Ursula K. Le Guin - Orsinian Tales

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ORSINIAN TALES

by Ursula K. Le Guin

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

Publishers, Inc.

Cover Illustration by Danilo Ducak

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

eBook scanned & proofed by Binwiped 10-22-02 [v1.0]

Contents

The Fountains

The Barrow

Ile Forest

Conversations at Night

The Road East

Brothers and Sisters

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A Week in the Country

An die Musik

The House

The Lady of Moge

Imaginary Countries

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

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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

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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.

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ORSINIAN TALES

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

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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.

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ORSINIAN TALES

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

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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?"

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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 with 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,

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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?"

"Me?"

It was a good joke, the idea of the little old priest going up into the mountains;

there was a good deal of laughter for quite a while. Father Egius, though without

vanity, was perhaps a little hurt, for he finally said in a rather stiff tone, "They

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ORSINIANTALESORSINIANTALESbyUrsulaK.LeGuinCopyright©1976byUrsulaK.LeGuinAhardcovereditionofthisbookwaspublishedin1976byHarper&Row,Publishers,Inc.CoverIllustrationbyDaniloDucakGratefulacknowledgmentismadeforpermissiontoreprintthefollowing:TheBarrowfirstappearedinTheMagazineofFantasyandScienceFictio...

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