Ursula Le Guin - The Beginning Place

I wasn’t afraid, she said to herself, but she did not know if that was true or false: his fear had so dominated and absorbed her.

He will never forgive me for seeing him like that, she thought, and knew that it was true, and could not bear the knowledge.

She left the stonecutter’s yard, walking slowly past Geba’s cottage and Venno’s shop.

I could go, I could go on to the City, if it wasn’t for him, she said to herself, vengefully, ragefully; but that she knew was false. Neither with him nor alone would she come to the City. It was all false, all lies and boasts and stupid daydreams. There was no way.

She stayed on only that one day and night more. She did not much want to stay at all, now. It was all spoilt, here. And she had left everything unsettled on the other side. She would get a place to live and so on and then she would come back here; maybe; if she felt like it. She was nobody’s servant. She would do what she liked.

Her heart pounded as she set out on the south road, but it was fear of fear, nothing more; she walked on steadily.

She did not look back. You don’t look back, over your shoulder. She had learned that long ago, a child afraid of the dark, in the weird night aisles of the tree nursery, running. If you look back it will get you. In the city streets downtown, footsteps behind you and a long way to the next street crossing. You go on and you don’t look back. The way down was steep and the woods very thick; she had never been so aware of the crowding of the trunks and mesh of branches. She tried to walk silently and then tried not to walk silently, for that was fear. At last she heard ahead the murmur of water, Third River, the stream at the foot of the mountain. It was beautiful, that sound of water running, the only music of the ain country. For you hardly saw the birds and they never sang, and the people of Tembreabrezi never sang, not even the children. The wind whispered or made its lonesome roaring in the high branches, but only the water sang aloud, for it rose from the places deeper than fear. She came to the stream, wide and shallow at the ford, gleaming and glancing under the old, moss-grown, leaning alders, quarreling cheerfully with every boulder in its course. She crossed, and then turned and knelt to drink. Now water ran between her and the mountain, and her heart was easier.

She was moving in the familiar half-trance of steady walking, the body alert and the mind occupied with thoughts so long and slow they cannot be put in words, for there are no words long enough, nor sentences, when her body carefully but without warning brought her to a halt, and only when she was standing stockstill, listening, did her mind ask, What was that?

The noise had been ahead of her. What she feared was behind her—but there! the white bulk lunging by the turn, ahead, there!—She held a branch she had picked up on the mountain for a walking stick—so she had called it to herself—and swung it up before her in a rage of terror and struck out. The blow was straight in his face but his arm was up as he broke through the thickets, and he took the blow on it. He stood, his head fallen back a little, his mouth open, his breath loud. His eyes were the eyes of the bull with a mans body in the narrow room. Her hand clutching the broken stick was numb. She took one step backwards on the path, a second, her eyes on him.

His gaping mouth shut, opened. “I can’t,” he said, thick and gasping, and shook his head. “Can’t get out.”

He sat down then, letting himself down heavily and shakily onto the weed-thick verge of the trail. He sat with his head bowed and arms lying on his knees, the heavy, simple posture of exhaustion. Her legs now were shaky with the aftermath of shock. She sat down crosslegged at a little distance from him, put down the broken stick, and rubbed her cramped right hand.

“You got lost?”

He nodded. His chest rose and fell. “Past the gate.”

“You left town two days ago.”

“The path kept going on.”

“You stayed on it? Past the—where the gate should have been?”

“I thought it had to come out somewhere.”

“You’re crazy,” she murmured, contemptuous, admiring the obstinate courage.

“It was stupid,” he said in his hoarse, thick voice. “I finally turned around. But I thought I’d lost the path.” He was mechanically rubbing the arm that had taken her blow. It was the white of his shirt she had seen in the thickets. Not very white close up, streaked with dirt and sweat.

She opened her belt pouch and got out the bread Sofir had given her—she had eaten all the cheese but only half the hard, dark bread at Third River—and handed it across the path.

He looked up; took it slowly; and ate it as she had never seen anyone eat bread: holding it in both hands and bringing his head forward to it, as if he were drinking or praying. It was very soon gone. He raised his head then and thanked her.

“Come on,” she said, and he stood up at once. She felt the inward lurch and turn of pity, the body’s blind compassion for the wound, seeing his heavy obedience and the white, weary face. “Let’s go,” she said as she would have said it to a child, and led off down the path.

After Middle River she asked him if he wanted to rest; he was late, he said; they went on.

They came down the last slope, across that beloved water, into the beginning place. She did not pause, for his fear drove her. She led on straight across the glade, between the high pine and the laurels, across the threshold.

At the top of the path in the heat and light of broad day and the sound of a jet dying off in the east and the reek of burning rubber from somewhere over the hill she stopped and let him catch up to her. “OK.?” she asked with a little triumph.

“O.K.,” he said. He was grey and wrinkled like a man of fifty, a bum with a two-day beard, a drunk or junkie, stooped and shaky.

“Oh, man,” she said with awe, “you look terrible.”

“Need something to eat,” he said.

Since they had walked so far together they walked on farther together.

“You come every week?” she asked.

“Every morning.”

That soaked into her for a while.

“You can always get in? The gate’s always there?”

He nodded.

After a while she said, “I can always get out.”

They came out of Pincus’s woods. The light over the waste pastures was so bright it stopped them. A bank of smog lay translucent brown over the city westward. The sun burned through the haze with bleared, blinding radiance, all the air blurred with smog and burning with light. Each grass stem cast its shadow. The piercing rattle of a cicada swelled and died away and a bird called once, sharply, in the woods behind them. Their eyes stung, there was already sweat on their faces.

“Look,” he said. “About your sign. I’m sorry. But I can’t keep out.”

“All right. I know.”

She hunched her shoulders, staring out over the fields to the distant freeway. The running metal thread of cars flicked and stabbed the sunglare back. “It doesn’t belong to me. Mostly I cant even get there any more.”

They set off across the fields.

“I get here about five-thirty in the morning, usually,” he said.

She kept silent.

“But I can’t get to the town on the mountain and back before work…” He was thinking aloud, slowly. “Next weekend. Labor Day. I get Sunday and Monday off. I can come then. They were—It seemed like they were asking me to come back.”

“They were.”

“O.K. So I could come then and stay a long time.” He mumbled off into silence again, then said abruptly, “So if you want to.”

After fifteen or twenty paces he said, “You helped me get out.”

Irene cleared her throat and said, “O.K. When?”