The Eye of the Heron

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The ground was muddy, the weeds heavy with wet, but the poncho-coat Italia had given her was thick; she sat down on the springy leaf mold under the trees, and with arms around knees beneath the poncho sat still, gazing westward over the bend of the river. She sat so for a long time, seeing nothing but the moveless land, the slow-moving clouds and river.

  Alone, alone. She was alone. She had not had time to know that she was alone, working with Southwind, nursing Vera, talking with Andre, joining little by little in the life of Shantih; helping to set up the new Town school, for the City school was closed henceforth to the people of Shantih; drawn in as guest to this house and that, this family and that; drawn in, made welcome, for they were gentle people, inexpert in resentment or distrust. Only at night, on the straw mattress in the dark of the loft, had it come to her, her loneliness, wearing a white and bitter face. She had been frightened, then. What shall I do? she had cried in her mind, and turning over to escape the bitter face of her solitude, had taken refuge in her weariness, in sleep.

  It came to her now, walking softly along the gray hilltop. Its face now was Lev’s face. She had no wish to turn away.

  It was time to look at what she had lost. To look at it and see it all. The sunset of spring over the roofs of the City, long ago, and his face lit by that glory—“There, there, you can see what it should be, what it is … .” The dusk of the room in Southwind’s house, and his face, his eyes. “To live and die for the sake of the spirit—” The wind and light on Rocktop Hill, and his voice. And the rest, all the rest, all the days and lights and winds and years that would have been, and that would not be, that should be and were not, because he was dead. Shot dead on the road, in the wind, at twenty-one. His mountains unclimbed, never to be climbed.

  If the spirit stayed in the world, Luz thought, that was where it had gone, by now: north to the valley he had found, to the mountains he had told her of, the last night before the march on the City, with such joy and yearning: “Higher than you can imagine, Luz, higher and whiter. You look up, and then up, and still there are peaks above the peaks.”

  He would be there, now, not here. It was only her own solitude she looked at, though it wore his face.

  “Go on, Lev,” she whispered aloud. “Go on to the mountains, go higher … .”

  But where shall I go? Where shall I go, alone?

  Without Lev, without the mother I never knew and the father I can never know, without my house and my City, without a friend—oh, yes, friends, Vera, Southwind, Andre, all the others, all the gentle people, but they’re not my people. Only Lev, only Lev was, and he couldn’t stay, he wouldn’t wait, he had to go climb his mountain, and put life off till later. He was my chance, my luck. And I was his. But he wouldn’t see it, he wouldn’t stop and look. He threw it all away.

  So now I stop here, between the valleys, under the trees, and I have to look. And what I see is Lev dead, and his hope lost; my father a murderer and mad; and I a traitor to the City and a stranger in the Town.

  And what else is there?

  All the rest of the world. The river there, and the hills, and the light on the Bay. All the rest of this silent living world, with no people in it. And I alone.

  As she came down from the hill she saw Andre coming out of Southwind’s house, turning to speak to Vera at the door. They called to each other across the fallow fields, and he waited for her at the turn of the lane that led to Shantih.

  “Where were you, Luz?” he asked in his concerned, shy way. He never, like the others, tried to draw her in; he was simply there, reliable. Since Lev’s death there had been no joy for him, and much anxiety. He stood there now, sturdy and a little stooped, overburdened, patient.

  “Nowhere,” she answered, truthfully. “Just walking. Thinking. Andre, tell me. I never want to ask you while Vera’s there, I don’t like to upset her. What will happen now, between the City and Shantih? I don’t know enough to understand what Elia says. Will it just go on the way it was—before?”

  After a fairly long pause, Andre nodded. His dark face, with jutting cheekbones like carved wood, was shut tight. “Or worse,” he said. Then, scrupulous to be fair to Elia, “Some things are better. The trade agreement—if they keep to it. And the South Valley expansion. There won’t be forced labor, or ‘estates’ and all that. I’m hopeful about that. We may work together there, for once.”

  “Will you go there?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose so. I should.”

  “What about the northern colony? The valley you found, the mountains?”

  Andre looked up at her. He shook his head.

  “No way—?”

  “Only if we went as their servants.”

  “Marquez won’t agree to your going alone, without City people?”

  He shook his head.

  “What if you went anyway?”

  “What do you think I dream of every night?” he said, and for the first time there was bitterness in his voice. “After I’ve been with Elia and Jewel and Sam and Marquez and the Council, talking compromise, talking cooperation, talking reason?—But if we went, they’d follow.”

  “Then go where they can’t follow.”

  “Where would that be?” Andre said, his voice patient again, ironic and miserable.

  “Anywhere! Farther east, into the forests. Or southeast. Or south, down the coast, down past where the trawlers go—there must be other bays, other town sites! This is a whole continent, a whole world. Why do we have to stay here, here, huddled up here, destroying each other? You’ve been in the wilderness, you and Lev and the others, you know what it’s like—”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “You came back. Why must you come back? Why couldn’t people just go, not too many of them all at once, but just go, at night, and go on; maybe a few should go ahead and make stopping-places with supplies; but you don’t leave a trail, any trail. You just go. Far! And when you’ve gone a hundred kilometers, or five hundred, or a thousand, and you find a good place, you stop, and make a settlement. A new place. Alone.”

  “It’s not—it breaks the community, Luz,” Andre said. “It would be … running away.”

  “Oh,” Luz said, and her eyes shone with anger. “Running away! You crawl into Marquez’s trap in the South Valley and call that standing firm ! You talk about choice and freedom—The world, the whole world is there for you to live in and be free, and that would be running away! From what? To what? Maybe we can’t be free, maybe people always take themselves with themselves, but at least you can try. What was your Long March for? What makes you think it ever ended?”

  11

  Vera had meant to stay awake to see them off, but she had fallen asleep by the fire, and the soft knock at the door did not waken her. Southwind and Luz looked at each other; Southwind shook her head. Luz knelt and hastily, as silently as she could, laid a fresh square of peat behind the coals, so the house would stay warm through the night. Southwind, made awkward by her heavy coat and backpack, stooped and touched Vera’s gray hair with her lips; then she looked around the house, a bewildered, hurried look, and went out. Luz followed her.

  The night was cloudy but dry, very dark. The cold of it woke Luz from her long trance of waiting, and she caught her breath. There were people around her in the dark, a few soft voices. “Both there? All right, come on.” They set off, past the house, through the potato field, toward the low ridge that lay behind it to the east. As Luz’s eyes became accustomed to the dark she made out that the person who walked beside her was Lev’s father, Sasha; sensing her gaze in the darkness he said, “How’s the pack?”

  “It’s all right,” she said in a bare whisper. They must not talk, they must not make any noise, she thought, not yet, not till they were clear of the settlement, past the last village and the last farm, across Mill River, a long way. They must go fast and silently, and not be stopped, O Lord God please not be stopped!

  “Mine’s made of iron ingots, or unforgiven sins,” Sasha murmured; and they went on
in silence, a dozen shadows in the shadow of the world.

  It was still dark when they came to Mill River, a few kilometers south of where it joined the Songe. The boat was waiting, Andre and Holdfast waiting with it. Hari rowed six across, then the second six. Luz was in the second lot. As they neared the eastern shore the solid blackness of the nightworld was growing insubstantial, a veil of light dimming all things, a mist thickening on the water. Shivering, she set foot on the far shore. Left alone in the boat, which Andre and the others had already pushed off again, Hari called out softly, “Good luck, good luck! Peace go with you!” And the boat vanished into the mist like a ghost; and the twelve stood there on the ghostly, fading sand.

  “Up this way,” said Andre’s voice out of the mist and pallor. “They’ll have breakfast for us.”

  They were the last and smallest of the three groups to leave, one group a night; the others were waiting farther on among the rugged hills east of the Mill, country where only coney trappers went. In single file, following Andre and Holdfast, they left the riverbank and set off into the wild land.

  She had been thinking for hours and hours, step after step, that as soon as they stopped she would sink right down on the dirt or the mud or the sand, sink down and not move again till morning. But when they stopped she saw Martin and Andre, up at the front, discussing something, and she went on, step after step, till she came up with them, and even then did not sink down, but kept standing, to hear what they were talking about.

  “Martin thinks the compass isn’t reading true,” Andre said. With a dubious look, he held the instrument out to Luz, as if she could judge its inaccuracy at a glance. What she saw was its delicacy, the box of polished wood, the gold ring, the glass, the frail burnished needle hovering, trembling between the finely incised points: what a beautiful thing, miraculous, improbable, she thought. But Martin was looking at it with disapproval. “I’m sure it’s pulling east,” he said. “Must be iron-ore masses in those hills, deflecting it.” He nodded toward the east. For a day and a half they had been in a queer scrubby country that bore no ringtrees or cottonwools but only a sparse, tangled scrub which grew no more than a couple of meters high; it was not forest, but not open country; there was seldom any long view. But they knew that to the east, to their left, the line of high hills they had first seen six days ago went on. Whenever they came up on a rise in the scrublands, they saw the dark red, rocky skyline of the heights.

  “Well,” Luz said, hearing her own voice for the first time in hours, “does it matter much?”

  Andre chewed his lower lip. His face looked bone weary, the eyes narrowed and lifeless. “Not for going on,” he said. “So long as we have the sun or some stars at night. But for making the map … .”

  “What if we turn east again. Get over those hills. They aren’t getting any lower,” Martin said. A younger man than Andre, he looked far less tired. He was one of the mainstays of the group. Luz felt at ease with Martin; he looked like a City man, stocky, dark, well muscled, rather curt and somber; even his name was a common one in the City. But for all Martin’s comfortable strength, it was to Andre that she turned with her question.

  “Can’t we mark the trail yet?”

  Unwilling to make any trail that could be followed, they had tried to map their course. A map could be brought back to Shantih by a few messengers, after a couple of years, to guide a second group to the new colony. That was the only reason for making it that they ever spoke of. Andre, the map maker of the northern journey, was in charge of it, and he felt his responsibility as a heavy one, for the unspoken purpose of the map was always in their minds. It was their one link to Shantih, to humankind, to their own past lives; their one assurance that they were not simply wandering lost in the wilderness, aimless, without goal and, since they could mark no trail, without hope of return.

  At times Luz clung to the idea of the map, at times she was impatient with it. Martin was keen on it, but his keenest care was that they keep their trail covered; he winced, Italia remarked, when anybody stepped on a stick and broke it. Certainly they had left, in the ten days of their journey, as little mark of their going as sixty-seven people could leave.

  Martin was shaking his head at Luz’s question. “Look,” he said, “our choice of route has been so obvious, the easiest way, right from the start.”

  Andre smiled. It was a dry crack of a smile, like a crack in tree bark, and narrowed his eyes to two lesser cracks. That was why Luz liked to be with Andre, drew strength from him, that humorous patient smile, like a tree smiling.

  “Consider the options, Martin!” he said, and she saw what he was imagining: a party of City men, Macmilan’s bullies, guns and whips and boots and all, standing on the bluffs of the Songe, looking north, east, south, over the gray rusty-ringed rising falling rain-darkened unending trackless voiceless enormous wilderness, and trying to decide which, of a hundred possible directions, the fugitives had chosen.

  “All right,” she said, “let’s cross the hills, then.”

  “Climbing won’t be much harder than slogging through this scrub,” Andre said.

  Martin nodded. “Turn east again here, then?”

  “Here as well as anywhere,” said Andre, and got out his grubby, dog-eared sketch map to make a note.

  “Now?” Luz asked. “Or camp?”

  They usually did not camp till near sundown, but they had come a long way today. She looked around the shoulder-high, thorny, bronze-colored bushes, which grew spaced a meter or two apart so that millions of pointless winding trails led around and between and amongst them. Only a few of the group were visible; most of them had sat right down to rest when the halt was called. Overhead was a lead-gray sky, featureless, one even cloud. No rain had fallen for two nights, but the weather was getting colder every hour.

  “Well, a few more kilos,” Andre said, “and we’d be at the foot of the hills; might find some shelter there. And water.” He looked at her judgingly, and waited for her judgment. He, Martin, Italia, the other pathfinders, often used her and a couple of the older women as representatives of the weak, the ones who could not keep the pace the strongest would have kept. She did not mind. She walked each day right to the limit of her endurance, or beyond it. The first three days of the journey, when they had been hurrying, afraid of pursuit, had exhausted her, and though she was growing tougher she never could make up that initial loss. She accepted this, and saved all her resentment for her backpack, that monstrous and irascible, knee-bending, neck-destroying load. If only they didn’t have to carry everything with them! But they could not push carts without making, or leaving, paths; and sixty-seven people could not live off the wilderness while traveling, or settle in it without tools, even if it were not late autumn getting on to winter … .

  “A few more kilos,” she said. She was always surprised when she said things like that. “A few more kilos,” as if it were nothing at all, when for the last six hours she had longed, craved to sit down, just to sit down, just to sit down for a minute, a month, a year! But now they had spoken of turning east again she found she also craved to get out of this dreary maze of thorn-scrub, into the hills, where maybe you could see your way ahead.

  “Few minutes’ rest,” she added, and sat down, slipping off her pack straps and rubbing her aching shoulders. Andre promptly sat down too. Martin went off to talk with some of the others and discuss the change of course. None of them was visible, they had all vanished in the sea of thorn-scrub, taking their few minutes’ rest already, flat out on the sandy, grayish soil littered with thorns. She could not see even Andre, only a corner of his pack. A northwest wind, faint but cold, rustled the little dry branches of the bushes. There was no other sound.

  Sixty-seven people: no sight of them, no sound of them. Vanished. Lost. A drop of water in the river, a word blown off on the wind. Some small creatures moved a little while in the wilderness, not going very far, and then ceased to move, and it made no difference to the wilderness, or to anything, no more differ
ence than the dropping of one thorn among a million thorns or the shifting of a grain of sand.

  The fear she had come to know these ten days of their journeying came up like a small gray fog in the fields of her mind, a chill creep of blindness. It was hers, hers by inheritance and training; it was to keep out her fear, their fear, that the roofs and walls of the City had been raised; it was fear that had drawn the streets so straight, and made the doors so narrow. She had scarcely known it, living behind those doors. She had felt quite safe. Even in Shantih she had forgotten it, stranger as she was, for the walls there were not visible but were very strong: companionship, cooperation, love; the close human circle. But she had walked away from that, by choice, and walked out into the wilderness, and come face to face at last with the fear that all her life had been built upon.

  She could not simply face it, but had to fight it when it first began to come upon her, or it would blot out everything, and she would lose the power of choice entirely. She had to fight blindly, for no reason stood against that fear. It was a great deal older and stronger than ideas.

  There was the idea of God. Back in the City they talked about God to children. He made all the worlds, and he punished the wicked, and sent good people up to Heaven when they died. Heaven was a beautiful house with a gold roof where Meria, God’s mother, everybody’s mother, tenderly waited for the souls of the dead. She had liked that story. When she was little she had prayed to God to make things happen and not happen, because he could do anything if you asked him; later she had liked to imagine God’s mother and her mother keeping house together. But when she thought of Heaven here, it was small and far away, like the City. It had nothing to do with the wilderness. There was no God here; he belonged to people, and where there were no people there was no God. At the funeral for Lev and the others they had talked about God, too, but that was back there, back there. Here there was nothing like that. Nobody had made this wilderness, and there was no evil in it and no good; it simply was.