Ursula Le Guin: Five Ways to Forgiveness

She got there, and spent a good while at the sweet-shop stove catching up on gossip, and at the news vendor’s woodstove, reading old newspapers about a new war in the eastern province. Eyid’s aunts and Wada’s father, mother, and aunts all asked her how the Chief was. They also all told her to go by her landlord’s house, Kebi had something for her. He had a packet of cheap nasty tea for her. Perfectly willing to let him enrich his soul, she thanked him for the tea. He asked her about Abberkam. The Chief had been ill? He was better now? He pried; she replied indifferently. It’s easy to live in silence, she thought; what I could not do is live with these voices.

She was loath to leave the warm room, but her bag was heavier than she liked to carry, and the icy spots on the road would be hard to see as the light failed. She took her leave and set off across the village again and up onto the causeway. It was later than she had thought. The sun was quite low, hiding behind one bar of cloud in an otherwise stark sky, as if grudging even a half hour’s warmth and brightness. She wanted to get home to her fire, and stepped right along.

Keeping her eyes on the way ahead for fear of ice, at first she only heard the voice. She knew it, and she thought, Abberkam has gone mad again! For he was running towards her, shouting. She stopped, afraid of him, but it was her name he was shouting. “Yoss! Yoss! It’s all right!” he shouted, coming up right on her, a huge wild man, all dirty, muddy, ice and mud in his grey hair, his hands black, his clothes black, and she could see the whites all round his eyes.

“Get back!” she said, “get away, get away from me!”

“It’s all right,” he said, “but the house, but the house—”

“What house?”

“Your house, it burned. I saw it, I was coming to the village, I saw the smoke down in the marsh—”

He went on, but Yoss stood paralysed, unhearing. She had shut the door, let the latch fall. She never locked it, but she had let the latch fall, and Gubu would not be able to get out. He was in the house. Locked in: the bright, desperate eyes: the little voice crying—

She started forward. Abberkam blocked her way.

“Let me get by,” she said. “I have to get by.” She set down her bag and began to run.

Her arm was caught, she was stopped as if by a sea wave, swung right round. The huge body and voice were all around her. “It’s all right, the kit is all right, it’s in my house,” he was saying. “Listen, listen to me, Yoss! The house burned. The kit is all right.”

“What happened?” she said, shouting, furious. “Let me go! I don’t understand! What happened?”

“Please, please be quiet,” he begged her, releasing her. “We’ll go by there. You’ll see it. There isn’t much to see.”

Very shakily, she walked along with him while he told her what had happened. “But how did it start?” she said, “how could it?”

“A spark; you left the fire burning? Of course, of course you did, it’s cold. But there were stones out of the chimney, I could see that. Sparks, if there was any wood on the fire—maybe a floorboard caught—the thatch, maybe. Then it would all go, in this dry weather, everything dried out, no rain. Oh my Lord, my sweet Lord, I thought you were in there. I thought you were in the house. I saw the fire, I was up on the causeway—then I was down at the door of the house, I don’t know how, did I fly, I don’t know—I pushed, it was latched, I pushed it in, and I saw the whole back wall and ceiling burning, blazing. There was so much smoke, I couldn’t tell if you were there, I went in, the little animal was hiding in a corner—I thought how you cried when the other one died, I tried to catch it, and it went out the door like a flash, and I saw no one was there, and made for the door, and the roof fell in.” He laughed, wild, triumphant. “Hit me on the head, see?” He stooped, but she still was not tall enough to see the top of his head. “I saw your bucket and tried to throw water on the front wall, to save something, then I saw that was crazy, it was all on fire, nothing left. And I went up the path, and the little animal, your pet, was waiting there, all shaking. It let me pick it up, and I didn’t know what to do with it, so I ran back to my house, and left it there. I shut the door. It’s safe there. Then I thought you must be in the village, so I came back to find you.”

They had come to the turnoff. She went to the side of the causeway and looked down. A smear of smoke, a huddle of black. Black sticks. Ice. She shook all over and felt so sick she had to crouch down, swallowing cold saliva. The sky and the reeds went from left to right, spinning, in her eyes; she could not stop them spinning.

“Come, come on now, it’s all right. Come on with me.” She was aware of the voice, the hands and arms, a large warmth supporting her. She walked along with her eyes shut. After a while she could open them and look down at the road, carefully.

“Oh, my bag—I left it— It’s all I have,” she said suddenly with a kind of laugh, turning around and nearly falling over because the turn started the spinning again.

“I have it here. Come on, it’s just a short way now.” He carried the bag oddly, in the crook of his arm. The other arm was around her, helping her stand up and walk. They came to his house, the dark raft-house. It faced a tremendous orange-and-yellow sky, with pink streaks going up the sky from where the sun had set; the sun’s hair, they used to call that, when she was a child. They turned from the glory, entering the dark house.

“Gubu?” she said.

It took a while to find him. He was cowering under the couch. She had to haul him out, he would not come to her. His fur was full of dust and came out in her hands as she stroked it. There was a little foam on his mouth, and he shivered and was silent in her arms. She stroked and stroked the silvery, speckled back, the spotted sides, the silken white belly fur. He closed his eyes finally; but the instant she moved a little, he leapt, and ran back under the couch.

She sat and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Gubu, I’m sorry.”

Hearing her speak, the Chief came back into the room. He had been in the scullery. He held his wet hands in front of him and she wondered why he didn’t dry them. “Is he all right?” he asked.

“It’ll take a while,” she said. “The fire. And a strange house. They’re… cats are territorial. Don’t like strange places.”

She could not arrange her thoughts or words, they came in pieces, unattached.

“That is a cat, then?”

“A spotted cat, yes.”

“Those pet animals, they belonged to the Bosses, they were in the Bosses’ houses,” he said. “We never had any around.”

She thought it was an accusation. “They came from Werel with the Bosses,” she said, “yes. So did we.” After the sharp words were out she thought that maybe what he had said was an apology for ignorance.

He still stood there holding out his hands stiffly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I need some kind of bandage, I think.”

She focused slowly on his hands.

“You burned them,” she said.

“Not much. I don’t know when.”

“Let me see.” He came nearer and turned the big hands palm up: a fierce red blistered bar across the bluish inner skin of the fingers of one, and a raw bloody wound in the base of the thumb of the other.

“I didn’t notice till I was washing,” he said. “It didn’t hurt.”

“Let me see your head,” she said, remembering; and he knelt and presented her a matted shaggy sooty object with a red-and-black burn right across the top of it. “Oh, Lord,” she said.

His big nose and eyes appeared under the grey tangle, close to her, looking up at her, anxious. “I know the roof fell onto me,” he said, and she began to laugh.