Ursula K Le Guin

by Powers (2007) (lit)

  staple of the local diet, but they became poisonous at rare, unpredictable intervals; Dorod forbade himself and me to eat them.

  Temec told me that Dorod s previous novice, a child, had died of the shellfish poisoning three years ago.

  Dorod and I did not get on well. My heart is not naturally rebellious, and I wanted very much to learn what he could teach me about my power, but I'd learned to distrust my own trustfulness. Dorod demanded absolute trust. He gave me arbitrary orders and expected silent obedience. I questioned the reason for each act. He refused to answer. I refused to obey.

  This went on for a half month or so. One morning he instructed me to spend the entire day kneeling in the hut with my eyes shut, saying the word erru. Two days earlier I had done just that. I told him I couldn't kneel that long again, my knees were still too painful from the last time. He said, "You must do as I say," and went off.

  I'd had enough. I made up my mind to walk back round the lake to East Lake Village.

  He came back into the hut and found me knotting up the little bundle of my belongings in the old brown blanket, which my uncle's cat Prut had nearly worn to shreds by kneading it with his claws before he went to sleep on it.

  "Gavir, you cannot go," he said, and I said, "What can I learn if you keep me in ignorance?"

  "The seerman is the guide. It is his burden and task to carry the mystery for the seer."

  He spoke, as he often did, pompously, but I felt he believed what he said.

  "Not this seer," I said. "I need to know what I'm doing and why I should do it. You want blind obedience. Why should a seer be blind?"

  "The seer of visions must be guided," Dorod said. "How can he guide himself? He gets lost among the visions. He doesn't know wheth-

  er he lives now or years ago or in years to come! You yourself, though you've barely begun to travel in time, have felt that. No one can walk that path by himself, unguided." "My aunt Gegemer —"

  "An ambamer!" Dorod said. "Women, babbling nonsense, screeching and screaming, seeing useless glimpses of things they don't understand. Phoh! A seer is trained and guided, he serves his clan and people, he is a man of value. I can make you a man of value. I know the secrets, the techniques, the sacred ways. Without a seerman a seer is no better than a woman!"

  "Well, maybe I am no better than a woman," I said. "But I'm not a child. You treat me as a child."

  New ideas came hard to Dorod, as perhaps they do to most villagers and tribesmen, but he could listen, he could think, and he was extremely, almost unnaturally, sensitive to mood and hint. What I said struck him hard.

  He said nothing for a while and finally asked, "How old are you, Gavir?"

  "About seventeen."

  "Seers are trained young. Ubec, whom I was training, was only twelve when he died. And I took him when he was seven," He spoke slowly, thinking as he spoke. "You are an initiated man. A child can be trained to obey in all things."

  "I was well trained in trust and obedience," I said with some bitterness. "As a child. Now I want to know what I'm to put my trust in, and what power I'm obeying."

  Again he listened to what I said, and thought before he spoke. "The power of your soul to see truth," he said at last— "that is what both the seer and seerman must follow."

  "Since I'm not a child, why can't I learn to do it by myself?"

  "But who would read your visions?" he said with blank surprise.

  "Read them?" I said as blankly.

  "I must learn to read the truth in what you see, so that I can tell people of it. That's my task as your seerman! How can a seer do that for himself?" He saw that I was as perplexed as he was. "Do you know what it is you see, Gavir? Do you know the people, the place, the time, the meaning of the vision?"

  "Only after they come to pass," I admitted. "But how can you know?"

  "That is my power! You are the eyes of our people, but I am your voice! The seer is not given the gift of reading what he sees. That is for the man trained in the ways of the myriad channels, who knows the roots of the reeds, where Amba walks, where Sua passes, where Hassa flies. You will learn to see and to tell me what you see. To you the visions are mysteries— is that not so? You can tell me only what you see. But I, looking with the eyes of Amba, looking deep within, I will understand the mysteries, and learn to speak the meaning of what is seen, and so give guidance to our people. You need me as I need you. And our kinfolk and all the clans of Ferusi need us both."

  "How do you know how to. . .read my visions?" I hesitated on the word "read," which was not one I had ever heard before in the Marshes, and which clearly did not have the meaning I knew.

  Dorod gave a kind of laugh. "How do you know how to see them?" he asked. He looked at me now with a less lofty expression, almost companionably. "Why does a man have one power and not another? You can't teach me to see visions. I can teach you how to see them, but not how to read them, because that is my power, not yours. I tell you, we need each other."

  "You can teach me how to see visions?"

  "What do you think I've been trying to do?"

  "I don't know! You never say. You say fast every third day, never go barefoot, don't sleep with my head to the south, kneel till my knees break— a hundred rules and do's and don'ts, but what for?"

  "You fast to keep your spirit pure and light, so it can travel easily."

  "But I'm not getting enough to eat between fasts. My spirit is so pure and light that it thinks about nothing except food. What good is that?" He frowned, and in fact looked a little ashamed. I pressed my advantage: "I don't mind fasting, but I won't starve. Why do I have to wear shoes?"

  "To keep your feet from contact with the earth, which draws the spirit down."

  "Superstition," I said. He looked blank. I said, "I've had visions both shod and barefoot. I don't need to learn obedience. I've had that lesson. I want to understand my power, and to learn how to use it."

  Dorod bowed his head in silence. After a long time he answered me, gravely, without patronising impatience or pompousness, "If you will do as I tell you to do, Gavir, I will try to tell you why seers do these things. Perhaps it is true that such knowledge befits your mind as an initiated man."

  I was proud of myself for standing up to him, and pleased with myself for earning some respect from him. I put my things back on the shelf by my cot and stayed on with him in his lonely, rather dirty hut.

  I saw well enough that Dorod did indeed need me, since his child pupil, when he died, had taken Dorod's position as seerman with him. But if he'd teach me what he knew, it was a fair bargain, I thought.

  It was hard for him to abandon his position as master, to answer my questions, to explain to me why I must do this or that. He was not an ill-natured man, and I think sometimes he found it a pleasure to have, instead of a pupil-slave, a student and companion; but still he never told me anything unless I asked him.

  All that he could or would teach me of the songs and the ritual stories I learned quickly. I was at last learning a little of the gods and spirits, the songs and tales of the Rassiu, coming a little closer to the heart of the Marshes.

  The gift of memorising hadn't deserted me, for all that I hadn't used it in a long time. So in that way I came along much faster than he had expected. He laughed once and said, of a ritual story I had just repeated to him, "I spent a month trying to hammer that into Ubec's head, and he never got it half right! You learned it in one saying."

  "That is half my power, and all my training when I was a slave," I said.

  But my power of vision seemed to resist his efforts to bring it forth and train it. I stayed with him a month and another month, and still had no more of those seeings I used to call remembering. I was impatient; he seemed untroubled.

  The central practice of his teaching he called waiting for the lion. It was to sit and breathe quietly and bring my thoughts away from all that was around me into a silence within myself: a very difficult thing to do. My knees began to get used to it at last, but it seemed
my mind never would.

  And he wanted me to tell him every vision I had ever had. This was very hard for me at first. Sallo sat beside me and whispered to me, "Don't talk about it, Gav!" All my life I had obeyed her. Now I was to disobey her to serve the wishes of this strange man. I resisted confiding in Dorod, and yet only he could teach me what I needed to know. I forced myself to speak, haltingly and incompletely describing what I had seen. His patience was inexhaustible: little by little he drew from me everything I could tell him of each "remembering"— the snowfall in Etra, the assault of the Casicaran troop, the cities I walked in, the man in the room with the books, the cave, the terrible dancing figure (which I had seen again when I was initiated), even the first and simplest of them all, the blue water and the reeds. He wanted to hear the visions over and over. "Tell me again," he would say. "You are in a boat."

  "What is there to tell? I see the Marshes. Just as they are. Just as I saw them when I was a baby, before I was stolen, no doubt. Blue water, green reeds, a blue hill way off there. . ."

  "To the west?" "No, south."

  How did I know the hill was in the south?

  He listened with the same intentness every time, often asking a question but never making any comment. Many words I used evidently meant nothing to him, as when I was trying to describe the cities I saw, or the room full of books where the man turned to me and said my name. Dorod had never seen a city. He used the word "read" but could not read; he had never seen a book, I took my small book, the Cosmologies, out of its silky reedcloth wrappings to show him what the word meant. He glanced at it but was not interested. He did not ask for realities or for meanings, only for the closest, most detailed description I could give him of what I had seen in vision. What he made of all I told him I never knew, because he never said.

  I wondered about other seers and seermen. I asked Dorod who the other seers of Ferusi were. He told me two names, one in South Shore, one in Middle Village. I asked if I could talk to one of these men. He looked at me, curious: "Why?"

  "To talk with him— to find out if it's like it is for me—

  He shook his head. "They wouldn't talk to you. They speak of their visions only to their seerman."

  I insisted a little. He said, "Gavir, these are holy men. They live in seclusion, alone with their visions. Only their seerman talks with them. They don't come out among people. Even if you were fully a seer yourself you wouldn't be allowed to see them."

  "Is that how I am to be — secluded, shut away, living among my visions?"

  The idea was horrible to me, and I think Dorod felt my horror.

  He hesitated and said, "You are different. You began differently. I cannot say how you will live."

  "Maybe I'll never have any more visions. Maybe I came back to the beginning there out on the lake, and the beginning was the end."

  "You're afraid," Dorod said, with unusual gentleness. "It's hard to know the lion is walking towards you. Don't be afraid. I will be with you."

  "Not there," I said.

  "Yes, even there. Go wait for the lion on the deck now."

  I obeyed, listlessly, kneeling on the little deck of the hut over the mud and stones of the end of the peninsula, looking out at the lake under a calm grey sky. I breathed as he had taught me and tried to keep my thoughts from drifting. Presently I was aware that a black lioness was walking across the ground behind me, but I did not turn round. Whatever it was I had been afraid of, my fear had gone. There were flowers in the narrow garden where I sat. I walked up a cobbled street at night in rain, and saw the rain blown against a high red wall over the street in the faint light from a window across the way. I was in the sunlit courtyard of a house I knew, my house, and a young girl came to greet me, smiling; it gave me great joy to see her face. I stood in a river, the current pushing me nearly off my feet, and on my shoulders was a heavy burden, so heavy I could barely stand up as the water pushed at me, and the sand under my feet slipped and slid. I staggered and took a step forward. I was kneeling on the deck of the hut in Reed Isles. It was evening. A last flight of wild duck passed across the reddish cloud cover where the sun had set.

  Dorod's hand was on my shoulder. "Come in," he said in a low voice. "You've made a long journey."

  He was silent and gentle with me that night. He asked nothing about what I had seen. He made sure I ate well, and sent me to sleep.

  Over the next days I told him my visions, little by little, and over and over. He knew how to draw from me things I would not have thought to tell, things I didn't even know I'd seen until he made me recall the vision again, closer, seeking details, as if studying a picture. In this I felt my two kinds of memory come together into one.

  And several times during those days I "journeyed," as he put it, again. It was as if a door stood open that I could go through, not at will, but at the lion's will.

  "I don't see how my visions can be of use or guidance to our clan," I said to Dorod one evening. "They're always of other places, other times— almost nothing of the Marshes. What use can they be here?"

  We were out fishing. Our contributions to the fish-mat had been rather poor lately, and what the women gave us had been correspondingly meager. We had thrown out the net and were drifting a while before we began to pull it in.

  "You are still making the journeys of a child," Dorod said,

  "What do you mean?"

  "The child sees only with his own eyes. He sees what is before him— places he will come to. As he learns to journey as a man, he learns to see more widely. He learns to see what other eyes may see, he sees where others will come. He goes where he will never himself go in his body. All the world, all places, all times are open to the great seer. He walks with Amba and flies with Hassa. He journeys with the Lord of the Waters." He said all this quite matter-of-factly. He looked round at me with a quick, shrewd glance. "Untaught, beginning so late, you see as a child sees. I can teach you how to make the greater journeys. But only if you trust me."

  "Do I distrust you?"

  "Yes," he said calmly.

  My aunt had said something to me about remembering myself but going no further. I could have found her words in my memory if I

  looked for them, but I did not look for them. Dorod was right: if I was to learn from him I must do it his way.

  We pulled in our net. We were in luck. We brought two big carp to the fish-mat. I found carp a bony, muddy fish, but the women of Reed Isles were fond of it, and we were given a good dinner that night.

  After we'd eaten it, I asked Dorod, "How will you teach me to see beyond the child's visions?"

  He didn't answer for a long time. "You must be ready," he said at last.

  "What will make me ready?" "Obedience and trust." "Do I disobey you?" "Only in your heart." "How do you know that?"

  He looked at me with something like scorn or pity, and said nothing.

  "What must I do, then? How do I prove I trust you?" "Obedience."

  "Tell me what to do and I'll do it."

  I did not like this battle of wills, I did not want it, but it was what he wanted. And having got what he wanted, he changed his tone. He spoke very seriously. "You need not go on, Gavir," he said. "It is a hard way, the seer's way. Hard and fearful. I will always be with you, but you are the one who makes the journey. I can guide you to the beginning of the way, but after that I can only follow. It is your will that dares, your eye that sees. If you wish not to make the greater journeys, so be it. I will not force you — I cannot. If you want, leave me tomorrow, go back to East Lake. Your child-visions will return sometimes, but they will soon begin to fade; you will lose them, lose the power. Then you can live as an ordinary man. If that is what you want."

  Much taken aback, confused, challenged, I said, "No. I told you, I want to know my power."

  "You will know it," he said with a quiet exultation.

  From that night on he was both gentler with me and even more exacting. I was determined to obey him without question, to find if I could, indeed
, learn to know my power. He asked me again to fast every third day. He controlled my diet very strictly, allowing me no milk or grain, but adding certain foods that he said were sacred: the eggs of duck and other wild fowl, a root called shardissu, and eda, a small fungus that sprang up in the willow groves inland— all eaten raw. He spent a great deal of time obtaining these foods. The shardissu and eda were vile-tasting and left me sick and dizzy, but I had to eat only tiny quantities of each.

  After some days of this diet, and many hours of kneeling daily, I began to feel a lightness of body and mind, a sense of floating free. As I knelt on the deck of the hut I would say the word "hassa, hassa," over and over, and feel myself lifted on the wings of the wild goose, the swan.

  I knelt on the deck and saw all the Marshes beneath me, and the cloud shadows drifting over them. I saw villages on the shores of lakes, and fishing boats out on the water. I saw the faces of children, of women, of men. I crossed a great river with a burden on my shoulders, borne down, heavy laden, and threw off the burden and found my wings again, the heron's wings. I flew and flew. . . and landed sick and cold and stiff, my knees afire with pain, my head dull, my belly aching, on the deck of Dorod's house.

  He helped me up. He brought me in by the tiny fire in the clay pot, for winter was coming on. He comforted me and praised me. He fed me translucent slices of raw fish and vegetables, beaten egg, a bit of sickening shardissu, a draft of water to take the evil taste out of my mouth. "She gave me milk," I said, remembering the woman in the inn when I