Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  I decided I wanted to be rich. If my mother could not warm herself at least I would keep her warm. Even that first year that I was home, I made a dance cloak to give to our heyimas. I wove it on Valiant’s loom, which had stood unused in the second room of the household. As I wove I watched the silver crescent bracelet on my arm shine across the warp, forth and back.

  Shell had looked after our ewes in lambing time, and at shearing had given the wool of them to the storehouses; there were still five sheep in the family, two wethers and three ewes. When I went to work with them I always took Ekwerkwe with me. She was ready to learn from them and the other animals of the pastures and the hills. In the City there had been nobody but human people, and her education had been grossly incomplete. On our journey to the Valley she had walked all the long way among the living Four-House people; she had tasted Coyote’s milk. Now in the Valley she wanted to be with the sheep and in the barns with the milk-cows and in dogtown with the puppies, like the other children, all day long. She did not like the gardens and the gathering-places so well; the work there is slower and harder and the results are not so easy to see, except at harvest time. That learning comes slowly.

  Ninepoint’s household kept himpi, and they gave us four young ones from a litter. I built up the old pen under the balcony and gave Ekwerkwe the himpis’ care, and she nearly smothered them with mindfulness at first and then forgot to give them water so that they nearly died, and she wept with remorse, and learned; she also learned to whistle like a himpi. The cat downstairs in High Porch House had kittens, and a couple of tabbies spilled over into our household. One day near our gathering trees I found a half-grown kid, lame and bleeding; wild dogs had killed the mother and mauled the kid. I doctored her as best I could, carried her down the ridge to town, and kept her penned till she recovered. As she was a stray, she became one of our household, and presently five of us were goats, very pretty tan-and-black longhairs, giving excellent mohair for weaving.

  I had always liked potting more than any other skill, but with sheep, goats, and a good loom, it seemed that weaving was there to do; so I did it. I took what was given, since I wanted to give. The trouble with weaving was that I did not like to stay indoors. I had had enough of roofs, for seven years. But all through the dry season, from the Moon to the Grass, I had the loom outside on the balcony, and it was pleasant, working there.

  Shadow, brought up as a “dressing-maid” in Sai, did not even know how to cook. She and Ekwerkwe learned that skill together. My mother got used to her company; she spoke very little to Shadow, but came to like being with her and working with her. Shadow learned gardening with her and with Shell. After a while she began talking to women in the Blood Lodge, receiving instruction, and with women and men in the Blue Clay heyimas; and in her third summer in Sinshan, at the dancing of the Water, she became a Blue Clay person, living in my House, my sister, as she had been in love and loyalty since we met as adolescents in Terter House. Later on she joined the Planting Lodge. Once when we were spading the heavy black adobe of our garden plot at planting time, when the clay clogged the spade in masses so that one of us had to dig one spadeful and hand the spade to the other to clean while digging one more spadeful with a second spade, which the other then cleaned so that it could dig one more spadeful…while we were sweating at that in a fine, cold rain, she said to me, “My father was a tyon, a farmer. He sold me to Terter House when I was five to be trained as a maid, to be spared that work. Now look at me!” She tried to lift her foot, and it too was clogged and clotted with the sticky black dirt. “I am stuck in the mud,” she said. She scraped a great weight of adobe off the shovel and handed it back to me, and we went on digging. We did not often talk about the City. Even for her, I think, those years now seemed like a feverish, restless night, which is long and dark and full of thoughts and emotions and miseries, a travail of the soul, but which will not let itself be remembered when the daylight shines.

  I have forgotten to say that in the year I came home, after the Sun was danced, I left Ekwerkwe and Shadow and Towhee, and went alone to Kastoha-na and to Wakwaha to relate my story of living with the Dayao and to answer questions that people wanted to ask concerning them and their weapons and plans for war. At that time much information was given and taken at the Exchange concerning the Condor’s armies; they told me that the Nestlings were flying again, and had set towns afire in the country southwest of Kulkun Eraian, but that there were no Condor armies outside the Condor’s lands. While I was there, a message on the Exchange from the Six Rivers country said that people there had seen a Nestling fall out of the air on fire; and the Exchange itself confirmed this when the scholars asked it. So many peoples were using the Exchange, from the Basin and the Inland Sea up the coast and clear round to the Crater Lake country and north even of that, that everything the City’s armies did was reported and known at once, they told me, and no one could be taken by surprise or left without aid if they asked for it. I listened to what they said and answered what they asked as best I could, but at that time I did not want to hear anything about the Dayao, but only to put them behind me; and so I left Wakwaha as soon as I could.

  I went back with Ekwerkwe when she was nine years old, but we did not go to the Exchange. We went to the Springs of the River to dance the Water where the water begins to shine.

  After I had been home two or three years, when the household was prospering and the day’s work did not fill my whole mind, I began to listen more carefully in the heyimas, and to talk with my side-grandfather and with Shell, who were both thoughtful and magnanimous people. They had always been careful of me. Now they were getting old; it was time that I be careful of them, and take at last what they offered me. I was happy with the giving that flowed in and out the doors of our household now, and Shell and Ninepoint praised my wealth; but I knew they did not consider me wealthy, because I was so poorly educated in matters of history, poetry, and the intellect. I had no songs except the mud wakwa the old man had given me when I was a child at the Geyser, and the rain and feather song that was given me in the high hills coming home. Ninepoint said, “If you want it, I will give you the Deer Gyre, granddaughter.” This was a very great gift, and I considered a long time before I accepted it, distrusting my ability. I said to Ninepoint, “That is a great stream to pour into a small bowl!” He said, “The bowl’s empty, so it can hold a great deal.” We took all that rainy season, meeting in the heyimas at early morning, to sing the Deer Gyre until I knew it. It is still the greatest thing in my keeping.

  After that I began reading at the Archives of the Madrone Lodge, and later I went to the Madrone of Telina-na, and to the Blue Clay in Wakwaha, continuing my education. I had not much gift, but much was given me.*

  When Spear and Shadow married, that put two families in our two rooms of High Porch House, which was a crowd. Also I was not very comfortable living under one roof with Spear, whom I had once desired. I did not quite trust him or myself. Though I sang the Wedding Song for them with all my heart, still, old feelings can be there suddenly and swallow you up, like the caves in the lava fields. And I had not had a man in my bed since I left those black fields.

  That spring I danced the Moon for the first time.

  For the summer Towhee and Ekwerkwe and I went to Gahheya, while Shadow and Spear went across the Valley to a summering place near Dry Falls. After the Water we were all together again in High Porch House, and I decided to go to Telina for a while. Ekwerkwe asked to come with me. We stayed in Hardcinder House. My half-uncle’s wife, Vine, was ill with sevai, and going blind; she liked to talk about the old days with me. She had no daughters, so her house was very quiet now, that had been so noisy with children. She liked to tell Ekwerkwe how I had called her house a mountain, and how she had asked me to come stay with her in that mountain; and now, she said, “not only the Owl but the Quail has come to stay in the mountain!” Then Ekwerkwe, though she knew, would ask, “Who is the Owl?” So they got on happily, rattling along like two creeks in t
he rainy season.

  While I was in Telina I went every day to the Madrone Lodge to read history. A person of the Serpentine of Chumo came there also, and sometimes we talked together. He had not been away from Chumo before, since he was somewhat lame from a boyhood fall, and it was hard for him to travel unless he got a ride on a horse or on a cart. He had not thought about travelling at all until he had lived about forty years. By then he had practiced for many years in the Doctors Lodge; he had a gift of healing, so great a gift that it burdened him beyond his strength. He had made so many life-debts in Chumo that he was worn out trying to pay them. So he had come to the Madrone in Telina to rest awhile, and went to the Doctors Lodge only to sing. He was a very quiet man but his talk was always interesting. Each time we talked I wanted to talk again.

  One day he said, “Woman Coming Home, if we could make one bed, I would be in it; but I don’t know where to make it.”

  I said, “I have a large bed in Sinshan, in High Porch House.”

  He said, “If I came into your household I would rather come as your husband. Maybe you don’t want a husband, or this husband.”

  I was not sure, so I said, “Well, I’ll speak to Vine. She was a girl in Chumo. She might like to have a Chumo man around her house for a while.”

  So he came into Hardcinder House to live with us, before the Sun. We both danced the Twenty-One days. Ekwerkwe slept with Vine, and I with Alder. What I felt was that if I wanted a husband, this was a good one; but maybe it was better that I not marry. My mothers had not been very good at being married, and I had already had one husband whom I had left without a word or a thought. Alder and I certainly got along well, and by marrying me he could leave his creditors in Chumo fairly and start fresh at the Doctors Lodge in Sinshan. That was a good reason for marrying. But I kept thinking about it. I was still the Condor’s daughter and the Condor’s wife, ignorant, poor of mind, only beginning to be a person. I was raw, and needed a lot of cooking yet. Though I had lived twenty-six years, I had lived only nineteen of them in the Valley. Nineteen is young to marry. I told Alder these thoughts. He listened carefully, without answering. That was a thing I liked very much in him and admired, his careful and silent listening. It was his gift and way.

  Some days after I had spoke to him, he said, “Send me back to Chumo.”

  I said, “This is not my mothers’ household. I can’t send you out of it.”

  He said, “I can’t leave you and should leave you. I am taking your strength. What I have to give you, you don’t want or need.”

  What he meant was his need of me. He spoke with great passion and with as great restraint. What he said was true. I did not want his need of me. But there was more than that that was true. Once a waterskater had given me the gift I did not want or understand; I had taken it, and it might yet be my wealth. I said, “The husbands in our part of High Porch House don’t seem to stay long; one of them kept going back to Chumo and the other went back outside the world. You needn’t stay long. You can go back to Chumo when you like. Come for a while.”

  So we went to Sinshan to dance the World, but not the Wedding Night. Ekwerkwe stayed another month with Vine, and after that Shadow and Spear went to live in Plum Trees House, where a room on the second floor was empty since Shell’s grandson had married Shopiwe of Up the Hill House. The other family on the first floor of High Porch House moved out of one small north room and let it come back to our family, so Alder and I slept there. In Sinshan we got along even better than in Telina. He never spoke of marrying, however, or behaved in any way that would remind me that he had said that if he came into my house he had wanted to come as my husband. I remembered it; but I kept thinking, “I will not be caught as my parents were caught. I will not let his need eat up my life. I must come to be myself by myself. When a man comes, under the Moon or in the sunlight, that I like as well as this man, I will have him if I wish.” So it was. Only I did not meet any man I liked as well as Alder.

  In the Doctors Lodge of Sinshan he conducted himself with caution, and I learned a good deal from watching his mindfulness. He knew that some small minded people in that lodge would be jealous of his skill, and took care never to compete with them. And he did not want to pile up life-debts as he had done in Chumo in the pride of his art; so the people he asked the lodge for the care of were people who had mortal cancers or were sevai, those for whom there was little relief and no cure. At one time there were three such people in Sinshan, and he would go and sing and care for all of them. In the lodge an illnatured person said, “The Chumo man hangs around the dying like a buzzard!” He heard that, and was ashamed. He would not tell me why, but I saw something had shamed him, and found out from Woman Laughs what it was; I was angry for him, but to him I laughed. I said, “My husbands are all condors and buzzards!”

  I had called him husband. He heard it, but he said nothing.

  In the household, he got on very well with Ekwerkwe, and Towhee was as much at ease with him as with anyone. Sometimes in the evening he would sing, almost under his breath, one of the long songs of his art, and when my mother listened her face grew soft and deep, without strain. Though because of his lameness he had never gone with the flocks on Sheep Mountain, still he was a Chumo man, and the sheep trusted him; and the she-goat whom I had found on Sinshan Ridge would come to him whenever he was in the fields. As they were both lame, it was a funny sight, one hobbling along quietly after the other, and the rest of the goats of Sinshan trailing along behind.

  When Ninepoint died I was the Deer Gyre Singer of my heyimas, and other responsibilities followed upon that. I felt quite wealthy enough, after a few years, and sometimes, like my mother, I wanted to go spend the summer away up in the hills away from human people. I did not do that, but I did walk in Coyote’s house, always some time after the Summer dancing or before the Grass.

  Sometimes a person would come across from Chumo to stay with Alder in our household. One of his creditors was a child whose inflamed appendix he had cut out when the boy was six years old. There was no denying his responsibility for that life. The boy was an adolescent now, and the mother would come with him to visit his side-father every season or so. She always said to Alder, “When are you coming back? So-and-so needs you, such-and-so asked me to ask you, when are you coming back to Chumo?”—all people who were alive because Alder had cured or healed them. He was fond of his side-son, whom he called Cutgut, an intelligent cheerful boy, but the mother always left him very cast down and uneasy. I could see him thinking about his life. At last, one day after they had been visiting and had left, he said, “I think I should go back to Chumo.”

  I had been thinking too, and I said, “Alder, those people are looking after one another in Chumo. Here there are people who need you now. How will the old man in Northwest House die, without you? How will this woman in High Porch House live, without you?”

  He stayed in Sinshan, and our people sang the Wedding Song for us on the second night of the World that year. After that, he joined the Black Adobe Lodge and became a scholar of that learning. Twice he rode to Wakwaha for the Western Gyre. When my mother fell ill he cared for her, and when she began dying he went with her as far as it is appropriate to go. I came with him, following him like the lame goat, and my mother went on, and he and I came back together, into our house.

  So there is no more history in my life after that; all that I could bring into the Valley from outside I have brought, all that I could remember I have written; the rest has been lived and will be lived again. I have lived in this place until I have become Stone Telling, and my husband Stone Listening, and my quail has become Shining; and in this house Acorn and Phoebe have made me the grandmother weaving at the loom.

  NOTES:

  I was happy…much was given me.

  “To be wealthy,” “to give,” are ambad; “to learn” is andabad; and “gift” in the sense of talent or capacity is badab. Stone Telling does a little wordplay to show that her education was not entirely wasted.
/>   Messages Concerning the Condor

  Most messages and notices coming into the Wakwaha Exchange were held in short-term memory for about twenty-four hours and then self-effaced, as they were of practical and immediate significance—notifications from other peoples of the region of goods and foods to trade, or changes in train schedules, announcements of festivals to which strangers were welcome, weather reports from the City satellites, and warnings of impending flood, fire, earthquake, volcanic eruption, or remote events which might affect local conditions. Occasionally reports concerning human doings perceived as concerning the peoples of a large area were printed out on paper for circulation and perhaps for preservation in the Archives.

  The following reports are of this latter kind. They were kept in the Archives of the Madrone in Wakwaha. (Of course all such records, along with all other data that passed through the computer network either by human agency or as part of the City’s process of existence, were stored in the permanent Memory Bank of the City, but the retrieval problem was considerable.)

  DOCUMENT 1.

  A notice concerning the Condor people, made and sent by Shor’ki Ti’ of Long Farms with Willows of the Rekwit People:

  The annual council of the Farms of Rekwit agreed that a report should be made and sent to all the Exchanges in the westward drainage of the Range of Light and all drainages into the Inland Sea and all drainages into the Ocean southward of the mouth of the Ssu Nnoo. I was told to make the report since I proposed the idea. People in Rekwit think it important that we stop the Condor people from making trouble.

  You can get a summary of information concerning this people from the Memory using Codes 1306611/3116/6/16 and 1306611/3116/6/6442. This is a synopsis of that summary: They call themselves Dayao or One People. They are related to people living in the Great Lakes area by language, and may have been sent west from that area a long time ago. They lived as nomads in the Grasslands and in the desert countries north of the Omorn Sea. About a hundred and twelve years ago they began to become civilised. A man named Kaspyoda took their power. They followed him west towards the Dark River country. He died near the Dry Lakes. His son took his power and started to give it back, but was killed by a cousin, a man named Astyoda, calling himself The Great Condor. He led the people down into the Lava Beds saying that a finger of light had pointed to the place where they should settle down. They made a town there. Their name for it is City. They have become entirely civilised, aggressive, and destructive. They have done much harm and will do more if we do not prevent them. A council is requested.