Ursula Le Guin - Dancing to Ganam

“You have it, sir,” Shan said, touched again. After Dalzul had left, he decided that what he should do was what Dalzul’s unexpected male-heterosexual defensiveness prevented him from doing: go ask advice and help of Forest and Riel.

He set off for their house. As he made his way through the marvelously noisy and aromatic market, he asked himself when he had seen them last, and realized it had been several days. What had he been doing? He had been in the orchards. He had been up on the mountain, on Iyananam, where there was a dynamo…where he had seen other cities…The pruning hook was steel. How did the Gaman make their steel? Did they have a foundry? Did they get it in trade? His mind was sluggishly, laboriously turning over these matters as he came into the courtyard, where Forest sat on a cushion on the terrace, reading a book.

“Well,” she said. “A visitor from another planet!”

It had been quite a long time since he had been here—eight, ten days?

“Where’ve you been?” he asked, confused.

“Right here. Riel!” Forest called up to the balcony. Several heads looked over the carved railing, and the one with curly hair said, “Shan! I’ll be right down!”

Riel arrived with a pot of tipu seeds, the ubiquitous munchy of Ganam. The three of them sat around on the terrace, half in the sun and half out of it, and cracked seeds; typical anthropoids, Riel remarked. She greeted Shan with real warmth, and yet she and Forest were unmistakably cautious: they watched him, they asked nothing, they waited to see…what? How long had it been, then, since he had seen them? He felt a sudden tremor of unease, a missed beat so profound that he put his hands flat on the warm sandstone, bracing himself. Was it an earthquake? Built between two sleepy volcanoes, the city shuddered a little now and then, bits of clay fell off the walls, little orange tiles off the roofs Forest and Riel watched him. Nothing was shaking, nothing was falling.

“Dalzul has run into some kind of problem in the palace,” he said.

“Has he,” said Forest in a perfectly neutral tone.

“A native claimant to the throne, a pretender or heir, has turned up, And the princess is staying with him, now. But she still tells Dalzul that he’s to be king. If this pretender gets power, apparently he threatens reprisals against all Viaka’s people, anybody who backed Dalzul. It’s just the kind of sticky situation Dalzul was hoping to avoid.”

“And is matchless at resolving,” said Forest.

“I think he feels pretty much at an impasse. He doesn’t understand what role the princess is playing. I think that troubles him most. I thought you might have some idea why, after more or less hurling herself into his arms, she’s gone off to stay with his rival.”

“It’s Ket you’re talking about,” Riel said, cautious.

“Yes. He calls her the princess. That’s not what she is?”

“I don’t know what Dalzul means by the word. It has a lot of connotations. If the denotation is ‘a king’s daughter,’ then it doesn’t fit. There is no king.”

“Not at present—”

“Not ever,” Forest said.

Shan suppressed a flash of anger. He was getting tired of being the half-wit child, and Forest could be abrasively gnomic. “Look,” he said, “I—I’ve been sort of out of it. Bear with me. I thought their king was dead. And given Dalzul’s apparently miraculous descent from heaven during the search for a new king, they saw him as divinely appointed, ‘the one who will hold the scepter.’ Is that all wrong?”

“Divinely appointed seems to be right,” Riel said. “These are certainly sacred matters.” She hesitated and looked at Forest. They worked as a team, Shan thought, but not, at the moment, a team that included him. What had become of the wonderful oneness?

“Who is this rival, this claimant?” Forest asked him.

“A man named Aketa.”

“Aketa!”

“You know him?”

Again the glance between the two; then Forest turned to face him and looked directly into his eyes. “Shan,” she said, “we are seriously out of sync. I wonder if we’re having the churten problem. The chaos experience you had on the Shoby .”

“Here, now? When we’ve been here for days, weeks—”

“Where’s here?” Forest asked, serious and intent.

Shan slapped his hand on the flagstone. “Here! Now! In this courtyard of your house in Ganam! This is nothing like the chaos experience. We’re sharing this—it’s coherent, it’s consonant, we’re here together! Eating tipu seeds!”

“I think so too,” Forest said, so gently that Shan realized she was trying to calm him, reassure him. “But we may be…reading the experience quite differently.”

“People always do, everywhere,” he said rather desperately.

She had moved so that he could see more clearly the book she had been reading when he came. It was an ordinary bound book, but they had brought no books with them on the Galba , a thick book on some kind of heavy brownish paper, hand-lettered, a Terran antique book from New Cairo Library, it was not a book but a pillow, a brick, a basket, not a book, it was a book. In a strange writing. In a strange language. A book with covers of carved wood, hinged with gold.

“What is that?” he asked almost inaudibly.

“The sacred history of the Cities Under Iyananam, we think,” Forest said.

“A book,” Riel said.

“They’re illiterate,” Shan said.

“Some of them are,” said Forest.

“Quite a lot of them are, actually,” said Riel. “But some of the merchants and the priests can read. Aketa gave us this. We’ve been studying with him. He’s a marvelous teacher.”

“He’s a kind of scholar priest, we think,” said Forest. “There are these positions, we’re calling them priesthoods because they’re basically sacred, but they’re really more like jobs, or vocations, callings. Very important to the Gaman, to the whole structure of society, we think. They have to be filled; things go out of whack if they aren’t. And if you have the vocation, the talent, you go out of whack if you don’t do it, too. A lot of them are kind of occasional, like a person that officiates at an annual festival, but some of them seem to be really demanding, and very prestigious. Most of them are for men. Our feeling is that probably the way a man gets prestige is to fill one of the priesthoods.”

“But men run the whole city,” Shan protested.

“I don’t know,” Forest said, still with the uncharacteristic gentleness that told Shan he was not in full control. “We’d describe it as a non-gender-dominant society. Not much division of labor on sexual lines. All kinds of marriages—polyandry may be the most common, two or three husbands. A good many women are out of heterosexual circulation because they have homosexual group marriages, the iyeha, three or four or more women. We haven’t found a male equivalent yet—”

“Anyhow,” said Riel, “Aketa is one of Ket’s husbands. His name means something like Ket’s-kin-first-husband. Kin, meaning they’re in the same volcano lineage. He was down the valley in Sponta when we first arrived.”

“And he’s a priest, a high one, we think. Maybe because he’s Ket’s husband, and she’s certainly an important one. But most of the really prestigious priesthoods seem to be for men. Probably to compensate for lack of childbearing.”

The anger rose up again in Shan. Who were these women to lecture him on gender and womb envy? Like a sea wave the hatred filled him with salt bitterness, and sank away, and was gone. He sat with his fragile sisters in the sunlight on the stone, and looked at the heavy, impossible book open on Forest’s lap.

After a long time he said, “What does it say?”