The Eye of the Heron

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  He nodded, watching her.

  “They’re angry, and they’re going to come here, I think it’s tomorrow night, the men young Macmilan has been training, the bullies, and try and take you and the other leaders prisoner, and then—outrage the others so that they’ll fight back, and then they can beat them and make them work on the latifundia for punishment for rebelling. They’re coming after dark, tomorrow I think but I’m not sure of that, and he has about forty of them, I think, but all with muskets.”

  Lev still watched her. He said nothing. Only then, in his silence, did she hear the question she had not asked herself.

  And the question took her so off guard, she was so far from the merest beginning of an answer to it, that she stood there and stared back at him, her face growing dull red with bewilderment and fear, and could not say another word.

  “Who sent you, Luz?” he asked at last, gently.

  It was natural that this should be his answer to the question, that he should think she was lying, or was being used for some kind of trick or spying by Falco. It was natural that he should think that, that he should imagine she was serving her father, and not imagine that she was betraying her father. All she could do was shake her head. Her legs and arms tingled, and there were flashes of light in her eyes; she felt that she was going to be sick. “I have to go back now,” she said, but did not move, because her knees would not work.

  “Are you all right? Come in, sit down. For a minute.”

  “I’m dizzy,” she said. Her voice sounded thin and whiny, she was ashamed of it. He brought her inside and she sat down in a wicker chair by a table in a dark, long, low-beamed room. She pulled the shawl off her head to get rid of the heat and weight of it; that helped; her cheeks began to cool, and the lights stopped flashing in her eyes as she got used to the dusk of the room. Lev stood near her, at the end of the table. He was barefoot, wearing only trousers; he stood quietly; she could not look at his face, but she sensed in his stance and his quietness no threat, no anger, no contempt.

  “I hurried,” she said. “I wanted to get back quickly, it’s a long way, it made me dizzy.” Then she got hold of herself, finding that there was, under the fluster and the fear, a place inside her, a silent corner where her mind could crouch down and think. She thought, and finally spoke again.

  “Vera has been living with us. In Casa Falco. You knew that? She and I have been together every day. We talk. I tell her what I hear that’s going on, she tells me … all kinds of things … . I tried to make her come back here. To warn you. She won’t, she says she promised not to run away, so she has to keep the promise. So I came. I heard them talking, Herman Macmilan and my father. I listened, I went and stood under the window to listen. What they said made me angry. It made me sick. So when Vera wouldn’t come, I came. Do you know about these new guards, Macmilan’s guards?”

  Lev shook his head, watching, intent.

  “I’m not lying,” she said coldly. “Nobody is using me. Nobody but Vera even knows I left the house. I came because I’m sick of being used and sick of lies and sick of doing nothing. You can believe me or not. I don’t care.”

  Lev shook his head again, blinking, as if dazzled. “No, I don’t—But slow down a little—”

  “There isn’t time. I have to go back before anybody notices. All right, my father got young Macmilan to train up a troop of other men, Bosses’ sons, as a special army, to use against you people. They haven’t talked about anything else for two weeks. They’re coming here because of whatever it was that happened down in South Valley, and they’re supposed to catch you and the other leaders, and then force your people into fighting so you’ll betray your idea of peace, of what do you call it, nonviolence. And then you’ll fight and you’ll lose, because we’re better fighters, and anyway we have guns. Do you know Herman Macmilan?”

  “By sight, I think,” Lev said. He was so utterly different from the man whose name she had just said and whose image filled her mind—the splendid face and muscular body, broad chest, long legs, strong hands, heavy clothing, tunic, trousers, boots, belt, coat, gun, whip, knife … . This man was barefoot; she could see the ribs and breastbone under the dark, fine skin of his chest.

  “I hate Herman Macmilan,” Luz said, less hurriedly, speaking from the small cool place inside her where she could think. “His soul is about the size of a toenail. You should be afraid of him. I am. He likes to hurt people. Don’t try to talk to him, the way you people do. He won’t listen. He fills up his whole world. All you can do with that kind of man is hit him, or run away from him. I ran away from him.—Do you believe me?” She could ask that, now.

  Lev nodded.

  She looked at his hands on the chair back; he was gripping the wooden bar tightly; his hands were nerve and bone under the dark skin, strong, fragile.

  “All right. I have to go back,” she said, and stood up.

  “Wait. You should tell this to the others.”

  “I can’t. You tell them.”

  “But you said you ran away from Macmilan. Now you’re going back to him?”

  “No! To my father—to my house—”

  But he was right. It was the same thing.

  “I came to warn you,” she said coldly, “because Macmilan was going to trick you, and deserves to be tricked himself. That’s all.”

  But it wasn’t enough.

  She looked out the open door and saw the lane she would have to walk on, beyond it the street, then the road, then the City and its streets and her house and her father—

  “I don’t understand,” she said. She sat down again, abruptly, because she was shaky again, though not with fear, now, but with anger. “I didn’t think. Vera said—”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said to stop and think.”

  “Has she—”

  “Wait. I have to think. I didn’t then, I have to now.”

  She sat still in the chair for some minutes, her hands clenched in her lap.

  “All right,” she said. “This is a war, Vera said. I should be—I have betrayed my father’s side. Vera is a hostage to the City. I’ll have to be a hostage to the Town. If she can’t come and go, neither can I. I have to go through with it.” Her breath stuck in her throat, making a catching sound at the end of the sentences.

  “We don’t take hostages, make prisoners, Lux—”

  “I didn’t say you did. I said I have to stay here. I choose to stay here. Will you let me?”

  Lev strode off down the room, ducking automatically as he came under the low crossbeam. His shirt had been drying on a chair before the fire; he put it on, went into the back room, came out with his shoes in his hand, sat down at a chair by the table to put them on. “Look,” he said, stooping down to get his shoe on, “you can stay here. Anybody can. We don’t make anybody go, we don’t make anybody stay.” He straightened up, looking directly at her. “But what is your father going to think? Even if he believed you were staying here by choice—”

  “He wouldn’t allow it. He’d come to get me.”

  “By force.”

  “Yes, by force. With Macmilan and his little army, no doubt.”

  “Then you become the pretext for violence they seek. You must go home, Luz.”

  “For your sake,” she said.

  She was simply thinking it out, seeing what she had done and what consequences must follow. But Lev sat motionless, a shoe—a muddy, battered, low boot, she noticed—in his hand.

  “Yes,” he said. “For our sake. You came here for our sake. Now you go back for our sake. And if they find out you’ve been here—?” There was a pause. “No,” he said. “You can’t go back. You’d be caught in the lie—yours and theirs. You came here. Because of Vera, because of us. You’re with us.”

  “No, I’m not,” Luz said, angrily; but the light and warmth in Lev’s face bewildered her mind. He spoke so plainly, with such certainty; he was smiling now. “Luz,” he said, “remember, when we were in school? You were always—I alw
ays wanted to talk to you, I never got up the courage—We did talk once, at sunset, you asked why I wouldn’t fight Angel and his crowd. You never were like the other City girls, you didn’t fit, you didn’t belong. You belong here. The truth matters to you. Do you remember when you got mad at the teacher once, when he said coneys don’t hibernate and Timmo tried to tell how he’d found a whole cave of them hibernating and the teacher was going to whip him for being insolent, do you remember?”

  “I said I’d tell my father,” Luz said in a low voice. She had turned very white.

  “You stood up in the class, you said the teacher didn’t know the truth and was going to whip Timmo for telling it—you were only about fourteen. Luz, listen, come with me now, we’ll go to Elia’s house. You can tell them what you told me and we can settle what to do. You can’t go back now and be punished, be ashamed! Listen, you can stay with Southwind, she lives outside of town, you can be quiet there. But come with me now, we can’t lose time.” He reached out his hand to her across the table, that fine, warm hand full of life; she took it, and met his eyes; her eyes filled up with tears. “I don’t know what to do,” she said, in tears. “You only have one shoe on, Lev.”

  8

  Short as the time was, the entire community must be rallied, brought together, to stand firm together, to hold fast. Indeed haste was in their favor, for, under no pressure, the timorous and halfhearted might fall away; under threat of imminent attack, all were eager to find and keep the center, the strength of the group.

  A center there was, and he was in it—was the center, himself, with Andre, Southwind, Martin, Italia, Santha, and all the others, the young, the determined. Vera was not there, and yet was there, in all their decisions, her gentleness and unshakable firmness. Elia was not there; he and Jewel and several others, mostly older people, stood aside, must stand aside, because their will was not the will of the community. Elia had never been strong for the plan of emigration, and now he argued that they had gone too far, the girl must be sent back to her father at once, with a delegation who would “sit down with the Council and talk—if we’ll only sit down and talk to each other, there’s no need for all this distrust and defiance … .”

  “Armed men don’t sit down and talk, Elia,” said old Lyons, wearily.

  It was not to Elia that they turned, but to “Vera’s people,” the young ones. Lev felt the strength of his friends and the whole community, supporting and upholding. It was as if he were not Lev alone, but Lev times a thousand—himself, but himself immensely increased, enlarged, a boundless self mingled with all the other selves, set free, as no man alone could ever be free.

  There was scarcely need to take counsel, to explain to people what must be done, the massive, patient resistance which they must set against the City’s violence. They knew already, they thought for him and he for them; his word spoke their will.

  The girl Luz, the stranger, self-exiled: her presence in Shantih sharpened this sense of perfect community by contrast, and edged it with compassion. They knew why she had come, and they tried to be kind to her. She was alone among them, scared and suspicious, drawing herself up in her pride and her Boss’s-daughter arrogance whenever she did not understand. But she did understand, Lev thought, however much her reason might confuse her; she understood with the heart, for she had come to them, trusting.

  When he told her that, told her that she was and always had been, in spirit, one of them, one of the People of the Peace, she put on her disdainful look. “I don’t even know what these ideas of yours are,” she said. But she had, in fact, learned a great deal from Vera; and during these strange, tense, inactive days of waiting for word or attack from the City, while ordinary work was suspended and “Vera’s people” were much together, Lev talked with her as often as he could, longing to bring her fully among them, into the center where so much peace and strength was and where one was not alone.

  “It’s very dull, really,” he explained, “a kind of list of rules, just like school. First you do this, next you do that. First you try negotiation and arbitration of the problem, whatever it is, by existing means and institutions. You try to talk it out, the way Elia keeps saying. That step was Vera’s group going to talk with the Council, you see. It didn’t work. So you go on to step two: noncooperation. A kind of settling down and holding still, so they know you mean what you said. That’s where we are now. Then step three, which we’re now preparing: issue of an ultimatum. A final appeal, offering a constructive solution, and a clear explanation of what will be done if that solution isn’t agreed upon now.”

  “And what will be done, if they don’t happen to agree?”

  “Move on to step four. Civil disobedience.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A refusal to obey any orders or laws, no matter what, issued by the authority being challenged. We set up our own, parallel, independent authority, and follow our own course.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that,” he said smiling. “It worked, you know, over and over again, on Earth. Against all kinds of threats and imprisonments, tortures, attacks. You can read about it, you should read Mirovskaya’s History—”

  “I can’t read books,” the girl said with her disdainful air. “I tried one once.—If it worked so well, why did you get sent away from Earth?”

  “There weren’t enough of us. The governments were too big and too powerful. But they wouldn’t have sent us off into exile, would they, if they hadn’t been afraid of us?”

  “That’s what my father says about his ancestors,” Luz remarked. Her eyebrows were drawn down level above her eyes, dark pondering eyes. Lev watched her, stilled for a moment by her stillness, caught by her strangeness. For despite his insistence that she was one of them, she was not; she was not like Southwind, not like Vera, not like any woman he knew. She was different, alien to him. Like the gray heron of the Meeting Pool, there was a silence in her, a silence that drew him, drew him aside, toward a different center.

  He was so caught, so held in watching her, that though Southwind said something he did not hear it, and when Luz herself spoke again he was startled, and for a moment the familiar room of Southwind’s house seemed strange, an alien place.

  “I wish we could forget about all that,” she said. “Earth—it’s a hundred years ago, a different world, a different sun, what does it matter to us here? We’re here, now. Why can’t we do things our way? I’m not from Earth. You’re not from Earth. This is our world … . It ought to have its own name. ‘Victoria,’ that’s stupid, it’s an Earth word. We ought to give it its own name.”

  “What name?”

  “One that doesn’t mean anything. Ooboo, or Baba. Or call it Mud. It’s all mud—if Earth’s called ‘earth’ why can’t this one be called ‘mud’?” She sounded angry, as she often did, but when Lev laughed she laughed too. Southwind only smiled, but said in her soft voice, “Yes, that’s right. And then we could make a world of our own, instead of always imitating what they did on Earth. If there wasn’t any violence there wouldn’t have to be any nonviolence … .”

  “Start with mud and build a world,” said Lev. “But don’t you see, that’s what we’re doing?”

  “Making mudpies,” said Luz.

  “Building a new world.”

  “Out of bits of the old one.”

  “If people forget what happened in the past, they have to do it all over again, they never get on into the future. That’s why they kept fighting wars, on Earth. They forgot what the last one was like. We are starting fresh. Because we remember the old mistakes, and won’t make them.”

  “Sometimes it seems to me,” said Andre, who was sitting on the hearth mending a sandal for Southwind—his side-trade was cobbling—“if you don’t mind my saying so, Luz, that in the City they remember all the old mistakes so they can make them all over again.”

  “I don’t know,” she said with indifference. She stood up, and went to the window. It was closed, for the rain had not stopp
ed and the weather was colder, with a wind from the east. The small fire in the hearth kept the room warm and bright. Luz stood with her back to that snugness, looking out through the tiny, cloudy panes of the window at the dark fields and the windy clouds.

  On the morning after she came to Shantih, after talking with Lev and the others, she had written a letter to her father. A short letter, though it had taken her all morning to write it. She had shown it first to Southwind, then to Lev. When he looked at her now, the straight strong figure outlined black against the light, he saw again the writing of her letter, straight black stiff strokes. She had written:

  Honored Sir!

  I have left our House. I will stay in Shanty Town because I do not approve of Your plans. I decided to leave and I decided to stay. No body is holding me prisoner or hostage. These people are my Hosts. If you mis treat them I am not on Your side. I had to make this choice. You have made a mistake about H. Macmilan. Senhora Adelson had nothing to do with my coming here. It was my Choice.

  Your respectful Daughter

  Luz Marina Falco Cooper

  No word of affection; no plea for forgiveness.

  And no answer. The letter had been taken by a runner at once, young Welcome; he had shoved it under the door of Casa Falco and trotted right on. As soon as he got safe back to Shantih, Luz had begun to wait for her father’s response, to dread it but also, visibly, to expect it. That was two full days ago. No answer had come; no attack or assault at night; nothing. They all discussed what change in Falco’s plans Luz’s defection might have caused, but they did not discuss it in front of her, unless she brought it up.

  She said now, “I don’t understand your ideas, really. All the steps, all the rules, all the talk.”

  “They are our weapons,” Lev replied.

  “But why fight?”

  “There’s no other choice.”

  “Yes, there is. To go.”

  “Go?”

  “Yes! Go north, to the valley you found. Just go. Leave. It’s what I did,” she added, looking imperiously at him when he did not answer at once. “I left.”