Ursula K Le Guin

by Powers (2007) (lit)

  We sailed all that day down the long lake. The next day, as its shores drew together, we entered a maze of channels between high reeds and rushes, lanes of blue-silver water widening and narrowing between walls of pale green and dun, endlessly repeated, endlessly the same. I asked Ammeda how he knew his way and he said, "The birds tell me."

  Hundreds of small birds flitted about above the rushes; ducks and geese flew overhead, and tall silver-grey herons and smaller white cranes stalked the margins of the reed islets. To some of these Ammeda spoke as if in salutation, saying the word or name Hassa.

  He asked me no more about myself than he had the first night, and he told me nothing about himself. He was not unfriendly, but he was deeply silent.

  The sun shone clear all day, the waning moon at night. I watched the summer stars, the stars I'd watched at the Vente farm, rise and slide across the vault of the dark. I fished, or sat in the sunlight and gazed at the ever-differing sameness of channels and reed beds, the blue water and the blue sky. Ammeda steered the boat. I went into the house and found it almost filled with cargo, mostly stacks and bundles of large sheets of a paperlike substance, some thin, some thick, but very tough. Ammeda told me it was reedcloth, made from beaten reeds, and used for everything from dishes and clothing to house walls. He carried it from the southern and western marshes, where it was made, to other parts, where people would pay or barter for it. Barter had filled his house with oddments— pots and pans, sandals, some pretty woven

  belts and cloaks, clay jugs of oil, and a large supply of ground horseradish. I gathered that he used or traded these things as he pleased. He kept his money — quarter- and half-bronzes and a few silver bits —in a brass bowl in the corner of the structure, with no effort to conceal it. This, and the behavior of the people at the inn at Shecha, gave me an idea that the people of the Marsh were singularly unsuspicious or unafraid, either of strangers or of one another.

  I knew, I knew all too well, that I was prone to put too much trust in people. I wondered if the fault was inborn, a characteristic, like my dark skin and hawk nose. Overtrustful, I had let myself be betrayed, and so had betrayed others. Maybe I had come to the right place at last, among people like me, who would meet trust with trust.

  There was time for my mind to wander among such thoughts and hopes in the long days of sunlight on the water, and to think back, too. Whenever I thought of my year in the Heart of the Forest, I heard Bar-na's voice, his deep, resonant voice, ringing out, talking and talking. . . and the silence of the marshes, the silence of my companion, were a blessing, a release.

  The last evening of my journey with Ammeda, I'd fished all day and had a fine catch ready. He lighted and tended a fire of charcoal in a big ceramic pot with a grill over the top of it set out on the deck in the lee of the house. Seeing me watching him, he said, "You know I have no village." I had no idea what he meant or why he said it, and merely nodded, waiting for more; but he said no more. He spattered the fish with oil and a few grains of salt and broiled them. They were succulent. After we ate he brought out a pottery jug and two tiny cups and poured us what he called ricegrass wine, clear and very strong. We sat in the stern. The boat was moving slowly down a wide channel. He did nothing to catch the wind, but only touched the tiller now arid then to keep the course. A clear blue-green-bronze dusk lay over the water and the

  reeds. We saw the evening star tremble like a drop of water low in the west.

  "The Sidoyu," Ammeda said. "They live near the border. Slave takers come through there. Could be that's where you come from. Stay if you like. Look around. I'll be back through in a couple of months." After a pause he added, "Been wanting a fisherman."

  I realised that he was saying in his laconic way that if I wanted to rejoin him then, I was welcome.

  Next morning at sunrise we were again in open water. After an hour or two we approached a solid shore where some trees grew and little stilted houses stood up over the banks. I heard children shouting. A small mob of them were on the pier to meet the boat. "Women's village," Ammeda said. I saw that the adults following the children were all women, dark, thin-limbed, in brief tunics, with short curling hair like Sallo's hair— and I saw Sallo's eyes, I saw her face, glimpses, flashes of her everywhere among them. It was strange, troubling, to see these strangers, these sisters all about me.

  As soon as we tied up at the pier, the women were scrambling over the boat, peering at what Ammeda had to offer, feeling the reedcloths, sniffing the oil jars, chattering away to him and to one another. They didn't speak to me, but a boy of ten or so came up, stood in front of me with his feet apart, and said importantly, "Who are you, stranger?"

  I said, with a rush of absurd hope of being instantly recognised, "My name is Gavir."

  The boy waited a moment and then asked rather pompously, as if offended, "Gavir— ?"

  It seemed I needed more names than I had, "Your clan!" the boy demanded,

  A woman came and pulled him away without ceremony, Ammeda said to her and an older woman with her, "He was taken as a slave. Maybe from the Sidoyu."

  "Ah," the older woman said. Turning sideways to me, not looking at me, but unmistakably speaking to me, she asked, "When were you taken?"

  "About fifteen years ago," I said, the foolish hope rising in me again. She thought, shrugged, and said, "Not from here. You don't know your clan?"

  "No. There were two of us. My sister Sallo and I." "Sallo is my name," the woman said in an indifferent voice. "Sallo Is-sidu Assa."

  "I am seeking my people, my name, ma-io," I said.

  I saw the sidelong, flashing glance of her eye, though she stayed turned half from me. "Try Ferusi," she said. "The soldiers used to take people from down there."

  "How will I come to Ferusi?"

  "Overland," Ammeda said. "Walk south. You can swim the channels."

  While I turned to get my gear together, he talked with Sallo Issidu Assa. He told me to wait for her while she went into the village. She came back with a reed-cloth packet and laid it on the deck beside me. "Food," she said in the same indifferent tone, her face turned from me.

  I thanked her and stowed the packet in my old blanket, which I had washed out and dried on the journey through the marshes, and which served as a backpack. I turned to Ammeda to thank him again, and he

  said, "With Me."

  "With Me," I said.

  I started to hop off the pier onto the ground, but a couple of women called out a sharp warning, and the officious boy came rushing to block my way. "Women's ground, women's ground!" he shouted. I looked about not knowing where to go, Ammeda pointed me to the right, where I made out a path marked with stones and clamshells right at the edge of the water. "Men go that way," he said. So I went that way.

  Within a very short distance the path led me to another village. I was uneasy about approaching it, but nobody shouted at me to keep away, and I went in among the little houses. An old man was sunning himself on the porch of his house, which seemed to be built of heavy reedcloth mats hung on a wooden frame. "With Me, young fellow," he said.

  I returned the greeting and asked him, "Is there a road south from here, ba-di?"

  "Badi, badi, what's badi? I am Rova Issidu Meni. Where do you come from, with your badi-badi? I'm not your father. Who is your father?"

  He was more teasing than aggressive. I had the feeling he knew the salutation I had used perfectly well, but didn't want to admit it. His hair was white and his face had a thousand wrinkles.

  "I'm looking for my father. And my mother. And my name."

  "Ha! Well!" He looked me over. "Why d'you want to go south?"

  "To find the Ferusi."

  "Ach! They're a queer lot. I wouldn't go there. Go there if you like. The path goes through the pasture." And he settled back down, stretching his little, black, bony legs, like crane's legs, out in the sun.

  No one else seemed to be in the village; I could see fishing boats out on the water. I found the path leading inland through the pasture and
set off south to find my people.

  It was a two days' walk to Ferusi. The path meandered a great deal but tended always south, as well as I could tell by having the sun on my left in the morning and on my right at sunset. There were many channels through the grasslands and willow meads to wade or swim, holding my pack and shoes up out of the water on a stick, but it was easy walking otherwise, and my supply of dried fish cakes and salted cheese lasted me well enough. From time to time I saw the smoke of a cabin or a village off to one side or another and a side path leading to it, but the main way kept on, and I kept on it. So late on the second day the path turning left along the sandy shore of a great lake led me to a village— pastures with a few cows, a few willows, a few little houses up on stilts, a few boats at the piers. Everything in the Marshes repeated itself with a slightly varied sameness, an extreme simplicity.

  There were no children around the village, and I saw a man spreading out a fishing net, so I walked on between the houses and called to him, "Is this Ferusi?"

  He laid the net down carefully and came towards me. "This is East Lake Village of Ferusi," he said.

  He listened gravely as I told him the quest I was on. He was thirty or so, the tallest man I'd seen among the Rassiu, and his eyes were grey; I knew later that he was the son of a Marsh woman raped by an Etran soldier. When I told him my name he said his, Rava Attiu Sidoy, and courteously invited me to his house and table. "The fishermen are coming back now," he said, "and we'll go to the fish-mat. Come with us and

  you can ask your question of the women. It's the women who will know."

  Boats were coming in to the piers and unloading their catch, a dozen or more light boats with small sails that made me think of moth wings. The village began to come alive with the voices of men, and dogs, too. Dogs came leaping out of the boats to prance ashore through shallow water, slender black dogs with tight-curled coats and large bright eyes. The manners of these dogs were quite formal: they greeted one another with a single bark, each investigated the other's other end while tail-wagging vigorously, one of them bowed and the other accepted the bow, and then they parted, each following its master. One of the dogs carried a large dead bird, a swan perhaps; it went through no ceremonies with other dogs but trotted off importantly along the beach westward with its bird. And quite soon all the men followed it, carrying their catch in nets and baskets. Rava brought me along with them. Around a grassy headland, in a little cove, we came to the women's village of East Lake.

  A number of women were waiting in a meadow at a large sheet of reedcloth spread out on the ground. A lot of children ran about the edges, but were careful not to set a foot on the cloth. Pots and reedcloth boxes full of cooked food were set out as if at a market. The men set down and displayed their catch on the cloth in the same way, and the dog laid the bird down and stood back wagging its tail. There was a lot of talking and joking, but it was unmistakably a formal occasion, a ceremony, and when a man came forward to take a box or pot of food, or a woman to pick up a net bag of fish, they said a ritual phrase of thanks. An old woman pounced on the swan, shouting, "Kora's arrow!" and that brought on more joking and teasing. The women seemed to know exactly which catch went to which woman; the men did a little more discussing over who got what, but the women mostly made it clear, and when two young men had an argument over a box of fritters a woman settled

  it by nodding at one of the rivals. The one who didn't get them went off sulkily. When everything had been picked up, Rava brought me forward and said to the women in general, "This man came to the village today, looking for his people. He was taken to Ettera by the soldiers as a young child. He knows his name only as Gavir. People in the north thought he might be a Sidoyu."

  At that all the women came forward to stare at me, and a sharp-eyed, sharp-nosed, dark-skinned woman of forty or so asked, "How many years ago?"

  "About fifteen, ma-io," I said, "I was taken with my older sister Sal-

  lo."

  An old woman cried out— "Tano's children!"

  "Sallo and Gavir!" said a woman with a baby in her arms, and the old woman carrying the dead swan by its large black feet pushed up close to study me and said, "Yes. Her children, Tano's children. Ennu-

  Amba, Ennu-Me!"

  "Tano went for blackfern, down the Long Channel," one of the women said to me. "She and the children. They didn't come back. Nobody found the boat."

  "Some said she drowned," another woman said, and another, "I always said it was the slave takers," and the older women pressed forward still closer to look at me, looking in me for the woman they had known. The young women stood back, eyeing me in a different way

  The dark woman who had spoken to me first had said nothing and had not come forward. The old woman with the swan went and talked to her, and then the dark one came close enough to say to me, "Tano Aytano Sidoy was my younger sister. I am Gegemer Aytano Sidoy." Her face was grim and she spoke harshly

  I was daunted, but after a minute I said, "Will you tell me my name,

  Aunt?"

  "Gavir Aytana Sidoy," she said, almost impatiently. "Did your mother —your sister —come back with you?

  "I never knew my mother. We were slaves in Etra. They killed my sister two years ago. I left and went to the Daneran Forest." I spoke briefly and said "left," not "escaped" or "ran away," because I needed to speak like a man, not like a runaway child, to this woman with her crow's face and crow's eyes.

  She looked at me briefly, intensely, but did not meet my gaze. She said at last, "The Aytanu men will look after you," and turned away.

  The other women clearly wanted to keep looking at me and talking about me, but they followed my aunt's lead. The men were beginning to straggle back to their village. So I turned and followed them.

  Rava and a couple of older men were having a discussion. I couldn't follow all they said; the Sidoyu dialect was strange to my ears and contained a lot of words I didn't know. They seemed to be talking about where I belonged, and finally one of them turned back and said to me,

  "Come."

  I followed him to his cabin, which was wood-framed, with a wooden floor, and walls and roof of reedcloth. It had no door or windows, since you could open up a whole side of it by raising any of the walls. Having put away the box and clay pot of food which he'd got from the women, the man raised the wall that faced the lake and tied it up on posts so that it extended the roof, shading that part of the deck from the hot late-afternoon sunlight. There he sat down on a thick reedcloth mat and set to work on a half-made fish hook of clamshell. Not looking up at me, he gestured to the house and said, "Take what you like."

  I felt intrusive and out of place, and did not want to take anything at all. I did not understand these people. If I was truly a lost child of the village, was this all the welcome they had for me? I was bitterly disappointed, but I wasn't going to show any disappointment, any weakness to these coldhearted strangers. I would keep my dignity, and act as

  standoffish as they did. I was a city man, an educated man; they were barbarians, lost in their marshes. I told myself that I'd come a long way to get here and might as well stay the night at least. Long enough to decide where else I might go, in a world where evidently I belonged nowhere.

  I found another mat and sat down on the outer edge of the deck. My feet dangled a couple of inches above the mud of the lakeshore. After a while I said, "May I know the name of my host?"

  "Metter Aytana Sidoy," he said. His voice was very soft.

  "Would you be my father?"

  "I would be the younger brother of that one, your aunt," he said.

  The way he spoke, keeping his face down, made me suspect that he was not so much unfriendly as very shy. Since he didn't look at me, I felt I shouldn't stare too much at him, but from the corner of my eye I could tell he didn't look much like the crow woman, my aunt, or like me.

  "And of my mother?"

  He nodded. One deep nod.

  At that I had to look round at him. Metter was younge
r than Gege-mer by a good deal, and not so dark and sharp-faced; in fact he looked something like Sallo, round-cheeked, with clear brown skin. Maybe that was what my mother Tano had looked like.

  He would have been about the age I was now when his sister disappeared with her two little children.

  After a long time I said, "Uncle."

  He said, "Ao."

  "Am I to live here?"

  "Ao."

  "With you?"

  "Ao."

  "I will have to learn how to live here. I don't know how you live."

  "Anh," he said.

  I would soon be familiar with these grunted or murmured responses: ao for yes, eng for no, and anh for anything between yes and no, but having the general meaning: I heard what you said.

  Another voice made itself heard: mao! A small black cat appeared from a heap of something in the darkness of the hut, came across the deck, and sat down beside me, decorously curling its tail round its front paws. Presently I gave its back a tentative stroke. It leaned up into my hand, so I continued stroking it. It and I gazed out across the lake. A couple of the black fishing-dogs ran past on the lakeshore; the cat ignored them. My uncle Metter was, I noticed, looking at the cat instead of bending industriously over his work. His face had relaxed.

  "Prut's a good mouser," my uncle said.

  I kneaded the nape of the cat's neck. Prut purred.

  After a while Metter said, "Mice are thick this year."

  I scratched behind Prut's ears and wondered if I should tell my uncle that for one summer of my life I had eaten mice as a major part of my diet. It seemed unwise. Nobody had yet asked me anything about where I came from.

  No one in Ferusi ever would. I had been in "Ettera"— where the slave takers came from, the robbing, raping, murdering, child-stealing soldiers. That was all they needed to know. I'd been elsewhere. They didn't want to know about elsewhere. Not many people do.