When the last had stood up, the boys stepped forward. Each lay down on a girl and pumped his buttocks up and down, though not one of them, Havzhiva saw, had had an erection. The men around him grasped their own penises, shouting, "Here, try mine!" and cheering and chanting until the last boy scrambled to his feet. The girls lay flat, their legs parted, like little dead lizards. There was a slight, terrible movement towards them in the crowd of men. But the old women were hauling the girls to their feet, yanking them up, hurrying them back across the bridge, followed by a wave of howls and jeers from the audience.
"They're drugged, you know," said the kind, dark man who had shared Havzhiva's bed, looking into his face. "The girls. It doesn't hurt them."
"Yes, I see," said Havzhiva, standing still in his place of honor.
"These ones are lucky, privileged to assist initia-aA 183 A-®
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tion. It's important that girls cease to be virgin as soon as possible, you know. Always more than one man must have them, you know. So that they can't make claims — 'this is your son,' 'this baby
is the chief's son,' you know. That's all witchcraft.
A son is chosen. Being a son has nothing to do with bondswomen's cunts. Bondswomen have to be taught that early. But the girls are given drugs now. It's not like the old days, under the Corporations."
"I understand," Havzhiva said- He looked into his friend's face, thinking that his dark skin meant he must have a good deal of owner blood, perhaps indeed was the son of an owner or a Boss. Nobody's son, begotten on a slave woman. A son is chosen- AH knowledge is local, all knowledge is partial. In Stse, in the Schools of the Ekumen, in the compounds of Yeowe.
"You still call them bondswomen," he said. His tact, all his feelings were frozen, and he spoke in mere stupid intellectual curiosity.
"No," the dark man said, "no, I'm sorry, the language I learned as a boy — I apologize —"
"Not to me."
Again Havzhiva spoke only and coldly what was in his head. The man winced and was silent, his head bowed.
"Please, my friend, take me to my room now," Havzhiva said, and the dark man gratefully obeyed him.
He talked softly into his noter in Hainish in the dark. "You can't change anything from outside it.
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A Man of the People
Standing apart, looking down, taking the overview, you see the pattern. What's wrong, what's missing. You want to fix it. But you can't patch it. You have to be in it, weaving it. You have to be part of the weaving." This last phrase was in the dialect of Stse.
Four women squatted on a patch of ground on the women's side, which had roused his curiosity by its untrodden smoothness: some kind of sacred space, he had thought. He walked towards them. They
squatted gracelessly, hunched forward between their knees, with the indifference to their appearance, the carelessness of men's gaze, that he had noticed before on the women's side. Their heads were shaved, their skin chalky and pale. Dust people, dusties, was the old epithet, but to Havzhiva their color was more like clay or ashes. The azure tinge of palms and soles and wherever the skin was fine was almost hidden by the soil they were handling. They had been talking fast and quietly, but went silent as he came near. Two were old, withered up, with knobby, wrinkled knees and feet. Two were young women. They all glanced sidelong from time to time as he squatted down near the edge of the smooth patch of ground.
On it, he saw, they had been spreading dust, colored earth, making some kind of pattern or picture. Following the boundaries between colors he made out a long pale figure a little like a hand or a branch, and a deep curve of earthen red.
Having greeted them, he said nothing more, but simply squatted there. Presently they went back to
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what they were doing, talking in whispers to one another now and then.
When they stopped working, he said, "Is it sacred?"
The old women looked at him, scowled, and said nothing.
"You can't see it," said the darker of the young women, with a flashing, teasing smile that took Havzhiva by surprise.
"I shouldn't be here, you mean."
"No. You can be here. But you can't see it."
He rose and looked over the earth painting they had made with grey and tan and red and umber dust. The lines and forms were in a definite relationship, rhythmical but puzzling.
"It's not all there," he said.
"This is only a little, little bit of it," said the teasing woman, her dark eyes bright with mockery in her dark face.
"Never all of it at once?"
"No," she said, and the others said, "No," and even the old women smiled.
"Can you tell me what the picture is?"
She did not know the word "picture." She glanced at the others; she pondered, and looked up at him shrewdly.
"We make what we know, here," she said, with a soft gesture over the softly colored design. A warm evening breeze was already blurring the boundaries between the colors.
"They don't know it," said the other young woman, ashen-skinned, in a whisper.
"The men? — They never see it whole?"
"Nobody does. Only us. We have it here." The -i-*-'® 186 -a-s A Man of the People
dark woman did not touch her head but her heart, covering her breasts with her long, work-hardened hands. She smiled again.
The old women stood up; they muttered together, one said something sharply to the young women, a phrase Havzhiva did not understand; and they stumped off.
"They don't approve of your talking of this work to a man," he said,
"A city man," said the dark woman, and laughed. "They think we'll run away."
"Do you want to run away?"
She shrugged. "Where to?"
She rose to her feet in one graceful movement and looked over the earth painting, a seemingly random, abstract pattern of lines and colors, curves and areas.
"Can you see it?" she asked Havzhiva, with that liquid teasing flash of the eyes.
"Maybe someday I can leam to," he said, meeting her gaze.
"You'll have to find a woman to teach you," said the woman the color of ashes.
"We are a free people now," said the Young Chief, the Son and Heir, the Chosen.
"I haven't yet known a free people," Havzhiva said, polite, ambiguous.
"We won our freedom. We made ourselves free. By courage, by sacrifice, by holding fast to the one noble thing. We are a free people." The Chosen was a strongfaced, handsome, intelligent man of forty. Six gouged lines of scarring ran down his upper arms like a
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rough mantle, and an open blue eye stared between his eyes, unwinking.
"You are free men," Havzhiva said.
There was a silence.
"Men of the cities do not understand our women," the Chosen said. "Our women do not want a man's freedom. It is not for them. A woman holds fast to her baby. That is the noble thing for her. That is how the Lord Kamye made woman, and the Merciful Tual is her example. In other places it may be different. There may be another kind of woman, who does not care for her children. That may be. Here it is as I have said."
Havzhiva nodded, the deep, single nod he had learned from the Yeowans, almost a bow. "That is
so," he said.
The Chosen looked gratified.
"I have seen a picture," Havzhiva went on.
The Chosen was impassive; he might or might not know the word. "Lines and colors made with earth on earth may hold knowledge in them. All knowledge is local, all truth is partial," Havzhiva said with an easy, colloquial dignity that he knew was an imitation of his mother, the Heir of the Sun, talking to foreign merchants. "No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is a part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole."