The Eye of the Heron

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The curly clerk made frantic gestures at the Shantih people with one hand while trying to find his place among the papers on his desk with the other. The two guards came forward briskly and flanked the five townspeople. “Come on!” one of them ordered.

  “Excuse me,” Vera said to them, gently. “Councillor Falco, I’m afraid we’re misunderstanding one another again. We have made a decision, a tentative one. We wish now, in cooperation with you, to make a definite one. Neither we, nor you, can decide alone upon a matter which concerns us all.”

  “You misunderstand,” Falco said, looking at the air above Vera’s head. “You have made a proposal. The decision is up to the Government of Victoria.”

  Vera smiled. “I know you’re not used to women speaking at your meetings, maybe it would go better if Jan Serov speaks for us.” She stepped back, and a big, fair-skinned man replaced her. “You see,” he said, as if continuing Vera’s sentence, “first we have to settle what we want and how to do it, and then when we’ve agreed on that, we do it.”

  “The topic is closed,” said bald Councillor Helder, at Falco’s left on the dais. “If you continue to obstruct the business of the Plenum you must be forcibly removed.”

  “We aren’t obstructing business, we’re trying to get it done,” Jan said. He didn’t know what to do with his big hands, which hung uneasily at his sides, half-closed, wanting the handle of an absent hoe. “We have to talk this business over.”

  Falco said very quietly, “Guards.”

  As the guards pressed forward again, Jan looked in perplexity at Vera, and Hari spoke up: “Oh, now, calm down, Councillor, all we want is a bit of sensible talk, you can see that.”

  “Your Excellency! Have these people taken out!” shouted a man from the benches, and others started calling out, as if they wanted to be heard doing so by the Councillors on the dais. The Shantih people stood quiet, though Jan Serov and young King stared rather wide-eyed at the angry, shouting faces turned toward them. Falco conferred a moment with Helder, then signaled one of the guards, who left the hall at a run. Falco raised his hand for silence.

  “You people,” he said quite gently, “must understand that you aren’t members of the Government, but subjects of the Government. To ‘decide’ upon some ‘plan’ contrary to the Government’s decision is an act of rebellion. To make this clear to you, and the rest of your people, you’ll be detained here until we are certain that normal order is restored.”

  “What’s ‘detained’?” Hari whispered to Vera, who said, “Prison.” Hari nodded. He had been born in a prison, in Canamerica; he didn’t remember it, but he was proud of it.

  Eight guards now came shoving in and began to hustle the Shantih people to the door. “Single file! Hurry up now! Don’t run or I’ll shoot!” their officer commanded. None of the five showed the least sign of trying to run, resist, or protest. King, shoved by an impatient guard, said, “Oh, sorry,” as if he had got in the way of someone in a rush.

  The guards bundled the group out past the frescoes, under the columns, into the street. There they stopped. “Where to?” one asked the officer.

  “Jail.”

  “Her too?”

  They all looked at Vera, neat and delicate in her white silk. She looked back at them with tranquil interest.

  “The boss said jail,” the officer said, scowling.

  “Hesumeria, sir, we can’t stick her in there,” said a little, sharp-eyed, scar-faced guard.

  “That’s what the boss said.”

  “But look, she’s a lady.”

  “Take her to Boss Falco’s house and let him decide when he gets home,” suggested another, Scarface’s twin, but scarless.

  “I’ll give you my word to stay wherever you decide, but I’d rather stay with my friends,” said Vera.

  “Please shut up, lady!” the officer said, clutching his head. “All right. You two take her to Casa Falco.”

  “The others will give their word too, if—” Vera began, but the officer turned his back on her and shouted, “All right! Get going! Single file!”

  “This way, senhora,” said Scarface.

  At the turning Vera paused and held up her hand to salute her four companions, now far down the street. “Peace! Peace!” Hari shouted back, enthusiastically. Scarface muttered something and spat thickly aside. The two guards were men Vera would have been afraid of if she had passed them in a City street alone, but as they walked now, flanking her, their protectiveness of her was evident even in their gait. She realized that they felt themselves to be her rescuers.

  “Is the jail very disagreeable?” she asked.

  “Drunks, fights, stink,” Scarface replied, and his twin added with grave propriety, “No place for a lady, senhora.”

  “Is it any better place for a man?” she inquired, but neither answered.

  Casa Falco stood only three streets from the Capitol: a big, low, white building with a red tile roof. The plump housemaid who came to the door was flustered by the presence of two soldiers and an unknown senhora on the doorstep; she curtseyed and panted and whispered, “Oh, hesumeria! Oh, hesumeria!”—and fled, leaving them on the doorstep. After a long pause, during which Vera conversed with her guards and found that they were indeed twin brothers, named Emiliano and Anibal, and that they liked their work as guards because they got good pay and didn’t have to take any lip off anybody, but Anibal—Scarface—didn’t like standing around so much because it made his feet hurt and his ankles swell—after this, a girl entered the front hall, a straight-backed, red-cheeked girl in sweeping full skirts. “I am Senhorita Falco,” she said, with a quick glance at the guards, but speaking to Vera. Then her face changed. “Senhora Adelson, I didn’t recognize you. I’m sorry. Please come in!”

  “This is embarrassing, my dear, you see, I’m not a visitor, I’m a prisoner. These gentlemen have been very kind. They thought the jail had no place for women, so they brought me here. I think they have to come in too, if I come in, to guard me.”

  Luz Marina’s eyebrows had come down in a fine, straight line. She stood silent for a moment. “They can wait in the entrance here,” she said. “Sit on those chests,” she said to Anibal and Emiliano. “Senhora Adelson will be with me.”

  The twins edged stiffly through the door after Vera.

  “Please come in,” Luz said, standing aside with formal courtesy, and Vera entered the hall of Casa Falco, with its cushioned wooden chairs and settees, its inlaid tables and patterned stone floor, its thick glass windows and huge cold fireplaces, her prison. “Please sit down,” said her jailer,. and went to an inner door to order a fire laid and lighted, and coffee brought.

  Vera did not sit down. As Luz returned toward her she looked at the girl with admiration. “My dear, you are kind and courteous. But I really am under arrest—by your father’s order.”

  “This is my house,” Luz said. Her voice was as dry as Falco’s. “It is a house hospitable to guests.”

  Vera gave a docile little sigh, and sat down. Her gray hair had been blown about by the wind in the streets; she smoothed it back, then clasped her thin, brown hands in her lap.

  “Why did he arrest you?” The question had been suppressed, and shot out under pressure. “What did you do?”

  “Well, we came and tried to talk with the Council about plans for the new settlement.”

  “Did you know they’d arrest you?”

  “We discussed it as one possibility.”

  “But what is it all about?”

  “About the new settlement—about freedom, I suppose. But really, my dear, I mustn’t talk about it with you. I’ve promised to be a prisoner, and prisoners aren’t supposed to preach their crime.”

  “Why not?” said Luz disdainfully. “Is it catching, like a cold?”

  Vera laughed. “Yes!—I know we’ve met, I don’t know where it was.”

  The flustered maid hurried in with a tray, set it on the table, and hurried out again, panting. Luz poured the black, hot drink—called
coffee, made from the roasted root of a native plant—into cups of fine red earthenware.

  “I was at the festival in Shanty Town a year ago,” she said. The authoritative dryness was gone from her voice; she sounded shy. “To see the dancing. And there were a couple of times you spoke at school.”

  “Of course! You and Lev and all that lot were in school together! You knew Timmo, then. You know he died, on the journey north?”

  “No. I didn’t. In the wilderness,” the girl said, and a brief silence followed the word. “Was Lev—Is Lev in jail now?”

  “He didn’t come with us. You know, in a war, you don’t put all your soldiers in the same place at once.” Vera, with recovered cheerfulness, sipped her coffee, and winced very slightly at the taste.

  “A war?”

  “Well, a war without fighting, of course. Maybe a rebellion, as your father says. Maybe, I hope, just a disagreement.” Luz still looked blank. “You know what a war is?”

  “Oh, yes. Hundreds of people killing each other. History of Earth at school was full of them. But I thought … your people wouldn’t fight?”

  “No,” Vera agreed. “We don’t fight. Not with knives and guns. But when we’ve agreed that something ought to be done, or not done, we get very stubborn. And when that meets up with another stubbornness, it can make a kind of war, a struggle of ideas, the only kind of war anybody ever wins. You see?”

  Luz evidently did not.

  “Well,” Vera said comfortably, “you will see.”

  4

  The ringtree of Victoria led a double life. It began as a single, fast-growing seedling with serrated red leaves. When it matured it flowered lavishly with large, honey-colored blossoms. Wotsits and other small flying creatures, attracted by the sweet-tasting petals, ate them, and while doing so fertilized the bitter-flavored heart of the flower with pollen caught on their fur, scales, wings, or vanes. The fertilized remnant of the flower curled itself up into a hard-shelled seed. There might be hundreds of these on the tree, but they dried up and dropped off, one after another, leaving at last one single seed on a high central branch. This seed, hard and ill-flavored, grew and grew while its tree weakened and withered, until the leafless branches drooped sadly beneath the big, heavy, black ball of the seed. Then, some afternoon when the autumn sun shone through gaps in the rainclouds, the seed performed its extraordinary feat: time-ripened and sun-warmed, it exploded. It went off with a bang that could be heard for miles. A cloud of dust and fragments rose and drifted slowly off across the hills. All was over, apparently, with the ringtree.

  But in a circle around the central stem, several hundred seedlets, exploded from the shell, were burrowing themselves with energy down into the damp rich dirt. A year later the shoots were already competing for root-room; the less hardy ones died. Ten years later, and for a century or two after that, from twenty to sixty copper-leaved trees stood in a perfect ring about the long-vanished central stem. Branch and root, they stood apart, yet touching, forty ringtrees, one tree-ring. Once every eight or ten years they flowered and bore a small edible fruit, the seeds of which were excreted by wotsits, pouchbats, farfallies, tree-coneys, and other fruit lovers. Dropped in the right spot, a seed germinated and produced the single tree; and it the single seed; and the cycle was repeated, from ringtree to tree-ring, timelessly.

  Where the soil was favorable the rings grew interlocking, but otherwise no large plants grew in the central circle of each ring, only grasses, moss, and ferns. Very old rings so exhausted their central ground that it might sink and form a hollow, which filled with ground seepage and with rain, and the circle of high, old dark-red trees was then mirrored in the still water of a central pool. The center of a tree-ring was always a quiet place. The ancient, pool-centered rings were the most quiet, the most strange.

  The Meeting House of Shantih stood outside town in a vale which contained such a ring: forty-six trees rearing their columnar trunks and bronze crowns around a silent circle of water, rough with rain, or cloud-gray, or bright with sunlight flashing through red foliage from a sky briefly clear. Roots of the trees grew gnarled at the water’s edge, making seats for the solitary contemplater. A single pair of herons lived in the Meeting-House Ring. The Victorian heron was not a heron; it was not even a bird. To describe their new world the exiles had had only words from their old world. The creatures that lived by the pools, one pair to a pool, were stilt-legged, pale-gray fish eaters: so they were herons. The first generation had known that they were not really herons, that they were not birds, nor reptiles, nor mammals. The following generations did not know what they were not, but did, in a way, know what they were. They were herons.

  They seemed to live as long as the trees. Nobody had ever seen a baby heron, or an egg. Sometimes they danced, but if a mating followed the dance it was in the secrecy of the wilderness night, unseen. Silent, angular, elegant, they nested in the drifts of red leaves among the roots, and fished for water creatures in the shallows, and gazed across the pool at human beings with large, round eyes as colorless as water. They showed no fear of man, but never allowed a close approach.

  The settlers of Victoria had never yet come upon any large land animal. The biggest herbivore was the coney, a fat slow rabbity beast with fine waterproof scales all over it; the biggest predator was the larva, red-eyed and shark-toothed, half a meter long. In captivity the larvas bit and screeched in insane frenzy till they died; the coneys refused to eat, lay down quietly, and died. There were big creatures in the sea; “whales” came into Songe Bay and were caught for food every summer; out at sea beasts huger than the whales had been seen, enormous, like writhing islands. The whales were not whales, but what the monsters were or were not, nobody knew. They never came near fishing boats. And the beasts of the plains and forests never came near, either. They did not run away. They simply kept their distance. They watched for a while, with clear eyes, and then moved away, ignoring the stranger.

  Only the bright-winged farfallies and the wotsits ever consented to come near. Caged, a farfallie folded its wings and died; but if you put out honey for it, it might set up housekeeping on your roof, constructing there the little nest-like rain-cup in which, being semiaquatic, it slept. Wotsits evidently trusted in their peculiar ability to look like something else every few minutes. Occasionally they showed a positive desire to fly round and round a human being, or even to sit on him. Their shape-changing had in it an element of eye-fooling, perhaps of hypnosis, and Lev had sometimes wondered if the wotsits liked to use human beings to practice their tricks on. In any case, if you caged a wotsit, it turned into a shapeless brown lump like a clod of dirt, and after two or three hours, died.

  None of the creatures of Victoria would be tamed, would live with man. None of them would approach him. They evaded; they slipped away, into the rain-shadowed, sweet-scented forests, or into the deep sea, or into death. They had nothing to do with man. He was a stranger. He did not belong.

  “I had a cat,” Lev’s grandmother used to tell him, long ago. “A fat, gray cat with fur like the softest, softest treesilk. He had black stripes on his legs, and green eyes. He’d jump up on my lap, and put his nose under my ear, so I could hear him, and purr, and purr—like this!” The old lady would make a deep, soft, rumbling noise, to which the little boy listened with intense delight.

  “What did he say when he was hungry, Nana?” He held his breath.

  “PRRREEOWW! PRRREEOWW!”

  She laughed, and he laughed.

  There was only one another. The voices, the faces, the hands, the holding arms, of one’s own kind. The other people, the other aliens.

  Outside the doors, beyond the small plowed fields, lay the wilderness, the endless world of hills and red leaves and mist, where no voice spoke. To speak, there, no matter what you said, was to say, “I am a stranger.”

  “Some day,” the child said, “I’ll go and explore the whole world.”

  It was a new idea he had had, and he was full of it. He was going to ma
ke maps, and everything. But Nana wasn’t listening. She had the sad look. He knew what to do about that. He came up quietly next to her and nuzzled in her neck below the ear, saying, “Prrrrr … .”

  “Is that my cat Mino? Hello, Mino! Why,” she said, “it isn’t Mino, it’s Levuchka! What a surprise!”

  He sat on her lap. Her large, old, brown arms were around him. On each wrist she wore a bangle of fine red soapstone. Her son Alexander, Sasha, Lev’s father, had carved them for her. “Manacles,” he had said when he gave them to her on her birthday. “Victoria manacles, Mama.” And all the grown-ups had laughed, but Nana had had the sad look while she laughed.

  “Nana. Was Mino Mino’s name?”

  “Of course, silly.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I named him Mino.”

  “But animals don’t have names.”

  “No. Not here.”

  “Why don’t they?”

  “Because we don’t know their names,” the grandmother said, looking out over the small plowed fields.

  “Nana.”

  “Well?” said the soft voice in the soft bosom against which his ear was pressed.

  “Why didn’t you bring Mino here?”

  “We couldn’t bring anything on the space ship. Nothing of our own. There wasn’t room. But anyhow, Mino was dead long before we came. I was a child when he was a kitten, and I was still a child when he was old and died. Cats don’t live long, just a few years.”

  “But people live a long time.”

  “Oh, yes. A very long time.”

  Lev sat still on her lap, pretending he was a cat, with gray fur like the down of the cottonwool, only warm. “Prrr,” he said softly, while the old woman sitting on the doorstep held him and gazed over his head at the land of her exile.

  As he sat now on the hard broad root of a ringtree at the edge of the Meeting Pool, he thought of Nana, of the cat, of the silver water of Lake Serene, of the mountains above it which he longed to climb, of climbing the mountains out of the mist and rain into the ice and brightness of the summits; he thought of many things, too many things. He sat still, but his mind would not be still. He had come here for stillness, but his mind raced, raced from past to future and back again. Only for a moment did he find quiet. One of the herons walked silently out into the water from the far side of the pool. Lifting its narrow head it gazed at Lev. He gazed back, and for an instant was caught in that round transparent eye, as depthless as the sky clear of clouds; and the moment was round, transparent, silent, a moment at the center of all moments, the eternal present moment of the silent animal.