The Left Hand Of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4) - Ursula K. Le Guin Page 0,51

planet, and the third winter had begun before autumn was underway – months and months of unrelenting cold, sleet, ice, wind, rain, snow, cold, cold inside, cold outside, cold to the bone and the marrow of the bone. And all that time on my own, alien and isolate, without a soul I could trust. Poor Genly, shall we cry? I saw Estraven come out of the house on to the street below me, a dark foreshortened figure in the even, vague grey-white of the snow. He looked about, adjusting the loose belt of his hieb – he wore no coat. He set off down the street, walking with a deft, definite grace, a quickness of being that made him seem in that minute the only thing alive in all Mishnory.

I turned back to the warm room. Its comforts were stuffy and cloddish, the heater, the padded chairs, the bed piled with furs, the rugs, drapes, wrappings, mufflings.

I put on my winter coat and went out for a walk, in a disagreeable mood, in a disagreeable world.

I was to lunch that day with Commensals Obsle and Yegey and others I had met the night before, and to be introduced to some I had not met. Lunch is usually served from a buffet and eaten standing up, perhaps so that one will not feel he has spent the entire day sitting at table. For this formal affair, however, places were set at table, and the buffet was enormous, eighteen or twenty hot and cold dishes, mostly variations on sube-eggs and breadapple. At the sideboard, before the taboo on conversation applied, Obsle remarked to me while loading up his plate with batter-fried sube-eggs, ‘The fellow named Mersen is a spy from Erhenrang, and Gaum there is an open agent of the Sarf, you know.’ He spoke conversationally, laughed as if I had made an amusing reply, and moved off to the pickled blackfish.

I had no idea what the Sarf was.

As people were beginning to sit down a young fellow came in and spoke to the host, Yegey, who then turned to us. ‘News from Karhide,’ he said. ‘King Argaven’s child was born this morning, and died within the hour.’

There was a pause, and a buzz, and then the handsome man called Gaum laughed and lifted up his beer-tankard. ‘May all the Kings of Karhide live as long!’ he cried. Some drank the toast with him, most did not. ‘Name of Meshe, to laugh at a child’s death,’ said a fat old man in purple sitting heavily down beside me, his leggings bunched around his thighs like skirts, his face heavy with disgust.

Discussion arose as to which of his kemmering-sons Argaven might name as his heir – for he was well over forty and would now surely have no child of his flesh – and how long he might leave Tibe as Regent. Some thought the regency would be ended at once, others were dubious. ‘What do you think, Mr. Ai?’ asked the man called Mersen, whom Obsle had identified as a Karhidish agent, and thus presumably one of Tibe’s own men. ‘You’ve just come from Erhenrang, what are they saying there about these rumours that Argaven has in fact abdicated without announcement, handed the sledge over to his cousin?’

‘Well, I’ve heard the rumour, yes.’

‘Do you think it’s got any foundation?’

‘I have no idea,’ I said, and at this point the host intervened with a mention of the weather; for people had begun to eat.

After servants had cleared away the plates and the mountainous wreckage of roasts and pickles from the buffet, we all sat on around the long table; small cups of a fierce liquor were served, lifewater they called it, as men often do; and they asked me questions.

Since my examination by the physicians and scientists of Erhenrang I had not been faced with a group of people who wanted me to answer their questions. Few Karhiders, even the fishermen and farmers with whom I had spent my first months, had been willing to satisfy their curiosity – which was often intense – by simply asking. They were involute, introvert, indirect; they did not like questions and answers. I thought of Otherhord Fastness, of what Faxe the Weaver had said concerning answers … Even the experts had limited their questions to strictly physiological subjects, such as the glandular and circulatory functions in which I differed most notably from the Gethenian norm. They had never gone on to ask, for example, how the