Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  They weren’t doing any sailing down the inland coast at that time of the year, but were all going out on the ocean for the big fish. But they were generous people, and some of them said they would take us along the inland coast as far as a place they called Tuburhuny, where one of them had family living. We had to get off the island somehow, so we accepted, although we weren’t sure where Tuburhuny was. The Falares people chart the seas, but not the lands, and none of our place names seemed to fit with theirs. But anything on the South Peninsula suited us.

  When we sailed south the weather was quiet and the waves low. The fog never lifted. We passed a few rocks and islands, and around midday, passing a long, low one, the Falares people said, “City.” We couldn’t see much of it in the fog; it looked like bare rock and some yerba buena and beach grass and a couple of tall, slender towers or masts supported by guywires. The Falares people carried on about it: “You touch, you die!” and they acted out electrocution or asphyxiation or getting struck by lightning. I never heard any such thing about the Cities, but I had never seen one before, or since. Whether it was true, or they were having one of their little jokes with us, or they are superstitious, I don’t know. They are certainly rather undereducated and out of touch, on those islands in the fog; they never use the Exchange at Sed, as if it too were dangerous. They were timid people, except on water.

  Tuburhuny turned out to be called Gohop on our maps, a little town a short way south of the northern tip of the Peninsula on the inland side. It was sheltered from the everlasting fog of the Gate. Avocadoes grew all over town, and they were just coming ripe when we were there. How the people there could stay thin, I don’t know, but they were thin, and whitish, like the Falares people; but not quite so much out on the edge of things. They were glad to talk to travellers, and helped Gold plan our trip on his maps. They had no boats going out any distance, and said none came by their little port regularly, so we set off south on foot.

  The Peninsular Range between the ocean and the Inland Sea is so buckled up by earthquakes and subsidences and so deeply scored by faults and rifts that walking the length of it is like crossing a forest by climbing up every tree you come to and then back down. There was usually no way round. Sometimes we could walk along the beaches, but in many places there wasn’t any beach—the mountains dropped sheer into the sea. So we would plod up and up, clear to the ridge, and from there we saw the ocean to our right and the sea to our left and ahead and behind the land falling away in fold after fold forever. As we went farther south there were more long, narrow sounds and inlets in the faults, and it was hard to know whether we were following the main ridge or had got onto a hogback between two rifts, in which case we would end up on a headland staring at the water, and would have to go back ten or fifteen miles and start over. Nobody knew how old the maps we had were; they were from the Exchange, some time or other, but they were out of date. Mostly there was nobody to ask directions of but sheep. The human people lived down in the canyons with the water and the trees. They weren’t used to strangers, and we were careful not to alarm them.

  This map is based upon “The Rivers That Run into the Inland Sea,” but while the orientation of Clearly’s map is that of the flow of the main rivers, the top of this map is North, in conformance with our convention. The names of peoples or cultural groups are underlined.

  In that part of the world the young men, late adolescents and older, often form groups and go out and live a hunting life, like our Bay Laurel Lodge, but less responsibly. The bands are allowed to fight each other, and to raid each other and any town except the one they came from, taking tools or food or animals or whatever they want. Those raids lead to killings, of course, sometimes; and some of the men never come back and settle down, but stay out in the hills as forest-living people, and some of them are crazy and kill for the sake of killing. The townspeople make a lot of fuss about these wild men of theirs, and live in fear of them; and so the four of us, young men and strangers, had to behave with notable propriety and good manners even at a distance, so as not to be mistaken for marauders or murderers.

  Once they saw we were harmless they were generous and talkative, giving us anything they thought we wanted. Most of their towns were small, pleasant places with wood-beamed adobe houses stuccoed white, shaded by avocado trees. They all stayed in town all year, because in a summerhouse a family would not be safe from the bands of young men; but they said they used to go to summerhouses, and it’s only in the last couple of generations that the young men have gotten irresponsible. They seemed to me foolish to let such an imbalance occur and continue, but perhaps they had some reason for it. The different peoples of those many canyons speak several different languages, but their towns and way of life were pretty much all alike. There were always people in the towns who could use TOK, so we could converse. At one of their Exchanges we sent messages to the Wakwaha Exchange to tell the Finders and our households that all was well with us, so far.

  Towards the inner base of the Peninsula the ridges flatten down into a hot, sandy country, not lived in by human people, which runs two full days’ walk to the southwest coasts of the Inland Sea. The beaches are broad and low, with sea-marshes and dunes and brackish, boggy lakes inland for miles; farther south, steep, desolate mountains run between east and west. The Inland Sea along that coast is very shallow, crowded with sandbars and islands, and on those islands is where they grow the cotton.

  The cotton people call themselves Usudegd. There are a lot of them, some thousands, living on the islands and at places on the coast where rivers come down from the mountains—they have salt water everywhere, but not much fresh. The sea is warm there, and it’s warm country, though nothing like so hot, they say, as across those desolate mountains on the shores of the Omorn Sea. There are some severely poisoned areas in their country, but since it’s so dry the stuff stays put in the ground, and they know where not to go.

  Across the Inland Sea in the northeast the cotton people look up to that tall peak of the Range of Light which we call South Mountain and they call Old Lion Mountain. Usually all one can see is the murk from the volcanoes south of it. It is important in their thoughts, but they never go to it. They say it is sacred, and its paths are not to be walked. But what about the Gongon people, who live all around South Mountain? That sort of idea is typical of the cotton people. They are not reasonable about some things.

  It is my opinion that people who have too much to do with the sea, and use boats a great deal, have their minds affected by it.

  At any rate, their towns are different from the towns of the Peninsular peoples. The cotton people dig in and build underground, with only a couple of feet of wall aboveground for windows, like a heyimas. The roof is a low dome covered with sod, so from any distance you don’t see a town, but a patch of hummocks. In among the roofs are all kinds of shrubs, trees, and vines they have down there; palm, avocado, big orange and lemon and grapefruit trees, carob and date, the same kinds of eucalyptus we have, and some I never saw before, are some of their trees. The vines flower splendidly. The trees make shade aboveground and the houses stay cool underground; the arrangement looks odd, but is reasonable. They have no problems draining their houses, as we do our heyimas, because it’s so dry there; though when it rains sometimes it rains hard, and they get flooded out, they said.

  Their sacred places are some distance outside the towns, and are artificial mountains, hillocks with ritual paths round and round them, and beautiful small buildings or enclosures on top. We didn’t mess with any of that. Patience said it was best to keep clear out of foreigners’ sacred places until invited into them. He said one reason he liked the Amaranth people, with whom he had stayed several times, was that they had no sacred places at all. People tend to get testy about those places.

  But the cotton people were already testy. Although they hadn’t replied or sent any message on the Exchange, they were angry that we had sent back their woven goods and hadn’t sent the usual amount of wine, and right awa
y we were in trouble there. All we had to do was say we had come from the Valley of the Na and the hornets began to buzz.

  We had to get into one of their boats, flat things that felt very unsafe, and go out to the most important island. As soon as we got on the water, though it was entirely calm and smooth, I got sick again. I have a very delicate sense of balance and the unsteadiness of boats affects my inner ear. The cotton people had no understanding of this at all. The Falares Islanders had made jokes about it, but the cotton people were contemptuous and rude.

  We passed many large islands, and the cotton people kept pointing and saying, “Cotton, cotton. See the cotton? Everybody knows we grow the best cotton. People as far north as Crater Lake know it! Look at that cotton,” and so on. The cotton fields were not very impressive at that time of year, but we nodded and smiled and behaved with admiration and propriety, agreeing with everything they said.

  After coasting a flat island miles long we turned northeast and landed on a small island with a good view of the mountains, all the south end of the Range of Light and the bare, raw Havil Range in the south. The whole island was a town, hundreds of hummock roofs, some of them turfed, others naked sand, and trees and bushes in patterns among the hummocks, and flowerbeds, also in patterns, with little paths between and through. They are strong on paths, down there, but you have to know which ones are to be walked on.

  We had been travelling all that day and thirty days before it, and it was sunset by the time we landed on this island, but they hardly stopped to give us dinner before they took us straight into the town council meeting. And there they hardly said anything polite or appropriate about our having come all that way to talk with them before they started saying “Where’s the Sweet Betebbes?” and “Why did you send our goods back? Do we not have an agreement, made sixty years ago? Every year since then it has been honored and renewed, until this year! Why have you of the Wally broken your word?” They spoke good TOK, but they always said Wally for Valley, and whine for wine.

  Patience knew what he was doing when he took his middle name. He listened to them endlessly and remained alert, yet never frowned, or nodded, or shook his head. Peregrine, Gold, and I imitated him as well as we could.

  After a great many of them had said their say, a little woman stood up, and a little man beside her. They both had twisted bodies and humped backs, and looked both young and old. One of them said, “Let our guests have a word now,” and the other said, “Let the Whine People speak.” They had authority, those little twins. The others all shut up like clams.

  Patience let there be silence for some while before he spoke, and when he spoke his voice was grave and soft, so that they had to stay quiet to hear what he said. He was cautious and polite. He said a lot about the fitness of the agreement and its admirable age and convenience, and the unsurpassed quality of Usudegd cotton, known to be the best cotton from Crater Lake to the Omorn Break, from the Ocean Coast to the Range of Heaven—he got fairly eloquent in here—and then he quieted down again and spoke a little sadly about how Time blunts the keenest knife and changes the meaning of words and the thoughts in human minds, so that finally the firmest knot must be retied, and the sincerest word spoken once again. And then he sat down.

  There was a silence. I thought he had awakened reason in them and they would agree at once. I was very young. The same woman who had talked the most before, got up and said, “Why didn’t you send forty barrels of Sweet Betebbes whine like always before?”

  I saw that the difficult part was only beginning. Patience had to answer that question and also say why we had sent back their woven goods. For a long time he didn’t. He kept talking in metaphors and images, and skirting around the issues; and after a while the little twisty twins began answering him the same way. And then, before anything that meant much had been said, it was so late that they called the meeting off for the night, and finally took us to an empty house where we could get some sleep. There was no heating, and one tiny electric light. The beds stood up on legs, and were lumpy.

  It went on like that for three more days. Even Patience said he hadn’t expected them to go on arguing, and that probably the reason they argued so much was that they were ashamed of something. If so, it was our part not to shame them further. So we could not say anything about the poor quality of the raw cotton for the last several years, or even about the sleazy they had tried to foist off on us. We just stayed calm and sad and said that indeed we regretted not shipping the sweet wine which we grew especially for them, but said nothing about why we had not shipped it. And sure enough, little by little it came out that they had had a lot of bad things happen in the last five years: a cottonleaf virus mutation that was hard to control, and three years of drought, and a set of unusually severe earthquakes that had drowned some of their islands and left the water on others too saline even for their hardy cotton. All these things they seemed to consider their own fault, things to be ashamed of. “We have walked in the wrong paths!” they kept saying.

  Patience, and Peregrine, who also spoke for us, never said anything about these troubles of theirs, but began talking about troubles we had had in the Valley. They had to exaggerate a good deal, because things had been going particularly well for the wine-makers, and the fourth and fifth years before had been great vintages of both Ganais and Fetali; but in any kind of farming there are always troubles enough to talk about. And the more they told or invented about unseasonable frosts and unsuccessful fermentations, the more the cotton people went on about their own troubles, until they had told everything. They seemed relieved, then, and they gave us a much nicer house to stay in, well-lighted and warm, with little paths all over the roof marked out with white shells and fumo balls.* And at last they began to renegotiate the contract. It had taken Patience seven days to get them to do that. When we got down to it at last, it was very simple. The terms were about the same as they had been, with more room for negotiation each year through the Exchange. Nothing was said about why they hadn’t used the Exchange to explain their behavior earlier. They were still touchy and unreasonable if you said the wrong thing. We said that we would accept short-staple cotton until they had the long staple in quantity again, and we would send a double quantity of Sweet Betebbes with the spring shipment; however, underweight bales would be refused, and we did not want woven goods, since we preferred to make our own. There was trouble on this point. The woman with the thirst for Sweet Betebbes got poisonous about it, and went on for hours about the quality and beauty of the fabrics of Usudegd. But by now Patience and the little twisty twins were friends of the heart; and the contract at last was spoken for cotton in the bale only, no fabrics.

  After speaking the contract, we stayed on nine days more, for politeness, and because Patience and the twins were drinking together. Gold was busy with, his maps and notes, and Peregrine, a person whom everybody everywhere liked, was always talking with townspeople or going off in boats with them to other islands. The boats were little better than bundles of tule reeds. I generally hung around with some young women who were weavers there. They had some fine mechanical looms, solar-powered, that I made notes on for my teacher Soaring, and also they were kind and friendly. Patience warned me that it’s better not to have a relation of sex with people in foreign countries until you know a good deal about their customs and expectations concerning commitment, marriage, contraception, techniques, and so on. So I just flirted and did some kissing. The cotton women kissed with their mouths wide open, which is surprising if you aren’t expecting it, and disagreeably wet, but very voluptuous; which was trying, under the circumstances.

  Peregrine came back from another island one day with a queer expression. He said, “We’ve been fooled, Patience!”

  Patience just waited, as usual.

  Peregrine explained: he had met, in a town on one of the northernmost islands, some of the sailors of the ships that had brought the cotton to Sed and taken our wine back—the same people who had explained that they were just sailo
rs and knew nothing about the cotton people and didn’t even speak their language. There they were living in that cotton town and speaking the language like natives, which they were. They were sailors by art or trade, and hadn’t wanted to get into trouble with us by arguing about the goods or the contract. They hadn’t told anybody except the people on their own island about their private supply of Sweet Betebbes, either. They laughed like crazy about it when they met him, Peregrine said. They told him that the man they had told us was one of the cotton people was the only one who wasn’t—he was a poor halfwit who had wandered in from the desert, and couldn’t speak much of any language.

  Patience was silent long enough that I believed he was angry, but then he began to laugh, and we all laughed. He said, “Go see if that crew will take us back north by sea!”

  But I suggested that we go home by land.

  We left a few days later. It took us two months to go along the eastern coast of the Inland Sea to Rekwit, from which we sailed across to Tatselots in a great storm, but all that journey is another story, which I may tell later.

  Since we went down there, there hasn’t been any more trouble with the cotton people, and they have always sent us good, long-staple cotton. They are not an unreasonable people, except in making little paths everywhere and being ashamed to admit they have had troubles.

  NOTES:

  Peregrine.

  Yestik, the peregrine falcon, a common Finders name.