Ursula Le Guin - Five Ways to Forgiveness

After a while he said, “Rocks are the river’s bed.”

She laughed. Her gaze rested on him again, appraising and affectionate. “So I came home,” she said. “For a rest.”

“But you’re not—you’re no longer a woman of your lineage?”

“Yes; here. Still. Always.”

“But you’ve changed being. You’ll leave again.”

“Yes,” she said decisively. “One can be more than one kind of being. I have work to do, there.”

He shook his head, slower, but equally decisive. “What good is work without the gods? It makes no sense to me, Mother of All Children. I don’t have the mind to understand.”

She smiled at the double meaning. “I think you’ll understand what you choose to understand, Man of my People,” she said, addressing him formally to show that he was free to leave when he wanted.

He hesitated, then took his leave. He went to work, filling his mind and world with the great repeated patterns of the broadloom rugs.

That night he made it up to Iyan Iyan so ardently that she was left spent and a bit amazed. The god had come back to them burning, consuming.

“I want a child,” Hav­zhiva said as they lay melded, sweated together, arms and legs and breasts and breath all mingled in the musky dark.

“Oh,” Iyan Iyan sighed, not wanting to talk, decide, resist. “Maybe… Later… Soon…”

“Now,” he said, “now.”

“No,” she said softly. “Hush.”

He was silent. She slept.

More than a year later, when they were nineteen, Iyan Iyan said to him before he put out the light, “I want a baby.”

“It’s too soon.”

“Why? My brother’s nearly thirty. And his wife would like a baby around. After it’s weaned I’ll come sleep with you at your house. You always said you’d like that.”

“It’s too soon,” he repeated. “I don’t want it.”

She turned to him, laying aside her coaxing, reasonable tone. “What do you want, Hav­zhiva?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re going away. You’re going to leave the People. You’re going crazy. That woman, that damned witch!”

“There are no witches,” he said coldly. “That’s stupid talk. Superstition.”

They stared at each other, the dear friends, the lovers.

“Then what’s wrong with you? If you want to move back home, say so. If you want another woman, go to her. But you could give me my child, first! when I ask you for it! Have you lost your araha?” She gazed at him with tearful eyes, fierce, unyielding.

He put his face in his hands. “Nothing is right,” he said. “Nothing is right. Everything I do, I have to do because that’s how it’s done, but it—it doesn’t make sense—there are other ways—”

“There’s one way to live rightly,” Iyan Iyan said, “that I know of. And this is where I live. There’s one way to make a baby. If you know another, you can do it with somebody else!” She cried hard after this, convulsively, the fear and anger of months breaking out at last, and he held her to calm and comfort her.

When she could speak, she leaned her head against him and said miserably, in a small, hoarse voice, “To have when you go, Hav­zhiva.”

At that he wept for shame and pity, and whispered, “Yes, yes.” But that night they lay holding each other, trying to console each other, till they fell asleep like children.

“I am ashamed,” Granite said painfully.

“Did you make this happen?” his sister asked, dry.

“How do I know? Maybe I did. First Mezha, now my son. Was I too stern with him?”

“No, no.”

“Too lax, then. I didn’t teach him well. Why is he crazy?”

“He isn’t crazy, brother. Let me tell you what I think. As a child he always asked why, why, the way children do. I would answer: That’s how it is, that’s how it’s done. He understood. But his mind has no peace. My mind is like that, if I don’t remind myself. Learning the Sun-stuff, he always asked, why thus? why this way, not another way? I answered: Because in what we do daily and in the way we do it, we enact the gods. He said: Then the gods are only what we do. I said: In what we do rightly, the gods are: that is the truth. But he wasn’t satisfied by the truth. He isn’t crazy, brother, but he is lame. He can’t walk. He can’t walk with us. So, if a man can’t walk, what should he do?”

“Sit still and sing,” Granite said slowly.

“If he can’t sit still? He can fly.”

“Fly?”

“They have wings for him, brother.”

“I am ashamed,” Granite said, and hid his face in his hands.

Tovo went to the temple and sent a message to Mezha at Kathhad: “Your pupil wishes to join you.” There was some malice in the words. Tovo blamed the historian for upsetting her son’s balance, offcentering him till, as she said, his soul was lamed. And she was jealous of the woman who in a few days had outdone the teachings of years. She knew she was jealous and did not care. What did her jealousy or her brother’s humiliation matter? What they had to do was grieve.

As the boat for Daha sailed away, Hav­zhiva looked back and saw Stse: a quilt of a thousand shades of green, the sea marshes, the pastures, fields, hedgerows, orchards; the town clambering up the bluffs above, pale granite walls, white stucco walls, black tile roofs, wall above wall and roof above roof. As it diminished it looked like a seabird perched there, white and black, a bird on its nest. Above the town the heights of the island came in view, grey-blue moors and high, wild hills fading into the clouds, white skeins of marsh birds flying.

At the port in Daha, though he was farther from Stse than he had ever been and people had a strange accent, he could understand them and read the signs. He had never seen signs before, but their usefulness was evident. Using them, he found his way to the waiting room for the Kathhad flyer. People were sleeping on the cots provided, in their own blankets. He found an empty cot and lay on it, wrapped in the blanket Granite had woven for him years ago. After a short, strange night, people came in with fruit and hot drinks. One of them gave Hav­zhiva his ticket. None of the passengers knew anyone else; they were all strangers; they kept their eyes down. Announcements were made, and they all went outside and went into the machine, the flyer.

Hav­zhiva made himself look at the world as it fell out from under him. He whispered the Staying Chant soundlessly, steadily. The stranger in the seat next to him joined in.

When the world began to tilt and rush up towards him he shut his eyes and tried to keep breathing.

One by one they filed out of the flyer onto a flat, black place where it was raining. Mezha came to him through the rain, saying his name. “Hav­zhiva, Man of my People, welcome! Come on. There’s a place for you at the School.”

By the third year at Kathhad Hav­zhiva knew a great many things that distressed him. The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense.

For instance, he knew now that historians did not study history. No human mind could encompass the history of Hain: three million years of it. The events of the first two million years, the Fore-Eras, like layers of metamorphic rock, were so compressed, so distorted by the weight of the succeeding millennia and their infinite events that one could reconstruct only the most sweeping generalities from the tiny surviving details. And if one did chance to find some miraculously preserved document from a thousand millennia ago, what then? A king ruled in Azbahan; the Empire fell to the Infidels; a fusion rocket has landed on Ve…. But there had been uncountable kings, empires, inventions, billions of lives lived in millions of countries, monarchies, democracies, oligarchies, anarchies, ages of chaos and ages of order, pantheon upon pantheon of gods, infinite wars and times of peace, incessant discoveries and forgettings, innumerable horrors and triumphs, an endless repetition of unceasing novelty. What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.