I crossed the Kargav, this time on lower passes, on a road that winds along above the coast of the southern sea. I paid a visit to the first village I had stayed in, when the fishermen brought me in from Horden Island three years ago; the folk of that Hearth received me, now as then, without the least surprise. I spent a week in the big port city Thather at the mouth of the River Ench, and then in early summer started on foot into Kerm Land.
I walked east and south into the steep harsh country full of crags and green hills and great rivers and lonely houses, till I came to Icefoot Lake. From the lakeshore looking up southward at the hills I saw a light I knew: the blink, the white suffusion of sky, the glare of the glacier lying high beyond. The Ice was there.
Estre was a very old place. Its Hearth and outbuildings were all of grey stone cut from the steep mountainside to which it clung. It was bleak, full of the sound of wind.
I knocked and the door was opened. I said, ‘I ask the hospitality of the Domain. I was a friend of Therem of Estre.’
The one who opened to me, a slight, grave-looking fellow of nineteen or twenty, accepted my words in silence and silently admitted me to the Hearth. He took me to the wash-house, the tiring-rooms, the great kitchen, and when he had seen to it that the stranger was clean, clothed, and fed, he left me to myself in a bedroom that looked down out of deep slit-windows over the grey lake and the grey thore-forests that lie between Estre and Stok. It was a bleak land, a bleak house. Fire roared in the deep hearth, giving as always more warmth for the eye and spirit than for the flesh, for the stone floor and walls, the wind outside blowing down off the mountains and the Ice, drank up most of the heat of the flames. But I did not feel the cold as I used to, my first two years on Winter; I had lived long in a cold land, now.
In an hour or so the boy (he had a girl’s quick delicacy in his looks and movements, but no girl could keep so grim a silence as he did) came to tell me that the Lord of Estre would receive me if it pleased me to come. I followed him downstairs, through long corridors where some kind of game of hide-and-seek was going on. Children shot by us, darted around us, little ones shrieking with excitement, adolescents slipping like shadows from door to door, hands over their mouths to keep laughter still. One fat little thing of five or six caromed into my legs, then plunged and grabbed my escort’s hand for protection. ‘Sorve!’ he squeaked, staring up wide-eyed at me all the time, ‘Sorve, I’m going to hide in the brewery—!’ Off he went like a round pebble from a sling. The young man Sorve, not at all discomposed, led me on and brought me into the Inner Hearth to the Lord of Estre.
Esvans Harth rem ir Estraven was an old man, past seventy, crippled by an arthritic disease of the hips. He sat erect in a rolling-chair by the fire. His face was broad, much blunted and worn down by time, like a rock in a torrent: a calm face, terribly calm.
‘You are the Envoy, Genry Ai?’
‘I am.’
He looked at me, and I at him. Therem had been the son, child of the flesh, of this old lord. Therem the younger son; Arek, the elder, that brother whose voice he had heard in mine bespeaking him; both dead now. I could not see anything of my friend in that worn, calm, hard old face that met my gaze. I found nothing there but the certainty, the sure fact of Therem’s death.
I had come on a fool’s errand to Estre, hoping for solace. There was no solace; and why should a pilgrimage to the place of my friend’s childhood make any difference, fill any absence, soothe any remorse? Nothing could be changed now. My coming to Estre had, however, another purpose, and this I could accomplish.
‘I was with your son in the months before his death. I was with him when he died. I’ve brought you the journals he kept. And if there’s anything I can tell you of those days—’
No particular expression showed on the old man’s face. That calmness was not to be altered. But the young one with a sudden movement came out of the shadows into the light between the window and the fire, a bleak uneasy light, and he spoke harshly: ‘In Erhenrang they still call him Estraven the Traitor.’
The old lord looked at the boy, then at me.
‘This is Sorve Harth,’ he said, ‘heir of Estre, my sons’ son.’
There is no ban on incest there, I knew it well enough. Only the strangeness of it, to me a Terran, and the strangeness of seeing the flash of my friend’s spirit in this grim, fierce, provincial boy, made me dumb for a while. When I spoke my voice was unsteady, ‘The king will recant. Therem was no traitor. What does it matter what fools call him?’ The old lord nodded slowly, smoothly. ‘It matters,’ he said.
‘You crossed the Gobrin Ice together,’ Sorve demanded, ‘you and he?’
‘We did.’
‘I should like to hear that tale, my Lord Envoy,’ said old Esvans, very calm. But the boy, Therem’s son, said stammering, ‘Will you tell us how he died? – Will you tell us about the other worlds out among the stars – the other kinds of men, the other lives?’
THE GETHENIAN CALENDAR
AND CLOCK
The Year.
Gethen’s period of revolution is 8401 Terran Standard Hours, or .96 of the Terran Standard Year.
The period of rotation is 23.08 Terran Standard Hours: the Gethenian year contains 364 days.
In Karhide/Orgoreyn years are not numbered consecutively from a base year forward to the present; the base year is the current year. Every New Years Day (Getheny Thern) the year just past becomes the year ‘one-ago’, and every past date is increased by one. The future is similarly counted, next year being the year ‘one-to-come,’ until it in turn becomes the Year One.
The inconvenience of this system in record-keeping is palliated by various devices, for instance reference to well-known events, reigns of kings, dynasties, local lords, etc. The Yomeshta count in 144-year cycles from the Birth of Meshe (2202 years-ago, in Ekumenical Year 1492), and keep ritual celebrations every twelfth year; but this system is strictly cultic and is not officially employed even by the government of Orgoreyn, which sponsors the Yomesh religion.
The Month.
The period of revolution of Gethen’s moon is 26 Gethenian days; the rotation is captured, so that the moon presents the same face to the planet always. There are 14 months in the year, and as solar and lunar calendars concur so closely that adjustment is required only about once in 200 years, the days of the month are invariable, as are the dates of the phases of the moon. The Karhidish names of the months:
Winter:
1. Thern
2. Thanern
3. Nimmer
4. Anner
Spring:
5. Irrem
6. Moth
7. Tuwa
Summer:
8. Osme
9. Ockre
10. Kus
11. Hakanna
Autumn:
12. Gor
13. Susmy
14. Grende
The 26-day month is divided into two halfmonths of 13 days.
The Day.
The day (23.08 T.S.H.) is divided into 10 hours (see below); being invariable, the days of the month are generally referred to by name like our days of the week, not by number. (Many of the names refer to the phase of the moon, e.g. Getheny, ‘darkness’, Arhad, ‘first crescent’, etc. The prefix od- used in the second halfmonth is a reversive, giving a contrary meaning, so that Odgetheny might be translated as ‘undarkness’.) The Karhidish names of the days of the month:
1. Getheny
14. Odgetheny
2. Sordny
15. Odsordny
3. Eps
16. Odeps
4. Arhad
17. Odarhad
5. Netherhad
18. Onnetherhad
6. Streth
19. Odstreth
7. Berny
20. Obberny
8. Orny
21. Odorny
9. Harhahad
22. Odharhahad
10. Guyrny
23. Odguyrny
11. Yrny
&nbs
p; 24. Odyrny
12. Posthe
25. Opposthe
13. Tormenbod
26. Ottormenbod
The Hour.
The decimal clock used in all Gethenian cultures converts as follows, very roughly, to the Terran double-twelve-hour clock (Note: This is a mere guide to the time of day implied by a Gethenian ‘Hour’; the complexities of an exact conversion, given the fact that the Gethenian day contains only 23.08 Terran Standard Hours, are irrelevant to my purpose):
First Hour
…
noon to 2:30 p.m.
Second Hour
…
2:30 to 5:00 p.m.
Third Hour
…
5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Fourth Hour
…
7:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Fifth Hour
…
9:30 to midnight
Sixth Hour
…
midnight to 2:30 a.m.
Seventh Hour
…
2:30 to 5:00 a.m.
Eighth Hour
…
5:00 to 7:00 a.m.
Ninth Hour
…
7:00 to 9:30 a.m.
Tenth Hour
…
9:30 to noon
COMING OF AGE IN KARHIDE
By Sov Thade Tage em Ereb, of Rer,
in Karhide, on Gethen.
I live in the oldest city in the world. Long before there were kings in Karhide, Rer was a city, the marketplace and meeting ground for all the Northeast, the Plains, and Kerm Land. The Fastness of Rer was a center of learning, a refuge, a judgment seat fifteen thousand years ago. Karhide became a nation here, under the Geger kings, who ruled for a thousand years. In the thousandth year Sedern Geger, the Unking, cast the crown into the River Arre from the palace towers, proclaiming an end to dominion. The time they call the Flowering of Rer, the Summer Century, began then. It ended when the Hearth of Harge took power and moved their capital across the mountains to Erhenrang. The Old Palace has been empty for centuries. But it stands. Nothing in Rer falls down. The Arre floods through the street-tunnels every year in the Thaw, winter blizzards may bring thirty feet of snow, but the city stands. Nobody knows how old the houses are, because they have been rebuilt forever. Each one sits in its gardens without respect to the position of any of the others, as vast and random and ancient as hills. The roofed streets and canals angle about among them. Rer is all corners. We say that the Harges left because they were afraid of what might be around the corner.
Time is different here. I learned in school how the Orgota, the Ekumen, and most other people count years. They call the year of some portentous event Year One and number forward from it. Here it’s always Year One. On Getheny Thern, New Year’s Day, the Year One becomes one-ago, one-to-come becomes One, and so on. It’s like Rer, everything always changing but the city never changing.
When I was fourteen (in the Year One, or fifty-ago) I came of age. I have been thinking about that a good deal recently.
It was a different world. Most of us had never seen an Alien, as we called them then. We might have heard the Mobile talk on the radio, and at school we saw pictures of Aliens – the ones with hair around their mouths were the most pleasingly savage and repulsive. Most of the pictures were disappointing. They looked too much like us. You couldn’t even tell that they were always in kemmer. The female Aliens were supposed to have enormous breasts, but my mothersib Dory had bigger breasts than the ones in the pictures.
When the Defenders of the Faith kicked them out of Orgoreyn, when King Emran got into the Border War and lost Erhenrang, even when their Mobiles were outlawed and forced into hiding at Estre in Kerm, the Ekumen did nothing much but wait. They had waited for two hundred years, as patient as Handdara. They did one thing: they took our young king offworld to foil a plot, and then brought the same king back sixty years later to end her wombchild’s disastrous reign. Argaven XVII is the only king who ever ruled four years before her heir and forty years after.
The year I was born (the Year One, or sixty-four-ago) was the year Argaven’s second reign began. By the time I was noticing anything beyond my own toes, the war was over, the West Fall was part of Karhide again, the capital was back in Erhenrang, and most of the damage done to Rer during the Overthrow of Emran had been repaired. The old houses had been rebuilt again. The Old Palace had been patched again. Argaven XVII was miraculously back on the throne again. Everything was the way it used to be, ought to be, back to normal, just like the old days – everybody said so.
Indeed those were quiet years, an interval of recovery before Argaven, the first Gethenian who ever left our planet, brought us at last fully into the Ekumen; before we, not they, became the Aliens; before we came of age. When I was a child we lived the way people had lived in Rer forever. It is that way, that timeless world, that world around the corner, I have been thinking about, and trying to describe for people who never knew it. Yet as I write I see how also nothing changes, that it is truly the Year One always, for each child that comes of age, each lover who falls in love.
There were a couple of thousand people in the Ereb Hearths, and a hundred and forty of them lived in my Hearth, Ereb Tage. My name is Sov Thade Tage em Ereb, after the old way of naming we still use in Rer. The first thing I remember is a huge dark place full of shouting and shadows, and I am falling upward through a golden light into the darkness. In thrilling terror, I scream. I am caught in my fall, held, held close; I weep; a voice so close to me that it seems to speak through my body says softly, ‘Sov, Sov, Sov.’ And then I am given something wonderful to eat, something so sweet, so delicate that never again will I eat anything quite so good …
I imagine that some of my wild elder hearthsibs had been throwing me about, and that my mother comforted me with a bit of festival cake. Later on when I was a wild elder sib we used to play catch with babies for balls; they always screamed, with terror or with delight, or both. It’s the nearest to flying anyone of my generation knew. We had dozens of different words for the way snow falls, descends, glides, blows, for the way clouds move, the way ice floats, the way boats sail; but not that word. Not yet. And so I don’t remember ‘flying’. I remember falling upward through the golden light.
Family houses in Rer are built around a big central hall. Each story has an inner balcony clear round that space, and we call the whole story, rooms and all, a balcony. My family occupied the whole second balcony of Ereb Tage. There were a lot of us. My grandmother had borne four children, and all of them had children, so I had a bunch of cousins as well as a younger and an older wombsib. ‘The Thades always kemmer as women and always get pregnant,’ I heard neighbors say, variously envious, disapproving, admiring. ‘And they never keep kemmer,’ somebody would add. The former was an exaggeration, but the latter was true. Not one of us kids had a father. I didn’t know for years who my getter was, and never gave it a thought. Clannish, the Thades preferred not to bring outsiders, even other members of our own Hearth, into the family. If young people fell in love and started talking about keeping kemmer or making vows, Grandmother and the mothers were ruthless. ‘Vowing kemmer, what do you think you are, some kind of noble? some kind of fancy person? The kemmerhouse was good enough for me and it’s good enough for you,’ the mothers said to their lovelorn children, and sent them away, clear off to the old Ereb Domain in the country, to hoe braties till they got over being in love.
So as a child I was a member of a flock, a school, a swarm, in and out of our warren of rooms, tearing up and down the staircases, working together and learning together and looking after the babies – in our own fashion – and terrorising quieter hearthmates by our numbers and our noise. As far as I know we did no real harm. Our escapades were well within the rules and limits of the sedate, ancient Hearth, which we felt not as constraints but as protection, the walls that kept us safe. The only time we got punished was when my cousin Sether decided it would be e
xciting if we tied a long rope we’d found to the second-floor balcony railing, tied a big knot in the rope, held onto the knot, and jumped. ‘I’ll go first,’ Sether said. Another misguided attempt at flight. The railing and Sether’s broken leg were mended, and the rest of us had to clean the privies, all the privies of the Hearth, for a month. I think the rest of the Hearth had decided it was time the young Thades observed some discipline.
Although I really don’t know what I was like as a child, I think that if I’d had any choice I might have been less noisy than my playmates, though just as unruly. I used to love to listen to the radio, and while the rest of them were racketing around the balconies or the centerhall in winter, or out in the streets and gardens in summer, I would crouch for hours in my mother’s room behind the bed, playing her old serem-wood radio very softly so that my sibs wouldn’t know I was there. I listened to anything, lays and plays and hearth-tales, the Palace news, the analyses of grain harvests and the detailed weather-reports; I listened every day all one winter to an ancient saga from the Pering Storm-Border about snowghouls, perfidious traitors, and bloody ax-murders, which haunted me at night so that I couldn’t sleep and would crawl into bed with my mother for comfort. Often my younger sib was already there in the warm, soft, breathing dark. We would sleep all entangled and curled up together like a nest of pesthry.
The Left Hand Of Darkness (SF Masterworks) Page 27