Our car was shunted along to the main yards
Ae 253 a
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
and hooked onto a train. When the train started we were served dinner, soup from great kettles wheeled through the car, bowls of sweet, heavy marsh rice, pini fruit — a luxury on Werel, here a commonplace. We ate and ate. I watched the last light die away from the long, rolling hills that the train was passing through. The stars came out. No moons. Never again. But I saw Werel rising in the east. It was a great blue-green star, looking as Yeowe looks from Werel. But you would never see Yeowe rising after sunset. Yeowe followed the sun.
I'm alive and I'm here, I thought. I'm following the sun. I let the rest go, and fell asleep to the swaying of the train.
We were taken off the train on the second day at a town on the great river Yot. Our group of twenty-three was separated there, and ten of us were taken by oxcart to a village, Hagayot. It had been an APCY compound, growing marsh rice to feed the Colony slaves. Now it was a cooperative village, growing marsh rice to feed the Free People. We were enrolled as members of the cooperative. We lived share and share alike with the villagers until payout, when we could pay them back what we owed the cooperative.
It was a reasonable way to handle immigrants without money who did not know the language or who had no skills. But I did not understand why they had ignored our skills. Why had they sent the men from Bambur plantations, field hands, into the city, not here? Why only women?
I did not understand why, in a village of free people, there was a men's side and a women's side, with a ditch between them.
zfs 254 s*A'
A Woman's Liberation
I did not understand why, as I soon discovered, the men made all the decisions and gave all the orders. But, it being so, I did understand that they were afraid of us Werelian women, who were not used to taking orders from our equals. And I understood that I must take orders and not even look as if I thought of questioning them. The men of Hagayot Village watched us with fierce suspicion and a whip as ready as any Boss's. 'Maybe you told men what to do back over there,' the foreman told us the first morning in the fields. 'Well, that's back over there-That's not here. Here we free people work together. You think you're Bosswomen. There aren't any Bosswomen here.'
There were grandmothers on the women's side, but they were not the powers our grandmothers had been. Here, where for the first century there had been no slave women at all, the men had had to make their own life, set up their own powers. When women slaves at last were sent into those slave-kingdoms of men, there was no power for them at all. They had no voice. Not till they got away to the cities did they ever have a voice on Yeowe.
I learned silence.
But it was not as bad for me and Tualtak as for our eight Bambur companions. We were the first immigrants any of these villagers had ever seen.
They knew only one language. They thought the Bambur women were witches because they did not talk 'like human beings.' They whipped them for talking to each other in their own language.
I will confess that in my first year on the Free World my heart was as tow as it had been at Zeskra. I hated standing all day in the shallow water of the
*a*s 255 At-®
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
rice paddies. Our feet were always sodden and swollen and full of tiny burrowing worms we had to pick out every night. But it was needed work and not too hard for a healthy woman. It was not the work that bore me down.
Hagayot was not a tribal village, not as conservative as some of the old villages I learned about later. Girls here were not ritually raped, and a woman was safe on the women's side. She 'jumped the ditch' only with a man she chose. But if a woman went anywhere alone, or even got separated from the other women working in the paddies, she was supposed to be 'asking for it,' and any man thought it his right to force himself on her.
I made good friends among the village women and the Bamburs. They were no more ignorant than I had been a few years before and some were wiser than I would ever be. There was no possibility of having a friend among men who thought themselves our owners. I could not see how life here would ever change. My heart was very low, nights, when I lay among the sleeping women and children in our hut and thought. Is this what Walsu died for?
In my second year there, I resolved to do what I could to keep above the misery that threatened me. One of the Bambur women, meek and slow of understanding, whipped and beaten by both women and men for speaking her language, had drowned in one of the great rice paddies. She had lain down there in the warm shallow water not much deeper than her ankles, and had drowned. I feared that yielding, that water of despair. I made up my mind to use my skill, to teach the village women and children to read.
sissi 256 A-s*
A Woman's Liberation
I wrote out some little primers on rice cloth and made a game of it for the little children, first. Some of the older girls and women were curious. Some of them knew that people in the towns and cities could read. They saw it as a mystery, a witchcraft that gave the city people their great power. I did not deny this.
For the women, I first wrote down verses and passages of the Arkamye, all I could remember, so that they could have it and not have to wait for one of the men who called themselves 'priests' to recite it. They were proud of learning to read these verses. Then I had my friend Seugi tell me a story, her own recollection of meeting a wild hunting cat in the marshes as a child. I wrote it down. entitling it 'The Marsh Lion, by Aro Seugi,' and read it aloud to the author and a circle of girls and women. They marveled and laughed. Seugi wept, touching the writing that held her voice.
foremen and honorary sons. all the hierarchy and government of the village, were suspicious and not pleased by my teaching, yet did not want to forbid me. The government of Yotebber Region had sent word that they were establishing country schools where village children were to be sent for half the year. The village men knew that their sons would be advantaged if they could already read and write when they went there.
The Chosen Son, a big, mild, pale man, blind in one eye from a war wound, came to me at last. He wore his coat of office, a tight, long coat such as Werelian owners had worn three hundred years ago. He told me that 1 should not teach girls to read, only boys.
TW> 257 i-'®
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
I told him I would teach all the children who wanted to learn or none of them.
'Girls do not want to learn this,' he said.
'They do. Fourteen girls have asked to be in my class- Eight boys. Do you say girls do not need religious training, Chosen Son?'
This gave him pause. 'They should learn the life of the Merciful Lady,' he said.
'I will write the Life of Tual for them.' I said at once. He walked away, saving his dignity.
I had little pleasure in my victory, such as it was.
At least I went on teaching.
Tualtak was always at me to run away, run away to the city downriver. She had grown very thin, for she could not digest the heavy food. She hated the work and the people. 'It's all right for you, you were a plantation pup, a dusty, but I never was, my mother was a rentswoman, we lived in fine rooms on Haba Street, I was the brightest trainee they ever had in the laboratory,' and on and on, over and over, living in the world she had lost.
Sometimes I listened to her talk about running away. 1 tried to remember the maps of Yeowe in my
lost books. 1 remembered the great river, the Yot, running from far inland three thousand kilos to the South Sea. But where were we on its vast length, how far from Yotebber City on its delta? Between Hagayot and the city might be a hundred villages like this one. 'Have you been raped?' I asked Tualtak.
She took offense. 'I'm a rentswoman, not a use-woman,' she snapped.
I said, 'I was a use-woman for two years. If I was raped again, I would kill the man or kill myself. I
i-xs. 258 a®
