Ursula K. Le Guin

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Itale Sorde the grandfather had lived in France in the 1770’s and had travelled in Germany and Italy. His neighbors of Val Malafrena slowly forgave him, though some of them never trusted him again. At forty he had returned for good to the mountain province and to his wife, a cousin of his neighbor Count Guide Valtorskar; had improved his estate, rebuilt his house, and settled down. He sent his sons down to Solariy to college, but both returned without further divagation to the Montayna, the elder to run the estate and the younger to practice law, moderately, in Portacheyka. Their father never left the province after 1790. Over the years his correspondence with friends abroad had slowly decreased, then stopped; they were dead, or had forgotten him, or knew he had chosen to be forgotten. After his death in 1810 he was remembered for his good management of the estate, his stately kindness, his skill as a gardener.

  The family was of the domey, the commoner-landowner class, which had in 1740 been granted by royal charter equal privilege with the nobles of the kingdom. In the eastern provinces the domey still stood outside the old social hierarchy, insulated off; in the center and west they had, with the burghers of the capital and the major cities, become more closely engrafted with the nobility by intermarriage and custom than convention permitted most people to admit, more numerous and potentially more influential than most of them realised themselves. The magic of names still held minds enchanted. The domey did not have names; they had property.

  Dom Itale’s property was small, but excellent. The house he built there looked out on three sides on the lake; it stood on a blunt peninsula, the end of a ridge running down from the shoulder of San Givan Mountain. The steep ridge was crowned with native oak and pine, so that approached from the east the house seemed to stand alone in a somber sweep of lake and mountain. But coming from Portacheyka, the town in the pass, one saw the fields and orchards and vineyards, the peasants’ and leaseholders’ houses, the roofs of other manors. The estate raised wine-grapes, pears, apples, rye, oats, barley; it was a dramatic but not a harsh climate. In a hard winter snow lay deep on the forested peaks, but not for a century had the ice frozen across Malafrena or the other lakes that stretched in a chain among the mountains to the southwest border of the land. Summers were long and hot, and thunderstorms roamed growling among the mountains. The years there were marked by drought or great rain, vintage, weather, harvest, rather than by the events of history; whether King Stefan ruled, or Napoleon and Grand Duke Matiyas, or Francis and Grand Duchess Mariya, it did not much affect the weather and the earth, the flavor of the wine, the aspects of the hills. Landowners and their tenants lived wholly within the mountain barrier. Taxation they grumbled at; so had their great-grandfathers.

  Guide Sorde, the inheritor, was a tall man, spare, dark, with acute grey eyes, a good type of the taciturn peasants of his province, from whom his ancestors had risen to be landowners in the seventeenth century. His wife Eleonora, born in Solariy on the southern plain, was the only thing he had found outside the mountains that he prized; and he brought her back with him, for good.

  In 1803 their son was born, their daughter three years later. Eleonora taught both children until Itale was eleven and Laura eight; then, since education had got to be a tradition in the family and Guide upheld all traditions, a tutor began to come in thrice a week for Laura, and Itale went off to school with the Benedictines on Sinviya Mountain. He came home most weekends; it was only seven miles. On the Thursday half-holiday he would go down to Portacheyka, whose peaked slate roofs and climbing streets lay under the windows of the monastery school, and have dinner with his uncle Emanuel and aunt Perneta in their high wooden house with its garden full of marigolds, pansies, phlox, and its view over the dark streets and roofs out through the pass. The town was set in a deep gap between Sinviya and San Givan Mountains; framed by the towering slopes, Portacheyka’s northward view had a quality of vision. It seemed as if the shadowed pass could not lead out to those remote and sunlit, azure hills, but only look down on them as if on fabled kingdoms across the barrier of possibility. When clouds gathered full of thunder on the peaks and hung low over the town sometimes the view of the lower hills shone out in a clear, golden light, an enchanted realm, free of the storm and darkness of the heights. Idling by the Golden Lion Inn, Itale saw the coaches of the Southwestern Post set off for distant cities or come in, high, swaying, dusty, from their journeys; and Portacheyka, the gateway of his province, had for him the glamor of voyage and the unknown that a seaport has for one whose country’s border is the sea.

  Saturdays at noon he walked down through town, through the oak-wooded rolling foothills, past the slopes of vine and orchard, to the house by the lake. On the way he might meet and stop with his friends among the boys of the estate, or stop to talk with Bron, the master vintner, a long-legged, high-shouldered, grim old man. He would ask and tell Bron all the events of the week; if they were mishaps Bron would say, “So things go,” and if triumphs, “Aye, but work’s certain and reward’s seldom, Dom Itaal!”

  When he was seventeen the monks of Sinviya sent him home with blessings and a first prize in Latin, and he took up the life of a young landowner, learning how to prune grape stocks and drain fields and keep accounts, hunting, riding, sailing his boat Falkone on the lake. The work filled his time but not his mind. He got restless. An important person to his family, he felt he ought to do something important. Status was obligation: that he had learned from his father, who never talked about duty but, autocrat as he was, served it unquestioning. Seeking a worthy duty, the boy studied the lives of great men. Aeneas had been his first hero; his grandfather had told him the story, then he had read it in school in his father’s battered school copy; but he found others in the meager lot of books he could get: Pericles, Socrates, Hector, Hannibal. And there was Napoleon. His childhood passed under the Empire, his boyhood during the exile. Powerless on his island jail, defeated, humiliated, Napoleon loomed there like Prometheus in chains, while over the broad lands of Europe and Russia ruled little, apprehensive kings. . . . In his grandfather’s library the seventeen-year-old found so many French books that—enlisting his sister’s willing aid, for she was being tutored in French—he taught himself enough of the language to be able to read Voltaire. Laura tried to read with him, but found it boring and returned to her mother’s favorite, the New Heloise, at which Itale was relieved, since at the monastery school Voltaire had been mentioned only in the same breath with the devil, and he was not quite sure what he was getting into. There were some odd volumes of the Moniteur, the French government newspaper. He looked at one from 1809 and found it like all newspapers he had ever seen, the mouthpiece of authority. But later he chanced on a volume from the early 1790’s. He did not at first recall what had been going on in Paris then—the monks had not been strong on recent history. He came on speeches made by M. Danton, M. Mirabeau, M. Vergniaud; they were strangers to him. M. Robespierre he had heard mentioned, along with Voltaire and the devil. He turned back to the year 1790 and began reading steadily. He held the French Revolution in his hands. He read the speech in which the orator called down the wrath of the people on the house of privilege, the speech that ended, “Vivre libre, ou mourir!”—Live free, or die. The yellowed newsprint crumbled under the boy’s touch; his head was bowed over dry columns of words spoken to a lost Assembly by men thirty years dead. His hands felt cold as if a wind blew on him, his mouth was dry. He did not understand half what he read, knowing almost nothing of the events of the Revolution. It did not matter. He understood that there had been a Revolution.

  The speeches were full of rant, cant, and vanity; he saw that clearly enough. But they discussed freedom as a human need, like bread, like water. Itale got up and walked up and down the quiet little library, rubbing his head and staring blankly at the bookcases and the windows. Freedom was not a necessity, it was a danger, all the lawmakers of Europe had been saying that for a decade. Men were children, to be governed for their own good by the few who understood the science of governmen
t. What did this Frenchman Vergniaud mean by stating a choice—live free or die? Such choices are not offered to children. The words were spoken to men. They rang bald and strange; they lacked the logic of statements made in support of alliances, counter-alliances, censorships, repressions, reprisals. They were not reasonable.

  Itale came late to supper, looking feverish. He ate little, and soon escaped the house, going down to the lake-shore in the darkness. There he wrestled for some hours with the angel, the messenger, who had challenged him that afternoon. He put up the best fight he could, since, for a nineteen-year-old, he regarded clear thinking highly; but the angel won hands down. Itale could not refuse what he had wanted and sought: the ideal of human greatness, not embodied in a person, but to be won for all by the fellowship of mankind. So long as one soul is unjustly jailed I am not free, thought the new convert, and when he thought of these things his face took on a stern expression, and also a look of great happiness. His twentieth year was in fact the happiest of his life. When out of long silence he would reply to something his mother said, she would look at him wistfully and wonder where it was he had been, so far from her that his blue eyes looked at her with joyous recognition, as if he had been long away in distant lands.

  She knew before he did that he wanted to leave home; he found it out for himself that summer. When his work was done he would take his boat and run the shining lake, returning at dusk from the farthest, eastern gulfs where the river Kiassa sprang from the lake and started down the forested mountainsides to the foothills and the plains, to join the Molsen and run on with it. The stream he watched chasing down amongst the rocks would, by summer’s end, have reached the sea; while he stayed home by the still lake.

  Guide Sorde was told that it was natural for a young man to want to leave home for a while, but he saw it as mere folly. The estate had to be run; Itale was the heir; if one had a job, one did it. Eleonora, following her brother-in-law’s suggestion, had proposed sending Itale to college in Solariy. “After all, your father sent you and Emanuel there. . . .”

  “There’s nothing there he needs,” said Guide in his quiet voice in which one could hear, like a wind blowing from the edge of distant storm, a muted resonance of passion. “Waste of time.”

  Eleonora had never combatted her husband’s arrogant provincialism for herself, but for Itale she did. “He needs to meet people, to know the world a little. What good will he be to his peasants if he’s no more than another peasant?”

  Guide scowled. His wife was using his own weapons against him, more cleverly than he could use them; and he felt besides that he had not been able to express his real reason for not wanting to let the boy go. He was angry at his family for not understanding this motive which he did not understand himself, and offended because he knew he must give in. Everybody knew he would give in, even Itale. Only Eleonora had the tact to argue with him.

  So in September of 1822 Itale set off on the Montayna Diligence, northward through the pass and down. Looking back he saw the mountains above long rising ranges of foothills, their familiar outlines changed and changing. San Givan had revealed a great falling eastern slope, Sinviya a second peak; the faint blue outline beyond them, the farthest away, must be the Hunter. As it sank out of sight Itale got out his watch, his grandfather’s silver watch, and checked the hour: nine-twenty of the morning. Here on the descending road, now bending towards the southeast, it was sunny, crickets sang in the mown fields, harvesters were at work, the villages were deserted, tranquil in the sunlight. It was the golden land he had seen from beneath the stormclouds of Portacheyka. They passed through towns and villages whose names he knew from hearsay, Vermare, Chaga, Bara; with the last they left the Montayna Province, and at Erreme he changed to the Sudana Post. He looked intently at the people, the houses, the chickens and pigs, as the Sudana Post rolled along, to see what pigs, chickens, houses, people looked like, down here.

  In Solariy all things were sleepy. Livestock was fat, houses drowsed in their overgrown gardens full of roses, even the Molsen slept as it flowed through Solariy under the old bridge, sending its wide flood slow and shining to the south. The students of the university did not work hard, they did not duel, they drank a lot of wine and fell in love continually, and the girls of Solariy fell in love with them. In his second year Itale, abandoned by a faithless baker’s daughter, renounced love violently and turned to politics. He became a leader in the student society, Amiktiya. The government was barely tolerant of Amiktiya; all such student groups had been outlawed in the Germanies; a society at the University of Wilno so aggravated the Tsar of All the Russias that in 1824 he disbanded it, exiled the boys that led it, and put the entire student body and faculty under permanent surveillance. It was this sort of thing that gave Amiktiya its spice. They drank a lot of wine and sang the society’s forbidden anthem, “Beyond this darkness is the light, O Liberty, of thine eternal day.” They passed contraband books around, discussed the revolutions of France, Naples, Piedmont, Spain, Greece, talked of constitutional monarchy, equality before the law, popular education, a free press, all without any clear idea of what they were getting at, where it all led. They were not supposed to talk, so they talked. So the third year passed and Itale thought himself ready to go home for good, until he found himself half-shod and laughing in the dark court of the chapel, until he heard Frenin saying in the sunlight over the river, “I’m thinking of Krasnoy.”

  III

  Emanuel Sorde cleared his throat and remarked with the carelessness suitable to an explosive topic, “The newspaper’s quite a puzzle this week. I wonder if the Estates aren’t going to be convened after all.”

  “The National Assembly? Why, dear me, they haven’t met, have they, since King Stefan died.”

  “Thirty years ago, that’s right.”

  “How extraordinary.”

  “It’s only my guess, count. The Courier-Mercury says nothing; therefore one suspects something.”

  “Yes.” Count Orlant Valtorskar sighed. “My wife used to have me subscribe to the Aisnar Mercury. It seemed to have more facts in it. Whatever became of it?”

  “It was banned so long that its owners went bankrupt,” Itale answered, with heat. “Since then we’ve had no free press at all.”

  “What if the Estates do meet?” said Guide in his slow, hard, quiet voice. “They’ll talk and do nothing, as in ’96.”

  “Talk!” said his son, setting down a wine glass, which continued to ring for a moment. “It’s not unimportant that—” But Emanuel interrupted him: “They might be able to do something about taxation, at least. The Hungarian Diet’s won back control over their taxes from Vienna.”

  “What if they did? Taxes won’t be decreased. Taxes are never decreased.”

  “The money wouldn’t go to support a foreign police force, at any rate,” said Itale.

  “What’s that to us up here?”

  Count Orlant’s long face, smooth and rosy for his years, wore a look of increasingly bewildered compunction as the discussion went on. He felt sorry for them all, emperors, policemen, tax-collectors, poor fellows caught in the webs and pressures of material affairs, but he knew something more than sympathy was expected of him, and he was never able to meet their expectations. There was Guide looking black, Emanuel watchful, Itale getting hotter and hotter and finally bursting out as usual, “A time will come—!” But to Count Orlant’s relief Guide spoke setting the challenge aside: “Let’s go out to the terrace.”

  They joined the women on the railed and paved garden old Itale had built out over the lake under the south windows of the house. It was a warm evening, the last of July. The water reflected the pale blue sky evenly except where, in the large shadows of the mountains, it lay translucent brown. Far off east where the lake was hidden by slopes descending sheer into it a little haze veiled the water. In the west sunset still colored the sky behind San Larenz Mountain and lighted the air so that the white flagstones of the terrace, the white nicotiana flowering in pots, the wh
ite dress Laura wore, the blue surface of the lake all were faintly flushed with rose, fading now as the sky paled and Vega overhead sent its first broken radiance down through the quiet air. The cypress at the outer corner of the terrace stood black against luminous water and sky, and the air bore a scent of dusk, dampness, flowers, and the murmur of women’s voices.