Ursula Le Guin - Five Ways to Forgiveness

“Not to me.”

Again Hav­zhiva spoke only and coldly what was in his head. The man winced and was silent, his head bowed.

“Please, my friend, take me to my room now,” Hav­zhiva said, and the dark man gratefully obeyed him.

He talked softly into his noter in Hainish in the dark. “You can’t change anything from outside it. Standing apart, looking down, taking the overview, you see the pattern. What’s wrong, what’s missing. You want to fix it. But you can’t patch it. You have to be in it, weaving it. You have to be part of the weaving.” This last phrase was in the dialect of Stse.

Four women squatted on a patch of ground on the women’s side, which had roused his curiosity by its untrodden smoothness: some kind of sacred space, he had thought. He walked towards them. They squatted gracelessly, hunched forward between their knees, with the indifference to their appearance, the carelessness of men’s gaze, that he had noticed before on the women’s side. Their heads were shaved, their skin chalky and pale. Dust people, dusties, was the old epithet, but to Hav­zhiva their color was more like clay or ashes. The azure tinge of palms and soles and wherever the skin was fine was almost hidden by the soil they were handling. They had been talking fast and quietly, but went silent as he came near. Two were old, withered up, with knobby, wrinkled knees and feet. Two were young women. They all glanced sidelong from time to time as he squatted down near the edge of the smooth patch of ground.

On it, he saw, they had been spreading dust, colored earth, making some kind of pattern or picture. Following the boundaries between colors he made out a long pale figure a little like a hand or a branch, and a deep curve of earthen red.

Having greeted them, he said nothing more, but simply squatted there. Presently they went back to what they were doing, talking in whispers to one another now and then.

When they stopped working, he said, “Is it sacred?”

The old women looked at him, scowled, and said nothing.

“You can’t see it,” said the darker of the young women, with a flashing, teasing smile that took Hav­zhiva by surprise.

“I shouldn’t be here, you mean.”

“No. You can be here. But you can’t see it.”

He rose and looked over the earth painting they had made with grey and tan and red and umber dust. The lines and forms were in a definite relationship, rhythmical but puzzling.

“It’s not all there,” he said.

“This is only a little, little bit of it,” said the teasing woman, her dark eyes bright with mockery in her dark face.

“Never all of it at once?”

“No,” she said, and the others said, “No,” and even the old women smiled.

“Can you tell me what the picture is?”

She did not know the word “picture.” She glanced at the others; she pondered, and looked up at him shrewdly.

“We make what we know, here,” she said, with a soft gesture over the softly colored design. A warm evening breeze was already blurring the boundaries between the colors.

“They don’t know it,” said the other young woman, ashen- skinned, in a whisper.

“The men? —They never see it whole?”

“Nobody does. Only us. We have it here.” The dark woman did not touch her head but her heart, covering her breasts with her long, work-hardened hands. She smiled again.

The old women stood up; they muttered together, one said something sharply to the young women, a phrase Hav­zhiva did not understand; and they stumped off.

“They don’t approve of your talking of this work to a man,” he said.

“A city man,” said the dark woman, and laughed. “They think we’ll run away.”

“Do you want to run away?”

She shrugged. “Where to?”

She rose to her feet in one graceful movement and looked over the earth painting, a seemingly random, abstract pattern of lines and colors, curves and areas.

“Can you see it?” she asked Hav­zhiva, with that liquid teasing flash of the eyes.

“Maybe someday I can learn to,” he said, meeting her gaze.

“You’ll have to find a woman to teach you,” said the woman the color of ashes.

“We are a free people now,” said the Young Chief, the Son and Heir, the Chosen.

“I haven’t yet known a free people,” Hav­zhiva said, polite, ambiguous.

“We won our freedom. We made ourselves free. By courage, by sacrifice, by holding fast to the one noble thing. We are a free people.” The Chosen was a strong-faced, handsome, intelligent man of forty. Six gouged lines of scarring ran down his upper arms like a rough mantle, and an open blue eye stared between his eyes, unwinking.

“You are free men,” Hav­zhiva said.

There was a silence.

“Men of the cities do not understand our women,” the Chosen said. “Our women do not want a man’s freedom. It is not for them. A woman holds fast to her baby. That is the noble thing for her. That is how the Lord Kamye made woman, and the Merciful Tual is her example. In other places it may be different. There may be another kind of woman, who does not care for her children. That may be. Here it is as I have said.”

Hav­zhiva nodded, the deep, single nod he had learned from the Yeowans, almost a bow. “That is so,” he said.

The Chosen looked gratified.

“I have seen a picture,” Hav­zhiva went on.

The Chosen was impassive; he might or might not know the word. “Lines and colors made with earth on earth may hold knowledge in them. All knowledge is local, all truth is partial,” Hav­zhiva said with an easy, colloquial dignity that he knew was an imitation of his mother, the Heir of the Sun, talking to foreign merchants. “No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is a part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.”

The Chosen stood like a grey stone. After a while he said, “If we come to live as they live in the cities, all we know will be lost.” Under his dogmatic tone was fear and grief.

“Chosen One,” Hav­zhiva said, “you speak the truth. Much will be lost. I know it. The lesser knowledge must be given to gain the greater. And not once only.”

“The men of this tribe will not deny our truth,” the Chosen said. His unseeing, unwinking central eye was fixed on the sun that hung in a yellow dust-haze above the endless fields, though his own dark eyes gazed downward at the earth.

His guest looked from that alien face to the fierce, white, small sun that still blazed low above the alien land. “I am sure of that,” he said.

When he was fifty-five, Stabile Yehedarhed Hav­zhiva went back to Yotebber for a visit. He had not been there for a long time. His work as Ekumenical Advisor to the Yeowan Ministry of Social Justice had kept him in the north, with frequent trips to the other hemisphere. He had lived for years in the Old Capital with his partner, but often visited the New Capital at the request of a new Ambassador who wanted to draw on his expertise. His partner—they had lived together for eighteen years, but there was no marriage on Yeowe—had a book she was trying to finish, and admitted that she would like to have the apartment to herself for a couple of weeks while she wrote. “Take that trip south you keep mooning about,” she said. “I’ll fly down as soon as I’m done. I won’t tell any damned politicians where you are. Escape! Go, go, go!”

He went. He had never liked flying, though he had had to do a great deal of it, and so he made the long journey by train. They were good, fast trains, terribly crowded, people at every station swarming and rushing and shouting bribes to the conductors, though not trying to ride the roofs of the cars, not at 130 kmh. He had a private room in a through car to Yotebber City. He spent the long hours in silence watching the landscape whirl by, the reclamation projects, the old wastelands, the young forests, the swarming cities, miles of shacks and cabins and cottages and houses and apartment buildings, sprawling Werel-style compounds with connected houses and kitchen gardens and worksheds, factories, huge new plants; and then suddenly the country again, canals and irrigation tanks reflecting the colors of the evening sky, a bare-legged child walking with a great white ox past a field of shadowy grain. The nights were short, a dark, rocking sweetness of sleep.