Ursula Le Guin - Unchosen Love

As he served himself, Hadri looked around among them for the woman of last night. Had it in fact been Esbuai? He thought not; the height was like, but Esbuai was very thin, and had a particularly arrogant carriage to her head. The woman was not here. Maybe she was First Sedoretu. Which of these women was Duun?

That one, the little one, with Sasni; he recalled her now. She was always with Sasni. He had never spoken to her, because Sasni of them all had snubbed him most hatefully, and Duun was her shadow.

“Come on,” said Suord, and went round the table to sit down beside Sasni, gesturing Hadri to sit beside Duun. He did so. I’m Suord’s shadow, he thought.

“Hadri says he’s never talked to you,” Suord said to Duun. The girl hunched up a bit and muttered something meaningless. Hadri saw Sasni’s face flash with anger, and yet there was a hint of a challenging smile in it, as she looked straight at Suord. They were very much alike. They were well matched.

Suord and Sasni talked—about the fishing, about the locks—while Hadri ate his dinner. He was ravenous after the day on the water. Duun, having finished her meal, sat and said nothing. These people had a capacity for remaining perfectly motionless and silent, like predatory animals, or fishing birds. The dinner was fish, of course; it was always fish. Meruo had been wealthy once and still had the manners of wealth, but few of the means. Dredging out the great canal took more of their income every year, as the sea relentlessly pulled back from the delta. Their fishing fleet was large, but the boats were old, often rebuilt. Hadri had asked why they did not build new ones, for a big shipyard loomed above the drydocks; Suord explained that the cost of the wood alone was prohibitive. Having only the one crop, fish and shellfish, they had to pay for all other food, for clothing, for wood, even for water. The wells for miles around Meruo were salt. An aqueduct led to the seahold from the village in the hills.

They drank their expensive water from silver cups, however, and ate their eternal fish from bowls of ancient, translucent blue Edia ware, which Hadri was always afraid of breaking when he washed them.

Sasni and Suord went on talking, and Hadri felt stupid and sullen, sitting there saying nothing to the girl who said nothing.

“I was out on the sea for the first time today,” he said, feeling the blood flush his face.

She made some kind of noise, mhm, and gazed at her empty bowl.

“Can I get you some soup?” Hadri asked. They ended the meal with broth, here, fish broth of course.

“No,” she said, with a scowl.

“In my farmhold,” he said, “people often bring dishes to each other; it’s a minor kind of courtesy; I am sorry if you find it offensive.” He stood up and strode off to the sideboard, where with shaking hands he served himself a bowl of soup. When he got back Suord was looking at him with a speculative eye and a faint smile, which he resented. What did they take him for? Did they think he had no standards, no people, no place of his own? Let them marry each other, he would have no part of it. He gulped his soup, got up without waiting for Suord, and went to the kitchen, where he spent an hour in the washing-up crew to make up for missing his time in the cooking crew. Maybe they had no standards about things, but he did.

Suord was waiting for him in their room—Suord’s room—Hadri had no room of his own here. That in itself was insulting, unnatural. In a decent hold, a guest was always given a room.

Whatever Suord said—he could not remember later what it was—was a spark to blasting-powder. “I will not be treated this way!” he cried passionately, and Suord firing up at once demanded what he meant, and they had at it, an explosion of rage and frustration and accusation that left them staring grey-faced at each other, appalled. “Hadri,” Suord said, the name a sob; he was shivering, his whole body shaking. They came together, clinging to each other. Suord’s small, rough, strong hands held Hadri close. The taste of Suord’s skin was salt as the sea. Hadri sank, sank and was drowned.

But in the morning everything was as it had been. He did not dare ask for a room to himself, knowing it would hurt Suord. If they do make this sedoretu, then at least I’ll have a room, said a small, unworthy voice in his head. But it was wrong, wrong…

He looked for the woman he had met on the roof, and saw half a dozen who might have been her and none he was certain was her. Would she not look at him, speak to him? Not in daylight, not in front of the others? Well, so much for her, then.

It occurred to him only now that he did not know whether she was a woman of the Morning or the Evening. But what did it matter?

That night the fog came in. Waking suddenly, deep in the night, he saw out the window only a formless grey, glowing very dimly with diffused light from a window somewhere in another wing of the house. Suord slept, as he always did, flat out, lying like a bit of jetsam flung on the beach of the night, utterly absent and abandoned. Hadri watched him with an aching tenderness for a while. Then he got up, pulled on clothes, and found the corridor to the stairs that led up to the roof.

The mist hid even the roof-peaks. Nothing at all was visible over the railing. He had to feel his way along, touching the railing. The wooden walkway was damp and cold to the soles of his feet. Yet a kind of happiness had started in him as he went up the attic stairs, and it grew as he breathed the foggy air, and as he turned the corner to the west side of the house. He stood still a while and then spoke, almost in a whisper. “Are you there?” he said.

There was a pause, as there had been the first time he spoke to her, and then she answered, the laugh just hidden in her voice, “Yes, I’m here. Are you there?”

The next moment they could see each other, though only as shapes bulking in the mist.

“I’m here,” he said. His happiness was absurd. He took a step closer to her, so that he could make out her dark hair, the darkness of her eyes in the lighter oval of her face. “I wanted to talk to you again,” he said.

“I wanted to talk to you again,” she said.

“I couldn’t find you. I hoped you’d speak to me.”

“Not down there,” she said, her voice turning light and cold.

“Are you in the First Sedoretu?”

“Yes,” she said. “The Morning wife of the First Sedoretu of Meruo. My name is An’nad. I wanted to know if you’re still unhappy.”

“Yes,” he said, “no—” He tried to see her face more clearly, but there was little light. “Why is it that you talk to me, and I can talk to you, and not to anybody else in this household?” he said. “Why are you the only kind one?”

“Is—Suord unkind?” she asked, with a little hesitation on the name.

“He never means to be. He never is. Only he—he drags me, he pushes me, he…He’s stronger than I am.”

“Maybe not,” said An’nad, “maybe only more used to getting his way.”

“Or more in love,” Hadri said, low-voiced, with shame.

“You’re not in love with him?”

“Oh yes!”

She laughed.

“I never knew anyone like him—he’s more than—his feelings are so deep, he’s—I’m out of my depth,” Hadri stammered. “But I love him—immensely—”

“So what’s wrong?”

“He wants to marry,” Hadri said, and then stopped. He was talking about her household, probably her blood kin; as a wife of the First Sedoretu she was part of all the network of relationships of Meruo. What was he blundering into?

“Who does he want to marry?” she asked. “Don’t worry. I won’t interfere. Is the trouble that you don’t want to marry him?”

“No, no,” Hadri said. “It’s only—I never meant to stay here, I thought I’d go home…Marrying Suord seems—more than I, than I deserve—But it would be amazing, it would be wonderful! But…the marriage itself, the sedoretu, it’s not right. He says that Sasni will marry him, and Duun will marry me, so that she and Duun can be married.”