the wind's twelve quarters (13 page)

Birt could not move at all, not even to blink. He cowered, staring whether he would or not. He saw the black dragon hang there in the air above Blackbeard. He saw the fire lick like many tongues from the scaly mouth, the steam jet from the red nostrils. He saw Blackbeard’s face grow white, white as chalk, and the beard-fringed lips trembling.
 

“Your name is Yevaud!”
 

“Yes,” said a great, husky, hissing voice. “My true-name is Yevaud, and my true shape is this shape.”
 

“But the dragon was killed—they found dragon-bones on Udrath Island—”
 

“That was another dragon,” said the dragon, and then stooped like a hawk, talons outstretched. And Birt shut his eyes.
 

When he opened them the sky was clear, the hillside empty, except for a reddish-blackish trampled spot, and a few talon-marks in the grass.
 

Birt the fisherman got to his feet and ran. He ran across the common, scattering sheep to right and left, and straight down the village street to Palani’s father’s house. Palani was out in the garden weeding the nasturtiums. “Come with me!” Birt gasped. She stared. He grabbed her wrist and dragged her with him. She screeched a little, but did not resist. He ran with her straight to the pier, pushed her into his fishing-sloop the Queenie, untied the painter, took up the oars and set off rowing like a demon. The last that Sattins Island saw of him and Palani was the Queenie's sail vanishing in the direction of the nearest island westward.
 

The villagers thought they would never stop talking about it, how Goody Guld’s nephew Birt had lost his
 

mind and sailed off with the schoolmistress on the very same day that the peddlar
Blackbeard disappeared without a trace, leaving all his feathers and beads behind. But they did stop talking about it, three days later. They had other things to talk about, when Mr. Underhill finally came out of his cave.
 

Mr. Underhill had decided that since his truename was no longer a secret, he might as well drop his disguise. Walking was a lot harder than flying, and besides, it was a long, long time since he had had a real meal.
 

When I wrote this story, a year before I began the novel The Left Hand of Darkness, I did not know that the inhabitants of the planet Winter or Gethen were androgynes. By the time the story came out in print, I did, but too late to emend such usages as “son,” “mother,” and so on.
 

Many feminists have been grieved or aggrieved by The Left Hand of Darkness because the androgynes in it are called “he” throughout. In the third person singular, the English generic pronoun is the same as the masculine pronoun. A fact worth reflecting upon. And its a trap, with no way out, because the exclusion of the feminine (she) and the neuter (it) from the generic/masculine (he) makes the use of either of them more specific, more unjust, as it were, than the use of “he.” And I find made-up pronouns, “te” and “heshe” and so on, dreary and annoying.
 

In revising the story for this edition, I saw a chance to redress that injustice slightly. In this version, I use the feminine pronoun for all Gethenians—while preserving certain masculine titles such as King and Lord, just to remind one of the ambiguity. This may drive some nonfeminists mad, but that’s only fair.
 

The androgyny of the characters has little to do with the events of this story, but the pronoun change does make it clear that the central, paradoxical relationship of parent and child is not, as it may have seemed in the other version, a kind of reverse Oedipus twist, but something less familiar and more ambiguous. Evidently my unconscious mind knew about the Gethenians long before it saw fit to inform me. It's always doing things like that.
 

When whirlpools appear in the onward run of time and history seems to swirl around a snag, as in the curious matter of the Succession of Karhide, then pictures come in handy: snapshots, which may be taken up and matched to compare the parent to the child, the young king to the old, and which may also be rearranged and shuffled till the years run straight. For despite the tricks played by instantaneous interstellar communication and just-sub-lightspeed interstellar travel, time (as the Plenipotentiary Axt remarked) does not reverse itself; nor is death mocked.
 

Thus, although the best-known picture is that dark image of a young king standing above an old king who lies dead in a corridor lit only by mirror-reflections of a burning city, set it aside a while. Look first at the young king, a nation’s pride, as bright and fortunate a soul as ever lived to the age of twenty-two; but when this picture was taken the young king had her back against a wall. She was filthy, she was trembling, and her face was blank and mad, for she had lost that minimal confidence in the world which is called sanity. Inside her head she repeated, as she had been repeating for hours or years, over and over, “I will abdicate. I will abdicate. I will abdicate.” Inside her eyes she saw the red-walled rooms of the Palace, the towers and streets of Erhenrang in falling snow, the lovely plains of the West Fall, the white summits of the Kargav, and she renounced them all, her kingdom. “I will abdicate,” she said not aloud and then, aloud, screamed as once again the person dressed in red and white approached her saying, “Majesty! A plot against your life has been discovered in the Artisan School,” and the humming noise began, softly. She hid her head in her arms and whispered, “Stop it, please stop it,” but the humming whine grew higher and louder and nearer, relentless, until it was so high and loud that it entered her flesh, tore the nerves from their channels and made her bones dance and jangle, hopping to its tune. She hopped and twitched, bare bones strung on thin white threads, and wept dry tears, and shouted, “Have them— Have
them— They must— Executed— Stopped— Stop!”
 

It stopped.
 

She fell in a clattering, chattering heap to the floor. What floor? Not red tiles, nor parquetry, not urine-stained cement, but the wood floor of the room in the tower, the little tower bedroom where she was safe, safe from her ogre parent, the cold, mad, uncaring king, safe to play cat’s cradle with Piry and to sit by the fireside on Borhub’s warm lap, as warm and deep as sleep. But there was no hiding, no safety, no sleep. The person dressed in black had come even here and had hold of her head, lifted it up, lifted on thin white strings the eyelids she tried to close.
 

“Who am I?”
 

The blank, black mask stared down. The young king struggled, sobbing, because now the suffocation would begin: she would not be able to breathe until she said the name, the right name—“Gerer!”—She could breathe. She was allowed to breathe. She had recognized the black one in time.
 

“Who am I?” said a different voice, gently, and the young king groped for that strong presence that always brought her sleep, truce, solace. “Rebade,” she whispered, “tell me what to do....”
 

“Sleep.”
 

She obeyed. A deep sleep, and dreamless, for it was real. Dreams came at waking, now. Unreal, the horrible dry red light of sunset burned her eyes open and she stood, once more, on the Palace balcony looking down at fifty thousand black pits opening and shutting. From the pits came a paroxysmic gush of sound, a shrill, rhythmic eructation: her name. Her name was roared in her ears as a taunt, a jeer. She beat her hands on the narrow brass railing and shouted at them, “I will silence you!” She could not hear her voice, only their voice, the pestilent mouths of the mob that hated her, screaming her name. “Come away, my king,” said the one gentle voice, and Rebade drew her away from the balcony into the vast, red-walled quiet of the Hall of Audience. The screaming ceased with a click. Rebade’s expression was as always composed, compassionate. “What will you do now?” she said in her gentle voice.
 

“I will— I will abdicate—”
 

“No,” Rebade said calmly. “That is not right. What will you do now?”
 

The young king stood silent, shaking. Rebade helped her sit down on the iron cot, for the walls had darkened as they often did and drawn in all about her to a little cell. “You will call...”
 

“Call up the Erhenrang Guard. Have them shoot into the crowd. Shoot to kill. They must be taught a lesson.” The young king spoke rapidly and distinctly in a loud, high voice. Rebade said, “Very good, my lord, a wise decision! Right. We shall come out all right. You are doing right. Trust me.”
 

“I do. I trust you. Get me out of here,” the young king whispered, seizing Rebade’s arm: but her friend frowned. That was not right. She had driven Rebade and hope away again. Rebade was leaving now, calm and regretful, though the young king begged her to stop, to come back, for the noise was softly beginning again, the whining hum that tore the mind to pieces, and already the person in red and white was approaching across a red, interminable floor. “Majesty! A plot against your life has been discovered in the Artisan School—”
 

Down Old Harbor Street to the water’s edge the street lamps burned cavernously bright. Guard Pepenerer on her rounds glanced down that slanting vault of light expecting nothing, and saw something staggering up it towards her. Pepenerer did not believe in porngropes, but she saw a porngrope, sea-beslimed, staggering on thin webbed feet, gasping dry air, whimpering.... Old sailors’ tales slid out of Pepenerer’s mind and she saw a drunk or a maniac or a victim staggering between the dank grey warehouse walls. “Now then! Hold on there!” she bellowed, on the run. The drunk,
half naked and wild-eyed, let out a yell of terror and tried to dodge away, slipped on the frost-slick stones of the street and pitched down sprawling. Pepenerer got out her gun and delivered a half-second of stun, just to keep the drunk quiet; then squatted down by her, wound up her radio and called the West Ward for a car.
 

Both the arms, sprawled out limp and meek on the cold cobbles, were blotched with injection marks. Not drunk; drugged. Pepenerer sniffed, but got no resinous scent of orgrevy. She had been drugged, then; thieves, or a ritual clan-revenge. Thieves would not have left the gold ring on the forefinger, a massive thing, carved, almost as wide as the fingerjoint. Pepenerer crouched forward to look at it. Then she turned her head and looked at the beaten, blank face in profile against the paving-stones, hard lit by the glare of the street lamps. She took a new quarter-crown piece out of her pouch and looked at the left profile stamped on the bright tin, then back at the right profile stamped in light and shadow and cold stone. Then, hearing the purr of the electric car turning down from the Longway into Old Harbor Street, she stuck the coin back in her pouch, muttering to herself, “Damn fool.”
 

King Argaven was off hunting in the mountains, anyhow, and had been for a couple of weeks; it had been in all the bulletins.
 

“You see,” said Hoge the physician, “we can assume that she was mindformed; but that gives us almost nothing to go on. There are too many expert mind-formers in Karhide, and in Orgoreyn for that matter. Not criminals whom the police might have a lead on, but respectable mentalists or physicians. To whom the drugs are legally available. As for getting anything from her, if they had any skill at all they will have blocked everything they did to rational access. All clues will be buried, the trigger-suggestions hidden, and we simply cannot guess what questions to ask. There is no way, short of brain-destruction, of going through everything in her mind; and even under hypnosis and deep drugging there would be no way now to distinguish implanted ideas or emotions from her own autonomous ones. Perhaps the Aliens could do something, though I doubt their mindscience is all they boast of; at any rate it’s out of reach. We have only one real hope.”
 

“Which is?” Lord Gerer asked, stolidly.
 

“The king is quick and resolute. At the beginning, before they broke her, she may have known what they were doing to her, and so set up some block or resistance, left herself some escape route....”
 

Hoge’s low voice lost confidence as she spoke, and trailed off in the silence of the high, red, dusky room. She drew no response from old Gerer who stood, black-clad, before the fire.
 

The temperature of that room in the King’s Palace of Erhenrang was 12° C where Lord Gerer stood, and 5° midway between the two big fireplaces; outside it was snowing lightly, a mild day only a few degrees below freezing. Spring had come to Winter. The fires at either end of the room roared red and gold, devouring thigh-thick logs. Magnificence, a harsh luxury, a quick splendor; fireplaces, fireworks, lightning, meteors, volcanoes; such things satisfied the people of Karhide on the world called Winter. But, except in Arctic colonies above the 35th parallel, they had never installed central heating in any building in the many centuries of their Age of Technology. Comfort was allowed to come to them rare, welcome, unsought: a gift, like joy.
 

The king’s personal servant, sitting by the bed, turned towards the physician and the Lord Councillor, though she did not speak. Both at once crossed the room. The broad, hard bed, high on gilt pillars, heavy with a finery of red cloaks and coverlets, bore up the king’s body almost level with their eyes. To Gerer it appeared a ship breasting, motionless, a swift vast flood of darkness, carrying the young king into shadows, terrors, years. Then with a terror of her own the old councillor saw that
Argaven’s eyes were open, staring out a half-curtained window at the stars.
 

Gerer feared lunacy; idiocy; she did not know what she feared. Hoge had warned her: “The king will not behave ‘normally,’ Lord Gerer. She has suffered thirteen days of torment, intimidation, exhaustion, and mind-handling. There may be brain damage, there will certainly be side-and after-effects of drugs.” Neither fear nor warning parried the shock. Argaven’s bright, weary eyes turned to Gerer and paused on her blankly a moment; then saw her. And Gerer, though she could not see the black mask reflected, saw the hate, the horror, saw her young king, infinitely beloved, gasping in imbecile terror and struggling with the servant, with Hoge, with her own weakness in the effort to get away, to get away from Gerer.