The Unreal and the Real - Vol 2 - Outer Space, Inner Lands

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The room she was in was large and rather shadowy, lighted only by a skylight, like a storeroom. Along one wall stood distaffs full of spun flax, in a row, and in the place where the light fell from the skylight stood a loom. My aunt had been a notable spinster and weaver all her life, and was sorely tempted now by those rolls of fine, even thread, as well spun as any she had ever spun herself; the loom was warped, and there lay the shuttle ready. But linen weaving is a careful art. If she began a shroud now she would be at it for a long time, and much as she wanted a proper shroud, she never had been one to start a job and then drop it unfinished. So it was that she kept worrying about what would become of me. But she had already made up her mind to leave the housework undone (since housework is never done anyhow), and now she admitted that she must let other people see to her winding sheet. She hoped she could trust me to choose a clean sheet, at least, and a well-patched one. But she could not resist picking up the end thread of one of the distaffs and feeding out a length between her thumb and finger to test it for evenness and strength; and she kept the thread running between thumb and finger as she walked on.

  It was well that she did so, as the new room opened onto a corridor along which were many doorways, each one leading to other halls and rooms, a maze in which she would certainly have lost her way but for the thread of flax.

  The rooms were clean, a little dusty, and unfurnished. In one of them my aunt found a toy lying on the floor, a wooden horse. It was crudely carved, the forelegs all of a piece and the hind legs the same, a kind of a two-legged horse with round, flat eyes, which she thought she remembered, though she was not sure.

  In another long, narrow room many unused kitchen tools and pans lay on a counter, and three horn buttons in a row.

  At the end of a long corridor into which she was drawn by a gleam or a reflection at the far end, there stood an engine of some kind, which was certainly nothing my aunt had ever seen before.

  In one small room with no skylight an intense, pungent smell hung in the air, filling up the room like a living creature caught in it. My aunt left that room hurriedly, upset.

  Though her curiosity had been roused by finding all these rooms she had not known in her house, her explorations, and the silence, brought on her a sense of oppression and unease. She stood for a moment outside the door of the room where the strong smell was, making up her mind. That never took her long. She began to follow the thread back, winding it about the fingers of her left hand as she took it up. This process needed more attention than the paying out, and lifting her eyes from a tangle in the thread she was puzzled to find herself in a room which she did not recall passing through, but could hardly have crossed without noticing, for it was very large. The walls were of a beautiful fine-grained stone of a pale grey hue, in which certain figures like astrologers’ charts of the constellations, fine lines connecting stars or clusters of stars, were inlaid in gold wire. The ceiling was light and high, the floor of worn, dark marble. It was like a church, my aunt thought, but not a religious church (that is what she thought). The patterns on the walls were like the illustrations in books of learning, and the room itself was like the hall of the great library in the city; there were no books, but the place was majestic and reposeful, having about it a collected stillness very pleasant to the spirit of my aunt. She was tired of walking, and decided to rest there.

  She sat down, since there was no furniture, on the floor in the corner nearest the door to which the thread had led her. My aunt was a woman who liked a wall at her back. The invasions had left her uneasy in open spaces, always looking over her shoulder. Though who could hurt her now? as she said to herself, sitting down. But, as she said to herself, you never can be sure.

  The lines of gold wire on the walls led her eye along them as she sat resting. Some of the figures they made seemed familiar. She began to think that these figures or patterns were a map of the maze which she was in, the wires representing passages and the stars, rooms; or perhaps the stars represented the doors into rooms, the walls of which were not outlined. She could pretty certainly retrace the first corridor back to the room of the distaffs; but on the far side of that, where the old part of our house ought to be, the patterns continued, looking a good deal more like the familiar constellations of the sky in early winter. She was not certain she understood the map at all, but she continued to study it, to let her mind follow the lines from star to star, until she began to see her way. She got up then, and went back, pursuing the flaxen thread and taking it up in her left hand, till she came back.

  There I was in the same room still crying. My mother was gone. Lacewing flies wait years to be born, but they live only a day. The undertaker’s men were just leaving, and I had to follow them, so my aunt came along to her funeral, though she did not want to leave the house. She tried to bring her ball of thread with her, but it broke as she crossed the threshold. I could hear her swear under her breath, the way she always did when she broke a thread or spilled the sugar—“Damn!” in a whisper.

  Neither of us enjoyed the funeral at all. My aunt grew panicky as they began to throw the dirt back into the grave. She cried aloud, “I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!”—which frightened me so much that I thought it was myself speaking, myself suffocating, and I fell down. People had to help me get up, and help me get home. I was so ashamed and confused among them that I lost my aunt.

  One of the neighbors, who had never been particularly pleasant to us, took pity on me, and behaved with much kindness. She talked so wisely to me that I got up the courage to ask her, “Where is my aunt? Will she come back?” But she did not know, and only said things meant to comfort me. I am not as clever as most people, but I knew there was no comfort for me.

  The neighbor made sure I could look after myself, and that evening she sent one of her children over with dinner in a dish for me. I ate it, and it was very good. I had not eaten anything while my aunt was away in the other part of the house.

  At night, after dark, I lay down all alone in the bedroom. At first I felt well and cheerful, because of the food I had eaten, and I pretended my aunt was there sleeping in the same room, the way it had always been. Then I got frightened, and the fright grew in the darkness.

  My aunt came up out of the floor in the middle of the room. The red tiles humped up and cracked apart. Her hair and her head pushed through the tiles, and then her body. She looked very dark, like dirt, and she was much smaller than she had been.

  “Let me be!” she said.

  I was too terrified to speak.

  “Let me go!” my aunt said. But it was not truly my aunt; it was only an old part of her that had come back underground from the graveyard, because I had been wanting her. I did not like that part of her, or want it there. I cried, “Go away! Go back!” and hid my head in my arms.

  My aunt made a little creaking sound like a wicker basket. I kept my eyes hidden so long that I nearly fell asleep. When I looked, no one was there, or only a kind of darker place in the air, and the tiles were not cracked apart. I went to sleep.

  Next morning when I woke up the sunlight was in the window and things were all right, but I could not walk across that part of the floor where my aunt had come up through the tiles.

  I was afraid to cry after that night, since crying might bring her back to taste the sweetness or to scold me. But it was lonely in the house now that she was buried and gone. I had no idea what to do without her. The neighbor came in and talked about finding me work, and gave me food again; but the next day a man came, who said he had been sent by a creditor. He took away the chest of clothes and bedding. Later that day, in the evening, he came back, because he had seen that I was alone there. I kept the door locked this time. He spoke smoothly at first, trying to make me let him in, and then he began saying in a low voice that he would hurt me, but I kept the door locked and never answered. The next day somebody else came, but I had pushed the bedstead up against the door. It may have been the neighbor’s child that came, but I was afraid
to look. I felt safe staying in the back room. Other people came and knocked, but I never answered, and they went away again.

  I stayed in the back room until at last I saw the door that my aunt had gone through, that day. I went and opened it. I was sure she would be there. But the room was empty. The loom was gone, and the distaffs were gone, and no one was there.

  I went on to the corridor beyond, but no farther. I could never find my way by myself through all those halls and rooms, or understand the patterns of the stars. I was so afraid and wretched that I went back, and crawled into my own mouth, and hid there.

  My aunt came to fetch me. She was very cross. I always tried her patience. All she said was, “Come on!” And she pulled me along by the hand. Once she said, “Shame on you!” When we got to the riverbank she looked me over very sternly. She washed my face with the dark water of that river, and pressed my hair down with the palms of her hands. She said, “I should have known.”

  “I’m sorry, Aunt,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Come along, now. Look sharp!”

  For the boat had come across the river and was tying up at the wharf. We walked down to the wharf among the reeds in the twilight. It was after sunset, and there was no moon or stars, and no wind blowing. The river was so wide I could not see the other shore.

  My aunt dickered with the ferryman. I let her do that, since people always cheated me. She had taken the obol off her tongue, and was talking fast. “My niece, can’t you see how it is? Of course they didn’t give her the fare! She’s not responsible! I came along with her to look after her. Here’s the fare. Yes, it’s for us both. No, you don’t,” and she drew back her hand, having merely shown him a glimpse of the bit of copper. “Not till we’re both safe across!”

  The ferryman glowered, but began to loosen the painter.

  “Come along, then!” my aunt said. She stepped into the boat, and held out her hand to me. So I followed her.

  The Poacher

  …And must one kiss

  Revoke the silent house, the birdsong wilderness?

  —Sylvia Townsend Warner

  I was a child when I came to the great hedge for the first time. I was hunting mushrooms, not for sport, as I have read ladies and gentlemen do, but in earnest. To hunt without need is the privilege, they say, of noblemen. I should say that it is one of the acts that makes a man a nobleman, that constitutes privilege itself. To hunt because one is hungry is the lot of the commoner. All it generally makes of him is a poacher. I was poaching mushrooms, then, in the King’s Forest.

  My father had sent me out that morning with a basket and the command, “Don’t come sneaking back here till it’s full!” I knew he would beat me if I didn’t come back with the basket full of something to eat—mushrooms at best, at this time of year, or the fiddleheads of ferns that were just beginning to poke through the cold ground in a few places. He would hit me across the shoulders with the hoe handle or a switch, and send me to bed supperless, because he was hungry and disappointed. He could feel that he was at least better off than somebody, if he made me hungrier than himself, and sore and ashamed as well. After a while my stepmother would pass silently by my corner of the hut and leave on my pallet or in my hand some scrap she had contrived or saved from her own scant supper—half a crust, a lump of pease pudding. Her eyes told me eloquently, Don’t say anything! I said nothing. I never thanked her. I ate the food in darkness.

  Often my father would beat her. It was my fate, fortunate or misfortunate, not to feel better off than her when I saw her beaten. Instead I felt more ashamed than ever, worse off even than the weeping, wretched woman. She could do nothing, and I could do nothing for her. Once I tried to sweep out the hut when she was working in our field, so that things would be in order when she came back, but my sweeping only stirred the dirt around. When she came in from hoeing, filthy and weary, she noticed nothing, but set straight to building up the fire, fetching water, and so on, while my father, as filthy and weary as she, sat down in the one chair we had with a great sigh. And I was angry because I had, after all, done nothing at all.

  I remembered that when my father first married her, when I was quite small, she had played with me like another child. She knew knife-toss games, and taught me them. She taught me the ABC from a book she had. The nuns had brought her up, and she knew her letters, poor thing. My father had a notion that I might be let into the friary if I learned to read, and make the family rich. That came to nothing, of course. She was little and weak and not the help to him at work my mother had been, and things did not prosper for us. My lessons in reading ended soon.

  It was she who found I was a clever hunter and taught me what to look for—the golden and brown mushrooms, woodmasters and morels and other fungi, the wild shoots, roots, berries, and hips in their seasons, the cresses in the streams; she taught me to make fishtraps; my father showed me how to set snares for rabbits. They soon came to count on me for a good portion of our food, for everything we grew on our field went to the Baron, who owned it, and we were allowed to cultivate only a mere patch of kitchen garden, lest our labors there detract from our work for the Baron. I took pride in my foraging, and went willingly into the forest, and fearlessly. Did we not live on the very edge of the forest, almost in it? Did I not know every path and glade and grove within a mile of our hut? I thought of it as my own domain. But my father still ordered me to go, every morning, as if I needed his command, and he laced it with distrust—“Don’t come sneaking back until the basket’s full!”

  That was no easy matter sometimes—in early spring, when nothing was up yet—like the day I first saw the great hedge. Old snow still lay greyish in the shadows of the oaks. I went on, finding not a mushroom nor a fiddlehead. Mummied berries hung on the brambles, tasting of decay. There had been no fish in the trap, no rabbit in the snares, and the crayfish were still hiding in the mud. I went on farther than I had yet gone, hoping to discover a new fernbrake, or trace a squirrel’s nut-hoard by her tracks on the glazed and porous snow. I was trudging along easily enough, having found a path almost as good as a road, like the avenue that led to the Baron’s hall. Cold sunlight lay between the tall beechtrees that stood along it. At the end of it was something like a hedgerow, but high, so high I had taken it at first for clouds. Was it the end of the forest? the end of the world?

  I stared as I walked, but never stopped walking. The nearer I came the more amazing it was—a hedge taller than the ancient beeches, and stretching as far as I could see to left and right. Like any hedgerow, it was made of shrubs and trees that laced and wove themselves together as they grew, but they were immensely tall, and thick, and thorny. At this time of the year the branches were black and bare, but nowhere could I find the least gap or hole to let me peer through to the other side. From the huge roots up, the thorns were impenetrably tangled. I pressed my face up close, and got well scratched for my pains, but saw nothing but an endless dark tangle of gnarled stems and fierce branches.

  Well, I thought, if they’re brambles, at least I’ve found a lot of berries, come summer!—for I didn’t think about much but food, when I was a child. It was my whole business and chief interest.

  All the same, a child’s mind will wander. Sometimes when I’d had enough to eat for supper, I’d lie watching our tiny hearthfire dying down, and wonder what was on the other side of the great hedge of thorns.

  The hedge was indeed a treasury of berries and haws, so that I was often there all summer and autumn. It took me half the morning to get there, but when the great hedge was bearing, I could fill my basket and sack with berries or haws in no time at all, and then I had all the middle of the day to spend as I pleased, alone. Oftenest what pleased me was to wander along beside the hedge, eating a particularly fine blackberry here and there, dreaming formless dreams. I knew no tales then, except the terribly simple one of my father, my stepmother, and myself, and so my daydreams had no shape or story to them. But all the time I walked, I had half an eye for any kind of
gap or opening that might be a way through the hedge. If I had a story to tell myself, that was it: There is a way through the great hedge, and I discover it.

  Climbing it was out of the question. It was the tallest thing I had ever seen, and all up that great height the thorns of the branches were as long as my fingers and sharp as sewing needles. If I was careless picking berries from it, my clothes got caught and ripped, and my arms were a net of red and black scratches every summer.

  Yet I liked to go there, and to walk beside it. One day of early summer, some years after I first found the hedge, I went there. It was too soon for berries, but when the thorns blossomed the flowered sprays rose up and up one above the other like clouds into the sky, and I liked to see that, and to smell their scent, as heavy as the smell of meat or bread, but sweet. I set off to the right. The walking was easy, all along the hedge, as if there might have been a road there once. The sun-dappling arms of the old beeches of the forest did not quite reach to the thorny wall that bore its highest sprays of blossom high above their crowns. It was shady under the wall, smelling heavily of blackberry flowers, and windlessly hot. It was always very silent there, a silence that came through the hedge.

  I had noticed long ago that I never heard a bird sing on the other side, though their spring songs might be ringing down every aisle of the forest. Sometimes I saw birds fly over the hedge, but I never was sure I saw the same one fly back.

  So I wandered on in the silence, on the springy grass, keeping an eye out for the little russet-brown mushrooms that were my favorites, when I began to feel something queer about the grass and the woods and the flowering hedge. I thought I had never walked this far before, and yet it all looked as if I had seen it many times. Surely I knew that clump of young birches, one bent down by last winter’s long snow? Then I saw, not far from the birches, under a currant bush beside the grassy way, a basket and a knotted sack. Someone else was here, where I had never met another soul. Someone was poaching in my domain.