastered on its north wall, caught the light of the lantern. He led the horse back. The hinges of the gate squealed. Dark outbuildings crowded round. He knocked, waited, knocked. A light moved inside the house, the door opened, again a candle held at eye-level dazzled him.

  “Who is that?”

  “That’s you, Ekata,” he said.

  “Who is that? Stefan?”

  “I must have missed the other farm, the one in between.”

  “Come in—”

  “The horse. Is that the stable?”

  “There, to the left—”

  He was all righ
t while he found a stall for the horse, robbed the Sachiks’ roan of some hay and water, found a sack and rubbed the horse down a bit; he did all that very well, he thought, but when he got back to the house his knees went weak and he could scarcely see the room or Ekata who took his hand to bring him in. She had on a coat over something white, a nightgown. “Oh lad,” she said, “you rode from Kampe tonight?”

  “Poor old horse,” he said, and smiled. His voice said the words some while after he thought he had said them. He sat down on the sofa.

  “Wait there,” she said. It seemed she left the room for a while, then she was putting a cup of something in his hands. He drank; it was hot; the sting of brandy woke him long enough to watch her stir up the buried coals and put wood on the fire. “I wanted to talk to you, see,” he said, and then he fell asleep.

  She took off his shoes, put his legs up on the sofa, got a blanket and put it over him, tended the reluctant fire. He never stirred. She turned out the lamp and slipped back upstairs in the dark. Her bed was by the window of her attic room, and she could see or feel that it was now snowing soft and thick in the dark outside.

  She roused to a knock and sat up seeing the even light of snow on walls and ceiling. Her uncle peered in. He was wearing yellowish-white woollen underwear and his hair stuck up like fine wire around his bald spot. The whites of his eyes were the same color as his underwear. “Who’s that downstairs?”

  Ekata explained to Stefan, somewhat later in the morning, that he was on his way to Lotima on business for the Chorin Company, that he had started from Kampe at noon and been held up by a stone in his horse’s shoe and then by the snow.

  “Why?” he said, evidently confused, his face looking rather childish with fatigue and sleep.

  “I had to tell them something.”

  He scratched his head. “What time did I get here?”

  “About two in the morning.”

  He remembered how he had looked for the dawn, hours away.

  “What did you come for?” Ekata said. She was clearing the breakfast table; her face was stern, though she spoke softly.

  “I had a fight,” Stefan said. “With Kostant.”

  She stopped, holding two plates, and looked at him.

  “You don’t think I hurt him?” He laughed. He was light-headed, tired out, serene. “He knocked me cold. You don’t think I could have beat him?”

  “I don’t know,” Ekata said with distress.

  “I always lose fights,” Stefan said. “And run away.”

  The deaf man came through, dressed to go outside in heavy boots, an old coat made of blanketing; it was still snowing. “Ye’ll not get on to Lotima today, Mr Stefan,” he said in his loud even voice, with satisfaction. “Tomas says the nag’s lame on four legs.” This had been discussed at breakfast, but the deaf man had not heard. He had not asked how Kostant was getting on, and when he did so later in the day it was with the same satisfied malice: “And your brother, he’s down in the pits again, no doubt?” He did not try to hear the answer.

  Stefan spent most of the day by the fire sleeping. Only Ekata’s cousin was curious about him. She said to Ekata as they were cooking supper, “They say his brother is a handsome man.”

  “Kostant? The handsomest man I ever saw.” Ekata smiled, chopping onions.

  “I don’t know as I’d call this one handsome,” the cousin said tentatively.

  The onions were making Ekata cry; she laughed, blew her nose, shook her head. “Oh no,” she said.

  After supper Stefan met Ekata as she came into the kitchen from dumping out peelings and swill for the pigs. She wore her father’s coat, clogs on her shoes, her black kerchief. The freezing wind swept in with her till she wrestled the door shut. “It’s clearing,” she said, “the wind’s from the south.”

  “Ekata, do you know what I came here for—”

  “Do you know yourself?” she said, looking up at him as she set the bucket down.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Then I do, I suppose.”

  “There isn’t anywhere,” he said in rage as the uncle’s clumping boots approached the kitchen.

  “There’s my room,” she said impatiently. But the walls were thin, and the cousin slept in the next attic and her parents across the stairwell; she frowned angrily and said, “No. Wait till the morning.”

  In the morning, early, the cousin went off alone down the road. She was back in half an hour, her straw-stuffed boots smacking in the thawing snow and mud. The neighbor’s wife at the next house but one had said, “He said he was the doctor, I asked who it was was sick with you. I gave him the lantern, it was so dark I didn’t see his face, I thought it was the doctor, he said so.” The cousin was munching the words sweetly, deciding whether to accost Stefan with them, or Ekata, or both before witnesses, when around a bend and down the snow-clotted, sun-bright grade of the road two horses came at a long trot: the livery-stable horse and the farm’s old roan. Stefan and Ekata rode; they were both laughing. “Where ye going?” the cousin shouted, trembling. “Running away,” the young man called back, and they went past her, splashing the puddles into diamond-slivers in the sunlight of March, and were gone.

  1910

  A Week in the Country

  ON A SUNNY MORNING of 1962 in Cleveland, Ohio, it was raining in Krasnoy and the streets between grey walls were full of men. “It’s raining down my neck in here,” Kasimir complained, but his friend in the adjoining stall of the streetcorner W.C. did not hear him because he was also talking: “Historical necessity is a solecism, what is history except what had to happen? But you can’t extend that. What happens next? God knows!” Kasimir followed him out, still buttoning his trousers, and looked at the small boy looking at the nine-foot-long black coffin leaning against the W.C. “What’s in it?” the boy asked. “My great-aunt’s body,” Kasimir explained. He picked up the coffin, hurried on with Stefan Fabbre through the rain. “A farce, determinism’s a farce. Anything to avoid awe. Show me a seed,” Stefan Fabbre said stopping and pointing at Kasimir, “yes, I can tell you what it is, it’s an apple seed. But can I tell you that an apple tree will grow from it? No! Because there’s no freedom, we think there’s a law. But there is no law. There’s growth and death, delight and terror, an abyss, the rest we invent. We’re going to miss the train.” They jostled on up Tiypontiy Street, the rain fell harder. Stefan Fabbre strode swinging his briefcase, his mouth firmly closed, his white face shining wet. “Why didn’t you take up the piccolo? Give me that awhile,” he said as Kasimir tangled with an office-worker running for a bus. “Science bearing the burden of Art,” Kasimir said, “heavy, isn’t it?” as his friend hoisted the case and lugged it on, frowning and by the time they reached West Station gasping. On the platform in rain and steam they ran as others ran, heard whistles shriek and urgent Sanskrit blare from loudspeakers, and lurched exhausted into the first car. The compartments were all empty. It was the other train that was pulling out, jammed, a suburban train. Theirs sat still for ten minutes. “Nobody on this train but us?” Stefan Fabbre asked, morose, standing at the window. Then with one high peep the walls slid away. Raindrops shook and merged on the pane, tracks interwove on a viaduct, the two young men stared into bedroom windows and at brick walls painted with enormous letters. Abruptly nothing was left in the rain-dark evening sliding backwards to the east but a line of hills, black against a colorless clearing sky.

  “The country,” Stefan Fabbre said.

  He got out a biochemical journal from amongst socks and undershirts in his briefcase, put on dark-rimmed glasses, read. Kasimir pushed back wet hair that had fallen all over his forehead, read the sign on the windowsill that said DO NOT LEAN OUT, stared at the shaking walls and the rain shuddering on the window, dozed. He dreamed that walls were falling down around him. He woke scared as they pulled out of Okats. His friend sat looking out the window, white-faced and black-haired, confirming the isolation and disaster of Kasimir’s dream. “Can’t see anything,” he said. “Night. Countr
y’s the only place where they have night left.” He stared through the reflection of his own face into the night that filled his eyes with blessed darkness.

  “So here we are on a train going to Aisnar,” Kasimir said, “but we don’t know that it’s going to Aisnar. It might go to Peking.”

  “It might derail and we’ll all be killed. And if we do come to Aisnar? What’s Aisnar? Mere hearsay.” —“That’s morbid,” Kasi­mir said, glimpsing again the walls collapsing. —“No, exhilarating,” his friend answered. “Takes a lot of work to hold the world together, when you look at it that way. But it’s worthwhile. Building up cities, holding up the roofs by an act of fidelity. Not faith. Fidelity.” He gazed out the window through his reflected eyes. Kasimir shared a bar of mud-like chocolate with him. They came to Aisnar.

  Rain fell in the gold-paved, ill-lit streets while the autobus to Vermare and Prevne waited for its passengers in South Square under dripping sycamores. The case rode in the back seat. A chicken with a string round its neck scratched the aisle for grain, a bushy-haired woman held the other end of the string, a drunk farm-worker talked loudly to the driver as the bus groaned out of Aisnar southward into the country night, the same night, the blessed darkness.

  “So I says to him, I says, you don’t know what’ll happen tomorrow—”