Ursula Le Guin - The Eye of the Heron

“Some day,” the child said, “I’ll go and explore the whole world.”

It was a new idea he had had, and he was full of it. He was going to make maps, and everything. But Nana wasn’t listening. She had the sad look. He knew what to do about that. He came up quietly next to her and nuzzled in her neck below the ear, saying, “Prrrrr … .”

“Is that my cat Mino? Hello, Mino! Why,” she said, “it isn’t Mino, it’s Levuchka! What a surprise!”

He sat on her lap. Her large, old, brown arms were around him. On each wrist she wore a bangle of fine red soapstone. Her son Alexander, Sasha, Lev’s father, had carved them for her. “Manacles,” he had said when he gave them to her on her birthday. “Victoria manacles, Mama.” And all the grown-ups had laughed, but Nana had had the sad look while she laughed.

“Nana. Was Mino Mino’s name?”

“Of course, silly.”

“But why?”

“Because I named him Mino.”

“But animals don’t have names.”

“No. Not here.”

“Why don’t they?”

“Because we don’t know their names,” the grandmother said, looking out over the small plowed fields.

“Nana.”

“Well?” said the soft voice in the soft bosom against which his ear was pressed.

“Why didn’t you bring Mino here?”

“We couldn’t bring anything on the space ship. Nothing of our own. There wasn’t room. But anyhow, Mino was dead long before we came. I was a child when he was a kitten, and I was still a child when he was old and died. Cats don’t live long, just a few years.”

“But people live a long time.”

“Oh, yes. A very long time.”

Lev sat still on her lap, pretending he was a cat, with gray fur like the down of the cottonwool, only warm. “Prrr,” he said softly, while the old woman sitting on the doorstep held him and gazed over his head at the land of her exile.

As he sat now on the hard broad root of a ringtree at the edge of the Meeting Pool, he thought of Nana, of the cat, of the silver water of Lake Serene, of the mountains above it which he longed to climb, of climbing the mountains out of the mist and rain into the ice and brightness of the summits; he thought of many things, too many things. He sat still, but his mind would not be still. He had come here for stillness, but his mind raced, raced from past to future and back again. Only for a moment did he find quiet. One of the herons walked silently out into the water from the far side of the pool. Lifting its narrow head it gazed at Lev. He gazed back, and for an instant was caught in that round transparent eye, as depthless as the sky clear of clouds; and the moment was round, transparent, silent, a moment at the center of all moments, the eternal present moment of the silent animal.

The heron turned away, bent its head, searching the dark water for fish.

Lev stood up, trying to move as quietly and deftly as the heron itself, and left the circle of the trees, passing between two of the massive red trunks. It was like going through a door into a different place entirely. The shallow valley was bright with sunlight, the sky windy and alive; sun gilt the red-painted timber roof of the Meeting House, which stood on the south-facing slope. A good many people were at the Meeting House already, standing on the steps and porch talking, and Lev quickened his pace. He wanted to run, to shout. This was no time for stillness. This was the first morning of the battle, the beginning of victory.

Andre hailed him: “Come on! Everybody’s waiting for Boss Lev!”

He laughed, and ran; he came up the six steps of the porch in two strides. “All right, all right, all right,” he said, “what kind of discipline is this, where are your boots, do you consider that a respectful position, Sam?” Sam, a brown, stocky man wearing only white trousers, was standing calmly on his head near the porch railing.

Elia took charge of the meeting. They did not go inside, but sat around on the porch to talk, for the sunlight was very pleasant. Elia was in a serious mood, as usual, but Lev’s arrival had cheered the others up, and the discussion was lively but brief. The sense of the meeting was clear almost at once. Elia wanted another delegation to go to the City to talk with the Bosses, but no one else did; they wanted a general meeting of the people of Shantih. They arranged that it would take place before sundown, and the younger people undertook to notify outlying villages and farms. As Lev was about to leave, Sam, who had serenely stood on his head throughout the discussion, came upright in a single graceful motion and said to Lev, smiling, “Arjuna, it will be a great battle.”

Lev, his mind busy with a hundred things, smiled at Sam and strode off.

The campaign which the people of Shantih were undertaking was a new thing to them, and yet a familiar one. All of them, in the Town school and the Meeting House, had learned its principles and tactics; they knew the lives of the hero-philosophers Gandhi and King, and the history of the People of the Peace, and the ideas that had inspired those lives, that history. In exile, the People of the Peace had continued to live by those ideas; and so far had done so with success. They had at least kept themselves independent, while taking over the whole farming enterprise of the community, and sharing the produce fully and freely with the City. In exchange, the City provided them tools and machinery made by the Government ironworks, fish caught by the City fleet, and various other products which the older-established colony could more easily provide. It had been an arrangement satisfactory to both.

But gradually the terms of the bargain had grown more unequal. Shantih raised the cottonwool plants and the silktrees, and took the raw stuff to the City mills to be spun and woven. But the mills were very slow; if the townsfolk needed clothes, they did better to spin and weave the cloth themselves. The fresh and dried fish they expected did not arrive. Bad catches, the Council explained. Tools were not replaced. The City had furnished the farmers tools; if the farmers were careless with them it was up to them to replace them, said the Council. So it went on, gradually enough that no crisis arose. The people of Shantih compromised, adjusted, made do. The children and grandchildren of the exiles, now grown men and women, had never seen the technique of conflict and resistance, which was the binding force of their community, in action.

But they had been taught it: the spirit, the reasons, and the rules. They had learned it, and practiced it in the minor conflicts that arose within the Town itself. They had watched their elders arrive, sometimes by passionate debate and sometimes by almost wordless consent, at solutions to problems and disagreements. They had learned how to listen for the sense of the meeting, not the voice of the loudest. They had learned that they must judge each time whether obedience was necessary and right, or misplaced and wrong. They had learned that the act of violence is the act of weakness, and that the spirit’s strength lies in holding fast to the truth.

At least they believed all that, and believed that they had learned it beyond any shadow of a doubt. Not one of them, under any provocation, would resort to violence. They were certain, and they were strong.

“It won’t be easy, this time,” Vera had said to them, before she and the others left for the City. “You know, it won’t be easy.”

They nodded, smiling, and cheered her. Of course it wouldn’t be easy. Easy victories aren’t worth winning.

As he went from farm to farm southwest of Shantih, Lev asked people to come to the big meeting, and answered their questions about Vera and the other hostages. Some of them were afraid of what the City men might do next, and Lev said, “Yes, they may do worse than take a few hostages. We can’t expect them simply to agree with us, when we don’t agree with them. We’re in for a fight.”