Free Planet Of Exile by Ursula K. LeGuin

talk—"
    "I stopped you so that we wouldn't have the farborns to fight along with the Gaal, you fool! She's of age to sleep with a man if she chooses, and this is no—"
    "He was no man, kinsman, and I am no fool."
    "You are a fool, Ukwet, for you jumped at this as a chance to make quarrel with the farborns, and so lost us our one chance to turn aside the Gaal!"
    "I do not hear you, liar, traitor!"
    They met with a yell in the middle of the circle, axes drawn. Wold got up. Men sitting near him looked up expecting him, as Eldest and clan-chief, to stop the fight. But he did not. He turned away from the broken circle and in silence, with his stiff, ponderous shuffle, went down the alley between the high slant roofs, under projecting eaves, to the house of his Kin.
    He clambered laboriously down earthen stairs into the stuffy, smoky warmth of the immense dug-out room. Boys and womenfolk came asking him if the Stone-Pounding was over and why he came alone.
    "Umaksuman and Ukwet are fighting," he said to get rid of them, and sat down by the fire, his legs right in the firepit. No good would come of this. No good would come of anything any more. When crying women brought in the body of his grandson Ukwet, a thick path of blood dropping behind them from the ax-split skull, he looked on without moving or speaking. "Umaksuman killed him, his kinsman, his brother," Uk-wet's wives shrilled at Wold, who never raised his head. Finally he looked around at them heavily like an old animal beset by hunters, and said in a thick voice, "Be still ... Can't you be still..."
    It snowed again next day. They buried Ukwet, the first-dead of the Winter, and the snow fell on the corpse's face before the grave was filled. Wold thought then and later of Umaksuman, outlawed, alone hi the hills, in the snow. Which was better off?
    His tongue was very thick and he did not like to talk. He stayed by the fire and was not sure, sometimes, whether outside it was day or night. He did not sleep well; he seemed somehow always to be waking up. He was just waking up when the noise began outside, up above ground.
    Women came shrieking in from the side-rooms, grabbing up then- little Fall-born brats. "The Gaal, the Gaal!" they screeched. Others were quiet as befitted women of a great house, and put the place in order and sat down to wait.
    No man came for Wold.
    He knew he was no longer a chief; but was he no longer a man? Must he stay with the babies and women by the fire, in a hole hi the ground?
    He had endured public shame, but the loss of his own self-respect he could not endure, and shaking a little he got up and began to rummage in his old painted chest for his leather vest and his heavy spear, the spear with which he had killed a snow-ghoul singlehanded, very long ago. He was stiff and heavy now and all the bright seasons had passed since then, but he was the same man, the same that had killed with that spear in the snow of another winter. Was he not the same man? They should not have left him here by the fire, when the enemy came.
    His fool womenfolk came squealing around him, and he got mixed up and angry. But old Kerly drove them all off, gave him back his spear that one of them had taken from him, and fastened at his neck the cape of gray korio-fur she had made for him in autumn. There was one left who knew what a man was. She watched him in silence and he felt her grieving pride. So he walked very erect. She was a cross old woman and he was a foolish old man, but pride remained. He climbed up into the cold, bright noon, hearing beyond the walls the calling of foreign-voices.
    Men were gathered on the square platform over the smokehold of the House of Absence. They made way for him when he hoisted himself up the ladder. He was wheezing and trembling so that at first he could see nothing. Then he saw. For a while he forgot everything in the unbelievable sight.
    The valley that wound from north to south along the base of Tevar Hill to the river-valley east