Ursula Le Guin: Unchosen Love

“Suord and Sasni,” again the faint pause on the name, “don’t love each other, then?”

“No,” he said, a little hesitant, remembering that challenge between them, like a spark struck.

“And you and Duun?”

“I don’t even know her.”

“Oh, no, that is dishonest,” An’nad said. “One should choose love, but not that way…Whose plan is it? All three of them?”

“I suppose so. Suord and Sasni have talked about it. The girl, Duun, she never says anything.”

“Talk to her,” said the soft voice. “Talk to her, Hadri.” She was looking at him; they stood quite close together, close enough that he felt the warmth of her arm on his arm though they did not touch.

“I’d rather talk to you,” he said, turning to face her. She moved back, seeming to grow insubstantial even in that slight movement, the fog was so dense and dark. She put out her hand, but again did not quite touch him. He knew she was smiling.

“Then stay and talk with me,” she said, leaning again on the rail. “Tell me…oh, tell me anything. What do you do, you and Suord, when you’re not making love?”

“We went out sailing,” he said, and found himself telling her what it had been like for him out on the open sea for the first time, his terror and delight. “Can you swim?” she asked, and he laughed and said, “In the lake at home, it’s not the same,” and she laughed and said, “No, I imagine not.” They talked a long time, and he asked her what she did—“in daylight. I haven’t seen you yet, down there.”

“No,” she said. “What do I do? Oh, I worry about Meruo, I suppose. I worry about my children…I don’t want to think about that now. How did you come to meet Suord?”

Before they were done talking the mist had begun to lighten very faintly with moonrise. It had grown piercingly cold. Hadri was shivering. “Go on,” she said. “I’m used to it. Go on to bed.”

“There’s frost,” he said, “look,” touching the silvered wooden rail. “You should go down too.”

“I will. Good night, Hadri.” As he turned she said, or he thought she said, “I’ll wait for the tide.”

“Good night, An’nad.” He spoke her name huskily, tenderly. If only the others were like her…

He stretched himself out close to Suord’s inert, delicious warmth, and slept.

The next day Suord had to work in the records office, where Hadri was utterly useless and in the way. Hadri took his chance, and by asking several sullen, snappish women, found where Duun was: in the fish-drying plant. He went down to the docks and found her, by luck, if it was luck, eating her lunch alone in the misty sunshine at the edge of the boat basin.

“I want to talk with you,” he said.

“What for?” she said. She would not look at him.

“Is it honest to marry a person you don’t even like in order to marry a person you love?”

“No,” she said fiercely. She kept looking down. She tried to fold up the bag she had carried her lunch in, but her hands shook too much.

“Why are you willing to do it, then?”

“Why are you willing to do it?”

“I’m not,” he said. “It’s Suord. And Sasni.”

She nodded.

“Not you?”

She shook her head violently. Her thin, dark face was a very young face, he realised.

“But you love Sasni,” he said a little uncertainly.

“Yes! I love Sasni! I always did, I always will! That doesn’t mean I, I, I have to do everything she says, everything she wants, that I have to, that I have to—” She was looking at him now, right at him, her face burning like a coal, her voice quivering and breaking. “I don’t belong to Sasni!”

“Well,” he said, “I don’t belong to Suord, either.”

“I don’t know anything about men,” Duun said, still glaring at him. “Or any other women. Or anything. I never was with anybody but Sasni, all my life! She thinks she owns me.”

“She and Suord are a lot alike,” Hadri said cautiously.

There was a silence. Duun, though tears had spouted out of her eyes in the most childlike fashion, did not deign to wipe them away. She sat straight-backed, cloaked in the dignity of the women of Meruo, and managed to get her lunch-bag folded.

“I don’t know very much about women,” Hadri said. His was perhaps a simpler dignity. “Or men. I know I love Suord. But I…I need freedom.”

“Freedom!” she said, and he thought at first she was mocking him, but quite the opposite—she burst right into tears, and put her head down on her knees, sobbing aloud. “I do too,” she cried, “I do too.”

Hadri put out a timid hand and stroked her shoulder. “I didn’t mean to make you cry,” he said. “Don’t cry, Duun. Look. If we, if we feel the same way, we can work something out. We don’t have to get married. We can be friends.”

She nodded, though she went on sobbing for a while. At last she raised her swollen face and looked at him with wet-lidded, luminous eyes. “I would like to have a friend,” she said. “I never had one.”

“I only have one other one here,” he said, thinking how right she had been in telling him to talk to Duun. “An’nad.”

She stared at him. “Who?”

“An’nad. The Morning woman of the First Sedoretu.”

“What do you mean?” She was not scornful, merely very surprised. “That’s Teheo.”

“Then who is An’nad?”

“She was the Morning woman of the First Sedoretu four hundred years ago,” the girl said, her eyes still on Hadri’s, clear and puzzled.

“Tell me,” he said.

“She was drowned—here, at the foot of the Rock. They were all down on the sands, her sedoretu, with the children. That was when the tides had begun not to come in as far as Meruo. They were all out on the sands, planning the canal, and she was up in the house. She saw there was a storm in the west, and the wind might bring one of the great tides. She ran down to warn them. And the tide did come in, all the way round the Rock, the way it used to. They all kept ahead of it, except An’nad. She was drowned…”

With all he had to wonder about then, about An’nad, and about Duun, he did not wonder why Duun answered his question and asked him none.

It was not until much later, half a year later, that he said, “Do you remember when I said I’d met An’nad—that first time we talked—by the boat basin?”

“I remember,” she said.

They were in Hadri’s room, a beautiful, high room with windows looking east, traditionally occupied by a member of the Eighth Sedoretu. Summer morning sunlight warmed their bed, and a soft, earth-scented land-wind blew in the windows.

“Didn’t it seem strange?” he asked. His head was pillowed on her shoulder. When she spoke he felt her warm breath in his hair.

“Everything was so strange then…I don’t know. And anyhow, if you’ve heard the tide…”

“The tide?”

“Winter nights. Up high in the house, in the attics. You can hear the tide come in, and crash around the Rock, and run on inland to the hills. At the true high tide. But the sea is miles away…”

Suord knocked, waited for their invitation, and came in, already dressed. “Are you still in bed? Are we going into town or not?” he demanded, splendid in his white summer coat, imperious. “Sasni’s already down in the courtyard.”

“Yes, yes, we’re just getting up,” they said, secretly entwining further.

“Now!” he said, and went out.

Hadri sat up, but Duun pulled him back down. “You saw her? You talked with her?”

“Twice. I never went back after you told me who she was. I was afraid…Not of her. Only afraid she wouldn’t be there.”

“What did she do?” Duun asked softly.