作者: raiderho@smth.edu.cn
標題: The Bones of The Earth silverharpe(轉寄)
時間: Fri May 7 08:13:19 2004
The Bones
of the Earth
IT WAS RAINING AGAIN, and the wizard of Re Albi
was sorely tempted to make a weather spell, just a
little, small spell, to send the rain on round the
mountain. His bones ached. They ached for the sun
to come out and shine through his flesh and dry
them out. Of course he could say a pain spell, but
all that would do was hide the ache for a while.
There was no cure for what ailed him. Old bones
need the sun. The wizard stood still in the doorway
of his house, between the dark room and the rainstreaked
open air, preventing himself from making
a spell, and angry at himself for preventing himself
and for having to be prevented.
He never swore-men of power do not swear, it is
not safe-but he cleared his throat with a coughing
growl, like a bear. A moment later a thunderclap
rolled off the hidden upper slopes of Gont
Mountain, echoing round from north to south, dying
away in the cloud-filled forests.
A good sign, thunder, Dulse thought. It would stop
raining soon. He pulled up his hood and went out
into the rain to feed the chickens.
He checked the henhouse, finding three eggs. Red
Bucca was setting. Her eggs were about due to
hatch. The mites were bothering her, and she
looked scruffy and jaded. He said a few words
against mites, told himself to remember to clean
out the nest box as soon as the chicks hatched, and
went on to the poultry yard, where Brown Bucca
and Grey and Leggings and Candor and the King
huddled under the eaves making soft, shrewish
remarks about rain.
"It'll stop by midday," the wizard told the chickens.
He fed them and squelched back to the house with
three warm eggs. When he was a child he had liked
to walk in mud. He remembered enjoying the cool
of it rising between his toes. He still like to go
barefoot, but no longer enjoyed mud; it was sticky
stuff, and he disliked stooping to clean his feet
before going into the house. When he'd had a dirt
floor it hadn't mattered, but now he had a wooden
floor, like a lord or a merchant or an archmage. To
keep the cold and damp out of his bones. Not his
own notion. Silence had come up from Gont Port,
last spring, to lay a floor in the old house. They had
had one of their arguments about it. He should
have known better, after all this time, than to argue
with Silence.
"I've walked on dirt for seventy-five years," Dulse
had said. "A few more won't kill me!"
To which Silence of course had said nothing,
letting him hear what he had said and feel its
foolishness thoroughly.
"Dirt's easier to keep clean," he said, knowing the
struggle already lost. It was true that all you had to
do with a good hard-packed clay floor was sweep it
and now and then sprinkle it to keep the dust
down. But it sounded silly all the same.
"Who's to lay this floor?" he said, now merely
querulous.
Silence nodded, meaning himself.
The boy was in fact a workman of the first order,
carpenter, cabinetmaker, stonelayer, roofer; he had
proved that when he lived up here as Dulse's
student, and his life with the rich folk of Gont Port
had not softened his hands. He brought the boards
from Sixth's mill in Re Albi, driving Gammer's oxteam;
he laid the floor and polished it the next day,
while the old wizard was up at Bog Lake gathering
simples. When Dulse came home there it was,
shining like a dark lake itself. "Have to wash my
feet every time I come in," he grumbled. He walked
in gingerly. The wood was so smooth it seemed soft
to the bare sole. "Satin," he said. "You didn't do all
that in one day without a spell or two. A village hut
with a palace floor. Well, it'll be a sight, come
winter, to see the fire shine in that! Or do I have to
get me a carpet now? A fleecefell, on a golden
warp?"
Silence smiled. He was pleased with himself.
He had turned up on Dulse's doorstep a few years
ago. Well, no, twenty years ago it must be, or
twenty-five. A while ago now. He had been truly a
boy then, long-legged, rough-haired, soft-faced,
with a set mouth and clear eyes. "What do you
want?" the wizard had asked, knowing what he
wanted, what they all wanted, and keeping his eyes
from those clear eyes. He was a good teacher, the
best on Gont, he knew that. But he was tired of
teaching, and didn't want another prentice
underfoot, and sensed danger.
"To learn," the boy whispered.
"Go to Roke," the wizard said. The boy wore shoes
and a good leather vest. He could afford or earn
ship's passage to the School.
"I've been there."
At that Dulse looked him over again. No cloak, no
staff.
"Failed? Sent away? Ran away?"
The boy shook his head at each question. He shut
his eyes; his mouth was already shut. He stood
there, intensely gathered, suffering: drew breath:
looked straight into the wizard's eyes.
"My mastery is here, on Gont," he said, still
speaking hardly above a whisper. "My master is
Heleth".
At that the wizard whose true name was Heleth
stood as still as he did, looking back at him, till the
boy's gaze dropped.
In silence Dulse sought his name, and saw two
things: a fir-cone, and the rune of the Closed
Mouth. Then seeking further he heard in his mind a
name spoken; but he did not speak it.
"I'm tired of teaching and talking," he said. "I need
silence. Is that enough for you?"
The boy nodded once.
"Then to me you are Silence," the wizard said.
"You can sleep in the nook under the west window.
There's an old pallet in the woodhouse. Air it. Don't
bring mice in with it." And he stalked off towards
the Overfell, angry with the boy for coming and
with himself for giving in; but it was not anger that
made his heart pound. Striding along-he could
stride, then-with the seawind pushing at him
always from the left and the early sunlight on the
sea out past the vast shadow of the mountain, he
thought of the Mages of Roke, the masters of the
art magic, the professors of mystery and power.
"He was too much for 'em, was he? And he'll be too
much for me," he thought, and smiled. He was a
peaceful man, but he did not mind a bit of danger.
He stopped and felt the dirt under his feet. He was
barefoot, as usual. When he was a student on
Roke, he had worn shoes. But he had come back
home to Gont, to Re Albi, with his wizard's staff,
and kicked his shoes off. He stood still and felt the
dust and rock of the cliff-top path under his feet,
and the cliffs under that, and the roots of the island
in the dark under that. In the dark under the waters
all islands touched and were one. So his teacher
Ard had said, and so his teachers on Roke had said.
But this was his island, his rock, dust, dirt. His
wizardry grew out of it. "My mastery is here," the
boy had said, but it went deeper than mastery.
That, perhaps, was something Dulse could teach
him: what went deeper than mastery. What he had
learned here, on Gont, before he ever went to
Roke.
And the boy must have a staff. Why had
Nemmerle let him leave Roke without one, emptyhanded
as a prentice or a witch? Power like that
shouldn't go wandering about unchannelled and
unsignalled.
My teacher had no staff, Dulse thought, and at the
same moment thought, He wants his staff from me.
Gontish oak, from the hands of a Gontish wizard.
Well, if he earns it I'll make him one. If he can keep
his mouth closed. And I'll leave him my lore-books.
If he can clean out a henhouse, and understand the
Glosses of Danemer, and keep his mouth closed.
The new student cleaned out the henhouse and
hoed the bean-patch, learned the meaning of the
Glosses of Danemer and the Arcana of the Enlades,
and kept his mouth closed. He listened. He heard
what Dulse said; sometimes he heard what Dulse
thought. He did what Dulse wanted and what Dulse
did not know he wanted. His gift was far beyond
Dulse's guidance, yet he had been right to come to
Re Albi, and they both knew it.
Dulse thought sometimes in those years about
sons and fathers. He had quarreled with his own
father, a sorcerer-prospector, over his choice of a
teacher; his father had shouted that a student of
Ard's was no son of his, had nursed his rage and
died unforgiving.
Dulse had seen young men weep for joy at the
birth of a first son. He had seen poor men pay
witches a year's earnings for the promise of a
healthy boy, and a rich man touch his goldbedizened
baby's face and whisper, adoring, "My
immortality!" He had seen men beat their sons,
bully and humiliate them, spite and thwart them,
hating the death they saw in them. He had seen the
answering hatred in the son's eyes, the threat, the
pitiless contempt. And seeing it, Dulse knew why he
had never sought reconciliation with his father.
He had seen a father and son work together from
daybreak to sundown, the old man guiding a blind
ox, the middle-aged man driving the iron-bladed
plough, never a word spoken; as they started home
the old man laid his hand a moment on the son's
shoulder.
He had always remembered that. He remembered
it now, when he looked across the hearth, winter
evenings, at the dark face bent above a lore-book
or a shirt that needed mending. The eyes cast
down, the mouth closed, the spirit listening.
"Once in his lifetime, if he's lucky, a wizard finds
somebody he can talk to." Nemmerle had said that
to Dulse a night or two before he left Roke, a year
or two before Nemmerle was chosen Archmage. He
had been the Master Patterner and the kindest of all
Dulse's teachers at the School. "I think, if you
stayed, Heleth, we could talk."
Dulse had been unable to answer at all for a while.
Then, stammering, guilty at his ingratitude and
incredulous at his obstinacy-"Master, I would stay,
but my work is on Gont-I wish it was here, with
you-"
"It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be,
before you've been to all the places you don't need
to be. Well, send me a student now and then. Roke
needs Gontish wizardry. I think we're leaving things
out, here, things worth knowing...."
Dulse had sent students on to the School, three or
four of them, nice lads with a gift for this or that;
but the one Nemmerle waited for had come and
gone of his own will, and what they had thought of
him on Roke Dulse did not know. Silence did not
say. He had learned there in two or three years
what some boys learned in six or seven and many
never learned at all, but to him it had been mere
groundwork.
"Why didn't you come to me first?" Dulse had
demanded. "And then Roke, to put a polish on it?"
"I didn't want to waste your time."
"Did Nemmerle know you were coming to work
with me?"
Silence shook his head.
"If you'd deigned to tell him your intentions, he
might have sent a message to me."
Silence looked stricken. "Was he your friend?"
Dulse paused. "He was my master. Would have
been my friend, perhaps, if I'd stayed on Roke.
Have wizards friends? No more than they have
wives, or sons, some would say.... Once he said to
me that in our trade it's a lucky man who finds
someone to talk to. Keep that in mind. If you're
lucky, one day you'll have to open your mouth."
Silence bowed his rough, thoughtful head.
"If it hasn't rusted shut," Dulse added.
"If you ask me to, I'll talk," the young man said, so
earnest, so willing to deny his whole nature at
Dulse's request that the wizard had to laugh.
"I asked you not to," he said, "and it's not my
need I spoke of. I talk enough for two. Never mind.
You'll know what to say when the time comes.
That's the art, eh? What to say, and when to say it.
And the rest is silence."
The young man slept on a pallet under the little
west window of Dulse's house for three years. He
learned wizardry, fed the chickens, milked the cow.
He suggested, once, that Dulse keep goats. He had
not said anything for a week or so, a cold, wet
week of autumn. He said, "You might keep some
goats."
Dulse had the big lore-book open on the table. He
had been trying to reweave one of the Acastan
Spells, much broken and made powerless by the
Emanations of Fundaur centuries ago. He had just
begun to get a sense of the missing word that
might fill one of the gaps, he almost had it, and-
"You might keep some goats," Silence said.
Dulse considered himself a wordy, impatient man
with a short temper. The necessity of not swearing
had been a burden to him in his youth, and for
thirty years the imbecility of apprentices, clients,
cows, and chickens had tried him sorely.
Apprentices and clients were afraid of his tongue,
though cows and chickens paid no attention to his
outbursts. He had never been angry at Silence
before. There was a very long pause.
"What for?"
Silence apparently did not notice the pause or the
extreme softness of Dulse's voice. "Milk, cheese,
roast kid, company," he said.
"Have you ever kept goats?" Dulse asked, in the
same soft, polite voice.
Silence shook his head.
He was in fact a town boy, born in Gont Port. He
had said nothing about himself, but Dulse had
asked around a bit. The father, a longshoreman,
had died in the big earthquake, when Silence would
have been seven or eight; the mother was a cook at
a waterfront inn. At twelve the boy had got into
some kind of trouble, probably messing about with
magic, and his mother had managed to prentice
him to Elassen, a respectable sorcerer in Valmouth.
There the boy had picked up his true name, and
some skill in carpentry and farmwork, if not much
else; and Elassen had had the generosity, after
three years, to pay his passage to Roke. That was
all Dulse knew about him.
"I dislike goat cheese," Dulse said.
Silence nodded, acceptant as always.
From time to time in the years since then, Dulse
remembered how he hadn't lost his temper when
Silence asked about keeping goats; and each time
the memory gave him a quiet satisfaction, like that
of finishing the last bite of a perfectly ripe pear.
After spending the next several days trying to
recapture the missing word, he had set Silence to
studying the Acastan Spells. Together they had
finally worked it out, a long toil. "Like ploughing
with a blind ox," Dulse said.
Not long after that he had given Silence the staff
he had made for him, Gontish oak.
And the Lord of Gont Port had tried once again to
get Dulse to come down to do what needed doing
in Gont Port, and Dulse had sent Silence down
instead, and there he had stayed.
And Dulse was standing on his own doorstep,
three eggs in his hand and the rain running cold
down his back.
How long had he been standing here? Why was he
standing here? He had been thinking about mud,
about the floor, about Silence. Had he been out
walking on the path above the Overfell? No, that
was years ago, years ago, in the sunlight. It was
raining. He had fed the chickens, and come back to
the house with three eggs, they were still warm in
his hand, silky brown lukewarm eggs, and the
sound of thunder was still in his mind, the vibration
of thunder was in his bones, in his feet. Thunder?
No. There had been a thunderclap, a while ago.
This was not thunder. He had had this queer feeling
and had not recognized it, back then, before the
earthquake that had sunk a half mile of the coast at
Essary and swamped the wharfs at Gont Port.
He stepped down from the doorstep onto the dirt
so that he could feel the ground with the nerves of
his soles, but the mud slimed and fouled any
messages the dirt had for him. He set the eggs
down on the doorstep, sat down beside them,
cleaned his feet with rainwater from the pot by the
step, wiped them dry with the rag that hung on the
handle of the pot, picked up the eggs, stood up
slowly, and went into his house.
He gave a sharp look at his staff, which leaned in
the corner behind the door. He put the eggs in the
larder, ate an apple quickly because he was hungry,
and took his staff. It was yew, bound at the foot
with copper, worn to silk at the grip. Nemmerle had
given it to him.
"Stand!" he said to it in its language, and let go of
it. It stood as if he had driven it into a socket.
"To the root," he said impatiently, in the language
of the Making. "To the root!"
He watched the staff that stood on the shining
floor. In a little while he saw it quiver very slightly,
a shiver, a tremble.
"Ah, ah, ah," said the old wizard.
"What should I do?" he said aloud after a while.
The staff swayed, was still, shivered again.
"Enough of that, my dear," Dulse said, laying his
hand on it. "Come now. No wonder I kept thinking
about Silence. I should send for him ... send to him
.. No. What did Ard say? Find the center, find the
center. That's the question to ask. That's what to
do..." As he muttered on to himself, routing out his
heavy cloak, setting water to boil on the small fire
he had lighted earlier, he wondered if he had
always talked to himself, if he had talked all the
time when Silence lived with him. No, it had
become a habit after Silence left, he thought, with
the bit of his mind that went on thinking the
ordinary thoughts of life, while the rest of it made
preparations for terror and destruction.
He hard-boiled the three new eggs and one
already in the larder and put them into a pouch
along with four apples and a bladder of resinated
wine, in case he had to stay out all night. He
shrugged arthritically into his heavy cloak, took up
his staff, told the fire to go out, and left.
He no longer kept a cow. He stood looking into the
poultry yard, considering. The fox had been visiting
the orchard lately. But the birds would have to
forage if he stayed away. They must take their
chances, like everyone else. He opened their gate a
little. Though the rain was no more than a misty
drizzle now, they stayed hunched up under the
henhouse eaves, disconsolate. The King had not
crowed once this morning.
"Have you anything to tell me?" Dulse asked them.
Brown Bucca, his favorite, shook herself and said
her name a few times. The others said nothing.
"Well, take care. I saw the fox on the full-moon
night," Dulse said, and went on his way.
As he walked he thought; he thought hard; he
recalled. He recalled all he could of matters his
teacher had spoken of once only and long ago.
Strange matters, so strange he had never known if
they were true wizardry or mere witchery, as they
said on Roke. Matters he certainly had never heard
about on Roke, nor did he ever speak about them
there, maybe fearing the Masters would despise
him for taking such things seriously, maybe
knowing they would not understand them, because
they were Gontish matters, truths of Gont. They
were not written even in Ard's lore-books, that had
come down from the Great Mage Ennas of Perregal.
They were all word of mouth. They were home
truths.
"If you need to read the Mountain," his teacher
had told him, "go to the Dark Pond at the top of
Semere's cow pasture. You can see the ways from
there. You need to find the center. See where to go
in."
"Go in?" the boy Dulse had whispered.
"What could you do from outside?"
Dulse was silent for a long time, and then said,
"How?"
"Thus." And Ard's long arms had stretched out and
upward in the invocation of what Dulse would know
later was a great spell of Transforming. Ard spoke
the words of the spell awry, as teachers of wizardry
must do lest the spell operate. Dulse knew the trick
of hearing them aright and remembering them. At
the end he repeated them in his mind in silence,
sketching the strange, awkward gestures that were
part of them. All at once his hand stopped.
"But you can't undo this!" he said aloud.
Ard nodded. "It is irrevocable".
Dulse knew no transformation that was
irrevocable, no spell that could not be unsaid,
except the Word of Unbinding, which is spoken only
once.
"But why-?"
"At need," Ard said.
Dulse knew better than to ask for explanation. The
need to speak such a spell could not come often;
the chance of his ever having to use it was very
slight. He let the terrible spell sink down in his mind
and be hidden and layered over with a thousand
useful or beautiful or enlightening mageries and
charms, all the lore and rules of Roke, all the
wisdom of the books Ard had bequeathed him.
Crude, monstrous, useless, it lay in the dark of his
mind for sixty years, like the cornerstone of an
earlier, forgotten house down in the cellar of a
mansion full of lights and treasures and children.
The rain had ceased, though mist still hid the peak
and shreds of cloud drifted through the high
forests. Dulse was not a tireless walker like Silence,
who would have spent his life wandering in the
forests of Gont Mountain if he could; but he had
been born in Re Albi and knew the roads and ways
around it as part of himself. He took the shortcut at
Rissi's well and came out before midday on
Semere's high pasture, a level step on the
mountainside. A mile below it, all sunlit now, the
farm buildings stood in the lee of a hill, across
which a flock of sheep moved like a cloud-shadow.
Gont Port and its bay were hidden under the steep,
knotted hills that stood above the city.
Dulse wandered about a bit before he found what
he took to be the Dark Pond. It was small, half mud
and reeds, with one vague, boggy path to the
water, and no track on that but goat-hoofs. The
water was dark, though it lay out under the bright
sky and far above the peat soils. Dulse followed the
goat-tracks, growling when his foot slipped in the
mud and he wrenched his ankle to keep from
falling. At the brink of the water he stood still. He
stooped to rub his ankle. He listened.
It was absolutely silent.
No wind. No birdcall. No distant lowing or bleating
or call of voice. As if all the island had gone still.
Not a fly buzzed.
He looked at the dark water. It reflected nothing.
Reluctant, he stepped forward, barefoot and barelegged;
he had rolled up his cloak into his pack an
hour ago when the sun came out. Reeds brushed
his legs. The mud was soft and sucking under his
feet, full of tangling reed-roots. He made no noise
as he moved slowly out into the pool, and the
circles of ripples from his movement were slight and
small. It was shallow for a long way. Then his
cautious foot felt no bottom, and he paused.
The water shivered. He felt it first on his thighs, a
lapping like the tickling touch of fur; then he saw it,
the trembling of the surface all over the pond. Not
the round ripples he made, which had already died
away, but a ruffling, a roughening, a shudder,
again, and again.
"Where?" he whispered, and then said the word
aloud in the language all things understand that
have no other language.
There was the silence. Then a fish leapt from the
black, shaking water, a white-grey fish the length of
his hand, and as it leapt it cried out in a small, clear
voice, in that same language, "Yaved!"
The old wizard stood there. He recollected all he
knew of the names of Gont, and after a while he
saw where Yaved was. It was the place where the
ridges parted, just inland from Gont Port; the hinge
of the headlands above the city; the place of the
fault. An earthquake centered there could shake the
city down, bring avalanche and tidal wave, close the
cliffs of the bay together like hands clapping. Dulse
shivered, shuddered all over like the water of the
pool.
He turned and made for the shore, hasty, careless
where he set his feet and not caring if he broke the
silence by splashing and breathing hard. He slogged
back up the path through the reeds till he reached
dry ground and coarse grass, and heard the buzz of
midges and crickets. He sat down then on the
ground, rather hard, for his legs were shaking.
"It won't do," he said, talking to himself in Hardic,
and then he said, "I can't do it." Then he said, "I
can't do it by myself."
He was so distraught that when he made up his
mind to call Silence he could not think of the
opening of the spell, which he had known for sixty
years; then when he thought he had it, he began to
speak a Summoning instead, and the spell had
begun to work before he realised what he was
doing and stopped and undid it word by word.
He pulled up some grass and rubbed at the slimy
mud on his feet and legs. It was not dry yet, and
only smeared about on his skin. "I hate mud," he
whispered. Then he snapped his jaws and stopped
trying to clean his legs. "Dirt, dirt," he said, gently
patting the ground he sat on. Then, very slow, very
careful, he began to speak the spell of calling.
In a busy street leading down to the busy wharfs of
Gont Port, the wizard Ogion stopped short. The
ship's captain beside him walked on several steps
and turned to see Ogion talking to the air.
"But I will come, master!" he said. And then after
a pause, "How soon?" And after a longer pause, he
told the air something in a language the ship's
captain did not understand, and made a gesture
that darkened the air about him for an instant.
"Captain," he said, "I'm sorry, I must wait to spell
your sails. An earthquake is near. I must warn the
city. Do you tell them down there, every ship that
can sail make for the open sea. Clear out, past the
Armed Cliffs! Good luck to you." And he turned and
ran back up the street, a tall, strong man with
rough greying hair, running now like a stag.
Gont Port lies at the inner end of a long narrow
bay between steep shores. Its entrance from the
sea is between two great headlands, the Gates of
the Port, the Armed Cliffs, not a hundred feet apart.
They are safe from sea-pirates in Gont Port. But
their safety is their danger; the long bay follows a
fault in the earth, and jaws that have opened may
shut.
When he had done what he could to warn the city,
and seen all the gate-guards and port-guards doing
what they could to keep the few roads out from
becoming choked and murderous with panicky
people, Ogion shut himself into a room in the signal
tower of the Port, locked the door, for everybody
wanted him at once, and sent a sending to the Dark
Pond in Semere's cow pasture up on the Mountain.
His old master was sitting in the grass near the
pond, eating an apple. Bits of eggshell flecked the
ground near his legs, which were caked with drying
mud. When he looked up and saw Ogion's sending
he smiled a wide, sweet smile. But he looked old.
He had never looked so old. Ogion had not seen
him for over a year, having been busy; he was
always busy in Gont Port, doing the business of the
lords and people, never a chance to walk in the
forests on the mountainside or to come sit with
Heleth in the little house at Re Albi and listen and
be still. Heleth was an old man, near eighty now;
and he was frightened. He smiled with joy to see
Ogion, but he was frightened.
"I think what we have to do," he said without
preamble, "is try to hold the fault from slipping
much, you at the Gates and me at the inner end, in
the Mountain. Working together, you know. We
might be able to. I can feel it building up, can you?"
Ogion shook his head. He let his sending sit down
in the grass near Heleth, though it did not bend the
stems of the grass where it stepped or sat. "I've
done nothing but set the city in a panic," he said.
"And send the ships out of the bay. What is it you
feel? How do you feel it?"
They were technical questions, mage to mage.
Heleth hesitated before answering.
"I learned about this from Ard," he said, and
paused again.
He had never told Ogion anything about his first
teacher, a sorcerer of no fame, even in Gont, and
perhaps of ill fame. There was some mystery or
shame connected with Ard. Though he was
talkative, for a wizard, Heleth was silent as a stone
about some things. Ogion, who respected silence,
had never asked him about his teacher.
"It's not Roke magic," the old man said. His voice
was dry, a little forced. "Not to do with the Old
Powers, either. Nothing of that sort. Nothing
sticky."
That had always been his word for evil doings,
spells for gain, curses, black magic: "sticky stuff."
After a while, searching for words, he went on:
"Dirt. Rocks. It's a dirty magic. Old. Very old. As old
as Gont Island."
"The Old Powers?" Ogion murmured.
Heleth said. "I'm not sure."
"Will it control the earth itself?"
"More a mater of getting in with it, I think." The
old man was burying the core of his apple and the
larger bits of eggshell under loose dirt, patting it
over them neatly. "Of course I know the words, but
I'll have to learn what to do as I go. That's the
trouble with the big spells, isn't it? You learn what
you're doing while you do it. No chance to practice.
"Ah-there! You feel that?"
Ogion shook his head.
"Straining," Heleth said, his hand still absently,
gently patting the dirt as one might pat a scared
cow. "Quite soon now, I think. Can you hold the
Gates open, my dear?"
"Tell me what you'll be doing-"
But Heleth was shaking his head: "No," he said,
"no time. Not your kind of thing." He was more and
more distracted by whatever it was he sensed in
the earth or air, and through him Ogion felt that
gathering, intolerable tension.
They sat unspeaking. The crisis passed. Heleth
relaxed a little and even smiled. "Very old stuff," he
said, "what I'll be doing. I wish now I'd thought
about it more. Passed it on to you. But it seemed a
bit crude. Heavy-handed ... She didn't say where
she'd learned it. Here, of course ... There are
different kinds of knowledge, after all."
"She?"
"Ard. My teacher." Heleth looked up, his face
unreadable, its expression possibly sly. "You didn't
know that? No, I suppose I never mentioned it. But
it doesn't make much difference, after all. Since we
none of us have any sex, us wizards, do we? What
matters is whose house we live in. It seems we may
have left out a good deal worth knowing. This kind
of thing-There! There again-"
His sudden tension and immobility, the strained
face and inward look, were like those of a woman in
labor when her womb contracts. That was Ogion's
thought, even as he said, "What did you mean, "in
the Mountain'?"
The spasm passed; Heleth answered, "Inside it.
There at Yaved." He pointed to the knotted hills
below them. "I'll go in, try to keep things from
sliding around, eh? I'll find out when I'm doing it,
no doubt. I think you should be getting back to
yourself. Things are tightening up." He stopped
again, looking as if he were in intense pain,
hunched and clenched. He struggled to stand up.
Unthinking, Ogion held out his hand to help him.
"No use," said the old wizard, grinning, "you're
only wind and sunlight. Now I'm going to be dirt
and stone. You'd best go on. Farewell, Aihal. Keep
the-keep the mouth open, for once, eh?"
Ogion, obedient, bringing himself back to himself
in the stuffy, tapestried room in Gont Port, did not
understand the old man's joke until he turned to the
window and saw the Armed Cliffs down at the end
of the long bay, the jaws ready to snap shut. "I
will," he said, and set to it.
"What I have to do, you see," the old wizard said,
still talking to Silence because it was a comfort to
talk to him even if he was no longer there, "is get
into the mountain, right inside; but not the way a
sorcerer-prospector does; not just slipping about
between things and looking and tasting. Deeper. All
the way in. Not the veins, but the bones. So," and
standing there alone in the high pasture, in the
noon light, Heleth opened his arms wide in the
gesture of invocation that opens all the greater
spells; and he spoke.
Nothing happened as he said the words Ard had
taught him, his old witch-teacher with her bitter
mouth and her long, lean arms, the words spoken
awry then, spoken truly now.
Nothing happened, and he had time to regret the
sunlight and the seawind, and to doubt the spell,
and to doubt himself, before the earth rose up
around him, dry, warm, and dark.
In there he knew he should hurry, that the bones
of the earth ached to move, and that he must
become them to guide them, but he could not
hurry. There was on him the bewilderment of any
transformation. He had in his day been fox, and
bull, and dragonfly, and knew what it was to
change being. But this was different, this slow
enlargement. I am vastening, he thought.
He reached out towards Yaved, towards the ache,
the suffering. As he came closer to it he felt a great
strength flow into him from the west, as if Silence
had taken him by the hand after all. Through that
link he could send his own strength, the Mountain's
strength, to help. I didn't tell him I wasn't coming
back, he thought, his last words in Hardic, his last
grief, for he was in the bones of the mountain now.
He knew the arteries of fire, and the beat of the
great heart. He knew what to do. It was in no
tongue of man that he said, "Be quiet, be easy.
There now, there. Hold fast. So, there. We can be
easy."
And he was easy, he was still, he held fast, rock
in rock and earth in earth in the fiery dark of the
mountain.
It was their mage Ogion whom the people saw
stand alone on the roof of the signal tower on the
wharf, when the streets ran up and down in waves,
the cobbles bursting out of them, and walls of clay
brick puffed into dust, and the Armed Cliffs leaned
together, groaning. It was Ogion they saw, his
hands held out before him, straining, parting: and
the cliffs parted with them, and stood straight,
unmoved. The city shuddered and stood still. It was
Ogion who stopped the earthquake. They saw it,
they said it.
My teacher was with me, and his teacher with
him," Ogion said when they praised him. "I could
hold the Gate open because he held the Mountain
still." They praised his modesty and did not listen to
him. Listening is a rare gift, and men will have their
heroes.
When the city was in order again, and the ships
had all come back, and the walls were being rebuilt,
Ogion escaped from praise and went up into the
hills above Gont Port. He found the queer little
valley called Trimmer's Dell, the true name of which
in the language of the Making was Yaved, as
Ogion's true name was Aihal. He walked about
there all one day, as if seeking something. In the
evening he lay down on the ground and talked to it.
"You should have told me, I could have said
goodbye," he said. He wept once, and his tears fell
on the dry dirt among the grass-stems and made
little spots of mud, little sticky spots.
He slept there, on the ground. At sunrise he got
up and walked by the high road over to Re Albi. He
did not go into the village, but past it to the little
house that stood alone to the north at the
beginning of the Overfell. The door of the house
stood open.
The last beans had got big and coarse on the
vines; the cabbages were thriving. Three hens came
clucking and pecking around the dusty dooryard, a
red, a brown, a white; a grey hen was setting her
clutch in the henhouse. There were no chicks, and
no sign of the cock, the King, Heleth had called him.
The king is dead, Ogion thought. Maybe a chick is
hatching even now to take his place. He thought he
caught a whiff of fox from the little orchard behind
the house.
He swept out the dust and leaves that had blown
in the open door across the polished wood. He set
Heleth's mattress and blanket in the sun to air. "I'll
stay here a while," he thought. "It's a good house."
After a while he thought, "I might keep some
goats."