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  Orsinian tales

  ( Orsinia - 1 )

  Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

  Born in California, Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of over twenty books. She is the recipient of numerous awards such as the Hugo and Nebula awards for her science fiction. Ms. Le Guin lives in Portland, Oregon.

  Contents

  The Fountains

  The Barrow

  Ile Forest

  Conversations at Night

  The Road East

  Brothers and Sisters

  A Week in the Country

  An die Musik

  The House

  The Lady of Moge

  Imaginary Countries

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1976 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following:

  The Barrow first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1976.

  Brothers and Sisters first appeared in The Little Magazine, Vol. 10, Nos. 1 & 2, Summer 1976.

  A Week in the Country first appeared in The Little Magazine, Vol. 9, No. 4, Spring 1976.

  An die Musik first appeared in The Western Humanities Review, Vol. XV, No. 3, Summer 1961.

  Imaginary Countries first appeared in the Harvard Advocate.

  First HarperPaperbacks printing: May 1991

  Orsinian tales

  by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The Fountains

  THEY knew, having given him cause, that Dr Kereth might attempt to seek political asylum in Paris. Therefore, on the plane flying west, in the hotel, on the streets, at the meetings, even while he read his paper to the Cytology section, he was distantly accompanied at all times by obscure figures who might be explained as graduate students or Croatian microbiologists, but who had no names, or faces. Since his presence lent not only distinction to his country's delegation but also a certain luster to his government – See, we let even him come – they had wanted him there; but they kept him in sight. He was used to being in sight. In his small country a man could get out of sight only by not moving at all, by keeping voice, body, brain all quiet. He had always been a restless, visible man. Thus, when all at once on the sixth day in the middle of a guided tour in broad daylight he found himself gone, he was confused for a time. Only by walking down a path could one achieve one's absence?

  It was in a very strange place that he did so. A great, desolate, terrible house stood behind him yellow in the yellow sunlight of afternoon. Thousands of many-colored dwarfs milled on terraces, beyond which a pale blue canal ran straight away into the unreal distance of September. The lawns ended in groves of chestnut trees a hundred feet high, noble, somber, shot through with gold. Under the trees they had walked in shadow on the riding-paths of dead kings, but the guide led them out again to sunlight on lawns and marble pavements. And ahead, straight ahead, towering and shining up into the air, fountains ran.

  They sprang and sang high above their marble basins in the light. The petty, pretty rooms of the palace as big as a city where no one lived, the indifference of the noble trees that were the only fit inhabitants of a garden too large for men, the dominance of autumn and the past, all this was brought into proportion by the running of water. The phonograph voices of the guides fell silent, the camera eyes of the guided saw. The fountains leapt up, crashed down exulting, and washed death away.

  They ran for forty minutes. Then they ceased. Only kings could afford to run the Great Fountains of Versailles and live forever. Republics must keep their own proportion. So the high white jets shrank, stuttering. The breasts of nymphs ran dry, the mouths of river-gods gaped black. The tremendous voice of uprushing and downfalling water became a rattling, coughing sigh. It was all through, and everyone stood for a moment alone. Adam Kereth turned, and seeing a path before him went down it away from the marble terraces, under the trees. Nobody followed him; and it was at this moment, though he was unaware of it, that he defected.

  Late-afternoon light lay warm across the path between shadows, and through the light and shadows a young man and a young woman walked hand in hand. A long way behind them Adam Kereth walked by himself, tears running down his cheeks.

  Presently the shadows fell away from him and he looked up to see no path, no lovers, only a vast tender light and, below him, many little round trees in tubs. He had come to the terrace above the Orangerie. Southward from this high place one saw only forest, France a broad forest in the autumn evening. Horns blew no longer, rousing wolf or wild boar for the king's hunt; there was no great game left. The only tracks in that forest would be the footprints of young lovers who had come out from Paris on the bus, and walked among the trees, and vanished.

  With no intent, unconscious still of his defection, Kereth roamed back along wide walks towards the palace, which stood now in the sinking light no longer yellow but colorless, like a sea-cliff over a beach when the last bathers are leaving. From beyond it came a dim roar like surf, engines of tourist busses starting back to Paris. Kereth stood still. A few small figures hurried on the terraces between silent fountains. A woman's voice far off called to a child, plaintive as a gull's cry. Kereth turned around and without looking back, intent now, conscious, erect as one who has just stolen something – a pineapple, a purse, a loaf – from a counter and has got it hidden under his coat, he strode back into the dusk among the trees.

  "This is mine," he said aloud to the high chestnuts and the oaks, like a thief among policemen. "This is mine!" The oaks and chestnuts, French, planted for aristocrats, did not answer his fierce republican claim made in a foreign language. But all the same their darkness, the taciturn, complicit darkness of all forests where fugitives have hidden, gathered around him.

  He was not long in the groves, an hour or less; there were gates to be locked and he did not want to be locked in. That was not what he was here for. So before nightfall he came up the terraces, still walking erect and calm as any king or kleptomaniac, and went around the huge, pale, many-windowed sea-cliff and across its cobbled beach. One bus still chuffed there, a blue bus, not the grey one he dreaded. His bus was gone. Gone, washed out to sea, with the guide, the colleagues, the fellow countrymen, the microbiologists, the spies. Gone and left him in possession of Versailles. Above him Louis XIV, foreshortened on a prodigious horse, asserted the existence of absolute privilege. Kereth looked up at the bronze face, the big bronze Bourbon nose, as a child looks up at his older brother, loving and derisive. He went on through the gates, and in a cafe across the Paris road his sister served him vermouth at a dusty green table under sycamores. The wind of night and autumn blew from the south, from the forests, and like the vermouth its scent was a little bitter, an odor of dry leaves.

  A free man, he took his own way in his own time to the suburban station, bought his own ticket, returned to Paris by himself. Where he came up out of the Metro nobody knows, perhaps not himself, nor where he wandered in the city while defecting. At eleven o'clock at night he was standing at the parapet of the Solferino Bridge, a short man of forty-seven in a shoddy suit, a free man. He watched the lights of the bridge and of farther bridges tremble on the black river running quietly. Up and down the river on either bank stood the asylums: the Government of France, the Embassies of America and England. He had walked past them all.

  Perhaps it was too late at night to enter them. Standing on the bridge there in the middle, between the Left Bank and the Right Bank, he thought: There are no hiding places left. There are no thrones; no wolves, no boars; even the lions of Africa are dying out. The only safe place is the zoo.

  But he had never cared much about being safe, and now thought that he did not care much about hiding either, having found something better: his
family, his inheritance. Here he had at last walked in the garden larger than life, on paths where his older brothers had gone before him, crowned. After that he really could not take refuge in the zoo. He went on across the bridge and under the dark arches of the Louvre, returning to his hotel. Knowing now that he was both a king and a thief and so was at home anywhere, what turned him to his own land was mere fidelity. For what else should move a man, these days? Kingly he strode past the secret-police agent in the hotel lobby, hiding under his coat the stolen, inexhaustible fountains.

  1960

  The Barrow

  NIGHT came down along the snowy road from the mountains. Darkness ate the village, the stone tower of Vermare Keep, the barrow by the road. Darkness stood in the corners of the rooms of the Keep, sat under the great table and on every rafter, waited behind the shoulders of each man at the hearth.

  The guest sat in the best place, a corner seat projecting from one side of the twelve-foot fireplace. The host, Freyga, Lord of the Keep, Count of the Montayna, sat with everybody else on the hearthstones, though nearer the fire than some. Cross-legged, his big hands on his knees, he watched the fire steadily. He was thinking of the worst hour he had known in his twenty-three years, a hunting trip, three autumns ago, to the mountain lake Malafrena. He thought of how the thin barbarian arrow had stuck up straight from his father's throat; he remembered how the cold mud had oozed against his knees as he knelt by his father's body in the reeds, in the circle of the dark mountains. His father's hair had stirred a little in the lake-water. And there had been a strange taste in his own mouth, the taste of death, like licking bronze. He tasted bronze now. He listened for the women's voices in the room overhead.

  The guest, a travelling priest, was talking about his travels. He came from Solariy, down in the southern plains. Even merchants had stone houses there, he said. Barons had palaces, and silver platters, and ate roast beef. Count Freyga's liege men and servants listened open-mouthed. Freyga, listening to make the minutes pass, scowled. The guest had already complained of the stables, of the cold, of mutton for breakfast, dinner and supper, of the dilapidated condition of Vermare Chapel and the way Mass was said there – "Arianism!" he had muttered, sucking in his breath and crossing himself. He told old Father Egius that every soul in Vermare was damned: they had received heretical baptism. "Arianism, Arianism!" he shouted. Father Egius, cowering, thought Arianism was a devil and tried to explain that no one in his parish had ever been possessed, except one of the count's rams, who had one yellow eye and one blue one and had butted a pregnant girl so that she miscarried her child, but they had sprinkled holy water on the ram and it made no more trouble, indeed was a fine breeder, and the girl, who had been pregnant out of wedlock, had married a good peasant from Bara and borne him five little Christians, one a year. "Heresy, adultery, ignorance!" the foreign priest had railed. Now he prayed for twenty minutes before he ate his mutton, slaughtered, cooked, and served by the hands of heretics. What did he want? thought Freyga. Did he expect comfort, in winter? Did he think they were heathens, with his "Arianism"? No doubt he had never seen a heathen, the little, dark, terrible people of Malafrena and the farther hills. No doubt he had never had a pagan arrow shot at him. That would teach him the difference between heathens and Christian men, thought Freyga.

  When the guest seemed to have finished boasting for the time being, Freyga spoke to a boy who lay beside him chin in hand: "Give us a song, Gilbert." The boy smiled and sat up, and began at once in a high, sweet voice:

  King Alexander forth he came,

  Armored in gold was Alexander,

  Golden his greaves and great helmet,

  His hauberk all of hammered gold.

  Clad in gold came the king,

  Christ he called on, crossing himself,

  In the hills at evening.

  Forward the army of King Alexander

  Rode on their horses, a great host,

  Down to the plains of Persia

  To kill and conquer, they followed the King,

  In the hills at evening.

  The long chant droned on; Gilbert had begun in the middle and stopped in the middle, long before the death of Alexander "in the hills at evening." It did not matter; they all knew it from beginning to end.

  "Why do you have the boy sing of pagan kings?" said the guest.

  Freyga raised his head. "Alexander was a great king of Christendom."

  "He was a Greek, a heathen idolater."

  "No doubt you know the song differently than we do," Freyga said politely. "As we sing it, it says, 'Christ he called on, crossing himself.'"

  Some of his men grinned.

  "Maybe your servant would sing us a better song," Freyga added, for his politeness was genuine. And the priest's servant, without much urging, began to sing in a nasal voice a canticle about a saint who lived for twenty years in his father's house, unrecognised, fed on scraps. Freyga and his household listened in fascination. New songs rarely came their way. But the singer stopped short, interrupted by a strange, shrieking howl from somewhere outside the room. Freyga leapt to his feet, staring into the darkness of the hall. Then he saw that his men had not moved, that they sat silently looking up at him. Again the faint howl came from the room overhead. The young count sat down. "Finish your song," he said. The priest's servant gabbled out the rest of the song. Silence closed down upon its ending.

  "Wind's coming up," a man said softly.

  "An evil winter it's been."

  "Snow to your thighs, coming through the pass from Malafrena yesterday."

  "It's their doing."

  "Who? The mountain folk?"

  "Remember the gutted sheep we found last autumn? Kass said then it was an evil sign. They'd been killing to Odne, he meant."

  "What else would it mean?"

  "What are you talking about?" the foreign priest demanded.

  "The mountain folk, Sir Priest. The heathen."

  "What is Odne?"

  A pause.

  "What do you mean, killing to Odne?"

  "Well, sir, maybe it's better not to talk about it."

  "Why?"

  "Well, sir, as you said of the singing, holy things are better, tonight." Kass the blacksmith spoke with dignity, only glancing up to indicate the room overhead; but another man, a young fellow with sores around his eyes, murmured, "The Barrow has ears, the Barrow hears. . . ."

  "Barrow? That hillock by the road, you mean?"

  Silence.

  Freyga turned to face the priest. "They kill to Odne," he said in his soft voice, "on stones beside the barrows in the mountains. What's inside the barrows, no man knows."

  "Poor heathen men, unholy men," old Father Egius murmured sorrowfully.

  "The altarstone of our chapel came from the Barrow," said the boy Gilbert.

  "What?"

  "Shut your mouth," the blacksmith said. "He means, sir, that we took the top stone from the stones beside the Barrow, a big marble stone, Father Egius blessed it and there's no harm in it."

  "A fine altarstone," Father Egius agreed, nodding and smiling, but on the end of his words another howl rang out from overhead. He bent his head and muttered prayers.

  "You pray too," said Freyga, looking at the stranger. He ducked his head and began to mumble, glancing at Freyga now and then from the corner of his eye.

  There was little warmth in the Keep except at the hearth, and dawn found most of them still there: Father Egius curled up like an aged dormouse in the rushes, the stranger slumped in his chimney corner, hands clasped across his belly, Freyga sprawled out on his back like a man cut down in battle. His men snored around him, started in their sleep, made unfinished gestures. Freyga woke first. He stepped over the sleeping bodies and climbed the stone stairs to the floor above. Ranni the midwife met him in the anteroom, where several girls and dogs were sleeping in a heap on a pile of sheepskins. "Not yet, count."

  "But it's been two nights now – "

  "Ah, she's hardly begun," the midwife said w
ith contempt. "Has to rest, hasn't she?"

  Freyga turned and went heavily down the twisted stairs. The woman's contempt weighed upon him. All the women, all yesterday; their faces were stern, preoccupied; they paid no attention to him. He was outside, out in the cold, insignificant. He could not do anything. He sat down at the oaken table and put his head in his hands, trying to think of Galla, his wife. She was seventeen; they had been married ten months. He thought of her round white belly. He tried to think of her face but there was nothing but the taste of bronze on his tongue. "Get me something to eat!" he shouted, bringing his fist down on the board, and the Tower Keep of Vermare woke with a jump from the grey paralysis of dawn. Boys ran about, dogs yelped, bellows roared in the kitchen, men stretched and spat by the fire. Freyga sat with his head buried in his hands.

  The women came down, one or two at a time, to rest by the great hearth and have a bite of food. Their faces were stern. They spoke to each other, not to the men.

  The snow had ceased and a wind blew from the mountains, piling snowdrifts against the walls and byres, a wind so cold it cut off breath in the throat like a knife.

  "Why has God's word not been brought to these mountain folk of yours, these sacrificers of sheep?" That was the potbellied priest, speaking to Father Egius and the man with sores around his eyes, Stefan.

  They hesitated, not sure what "sacrificers" meant.

  "It's not just sheep they kill," said Father Egius, tentatively.

  Stefan smiled. "No, no, no," he said, shaking his head.

  "What do you mean?" The stranger's voice was sharp, and Father Egius, cowering slightly, said, "They – they kill goats, too."

  "Sheep or goats, what's that to me? Where do they come from, these pagans? Why are they permitted to live in a Christian land?"

  "They've always lived here," the old priest said, puzzled.

  "And you've never tried to bring the Holy Church among them?"