Ursula Le Guin: Five Ways to Forgiveness

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.” Her lips quivered and her throat closed up. She kept seeing the design on her blue scarf, leaves printed in a darker blue. She made herself busy. Presently she came back to see to the fire and sit down beside it. She felt very tired.

“Before the Lord Kamye took up the sword, he was a herdsman,” Abberkam said. “And they called him Lord of the Beasts, and Deer-Herd, because when he went into the forest he came among the deer, and lions also walked with him among the deer, offering no harm. None were afraid.”

He spoke so quietly that it was a while before she realised he was saying lines from the Arkamye .

She put another block of peat on the fire and sat down again.

“Tell me where you come from, Chief Abberkam,” she said.

“Gebba Plantation.”

“In the east?”

He nodded.

“What was it like?”

The fire smouldered, making its pungent smoke. The night was intensely silent. When she first came out here from the city the silence had wakened her, night after night.

“What was it like,” he said almost in a whisper. Like most people of their race, the dark iris filled his eyes, but she saw the white flash as he glanced over at her. “Sixty years ago,” he said. “We lived in the Plantation compound. The canebrakes; some of us worked there, cut cane, worked in the mill. Most of the women, the little children. Most men and the boys over nine or ten went down the mines. Some of the girls, too, they wanted them small, to work the shafts a man couldn’t get into. I was big. They sent me down the mines when I was eight years old.”

“What was it like?”

“Dark,” he said. Again she saw the flash of his eyes. “I look back and think how did we live? how did we stay living in that place? The air down the mine was so thick with the dust that it was black. Black air. Your lantern light didn’t go five feet into that air. There was water in most of the workings, up to a man’s knees. There was one shaft where a soft-coal face had caught fire and was burning so the whole system was full of smoke. They went on working it, because the lodes ran behind that coke. We wore masks, filters. They didn’t do much good. We breathed the smoke. I always wheeze some like I do now. It’s not just the berlot. It’s the old smoke. The men died of the black lung. All the men. Forty, forty-five years old, they died. The Bosses gave your tribe money when a man died. A death bonus. Some men thought that made it worth while dying.”

“How did you get out?”

“My mother,” he said. “She was a chief’s daughter from the village. She taught me. She taught me religion and freedom.”

He has said that before, Yoss thought. It has become his stock answer, his standard myth.

“How? What did she say?”

A pause. “She taught me the Holy Word,” Abberkam said. “And she said to me, ‘You and your brother, you are the true people, you are the Lord’s people, his servants, his warriors, his lions: only you. Lord Kamye came with us from the Old World and he is ours now, he lives among us.’ She named us Abberkam, Tongue of the Lord, and Domerkam, Arm of the Lord. To speak the truth and fight to be free.”

“What became of your brother?” Yoss asked after a time.

“Killed at Nadami,” Abberkam said, and again both were silent for a while.

Nadami had been the first great outbreak of the Uprising which finally brought the Liberation to Yeowe. At Nadami plantation slaves and city freedpeople had first fought side by side against the owners. If the slaves had been able to hold together against the owners, the Corporations, they might have won their freedom years sooner. But the liberation movement had constantly splintered into tribal rivalries, chiefs vying for power in the newly freed territories, bargaining with the Bosses to consolidate their gains. Thirty years of war and destruction before the vastly outnumbered Werelians were defeated, driven offworld, leaving the Yeowans free to turn upon one another.

“Your brother was lucky,” said Yoss.

Then she looked across at the Chief, wondering how he would take this challenge. His big, dark face had a softened look in the firelight. His grey, coarse hair had escaped from the loose braid she had made of it to keep it from his eyes, and straggled around his face. He said slowly and softly, “He was my younger brother. He was Enar on the Field of the Five Armies.”

Oh, so then you’re the Lord Kamye himself? Yoss retorted in her mind, moved, indignant, cynical. What an ego! —But, to be sure, there was another implication. Enar had taken up his sword to kill his Elder Brother on that battlefield, to keep him from becoming Lord of the World. And Kamye had told him that the sword he held was his own death; that there is no lordship and no freedom in life, only in the letting go of life, of longing, of desire. Enar had laid down his sword and gone into the wilderness, into the silence, saying only, “Brother, I am thou.” And Kamye had taken up that sword to fight the Armies of Desolation, knowing there is no victory.

So who was he, this man? this big fellow? this sick old man, this little boy down in the mines in the dark, this bully, thief, and liar who thought he could speak for the Lord?

“We’re talking too much,” Yoss said, though neither of them had said a word for five minutes. She poured a cup of tea for him and set the kettle off the fire, where she had kept it simmering to keep the air moist. She took up her shawl. He watched her with that same soft look in his face, an expression almost of confusion.

“It was freedom I wanted,” he said. “Our freedom.”

His conscience was none of her concern. “Keep warm,” she said.

“You’re going out now?”

“I can’t get lost on the causeway.”

It was a strange walk, though, for she had no lantern, and the night was very black. She thought, feeling her way along the causeway, of that black air he had told her of down in the mines, swallowing light. She thought of Abberkam’s black, heavy body. She thought how seldom she had walked alone at night. When she was a child on Banni Plantation, the slaves were locked in the compound at night. Women stayed on the women’s side and never went alone. Before the War, when she came to the city as a freedwoman, studying at the training school, she’d had a taste of freedom; but in the bad years of the War and even since the Liberation a woman couldn’t go safely in the streets at night. There were no police in the working quarters, no streetlights; district warlords sent their gangs out raiding; even in daylight you had to look out, try to stay in the crowd, always be sure there was a street you could escape by.

She grew anxious that she would miss her turning, but her eyes had grown used to the dark by the time she came to it, and she could even make out the blot of her house down in the formlessness of the reedbeds. The Aliens had poor night vision, she had heard. They had little eyes, little dots with white all round them, like a scared calf. She didn’t like their eyes, though she liked the colors of their skin, mostly dark brown or ruddy brown, warmer than her greyish-brown slave skin or the blue-black hide Abberkam had got from the owner who had raped his mother. Cyanid skins 338.10 Cyanid skins] Cyan is a greenish blue color; “cyanid” is different from cyanosis, a bluish skin condition caused by lack of oxygen. 353.5 aiji ] A given name in Japanese, meaning “beloved child,” but here denoting a martial art. 417.26 There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal.] “Local knowledge” usually refers to such minor items as weather patterns or road conditions, but Le Guin draws here on the work of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who uses the phrase to show how complex cultural patterns such as religion are built upon, and defined by, those smaller sorts of understanding. 424.15 the Terran Altiplano] The high plateau (averaging over 12,000 feet in elevation) that sits amid the Andes Mountains in Bolivia and extends into parts of Peru, Argentina, and Chile. 433.29 I believe in it because it is impossible.] Adapted from a line by Carthaginian Christian philosopher Tertullian (c. 155–240 C.E.): Certum est quia impossibile est , “It [the resurrection of Christ] is certain because it is impossible.” 459.36 “jump the ditch.”] An echo of the custom of jumping the broom, originally a joking term in Britain for an unsanctioned elopement but later a marriage ceremony practiced by American slaves who were not allowed to marry legally. 518.23–25 But how do you get there?… the problem with Utopia] In “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891), Oscar Wilde wrote, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.” 572.25–26 cyanotic skin coloration] See note 338.10 . 576.31 Kwan Yin–like] Kwan Yin or Guanyin, an East Asian Buddhist divinity commonly called the “Goddess of Mercy.” , the Aliens said politely, and ocular adaptation to the radiation spectrum of the Werelian System sun.