Ursula K. Le Guin

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “But you can’t,” Itale said, slowly, not playfully.

  “Go alone,” Estenskar whispered. “Go alone.”

  The stars shone splendid in the great square of the window, Vega overhead, the Lion like a mower’s sickle left lying in the white wheat, the Swan on the river of stars, and in the southwest Scorpio huge among lesser constellations, cold above the warm earth-night. The horses and cattle in the stalls beneath snorted, shifted, slept their queer waking sleep. A few late crickets trilled, no longer alarmed by human voices. Itale slept, and waking before dawn opened his eyes to colorless gulfs of space where, fading, Orion stood, hunter and warrior of the winter sky.

  They came that day to Sorg, a little city on the confluence of the rivers Sorg and Ras, and following the Ras for a few miles in late afternoon left the Frelana province and entered the Polana. As if waiting for them there the east wind rose after sunset, carrying the chill of great spaces crossed, long plains and empty hills. They stayed at a village inn, wakened often from sleep by the bleating of hundreds of sheep penned in fields behind the inn, the clanking of sheep-bells, the carousing of the drovers in the commonroom beneath. The next day was cool; a fine fog was dissolved through the sky so that in the pale glare reflected from horizon to horizon the sun looked small and wan. As they went east and south the wind blew in their faces. The land grew poorer as they rode. Ploughlands yielded to grasslands rolling to an interminable distance. They rode all day alone between earth and sky, with few trees or streams or houses or men to keep them company in the middle space. The road mounted, taking a whole day to rise a thousand feet. As they neared Esten the slopes became steeper, the rare farms poorer, crouched with their sheep-pens under the western side of a hill in the lee of the endless wind. They came to the village of Kolleiy in the late afternoon and pushed on four more miles to Esten, arriving after night had fallen. All Itale saw of the house then was its lights hidden among trees at the foot of a hill whose high, smooth curve blocked out the east wind and the eastern stars. All round were dark hills in starlight, no light to be seen but the stars and the one house, lonely as a ship in midsea. After a brief supper with Estenskar’s brother and sister-in-law the travellers went off to bed. Itale was given a room at the southeast corner, high, sparsely furnished, clean as bone; all the house was like that. The house, the room smelled of the country. It was utterly silent.

  Waking late, he opened his eyes to a flood of white sunlight. In the yard below his window a stable-boy was singing as he curried a stamping, snorting horse. Itale had never heard the tune, and the dialect was hard for him to follow.

  In Rákava, beneath the high walls,

  I left my love forever,

  I came to live among the barren hills

  Where runs no river. . . .

  The archaic turns, the high, harsh, fluent voice pouring over trills and catches as a shallow stream pours over rocks, it was all part of the stirring bright windy morning, and Itale got up ready for whatever came next.

  He took breakfast with Amadey in the long dining room; Ladislas Estenskar was “on the fields” as his wife said—at work. She sat with them, though she had got up long before, when her husband did. She was quiet, dark, barely eighteen, she had been married five months. Her manner was more that of a girl at home than a woman head of her household, and she was evidently in awe of her brother-in-law. With Itale she got on at once, and he said to his friend as they climbed the hill above the house, “I like her, your little sister.”

  “Ladislas is a man of sense.”

  “And taste. . . . They don’t come like that in the city. I knew a girl like her, at Malafrena. . . .”

  “What became of her, the girl at Malafrena?”

  “They sent her to convent school in Aisnar, married a rich widower— Should never have let her leave the country. Town spoils them. My word, what a view!”

  Beneath them now the house and stables huddled at the head of the vale, at the edge of a sparse, straggling wood. All round the barren crest where they stood stretched pale, rounded hills, even in the farthest distance hardly blued by the dry, pure, sunlit air. The grass on them was short as stubble after mowing. Here and there the flocks, ragged grey like patches of dandelion in seed, were scattered on the slopes; sheep-bells made a faint, sparse music over all the great landscape. Northward, beyond the end of the woods, on a scarped and wrinkled summit higher than the other hills, something stood at the edge of sight, a wall or tower.

  “What’s that, Amadey?”

  Estenskar turned. The wind and light made him squint; his hard, thin face looked as if it was made of the same stuff as the high, pale, arid land. “That tower? Radiko, it’s called.”

  “Castle?”

  “Blown up in the War of the Three Kings. Not much of it left.”

  “Which king did they back?”

  Estenskar laughed. “The Pretender. People here are never on the winning side. . . .”

  When they came down from the hilltop the cessation of the wind was a relief, as was the presence of things close at hand, walls and trees, giving shelter from the pale distances.

  They met Ladislas coming into the yard, and with him went to the stables to look at the two horses Amadey had bought in Krasnoy. Admiring the brown mare, he stroked her neck and said, “You always had an eye for horses, Amadey,” and it was plain that he was glad the younger brother had come home, that he loved him, admired him, and was afraid of him. In the afternoon they rode out to show Itale the estate. The elder brother talked farming with him, the younger was mostly silent. Sheep were raised in the Montayna but Itale had had little to do with them and had never seen flocks or pasturage on anything like this scale; he was impressed, fascinated, asked Ladislas endless questions, to which the answers became increasingly technical and complete as Ladislas discovered that he was talking to a man who had worked “on the fields,” and began to forget that the guest was a literary fellow from the city. They reined in beside one of the deep, stone-mounted wells, and dismounted to look at it, and remounted but neglected to ride on, discussing intently and with passion the principal problem of farming in the Polana and its principal difference from farming in the Montayna, the lack of surface water. Amadey sat silent, patient on a patient old horse from the stable of the farm, gazing at the hills.

  As he rode back to the house with Itale he said, “It’s queer, coming back. Like coming to a foreign country, utterly foreign, and finding one speaks the language perfectly. . . .”

  That night after supper they sat talking by the fire. Ladislas’ wife began to gather courage, and when Amadey said something about his book now in press she asked, in her soft voice, “Have you brought it with you?”

  “Only my rough copy. Rochoy has it, it’ll come out early in ’28.”

  “You’re the cause of our meeting, Amadey,” his brother said. “Givana wanted to see what Estenskar’s brother looked like.”

  “I’m Estenskar’s brother. And glad to have been of use. It’s the first time I’ve heard of my reputation doing any good to anyone.”

  “He is weary of fame,” Itale said. “Soon he will get weary of being weary, I hope. He always runs his books down, too, the better they are the more he reviles them; this next one may really be quite fair, going by that indication.”

  “Is it a novel?” asked Givana. “What will it be called? Can you say what it’s about?”

  “It’s called Givan Faugen, and it’s about him,” Amadey replied, with an evident effort not to intimidate her. “Very gloomy. It didn’t really come off.”

  “See?” said Itale. “No one has seen it, but we’ve all been told how very poor it is.”

  “It’s not poor,” Amadey said. “I wouldn’t publish it if it were.”

  Ladislas grinned; either he liked to see his brother teased a bit, or liked to see him fire up.

  “It’s merely mediocre,” Itale said.

  “It’s not what it should have been. That’s all. It’s not as good as Karantay’s book.
I wish it was.”

  “The Young Man Liyve?” Givana asked, timorous, her eyes very large and dark, her hands tensely clasped in her lap.

  “There’s young Liyve, you know, in person,” Amadey said, indicating Itale, who at once got hot in his turn: “Oh, rot, Amadey! Givan Karantay was writing that book before he ever met me—besides there’s absolutely nothing in common—”

  “Sorde, too, is weary of fame.”

  “Sorde’s dignity is hurt, and he can’t think of anything clever to say,” said Itale. “Is that a piano, hidden over there?”

  It was a delicate and cranky old harpsichord, and Givana played for them, formal little salon pieces of the last century; her husband stood protectively near her while she played, turning the pages of the music; they sang together, a Scottish love-song so the yellowed book said, a yearning tune in which their voices blended with a reticent clarity. They had sung it before, alone in the lonely house, for their own pleasure. Itale, watching them, thought: But this is how it should be, how have they found it so simply? —and for a minute there in the peaceful room by the fire listening to that music, it seemed to him that life was an infinitely simple thing if only one looked at it clearly, without fear; that if one were thirsty, one need only look to see, close by, however dry the land, the deep well, the well of clear water.

  But it wasn’t his spring, it wasn’t his land.

  He stayed a week at Esten. He went about the farm with Ladislas, went shooting with Amadey in the sparse forests, talked with the brothers and Givana in the evenings; he felt half at home because it was the country, a farm, and half strange, a city visitor among these hard-working people, no part of the spare silent current of their life. Amadey was increasingly silent, speaking curtly and sometimes at random out of some inner preoccupation. On his last day there Itale suggested they ride over to the ruined tower, Radiko.

  “No,” Amadey said.

  Then becoming aware of the uncouthness of his refusal he scowled: “Nothing there,” he said. “I’d rather—I want to go there alone. I’m sorry.” His face was angry, obdurate, suffering. Everything, Itale thought, came hard to him, he could take nothing lightly in life. Even Itale’s admiring, undemanding friendship caused him pain. All love hurt him. “The ropes burn my hands,” said the ferryman of the icy river in his first book.

  “Stay a while longer,” he said, late that last night; Ladislas and Givana had gone to bed, leaving them talking by the fire.

  “I promised to meet Isaber.”

  “It’s a foul city, Rákava,” Amadey said, brooding, gazing into the fire. “You shouldn’t go there. Only easterners can understand the east.”

  “Then come with me. Help me with these articles.”

  Amadey merely shook his head.

  Next day at noon, beside the little, dusty coach that would take Itale to Rákava, he said, “When you see Karantay this winter, tell him . . .” He paused for a long time, shrugged, looked off down the dusty, straggling street of the village. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. The driver was up on his box, it was time for Itale to mount up beside him. “Don’t stay here too long, Amadey, come back to your friends,” he said, putting out his hand to touch his friend’s arm, to embrace him if Amadey would: Amadey pulled away from him, saying, “All right. Goodbye, have a good trip,” and without looking at him turned and went off. Itale stood a moment nonplussed, then swung himself up on the high wheel and took his place; the coach set off with a jangle and commotion of harness and wheels and shouting. Itale looked back through the dust thrown up by the horses’ hooves and saw his friend already mounted on the bay horse, riding off on the road to Esten; behind him the mare, her saddle empty, followed quietly.

  II

  Late that night Amadey lay awake and listened to the wind. It had risen strong and cold, bearing gusts of rain. When it was still a moment there was a sighing sound which might be the settling of the house whose wooden walls strained against the blast, but which sounded like breathing, as if the wind itself took breath before its next sweep across the hills into the west. Amadey sat up at last, groped for the tinderbox, and lighted his candle. The room appeared around him, an island of dim light in the night and the storm of wind. On one high wall hung a map of Europe which he recalled from his earliest childhood, the Latin names of realms, the strange indented coastlines, the boundaries of nations all changed by eighty years of history, the decorative monsters sporting in the ocean he had never seen. The east wind in the darkness blew towards that ocean, towards the remote and cold, autumnal sea, over the hills, plains, cities of the inland, the dawn behind it and the sunset ahead; sunrise might catch it on the coasts of France, or it catch up with evening on the Atlantic, near the shores of the western world. A great gust like a stormwave struck the house. Voices cried along the eaves and roof-peaks. The candle flickered, smoky. “I’m through, I’m done,” he whispered furiously in the sighing stillness after the gust. “It’s gone, all gone, there’s nothing left, what do you want of me?”

  Silence, wind, darkness, the walls of the room where he had slept as a boy. When he blew out his candle he could see the window as a paler oblong, and as the clouds streamed westward glimpsed Orion fiery in the black gulfs.

  In the afternoon he went to the stable to take out the bay horse. The other horse he had bought in Krasnoy, the brown mare, was in the next stall. He heard Itale in the Golden Lion inn saying, “You must take the mare tomorrow, she has a lovely gait,” the pleasant, easy voice and the open, easy dialect, the generous heart— Again tears came into Amadey’s eyes as they had when he tried to say goodbye to Itale beside the coach, no warm sentimental expansion but a painful and frightening storm of grief like an attack from behind, which he met as best he could, turning to face it with surprise and rage.

  He saddled up the mare instead of the bay, and set off alone towards Radiko. In the forest October was setting its somber fires, the birches were beginning to lose their leaves; the wind had blown itself out. The mare’s long gait soon took them out of the trees and up the long slopes towards the high place. The hills were empty except for his brother’s scattered flocks, the agile, heavy-bodied sheep turning their remote gaze on the rider. The sky was pale blue. Once a hawk circled indolently near the sun, and flew off to the north.

  At the top of the hill he dismounted in what had been the courtyard of the keep. A long mound broken by angles of half-buried stone showed where the walls had stood. The wind that never stilled on these summits played in the yellow grass. The body of the castle was gone except for a fragment of the gateway and, overhanging the scarp, some ruins of the outer defense wall. The tower stood scarred and intact, sharing its eminence with two things: the sun now sinking to the west, and, far off in the east, more sensed than seen in the obscure distances of autumn, a violet bulk, the mountains of another land. A ramp led up inside the tower to a first floor of stone. The higher floors had been burned away when the castle was taken, a hundred and eighty years before, leaving only stone beam-supports and a jagged blue circle of sky overhead. Weeds flourished between the stones of floor and walls; in a window fifty feet above the floor a few purple daisies nodded. Amadey went to the south window of the first floor, a narrow bright shaft of view over sunlit hills. An inscription was scratched in the sill, in the hard yellow-grey sandstone:

  Amadeus • Ioannes • Estensis

  anno MDCCCXVIII

  vincam

  He had cut the words there two days before he first left Esten for Krasnoy. He had been seventeen years old. He remembered in one intense imponderable vision full of scents and weathers and the light of other sunsets all the times he had stood alone here in Radiko. The first time he had come had been in the days after his mother’s death. He had come to the tower on foot, he had climbed up the broken ramp and sat down, worn out, here under the south window, and found himself in a place where death had no power, all here being dead and yet enduring, invulnerable. The sun had gone down, the tower had filled with blue shadows. He h
ad heard his name called on the hills, and at last had answered. His father, Ladis, the servants had been out looking for him, calling; he had been only a boy of ten.

  Again the tower filled slowly with shadow, and as it did so grew cold, as if the shadow were clear, still water. He went out and sat on the ruined wall over the cliff in the sun’s last warmth, looking out over the vast landscape that as a child he had pretended was his domain, he the prince of the fallen castle, until the shadow had risen to the top of the highest hills. The frightening pang of loss that he had felt parting with Itale, all the bitter restlessness that had followed him from Krasnoy, dropped away from him at last, here, among the largeness of things, the high ruin, wind, evening. When he stood up at last he still lingered, surrendering to those things, acknowledging their absolute, healing indifference and their absolute claim upon him. He stood alone at last in the only place where he could be alone, could be himself, and free. “This is it, the place. This is where I was to come,” he thought with triumph. In the same moment he turned again, seeing himself posing and boasting, a fool in the house of grandeur. Why had he refused to come here with Itale? Because he was ashamed. He did not want Itale to see the word scratched on the stone of the tower, I shall conquer, and, in his ignorance and magnanimity, believe it. For Itale believed in victory, in the spirit’s struggle and triumph. He had not lived in the ruined tower, on the barren land. He had not seen that there was only a single choice, between illusion and hypocrisy, a choice not worth making. What am I doing here? Amadey asked himself jeering, and went to remount; once off the steep heights he put the mare into a run, leaving behind him in the dead place his defeat and his irrecoverable glimpse of peace.