Ursula Guin - Planet Of Exile

"Yes, she is; and because of me, no shame rests on our Kin! I and my brothers knocked the teeth out of the dirty face of that one she lay with, and I had him down to geld him as he-animals should be gelded, but then you stopped us, Umaksuman. You stopped us with your fool talk—"

"I stopped you so that we wouldn't have the farborns to fight along with the Gaal, you fool! She's of age to sleep with a man if she chooses, and this is no—"

"He was no man, kinsman, and I am no fool."

"You are a fool, Ukwet, for you jumped at this as a chance to make quarrel with the farborns, and so lost us our one chance to turn aside the Gaal!"

"I do not hear you, liar, traitor!"

They met with a yell in the middle of the circle, axes drawn. Wold got up. Men sitting near him looked up expecting him, as Eldest and clan-chief, to stop the fight. But he did not. He turned away from the broken circle and in silence, with his stiff, ponderous shuffle, went down the alley between the high slant roofs, under projecting eaves, to the house of his Kin.

He clambered laboriously down earthen stairs into the stuffy, smoky warmth of the immense dug-out room. Boys and womenfolk came asking him if the Stone-Pounding was over and why he came alone.

"Umaksuman and Ukwet are fighting," he said to get rid of them, and sat down by the fire, his legs right in the firepit. No good would come of this. No good would come of anything any more. When crying women brought in the body of his grandson Ukwet, a thick path of blood dropping behind them from the ax-split skull, he looked on without moving or speaking. "Umaksuman killed him, his kinsman, his brother," Uk-wet's wives shrilled at Wold, who never raised his head. Finally he looked around at them heavily like an old animal beset by hunters, and said in a thick voice, "Be still ... Can't you be still..."

It snowed again next day. They buried Ukwet, the first-dead of the Winter, and the snow fell on the corpse's face before the grave was filled. Wold thought then and later of Umaksuman, outlawed, alone hi the hills, in the snow. Which was better off?

His tongue was very thick and he did not like to talk. He stayed by the fire and was not sure, sometimes, whether outside it was day or night. He did not sleep well; he seemed somehow always to be waking up. He was just waking up when the noise began outside, up above ground.

Women came shrieking in from the side-rooms, grabbing up then- little Fall-born brats. "The Gaal, the Gaal!" they screeched. Others were quiet as befitted women of a great house, and put the place in order and sat down to wait.

No man came for Wold.

He knew he was no longer a chief; but was he no longer a man? Must he stay with the babies and women by the fire, in a hole hi the ground?

He had endured public shame, but the loss of his own self-respect he could not endure, and shaking a little he got up and began to rummage in his old painted chest for his leather vest and his heavy spear, the spear with which he had killed a snow-ghoul singlehanded, very long ago. He was stiff and heavy now and all the bright seasons had passed since then, but he was the same man, the same that had killed with that spear in the snow of another winter. Was he not the same man? They should not have left him here by the fire, when the enemy came.

His fool womenfolk came squealing around him, and he got mixed up and angry. But old Kerly drove them all off, gave him back his spear that one of them had taken from him, and fastened at his neck the cape of gray korio-fur she had made for him in autumn. There was one left who knew what a man was. She watched him in silence and he felt her grieving pride. So he walked very erect. She was a cross old woman and he was a foolish old man, but pride remained. He climbed up into the cold, bright noon, hearing beyond the walls the calling of foreign-voices.

Men were gathered on the square platform over the smokehold of the House of Absence. They made way for him when he hoisted himself up the ladder. He was wheezing and trembling so that at first he could see nothing. Then he saw. For a while he forgot everything in the unbelievable sight.

The valley that wound from north to south along the base of Tevar Hill to the river-valley east of the forest was full—full as the river in the flood-time, swarming, overrunning with people. They were moving southward, a sluggish, jumbled, dark flood, stretching and contracting, stopping and starting, with yells, cries, calls, creaking, snapping whips, the hoarse bray of hann, the wail of babies, the tuneless chanting of travois-pullers; the flash of color from a rolled-up red felt tent, a woman's painted bangles, a red plume, a spearhead; the stink, the noise, the movement—always the movement, moving southward, the Southing. But in all timepast there had never been a Southing like this, so many all together. As far as eye could follow up the widening valley northward there were more coming, and behind them more, and behind them more. And these were only the women and the brats and the baggage-train ... Beside that slow torrent of people the Winter City of Tevar was nothing. A pebble on the edge of a river in flood.

At first Wold felt sick; then he took heart, and said presently, "This is a wonderful thing ..."

And it was, this migration of all the nations of the north. He was glad to have seen it. The man next to him, an Elder, Anweld of Siok- man's Kin, shrugged and answered quietly, "But it's the end of us."

"If they stop here."

"These won't. But the warriors come behind."

They were so strong, so safe in their numbers, that their warriors came behind. ...

"They'll need our stores and our herds tonight, to feed all those," Anweld went on. "As soon as these get by, they'll attack."

"Send our women and children out into the hills to the west, then. This City is only a trap against such a force."

"I listen," Anweld said with a shrug of assent.

"Now—quickly—before the Gaal encircle us."

"This has been said and heard. But others say we can't send our women out to fend for themselves while we stay in the shelter of the walls."

"Then let's go with them!" Wold growled. "Can the Men of Tevar,decide nothing?"

"They have no leader," Anweld said. "They follow this man and that man and no man." To say more would be to seem to blame Wold and his kinsmen; he said no more except, "So we wait here to be destroyed."

"I'm going to send my womenfolk off," Wold said, irked by Anweld's cool hopelessness, and he left the mighty spectacle of the Southing, to lower himself down the lad-. der and go tell his kinfolk to save themselves while there was some chance. He meant to go with them. For there was no fighting such odds, and some, some few of the people of Tevar must survive.

But the younger men of his clan did not agree and would not take his orders. They would stand and fight.

"But you'll die," said Wold, "and your women and children might go free—if they're not here with you." His tongue was thick again. They could hardly wait for him to finish.

"We'll beat off the Gaal," said a young grandson. "We are warriors!" "Tevar is a strong city, Eldest," another said, persuasive, flattering. "You told us and taught us to build it well."

"It will stand against Winter," Wold said. "Not against ten thousand warriors. I would rather see my women die of the cold in the bare hills, than live as whores and slaves of the Gaal." But they were not listening, only waiting for him to be done talking.

He went outside again, but was too weary now to climb the ladders to the platform again. He found himself a place to wait out of the way of the coming and going hi the narrow alleys: a niche by a supporting buttress of the south wall, not far from the gate. If he clambered up on the slanting mud-brick buttress he could look over the wall and watch the Southing going by; when the wind got under his cape he could squat down, chin on knees, and have some shelter in the angle. For a while the sun shone on him there. He squatted in its warmth and did not think of much. Once or twice he glanced up at the sun, the Winter sun, old, weak in its old age.