Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Genres: Science Fiction; Science Fiction Fantasy; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

“One of [Le Guin's] most radical novels. . . . A study in what a complete and utter rejection of capitalism and patriarchy might look like—for society and for the art of storytelling."—The Millions

Reissued for a new generation of readers, Always Coming Home is Ursula K. Le Guin’s magnificent work of imagination, a visionary, genre-crossing story about a future utopian community on the Northern California coast, hailed as “masterly” (Newsweek), “hypnotic” (People) and “[her] most consistently lyric and luminous book” (New York Times). This new edition features an introduction by Shruti Swamy, author of A House is a Body, as well as illuminating extra material that includes interviews and liner notes to the book's musical soundtrack.

Midway through her career, Le Guin embarked on one of her most detailed, impressive literary projects, a novel that took more than five years to complete. Blending story and fable, poetry, artwork, and song, Always Coming Home is this legendary writer’s fictional ethnography of the Kesh, a people of the far future living in a post-apocalyptic Napa Valley.

Having survived ecological catastrophe brought on by relentless industrialization, the Kesh are a peaceful people who reject governance and the constriction of genders, limit population growth to prevent overcrowding and preserve resources, and maintain a healthy community in which everyone works to contribute to its well-being. This richly imagined story unfolds through a series of narrated “translations” that illuminate individual lives, including a woman named Stone Telling, who travels beyond the Valley and comes to reside with another tribe, the patriarchal Condor people. With sharp poignancy, Le Guin explores the complexities of the Kesh’s unified society and presents to us—in exquisite detail—their lives, histories, adventures, customs, language, and art. 

In addition to poems and folk tales, Le Guin created verse dramas, records of oral performances, recipes, and even an alphabet and glossary of the Kesh language. The novel is illustrated throughout with drawings by artist Margaret Chodos and includes a musical component—original recordings of Kesh songs that Le Guin collaborated on with composer Todd Barton—bringing this utterly original and compelling world to life.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Release date: June 27, 2023

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 640

Sample

A First Note

THE PEOPLE IN this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California.

The main part of the book is their voices speaking for themselves in stories and life-stories, plays, poems, and songs. If the reader will bear with some unfamiliar terms they will all be made clear at last. Coming at my work as a novelist, I thought it best to put many of the explanatory, descriptive pieces into a section called The Back of the Book, where those who want narrative can ignore them and those who enjoy explanations can find them. The glossary may also be useful or amusing.

The difficulty of translation from a language that doesn’t yet exist is considerable, but there’s no need to exaggerate it. The past, after all, can be quite as obscure as the future. The ancient Chinese book called Tao teh ching has been translated into English dozens of times, and indeed the Chinese have to keep retranslating it into Chinese at every cycle of Cathay, but no translation can give us the book that Lao Tze (who may not have existed) wrote. All we have is the Tao teh ching that is here, now. And so with translations from a literature of the (or a) future. The fact that it hasn’t yet been written, the mere absence of a text to translate, doesn’t make all that much difference. What was and what may be lie, like children whose faces we cannot see, in the arms of silence. All we ever have is here, now.

 

Introduction

TO LOVE CALIFORNIA in this moment is to mourn it, which is possibly true of anything at any time, but feels especially true of my here and now, this long, tawny state where I have lived my whole life and is my home, the dry, sweet air of the summer—these days laced with danger—the smell of grass and the dust beneath, grass shimmering on the flanks of hills like gold fur on a sleeping animal, the fog that makes a thin rain when it passes through the fingers of redwood leaves—I could go on. When I am gone, I ache for it, when I am here, I feel in my body its newly off kilter seasons, I feel thirsty for real rain like a tree would, and spend restless days or weeks indoors avoiding the smoke from sometimes hundreds of wildfires. And still: such beauty. The summer in Mendocino, when I first read Always Coming Home, the ferns were a little brown at the tips, the birds seemed dazed and hot, the creek was patchy. Around town, desperate signs urged us to conserve, the town was nearly out of water. I was sitting out on a stump, reading much more slowly than I normally do, often taking breaks from the text to look up at the forest, whose small movements I felt more attuned to. Every now and then some of the animals from the book wandered into my clearing, the liquid-eyed fox that gazed at me for a moment before slinking away; the immensely talkative woodpeckers who held long, angry-sounding conversations just out of sight. It was an experience I had never quite had before or since in my reading life: one of utter transparency. It felt, at times, less like I was reading, and more like I was looking through. The book’s utopia was almost visible to me, shimmering like heat in the day’s air. That shimmer of possibility is akin to hope.

Always Coming Home investigates a point in the unfixed future, after Northern California has been destroyed by the forces that are currently overtaking it, and remade anew. What happens in the Valley of Na, to the Kesh people whose culture and landscape, animals and other non-human people this book takes as its center, have not yet happened, but will happen. From all the strange certainty of that future tense, this remarkable novel takes its energy. Here we are, grounded in the Kesh’s present culture, which looks a little at first like our understandings of other indigenous American cultures. But as we get our bearings, the Kesh and surrounding communities become distinct, science-fictional, and we see the edges of what came before. What happened to that society that drove itself into ruin, the culture—ours—that preceded the Kesh? And what became of the pre-colonized cultures that were there before?

You may be sensing already that in order to ask these questions, the book has to do something, I mean formally, that novels rarely allow themselves to do: to loose itself from the strictures of the addictive narrative arc. If the engine of narrative is conflict, then what happens if a story organizes itself around another center? What a dangerous question, one that risks nearly everything—most pressingly, risks losing the reader’s precious attention. Le Guin is conscious of the danger, and starts her novel off with a sly bait and switch—that is, she starts with a story. It’s a nice, normal, conflict-y one, of a young girl, North Owl, coming of age between two worlds. One is that of the Kesh, whose peaceful, matriarchal society the book spends most of its time investigating; the other is the Condor’s, her absent father’s people, a war-like, patriarchal society doomed to replicate the same failures of an apocalyptic past (a past that closely and at times satirically mirrors our own). As North Owl meets her father for the first time and is introduced to the possibility of life beyond the Kesh, Le Guin imparts many of the customs and features of the culture she has created in that elegant, offhand way of hers. This entire book could have been North Owl’s—the philosophies that underlie the life of the Kesh imparted to us through her voice and experience. But her story ends—or rather, and rather abruptly, it stops. It is only an excerpt of her autobiography, of which, at the beginning, we receive a few chapters. From there, we’re pushed off the cliff of narrative, and into poem, ritual, description, an

d song.

If the human brain loves narrative, it loves perhaps equally if more subtly its cousin, pattern. And in this book, patterns abound. The book forgoes the arc to take the spiral as both its structure and its repeating motif. A spiral is not a circle; you never quite return to the place where you started, but you never quite leave it either, a curving motion that complicates the linear idea of progress. After all, there’s a little poison in the arc, along with the pleasure. In her lively essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Le Guin argues that this structure most ably serves “the killer story,” about “bashing, thrusting, raping, killing, about the Hero.” It’s the story we in the West keep telling ourselves about the righteousness of imperialism, capitalism, and violent conquest, of the elevation of the individual over the communal, of conflict as a kind of proving ground for who deserves to hold power. Le Guin proposes an alternative: “A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.” Maybe the spiral is the twine that ties this bundle together, and holds it in place.

The Kesh’s spiral is actually two: the heyiya-if, two interlocking arms that do not touch at the center. This spiral is found—fractal-like—in every level of Kesh life; from its underpinning philosophies on life and death, to the wide arcs traced by hawks and buzzards, in musical notions and the structures of Kesh plays and the pattern of whirling fur of the Le Guin–invented animal, the himpi. And look at the title itself! Coming suggests the movement of return rather than of arrival, always fixes us in that perpetual movement. Home: well, homes themselves are spirals, the sites for constant return to the daily tasks that make up life, the washing of dishes, the preparing of food, the sweeping and bathing and mending. “To [the historian, named Gather], it appears, chronology is essentially artificial, almost an arbitrary arrangement of events—an alphabet as opposed to a sentence . . . He doesn’t perceive time as a direction, let alone a progress . . . Time is not an arrow, or a river, but a house, the house he lives in.”

And there are other pleasures too. Of the many smaller texts that comprise the novel, many histories, songs and myths are “transcribed” speech, some of the most memorable told gleefully, raunchily, by old women. Le Guin is a beautiful writer of the sentence but in these sections she bends her style to accommodate a different beauty, one that captures the cadence of colloquial speech, and human humor. There’s an earthiness in this prose, a lack of preciousness—even though we’re covering the big things like death and apocalypse and the nature of time and the sacredness of life, we’re also talking about fleas and about penises that grow hands to cut themselves from their owners, and people created by Coyote turds or words, and even passionate, multi-night orgies. In a creation story, you’re as likely to hear to the poetry of: “The sea was all mixed up with the dream, death and eternity were the same, smooth, not

 moving or going, the waters mixed up with the sands of the beach and the air so there were no edges” as you are: “The stars were his semen, they say.” Or: “Coyote steals chickens! Coyote has ticks in her asshole!”

What I’m saying is that there is great fun to be had here, Ursula is having it, she is running wild as the oats through the Valley of her novel, hooting with delight. She’s willing to argue with the novel as much as we are, ready to poke holes in the perfection of this utopia—the idea of utopia at all—to allow in stinging insects and menstrual blood, men and boys who want to make war, girls who are restless with the sameness of Valley life, and grandmothers wrapped up in insane blood feuds. And don’t even get me started on the amazing audacity of creating a cassette tape of Kesh folk songs to go along with the first edition. I marvel, revel in this, the utter luxuriousness of watching a writer say yes to herself—the discipline she has to allow herself such freedom.

“I think hard times are coming . . . ,” Le Guin warned us, in her defiant National Book Award acceptance speech in 2014, “We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.” Oh Ursula, I think often, those hard times are here. I never knew her, but in the last years of her life, which coincided with the Trump presidency, I thought of her often, comforted that her luminous mind was still at work, trying to make sense of the same world I was. When she was gone—maybe it was selfish, but I felt bereft, as though she had left me to muddle through it alone, without her. But with her books, with this book, Ursula left us a map, not a way forward, but a way around, not a way to, but a way through. Let me be clear: the hope that this book offers us is not the idea that though we may die in horrible ecological and man-made catastrophes our children’s children—or someone’s children’s children—will find balance, and flourish. I am much too selfish to find any comfort in that. Hope lies elsewhere for me.

Always Coming Home is not the first book of Le Guin’s, nor the last, to explore her radical alternative visions for how societies can be organized, how we can live with integrity in relation to one another. I love these books, but at best—I’m thinking of The Dispossessed in particular, which is tattooed upon my very heart—we are only able to enter a simulation of these ways of being, through the eyes of our hero. If narrative seduces, it can at also distract, at times calling our attention away from the burning world and into the glittering unreal (no shade: sometimes we need a break from the burning world). At worst, it can numb. So, like a limb tingling awake, stepping outside the arc can be uncomfortable at first. Without a clear conflict to pin your pleasure on, you can feel a little disoriented. You might even feel bored, a fate, in our attention-starved society, we’ve been taught to fear like death. Yet slowly, as you read, you will feel something dawning. Le Guin writes:

Even if the bowl is broken (and the bowl is broken), from the clay and the making a

nd the firing and the pattern, even if the pattern is incomplete (and the pattern is incomplete), let the mind draw its energy. Let the heart complete the pattern.

Whose heart? Yours, dear reader. Your own hands put together the shards of these smashed bowls.

The cause and effect we’re used to looking for is largely absent, or at least beside the point; the didactic morals we can usually take away do exist in the stories and especially myths contained in the book, but not the book as a whole. So we make meaning—and that making is active, even collaborative—from putting together these fragments of culture instead. This is a kind of teaching too, but it is not one that is interested in imparting the values of Kesh culture. You may not share all of the Kesh’s values; this may or may not be your utopia. (Hell, it might not even be Le Guin’s: “This isn’t a utopia, aunt! . . . This is a mere dream dreamed up in a bad time, an Up Yours to the people who ride snowmobiles, make nuclear weapons . . . a critique of civilization possible only by the civilized, an affirmation pretending to be a rejection . . .”)

What is on offer here is a profoundly different way of looking, seeing, even thinking. In a short story of Le Guin’s I love, “The Shobies’ Story,” things are going south on an interplanetary mission, but describing what the crew does in response to the crisis proves to be problematic: “To those who live by mutual empowerment, ‘thick’ description, complex and open-ended, is normal and comprehensible, but to those whose only model is hierarchic control, such description seems a muddle, a mess, along with what it describes.” For years I carried this brain-breaking sentence in my mind, provoked and tantalized. Was I so steeped in the culture of hierarchy that this principal ordered even my perception of time? Would I ever be able to experience something outside it? And then one summer, on a redwood stump in Mendocino, I looked up from this book and for a moment I felt I could.

Is it an audacious experiment to include a cassette tape of Kesh folk songs and spoken poetry, in a language you made up yourself? To break the seemingly iron-clad rules of fiction and tell us about the houses, the animals, the rituals, the food? To address the reader directly? Yes, but it is not experiment for experiment’s sake. This is a book not just to read but to live. And within this shift in attention, in experience, lies an incredible, radical power. In another great spiral text, the essay “Bewilderment,” the poet Fanny Howe writes “A dream often undermines the narratives of power and winning . . . the dreamer is aware that everything but this tiny dream exists and in this way the dream is free to act without restraint.” And here’s Audre Lorde: “[Poetry] forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change . . . the farthest

 horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems . . .” But this might make it sound like a novel, a poem, or a dream is the first step into action, another foot into the punishing certainty of linear time. And we don’t have time for linear time, with its demands for hard-won, incremental progress toward a just—or even livable—world.

Can we disobey the law of this kind of time? Can we jump straight from one rung of the spiral to another instead of diligently travelling its curves? Can we build a utopia in the world that grows ever more dystopic each passing day—in an instant? Here is my hope. Always Coming Home is not set, after all, in the future—it is set now and in the future, a future that is accessible to the people in the novel’s present. The people of the Kesh aren’t strangers, but our kin. The Valley is not a foreign land. “You take your child or grandchild in your arms,” writes Le Guin directly to the reader in the opening pages of this book, “a young baby, not a year old yet, and go down into the wild oats in the field below the barn. Stand quietly under the oak on the last slope of the hill, facing the creek. Stand quietly. Perhaps the baby will see something, or hear a voice, or speak to somebody there. Someone from home.”

Stand quietly. Read this book with your whole heart. Let it call you home.

 

Shruti Swamy

SEPTEMBER 2022

SAN FRANCISCO

 

The Quail Song

 

From the Summer Dance.

In the fields by the river

from the meadows by the river

from the fields by the river

in the meadows by the river

two quail run

 

Run two quail

rise two quail

two quail run

two quail rise

from the meadows by the river

 

Towards an Archaeology of the Future

HOW THE PATIENT scientist feels when the shapeless tussocks and vague ditches under the thistles and scrub begin to take shape and come clear: this was the outer rampart—this the gateway—that was the granary! We’ll dig here, and here, and after that I want a look at that lumpy bit on the slope. . . . How they know true glory when a thin disk slips through the fingers with the sifted dirt, and cleared with the swipe of a thumb shows, stamped in the fragile bronze, the horned god! How I envy them their shovels and sieves and tape measures, all their tools, and their wise, expert hands that touch and hold what they find! Not for long; they’ll give it to the museum, of course; but they did hold it for a moment in their hands.

I found, at last, the town I had been hunting for. After digging in several wrong places for over a year and persisting in several blockheaded opinions—that it must be walled, with one gate, for instance—I was studying yet once more the contours of my map of the region, when it dawned as slowly and certainly as the sun itself upon me that the town was there, between the creeks, under my feet the whole time. And there was never a wall; what on earth did they need a wall for? What I had taken for the gate was the bridge across the meeting of the creeks. And the sacred buildings and the dancing place not in the center of town, for the center is the Hinge, but over in their own arm of the double spiral, the right arm, of course—there in the pasture below the barn. And so it is, and so it is.

But I can’t go digging there and hope to find the curved fragment of a roof tile, the iridescent foot of a wine goblet, the ceramic cap of a solar battery, or a little coin of the gold of California, the same, for gold rusts not, that was weighed out in Placerville and spent on whores or real estate in Frisco and then perhaps was a wedding ring awhile and then went hidden in a vault deeper than the mine it came from until all security proved illfounded, and now reshaped, this time round, into a curl-rayed sun and given in honor to a skilful artisan: no, I won’t find that. It isn’t here. That little sun of gold is not, as they say, dwelling in the Houses of the Earth. It is in thin air, in the wilderness that lies beyond this day and night, the Houses of the Sky. My gold is in the shards of the broken pot at the end of the rainbow. Dig there! What will you find? Seeds. Seeds of the wild oats.

I can walk in the wild oats and the thistles, between the houses of the little town I was looking for, Sinshan. I can cross the Hinge and come onto the dancing place. There, about where that Valley oak is now, will be Obsidian, in the northeast; the Blue Clay quite close to it, dug into the hillside, the northwest; closer to me, towards the center, Serpentine of the Four Directions; then the two Adobes on a curve down towards the creek, southeast, southwest. They’ll have to drain this field, if they build the heyimas, as I think they do, underground, only the pyramidal roofs with their clerestories elevated, and the ornamented ends of the entrance ladder sticking out of the top. I can see that well enough. All kinds of seeing with the mind’s eye is allowed me here. I can stand here in the old pasture where there’s nothing but sun and rain, wild oats and thistles and crazy salsify, no cattle grazing, only deer, stand here and shut my eyes and see: the dancing place, the stepped pyramid roofs, a moon of beaten copper on a high pole over the Obsidian. If I listen, can I hear voices with the inner ear? Could you hear voices, Schliemann, in the streets of Troy? If you did, you were crazy too. The Trojans had all been dead three thousand years. Which is farther from us, farther out of reach, more silent—the dead, or the unborn? Those whose bones lie under the thistles and the dirt and the tombstones of the Past, or those who slip weightless among molecules, dwelling where a century passes in a day, among the fair folk, under the great, bell-curved Hill of Possibility?

There’s no way to reach that lot by digging. They have no bones. The only human bones in this pasture would be those of the first-comers, and they did not bury here, and left no tombs or tiles or shards or wa

lls or coins behind them. If they had a town here it was made of what the woods and fields are made of, and is gone. One may listen, but all the words of their language are gone, gone utterly. They worked obsidian, and that stays; down there at the edge of the rich man’s airport there was a workshop, and you can pick up plenty of chipped pieces, though no one has found a finished point for years. There is no other trace of them. They owned their Valley very lightly, with easy hands. They walked softly here. So will the others, the ones I seek.

The only way I can think to find them, the only archaeology that might be practical, is as follows: You take your child or grandchild in your arms, or you borrow a baby, not a year old yet, and go down into the wild oats in the field below the barn. Stand under the oak on the last slope of the hill, facing the creek. Stand quietly. Perhaps the baby will see something, or hear a voice, or speak to somebody there, somebody from home.

Stone TellingPart One

 

STONE TELLING IS my last name. It has come to me of my own choosing, because I have a story to tell of where I went when I was young; but now I go nowhere, sitting like a stone in this place, in this ground, in this Valley. I have come where I was going.

My House is the Blue Clay, my household the High Porch of Sinshan.

My mother was named Towhee, Willow, and Ashes. My father’s name, Abhao, in the Valley means Kills.

In Sinshan babies’ names often come from birds, since they are messengers. In the month before my mother bore me, an owl came every night to the oak trees called Gairga outside the windows of High Porch House, on the north side, and sang the owl’s song there; so my first name was North Owl.

High Porch is an old house, well-built, with large rooms; the beams and frame are redwood, the walls of adobe brick and plaster, the flooring oak, the windows of clear glass in small square panes. The balconies of High Porch are deep and beautiful. The great-grandmother of my grandmother was the first to live in our rooms, on the first floor, under the roof; when the family was big they needed the whole floor, but my grandmother was the only one of her generation, and so we lived in the two west rooms only. We could not give much. We had the use of ten wild olives and several other gathering trees on Sinshan Ridge and a seed-clearing on the east side of Wakyahum, and planted potatoes and corn and vegetables in one of the plots on the creek southeast of Adobe Hill, but we took much more corn and beans from the storehouses than we gave. My grandmother Valiant was a weaver. When I was a small child she had no sheep in the family, and so gave most of what she wove for wool to weave more. The first thing I remember of being alive is that my grandmother’s fingers moved across the warp of the loom, forth and back, a silver crescent bracelet shining on her wrist below the red sleeve.

The second thing I remember is that I went up to the spring of our creek in the fog in early morning in the winter. It was my first time as a Blue Clay child to dip up water for the new-moon wakwa. I was so cold I cried. The older children laughed at me and said I had spoiled the water by crying into it. I believed them, and began to bawl because I had spoiled the water. My grandmother was officiating, and she told me the water was all right, and let me carry the moon-jar all the way back to town; but I bawled and snivelled all the way, because I was cold and ashamed and the jar of spring water was cold and heavy. I can feel that cold and wet and weight now in old age, and see the dead arms of manzanita black in fog, and hear the voices laughing and talking before me and behind me on the steep path beside the creek.

 

I go there, I go there.

I go where I went

Crying beside the water.

It goes there, it goes there,

The fog along the water.

 

I did not spend much time crying; maybe not enough. My mother’s father said, “Laugh first, cry later; cry first, laugh later.” He was a Serpentine man from Chumo, and had gone back to that town to live with his mother’s people. That was all right with my grandmother. She said once, “Living with my husband is like eating unleached acorns.” But she went down to visit him from time to time in Chumo, and he would come and stay with us in the hills in summer, when Chumo was baking like a biscuit down on the Valley floor. His sister Green Drum was a famous Summer dancer, but his family never gave anything. He said they were poor because his mother and grandmother had given everything in past years putting on the Summer dances at Chumo. My grandmother said they were poor because they didn’t like working. They may both have been right.

The only other human people directly in my family lived in Madidinou. My grandmother’s sister had gone there to live, and her son had married a Red Adobe woman there. We often visited, and I played with my second cousins, a girl and boy called Pelican and Hops.

***

Our family animals when I was a small child were himpi, poultry, and a cat. Our cat was black without a white hair, handsome, mannerly, and a great hunter. We traded her kittens for himpi, so that for a while we had a big pen of himpi. I looked after them and the chickens, and kept cats out of the runs and pens down under the lower balconies. When I began staying with the animals I was still so small that the green-tailed cock frightened me. He knew it, and would come at me jerking his neck and swearing, and I would scramble over the divider into the himpi run to escape him. The himpi would come out and sit up and whistle at me. They were a comfort to me, even more than kittens. I learned not to name them, and not to trade them alive for eating, but to kill quickly those I traded, since some people kill animals without care or skill, causing fear and pain. I cried enough to suit even my grandfather, after the night a sheepdog went amok and got into the run and slaughtered every himpi but a few nestlings. I could not speak to a dog for months after that. But it turned out well for my family, since the sheepdog’s people gave us a ewe in lamb to make up for the loss of our himpi. The ewe bore twin ewe lambs, and so my mother was a shepherd again, and my grandmother had family wool to spin and weave.

I do not remember learning to read and dance; my grandmother was teaching me from before the time I began to speak and walk. When I was five I began going to the heyimas with the other Blue Clay children, mornings, and later I studied with teachers in the heyimas and in the Blood, Oak, and Mole Lodges; I learned the Salt Journey; I studied a little with the poet Ire, and a long time with the potter Clay Sun. I was not quick to learn, and never considered going to a school in one of the great towns, though several children of Sinshan did so. I liked learning in the heyimas, taking part in a structure larger than my own knowledge, in which I could find relief from feelings of fear and anger which unaided I could not understand or get past. Yet I did not learn as much as I might have done, but always hung back, and said, “I can’t do that.”

Some of the children, illmeaning or ignorant, called me Hwikmas, “half-House.” I had also heard people say of me, “She is half a person.” I understood this in my own way, badly, since it was not explained to me at home. I had not the courage to ask questions at the heyimas, or to go where I might have learned about matters outside the little town of Sinshan, and begun to see the Valley as a part of a whole as well as a whole. Since neither my mother nor her mother spoke of him, in the first years of my life all I knew of my father was that he had come from outside the Valley and had gone away again. This meant to me only that I had no father’s mother, no father’s House, and therefore was a half-person. I had not even heard of the Condor people. I had lived eight years before we went to the hot springs in Kastoha-na to treat my grandmother’s rheumatism, and in the common place there saw men of the Condor.

I will tell that journey. It was a small journey many years ago. It is a journey of the still air.

We got up in the darkness of a morning about a month past the World Dance. I gave some meat I had saved to the black cat Sidi, who was growing old. I had thought she would be hungry while we were away, and the thought had worried me for days. My mother told me, “You eat that. The cat will catch what she needs!” My mother was stern and reasoning. My grandmother said, “The child is feeding her soul. Let be.”

We put out the hearthfire and left the door open a little for the cat and the wind. We went down the stairs under the last stars; the houses looked like hills in the darkness, dark. Out on the common place it seemed lighter. We crossed the Hinge and went to the Blue Clay heyimas. Shell was waiting for us there; she was a member of the Doctors Lodge and had treated my grandmother’s pain, and they were old friends. They filled the water basin and sang the Return together. When we came up into the dancing place the light was beginning. Shell came back across the Hinge with us and through town, and after we crossed the bridge over Sinshan Creek we all squatted there under the live oaks and pissed, and said, “Go well! Stay well!” laughing. That was how Lower Valley people used to do when they left on a journey, but only old people remember it now. Then Shell went back and we went on past the barns, between the creeks, across Sinshan Fields. The sky above the hills across the Valley began to be yellow and red; where we were in the middle the woods

and hills were green; behind us Sinshan Mountain was blue and dark. So we walked in the arm of life.^* Birds were singing their different songs in the air, in the trees, and in the fields. As we came to Amiou path and turned northwest to face Grandmother Mountain, the southeast mountains let go the sun’s edge, white. Now I walk that way in that light.

My grandmother Valiant felt well and walked easily that morning, and she said, “Let’s go and see our family in Madidinou.” So we went that way, towards the sun, and came there along Sinshan Creek, where the wild and domestic geese and ducks were feeding and talking in great numbers in the cattail marshes. I had been to Madidinou many times, of course, but this time the town looked altogether different, since I was on a journey beyond it. I felt serious and important, and did not want to play with my Red Adobe cousins, though they were the children I loved best. My grandmother visited awhile with her daughter-in-law—her son died before my birth—and her grandchildren’s stepfather, and then we went on our way, crossing the plum and apricot orchards to the Old Straight Road.

I had been past and across the Old Straight Road with my Madidinou cousins, but now I was going to walk on it. I felt important but awed, and whispered heya for the first nine steps. People said it was the oldest work of hands in all the Valley, that nobody knew how long there had been a road there. Parts of it were indeed straight, but other parts went curving off towards the River and then came back to the straight. In the dust were marks of feet, sheep’s hooves, donkeys’ hooves, dogs’ paws, people’s feet shod, people’s feet bare, so many tracks of feet that I thought they must be all the tracks of all the people that had ever walked on the road for fifty thousand years. Great Valley oaks stood along the sides of the road to give windbreak and shade, and in places elms, or poplars, or huge white eucalyptus so vast and twisted that they looked older than the Road; but it was so wide that even the morning shadows did not reach across it. I thought that because it was so old, it had to be wide; but my mother explained that it was wide because the big flocks of the Upper Valley went along it to the saltgrass prairies at the Mouths of the Na after the World, and came back up-valley after the Grass, and some of those flocks were of a thousand sheep or more. They had all gone by, and we met only a couple of dungcarts following after the last of them, with a group of shitty and raucous adolescents from Telina shovelling up dung for the fields. They called all sorts of jokes at us, and my mothers replied laughing, but I hid my face. There were some other travellers on the road, and when they greeted us, again I hid my face each time; but once they were past I stared after them and asked so many questions, who are they? where are they coming from? where are they going?, that Valiant began to laugh at me and answer me with jokes.

Himpí

Because she was lame we went slowly, and because it was all new to me the way seemed immensely long to me, but by midmorning we came through the vineyards to Telina-na. I saw that town rise beside the Na, the great barns, the walls and windows of its houses among the oaks, the roofs of the heyimas, high-stepped, red and yellow around the bannered dancing place, a town like a bunch of grapes, like a cock pheasant, rich, elaborate, amazing, beautiful.

My grandmother’s half-sister’s son was living in Telina-na in a Red Adobe household, and that family had sent word to us to stay with them on our way. Telina was so much bigger than Sinshan that I thought there was no end to it, and that household was so much bigger than ours that I thought there was no end to them. Actually there were only seven or eight, living in the ground floor of Hardcinder House, but other relatives and friends kept coming and going, and there was so much working and talking and cooking and bringing and taking that I thought this household must be the wealthiest in the world. They heard me whisper to my grandmother, “Look! There are seven cooking-pots!” They all laughed at that. I was ashamed at first, but they kept repeating what I had said and laughing with so much good nature that I began saying things to make them laugh more. After I said, “This household is huge, like a mountain!” my half-uncle’s wife Vine said, “Come and live with us awhile in this mountain, then, you North Owl. We have seven pots but no daughter. We need one!” She meant that; she was the center of all that giving and taking and flowing, a generous person. But my mother did not let the words come to her, and my grandmother smiled but said nothing.

That evening my Red Adobe cousins, Vine’s two sons and some other children of the household, took me all around Telina. Hardcinder House is one of the inner houses of the left-hand common place. In the center place a horse race was going on, a wonder to me who had never dreamed of a common place big enough to hold a horse race on. I had not seen many horses, for that matter; in Sinshan it was donkey races in a cow pasture. The course was around the place leftwards, reverse, and back around rightwards to make the heyiya-if. People were up in the balconies and out on the roofs with oil and battery lamps, betting and drinking and shouting, and the horses ran through shadow and flashing lights, turning as fast as swallows, the riders yipping and yelling. Over in some balconies of the right-hand place people were singing, getting ready for the Summer dancing,

 

“Two quail run,

Two quail rise . . .”

 

Over in the dancing place they were singing down in the Serpentine heyimas, too, but we only went by there on the way to the River. Down among the willows there where the lights from the town made a little gleaming among the shadows, couples had come away to enjoy privacy. We children sneaked around looking for them in the willow thickets, and when we found a couple my cousins would yell, “Holy mole, there’s sand in the hole!” or make rude noises, and the couple would get up swearing and come after us, and we would scatter and run. If those cousins of mine did that every warm night, there wasn’t much need for contraceptives in Telina. When we got tired we went back to the house and ate some cold beans and went to sleep on the balconies and porches. All night we heard them singing the Quail Song over the way.

Next morning we three left early, though not before daybreak and a good breakfast. As we crossed the Na on the arched stone bridge, my mother held my hand. She did not do that often. I thought she did it because it was sacred to cross the River. I think now she was afraid to lose me. She thought she should let me stay in the rich town with those rich relatives.

When we were away from Telina-na her mother said to her, “For the winter, perhaps, Willow?”

My mother said nothing.

I did not think anything about it. I was happy, and talked the whole way to Chumo about the wonderful things I had seen and heard and done in Telina-na. All the time I talked my mother held my hand.

We came into Chumo hardly knowing we had come into it, the houses are so sca

ttered out and hidden among trees. We were to spend the night at our heyimas there, but first we went to visit my grandmother’s husband, my mother’s father. He had a room of his own with some of his Yellow Adobe relatives in a single-story house under oaks in sight of the creek, a pretty place. His room, which was his workroom, was large and dank. Up till then I had always known my grandfather by his middle name, Potter, but he had changed his name: he told us to call him Corruption.

I thought that was a crazy name, and being puffed up by the laughter of the family in Telina when I made jokes, I said to my mother, pretty loudly, “Does he stink?” My grandmother heard and said, “Be quiet. It’s nothing to joke about.” I felt bad and foolish, but my grandmother didn’t seem to be cross with me. When the other people of the house had gone back to their rooms, leaving us with my grandfather in his room, she said to him, “What kind of name have you let come to you?”

He said, “A true name.”

He looked different from the way he had looked the summer before in Sinshan. He had always been gloomy and complaining. Nothing was ever right, and nobody ever did things right except himself, although he never did anything much, because the time wasn’t right. Now he still looked grim and sour, but he behaved with importance. He said to Valiant, “There’s no use going to the hot springs for a cure. You’d do better staying home and learning how to think.”

“How do you learn that?” she asked.

He said, “You have to learn that your pains and aches are merely an error in thinking. Your body is not real.”

“I think it’s real,” Valiant said, and she laughed and slapped her hips.

“Like this?” Corruption said. He was holding the wooden paddle he used to smooth the outside of the big clay storage jars he made. The paddle was carved of olive wood, as long as my arm and a handspan wide. He held it up in his right hand, brought his left hand up towards it, and passed it through his left hand. It went thro

ugh muscle and bone like a knife through water.

Valiant and Willow stared at the paddle and the hand. He motioned to them to let him do the same thing to them. They did not put up their hands; but I was curious, and wanted to go on having attention paid to me, so I held up my right arm. Corruption reached out the paddle and passed it through my arm between wrist and elbow. I felt the soft motion of it; it felt as a candle flame feels when you pass a finger through it. It made me laugh with surprise. My grandfather looked at me and said, “This North Owl might come to the Warriors.”

It was the first time I had heard that word.

Valiant said, and I could tell she was angry, “No chance of that. Your Warriors are all men.”

“She can marry one,” said my grandfather. “When the time comes she can marry Dead Sheep’s son.”

“You can go do such-and-such with your dead sheep!” Valiant said, which made me laugh again, but Willow touched her arm to quieten her. I don’t know whether my mother was frightened by the power her father had shown, or by the quarrelling between her father and mother; anyhow, she restored quiet behavior between them. We drank a glass of wine with my grandfather, and then we walked with him to the dancing place of Chumo and to the Blue Clay heyimas. We spent the night there in their guest room, the first night I had slept underground. I liked the silence and stillness of the air, but was not used to it, and kept waking in the night and listening, and only when I heard my mothers’ breathing could I sleep again.

There were some other people Valiant wanted to see in Chumo, where she had lived when she learned tapestry weaving, and we did not leave that town till near noon. As we went along the northeast side of the River the Valley narrowed in, and the road went among orchards of olive, plum, and nectarine, among hills terraced with vines. I had never been so close to the Mountain, and it filled my eyes. When I looked back, I could not see Sinshan Mountain: its shape had changed, or other mountains of the southwest side had hidden it. That alarmed me. I finally spoke of it to my mother, who understood my fear, and reassured me that when we returned to Sinshan our mountain would be where it belonged.

After we crossed the Wether Creek we could see the town of Chukulmas up in the hills across the Valley, its Fire Tower standing up by itself, built of colored stones, red, orange, and yellowish-white, patterned as finely as a basket or a snake. Cattle grazed in the yellow pasture-bays on the foothills, between the arms of the woods. On the narrowed, flat floor of the Valley were many wineries and fruit-drying sheds, and the orcharders from Chukulmas were putting up summerhouses. Beside the Na the dark mills loomed among the oaks, their wheels making a sound you could hear for a long way. Quail were calling the three-note call and larks went up from the fields and the buzzards turned very high up. The sunlight was clear, the air was still.

My mother said, “This is a day of the Ninth House.”

My grandmother said only, “I’ll be glad to get to Kastoha.” Since we left Chumo she had been silent and walked lame.

There was a feather on the way before my mother’s feet, a grey-barred, blue wing-feather of a jay. It was the answer to what she had said. She picked it up and held it as she walked. She was a small woman, round-faced, with fine hands and feet, barefoot that day, wearing old buckskin trousers and a sleeveless shirt, carrying a little backpack, her hair braided and coiled, a blue feather in her hand. So she walks in the sunlight in the still air.

Shadows were coming across the Valley from the western hills when we came to

Kastoha-na. Valiant saw the roofs above the orchards and said, “Aha, there’s Granny’s Twat!” Old people used to call Kastoha that, because it is between the spread legs of the Mountain. Hearing it called that, I had imagined the town to be set among fir and redwood trees and to be a cave, dark and mysterious, with the River running out of it. When we came across the Na Bridge and I saw it was a big town like Telina only bigger yet, with hundreds of houses, and more people than I knew were in the world, I began crying. Maybe it was shame that made me cry, because I saw how silly I had been to think that a town could be a cave; maybe I was frightened or tired from all I had seen in the days and nights of our journey. Valiant took my right arm in her hands and felt it and looked at it. She had not done that after Corruption had put the paddle through it; nothing at all had been said about that. “He’s an old fool,” she said now, “and so am I.” She took off the silver crescent bracelet which she always wore, and slipped it over my hand onto my right arm. “There,” she said. “It won’t fall off, North Owl.”

She was so thin that the crescent was only a little large for my small arm; but that was not what she meant. I stopped crying. In the lodging house by the hot springs that night I slept, but while I slept I knew all night that the moon was on my arm, under my head.

On the next day I saw the Condor for the first time. Everything in Kastoha-na was strange to me, everything was new, everything was different from home; but as soon as I saw those men I knew that Sinshan and Kastoha were all one thing, the same thing, and this was a different thing.

I was like a cat that scents a rattlesnake or a dog that sees a ghost. My legs got stiff, and I could feel the air on my head because my hair was trying to stand up. I stopped short and said in a whisper, “What are they?”

My grandmother said, “Men of the Condor. Men of no House.”

My mother was beside me. She went forward very suddenly and spoke to the four tall men. They turned to her, beaked and winged, looking down at her. My legs went weak then and I wanted to piss. I saw black vultures stooping on my mother, stretching out their red necks, their pointed beaks, staring with eyes ringed with white. They pulled things out of her mouth and belly.

She came back to us and we walked on towards the hot springs. She said, “He’s been in the north, in the volcano country. Those men say the Condor are coming back. They knew his name when I said it, they said he is an important person. Did you see how they listened when I said his name?” My mother laughed. I had never heard her laugh that way.

Valiant said, “Whose name?”

Willow said, “My husband’s name.”

They had stopped again, facing each other.

My grandmother shrugged and turned away.

“I tell you he’s coming back,” my mother said.

I saw white sparkles crowding all around her face, like flies of light. I cried out, and then I began to vomit, and crouched down. “I don’t want it to eat you!” I kept saying.

My mother carriedn

 me back to the lodging house in her arms. I slept awhile, and in the afternoon I went with Valiant to the hot springs. We lay a long time in the hot water. It was brownish-blue and full of mud and smelled of sulphur, very disagreeable at first, but once you were in it you began to feel like floating in it forever. The pool was shallow, wide, and long, lined with blue-green glazed tiles. There were no walls, but a high roof of timbers; screens could be set against the wind. It was a lovely place. All the people there had come there for healing, and talked only quietly, or lay alone in the water singing soft healing songs. The blue-brown water hid their bodies, so looking down the long pool you could only see heads resting on the water, leaning back against the tiles, some with eyes closed, some singing, in the mist that hung above the hot springs.

 

I lie there, I lie there,

I lie where I lay

Floating in the shallow water.

It floats there, it floats there,

The mist above the water.

 

The lodging house of the hot springs of Kastoha-na was our household for a month. Valiant bathed in the waters and went daily to the Doctors Lodge to learn the Copper Snake. My mother went alone up onto the Mountain, to the Springs of the River, to Wakwaha, and on to the summit in the tracks of the mountain lion^*. A child could not spend all day in the hot pool and the Doctors Lodge, but I was afraid of the crowded common places of the big town, and we had no relatives in the houses, so I stayed mostly at the hot springs and helped with the work. When I learned where the Geyser was I went there often. An old man who lived there and guided visitors about the heya place and sang the story of the Rivers Underground used to talk to me and  let me help him. ...