Kalpa Imperial

by LAngelica Gorodischer, Ursula K. Le Guin

  “You don’t?” Orgammbm’s younger brother asked. “You really don’t? A spear, bow and arrows? Nothing?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “How are you going to hunt, then?”

  “I’m not going to hunt.”

  And yet he had hunted when he lived in the cities of the North, all rigged out with fine leather boots and costly, well-oiled weapons, in a cavalcade under the crowns of the autumn trees on the country estate of some nobleman who hadn’t been able to get out of inviting him. But now, no, now he didn’t want to hunt: let tigers poison the wells, let his guts knot up with hunger, but he wasn’t going to hunt.

  “Very well,” said Orgammbm, “very well, but you’ll want something to fish with.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “A net, maybe.”

  And next morning he left. But before he left, in the night, two things happened to him: he saw the townsmen dance, only the men, naked, shining, grave, all the men of the village, between the houses and the riverbank; and he spoke with Genna.

  “What are they doing?” he asked the girl.

  “Dancing, don’t you see?”

  “Yes, but why?”

  “What a question,” she said condescendingly.

  “I mean is it a religious occasion, or are they celebrating something?”

  “I don’t understand,” she said, and went on watching the men dance.

  “It’s I who don’t understand,” he said.

  “That’s true,” said the girl.

  They stayed side by side, watching. He saw the bare feet fall and rise, the heels strike and slide, the toes grip the hard earth, the bodies arch, the heads turn, the half-closed eyes, the open mouths.

  “What are they dancing?” he asked.

  “Ah!” said she. “Finally you understand. It’s the Twenty-Fourth Dance. It’s called Seven Shells.”

  And next morning he left, as he had said he would. He took his two pair of sandals, his belt, a bag of provisions, and a net. It was hot. The sky was cloudy but the sun’s so strong there in the South that it heated up everything from above the heavy clouds. And there’s so much water there, the rivers run and leap and overflow their channels, marshes spread out and lakes fill the low places, so that the world is green and golden and everything grows and sings. He had to keep off the insects that flew and crawled and dropped from branches, but his sandals protected the soles of his feet, and in the morning he’d pick damp tiaulana leaves, squeeze them with his fingers, and cover his body, face, arms and shoulders with the whitish juice. He lived on fruit and spinner-bird eggs and sometimes eggs of the little zedanna bird who leaves them to keep warm in the sun and goes off pecking up bugs by the water and only returns to them at evening; and he drank nothing but running water which was not stagnant, or dirty, or thick. He slept in the fork of a big tree when he found one, and if he didn’t find one he didn’t sleep but walked on, always farther south.

  He was going upstream along a large river, trying to keep close to its course, walking towards its springs. In places the river formed meanders and swamps, where the water seemed not to come from sources far to the south, but to well up endlessly out of the ground. He rested when the morning was getting on and the heat grew almost unbearable: he cleared the ground about the trunk of some high-topped tree not overgrown with ferns and creepers, and sat down there, not leaning back, his arms loose on his lifted knees, his stick within reach of his hand, and dozed. But his eyes were not always shut: he gazed now and then at the water or the green shadow, or watched small shy animals peep from the mouths of their burrows.

  He soon noticed that in the South the air was not that inert space he had known in parks, the suffocating perfumed mantle of bedrooms, the weary, stale atmosphere of casinos. The air he breathed here was as thick and fertile as the earth and water. The earth sustained everything and under it was the water; but the water rose up too and covered the earth, and the air that was above them both extended down into the earth enriched by the water, silent or noisy, and a white-gold dust floated and drifted around still things and among the insects with transparent wings and the greedy birds darting among fleshy leaves. And this joyous commotion went on all the time, everywhere, and he had to take part in it.

  One evening he heard someone singing, another evening he saw a hanged man.

  He was so tired when he first heard the singing that he thought he’d fallen asleep and was dreaming. But that couldn’t be: he was awake, walking, going forward, slowly but with a goal, that of finding a safe place to sleep. He wasn’t dreaming, for sure: somebody was singing. It might have been a man, for the voice was deep, opaque, almost harsh; but he was sure it was a woman, though he didn’t know why. It’s occurred to me that since Genna had hinted to him that there were things women did, and since it had been she who sang for him, he thought that in the South women did the singing as men did the dancing. He wasn’t entirely mistaken about this, I can tell you, not entirely. He stopped and listened. It wasn’t the best place to be standing, since the big, white, blind ants, which the North knows only as traveller’s tales, roamed there, quick, insatiable insects that feed on living wood and destroy tree-roots and soften the ground till it turns to a kind of ash that would give way under a rat’s weight let alone a man’s, but he stood still, because whether or not he sank into the ground was less important than listening to the song. And the song was very simple, almost foolish, almost nonsense like the songs happy kids make up while they’re hopping on one foot or walking where they’re not supposed to.

  The man with the spear goes running, running, the song went. And it went on:

  The rush-mat woman speaks, she speaks and says.

  There’s a child in the hammock.

  There’s a tree by the river.

  There’s a fish in the basket.

  And we’re still waiting, we’re still waiting.

  After that came a long silence, and when he was thinking about going on, not sure whether to look for the singer or for a place to sleep, the voice was heard again: there’s a child in the hammock, there’s a tree by the river, and so on to the end. This time he stayed still for a long time, but though he stood alert, hearing all the sounds of the forest, the song was done, and he went on his way, and despite weariness and sleepiness did not sleep for hours yet to come.

  Day after day he went on through the humid wilderness, alert to great and lesser perils, the needs of his body and those of the unknown world he was crossing. For though he tried to find what to eat when he was hungry and where to rest when he felt he couldn’t go on, he also did his best not to cut young branches that barred his way, not to destroy the shoots of the great trees or the pale buds that put forth from the branches, and he walked mindfully, as if he and the earth and the things that grew in it and walked on it were brothers, each life dependent on the others’ lives. When his solitude weighed on him he thought about Rammsa, her children, the men who danced the dance called Seven Shells, and was comforted. And sometimes he thought, but indifferently, with no change in his state of mind, about the men and women of the North, the salons, the parks, the festivals, the marble statues and the still air; about luxury, servants, gold, and power. And so he came to know his name.

  And he went on day after day, he didn’t know how many days because he had no way to count them and had no desire to, and one morning suddenly the river ran out into marshlands and the marshes vanished into solid ground and he thought the river was gone. It wasn’t, of course; never have I heard of a river vanishing like a magician at the fair, finished like a piece of bread. It hadn’t disappeared, and after one more day’s walk across the soft muddy land swarming with aquatic larvae and shoots of wetland plants he found it again, only now it was a little thread of water, a brook that didn’t seem remotely related to the mighty torrent he’d been following. But he went on following it, since it was all he had to keep him from walking in circles without ever getting anywhere.

  The brook ran from a lake. And in the lake,
as wide as a sea, a city was built on wooden pilings, greenish and eaten away by the years and the water, but more durable than the hardest stone. Boats carved from hollowed tree-trunks rocked, moored to the pilings, and in the boats were oars painted in bright colors, nets, baskets, fishing gear. He spent a whole day looking at the lake town from a distance, and the next day he walked down to the shore of the lake, before the men came down to the boats and unmoored them and went fishing. He spoke with them, and spoke with the women; children came up and touched his stiffened tunic and leather belt and took hold of his walking stick and looked at him with wide eyes.

  That day the men didn’t go out fishing. The people of the lake town asked him his name and he told them. They offered him food and drink and took him to one of the houses and told him he could rest there. They told him, too, that he could stay with them as long as he liked before he went on his way.

  “They’re waiting for you,” said one of the women, who was called Selldae. “They’re waiting for you somewhere else.”

  “Yes,” said an old man, who was missing some fingers of his left hand, “and they know you’re going to come.”

  “Where?” he asked.

  “Oh, over there,” said the old man, waving with his good hand, a gesture that included everything on the far side of the lake. “Over there.”

  “Where you go,” said Selldae’s sister, who looked like her but was fatter, heavier, sadder, “there they’ll be waiting for you.”

  “And you?” he asked. “Were you waiting for me too?”

  Yes, they told him. And they told him that not everything was said and that the man who has come must go, and that he who has come and gone must always come back, some day.

  He might have asked what that meant, or not asked but assumed that it was some legend or tradition of the South, but he did neither, now that he knew his name, and accepted and was silent, knowing, as they knew, that he must go and must return. He stayed six days in the village on the lake, a far shorter stay than he had made in Rammsa’s village, but after all he was not ill now. He slept in a tiny, very high house over the water; he ate, sometimes with the women in one or another house, most often in Selldae’s sister’s house, or with the old man with the mutilated hand and his grandsons, or with other men; he went fishing before sunrise with the youngest men and one or two hardy old ones; he helped repair the roofs of some houses after a storm and dived into the dark waters of the lake with the fishermen to inspect the pilings planted down in the lake-bottom. One night he heard a young girl singing, who lived with Selldae though she didn’t seem to be one of her daughters; she sang:

  The water is a burnt body

  that goes by;

  the song the color of earth

  rules your house and your belly

  and doesn’t go by;

  you won’t see the world

  that is green;

  the earth is the body of the man

  who comes back.

  And one evening he saved a little child who’d just begun to walk and fell into the lake from the platform of his mother’s house. The mother was a tiny, serious young woman who adorned her hair with yellow flowers at night, and three days later gave birth to her fourth child. She received her sodden, bawling son, who clung to her neck, and said that she had never thought that her boy was going to be one of those who come back from death. He was on the point of telling her that in fact the child hadn’t been dead, that he’d caught him a second before he went down and was drowned, but he said nothing to her, and instead of talking, which might be useless, thought that in these matters of death a second counts for nothing and that maybe the child was in fact dead when he fell into the water, before he fell, when he was born, before he was born, like us all. She said no more to him either, did not cry, did not thank him, and went off with the little boy who went on bawling and hanging on to her neck, leaving a trail of drops of lake water on the weathered boards of the platform.

  He left the village at dawn of the seventh day. He carried a pouch full of provisions and had a new walking stick, stronger, better made, and a tunic of newly woven cotton, shorter and more comfortable than the old one. Some of the men, almost all of them actually, went with him in their boats to the far side of the lake.

  “Over there,” they told him when they landed, “are the sources of the river.”

  “And over there,” another man said, “the foothills of the Drambulnyarad. And over that way, the Bogs of Nan, and there, you have to be careful about quicksand.”

  “Good,” he said, “farewell,” and then stopped. “What is that music?”

  “That’s the Sixth Dance,” said one of the fishermen. “The one called The Lamp and the Cauldron.”

  Then he asked, “How many dances are there?”

  “Thirty-seven,” they replied. “For a long, long time there have been thirty-seven dances.”

  He did not go towards Drambulnyarad nor towards the Bogs of Nan but went on in search of the springs of the river. Now he went far more quickly; he had learned to follow the tracks of the big rodents that go along clearing and beating a path that’s almost invisible because though their paws and teeth leave the ground bare, they don’t harm the tender little branches growing across it that hide it; he had learned you can’t walk far or easily when the sun falls straight down on the earth, nor when it’s very red or very white around the horizon; that you have to drink by day, very early or very late, never at midday or in the middle of the night, and always in places where the earth shows the tracks of many different kinds of animals; that you have to walk first and eat after, and after eating walk slowly a very short way and then sleep; that you can walk far and eat little so long as you drink enough; that it doesn’t work to eat much and walk much; and that it’s dangerous to eat much and walk little.

  Coming to a clearing made by man and not by fire or water or animals, on a stormy evening, he thought he was near a settlement and decided to rest where he was that night and come among people next day. He studied the ground, selected a place, and sat down. Very soon rain began to fall. There was a great bolt of lightning, and before the thunder sounded he glimpsed a man turning slowly around, as if to look at him, across the clearing. In what light was left he looked at the man again and saw he kept turning and as if wavering in the wind. He got up, went over, and spoke; but the man’s feet did not touch the ground: he was hanging by the neck on a rope tied to a branch not far up the tree, he was blindfolded and his hands were tied behind his back; his lips were purple, his torso naked, his chest laid open with the point of a knife or spear, a wound that had bled when the executed man was still alive. Now that he knew how to read the earth, the plants, and even the air and water, now that he knew the smells, and the tips of his fingers had grown as sensitive as the palms of his hands had grown hard and callused, he knew that five men had brought this one by force, and behind them had come a woman; he knew that they had struggled a little, not much, with the prisoner, and that they had hanged him after marking his chest, had waited for him to die, had peeled and eaten some fruit while they waited, and had gone, the woman ahead, the men following, this time slowly, peacefully.

  A dead man should be buried—in the South, in the North, anywhere, everywhere. He stayed near the hanged man and waited till the earth grew soft under the rain, and when he felt the mud yielding and with a little effort could push his feet into it, he used a dead branch and a stone to dig a grave at the foot of the gallows tree.

  The storm passed; like a wrathful woman who yells and breaks all the plates and bowls in the cupboard and goes off to stay in her mother’s house or with her elder sister, it went away muttering between its teeth and sobbing, and left silence and fallen twigs and puddles and bent trees and the moon away up there in the black sky.

  Next day he went on walking but found no settlement, nor on the next day or the next. He ate little, slept, drank, walked and walked, and thought about the hanged man, about death, vengeance, justice. He heard no singin
g, but talk of justice; he was in a courtroom.

  He had carefully avoided courts, up there in the North, I tell you that, for this man who walked through the green and rancorous South no longer thought about the rich provinces where dry judges consult dusty papers before choosing life or death for an accused man whom they know nothing about, but even if he’d frequented courtrooms assiduously he wouldn’t have been able to identify what he saw now as a place and ceremony where it was decided what was just and what was not.

  He saw no drapes of black and purple velvet, no balustrades of marble and bronze, no uniforms or robes. The judge was not a thin, bilious man, nor a greasy, sleepy, fat one, but a dark-eyed, middle-aged woman. There were no prosecutors, no defenders, and a lot of people were there to see judgment done. And there was an old woman, a very old woman, who had been carried there on a litter, probably because she could no longer travel a long way through trees and ferns, ford rivers, or cross rope bridges, sitting behind the stump that served as the judge’s seat. Now and then she spoke to the woman who was the judge, only to her, never to anyone else, reminding her of similar cases or giving her advice.

  He saw two men absolved and two men and a woman condemned. He heard laughter and saw a defendant and a claimant noisily settle their difference, but he also saw tears and lamentation and heard groans and complaints. The condemned woman screamed insults and tried to kill the judge, and one of the guilty men sat down on the ground and wept.

  He asked how it was that there were no guards nor prison cells nor police.

  “How can you not know that?” they asked him, and he remembered Ramma’s children.

  They told him that there were prisons, and that some people were foolish enough to escape or resist, but that everybody knew what was in store for people who didn’t submit to village law.