The Left Hand of Darkness hc-4

by Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

  I almost let go the sledge-bar to go look for him. It was pure luck that I did not. I held on, while I stared stupidly about for him, and so I saw the lip of the crevasse, made visible by the shifting and dropping of another section of the broken snow-bridge. He had gone right down feet-first, and nothing kept the sledge from following him but my weight, which held the rear third of the runners still on solid ice. It kept tipping a little farther nose-downward, pulled by his weight as he hung in harness in the pit.

  I brought my weight down on the rear-bar and pulled and rocked and levered the sledge back away from the edge of the crevasse. It did not come easy. But I threw my weight hard on the bar and tugged until it began grudgingly to move, and then slid abruptly right away from the crevasse. Estraven had got his hands onto the edge, and his weight now aided me. Scrambling, dragged by the harness, he came up over the edge and collapsed face down on the ice.

  I knelt by him trying to unbuckle his harness, alarmed by the way he sprawled there, passive except for the great gasping rise and fall of his chest. His lips were cyanotic, one side of his face was bruised and scraped.

  He sat up unsteadily and said in a whistling whisper, "Blue—all blue— Towers in the depths—"

  "What?"

  "In the crevasse. All blue—full of light."

  "Are you all right?"

  He started rebuckling his harness.

  "You go ahead—on the rope—with the stick," he gasped. "Pick the route."

  For hours one of us hauled while the other guided, mincing along like a cat on eggshells, sounding every step in advance with the stick. In the white weather one could not see a crevasse until one could look down into it—a little late, for the edges overhung, and were not always solid. Every footfall was a surprise, a drop or a jolt. No shadows. An even, white, soundless sphere: we moved along inside a huge frosted-glass ball. There was nothing inside the ball, and nothing was outside it. But there were cracks in the glass. Probe and step, probe and step. Probe for the invisible cracks through which one might fall out of the white glass ball, and fall, and fall, and fall… An unrelaxable tension little by little took hold of all my muscles. It became exceedingly difficult to take even one more step.

  "What's up, Genry?"

  I stood there in the middle of nothing. Tears came out and froze my eyelids together. I said, "I'm afraid of falling."

  "But you're on the rope," he said. Then, coming up and seeing that there was no crevasse anywhere visible, he saw what was up and said, "Pitch camp."

  "It's not time yet, we ought to go on."

  He was already unlashing the tent.

  Later on, after we had eaten, he said, "It was time to stop. I don't think we can go this way. The Ice seems to drop off slowly, and will be rotten and crevassed all the way. If we could see, we could make it: but not in unshadow."

  "But then how do we get down onto the Shenshey Bogs?"

  "Well, if we keep east again instead of trending south, we might be on sound ice clear to Guthen Bay. I saw the Ice once from a boat on the Bay in summer. It comes up against the Red Hills, and feeds down in ice-rivers to the Bay. If we came down one of those glaciers we could run due south on the sea-ice to Karhide, and so enter at the coast rather than the border, which might be better. It will add some miles to our way, though— something between twenty and fifty, I should think. What's your opinion, Genry?"

  "My opinion is that I can't go twenty more feet so long as the white weather lasts."

  "But if we get out of the crevassed area…"

  "Oh, if we get out of the crevasses I'll be fine. And if the sun ever comes out again, you get on the sledge and I'll give you a free ride to Karhide." That was typical of our attempts at humor, at this stage of the journey; they were always very stupid, but sometimes theyВ madeВ the other fellow smile. "There's nothing wrong with me," I went on, "except acute chronic fear."

  "Fear's very useful. Like darkness; like shadows." Estraven's smile was an ugly split in a peeling, cracked brown mask, thatched with black fur and set with two flecks of black rock. "It's queerВ thatВ В daylight's not enough. We need the shadows, in order to walk."

  "Give me your notebook a moment."

  He had just noted down our day's journey and done some calculation of mileage and rations. He pushed the little tablet and carbon-pencil around the Chabe stove to me. On the blank leaf glued to the inner back cover I drew the double curve within the circle, and blacked the yin half of the symbol, then pushed it back to my companion. "Do you know that sign?"

  He looked at it a long time with a strange look, but he said, "No."

  "It's found on Earth, and on Hain-Davenant, and on Chiffewar. It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness… how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow."

  The next day we trudged northeast through the white absence of everything until there were no longer any cracks in the floor of nothing: a day's haul. We were on 2⁄3 ration, hoping to keep the longer route from running us right out of food. It seemed to me that it would not matter much if it did, as the difference between little and nothing seemed a rather fine one. Estraven, however, was on the track of his luck, following what appeared to be hunch or intuition, but may have been applied experience and reasoning. We went east for four days, four of the longest hauls we had made, eighteen to twenty miles a day, and then the quiet zero weather broke and went to pieces, turning into a whirl, whirl, whirl of tiny snow-particles ahead, behind, to the side, in the eyes, a storm beginning as the light died. We lay in the tent for three days while the blizzard yelled at us, a three-day-long, wordless, hateful yell from the unbreathing lungs.

  "It'll drive me to screaming back, " I said to Estraven in mindspeech, and he, with the hesitant formality that marked his rapport: "No use. It will not listen. "

  We slept hour after hour, ate a little, tended our frostbites, inflammations, and bruises, mindspoke, slept again. The three-day shriek died down into a gabbling, then a sobbing, then a silence. Day broke. Through the opened door-valve the sky's brightness shone. It lightened the heart, though we were too rundown to be able to show our relief in alacrity or zest of movement. We broke camp—it took nearly two hours, for we crept about like two old men—and set off. The way was downhill, an unmistakable slight grade; the crust was perfect for skis. The sun shone. The thermometer at midmorning showed −10°. We seemed to get strength from going, and we went fast and easy. We went that day till the stars came out.

  For dinner Estraven served out full rations. At that rate, we had enough for only seven days more.

  "The wheel turns," he said with serenity. "To make a good run, we've got to eat."

  "Eat, drink, and be merry," said I. The food had got me high. I laughed inordinately at my own words. "All one-eating-drinking-merrymaking. Can't have merry without eats, can you?" This seemed to me a mystery quite on a par with that of the yin-yang circle, but it did not last. Something in Estraven's expression dispelled it. Then I felt like crying, but refrained. Estraven was not as strong as I was, and it would not be fair, it might make him cry too. He was already asleep: he had fallen asleep sitting up, his bowl on his lap. It was not like him to be so unmethodical. But it was not a bad idea, sleep.

  We woke rather late next morning, had a double breakfast, and then got in harness and pulled our light sledge right off the edge of the world.

  Below the world's edge, which was a steep rubbly slope of white and red in a pallid noon light, lay the frozen sea: the Bay of Guthen, frozen from shore to shore and from Karhide clear to the North Pole.

  To get down onto the sea-ice through the broken edges and shelves and trenches of the Ice jammed up amongst the Red Hills took that afternoon and the next day. On that second day we abandoned our sledge. We made up backpacks; with the tent as the main bulk of one and the bags of the other, and our food equally distributed, we had less than twenty-five pounds apiece to carry; I added the Chabe stove to m
y pack and still had under thirty. It was good to be released from forever pulling and pushing and hauling and prying that sledge, and I said so to Estraven as we went on. He glanced back at the sledge, a bit of refuse in the vast torment of ice and reddish rock. "It did well," he said. His loyalty extended without disproportion to things, the patient, obstinate, reliable things that we use and get used to, the things we live by. He missed the sledge. That evening, the seventy-fifth of our journey, our fifty-first day on the plateau, Harhahad Anner, we came down off the Gobrin Ice onto the sea-ice of Guthen Bay. Again we traveled long and late, till dark. The air was very cold, but clear and still, and the clean ice-surface, with no sledge to pull, invited our skis. When we camped that night it was strange to think,В lying down, that under us there was no longer a mile of ice, but a few feet of it, and then salt water. But we did not spend much time thinking. We ate, and slept.

  At dawn, again a clear day though terribly cold, below −40° at daybreak, we could look southward and see the coastline, bulged out here and there with protruding tongues of glacier, fall away southward almost in a straight line. We followed it close inshore at first. A north wind helped us along till we skied up abreast a valley-mouth between two high orange hills; out of that gorge howled a gale that knocked us both off our feet. We scuttled farther east, out on the level sea-plain, where we could at least stand up and keep going. "The Gobrin Ice has spewed us out of its mouth," I said.

  The next day, the eastward curve of the coastline was plain, straight ahead of us. To our right was Orgoreyn, but that blue curve ahead was Karhide.

  On that day we used up the last grains of orsh, and the last few ounces of kadik-germ; we had left now two pounds apiece of gichy-michy, and six ounces of sugar.

  I cannot describe these last days of our journey very well, I find, because I cannot really remember them. Hunger can heighten perception, but not when combined with extreme fatigue; I suppose all my senses were very much deadened. I remember having hunger-cramps, but I don't remember suffering from them. I had, if anything, a vague feeling all the time of liberation, of having got beyond something, of joy; also of being terribly sleepy. We reached land on the twelfth, Posthe Anner, and clambered over a frozen beach and into the rocky, snowy desolation of the Guthen Coast.

  We were in Karhide. We had achieved our goal. It came near being an empty achievement, for our packs were empty. We had a feast of hot water to celebrate our arrival. The next morning we got up and set off to find a road, a settlement. It is a desolate region, and we had no map of it. What roads there might be were under five or ten feet of snow, and we may have crossed several without knowing it. There was no sign of cultivation. We strayed south and west that day, and the next, and on the evening of the next, seeing a light shine on a distant hillside through the dusk and thin falling snow, neither of us said anything for some time. We stood and stared. Finally my companion croaked, "Is that a light?"

  It was long after dark when we came shambling into a Karhidish village, one street between high-roofed dark houses, the snow packed and banked up to their winter-doors. We stopped at the hot-shop, through the narrow shutters of which flowed, in cracks and rays and arrows, the yellow light we had seen across the hills of winter. We opened the door and went in.

  It was Odsordny Anner, the eighty-first day of our journey; we were eleven days over Estraven's proposed schedule. He had estimated our food supply exactly: seventy-eight days' worth at the outside. We had come 840 miles, by the sledge-meter plus a guess for the last few days. Many of those miles had been wasted in backtracking, and if we had really had eight hundred miles to cover we should never have made it; when we got a good map we figured that the distance between Pulefen Farm and this village was less than 730 miles. All those miles and days had been across a houseless, speechless desolation: rock, ice, sky, and silence: nothing else, for eighty-one days, except each other.

  We entered into a big steaming-hot bright-lit room full of food and the smells of food, and people and the voices of people. I caught hold of Estraven's shoulder. Strange faces turned to us, strange eyes. I had forgotten there was anyone alive who did not look like Estraven. I was terrified.

  In fact it was rather a small room, and the crowd of strangers in it was seven or eight people, all of whom were certainly as taken aback as I was for a while. Nobody comes to Kurkurast Domain in midwinter from the north at night. They stared, and peered, and all the voices had fallen silent.

  Estraven spoke, a barely audible whisper. "We ask the hospitality of the Domain."

  Noise, buzz, confusion, alarm, welcome.

  "We came over the Gobrin Ice."

  More noise, more voices, questions; they crowded in on us.

  "Will you look to my friend?"

  I thought I had said it, but Estraven had. Somebody was making me sit down. They brought us food; they looked after us, took us in, welcomed us home.

  Benighted, contentious, passionate, ignorant souls, countryfolk of a poor land, their generosity gave a noble ending to that hard journey. They gave with both hands. No doling out, no counting up. And so Estraven received what they gave us, as a lord among lords or a beggar among beggars, a man among his own people.

  To those fishermen-villagers who live on the edge of the edge, on the extreme habitable limit of a barely habitable continent, honesty is as essential as food. They must play fair with one another; there's not enough to cheat with. Estraven knew this, and when after a day or two they got around to asking, discreetly and indirectly, with due regard to shifgrethor, why we had chosen to spend a winter rambling on the Gobrin Ice, he replied at once, "Silence is not what I should choose, yet it suits me better than a lie."

  "It's well known that honorable men come to be outlawed, yet their shadow does not shrink," said the hot-shop cook, who ranked next to the village chief in consequence, and whose shop was a sort of living-room for the whole Domain in winter.

  "One person may be outlawed in Karhide, another in Orgoreyn," said Estraven.

  "True; and one by his clan, another by the king in Erhenrang."

  "The king shortens no man's shadow, though he may try," Estraven remarked, and the cook looked satisfied. If Estraven's own clan had cast him out he would be a suspect character, but the king's strictures were unimportant. As for me, evidently a foreigner and so the one outlawed by Orgoreyn, that was if anything to my credit. We never told our names to our hosts in Kurkurast. Estraven was very reluctant to use a false name, and our true ones could not be avowed. It was, after all, a crime to speak to Estraven, let alone to feed and clothe and house him, as they did. Even a remote village of the Guthen Coast has radio, and they could not have pleaded ignorance of the Order of Exile; only real ignorance of their guest's identity might give them some excuse. Their vulnerability weighed on Estraven's mind, before I had even thought of it.В On our third night there he came into my room to discuss our next move. A Karhidish village is like an ancient castle of Earth in having few or no separate, private dwellings. Yet in the high, rambling oldВ buildings of the Hearth, the Commerce, the Co-Domain (there was no Lord of Kurkurast) and the Outer-House, each of the five hundred villagers could have privacy, even seclusion, in rooms off those ancient corridors with walls three feet thick. We had been given a room apiece, on the top floor of the Hearth. I was sitting in mine beside the fire, a small, hot, heavy-scented fire of peat from the Shenshey Bogs, when Estraven came in. He said."

  "We must soon be going on from here, Genry."

  I remember him standing there in the shadows of the firelit room barefoot and wearing nothing but the loose fur breeches the chief had given him. In the privacy and what they consider the warmth of their houses Karhiders often go half-clothed or naked. On our journey Estraven had lost all the smooth, compact solidity that marks the Gethenian physique; he was gaunt and scarred, and his face was burned by cold almost as by fire. He was a dark, hard, and yet elusive figure in the quick, restless light.

  "Where to?"

  "South an
d west, I think. Towards the border. Our first job is to find you a radio transmitter strong enough to reach your ship. After that, I must find a hiding place, or else go back into Orgoreyn for a while, to avoid bringing punishment on those who help us here."

  "How will you get back into Orgoreyn?"

  "As I did before—cross the border. The Orgota have nothing against me."

  "Where will we find a transmitter?"

  "No nearer than Sassinoth."

  I winced. He grinned.

  "Nothing closer?"

  "A hundred and fifty miles or so; we've come farther over worse ground. There are roads all the way; people will take us in; we may get a lift on a powersledge."

  I assented, but I was depressed by the prospect of still another stage of our winter-journey, and this one not towards haven but back to that damned border where Estraven might go back into exile, leaving me alone.

  I brooded over it and finally said, "There'll be one condition which Karhide must fulfill before it can join the Ekumen. Argaven must revoke your banishment."

  He said nothing, but stood gazing at the fire.

  "I mean it," I insisted. "First things first."

  "I thank you, Genry," he said. His voice, when he spoke very softly as now, did have much the timbre of a woman's voice, husky and unresonant. He looked at me, gently, not smiling. "But I haven't expected to see my home again for a long time now. I've been in exile for twenty years, you know. This is not so much different, this banishment. I'll look after myself; and you look after yourself, and your Ekumen. That you must do alone. But all this is said too soon. Tell your ship to come down! When that's done, then I'll think beyond it."

  We stayed two more days in Kurkurast, getting well fed and rested, waiting for a road-packer that was due in from the south and would give us a lift when it went back again. Our hosts got Estraven to tell them the whole tale of our crossing of the Ice. He told it as only a person of an oral-literature tradition can tell a story, so that it became a saga, full of traditional locutions and even episodes, yet exact and vivid, from the sulphurous fire and dark of the pass between Drumner and Dremegole to the screaming gusts from mountain-gaps that swept the Bay of Guthen; with comic interludes, such as his fall into the crevasse, and mystical ones, when he spoke of the sounds and silences of the Ice, of the shadowless weather, of the night's darkness. I listened as fascinated as all the rest, my gaze on my friend's dark face.