The Left Hand Of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4) - Ursula K. Le Guin Page 0,104

use a false name, and our true ones could not be avowed. It was, after all, a crime to speak to Estraven let alone to feed and clothe and house him, as they did. Even a remote village of the Guthen Coast has radio, and they could not have pleaded ignorance of the Order of Exile; only real ignorance of their guest’s identity might give them some excuse. Their vulnerability weighed on Estraven’s mind, before I had even thought of it. On our third night there he came into my room to discuss our next move. A Karhidish village is like an ancient castle of Earth in having few or no separate, private dwellings. Yet in the high, rambling old buildings of the Hearth, the Commerce, the Co-Domain (there was no Lord of Kurkurast) and the Outer-House, each of the five hundred villagers could have privacy, even seclusion, in rooms off those ancient corridors with walls three feet thick. We had been given a room apiece, on the top floor of the Hearth. I was sitting in mine beside the fire, a small, hot, heavy-scented fire of peat from the Shenshey Bogs, when Estraven came in. He said, ‘We must soon be going on from here, Genry.’

I remember him standing there in the shadows of the firelit room barefoot and wearing nothing but the loose fur breeches the chief had given him. In the privacy and what they consider the warmth of their houses Karhiders often go half-clothed or naked. On our journey Estraven had lost all the smooth, compact solidity that marks the Gethenian physique; he was gaunt and scarred, and his face was burned by cold almost as by fire. He was a dark, hard, and yet elusive figure in the quick, restless light.

‘Where to?’

‘South and west, I think. Towards the border. Our first job is to find you a radio transmitter strong enough to reach your ship. After that, I must find a hiding place, or else go back into Orgoreyn for a while, to avoid bringing punishment on those who help us here.’

‘How will you get back into Orgoreyn?’

‘As I did before – cross the border. The Orgota have nothing against me.’

‘Where will we find a transmitter?’

‘No nearer than Sassinoth.’

I winced. He grinned.

‘Nothing closer?’

‘A hundred and fifty miles or so; we’ve come farther over worse ground. There are roads all the way; people will take us in; we may get a lift on a powersledge.’

I assented, but I was depressed by the prospect of still another stage of our winter-journey, and this one not towards haven but back to that damned border where Estraven might go back into exile, leaving me alone.

I brooded over it and finally said, ‘There’ll be one condition which Karhide must fulfill before it can join the Ekumen. Argaven must revoke your banishment.’

He said nothing, but stood gazing at the fire.

‘I mean it,’ I insisted. ‘First things first.’

‘I thank you, Genry,’ he said. His voice, when he spoke very softly as now, did have much the timbre of a woman’s voice, husky and unresonant. He looked at me, gently, not smiling. ‘But I haven’t expected to see my home again for a long time now. I’ve been in exile for twenty years, you know. This is not so much different, this banishment. I’ll look after myself; and you look after yourself, and your Ekumen. That you must do alone. But all this is said too soon. Tell your ship to come down! When that’s done, then I’ll think beyond it.’

We stayed two more days in Kurkurast, getting well fed and rested, waiting for a road-packer that was due in from the south and would give us a lift when it went back again. Our hosts got Estraven to tell them the whole tale of our crossing of the Ice. He told it as only a person of an oral-literature tradition can tell a story, so that it became a saga, full of traditional locations and even episodes, yet exact and vivid, from the sulphurous fire and dark of the pass between Drumner and Dremegole to the screaming gusts from mountain-gaps that swept the Bay of Guthen; with comic interludes, such as his fall into the crevasse, and mystical ones, when he spoke of the sounds and silences of the Ice, of the shadowless weather, of the night’s darkness. I listened as fascinated as all the rest, my gaze on my friend’s dark face.

We left Kurkurast riding elbow-jammed in the cab of a