◇ Earthsea 2 Atuman

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標題: Earthsea 2 Atuman                      silverharpe(轉寄)
時間: Fri May  7 08:08:57 2004

發信人: david (Make our Promising Future), 信區: Emprise       
標  題: 地海傳說第二卷
發信站: BBS 水木清華站 (Sat Apr 27 17:39:16 2002)

TheTombs of Atuan
Ursula K. Leguin
1970




------
Prologue
------

        "Come home, Tenar! Come home!"
        In the deep valley, in the twilight, the apple trees were on
the eve of blossoming; here and there among the shadowed boughs one
flower had opened early, rose and white, like a faint star. Down the
orchard aisles, in the thick, new, wet grass, the little girl ran for
the joy of running; hearing the call she did not come at once, but
made a long circle before she turned her face towards home. The mother
waiting in the doorway of the hut, with the firelight behind her,
watched the tiny figure running and bobbing like a bit of thistledown
blown over the darkening grass beneath the trees.
        By the corner of the hut, scraping clean an earthclotted hoe,
the father said, "Why do you let your heart hang on the child? They're
coming to take her away next month. For good. Might as well bury her
and be done with it. What's the good of clinging to one you're bound
to lose? She's no good to us. If they'd pay for her when they took
her, that would be something, but they won't. They'll take her and
that's an end of it."
        The mother said nothing, watching the child who had stopped to
look up through the trees. Over the high hills, above the orchards,
the evening star shone piercing clear.
        "She isn't ours, she never was since they came here and said
she must be the Priestess at the Tombs. Why can't you see that?" The
man's voice was harsh with complaint and bitterness. "You have four
others. They'll stay here, and this one won't. So, don't set your
heart on her. Let her go!"
        "When the time comes," the woman said, "I will let her go."
She bent to meet the child who came running on little, bare, white
feet across the muddy ground, and gathered her up in her arms. As she
turned to enter the hut she bent her head to kiss the child's hair,
which was black; but her own hair, in the flicker of firelight from
the hearth, was fair.
        The man stood outside, his own feet bare and cold on the
ground, the clear sky of spring darkening above him. His face in the
dusk was full of grief, a dull, heavy, angry grief that he would never
find the words to say. At last he shrugged, and followed his wife into
the firelit room that rang with children's voices.



------
The Eaten One
------

        One high horn shrilled and ceased. The silence that followed
was shaken only by the sound of many footsteps keeping time with a
drum struck softly at a slow heartpace. Through cracks in the roof of
the Hall of the Throne, gaps between columns where a whole section of
masonry and tile had collapsed, unsteady sunlight shone aslant. It was
an hour after sunrise. The air was still and cold. Dead leaves of
weeds that had forced up between marble pavement-tiles were outlined
with frost, and crackled, catching on the long black robes of the
priestesses.
        They came, four by four, down the vast hall between double
rows of columns. The drum beat dully. No voice spoke, no eye watched.
Torches carried by black-clad girls burned reddish in the shafts of
sunlight, brighter in the dusk between. Outside, on the steps of the
Hall of the Throne, the men stood, guards, trumpeters, drummers;
within the great doors only women had come, dark-robed and hooded,
walking slowly four by four towards the empty throne.
        Two came, tall women looming in their black, one of them thin

and rigid, the other heavy, swaying with the planting of her feet.
Between these two walked a child of about six. She wore a straight
white shift. Her head and arms and legs were bare, and she was
barefoot. She looked extremely small. At the foot of the steps leading
up to the throne, where the others now waited in dark rows, the two
tall women halted. They pushed the child forward a little.
        The throne on its high platform seemed to be curtained on each
side with great webs of blackness dropping from the gloom of the roof;
whether these were curtains, or only denser shadows, the eye could not
make certain. The throne itself was black, with a dull glimmer of
precious stones or gold on the arms and back, and it was huge. A man
sitting in it would have been dwarfed; it was not of human dimensions.
It was empty. Nothing sat in it but shadows.
        Alone, the child climbed up four of the seven steps of
red-veined marble. They were so broad and high that she had to get
both feet onto one step before attempting the next. On the middle
step, directly in front of the throne, stood a large, rough block of
wood, hollowed out on top. The child knelt on both knees and fitted
her head into the hollow, turning it a little sideways. She knelt
there without moving.
        A figure in a belted gown of white wool stepped suddenly out
of the shadows at the right of the throne and strode down the steps to
the child. His face was masked with white. He held a sword of polished
steel five feet long. Without word or hesitation he swung the sword,
held in both hands, up over the little girl's neck. The drum stopped
beating.
        As the blade swung to its highest point and poised, a figure
in black darted out from the left side of the throne, leapt down the
stairs, and stayed the sacrificer's arms with slenderer arms. The
sharp edge of the sword glittered in mid-air. So they balanced for a
moment, the white figure and the black, both faceless, dancer-like
above the motionless child whose white neck was bared by the parting
of her black hair.
        In silence each leapt aside and up the stairs again, vanishing
in the darkness behind the enormous throne. A priestess came forward
and poured out a bowl of some liquid on the steps beside the kneeling
child. The stain looked black in the dimness of the hall.
        The child got up and descended the four stairs laboriously.
When she stood at the bottom, the two tall priestesses put on her a
black robe and hood and mantle, and turned her around again to face
the steps, the dark stain, the throne.
        "O let the Nameless Ones behold the girl given to them, who is
verily the one born ever nameless. Let them accept her life and the
years of her life until her death, which is also theirs. Let them find
her acceptable. Let her be eaten!"
        Other voices, shrill and harsh as trumpets, replied: "She is
eaten! She is eaten!"
        The little girl stood looking from under her black cowl up at
the throne. The jewels inset in the huge clawed arms and the back were
glazed with dust, and on the carven back were cobwebs and whitish
stains of owl droppings. The three highest steps directly before the
throne, above the step on which she had knelt, had never been climbed
by mortal feet. They were so thick with dust that they looked like one
slant of gray soil, the planes of the red-veined marble wholly hidden
by the unstirred, untrodden siftings of how many years, how many
centuries.
        "She is eaten! She is eaten!"
        Now the drum, abrupt, began to sound again, beating a quicker
pace.
        Silent and shuffling, the procession formed and moved away
from the throne, eastward towards the bright, distant square of the
doorway. On either side, the thick double columns, like the calves of
immense pale legs, went up to the dusk under the ceiling. Among the
priestesses, and now all in black like them, the child walked, her
small bare feet treading solemnly over the frozen weeds, the icy
stones. When sunlight slanting through the ruined roof flashed across
her way, she did not look up.
        Guards held the great doors wide. The black procession came
out into the thin, cold light and wind of early morning. The sun
dazzled, swimming above the eastern vastness. Westward, the mountains
caught its yellow light, as did the facade of the Hall of the Throne.
The other buildings, lower on the hill, still lay in purplish shadow,
except for the Temple of the God-Brothers across the way on a little
knoll: its roof, newly gilt, flashed the day back in glory. The black
line of priestesses, four by four, wound down the Hill of the Tombs,
and as they went they began softly to chant. The tune was on three
notes only, and the word that was repeated over and over was a word so
old it had lost its meaning, like a signpost still standing when the
road is gone. Over and over they chanted the empty word. All that day
of the Remaking of the Priestess was filled with the low chanting of
women's voices, a dry unceasing drone.
        The little girl was taken from room to room, from temple to
temple. In one place salt was placed upon her tongue; in another she
knelt facing west while her hair was cut short and washed with oil and
scented vinegar; in another she lay face down on a slab of black
marble behind an altar while shrill voices sang a lament for the dead.
Neither she nor any of the priestesses ate food or drank water all
that day. As the evening star set, the little girl was put to bed,
naked between sheepskin rugs, in a room she had never slept in before.
It was in a house that had been locked for years, unlocked only that
day. The room was higher than it was long, and had no windows. There
was a dead smell in it, still and stale. The silent women left her
there in the dark.
        She held still, lying just as they had put her. Her eyes were
wide open. She lay so for a long time.
        She saw light shake on the high wall. Someone came quietly
along the corridor, shielding a rushlight so it showed no more light
than a firefly. A husky whisper: "Ho, are you there, Tenar?"
        The child did not reply.
        A head poked in the doorway, a strange head, hairless as a
peeled potato, and of the same yellowish color. The eyes were like
potato-eyes, brown and tiny. The nose was dwarfed by great, fiat slabs
of cheek, and the mouth was a lipless slit. The child stared unmoving
at this face. Her eyes were large, dark, and fixed.
        "Ho, Tenar, my little honeycomb, there you are!" The voice was
husky, high as a woman's voice but not a woman's voice. "I shouldn't
be here, I belong outside the door, on the porch, that's where I go.
But I had to see how my little Tenar is, after all the long day of it,
eh, how's my poor little honeycomb?"
        He moved towards her, noiseless and burly, and put out his
hand as if to smooth back her hair.
        "I am not Tenar any more," the child said, staring up at him.
His hand stopped; he did not touch her.
        "No," he said, after a moment, whispering. "I know. I know.
Now you're the little Eaten One. But I..."
        She said nothing.
        "It was a hard day for a little one," the man said, shuffling,
the tiny light flickering in his big yellow hand.
        "You should not be in this House, Manan."
        "No. No. I know. I shouldn't be in this House. Well, good
night, little one... Good night."
        The child said nothing. Manan slowly turned around and went
away. The glimmer died from the high cell walls. The little girl, who
had no name any more but Arha, the Eaten One, lay on her back looking
steadily at the dark.



------
The Wall Around the Place
------

        As she grew older she lost all remembrance of her mother,
without knowing she had lost it. She belonged here, at the Place of
the Tombs; she had always belonged here. Only sometimes in the long
evenings of July as she watched the western mountains, dry and
lion-colored in the afterglow of sunset, she would think of a fire
that had burned on a hearth, long ago, with the same clear yellow
light. And with this came a memory of being held, which was strange,
for here she was seldom even touched; and the memory of a pleasant
smell, the fragrance of hair freshly washed and rinsed in sage-scented
water, fair long hair, the color of sunset and firelight. That was all
she had left.
        She knew more than she remembered, of course, for she had been
told the whole story. When she was seven or eight years old, and first
beginning to wonder who indeed this person called "Arha" was, she had
gone to her guardian, the Warden Manan, and said, "Tell me how I was
chosen, Manan."
        "Oh, you know all that, little one."
        And indeed she did; the tall, dry-voiced priestess Thar had
told her till she knew the words by heart, and she recited them: "Yes,
I know. At the death of the One Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, the
ceremonies of burial and purification are completed within one month
by the moon's calendar. After this certain of the Priestesses and
Wardens of the Place of the Tombs go forth across the desert, among
the towns and villages of Atuan, seeking and asking. They seek the
girl-child who was born on the night of the Priestess' death. When
they find such a child, they wait and they watch. The child must be
sound of body and of mind, and as it grows it must not suffer from
rickets nor the smallpox nor any deformity, nor become blind. If it
reaches the age of five years unblemished, then it is known that the
body of the child is indeed the new body of the Priestess who died.
And the child is made known to the Godking in Awabath, and brought
here to her Temple and instructed for a year. And at the year's end
she is taken to the Hall of the Throne and her name is given back to
those who are her Masters, the Nameless Ones: for she is the nameless
one, the Priestess Ever Reborn."
        This was all word for word as Thar had told her, and she had
never dared ask for a word more. The thin priestess was not cruel, but
she was very cold and lived by an iron law, and Arha was in awe of
her. But she was not in awe of Manan, far from it, and she would
command him, "Now tell me how I was chosen!" And he would tell her
again.
        "We left here, going north and west, in the third day of the
moon's waxing; for Arha-that-was had died in the third day of the last
moon. And first we went to Tenacbah, which is a great city, though
those who've seen both say it's no more to Awabath than a flea to a
cow. But it's big enough for me, there must be ten hundred houses in
Tenacbahl And we went on to Gar. But nobody in those cities had a baby
girl born to them on the third day of the moon a month before; there
were some had boys, but boys won't do... So we went into the hill

country north of Gar, to the towns and villages. That's my own land. I
was born in the hills there, where the rivers run, and the land is
green. Not in this desert." Manan's husky voice would get a strange
sound when he said that, and his small eyes would be quite hidden in
their folds; he would pause a little, and at last go on. "And so we
found and spoke to all those who were parents of babies born in the
last months. And some would lie to us. `Oh yes, surely our baby girl
was born on the moon's third day!' For poor folk, you know, are often
glad to get rid of girl-babies. And there were others who were so
poor, living in lonely huts in the valleys of the hills, that they
kept no count of days and scarce knew how to tell the turn of time, so
they could not say for certain how old their baby was. But we could
always come at the truth, by asking long enough. But it was slow work.
At last we found a girlchild, in a village of ten houses, in the
orchard-vales westward of Entat. Eight months old she was, so long had
we been looking. But she had been born on the night that the Priestess
of the Tombs had died, and within the very hour of her death. And she
was a fine baby, sitting up on her mother's knee and looking with
bright eyes at all of us, crowding into the one room of the house like
bats into a cave! The father was a poor man. He tended the apple trees
of the rich man's orchard, and had nothing of his own but five
children and a goat. Not even the house was his. So there we all
crowded in, and you could tell by the way the priestesses looked at
the baby and spoke among themselves that they thought they had found
the Reborn One at last. And the mother could tell this too. She held
the baby and never said a word. Well, so, the next day we came back.
And look here! The little bright-eyed baby lying in a cot of rushes
weeping and screaming, and all over its body weals and red rashes of
fever, and the mother wailing louder than the baby, `Oh! Oh! My babe
hath the Witch-Fingers on her!' That's how she said it; the smallpox
she meant. In my village, too, they called it the Witch-Fingers. But
Kossil, she who is now the High Priestess of the Godking, she went to
the cot and picked up the baby. The others had all drawn back, and I
with them; I don't value my life very high, but who enters a house
where smallpox is? But she had no fear, not that one. She picked up
the baby and said, `It has no fever.' And she spat on her finger and
rubbed at the red marks, and they came off. They were only berry
juice. The poor silly mother had thought to fool us and keep her
child!" Manan laughed heartily at this; his yellow face hardly
changed, but his sides heaved. "So, her husband beat her, for he was
afraid of the wrath of the priestesses. And soon we came back to the
desert, but each year one of the people of the Place would return to
the village among the apple orchards, and see how the child got on. So
five years passed, and then Thar and Kossil made the journey, with the
Temple guards, and soldiers of the red helmet sent by the Godking to
escort them safely. They brought the child back here, for it was
indeed the Priestess of the Tombs reborn, and here it belonged. And
who was the child, eh, little one?"
        "Me," said Arha, looking off into the distance as if to see
something she could not see, something gone out of sight.
        Once she asked, "What did the... the mother do, when they came
to take the child away?"
        But Manan didn't know; he had not gone with the priestesses on
that final journey.
        And she could not remember. What was the good in remembering?
It was gone, all gone. She had come where she must come. In all the
world she knew only one place: the Place of the Tombs of Atuan.
        In her first year there she had slept in the big dormitory
with the other novices, girls between four and fourteen. Even then
Manan had been set apart among the Ten Wardens as her particular
guardian, and her cot had been in a little alcove, partly separated
from the long, low-beamed main room of the dormitory in the Big House
where the girls giggled and whispered before they slept, and yawned
and plaited one another's hair in the gray light of morning. When her
name was taken from her and she became Arha, she slept alone in the
Small House, in the bed and in the room that would be her bed and her
room for the rest of her life. That house was hers, the House of the
One Priestess, and no one might enter it without her permission. When
she was quite little still, she enjoyed hearing people knock
submissively on her door, and saying, "You may come in," and it
annoyed her that the two High Priestesses, Kossil and Thar, took their
permission for granted and entered her house without knocking.
        The days went by, the years went by, all alike. The girls of
the Place of the Tombs spent their time at classes and disciplines.
They did not play any games. There was no time for games. They learned
the sacred songs and the sacred dances, the histories of the Kargad
Lands, and the mysteries of whichever of the gods they were dedicated
to: the Godking who ruled in Awabath, or the Twin Brothers, Atwah and
Wuluah. Of them all, only Arha learned the rites of the Nameless Ones,
and these were taught her by one person, Thar, the High Priestess of
the Twin Gods. This took her away from the others for an hour or more
daily, but most of her day, like theirs, was spent simply working.
They learned how to spin and weave the wool of their flocks, and how
to plant and harvest and prepare the food they always ate: lentils,
buckwheat ground to a coarse meal for porridge or a fine flour for
unleavened bread, onions, cabbages, goat-cheese, apples, and honey.
        The best thing that could happen was to be allowed to go
fishing in the murky green river that flowed through the desert a half
mile northeast of the Place; to take along an apple or a cold
buckwheat bannock for lunch and sit all day in the dry sunlight among
the reeds, watching the slow green water run and the cloudshadows
change slowly on the mountains. But if you squealed with excitement
when the line tensed and you swung in a flat, glittering fish to flop
on the riverbank and drown in air, then Mebbeth would hiss like an
adder, "Be still, you screeching fool!" Mebbeth, who served in the
Godking's temple, was a dark woman, still young, but hard and sharp as
obsidian. Fishing was her passion. You had to keep on her good side,
and never make a sound, or she would not take you out to fish again;
and then you'd never get to the river except to fetch water in summer
when the wells ran low. That was a dreary business, to trudge through
the searing white heat a half mile down to the river, fill the two
buckets on their carrying pole, and then set off as fast as possible
uphill to the Place. The first hundred yards were easy, but then the
buckets began to grow heavier, and the pole burned your shoulders like
a bar of hot iron, and the light glared on the dry road, and every
step was harder and slower. At last you got to the cool shade of the
back courtyard of the Big House by the vegetable patch, and dumped the
buckets into the great cistern with a splash. And then you had to turn
around to do it all over again, and again, and again.
        Within the precincts of the Place -that was all the name it

had or needed, for it was the most ancient and sacred of all places in
the Four Lands of the Kargish Empire- a couple of hundred people
lived, and there were many buildings: three temples, the Big House and
the Small House, the quarters of the eunuch wardens, and close outside
the wall the guards' barracks and many slaves' huts, the storehouses
and sheep pens and goat pens and farm buildings. It looked like a
little town, seen from a distance, from up on the dry hills westward
where nothing grew but sage, wire-grass in straggling clumps, small
weeds and desert herbs. Even from away off on the eastern plains,
looking up one might see the gold roof of the Temple of the Twin Gods
wink and glitter beneath the mountains, like a speck of mica in a
shelf of rock.
        That temple itself was a cube of stone, plastered white,
windowless, with a low porch and door. Showier, and centuries newer,
was the Temple of the God-king a little below it, with a high portico
and a row of thick white columns with painted capitals - each one a
solid log of cedar, brought on shipboard from Hur-atHur where there
are forests, and dragged by the straining of twenty slaves across the
barren plains to the Place. Only after a traveler approaching from the
east had seen the gold roof and the bright columns would he see,
higher up on the Hill of the Place, above them all, tawny and ruinous
as the desert itself, the oldest of the temples of his race: the huge,
low Hall of the Throne, with patched walls and flattish, crumbling
dome.
        Behind the Hall and encircling the whole crest of the hill ran
a massive wall of rock, laid without mortar and half fallen down in
many places. Inside the loop of the wall several black stones eighteen
or twenty feet high stuck up like huge fingers out of the earth. Once
the eye saw them it kept returning to them. They stood there full of
meaning, and yet there was no saying what they meant. There were nine
of them. One stood straight, the others leaned more or less, two had
fallen. They were crusted with gray and orange lichen as if splotched
with paint, all but one, which was naked and black, with a dull gloss
to it. It was smooth to the touch, but on the others, under the crust
of lichen, vague carvings could be seen, or felt with the fingers -
shapes, signs. These nine stones were the Tombs of Atuan. They had
stood there, it was said, since the time of the first men, since
Earthsea was created. They had been planted in the darkness when the
lands were raised up from the ocean's depths. They were older by far
than the God-kings of Kargad, older than the Twin Gods, older than
light. They were the tombs of those who ruled before the world of men
came to be, the ones not named, and she who served them had no name.
        She did not go among them often, and no one else ever set foot
on that ground where they stood, on the hilltop within the rock wall
behind the Hall of the Throne. Twice a year, at the full moon nearest
the equinox of spring and of autumn, there was a sacrifice before the
Throne and she came out from the low back door of the Hall carrying a
great brass basin full of smoking goat's blood; this she must pour
out, half at the foot of the standing black stone, half over one of
the fallen stones which lay embedded in the rocky dirt, stained by the
blood-offering of centuries.
        Sometimes Arha went by herself in the early morning and
wandered among the Stones trying to make out the dim humps and
scratches of the carvings, brought out more clearly by the low angle
of the light; or she would sit there and look up at the mountains
westward, and down at the roofs and walls of the Place all laid out
below, and watch the first stirrings of activity around the Big House
and the guards' barracks, and the flocks of sheep and goats going off
to their sparse pastures by the river. There was never anything to do
among the Stones. She went only because it was permitted her to go
there, because there she was alone. It was a dreary place. Even in the
heat of noon in the desert summer there was a coldness about it.
Sometimes the wind whistled a little between the two stones that stood
closest together, leaning together as if telling secrets. But no
secret was told.
        From the Tomb Wall another, lower rock wall ran, making a long

irregular semicircle about the Hill of the Place and then trailing off
northward towards the river. It did not so much protect the Place, as
cut it in two: on one side the temples and houses of the priestesses
and wardens, on the other the quarters of the guards and of the slaves
who farmed and herded and foraged for the Place. None of these ever
crossed the wall, except that on certain very holy festivals the
guards, and their drummers and players of the horn, would attend the
procession of the priestesses; but they did not enter the portals of
the temples. No other men set foot upon the inner ground of the Place.
There had once been pilgrimages, kings and chieftains coming from the
Four Lands to worship there; the first God-king, a century and a half
ago, had come to enact the rites of his own temple. Yet even he could
not enter among the Tombstones, even he had had to eat and sleep
outside the wall around the Place.
        One could climb that wall easily enough, fitting toes into
crevices. The Eaten One and a girl called Penthe were sitting up on
the wall one afternoon in late spring.
        They were both twelve years old. They were supposed to be in
the weaving room of the Big House, a huge stone attic; they were
supposed to be at the great looms always warped with dull black wool,
weaving black cloth for robes. They had slipped outside for a drink at
the well in the courtyard, and then Arha had said, "Come on!" and had
led the other girl down the hill, around out of sight of the Big
House, to the wall. Now they sat on top of it, ten feet up, their bare
legs dangling down on the outside, looking over the flat plains that
went on and on to the east and north.
        "I'd like to see the sea," said Penthe.
        "What for?" said Arha, chewing a bitter stem of milkweed she
had picked from the wall. The barren land was just past its flowering.
All the small desert blossoms, yellow and rose and white, low-growing
and quick-flowering, were going to seed, scattering tiny plumes and
parasols of ash white on the wind, dropping their hooked, ingenious
burrs. The ground under the apple trees of the orchard was a drift of
bruised white and pink. The branches were green, the only green trees
within miles of the Place. Everything else, from horizon to horizon,
was a dull, tawny, desert color, except that the mountains had a
silvery bluish tinge from the first buds of the flowering sage.
        "Oh, I don't know what for. I'd just like to see something
different. It's always the same here. Nothing happens."
        "All that happens everywhere, begins here," said Arha.
        "Oh, I know... But I'd like to see some of it happening!"
        Penthe smiled. She was a soft, comfortable-looking girl. She
scratched the soles of her bare feet on the sunwarmed rocks, and after
a while went on, "You know, I used to live by the sea when I was
little. Our village was right behind the dunes, and we used to go down
and play on the beach sometimes. Once I remember we saw a fleet of
ships going by, way out at sea. The ships looked like dragons with red
wings. Some of them had real necks, with dragon heads. They came
sailing by Atuan, but they weren't Kargish ships. They came from the
west, from the Inner Lands, the headman said. Everybody came down to
watch them. I think they were afraid they might land. They just went
by, nobody knew where they were going. Maybe to make war in Karego-At.
But think of it, they really came from the sorcerers' islands, where
all the people are the color of dirt and they can all cast a spell on
you easy as winking."
        "Not on me," Arha said fiercely. "I wouldn't have looked at
them. They're vile accursed sorcerers. How dare they sail so close to
the Holy Land?"
        "Oh, well, I suppose the God-king will conquer them some day
and make them all slaves. But I wish I could see the sea again. There
used to be little octopuses in the tide pools, and if you shouted
`Boo!' at them they turned all white. -There comes that old Manan,
looking for you."
        Arha's guard and servant was coming slowly along the inner
side of the wall. He would stoop to pull a wild onion, of which he
held a large, limp bunch, then straighten up and look about him with
his small, dull, brown eyes. He had grown fatter with the years, and
his hairless yellow skin glistened in the sun.
        "Slide down part way on the men's side," Arha hissed, and both
girls wriggled lithe as lizards down the far side of the wall until
they could cling there just below the top, invisible from the inner
side. They heard Manan's slow footsteps coming by.
        "Hoo! Hoo! Potato face!" crooned Arha, a whispering jeer faint
as the wind among the grasses.
        The heavy tread halted. "Ho there," said the uncertain voice.
"Little one? Arha?"
        Silence.
        Manan went forward.
        "Hoo-oo! Potato face!"
        "Hoo, potato belly!" Penthe whispered in imitation, and then
moaned, trying to suppress giggles.
        "Somebody there?"
        Silence.
        "Oh well, well, well," the eunuch sighed, and his slow feet
went on. When he was gone over the shoulder of the slope, the girls
scrambled back up onto the top of the wall. Penthe was pink with sweat
and giggles, but Arha looked savage.
        "The stupid old bellwether, following me around everywhere!"
        "He has to," Penthe said reasonably. "It's his job, looking
after you."
        "Those I serve look after me. I please them; I need please
nobody else. These old women and half-men, these people should leave
me alone. I am the One Priestess!"
        Penthe stared at the other girl. "Oh," she said feebly, "oh, I
know you are, Arha-"
        "Then they should let me be. And not order me about all the
time!"
        Penthe said nothing for a while, but sighed, and sat swinging
her plump legs and gazing at the vast, pale lands below, that rose so
slowly to a high, vague, immense horizon.
        "You'll get to give the orders pretty soon, you know," she
said at last, quietly. "In two more years we won't be children any
more. We'll be fourteen. I'll go into the Godking's temple, and things
will be about the same for me. But you'll really be the High Priestess
then. Even Kossil and Thar will have to obey you."
        The Eaten One said nothing. Her face was set, her eyes under
black brows caught the light of the sky in a pale glitter.
        "We ought to go back," Penthe said.
        "No."
        "But the weaving mistress might tell Thar. And soon it'll be
time for the Nine Chants."
        "I'm staying here. You stay, too."
        "They won't punish you, but they will punish me," Penthe said
in her mild way. Arha did not reply. Penthe sighed, and stayed. The
sun was sinking into haze high above the plains. Far away on the long,
gradual slant of the land, sheep bells clanked faintly and lambs
bleated. The spring wind blew in dry, faint gusts, sweetsmelling.
        The Nine Chants were nearly over when the two girls returned.
Mebbeth had seen them sitting on the `Men's Wall' and had reported
this to her superior, Kossil, High Priestess of the Godking.
        Kossil was heavy-footed, heavy-faced. Without expression in
face or voice she spoke to the two girls, telling them to follow her.
She led them through the stone hallways of the Big House, out the
front door, up the knoll to the Temple of Atwah and Wuluah. There she
spoke with the High Priestess of that temple, Thar, tall and dry and
thin as the legbone of a deer.
        Kossil said to Penthe, "Take off your gown."
        She whipped the girl with a bundle of reed canes, which cut
the skin a little. Penthe bore this patiently, with silent tears. She
was sent back to the weaving room without supper, and the next day
also she would go without food. "If you are found climbing over the
Men's Wall again," Kossil said, "there will be very much worse things
than this happen to you. Do you understand, Penthe?" Kossil's voice
was soft, but not kindly. Penthe said, "Yes," and slipped away,
cowering and flinching as her heavy clothing rubbed the cuts on her
back.
        Arha had stood beside Thar to watch the whipping. Now she
watched Kossil clean the canes of the whip.
        Thar said to her, "It is not fitting that you be seen climbing
and running with other girls. You are Arha."
        She stood sullen and did not reply.
        "It is better that you do only what is needful for you to do.
You are Arha."
        For a moment the girl raised her eyes to Thar's face, then to
Kossil's, and there was a depth of hate or rage in her look that was
terrible to see. But the thin priestess showed no concern; rather she
confirmed, leaning forward a little, almost whispering, "You are Arha.
There is nothing left. It was all eaten."
        "It was all eaten," the girl repeated, as she had repeated
daily, all the days of her life since she was six.
        Thar bowed her head slightly; so did Kossil, as she put away
the whip. The girl did not bow, but turned submissively and left.
        After the supper of potatoes and spring onions, eaten in
silence in the narrow, dark refectory, after the chanting of the
evening hymns, and the placing of the sacred words upon the doors, and
the brief Ritual of the Unspoken, the work of the day was done. Now
the girls might go up to the dormitory and play games with dice and
sticks, so long as the single rushlight burned, and whisper in the
dark from bed to bed. Arha set off across the courts and slopes of the
Place as she did every night, to the Small House where she slept
alone.
        The night wind was sweet. The stars of spring shone thick,
like drifts of daisies in spring meadows, like the glittering of light
on the April sea. But the girl had no memory of meadows or the sea.
She did not look up.
        "Ho there, little one!"
        "Manan," she said indifferently.
        The big shadow shuffled up beside her, starlight glinting on
his hairless pate.
        "Were you punished?"
        "I can't be punished."
        "No... That's so..."
        "They can't punish me. They don't dare."
        He stood with his big hands hanging, dim and bulky. She
smelled wild onion, and the sweaty, sagey smell of his old black
robes, which were torn at the hem, and too short for him.
        "They can't touch me. I am Arha," she said in a shrill, fierce
voice, and burst into tears.
        The big, waiting hands came up and drew her to him, held her
gently, smoothed her braided hair. "There, there. Little honeycomb,
little girl..." She heard the husky murmur in the deep hollow of his
chest, and clung to him. Her tears stopped soon, but she held onto
Manan as if she could not stand up.

        "Poor little one," he whispered, and picking the child up
carried her to the doorway of the house where she slept alone. He set
her down.
        "All right now, little one?"
        She nodded, turned from him, and entered the dark house.




------
The Prisoners
------

        Kossil's steps sounded along the hallway of the Small House,
even and deliberate. The tall, heavy figure filled the doorway of the
room, shrank as the priestess bowed down touching one knee to the
floor, swelled as she straightened to her full height.
        "Mistress."
        "What is it, Kossil?"
        "I have been permitted to look after certain matters
pertaining to the Domain of the Nameless Ones, until now. If you so
desire, it is now time for you to learn, and see, and take charge of
these matters, which you have not yet remembered in this life."
        The girl had been sitting in her windowless room, supposedly
meditating, actually doing nothing and thinking almost nothing. It
took some time for the fixed, dull, haughty expression of her face to
change. Yet it did change, though she tried to conceal it. She said,
with a certain slyness, "The Labyrinth?"
        "We will not enter the Labyrinth. But it will be necessary to
cross the Undertomb."
        There was a tone in Kossil's voice that might have been fear,
or might have been a pretense of fear, intended to frighten Arha. The
girl stood up without haste and said indifferently, "Very well." But
in her heart, as she followed the heavy figure of the Godking's
priestess, she exulted: At last! At last! I shall see my own domain at
last!
        She was fifteen. It was over a year since she had made her
crossing into womanhood and at the same time had come into her full
powers as the One Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, highest of all high
priestesses of the Kargad Lands, one whom not even the Godking himself
might command. They all bowed the knee to her now, even grim Thar and
Kossil. All spoke to her with elaborate deference. But nothing had
changed. Nothing happened. Once the ceremonies of her consecration
were over, the days went on as they had always gone. There was wool to
be spun, black cloth to be woven, meal to be ground, rites to be
performed; the Nine Chants must be sung nightly, the doorways blessed,
the Stones fed with goat's blood twice a year, the dances of the dark
of the moon danced before the Empty Throne. And so the whole year had
passed, just as the years before it had passed, and were all the years
of her life to pass so?
        Her boredom rose so strong in her sometimes that it felt like
terror: it took her by the throat. Not long ago she had been driven to
speak of it. She had to talk, she thought, or she would go mad. It was
Manan she talked to. Pride kept her from confiding in the other girls,
and caution kept her from confession to the older women, but Manan was
nothing, a faithful old bellwether; it didn't matter what she said to
him. To her surprise he had had an answer for her.
        "Long ago," he said, "you know, little one, before our four
lands joined together into an empire, before there was a Godking over
us all, there were a lot of lesser kings, princes, chiefs. They were
always quarreling with each other. And they'd come here to settle
their quarrels. That was how it was, they'd come from our land Atuan,
and from Karego-At, and Atnini, and even from Hur-at-Hur, all the
chiefs and princes with their servants and their armies. And they'd
ask you what to do. And you'd go before the Empty Throne, and give
them the counsel of the Nameless Ones. Well, that was long ago. After
a while the Priest-Kings came to rule all of Karego-At, and soon they
were ruling Atuan; and now for four or five lifetimes of men the
Godkings have ruled all the four lands together, and made them an
empire. And so things are changed. The Godking can put down the unruly
chiefs, and settle all the quarrels himself. And being a god, you see,
he doesn't have to consult the Nameless Ones very often."
        Arha stopped to think this over. Time did not mean very much,
here in the desert land, under the unchanging Stones, leading a life
that had been led in the same way since the beginning of the world.
She was not accustomed to thinking about things changing, old ways
dying and new ones arising. She did not find it comfortable to look at
things in that light. "The powers of the Godking are much less than
the powers of the Ones I serve," she said, frowning.
        "Surely... Surely... But one doesn't go about saying that to a
god, little honeycomb. Nor to his priestess."
        And catching his small, brown, twinkling eye, she thought of
Kissil, High Priestess of the Godking, whom she had feared ever since
she first came to the Place; and she took his meaning.
        "But the Godking, and his people, are neglecting the worship
of the Tombs. No one comes."
        "Well, he sends prisoners here to sacrifice. He doesn't
neglect that. Nor the gifts due to the Nameless Ones."
        "Gifts! His temple is painted fresh every year, there's a
hundredweight of gold on the altar, the lamps burn attar of roses! And
look at the Hall of the Throne- holes in the roof, and the dome
cracking, and the walls full of mice, and owls, and bats... But all
the same it will outlast the Godking and all his temples, and all the
kings that come after him. It was there before them, and when they're
all gone it will still be there. It is the center of things."
        "It is the center of things."
        "There are riches there; Thar tells me about them sometimes.
Enough to fill the Godking's temple ten times over. Gold and trophies
given ages ago, a hundred generations, who knows how long. They're all
locked away in the pits and vaults, underground. They won't take me
there yet, they keep me waiting and waiting. But I know what it's
like. There are rooms underneath the Hall, underneath the whole Place,
under where we stand now. There's a great maze of tunnels, a
Labyrinth. It's like a great dark city, under the hill. Full of gold,
and the swords of old heroes, and old crowns, and bones, and years,
and silence."
        She spoke as if in trance, in rapture. Manan watched her. His
slabby face never expressed much but stolid, careful sadness; it was
sadder than usual now. "Well, and you're mistress of all that," he
said. "The silence, and the dark."
        "I am. But they won't show me anything, only the rooms above
ground, behind the Throne. They haven't even shown me the entrances to
the places underground; they just mumble about them sometimes. They're
keeping my own domain from me! Why do they make me wait and wait?"
        "You are young. And perhaps," Manan said in his husky alto,
"perhaps they're afraid, little one. It's not their domain, after all.
It's yours. They are in danger when they enter there. There's no
mortal that doesn't fear the Nameless Ones."
        Arha said nothing, but her eyes flashed. Again Manan had shown
her a new way of seeing things. So formidable, so cold, so strong had
Thar and Kossil always seemed to her, that she had never even imagined
their being afraid. Yet Manan was right. They feared those places,
those powers of which Arha was part, to which she belonged. They were
afraid to go into the dark places, lest they be eaten.
        Now, as she went with Kossil down the steps of the Small House
and up the steep winding path towards the Hall of the Throne, she
recalled that conversation with Manan, and exulted again. No matter
where they took her, what they showed her, she would not be afraid.
She would know her way.
        A little behind her on the path, Kossil spoke. "One of my
mistress' duties, as she knows, is the sacrifice of certain prisoners,
criminals of noble birth, who by sacrilege or treason have sinned
against our lord the Godking."
        "Or against the Nameless Ones," said Arha.
        "Truly. Now it is not fitting that the Eaten One while yet a
child should undertake this duty. But my mistress is no longer a
child. There are prisoners in the Room of Chains, sent a month ago by
the grace of our lord the Godking from his city Awabath."
        "I did not know prisoners had come. Why did I not know?"
        "Prisoners are brought at night, and secretly, in the way
prescribed of old in the rituals of the Tombs. It is the secret way my
mistress will follow, if she takes the path that leads along the
wall."
        Arha turned off the path to follow the great wall of stone
that bounded the Tombs behind the domed hall. The rocks it was built
of were massive; the least of them would outweigh a man, and the
largest were big as wagons. Though unshapen they were carefully fitted
and interlocked. Yet in places the height of the wall had slipped down
and the rocks lay in a shapeless heap. Only a vast span of time could
do that, the desert centuries of fiery days and frozen nights, the
millennial, imperceptible movements of the hills themselves.
        "It is very easy to climb the Tomb Wall," Arha said as they
went along beneath it.
        "We have not men enough to rebuild it," Kossil replied.
        "We have men enough to guard it."
        "Only slaves. They cannot be trusted."
        "They can be trusted if they're frightened. Let the penalty be
the same for them as for the stranger they allow to set foot on the
holy ground within the wall."
        "What is that penalty?" Kossil did not ask to learn the
answer. She had taught the answer to Arha, long ago.
        "To be decapitated before the Throne."
        "Is it my mistress' will that a guard be set upon the Tomb
Wall?"
        "It is," the girl answered. Inside her long black sleeves her
fingers clenched with elation. She knew Kossil did not want to spare a
slave to this duty of watching the wall, and indeed it was a useless
duty, for what strangers ever came here? It was not likely that any
man would wander, by mischance or intent, anywhere within a mile of
the Place without being seen; he certainly would get nowhere near the
Tombs. But a guard was an honor due them, and Kossil could not well
argue against it. She must obey Arha.
        "Here," said her cold voice.
        Arha stopped. She had often walked this path around the Tomb
Wall, and knew it as she knew every foot of the Place, every rock and
thorn and thistle. The great rock wall reared up thrice her height to
the left; to the right the hill shelved away into a shallow, arid
valley, which soon rose again towards the foothills of the western
range. She looked over all the ground nearby, and saw nothing that she
had not seen before.
        "Under the red rocks, mistress."
        A few yards down the slope an outcropping of red lava made a
stair or little cliff in the hill. When she went down to it and stood
on the level before it, facing the rocks, Arha realized that they
looked like a rough doorway, four feet high.
        "What must be done?"
        She had learned long ago that in the holy places it is no use
trying to open a door until you know how the door is opened.
        "My mistress has all the keys to the dark places."
        Since the rites of her coming of age, Arha had worn on her
belt an iron ring on which hung a little dagger and thirteen keys,
some long and heavy, some small as fishhooks. She lifted the ring and
spread the keys. "That one," Kossil said, pointing; and then placed
her thick forefinger on a crevice between two red, pitted
rock-surfaces.
        "The key, a long shaft of iron with two ornate wards, entered
the crevice. Arha turned it to the left, using both hands, for it was
stiff to move; yet it turned smoothly.
        "Now?"
        "Together-"
        Together they pushed at the rough rock face to the left of the
keyhole. Heavily, but without catch and with very little noise, an
uneven section of the red rock moved inward until a narrow slit was
opened. Inside it was blackness.
        Arha stooped and entered.
        Kossil, a heavy woman heavily clothed, had to squeeze through
the narrow opening. As soon as she was inside she backed against the
door and, straining, pushed it shut.
        It was absolutely black. There was no light. The dark seemed
to press like wet felt upon the open eyes.
        They crouched, almost doubled over, for the place they stood
in was not four feet high, and so narrow that Arha's groping hands
touched damp rock at once to right and left.
        "Did you bring a light?"
        She whispered, as one does in the dark.
        "I brought no light," Kossil replied, behind her. Kossil's
voice too was lowered, but it had an odd sound to it, as if she were
smiling. Kossil never smiled. Arha's heart jumped; the blood pounded
in her throat. She said to herself, fiercely: This is my place, I
belong here, I will not be afraid!
        Aloud she said nothing. She started forward; there was only
one way to go. It went into the hill, and downward.
        Kossil followed, breathing heavily, her garments brushing and
scraping against rock and earth.
        All at once the roof lifted: Arha could stand straight, and
stretching out her hands she felt no walls. The air, which had been
close and earthy, touched her face with a cooler dampness, and faint
movements in it gave the sense of a great expanse. Arha took a few
cautious steps forward into the utter blackness. A pebble, slipping
under her sandaled foot, struck another pebble, and the tiny sound
wakened echoes, many echoes, minute, remote, yet more remote. The
cavern must be immense, high and broad, yet not empty: something in
its darkness, surfaces of invisible objects or partitions, broke the
echo into a thousand fragments.
        "Here we must be beneath the Stones," the girl said
whispering, and her whisper ran out into the hollow blackness and
frayed into threads of sound as fine as spiderweb, that clung to the
hearing for a long time.
        "Yes. This is the Undertomb. Go on. I cannot stay here. Follow
the wall to the left. Pass three openings."
        Kossil's whisper hissed (and the tiny echoes hissed after it).
She was afraid, she was indeed afraid. She did not like to be here
among the Nameless Ones, in their tombs, in their caves, in the dark.
It was not her place, she did not belong here.
        "I shall come here with a torch," Arha said, guiding herself
along the wall of the cavern by the touch of her fingers, wondering at
the strange shapes of the rock, hollows and swellings and fine curves
and edges, rough as lace here, smooth as brass there: surely this was
carven work. Perhaps the whole cavern was the work of sculptors of the
ancient days?
        "Light is forbidden here." Kossil's whisper was sharp. Even as
she said it, Arha knew it must be so. This was the very home of
darkness, the inmost center of the night.
        Three times her fingers swept across a gap in the complex,
rocky blackness. The fourth time she felt for the height and width of
the opening, and entered it. Kossil came behind.
        In this tunnel, which went upward again at a slight slant,
they passed an opening on the left, and then at a branching way took
the right: all by feel, by groping, in the blindness of the underearth
and the silence inside the ground. In such a passageway as this, one
must reach out almost constantly to touch both sides of the tunnel,
lest one of the openings that must be counted be missed, or the
forking of the way go unnoticed. Touch was one's whole guidance; one
could not see the way, but held it in one's hands.
        "Is this the Labyrinth?"
        "No. This is the lesser maze, which is beneath the Throne."
        "Where is the entrance to the Labyrinth?"
        Arha liked this game in the dark, she wanted a greater puzzle
to be set her.
        "The second opening we passed in the Undertomb. Feel for a
door to the right now, a wooden door, perhaps we've passed it
already-"
        Arha heard Kossil's hands fumbling uneasily along the wall,
scraping on the rough rock. She kept her fingertips light against the
rock, and in a moment felt the smooth grain of wood beneath them. She
pushed on it, and the door creaked open easily. She stood for a moment
blind with light.
        They entered a large low room, walled with hewn stone and
lighted by one fuming torch hung from a chain. The place was foul with
the torch-smoke that had no outlet. Arha's eyes stung and watered.
        "Where are the prisoners?"
        "There."
        At last she realized that the three heaps of something on the
far side of the room were men.
        "The door isn't locked. Is there no guard?"
        "None is needed."
        She went a little farther into the room, hesitant, peering
through the smoky haze. The prisoners were manacled by both ankles and
one wrist to great rings driven into the rock of the wall. If one of
them wanted to lie down, his chained arm must remain raised, hanging
from the manacle. Their hair and beards had made a matted tangle
which, together with the shadows, hid their faces. One of them half
lay, the other two sat or squatted. They were naked. The smell from
them was stronger even than the reek of smoke.
        One of them seemed to be watching Arha; she thought she saw
the glitter of eyes, then was not sure. The others had not moved or
lifted their heads.
        She turned away. "They are not men any more," she said.
        "They were never men. They were demons, beast-spirits, who
plotted against the sacred life of the Godking!" Kossil's eyes shone
with the reddish torchlight.
        Arha looked again at the prisoners, awed and curious. "How
could a man attack a god? How was it? You: how could you dare attack a
living god?"
        The one man stared at her through the black brush of his hair,
but said nothing.
        "Their tongues were cut out before they were sent from
Awabath," Kossil said. "Do not speak to them, mistress. They are
defilement. They are yours, but not to speak to, nor to look at, nor
to think upon. They are yours to give to the Nameless Ones."
        "How are they to be sacrificed?"
        Arha no longer looked at the prisoners. She faced Kossil
instead, drawing strength from the massive body, the cold voice. She
felt dizzy, and the reek of smoke and filth made her sick, yet she
seemed to think and speak with perfect calm. Had she not done this
many times before?
        "The Priestess of the Tombs knows best what manner of death
will please her Masters, and it is hers to choose. There are many
ways."
        "Let Gobar the captain of the guards hew off their heads. And
the blood will be poured out before the Throne."
        "As if it were a sacrifice of goats?" Kossil seemed to be
sneering at her lack of imagination. She stood dumb. Kossil went on,
"Besides, Gobar is a man. No man can enter the Dark Places of the
Tombs, surely my mistress remembers that? If he enters, he does not
leave..."
        "Who brought them here? Who feeds them?"
        "The wardens who serve my temple, Duby and Uahto; they are
eunuchs and may enter here on the services of the Nameless Ones, as I
may. The Godking's soldiers left the prisoners bound outside the wall,
and I and the wardens brought them in through the Prisoner's Door, the
door in the red rocks. So it is always done. The food and water is
lowered from a trapdoor in one of the rooms behind the Throne."
        Arha looked up and saw, beside the chain from which the torch
hung, a wooden square set into the stone ceiling. It was far too small
for a man to crawl through, but a rope lowered from it would come down
just within reach of the middle prisoner of the three. She looked away
again quickly.
        "Let them not bring any more food or water, then. Let the
torch go out."
        Kossil bowed. "And the bodies, when they die?"
        "Let Duby and Uahto bury them in the great cavern that we
passed through, the Undertomb," the girl said, her voice becoming
quick and high. "They must do it in the dark. My Masters will eat the
bodies."
        "It shall be done."
        "Is this well, Kossil?"
        "It is well, mistress."
        "Then let us go," Arha said, very shrill. She turned and
hurried back to the wooden door, and out of the Room of Chains into
the blackness of the tunnel. It seemed sweet and peaceful as a
starless night, silent, without sight, or light, or life. She plunged
into the clean darkness, hurried forward through it like a swimmer
through water. Kossil hastened along, behind her and getting farther
behind, panting, lumbering. Without hesitation Arha repeated the
missed and taken turnings as they had come, skirted the vast echoing
Undertomb, and crept, bent over, up the last long tunnel to the shut
door of rock. There she crouched down and felt for the long key on the
ring at her waist. She found it, but could not find the keyhole. There
was no pinprick of light in the invisible wall before her. Her fingers
groped over it seeking lock or bolt or handle and finding nothing.
Where must the key go? How could she get out?
        "Mistress!"
        Kossil's voice, magnified by echoes, hissed and boomed far
behind her.
        "Mistress, the door will not open from inside. There is no way
out. There is no return."
        Arha crouched against the rock. She said nothing.
        "Arha!"
        "I am here."
        "Come!"
        She came, crawling on hands and knees along the passage, like
a dog, to Kossil's skirts.
        "To the right. Hurry! I must not linger here. It is not my
place. Follow me."
        Arha got to her feet, and held onto Kossils robes. They went
forward, following the strangely carven wall of the cavern to the
right for a long way, then entering a black gap in the blackness. They
went upward now, in tunnels, by stairs. The girl still clung to the
woman's robe. Her eyes were shut.
        There was light, red through her eyelids. She thought it was
the torchlit room full of smoke again, and did not open her eyes. But
the air smelt sweetish, dry and moldy, a familiar smell; and her feet
were on a staircase steep almost as a ladder. She let go Kossil's
robe, and looked. A trapdoor was open over her head. She scrambled
through it after Kossil. It let her into a room she knew, a little
stone cell containing a couple of chests and iron boxes, in the warren
of rooms behind the Throne Room of the Hall. Daylight glimmered gray
and faint in the hallway outside its door.
        "The other, the Prisoner's Door, leads only into the tunnels.
It does not lead out. This is the only way out. If there is any other
way I do not know of it, nor does Thar. You must remember it for
yourself, if there is one. But I do not think there is." Kossil still
spoke in an undertone, and with a kind of spitefulness. Her heavy face
within the black cowl was pale, and damp with sweat.
        "I don't remember the turnings to this way out."
        "I'll tell them to you. Once. You must remember them. Next
time I will not come with you. This is not my place. You must come
alone."
        The girl nodded. She looked up into the older woman's face,
and thought how strange it looked, pale with scarcely mastered fear
and yet triumphant, as if Kossil gloated over her weakness.
        "I will come alone after this," Arha said, and then trying to
turn away from Kossil she felt her legs give way, and saw the room
turn over. She fainted in a little black heap at the priestess' feet.
        "You'll learn," Kossil said, still breathing heavily, standing
motionless. "You'll learn."



------
Dreams and Tales
------

        Arha was not well for several days. They treated her for
fever. She kept to her bed, or sat in the mild autumn sunlight on the
porch of the Small House, and looked up at the western hills. She felt
weak and stupid. The same ideas occurred to her again and again. She
was ashamed of having fainted. No guard had been set upon the Tomb
Wall, but now she would never dare ask Kossil about that. She did not
want to see Kossil at all: never. It was because she was ashamed of
having fainted.
        Often, in the sunlight, she would plan how she was going to
behave next time she went into the dark places under the hill. She
thought many times about what kind of death she should command for the
next set of prisoners, more elaborate, better suited to the rituals of
the Empty Throne.
        Each night, in the dark, she woke up screaming, "They aren't
dead yet! They are still dying!"
        She dreamed a great deal. She dreamed that she had to cook
food, great cauldrons full of savory porridge, and pour it all out
into a hole in the ground. She dreamed that she had to carry a full
bowl of water, a deep brass bowl, through the dark, to someone who was
thirsty. She could never get to this person. She woke, and she herself
was thirsty, but she did not go and get a drink. She lay awake, eyes
open, in the room without windows.
        One morning Penthe came to see her. From the porch Arha saw
her approach the Small House with a careless, purposeless air, as if
she just happened to be wandering that way. If Arha had not spoken she
would not have come up the steps. But Arha was lonely, and spoke.
        Penthe made the deep bow required of all who approached the
Priestess of the Tombs, and then plopped down on the steps below Arha
and made a noise like "Phewph!" She had gotten quite tall and plump;
anything she did turned her cherry pink, and she was pink now from
walking.
        "I heard you were ill. I saved you out some apples." She
suddenly produced a rush net containing six or eight perfect yellow
apples, from somewhere under her voluminous black robe. She was now
consecrated to the service of the Godking, and served in his temple
under Kossil; but she wasn't yet a priestess, and still did lessons
and chores with the novices. "Poppe and I sorted the apples this year,
and I saved the very best ones out. They always dry all the really
good ones. Of course they keep best, but it seems such a waste. Aren't
they pretty?"
        Arha felt the pale gold satin skins of the apples, looked at
the twigs to which brown leaves still delicately clung. "They are
pretty."
        "Have one," said Penthe.
        "Not now. You do."
        Penthe selected the smallest, out of politeness, and ate it in
about ten juicy, skillful, interested bites.
        "I could eat all day," she said. "I never get enough. I wish I
could be a cook instead of a priestess. I'd cook better than that old
skinflint Nathabba, and besides, I'd get to lick the pots... Oh, did
you hear about Munith? She was supposed to be polishing those brass
pots they keep the rose oil in, you know, those long thin sort of jars
with stoppers. And she thought she was supposed to clean the insides
too, so she stuck her hand in, with a rag around it, you know, and
then she couldn't get it out. She tried so hard it got all puffed up
and swollen at the wrist, you know, so that she really was stuck. And
she went galloping all over the dormitories yelling, `I can't get it
off! I can't get it off!' And Punti's so deaf now he thought it was a
fire, and started screeching at the other wardens to come and rescue
the novices. And Uahto was milking and came running out of the pen to
see what was the matter, and left the gate open, and all the
milch-goats got out and came charging into the courtyard and ran into
Punti and the wardens and the little girls, and Munith waving this
brass pot around on the end of her arm and having hysterics, and they
were all sort of rushing around down there when Kossil came down from
the temple. And she said, `What's this? What's this?"'
        Penthe's fair, round face took on a repulsive sneer, not at
all like Kossil's cold expression, and yet somehow so like Kossil that
Arha gave a snort of almost terrified laughter.
        "'What's this? What's all this?' Kossil said. And then-and
then the brown goat butted her-" Penthe dissolved in laughter, tears
welled in her eyes. "And M-Munith hit the, the goat with the p-ppot"
        Both girls rocked back and forth in spasms of giggling,
holding their knees, choking.
        "And Kossil turned around and said, `What's this? What's
this?' to the - to the - to the goat..." The end of the tale was lost
in laughter. Penthe finally wiped her eyes and nose, and
absentmindedly started on another apple.
        To laugh so hard made Arha feel a little shaky. She calmed
herself down, and after a while asked, "How did you come here,
Penthe?"
        "Oh, I was the sixth girl my mother and father had, and they
just couldn't bring up so many and marry them all off. So when I was
seven they brought me to the Godking's temple and dedicated me. That
was in Ossawa. They had too many novices there, I guess, because
pretty soon they sent me on here. Or maybe they thought I'd make a
specially good priestess or something. But they were wrong about
that!" Penthe bit her apple with a cheerful, rueful face.
        "Would you rather not have been a priestess?"
        "Would I rather! Of course! I'd rather marry a pigherd and
live in a ditch. I'd rather anything than stay buried alive here all
my born days with a mess of women in a perishing old desert where
nobody ever comes! But there's no good wishing about it, because I've
been consecrated now and I'm stuck with it. But I do hope that in my
next life I'm a dancing-girl in Awabath! Because I will have earned
it."
        Arha looked down at her with a dark steady gaze. She did not
understand. She felt that she had never seen Penthe before, never
looked at her and seen her, round and full of life and juice as one of
her golden apples, beautiful to see.
        "Doesn't the Temple mean anything to you?" she asked, rather
harshly.
        Penthe, always submissive and easily bullied, did not take
alarm this time. "Oh, I know your Masters are very important to you,"
she said with an indifference that shocked Arha. "That makes some
sense, anyhow, because you're their one special servant. You weren't
just consecrated, you were specially born. But look at me. Am I
supposed to feel so much awe and so on about the Godking? After all
he's just a man, even if he does live in Awabath in a palace ten miles
around with gold roofs. He's about fifty years old, and he's bald. You
can see in all the statues. And I'll bet you he has to cut his
toenails, just like any other man. I know perfectly well that he's a
god, too. But what I think is, he'll be much godlier after he's dead."
        Arha agreed with Penthe, for secretly she had come to consider
the self-styled Divine Emperors of Kargad as upstarts, false gods
trying to filch the worship due to the true and everlasting Powers.
But there was something underneath Penthe's words with which she
didn't agree, something wholly new to her, frightening to her. She had
not realized how very different people were, how differently they saw
life. She felt as if she had looked up and suddenly seen a whole new
planet hanging huge and populous right outside the window, an entirely
strange world, one in which the gods did not matter. She was scared by
the solidity of Penthe's unfaith. Scared, she struck out.
        "That's true. My Masters have been dead a long, long time; and
they were never men... Do you know, Penthe, I could call you into the
service of the Tombs." She spoke pleasantly, as if offering her friend
a better choice.
        The pink went right out of Penthe's cheeks.
        "Yes," she said, "you could. But I'm not... I'm not the sort
that would be good at that."
        "Why?"
        "I am afraid of the dark," Penthe said in a low voice.
        Arha made a little sound of scorn, but she was pleased. She
had made her point. Penthe might disbelieve in the gods, but she
feared the unnameable powers of the dark - as did every mortal soul.
        "I wouldn't do that unless you wanted to, you know," Arha
said.
        A long silence fell between their.
        "You're getting to be more and more like Thar," Penthe said in
her soft dreamy way. "Thank goodness you're not getting like Kossil!
But you're so strong. I wish I were strong. I just like eating..."
        "Go ahead," Arha said, superior and amused, and Penthe slowly
consumed a third apple down to the seeds.
        The demands of the endless ritual of the Place brought Arha
out of her privacy a couple of days later. Twin kids had been born out
of season to a she-goat, and were to be sacrificed to the Twin
God-Brothers as the custom was: an important rite, at which the First
Priestess must be present. Then it was dark of the moon, and the
ceremonies of the darkness must be performed before the Empty Throne.
Arha breathed in the drugging fumes of herbs burning in broad trays of
bronze before the Throne, and danced, solitary in black. She danced
for the unseen spirits of the dead and the unborn and as she danced
the spirits crowded the air around her, following the turn and spin of
her feet and the slow, sure gestures of her arms. She sang the songs
whose words no man understood, which she had learned syllable by
syllable, long ago, from Thar. A choir of priestesses hidden in the
dusk behind the great double row of columns echoed the strange words
after her, and the air in the vast ruinous room hummed with voices, as
if the crowding spirits repeated the chants again and again.

        The Godking in Awabath sent no more prisoners to the Place,
and gradually Arha ceased to dream of the three now long since dead
and buried in shallow graves in the great cavern under the Tombstones.
        She summoned up her courage to return to that cavern. She must
go back there: the Priestess of the Tombs must be able to enter her
own domain without terror, to know its ways.
        The first time she entered the trapdoor was hard; yet not so
hard as she had feared. She had schooled herself up to it so well, had
so determined that she would go alone and keep her nerve, that when
she came there she was almost dismayed to find that there was nothing
to be afraid of. Graves might be there, but she could not see them;
she could not see anything. It was black; it was silent. And that was
all.
        Day after day she went there, always entering by the trapdoor
in the room behind the Throne, until she knew well the whole circuit
of the cavern, with its strange sculptured walls -as well as one can
know what one cannot see. She never left the walls, for in striking
out across the great hollow she might soon lose the sense of direction
in the darkness, and so, blundering back at last to the wall, not know
where she was. For as she had learned the first time, the important
thing down in the dark places was to know which turnings and openings
one had passed, and which were to come. It must be done by counting,
for they were all alike to the groping hands. Arha's memory had been
well trained, and she found no difficulty to this odd trick of finding
one's way by touch and number, instead of by sight and common sense.
She soon knew by heart all the corridors that opened off the
Undertomb, the lesser maze that lay under the Hall of the Throne and
the hilltop. But there was one corridor she never entered: the second
left of the red rock entrance, that one which, if she entered
mistaking it for one she knew, she might never find her way out of
again. Her longing to enter it, to learn the Labyrinth, grew steadily,
but she restrained it until she had learned all she could about it,
aboveground.
        Thar knew little about it but the names of certain of its
rooms, and the list of directions, of turns made and missed, for
getting to these rooms. She would tell these to Arha, but she would
never draw them in the dust or even with the gesture of a hand in the
air; and she herself had never followed them, had never entered the
Labyrinth. But when Arha asked her, "What is the way from the iron
door that stands open to the Painted Room?" or, "How does the way run
from the Room of Bones to the tunnel by the river?" then Thar would be
silent a little, and then recite the strange directions she had
learned long before from Arha-that-was: so many crossings passed, so
many left-hand turns taken, and so on, and so on. And all these Arha
got by heart, as Thar had, often on the first listening. When she lay
in bed nights she would repeat them to herself, trying to imagine the
places, the rooms, the turnings.
        Thar showed Arha the many spy holes that opened into the maze,
in every building and temple of the Place, and even under rocks out of
doors. The spiderweb of stone-walled tunnels underlay all the Place
and even beyond its walls; there were miles of tunnels, down there in
the dark. No person there but she, the two High Priestesses, and their
special servants, the eunuchs Manan, Uahto, and Duby, knew of the
existence of this maze that lay beneath every step they took. There
were vague rumors of it among the others; they all knew that there
were caves or rooms of some sort under the Tombstones. But none of
them was very curious about anything to do with the Nameless Ones and
the places sacred to them. Perhaps they felt that the less they knew,
the better. Arha of course bad been intensely curious, and knowing
that there were spy holes into the Labyrinth, had sought for them; yet
they were so well concealed, in the pavements of the floors or in the
desert ground, that she had never found one, not even the one in her
own Small House, until Thar showed it to her.
        One night in early spring she took a candle lantern and went
down with it, unlit, through the Undertomb to the second passage to
the left of the passage from the red rock door.
        In the dark, she went some thirty paces down the passage, and
then passed through a doorway, feeling the iron frame set in the rock:
the limit, until now, of her explorations. Past the Iron Door she went
a long way along the tunnel, and when at last it began to curve to the
right, she lit her candle and looked about her. For light was
permitted, here. She was no longer in the Undertomb. She was in a
place less sacred though perhaps more dreadful. She was in the
Labyrinth.
        The raw, blank walls and vault and floor of rock surrounded
her in the small sphere of candlelight. The air was dead. Before her
and behind her the tunnel stretched off into darkness.
        All the tunnels were the same, crossing and recrossing. She
kept careful count of her turnings and gassings, and recited Thar's
directions to herself, though she knew them perfectly. For it would
not do to get lost in the Labyrinth. In the Undertomb and the short
passages around it, Kossil or Thar might find her, or Manan come
seeking for her, for she had taken him there several times. Here, none
of them had ever been: only she herself. Little good it would do her
if they came to the Undertomb and called aloud, and she was lost in
some spiraling tangle of tunnels half a mile away. She imagined how
she might hear the echo of voices calling her, echoing down every
corridor, and she would try to come to them, but, lost, would only
become farther lost. So vividly did she imagine this that she stopped,
thinking she heard a distant voice calling. But there was nothing. And
she would not get lost. She was very careful; and this was her place,
her own domain. The powers of the dark, the Nameless Ones, would guide
her steps here, just as they would lead astray any other mortal who
dared enter the Labyrinth of the Tombs.
        She did not go far into it that first time, but far enough
that the strange, bitter, yet pleasurable certainty of her utter
solitude and independence there grew strong in her, and led her back,
and back again, and each time farther. She came to the Painted Room,
and the Six Ways, and followed the long Outmost Tunnel, and penetrated
the strange tangle that led to the Room of Bones.
        "When was the Labyrinth made?" she asked Thar, and the stern,
thin priestess answered, "Mistress, I do not know. No one knows."
        "Why was it made?"
        "For the hiding away of the treasures of the Tombs, and for
the punishment of those who tried to steal those treasures."
        "All the treasures I've seen are in the rooms behind the
Throne, and the basements under it. What lies in the Labyrinth?"
        "A far greater and more ancient treasure. Would you look on
it?"
        "Yes."
        "None but you may enter the Treasury of the Tombs. You may
take your servants into the Labyrinth, but not into the Treasury. If
even Manan entered there, the anger of the dark would waken; he would
not leave the Labyrinth alive. There you must go alone, forever. I
know where the Great Treasure is. You told me the way, fifteen years
ago, before you died, so that I would remember and tell you when you
returned. I can tell you the way to follow in the Labyrinth, beyond
the Painted Room; and the key to the treasury is that silver one on
your ring, with a figure of a dragon on the haft. But you must go
alone."
        "Tell me the way."
        Thar told her, and she remembered, as she remembered all that
was told her. But she did not go to see the Great Treasure of the
Tombs. Some feeling that her will or her knowledge was not yet
complete held her back. Or perhaps she wanted to keep something in
reserve, something to look forward to, that cast a glamor over those
endless tunnels through the dark that ended always in blank walls or
bare dusty cells. She would wait awhile before she saw her treasures.
        After all, had she not seen them before?
        It still made her feel strange when Thar and Kossil spoke to
her of things she had seen or said before she died. She knew that
indeed she had died, and had been reborn in a new body at the hour of
her old body's death: not only once, fifteen years ago, but fifty
years ago, and before that, and before that, back down the years and
hundreds of years, generation before generation, to the very beginning
of years when the Labyrinth was dug, and the Stones were raised, and
the First Priestess of the Nameless Ones lived in this Place and
danced before the Empty Throne. They were all one, all those lives and
hers. She was the First Priestess. All human beings were forever
reborn, but only she, Arha, was reborn forever as herself. A hundred
times she had learned the ways and turnings of the Labyrinth and had
come to the hidden room at last.
        Sometimes she thought she remembered. The dark places under
the hill were so familiar to her, as if they were not only her domain,
but her home. When she breathed in the drug-fumes to dance at dark of
the moon, her head grew light and her body was no longer hers; then
she danced across the centuries, barefoot in black robes, and knew
that the dance had never ceased.
        Yet it was always strange when Thar said, "You told me before
you died..."
        Once she asked, "Who were those men that came to rob the
Tombs? Did any ever do so?" The idea of robbers had struck her as
exciting, but improbable. How would they come secretly to the Place?
Pilgrims were very few, fewer even than prisoners. Now and then new
novices or slaves were sent from lesser temples of the Four Lands, or
a small group came to bring some offering of gold or rare incense to
one of the temples. And that was all. Nobody came by chance, or to buy
and sell, or to sightsee, or to steal; nobody came but under orders.
Arha did not even know how far it was to the nearest town, twenty
miles or more; and the nearest town was a small one. The Place was
guarded and defended by emptiness, by solitude. Anybody crossing the
desert that surrounded it, she thought, would have as much chance of
going unseen as a black sheep in a snowfield.
        She was with Thar and Kossil, with whom much of her time was
spent now when she was not in the Small House or alone under the hill.
It was a stormy, cold night in April. They sat by a tiny fire of sage
on the hearth in the room behind the Godking's temple, Kossil's room.
Outside the doorway, in the hall, Manan and Duby played a game with
sticks and counters, tossing a bundle of sticks and catching as many
as possible on the back of the hand. Manan and Arha still sometimes
played that game, in secret, in the inner courtyard of the Small
House. The rattle of dropped sticks, the husky mumbles of triumph and
defeat, the small crackle of the fire, were the only sounds when the
three priestesses fell silent. All around beyond the walls reached the
profound silence of the desert night. From time to time came the
patter of a sparse, hard shower of rain.
        "Many came to rob the Tombs, long ago; but none ever did so,"
said Thar. Taciturn as she was, she liked now and then to tell a
story, and often did so as part of Arha's instruction. She looked
tonight as if a story might be gotten out of her.
        "How would any man dare?"
        "They would dare," Kossil said. "They were sorcerers,
wizardfolk from the Inner Lands. That was before the Godkings ruled
the Kargad Lands; we were not so strong then. The wizards used to sail
from the west to Karego-At and Atuan to plunder the towns on the
coast, loot the farms, even come into the Sacred City Awabath. They
came to kill dragons, they said, but they stayed to rob towns and
temples."
        "And their great heroes would come among us to test their
swords," Thar said, "and work their ungodly spells. One of them, a
mighty sorcerer and dragonlord, the greatest of them all, came to
grief here. It was long ago, very long ago, but the tale is still
remembered, and not only in this place. The sorcerer was named
Erreth-Akbe, and he was both king and wizard in the West. He came to
our lands, and in Awabath he joined with certain Kargish rebel lords,
and fought for the rule of the city with the High Priest of the Inmost
Temple of the Twin Gods. Long they fought, the man's sorcery against
the lightning of the gods, and the temple was destroyed around them.
At last the High Priest broke the sorcerer's witching-staff, broke in
half his amulet of power, and defeated him. He escaped from the city
and from the Kargish lands, and fled clear across Earthsea to the
farthest west; and there a dragon slew him, because his power was
gone. And since that day the power and might of the Inner Lands has
ever waned. Now the High Priest was named Intathin, and he was the
first of the house of Tarb, that lineage from which, after the
fulfillment of the prophecies and the centuries, the Priest-Kings of
Karego-At were descended, and from them, the Godkings of all Kargad.
So it is that since the day of Intathin the power and might of the
Kargish lands has ever grown. Those who came to rob the Tombs, they
were sorcerers, trying and trying to get back the broken amulet of
Erreth-Akbe. But it is still here, where the High Priest put it for
safekeeping. And so are their bones..." Thar pointed at the ground
under her feet.
        "Half of it is here," Kossil said.
        "And the other half lost forever."
        "How lost?" asked Arha.
        "The one half, in Intathin's hand, was given by him to the
Treasury of the Tombs, where it should lie safe forever. The other
remained in the sorcerer's hand, but he gave it before he fled to a
petty king, one of the rebels, named Thoreg of Hupun. I do not know
why he did so."
        "To cause strife, to make Thoreg proud," Kossil said. "And so
it did. The descendants of Thoreg rebelled again when the house of
Tarb ruled; and yet again they took arms against the first Godking,
refusing to acknowledge him as either king or god. They were an
accursed, ensorcelled race. They are all dead now."
        Thar nodded. "The father of our present Godking, the Lord Who
Has Arisen, put down that family of Hupun, and destroyed their
palaces. When that was done, the half-amulet, which they had kept ever
since the days of Erreth-Akbe and Intathin, was lost. No one knows
what became of it. And that was a lifetime ago."
        "It was thrown out as trash, no doubt," Kossil said. "They say
it doesn't look like anything of value, the Ring of Erreth-Akbe. A
curse upon it and upon all the things of the wizardfolk!" Kossil spat
into the fire.
        "Have you seen the half that is here?" Arha asked of Thar.
        The thin woman shook her head. "It is in that treasury to
which none may come but the One Priestess. It may be the greatest of
all the treasures there; I do not know. I think perhaps it is. For
hundreds of years the Inner Lands sent thieves and wizards here to try
to steal it back, and they would pass by open coffers of gold, seeking
that one thing. It is very long since Erreth-Akbe and Intathin lived,
and yet still the story is known and told, both here and in the West.
Most things grow old and perish, as the centuries go on and on. Very
few are the precious things that remain precious, or the tales that
are still told."
        Arha brooded awhile and said, "They must have been very brave
men, or very stupid, to enter the Tombs. Don't they know the powers of
the Nameless Ones?"
        "No," Kossil said in her cold voice. "They have no gods. They
work magic, and think they are gods themselves. But they are not. And
when they die, they are not reborn. They become dust and bone, and
their ghosts whine on the wind a little while till the wind blows them
away. They do not have immortal souls."
        "But what is this magic they work?" Arha asked, enthralled.
She did not remember having said once that she would have turned away
and refused to look at the ships from the Inner Lands. "How do they do
it? What does it do?"
        "Tricks, deceptions, jugglery," Kossil said.
        "Somewhat more," said Thar, "if the tales be true even in
part. The wizards of the West can raise and still the winds, and make
them blow whither they will. On that, all agree, and tell the same
tale. That is why they are great sailors; they can put the wind of
magic in their sails, and go where they will, and hush the storms at
sea. And it is said that they can make light at will, and darkness;
and change rocks to diamonds, and lead to gold; that they can build a
great palace or a whole city in one instant, at least in seeming; that

they can turn themselves into bears, or fish, or dragons, just as they
please."
        "I do not believe all that," said Kossil. "That they are
dangerous, subtle with trickery, slippery as eels, yes. But they say
that if you take his wooden staff away from a sorcerer, he has no
power left. Probably there are evil runes written on the staff."
        Thar shook her head again. "They carry a staff, indeed, but it
is only a tool for the power they bear within them."
        "But how do they get the power?" Arha asked. "Where does it
come from?"
        "Lies," Kossil said.
        "Words," said Thar. "So I was told by one who once had watched
a great sorcerer of the Inner Lands, a Mage as they are called. They
had taken him prisoner, raiding to the West. He showed them a stick of

dry wood, and spoke a word to it. And lo! it blossomed. And he spoke
another word, and lo! it bore red apples. And he spoke one word more,
and stick, blossoms, apples, and all vanished, and with them the
sorcerer. With one word he had gone as a rainbow goes, like a wink,
without a trace; and they never found him on that isle. Was that mere
jugglery?"
        "It's easy to fool fools," Kossil said.
        Thar said no more, avoiding argument but Arha was loath to
have the subject dropped. "What do the wizard-folk look like," she
asked, "are they truly black all over, with white eyes?"
        "They are black and vile. I have never seen one," Kossil said
with satisfaction, shifting her heavy bulk on the low stool and
spreading her hands to the fire.
        "May the Twin Gods keep them afar," Thar muttered.
        "They will never come here again," said Kossil. And the fire
sputtered, and the rain spattered on the roof, and outside the gloomy
doorway Manan cried shrilly, "Aha! A half for me, a half!"



------
Light Under the Hill
------

        As the year was rounding again towards winter, Thar died. In
the summer a wasting disease had come upon her; she who had been thin
grew skeletal, she who had been grim now did not speak at all. Only to
Arha would she talk, sometimes, when they were alone together; then
even that ceased, and she went silently into the dark. When she was
gone, Arha missed her sorely. If Thar had been stern, she had never
been cruel. It was pride she had taught to Arha, not fear.
        Now there was only Kossil.
        A new High Priestess for the Temple of the Twin Gods would
come in spring from Awabath; until then, Arha and Kossil between them
were the rulers of the Place. The woman called the girl "mistress,"
and should obey her if commanded. But Arha learned not to command
Kossil. She had the right to do so, but not the strength; it would
take very great strength to stand up against Kossil's jealousy of a
higher status than her own, her hatred of anything she herself did not
control.
        Since Arha had learned (from gentle Penthe) of the existence
of unfaith, and had accepted it as a reality even though it frightened
her, she had been able to look at Kossil much more steadily, and to
understand her. Kossil had no true worship in her heart of the
Nameless Ones or of the gods. She held nothing sacred but power. The
Emperor of the Kargad Lands now held the power, and therefore he was
indeed a godking in her eyes, and she would serve him well. But to her
the temples were mere show, the Tombstones were rocks, the Tombs of
Atuan were dark holes in the ground, terrible but empty. She would do
away with the worship of the Empty Throne, if she could. She would do
away with the First Priestess, if she dared.
        Arha had come to face even this last fact quite steadily.
Perhaps Thar had helped her to see it, though she had never said
anything directly. In the first stages of her illness, before the
silence came upon her, she had asked Arha to come to her every few
days, and had talked to her, telling her much about the doings of the
Godking and his predecessor, and the ways of Awabath - matters which
she should as an important priestess know, but which were not often
flattering to the Godking and his court. And she had spoken of her own
life, and described what the Arha of the previous life had looked like
and done; and sometimes, not often, she had mentioned what might be
the difficulties and dangers of Arha's present life. Not once did she
mention Kossil by name. But Arha had been Thar's pupil for eleven
years, and needed no more than a hint or a tone to understand, and to
remember.
        After the gloomy commotion of the Rites of Mourning was over,
Arha took to avoiding Kossil. When the long works and rituals of the
day were done, she went to her solitary dwelling; and whenever there
was time, she went to the room behind the Throne, and opened the
trapdoor, and went down into the dark. In daytime and nighttime, for
it made no difference there, she pursued a systematic exploration of
her domain. The Undertomb, with its great weight of sacredness, was
utterly forbidden to any but priestesses and their most trusted
eunuchs. Any other, man or woman, who ventured there would certainly
be struck dead by the wrath of the Nameless Ones. But among all the
rules she had learned, there was no rule forbidding entry to the
Labyrinth. There was no need. It could be entered only from the
Undertomb; and anyway, do flies need rules to tell them not to enter
in a spider's web?
        So she took Manan often into the nearer regions of the
Labyrinth, that he might learn the ways. He was not at all eager to go
there, but as always he obeyed her. She made sure that Duby and Uahto,
Kossil's eunuchs, knew the way to the Room of Chains and the way out
of the Undertomb, but no more; she never took them into the Labyrinth.
She wanted no one but Manan, utterly faithful to her, to know those
secret ways. For they were hers, hers alone, forever. She had begun
her full exploration with the Labyrinth. All the autumn she spent many
days walking those endless corridors, and still there were regions of
them she had never come to. There was a weariness in that tracing of
the vast, meaningless web of ways; the legs got tired and the mind got
bored, forever reckoning up the turnings and the passages behind and
to come. It was wonderful, laid out in the solid rock underground like
the streets of a great city; but it had been made to weary and confuse
the mortal walking in it, and even its priestess must feel it to be
nothing, in the end, but a great trap.
        So, more and more as winter deepened, she turned her thorough
exploration to the Hall itself, the altars, the alcoves behind and
beneath the altars, the rooms of chests and boxes, the contents of the
chests and boxes, the passages and attics, the dusty hollow under the
dome where hundreds of bats nested, the basements and underbasements
that were the anterooms of the corridors of darkness.
        Her hands and sleeves perfumed with the dry sweetness of a
musk that had fallen to powder lying for eight centuries in an iron
chest, her brow smeared with the clinging black of cobweb, she would
kneel for an hour to study the carvings on a beautiful, time-ruined
coffer of cedar wood, the gift of some king ages since to the Nameless
Powers of the Tombs. There was the king, a tiny stiff figure with a
big nose, and there was the Hall of the Throne with its flat dome and
porch columns, carved in delicate relief on the wood by some artist
who had been dust for how many hundred years. There was the One
Priestess, breathing in the drug-fumes from the trays of bronze and
prophesying or advising the king, whose nose was broken off in this
frame; the face of the Priestess was too small to have clear features,
yet Arha would imagine that the face was her own face. She wondered
what she had told the king with the big nose, and whether he had been
grateful.
        She had favorite places in the Hall of the Throne, as one
might have favorite spots to sit in a sunny house. She often went to a
little half-loft over one of the robing rooms in the hinder part of
the Hall. There ancient gowns and costumes were kept, left from the
days when great kings and lords came to worship at the Place of the
Tombs of Atuan, acknowledging a domain greater than their own or any
man's. Sometimes their daughters, the princesses, had put on these
soft white silks, embroidered with topaz and dark amethyst, and had
danced with the Priestess of the Tombs. There were little painted
ivory tables in one of the treasuries, showing such a dance, and the
lords and kings waiting outside the Hall, for then as now no man ever
set foot on the ground of the Tombs. But the maidens might come in,
and dance with the Priestess, in white silk. The Priestess herself
wore rough cloth, homespun black, always, then and now; but she liked
to come and finger the sweet, soft stuff, rotten with age, the
unperishing jewels tearing from the cloth by their own slight weight.
There was a scent in these chests different from all the musks and
incenses of the temples of the Place: a fresher scent, fainter,
younger.
        In the treasure rooms she would spend a night learning the
contents of a single chest, jewel by jewel, the rusted armor, the
broken plumes of helms, the buckles and pins and brooches, bronze,
silver-gilt, and solid gold.
        Owls, undisturbed by her presence, sat on the rafters and
opened and shut their yellow eyes. A bit of starlight shone in between
tiles of the roof; or the snow came sifting down, fine and cold as
those ancient silks that fell to nothing at hand's touch.
        One night late in the winter, it was too cold in the Hall. She
went to the trapdoor, raised it, swung down onto the steps, and closed
it above her. She set off silently on the way she now knew so well,
the passage to the Undertomb. There, of course, she never bore a
light; if she carried a lantern, from going in the Labyrinth or in the
dark of night above ground, she extinguished it before she came near
the Undertomb. She had never seen that place, never in all the
generations of her priestesshood. In the passage now, she blew out the
candle in the lamp she carried, and without slowing her pace at all
went forward in the pitch dark, easy as a little fish in dark water.
Here, winter or summer, there was no cold, no heat: always the same
even chill, a little damp, changeless. Up above, the great frozen
winds of winter whipped thin snow over the desert. Here there was no
wind, no season; it was close, it was still, it was safe.
        She was going to the Painted Room. She liked sometimes to go
there and study the strange wall drawings that leapt out of the dark
at the gleam of her candle: men with long wings and great eyes, serene
and morose. No one could tell her what they were, there were no such
paintings elsewhere in the Place, but she thought she knew; they were
the spirits of the damned, who are not reborn. The Painted Room was in
the Labyrinth, so she must pass through the cavern beneath the
Tombstones first. As she approached it down the slanting passage, a
faint gray bloomed, a bare hint and glimmer, the echo of an echo of a
distant light.
        She thought her eyes were tricking her, as they often did in
that utter blackness. She closed them, and the glimmering vanished.
She opened them, and it reappeared.
        She had stopped and was standing still. Gray, not black. A
dull edge of pallor, just visible, where nothing could be visible,
where all must be black.
        She took a few steps forward and put out her hand to that
angle of the tunnel wall; and, infinitely faint, saw the movement of
her hand.
        She went on. This was strange beyond thought, beyond fear,
this faint blooming of light where no light had ever been, in the
inmost grave of darkness. She went noiseless on bare feet,
blackclothed. At the last turn of the corridor she halted; then very
slowly took the last step, and looked, and saw.
        -Saw what she had never seen, not though she had lived a
hundred lives: the great vaulted cavern beneath the Tombstones, not
hollowed by man's hand but by the powers of the Earth. It was jeweled
with crystals and ornamented with pinnacles and filigrees of white
limestone where the waters under earth had worked, eons since:
immense, with glittering roof and walls, sparkling, delicate,
intricate, a palace of diamonds, a house of amethyst and crystal, from
which the ancient darkness had been driven out by glory.
        Not bright, but dazzling to the dark-accustomed eye, was the
light that worked this wonder. It was a soft gleam, like marshlight,
that moved slowly across the cavern, striking a thousand
scintillations from the jeweled roof and shifting a thousand fantastic
shadows along the carven walls.
        The light burned at the end of a staff of wood, smokeless,
unconsuming. The staff was held by a human hand. Arha saw the face
beside the light; the dark face: the face of a man.
        She did not move.
        For a long time he crossed and recrossed the vast cave. He
moved as if he sought something, looking behind the lacy cataracts of
stone, studying the several corridors that led out of the Undertomb,
yet not entering them. And still the Priestess of the Tombs stood
motionless, in the black angle of the passage, waiting.
        What was hardest for her to think, perhaps, was that she was
looking at a stranger. She had very seldom seen a stranger. It seemed
to her that this must be one of the wardens - no, one of the men from
over the wall, a goatherd or guard, a slave of the Place; and he had
come to see the secrets of the Nameless Ones, maybe to steal something
from the Tombs...
        To steal something. To rob the Dark Powers. Sacrilege: the
word came slowly into Arha's mind. This was a man, and no man's foot
must ever touch the soil of the Tombs, the Holy Place. Yet he had come
here into the hollow place that was the heart of the Tombs. He had
entered in. He had made light where light was forbidden, where it had
never been since world's beginning. Why did the Nameless Ones not
strike him down?
        He was standing now looking down at the rocky floor, which was
cut and troubled. One could see that it had been opened and reclosed.
The sour sterile clods dug up for the graves had not all been stamped
down again.
        Her Masters had eaten those three. Why did they not eat this
one? What were they waiting for?
        For their hands to act, for their tongue to speak...
        "Go! Go! Begone!" she screamed all at once at the top of her
voice. Great echoes shrilled and boomed across the cavern, seeming to
blur the dark, startled face that turned towards her, and, for one
moment, across the shaken splendor of the cavern, saw her. Then the
light was gone. All splendor gone. Blind dark, and silence.
        Now she could think again. She was released from the spell of
light.
        He must have come in by the red rock door, the Prisoners'
Door, so he would try to escape by it. Light and silent as the
soft-winged owls she ran the half-circuit of the cavern to the low
tunnel that led to the door which opened only inwards. She stooped
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pit beside him, Ged looked up, saw him, and with a shout of surprise
or rage struck out at him with the staff. At the shout the light
blazed up white and intolerable, straight in the eunuch's face. Manan
flung up one of his big hands to shield his eyes, lunged desperately
to catch hold of Ged, and missed, and fell.
        He made no cry as he fell. No sound came up out of the black
pit, no sound of his body hitting the bottom, no sound of his death,
none at all. Clinging perilously to the ledge, kneeling frozen at the
lip, Ged and Tenar did not move; listened; heard nothing.
        The light was gray wisp, barely visible.
        "Come!" Ged said, holding out his hand; she took it, and in
three bold steps he brought her across. He quenched the light. She
went ahead of him again to lead the way. She was quite numb and did
not think of anything. Only after some time she thought, Is it right
or left?
        She stopped.
        Halted a few steps behind her, he said softly, "What is it?"
        "I am lost. Make the light."
        "Lost?"
        "I have... I have lost count of the turnings."
        "I kept count," he said, coming a little closer. "A left turn
after the pit; then a right, and a right again."
        "Then the next will be right again," she said automatically,
but she did not move. "Make the light."
        "The light won't show us the way, Tenar."
        "Nothing will. It is lost. We are lost."
        The dead silence closed in upon her whisper, ate it.
        She felt the movement and warmth of the other, close to her in
the cold dark. He sought her hand and took it. "Go on, Tenar. The next
turn to the right."
        "Make a light," she pleaded. "The tunnels twist so..."
        "I cannot. I have no strength to spare. Tenar, they are- They
know that we left the Treasury. They know that we're past the pit.
They are seeking us, seeking our will, our spirit. To quench it, to
devour it. I must keep that alight. All my strength is going into
that. I must withstand them; with you. With your help. We must go on."
        "There is no way out," she said, but she took one step
forward. Then she took another, hesitant as if beneath each step the
black hollow void gaped open, the emptiness under the earth. The warm,
hard grip of his hand was on her hand. They went forward.
        After what seemed a long time they came to the flight of
steps. It had not seemed so steep before, the steps hardly more than
slimy notches in the rock. But they climbed it, and then went on a
little more rapidly, for she knew that the curving passage went a long
way without side turnings after the steps. Her fingers, trailing the
left-hand wall for guidance, crossed a gap, an opening to the left.
"Here," she murmured; but he seemed to hold back, as if something in
her movements made him doubtful.
        "No," she muttered in confusion, "not this, it's the next turn
to the left. I don't know. I can't do it. There's no way out."
        "We are going to the Painted Room," the quiet voice said in
the darkness. "How should we go there?"
        "The left turn after this."
        She led on. They made the long circuit, past two false leads,
to the passage that branched rightwards towards the Painted Room.
        "Straight on," she whispered, and now the long unraveling of
the darkness went better, for she knew these passages towards the iron
door and had counted their turns a hundred times; the strange weight
that lay upon her mind could not confuse her about them, if she did
not try to think. But all the time they were getting nearer and nearer
to that which weighed upon her and pressed against her; and her legs
were so tired and heavy that she whimpered once or twice with the
labor of making them move. And beside her the man would breathe deep,
and hold the breath, again and again, like one making a mighty effort
with all the strength of his body. Sometimes his voice broke out,
hushed and sharp, in a word or fragment of a word. So they came at
last to the iron door; and in sudden terror she put out her hand.
        The door was open.
        "Quick!" she said, and pulled her companion through. Then, on
the further side, she halted.
        "Why was it open?" she said.
        "Because your Masters need your hands to shut it for them."
        "We are coming to..." Her voice failed her.
        "To the center of the darkness. I know. Yet we're out of the
Labyrinth. What ways out of the Undertomb are there?"
        "Only one. The door you entered doesn't open from within. The
way goes through the cavern and up passages to a trapdoor in a room
behind the Throne. In the Hall of the Throne."
        "Then we must go that way."
        "But she is there," the girl whispered. "There in the
Undertomb. In the cavern. Digging in the empty grave. I cannot pass
her, oh, I cannot pass her again!"
        "She will have gone by now."
        "I cannot go there."
        "Tenar, I hold the roof up over our heads, this moment. I keep
the walls from closing in upon us. I keep the ground from opening
beneath our feet. I have done this since we passed the pit where their
servant waited. If I can hold off the earthquake, do you fear to meet
one human soul with me? Trust me, as I have trusted you! Come with me
now."
        They went forward.
        The endless tunnel opened out. The sense of a greater air met
them, an enlarging of the dark. They had entered the great cave
beneath the Tombstones.
        They started to circle it, keeping to the right-hand wall.
Tenar had gone only a few steps when she paused. "What is it?" she
murmured, her voice barely passing her lips. There was a noise in the
dead, vast, black bubble of air: a tremor or shaking, a sound heard by
the blood and felt in the bones. The time-carven walls beneath her
fingers thrummed, thrummed.
        "Go forward," the man's voice said, dry and strained. "Hurry,
Tenar."
        As she stumbled forward she cried out in her mind, which was
as dark, as shaken as the subterranean vault, "Forgive me. O my
Masters, O unnamed ones, most ancient ones, forgive me, forgive me!"
        There was no answer. There had never been an answer.
        They came to the passage beneath the Hall, climbed the stairs,
came to the last steps up and the trapdoor at their head. It was shut,
as she always left it. She pressed the spring that opened it. It did
not open.
        "It is broken," she said. "It is locked."
        He came up past her and put his back against the trap. It did
not move.
        "It's not locked, but held down by something heavy."
        "Can you open it?"
        "Perhaps. I think she'll be waiting there. Has she men with
her?"
        "Duby and Uahto, maybe other wardens -men cannot come there-"
        "I can't make a spell of opening, and hold off the people
waiting up there, and withstand the will of the darkness, all at one
time," said his steady voice, considering. "We must try the other door
then, the door in the rocks, by which I came in. She knows that it
can't be opened from within?"
        "She knows. She let me try it once."
        "Then she may discount it. Come. Come, Tenar!"
        She had sunk down on the stone steps, which hummed and
shivered as if a great bowstring were being plucked in the depths
beneath them.
        "What is it- the shaking?"
        "Come," he said, so steady and certain that she obeyed, and
crept back down the passages and stairs, back to the dreadful cavern.
        At the entrance so great a weight of blind and dire hatred
came pressing down upon her, like the weight of the earth itself, that
she cowered and without knowing it cried out aloud, "They are here!
They are here!"
        "Then let them know that we are here," the man said, and from
his staff and hands leapt forth a white radiance that broke as a
seawave breaks in sunlight, against the thousand diamonds of the roof
and walls: a glory of light, through which the two fled, straight
across the great cavern, their shadows racing from them into the white
traceries and the glittering crevices and the empty, open grave. To
the low doorway they ran, down the tunnel, stooping over, she first,
he following. There in the tunnel the rocks boomed, and moved under
their feet. Yet the light was with them still, dazzling. As she saw
the dead rock-face before her, she heard over the thundering of the
earth his voice speaking one word, and as she fell to her knees his
staff struck down, over her head, against the red rock of the shut
door. The rocks burned white as if afire, and burst asunder.
        Outside them was the sky, paling to dawn. A few white stars
lay high and cool within it.
        Tenar saw the stars and felt the sweet wind on her face; but
she did not get up. She crouched on hands and knees there between the
earth and sky.
        The man, a strange dark figure in that half-light before the
dawn, turned and pulled at her arm to make her get up. His face was
black and twisted like a demon's. She cowered away from him, shrieking
in a thick voice not her own, as if a dead tongue moved in her mouth,
"No! No! Don't touch me -leave me- Go!" And she writhed back away from
him, into the crumbling, lipless mouth of the Tombs.
        His hard grip loosened. He said in a quiet voice, "By the bond
you wear I bid you come, Tenar."
        She saw the starlight on the silver of the ring on her arm.
Her eyes on that, she rose, staggering. She put her hand in his, and
came with him. She could not run. They walked down the hill. From the
black mouth among the rocks behind them issued forth a long, long,
groaning howl of hatred and lament. Stones fell about them. The ground
quivered. They went on, she with her eyes still fixed on the glimmer
of starlight on her wrist.
        They were in the dim valley westward of the Place. Now they
began to climb; and all at once he bade her turn. "See-"
        She turned, and saw. They were across the valley, on a level
now with the Tombstones, the nine great monoliths that stood or lay
above the cavern of diamonds and graves. The stones that stood were
moving. They jerked, and leaned slowly like the masts of ships. One of
them seemed to twitch and rise taller; then a shudder went through it,
and it fell. Another fell, smashing crossways on the first. Behind
them the low dome of the Hall of the Throne, black against the yellow

light in the east, quivered. The walls bulged. The whole great ruinous
mass of stone and masonry changed shape like clay in running water,
sank in upon itself, and with a roar and sudden storm of splinters and
dust slid sideways and collapsed. The earth of the valley rippled and
bucked; a kind of wave ran up the hillside, and a huge crack opened
among the Tombstones, gaping on the blackness underneath, oozing dust
like gray smoke. The stones that still stood upright toppled into it
and were swallowed. Then with a crash that seemed to echo off the sky
itself, the raw black lips of the crack closed together; and the hills
shook once, and grew still.
        She looked from the horror of earthquake to the man beside
her, whose face she had never seen by daylight. "You held it back,"
she said, and her voice piped like the wind in a reed, after that
mighty bellowing and crying of the earth. "You held back the
earthquake, the anger of the dark."
        "We must go on," he said, turning away from the sunrise and

the ruined Tombs. "I am tired, I am cold..." He stumbled as they went,
and she took his arm. Neither could go faster than a dragging walk.
Slowly, like two tiny spiders on a great wall, they toiled up the
immense slope of the hill, until at the top they stood on dry ground
yellowed by the rising sun and streaked with the long, sparse shadows
of the sage. Before them the western mountains stood, their feet
purple, their upper slopes gold. The two paused a moment, then passed
over the crest of the hill, out of sight of the Place of the Tombs,
and were gone.




------
The Western Mountains
------

        Tenar woke, struggling up from bad dreams, out of places where
she had walked so long that all the flesh had fallen from her and she
could see the double white bones of her arms glimmer faintly in the
dark. She opened her eyes to a golden light, and smelled the pungency
of sage. A sweetness came into her as she woke, a pleasure that filled
her slowly and wholly till it overflowed, and she sat up, stretching
her arms out from the black sleeves of her robe, and looked about her
in unquestioning delight.
        It was evening. The sun was down behind the mountains that
loomed close and high to westward, but its afterglow filled all earth
and sky: a vast, clear, wintry sky, a vast, barren, golden land of
mountains and wide valleys. The wind was down. It was cold, and
absolutely silent. Nothing moved. The leaves of the sagebushes nearby
were dry and gray, the stalks of tiny dried-up desert herbs prickled
her hand. The huge silent glory of light burned on every twig and
withered leaf and stem, on the hills, in the air.
        She looked to her left and saw the man lying on the desert
ground, his cloak pulled round him, one arm under his head, fast
asleep. His face in sleep was stern, almost frowning; but his left
hand lay relaxed on the dirt, beside a small thistle that still bore
its ragged cloak of gray fluff and its tiny defense of spikes and
spines. The man and the small desert thistle; the thistle and the
sleeping man...
        He was one whose power was akin to, and as strong as, the Old
Powers of the earth; one who talked with dragons, and held off
earthquakes with his word. And there he lay asleep on the dirt, with a
little thistle growing by his hand. It was very strange. Living, being
in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever
dreamed. The glory of the sky touched his dusty hair, and turned the
thistle gold for a little while.
        The light was slowly fading. As it did so, the cold seemed to
grow intenser minute by minute. Tenar got up and began to gather dry
sagebrush, picking up fallen twigs, breaking off the tough branches
that grew as gnarled and massive, in their scale, as the limbs of
oaks. They had stopped here about noon, when it was warm, and they
could go no farther for weariness. A couple of stunted junipers, and
the westward slope of the ridge they had just descended, had offered
shelter enough; they had drunk a little water from the flask, and lain
down, and gone to sleep.
        There was a litter of larger branches under the little trees,
which she gathered. Scooping out a pit in an angle of earth-embedded
rocks, she built up a fire, and lit it with her flint and steel. The
tinder of sage leaves and twigs caught at once. Dry branches bloomed
into rosy flame, scented with resin. Now it seemed quite dark, all
around the fire; and the stars were coming out again in the tremendous
sky.
        The snap and crack of the flames roused the sleeper. He sat
up, rubbing his hands over his grimy face, and at last got up stiffly
and came close to the fire.
        "I wonder-" he said sleepily.
        "I know, but we can't last the night here without a fire. It
gets too cold." After a minute she added, "Unless you have some magic
that would keep us warm, or that would hide the fire..."
        He sat down by the fire, his feet almost in it, his arms round
his knees. "Brr," he said. "A fire is much better than magic. I've put
a little illusion about us here; if someone comes by, we might look
like sticks and stones to him. What do you think? Will they be
following us?"
        "I fear it, yet I don't think they will. No one but Kossil
knew of your being there. Kossil, and Manan. And they are dead. Surely
she was in the Hall when it fell. She was waiting at the trapdoor. And
the others, the rest, they must think that I was in the Hall or the
Tombs, and was crushed in the earthquake." She too put her arms round
her knees, and shuddered. "I hope the other buildings didn't fall. It
was hard to see from the hill, there was so much dust. Surely all the
temples and houses didn't fall, the Big House where all the girls
sleep."
        "I think not. It was the Tombs that devoured themselves. I saw
a gold roof of some temple as we turned away; it still stood. And
there were figures down the hill, people running."
        "What will they say, what will they think... Poor Penthe! She
might have to become the High Priestess of the Godking now. And it was
always she who wanted to run away. Not I. Maybe now she'll run away."
Tenar smiled. There was a joy in her that no thought nor dread could
darken, that same sure joy that had risen in her, waking in the golden
light. She opened her bag and took out two small, flat loaves; she
handed one across the fire to Ged, and bit into the other. The bread
was tough, and sour, and very good to eat.
        They munched together in silence awhile.
        "How far are we from the sea?"
        "It took me two nights and two days coming. It'll take us
longer going."
        "I'm strong," she said.
        "You are. And valiant. But your companion's tired," he said
with a smile. "And we haven't any too much bread."
        "Will we find water?"
        "Tomorrow, in the mountains."
        "Can you find food for us?" she asked, rather vaguely and
timidly.
        "Hunting takes time, and weapons."
        "I meant, with, you know, spells."
        "I can call a rabbit," he said, poking the fire with a twisted
stick of juniper. "The rabbits are coming out of their holes all
around us, now. Evening's their time. I could call one by name, and
he'd come. But would you catch and skin and broil a rabbit that you'd
called to you thus? Perhaps if you were starving. But it would be a
breaking of trust, I think."
        "Yes. I thought, perhaps you could just...
        "Summon up a supper," he said. "Oh, I could. On golden plates,
if you like. But that's illusion, and when you eat illusions you end
up hungrier than before. It's about as nourishing as eating your own
words." She saw his white teeth flash a moment in the firelight.
        "Your magic is peculiar," she said, with a little dignity of
equals, Priestess addressing Mage. "It appears to be useful only for
large matters."
        He laid more wood on the fire, and it flared up in a
juniperscented fireworks of sparks and crackles.
        "Can you really call a rabbit?" Tenar inquired suddenly.
        "Do you want me to?"
        She nodded.
        He turned away from the fire and said softly into the immense
and starlit dark, "Kebbo... O kebbo..."
        Silence. No sound. No motion. Only presently, at the very edge

of the flickering firelight, a round eye like a pebble of jet, very
near the ground. A curve of furry back; an ear, long, alert, upraised.
        Ged spoke again. The ear flicked, gained a sudden partner-ear
out of the shadow; then as the little beast turned Tenar saw it entire
for an instant, the small, soft, lithe hop of it returning unconcerned
to its business in the night.
        "Ah!" she said, letting out her breath. "That's lovely."
Presently she asked, "Could I do that?"
        "Well-"
        "It is a secret," she said at once, dignified again.
        "The rabbit's name is a secret. At least, one should not use
it lightly, for no reason. But what is not a secret, but rather a
gift, or a mystery, do you see, is the power of calling."
        "Oh," she said, "that you have. I know!" There was a passion
in her voice, not hidden by pretended mockery. He looked at her and
did not answer.
        He was indeed still worn out by his struggle against the
Nameless Ones; he had spent his strength in the quaking tunnels.
Though he had won, he had little spirit left for exultation. He soon
curled up again, as near the fire as he could get, and slept.
        Tenar sat feeding the fire and watching the blaze of the
winter constellations from horizon to horizon until her head grew
giddy with splendor and silence, and she dozed off.
        They both woke. The fire was dead. The stars she had watched
were now far over the mountains and new ones had risen in the east. It
was the cold that woke them, the dry cold of the desert night, the
wind like a knife of ice. A veil of cloud was coming over the sky from
the southwest.
        The gathered firewood was almost gone. "Let's walk," Ged said,
"it's not long till dawn." His teeth chattered so that she could
hardly understand him. They set out, climbing the long slow slope
westward. The bushes and rocks showed black in starlight, and it was
as easy to walk as in the day. After a cold first while, the walking
warmed them; they stopped crouching and shivering, and began to go
easier. So by sunrise they were on the first rise of the western
mountains, which had walled in Tenar's life till then.
        They stopped in a grove of trees whose golden, quivering
leaves still clung to the boughs. He told her they were aspens; she
knew no trees but juniper, and the sickly poplars by the riversprings,
and the forty apple trees of the orchard of the Place. A small bird
among the aspens said "dee, dee," in a small voice. Under the trees
ran a stream, narrow but powerful, shouting, muscular over its rocks
and falls, too hasty to freeze. Tenar was almost afraid of it. She was
used to the desert where things are silent and move slowly: sluggish
rivers, shadows of clouds, vultures circling.
        They divided a piece of bread and a last crumbling bit of
cheese for breakfast, rested a little, and went on.
        By evening they were up high. It was overcast and windy,
freezing weather. They camped in the valley of another stream, where
there was plenty of wood, and this time built up a sturdy fire of logs
by which they could keep fairly warm.
        Tenar was happy. She had found a squirrel's cache of nuts,
exposed by the falling of a hollow tree: a couple of pounds of fine
walnuts and a smooth-shelled kind that Ged, not knowing the Kargish
name, called ubir. She cracked them one by one between a flat stone
and a hammerstone, and handed every second nutmeat to the man.
        "I wish we could stay here," she said, looking down at the
windy, twilit valley between the hills. "I like this place."
        "This is a good place," he agreed.
        "People would never come here."
        "Not often... I was born in the mountains," he said, "on the
Mountain of Gont. We shall pass it, sailing to Havnor, if we take the
northern way. It's beautiful to see it in winter, rising all white out
of the sea, like a greater wave. My village was by just such a stream
as this one. Where were you born, Tenar?"
        "In the north of Atuan, in Entat, I think. I can't remember
it."
        "They took you so young?"
        "I was five. I remember a fire on a hearth, and... nothing
else."
        He rubbed his jaw, which though it had acquired a sparse
beard, was at least clean; despite the cold, both of them had washed
in the mountain streams. He rubbed his jaw and looked thoughtful and
severe. She watched him, and never could she have said what was in her
heart as she watched him, in the firelight, in the mountain dusk.
        "What are you going to do in Havnor?" he said, asking the
question of the fire, not of her. "You are -more than I had realized-
truly reborn."
        She nodded, smiling a little. She felt newborn.
        "You should learn the language, at least."
        "Your language?"
        "Yes."
        "I'd like to"
        "Well, then. This is kabat," and he tossed a little stone into
the lap of her black robe.
        "Kabat. Is that in the dragon-tongue?"
        "No, no. You don't want to work spells, you want to talk with
other men and women!"
        "But what is a pebble in the dragon's tongue?"
        "Tolk," he said. "But I am not making you my apprentice
sorcerer. I'm teaching you the language people speak in the
Archipelago, the Inner Lands. I had to learn your language before I
came here."
        "You speak it oddly."
        "No doubt. Now, arkemmi kabat," and he held out his hands for
her to give him the pebble.
        "Must I go to Havnor?" she said.
        "Where else would you go, Tenar?"
        She hesitated.
        "Havnor is a beautiful city," he said. "And you bring it the
ring, the sign of peace, the lost treasure. They'll welcome you in
Havnor as a princess. They'll do you honor for the great gift you
bring them, and bid you welcome, and make you welcome. They are a
noble and generous people in that city. They'll call you the White
Lady because of your fair skin, and they'll love you the more because
you are so young. And because you are beautiful. You'll have a hundred
dresses like the one I showed you by illusion, but real ones. You'll
meet with praise, and gratitude, and love. You who have known nothing
but solitude and envy and the dark."
        "There was Manan," she said, defensive, her mouth trembling
just a little. "He loved me and was kind to me, always. He protected
me as well as he knew how, and I killed him for it; he fell into the
black pit. I don't want to go to Havnor. I don't want to go there. I
want to stay here."
        "Here- in Atuan?"
        "In the mountains. Where we are now."
        "Tenar," he said in his grave, quiet voice, "we'll stay then.
I haven't my knife, and if it snows it will be hard. But so long as we
can find food-"
        "No. I know we can't stay. I'm merely being foolish," Tenar
said, and got up, scattering walnut shells, to lay new wood on the
fire. She stood thin and very straight in her torn, dirt-stained gown
and cloak of black. "All I know is of no use now," she said, "and I
haven't learned anything else. I will try to learn."
        Ged looked away, wincing as if in pain.

        Next day they crossed the summit of the tawny range. In the
pass a hard wind blew, with snow in it, stinging and blinding. It was
not until they had come down a long way on the other side, out from
under the snow clouds of the peaks, that Tenar saw the land beyond the
mountain wall. It was all green- green of pines, of grasslands, of
sown fields and fallows. Even in the dead of winter, when the thickets
were bare and the forests full of gray boughs, it was a green land,
humble and mild. They looked down on it from a high, rocky slant of
the mountainside. Wordless, Ged pointed to the west, where the sun was
getting low behind a thick cream and roil of clouds. The sun itself
was hidden, but there was a glitter on the horizon, almost like the
dazzle of the crystal walls of the Undertomb, a kind of joyous
shimmering off on the edge of the world.
        "What is that?" the girl said, and he: "The sea."
        Shortly afterward, she saw a less wonderful thing than that,
but wonderful enough. They came on a road, and followed it; and it
brought them by dusk into a village: ten or a dozen houses strung
along the road. She looked at her companion in alarm when she realized
they were coming among men. She looked, and did not see him. Beside
her, in Ged's clothing, and with his gait, and in his shoes, strode
another man. He had a white skin, and no beard. He glanced at her; his
eyes were blue. He winked.
        "Will I fool 'em?" he said. "How are your clothes?"
        She looked down at herself. She had on a countrywoman's brown
skirt and jacket, and a large red woolen shawl.
        "Oh," she said, stopping short. "Oh, you are- you are Ged!" As
she said his name she saw him perfectly clearly, the dark, scarred
face she knew, the dark eyes; yet there stood the milk-faced stranger.
        "Don't say my true name before others. Nor will I say yours.
We are brother and sister, come from Tenacbah. And I think I'll ask
for a bite of supper if I see a kindly face." He took her hand and
they entered the village.
        They left it next morning with full stomachs, after a pleasant
sleep in a hayloft.
        "Do Mages often beg?" asked Tenar, on the road between green
fields, where goats and little spotted cattle grazed.
        "Why do you ask?"
        "You seemed used to begging. In fact you were good at it."
        "Well, yes. I've begged all my life, if you look at it that
way. Wizards don't own much, you know. In fact nothing but their staff
and clothing, if they wander. They are received and given food and
shelter, by most people, gladly. They do make some return."
        "What return?"
        "Well, that woman in the village. I cured her goats."
        "What was wrong with them?"
        "They both had infected udders. I used to herd goats when I
was a boy."
        "Did you tell her you'd cured them?"
        "No. How could I? Why should I?"
        After a pause she said, "I see your magic is not good only for
large things."
        "Hospitality," he said, "kindness to a stranger, that's a very
large thing. Thanks are enough, of course. But I was sorry for the
goats."
        In the afternoon they came by a large town. It was built of
clay brick, and walled round in the Kargish fashion, with overhanging
battlements, watchtowers at the four corners, and a single gate, under
which drovers were herding a big flock of sheep. The red tile roofs of
a hundred or more houses poked up over the walls of yellowish brick.
At the gate stood two guards in the red-plumed helmets of the
Godking's service. Tenar had seen men in such helmets come, once a
year or so, to the Place, escorting offerings of slaves or money to
the Godking's temple. When she told Ged that, as they passed by
outside the walls, he said, "I saw them too, as a boy. They came
raiding to Gont. They came into my village, to plunder it. But they
were driven off. And there was a battle down by Armouth, on the shore;
many men were killed, hundreds, they say. Well, perhaps now that the
ring is rejoined and the Lost Rune remade, there will be no more such
raiding and killing between the Kargish Empire and the Inner Lands."
        "It would be foolish if such things went on," said Tenar.
"What would the Godking ever do with so many slaves?"
        Her companion appeared to ponder this awhile. "If the Kargish
lands defeated the Archipelago, you mean?"
        She nodded.
        "I don't think that would be likely to happen."
        "But look how strong the Empire is- that great city, with its
walls, and all its men. How could your lands stand against them, if
they attacked?'
        "That is not a very big city," he said cautiously and gently.
"I too would have thought it tremendous, when I was new from my
mountain. But there are many, many cities in Earthsea, among which
this is only a town. There are many, many lands. You will see them,
Tenar."
        She said nothing. She trudged along the road, her face set.
        "It is marvelous to see them: the new lands rising from the
sea as your boat comes towards them. The farmlands and forests, the
cities with their harbors and palaces, the marketplaces where they
sell everything in the world."
        She nodded. She knew he was trying to hearten her, but she had
left joy up in the mountains, in the twilit valley of the stream.
There was a dread in her now that grew and grew. All that lay ahead of
her was unknown. She knew nothing but the desert and the Tombs. What

good was that? She knew the turnings of a ruined maze, she knew the
dances danced before a fallen altar. She knew nothing of forests, or
cities, or the hearts of men.
        She said suddenly, "Will you stay with me there?"
        She did not look at him. He was in his illusory disguise, a
white-skinned Kargish countryman, and she did not like to see him so.
But his voice was unchanged, the same voice that had spoken in the
darkness of the Labyrinth.
        He was slow to answer. "Tenar, I go where I am sent. I follow
my calling. It has not yet let me stay in any land for long. Do you
see that? I do what I must do. Where I go, I must go alone. So long as
you need me, I'll be with you in Havnor. And if you ever need me
again, call me. I will come. I would come from my grave if you called
me, Tenar! But I cannot stay with you."
        She said nothing. After a while he said, "You will not need me
long, there. You will be happy."
        She nodded, accepting, silent.
        They went on side by side towards the sea.



------
Voyage
------

        He had hidden his boat in a cave on the side of a great rocky
headland, Cloud Cape it was called by the villagers nearby, one of
whom gave them a bowl of fish stew for their supper. They made their
way down the cliffs to the beach in the last light of the gray day.
The cave was a narrow crack that went back into the rock for about
thirty feet; its sandy floor was damp, for it lay just above the
high-tide mark. Its opening was visible from sea, and Ged said they
should not light a fire lest the night-fishermen out in their small
craft along shore should see it and be curious. So they lay miserably
on the sand, which seemed so soft between the fingers and was
rock-hard to the tired body. And Tenar listened to the sea, a few
yards below the cave mouth, crashing and sucking and booming on the
rocks, and the thunder of it down the beach eastward for miles. Over
and over and over it made the same sounds, yet never quite the same.
It never rested. On all the shores of all the lands in all the world,
it heaved itself in these unresting waves, and never ceased, and never
was still. The desert, the mountains: they stood still. They did not
cry out forever in a great, dull voice. The sea spoke forever, but its
language was foreign to her. She did not understand.
        In the first gray light, when the tide was low, she roused
from uneasy sleep and saw the wizard go out of the cave. She watched
him walk, barefoot and with belted cloak, on the black-haired rocks
below, seeking something. He came back, darkening the cave as he
entered. "Here," he said, holding out a handful of wet, hideous things
like purple rocks and orange lips.
        "What are they?"
        "Mussels, off the rocks. And those two are oysters, even
better. Look- like this." With the little dagger from her keyring,
which she had lent him up in the mountains, he opened a shell and ate
the orange mussel with seawater as its sauce.
        "You don't even cook it? You ate it alive!"
        She would not look at him while he, shamefaced but undeterred,
went on opening and eating the shellfish one by one.
        When he was done, he went back into the cave to the boat,
which lay prow forward, kept from the sand by several long driftwood
logs. Tenar had looked at the boat the night before, mistrustfully and
without comprehension. It was much larger than she had thought boats
were, three times her own length. It was full of objects she did not
know the use of, and it looked dangerous. On either side of its nose
(which is what she called the prow) an eye was painted; and in her
halfsleep she had constantly felt the boat staring at her.
        Ged rummaged about inside it a moment and came back with
something: a packet of hard bread, well wrapped to keep dry. He
offered her a large piece.
        "I'm not hungry."
        He looked into her sullen face.
        He put the bread away, wrapping it as before, and then sat
down in the mouth of the cave. "About two hours till the tide's back
in," he said. "Then we can go. You had a restless night, why don't you
sleep now."
        "I'm not sleepy."
        He made no answer. He sat there, in profile to her,
cross-legged in the dark arch of rocks; the shining heave and movement
of the sea was beyond him as she watched him from deeper in the cave.
He did not move. He was still as the rocks themselves. Stillness
spread out from him, like rings from a stone dropped in water. His
silence became not absence of speech, but a thing in itself, like the
silence of the desert,
        After a long time Tenar got up and came to the mouth of the

cave. He did not move. She looked down at his face. It was as if cast
in copper-rigid, the dark eyes not shut, but looking down, the mouth
serene.
        He was as far beyond her as the sea.
        Where was he now, on what way of the spirit did he walk? She
could never follow him.
        He had made her follow him. He had called her by her name, and
she had come crouching to his hand, as the little wild desert rabbit
had come to him out of the dark. And now that he had the ring, now
that the Tombs were in ruin and their priestess forsworn forever, now
he didn't need her, and went away where she could not follow. He would
not stay with her. He had fooled her, and would leave her desolate.
        She reached down and with one swift gesture plucked from his
belt the little steel dagger she had given him. He moved no more than
a robbed statue.
        The dagger blade was only four inches long, sharp on one side;
it was the miniature of a sacrificial knife. It was part of the
garments of the Priestess of the Tombs, who must wear it along with
the ring of keys, and a belt of horsehair, and other items some of
which had no known purpose. She had never used the dagger for
anything, except that in one of the dances performed at dark of the
moon she would throw and catch it before the Throne. She had liked
that dance; it was a wild one, with no music but the drumming of her
own feet. She had used to cut her fingers, practicing it, till she got
the trick of catching the knife handle every time. The little blade
was sharp enough to cut a finger to the bone, or to cut the arteries
of a throat. She would serve her Masters still, though they had
betrayed her and forsaken her. They would guide and drive her hand in
the last act of darkness. They would accept the sacrifice.
        She turned upon the man, the knife held back in her right hand
behind her hip. As she did so he raised his face slowly and looked at
her. He had the look of one come from a long way off, one who has seen
terrible things. His face was calm but full of pain. As he gazed up at
her and seemed to see her more and more clearly, his expression
cleared. At last he said, "Tenar," as if in greeting, and reached up
his hand to touch the band of pierced and carven silver on her wrist.
He did this as if reassuring himself, trustingly. He did not pay
attention to the dagger in her hand. He looked away, at the waves,
which heaved deep over the rocks below, and said with effort, "It's
time... Time we were going."
        At the sound of his voice the fury left her. She was afraid.
        "You'll leave them behind, Tenar. You're going free now," he
said, getting up with sudden vigor. He stretched, and belted his cloak
tight again. "Give me a hand with the boat. She's up on logs, for
rollers. That's it, push... again. There, there, enough. Now be ready
to hop in when I say `hop.' This is a tricky place to launch from-
once more. There! In you go!"-and leaping in after her, he caught her
as she overbalanced, sat her down in the bottom of the boat, braced
his legs wide, and standing to the oars sent the boat shooting out on
an ebb wave over the rocks, out past the roaring foam-drenched head of
the cape, and so to sea.
        He shipped the oars when they were well away from shoal water,
and stepped the mast. The boat looked very small, now that she was
inside it and the sea was outside it.
        He put up the sail. All the gear had a look of long, hard use,
though the dull red sail was patched with great care and the boat was
as clean and trim as could be. They were like their master: they had
gone far, and had not been treated gently.
        "Now," he said, "now we're away, now we're clear, we're clean
gone, Tenar. Do you feel it?"
        She did feel it. A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon
her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She
put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and
wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless
evil. She wept in pain, because she was free.
        What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom
is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to
undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made,
and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the
light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
        Ged let her cry, and said no word of comfort; nor when she was
done with tears and sat looking back towards the low blue land of
Atuan, did he speak. His face was stern and alert, as if he were
alone; he saw to the sail and the steering, quick and silent, looking
always ahead.
        In the afternoon he pointed rightward of the sun, towards
which they now sailed. "That is Karego-At," he said, and Tenar
following his gesture saw the distant loom of hills like clouds, the
great island of the Godking. Atuan was out of sight behind them. Her
heart was very heavy. The sun beat in her eyes like a hammer of gold.
        Supper was dry bread, and dried smoked fish, which tasted vile
to Tenar, and water from the boat's cask, which Ged had filled at a
stream on Cloud Cape beach the evening before. The winter night came
down soon and cold upon the sea. Far off to northward they saw for a
while the tiny glitter of lights, yellow firelight in distant villages
on the shore of Karego-At. These vanished in a haze that rose up from
the ocean, and they were alone in the starless night over deep water.
        She had curled up in the stern; Ged lay down in the prow, with
the water cask for a pillow. The boat moved on steadily, the low
swells slapping her sides a little, though the wind was only a faint
breath from the south. Out here, away from the rocky shores, the sea
too was silent; only as it touched the boat did it whisper a little.
        "If the wind is from the south," Tenar said, whispering
because the sea did, "doesn't the boat sail north?"
        "Yes, unless we tack. But I've put the mage-wind in her sail,
to the west. By tomorrow morning we should be out of Kargish waters.
Then I'll let her go by the world's wind."
        "Does it steer itself?"
        "Yes," Ged replied with gravity, "given the proper
instructions. She doesn't need many. She's been in the open sea,
beyond the farthest isle of the East Reach; she's been to Selidor
where Erreth-Akbe died, in the farthest West. She's a wise crafty
boat, my Lookfar. You can trust her."
        In the boat moved by magic over the great deep, the girl lay
looking up into the dark. All her life she had looked into the dark;
but this was a vaster darkness, this night on the ocean. There was no
end to it. There was no roof. It went on out beyond the stars. No
earthly Powers moved it. It had been before light, and would be after.
It had been before life, and would be after. It went on beyond evil.
        In the dark, she spoke: "The little island, where the talisman
was given you, is that in this sea?"
        "Yes," his voice answered out of the dark. "Somewhere. To the
south, perhaps. I could not find it again."
        "I know who she was, the old woman who gave you the ring."
        "You know?"
        "I was told the tale. It is part of the knowledge of the First
Priestess. Thar told it to me, first when Kossil was there, then more
fully when we were alone; it was the last time she talked to me before
she died. There was a noble house in Hupun who fought against the rise
of the High Priests in Awabath. The founder of the house was King
Thoreg, and among the treasures he left his descendants was the
half-ring, which Erreth-Akbe had given him."
        "That indeed is told in the Deed of Erreth-Akbe. It says... in
your tongue it says, `When the ring was broken, half remained in the
hand of the High Priest Intathin, and half in the hero's hand. And the
High Priest sent the broken half to the Nameless, to the Ancient of
the Earth in Atuan, and it went into the dark, into the lost places.
But Erreth-Akbe gave the broken half into the hands of the maiden
Tiarath, daughter of the wise king, saying: "Let it remain in the
light, in the maiden's dowry, let it remain in this land until it be
rejoined." So spoke the hero before he sailed to the west.' "
        "So it must have gone from daughter to daughter of that house,
over all the years. It was not lost, as your people thought. But as
the High Priests made themselves into the Priest-Kings, and then when
the Priest-Kings made the Empire and began to call themselves
Godkings, all this time the house of Thoreg grew poorer and weaker.
And at last, so Thar told me, there were only two of the lineage of
Thoreg left, little children, a boy and a girl. The Godking in Awabath
then was the father of him who rules now. He had the children stolen
from their palace in Hupun. There was a prophecy that one of the
descendants of Thoreg of Hupun would bring about the fall of the
Empire in the end, and that frightened him. He had the children stolen
away, and taken to a lonely isle somewhere out in the middle of the
sea, and left there with nothing but the clothes they wore and a
little food. He feared to kill them by knife or strangling or poison;
they were of kingly blood, and murder of kings brings a curse even on
the gods. They were named Ensar and Anthil. It was Anthil who gave you
the broken ring."
        He was silent a long while. "So the story comes whole," he
said at last, "even as the ring is made whole. But it is a cruel
story, Tenar. The little children, that isle, the old man and woman I
saw... They scarcely knew human speech."
        "I would ask you something."
        "Ask."
        "I do not wish to go to the Inner Lands, to Havnor. I do not
belong there, in the great cities among foreign men. I do not belong
to any land. I betrayed my own people. I have no people. And I have
done a very evil thing. Put me alone on an island, as the king's
children were left, on a lone isle where there are no people, where
there is no one. Leave me, and take the ring to Havnor. It is yours,
not mine. It has nothing to do with me. Nor have your people. Let me
be by myself!"
        Slowly, gradually, yet startling her, a light dawned like a
small moonrise in the blackness before her; the wizardly light that
came at his command. It clung to the end of his staff, which he held
upright as he sat facing her in the prow. It lit the bottom of the
sail, and the gunwales, and the planking, and his face, with a silvery
glow. He was looking straight at her.
        "What evil have you done, Tenar?"
        "I ordered that three men be shut into a room beneath the
Throne, and starved to death. They died of hunger and thirst. They
died, and are buried there in the Undertomb. The Tombstones fell on
their graves." She stopped.
        "Is there more?"
        "Manan."
        "That death is on my soul."
        "No. He died because he loved me, and was faithful. He thought
he was protecting me. He held the sword above my neck. When I was
little he was kind to me -when I cried-" She stopped again, for the
tears rose hard in her, yet she would cry no more. Her hands were
clenched on the black folds of her dress. "I was never kind to him,"
she said. "I will not go to Havnor. I will not go with you. Find some
isle where no one comes, and put me there, and leave me. The evil must
be paid for. I am not free."
        The soft light, grayed by sea mist, glimmered between them.
        "Listen, Tenar. Heed me. You were the vessel of evil. The evil
is poured out. It is done. It is buried in its own tomb. You were
never made for cruelty and darkness; you were made to hold light, as a
lamp burning holds and gives its light. I found the lamp unlit; I
won't leave it on some desert island like a thing found and cast away.
I'll take you to Havnor and say to the princes of Earthsea, `Look! In
the place of darkness I found the light, her spirit. By her an old
evil was brought to nothing. By her I was brought out of the grave. By
her the broken was made whole, and where there was hatred there will
be peace.'"
        "I will not," Tenar said in agony. "I cannot. It's not true!"
        "And after that," he went on quietly, "I'll take you away from
the princes and the rich lords; for it's true that you have no place
there. You are too young, and too wise. I'll take you to my own land,

to Gont where I was born, to my old master Ogion. He's an old man now,
a very great Mage, a man of quiet heart. They call him `the Silent.'
He lives in a small house on the great cliffs of Re Albi, high over
the sea. He keeps some goats, and a garden patch. In autumn he goes
wandering over the island, alone, in the forests, on the
mountainsides, through the valleys of the rivers. I lived there once
with him, when I was younger than you are now. I didn't stay long, I
hadn't the sense to stay. I went off seeking evil, and sure enough I
found it... But you come escaping evil; seeking freedom; seeking
silence for a while, until you find your own way. There you will find
kindness and silence, Tenar. There the lamp will burn out of the wind
awhile. Will you do that?"
        The sea mist drifted gray between their faces. The boat lifted
lightly on the long waves. Around them was the night and under them
the sea.
        "I will," she said with a long sigh. And after a long time,
"Oh, I wish it were sooner... that we could go there now..."
        "It won't be long, little one."
        "Will you come there, ever?"
        "When I can I will come."
        The light had died away; it was all dark around them.

        They came, after the sunrises and sunsets, the still days and
the icy winds of their winter voyage, to the Inmost Sea. They sailed
the crowded lanes among great ships, up the Ebavnor Straits and into
the bay that lies locked in the heart of Havnor, and across the bay to
Havnor Great Port. They saw the white towers, and all the city white
and radiant in snow. The roofs of the bridges and the red roofs of the
houses were snow-covered, and the rigging of the hundred ships in the
harbor glittered with ice in the winter sun. News of their coming had
run ahead of them, for Lookfar's patched red sail was known in those
seas; a great crowd had gathered on the snowy quays, and colored
pennants cracked above the people in the bright, cold wind.
        Tenar sat in the stern, erect, in her ragged cloak of black.
She looked at the ring around her wrist, then at the crowded,
many-colored shore and the palaces and the high towers. She lifted up
her right hand, and sunlight flashed on the silver of the ring. A
cheer went up, faint and joyous on the wind, over the restless water.
Ged brought the boat in. A hundred hands reached to catch the rope he
flung up to the mooring. He leapt up onto the pier and turned, holding
out his hand to her. "Come!" he said smiling, and she rose, and came.
Gravely she walked beside him up the white streets of Havnor, holding
his hand, like a child coming home.


--end-

http://ebook99.myetang.com   achong

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