Ursula Le Guin - Powers

The last evening of my journey with Ammeda, I’d fished all day and had a fine catch ready. He lighted and tended a fire of charcoal in a big ceramic pot with a grill over the top of it set out on the deck in the lee of the house. Seeing me watching him, he said, “You know I have no village.” I had no idea what he meant or why he said it, and merely nodded, waiting for more; but he said no more. He spattered the fish with oil and a few grains of salt and broiled them. They were succulent. After we ate he brought out a pottery jug and two tiny cups and poured us what he called ricegrass wine, clear and very strong. We sat in the stern. The boat was moving slowly down a wide channel. He did nothing to catch the wind, but only touched the tiller now arid then to keep the course. A clear blue-green-bronze dusk lay over the water and the reeds. We saw the evening star tremble like a drop of water low in the west.

“The Sidoyu,” Ammeda said. “They live near the border. Slave takers come through there. Could be that’s where you come from. Stay if you like. Look around. I’ll be back through in a couple of months.” After a pause he added, “Been wanting a fisherman.”

I realised that he was saying in his laconic way that if I wanted to rejoin him then, I was welcome.

Next morning at sunrise we were again in open water. After an hour or two we approached a solid shore where some trees grew and little stilted houses stood up over the banks. I heard children shouting. A small mob of them were on the pier to meet the boat. “Women’s village,” Ammeda said. I saw that the adults following the children were all women, dark, thin-limbed, in brief tunics, with short curling hair like Sallo’s hair—and I saw Sallo’s eyes, I saw her face, glimpses, flashes of her everywhere among them. It was strange, troubling, to see these strangers, these sisters all about me.

As soon as we tied up at the pier, the women were scrambling over the boat, peering at what Ammeda had to offer, feeling the reedcloths, sniffing the oil jars, chattering away to him and to one another. They didn’t speak to me, but a boy of ten or so came up, stood in front of me with his feet apart, and said importantly, “Who are you, stranger?”

I said, with a rush of absurd hope of being instantly recognised, “My name is Gavir.”

The boy waited a moment and then asked rather pompously, as if offended, “Gavir—?”

It seemed I needed more names than I had, “Your clan!” the boy demanded,

A woman came and pulled him away without ceremony, Ammeda said to her and an older woman with her, “He was taken as a slave. Maybe from the Sidoyu.”

“Ah,” the older woman said. Turning sideways to me, not looking at me, but unmistakably speaking to me, she asked, “When were you taken?”

“About fifteen years ago,” I said, the foolish hope rising in me again. She thought, shrugged, and said, “Not from here. You don’t know your clan?”

“No. There were two of us. My sister Sallo and I.” “Sallo is my name,” the woman said in an indifferent voice. “Sallo Is-sidu Assa.”

“I am seeking my people, my name, ma-io,” I said.

I saw the sidelong, flashing glance of her eye, though she stayed turned half from me. “Try Ferusi,” she said. “The soldiers used to take people from down there.”

“How will I come to Ferusi?”

“Overland,” Ammeda said. “Walk south. You can swim the channels.”

While I turned to get my gear together, he talked with Sallo Issidu Assa. He told me to wait for her while she went into the village. She came back with a reed-cloth packet and laid it on the deck beside me. “Food,” she said in the same indifferent tone, her face turned from me.

I thanked her and stowed the packet in my old blanket, which I had washed out and dried on the journey through the marshes, and which served as a backpack. I turned to Ammeda to thank him again, and he said, “With Me.”

“With Me,” I said.

I started to hop off the pier onto the ground, but a couple of women called out a sharp warning, and the officious boy came rushing to block my way. “Women’s ground, women’s ground!” he shouted. I looked about not knowing where to go, Ammeda pointed me to the right, where I made out a path marked with stones and clamshells right at the edge of the water. “Men go that way,” he said. So I went that way.

Within a very short distance the path led me to another village. I was uneasy about approaching it, but nobody shouted at me to keep away, and I went in among the little houses. An old man was sunning himself on the porch of his house, which seemed to be built of heavy reedcloth mats hung on a wooden frame. “With Me, young fellow,” he said.

I returned the greeting and asked him, “Is there a road south from here, ba-di?”

“Badi, badi, what’s badi? I am Rova Issidu Meni. Where do you come from, with your badi-badi? I’m not your father. Who is your father?”

He was more teasing than aggressive. I had the feeling he knew the salutation I had used perfectly well, but didn’t want to admit it. His hair was white and his face had a thousand wrinkles.

“I’m looking for my father. And my mother. And my name.”

“Ha! Well!” He looked me over. “Why d’you want to go south?”

“To find the Ferusi.”

“Ach! They’re a queer lot. I wouldn’t go there. Go there if you like. The path goes through the pasture.” And he settled back down, stretching his little, black, bony legs, like crane’s legs, out in the sun.

No one else seemed to be in the village; I could see fishing boats out on the water. I found the path leading inland through the pasture and set off south to find my people.

It was a two days’ walk to Ferusi. The path meandered a great deal but tended always south, as well as I could tell by having the sun on my left in the morning and on my right at sunset. There were many channels through the grasslands and willow meads to wade or swim, holding my pack and shoes up out of the water on a stick, but it was easy walking otherwise, and my supply of dried fish cakes and salted cheese lasted me well enough. From time to time I saw the smoke of a cabin or a village off to one side or another and a side path leading to it, but the main way kept on, and I kept on it. So late on the second day the path turning left along the sandy shore of a great lake led me to a village—pastures with a few cows, a few willows, a few little houses up on stilts, a few boats at the piers. Everything in the Marshes repeated itself with a slightly varied sameness, an extreme simplicity.

There were no children around the village, and I saw a man spreading out a fishing net, so I walked on between the houses and called to him, “Is this Ferusi?”

He laid the net down carefully and came towards me. “This is East Lake Village of Ferusi,” he said.

He listened gravely as I told him the quest I was on. He was thirty or so, the tallest man I’d seen among the Rassiu, and his eyes were grey; I knew later that he was the son of a Marsh woman raped by an Etran soldier. When I told him my name he said his, Rava Attiu Sidoy, and courteously invited me to his house and table. “The fishermen are coming back now,” he said, “and we’ll go to the fish-mat. Come with us and you can ask your question of the women. It’s the women who will know.”

Boats were coming in to the piers and unloading their catch, a dozen or more light boats with small sails that made me think of moth wings. The village began to come alive with the voices of men, and dogs, too. Dogs came leaping out of the boats to prance ashore through shallow water, slender black dogs with tight-curled coats and large bright eyes. The manners of these dogs were quite formal: they greeted one another with a single bark, each investigated the other’s other end while tail-wagging vigorously, one of them bowed and the other accepted the bow, and then they parted, each following its master. One of the dogs carried a large dead bird, a swan perhaps; it went through no ceremonies with other dogs but trotted off importantly along the beach westward with its bird. And quite soon all the men followed it, carrying their catch in nets and baskets. Rava brought me along with them. Around a grassy headland, in a little cove, we came to the women’s village of East Lake.