The Eye of the Heron

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  She drew a circle in the sandy dirt near her foot, making it as perfect as she could, using a thorny twig to draw it with. That was a world, or a self, or God, that circle, you could call it anything. Nothing else in the wilderness could think of a circle like that —she thought of the delicate gold ring around the compass glass. Because she was human, she had the mind and eyes and skillful hand to imagine the idea of a circle and to draw the idea. But any drop of water falling from a leaf into a pool or rain puddle could make a circle, a more perfect one, fleeting outward from the center, and if there were no boundary to the water the circle would fleet outward forever, fainter and fainter, forever larger. She could not do that, which any drop of water could do. Inside her circle what was there? Grains of sand, dust, a few tiny pebbles, a half-buried thorn, Andre’s tired face, the sound of Southwind’s voice, Sasha’s eyes which were like Lev’s eyes, the ache of her own shoulders where the pack straps pulled, and her fear. The circle could not keep out the fear. And the hand erased the circle, smoothing out the sand, leaving it as it had always been and would always be after they had gone on.

  “At first I felt that I was leaving Timmo behind,” Southwind said, as she studied the worst blister on her left foot. “When we left the house. He and I built it … you know. I felt as if I was walking away and finally leaving him forever, leaving him behind. But now it doesn’t seem that way. It was out here he died, in the wilderness. Not here, I know; way back up north there. But I don’t feel that he’s so terribly far away as I did all autumn living in our house, it’s almost as if I’d come out to join him. Not dying, I don’t mean that. It’s just that there I only thought about his death, and here, while we’re walking, all the time, I think about him alive. As if he was with me now.”

  They had camped in a fold of the land just under the red hills, beside a lively, rocky stream. They had built their fires, cooked, and eaten; many were already stretched out in their blankets to sleep. It was not dark yet, but so cold that if you weren’t moving about you must either huddle to the fire or wrap up and sleep. The first five nights of the journey they had not built fires, for fear of pursuers, and those had been miserable nights; Luz had never known such a pure delight as she had felt at their first campfire, back in a great tree-ring on the south slope of the badlands, and every night that pleasure came again, the utter luxury of hot food, of warmth. The three families she and Southwind camped and cooked with were settling down for the night; the youngest child—the youngest of the whole migration, a boy of eleven—was curled up like a pouchbat in his blanket already, fast asleep. Luz tended the fire, while Southwind tended her blisters. Up and down the riverbank were seven other fires, the farthest no more than a candle flame in the blue-gray dusk, a spot of hazy, trembling gold. The noise of the stream covered any sound of voices round the other fires.

  “I’ll get some more brushwood,” Luz said. She was not avoiding an answer to what Southwind had said. No answer was needed. Southwind was gentle and complete; she gave and spoke, expecting no return; in all the world there could be no companion less demanding, or more encouraging.

  They had done a good day’s walk, twenty-seven kilometers by Martin’s estimate; they had got out of that drab nightmare labyrinth of scrub; they had had a hot dinner, the fire was hot, and it was not raining. Even the ache in Luz’s shoulders was pleasant (because the pack was not pulling on them) when she stood up. It was these times at the day’s end, by the fire, that counterweighed the long dreary hungry afternoons of walking and walking and walking and trying to ease the cut of the pack straps on her shoulders, and the hours in the mud and rain when there seemed to be no reason at all to go on, and the worst hours, in the black dark of the night, when she woke always from the same terrible dream: that there was a circle of some things, not people, standing around their camp, just out of sight, not visible in the darkness, but watching.

  “This one’s better,” Southwind said when Luz came back with an armload of wood from the thickets up the slope, “but the one on my heel isn’t. You know, all today I’ve been feeling that we aren’t being followed.”

  “I don’t think we ever were,” Luz said, building up the fire. “I never did think they’d really care, even if they knew. They don’t want to think about the wilderness, in the City. They want to pretend it isn’t there.”

  “I hope so. I hated feeling that we were running. Being explorers is a much braver feeling.”

  Luz got the fire settled to burning low but warm, and squatted by it simply soaking the heat up for some while.

  “I miss Vera,” she said. Her throat was dry with the dust of walking, and she did not use her voice often these days; it sounded dry and harsh to her, like her father’s voice.

  “She’ll come with the second group,” Southwind said with comfortable certainty, winding a cloth strip around her pretty, battered foot, and tying it off firmly at the ankle. “Ah, that feels better. I’m going to wrap my feet tomorrow like Holdfast does. It’ll be warmer, too.”

  “If it just won’t rain.”

  “It won’t rain tonight.” The Shantih people were much weather-wiser than Luz. They had not lived so much within doors as she, they knew what the wind meant, even here, where the winds were different.

  “It might tomorrow,” Southwind added, beginning to wriggle into her blanket-bag, her voice already sounding small and warm.

  “Tomorrow we’ll be up in the hills,” Luz said. She looked up, to the east, but the near slope of the stream valley and the blue-gray dusk hid that rocky skyline. The clouds had thinned; a star shone out for a while high in the east, small and misty, then vanished as the unseen clouds rejoined. Luz watched for it to reappear, but it did not. She felt foolishly disappointed. The sky was dark now, the ground was dark. No light anywhere, except the eight gold flecks, their campfires, a tiny constellation in the night. And far off there, days behind them in the west, thousands and thousands of steps behind them, behind the scrubland and the badland and the hills and the valleys and the streams, beside the great river running to the sea, a few more lights: the City and the Town, a tiny huddle of yellow-lit windows. The river dark, running in darkness. And no light on the sea.

  She reset a log to smolder more slowly, and banked the ashes against it. She found her sleeping bag and wriggled down into it, next to Southwind. She wanted to talk, now. Southwind had seldom spoken much of Timmo. She wanted to hear her talk about him, and about Lev; she wanted for the first time to speak about Lev herself. There was too much silence here. Things would get lost in the silence. One should speak. And Southwind would understand. She too had lost her luck, and known death, and gone on.

  Luz said her name softly, but the warm blanket-bundle next to her did not stir. Southwind was asleep.

  Luz settled down cautiously, getting herself comfortable. The river beach, though stony, was a better bed than last night’s in the thorny scrubland. But her body was so tired that it felt heavy, unwieldy, hard; her chest was hard and tight. She closed her eyes. At once she saw the hall of Casa Falco, long and serene, the silver light reflected from the Bay filling the windows; and her father standing there, erect, alert, self-contained, as he always stood. But he was standing there doing nothing, which was not like him. Michael and Teresa were off in the doorway, whispering together. She felt a curious resentment toward them. Her father stood with his back to them, as if he did not know they were there, or as if he knew it, but was afraid of them. He raised his arms in a strange way. She saw his face for a moment. He was crying. She could not breathe, she tried to draw a long breath but could not; it caught; because she was crying—deep shaking sobs from which she could scarcely gasp a breath before the next came. Racked with sobs, lying shaken and tormented on the ground in the enormous night, she wept for the dead, for the lost. Not fear now, but grief, the grief past enduring, that endures.

  Her weariness and the darkness drank her tears, and she fell asleep before she was done weeping. She slept all night without dreams or evil wakin
gs, like a stone among the stones.

  The hills were high and hard. The uphill going was not bad, for they could zigzag up across the great, open, rusty slopes, but when they got to the top, among the rimrock piled like houses and towers, they saw that they had climbed only the first of a triple or quadruple chain of hills, and that the farther ridges were higher.

  In the canyons between the ridges ringtrees crowded, not growing in rings but jammed close and shooting up unnaturally high toward the light. The heavy shrub called aloes crowded between the red trunks, making the going very difficult; but there was still fruit on the aloes, thick rich dark flesh wrinkled about a center seed, a welcome addition to the scanty food in their packs. In this country they had no choice but to leave a trail behind them: they had to cut their way with brush hooks to get on at all. They were a day getting through the canyon, another climbing the second line of hills, beyond which lay the next chain of canyons massed with bronze trees and crimson underbrush, and beyond it a formidable ridge, steep-spurred, rising in bare screes to the rock-capped summit.

  They had to camp down in the gorge the next night. Even Martin, after cutting and hacking their way forward step by step, by mid-afternoon was too tired to go on. When they camped, those who were not worn out from path-making spread out from the camp, cautiously and not going far, for in the undergrowth you could lose all sense of direction very easily. They found and picked aloes, and several of the boys, led by Welcome, found freshwater mussels in the stream at the bottom of the gorge when they went for water. They had a good meal that night. They needed it, for it was raining again. Mist, rain, evening grayed the heavy vivid reds of the forest. They built up brushwood shelters and huddled by fires which would not stay alight.

  “I saw a queer thing, Luz.”

  He was a strange fellow, Sasha; the oldest of them all, though tough and wiry, better able to keep up than some of the younger men; never out of temper, totally self-reliant, and almost totally silent. Luz had never seen him take part in a conversation beyond a yes or no, a smile or head shake. She knew he had never spoken at the Meeting House, never been one of Elia’s group or Vera’s people, never been a choice-maker among his people, though he was the son of one of their great heroes and leaders, Shults who had led the Long March from the streets of the City Moskva to the Port of Lisboa, and on. Shults had had other children, but they had died in the first hard years on Victoria; only Sasha, last-born, Victoria-born, had lived. And had fathered a son, and seen him die. He never talked. Only, sometimes, to her, to Luz. “I saw a queer thing, Luz.”

  “What?”

  “An animal.” He pointed to the right, up the steep slope of brush and trees, a dark wall now in the fading light. “There’s a bit of a clearing up there where a couple of big trees went down and cleared some room. Found some aloes at one end of it and was picking them. Looked over my shoulder—felt something watching. It was at the far end of the clearing.” He paused a minute, not for effect but to order his description. “It was gathering aloes too. I thought it was a man at first. Like a man. But it wasn’t much bigger than a coney, when it went down on all fours. Dark-colored, with a reddish head—a big head, seemed too big for the rest of it. A center eye, like a wotsit, looking at me. Eyes on the sides too, I think, but I couldn’t see it clear enough. It stared a minute and then it turned and went into the trees.”

  His voice was low and even.

  “It sounds frightening,” Luz said quietly, “I don’t know why.” But she did know why, thinking of her dream of the beings who came and watched; though she had not had the dream since they were in the scrublands.

  Sasha shook his head. They were squatting side by side under a rough roof of branches. He rubbed the beaded rain off his hair, rubbed down his bristling gray mustache. “There’s nothing here will hurt us,” he said. “Except ourselves. Are there any stories in the City about animals we don’t know of?”

  “No—only the scures.”

  “Scures?”

  “Old stories. Creatures like men, with glaring eyes, hairy. My cousin Lores talked about them. My father said they were men—exiles, or men who had wandered off, crazy men, gone wild.”

  Sasha nodded. “Nothing like that would come this far,” he said. “We’re the first.”

  “We’ve only lived there on the coast. I suppose there are animals we’ve never seen before.”

  “Plants too. See that, it’s like what we call white-berry, but it’s not the same. I never saw it until yesterday.”

  Presently he said, “There’s no name for the animal I saw.”

  Luz nodded.

  Between her and Sasha was silence, the bond of silence. He did not speak of the animal to others, nor did she. They knew nothing of this world, their world, only that they must walk in it in silence, until they had learned a language fitting to be spoken here. He was one who was willing to wait.

  The second ridge climbed, in a third day of rain. A longer, shallower valley, where the going was easier. About midday the wind turned, blowing down from the north, scouring the ridges free of cloud and mist. All afternoon they climbed the last slope, and that evening in a vast, cold clarity of light they came up among the massive, rusty rock-formations of the summit, and saw the eastern lands.

  They gathered there slowly, the slowest still struggling up the stony slope while the leaders stood waiting for them—a few tiny dark figures, to the climbers’ eyes, against an immense bright emptiness of sky. The short, sparse grass of the ridge top glowed ruddy in the sunset. They all gathered there, sixty-seven people, and stood looking out over the rest of the world. They said little. The rest of the world looked very large.

  The shadows of the ridge they had been climbing stretched a long way across the plain. Beyond those shadows the land was gold, a hazy, reddish, wintry gold, dimly streaked and mottled with courses of distant streams and the bulk of low hills or ringtree groves. Far across that plateau, at the very edge of the eyes’ reach, mountains rose against the tremendous, colorless, windy sky.

  “How far?” someone asked.

  “A hundred kilometers to the foothills, maybe.”

  “They’re big … .”

  “Like the ones we saw in the north, over Lake Serene.”

  “It may be the same range. It ran southeastward.”

  “That plain is like the sea, it goes on and on.”

  “It’s cold up here!”

  “Let’s get down over the summit, out of the wind.”

  Long after the high plains had sunk into gray, the keen small edge of sunlit ice burned there at the edge of vision in the east. It whitened and faded; the stars came out, thick in the windy blackness, all the constellations, all the bright cities that were not their home.

  Wild bog-rice grew thick by the streams of the plateau; they lived on that during the eight days of their crossing. The Iron Hills shrank behind them, a wrinkled rusty line drawn down the west. The plain was alive with coneys, a longer-legged breed than those of the coastal forests; the riverbanks were pocked and hollowed with their warrens, and when the sun was out the coneys came out, and sat in the sun, and watched the people pass with tranquil, uninterested eyes.

  “You’d have to be a fool to starve here,” Holdfast said, watching Italia lay her snares near a glittering, stony ford.

  But they went on. The wind blew bitter on that high, open land, and there was no wood to build with, or to burn. They went on until the land began to swell, rising toward the foothills of the mountains, and they came to a big river, south-running, which Andre the map maker named the Grayrock. To cross it they must find a ford, which looked unlikely, or build rafts. Some were for crossing, putting that barrier too behind them. Others were for turning south again and going on along the west bank of the river. While they deliberated, they set up their first stopping-place camp. One of the men had hurt his foot in a fall, and there were several other minor injuries and troubles; their footgear needed mending; they were all weary, and needed a few days’ rest. Th
ey put up shelters of brushwood and thatchleaf, the first day. It was cold, with gathering clouds, though the bitter wind did not blow here. That night the first snow fell.

  It seldom snowed at Songe Bay; never this early in the winter. They were no longer in the soft climate of the western coast. The coastal hills, the badlands, and the Iron Hills caught the rain that came in on the west winds off the sea; here it would be dryer, but colder.

  The great range toward which they had been walking, the sharp heights of ice, had seldom been visible while they crossed the plain, snowclouds hiding all but the blue foothills. They were in those foothills now, a haven between the windy plain and the stormy peaks. They had entered a narrow stream valley which wound and widened till it opened out on the broad, deep gorge of the Grayrock. The valley floor was forested, mostly with ringtrees and a few thick stands of cottonwools, but there were many glades and clearings among the trees. The hills on the north side of the valley were steep and craggy, sheltering the valley and the lower, open, southern slopes. It was a pleasant place. They had all felt at ease there, putting up their shelters, the first day. But in the morning the glades were white, and under the ringtrees, though the bronze foliage had kept the light snow off, every stone and leaf of withered grass sparkled with thick frost. The people huddled up to the fires to thaw out before they could go gather more firewood.