A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “You have it, sir,” Shan said, touched again. After Dalzul had left, he decided that what he should do was what Dalzul’s unexpected male-heterosexual defensiveness prevented him from doing: go ask advice and help of Forest and Riel.

  He set off for their house. As he made his way through the marvelously noisy and aromatic market, he asked himself when he had seen them last, and realized it had been several days. What had he been doing? He had been in the orchards. He had been up on the mountain, on Iyananam, where there was a dynamo … where he had seen other cities…. The pruning hook was steel. How did the Gaman make their steel? Did they have a foundry? Did they get it in trade? His mind was sluggishly, laboriously turning over these matters as he came into the courtyard, where Forest sat on a cushion on the terrace, reading a book.

  “Well,” she said. “A visitor from another planet!”

  It had been quite a long time since he had been here—eight, ten days?

  “Where’ve you been?” he asked, confused.

  “Right here. Riel!” Forest called up to the balcony. Several heads looked over the carved railing, and the one with curly hair said, “Shan! I’ll be right down!”

  Riel arrived with a pot of tipu seeds, the ubiquitous munchy of Ganam. The three of them sat around on the terrace, half in the sun and half out of it, and cracked seeds; typical anthropoids, Riel remarked. She greeted Shan with real warmth, and yet she and Forest were unmistakably cautious: they watched him, they asked nothing, they waited to see … what? How long had it been, then, since he had seen them? He felt a sudden tremor of unease, a missed beat so profound that he put his hands flat on the warm sandstone, bracing himself. Was it an earthquake? Built between two sleepy volcanoes, the city shuddered a little now and then, bits of clay fell off the walls, little orange tiles off the roofs…. Forest and Riel watched him. Nothing was shaking, nothing was falling.

  “Dalzul has run into some kind of problem in the palace,” he said.

  “Has he,” said Forest in a perfectly neutral tone.

  “A native claimant to the throne, a pretender or heir, has turned up. And the princess is staying with him, now. But she still tells Dalzul that he’s to be king. If this pretender gets power, apparently he threatens reprisals against all Viaka’s people, anybody who backed Dalzul. It’s just the kind of sticky situation Dalzul was hoping to avoid.”

  “And is matchless at resolving,” said Forest.

  “I think he feels pretty much at an impasse. He doesn’t understand what role the princess is playing. I think that troubles him most. I thought you might have some idea why, after more or less hurling herself into his arms, she’s gone off to stay with his rival.”

  “It’s Ket you’re talking about,” Riel said, cautious.

  “Yes. He calls her the princess. That’s not what she is?”

  “I don’t know what Dalzul means by the word. It has a lot of connotations. If the denotation is ‘a king’s daughter,’ then it doesn’t fit. There is no king.”

  “Not at present—”

  “Not ever,” Forest said.

  Shan suppressed a flash of anger. He was getting tired of being the half-wit child, and Forest could be abrasively gnomic. “Look,” he said, “I—I’ve been sort of out of it. Bear with me. I thought their king was dead. And given Dalzul’s apparently miraculous descent from heaven during the search for a new king, they saw him as divinely appointed, ‘the one who will hold the scepter.’ Is that all wrong?”

  “Divinely appointed seems to be right,” Riel said. “These are certainly sacred matters.” She hesitated and looked at Forest. They worked as a team, Shan thought, but not, at the moment, a team that included him. What had become of the wonderful oneness?

  “Who is this rival, this claimant?” Forest asked him.

  “A man named Aketa.”

  “Aketa!”

  “You know him?”

  Again the glance between the two; then Forest turned to face him and looked directly into his eyes. “Shan,” she said, “we are seriously out of sync. I wonder if we’re having the churten problem. The chaos experience you had on the Shoby.”

  “Here, now? When we’ve been here for days, weeks—”

  “Where’s here?” Forest asked, serious and intent.

  Shan slapped his hand on the flagstone. “Here! Now! In this courtyard of your house in Ganam! This is nothing like the chaos experience. We’re sharing this—it’s coherent, it’s consonant, we’re here together! Eating tipu seeds!”

  “I think so too,” Forest said, so gently that Shan realized she was trying to calm him, reassure him. “But we may be … reading the experience quite differently.”

  “People always do, everywhere,” he said rather desperately.

  She had moved so that he could see more clearly the book she had been reading when he came. It was an ordinary bound book, but they had brought no books with them on the Galba, a thick book on some kind of heavy brownish paper, hand-lettered, a Terran antique book from New Cairo Library, it was not a book but a pillow, a brick, a basket, not a book, it was a book. In a strange writing. In a strange language. A book with covers of carved wood, hinged with gold.

  “What is that?” he asked almost inaudibly.

  “The sacred history of the Cities Under Iyananam, we think,” Forest said.

  “A book,” Riel said.

  “They’re illiterate,” Shan said.

  “Some of them are,” said Forest.

  “Quite a lot of them are, actually,” said Riel. “But some of the merchants and the priests can read. Aketa gave us this. We’ve been studying with him. He’s a marvelous teacher.”

  “He’s a kind of scholar priest, we think,” said Forest. “There are these positions, we’re calling them priesthoods because they’re basically sacred, but they’re really more like jobs, or vocations, callings. Very important to the Gaman, to the whole structure of society, we think. They have to be filled; things go out of whack if they aren’t. And if you have the vocation, the talent, you go out of whack if you don’t do it, too. A lot of them are kind of occasional, like a person that officiates at an annual festival, but some of them seem to be really demanding, and very prestigious. Most of them are for men. Our feeling is that probably the way a man gets prestige is to fill one of the priesthoods.”

  “But men run the whole city,” Shan protested.

  “I don’t know,” Forest said, still with the uncharacteristic gentleness that told Shan he was not in full control. “We’d describe it as a non-gender-dominant society. Not much division of labor on sexual lines. All kinds of marriages—polyandry may be the most common, two or three husbands. A good many women are out of heterosexual circulation because they have homosexual group marriages, the iyeha, three or four or more women. We haven’t found a male equivalent yet—”

  “Anyhow,” said Riel, “Aketa is one of Ket’s husbands. His name means something like Ket’s-kin-first-husband. Kin, meaning they’re in the same volcano lineage. He was down the valley in Sponta when we first arrived.”

  “And he’s a priest, a high one, we think. Maybe because he’s Ket’s husband, and she’s certainly an important one. But most of the really prestigious priesthoods seem to be for men. Probably to compensate for lack of childbearing.”

  The anger rose up again in Shan. Who were these women to lecture him on gender and womb envy? Like a sea wave the hatred filled him with salt bitterness, and sank away, and was gone. He sat with his fragile sisters in the sunlight on the stone, and looked at the heavy, impossible book open on Forest’s lap.

  After a long time he said, “What does it say?”

  “I only know a word here and there. Aketa wanted me to have it for a while. He’s been teaching us. Mostly I look at the pictures. Like a baby.” She showed him the small, brightly painted, gilded picture on the open page: men in wonderful robes and headdresses, dancing, under the purple slopes of Iyananam.

  “Dalzul thought they were preliterate,” he said. “He h
as to see this.”

  “He has seen it,” Riel said.

  “But—” Shan began, and was silent.

  “Long long ago on Terra,” Riel said, “one of the first anthropologists took a man from a tiny, remote, isolated Arctic tribe to a huge city, New York City. The thing that most impressed this very intelligent tribesman about New York City were the knobs on the bottom posts of staircases. He studied them with deep interest. He wasn’t interested in the vast buildings, the streets full of crowds, the machines.…”

  “We wonder if the churten problem centers not on impressions only, but expectations,” Forest said. “We make sense of the world intentionally. Faced with chaos, we seek or make the familiar, and build up the world with it. Babies do it, we all do it; we filter out most of what our senses report. We’re conscious only of what we need to be or want to be conscious of. In churten, the universe dissolves. As we come out, we reconstruct it—frantically. Grabbing at things we recognize. And once one part of it is there, the rest gets built on that.”

  “I say ‘I,’“ said Riel, “and an infinite number of sentences could follow. But the next word begins to build the immutable syntax. ‘I want—’ By the last word of the sentence, there may be no choice at all. And also, you can only use words you know.”

  “That’s how we came out of the chaos experience on the Shoby,” Shan said. His head had begun suddenly to ache, a painful, irregular throb at the temples. “We talked. We constructed the syntax of the experience. We told our story.”

  “And tried very hard to tell it truly,” Forest said.

  After a pause, pressing the pressure points on his temples, Shan said, “You’re saying that Dalzul has been lying?”

  “No. But is he telling the Ganam story or the Dalzul story? The childlike, simple people acclaiming him king, the beautiful princess offering herself… “

  “But she did—”

  “It’s her job. Her vocation. She’s one of these priests, an important one. Her title is Anam. Dalzul translated it princess. We think it means earth. The earth, the ground, the world. She is Ganam’s earth, receiving the stranger in honor. But there’s more to it—this reciprocal function, which Dalzul interprets as kingship. They simply don’t have kings. It must be some kind of priesthood role as Anam’s mate. Not Ket’s husband, but her mate when she’s Anam. But we don’t know. We don’t know what responsibility he’s taken on.”

  “And we may be inventing just as much of it as Dalzul is,” Riel said. “How can we be sure?”

  “If we have you back to compare notes with, it’ll be a big relief,” said Forest. “We need you.”

  So does he, Shan thought. He needs my help, they need my help. What help have I to give? I don’t know where I am. I know nothing about this place. I know the stone is warm and rough under the palm of my hand.

  I know these two women are sympathetic, intelligent, trying to be honest.

  I know Dalzul is a great man, not a foolish egoist, not a liar.

  I know the stone is rough, the sun is warm, the shadow cool. I know the slight, sweet taste of tipu seeds, the crunch between the teeth.

  I know that when he was thirty, Dalzul was worshiped as God. No matter how he disavowed that worship, it must have changed him. Growing old, he would remember what it was to be a king….

  “Do we know anything at all about this priesthood he’s supposed to fill, then?” he asked harshly.

  “The key word seems to be ‘todok,’ stick or staff or scepter. Todoghay, the one who holds the scepter, is the title. Dalzul got that right. It does sound like a king. But we don’t think it means ruling people.”

  “Day-to-day decisions are made by the councils,” Riel said. “The priests educate and lead ceremony and—keep the city in spiritual balance?”

  “Sometimes, possibly, by blood sacrifice,” Forest said. “We don’t know what they’ve asked him to do! But it does seem he’d better find out.”

  After a while Shan sighed. “I feel like a fool,” he said.

  “Because you fell in love with Dalzul?” Forest’s black eyes gazed straight into his. “I honor you for it. But I think he needs your help.”

  When he left, walking slowly, he felt Forest and Riel watch him go, felt their affectionate concern following him, staying with him.

  He headed back for the big market square. We must tell our story together, he told himself. But the words were hollow.

  I must listen, he thought. Not talk, not tell. Be still.

  He listened as he walked in the streets of Ganam. He tried to look, to see with his eyes, to feel, to be in his own skin in this world, in this world, itself. Not his world, not Dalzul’s, or Forest’s or Riel’s, but this world as it was in its recalcitrant and irreducible earth and stone and clay, its dry bright air, its breathing bodies and thinking minds. A vendor was calling wares in a brief musical phrase, five beats, tataBANaba, and an equal pause, and the call again, sweet and endless. A woman passed him and Shan saw her, saw her absolutely for a moment: short, with muscular arms and hands, a preoccupied look on her wide face with its thousand tiny wrinkles etched by the sun on the pottery smoothness of the skin. She strode past him, purposeful, not noticing him, and was gone. She left behind her an indubitable sense of being. Of being herself. Unconstructed, unreadable, unreachable. The other. Not his to understand.

  All right then. Rough stone warm against the palm, and a five-beat measure, and a short old woman going about her business. It was a beginning.

  I’ve been dreaming, he thought. Ever since we got here. Not a nightmare like the Shoby. A good dream, a sweet dream. But was it my dream or his? Following him around, seeing through his eyes, meeting Viaka and the others, being feasted, listening to the music … Learning their dances, learning to drum with them … Learning to cook… Pruning orchards … Sitting on my terrace, eating tipu seeds … A sunny dream, full of music and trees and simple companionship and peaceful solitude. My good dream, he thought, surprised and wry. No kingship, no beautiful princess, no rivals for the throne. I’m a lazy man. With lazy dreams. I need Tai to wake me up, make me vibrate, irritate me. I need my angry woman, my unforgiving friend.

  Forest and Riel weren’t a bad substitute. They were certainly friends, and though they forgave his laziness, they had jolted him out of it.

  An odd question appeared in his mind: Does Dalzul know we’re here? Apparently Forest and Riel don’t exist for him as women; do I exist for him as a man?

  He did not try to answer the question. My job, he thought, is to try to jolt him. To put a bit of dissonance in the harmony, to syncopate the beat. I’ll ask him to dinner and talk to him, he thought.

  Middle-aged, majestic, hawk-nosed, fierce-faced, Aketa was the most mild and patient of teachers. “Todokyu nkenes ebegebyu,” he repeated for the fifth or sixth time, smiling.

  “The scepter—something—is full of? has mastery over? represents?” said Forest.

  “Is connected with—symbolizes?” said Riel.

  “Kenes!” Shan said. “Electric! That’s the word they kept using at the generator. Power!”

  “The scepter symbolizes power?” said Forest. “Well, what a revelation. Shit!”

  “Shit,” Aketa repeated, evidently liking the sound of the word. “Shit!”

  Shan went into mime, dancing a waterfall, imitating the motion of wheels, the hum and buzz of the little dynamo up on the volcano. The two women stared at him as he roared, turned, hummed, buzzed, and crackled, shouting “Kenes?” at intervals like a demented chicken. But Aketa’s smile broadened. “Soha, kenes,” he agreed, and mimicked the leap of a spark from one fingertip to another. “Todokyu nkenes ebegebyu.”

  “The scepter signifies, symbolizes electricity! It must mean something like—if you take up the scepter you’re the Electricity Priest—like Aketa’s the Library Priest and Agot’s the Calendar Priest—right?”

  “It would make sense,” Forest said.

  “Why would they pick Dalzul straight off as their chief el
ectrician?” Riel asked.

  “Because he came out of the sky, like lightning!” said Shan.

  “Did they pick him?” Forest asked.

  There was a pause. Aketa looked from one to the other, alert and patient.

  “What’s ‘choose’?” Forest asked Riel, who said, “Sotot.”

  Forest turned to their teacher. “Aketa: Dazu … ntodok… sotot?”

  Aketa was silent for some time and then said, gravely and clearly, “Soha. Todok nDazu oyo sotot.”

  “‘Yes. And also the scepter chooses Dalzul,’“ Riel murmured.

  “Aheo?” Shan demanded—why? But of Aketa’s answer they could understand only a few words: priesthood or vocation, sacredness, the earth.

  “Anam,” Riel said—”Ket? Anam Ket?”

  Aketa’s pitch-black eyes met hers. Again he was silent, and the quality of his silence held them all still. When he spoke it was with sorrow. “Ai Dazu!” he said. “Ai Dazu kesemmas!”

  He stood up, and knowing what was expected, they too rose, thanked him quietly for his teaching, and filed out. Obedient children, Shan thought. Good pupils. Learning what knowledge?

  That evening he looked up from his practice on the little Gaman finger-drum, to which Abud liked to listen, sitting with him on the terrace, sometimes singing a soft chant when he caught a familiar beat.

  “Abud,” he said, “metu?”—a word?

  Abud, who had got used to the inquiry in the last few days, said, “Soha.” He was a humorless, even-natured young man; he tolerated all Shan’s peculiarities, perhaps, Shan thought, because he really hardly noticed them.

  “‘Kesemmas,’“ Shan said.

  “Ah,” said Abud, and repeated the word, and then went off slowly and relentlessly into the incomprehensible. Shan had learned to watch him rather than trying to catch the words. He listened to the tone, saw the gestures, the expressions. The earth, down, low, digging? The Gaman buried their dead. Dead, death? He mimed dying, a corpse; but Abud never understood his charades, and stared blankly. Shan gave up, and pattered out the dance rhythm of yesterday’s festival on the drum. “Soha, soha,” said Abud.