Havzhiva would have liked, but he was obedient to his god and his teacher.
They sat in a niche of the fountain's broad base and conversed, greeting people every sentence or two with a nod or a word.
'Why did —' Havzhiva began, and stuck.
'Why did I leave? Where did I go?' She cocked
her head, bright-eyed as an araha, checking that those were the questions he wanted answered. 'Yes. Well, I was crazy in love with Granite, but we had no child, and he wanted a child. . . - You look like he did then. I like to look at you. ... So, I was unhappy- Nothing here was any good to me. And I knew how to do everything here. Or that's what I thought.'
Havzhiva nodded once.
'I worked at the temple. I'd read messages that came in or came by and wonder what they were about. I thought, all that's going on in the world!
Why should I stay here my whole life? Does my mind have to stay here? So I began to talk with
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some of them in other places in the temple: who are you, what do you do, what is it like there. . . . Right away they put me in touch with a group of historians who were born in the pueblos, who look out for people like me, to make sure they don't waste time or offend a god.'
This language was completely familiar to Havzhiva, and he nodded again, intent.
'I asked them questions. They asked me questions. Historians have to do a lot of that, I found out they have schools, and asked if I could go to one. Some of them came here and talked to me and my family and other people, finding out if there would be trouble if I left. Stse is a conservative pueblo. There hadn't been a historian from here for four hundred years.'
She smiled; she had a quick, catching smile, but the young man listened with unchanging, intense seriousness. Her look rested on his face tenderly.
'People here were upset, but nobody was angry.
So after they talked about it, I left with those people. We flew to Kathhad. There's a school there. 1 was twenty-two. I began a new education. I changed being. I learned to be a historian.'
'How?' he asked, after a long silence.
She drew a long breath. 'By asking hard ques-
tions,' she said. 'Like you're doing now.... And by giving up all the knowledge I had — throwing it away.'
'How?' he asked again, frowning. 'Why?'
'Like this. When I left, I knew 1 was a Buried Cable woman. When I was there, I had to unknow that knowledge. There, I'm not a Buried Cable woman. I'm a woman. I can have sex with any per-
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son I choose. I can take up any profession I choose. Lineage matters, here. It does not matter, there. It has meaning here, and a use. It has no meaning and no use, anywhere else in the universe.' She was as intense as he, now. 'There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal. There are two kinds of time, local and historical.'
'Are there two kinds of gods?'
'No,' she said. 'There are no gods there. The gods are here.'
She saw his face change.
She said after a while, 'There are souls, there.
Many, many souls, minds, minds full of knowledge and passion. Living and dead. People who lived on this earth a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand years ago. Minds and souls of people from worlds a hundred light-years from this one, all of them with their own knowledge, their own history.
The world is sacred, Havzhiva. The cosmos is sacred. That's not a knowledge I ever had to give up. All I learned, here and there, only increased it. There's nothing that is not sacred.' She spoke slowly and quietly, the way most people talked in the pueblo. 'You can choose the local sacredness or the great one. In the end they're the same. But not in the life one lives. To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.' The Peoples are the rock. The historians are the river.'
After a while he said, 'Rocks are the river's bed.'
She laughed. Her gaze rested on him again,
appraising and affectionate. 'So I came home,' she said. 'For a rest.'
'But you're not — you're no longer a woman of your lineage?'
As> 139 a
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'Yes; here. Still. Always.'
'But you've changed being. You'll leave again.'
'Yes,' she said decisively. 'One can be more than one kind of being. I have work to do, there.'
He shook his head, slower, but equally decisive. 'What good is work without the gods? It makes no sense to me, Mother of All Children. I don't have the mind to understand.'
She smiled at the double meaning. 'I think you'll understand what you choose to understand, Man of my People,' she said, addressing him formally to show that he was free to leave when he wanted.
He hesitated, then took his leave. He went to work, filling his mind and world with the great repeated patterns of the broadloom rugs.
That night he made it up to lyan lyan so ardently that she was left spent and a bit amazed. The god had come back to them burning, consuming.
' 1 want a child,' Havzhiva said as they lay melded, sweated together, arms and legs and breasts and breath all mingled in the musky dark.
'Oh,' lyan lyan sighed, not wanting to talk, decide, resist. 'Maybe . . . Later , . . Soon . ..'
'Now,' he said, 'now.'
'No,' she said softly. 'Hush.'
He was silent. She slept.
More than a year later, when they were nineteen, lyan lyan said to him before he put out the light, 'I
want a baby.'
'It's too soon.'
'Why? My brother's nearly thirty. And his wife J-»® 140 -xAs A Man of the People
would like a baby around. After it's weaned I'll come sleep with you at your house. You always said you'd like that.'
'It's too soon,' he repeated. 'I don't want it.'
She turned to him, laying aside her coaxing, reasonable tone. 'What do you want, Havzhiva?'
'I don't know.'
'You're going away. You're going to leave the People. You're going crazy. That woman, that damned witch!'
'There are no witches,' he said coldly. 'That's stupid talk. Superstition.'
They stared at each other, the dear friends, the lovers.
'Then what's wrong with you? If you want to move back home, say so. If you want another woman, go to her. But you could give me my child, first! when I ask you for it! Have you lost your araha?' She gazed at him with tearful eyes, fierce, unyielding.
He put his face in his hands. 'Nothing is right,' he said. 'Nothing is right. Everything I do, I have to do because that's how it's done, but it — it doesn't make sense — there are other ways —'
'There's one way to live rightly,' lyan lyan said,
'that I know of. And this is where I live. There's one way to make a baby. If you know another, you can do it with somebody else!' She cried hard after this, convulsively, the fear and anger of months breaking out at last, and he held her to calm and comfort her.
When she could speak, she leaned her head
against him and said miserably, in a small, hoarse voice, 'To have when you go, Havzhiva.'
At that he wept for shame and pity, and whis-
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