Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  My husband’s first wife, Retforok Syasip Bele, was afraid of me at first, through jealousy of course, and because people had told her that I was an animal person, dangerous and crazy, like a wild dog. She was afraid I would hurt her children. She was not stupid at all, only ignorant. She had never been anywhere but the women’s quarters of two houses in Sai, and had been having a baby every second summer since she was seventeen. When she found that I did not bite, and did not eat babies, and even talked her language, she began to make me welcome, and to see that both Esiryu and I were treated well by the other women of the house. She was a talkative, funny woman, not very thoughtful but quick and perceptive. She told me she was glad I was there for Dayat to fuck, because she was tired of his appetite and never interested in having sex when she was nursing, anyhow; but she said, “When I want another one, you’ll have to send him across the passage, one night, at least!”

  I said, “Another baby!”—disbelieving.

  “These are all girls but one,” she said.

  I said, “Well, at least you could get pregnant by some man you liked?” That made her stare in disbelief, and then she laughed and said, “Ayatyu, you really are dirty! I don’t like any men in this household, anyhow. We’ve got the best of the lot, I think.” I agreed with her. Our husband was not a bully, and was good-natured and good-looking. She said, “But don’t you let him know you even think about other men, he’s very sensitive about that.” And she told me that a woman who slept with a man not her husband would be killed by the husband’s family. I did not believe that. Of course people kill each other out of jealousy and sexual rage, I knew that; but that was not what Syasip meant. She said, “No, no, you would be killed in public, to get the shame out of the house. You belong to Dayat, don’t you see? You belong to him, and I belong to him, that’s how it is.”

  I thought of my father saying in the common place of Sinshan, “But she belongs to me!” Now I had two eyes to see him with.

  Early in the spring my husband said, “Ayatyu, good news from the west. Terter Abhao is back with the Victorious Army.”

  I said, “My father is dead.”

  Retforok Dayat laughed and said, “He’s at the Palace now.”

  This too I did not believe, until I saw my father. He came to Retforok House to see me. He looked gaunt and fearfully weary, but he was not lying with his back broken, head downward, in a canyon in the wilderness. Still when I saw him here I saw him there also, as in images painted on glass placed one behind another.

  We talked with pleasure and tenderness. He said, “I’m glad you have married, Ayatyu. Is it all right for you in this house?”

  I said, “Yes, it’s all right, and Dayat is kind. Is there any way I might go home?”

  He looked at me and away, and shook his head.

  “If you could take me as far as South City, I could go alone from there; I know the landmarks,” I said.

  He considered it only a moment before he said, “Listen, Ayatyu, since you chose to come here it can’t be undone. If you run away from your husband, you put me into shame and disgrace. You belong to the Retforoks now. Better stay with them. You’re well out of my house; things are not going well for us there. Make this your home. Put the Valley out of your mind!”

  “My mind is not that small,” I said. “It holds the Valley and the City and still I don’t know where the end of it is. But it’s only you that can make the City my home.”

  “No,” he said, “I think only you can do that.”

  That was fairly said. And I continued to live as Dayat’s pretty wife, knowing that what my father had said was true: he was living in disgrace, and any further disgrace brought upon him would endanger him. What I could do for him was to behave quietly and with patience until The Condor and his advisers no longer wanted somebody to blame for the loss of the war in the Six Rivers country.

  It sounds strange when I say that disgrace could put a person in danger of his life; disgrace and shame are quite bad enough by themselves, among us in the Valley; but there, where every relationship was a battle, they were deadly. Punishment was violent. I have said that I was told that a hontik could be blinded for writing or reading, a woman killed for having sex; I did not see such things happen, but every day I did see or hear about violent punishments, striking children, beating slaves, locking up disobedient hontik or tyon; and later on, as I shall tell, it grew worse. It was frightening to live in this kind of continuous war. The Dayao seemed never to decide things together, never discussing and arguing and yielding and agreeing to do something before they did it. Everything was done because there was a law to do it or not do it, or an order to do it or not do it. And if something went wrong it seemed never to be the orders, but the people who obeyed them, that got blamed; and blame was usually physical punishment. I learned caution daily. I learned, whether I wanted to or not, how to be a warrior. Where life has been made into a battle, one has to fight.

  The Retforoks were not in disgrace; indeed they had become favorites of The Condor. The chief of our household, Retforok Areman, and his youngest brother, my husband, Dayat, went often to the Palace, that tall house where The Condor lived. My husband, who liked talking as well as he liked sex, told me all about what he did and saw and heard there. I liked to listen, because it was interesting, although very strange and often as horrible as a ghost story. He told me what had happened to the son of The Condor: when he tried to escape from the part of the Palace where he had been walled in he was betrayed by people who had pretended to help him, and as punishment for disobeying the Law of One he was killed. The manner in which he was killed Dayat described at length. No mortal hand could kill the Son of the Son, so he was tied down and a strong current was run through his body until his heart and brain stopped; thus the electricity killed him in accordance with the Law of One. All his wives, kept women, children, and slaves were also killed. I said, “But then who will be the next Condor?” and Dayat told me that there was a second son, still a young child and still alive.

  He told me also about the weapons the Dayao were building. The armies going out from Sai now were not making war to gain land, but to take copper, tin, and other metals from towns and peoples that had any store of them; and they made slaves of the Sensh, who worked the iron mines where Cloud River comes into the Dark River, and took all the iron the Sensh had used to trade with us and other people. The instructions for the materials needed and the making of the Great Weapons came, as well as I could tell, from the Exchange; and the Dayao were very skilled artisans in metal and machinery, and excellent engineers, who could follow such instructions with understanding. I am not sure that their understanding of the use of the Exchange was very good, since no one but The Condor and his High One-Warriors were permitted to learn the use of it at all, and restricted knowledge is perverted knowledge, as they say at the Library; but having little skill with the matter myself, I cannot be certain. In any case, the gathering of materials to make the Great Weapons and the making of them took four years.

  During that time I became pregnant twice. I aborted the first pregnancy, because my husband had raped me when I told him I did not want him and though I had no contraceptive. A Condor’s Daughter would go on and have the child of a rape, but I did not. It was easy to get abortifacient from the tyon, who aborted more often than they bore, and Esiryu helped me. Two years later, when I was twenty-one years old, I wanted to become pregnant. Esiryu and Syasip were good friends, but I was always bored, because there was nothing to do but spin and sew and talk, always indoors and always among people, never alone and therefore always lonely. I kept thinking that a child would be like the Valley. It would be part of me and I part of it; it would be beloved home. Maybe that part of my soul that was like a tight string stretched between the City and Sinshan would loosen and come back into my body if the child consented to come into my womb. So I ceased to use the contraceptive, and after three months Dayat and I opened the door to the child. It took that long because neither he nor I wer
e living so easily or eating so well as before, and though he still liked to talk to me he did not have so much energy for fucking. Being a favorite of The Condor was as difficult a life as being in disgrace with him. And all the wealth of Sai was now going to The Condor’s one purpose of getting the materials and making the Great Weapons. Everything was sacrificed to that. The Dayao were a people of true heroes.

  The first of the Great Weapons was a hut made of iron plates mounted on wheels that ran inside linked metal treads so that it could climb a rough course clinging to it like a caterpillar without getting the wheels stuck. The wheels were turned by a powerful motor inside the hut. It was so strong that it could push over trees and houses, and mounted on it were guns to fire large shot and fire-bombs. It was huge and magnificent, making a noise like continuous thunder when it moved. It was displayed to the people of the City outside the walls. I came veiled with all the women of the Retforoks. We saw it push through a wall of bricks, thundering and shaking through the ruins it made, huge and blind, with a thick penis-snout. Three Condors inside it emerged from it like maggots from an ear of corn, small and soft. It was named Destroyer. It was to lead the army, making a path for the soldiers called The Way of Destruction. I went into my corner in Retforok House and lay there on the red rugs, imagining the Destroyer pushing against the oak trees named Gairga in Sinshan, pushing them over, pushing against High Porch House, pushing its wall in, pushing against the roof of the Blue Clay heyimas, pushing the roof in. I imagined its metal treads, caked with adobe, crushing cornstalks and cattle and children into the dirt, grinding them as millstones grind. I kept thinking about the Destroyer even after it broke through the roof of a hidden cave a few miles south of the City and destroyed itself with its own great weight, thrusting and wedging itself into the lava tube. Even then I dreamed of it moving in the cave, pushing the earth in, crushing darkness.

  The Condor then set his purpose upon the machines called Nestlings. They were flying machines, condors with engines. The Dayao did not use balloons, but they knew how to make and fly light gliders, soaring off the cliffs above the black lava fields on the summer thermals like the buzzards and condors. Such gliding was a sacred sport, much prized and enjoyed by the young warriors. So there was great excitement over the planning of a self-powered flying vehicle. Dayat, however, did not share it. The Retforoks had worked and planned for the Destroyer, and when it came to grief they fell out of favor, and no longer went daily to the Palace, though they were not punished. Dayat was rather sore and gloomy, and sneered at the plans for the Nestlings, and the people building them. They required much less metal in their construction than the Destroyer, but they needed a good deal of fuel, and that was, Dayat said, a fatal weakness in them. The Condor had sent an army clear to the Range of Heaven to trade for petroleum fuel; it took them nearly a year to go and return, and then there was enough only for one Nestling to fly for a few days. But they began to make fuel out of alcohol from grain and shit, and two Nestlings that carried two men in them began to fly to Kulkun Eraian and back. The first day they did this was a holiday in Sai. Again we women all came out in our veils, and even the hontik cheered and danced when the Nestlings came flying over on their stiff black wings. That day I saw The Condor. He came out onto the balcony of the Palace to see his Nestlings fly over him. Women were not supposed to make him unclean with their eyes by looking at him, but I did not care about that, and was careful only not to be seen seeing him. He was dressed in golden cloth and wore a gold and black Condor helmet with the beak-mask, so I did not see the man at all, but only casings and surfaces, nothing of what was within. To be The Condor is to be outside.

  The child was staying inside me that day, but thinking about coming out into the Second House. A few more days and it decided to be born and make me a daughter’s mother. She was small, strong, and elegantly formed. Whenever I saw her pink flower-cunt I said heya in my heart, for if she had decided to be a son, that son would have “belonged” to my husband and been a Condor. Since she had decided to be a girl she was unimportant and did not matter to anyone but me and Esiryu and Syasip. Her family name was Retforok, and their priest named her Danaryu, which means Woman Given to One. The sound of it is pretty, and I used it before my husband and the others, but when I was alone with her I called her by one of the names quail have in Sinshan: Ekwerkwe, Watching Quail, the one of the covey who perches on a branch and watches out while the others are feeding on the ground, in the rainy season, before the birds pair off. Her eyes were bright like the eyes of a watching quail, and she was plump, and her hair made a little topknot, like a quail.

  The rest of us were not very plump. The food in Sai was poor and scant in those years. One had ordered The Condor to make the City in the lava beds to be safe from enemies, but nothing much grew in that black desert, and they had to bring food in from places where food was. As they kept breeding, having as many children as possible, they kept having to go farther to get food, and many tyon and hontik that had used to grow crops, or herd, or hunt, were employed on the great labors of making the Weapons and supplying them with fuel. Grain that animals and humans would have eaten was eaten by the machines. The One-Warriors paraded through the streets of Sai in sacred procession, singing,

  “Our food is Victory,

  Battle is our wine,

  In One we win all things!

  One is our wealth!

  There is no death!”

  But I held mortality in my arms and suckled her, gave food to her, the person who was born because she would die, Watching Quail. And she fed my soul with her being, her needing. If One is anything other than a word, what can it be but food?

  The sacrifices the Dayao were making were to win them wealth and comfort when the Nestlings went out to war. The trouble with the plan was that all the human peoples living anywhere near Dayao country had already moved away or, if they remained, stayed to make war, not to give tribute of food, slaves, or anything else. Anyone could see this, and as life got harder in Sai, the advice of the Terter family to move as a whole people southward into more prosperous lands began to be spoken of again. The old restless spirit of the Dayao was still in them, and many of their ways were better fitted to a nomad life than a settled one. Some of the Retforok women talked about going under the Condor’s wing to the south where there would be plenty to eat, grass and trees and cattle and new things to see, and the men listened; though the talk of women was supposed to be ignorant, foolish babble, they listened. But since the Dayao did not talk decisions over in public council, as people usually do, there was no way for disagreements to come together into agreement. So ideas became opinions, and these made factions, which diverged and became fixed opponents.

  The Retforok Condors were among the faction that said the City must remain where it was, where the finger of light had pointed, and only the soldiers would follow the fire-track of the Nestlings when they went to war. And though the women kept talking of their wish to find a better place to live, they were also frightened of moving, since most of them had lived their whole life inside the City, inside the houses, inside the rooms. They were as ignorant of other places and people as I was when I first went to Kastoha-na. Even the soldiers were ignorant about how other people lived and thought, though they had been among them for years. In the Finders Lodge they say that trading and learning go together, as do ignorance and war. And I think also, because the Dayao said that everything belonged to One, they forced themselves to think in twos: either this, or that. They could not be among the Many.

  Before Ekwerkwe was a year old, there began to be trouble among the enslaved people who worked in the fields and mines and workshops, and even some of the farmers, the tyon, had begun to steal off to become forest-living people, or back east into the Basin to live with the jackrabbits in the sagebrush. At a mine up in the Crater Lake country a group of hontik men killed the Condor soldiers who were commanding them, and went off into the Silver Mountains. I knew about this because The Condor ordered that ten
hontik of the City be killed as punishment or payment for the deaths of the ten Condors killed at the mine. This was fair, if all Condors were one and all non-Condors the other: either this, or that. The ten hontik men were tied to posts in front of the Palace at the end of the wide, beautiful street. The One-Warriors prayed aloud to One, and Condor soldiers armed with guns shot the men dead while they stood there tied. I did not see this, but was told about it. It was called the Execution of the Law of One. When I heard about it, I felt my head turning. I saw the sunlight in the common place of Kastoha-na, but it was not my mother I saw there: I saw the black vultures stooping to tear at their own bellies, pulling out their own entrails and eating them. I ran into the room where Ekwerkwe was and took her in my arms, and we sat on the floor in the corner for a long time till the vision and the sickness passed. But from that day I had no more heart to be a woman of the Condor or to follow their way. I was living among people who were going the wrong way. All I sought was to get my daughter and her mother away from them, to any other place.

  It was a long time before I could do that, for Sai was more and more like an ant-hill against which another ant-hill is making war, closed and desperate. When The Condor sent the Nestlings out to drop fire-bombs on the forests and villages of the Ziaun people southwest of Kulkun Eraian, several other peoples joined with the Ziaun to fight the war. They had made plans ahead, meeting and talking and communicating news through the Exchange. They could not hurt the Nestlings when they flew, as they went above the range of guns, and the field from which they flew and to which they returned was protected by a great number of Condor soldiers; so one person, probably a man or woman who had been a hontik slave and knew where things were and how to behave and talk, came at night and set fire to the fuel storage tanks. They exploded. The person was burned to death, but the Nestlings were left without fuel. While more was being made, The Condor sent young warriors on gliders to fly over the Ziaun villages, but the gliders were easy to shoot down, and none returned. So much of the harvest of that autumn, not only grain but potatoes, turnips, and so on, went to make fuel for the Nestlings that the storehouses of the City were emptied out; they used the seed grain. All the songs were about the glory of dying for One. All the men of the Dayao were intent to kill all that they could kill, and the women to praise them for it.