作者: raiderho@smth.edu.cn
標題: THE DARK TIME, THE HAND, AND ROKE SCHO silverharpe(轉寄)
時間: Fri May 7 08:17:25 2004
THE DARK TIME, THE HAND, AND ROKE
SCHOOL
After Maharion's death in 452, several claimants
contested the throne; none prevailed. Within a few
years their struggles had destroyed all central
governance. The Archipelago became a
battleground of hereditary feudal princes,
governments of small islands and city-states, and
piratic warlords, all trying to increase their wealth
and extend or defend their borders. Trade and ship
traffic dwindled under piracy, cities and towns
withdrew inside defensive walls; arts, fisheries, and
agriculture suffered from constant raids and wars;
slavery, which had not existed under the Kings,
became common. Magic was the primary weapon in
forays and battles. Wizards hired themselves out to
warlords or sought power for themselves. Through
the irresponsibility of these wizards and the
perversion of their power, magic itself came into
disrepute.
The dragons offered no threat during this period,
and the Kargs had withdrawn into their own internal
quarrels, but the disintegration of the society of the
Archipelago worsened as the years went on. Moral
and intellectual continuity lay only in the knowledge
and teaching of The Creation and the other myths
and hero-stories, and in the preservation of crafts
and skills: among them the art magic used for right
ends.
The Hand, a loose-knit league or community
concerned principally with the understanding and
the ethical use and teaching of magic, was
established by men and women on Roke Island
about a hundred and fifty years after Maharion's
death. Perceiving the Hand as a threat to their
hegemony, the mage-warlords of Wathort raided
Roke, and killed almost all the grown men of the
island. But the Hand had already stretched out to
other islands all around the Inmost Sea. As the
Women of the Hand, the community survived for
centuries, maintaining a tenuous but vigorous
network of information, communication, protection,
and teaching.
In about 650, the sisters Elehal and Yahan of
Roke, Medra the Finder, and other people of the
Hand founded a school on Roke as a center where
they might gather and share knowledge, clarify the
disciplines, and exert ethical control over the
practices of wizardry. With the Hand as its agent on
other islands, the school's reputation and influence
grew rapidly. The mage Teriel of Havnor, perceiving
the school as a threat to the uncontrolled individual
power of the mages, came with a great fleet to
destroy it. He was destroyed, and his fleet
scattered.
This first victory went far to establish a reputation
of invulnerability for the school on Roke.
Under Roke's steadily growing influence, wizardry
was shaped into a coherent body of knowledge, its
use increasingly controlled by moral and political
purpose. Wizards trained at the school went to
other islands of the Archipelago to work against
warlords, pirates, and feuding nobles, preventing
raids and forays, imposing penalties and
settlements, enforcing boundaries, and protecting
individuals, farms, towns, cities, and shipping, until
social order was re-established. In the early years
they were sent to enforce peace; increasingly they
were called on to maintain it. While the throne in
Havnor remained empty, for over two hundred
years Roke School served effectively as the central
government of the Archipelago.
The power of the Archmage of Roke was in many
respects that of a king. Ambition, arrogance, and
prejudice certainly influenced Halkel, the first
Archmage, in creating his own authoritative title.
Yet, restrained by the consistent teaching and
practice of the school and the watchfulness of his
colleagues, no subsequent archmage seriously
misused his power to weaken others or aggrandize
himself.
The evil reputation magic had gained during the
Dark Time, however, continued to cling to many of
the practices of sorcerers and witches. Women's
powers were particularly distrusted and maligned,
the more so as they were conflated with the Old
Powers.
Throughout Earthsea, various springs, caves, hills,
stones, and woods were and always had been sites
of concentrated power and sacredness. All were
locally feared or venerated; some were known far
and wide.
Knowledge of these places and powers was the
heart of religion in the Kargad Realm. In the
Archipelago, the lore of the Old Powers was still
part of the profound, common basis of thought and
reverence. On all the islands, the arts mostly
practiced by witches, such as midwifery, healing,
animal husbandry, dousing, mining and metallurgy,
planting and growing spells, love spells, and so on,
often invoked or drew upon the Old Powers. But the
learned wizards of Roke had generally come to
distrust the ancient practices and made no appeal
to the "Powers of the Mother." Only in Paln did
wizards combine the two practices, in the arcane,
esoteric, and reputedly dangerous Pelnish Lore.
Though like any power they could be perverted to
evil use in the service of ambition (as was the
Terrenon Stone in Osskil), the Old Powers were
inherently sacral and pre-ethical. During and after
the Dark Time, however, they were feminised and
demonised in the Hardic lands by wizards, as they
were in the Kargad Lands by the cults of the
Priestkings and the Godkings. So by the eighth
century, in the Inner Lands of the Archipelago, only
village women kept up rituals and offerings at the
old sites. They were despised or abused for doing
so. Wizards kept clear of such places. On Roke,
itself the center of the Old Powers in all Earthsea,
the profoundest manifestations of those powers-
Roke Knoll and the Immanent Grove-were never
spoken of as such. Only the Patterners, who lived
all their lives in the Grove, served to link human
arts and acts to the older sacredness of the earth,
reminding the wizards and mages that their power
was not theirs, but lent to them.