Ursula Le Guin - Mountain Ways

Akal knew all the customs and sanctions, and she insisted that they be followed to the letter. Her wedding night with Shahes was tender and a little tense. Her wedding night with Otorra was also tender; they sat in his room and talked softly, shy with each other but each very grateful; then Otorra slept in the deep windowseat, insisting that Akal have the bed.

Within a few weeks Akal knew that Shahes was more intent on having her way, on having Akal as her partner, than on maintaining any kind of sexual balance or even a pretense of it. As far as Shahes was concerned, Otorra and Temly could look after each other and that was that. Akal had of course known many sedoretu where one or two of the partnerships dominated the others completely, through passion or the power of an ego. To balance all four relationships perfectly was an ideal seldom realised. But this sedoretu, already built on a deception, a disguise, was more fragile than most. Shahes wanted what she wanted and consequences be damned. Akal had followed her far up the mountain, but would not follow her over a precipice.

It was a clear autumn night, the window full of stars, like that night last year when Shahes had said, “Marry me.”

“You have to give Temly tomorrow night,” Akal repeated.

“She’s got Otorra,” Shahes repeated.

“She wants you. Why do you think she married you?”

“She’s got what she wants. I hope she gets pregnant soon,” Shahes said, stretching luxuriously, and running her hand over Akal’s breasts and belly. Akal stopped her hand and held it.

“It isn’t fair, Shahes. It isn’t right.”

“A fine one you are to talk!”

“But Otorra doesn’t want me, you know that. And Temly does want you. And we owe it to her.”

“Owe her what?”

“Love and honor.”

“She’s got what she wanted,” Shahes said, and freed her hand from Akal’s grasp with a harsh twist. “Don’t preach at me.”

“I’m going back to my room,” Akal said, slipping lithely from the bed and stalking naked through the starry dark. “Good night.”

She was with Temly in the old dye room, unused for years until Temly, an expert dyer, came to the farm. Weavers down in the Centers would pay well for fleece dyed the true Deka red. Her skill had been Temly’s dowry. Akal was her assistant and apprentice now.

“Eighteen minutes. Timer set?”

“Set.”

Temly nodded, checked the vents on the great dye-boiler, checked the read-out again, and went outside to catch the morning sun. Akal joined her on the stone bench by the stone doorway. The smell of the vegetable dye, pungent and acid-sweet, clung to them, and their clothes and hands and arms were raddled pink and crimson.

Akal had become attached to Temly very soon, finding her reliably good-tempered and unexpectedly thoughtful—both qualities that had been in rather short supply at Danro. Without knowing it, Akal had formed her expectation of the mountain people on Shahes—powerful, wilful, undeviating, rough. Temly was strong and quite self-contained, but open to impressions as Shahes was not. Relationships within her moiety meant little to Shahes; she called Otorra brother because it was customary, but did not see a brother in him. Temly called Akal brother and meant it, and Akal, who had had no family for so long, welcomed the relationship, returning Temly’s warmth. They talked easily together, though Akal had constantly to guard herself from becoming too easy and letting her woman-self speak out. Mostly it was no trouble at all being Akal and she gave little thought to it, but sometimes with Temly it was very hard to keep up the pretense, to prevent herself from saying what a woman would say to her sister. In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting.

They talked about the next step in the dyeing process, and then Temly said, looking off over the low stone wall of the yard to the huge purple slant of the Farren, “You know Enno, don’t you?”

The question seemed innocent and Akal almost answered automatically with some kind of deceit—“The scholar that was here…?”

But there was no reason why Akal the fleecer should know Enno the scholar. And Temly had not asked, do you remember Enno, or did you know Enno, but, “You know Enno, don’t you?” She knew the answer.

“Yes.”

Temly nodded, smiling a little. She said nothing more.

Akal was amazed by her subtlety, her restraint. There was no difficulty in honoring so honorable a woman.

“I lived alone for a long time,” Akal said. “Even on the farm where I grew up I was mostly alone. I never had a sister. I’m glad to have one at last.”

“So am I,” said Temly.

Their eyes met briefly, a flicker of recognition, a glance planting trust deep and silent as a tree-root.

“She knows who I am, Shahes.”

Shahes said nothing, trudging up the steep slope.

“Now I wonder if she knew from the start. From the first water-sharing…”

“Ask her if you like,” Shahes said, indifferent.

“I can’t. The deceiver has no right to ask for the truth.”

“Humbug!” Shahes said, turning on her, halting her in mid-stride. They were up on the Farren looking for an old beast that Asbi had reported missing from the herd. The keen autumn wind had blown Shahes’s cheeks red, and as she stood staring up at Akal she squinted her watering eyes so that they glinted like knifeblades. “Quit preaching! Is that who you are? ‘The deceiver’? I thought you were my wife!”

“I am, and Otorra’s too, and you’re Temly’s—you can’t leave them out, Shahes!”

“Are they complaining?”

“Do you want them to complain?” Akal shouted, losing her temper. “Is that the kind of marriage you want?—Look, there she is,” she added in a suddenly quiet voice, pointing up the great rocky mountainside. Farsighted, led by a bird’s circling, she had caught the movement of the yama’s head near an outcrop of boulders. The quarrel was postponed. They both set off at a cautious trot towards the boulders.

The old yama had broken a leg in a slip from the rocks. She lay neatly collected, though the broken foreleg would not double under her white breast but stuck out forward, and her whole body had a lurch to that side. Her disdainful head was erect on the long neck, and she gazed at the women, watching her death approach, with clear, unfathomable, uninterested eyes.

“Is she in pain?” Akal asked, daunted by that great serenity.

“Of course,” Shahes said, sitting down several paces away from the yama to sharpen her knife on its emery-stone. “Wouldn’t you be?”

She took a long time getting the knife as sharp as she could get it, patiently retesting and rewhetting the blade. At last she tested it again and then sat completely still. She stood up quietly, walked over to the yama, pressed its head up against her breast and cut its throat in one long fast slash. Blood leaped out in a brilliant arc. Shahes slowly lowered the head with its gazing eyes down to the ground.

Akal found that she was speaking the words of the ceremony for the dead, Now all that was owed is repaid and all that was owned, returned. Now all that was lost is found and all that was bound, free. Shahes stood silent, listening till the end.

Then came the work of skinning. They would leave the carcass to be cleaned by the scavengers of the mountain; it was a carrion-bird circling over the yama that had first caught Akal’s eye, and there were now three of them riding the wind. Skinning was fussy, dirty work, in the stink of meat and blood. Akal was inexpert, clumsy, cutting the hide more than once. In penance she insisted on carrying the pelt, rolled as best they could and strapped with their belts. She felt like a grave robber, carrying away the white-and-dun fleece, leaving the thin, broken corpse sprawled among the rocks in the indignity of its nakedness. Yet in her mind as she lugged the heavy fleece along was Shahes standing up and taking the yama’s beautiful head against her breast and slashing its throat, all one long movement, in which the woman and the animal were utterly one.