Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Our family animals when I was a small child were himpi, poultry, and a cat. Our cat was black without a white hair, handsome, mannerly, and a great hunter. We traded her kittens for himpi, so that for a while we had a big pen of himpi. I looked after them and the chickens, and kept cats out of the runs and pens down under the lower balconies. When I began staying with the animals I was still so small that the green-tailed cock frightened me. He knew it, and would come at me jerking his neck and swearing, and I would scramble over the divider into the himpi run to escape him. The himpi would come out and sit up and whistle at me. They were a comfort to me, even more than kittens. I learned not to name them, and not to trade them alive for eating, but to kill quickly those I traded, since some people kill animals without care or skill, causing fear and pain. I cried enough to suit even my grandfather, after the night a sheepdog went amok and got into the run and slaughtered every himpi but a few nestlings. I could not speak to a dog for months after that. But it turned out well for my family, since the sheepdog’s people gave us a ewe in lamb to make up for the loss of our himpi. The ewe bore twin ewe lambs, and so my mother was a shepherd again, and my grandmother had family wool to spin and weave.

  I do not remember learning to read and dance; my grandmother was teaching me from before the time I began to speak and walk. When I was five I began going to the heyimas with the other Blue Clay children, mornings, and later I studied with teachers in the heyimas and in the Blood, Oak, and Mole Lodges; I learned the Salt Journey; I studied a little with the poet Ire, and a long time with the potter Clay Sun. I was not quick to learn, and never considered going to a school in one of the great towns, though several children of Sinshan did so. I liked learning in the heyimas, taking part in a structure larger than my own knowledge, in which I could find relief from feelings of fear and anger which unaided I could not understand or get past. Yet I did not learn as much as I might have done, but always hung back, and said, “I can’t do that.”

  Some of the children, illmeaning or ignorant, called me Hwikmas, “half-House.” I had also heard people say of me, “She is half a person.” I understood this in my own way, badly, since it was not explained to me at home. I had not the courage to ask questions at the heyimas, or to go where I might have learned about matters outside the little town of Sinshan, and begun to see the Valley as a part of a whole as well as a whole. Since neither my mother nor her mother spoke of him, in the first years of my life all I knew of my father was that he had come from outside the Valley and had gone away again. This meant to me only that I had no father’s mother, no father’s House, and therefore was a half-person. I had not even heard of the Condor people. I had lived eight years before we went to the hot springs in Kastoha-na to treat my grandmother’s rheumatism, and in the common place there saw men of the Condor.

  I will tell that journey. It was a small journey many years ago. It is a journey of the still air.

  We got up in the darkness of a morning about a month past the World Dance. I gave some meat I had saved to the black cat Sidi, who was growing old. I had thought she would be hungry while we were away, and the thought had worried me for days. My mother told me, “You eat that. The cat will catch what she needs!” My mother was stern and reasoning. My grandmother said, “The child is feeding her soul. Let be.”

  We put out the hearthfire and left the door open a little for the cat and the wind. We went down the stairs under the last stars; the houses looked like hills in the darkness, dark. Out on the common place it seemed lighter. We crossed the Hinge and went to the Blue Clay heyimas. Shell was waiting for us there; she was a member of the Doctors Lodge and had treated my grandmother’s pain, and they were old friends. They filled the water basin and sang the Return together. When we came up into the dancing place the light was beginning. Shell came back across the Hinge with us and through town, and after we crossed the bridge over Sinshan Creek we all squatted there under the live oaks and pissed, and said, “Go well! Stay well!” laughing. That was how Lower Valley people used to do when they left on a journey, but only old people remember it now. Then Shell went back and we went on past the barns, between the creeks, across Sinshan Fields. The sky above the hills across the Valley began to be yellow and red; where we were in the middle the woods and hills were green; behind us Sinshan Mountain was blue and dark. So we walked in the arm of life.* Birds were singing their different songs in the air, in the trees, and in the fields. As we came to Amiou path and turned northwest to face Grandmother Mountain, the southeast mountains let go the sun’s edge, white. Now I walk that way in that light.

  My grandmother Valiant felt well and walked easily that morning, and she said, “Let’s go and see our family in Madidinou.” So we went that way, towards the sun, and came there along Sinshan Creek, where the wild and domestic geese and ducks were feeding and talking in great numbers in the cattail marshes. I had been to Madidinou many times, of course, but this time the town looked altogether different, since I was on a journey beyond it. I felt serious and important, and did not want to play with my Red Adobe cousins, though they were the children I loved best. My grandmother visited awhile with her daughter-in-law—her son died before my birth—and her grandchildren’s stepfather, and then we went on our way, crossing the plum and apricot orchards to the Old Straight Road.

  Himpí

  I had been past and across the Old Straight Road with my Madidinou cousins, but now I was going to walk on it. I felt important but awed, and whispered heya for the first nine steps. People said it was the oldest work of hands in all the Valley, that nobody knew low long there had been a road there. Parts of it were indeed straight, but other parts went curving off towards the River and then came back to the straight. In the dust were marks of feet, sheep’s hooves, donkeys’ hooves, dogs’ paws, people’s feet shod, people’s feet bare, so many tracks of feet that I thought they must be all the tracks of all the people that had ever walked on the road for fifty thousand years. Great Valley oaks stood along the sides of the road to give windbreak and shade, and in places elms, or poplars, or huge white eucalyptus so vast and twisted that they looked older than the Road; but it was so wide that even the morning shadows did not reach across it. I thought that because it was so old, it had to be wide; but my mother explained that it was wide because the big flocks of the Upper Valley went along it to the salt-grass prairies at the Mouths of the Na after the World, and came back up-valley after the Grass, and some of those flocks were of a thousand sheep or more. They had all gone by, and we met only a couple of dungcarts following after the last of them, with a group of shitty and raucous adolescents from Telina shovelling up dung for the fields. They called all sorts of jokes at us, and my mothers replied laughing, but I hid my face. There were some other travellers on the road, and when they greeted us, again I hid my face each time; but once they were past I stared after them and asked so many questions, who are they? where are they coming from? where are they going?, that Valiant began to laugh at me and answer me with jokes.

  Because she was lame we went slowly, and because it was all new to me the way seemed immensely long to me, but by mid-morning we came through the vineyards to Telina-na. I saw that town rise beside the Na, the great barns, the walls and windows of its houses among the oaks, the roofs of the heyimas, high-stepped, red and yellow around the bannered dancing place, a town like a bunch of grapes, like a cock pheasant, rich, elaborate, amazing, beautiful.

  My grandmother’s half-sister’s son was living in Telina-na in a Red Adobe household, and that family had sent word to us to stay with them on our way. Telina was so much bigger than Sinshan that I thought there was no end to it, and that household was so much bigger than ours that I thought there was no end to them. Actually there were only seven or eight, living in the ground floor of Hard-cinder House, but other relatives and friends kept coming and going, and there was so much working and talking and cooking and bringing and taking that I thought this household must be the wealthiest in the world. They heard me w
hisper to my grandmother, “Look! There are seven cooking-pots!” They all laughed at that. I was ashamed at first, but they kept repeating what I had said and laughing with so much good nature that I began saying things to make them laugh more. After I said, “This household is huge, like a mountain!” my half-uncle’s wife Vine said, “Come and live with us awhile in this mountain, then, you North Owl. We have seven pots but no daughter. We need one!” She meant that; she was the center of all that giving and taking and flowing, a generous person. But my mother did not let the words come to her, and my grandmother smiled but said nothing.

  That evening my Red Adobe cousins, Vine’s two sons and some other children of the household, took me all around Telina. Hardcinder House is one of the inner houses of the left-hand common place. In the center place a horse race was going on, a wonder to me who had never dreamed of a common place big enough to hold a horse race on. I had not seen many horses, for that matter; in Sinshan it was donkey races in a cow pasture. The course was around the place leftwards, reverse, and back around rightwards to make the heyiya-if. People were up in the balconies and out on the roofs with oil and battery lamps, betting and drinking and shouting, and the horses ran through shadow and flashing lights, turning as fast as swallows, the riders yipping and yelling. Over in some balconies of the right-hand place people were singing, getting ready for the Summer dancing,

  “Two quail run,

  Two quail rise…”

  Over in the dancing place they were singing down in the Serpentine heyimas, too, but we only went by there on the way to the River. Down among the willows there where the lights from the town made a little gleaming among the shadows, couples had come away to enjoy privacy. We children sneaked around looking for them in the willow thickets, and when we found a couple my cousins would yell, “Holy mole, there’s sand in the hole!” or make rude noises, and the couple would get up swearing and come after us, and we would scatter and run. If those cousins of mine did that every warm night, there wasn’t much need for contraceptives in Telina. When we got tired we went back to the house and ate some cold beans and went to sleep on the balconies and porches. All night we heard them singing the Quail Song over the way.

  Next morning we three left early, though not before daybreak and a good breakfast. As we crossed the Na on the arched stone bridge, my mother held my hand. She did not do that often. I thought she did it because it was sacred to cross the River. I think now she was afraid to lose me. She thought she should let me stay in the rich town with those rich relatives.

  When we were away from Telina-na her mother said to her, “For the winter, perhaps, Willow?”

  My mother said nothing.

  I did not think anything about it. I was happy, and talked the whole way to Chumo about the wonderful things I had seen and heard and done in Telina-na. All the time I talked my mother held my hand.

  We came into Chumo hardly knowing we had come into it, the houses are so scattered out and hidden among trees. We were to spend the night at our heyimas there, but first we went to visit my grandmother’s husband, my mother’s father. He had a room of his own with some of his Yellow Adobe relatives in a single-story house under oaks in sight of the creek, a pretty place. His room, which was his workroom, was large and dank. Up till then I had always known my grandfather by his middle name, Potter, but he had changed his name: he told us to call him Corruption.

  I thought that was a crazy name, and being puffed up by the laughter of the family in Telina when I made jokes, I said to my mother, pretty loudly, “Does he stink?” My grandmother heard and said, “Be quiet. It’s nothing to joke about.” I felt bad and foolish, but my grandmother didn’t seem to be cross with me. When the other people of the house had gone back to their rooms, leaving us with my grandfather in his room, she said to him, “What kind of name have you let come to you?”

  He said, “A true name.”

  He looked different from the way he had looked the summer before in Sinshan. He had always been gloomy and complaining. Nothing was ever right, and nobody ever did things right except himself, although he never did anything much, because the time wasn’t right. Now he still looked grim and sour, but he behaved with importance. He said to Valiant, “There’s no use going to the hot springs for a cure. You’d do better staying home and learning how to think.”

  “How do you learn that?” she asked.

  He said, “You have to learn that your pains and aches are merely an error in thinking. Your body is not real.”

  “I think it’s real,” Valiant said, and she laughed and slapped her hips.

  “Like this?” Corruption said. He was holding the wooden paddle he used to smooth the outside of the big clay storage jars he made. The paddle was carved of olive wood, as long as my arm and a handspan wide. He held it up in his right hand, brought his left hand up towards it, and passed it through his left hand. It went through muscle and bone like a knife through water.

  Valiant and Willow stared at the paddle and the hand. He motioned to them to let him do the same thing to them. They did not put up their hands; but I was curious, and wanted to go on having attention paid to me, so I held up my right arm. Corruption reached out the paddle and passed it through my arm between wrist and elbow. I felt the soft motion of it; it felt as a candle flame feels when you pass a finger through it. It made me laugh with surprise. My grandfather looked at me and said, “This North Owl might come to the Warriors.”

  It was the first time I had heard that word.

  Valiant said, and I could tell she was angry, “No chance of that. Your Warriors are all men.”

  “She can marry one,” said my grandfather. “When the time comes she can marry Dead Sheep’s son.”

  “You can go do such-and-such with your dead sheep!” Valiant said, which made me laugh again, but Willow touched her arm to quieten her. I don’t know whether my mother was frightened by the power her father had shown, or by the quarrelling between her father and mother; anyhow, she restored quiet behavior between them. We drank a glass of wine with my grandfather, and then we walked with him to the dancing place of Chumo and to the Blue Clay heyimas. We spent the night there in their guest room, the first night I had slept underground. I liked the silence and stillness of the air, but was not used to it, and kept waking in the night and listening, and only when I heard my mothers’ breathing could I sleep again.

  There were some other people Valiant wanted to see in Chumo, where she had lived when she learned tapestry weaving, and we did not leave that town till near noon. As we went along the northeast side of the River the Valley narrowed in, and the road went among orchards of olive, plum, and nectarine, among hills terraced with vines. I had never been so close to the Mountain, and it filled my eyes. When I looked back, I could not see Sinshan Mountain: its shape had changed, or other mountains of the southwest side had hidden it. That alarmed me. I finally spoke of it to my mother, who understood my fear, and reassured me that when we returned to Sinshan our mountain would be where it belonged.

  After we crossed the Wether Creek we could see the town of Chukulmas up in the hills across the Valley, its Fire Tower standing up by itself, built of colored stones, red, orange, and yellowish-white, patterned as finely as a basket or a snake. Cattle grazed in the yellow pasture-bays on the foothills, between the arms of the woods. On the narrowed, flat floor of the Valley were many wineries and fruit-drying sheds, and the orcharders from Chukulmas were putting up summerhouses. Beside the Na the dark mills loomed among the oaks, their wheels making a sound you could hear for a long way Quail were calling the three-note call and larks went up from the fields and the buzzards turned very high up. The sunlight was clear, the air was still.

  My mother said, “This is a day of the Ninth House.”

  My grandmother said only, “I’ll be glad to get to Kastoha.” Since we left Chumo she had been silent and walked lame.

  There was a feather on the way before my mother’s feet, a grey-barred, blue wing-feather of a jay. It wa
s the answer to what she had said. She picked it up and held it as she walked. She was a small woman, round-faced, with fine hands and feet, barefoot that day, wearing old buckskin trousers and a sleeveless shirt, carrying a little backpack, her hair braided and coiled, a blue feather in her hand. So she walks in the sunlight in the still air.

  Shadows were coming across the Valley from the western hills when we came to Kastoha-na. Valiant saw the roofs above the orchards and said, “Aha, there’s Granny’s Twat!” Old people used to call Kastoha that, because it is between the spread legs of the Mountain. Hearing it called that, I had imagined the town to be set among fir and redwood trees and to be a cave, dark and mysterious, with the River running out of it. When we came across the Na Bridge and I saw it was a big town like Telina only bigger yet, with hundreds of houses, and more people than I knew were in the world, I began crying. Maybe it was shame that made me cry, because I saw how silly I had been to think that a town could be a cave; maybe I was frightened or tired from all I had seen in the days and nights of our journey. Valiant took my right arm in her hands and felt it and looked at it. She had not done that after Corruption had put the paddle through it; nothing at all had been said about that. “He’s an old fool,” she said now, “and so am I.” She took off the silver crescent bracelet which she always wore, and slipped it over my hand onto my right arm. “There,” she said. “It won’t fall off, North Owl.”

  She was so thin that the crescent was only a little large for my small arm; but that was not what she meant. I stopped crying. In the lodging house by the hot springs that night I slept, but while I slept I knew all night that the moon was on my arm, under my head.

  On the next day I saw the Condor for the first time. Everything in Kastoha-na was strange to me, everything was new, everything was different from home; but as soon as I saw those men I knew that Sinshan and Kastoha were all one thing, the same thing, and this was a different thing.