Before night we stopped to make camp in live-oak woods on the wrong side of Metouli Spring. I could not get off the horse, and my father, laughing, had to help me. My legs and buttocks were as stiff as wood and pretty soon they began to ache. The Condor men joked a little, but cautiously. They treated me partly as a child but also with something like fear, and they knocked their forehead with their fist when they first spoke to me, as they did to my father. We two sat a little apart and did nothing while they made the fire, cooked the dinner, and laid out the beds.
After eating, I went to talk to the sorrel mare for a while. I smelled of her now, and liked the smell. I had never made a friend so easily. My father talked for a long time to one man, who was to ride a different way the next day, giving him several messages, some quite long, to carry in his head. He made him repeat them, and they were still doing this when I came back to the fire. It was boring to listen to, as I did not know the language. When they were done and the man had gone back to the other men, I said, “Why didn’t you write the messages?”
“He can’t read,” my father said.
If he was blind or weakminded he made a strange messenger, I thought, but I could not see what was wrong with him. I said so.
“Writing is sacred,” my father said.
I knew that already.
“Show me your writing,” I said.
Sinshan Mountain
He said, “Writing is sacred. Not for hontik. You don’t need to write words!”
I did not understand, was all that I understood of this; so I said, “I need words to speak, anyhow. What is hontik?”
And he began then to teach me his language, how the Dayao said to ride a horse, to see a rock, and all the rest.
It was cold up there on the side of the Mountain in the night. The other men sat on the other side of the fire, talking. My father joined in the talk from time to time, briefly, with dignity in the tone of his voice. He gave me some hot brandy, and I soon slept, curled up in Grandmother’s arm. In the morning he had to lift me onto the horse, but as soon as we had ridden a little way the stiffness went out of my legs and I was easy in the saddle. So we rode up to the pass in the fog of the autumn morning, in the way of the White Puma.
I have heard people in the Finders Lodge say that when they leave the Valley, even though they have left and returned many times, there is a pain in their heart, or a voice singing in their ears, or a whitening, or a sense of falling—always some sign. Downstream, the historian of the Sinshan Finders, said that he knew when he entered the Valley because for nine breaths his feet did not touch the ground, and when he left the Valley he knew it because for nine breaths he walked knee-deep through earth. Maybe because I was on horseback, or because I was with the Condor, or because I was half a Condor, I felt no sign. Only when I touched my cheeks and felt no mark of the blue clay from Sinshan Creek left there, again my heart turned and went dark and small inside its house. It stayed that way as we rode down the wrong side of the Mountain.
All that country between the Mountain and Clear Lake is very beautiful and like the Valley; rocks, plants, all the people are the same kinds, and the human people live in towns and farms like the towns and farms of the Valley. We did not stay with any of them, nor did we speak to people anywhere; when I asked why, my father said that these were people of no account. We rode as if in another House, without speech. I thought, this is why they are called Condors: they go in silence, above all the others.
When we were in the golden hills northeast of Clear Lake, lying down to sleep on the third night, I began to feel the Valley behind me like a body, my own body. My feet were the sea-channels of the River, the organs and passages of my body were the places and streams and my bones the rocks and my head was the Mountain. That was all my body, and I here lying down was a breath-soul, going farther away from its body every day. A long very thin string connected that body and that soul, a string of pain. I slept, and the next day went on riding, and talked with my father, learning his language. Often we laughed. Still I felt that I was not quite my body, and that I weighed nothing, like a soul.
Indeed I grew thin on that long journey. The Condor food did not taste good to me. They carried dried meat, all beef; along the way they sometimes killed cattle or sheep grazing on those high hills. They did not ask me to, but I came and gave the person they killed my words. At first I thought the human people of these families were generously giving us the animals’ deaths, and wondered why I never saw the human people, and why they never gave vegetables or grain or fruit, since it was harvest time. Then I saw two of the men of our group kill a strayed ewe by the path, without giving her any word, cutting off her legs for food and leaving the head and hooves and entrails and fleece for the maggots and coyotes. For several days I put what I had seen away from my mind; but I did not eat that mutton.
Many, many times while I lived with the Condor people I put a thing I saw away, saying, “I’ll think about that later,” or refusing to think about it at all. This was not mindfulness. But where everything was outside me I could not make all of it enter into me; and when it did enter into me I often felt as if I had no soul at all, and it is the attentive soul that tells the mind, “Remember.” Now I am trying to write down my journey to the northeast, to bring it all into my mind at last; but a great deal of it, and of all my years with the Dayao, is lost and will not come back. I could not take it in.
I remember with great clarity how we rode, all in line, across the last pass of the wrinkled hills, and from it saw the wide valley of the River of the Marshes all before us to the north and east; far in the southeast was the shore of the Inland Sea, hazy and shining. A broad golden light lay over the yellow willows by the river and the cattail marshes and the far peaks of the Range of Light, slanting from under clouds behind us. I sang heya to that great river and the beauty and vastness of the world, and to the sun going into the house of winter. That night it rained. All the next day and the next as we followed the River of the Marshes north we rode and walked in rain.
We crossed that big river at a ford where it spread out in many shallow channels and the horses did not have to swim far, so early in the rainy season. At that ford another group of Condor men joined us, twelve of them, so we were a big group going along, nineteen human people and twenty-five horses, one mare with a colt following. As they rode, the men liked to sing a song they had:
“Where the City is, I am coming,
Where the Condor is, I am coming,
Where the battle is, I am coming.”
They put any word they liked into the song, and sang, “Where the food is, I am coming,” or “Where the cunt is, I am coming,” over and over as they rode along in line.
After long rain there was a day I remember when the sky partly cleared and we saw Kulkun When pouring a stream of dun smoke up into the clouds, southeast of where we were. All around the dark volcano was a roil of steam and smoke from lesser vents, and the air stank like rotten eggs when the wind changed. We began to come near the foothills of the volcanoes. I was very much afraid of them, and dreamed all night that fiery cracks were gaping in the earth about me and clouds of smoke were burning and choking me, but I said nothing about my cowardice. On the next day the whole sky cleared, and from those hills looking north I saw the Mountain of the North hanging snowstreaked from the sky down to the dark forests. One pure plume of steam rose from its eastern crown, like a down feather of the white egret. Because the mountain was beautiful and because I knew its name from maps and stories in the heyimas, the sight of it made me happy: I recognised it. I sat on the mare singing heya to it.
My father rode up beside me and said, “That is Tsatasyan,” the White Mountain.
I said, “Also it is Kulkun Eraian, one of the places where the arms of the world meet.”
He said, “I spent ten years of my life winning the land around that mountain for the Condor, and now it’s all to do over.” He used the word zarirt, which I had learned playing long-dice with the sold
iers; it means to win at gambling, like our word dumi. I could not imagine what he meant, how he had won an enormous piece of the world like that, or who he had won it from, or what use it was to him. I tried to ask and he tried to explain, but we talked backwards for a while, and he grew impatient with my stupidity. “This, here, is land the Condor armies won,” he said. “Why do you think the hontik aren’t shooting at us any more?”
“That was only one place that they shot at us,” I said. It had been where we first turned to follow the Dark River; some people hidden in the willow thickets had shot arrows at us, and then ran away when the men tried to chase them. My father had ordered the men to come back and ride on, and they had galloped back laughing and shouting jokes, very excited, so that I was also excited, and not afraid, though I certainly had never expected to be part of a war.
My father said, “That’s because they are afraid of us.”
I gave up trying to understand what he was talking about. But part of my stupidity was that I did not want to understand. Educated people who read this will have been laughing at me, that I could ride for days and days with armed men called soldiers or warriors, with my father the chief of them, and see them steal, and never enter a town or farmstead, and be ambushed, and still not understand that they were at war with every people of the lands we had come through. They are quite right to laugh. I was uneducated, and unwilling to use my mind.
Now in these foothills of the volcanoes we came to villages where the people came out and knocked their heads to us instead of keeping out of sight or running their sheep away and turning back to spit after us. The villages were very small, five or six log houses along a creek, and some sheep or pigs and turkeys, and a lot of dogs barking and snarling. But they were very generous, I thought, giving us food even when there were more of us than of them. After two days riding in that broken country, we came to the ^lace called South City, Sainyan.
The Dayao word sai means the same as our word kach. We use it only to speak of a different place in time or mind, those people who lived outside the world, and the network of the Exchanges. They have those uses too, but chiefly they use the word to name the place where they live, saying that they are inhabitants of the City of Man. What to us is disaster to them is their glory. How am I to write all this story in reversal-words?
People of the Madrone Lodge asked me to write my life story as an offering because nobody else in the Valley has lived with the Condor and come back, and so my story is a history; but I wish now I had learned to write history instead of learning to make pots, when I was North Owl. When I was Ayatyu I had to forget writing and reading altogether. The Dayao will blind the eye or cut off the hand of a woman or a farmer who writes a single word. Only the True Condors may write or read, and of them I think only the ones called the One-Warriors, who officiate at the wakwa, learn how to write and read freely. They say that since One made the cosmos by speaking a word, the universe is his book, and to write or read words is to share the power that belongs to One; and only certain men are supposed to share that power. They have the abacus for household use, and in both their Cities they had electrical devices made by instructions from the Exchange to keep records, but all their records are reduced to numbers. Nothing is written down or printed, and so the Word of One remains, as they say, clean. Once in my ignorance I said to my father, “If I wrote ‘Boo!’ on a wall here all those fierce warriors would scream and run away!” He said in anger, “They would punish you, to teach you to fear One.” That word is the end of talking, as well as the end of writing, under the Condor’s wing, and I said no more.
When I went with Abhao, my heart wanted to be a Condor’s heart. I tried to be a Condor woman. I tried not to think in the language or the ways of the Valley. I wanted to leave the Valley, not to be of it, to be new, living a new way. But I could not do that; only an educated person might do that. I was too young, and had not considered existence, or read books, or trained with the Finders, or thought about history My mind was not freed. It was held inside the Valley, instead of holding the Valley inside it. Even for my age I was ignorant, because Sinshan, like other small towns, was given to prejudice and wilful ignorance; and because my family was a troubled one; and most of all because the Warrior and Lamb cults had interfered with education and ceremony during my adolescence. So I was not free to go from the Valley. Not being entirely a person, I could not become a different person.
Also, however wilfully I tried, it was difficult for me to become entirely a Condor person. I became as sick as I could, but I was not willing to die.
It is almost as hard to write about being Ayatyu as it was to be her.
While I am talking about talking, I may explain certain words I have used or will use. We call them the Condor people; their name for themselves as distinct from all other people is Dayao, One-People. I shall call them that in this story now, because the way they use the word Condor, Rehemar, is complicated. Only one man, whom they believe to be a messenger from One to them, and whom they all serve, is called The Condor. Certain men belonging to certain families are called True Condors, and others like them are called, as I said, One-Warriors. No other people are called Condors. Men who are not of those families are all called tyon, farmers, and must serve the True Condors. Women of those families are called Condor Women, and must serve Condor men, but may give orders to tyon and hontik. The hontik are all other women, foreigners, and animals.
The condor bird itself is not called rehemar but Da-Hontik, and is sacred. Boys of the True Condor families must shoot a condor, or at least a buzzard, to become men.
I had the condor feather that had come to me as a child with me in my pouch of valuables; it was lucky that I did not show it to anyone before I learned that women are not permitted to touch condor feathers or even to see the condor in the sky. They are supposed to hide their eyes and wail when the Great One flies.
It is easy to say that such customs are barbaric, but then what has one said? Having lived in civilisation, in the City of Man, I do not use those words, civilised, barbaric; I do not know what they mean. All I can write is what I saw, what I learned, what I did, and let wiser people find a name for it all.
The Dayao had built South City about forty years before I came there. They had come down from The City and made a war with some people who lived in small towns and farmsteads in these foothills south of Dark River, and took their place to live from them. It is not true that they ate the bodies of human people whom they killed in wars; that is a superstition grown out of a symbol. They killed and burned men and children and kept women to be fucked by Dayao men. They penned the women with the cattle. Some of the women stayed of their own will after a while because their life was destroyed and there was no other place to go, and these women became Dayao. I talked to some of them who told me who they had been before they were made Dayao, but most of them did not like to talk about it.
The time when the Dayao made South City was the time when they began making war with everyone. They said, “The Condor rules from the Omorn Sea to the Western Sea, from the North Mountain to the Coast of Amaranth!” They killed many people and caused pain and long disorder in the Volcano country, and infected other people with their sickness, but when I came there they were dying. It was themselves they ate.
I know that now; I did not then. I saw the towers of South City and the walls of black basalt, the wide streets at right angles, the splendor and array. I saw the magnificent bridge across the Dark River and the road that lay straight as a suntrack on water to the north, to The City. I saw the machines and engines of work and war they used, of most exact and elegant make, marvelous products of handmind. All I saw was great, and straight, and hard, and strong, and f saw it all in fear and admiration.
My father had had relatives in South City, and we rode to that house; but it was empty.
The Dayao make three kinds of house. The farmhouses are much like our farmhouses; the tyon and hontik in the Cities live in huge, long houses, many families
to each, like barns or stables; and the True Condor live in family houses, which are dug down into the earth, with low stone walls aboveground, no windows, and a peaked timber roof. They look a little like heyimas, but inside they are entirely different. The house is divided into as many apartments as the people want by movable panels of wood and cloth, five or six feet high, which can be set against the poles and columns that support the roof. The floor is covered with layers of rugs, and the walls with hangings of cloth, and often the hangings are brought together into a peak at the top of the room, like a tent. The Dayao house remembers the winter dugouts and summer tents of the nomads of the Plains of Grass, as the wooden houses of Tachas Touchas remember the river-forests of the northern coast. All the heating and lighting is electric, from mills and solar cells; and when such a house is furnished and tapestried and brightly lit, it is very warm and comfortable, encompassing. But the house of my father’s people in South City that we came to that night was dark and dank, smelling of earth and urine. My father stood inside the entranceway and spoke like a child: “They have gone away!”
We had to go to another Condor house for shelter and food that night. My father left me with the women of the household and went off to talk with the men. The women smiled at me and tried to talk, but they were timid, and I was very tired and confused. I could not understand why they acted as if they were afraid of me. Among them I felt a little as I had felt in Hardcinder House in Telina when I was a child, awed by everything. There was metal everywhere; it seemed that copper wire was as common to them as string to us. And they were very good cooks, and though the food was strange to me I enjoyed most of it very much, after the salt beef and stolen mutton of the soldiers. But their wealth did not flow; they did not give with pleasure. Some of them knocked their heads every time they spoke to me, and others of them did not speak to me at all. Later on I found that the ones who did not speak to me were the Condor Women, and the ones who smiled and knocked their heads were the hontik.
Always Coming Home Page 22