Ursula Le Guin - The Eye of the Heron

“Martin thinks the compass isn’t reading true,” Andre said. With a dubious look, he held the instrument out to Luz, as if she could judge its inaccuracy at a glance. What she saw was its delicacy, the box of polished wood, the gold ring, the glass, the frail burnished needle hovering, trembling between the finely incised points: what a beautiful thing, miraculous, improbable, she thought. But Martin was looking at it with disapproval. “I’m sure it’s pulling east,” he said. “Must be iron-ore masses in those hills, deflecting it.” He nodded toward the east. For a day and a half they had been in a queer scrubby country that bore no ringtrees or cottonwools but only a sparse, tangled scrub which grew no more than a couple of meters high; it was not forest, but not open country; there was seldom any long view. But they knew that to the east, to their left, the line of high hills they had first seen six days ago went on. Whenever they came up on a rise in the scrublands, they saw the dark red, rocky skyline of the heights.

“Well,” Luz said, hearing her own voice for the first time in hours, “does it matter much?”

Andre chewed his lower lip. His face looked bone weary, the eyes narrowed and lifeless. “Not for going on,” he said. “So long as we have the sun or some stars at night. But for making the map … .”

“What if we turn east again. Get over those hills. They aren’t getting any lower,” Martin said. A younger man than Andre, he looked far less tired. He was one of the mainstays of the group. Luz felt at ease with Martin; he looked like a City man, stocky, dark, well muscled, rather curt and somber; even his name was a common one in the City. But for all Martin’s comfortable strength, it was to Andre that she turned with her question.

“Can’t we mark the trail yet?”

Unwilling to make any trail that could be followed, they had tried to map their course. A map could be brought back to Shantih by a few messengers, after a couple of years, to guide a second group to the new colony. That was the only reason for making it that they ever spoke of. Andre, the map maker of the northern journey, was in charge of it, and he felt his responsibility as a heavy one, for the unspoken purpose of the map was always in their minds. It was their one link to Shantih, to humankind, to their own past lives; their one assurance that they were not simply wandering lost in the wilderness, aimless, without goal and, since they could mark no trail, without hope of return.

At times Luz clung to the idea of the map, at times she was impatient with it. Martin was keen on it, but his keenest care was that they keep their trail covered; he winced, Italia remarked, when anybody stepped on a stick and broke it. Certainly they had left, in the ten days of their journey, as little mark of their going as sixty-seven people could leave.

Martin was shaking his head at Luz’s question. “Look,” he said, “our choice of route has been so obvious, the easiest way, right from the start.”

Andre smiled. It was a dry crack of a smile, like a crack in tree bark, and narrowed his eyes to two lesser cracks. That was why Luz liked to be with Andre, drew strength from him, that humorous patient smile, like a tree smiling.

“Consider the options, Martin!” he said, and she saw what he was imagining: a party of City men, Macmilan’s bullies, guns and whips and boots and all, standing on the bluffs of the Songe, looking north, east, south, over the gray rusty-ringed rising falling rain-darkened unending trackless voiceless enormous wilderness, and trying to decide which, of a hundred possible directions, the fugitives had chosen.

“All right,” she said, “let’s cross the hills, then.”

“Climbing won’t be much harder than slogging through this scrub,” Andre said.

Martin nodded. “Turn east again here, then?”

“Here as well as anywhere,” said Andre, and got out his grubby, dog-eared sketch map to make a note.

“Now?” Luz asked. “Or camp?”

They usually did not camp till near sundown, but they had come a long way today. She looked around the shoulder-high, thorny, bronze-colored bushes, which grew spaced a meter or two apart so that millions of pointless winding trails led around and between and amongst them. Only a few of the group were visible; most of them had sat right down to rest when the halt was called. Overhead was a lead-gray sky, featureless, one even cloud. No rain had fallen for two nights, but the weather was getting colder every hour.

“Well, a few more kilos,” Andre said, “and we’d be at the foot of the hills; might find some shelter there. And water.” He looked at her judgingly, and waited for her judgment. He, Martin, Italia, the other pathfinders, often used her and a couple of the older women as representatives of the weak, the ones who could not keep the pace the strongest would have kept. She did not mind. She walked each day right to the limit of her endurance, or beyond it. The first three days of the journey, when they had been hurrying, afraid of pursuit, had exhausted her, and though she was growing tougher she never could make up that initial loss. She accepted this, and saved all her resentment for her backpack, that monstrous and irascible, knee-bending, neck-destroying load. If only they didn’t have to carry everything with them! But they could not push carts without making, or leaving, paths; and sixty-seven people could not live off the wilderness while traveling, or settle in it without tools, even if it were not late autumn getting on to winter … .

“A few more kilos,” she said. She was always surprised when she said things like that. “A few more kilos,” as if it were nothing at all, when for the last six hours she had longed, craved to sit down, just to sit down, just to sit down for a minute, a month, a year! But now they had spoken of turning east again she found she also craved to get out of this dreary maze of thorn-scrub, into the hills, where maybe you could see your way ahead.

“Few minutes’ rest,” she added, and sat down, slipping off her pack straps and rubbing her aching shoulders. Andre promptly sat down too. Martin went off to talk with some of the others and discuss the change of course. None of them was visible, they had all vanished in the sea of thorn-scrub, taking their few minutes’ rest already, flat out on the sandy, grayish soil littered with thorns. She could not see even Andre, only a corner of his pack. A northwest wind, faint but cold, rustled the little dry branches of the bushes. There was no other sound.

Sixty-seven people: no sight of them, no sound of them. Vanished. Lost. A drop of water in the river, a word blown off on the wind. Some small creatures moved a little while in the wilderness, not going very far, and then ceased to move, and it made no difference to the wilderness, or to anything, no more difference than the dropping of one thorn among a million thorns or the shifting of a grain of sand.

The fear she had come to know these ten days of their journeying came up like a small gray fog in the fields of her mind, a chill creep of blindness. It was hers, hers by inheritance and training; it was to keep out her fear, their fear, that the roofs and walls of the City had been raised; it was fear that had drawn the streets so straight, and made the doors so narrow. She had scarcely known it, living behind those doors. She had felt quite safe. Even in Shantih she had forgotten it, stranger as she was, for the walls there were not visible but were very strong: companionship, cooperation, love; the close human circle. But she had walked away from that, by choice, and walked out into the wilderness, and come face to face at last with the fear that all her life had been built upon.

She could not simply face it, but had to fight it when it first began to come upon her, or it would blot out everything, and she would lose the power of choice entirely. She had to fight blindly, for no reason stood against that fear. It was a great deal older and stronger than ideas.