A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories (19 page)

On the morning of the Ceremony of the Scepter, there was no buying and selling in the marketplace. People came out in their
finest kilts and gorgeous vests; all the men of the priesthoods wore the high, plumed, basketry headdresses and massive gold
earrings. Babies’ and children’s heads were rubbed with red ocher. But it was not a festivity, such as the Star-Rising ceremony
of a few days earlier; nobody danced, nobody cooked tipu-bread, there was no music. Only a large, rather subdued crowd kept
gathering in the marketplace. At last the doors of Aketa’s house—Ket’s house, actually, Riel reminded them—swung open, and
a procession came forth, walking to the complex, thrilling, somber beat of drums. The drummers had been waiting in the streets
behind the house, and came forward to walk behind the procession. The whole city seemed to shake to the steady, heavy rhythms.

Shan had never seen Ket except on the ship’s tape of Dalzul’s first arrival, but he recognized her at once in the procession:
a stern, splendid woman. She wore a headdress less elaborate than most of the men’s, but ornate with gold, balancing it proudly
as she walked. Beside her walked Aketa, red plumes nodding above his wicker
crown, and another man to her left—”Ketketa, second husband,” Riel murmured. “That’s their daughter.” The child was four or
five, very dignified, pacing along with her parents, her dark hair rough and red with ocher. “All the priests in Ket’s volcano
lineage are here,” Riel went on. “There’s the Earth-Turner. That old one, that’s the Calendar Priest. There’s a lot of them
I don’t know. This is a
big
ceremony… ” Her whisper was a little shaky.

The procession turned left out of the marketplace and moved on to the heavy beating of the drums until Ket came abreast of
the main entrance of Viaka’s rambling, yellow-walled house. There, with no visible signal, everyone stopped walking at once.
The drums maintained the heavy, complex beat; but one by one they dropped out, till one throbbed alone like a heart and then
stopped, leaving a terrifying silence.

A man with a towering headdress of woven feathers stepped forward and called out a summons: “Sem ayatan! Sem Dazu!”

The door opened slowly. Dalzul stood framed in the sunlit doorway, darkness behind him. He wore his black-and-silver uniform.
His hair shone silver.

In the absolute silence of the crowd, Ket walked forward to face him. She knelt down on both knees, bowed her head, and said,
“Dazu, sototiyu!”

“ ‘Dalzul, you chose,’ “ Riel whispered.

Dalzul smiled. He stepped forward and reached out his hands to lift Ket to her feet.

A whisper ran like wind in the crowd, a hiss or gasp or sigh of shock. Ket’s gold-burdened head came up, startled, then she
was on her feet, fiercely erect, her hands at her sides. “Sototiyu!” she said, and turned, and strode back to her husbands.

The drums took up a soft patter, a rain sound.

A gap opened in the procession just in front of the door of the house. Quiet and self-possessed, walking with great dignity,
Dalzul came forward and took the place left open for him. The rain sound of the drums grew louder, turning to thunder, thunder
rolling near and far,
loud and low. With the perfect unanimity of a school of fish or flock of birds the procession moved forward.

The people of the city followed, Shan, Riel, and Forest among them.

“Where are they going?” Forest said as they left the last street and struck out on the narrow road between the orchards.

“This road goes up Iyananam,” Shan said.

“Onto the volcano? Maybe that’s where the ritual will be.”

The drums beat, the sunlight beat, Shan’s heart beat, his feet struck the dust of the road, all in one huge pulse. Entrained.
Thought and speech lost in the one great beat, beat, beat.

The procession had halted. The followers were stopping. The three Terrans kept on until they came up alongside the procession
itself. It was re-forming, the drummers drawing off to one side, a few of them softly playing the thunder roll. Some of the
crowd, people with children, were beginning to go back down the steep trail beside the mountain stream. Nobody spoke, and
the noise of the waterfall uphill from them and the noisy torrent nearby almost drowned out the drums.

They were a hundred paces or so downhill from the little stone building that housed the dynamo. The plumed priests, Ket and
her husbands and household, all had drawn aside, leaving the way clear to the bank of the stream. Stone steps were built down
right to the water, and at their foot lay a terrace, paved with light-colored stone, over which the clear water washed in
quick-moving, shallow sheets. Amidst the shine and motion of the water stood an altar or low pedestal, blinding bright in
the noon sun: gilt or solid gold, carved and drawn into intricate and fantastic figures of crowned men, dancing men, men with
diamond eyes. On the pedestal lay a wand, not gold, unornamented, of dark wood or tarnished metal.

Dalzul began to walk towards the pedestal.

Aketa stepped forward suddenly and stood at the
head of the stone steps, blocking Dalzul’s way. He spoke in a ringing voice, a few words. Riel shook her head, not understanding.
Dalzul stood silent, motionless, and made no reply. When Aketa fell silent, Dalzul strode straight forward, as if to walk
through him.

Aketa held his ground. He pointed to Dalzul’s feet. “Tediad!” he said sharply—” ‘Shoes,’“ Riel murmured. Aketa and all the
Gaman in the procession were barefoot. After a moment, with no loss of dignity, Dalzul knelt, took off his shoes and stockings,
set them aside, and stood up, barefoot in his black uniform.

“Stand aside now,” he said quietly, and, as if understanding him, Aketa stepped back among the watchers.

“Ai Dazu,” he said as Dalzul passed him, and Ket said softly, “Ai Dazu!” The soft murmur followed Dalzul as he paced down
the steps and out onto the terrace, walking through the shallow water that broke in bright drops around his ankles. Unhesitating,
he walked to the pedestal and around it, so that he faced the procession and the watching people. He smiled, and put out his
hand, and seized the scepter.

“No,” Shan said. “No, we had no spy-eye with us. Yes, he died instantly. No, I have no idea what voltage. Underground wires
from the generator, we assume. Yes, of course it was deliberate, intentional, arranged. They thought he had chosen that death.
He chose it when he chose to have sex with Ket, with the Earth Priestess, with the Earth. They thought he knew; how could
they know he didn’t know? If you lie with the Earth, you die by the Lightning. Men come from a long way to Ganam for that
death. Dalzul came from a very long way. No, we none of us understood. No, I don’t know if it had anything to do with the
churten effect, with perceptual dissonance, with chaos. We came to see things differently, but which of us knew the truth?
He knew he had to be a god again.”

To the Stabiles of the Ekumen on Hain, and to Gvonesh, Director of the Churten Field Laboratories at Ve Port: from Tiokunan’n
Hideo, Farmholder of the Second Sedoretu of Udan, Derdan’nad, Oket, on O.

I shall make my report as if I told a story, this having been the tradition for some time now. You may, however, wonder why
a farmer on the planet O is reporting to you as if he were a Mobile of the Ekumen. My story will explain that. But it does
not explain itself. Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time, but in the great rapids and the winding shallows,
no boat is safe.

So: once upon a time when I was twenty-one years old I left my home and came on the NAFAL ship
Terraces of Darranda
to study at the Ekumenical Schools on Hain.

The distance between Hain and my home world is just over four light-years, and there has been traffic between O and the Hainish
system for twenty centuries. Even before the Nearly As Fast As Light drive, when ships spent a hundred years of planetary
time instead of four to make the crossing, there were people who would give up their old life to come to a new
world. Sometimes they returned; not often. There were tales of such sad returns to a world that had forgotten the voyager.
I knew also from my mother a very old story called “The Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” which came from her home world, Terra.
The life of a ki’O child is full of stories, but of all I heard told by her and my othermother and my fathers and grandparents
and uncles and aunts and teachers, that one was my favorite. Perhaps I liked it so well because my mother told it with deep
feeling, though very plainly, and always in the same words (and I would not let her change the words if she ever tried to).

The story tells of a poor fisherman, Urashima, who went out daily in his boat alone on the quiet sea that lay between his
home island and the mainland. He was a beautiful young man with long, black hair, and the daughter of the king of the sea
saw him as he leaned over the side of the boat and she gazed up to see the floating shadow cross the wide circle of the sky.

Rising from the waves, she begged him to come to her palace under the sea with him. At first he refused, saying, “My children
wait for me at home.” But how could he resist the sea king’s daughter? “One night,” he said. She drew him down with her under
the water, and they spent a night of love in her green palace, served by strange undersea beings. Urashima came to love her
dearly, and maybe he stayed more than one night only. But at last he said, “My dear, I must go. My children wait for me at
home.”

“If you go, you go forever,” she said.

“I will come back,” he promised.

She shook her head. She grieved, but did not plead with him. “Take this with you,” she said, giving him a little box, wonderfully
carved, and sealed shut. “Do not open it, Urashima.”

So he went up onto the land, and ran up the shore to his village, to his house: but the garden was a wilderness, the windows
were blank, the roof had fallen in. People came and went among the familiar houses of the
village, but he did not know a single face. “Where are my children?” he cried. An old woman stopped and spoke to him: “What
is your trouble, young stranger?”

“I am Urashima, of this village, but I see no one here I know!”

“Urashima!” the woman said—and my mother would look far away, and her voice as she said the name made me shiver, tears starting
to my eyes—”Urashima! My grandfather told me a fisherman named Urashima was lost at sea, in the time of his grandfather’s
grandfather. There has been no one of that family alive for a hundred years.”

So Urashima went back down to the shore; and there he opened the box, the gift of the sea king’s daughter. A little white
smoke came out of it and drifted away on the sea wind. In that moment Urashima’s black hair turned white, and he grew old,
old, old; and he lay down on the sand and died.

Once, I remember, a traveling teacher asked my mother about the fable, as he called it. She smiled and said, “In the Annals
of the Emperors of my nation of Terra it is recorded that a young man named Urashima, of the Yosa district, went away in the
year 477, and came back to his village in the year 825, but soon departed again. And I have heard that the box was kept in
a shrine for many centuries.” Then they talked about something else.

My mother, Isako, would not tell the story as often as I demanded it. “That one is so sad,” she would say, and tell instead
about Grandmother and the rice dumpling that rolled away, or the painted cat who came alive and killed the demon rats, or
the peach boy who floated down the river. My sister and my germanes, and older people, too, listened to her tales as closely
as I did. They were new stories on O, and a new story is always a treasure. The painted cat story was the general favorite,
especially when my mother would take out her brush and the block of strange, black, dry ink from Terra, and sketch the animals—cat,
rat—that none of us had ever seen: the
wonderful cat with arched back and brave round eyes, the fanged and skulking rats, “pointed at both ends” as my sister said.
But I waited always, through all other stories, for her to catch my eye, look away, smile a little and sigh, and begin, “Long,
long ago, on the shore of the Inland Sea there lived a fisherman …”

Did I know then what that story meant to her? that it was her story? that if she were to return to her village, her world,
all the people she had known would have been dead for centuries?

Certainly I knew that she “came from another world,” but what that meant to me as a five-, or seven-, or ten-year-old, is
hard for me now to imagine, impossible to remember. I knew that she was a Terran and had lived on Hain; that was something
to be proud of. I knew that she had come to O as a Mobile of the Ekumen (more pride, vague and grandiose) and that “your father
and I fell in love at the Festival of Plays in Sudiran.” I knew also that arranging the marriage had been a tricky business.
Getting permission to resign her duties had not been difficult—the Ekumen is used to Mobiles going native. But as a foreigner,
Isako did not belong to a ki’O moiety, and that was only the first problem. I heard all about it from my othermother, Tubdu,
an endless source of family history, anecdote, and scandal. “You know,” Tubdu told me when I was eleven or twelve, her eyes
shining and her irrepressible, slightly wheezing, almost silent laugh beginning to shake her from the inside out—”you know,
she didn’t even know women got married? Where she came from, she said, women don’t marry.”