The Compass Rose

by Ursula K LeGuin

  Ramchandra knelt down by the grave. “I am sorry I was jealous of you,” he said. “If we meet reborn, you will be a king again, but I will be the dog at your heel.” He bowed down, touching the raw, damp clods of the grave, then slowly stood up. He looked at Tamara. She knew his look, the dark, clear, grieving eyes, but she could not meet them, or speak. It was her turn to cry. He came to her across the grave, as if it was any bit of ground, and put his arms around her, holding her so she could weep. When the first hardest sobbing was done and-she could walk, they set off slowly down the narrow, half-overgrown path through the peacock splendors of the forest, back to the village.

  “Burning is better,” Ramchandra said. “The spirit is freed sooner to go on.”

  “Earth is best,” Tamara said, very low and hoarse.

  “Tamara. Do you want to radio Ankara Base to send the launch to us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There’s no hurry to decide.”

  The gorgeous colors of the lamabas blurred and cleared and blurred again. She stumbled, though Ramchandra’s hand was kind and firm on her arm.

  “We might as well go on and finish what we came for.”

  “The ethnology of dreams.”

  “Dreams? Oh no. This is real... Much realler than I wish it were.”

  “So are all dreams.”

  In three days they put in their regular call to Ankara, the inner planet where the central base for the various research groups in Yirdo’s solar system was established; they reported Bob’s death, “by misunderstanding—no blame,” in the Ethnographic Corps code., They did not request relief.

  Life in Hamo village went on as before. The Middle-Aged Women said nothing about Bob’s death to Tamara, but several evenings old Binira sat just outside her hut and sang to her, a quiet cricket trill. Once she saw two of the little saweya dancers leaving a flowering branch at the door of Bob’s empty hut; she went towards them, but they trotted off, giggling. Soon after, the Young Men set. fire to the hut, deliberately or by accident, there was no telling; it burned to ashes and all trace of it was gone within a week. Ramchandra spent his days and nights) with the Old Ones of Hamo and Gunda, gathering an increasingly solid bulk of linguistic and mythic data. The long lines of saweya dancers undulated, the baliya dancers thrust their high breasts left and right, the singers chanted “Ah-weh, weh, ah-weh, weh,” and the forest glades round the dancing ground at dusk swarmed with coupled bodies. Hunters returned proudly with dead poro, like suckling pigs with blunt, curved fangs, slung on carrying poles. On) the twelfth night after Bob’s death Ramchandra came to Tamara’s hut; she had been trying to read over some notes, but the pages might as well have been empty, her head ached and nothing made sense, nothing meant anything. He came to the doorway, dark, slight, shadowy, and she looked up at him with dull eyes. He said some-! thing that meant nothing about loneliness, and then he said, with the darkness around him and behind him, “It’s like fire. Like burning in a fire. But the spirit caught too, burning—”

  “Come in,” she said.

  A few nights later they lay talking, in the dark, the soft windy rain sighing in the forest and on the thatch of the hut above them.

  “Since I first saw you,” he said. “Truly, since the day we met, in the canteen at Ankara Base.”

  With a laugh, Tamara said, “You scarcely behaved as if...”

  “I didn’t like it! I refused. I said, No, no, no!—my wife was enough, this doesn’t come twice to a man in one life, I will remember her.”

  “You do,” Tamara murmured.

  “Of course. To her in me now I can say, Yes, and to you with me, Yes, yes... Listen, Tamara, you set me free, your hands free me. And bind me. Tighter to the wheel, never in this life now will I get free, never cease to desire you, I don’t want to cease...”

  “It’s so simple now. What was in our way?”

  “My fear. My jealousy.”

  “Jealousy?—Of Bob?”

  “Oh yes,” he said, shivering.

  “Oh Ram, never—Right from the beginning, you—”

  “Confusion,” he whispered. “Illusion...”

  His warmth against her the length of her body; and cold Bob, cold in the ground. Fire is better than earth.

  She woke; he was stroking her hair and cheek, soothing her, whispering, “Sleep again, it’s all right, Tamara,” his voice heavy with sleep and tenderness.

  “What—did I—”

  “A bad dream.”

  “Dream. Oh, no—it wasn’t bad—just queer.”

  The rain had ceased and the light of the giant planet, greyed and filtered by clouds, was like a faint mist in the hut. She could just make out the hook of his nose, the darkness of his hair, in that grey dust of light.

  “What was the dream?”

  “A boy—a young man—no, a boy, about fifteen. Standing in front of me. Sort of filling everything, taking up all the room, so that I couldn’t possibly get past him or around him. But just an ordinary boy, with glasses, I think. And he was staring at me, not threatening, not even really seeing me, but he kept staring and saying ‘Bill me, bill me.’ And I didn’t think he owed me anything, so I said, ‘What for?’ But he just kept saying, ‘Bill me!’ And then I woke up.”

  “Bill me, how funny,” Ramchandra said sleepily. “Bill me... Me Bill...”

  “Yes. That’s it. I’m Bill, that’s what he meant.”

  “Oh,” Ramchandra said, a deep exhalation, and she felt his relaxed body go tense. Since Bob’s death she had not trusted the Ndif, or rather without distrusting any one of them she had lost trust in their world, she feared harm. She raised her head quickly to see if someone had entered the hut. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong.”

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing. Go back to sleep. You talked to God.”

  “The dream?”

  “Yes. He told you his name.”

  “Bill?” she said, and because the alarm was past and she was still sleepy and Ramchandra was laughing, she laughed. “God’s name is Bill?”

  “Yes, yes. Bill Kopman, or Kopfman, or Cupman.”

  “Bik-Kop-Man?”

  “The T assimilates to the ‘k,’ as in sikka, the fiber they make fishing lines of—silk.”

  “What are you babbling about?”

  “Bill Kopman, who made this world.”

  “Who what? Who?”

  “Who made this world. This world—Yirdo, the poro, the puti bushes, the Ndif. You saw him in your dream. A fifteen-year-old boy, with glasses, probably also acne and weak ankles. You saw him, and so my eyes see for a moment too. A skinny boy, lazy, shy. He reads stories, he daydreams, about the great blond hero who can hunt and fight and make love all day and night. His head is full of the hero, himself, and so it all comes to be.”

  “Ram, stop it.”

  “But you talked to him, not I! You asked him, ‘What for?’ But he couldn’t tell you. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t understand desire. He is entirely caught in it, bound by it, he sees and knows nothing but his own immense desire. And so he makes the world. Only one free of desire is free of the worlds, you know.”

  Tamara looked, as if over her shoulder, back into her dream. “He speaks English,” she said, unwillingly.

  Ramchandra nodded. His tranquillity, his acceptant, playful tone, reassured her; it was interesting to lie looking together at the same silly dream.

  “He writes it all down,” she said, “his fantasies about the Ndif. Maps and everything. A lot of kids do that. And some adults...”

  “Perhaps he has a notebook of his invented language. It would be interesting to compare with my notebooks.”

  “Much easier just to go find him and borrow his.”

  “Yes, but he doesn’t know Old Ndif.”

  “Ramchandra.”

  “Beloved.”

  “You are saying that because a boy writes nonsense in a notebook in—in Topeka, a planet thirty-one light-years away comes into existence, wit
h all its plants and animals and people. And always has been in existence. Because of the boy and the notebook. And what about the boy with a notebook in Schenectady? or New Delhi?”

  “Evidently!”

  “Your nonsense is much worse than Bill Kopman’s.”

  “Why?”

  “Time—And there isn’t room—”

  “There is room. There is time. All the galaxies. All the universes. That is infinity. The worlds are infinite, the cycles are endless. There is room. Room for all the dreams, all the desires. No end to it. Worlds without end.”

  His voice now was remote.

  “Bill Kopman dreams,” he said, “and the God dances. And Bob dies, and we make love.”

  She saw the boy’s blind yearning face before her, filling the world, no way around it, no path.

  “You’re only joking, Ramchandra,” she said; she was shivering, now.

  “I’m only joking, Tamara,” he said.

  “If it weren’t a joke I couldn’t bear it. Being caught here, stuck in somebody else’s dream, dream world, alternate world, whatever it is.”

  “Why caught? We call Ankara; they send the launch for us; next passage out we can go back to Earth if we like. Nothing has changed.”

  “But this idea that it’s somebody else’s world. What if—what if—while we’re still here—Bill Kopman woke up?”

  “Once in a thousand thousand years does a soul wake up,” Ramchandra said, and his voice was sad.

  She wondered why that made him sad; she found it comforting. Brooding, she found further comfort. “It wouldn’t all depend on him, even if he started it,” she said. “All the uninhabited places, they’d just be blanks on his maps, but they’re full of life, animals and trees and ferns and little flies... Reality is what works, isn’t it? And the old men and women. They aren’t, they wouldn’t be, part of... of Bill’s wet dreams. He probably doesn’t even know any old people, he isn’t interested. So they get free.”

  “Yes. They begin to imagine their world for themselves. To think, to make words. To tell the story.”

  “I wonder if he ever thinks of death.”

  “Can anyone think of death?” Ramchandra asked. “One can only do it. As Bob did it... Can one dream of sleep?”

  The soft, dust-grey light was more intense, as the clouds thinned, drifting silent to the east.

  “He looked anxious, in the dream,” Tamara murmured. “Frightened. As if... ‘Bill me...’ As if Bob paid... the debt.”

  “Tamara, Tamara, you go before me, always before me.” His forehead was against her breasts; she touched his hair lightly.“Ramchandra,” she said, “I want to go home, I think. Away from this place. Back to the real world.”

  “You go before, I follow you.”

  “Oh, humble you are, liar, hoaxer, dancer, you’re so humble, but you don’t really care, do you? You’re not frightened.”

  “Not any more,” he said, in a breath, barely audible.

  “How long have you understood about this place? Since you danced with Bro-Kap and the others, that first time?”

  “No, no. Only now, since your dream, this night, now. You saw. All I can do is say. But yes, if you like, I can say it because I have always known it. I speak my native tongue, because you have brought me home. The house under the trees behind the temple of Shiva in a suburb of Calcutta, is that my home? Is this? The world, the real world, which one? What does it matter? Who dreamed the Earth? A greater dreamer than you or I, but we are the dreamer, Shakti, and the worlds will endure as long as our desire.”

  Gwilan’s Harp

  The harp had come to Gwilan from her mother, and so had her mastery of it, people said. “Ah,” they said when Gwilan played, “you can tell, that’s Diera’s touch,” just as their parents had said when Diera played, “Ah, that’s the true Penlin touch!” Gwilan’s mother had had the harp from Penlin, a musician’s dying gift to the worthiest of pupils. From a musician’s hands Penlin too had received it; never had it been sold or bartered for, nor any value put upon it that can be said in numbers. A princely and most incredible instrument it was for a poor harper to own. The shape of it was perfection, and every part was strong and fine: the wood as hard and smooth as bronze, the fittings of ivory and silver. The grand curves of the frame bore silver mountings chased with long intertwining lines that became waves and the waves became leaves, and the eyes of gods and stags looked out from among the leaves that became waves and the waves became lines again. It was the work of great craftsmen, you could see that at a glance, and the longer you looked the clearer you saw it. But all this beauty was practical, obedient, shaped to the service of sound. The sound of Gwilan’s harp was water running and rain and sunlight on the water, waves breaking and the foam on the brown sands, forests, the leaves and branches of the forest and the shining eyes of gods and stags among the leaves when the wind blows in the valleys. It was all that and none of that. When Gwilan played, the harp made music; and what is music but a little wrinkling of the air?

  Play she did, wherever they wanted her. Her singing voice was true but had no sweetness, so when songs and ballads were wanted she accompanied the singers. Weak voices were borne up by her playing, fine voices gained a glory from it; the loudest, proudest singers might keep still a verse to hear her play alone. She played along with the flute and reed flute and tambour, and the music made for the harp to play alone, and the music that sprang up of itself when her fingers touched the strings. At weddings and festivals it was, “Gwilan will be here to play,” and at music-day competitions, “When will Gwilan play?”

  She was young; her hands were iron and her touch was silk; she could play all night and the next day too. She travelled from valley to valley, from town to town, stopping here and staying there and moving on again with other musicians on their wanderings. They walked, or a wagon was sent for them, or they got a lift on a farmer’s cart. However they went, Gwilan carried her harp in its silk and leather case at her back or in her hands. When she rode she rode with the harp and when she walked she walked with the harp and when she slept, no, she didn’t sleep with the harp, but it was there where she could reach out and touch it. She was not jealous of it, and would change instruments with another harper gladly; it was a great pleasure to her when at last they gave her back her own, saying with sober envy, “I never played so fine an instrument.” She kept it clean, the mountings polished, and strung it with the harp strings made by old Uliad, which cost as much apiece as a whole set of common harp strings. In the heat of summer she carried it in the shade of her body, in the bitter winter it shared her cloak. In a firelit hall she did not sit with it very near the fire, nor yet too far away, for changes of heat and cold would change the voice of it, and perhaps harm the frame. She did not look after herself with half the care. Indeed she saw no need to. She knew there were other harpers, and would be other harpers; most not as good,some better. But the harp was the best. There had not been and there would not be a better. Delight and service were due and fitting to it. She was not its owner but its player. It was her music, her joy, her life, the noble instrument.

  She was young; she travelled from town to town; she played “A Fine Long Life” at weddings, and “The Green Leaves” at festivals. There were funerals, with the burial feast, the singing of elegies, and Gwilan to play the Lament of Orioth, the music that crashes and cries out like the sea and the seabirds, bringing relief and a burst of tears to the grief-dried heart. There were music days, with a rivalry of harpers and a shrilling of fiddlers and a mighty outshouting of tenors. She went from town to town in sun and rain, the harp on her back or in her hands. So she was going one day to the yearly music day at Comin, and the landowner of Torm Vale was giving her a lift, a man who so loved music that he had traded a good cow for a bad horse, since the cow would not take him where he could hear music played. It was he and Gwilan in a rickety cart, and the lean-necked roan stepping out down the steep, sunlit road from Torm.

  A bear in the forest by the road, or
a bear’s ghost, or the shadow of a hawk: the horse shied half across the road. Torm had been discussing music deeply with Gwilan, waving his hands to conduct a choir of voices, and the reins went flipping out of those startled hands. The horse jumped like a cat, and ran. At the sharp curve of the road the cart swung round and smashed against the rocky cutting. A wheel leapt free and rolled, rocking like a top, for a few yards. The roan went plunging and sliding down the road with half the wrecked cart dragging behind, and was gone, and the road lay silent in the sunlight between the forest trees.

  Torm had been thrown from the cart, and lay stunned for a minute or two.

  Gwilan had clutched the harp to her when the horse shied, but had lost hold of it in the smash. The cart had tipped over and dragged on it. It was in its case of leather and embroidered silk, but when, one-handed, she got the case out from under the wheel and opened it, she did not take out a harp, but a piece of wood, and another piece, and a tangle of strings, and a sliver of ivory, and a twisted shell of silver chased with lines and leaves and eyes, held by a silver nail to a fragment of the frame.