The Left Hand Of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4) - Ursula K. Le Guin Page 0,122

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 had to go home to my Hearth and the kemmerhouse.

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

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 to live 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