Ursula Le Guin - Unchosen Love

“Suord,” she said thoughtfully.

“He is strong. Generous. He gives me everything he is, his whole life. But I’m not, I’m not able to…”

“Why do you stay?” she asked, not accusingly, but asking for an answer.

“I love him,” Hadri said. “I don’t want to hurt him. If I run away I’ll be a coward. I want to be worth him.” They were four separate answers, each spoken separately, painfully.

“Unchosen love,” she said with a dry, rough tenderness. “Oh, it’s hard.”

She did not sound like a girl now, but like a woman who knew what love is. While they talked they had both looked out westward over the sea of mist, because it was easier to talk that way. She turned now to look at him again. He was aware of her quiet gaze in the darkness. A great star shone bright between the line of the roof and her head. When she moved again her round, dark head occulted the star, and then it shone tangled in her hair, as if she was wearing it. It was a lovely thing to see.

“I always thought I’d choose love,” he said at last, her words working in his mind. “Choose a sedoretu, settle down, some day, somewhere near my farm. I never imagined anything else. And then I came out here, to the edge of the world…And I don’t know what to do. I was chosen, I can’t choose…”

There was a little self-mockery in his voice.

“This is a strange place,” he said.

“It is,” she said. “Once you’ve seen the great tide…”

He had seen it once. Suord had taken him to a headland that stood above the southern floodplain. Though it was only a few miles southwest of Meruo, they had to go a long way round inland and then back out west again, and Hadri asked, “Why can’t we just go down the coast?”

“You’ll see why,” Suord said. They sat up on the rocky headland eating their picnic, Suord always with an eye on the brown-grey mud flats stretching off to the western horizon, endless and dreary, cut by a few worming, silted channels. “Here it comes,” he said, standing up; and Hadri stood up to see the gleam and hear the distant thunder, see the advancing bright line, the incredible rush of the tide across the immense plain for seven miles till it crashed in foam on the rocks below them and flooded on round the headland.

“A good deal faster than you could run,” Suord said, his dark face keen and intense. “That’s how it used to come in around our Rock. In the old days.”

“Are we cut off here?” Hadri had asked, and Suord had answered, “No, but I wish we were.”

Thinking of it now, Hadri imagined the broad sea lying under the fog all around Meruo, lapping on the rocks, under the walls. As it had been in the old days.

“I suppose the tides cut Meruo off from the mainland,” he said, and she said, “Twice every day.”

“Strange,” he murmured, and heard her slight intaken breath of laughter.

“Not at all,” she said. “Not if you were born here…Do you know that babies are born and the dying die on what they call the lull? The low point of the low tide of morning.”

Her voice and words made his heart clench within him, they were so soft and seemed so strange. “I come from inland, from the hills, I never saw the sea before,” he said. “I don’t know anything about the tides.”

“Well,” she said, “there’s their true love.” She was looking behind him. He turned and saw the waning moon just above the sea of mist, only its darkest, scarred crescent showing. He stared at it, unable to say anything more.

“Hadri,” she said, “don’t be sad. It’s only the moon. Come up here again if you are sad, though. I liked talking with you. There’s nobody here to talk to…Good night,” she whispered. She went away from him along the walk and vanished in the shadows.

He stayed a while watching the mist rise and the moon rise; the mist won the slow race, blotting out moon and all in a cold dimness at last. Shivering, but no longer tense and anguished, he found his way back to Suord’s room and slid into the wide, warm bed. As he stretched out to sleep, he thought, I don’t know her name.

Suord woke in an unhappy mood. He insisted that Hadri come out in the sailboat with him down the canal, to check the locks on the side-canals, he said; but what he wanted was to get Hadri alone, in a boat, where Hadri was not only useless but slightly uneasy and had no escape at all. They drifted in the mild sunshine on the glassy side-canal. “You want to leave, don’t you,” Suord said, speaking as if the sentence was a knife that cut his tongue as he spoke it.

“No,” Hadri said, not knowing if it was true, but unable to say any other word.

“You don’t want to get married here.”

“I don’t know, Suord.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I don’t think any of the Evening women want a marriage with me,” he said, and trying to speak true, “I know they don’t. They want you to find somebody from around here. I’m a foreigner.”

“They don’t know you,” Suord said with a sudden, pleading gentleness. “People here, they take a long time to get to know people. We’ve lived too long on our Rock. Seawater in our veins instead of blood. But they’ll see—they’ll come to know you if you—If you’ll stay—” He looked out over the side of the boat and after a while said almost inaudibly, “If you leave, can I come with you?”

“I’m not leaving,” Hadri said. He went and stroked Suord’s hair and face and kissed him. He knew that Suord could not follow him, couldn’t live in Oket, inland; it wouldn’t work, it wouldn’t do. But that meant he must stay here with Suord. There was a numb coldness in him, under his heart.

“Sasni and Duun are germanes,” Suord said presently, sounding like himself again, controlled, intense. “They’ve been lovers ever since they were thirteen. Sasni would marry me if I asked her, if she can have Duun in the Day marriage. We can make a sedoretu with them, Hadri.”

The numbness kept Hadri from reacting to this for some time; he did not know what he was feeling, what he thought. What he finally said was, “Who is Duun?” There was a vague hope in him that it was the woman he had talked with on the roof, last night—in a different world, it seemed, a realm of fog and darkness and truth.

“You know Duun.”

“Did she just come back from somewhere else?”

“No,” Suord said, too intent to be puzzled by Hadri’s stupidity. “Sasni’s germane, Lasudu’s daughter of the Fourth Sedoretu. She’s short, very thin, doesn’t talk much.”

“I don’t know her,” Hadri said in despair, “I can’t tell them apart, they don’t talk to me,” and he bit his lip and stalked over to the other end of the boat and stood with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched.

Suord’s mood had quite changed; he splashed about happily in the water and mud when they got to the lock, making sure the mechanisms were in order, then sailed them back to the great canal with a fine following wind. Shouting, “Time you got your sea legs!” to Hadri, he took the boat west down the canal and out onto the open sea. The misty sunlight, the breeze full of salt spray, the fear of the depths, the exertion of working the boat under Suord’s capable directions, the triumph of steering it back into the canal at sunset, when the light lay red-gold on the water and vast flocks of stilts and marshbirds rose crying and circling around them—it made a great day, after all, for Hadri.

But the glory dropped away as soon as he came under the roofs of Meruo again, into the dark corridors and the low, wide, dark rooms that all looked west. They took meals with the Fourth and Fifth Sedoretu. In Hadri’s farmhold there would have been a good deal of teasing when they came in just in time for dinner, having been out all day without notice and done none of the work of it; here nobody ever teased or joked. If there was resentment it stayed hidden. Maybe there was no resentment, maybe they all knew each other so well and were so much of a piece that they trusted one other the way you trust your own hands, without question. Even the children joked and quarrelled less than Hadri was used to. Conversation at the long table was always quiet, many not speaking a word.