Ursula Le Guin - Five Ways to Forgiveness

“Esdardon Aya of the embassy of the Ekumen.”

“Mighty Lord!” the voice said.

“Get me out of here, will you?”

There was no reply, but the door was rattled vainly on its massive hinges, was thumped; more voices outside, more thumping and banging. “Axe,” somebody said. “Find the key,” somebody else said; they went off. Esdan waited. He fought down a repeated impulse to laugh, afraid of hysteria, but it was funny, stupidly funny, all the shouting through the door and seeking keys and axes, a farce in the middle of a battle. What battle?

He had had it backwards. Liberation men had entered the house and killed Rayaye’s men, taking most of them by surprise. They had been waiting for Rayaye’s flyer when it came. They must have had contacts among the fieldhands, informers, guides. Sealed in his room, he had heard only the noisy end of the business. When he was let out, they were dragging out the dead. He saw the horribly maimed body of one of the young men, Alatual or Nemeo, come apart as they dragged it, ropy blood and entrails stretching out along the floor, the legs left behind. The man dragging the corpse was nonplussed and stood there holding the shoulders of the torso. “Well, shit,” he said, and Esdan stood gasping, again trying not to laugh, not to vomit.

“Come on,” said the men with him, and he came on.

Early morning light slanted through broken windows. Esdan kept looking around, seeing none of the house people. The men took him into the room with the packdog head over the mantel. Six or seven men were gathered around the table there. They wore no uniforms, though some had the yellow knot or ribbon of the Liberation on their cap or sleeve. They were ragged, tough, hard. Some were dark, some had beige or clayey or bluish skin, all of them looked edgy and dangerous. One of those with him, a thin, tall man, said in the harsh voice that had said “Mighty Lord” outside the door: “This is him.”

“I’m Esdardon Aya, Old Music, of the embassy of the Ekumen,” he said again, as easily as he could. “I was being held here. Thank you for liberating me.”

Several of them stared at him the way people who had never seen an alien stared, taking in his red-brown skin and deep-set, white-cornered eyes and the subtler differences of skull structure and features. One or two stared more aggressively, as if to test his assertion, show they’d believe he was what he said he was when he proved it. A big, broad-shouldered man, white-skinned and with brownish hair, pure dusty, pure blood of the ancient conquered race, looked at Esdan a long time. “We came to do that,” he said.

He spoke softly, the asset voice. It might take them a generation or more to learn to raise their voices, to speak free.

“How did you know I was here? The fieldnet?”

It was what they had called the clandestine system of information passed from voice to ear, field to compound to city and back again, long before there was a holonet. The Hame had used the fieldnet and it had been the chief instrument of the Uprising.

A short, dark man smiled and nodded slightly, then froze his nod as he saw that the others weren’t giving out any information.

“You know who brought me here, then—Rayaye. I don’t know who he was acting for. What I can tell you, I will.” Relief had made him stupid, he was talking too much, playing hands-around-the-flowerbed while they played tough guy. “I have friends here,” he went on in a more neutral voice, looking at each of their faces in turn, direct but civil. “Bondswomen, house people. I hope they’re all right.”

“Depends,” said a grey-haired, slight man who looked very tired.

“A woman with a baby, Kamsa. An old woman, Gana.”

A couple of them shook their heads to signify ignorance or indifference. Most made no response at all. He looked around at them again, repressing anger and irritation at this pomposity, this tight-lipped stuff.

“We need to know what you were doing here,” the brown-haired man said.

“A Liberation Army contact in the city was taking me from the embassy to Liberation Command, about fifteen days ago. We were intercepted in the Divide by Rayaye’s men. They brought me here. I spent some time in a crouchcage,” Esdan said in the same neutral voice. “My foot was hurt and I can’t walk much. I talked twice with Rayaye. Before I say anything else I think you can understand that I need to know who I’m talking to.”

The tall thin man who had released him from the locked room went around the table and conferred briefly with the grey-haired man. The brown-haired one listened, consented. The tall thin one spoke to Esdan in his uncharacteristically harsh, flat voice: “We are a special mission of the Advance Army of the World Liberation. I am Marshal Metoy.” The others all said their names. The big brown-haired man was General Banarkamye, the tired older man was General Tueyo. They said their rank with their name, but didn’t use it addressing one another, nor did they call him Mister. Before Liberation, rentspeople had seldom used any titles to one another but those of parentage: father, sister, aunty. Titles were something that went in front of an owner’s name: Lord, Master, Mister, Boss. Evidently the Liberation had decided to do without them. It pleased him to find an army that didn’t click its heels and shout Sir! But he wasn’t certain what army he’d found.

“They kept you in that room?” Metoy asked him. He was a strange man, a flat, cold voice, a pale, cold face, but he wasn’t as jumpy as the others. He seemed sure of himself, used to being in charge.

“They locked me in there last night. As if they’d had some kind of warning of trouble coming. Usually I had a room upstairs.”

“You may go there now,” Metoy said. “Stay indoors.”

“I will. Thank you again,” he said to them all. “Please, when you have word of Kamsa and Gana—?” He did not wait to be snubbed, but turned and went out.

One of the younger men went with him. He had named himself Zadyo Tema. The Army of the Liberation was using the old veot ranks, then. There were veots among them, Esdan knew, but Tema was not one. He was light-skinned and had the city-dusty accent, soft, dry, clipped. Esdan did not try to talk to him. Tema was extremely nervous, spooked by the night’s work of killing at close quarters or by something else; there was an almost constant tremor in his shoulders, arms, and hands, and his pale face was set in a painful scowl. He was not in a mood for chitchat with an elderly civilian alien prisoner.

In war everybody is a prisoner , the historian Henennemores had written.

Esdan had thanked his new captors for liberating him, but he knew where, at the moment, he stood. It was still Yaramera.

Yet there was some relief in seeing his room again, sitting down in the one-armed chair by the window to look out at the early sunlight, the long shadows of trees across the lawns and terraces.

None of the housepeople came out as usual to go about their work or take a break from it. Nobody came to his room. The morning wore on. He did what exercises of the tanhai he could do with his foot as it was. He sat aware, dozed off, woke up, tried to sit aware, sat restless, anxious, working over words: A special mission of the Advance Army of World Liberation .

The Legitimate Government called the enemy army “insurgent forces” or “rebel hordes” on the holonews. It had started out calling itself the Army of the Liberation, nothing about World Liberation; but he had been cut off from any coherent contact with the freedom fighters ever since the Uprising, and cut off from all information of any kind since the embassy was sealed—except for information from other worlds light years away, of course, there’d been no end of that, the ansible was full of it, but of what was going on two streets away, nothing, not a word. In the embassy he’d been ignorant, useless, helpless, passive. Exactly as he was here. Since the war began he’d been, as Henennemores had said, a prisoner. Along with every­body else on Werel. A prisoner in the cause of liberty.