Four Ways to Forgiveness

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  When they left the consecrated house the next day, they both went to Iyan Iyan’s house. “Havzhiva will live here,” Iyan Iyan said, as a woman has a right to say. Everybody in her family made him welcome and none of them seemed surprised.

  When he went to get his clothes from his grandmother’s house, nobody there seemed surprised, everybody congratulated him, an old woman cousin from Etsahin made some embarrassing jokes, and his father said, “You are a man of this house now; come back for dinner.”

  So he slept with Iyan Iyan at her house, ate breakfast there, ate dinner at his house, kept his daily clothes at her house, kept his dance clothes at his house, and went on with his education, which now had mostly to do with rug-weaving on the power broadlooms and with the nature of the cosmos. He and Iyan Iyan both played on the adult soccer team.

  He began to see more of his mother, because when he was seventeen she asked him if he wanted to learn Sun-stuff with her, the rites and protocols of trade, arranging fair exchange with farmers of Stse and bargaining with other pueblos of the lineages and with foreigners. The rituals were learned by rote, the protocols were learned by practice. Havzhiva went with his mother to the market, to outlying farms, and across the bay to the mainland pueblos. He had been getting restless with weaving, which filled his mind with patterns that left no room outside themselves. The travel was welcome, the work was interesting, and he admired Tovo’s authority, wit, and tact. Listening to her and a group of old merchants and Sun people maneuvering around a deal was an education in itself. She did not push him; he played a very minor role in these negotiations. Training in complicated business such as Sun-stuff took years, and there were other, older people in training before him. But she was satisfied with him. “You have a knack for persuading,” she told him one afternoon as they were sailing home across the golden water, watching the roofs of Stse solidify out of mist and sunset light. “You could inherit the Sun, if you wanted to.”

  Do I want to? he thought. There was no response in him but a sense of darkening or softening, which he could not interpret. He knew he liked the work. Its patterns were not closed. It took him out of Stse, among strangers, and he liked that. It gave him something to do which he didn’t know how to do, and he liked that.

  “The woman who used to live with your father is coming for a visit,” Tovo said.

  Havzhiva pondered. Granite had never married. The women who had borne the children Granite sired both lived in Stse and always had. He asked nothing, a polite silence being the adult way of signifying that one doesn’t understand.

  “They were young. No child came,” his mother said. “She went away after that. She became a historian.”

  “Ah,” Havzhiva said in pure, blank surprise.

  He had never heard of anybody who became a historian. It had never occurred to him that a person could become one, any more than a person could become a Stse. You were born what you were. You were what you were born.

  The quality of his polite silence was desperately intense, and Tovo certainly was not unaware of it. Part of her tact as a teacher was knowing when a question needed an answer. She said nothing.

  As their sail slackened and the boat slid in toward the pier built on the ancient bridge foundations, he asked, “Is the historian Buried Cable or Original?”

  “Buried Cable,” his mother said. “Oh, how stiff I am! Boats are such stiff creatures!” The woman who had sailed them across, a ferrywoman of the Grass lineage, rolled her eyes, but said nothing in defense of her sweet, supple little boat.

  “A relative of yours is coming?” Havzhiva said to Iyan Iyan that night.

  “Oh, yes, she templed in.” Iyan Iyan meant a message had been received in the information center of Stse and transmitted to the recorder in her household. “She used to live in your house, my mother said. Who did you see in Etsahin today?”

  “Just some Sun people. Your relative is a historian?”

  “Crazy people,” Iyan Iyan said with indifference, and came to sit naked on naked Havzhiva and massage his back.

  The historian arrived, a little short thin woman of fifty or so called Mezha. By the time Havzhiva met her she was wearing Stse clothing and eating breakfast with everybody else. She had bright eyes and was cheerful but not talkative. Nothing about her showed that she had broken the social contract, done things no woman does, ignored her lineage, become another kind of being. For all he knew she was married to the father of her children, and wove at a loom, and castrated animals. But nobody shunned her, and after breakfast the old people of the household took her off for a returning-traveler ceremony, just as if she were still one of them.

  He kept wondering about her, wondering what she had done. He asked Iyan Iyan questions about her till Iyan Iyan snapped at him, “I don’t know what she does, I don’t know what she thinks. Historians are crazy. Ask her yourself!”

  When Havzhiva realised that he was afraid to do so, for no reason, he understood that he was in the presence of a god who was requiring something of him. He went up to one of the sitting holes, rock cairns on the heights above the town. Below him the black tile roofs and white walls of Stse nestled under the bluffs, and the irrigation tanks shone silver among fields and orchards. Beyond the tilled land stretched the long sea marshes. He spent a day sitting in silence, looking out to sea and into his soul. He came back down to his own house and slept there. When he turned up for breakfast at Iyan Iyan’s house she looked at him and said nothing.

  “I was fasting,” he said.

  She shrugged a little. “So eat,” she said, sitting down by him. After breakfast she left for work. He did not, though he was expected at the looms.

  “Mother of All Children,” he said to the historian, giving her the most respectful title a man of one lineage can give a woman of another, “there are things I do not know, which you know.”

  “What I know I will teach you with pleasure,” she said, as ready with the formula as if she had lived here all her life. She then smiled and forestalled his next oblique question. “What was given me I give,” she said, meaning there was no question of payment or obligation. “Come on, let’s go to the plaza.”

  Everybody goes to the plaza in Stse to talk, and sits on the steps or around the fountain or on hot days under the arcades, and watches other people come and go and sit and talk. It was perhaps a little more public than Havzhiva would have liked, but he was obedient to his god and his teacher.

  They sat in a niche of the fountain’s broad base and conversed, greeting people every sentence or two with a nod or a word.

  “Why did—” Havzhiva began, and stuck.

  “Why did I leave? Where did I go?” She cocked her head, bright-eyed as an araha, checking that those were the questions he wanted answered. “Yes. Well, I was crazy in love with Granite, but we had no child, and he wanted a child…You look like he did then. I like to look at you…So, I was unhappy. Nothing here was any good to me. And I knew how to do everything here. Or that’s what I thought.”

  Havzhiva nodded once.

  “I worked at the temple. I’d read messages that came in or came by and wonder what they were about. I thought, all that’s going on in the world! Why should I stay here my whole life? Does my mind have to stay here? So I began to talk with some of them in other places in the temple: who are you, what do you do, what is it like there…Right away they put me in touch with a group of historians who were born in the pueblos, who look out for people like me, to make sure they don’t waste time or offend a god.”

  This language was completely familiar to Havzhiva, and he nodded again, intent.

  “I asked them questions. They asked me questions. Historians have to do a lot of that, I found out they have schools, and asked if I could go to one. Some of them came here and talked to me and my family and other people, finding out if there would be trouble if I left. Stse is a conservative pueblo. There hadn’t been a historian from here for four hundred years.”

  She smiled; she had a quick, catchin
g smile, but the young man listened with unchanging, intense seriousness. Her look rested on his face tenderly.

  “People here were upset, but nobody was angry. So after they talked about it, I left with those people. We flew to Kathhad. There’s a school there. I was twenty-two. I began a new education. I changed being. I learned to be a historian.”

  “How?” he asked, after a long silence.

  She drew a long breath. “By asking hard questions,” she said. “Like you’re doing now…And by giving up all the knowledge I had—throwing it away.”

  “How?” he asked again, frowning. “Why?”

  “Like this. When I left, I knew I was a Buried Cable woman. When I was there, I had to unknow that knowledge. There, I’m not a Buried Cable woman. I’m a woman. I can have sex with any person I choose. I can take up any profession I choose. Lineage matters, here. It does not matter, there. It has meaning here, and a use. It has no meaning and no use, anywhere else in the universe.” She was as intense as he, now. “There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal. There are two kinds of time, local and historical.”

  “Are there two kinds of gods?”

  “No,” she said. “There are no gods there. The gods are here.”

  She saw his face change.

  She said after a while, “There are souls, there. Many, many souls, minds, minds full of knowledge and passion. Living and dead. People who lived on this earth a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand years ago. Minds and souls of people from worlds a hundred light-years from this one, all of them with their own knowledge, their own history. The world is sacred, Havzhiva. The cosmos is sacred. That’s not a knowledge I ever had to give up. All I learned, here and there, only increased it. There’s nothing that is not sacred.” She spoke slowly and quietly, the way most people talked in the pueblo. “You can choose the local sacredness or the great one. In the end they’re the same. But not in the life one lives. To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.’ The Peoples are the rock. The historians are the river.”

  After a while he said, “Rocks are the river’s bed.”

  She laughed. Her gaze rested on him again, appraising and affectionate. “So I came home,” she said. “For a rest.”

  “But you’re not—you’re no longer a woman of your lineage?”

  “Yes; here. Still. Always.”

  “But you’ve changed being. You’ll leave again.”

  “Yes,” she said decisively. “One can be more than one kind of being. I have work to do, there.”

  He shook his head, slower, but equally decisive. “What good is work without the gods? It makes no sense to me, Mother of All Children. I don’t have the mind to understand.”

  She smiled at the double meaning. “I think you’ll understand what you choose to understand, Man of my People,” she said, addressing him formally to show that he was free to leave when he wanted.

  He hesitated, then took his leave. He went to work, filling his mind and world with the great repeated patterns of the broadloom rugs.

  That night he made it up to Iyan Iyan so ardently that she was left spent and a bit amazed. The god had come back to them burning, consuming.

  “I want a child,” Havzhiva said as they lay melded, sweated together, arms and legs and breasts and breath all mingled in the musky dark.

  “Oh,” Iyan Iyan sighed, not wanting to talk, decide, resist. “Maybe…Later…Soon…”

  “Now,” he said, “now.”

  “No,” she said softly. “Hush.”

  He was silent. She slept.

  More than a year later, when they were nineteen, Iyan Iyan said to him before he put out the light, “I want a baby.”

  “It’s too soon.”

  “Why? My brother’s nearly thirty. And his wife would like a baby around. After it’s weaned I’ll come sleep with you at your house. You always said you’d like that.”

  “It’s too soon,” he repeated. “I don’t want it.”

  She turned to him, laying aside her coaxing, reasonable tone. “What do you want, Havzhiva?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re going away. You’re going to leave the People. You’re going crazy. That woman, that damned witch!”

  “There are no witches,” he said coldly. “That’s stupid talk. Superstition.”

  They stared at each other, the dear friends, the lovers.

  “Then what’s wrong with you? If you want to move back home, say so. If you want another woman, go to her. But you could give me my child, first! when I ask you for it! Have you lost your araha?” She gazed at him with tearful eyes, fierce, unyielding.

  He put his face in his hands. “Nothing is right,” he said. “Nothing is right. Everything I do, I have to do because that’s how it’s done, but it—it doesn’t make sense—there are other ways—”

  “There’s one way to live rightly,” Iyan Iyan said, “that I know of. And this is where I live. There’s one way to make a baby. If you know another, you can do it with somebody else!” She cried hard after this, convulsively, the fear and anger of months breaking out at last, and he held her to calm and comfort her.

  When she could speak, she leaned her head against him and said miserably, in a small, hoarse voice, “To have when you go, Havzhiva.”

  At that he wept for shame and pity, and whispered, “Yes, yes.” But that night they lay holding each other, trying to console each other, till they fell asleep like children.

  “I am ashamed,” Granite said painfully.

  “Did you make this happen?” his sister asked, dry.

  “How do I know? Maybe I did. First Mezha, now my son. Was I too stern with him?”

  “No, no.”

  “Too lax, then. I didn’t teach him well. Why is he crazy?”

  “He isn’t crazy, brother. Let me tell you what I think. As a child he always asked why, why, the way children do. I would answer: That’s how it is, that’s how it’s done. He understood. But his mind has no peace. My mind is like that, if I don’t remind myself. Learning the Sun-stuff, he always asked, why thus? why this way, not another way? I answered: Because in what we do daily and in the way we do it, we enact the gods. He said: Then the gods are only what we do. I said: In what we do rightly, the gods are: that is the truth. But he wasn’t satisfied by the truth. He isn’t crazy, brother, but he is lame. He can’t walk. He can’t walk with us. So, if a man can’t walk, what should he do?”

  “Sit still and sing,” Granite said slowly.

  “If he can’t sit still? He can fly.”

  “Fly?”

  “They have wings for him, brother.”

  “I am ashamed,” Granite said, and hid his face in his hands.

  Tovo went to the temple and sent a message to Mezha at Kathhad: “Your pupil wishes to join you.” There was some malice in the words. Tovo blamed the historian for upsetting her son’s balance, off centering him till, as she said, his soul was lamed. And she was jealous of the woman who in a few days had outdone the teachings of years. She knew she was jealous and did not care. What did her jealousy or her brother’s humiliation matter? What they had to do was grieve.

  As the boat for Daha sailed away, Havzhiva looked back and saw Stse: a quilt of a thousand shades of green, the sea marshes, the pastures, fields, hedgerows, orchards; the town clambering up the bluffs above, pale granite walls, white stucco walls, black tile roofs, wall above wall and roof above roof. As it diminished it looked like a seabird perched there, white and black, a bird on its nest. Above the town the heights of the island came in view, grey-blue moors and high, wild hills fading into the clouds, white skeins of marsh birds flying.

  At the port in Daha, though he was farther from Stse than he had ever been and people had a strange accent, he could understand them and read the signs. He had never seen signs before, but their usefulness was evident. Using them, he found his way to the waiting room for the Kathhad flyer. People were sleeping on the cots provided, in their own
blankets. He found an empty cot and lay on it, wrapped in the blanket Granite had woven for him years ago. After a short, strange night, people came in with fruit and hot drinks. One of them gave Havzhiva his ticket. None of the passengers knew anyone else; they were all strangers; they kept their eyes down. Announcements were made, and they all went outside and went into the machine, the flyer.

  Havzhiva made himself look at the world as it fell out from under him. He whispered the Staying Chant soundlessly, steadily. The stranger in the seat next to him joined in.

  When the world began to tilt and rush up towards him he shut his eyes and tried to keep breathing.

  One by one they filed out of the flyer onto a flat, black place where it was raining. Mezha came to him through the rain, saying his name. “Havzhiva, Man of my People, welcome! Come on. There’s a place for you at the School.”

  Kathhad and Ve

  By the third year at Kathhad Havzhiva knew a great many things that distressed him. The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense.

  For instance, he knew now that historians did not study history. No human mind could encompass the history of Hain; three million years of it. The events of the first two million years, the Fore-Eras, like layers of metamorphic rock, were so compressed, so distorted by the weight of the succeeding millennia and their infinite events that one could reconstruct only the most sweeping generalities from the tiny surviving details. And if one did chance to find some miraculously preserved document from a thousand millennia ago, what then? A king ruled in Azbahan; the Empire fell to the Infidels; a fusion rocket has landed on Ve…But there had been uncountable kings, empires, inventions, billions of lives lived in millions of countries, monarchies, democracies, oligarchies, anarchies, ages of chaos and ages of order, pantheon upon pantheon of gods, infinite wars and times of peace, incessant discoveries and forgettings, innumerable horrors and triumphs, an endless repetition of unceasing novelty. What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.