Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Besides, he was entirely different from the men in the camp. He spoke Kesh, and lived in a household, and was a daughter’s father.

  When he first took me down to Eucalyptus Pastures with him, I was not sure that the men there were human beings. They all dressed alike and looked alike, like a herd of some kind of animal, and they did not speak any word I knew. Whenever they came near my father they would slap their forehead, or sometimes kneel down in front of him as if they were looking at his toes. I thought they were crazy men, very stupid, and that my father was the only real person among them.

  Among the people of Sinshan it was sometimes he who seemed rather stupid, though I did not like to admit it. He did not know how to read and write, or cook, or dance, and if he knew songs they were in words no one understood; he did not work in any of the workshops or at the winery or at the barns, and never even walked through the fields; and though he wanted to go out with hunting parties, only the most careless hunters would let him come, because he did not sing to the deer or speak to the death. At first they put it down to ignorance and did it for him, but when he did not learn appropriate behavior, they would not hunt with him. Only once was he notably useful, when the Red Adobe heyimas had to be re-dug and rebuilt. Their speaker was very strict and did not like people from the other Houses helping out, but since my father was a no-House man there were no restrictions on his lending a hand, and his hand was a strong one. But he did not get much goodwill out of that work, because when people saw how he could work they were more inclined to ask why he did so little.

  My grandmother held her tongue, but she could not hide her contempt for a man who would not herd or farm or even chop wood. He, holding herders and farmers and woodcutters in contempt, found this hard to bear. One day he said to Willow, “Your mother has rheumatism. She shouldn’t work down there in that mud in the rain, digging potatoes. Let her stay home and weave in the warmth. I’ll pay some young man to work your patch of land for you.”

  My mother laughed. I did too; it was a funny idea, a reversal.

  “You use money like this, I’ve seen it here,” he said, showing a handful of rather poor money of different kinds from both coasts.

  “Well, of course we use money. To give people who act and dance and recite and make, for making, for the dances, you know! What ever did you do to get paid that for?” my mother asked, laughing again.

  He did not know what to say.

  “Money’s a sign, an honor, it shows that you’re rich,” she tried to explain, but he did not understand, so she said, “Anyhow, about the garden, our plot is much too small to be worth anyone’s sharing the work with us. I’d be ashamed to ask.”

  “I’ll bring one of my men, then,” he said.

  “To work our plot?” my mother said. “But it’s Blue Clay land.”

  My father swore. He had picked up swearing before anything else, and swore well. “Blue clay, red clay, what does it matter!” he said. “Any fool can dig black mud!”

  My mother sat spinning awhile and said at last, “That’s crazy talk.” She laughed again. “If any fool can, why can’t you, my dear?”

  My father said stiffly, “I am not a tyon.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A man who digs dirt.”

  “A farmer?”

  “I’m not a farmer, Willow. I am a commander of three hundred, in charge of an army, I am—There are things a man can do and cannot do. Surely you understand that!”

  “Surely,” my mother said, looking at him with admiration of his dignity. So it all passed without either understanding what the other said and yet without anger or hurt, since their love and liking kept the harm from building up, kept washing it away, like the water in the millwheel.

  When they were building the bridge across the Na, my father took me down to Eucalyptus Pastures every day. His dun gelding was twice the weight and half again the height of most Valley horses. Sitting up on that horse, on the high-horned saddle, in front of the big man with the condor helmet, I felt as if I were not a child but something quite different, something rarer than a human being. I would see and hear him speak to the men in the Condor camp: everything he said to them was an order—a direction that had to be obeyed without question or discussion. They never discussed anything. He would give an order, and the man he spoke to would slap his hand over his eyes and run to do whatever it was. I liked seeing that. I was still afraid of the Condor men. All men, all tall, wearing strange clothing, smelling strange, armed, not speaking my language: when they smiled at me or spoke to me I always shrank away and looked down, not answering.

  One day when they were starting work on the bridge, my father taught me a word in his language, pyez, now: when he signalled I was to shout “Pyez!” as loud as I could, and the men working would drop the piledriver, a big stone in a pulley. I heard my high, thin voice and saw ten strong men obey it, over and over. So I first felt the great energy of the power that originates in imbalance, whether the imbalance of a weighted pulley or a society. Being the driver not the pile, I thought it was fine.

  There was trouble, however, about the bridge. Ever since the Condor soldiers had camped in Eucalyptus Pastures, groups of men from the Upper Valley towns kept coming down and walking past the camp, or staying in the hills above Ounmalin Vineyards, not hunting, just hanging around. These were all members of the Warrior Lodge. People in Sinshan talked about them uneasily, with a kind of fascination—how the Warriors smoked tobacco daily, how each of them had a gun of his own, and so on. My cousin Hops, who had become a member of the Bay Laurel, would not allow Pelican and me to be wild dogs when we played; we were to be Condors and he a Warrior. But I said Pelican could not be a Condor, since she was not a Condor, and I was—partly. She said she didn’t want to be either one and it was a stupid game, and went home. Hops and I hunted each other all over Adobe Hill all afternoon, with sticks for guns, shouting, “Kak! You’re dead!” when we saw each other. It was the same game the men down around Eucalyptus Pastures wanted to play. Hops and I were mad for it, and played it every day, drawing other children into it, until Valiant noticed what we were doing. She was very angry. She said nothing at all about the game, but put me to work shelling walnuts and almonds till my hands almost dropped off, and told me that if I missed lessons at the heyimas once more before the Grass I would probably grow up to be a superstitious, illnatured, mindless, repulsive, cowardly person; but of course if that’s what I wanted to be it was up to me. I knew that she disapproved of the game, so I stopped playing it; it did not occur to me then that she also wished I would not go down to Eucalyptus Pastures with my father to see them building the bridge.

  The next time I went with him, the soldiers were not working: a group of Warriors from Chumo and Kastoha-na had set up camp right between the pilings on the river shore. Some of the Condor men were angry, I could tell, as they talked to my father; they were asking him to let them make the Valley men move out of the way by force. He said no, and went down to talk to the Warriors. I started to follow him. He sent me back to wait with his horse, so I do not know what the Warriors said to him, but he came back up into the Pastures looking fierce, and talked a long time to his officers.

  The Warriors moved away that night, and work went on for a couple of days on the bridge, peacefully, so my father was willing to take me with him to the Pastures when I asked. But when we got there that afternoon, there was a group of Valley people waiting under the last of the great double row of blue-gums that gave the place its name. Some of them came by and began to discuss things with my father. They said they were sorry that some young men had been rude or quarrelsome, and that they hoped it would not happen again; but on consideration, most of the Valley people who had given thought to the matter had decided that it was a mistake to put a bridge across the River without consulting either the River or the people who lived alongside it.

  My father said his men needed the bridge to get their supplies across the River.

  “There are br
idges at Madidinou and Ounmalin and ferries at Bluerock and Round Oak,” a Valley person said.

  “They will not carry our wagons.”

  “There are stone bridges at Telina and Kastoha.”

  “That is too far to go round.”

  “Your people can carry things across by the ferry,” said Sun Weaver of Kastoha-na.

  “Soldiers don’t carry loads on their backs,” my father said.

  Sun Weaver thought this over a little while and then said, “Well, if they want to eat the food, maybe they’ll learn how to carry it.”

  “My soldiers are resting here. Wagons are for carrying. If our wagons cannot cross the River your people will have to bring the food to us.”

  “In a pig’s eye,” said a man from Tachas Touchas.

  Sun Weaver and others eyed him. There was a silence.

  “We have built bridges in many places. Men of the Condor are not only brave fighters but great engineers. The roads and bridges in the lands around the City of the Condor are the wonder of the age.”

  “If a bridge at this place were appropriate, there would be one,” said White Peach from Ounmalin. My father did not like to talk to women in front of Condor men, so he said nothing, and there was another thoughtful silence.

  “In our judgment,” Sun Weaver said very politely, “this bridge would not be in the right place.”

  “All you have going south is your railway, with six wooden cars!” my father said. “A bridge here will open up a way clear to—” He paused.

  Sun Weaver nodded.

  My father thought hard, and said, “Listen. My army is not here to do any harm to the Valley. We are not making war on you.” As he spoke he looked over at me once or twice, seeing me with half his mind, as he worked to find the words he needed. “But you must understand that the Condor rules all the North, and that you live now under the shadow of His wing. I do not bring you war. I only come to widen your roads and build you one bridge that something wider than a fat woman can get across! You see, I build it down here away from your towns, where it need not bother you. But you must not stand in our way. You must come with us.”

  “We’re dwellers, not travellers,” said Digger of Telina-na, the speaker of the Blue Clay, a well-known man, quiet, but one of the great speakers. “One doesn’t need roads and bridges to go from room to room of one’s house. This Valley is our house, where we live. In it we welcome guests whose house is elsewhere, on their way.”

  My father arranged his reply for a while in his mind, and then said in a strong voice, “My desire is to be your guest. You know that this Valley is my house, too! But I serve the Condor. He has given his orders. The decision is neither mine nor yours to make or change. You must understand that.”

  At that, the man from Tachas Touchas twisted his head round on his neck with a grin; and he stood back from the group, to signify that he did not consider it profitable to go on talking. A couple of the others did the same; but Obsidian of Ounmalin stood forward to speak. She was the only person in the nine towns at that time called by the name of her House, the best-known of all dancers of the Moon and Blood, unmarried, singlesexed, a person of great power. She said, “Listen, child, I think you don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe you could begin to learn, if you learned to read.”

  He could not take that, in front of his men. Though most of them did not understand her words they heard the scorn and the authority in her voice. He said, “Be quiet, woman!” And looking past her to Sun Weaver, he said, “I will order work on the bridge stopped at this time, because I wish no harm. We will make a plank bridge for the wagons, and take it down when we go. But we will return. It may be that a great army, a thousand men, will come through the Valley. Roads will be widened, bridges will be built. Do not provoke the anger of the Condor! Let them—let them flow through the Valley, as the water through the wheel of the mill.”

  My father’s head was not on backwards. Even in these few months he had begun to understand the image of the water. If only he had been born in the Valley, if only he had stayed and lived in the Valley! But that, as they say, is water under the bridge.

  Obsidian walked away in anger, and all the people from Ounmalin followed her except White Peach, who with considerable courage stood fast and spoke: “Then I think the people of the towns should help these people carry the food we give them; conditions upon gifts are odious.”

  “I agree,” said Digger, and several others from Madidinou, and one from Tachas Touchas. Digger added, from the Water Songs, “The bridge falls, the river runs…” He opened his palms to my father, smiling, and stood back. The others with him did the same.

  “That is good,” my father said, and he also turned away.

  I stood there and did not know which way to turn, whether to go with my father or my townspeople; for I knew that despite their restraint there was anger on both sides, that they had not come together. The weak follow weakness, and I was a child; I followed my father; but I shut my eyes so that nobody would see me.

  The business of the bridge was patched up. The soldiers made a plank bridge that would carry their wagons, and the Valley people brought supplies a few sacks or baskets at a time, and left the stuff in a drying shed at Atsamye, where the Condor wagons could come pick it up. But the Warriors kept hanging around keeping watch on the Condor camp; and many people in Ounmalin refused to give anything to the Condor men, or speak to them, or look at them, and started attending meetings of the Warrior Lodge. Obsidian of the Obsidian of Ounmalin was one to hold a grudge.

  In Tachas Touchas, an Obsidian girl had made friends with one of the Condor men, and wanted to come inland with him; but being only seventeen and frightened by some things people had said to her, she asked for the consent of her heyimas—which my mother Willow had not done in her day. The Obsidian of Tachas Touchas sent people over to Ounmalin to talk about it, and Obsidian of the Obsidian said, “Why are these Condor people all men? Where are the Condor women? Are they ginkgos?* Let them marry each other and breed whatever they like. Let this daughter of our House not take a man of no House!”

  I heard about that, but whether the girl in Tachas Touchas took this advice or went on meeting that young Condor, I do not know. Certainly she did not marry him.

  Between the Grass and the Sun, the Warriors from up and down the Valley held several wakwa along the Old Straight Road and on the riverbanks, which they called Purifications. Men had joined the Warrior Lodge in all the towns, as the Condor stayed on in the Valley. My side-grandfather Ninepoint’s son and grandson joined them, and that whole family was busy for a while weaving them the special clothing they wore for their wakwa, a tunic and hooded cloak in dark wool, something like the Condor soldiers’ clothing. The Warrior Lodge had no clowns. When some Blood Clowns from Madidinou came to one of their Purifications, instead of flyting with them or ignoring them the Warriors began pushing and pulling them, and there was some fighting and a lot of bad feeling. There was always sexual trouble and tension around the Warriors. And some women in Sinshan whose husbands had joined that lodge complained about their rules of sexual abstinence, but other women laughed at them; in winter there are so many ritual abstinences for anybody dancing the Sun or the World that another set of them really would not make a great difference, though it might be, as they say, the pin that made the donkey bray.

  My grandmother danced the Inner Sun that year, and I fasted the Twenty-One Days for the first time, and listened every night to the trance singing in our heyimas. It was a strange Sun. Every morning of that winter there was fog, and on many days it never lifted up higher than the foothills of Sinshan Mountain, so that we lived under a low roof; and in the evening the fog would settle back down to the Valley floor. There were more White Clowns than ever before, that year. Even if some of them came to Sinshan from other towns, still there were too many; some must have come from the Four Houses, from the House of the Lion, through that wet white fog that hid the world. Children were afraid to go out of sight of
the houses. Even the balconies were frightening at dusk. Even in the hearthroom a child might look up and see the white staring face at the window, and hear the stuttering.

  I had tended my seedlings in a place in the woods over the second ridge north of town, a long way, because I wanted them to be a surprise when I gave them. I had a hard time of it making myself go there alone to look after them during the Twenty-One Days, because I was so frightened of the White Clowns. Whenever the little bushbirds or the squirrels chipped and tsked I froze, thinking it was the stuttering. On the morning of the solstice I went to get my seedlings in a fog so thick I could not see five steps before me. Every tree of the woods was a White Clown waiting and groping for me in silence. It was entirely silent. Nothing spoke. Nothing moved but me, in all those white ridges. I was cold to the bone and cold to the soul; I had come into the Seventh House and did not know how to get out again. But I went on, although the woods were so hidden and changed by the fog that I was not sure where I was at any moment, and I got to my little trees. I sang the Sun heya almost with my mouth closed, because any sound was so awful, and dug up the seedlings and replanted them in the pots I had made for them, shaking all the time, hurrying and clumsy; I probably bent the roots. Then I had to take them back to Sinshan. The strange thing was that when I came among the grapevines on Topknot Hill and knew I was home, I was not altogether glad of it. Part of me wanted to be cold and terrified and lost in the fog, part of me was at home in the Seventh House, not in High Porch House. So I went up our stairs and woke my family to the Sun. To Willow I gave a buckeye seedling, to Valiant a wild rose, and to Kills a seedling of the Valley oak. The oak stands now where we planted it on the west side of the oak grove Gairga, a spreading, shapely tree, not yet heavily girthed. The buckeye and the rose are gone.

  Before the Sun was danced and after it, my father was with us in High Porch House every night and morning. Valiant, who danced both the Sun and the World that year, spent most of her time and all her nights down in the heyimas. Willow did not dance, that year; and Kills was of course bound neither to fast nor to feast. At that time, knowing nothing about his people, I thought that he had no observances or wakwa at all, and stood in no relation to anything in the world, except the soldiers to whom he gave orders, and my mother and myself. He and Willow kept indoors together whenever they could, that winter. After the Sun the low fogs gave way to rain, and a cold spell with snow up on Sinshan Mountain like the flour dust on a miller’s hair, and hoarfrost some mornings on the grass. My father had some fine red wool rugs which he carried to furnish his tent on march; he had brought them to us, and our hearthroom was rich with them. I liked to lie on them. They smelled of sweet sage and other smells I had no name for, the smell of the place my father came from far away in the northeast. We had plenty of firewood, applewood, since the town had replanted two of the old orchards. There was great peace by the fireside in those long evenings for them and for me. I think of my mother in her beauty by that fire, on the edge of the years of sorrow. It is like watching a fire burning in the rain.