Ursula Le Guin - Five Ways to Forgiveness

He is a factionalist, Esdan thought. He’s not going to Bellen, or if he is, that’s not where Oyo’s government is. This is some scheme of his own. Crackbrained. It won’t work. He doesn’t have the bibo. But he has a gun. And he’ll shoot me.

“Thank you for a pleasant dinner, Minister,” he said.

Next morning he heard the flyer leave at dawn. He limped out into the morning sunshine after breakfast. One of his veot guards watched him from a window and then turned away. In a sheltered nook just under the balustrade of the south terrace, near a planting of great bushes with big, blowsy, sweet-smelling white flowers, he saw Kamsa with her baby and Heo. He made his way to them, dot-and-go-one. The distances at Yaramera, even inside the house, were daunting to a lamed man. When he finally got there he said, “I am lonely. May I sit with you?”

The women were afoot, of course, reverencing, though Kamsa’s reverence had become pretty sketchy. He sat on a curved bench splotched all over with fallen flowers. They sat back down on the flagstone path with the baby. They had unwrapped the little body to the mild sunshine. It was a very thin baby, Esdan thought. The joints in the bluish-dark arms and legs were like the joints in flowerstems, translucent knobs. The baby was moving more than he had ever seen it move, stretching its arms and turning its head as if enjoying the feel of the air. The head was large for the neck, again like a flower, too large a flower on too thin a stalk. Kamsa dangled one of the real flowers over the baby. His dark eyes gazed up at it. His eyelids and eyebrows were exquisitely delicate. The sunlight shone through his fingers. He smiled. Esdan caught his breath. The baby’s smile at the flower was the beauty of the flower, the beauty of the world.

“What is his name?”

“Rekam.”

Grandson of Kamye. Kamye the Lord and slave, huntsman and husbandman, warrior and peacemaker.

“A beautiful name. How old is he?”

In the language they spoke that was, “How long has he lived?” Kamsa’s answer was strange. “As long as his life,” she said, or so he understood her whisper and her dialect. Maybe it was bad manners or bad luck to ask a child’s age.

He sat back on the bench. “I feel very old,” he said. “I haven’t seen a baby for a hundred years.”

Heo sat hunched over, her back to him; he felt that she wanted to cover her ears. She was terrified of him, the alien. Life had not left much to Heo but fear, he guessed. Was she twenty, twenty-five? She looked forty. Maybe she was seventeen. Usewomen, ill-used, aged fast. Kamsa he guessed to be not much over twenty. She was thin and plain, but there was bloom and juice in her as there was not in Heo.

“Master did have children?” Kamsa asked, lifting up her baby to her breast with a certain discreet pride, shyly flaunting.

“No.”

“ A yera yera ,” she murmured, another slave word he had often heard in the urban compounds: O pity, pity.

“How you get to the center of things, Kamsa,” he said. She glanced his way and smiled. Her teeth were bad but it was a good smile. He thought the baby was not sucking. It lay peacefully in the crook of her arm. Heo remained tense and jumped whenever he spoke, so he said no more. He looked away from them, past the bushes, out over the wonderful view that arranged itself, wherever you walked or sat, into a perfect balance: the levels of flagstone, of dun grass and blue water, the curves of the avenues, the masses and lines of shrubbery, the great old tree, the misty river and its green far bank. Presently the women began talking softly again. He did not listen to what they said. He was aware of their voices, aware of sunlight, aware of peace.

Old Gana came stumping across the upper terrace towards them, bobbed to him, said to Kamsa and Heo, “Choyo does want you. Leave me that baby.” Kamsa set the baby down on the warm stone again. She and Heo sprang up and went off, thin, light women moving with easy haste. The old woman settled down piece by piece and with groans and grimaces onto the path beside Rekam. She immediately covered him up with a fold of his swaddling-cloth, frowning and muttering at the foolishness of his mother. Esdan watched her careful movements, her gentleness when she picked the child up, supporting that heavy head and tiny limbs, her tenderness cradling him, rocking her body to rock him.

She looked up at Esdan. She smiled, her face wrinkling up into a thousand wrinkles. “He is my great gift,” she said.

He whispered, “Your grandson?”

The backward nod. She kept rocking gently. The baby’s eyes were closed, his head lay softly on her thin, dry breast. “I think now he’ll die not long now.”

After a while Esdan said, “Die?”

The nod. She still smiled. Gently, gently rocking. “He is two years of age, master.”

“I thought he was born this summer,” Esdan said in a whisper.

The old woman said, “He did come to stay a little while with us.”

“What is wrong?”

“The wasting.”

Esdan had heard the term. He said, “Avo?” the name he knew for it, a systemic viral infection common among Werelian children, frequently epidemic in the asset compounds of the cities.

She nodded.

“But it’s curable!”

The old woman said nothing.

Avo was completely curable. Where there were doctors. Where there was medicine. Avo was curable in the city not the country. In the great house not the asset quarters. In peacetime not in wartime. Fool!

Maybe she knew it was curable, maybe she did not, maybe she did not know what the word meant. She rocked the baby, crooning in a whisper, paying no attention to the fool. But she had heard him, and answered him at last, not looking at him, watching the baby’s sleeping face.

“I was born owned,” she said, “and my daughters. But he was not. He is the gift. To us. Nobody can own him. The gift of the Lord Kamye of himself. Who could keep that gift?”

Esdan bowed his head down.

He had said to the mother, “He will be free.” And she had said, “Yes.”

He said at last, “May I hold him?”

The grandmother stopped rocking and held still a while. “Yes,” she said. She raised herself up and very carefully transferred the sleeping baby into Esdan’s arms, onto his lap.

“You do hold my joy,” she said.

The child weighed nothing—six or seven pounds. It was like holding a warm flower, a tiny animal, a bird. The swaddling-cloth trailed down across the stones. Gana gathered it up and laid it softly around the baby, hiding his face. Tense and nervous, jealous, full of pride, she knelt there. Before long she took the baby back against her heart. “There,” she said, and her face softened into happiness.

That night Esdan sleeping in the room that looked out over the terraces of Yaramera dreamed that he had lost a little round, flat stone that he always carried with him in a pouch. The stone was from the pueblo. When he held it in his palm and warmed it, it was able to speak, to talk with him. But he had not talked with it for a long time. Now he realised he did not have it. He had lost it, left it somewhere. He thought it was in the basement of the embassy. He tried to get into the basement, but the door was locked, and he could not find the other door.

He woke. Early morning. No need to get up. He should think about what to do, what to say, when Rayaye came back. He could not. He thought about the dream, the stone that talked. He wished he had heard what it said. He thought about the pueblo. His father’s brother’s family had lived in Arkanan Pueblo in the Far South Highlands. In his boyhood, every year in the heart of the northern winter, Esi had flown down there for forty days of summer. With his parents at first, later on alone. His uncle and aunt had grown up in Darranda and were not pueblo people. Their children were. They had grown up in Arkanan and belonged to it entirely. The eldest, Suhan, fourteen years older than Esdan, had been born with irreparable brain and neural defects, and it was for his sake that his parents had settled in a pueblo. There was a place for him there. He became a herdsman. He went up on the mountains with the yama, animals the South Hainish had brought over from O a millennium or so ago. He looked after the animals. He came back to live in the pueblo only in winter. Esi saw him seldom, and was glad of it, finding Suhan a fearful figure—big, shambling, foul-smelling, with a loud braying voice, mouthing incomprehensible words. Esi could not understand why Suhan’s parents and sisters loved him. He thought they pretended to. No one could love him.