The Wild Girls
Authors: Ursula K. Le Guin
“Queen of the Realm of Fantasy”
—
Washington Post
Winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards
The World Fantasy Award
The National Book award
“Like all great writers of fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin creates imaginary worlds that restore us, hearts eased, to our own.” —
Boston Globe
“Her characters are complex and haunting, and her writing is remarkable for its sinewy grace.” —
Time
“She wields her pen with a moral and psychological sophistication rarely seen. What she really does is write fables: splendidly intricate and hugely imaginative tales about such mundane concerns as life, death, love, and sex.” —
Newsweek
“Idiosyncratic and convincing, Le Guin’s characters have a long afterlife.” —
Publishers Weekl
y
“Her worlds are haunting psychological visions molded with firm artistry” —
Library Journal
“If you want excess and risk and intelligence, try Le Guin.” —
San Francisco Chronicle
1.
The Left Left Behind
Terry Bisson
2.
The Lucky Strike
Kim Stanley Robinson
3.
The Underbelly
Gary Phillips
4.
Mammoths of the Great Plains
Eleanor Arnason
5.
Modem Times 2.0
Michael Moorcock
6.
The Wild Girls
Ursula Le Guin
7.
Surfing The Gnarl
Rudy Rucker
8.
The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow
Cory Doctorow
Ursula K. Le Guin © 2011
This edition © 2011 PM Press
“The Wild Girls” was first published in
Asimov’s Science Fiction
magazine in March 2002. It has been revised by the author for this edition.
“Staying Awake While we Read” first appeared in
Harper’s Magazine
, February 2008. This is its first book publication.
“The Conversation of the Modest” is published here for the first time.
Series Editor: Terry Bisson
ISBN: 978-1-60486-403-8
LCCN: 2010916472
PM Press
P.O. Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
Printed in the USA on recycled paper.
Cover: John Yates/Stealworks.com
Inside design: Josh MacPhee/Justseeds.org
“The Conversation of the Modest”
“A Lovely Art”
Outspoken Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin
B
ELA TEN
B
ELEN WENT ON A FORAY
with five companions. There had been no nomad camps near the City for several years, but harvesters in the Eastern Fields reported seeing smoke of fires beyond the Dayward Hills, and the six young men announced that they’d go see how many camps there were. They took with them as guide Bidh Handa, who had guided forays against the nomad tribes before. Bidh and his sister had been captured from a nomad village as children and grew up in the City as slaves. Bidh’s sister Nata was famous for her beauty, and Bela’s brother Alo had given her owner a good deal of the Belen family wealth to get her for his wife.
Bela and his companions walked and ran all day following the course of the East River up into the hills. In the evening they came to the crest of the hills and saw on the plains below them, among watermeadows and winding streams, three circles of the nomads’ skin huts, strung out quite far apart.
“They came to the marshes to gather mudroots,” the guide said. “They’re not planning a raid on the Fields of the City. If they were, the three camps would be close together.”
“Who gathers the roots?” Bela ten Belen asked.
“Men and women. Old people and children stay in the camps.”
“When do the people go to the marshes?”
“Early in the morning.”
“We’ll go down to that nearest camp tomorrow after the gatherers are gone.”
“It would be better to go to the second village, the one on the river,” Bidh said.
Bela ten Belen turned to his soldiers and said, “Those are this man’s people. We should shackle him.”
They agreed, but none of them had brought shackles. Bela began to tear his cape into strips.
“Why do you want to tie me up, lord?” the Dirt man asked with his fist to his forehead to show respect. “Have I not guided you, and others before you, to the nomads? Am I not a man of the City? Is not my sister your brother’s wife? Is not my nephew your nephew, and a god? Why would I run away from our City to those ignorant people who starve in the wilderness, eating mudroots and crawling things?” The Crown men did not answer the Dirt man. They tied his legs with the lengths of twisted cloth, pulling the knots in the silk so tight they could not be untied but only cut open. Bela appointed three men to keep watch in turn that night.
Tired from walking and running all day, the young man on watch before dawn fell asleep. Bidh put his legs into the coals of their fire and burned through the silken ropes and stole away.
When he woke in the morning and found the slave gone, Bela ten Belen’s face grew heavy with anger, but he said only, “He’ll have warned that nearest camp. We’ll go to the farthest one, off there on the high ground.”
“They’ll see us crossing the marshes,” said Dos ten Han.
“Not if we walk in the rivers,” Bela ten Belen said.
And once they were out of the hills on the flat lands they walked along streambeds, hidden by the high reeds and willows that grew on the banks. It was autumn, before the rains, so the water was shallow enough that they could make their way along beside it or wade in it. Where the reeds grew thin and low and the stream widened out into the marshes, they crouched down and found what cover they could.
By midday they came near the farthest of the camps, which was on a low grassy rise like an island among the marshes. They could hear the voices of people gathering mudroot on the eastern side of the island. They crept up through the high grass and came to the camp from the south. No one was in the circle of skin huts but a few old men and women and a little swarm of children. The children were spreading out long yellow-brown roots on the grass, the old people cutting up the largest roots and putting them on racks over low fires to hasten the drying. The six Crown men came among them suddenly with their swords drawn. They cut the throats of the old men and women. Some children ran away down into the marshes. Others stood staring, uncomprehending.
Young men on their first foray, the soldiers had made no plans—Bela ten Belen had said to them, “I want to go out there and kill some thieves and bring home slaves,” and that was all the plan they wanted. To his friend Dos ten Han he had said, “I want to get some new Dirt girls, there’s not one in the City I can stand to look at.” Dos ten Han knew he was thinking about the beautiful nomad-born woman his brother had married. All the young Crown men thought about Nata Belenda and wished they had her or a girl as beautiful as her.
“Get the girls,” Bela shouted to the others, and they all ran at the children, seizing one or another. The older children had mostly fled at once, it was the young ones who stood staring or began too late to run. Each soldier caught one or two and dragged them back to the center of the village where the old men and women lay in their blood in the sunlight.
Having no ropes to tie the children with, the men had to keep hold of them. One little girl fought so fiercely, biting and scratching, that the soldier dropped her, and she scrabbled away screaming shrilly for help. Bela ten Belen ran after her, took her by the hair, and cut her throat to silence her screaming. His sword was sharp and her neck was soft and thin; her body dropped away from her head, held on only by the bones at the back of the neck. He dropped the head and came running back to his men. “Take one you can carry and follow me,” he shouted at them.
“Where? The people down there will be coming,” they said. For the children who had escaped had run down to the marsh where their parents were.
“Follow the river back,” Bela said, snatching up a girl of about five years old. He seized her wrists and slung her on his back as if she were a sack. The other men followed him, each with a child, two of them babies a year or two old.
The raid had occurred so quickly that they had a long lead on the nomads who came straggling up round the hill following the children who had run to them. The soldiers were able to get down into the rivercourse, where the banks and reeds hid them from people looking for them even from the top of the island.
The nomads scattered out through the reedbeds and meadows west of the island, looking to catch them on their way back to the City. But Bela had led them not west but down a branch of the river that led off southeast. They trotted and ran and walked as best they could in the water and mud and rocks of the riverbed. At first they heard voices far behind them. The heat and light of the sun filled the world. The air above the reeds was thick with stinging insects. Their eyes soon swelled almost closed with bites and burned with salt sweat. Crown men, unused to carrying burdens, they found the children heavy, even the little ones. They struggled to go fast but went slower and slower along the winding channels of the water, listening for the nomads behind them. When a child made any noise, the soldiers slapped or shook it till it was still. The girl Bela ten Belen carried hung like a stone on his back and never made any sound.
When at last the sun sank behind the Dayward Hills, that seemed strange to them, for they had always seen the sun rise behind those hills.
They were now a long way south and east of the hills. They had heard no sound of their pursuers for a long time. The gnats and mosquitoes growing even thicker with dusk drove them at last up onto a drier meadowland, where they could sink down in a place where deer had lain, hidden by the high grasses. There they all lay while the light died away. The great herons of the marsh flew over with heavy wings. Birds down in the reeds called. The men heard each other’s breathing and the whine and buzz of insects. The smaller children made tiny whimpering noises, but not often, and not loud. Even the babies of the nomad tribes were used to fear and silence.
As soon as the soldiers had let go of them, making threatening gestures to them not to try to run away, the six children crawled together and huddled up into a little mound, holding one another. Their faces were swollen with insect bites and one of the babies looked dazed and feverish. There was no food, but none of the children complained.
The light sank away from the marshes, and the insects grew silent. Now and then a frog croaked, startling the men as they sat silent, listening.
Dos ten Han pointed northward: he had heard a sound, a rustling in the grasses, not far away.
