Ursula K. Le Guin - Coming of Age in Karhide

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Coming of Age in Karhide

by Ursula K. Le Guin

SOV THADE TAGE EM EREB, OF RER

IN KARHIDE, ON GETHEN

I live in the oldest city in the world. Long before there were kings in Karhide, Rer was a city, the

marketplace and meeting ground for all the Northeast, the Plains, and Kerm Land. The Fastness of Rer

was a center of learning, a refuge, a judgment seat fifteen thousand years ago. Karhide became a nation

here, under the Geger kings, who ruled for a thousand years. In the thousandth year Sedern Geger, the

Unking, cast the crown into the River Arre from the palace towers, proclaiming an end to dominion. The

time they call the Flowering of Rer, the Summer Century, began then. It ended when the Hearth of Harge

took power and moved their capital across the mountains to Erhenrang. The Old Palace has been empty

for centuries. But it stands. Nothing in Rer falls down. The Arre floods through the street-tunnels every

year in the Thaw, winter blizzards may bring thirty feet of snow, but the city stands. Nobody knows how

old the houses are, because they have been rebuilt forever. Each one sits in its gardens without respect to

the position of any of the others, as vast and random and ancient as hills. The roofed streets and canals

angle about among them. Rer is all corners. We say that the Harges left because they were afraid of what

might be around the corner.

Time is different here. I learned in school how the Orgota, the Ekumen, and most other people count

years. They call the year of some portentous event Year One and number forward from it. Here it's

always Year One. On Getheny Thern, New Year's Day, the Year One becomes one-ago, one-to-come

becomes One, and so on. It's like Rer, everything always changing but the city never changing.

When I was fourteen (in the Year One, or fifty-ago) I came of age. I have been thinking about that a

good deal recently.

It was a different world. Most of us had never seen an Alien, as we called them then. We might have

heard the Mobile talk on the radio, and at school we saw pictures of Aliens—the ones with hair around

their mouths were the most pleasingly savage and repulsive. Most of the pictures were disappointing.

They looked too much like us. You couldn't even tell that they were always in kemmer. The female

Aliens were supposed to have enormous breasts, but my Mothersib Dory had bigger breasts than the

ones in the pictures.

When the Defenders of the Faith kicked them out of Orgoreyn, when King Emran got into the Border

War and lost Erhenrang, even when their Mobiles were outlawed and forced into hiding at Estre in

Kerm, the Ekumen did nothing much but wait. They had waited for two hundred years, as patient as

Handdara. They did one thing: they took our young king off-world to foil a plot, and then brought the

same king back sixty years later to end her wombchild's disastrous reign. Argaven XVII is the only king

who ever ruled four years before her heir and forty years after.

The year I was born (the Year One, or sixty-four-ago) was the year Argaven's second reign began. By

the time I was noticing anything beyond my own toes, the war was over, the West Fall was part of

Karhide again, the capital was back in Erhenrang, and most of the damage done to Rer during the

Overthrow of Emran had been repaired. The old houses had been rebuilt again. The Old Palace had

been patched again. Argaven XVII was miraculously back on the throne again. Everything was the way it

used to be, ought to be, back to normal, just like the old days—everybody said so.

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Indeed those were quiet years, an interval of recovery before Argaven, the first Gethenian who ever left

our planet, brought us at last fully into the Ekumen; before we, not they, became the Aliens; before we

came of age. When I was a child we lived the way people had lived in Rer forever. It is that way, that

timeless world, that world around the corner, I have been thinking about, and trying to describe for

people who never knew it. Yet as I write I see how also nothing changes, that it is truly the Year One

always, for each child that comes of age, each lover who falls in love.

There were a couple of thousand people in the Ereb Hearths, and a hundred and forty of them lived in

my Hearth, Ereb Tage. My name is Sov Thade Tage em Ereb, after the old way of naming we still use in

Rer. The first thing I remember is a huge dark place full of shouting and shadows, and I am falling upward

through a golden light into the darkness. In thrilling terror, I scream. I am caught in my fall, held, held

close; I weep; a voice so close to me that it seems to speak through my body says softly, "Sov, Sov,

Sov." And then I am given something wonderful to eat, something so sweet, so delicate that never again

will I eat anything quite so good....

I imagine that some of my wild elder hearthsibs had been throwing me about, and that my mother

comforted me with a bit of festival cake. Later on when I was a wild elder sib we used to play catch with

babies for balls; they always screamed, with terror or with delight, or both. It's the nearest to flying

anyone of my generation knew. We had dozens of different words for the way snow falls, floats,

descends, glides; blows, for the way clouds move, the way ice floats, the way boats sail; but not that

word. Not yet. And so I don't remember "flying." I remember falling upward through the golden light.

Family houses in Rer are built around a big central hall. Each story has an inner balcony clear round that

space, and we call the whole story, rooms and all, a balcony. My family occupied the whole second

balcony of Ereb Tage. There were a lot of us. My grandmother had borne four children, and all of them

had children, so I had a bunch of cousins as well as a younger and an older wombsib. "The Thades

always kemmer as women and always get pregnant," I heard neighbors say, variously envious,

disapproving, admiring. "And they never keep kemmer," somebody would add. The former was an

exaggeration, but the latter was true. Not one of us kids had a father. I didn't know for years who my

getter was, and never gave it a thought. Clannish, the Thades preferred not to bring outsiders, even other

members of our own Hearth, into the family. If young people fell in love and started talking about keeping

kemmer or making vows, Grandmother and the mothers were ruthless. "Vowing kemmer, what do you

think you are, some kind of noble? some kind of fancy person? The kemmerhouse was good enough for

me and it's good enough for you," the mothers said to their lovelorn children, and sent them away, clear

off to the old Ereb Domain in the country, to hoe braties till they got over being in love.

So as a child I was a member of a flock, a school; a swarm, in and out of our warren of rooms, tearing

up and down the staircases, working together and learning together and looking after the babies—in our

own fashion—and terrorizing quieter hearthmates by our numbers and our noise. As far as I know we

did no real harm. Our escapades were well within the rules and limits of the sedate, ancient Hearth, which

we felt not as constraints but as protection, the walls that kept us safe. The only time we got punished

was when my cousin Sether decided it would be exciting if we tied a long rope we'd found to the

second-floor balcony railing, tied a big knot in the rope, held onto the knot, and jumped. "I'll go first,"

Sether said. Another misguided attempt at flight. The railing and Sether's broken leg were mended, and

the rest of us had to clean the privies, all the privies of the Hearth, for a month. I think the rest of the

Hearth had decided it was time the young Thades observed some discipline.

Although I really don't know what I was like as a child, I think that if I'd had any choice I might have

been less noisy than my playmates, though just as unruly. I used to love to listen to the radio, and while

the rest of them were racketing around the balconies or the centerhall in winter, or out in the streets and

gardens in summer, I would crouch for hours in my mother's room behind the bed, playing her old

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serem-wood radio very softly so that my sibs wouldn't know I was there. I listened to anything, Lays and

plays and hearthtales, the Palace news, the analyses of grain harvests and the detailed weather reports; I

listened every day all one winter to an ancient saga from the Pering Storm-Border about snowghouls,

perfidious traitors, and bloody ax-murders, which haunted me at night so that I couldn't sleep and would

crawl into bed with my mother for comfort. Often my younger sib was already there in the warm, soft,

breathing dark. We would sleep all entangled and curled up together like a nest of Pesthry.

My mother, Guyr Thade Tage em Ereb, was impatient, warm-hearted, and impartial, not exerting much

control over us three wombchildren, buy keeping watch. The Thades were all tradespeople working in

Ereb shops and masteries, with little or no cash to spend; but when I was ten, Guyr bought me a radio, a

new one, and said where my sibs could hear, "You don't have to share it." I treasured it for years and

finally shared it with my own wombchild.

So the years went along and I went along in the warmth and density and certainty of a family and a

Hearth embedded in tradition, threads on the quick ever-repeating shuttle weaving the timeless web of

custom and act and work and relationship, and at this distance I can hardly tell one year from the other or

myself from the other children: until I turned fourteen.

The reason most people in my Hearth would remember that year is for the big party known as Dory's

Somer-Forever Celebration. My Mothersib Dory had stopped going into kemmer that winter. Some

people didn't do anything when they stopped going into kemmer; others went to the Fastness for a ritual;

some stayed on at the Fastness for months after, or even moved there. Dory, who wasn't spiritually

inclined, said, "If I can't have kids and can't have sex anymore and have to get old and die, at least I can

have a party."

I have already had some trouble trying to tell this story in a language that has no somer pronouns, only

gendered pronouns. In their last years of kemmer, as the hormone balance chances, many people tend to

go into kemmer as men; Dory's kemmers had been male for over a year, so I'll call Dory "he," although

of course the point was that he would never be either he or she again.

In any event, his party was tremendous. He invited everyone in our Hearth and the two neighboring Ereb

Hearths, and it went on for three days. It had been a long winter and the spring was late and cold; people

were ready for something new, something hot to happen. We cooked for a week, and a whole

storeroom was packed full of beer kegs. A lot of people who were in the middle of going out of kemmer,

or had already and hadn't done anything about it, came and joined in the ritual. That's what I remember

vividly: in the firelit three-story centerhall of our Hearth, a circle of thirty or forty people, all middle-aged

or old, singing and dancing, stamping the drumbeats. There was a fierce energy in them, their gray hair

was loose and wild, they stamped as if their feet would go through the floor, their voices were deep and

strong, they were laughing. The younger people watching them seemed pallid and shadowy. I looked at

the dancers and wondered, why are they happy? Aren't they old? Why do they act like they'd got free?

What's it like, then, kemmer?

No, I hadn't thought much about kemmer before. What would be the use? Until we come of age we

have no gender and no sexuality, our hormones don't give us any trouble at all. And in a city Hearth we

never see adults in kemmer. They kiss and go. Where's Maba? In the kemmerhouse, love, now eat your

porridge. When's Maba coming back? Soon, love. And in a couple of days Maba comes back, looking

sleepy and shiny and refreshed and exhausted. Is it like having a bath, Maba? Yes, a bit, love, and what

have you been up to while I was away?

Of course we played kemmer, when we were seven or eight. This here's the kemmerhouse and I get to

be the woman. No, I do. No, I do, I thought of it! And we rubbed our bodies together and rolled around

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laughing, and then maybe we stuffed a ball under our shirt and were pregnant, and then we gave birth,

and then we played catch with the ball. Children will play whatever adults do; but the kemmer game

wasn't much of a game. It often ended in a tickling match. And most children aren't even very ticklish; till

they come of age.

After Dory's party, I was on duty in the Hearth crèche all through Tuwa, the last month of spring; come

summer I began my fast apprenticeship, in a furniture workshop in the Third Ward. I loved getting up

early and running across the city on the wayroofs and up on the curbs of the open ways; after the late

Thaw some of the ways were still full of water, deep enough for kayaks and poleboats. The air would be

still and cold and clear; the sun would come up behind the old towers of the Unpalace, red as blood, and

all the waters and the windows of the city would flash scarlet and gold. In the workshop there was the

piercing sweet smell of fresh-cut wood and the company of grown people, hard-working, patient, and

demanding, taking me seriously. I wasn't a child anymore, I said to myself. I was an adult, a working

person.

But why did I want to cry all the time? Why did I want to sleep all the time? Why did I get angry at

Sether? Why did Sether keep bumping into me and saying "Oh sorry" in that stupid husky voice? Why

was I so clumsy with the big electric lathe that I ruined six chair-legs one after the other? "Get that kid off

the lathe," shouted old Marth, and I slunk away in a fury of humiliation. I would never be a carpenter, I

would never be adult, who gave a shit for chair-legs anyway?

"I want to work in the gardens," I told my mother and grandmother.

"Finish your training and you can work in the gar-dens next summer," Grand said, and Mother nodded.

This sensible counsel appeared to me as a heartless injustice, a failure of love, a condemnation to despair.

I Sulked. I raged.

"What's wrong with the furniture shop?" my elders asked after several days of sulk and rage.

"Why does stupid Sether have to be there!" I shouted. Dory, who was Sether's mother, raised an

eyebrow and smiled.

"Are you all right?" my mother asked me as I slouched into the balcony after work, and I snarled, "I'm

fine," and rushed to the privies and vomited.

I was sick. My back ached all the time. My head ached and got dizzy and heavy. Something I could not

locate anywhere, some part of my soul, hurt with a keen, desolate, ceaseless pain. I was afraid of myself:

of my tears, my rage, my sickness, my clumsy body. It did not feel like my body, like me. It felt like

something else, an ill-fitting garment, a smelly, heavy overcoat that belonged to some old person, some

dead person. It wasn't mine, it wasn't me. Tiny needles of agony shot through my nipples, hot as fire.

When I winced and held my arms across my chest, I knew that everybody could see what was

happening. Anybody could smell me. I smelled sour, strong, like blood, tike raw pelts of animals. My

clitopenis was swollen hugely and stuck out from between my labia, and then shrank nearly to nothing, so

that it hurt to piss. My labia itched and reddened as with loathsome insect-bites. Deep in my belly

something moved, some monstrous growth. I was utterly ashamed. I was dying.

"Sov," my mother said, sitting down beside me on my bed, with a curious, tender, complicitous smile,

"shall we choose your kemmerday?"

"I'm not in kemmer," I said passionately.

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"No," Guyr said. "But next month I think you will be."

"Iwon't! "

My mother stroked my hair and face and arm.We shape each other to be human, old people used to

say as they stroked babies or children or one another with those long, slow, soft caresses.

After a while my mother said, "Sether's coming in, too. But a month or so later than you, I think. Dory

said let's have a double kemmerday, but I think you should have your own day in your own time."

I burst into tears and cried, "I don't want one, I don't want to, I just want, I just want to go away...."

"Sov," my mother said, "if you want to, you can go to the kemmerhouse at Gerodda Ereb, where you

won't know anybody. But I think it would be better here, where people do know you. They'd like it.

They'll be so glad for you. Oh, your Grand's so proud of you! 'Have you seen that grandchild of mine,

Sov, have you seen what a beauty, what amahad! ' Everybody's bored to tears hearing about you...."

Mahad is a dialect word, a Rer word; it means a strong, handsome, generous, upright person, a reliable

person. My mother's stern mother, who commanded and thanked, but never praised, said I was a

mahad? A terrifying idea, that dried my tears.

"All right," I said desperately, "Here. But not next month! It isn't. I'm not."

"Let me see," my mother said. Fiercely embarrassed yet relieved to obey, I stood up and undid my

trousers.

My mother took a very brief and delicate look, hugged me, and said, "Next month, yes, I'm sure. You'll

feel much better in a day or two. And next month it'll be different. It really will."

Sure enough, the next day the headache and the hot itching were gone, and though I was still tired and

sleepy a lot of the time, I wasn't quite so stupid and clumsy at work. After a few more days I felt pretty

much myself, light and easy in my limbs. Only if I thought about it there was still that queer feeling that

wasn't quite in any part of my body, and that was sometimes very painful and sometimes only strange,

almost something I wanted to feel again.

My cousin Sether and I had been apprenticed together at the furniture shop. We didn't go to work

together because Sether was still slightly lame from that rope trick a couple of years earlier, and got a lift

to work in a poleboat so long as there was water in the streets. When they closed the Arre Watergate

and the ways went dry, Sether had to walk. So we walked together. The first couple of days we didn't

talk much. I still felt angry at Sether. Because I couldn't run through the dawn anymore but had to walk at

a lame-leg pace. And because Sether was always around. Always there. Taller than me, and quicker at

the lathe, and with that long, heavy, shining hair. Why did anybody want to wear their hair so long,

anyhow? I felt as if Sether's hair was in front of my own eyes.

We were walking home, tired, on a hot evening of Ockre, the first month of summer. I could see that

Sether was limping and trying to hide or ignore it, trying to swing right along at my quick pace, very

straight-backed, scowling. A great wave of pity and admiration overwhelmed me, and that thing, that

growth, that new being, whatever it was in my bowels and in the ground of my soul moved and turned

again, turned towards Sether, aching, yearning.

"Are you coming into kemmer?" I said in a hoarse, husky voice I had never heard come out of my

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mouth.

"In a couple of months," Sether said in a mumble, not looking at me, still very stiff and frowning.

"I guess I have to have this, do this, you know, this stuff, pretty soon."

"I wish I could," Sether said. "Get it over with."

We did not look at each other. Very gradually, unnoticeably, I was slowing my pace till we were going

along side by side at an easy walk.

"Sometimes do you feel like your tits are on fire?" I asked without knowing that I was going to say

anything.

Sether nodded.

After a while, Sether said, "Listen, does your pisser get...."

I nodded.

"It must be what the Aliens look like," Sether said with revulsion. "This, this thing sticking out, it gets so

big ... it gets in the way."

We exchanged and compared symptoms for a mile or so. It was a relief to talk about it, to find company

in misery, but it was also frightening to hear our misery confirmed by the other. Sether burst out, "I'll tell

you what I hate, what I reallyhate about it—it's dehumanizing. To get jerked around like that by your

own body, to lose control, I can't stand the idea. Of being just a sex machine. And everybody just turns

into something to have sex with. You know that people in kemmer go crazy anddie if there isn't anybody

else in kemmer? That they'll even attack people in somer? Their own mothers?"

"They can't," I said, shocked.

"Yes they can. Tharry told me. This truck driver up in the High Kargav went into kemmer as a male

while their caravan was stuck in the snow, and he was big and strong, and he went crazy and he, he did it

to his cab-mate, and his cab-mate was in somer and got hurt, really hurt, trying to fight him off. And then

the driver came out of kemmer and committed suicide."

This horrible story brought the sickness back up from the pit of my stomach, and I could say nothing.

Sether went on, "People in kemmer aren't even human anymore! And we have to do that—to be that

way!

Now that awful, desolate fear was out in the open. Buts was not a relief to speak it. It was even larger

and more terrible, spoken.

"It's stupid," Sether said. "It's a primitive device for continuing the species. There's no need for civilized

people to undergo it. People who want to get pregnant could do it with injections. It would be genetically

sound. You could choose your child's getter. There wouldn't be all this inbreeding, people fucking with

their sibs, like animals. Why do we have to be animals?"

Sether's rage stirred me. I shared it. I also felt shocked and excited by the word "fucking," which I had

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never heard spoken. I looked again at my cousin, the thin, ruddy face, the heavy, long, shining hair. My

age, Sether looked older. A half year in pain from a shattered leg had darkened and matured the

adventurous, mischievous child, teaching anger, pride, endurance. "Sether," I said, "listen, it doesn't

matter, you're human, even if you have to do that stuff, that fucking. You're a mahad."

"Getheny Kus," Grand said: the first day of the month of Kus, midsummer day.

"I won't be ready," I said.

"You'll be ready."

"I want to go into kemmer with Sether."

"Sether's got a month or two yet to go. Soon enough. It looks like you might be on the same moon-time,

though. Dark-of-the-mooners, eh? That's what I used to be. So, just stay on the same wavelength, you

and Sether...." Grand had never grinned at me this way, an inclusive grin, as if I were an equal.

My mother's mother was sixty years old, short, brawny, broad-hipped, with keen clear eyes, a

stone-mason by trade, an unquestioned autocrat in the Hearth. I, equal to this formidable person? It was

my first intimation that I might be becoming more, rather than less, human.

"I'd like it," said Grand, "if you spent this half-month at the Fastness. But it's up to you."

"At the Fastness?" I said, taken by surprise. We Thades were all Handdara, but very inert Handdara,

keeping only the great festivals, muttering the grace all in one garbled word, practicing none of the

disciplines. None of my older hearthsibs had been sent off to the Fastness before their kemmerday. Was

there something wrong with me?

"You've got a good brain," said Grand. "You and Sether. I'd like to see some of you lot casting some

shadows, some day. We Thades sit here in our Hearth and breed like pesthry. Is that enough? It'd be a

good thing if some of you got your heads out of the bedding."

"What do they do in the Fastness?" I asked, and Grand answered frankly, "I don't know. Go find out.

They teach you. They can teach you how to control kemmer."

"All right," I said promptly. I would tell Sether that the Indwellers could control kemmer. Maybe I could

learn how to do it and come home and teach it to Sether.

Grand looked at me with approval. I had taken up the challenge.

Of course I didn't learn how to control kemmer, in a halfmonth in the Fastness. The first couple of days

there, I thought I wouldn't even be able to control my homesickness. From our warm, dark warren of

rooms full of people talking, sleeping, eating, cooking, washing, playing remma, playing music, kids

running around, noise, family, I went across the city to a huge, clean, cold, quiet house of strangers. They

were courteous, they treated me with respect. I was terrified. Why should a person of forty, who knew

magic disciplines of superhuman strength and fortitude, who could walk barefoot through blizzards, who

could Foretell, whose eyes were the wisest and calmest I had ever seen, why should an Adept of the

Handdara respect me?

"Because you are so ignorant," Ranharrer the Adept said, smiling, with great tenderness.

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Having me only for a halfmonth, they didn't try to influence the nature of my ignorance very much. I

practiced the Untrance several hours a day, and came to like it: that was quite enough for them, and they

praised me. "At fourteen, most people go crazy moving slowly," my teacher said.

During my last six or seven days in the Fastness certain symptoms began to show up again, the

headache, the swellings and shooting pains, the irritability. One morning the sheet of my cot in my bare,

peaceful little room was bloodstained. I looked at the smear with horror and loathing. I thought I had

scratched my itching labia to bleeding in my sleep, but I knew also what the blood was. I began to cry. I

had to wash the sheet somehow. I had fouled, defiled this place where everything was clean, austere, and

beautiful.

An old Indweller, finding me scrubbing desperately at the sheet in the washrooms, said nothing, but

brought me some soap that bleached away the stain. I went back to my room, which I had come to love

with the passion of one who had never before known any actual privacy, and crouched on the sheetless

bed, miserable, checking every few minutes to be sure I was not bleeding again. I missed my Untrance

practice time. The immense house was very quiet. Its peace sank into me. Again I felt that strangeness in

my soul, but it was not pain now; it was a desolation like the air at evening, like the peaks of the Kargav

seen far in the west in the clarity of winter. It was an immense enlargement.

Ranharrer the Adept knocked and entered at my word, looked at me for a minute, and asked gently,

"What is it?"

"Everything is strange," I said.

The Adept smiled radiantly and said, "Yes."

I know now how Ranharrer cherished and honored my ignorance, in the Handdara sense. Then I knew

only that somehow or other I had said the right thing and so pleased a person I wanted very much to

please.

"We're doing some singing," Ranharrer said, "you might like to hear it."

They were in fact singing the Midsummer Chant, which goes on for the four days before Getheny Kus,

night and day. Singers and drummers drop in and out at will, most of them singing on certain syllables in

an endless group improvisation guided only by the drums and by melodic cues in the Chantbook, and

failing into harmony with the soloist if one is present. At first I heard only a pleasantly thick-textured,

droning sound over a quiet and subtle beat. I listened till I got bored and decided I could do it too. So I

opened my mouth and sang "Aah" and heard all the other voices singing "Aah" above and with and below

mine until I lost mine and heard only all the voices, and then only the music itself, and then suddenly the

startling silvery rush of a single voice running across the weaving, against the current, and sinking into it

and vanishing, and rising out of it again.... Ranharrer touched my arm. It was time for dinner, I had been

singing since Third Hour. I went back to the chantry after dinner, and after supper. I spent the next three

days there. I would have spent the nights there if they had let me. I wasn't sleepy at all anymore. I had

sudden, endless energy, and couldn't sleep. In my little room I sang to mysrelf, or read the strange

Handdara poetry which was the only book they had given me, and practiced the Untrance, trying to

ignore the heat and cold, the fire and ice in my body, till dawn came and I could go sing again.

And then it was Ottormenbod, midsummer's eve, and I must go home to my Hearth and the

kemmer-house.

To my surprise, my mother and grandmother and all the elders came to the Fastness to fetch me,

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wearing ceremonial hiebs and looking solemn. Ranharrer handed me over to them, saying to me only,

"Come back to us." My family paraded me through the streets in the hot summer morning; all the vines

were in flower, perfuming the air, all the gardens were blooming, bearing, fruiting. "This is an excellent

time," Grand said judiciously, "to come into kemmer."

The Hearth looked very dark to me after the Fastness, and somehow shrunken. I looked around for

Sether, but it was a workday, Sether was at the shop. That gave me a sense of holiday, which was not

unpleasant. And then up in the hearthroom of our balcony, Grand and the Hearth elders formally

presented me with a whole set of new clothes, new everything, from the boots up, topped by a

magnificently embroidered hieb. There was a spoken ritual that went with the clothes, not Handdara; I

think, but a tradition of our Hearth; the words were all old and strange, the language of a thousand years

ago. Grand rattled them out like somebody spitting rocks, and put the hieb on my shoulders. Everybody

said, "Haya!"

All the elders, and a lot of younger kids, hung around helping me put on the new clothes as if I was a

king or a baby, and some of the elders wanted to give me advice—"last advice," they called it, since you

gain shifgrethor when you go into kemmer, and once you have shifgrethor advice is insulting. "Now you

just keep away from that old Ebbeche," one of them told me shrilly. My mother took offense, snapping,

"Keep your shadow to yourself, Tadsh!" And to me, "Don't listen to the old fish. Flapmouth Tadsh! But

now listen, Sov."

I listened. Guyr had drawn me a little away from the others, and spoke gravely, with some

embarrassment. "Remember, it will matter who you're with first."

I nodded. "I understand," I said.

"No, you don't," my mother snapped, forgetting to be embarrassed. "Just keep it in mind!"

"What, ah," I said. My mother waited. "If I, if I go into, as a, as female," I said. "Don't I, shouldn't I—?"

"Ah," Guyr said. "Don't worry. It'll be a year or more before you can conceive. Or get. Don't worry, this

time. The other people will see to it, just in case. They all know it's your first kemmer. But do keep it in

mind, who you're with first! Around, oh, around Karrid, and Ebbeche, and some of them."

"Come on!" Dory shouted, and we all got into a procession again to go downstairs and across the

centerhall, where everybody cheered "Haya Sov! Haya Sov!" and the cooks beat on their saucepans. I

wanted to die. But they all seemed so cheerful, so happy about me, wishing me well; I wanted also to

live.

We went out the west door and across the sunny gardens and came to the kemmerhouse. Tage Ereb

shares a kemmerhouse with two other Ereb Hearths; it's a beautiful building, all carved with deep-figure

friezes in the Old Dynasty style, terribly worn by the weather of a couple of thousand years. On the red

stone steps my family all kissed me, murmuring, "Praise then Darkness," or "In the act of creation praise,"

and my mother gave me a hard push on my shoulders, what they call the sledge-push, for good luck, as I

turned away from them and went in the door.

The doorkeeper was waiting for me; a queer-looking, rather stooped person, with coarse, pale skin.

Now I realized who this "Ebbeche" they'd been talking about was. I'd never met him, but I'd heard

about him. He was the Doorkeeper of our kemmerhouse, a halfdead—that is, a person in permanent

kemmer, like the Aliens.

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There are always a few people born that way here. Some of them can be cured; those who can't or

choose not to be usually live in a Fastness and learn the disciplines, or they become Doorkeepers. It's

convenient for them, and for normal people too. After all, who else would want tolive in a

kemmerhouse? But there are drawbacks. If you come to the kemmerhouse in thorharmen, ready to

gender, and the first person you meet is fully male, his pheromones are likely to gender you female right

then, whether that's what you had in mind this month or not. Responsible Doorkeepers, of course, keep

well away from anybody who doesn't invite them to come close. But permanent kemmer may not lead to

responsibility of character; nor does being calledhalfdead andpervert all your life, I imagine. Obviously

my family didn't trust Ebbeche to keep his hands and his pheromones off me. But they were unjust. He

honored a first kemmer as much as anyone else. He greeted me by name and showed me where to take

off my new boots. Then he began to speak the ancient ritual welcome, backing down the hall before me;

the first time I ever heard the words I would hear so many times again for so many years.

You cross earth now.

You cross water now.

You cross the Ice now ....

And the exulting ending, as we came into the centerhall:

Together we have crossed the Ice.

Together we come into the Hearthplace,

Into life, bringing life!

In the act of creation, praise!

The solemnity of the words moved me and distracted me somewhat from my intense self-consciousness.

As I had in the Fastness, I felt the familiar reassurance of being part of something immensely older and

larger than myself, even if it was strange and new to me. I must entrust myself to it and be what it made

me. At the same time I was intensely alert. All my senses were extraordinarily keen, as they had been all

morning. I was aware of everything, the beautiful blue color of the walls, the lightness and vigor of my

steps as I walked, the texture of the wood under my bare feet, the sound and meaning of the ritual

words, the Doorkeeper himself. He fascinated me. Ebbeche was certainly not handsome, and yet I

noticed how musical his rather deep voice was; and pale skin was more attractive than I had ever thought

it. I felt that he had been maligned, that his life must be a strange one. I wanted to talk to him. But as he

finished the welcome, standing aside for me at the doorway of the centerhall, a tall person strode forward

eagerly to meet me.

I was glad to see a familiar face: it was the head cook of my Hearth, Karrid Arrage. Like many cooks a

rather fierce and temperamental person, Karrid had often taken notice of me, singling me out in a joking,

challenging way, tossing me some delicacy—"Here, youngun! get some meat on your bones!" As I saw

Karrid now I went through the most extraordinary multiplicity of awarenesses: that Karrid was naked and

that this nakedness was not like the nakedness of people in the Hearth, but a significant nakedness—that

he was not the Karrid I had seen before but transfigured into great beauty—that he washe —that my

mother had warned me about him—that I wanted to touch him—that I was afraid of him.

He picked me right up in his arms and pressed me against him. I felt his clitopenis like a fist between my

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ComingofAgeinKarhidebyUrsulaK.LeGuinSOVTHADETAGEEMEREB,OFRERINKARHIDE,ONGETHENIliveintheoldestcityintheworld.LongbeforetherewerekingsinKarhide,Rerwasacity,themarketplaceandmeetinggroundforalltheNortheast,thePlains,andKermLand.TheFastnessofRerwasacenteroflearning,arefuge,ajudgmentseatfifteenthousandy...

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Ursula K. Le Guin - Coming of Age in Karhide

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