作者: raiderho@smth.edu.cn
標題: III. Azver silverharpe(轉寄)
時間: Fri May 7 08:14:10 2004
III. Azver
He left her at the comer of the street, a narrow,
dull, somehow sly-looking street that slanted up
between featureless walls to a wooden door in a
higher wall. He had put his spell on her, and she
looked like a man, though she did not feel like one.
She and Ivory took each other in their arms,
because after all they had been friends,
companions, and he had done all this for her.
"Courage!" he said, and let her go. She walked up
the street and stood before the door. She looked
back then, but he was gone.
She knocked.
After a while she heard the latch rattle. The door
opened. An ordinary-looking middle-aged man
stood there. "What can I do for you?" he said. He
did not smile, but his voice was pleasant.
"You can let me into the Great House, sir."
"Do you know the way in?" His almond-shaped
eyes were attentive, yet seemed to look at her from
miles or years away.
"This is the way in, sir."
"Do you know whose name you must tell me
before I let you in?"
"My own, sir. It is Irian."
"Is it?" he said.
That gave her pause. She stood silent. "It's the
name the witch Rose of my village on Way gave
me, in the spring under Iria Hill," she said at last,
standing up and speaking truth.
The Doorkeeper looked at her for what seemed a
long time. Then it is your name," he said. "But
maybe not all your name. I think you have
another."
"I don't know it, sir."
After another long time she said, "Maybe I can
learn it here, sir."
The Doorkeeper bowed his head a little. A very
faint smile made crescent curves in his cheeks. He
stood aside. "Come in, daughter," he said.
She stepped across the threshold of the Great
House.
Ivory's spell of semblance dropped away like a
cobweb. She was and looked herself.
She followed the Doorkeeper down a stone
passageway. Only at the end of it did she think to
turn back to see the light shine through the
thousand leaves of the tree carved in the high door
in its bone-white frame.
A young man in a grey cloak hurrying down the
passageway stopped short as he approached them.
He stared at Irian; then with a brief nod he went
on. She looked back at him. He was looking back at
her.
A globe of misty, greenish fire drifted swiftly down
the corridor at eye level, apparently pursuing the
young man. The Doorkeeper waved his hand at it,
and it avoided him. Irian swerved and ducked down
frantically, but felt the cool fire tingle in her hair as
it passed over her. The Doorkeeper looked round,
and now his smile was wider. Though he said
nothing, she felt he was aware of her, concerned
for her. She stood up and followed him.
He stopped before an oak door. Instead of
knocking he sketched a little sign or rune on it with
the top of his staff, a light staff of some greyish
wood. The door opened as a resonant voice behind
it said, "Come in!"
"Wait here a little, if you please, Irian," the
Doorkeeper said, and went into the room, leaving
the door wide open behind him. She could see
bookshelves and books, a table piled with more
books and inkpots and writings, two or three boys
seated at the table, and the grey-haired, stocky
man the Doorkeeper spoke to. She saw the man's
face change, saw his eyes shift to her in a brief,
startled gaze, saw him question the Doorkeeper,
low-voiced, intense.
They both came to her. "The Master Changer of
Roke: Irian of Way," said the Doorkeeper.
The Changer stared openly at her. He was not as
tall as she was. He stared at the Doorkeeper, and
then at her again.
"Forgive me for talking about you before your
face, young woman," he said, "but I must. Master
Doorkeeper, you know I'd never question your
judgment, but the Rule is clear. I have to ask what
moved you to break it and let her come in."
"She asked to," said the Doorkeeper.
"But. . ." The Changer paused.
"When did a woman last ask to enter the School?"
"They know the Rule doesn't allow them."
"Did you know that, Irian?" the Doorkeeper asked
her.
"Yes, sir."
"So what brought you here?" the Changer asked,
stern, but not hiding his curiosity.
"Master Ivory said I could pass for a man. Though
I thought I should say who I was. I will be as
celibate as anyone, sir."
Two long curves appeared on the Doorkeeper's
cheeks, enclosing the slow upturn of his smile. The
Changer's face remained stern, but he blinked, and
after a little thought said, "I'm sure - yes - it was
definitely the better plan to be honest. What Master
did you speak of?"
"Ivory," said the Doorkeeper. "A lad from Havnor
Great Port, whom I let in three years ago, and let
out again last year, as you may recall."
"Ivory! That fellow that studied with the Hand? Is
he here?" the Changer demanded of Irian, wrathily.
She stood straight and said nothing.
"Not in the School," the Doorkeeper said, smiling.
"He fooled you, young woman. Made a fool of you
by trying to make fools of us."
"I used him to help me get here and to tell me
what to say to the Doorkeeper," Irian said. "I'm not
here to fool anybody, but to learn what I need to
know."
"I've often wondered why I let the boy in," said
the Doorkeeper. "Now I begin to understand,"
At that the Changer looked at him, and after
pondering said soberly, "Doorkeeper, what have
you in mind?"
"I think Irian of Way may have come to us seeking
not only what she needs to know, but also what we
need to know." The Doorkeeper's tone was equally
sober, and his smile was gone. "I think this may be
a matter for talk among the nine of us."
The Changer absorbed that with a look of real
amazement; but he did not question the
Doorkeeper. He said only, "But not among the
students."
The Doorkeeper shook his head, agreeing.
"She can lodge in the town," the Changer said,
with some relief.
"While we talk behind her back?"
"You won't bring her into the Council Room?" the
Changer said in disbelief.
"The Archmage brought the boy Arren there."
"But - but Arren was King Lebannen -"
"And who is Irian?"
The Changer stood silent, and then he said quietly,
with respect, "My friend, what is it you think to do,
to learn? What is she, that you ask this for her?"
"Who are we," said the Doorkeeper, "that we
refuse her without knowing what she is?"
"A woman," said the Master Summoner.
Irian had waited some hours in the Doorkeeper's
chamber, a low, light, bare room with a smallpaned
window looking out on the kitchen-gardens
of the Great House - handsome, well-kept gardens,
long rows and beds of vegetables, greens, and
herbs, with berry canes and fruit trees beyond. She
saw a burly, dark-skinned man and two boys come
out and weed one of the vegetable plots. It eased
her mind to watch their careful work. She wished
she could help them at it. The waiting and the
strangeness were very difficult. Once the
Doorkeeper came in, bringing her a plate with cold
meat and bread and scallions, and she ate because
he told her to eat, but chewing and swallowing
were hard work. The gardeners went away and
there was nothing to watch out the window but the
cabbages growing and the sparrows hopping, and
now and then a hawk far up in the sky, and the
wind moving softly in the tops of tall trees, on
beyond the gardens.
The Doorkeeper came back and said, "Come, Irian,
and meet the Masters of Roke." Her heart began to
go at a carthorse gallop. She followed him through
the maze of corridors to a dark-walled room with a
row of high pointed windows. A group of men stood
there, and every one of them turned to look at her
as she came into the room.
"Irian of Way, my lords," said the Doorkeeper.
They were all silent. He motioned her to come
farther into the room. "The Master Changer you
have met," he said. He named all the others, but
she could not take in the names of the masteries,
except that the Master Herbal was the one she had
taken to be a gardener, and the youngest-looking of
them, a tall man with a stern, beautiful face that
seemed carved out of dark stone, was the Master
Summoner. It was he who spoke, when the
Doorkeeper was done. "A woman," he said.
The Doorkeeper nodded once, mild as ever.
"This is what you brought the Nine together for?
This and no more?"
"This and no more," said the Doorkeeper.
"Dragons have been seen flying above the Inmost
Sea. Roke has no Archmage, and the islands no
true-crowned king. There is real work to do," the
Summoner said, and his voice too was like stone,
cold and heavy. "When will we do it?"
There was an uncomfortable silence, as the
Doorkeeper did not speak. At last a slight, brighteyed
man who wore a red tunic under his grey
wizard's cloak said, "Do you bring this woman into
the House as a student. Master Doorkeeper?"
"If I did, it would be up to you all to approve or
disapprove," said he.
"Do you?" asked the man in the red tunic, smiling
a little.
"Master Hand," said the Doorkeeper, "she asked to
enter as a student, and I saw no reason to deny
her."
"Every reason," said the Summoner.
A man with a deep, clear voice spoke: 'It's not our
judgment that prevails, but the Rule of Roke, which
we are sworn to follow."
"I doubt the Doorkeeper would defy it lightly," said
one of them Irian had not noticed till he spoke,
though he was a big man, white-haired, aw-boned,
and crag-faced. Unlike the others, he looked at her
as he spoke. "I am Kurremkarmerruk," he said to
her. "As the Master Namer here, I make free with
names, my own included. Who named you, Irian?"
"The witch Rose of our village, lord," she
answered, standing straight, though her voice came
out high-pitched and rough.
"Is she misnamed?" the Doorkeeper asked the
Namer.
Kurremkarmerruk shook his head. "No. But...."
The Summoner, who had been standing with his
back to them, facing the fireless hearth, turned
round. "The names witches give each other are not
our concern here," he said. "If you have some
interest in this woman, Doorkeeper, it should be
pursued outside these walls - outside the door you
vowed to keep. She has no place here nor ever will.
She can bring only confusion, dissension, and
further weakness among us. I will speak no longer
and say nothing else in her presence. The only
answer to conscious error is silence."
"Silence is not enough, my lord," said one who had
not spoken before. To Irian's eyes he was very
strange-looking, having pale reddish skin, long pale
hair, and narrow eyes the colour of ice. His speech
was also strange, stiff and somehow deformed.
"Silence is the answer to everything, and to
nothing," he said.
The Summoner lifted his noble, dark face and
looked across the room at the pale man, but did not
speak. Without a word or gesture he turned away
again and left the room. As he walked slowly past
Irian, she shrank back from him. It was as if a
grave had opened, a winter grave, cold, wet, dark.
Her breath stuck in her throat. She gasped a little
for air. When she recovered herself she saw the
Changer and the pale man both watching her
intently.
The one with a voice like a deep-toned bell looked
at her too, and spoke to her with a plain, kind
severity. "As I see it, the man who brought you
here meant to do harm, but you do not. Yet being
here, Irian, you do us and yourself harm.
Everything not in its own place does harm. A note
sung, however well sung, wrecks the tune it isn't
part of. Women teach women. Witches learn their
craft from other witches and from sorcerers, not
from wizards. What we teach here is in a language
not for women's tongues. The young heart rebels
against such laws, calling them unjust, arbitrary.
But they are true laws, founded not on what we
want, but on what is. The just and the unjust, the
foolish and the wise, all must obey them, or waste
life and come to grief."
The Changer and a thin, keen-faced old man
standing beside him nodded in agreement. The
Master Hand said, "Irian, I am sorry. Ivory was my
pupil. If I taught him badly, I did worse in sending
him away. I thought him insignificant, and so
harmless. But he lied to you and beguiled you. You
must not feel shame. The fault was his, and mine."
"I am not ashamed," Irian said. She looked at
them all. She felt that she should thank them for
their courtesy but the words would not come. She
nodded stiffly to them, turned round, and strode
out of the room.
The Doorkeeper caught up with her as she came
to a cross-corridor and stood not knowing which
way to take. "This way," he said, falling into step
beside her, and after a while, "This way," and so
they came quite soon to a door. It was not made of
horn and ivory. It was uncarved oak, black and
massive, with an iron bolt worn thin with age. "This
is the back door," the mage said, unbolting it.
"Media's Gate, they used to call it. I keep both
doors." He opened it. The brightness of the day
dazzled Irian's eyes. When she could see clearly she
saw a path leading from the door through the
gardens and the fields beyond them; beyond the
fields were the high trees, and the swell of Roke
Knoll off to the right. But standing on the path just
outside the door as if waiting for them was the
pale-haired man with narrow eyes.
"Patterner," said the Doorkeeper, not at all
surprised.
"Where do you send this lady?" said the Patterner
in his strange speech.
"Nowhere," said the Doorkeeper. "I let her out as I
let her in, at her desire."
"Will you come with me?" the Patterner said to
Irian.
She looked at him and at the Doorkeeper and said
nothing.
"I don't live in this House. In any house," the
Patterner said. "I live there. The Grove - ah," he
said, turning suddenly. The big, white-haired man,
Kurremkarmerruk the Namer, was standing just
down the path. He had not been standing there
until the other mage said 'Ah." Irian stared from
one to the other in blank bewilderment.
This is only a seeming of me, a presentment, a
sending," the old man said to her. "I don't live here
either. Miles off." He gestured northward. "You
might come there when you're done with the
Patterner here. I'd like to learn more about your
name." He nodded to the other two mages and was
not there. A bumblebee buzzed heavily through the
air where he had been.
Irian looked down at the ground. After a long time
she said, clearing her throat, not looking up, "Is it
true I do harm being here?"
"I don't know," said the Doorkeeper.
"In the Grove is no harm," said the Patterner.
"Come on. There is an old house, a hut. Old, dirty.
You don't care, eh? Stay a while. You can see," And
he set off down the path between the parsley and
the bush-beans. She looked at the Doorkeeper; he
smiled a little. She followed the pale-haired man.
They walked a half-mile or so. The Knoll rose up
full in the western sun on their right. Behind them
the School sprawled grey and many-roofed on its
lower hill. The grove of trees towered before them
now. She saw oak and willow, chestnut and ash,
and tall evergreens. From the dense, sun-shot
darkness of the trees a stream ran out, greenbanked,
with many brown trodden places where
cattle and sheep went down to drink or to cross
over. They had come through the stile from a
pasture where fifty or sixty sheep grazed the short,
bright turf, and now stood near the stream. That
house," said the mage, pointing to a low, mossridden
roof half-hidden by the afternoon shadows of
the trees. "Stay tonight. You will?"
He asked her to stay, he did not tell her to. All she
could do was nod.
"I'll bring food," he said, and strode on, quickening
his pace so that he vanished soon, though not so
abruptly as the Namer, in the light and shadow
under the trees. Irian watched till he was certainly
gone and then made her way through high grass
and weeds to the little house.
It looked very old. It had been rebuilt and rebuilt
again, but not for a long time. Nor had anyone lived
in it for a long time, from the feel of it. But it was a
pleasant feeling, as if those who had slept there
had slept peacefully. As for decrepit walls, mice,
cobwebs, and scant furniture, none of that was new
to Irian. She found a bald broom and swept out a
bit. She unrolled her blanket on the plank bed. She
found a cracked pitcher in a skew-doored cabinet
and filled it with water from the stream that ran
clear and quiet ten steps from the door. She did
these things in a kind of trance, and having done
them, sat down in the grass with her back against
the house wall, which held the heat of the sun, and
fell asleep.
When she woke, the Master Patterner was sitting
nearby, and a basket was on the grass between
them.
"Hungry? Eat," he said.
"I'll eat later, sir. Thank you," said Irian.
"I am hungry now," said the mage. He took a
hardboiled egg from the basket, cracked, shelled,
and ate it.
They call this the Otter's House," he said. "Very
old. As old as the Great House. Everything is old,
here. We are old - the Masters."
"You're not," Irian said. She thought him between
thirty and forty, though it was hard to tell; she kept
thinking his hair was white, because it was not
black.
"But I came far. Miles can be years. I am Kargish,
from Karego. You know?"
"The Hoary Men!" said Irian, staring openly at him.
All Daisy's ballads of the Hoary Men who sailed out
of the east to lay the land waste and spit innocent
babes on their lances, and the story of how Erreth-
Akbe lost the Ring of Peace, and the new songs and
the King's Tale about how Archmage Sparrowhawk
had gone among the Hoary Men and come back
with that ring -
"Hoary?" said the Patterner.
"Frosty. White," she said, looking away,
embarrassed.
"Ah." Presently he said, "The Master Summoner is
not old." And she got a sidelong look from those
narrow, ice-coloured eyes.
She said nothing.
"I think you feared him."
She nodded.
When she said nothing, and some time had
passed, he said, "In the shadow of these trees is no
harm. Only truth."
"When he passed me," she said in a low voice, "I
saw a grave."
"Ah," said the Patterner.
He had made a little heap of bits of eggshell on
the ground by his knee. He arranged the white
fragments into a curve, then closed it into a circle.
"Yes," he said, studying his eggshells, then,
scratching up the earth a bit, he neatly and
delicately buried them. He dusted off his hands.
Again his glance flicked to Irian and away.
"You have been a witch, Irian?"
"No."
"But you have some knowledge."
"No. I don't. Rose wouldn't teach me. She said she
didn't dare. Because I had power but she didn't
know what it was."
"Your Rose is a wise flower," said the mage,
unsmiling.
"But I know I have -I have something to do, to be.
That's why I wanted to come here. To find out. On
the Isle of the Wise."
She was getting used to his strange face now and
was able to read it. She thought that he looked sad.
His way of speaking was harsh, quick, dry,
peaceable. The men of the Isle are not always wise,
eh?" he said. "Maybe the Doorkeeper." He looked at
her now, not glancing but squarely, his eyes
catching and holding hers. "But there. In the wood.
Under the trees. There is the old wisdom. Never
old. I can't teach you. I can take you into the
Grove." After a minute he stood up. "Yes?"
"Yes," she said uncertainly.
"The house is all right?"
"Yes -"
"Tomorrow," he said, and strode off.
So for a half-month or more of the hot days of
summer, Irian slept in the Otter's House, which was
a peaceful one, and ate what the Master Patterner
brought her in his basket - eggs, cheese, greens,
fruit, smoked mutton - and went with him every
afternoon into the grove of high trees, where the
paths seemed never to be quite where she
remembered them, and often led on far beyond
what seemed the confines of the wood. They
walked there in silence, and spoke seldom when
they rested. The mage was a quiet man. Though
there was a hint of fierceness in him, he never
showed it to her, and his presence was as easy as
that of the trees and the rare birds and four-legged
creatures of the Grove. As he had said, he did not
try to teach her. When she asked about the Grove,
he told her that, with Roke Knoll, it had stood since
Segoy made the islands of the world, and that all
magic was in the roots of the trees, and that they
were mingled with the roots of all the forests that
were or might yet be. "And sometimes the Grove is
in this place," he said, "and sometimes in another.
But it is always."
She had never seen where he lived. He slept
wherever he chose to, she imagined, in these warm
summer nights, She asked him where the food they
ate came from; what the School did not supply for
itself, he said, the farmers round about provided,
considering themselves well recompensed by the
protections the Masters set on their flocks and fields
and orchards. That made sense to her. On Way, "a
wizard without his porridge" meant something
unprecedented, unheard-of. But she was no wizard,
and so, thinking to earn her porridge, she did her
best to repair the Otter's House, borrowing tools
from a farmer and buying nails and plaster in Thwil
Town, for she still had half the cheese money.
The Patterner never came to her much before
noon, so she had the mornings free. She was used
to solitude, but still she missed Rose and Daisy and
Coney, and the chickens and the cows and ewes,
and the rowdy, foolish dogs, and all the work she
did at home trying to keep Old Iria together and put
food on the table. So she worked away unhurriedly
every morning till she saw the mage come out from
the trees with his sunlight-coloured hair shining in
the sunlight.
Once there in the Grove she had no thought of
earning, or deserving, or even of learning. To be
there was enough, was all.
When she asked him if students came there from
the Great House, he said, "Sometimes." Another
time he said, "My words are nothing. Hear the
leaves." That was all he said that could be called
teaching. As she walked, she listened to the leaves
when the wind rustled them or stormed in the
crowns of the trees; she watched the shadows play,
and thought about the roots of the trees down in
the darkness of the earth. She was utterly content
to be there. Yet always, without discontent or
urgency, she felt that she was waiting. And that
silent expectancy was deepest and clearest when
she came out of the shelter of the woods and saw
the open sky.
Once, when they had gone a long way and the
trees, dark evergreens she did not know, stood very
high about them, she heard a call - a horn blowing,
a cry? - remote, on the very edge of hearing. She
stood still, listening towards the west. The mage
walked on, turning only when he realized she had
stopped.
"I heard -" she said, and could not say what she
had heard.
He listened. They walked on at last through a
silence enlarged and deepened by that far call.
She never went into the Grove without him, and it
was many days before he left her alone within it.
But one hot afternoon when they came to a glade
among a stand of oaks, he said, "I will come back
here, eh?" and walked off with his quick, silent step,
lost almost at once in the dappled, shifting depths
of the forest.
She had no wish to explore for herself. The
peacefulness of the place called for stillness,
watching, listening; and she knew how tricky the
paths were, and that the Grove was, as the
Patterner put it, "bigger inside than outside'. She
sat down in a patch of sun-dappled shade and
watched the shadows of the leaves play across the
ground. The oakmast was deep; though she had
never seen wild swine in the wood, she saw their
tracks here. For a moment she caught the scent of
a fox. Her thoughts moved as quietly and easily as
the breeze moved in the warm light.
Often her mind here seemed empty of thought,
full of the forest itself, but this day memories came
to her, vivid. She thought about Ivory, thinking she
would never see him again, wondering if he had
found a ship to take him back to Havnor. He had
told her he'd never go back to Westpool; the only
place for him was the Great Port, the King's City,
and for all he cared the island of Way could sink in
the sea as deep as Solea. But she thought with love
of the roads and fields of Way. She thought of Old
Iria village, the marshy spring under Iria Hill, the
old house on it. She thought about Daisy singing
ballads in the kitchen, winter evenings, beating out
the time with her wooden clogs; and old Coney in
the vineyards with his razor-edge knife, showing
her how to prune the vine "right down to the life in
it"; and Rose, her Etaudis, whispering charms to
ease the pain in a child's broken arm. I have known
wise people, she thought. Her mind flinched away
from remembering her father, but the motion of the
leaves and shadows drew it on. She saw him drunk,
shouting. She felt his prying, tremulous hands on
her. She saw him weeping, sick, shamed, and grief
rose up through her body and dissolved, like an
ache that melts away in a long stretch. He was less
to her than the mother she had not known.
She stretched, feeling the ease of her body in the
warmth, and her mind drifted back to Ivory. She
had had no one in her life to desire. When the
young wizard first came riding by so slim and
arrogant, she wished she could want him; but she
didn't and couldn't, and so she had thought him
spell-protected. Rose had explained to her how
wizards' spells worked 'so that it never enters your
head nor theirs, see, because it would take from
their power, they say'. But Ivory, poor Ivory, had
been all too unprotected. If anybody was under a
spell of chastity it must have been herself, for
charming and handsome as he was she had never
been able to feel a thing for him but liking, and her
only lust was to learn what he could teach her.
She considered herself, sitting in the deep silence
of the Grove. No bird sang; the breeze was down;
the leaves hung still. Am I ensorcelled? Am I a
sterile thing, not whole, not a woman? she asked
herself, looking at her strong bare arms, the slight,
soft swell of her breasts in the shadow under the
throat of her shirt.
She looked up and saw the Hoary Man come out
of a dark aisle of great oaks and come towards her
across the glade.
He stopped in front of her. She felt herself blush,
her face and throat burning, dizzy, her ears ringing.
She sought words, anything to say, to turn his
attention away from her, and could find nothing at
all. He sat down near her. She looked down, as if
studying the skeleton of a last-year's leaf by her
hand.
What do I want? she asked herself, and the
answer came not in words but throughout her
whole body and soul: the fire, a greater fire than
that, the flight, the flight burning -
She came back into herself, into the still air under
the trees. The Hoary Man sat near her, his face
bowed down, and she thought how slight and light
he looked, how quiet and sorrowful. There was
nothing to fear. There was no harm.
He looked over at her.
"Irian," he said, "do you hear the leaves?"
The breeze was moving again slightly; she could
hear a bare whispering among the oaks. "A little,"
she said.
"Do you hear the words?"
"No."
She asked nothing and he said no more. Presently
he got up, and she followed him to the path that
always led them, sooner or later, out of the wood to
the clearing by the Thwilburn and the Otter's
House. When they came there, it was late
afternoon. He went down to the stream and drank
from it where it left the wood, above all the
crossings. She did the same. Then sitting in the
cool, long grass of the bank, he began to speak.
"My people, the Kargs, they worship gods. Twin
gods, brothers. And the king there is also a god.
But before that and after are the streams. Caves,
stones, hills. Trees. The earth. The darkness of the
earth."
The Old Powers," Irian said.
He nodded. There, women know the Old Powers.
Here too, witches. And the knowledge is bad - eh?"
When he added that little questioning "eh?" or
"neh?" to the end of what had seemed a statement
it always took her by surprise. She said nothing.
"Dark is bad," said the Patterner. "Eh?"
Irian drew a deep breath and looked at him eye to
eye as they sat there. ""Only in dark the light,"" she
said.
"Ah," he said. He looked away so that she could
not see his expression.
"I should go," she said. "I can walk in the Grove,
but not live there. It isn't my - my place. And the
Master Chanter said I did harm by being here."
"We all do harm by being," said the Patterner.
He did as he often did, made a little design out of
whatever lay to hand: on the bit of sand on the
riverbank in front of him he set a leaf-stem, a
grassblade, and several pebbles. He studied them
and rearranged them. "Now I must speak of harm,"
he said.
After a long pause he went on. "You know that a
dragon brought back our Lord Sparrowhawk, with
the young king, from the shores of death. Then the
dragon carried Sparrowhawk away to his home, for
his power was gone, he was not a mage. So
presently the Masters of Roke met to choose a new
Archmage, here, in the Grove, as always. But not as
always.
"Before the dragon came, the Summoner too had
returned from death, where he can go, where his
art can take him. He had seen our lord and the
young king there, in that country across the wall of
stones. He said they would not come back. He said
Lord Sparrowhawk had told him to come back to us,
to life, to bear that word. So we grieved for our
lord.
"But then came the dragon, Kalessin, bearing him
living.
"The Summoner was among us when we stood on
Roke Knoll and saw the Archmage kneel to King
Lebannen. Then, as the dragon bore our friend
away, the Summoner fell down.
"He lay as if dead, cold, his heart not beating, yet
he breathed. The Herbal used all his art, but could
not rouse him. "He is dead," he said. "The breath
will not leave him, but he is dead." So we mourned
him. Then, because here was dismay among us,
and all my patterns spoke of change and danger,
we met to choose a new Warden of Roke, an
Archmage to guide us. And in our council we set the
young king in the Summoner's place. To us it
seemed right that he should sit among us. Only the
Changer spoke against it at first, and then agreed.
"But we met, we sat, and we could not choose.
We said this and said that, but no name was
spoken. And then I..." He paused a while. There
came on me what my people call the eduevanu, the
other breath. Words came to me and I spoke them.
I said, Hama Gondun! And Kurremkarmerruk told
them this in Hardic: "A woman on Gont." But when
I came back to my own wits, I could not tell them
what that meant. And so we parted with no
Archmage chosen.
The king left soon after, and the Master Windkey
went with him. Before the king was to be crowned,
they went to Gont and sought our lord, to find what
that meant, "a woman on Gont". Eh? But they did
not see him, only my countrywoman Tenar of the
Ring. She said she was not the woman they sought.
And they found no one, nothing. So Lebannen
judged it to be a prophecy yet to be fulfilled. And in
Havnor he set his crown on his own head.
The Herbal, and I too, judged the Summoner
dead. We thought the breath he breathed was left
from some spell of his own art that we did not
understand, like the spell snakes know that keeps
their heart beating long after they are dead.
Though it seemed terrible to bury a breathing body,
yet he was cold, and his blood did not run, and no
soul was in him. That was more terrible. So we
made ready to bury him. And then, by his grave, his
eyes opened. He moved, and spoke. He said, "I
have summoned myself again into life, to do what
must be done."'
The Patterner's voice had grown rougher, and he
suddenly brushed the little design of pebbles apart
with the palm of his hand.
"So when the Windkey returned, we were nine
again. But divided. For the Summoner said we must
meet again and choose an Archmage. The king had
had no place among us, he said. And "a woman on
Gont", whoever she may be, has no place among
the men on Roke. Eh? The Windkey, the Chanter,
the Changer, the Hand, say he is right. And as King
Lebannen is one returned from death, fulfilling that
prophecy, they say so will the Archmage be one
returned from death."
"But -" Irian said, and stopped.
After a while the Patterner said, "That art,
summoning, you know, is very . . . terrible. It is ...
always danger. Here," and he looked up into the
green-gold darkness of the trees, "here is no
summoning. No bringing back across the wall. No
wall."
His face was a warrior's face, but when he looked
into the trees it was softened, yearning.
"So," he said, "now he makes you his reason for
our meeting. But I will not go to the Great House. I
will not be summoned."
"He won't come here?"
"I think he will not walk in the Grove. Nor on Roke
Knoll. On the Knoll, what is, is so,"
She did not know what he meant, but did not ask,
preoccupied: "You say he makes me his reason for
you to meet together."
"Yes. To send away one woman, it takes nine
mages." He very seldom smiled, and when he did it
was quick and fierce. "We are to meet to uphold the
Rule of Roke. And so to choose an Archmage."
"If I went away -" She saw him shake his head. "I
could go to the Namer -"
"You are safer here."
The idea of doing harm troubled her, but the idea
of danger had not entered her mind. She found it
inconceivable. "I'll be all right," she said. "So the
Namer, and you - and the Doorkeeper?"
"- do not wish Thorion to be Archmage. Also the
Master Herbal, though he digs and says little."
He saw Irian staring at him in amazement. Thorion
the Summoner speaks his true name," he said. "He
died, eh?"
She knew that King Lebannen used his true name
openly. He too had returned from death. Yet that
the Summoner should do so continued to shock and
disturb her as she thought about it.
"And the ... the students?"
"Divided also."
She thought about the School, where she had
been so briefly. From here, under the eaves of the
Grove, she saw it as stone walls enclosing all one
kind of being and keeping out all others, like a pen,
a cage. How could any of them keep their balance
in a place like that?
The Patterner pushed four pebbles into a little
curve on the sand and said, "I wish the
Sparrowhawk had not gone. I wish I could read
what the shadows write. But all I can hear the
leaves say is change, change... Everything will
change but them." He looked up into the trees
again with that yearning look. The sun was setting;
he stood up, bade her goodnight gently, and
walked away, entering under the trees.
She sat on a while by the Thwilburn. She was
troubled by what he had told her and by her
thoughts and feelings in the Grove, and troubled
that any thought or feeling could have troubled her
there. She went to the house, set out her supper of
smoked meat and bread and summer lettuce, and
ate it without tasting it. She roamed restlessly back
down he streambank to the water. It was very still
and warm in the late dusk, only the largest stars
burning through a milky overcast. She slipped off
her sandals and put her feet in the water. It was
cool, but veins of sunwarmth ran through it. She
slid out of her clothes, the man's breeches and shirt
that were all she had, and slipped naked into the
water, feeling the push and stir of the current all
along her body. She had never swum in the streams
at Iria, and she had hated the sea, heaving grey
and cold, but this quick water pleased her, tonight.
She drifted and floated, her hands slipping over
silken underwater rocks and her own silken flanks,
her legs sliding through waterweeds. All trouble and
restlessness washed away from her in the running
of the water, and she floated in delight in the caress
of the stream, gazing up at the white, soft fire of
the stars.
A chill ran through her. The water ran cold.
Gathering herself together, her limbs still soft and
loose, she looked up and saw on the bank above
her the black figure of a man.
She stood straight up in the water.
"Get out!" she shouted. "Get away, you traitor,
you foul lecher, or I'll cut the liver out of you!" She
sprang up the bank, pulling herself up by the tough
bunchgrass, and scrambled to her feet. No one was
there. She stood afire, shaking with rage. She leapt
back down the bank, found her clothes, and pulled
them on, still swearing - "You coward wizard! You
traitorous son of a bitch!"
"Irian?"
"He was here!" she cried. "That foul heart, that
Thorion!" She strode to meet the Patterner as he
came into the starlight by the house. "I was bathing
in the stream, and he stood there watching me!"
"A sending - only a seeming of him. It could not
hurt you, Irian."
"A sending with eyes, a seeming with seeing! May
he be -" She stopped, at a loss suddenly for the
word. She felt sick. She shuddered, and swallowed
the cold spittle that welled in her mouth.
The Patterner came forward and took her hands in
his. His hands were warm, and she felt so mortally
cold that she came close up against him for the
warmth of his body. They stood so for a while, her
face turned from him but their hands joined and
their bodies pressed close. At last she broke free,
straightening herself, pushing back her lank wet
hair. Thank you," she said. "I was cold."
"I know."
"I'm never cold," she said. "It was him."
"I tell you, Irian, he cannot come here, he cannot
harm you here."
"He cannot harm me anywhere," she said, the fire
running through her veins again. "If he tries to, I'll
destroy him."
"Ah," said the Patterner.
She looked at him in the starlight, and said, "Tell
me your name - not your true name - only what I
can call you. When I think of you."
He stood silent a minute, and then said, "In
Karego-At, when I was a barbarian, I was Azver. In
Hardic, that is a banner of war."
"Azver," she said. "Thank you."
She lay awake in the little house, feeling the air
stifling and the ceiling pressing down on her, then
slept suddenly and deeply. She woke as suddenly
when the east was just getting light. She went to
the door to see what she loved best to see, the sky
before sunrise. Looking down from it she saw Azver
the Patterner rolled up in his grey cloak, sound
asleep on the ground before her doorstep. She
withdrew noiselessly into the house. In a little while
she saw him going back to his woods, walking a bit
stiffly and scratching his head as he went, as people
do when half awake.
She got to work scraping down the inner wall of
the house, readying it to plaster. But before the sun
was in the windows, there was a knock at her open
door. Outside was the man she had thought was a
gardener, the Master Herbal, looking solid and
stolid, like a brown ox, beside the gaunt, grim-faced
old Namer.
She came to the door and muttered some kind of
greeting. They daunted her, these Masters of Roke,
and also their presence meant that the peaceful
time was over, the days of walking in the silent
summer forest with the Patterner. That had come
to an end last night. She knew it, but she did not
want to know it.
"The Patterner sent for us," said the Master
Herbal. He looked uncomfortable. Noticing a clump
of weeds under the window, he said, "That's velvet.
Somebody from Havnor planted it here. Didn't know
there was any on the island." He examined it
attentively, and put some seedpods into his pouch.
Irian was studying the Namer covertly but equally
attentively, trying to see if she could tell if he was
what he had called a sending or was there in flesh
and blood. Nothing about him appeared
insubstantial, but she thought he was not there,
and when he stepped into the slanting sunlight and
cast no shadow, she knew it.
"Is it a long way from where you live, sir?" she
asked.
He nodded. "Left myself halfway," he said. He
looked up; the Patterner was coming towards them,
wide awake now.
He greeted them and asked, "The Doorkeeper will
come?"
"Said he thought he'd better keep the doors," said
the Herbal. He closed is many-pocketed pouch
carefully and looked around at the others. "But I
don't know if he can keep a lid on the ant-hill."
"What's up?" said Kurremkarmerruk. "I've been
reading about dragons. Not paying attention. But all
the boys I had studying at the Tower left."
"Summoned," said the Herbal, drily.
"So?" said the Namer, more drily.
"I can tell you only how it seems to me," the
Herbal said, reluctant, uncomfortable.
"Do that," the old mage said.
The Herbal still hesitated. "This lady is not of our
council," he said at last.
"She is of mine," said Azver.
"She came to this place at this time," the Namer
said. "And to this place, at this time, no one comes
by chance. All any of us knows is how it seems to
us. There are names behind names, my Lord
Healer."
The dark-eyed mage bowed his head at that, and
said, "Very well," evidently with relief at accepting
their judgment over his own. "Thorion has been
much with the other Masters, and with the young
men. Secret meetings, inner circles. Rumors,
whispers. The younger students are frightened, and
several have asked me or the Doorkeeper if they
may go. And we'd let them go. But there's no ship
in port, and none has come into Thwil Bay since the
one that brought you, lady, and sailed again next
day for Wathort. The Windkey keeps the Roke-wind
against all. If the king himself should come, he
could not land on Roke,"
"Until the wind changes, eh?" said the Patterner.
"Thorion says Lebannen is not truly king, since no
Archmage crowned him,"
"Nonsense! Not history!" said the old Namer. "The
first Archmage came centuries after the last king.
Roke ruled in the kings' stead."
"Ah," said the Patterner. "Hard for the
housekeeper to give up the keys when the owner
comes home."
"The Ring of Peace is healed," said the Herbal, in
his patient, troubled voice, "the prophecy is fulfilled,
the son of Morred is crowned, and yet we have no
peace. Where have we gone wrong? Why can we
not find the balance?"
"What does Thorion intend?" asked the Namer.
"To bring Lebannen here," said the Herbal. "The
young men talk of "the true crown". A second
coronation, here. By the Archmage Thorion."
"Avert!" Irian blurted out, making the sign to
prevent word from becoming deed. None of the
men smiled, and the Herbal belatedly made the
same gesture.
"How does he hold them all?" the Namer said.
"Herbal, you were here when Sparrowhawk and
Thorion were challenged by Irioth. His gift was as
great as Thorion's, I think. He used it to use men,
to control them wholly. Is that what Thorion does?"
"I don't know," the Herbal said. "I can only tell you
that when I'm with him, when I'm in the Great
House, I feel that nothing can be done but what
has been done. That nothing will change. Nothing
will grow. That no matter what cures I use, the
sickness will end in death." He looked around at
them all like a hurt ox. "And I think it is true. There
is no way to regain the Equilibrium but by holding
still. We have gone too far. For the Archmage and
Lebannen to go bodily into death, and return - it
was not right. They broke a law that must not be
broken. It was to restore the law that Thorion
returned."
"What, to send them back into death?" the Namer
said, and the Patterner, "Who is to say what is the
law?"
"There is a wall," the Herbal said.
"That wall is not as deep-rooted as my trees," said
the Patterner.
"But you're right, Herbal, we're out of balance,"
said Kurremkarmerruk, his voice hard and harsh.
"When and where did we begin to go too far? What
have we forgotten, turned our back on,
overlooked?"
Irian looked from one to the other.
"When the balance is wrong, holding still is not
good. It must get more wrong," said the Patterner.
"Until -" He made a quick gesture of reversal with
his open hands, down going up and up down.
"What's more wrong than to summon oneself back
from death?" said the Namer.
"Thorion was the best of us all - a brave heart, a
noble mind." The Herbal spoke almost in anger.
"Sparrowhawk loved him. So did we all."
"Conscience caught him," said the Namer.
"Conscience told him he alone could set things
right. To do it, he denied his death. So he denies
life."
"And who shall stand against him?" said the
Patterner. "I can only hide in my woods."
"And I in my tower," said the Namer. "And you,
Herbal, and the Doorkeeper, are in the trap, in the
Great House. The walls we built to keep all evil out.
Or in, as the case may be."
"We are four against him," said the Patterner.
They are five against us," said the Herbal.
"Has it come to this," the Namer said, "that we
stand at the edge of the forest Segoy planted and
talk of how to destroy one another?"
"Yes," said the Patterner. "What goes too long
unchanged destroys itself. The forest is for ever
because it dies and dies and so lives. I will not let
this dead hand touch me. Or touch the king who
brought us hope. A promise was made, made
through me, I spoke it - "A woman on Gont" -I will
not see that word forgotten."
"Then should we go to Gont?" said the Herbal,
caught in Azver's passion. "Sparrowhawk is there."
Tenar of the Ring is there," said Azver.
"Maybe our hope is there," said the Namer.
They stood silent, uncertain, trying to cherish
hope.
Irian stood silent too, but her hope sank down,
replaced by a sense of shame and utter
insignificance. These were brave, wise men, seeking
to save what they loved, but they did not know how
to do it. And she had no share in their wisdom, no
part in their decisions. She drew away from them,
and they did not notice. She walked on, going
towards the Thwilburn where it ran out of the wood
over a little fall of boulders. The water was bright in
the morning sunlight and made a happy noise. She
wanted to cry but she had never been good at
crying. She stood and watched the water, and her
shame turned slowly into anger.
She came back towards the three men, and said,
"Azver."
He turned to her, startled, and came forward a
little.
"Why did you break your Rule for me? Was it fair
to me, who can never be what you are?"
Azver frowned. "The Doorkeeper admitted you
because you asked," he said. "I brought you to the
Grove because the leaves of the trees spoke your
name to me before you ever came here. Irian, they
said, Irian. Why you came I don't know, but not by
chance. The Summoner too knows that."
"Maybe I came to destroy him."
He looked at her and said nothing.
"Maybe I came to destroy Roke."
His pale eyes blazed then. Try!"
A long shudder went through her as she stood
facing him. She felt herself larger than he was,
larger than she was, enormously larger. She could
reach out one finger and destroy him. He stood
there in his small, brave, brief humanity, his
mortality, defenseless. She drew a long, long
breath. She stepped back from him.
The sense of huge strength was draining out of
her. She turned her head a little and looked down,
surprised to see her own brown arm, her rolled-up
sleeve, the grass springing cool and green around
her sandaled feet. She looked back at the Patterner
and he still seemed a fragile being. She pitied and
honoured him. She wanted to warn him of the peril
he was in. But no words came to her at all. She
turned round and went back to the streambank by
the little falls. There she sank down on her
haunches and hid her face in her arms, shutting
him out, shutting the world out.
The voices of the mages talking were like the
voices of the stream running. The stream said its
words and they said theirs, but none of them were
the right words.