Ursula Le Guin - Powers

A number of women were waiting in a meadow at a large sheet of reedcloth spread out on the ground. A lot of children ran about the edges, but were careful not to set a foot on the cloth. Pots and reedcloth boxes full of cooked food were set out as if at a market. The men set down and displayed their catch on the cloth in the same way, and the dog laid the bird down and stood back wagging its tail. There was a lot of talking and joking, but it was unmistakably a formal occasion, a ceremony, and when a man came forward to take a box or pot of food, or a woman to pick up a net bag of fish, they said a ritual phrase of thanks. An old woman pounced on the swan, shouting, “Kora’s arrow!” and that brought on more joking and teasing. The women seemed to know exactly which catch went to which woman; the men did a little more discussing over who got what, but the women mostly made it clear, and when two young men had an argument over a box of fritters a woman settled it by nodding at one of the rivals. The one who didn’t get them went off sulkily. When everything had been picked up, Rava brought me forward and said to the women in general, “This man came to the village today, looking for his people. He was taken to Ettera by the soldiers as a young child. He knows his name only as Gavir. People in the north thought he might be a Sidoyu.”

At that all the women came forward to stare at me, and a sharp-eyed, sharp-nosed, dark-skinned woman of forty or so asked, “How many years ago?”

“About fifteen, ma-io,” I said, “I was taken with my older sister Sallo.”

An old woman cried out—“Tano’s children!”

“Sallo and Gavir!” said a woman with a baby in her arms, and the old woman carrying the dead swan by its large black feet pushed up close to study me and said, “Yes. Her children, Tano’s children. Ennu-Amba, Ennu-Me!”

“Tano went for blackfern, down the Long Channel,” one of the women said to me. “She and the children. They didn’t come back. Nobody found the boat.”

“Some said she drowned,” another woman said, and another, “I always said it was the slave takers,” and the older women pressed forward still closer to look at me, looking in me for the woman they had known. The young women stood back, eyeing me in a different way.

The dark woman who had spoken to me first had said nothing and had not come forward. The old woman with the swan went and talked to her, and then the dark one came close enough to say to me, “Tano Aytano Sidoy was my younger sister. I am Gegemer Aytano Sidoy.” Her face was grim and she spoke harshly.

I was daunted, but after a minute I said, “Will you tell me my name, Aunt?”

“Gavir Aytana Sidoy,” she said, almost impatiently. “Did your mother—your sister—come back with you?’’

“I never knew my mother. We were slaves in Etra. They killed my sister two years ago. I left and went to the Daneran Forest.” I spoke briefly and said “left,” not “escaped” or “ran away,” because I needed to speak like a man, not like a runaway child, to this woman with her crow’s face and crow’s eyes.

She looked at me briefly, intensely, but did not meet my gaze. She said at last, “The Aytanu men will look after you,” and turned away.

The other women clearly wanted to keep looking at me and talking about me, but they followed my aunt’s lead. The men were beginning to straggle back to their village. So I turned and followed them.

Rava and a couple of older men were having a discussion. I couldn’t follow all they said; the Sidoyu dialect was strange to my ears and contained a lot of words I didn’t know. They seemed to be talking about where I belonged, and finally one of them turned back and said to me,

“Come.”

I followed him to his cabin, which was wood-framed, with a wooden floor, and walls and roof of reedcloth. It had no door or windows, since you could open up a whole side of it by raising any of the walls. Having put away the box and clay pot of food which he’d got from the women, the man raised the wall that faced the lake and tied it up on posts so that it extended the roof, shading that part of the deck from the hot late-afternoon sunlight. There he sat down on a thick reedcloth mat and set to work on a half-made fish hook of clamshell. Not looking up at me, he gestured to the house and said, “Take what you like.”

I felt intrusive and out of place, and did not want to take anything at all. I did not understand these people. If I was truly a lost child of the village, was this all the welcome they had for me? I was bitterly disappointed, but I wasn’t going to show any disappointment, any weakness to these coldhearted strangers. I would keep my dignity, and act as standoffish as they did. I was a city man, an educated man; they were barbarians, lost in their marshes. I told myself that I’d come a long way to get here and might as well stay the night at least. Long enough to decide where else I might go, in a world where evidently I belonged nowhere.

I found another mat and sat down on the outer edge of the deck. My feet dangled a couple of inches above the mud of the lakeshore. After a while I said, “May I know the name of my host?”

“Metter Aytana Sidoy,” he said. His voice was very soft.

“Would you be my father?”

“I would be the younger brother of that one, your aunt,” he said.

The way he spoke, keeping his face down, made me suspect that he was not so much unfriendly as very shy. Since he didn’t look at me, I felt I shouldn’t stare too much at him, but from the corner of my eye I could tell he didn’t look much like the crow woman, my aunt, or like me.

“And of my mother?”

He nodded. One deep nod.

At that I had to look round at him. Metter was younger than Gege-mer by a good deal, and not so dark and sharp-faced; in fact he looked something like Sallo, round-cheeked, with clear brown skin. Maybe that was what my mother Tano had looked like.

He would have been about the age I was now when his sister disappeared with her two little children.

After a long time I said, “Uncle.”

He said, “Ao.”

“Am I to live here?”

“Ao.”

“With you?”

“Ao.”

“I will have to learn how to live here. I don’t know how you live.”

“Anh,” he said.

I would soon be familiar with these grunted or murmured responses: ao for yes, eng for no, and anh for anything between yes and no, but having the general meaning: I heard what you said.

Another voice made itself heard: mao! A small black cat appeared from a heap of something in the darkness of the hut, came across the deck, and sat down beside me, decorously curling its tail round its front paws. Presently I gave its back a tentative stroke. It leaned up into my hand, so I continued stroking it. It and I gazed out across the lake. A couple of the black fishing-dogs ran past on the lakeshore; the cat ignored them. My uncle Metter was, I noticed, looking at the cat instead of bending industriously over his work. His face had relaxed.

“Prut’s a good mouser,” my uncle said.

I kneaded the nape of the cat’s neck. Prut purred.

After a while Metter said, “Mice are thick this year.”

I scratched behind Prut’s ears and wondered if I should tell my uncle that for one summer of my life I had eaten mice as a major part of my diet. It seemed unwise. Nobody had yet asked me anything about where I came from.

No one in Ferusi ever would. I had been in “Ettera"—where the slave takers came from, the robbing, raping, murdering, child-stealing soldiers. That was all they needed to know. I’d been elsewhere. They didn’t want to know about elsewhere. Not many people do.

It wasn’t easy for me to ask them about Ferusi, not that they didn’t know all about it or didn’t want to talk about it, but because it was their entire universe and was therefore taken for granted. They could not understand the kind of questions I asked. How could anybody not know the name of the lake? Why would anybody ask why men and women lived separately—surely no one could think they should live shamelessly in the same village, the same house? How could anybody possibly be ignorant of the evening worship or the words to say when giving or receiving food? How could a man not know how to cut reed-grass or a woman not know how to pound it to make reedcloth? I soon learned that I was more ignorant here than I’d been even my first winter in the forest, for there was a lot more to be ignorant of. City people might say that the Sidoyu were simple people, living a simple life; but I think only a life as solitary, poor, and crude as Cuga’s could be called simple, and even so the word belies it. In the villages of the Sidoyu existence was full, rich, elaborate, a tapestry of demanding relationships, choices, obligations, and rules. To live as a Sidoy was as complex and subtle a business as to live as an Etran; to live rightly as either was, perhaps, equally difficult.