Ursula Le Guin - Five Ways to Forgiveness

When the sun came around to that side of the compound and shone full on him, the dizziness turned to sickness. Sometimes then he fainted for a while.

There was night and cold and he tried to imagine water, but there was no water.

He thought later he had been in the crouchcage two days. He could remember the scraping of the wires on his sunburned naked flesh when they pulled him out, the shock of cold water played over him from a hose. He had been fully aware for a moment then, aware of himself, like a doll, lying small, limp, on dirt, while men above him talked and shouted about something. Then he must have been carried back to the cell or stable where he was kept, for there was dark and silence, but also he was still hanging in the crouchcage roasting in the icy fire of the sun, freezing in his burning body, fitted tighter and tighter into the exact mesh of the wires of pain.

At some point he was taken to a bed in a room with a window, but he was still in the crouchcage, swinging high above the dusty ground, the dusties’ ground, the circle of green grass.

The zadyo and the heavy-set man were there, were not there. A bondswoman, whey-faced, crouching and trembling, hurt him trying to put salve on his burned arm and leg and back. She was there and not there. The sun shone in the window. He felt the wire snap down on his foot again, and again.

Darkness eased him. He slept most of the time. After a couple of days he could sit up and eat what the scared bondswoman brought him. His sunburn was healing and most of his aches and pains were milder. His foot was swollen hugely; bones were broken; that didn’t matter till he had to get up. He dozed, drifted. When Rayaye walked into the room, he recognised him at once.

They had met several times, before the Uprising. Rayaye had been Minister of Foreign Affairs under President Oyo. What position he had now, in the Legitimate Government, Esdan did not know. Rayaye was short for a Werelian but broad and solid, with a blue-black polished-looking face and greying hair, a striking man, a politician.

“Minister Rayaye,” Esdan said.

“Mr. Old Music. How kind of you to recall me! I’m sorry you’ve been unwell. I hope the people here are looking after you satisfactorily?”

“Thank you.”

“When I heard you were unwell I inquired for a doctor, but there’s no one here but a veterinarian. No staff at all. Not like the old days! What a change! I wish you’d seen Yaramera in its glory.”

“I did.” His voice was rather weak, but sounded quite natural. “Thirty-two or -three years ago. Lord and Lady Aneo entertained a party from our embassy.”

“Really? Then you know what it was,” said Rayaye, sitting down in the one chair, a fine old piece missing one arm. “Painful to see it like this, isn’t it! The worst of the destruction was here in the house. The whole women’s wing and the great rooms burned. But the gardens were spared, may the Lady be praised. Laid out by Meneya himself, you know, four hundred years ago. And the fields are still being worked. I’m told there are still nearly three thousand assets attached to the property. When the trouble’s over, it’ll be far easier to restore Yaramera than many of the great estates.” He gazed out the window. “Beautiful, beautiful. The Aneos’ housepeople were famous for their beauty, you know. And training. It’ll take a long time to build up to that kind of standard again.”

“No doubt.”

The Werelian looked at him with bland attentiveness. “I expect you’re wondering why you’re here.”

“Not particularly,” Esdan said pleasantly.

“Oh?”

“Since I left the embassy without permission, I suppose the Government wanted to keep an eye on me.”

“Some of us were glad to hear you’d left the embassy. Shut up there—a waste of your talents.”

“Oh, my talents,” Esdan said with a deprecatory shrug, which hurt his shoulder. He would wince later. Just now he was enjoying himself. He liked fencing.

“You’re a very talented man, Mr. Old Music. The wisest, canniest alien on Werel, Lord Mehao called you once. You’ve worked with us—and against us, yes—more effectively than any other offworlder. We understand one another. We can talk. It’s my belief that you genuinely wish my people well, and that if I offered you a way of serving them—a hope of bringing this terrible conflict to an end—you’d take it.”

“I would hope to be able to.”

“Is it important to you that you be identified as a supporter of one side of the conflict, or would you prefer to remain neutral?”

“Any action can bring neutrality into question.”

“To have been kidnapped from the embassy by the rebels is no evidence of your sympathy for them.”

“It would seem not.”

“Rather the opposite.”

“It could be so perceived.”

“It can be. If you like.”

“My preferences are of no weight, Minister.”

“They’re of very great weight, Mr. Old Music. But here. You’ve been ill, I’m tiring you. We’ll continue our conversation tomorrow, eh? If you like.”

“Of course, Minister,” Esdan said, with a politeness edging on submissiveness, a tone that he knew suited men like this one, more accustomed to the attention of slaves than the company of equals. Never having equated incivility with pride, Esdan, like most of his people, was disposed to be polite in any circumstance that allowed it, and disliked circumstances that did not. Mere hypocrisy did not trouble him. He was perfectly capable of it himself. If Rayaye’s men had tortured him and Rayaye pretended ignorance of the fact, Esdan had nothing to gain by insisting on it.

He was glad, indeed, not to be obliged to talk about it, and hoped not to think about it. His body thought about it for him, remembered it precisely, in every joint and muscle, now. The rest of his thinking about it he would do as long as he lived. He had learned things he had not known. He had thought he understood what it was to be helpless. Now he knew he had not understood.

When the scared woman came in, he asked her to send for the veterinarian. “I need a cast on my foot,” he said.

“He does mend the hands, the bondsfolk, master,” the woman whispered, shrinking. The assets here spoke an archaic-sounding dialect that was sometimes hard to follow.

“Can he come into the house?”

She shook her head.

“Is there anybody here who can look after it?”

“I will ask, master,” she whispered.

An old bondswoman came in that night. She had a wrinkled, seared, stern face, and none of the crouching manner of the other. When she first saw him she whispered, “Mighty Lord!” But she performed the reverence stiffly, and then examined his swollen foot, impersonal as any doctor. She said, “If you do let me bind that, master, it will heal.”

“What’s broken?”

“These toes. There. Maybe a little bone in here too. Lotsalot bones in feet.”

“Please bind it for me.”

She did so, firmly, binding cloths round and round until the wrapping was quite thick and kept his foot immobile at one angle. She said, “You do walk, then you use a stick, sir. You put down only that heel to the ground.”

He asked her name.

“Gana,” she said. Saying her name she shot a sharp glance right at him, full-face, a daring thing for a slave to do. She probably wanted to get a good look at his alien eyes, having found the rest of him, though a strange color, pretty commonplace, bones in the feet and all.

“Thank you, Gana. I’m grateful for your skill and kindness.”

She bobbed, but did not reverence, and left the room. She herself walked lame, but upright. “All the grandmothers are rebels,” somebody had told him long ago, before the Uprising.