Ursula Le Guin: Mountain Ways

Her hand was like iron on Akal’s wrist, and her voice shook with exultation. Akal listened as to a fairytale.

“Who’s to know, Akal? Who’d ever know you? You’re taller than most men up here—you can grow your hair, and dress like a man—you said you liked men’s clothes once. Nobody will know. Who ever comes here anyway?”

“Oh, come on, Shahes! The people here, Magel and Madu—Shest—”

“The old people won’t see anything. Mika’s a halfwit. The child won’t know. Temly can bring old Barres from Ked’din to marry us. He never knew a tit from a toe anyhow. But he can say the marriage ceremony.”

“And Temly?” Akal said, laughing but disturbed; the idea was so wild and Shahes was so serious about it.

“Don’t worry about Temly. She’d do anything to get out of Ked’din. She wants to come here, she and I have wanted to marry for years. Now we can. All we need is a Morning man for her. She likes Otorra well enough. And he’d like a share of Danro.”

“No doubt, but he gets a share of me with it, you know! A woman in a Night marriage?”

“He doesn’t have to know.”

“You’re crazy, of course he’ll know!”

“Only after we’re married.”

Akal stared through the dark at Shahes, speechless. Finally she said, “What you’re proposing is that I go away now and come back after half a year dressed as a man. And marry you and Temly and a man I never met. And live here the rest of my life pretending to be a man. And nobody is going to guess who I am or see through it or object to it. Least of all my husband.”

“He doesn’t matter.”

“Yes he does,” said Akal. “It’s wicked and unfair. It would desecrate the marriage sacrament. And anyway it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t fool everybody! Certainly not for the rest of my life!”

“What other way have we to marry?”

“Find an Evening husband—somewhere—”

“But I want you! I want you for my husband and my wife. I don’t want any man, ever. I want you, only you till the end of life, and nobody between us, and nobody to part us. Akal, think, think about it, maybe it’s against religion, but who does it hurt? Why is it unfair? Temly likes men, and she’ll have Otorra. He’ll have her, and Danro. And Danro will have their children. And I will have you, I’ll have you forever and ever, my soul, my life and soul.”

“Oh don’t, oh don’t,” Akal said with a great sob.

Shahes held her.

“I never was much good at being a woman,” Akal said. “Till I met you. You can’t make me into a man now! I’d be even worse at that, no good at all!”

“You won’t be a man, you’ll be my Akal, my love, and nothing and nobody will ever come between us.”

They rocked back and forth together, laughing and crying, with the fleece around them and the stars blazing at them. “We’ll do it, we’ll do it!” Shahes said, and Akal said, “We’re crazy, we’re crazy!”

Gossips in Oro had begun to ask if that scholar woman was going to spend the winter up in the high farmholds, where was she now, Danro was it or Ked’din?—when she came walking down the zigzag road. She spent the night and sang the Offerings for the mayor’s family, and caught the daily freighter to the suntrain station down at Dermane. The first of the autumn blizzards followed her down from the peaks.

Shahes and Akal sent no message to each other all through the winter. In the early spring Akal telephoned the farm. “When are you coming?” Shahes asked, and the distant voice replied, “In time for the fleecing.”

For Shahes the winter passed in a long dream of Akal. Her voice sounded in the empty next room. Her tall body moved beside Shahes through the wind and snow. Shahes’s sleep was peaceful, rocked in a certainty of love known and love to come.

For Akal, or Enno as she became again in the lowlands, the winter passed in a long misery of guilt and indecision. Marriage was a sacrament, and surely what they planned was a mockery of that sacrament. Yet as surely it was a marriage of love. And as Shahes had said, it harmed no one—unless to deceive them was to harm them. It could not be right to fool the man, Otorra, into a marriage where his Night partner would turn out to be a woman. But surely no man knowing the scheme beforehand would agree to it; deception was the only means at hand. They must cheat him.

The religion of the ki’O lacks priests and pundits who tell the common folk what to do. The common folk have to make their own moral and spiritual choices, which is why they spend a good deal of time discussing the Discussions. As a scholar of the Discussions, Enno knew more questions than most people, but fewer answers.

She sat all the dark winter mornings wrestling with her soul. When she called Shahes, it was to tell her that she could not come. When she heard Shahes’s voice her misery and guilt ceased to exist, were gone, as a dream is gone on waking. She said, “I’ll be there in time for the fleecing.”

In the spring, while she worked with a crew rebuilding and repainting a wing of her old school at Asta, she let her hair grow. When it was long enough, she clubbed it back, as men often did. In the summer, having saved a little money working for the school, she bought men’s clothes. She put them on and looked at herself in the mirror in the shop. She saw Akal. Akal was a tall, thin man with a thin face, a bony nose, and a slow, brilliant smile. She liked him.

Akal got off the High Deka freighter at its last stop, Oro, went to the village center, and asked if anybody was looking for a fleecer.

“Danro.”—“The farmer was down from Danro, twice already.”—“Wants a finefleecer.”—“Coarsefleecer, wasn’t it?”—It took a while, but the elders and gossips agreed at last: a finefleecer was wanted at Danro.

“Where’s Danro?” asked the tall man.

“Up,” said an elder succinctly. “You ever handled ariu yearlings?”

“Yes,” said the tall man. “Up west or up east?”

They told him the road to Danro, and he went off up the zigzags, whistling a familiar praise song.

As Akal went on he stopped whistling, and stopped being a man, and wondered how she could pretend not to know anybody in the household, and how she could imagine they wouldn’t know her. How could she deceive Shest, the child whom she had taught the water rite and the praise-songs? A pang of fear and dismay and shame shook her when she saw Shest come running to the gate to let the stranger in.

Akal spoke little, keeping her voice down in her chest, not meeting the child’s eyes. She was sure he recognised her. But his stare was simply that of a child who saw strangers so seldom that for all he knew they all looked alike. He ran in to fetch the old people, Magel and Madu. They came out to offer Akal the customary hospitality, a religious duty, and Akal accepted, feeling mean and low at deceiving these people, who had always been kind to her in their rusty, stingy way, and at the same time feeling a wild impulse of laughter, of triumph. They did not see Enno in her, they did not know her. That meant that she was Akal, and Akal was free.

She was sitting in the kitchen drinking a thin and sour soup of summer greens when Shahes came in—grim, stocky, weather-beaten, wet. A summer thunderstorm had broken over the Farren soon after Akal reached the farm. “Who’s that?” said Shahes, doffing her wet coat.

“Come up from the village.” Old Magel lowered his voice to address Shahes confidentially: “He said they said you said you wanted a hand with the yearlings.”

“Where’ve you worked?” Shahes demanded, her back turned, as she ladled herself a bowl of soup.

Akal had no life history, at least not a recent one. She groped a long time. No one took any notice, prompt answers and quick talk being unusual and suspect practices in the mountains. At last she said the name of the farm she had run away from twenty years ago. “Bredde Hold, of Abba Village, on the Oriso.”