◇ Earthsea 1 The wizard of earthsea

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A Wizard of Earthsea
Ursula K. LeGuin
1968




Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.
                -The Creation of Ea



------
1 Warriors in the Mist
------

        The Island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a
mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for
wizards. From the towns in its high valleys and the ports on its dark
narrow bays many a Gontishman has gone forth to serve the Lords of the
Archipelago in their cities as wizard or mage, or, looking for
adventure, to wander working magic from isle to isle of all Earthsea.
Of these some say the greatest, and surely the greatest voyager, was
the man called Sparrowhawk, who in his day became both dragonlord and
Archmage. His life is told of in the Deed of Ged and in many songs,
but this is a tale of the time before his fame, before the songs were
made.
        He was born in a lonely village called Ten Alders, high on the
mountain at the head of the Northward Vale. Below the village the
pastures and plowlands of the Vale slope downward level below level
towards the sea, and other towns lie on the bends of the River Ar;
above the village only forest rises ridge behind ridge to the stone
and snow of the heights.
        The name he bore as a child, Duny, was given him by his
mother, and that and his life were all she could give him, for she
died before he was a year old. His father, the bronze-smith of the
village, was a grim unspeaking man, and since Duny's six brothers were
older than he by many years and went one by one from home to farm the
land or sail the sea or work as smith in other towns of the Northward
Vale, there was no one to bring the child up in tenderness. He grew
wild, a thriving weed, a tall, quick boy, loud and proud and full of
temper. With the few other children of the village he herded goats on
the steep meadows above the riversprings; and when he was strong
enough to push and pull the long bellows-sleeves, his father made him
work as smith's boy, at a high cost in blows and whippings. There was
not much work to be got out of Duny. He was always off and away;
roaming deep in the forest, swimming in the pools of the River Ar that
like all Gontish rivers runs very quick and cold, or climbing by cliff
and scarp to the heights above the forest, from which he could see the
sea, that broad northern ocean where, past Perregal, no islands are.
        A sister of his dead mother lived in the village. She had done
what was needful for him as a baby, but she had business of her own
and once he could look after himself at all she paid no more heed to
him. But one day when the boy was seven years old, untaught and
knowing nothing of the arts and powers that are in the world, he heard
his aunt crying out words to a goat which had jumped up onto the
thatch of a hut and would not come down: but it came jumping when she
cried a certain rhyme to it. Next day herding the longhaired goats on
the meadows of High Fall, Duny shouted to them the words he had heard,
not knowing their use or meaning or what kind of words they were:

Noth hierth malk man
hiolk han merth han!

He yelled the rhyme aloud, and the goats came to him. They came very
quickly, all of them together, not making any sound. They looked at
him out of the dark slot in their yellow eyes.
        Duny laughed and shouted it out again, the rhyme that gave him
power over the goats. They came closer, crowing and pushing round him.
All at once he felt afraid of their thick, ridged horns and their
strange eyes and their strange silence. He tried to get free of them
and to run away. The goats ran with him keeping in a knot around him,
and so they came charging down into the village at last, all the goats
going huddled together as if a rope were pulled tight round them, and
the boy in the midst of them weeping and bellowing. Villagers ran from
their houses to swear at the goats and laugh at the boy. Among them
came the boy's aunt, who did not laugh. She said a word to the goats,
and the beasts began to bleat and browse and wander, freed from the
spell.
        "Come with me," she said to Deny.
        She took him into her hut where she lived alone. She let no
child enter there usually, and the children feared the place. It was
low and dusky, windowless, fragrant with herbs that hung drying from
the cross-pole of the roof, mint and moly and thyme, yarrow and
rushwash and paramal, kingsfoil, clovenfoot, tansy and bay. There his
aunt sat crosslegged by the firepit, and looking sidelong at the boy
through the tangles of her black hair she asked him what he had said
to the goats, and if he knew what the rhyme was. When she found that
he knew nothing, and yet had spellbound the goats to come to him and
follow him, then she saw that he must have in him the makings of
power.
        As her sister's son he had been nothing to her, but now she
looked at him with a new eye. She praised him, and told him she might
teach him rhymes he would like better, such as the word that makes a
snail look out of its shell, or the name that calls a falcon down from
the sky.
        "Aye, teach me that name!" he said, being clear over the
fright the goats had given him, and puffed up with her praise of his
cleverness.
        The witch said to him, "You will not ever tell that word to
the other children, if I teach it to you."
        "I promise."
        She smiled at his ready ignorance. "Well and good. But I will
bind your promise. Your tongue will be stilled until I choose to
unbind it, and even then, though you can speak, you will not be able
to speak the word I teach you where another person can hear it. We
must keep the secrets of our craft."
        "Good," said the boy, for he had no wish to tell the secret to
his playmates, liking to know and do what they knew not and could not.
        He sat still while his aunt bound back her un-combed hair, and
knotted the belt of her dress, and sat crosslegged throwing handfuls
of leaves into the firepit so that a smoke spread and filled the
darkness of the hut. She began to sing, Her voice changed sometimes to
low or high as if another voice sang through her, and the singing went
on and on until the boy did not know if he waked or slept, and all the
while the witch's old black dog that never barked sat by him with eyes
red from the smoke. Then the witch spoke to Duny in a tongue he did
not understand, and made him say with her certain rhymes and words
until the enchantment came on him and held him still.
        "Speak!" she said to test the spell.
        The boy Could not speak, but he laughed.
        Then his aunt was a little afraid of his strength, for this
was as strong a spell as she knew how to weave: she had tried not only
to gain control of his speech and silence, but to bind him at the same
time to her service in the craft of sorcery. Yet even as the spell
bound him, he had laughed. She said nothing. She threw clear water on
the fire till the smoke cleared away, and gave the boy water to drink,
and when the air was clear and he could speak again she taught him the
true name of the falcon, to which the falcon must come.
        This was Duny's first step on the way he was to follow all his
life, the way of magery, the way that led him at last to hunt a shadow
over land and sea to the lightless coasts of death's kingdom. But in
those first steps along the way, it seemed a broad, bright road.
        When he found that the wild falcons stooped down to him from
the wind when he summoned them by name, lighting with a thunder of
wings on his wrist like the hunting-birds of a prince, then he
hungered to know more such names and came to his aunt begging to learn
the name of the sparrowhawk and the osprey and the eagle. To earn the
words of power he did all the witch asked of him and learned of her
all she taught, though not all of it was pleasant to do or know. There
is a saying on Gont, Weak as woman's magic, and there is another
saying, Wicked as woman's magic. Now the witch of Ten Alders was no
black sorceress, nor did she ever meddle with the high arts or traffic
with Old Powers; but being an ignorant woman among ignorant folk, she
often used her crafts to foolish and dubious ends. She knew nothing of
the Balance and the Pattern which the true wizard knows and serves,
and which keep him from using his spells unless real need demands. She
had a spell for every circumstance, and was forever wearing charms.
Much of her lore was mere rubbish and humbug, nor did she know the
true spells from the false. She knew many curses, and was better at
causing sickness, perhaps, than at curing it. Like any village witch
she could brew up a love-potion, but there were other, uglier brews
she made to serve men's jealousy and hate. Such practices, however,
she kept from her young prentice, and as far as she was able she
taught him honest craft.
        At first all his pleasure in the art-magic was, childlike, the
power it gave him over bird and beast, and the knowledge of these. And
indeed that pleasure stayed with him all his life. Seeing him in the
high pastures often with a bird of prey about him, the other children
called him Sparrowhawk, and so he came by the name that he kept in
later life as his use-name, when his true-name was not known.
        As the witch kept talking of the glory and the riches and the
great power over men that a sorcerer could gain, he set himself to
learn more useful lore. He was very quick at it. The witch praised him
and the children of the village began to fear him, and he himself was
sure that very soon he would become great among men. So he went on
from word to word and from spell to spell with the witch till he was    
twelve years old and had learned from her a great part of what she
knew: not much, but enough for the witchwife of a small village, and
more than enough for a boy of twelve. She had taught him all her lore
in herbals and healing, and all she knew of the crafts of finding,
binding, mending, unsealing and revealing. What she knew of chanters'
tales and the great Deeds she had sung him, and all the words of the
True Speech that she had learned from the sorcerer that taught her,
she taught again to Deny. And from weatherworkers and wandering
jugglers who went from town to town of the Northward Vale and the East
Forest he had learned various ticks and pleasantries, spells of
Illusion. It was with one of these light spells that he first proved
the great power that was in him.
        In those days the Kargad Empire was strong. Those are four
great lands that lie between the Northern and the Eastern Reaches:
Karego-At, Atuan, Hur-at-Hur, Atnini. The tongue they speak there is
not like any spoken in the Archipelago or the other Reaches, and they
are a savage people, white-skinned, yellowhaired, and fierce, liking
the sight of blood and the smell of burning towns. Last year they had
attacked the Torikles and the strong island Torheven, raiding in great
force in fleets of redsailed ships. News of this came north to Gont,
but the Lords of Gont were busy with their piracy and paid small heed
to the woes of other lands. Then Spevy fell to the Kargs and was
looted and laid waste, its people taken as slaves, so that even now it
is an isle of ruins. In lust of conquest the Kargs sailed next to
Gont, coming in a host, thirty great longships, to East Port. They
fought through that town, took it, burned it; leaving their ships
under guard at the mouth of the River Ar they went up the Vale
wrecking and looting, slaughtering cattle and men. As they went they
split into bands, and each of these bands plundered where it chose.
Fugitives brought warning to the villages of the heights. Soon the
people of Ten Alders saw smoke darken the eastern sky, and that night
those who climbed the High Fall looked down on the Vale all hazed and
red-streaked with fires where fields ready for harvest had been set
ablaze, and orchards burned, the fruit roasting on the blazing boughs,
and urns and farmhouses smouldered in ruin.
        Some of the villagers fled up the ravines and hid in the
forest, and some made ready to fight for their lives, and some did
neither but stood about lamenting. The witch was one who fled; hiding
alone in a cave up on the Kapperding Scarp and sealing the cave-mouth
with spells. Duny's father the bronze-smith was one who stayed, for he
would not leave his smelting-pit and forge where he had worked for
fifty years. All that night he labored beating up what ready metal he
had there into spearpoints, and others worked with him binding these
to the handles of hoes and rakes; there being no time to make sockets
and shaft them properly. There had been no weapons in the village but
hunting bows and short knives, for the mountain folk of Cont are not
warlike; it is not warriors they are famous for, but goat-thieves, sea
pirates, and wizards.
        With sunrise came a thick white fog, as on many autumn
mornings in the heights of the island. Among their huts and houses
down the straggling street of Ten'Alders the villagers stood waiting
with their hunting bows and new-forged spears, not knowing whether the
Kargs might be far-off or very near, all silent, all peering into the
fog that hid shapes and distances and dangers from their eyes.
        With them was Duny. He had worked all night at the
forgebellows, pushing and pulling the two long sleeves of goathide
that fed the fire with a blast of sir. Now his arms so ached and
trembled from that work that he could not hold out the spear he had
chosen. He did not see how he could fight or be of any good to himself
or the villagers. It rankled at his heart that he should die, spitted
on a Kargish lance, while still a boy: that he should go into the dark
land without ever having known his own name, his true name as a man.
He looked down at his thin arms, wet with cold fogdew, and raged at
his weakness, for he knew his strength. There was power in him, if he
knew how to use it, and he sought among all the spells he knew for
some device that might give him and his  companions an advantage, or
at least a chance. But need alone is not enough to set power free:
there must be knowledge.
        The fog was thinning now under the heat of the sun that shone
bare above on the peak - in a bright sky. As the mists moved and
parted in great drifts and smoky wisps, the villagers saw a band of
warriors coming up the mountain. They were armored with bronze helmets
and greaves and breastplates of heavy leather and shields of wood and
bronze, and armed with swords and the long Kargish lance. Winding up
along the steep bank of the Ar they came in a plumed, clanking,
straggling line, near enough already that their white faces could be
seen, and the words of their jargon heard as they shouted to one
another. In this band of the invading horde there were about a hundred
men, which is not many; but in the village were only eighteen men and
boys.
        Now need called knowledge out: Duny, seeing the fog blow and
thin across the path before the Kargs, saw a spell that might avail
him. An old weatherworker of the Vale, seeking to win the boy as
prentice, had taught him several charms. One of these tricks was
called fogweaving, a binding-spell that gathers the mists together for
a while in one place; with it one skilled in illusion can shape the
mist into fair ghostly seemings, which last a little and fade away.
The boy had no such skill, but his intent was different, and he had
the strength to turn the spell to his own ends. Rapidly and aloud he
named the places and the boundaries of the village, and then spoke the
fogweaving charm, but in among its words he enlaced the words of a
spell of concealment, and last he cried the word that set the magic
going.
        Even as he did so his father coming up behind him struck him
hard on the side of the head, knocking him right down. "Be still,
fool! keep your blattering mouth shut, and hide if you can't fight!"
        Duny got to his feet. He could hear the Kargs now at the end
of the village, as near as the great yew-tree by the tanner's yard.
Their voices were clear, and the clink and creak of their harness and
arms, but they could not be seen. The fog had closed and thickened all
over the village, greying the light, blurring the world till a man
could hardly see his own hands before him.
        "I've hidden us all," Duny said, sullenly, for his head hurt
from his father's blow, and the working of the doubled incantation had
drained his strength. "I'll keep up this fog as long as I can. Get the
others to lead them up to High Fall."
        The smith stared at his son who stood wraithlike in that
weird, dank mist. It took him a minute to see Duny's meaning, but when
he did he ran at once, noiselessly, knowing every fence and corner of
the village, to find the others and tell them what to do. Now through
the grey fog bloomed a blur of red, as the Kargs set fire to the
thatch of a house. Still they did not come up into the village, but
waited at the lower end till the mist should lift and lay bare their
loot and prey.
        The tanner, whose house it was that burned, sent a couple of
boys skipping right under the Kargs' noses, taunting and yelling and
vanishing again like smoke into smoke. Meantime the older men,
creeping behind fences and running from house to house, came close on
the other side and sent a volley of arrows and spears at the warriors,
who stood all in a bunch. One Karg fell writhing with a spear, still
warm from its forging, right through his body. Others were
arrow-bitten, and all enraged. They charged forward then to hew down
their puny attackers, but they found only the fog about them, full of
voices. They followed the voices, stabbing ahead into the mist with
their great, plumed, bloodstained lances. Up the length of the street
they came shouting, and never knew they had run right through the
village, as the empty huts and houses loomed and disappeared again in
the writhing grey fog. The villagers ran scattering, most of them
keeping well ahead since they knew the ground; but some, boys or old
men, were slow. The Kargs stumbling on them drove their lances or
hacked with their swords, yelling their war-cry, the names of the
White Godbrothers of Atuan:
        "Wuluah! Atwah!"

        Some of the band stopped when they felt the land grow rough
underfoot, but others pressed right on, seeking the phantom village,
following dim wavering shapes that fled just out of reach before them.
All the mist had come alive with these fleeting forms, dodging,
flickering, fading on every side. One group of the Kargs chased the
wraiths straight to the High Fall, the cliff's edge above the springs
of Ar, and the shapes they pursued ran out onto the air and there
vanished in a thinning of the mist, while the pursuers fell screaming
through fog and sudden sunlight a hundred feet sheer to the shallow
pools among the rocks. And those that came behind and did not fall
stood at the cliff's edge, listening.
        Now dread came into the Kargs' hearts and they began to seek
one another, not the villagers, in the uncanny mist. They gathered on
the hillside, and yet always there were wraiths and ghost-shapes among
them; and other shapes that ran and stabbed from behind with spear or
knife and vanished again. The Kargs began to run, all of them,
downhill, stumbling, silent, until all at once they ran out from the
grey blind mist and saw the river and the ravines below the village
all bare and bright in morning sunlight. Then they stopped, gathering
together, and looked back. A wall of wavering, writhing grey lay blank
across the path, hiding all that lay behind it. Out from it burst two
or three stragglers, lunging and stumbling along, their long lances
rocking on their shoulders. Not one Karg looked back more than that
once. All went down, in haste, away from the enchanted place.
        Farther down the Northward Vale those warriors got their fill
of fighting. The towns of the East Forest, from Ovark to the coast,
had gathered their men and sent them against the invaders of Gont.
Band after band they came down from the hills, and that day and the
next the Kargs were harried back down to the beaches above East Port,
where they found their ships burnt; so they fought with their backs to
the sea till every man of them was killed, and the sands of Armouth
were brown with blood until the tide came in.
        But on that morning in Ten Alders village and up on the High
Fall, the dank grey fog had clung a while, and then suddenly it blew
and drifted and melted away. This man and that stood up in the windy
brightness of the morning, and looked about him wondering. Here lay a
dead Karg with yellow hair long, loose; and bloody; there lay the
village tanner, killed in battle like a king.
        Down in the village the house that bad been set afire still
blazed. They ran to put the fire out, since their battle had been won.
In the street, near the great yew, they found Duny the bronze-smith's
son standing by himself, bearing no hurt, but speechless and stupid
like one stunned. They were well aware of what he had done, and they
led him into his father's house and went calling for the witch to come
down out of her cave and heal the lad who had saved their lives and
their property, all but four who were killed by the Kargs, and the one
house that was burnt.
        No weapon-hurt had come to the boy, but he would not speak nor
eat nor sleep; he seemed not to hear what was said to him, not to see
those who came to see him. There was none in those parts wizard enough
to cure what ailed him. His aunt said, "He has overspent his power,"
but she had no art to help him.
        While he lay thus dark and dumb, the story of the lad who wove
the fog and scared off Kargish swordsmen with a mess of shadows was
told all down the Northward Vale, and in the East Forest, and high on
the mountain and over the mountain even in the Great Port of Gont. So
it happened that on the fifth day after the slaughter at Armouth a
stranger came into Ten Alders village, a man neither young nor old,
who came cloaked and bareheaded, lightly carrying a great staff of oak
that was as tall as himself. He did not come up the course of the Ar
like most people, but down, out of the forests of the higher
mountainside. The village goodwives saw well that he was a wizard, and
when he told them that he was a healall, they brought him straight to
the smith's house. Sending away all but the boy's father and aunt the
stranger stooped above the cot where Duny lay staring into the dark,
and did no more than lay his hand on the boy's forehead and touch his
lips once.
        Duny sat up slowly looking about him. In a little while he
spoke, and strength and hunger began to come back into him. They gave
him a little to drink and eat, and he lay back again, always watching
the stranger with dark wondering eyes.
        The bronze-smith said to that stranger, "You are no common
man."
        "Nor will this boy be a common man," the other answered. "The
tale of his deed with the fog has come to Re Albi, which is my home. I
have come here to give him his name, if as they say he has not yet
made his passage into manhood."
        The witch whispered to the smith, "Brother, this must surely
be the Mage of Re Albi, Ogion the Silent, that one who tamed the
earthquake-"
        "Sir," said the bronze-smith who would not let a great name
daunt him, "my son will be thirteen this month coming, but we thought
to hold his Passage at the feast of Sunreturn this winter."
        "Let him be named as soon as may be," said the mage, "for he
needs his name. I have other business now, but I will come back here
for the day you choose. If you see fit I will take him with me when I
go thereafter. And if he prove apt I will keep him as prentice, or see
to it that he is schooled as fits his gifts. For to keep dark the mind
of the mageborn, that is a dangerous thing."
        Very gently Ogion spoke, but with certainty, and even the
hardheaded smith assented to all he said.
        On the day the boy was thirteen years old, a day in the early
splendor of autumn while still the bright leaves are on the trees,
Ogion returned to the village from his rovings over Gont Mountain, and
the ceremony of Passage was held. The witch took from the boy his name
Duny, the name his mother had given him as a baby. Nameless and naked
he walked into the cold springs of the Ar where it rises among rocks
under the high cliffs. As he entered the water clouds crossed the
sun's face and great shadows slid and mingled over the water of the
pool about him. He crossed to the far bank, shuddering with cold but
walking slow and erect as be should through that icy, living water. As
he came to the bank Ogion, waiting, reached out his hand and clasping
the boy's arm whispered to him his true name: Ged.
        Thus was he given his name by one very wise in the uses of
power.
        The feasting was far from over, and all the villagers were
making merry with plenty to eat and beer to drink and a chanter from
down the Vale singing the Deed of the Dragonlords, when the mage spoke
in his quiet voice to Ged: "Come, lad. Bid your people farewell and
leave them feasting."
        Ged fetched what he had to carry, which was the good bronze
knife his father had forged him, and a leather coat the tanner's widow
had cut down to his size, and an alderstick his aunt had becharmed for
him: that was all he owned besides his shirt and breeches. He said
farewell to them, all the people he knew in all the world, and looked
about once at the village that straggled and huddled there under the
cliffs, over the river-springs. Then he set off with his new master
through the steep slanting forests of the mountain isle, through the
leaves and shadows of bright autumn.



------
2 The Shadow
------

        Ged had thought that as the prentice of a great mage he would
enter at once into the mystery and mastery of power. He would
understand the language of the beasts and the speech of the leaves of
the forest, he thought, and sway the winds with his word, and learn to
change himself into any shape he wished. Maybe he and his master would
run together as stags, or fly to Re Albi over the mountain on the
wings of eagles.
        But it was not so at all. They wandered, first down into the
Vale and then gradually south and westward around the mountain, given
lodging in little villages or spending the night out in the
wilderness, like poor journeyman-sorcerers, or tinkers, or beggars.
They entered no mysterious domain. Nothing happened. The mage's oaken
staff that Ged had watched at first with eager dread was nothing but a
stout staff to walk with. Three days went by and four days went by and
still Ogion had not spoken a single charm in Ged's hearing, and had
not taught him a single name or rune or spell.
        Though a very silent man he was so mild and calm that Ged soon
lost his awe of him, and in a day or two more he was bold enough to
ask his master, "When will my apprenticeship begin, Sir?"
        "It has begun," said Ogion.
        There was a silence, as if Ged was keeping back something he
had to say. Then he said it: "But I haven't learned anything yet!"
        "Because you haven't found out what I am teaching," replied
the mage, going on at his steady, long-legged pace along their road,
which was the high pass between Ovark and Wiss. He was a dark man,
like most Gontishmen, dark copper-brown; grey-haired, lean and tough
as a hound, tireless. He spoke seldom, ate little, slept less. His
eyes and ears were very keen, and often there was a listening look on
his face.
        Ged did not answer him. It is not always easy to answer a
mage.
        "You want to work spells," Ogion said presently, striding
along. "You've drawn too much water from that well. Wait. Manhood is
patience. Mastery is nine times patience. What is that herb by the
path?"
        "Strawflower."
        "And that?"
        "I don't know."
        "Fourfoil, they call it." Ogion had halted, the coppershod
foot of his staff near the little weed, so Ged looked closely at the
plant, and plucked a dry seedpod from it, and finally asked, since
Ogion said nothing more, "What is its use, Master?"
        "None I know of."
        Ged kept the seedpod a while as they went on, then tossed it
away.
        "When you know the fourfoil in all its seasons root and leaf
and flower, by sight and scent and seed, then you may learn its true
name, knowing its being: which is more than its use. What, after all,
is the use of you? or of myself? Is Gont Mountain useful, or the Open
Sea?" Ogion went on a halfmile or so, and said at last, "To hear, one
must be silent."        The boy frowned. He did not like to be made to
feel a fool. He kept back his resentment and impatience, and tried to
be obedient, so that Ogion would consent at last to teach him
something. For he hungered to learn, to gain power. It began to seem
to him, though, that he could have learned more walking with any
herb-gatherer or village sorcerer, and as they went round the mountain
westward into the lonely forests past Wiss he wondered more and more
what was the greatness and the magic of this great Mage Ogion. For
when it rained Ogion would not even say the spell that every
weatherworker knows, to send the storm aside. In a land where
sorcerers come thick, like Gont or the Enlades, you may see a
raincloud blundering slowly from side to side and place to place as
one spell shunts it on to the next, till at last it is buffeted out
over the sea where it can rain in peace. But Ogion let the rain fall
where it would. He found a thick fir-tree and lay down beneath it. Ged
crouched among the dripping bushes wet and sullen, and wondered what
was the good of having power if you were too wise to use it, and
wished he had gone as prentice to that old weatherworker of the Vale,
where at least he would have slept dry. He did not speak any of his
thoughts aloud. He said not a word. His master smiled, and fell asleep
in the rain.
        Along towards Sunreturn when the first heavy snows began to
fall in the heights of Gont they came to Re Albi, Ogion's home. It is
a town on the edge of the high rocks of Overfell, and its name means
Falcon's Nest. From it one can see far below the deep harbor and the
towers of the Port of Gont, and the ships that go in and out the gate
of the bay between the Armed Cliffs, and far to the west across the
sea one may make out the blue hills of Oranea, easternmost of the
Inward Isles.
        The mage's house, though large and soundly built of timber,
with hearth and chimney rather than a firepit, was like the huts of
Ten Alders village: all one room, with a goatshed built onto one side.
There was a kind of alcove in the west wall of the room, where Ged
slept. Over his pallet was a window that looked out on the sea, but
most often the shutters must be closed against the great winds that
blew all winter from the west and north. In the dark warmth of that
house Ged spent the winter, hearing the rush of rain and wind outside
or the silence of snowfall, learning to write and read the Six Hundred
Runes of Hardic. Very glad he was to learn this lore, for without it
no mere rote-learning of charms and spells will give a man true
mastery. The Hardic tongue of the Archipelago, though it has no more
magic power in it than any other tongue of men, has its roots in the
Old Speech, that language in which things are named with their true
names: and the way to the understanding of this speech starts with the
Runes that were written when the islands of the world first were
raised up from the sea.
        Still no marvels and enchantments occurred. All winter there
was nothing but the heavy pages of the Runebook turning, and the rain
and the snow falling; and Ogion would come in from roaming the icy
forests or from looking after his goats, and stamp the snow off his
boots, and sit down in silence by the fire. And the mage's long,
listening silence would fill the room, and fill Ged's mind, until
sometimes it seemed he had forgotten what words sounded like: and when
Ogion spoke at last it was as if he had, just then and for the first
time, invented speech. Yet the words he spoke were no great matters
but had to do only with simple things, bread and water and weather and
sleep.
        As the spring came on, quick and bright, Ogion often sent Ged
forth to gather herbs on the meadows above Re Albi, and told him to
take as long as he liked about it, giving him freedom to spend all day
wandering by rainfilled streams and through the woods and over wet
green fields in the sun. Ged went with delight each time, and stayed
out till night; but he did not entirely forget the herbs. He kept an
eye out for them, while he climbed and roamed and waded and explored,
and always brought some home. He came on a meadow between two streams
where the flower called white hallows grew thick, and as these
blossoms are rare and prized by healers, he came back again next day.
Someone else was there before him, a girl, whom he knew by sight as
the daughter of the old Lord of Re Albi. He would not have spoken to
her, but she came to him and greeted him pleasantly: "I know you, you
are the Sparrowhawk, our mage's adept. I wish you would tell me about
sorcery!"
        He looked down at the white flowers that brushed against her
white skirt, and at first he was shy and glum and hardly answered. But
she went on talking, in an open, careless, wilful way that little by
little set him at ease. She was a tall girl of about his own age, very
sallow, almost white-skinned; her mother, they said in the village,
was from Osskil or some such foreign land. Her hair fell long and
straight like a fall of black water. Ged thought her very ugly, but he
had a desire to please her, to win her admiration, that grew on him as
they talked. She made him tell all the story of his tricks with the
mist that had defeated the Kargish warriors, and she listened as if
she wondered and admired, but she spoke no praise. And soon she was
off on another tack: "Can you call the birds and beasts to you?" she
asked.
        "I can," said Ged.
        He knew there was a falcon's nest in the cliffs above the
meadow, and he summoned the bird by its name. It came, but it would
not light on his wrist, being put off no doubt by the girl's presence.
It screamed and struck the air with broad barred wings, and rose up on
the wind.
        "What do you call that kind of charm, that made the falcon
come?"
        "A spell of Summoning."
        "Can you call the spirits of the dead to come to you, too?"
        He thought she was mocking him with this question, because the
falcon had not fully obeyed his summons. He would not let her mock
him. "I might if I chose," he said in a calm voice.
        "Is it not very difficult, very dangerous, to summon a
spirit?"
        "Difficult, yes. Dangerous?" He shrugged.
        This time be was almost certain there was admiration in her
eyes.
        "Can you make a love-charm?"
        "That is no mastery."
        "True," says she, "any village witch can do it. Can you do
Changing spells? Can you change your own shape, as wizards do, they
say?"
        Again he was not quite sure that she did not ask the question
mockingly, and so again he replied, "I might if I chose."
        She began to beg him to transform himself into anything he
wished - a hawk, a bull, a fire, a tree. He put her off with sort
secretive words such as his master used, but he did not know how to
refuse flatly when she coaxed him; and besides he did not know whether
he himself believed his boast, or not. He left her, saying that his
master the mage expected him at home, and he did not come back to the
meadow the next day. But the day after he came again, saying to
himself that he should gather more of the flowers while they bloomed.
She was there, and together they waded barefoot in the boggy grass,
pulling the heavy white hallow-blooms. The sun of spring shone, and
she talked with him as merrily as any goatherd lass of his own
village. She asked him again about sorcery, and listened wide-eyed to
all he told her, so that he fell to boasting again. Then she asked him
if he would not work a Changing spell, and when he put her off, she
looked at him, putting back the black hair from her face, and said,
"Are you afraid to do it?"
        "No, I am not afraid."
        She smiled a little disdainfully and said, "Maybe you are too
young."
        That he would not endure. He did not say much, but he resolved
that he would prove himself to her. He told her to come again to the
meadow tomorrow, if she liked, and so took leave of her, and came back
to the house while his master was still out. He went straight to the
shelf and took down the two Lore-Books, which Ogion had never yet
opened in his presence.
        He looked for a spell of self-transformation, but being slow
to read the runes yet and understanding little of what he read, he
could not find what he sought. These books were very ancient, Ogion
having them from his own master Heleth Farseer, and Heleth from his
master the Mage of Perregal, and so back into the times of myth. Small
and strange was the writing, overwritten and interlined by many hands,
and all those hands were dust now. Yet here and there Ged understood
something of what he tried to read, and with the girl's questions and
her mockery always in his mind, he stopped on a page that bore a spell
of summoning up the spirits of the dead.
        As he read it, puzzling out the runes and symbols one by one,
a horror came over him. His eyes were fixed, and he could not lift
them till he had finished reading all the spell.
        Then raising his head he saw it was dark in the house. He had
been reading without any light, in the darkness. He could not now make
out the runes when he looked down at the book. Yet the horror grew in
him, seeming to hold him bound in his chair. He was cold. Looking over
his shoulder he saw that something was crouching beside the closed
door, a shapeless clot of shadow darker than the darkness. It seemed
to reach out towards him, and to whisper, and to call to him in a
whisper: but he could not understand the words.
        The door was flung wide. A man entered with a white light
flaming about him, a great bright figure who spoke aloud, fiercely and
suddenly. The darkness and the whispering ceased and were dispelled.
        The horror went out of Ged, but still he was mortally afraid,
for it was Ogion the Mage who stood there in the doorway with a
brightness all about him, and the oaken staff in his hand burned with
a white radiance.
        Saying no word the mage came past Ged, and lighted the lamp,
and put the books away on their shelf. Then be turned to the boy and
said, "You will never work that spell but in peril of your power and
your life. Was it for that spell you opened the books?"
        "No, Master," the boy murmured, and shamefully he told Ogion
what he had sought, and why.
        "You do not remember what I told you, that that girl's mother,
the Lord's wife, is an enchantress?"
        Indeed Ogion had once said this, but Ged had not paid much
attention, though he knew by now that Ogion never told him anything
that he had not good reason to tell him.
        "The girl herself is half a witch already. It may be the
mother who sent the girl to talk to you. It may be she who opened the
book to the page you read. The powers she serves are not the powers I
serve: I do not know her will, but I know she does not will me well.
Ged, listen to me now. Have you never thought how danger must surround
power as shadow does light? This sorcery is not a game we play for
pleasure or for praise. Think of this: that every word, every act of
our Art is said and is done either for good, or for evil. Before you
speak or do you must know the price that is to pay!"
        Driven by his shame Ged cried, "How am I to know these things,
when you teach me nothing? Since I lived with you I have done nothing,
seen nothing-"
        "Now you have seen something," said the mage. "By the door, in
the darkness, when I came in."
        Ged was silent.
        Ogion knelt down and built the fire on the hearth and lit it,
for the house was cold. Then still kneeling he said in his quiet
voice, "Ged, my young falcon, you are not bound to me or to my
service. You did not come to me, but I to you. You are very young to
make this choice, but I cannot make it for you. If you wish, I will
send you to Roke Island, where all high arts are taught. Any craft you
undertake to learn you will learn, for your power is great. Greater
even than your pride, I hope. I would keep you here with me, for what
I have is what you lack, but I will not keep you against your will.
Now choose between Re Albi and Roke."
        Ged stood dumb, his heart bewildered. He had come to love this
man Ogion who had healed him with a touch, and who had no anger: he
loved him, and had not known it until now. He looked at the oaken
staff leaning in the chimneycorner, remembering the radiance of it
that had burned out evil from the dark, and he yearned to stay with
Ogion, to go wandering through the forests with him, long and far,
learning how to be silent. Yet other cravings were in him that would
not be stilled, the wish for glory, the will to act. Ogion's seemed a
long road towards mastery, a slow bypath to follow, when he might go
sailing before the seawinds straight to the Inmost Sea, to the Isle of
the Wise, where the air was bright with enchantments and the Archmage
walked amidst wonders.
        "Master," he said, "I will go to Roke."
        So a few days later on a sunny morning of spring Ogion strode
beside him down the steep road from the Overfell, fifteen miles to the
Great Port of Gont. There at the landgate between carven dragons the
guards of the City of Gont, seeing the mage, knelt with bared swords
and welcomed him. They knew him and did him honor by the Prince's
order and their own will, for ten years ago Ogion had saved the city
from earthquake that would have shaken the towers of the rich down to
the ground and closed the channel of the Armed Cliffs with avalanche.
He had spoken to the Mountain of Gont, calming it, and had stilled the
trembling precipices of the Overfell as one soothes a frightened
beast. Ged had heard some talk of this, and now, wondering to see the
armed guardsmen kneel to his quiet master, he remembered it. He
glanced up almost in fear at this man who had stopped an earthquake;
but Ogion's face was quiet as always.
        They went down to the quays, where the Harbormaster came
hastening to welcome Ogion and ask what service he might do. The mage
told him, and at once he named a ship bound for the Inmost Sea aboard
which Ged might go as passenger. "Or they will take him as
windbringer," he said, "if he has the craft. They have no
weatherworker aboard."
        "He has some skill with mist and fog, but none with seawinds,"
the mage said, putting his hand lightly on Ged's shoulder. "Do not try
any tricks with the sea and the winds of the sea, Sparrowhawk; you are
a landsman still. Harbormaster, what is the ship's name?"
        "Shadow, from the Andrades, bound to Hort Town with furs and
ivories. A good ship, Master Ogion."
        The mage's face darkened at the name of the ship, but he said,
"So be it. Give this writing to the Warden of the School on Roke,
Sparrowhawk. Go with a fair wind. Farewelll"
        That was all his parting. He turned away, and went striding up
the street away from the quays. Ged stood forlorn and watched his
master go.
        "Come along, lad," said the Harbormaster, and took him down
the waterfront to the pier where Shadow was making ready to sail.
        It might seem strange that on an island fifty miles wide, in a
village under cliffs that stare out forever on the sea, a child may
grow to manhood never having stepped in a boat or dipped his finger in
salt water, but so it is. Farmer, goatherd, cattleherd, hunter or
artisan, the landsman looks at the ocean as at a salt unsteady realm
that has nothing to do with him at all. The village two days' walk
from his village is a foreign land, and the island a day's sail from
his island is a mere rumor, misty hills seen across the water, not
solid ground like that he walks on.
        So to Ged who had never been down from the heights of the
mountain, the Port of Gont was an awesome and marvellous place, the
great houses and towers of cut stone and waterfront of piers and docks
and basins and moorages, the seaport where half a hundred boats and
galleys rocked at quayside or lay hauled up and overturned for repairs
or stood out at anchor in the roadstead with furled sails and closed
oarports, the sailors shouting in strange dialects and the
longshoremen running heavyladen amongst barrels and boxes and coils of
rope and stacks of oars, the bearded merchants in furred robes
conversing quietly as they picked their way along the slimy stones
above the water, the fishermen unloading their catch, coopers pounding
and shipmakers hammering and clamsellers singing and shipmasters
bellowing, and beyond all the silent, shining bay. With eyes and ears
and mind bewildered he followed the Harbormaster to the broad dock
where Shadow was tied up, and the harbormaster brought him to the
master of the ship.
        With few words spoken the ship's master agreed to take Ged as
passenger to Roke, since it was a mage that asked it; and the
Harbormaster left the boy with him. The master of the Shadow was a big
man, and fat, in a red cloak trimmed with pellawi-fur such as
Andradean merchants wear. He never looked at Ged but asked him in a
mighty voice, "Can you work weather, boy?"
        "I can. "
        "Can you bring the wind?'
        He had to say he could not, and with that the master told him
to find a place out of the way and stay in it.
        The oarsmen were coming aboard now, for the ship was to go out
into the roadstead before night fell, and sail with the ebb-tide near
dawn. There was no place out of the way, but Ged climbed up as well as
he could onto the bundled, lashed, and hide-covered cargo in the stern
of the ship, and clinging there watched all that passed. The oarsmen
came leaping aboard, sturdy men with great arms, while longshoremen
rolled water barrels thundering out the dock and stowed them under the
rowers' benches. The wellbuilt ship rode low with her burden, yet
danced a little on the lapping shore-waves, ready to be gone. Then the
steersman took his place at the right of the sternpost, looking
forward to the ship's master, who stood on a plank let in at the
jointure of the keel with the stem, which was carved as the Old
Serpent of Andrad. The master roared his orders hugely, and Shadow was
untied and towed clear of the docks by two laboring rowboats. Then the
master's roar was "Open ports!" and the great oars shot rattling out,
fifteen to a side. The rowers bent their strong backs while a lad up
beside the master beat the stroke on a drum. Easy as a gull oared by
her wings the ship went now, and the noise and hurly-burly of the City
fell away suddenly behind. They came out in the silence of the waters
of the bay, and over them rose the white peak of the Mountain, seeming
to hang above the sea. In a shallow creek in the lee of the southern
Armed Cliff the anchor was thrown over, and there they rode the night.
        Of the seventy crewmen of the ship some were like Ged very
young in years, though all had made their passage into manhood. These
lads called him over to share food and drink with them, and were
friendly though rough and full of jokes and jibes. They called him
Goatherd, of course, because he was Gontish, but they did not go
further than that. He was as tall and strong as the fifteen-year-olds,
and quick to return either a good word or a jeer; so he made his way
among them and even that first night began to live as one of them and
learn their work. This suited the ship's officers, for there was no
room aboard for idle passengers.
        There was little enough room for the crew, and no comfort at
all, in an undecked galley crowded with men and gear and cargo; but
what was comfort to Ged? He lay that night among corded rolls of pelts
from the northern isles and watched the stars of spring above the
harbor waters and the little yellow lights of the City astern, and he
slept and waked again full of delight. Before dawn the tide turned.
They raised anchor and rowed softly out between the Armed Cliffs. As
sunrise reddened the Mountain of Gont behind them they raised the high
sail and ran southwestward over the Gontish Sea.
        Between Barnisk and Torheven they sailed with a light wind,
and on the second day came in sight of Havnor, the Great Island, heart
and hearth of the Archipelago. For three days they were in sight of
the green hills of Havnor as they worked along its eastern coast, but
they did not come to shore. Not for many years did Ged set foot on
that land or see the white towers of Havnor Great Port at the center
of the world.
        They lay over one night at Kembermouth, the northern port of
Way Island, and the next at a little town on the entrance of Felkway
Bay, and the next day passed the northern cape of O and entered the
Ebavnor Straits. There they dropped sail and rowed, always with land
on either side and always within hail of other ships, great and small,
merchants and traders, some bound in from the Outer Reaches with
strange cargo after a voyage of years and others that hopped like
sparrows from isle to isle of the Inmost Sea. Turning southward out of
the crowded Straits they left Havnor astern and sailed between the two
fair islands Ark and Ilien, towered and terraced with cities, and then
through rain and rising wind began to beat their way across the Inmost
Sea to Roke Island.
        In the night as the wind freshened to a gale they took down
both sail and mast, and the next day, all day, they rowed. The long
ship lay steady on the waves and went gallantly, but the steersman at
the long steering-sweep in the stern looked into the rain that beat
the sea and saw nothing but the rain. They went southwest by the
pointing of the magnet, knowing how they went, but not through what
waters. Ged heard men speak of the shoal waters north of Roke, and of
the Borilous Rocks to the east; others argued that they might be far
out of course by now, in the empty waters south of Kamery. Still the
wind grew stronger, tearing the edges of the great waves into flying
tatters of foam, and still they rowed southwest with the wind behind
them. The stints at the oars were shortened, for the labor was very
hard; the younger lads were set two to an oar, and Ged took his turn
with the others as he had since they left Gont. When they did not row
they bailed, for the seas broke heavy on the ship. So they labored
among the waves that ran like smoking mountains under the wind, while
the rain beat hard and cold on their backs, and the drum thumped
through the noise of the storm like a heart thumping.
        A man came to take Ged's place at the oar, sending him to the
ship's master in the bow. Rainwater dripped from the hem of the
master's cloak, but he stood stout as a winebarrel on his bit of
decking and looking down at Ged he asked, "Can you abate this wind,
lad?"
        "No, sir."
        "Have you craft with iron?"
        He meant, could Ged make the compass-needle point their way to
Roke, making the magnet follow not its north but their need. That
skill is a secret of the Seamasters, and again Ged must say no.
        "Well then," the master bellowed through the wind and rain,
"you must find some ship to take you back to Roke from Hort Town. Roke
must be west of us now, and only wizardry could bring us there through
this sea. We must keep south."
        Ged did not like this, for he had heard the sailors talk of
Hort Town, how it was a lawless place, full of evil traffic, where men
were often taken and sold into slavery in the South Reach. Returning
to his labor at the oar he pulled away with his companion, a sturdy
Andradean lad, and heard the drum beat the stroke and saw the lantern
hung on the stern bob and flicker as the wind plucked it about, a
tormented fleck of light in the rain-lashed dusk. He kept looking to
westward, as often as he could in the heavy rhythm of pulling the oar.
And as the ship rose on a high swell he saw for a moment over the dark
smoking water a light between clouds, as it might be the last gleam of
sunset: but this was a clear light, not red.
        His oar-mate had not seen it, but he called it out. The
steersman watched for it on each rise of the great waves, and saw it
as Ged saw it again, but shouted back that it was only the setting
sun. Then Ged called to one of the lads that was bailing to take his
place on the bench a minute, and made his way forward again along the
encumbered aisle between the benches, and catching hold of the carved
prow to keep from being pitched overboard he shouted up to the master,
"Sir! that light to the west is Roke Island!"
        "I saw no light," the master roared, but even as he spoke Ged
flung out his arm pointing, and all saw the light gleam clear in the
west over the heaving scud and tumult of the sea.
        Not for his passenger's sake, but to save his ship from the
peril of the storm, the master shouted at once to the steersman to
head westward toward the light. But he said to Ged, "Boy, you speak
like a Seamaster, but I tell you if you lead us wrong in this weather
I will throw you over to swim to Roke!"
        Now instead of running before the storm they must row across
the wind's way, and it was hard: waves striking the ship abeam pushed
her always south of their new course, and rolled her, and filled her
with water so that bailing must be ceaseless, and the oarsmen must
watch lest the ship rolling should lift their oars out of water as
they pulled and so pitch them down among the benches. It was nearly
dark under the stormclouds, but now and again they made out the light
to the west, enough to set course by, and so struggled on. At last the
wind dropped a little, and the light grew broad before them. They
rowed on, and they came as it were through a curtain, between one
oarstroke and the next running out of the storm into a clear air,
where the light of after-sunset glowed in the sky and on the sea. Over
the foam-crested waves they saw not far off a high, round, green hill,
and beneath it a town built on a small bay where boats lay at anchor,
all in peace.
        The steersman leaning on his long sweep turned his bead and
called, "Sir! is this true land or a witchery?"
        "Keep her as she goes, you witless woodenhead! Row, you
spineless slave-sons! That's Thwil Bay and the Knoll of Roke, as any
fool could see! Row!"
        So to the beat of the drum they rowed wearily into the bay.
There it was still, so that they could hear the voices of people up in
the town, and a bell ringing, and only far off the hiss and roaring of
the storm. Clouds hung dark to north and east and south a mile off all
about the island. But over Roke stars were coming out one by one in a
clear and quiet sky.


---------
3 The School for Wizards
---------

        Ged slept that night aboard Shadow, and early in the morning
parted with those first sea-comrades of his, they shouting good wishes
cheerily after him as he went up the docks. The town of Thwil is not
large, its high houses huddling close over a few steep narrow streets.
To Ged, however, it seemed a city, and not knowing where to go he
asked the first townsman of Thwil he met where he would find the
Warder of the School on Roke. The man looked at him sidelong a while
and said, "The wise don't need to ask, the fool asks in vain," and so
went on along the street. Ged went uphill till he came out into a
square, rimmed on three sides by the houses with their sharp slate
roofs and on the fourth side by the wall of a great building whose few
small windows were higher than the chimneytops of the houses: a fort
or castle it seemed, built of mighty grey blocks of stone. In the
square beneath it market-booths were set up and there was some coming
and going of people. Ged asked his question of an old woman with a
basket of mussels, and she replied, "You cannot always find the Warder
where he is, but sometimes you find him where he is not," and went on
crying her mussels to sell.
        In the great building, near one corner, there was a mean
little door of wood. Ged went to this and knocked loud. To the old man
who opened the door he said, "I bear a letter from the Mage Ogion of
Gont to the Warder of the School on this island. I want to find the
Warder, but I will not hear more riddles and scoffing!"
        "This is the School," the old man said mildly. "I am the
doorkeeper. Enter if you can."
        Ged stepped forward. It seemed to him that he had passed
through the doorway: yet he stood outside on the pavement where he had
stood before.
        Once more he stepped forward, and once more he remained
standing outside the door. The doorkeeper, inside, watched him with
mild eyes.
        Ged was not so much baffled as angry, for this seemed like a
further mockery to him. With voice and hand he made the Opening spell
which his aunt had taught him long ago; it was the prize among all her
stock of spells, and he wove it well now. But it was only a witch's
charm, and the power that held this doorway was not moved at all.
        When that failed Ged stood a long while there on the pavement.
At last he looked at the old man who waited inside. "I cannot enter,"
he said unwillingly, "unless you help me."
        The doorkeeper answered, "Say your name."
        Then again Ged stood still a while; for a man never speaks his
own name aloud, until more than his life's safety is at stake.
        "I am Ged," he said aloud. Stepping forward then he entered
the open doorway. Yet it seemed to him that though the light was
behind him, a shadow followed him in at his heels.
        He saw also as he turned that the doorway through which he had
come was not plain wood as he had thought, but ivory without joint or
seam: it was cut, as he knew later, from a tooth of the Great Dragon.
The door that the old man closed behind him was of polished horn,
through which the daylight shone dimly, and on its inner face was
carved the Thousand-Leaved Tree.
        "Welcome to this house, lad," the doorkeeper said, and without
saying more led him through halls and corridors to an open court far
inside the walls of the building. The court was partly paved with
stone, but was roofless, and on a grassplot a fountain played under
young trees in the sunlight. There Ged waited alone some while. He
stood still, and his heart beat hard, for it seemed to him that he
felt presences and powers at work unseen about him here, and he knew
that this place was built not only of stone but of magic stronger than
stone. He stood in the innermost room of the House of the Wise, and it
was open to the sky. Then suddenly he was aware of a man clothed in
white who watched him through the falling water of the fountain.
        As their eyes met, a bird sang aloud in the branches of the
tree. In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the
language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the
shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that
stirred the leaves: it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken
by the sunlight.
        Then that moment passed, and he and the world were as before,
or almost as before. He went forward to kneel before the Archmage,
holding out to him the letter written by Ogion.
        The Archmage Nemmerle, Warder of Roke, was an old man, older
it was said than any man then living. His voice quavered like the
bird's voice when he spoke, welcoming Ged kindly. His hair and beard
and robe were white, and he seemed as if all darkness and heaviness
had been leached out of him by the slow usage of the years, leaving
him white and worn as driftwood that has been a century adrift. "My
eyes are old, I cannot read what your master writes," he said in his
quavering voice. "Read me the letter, lad."
        So Ged made out and read aloud the writing, which was in
Hardic runes, and said no more than this: Lord Nemmerle! I send you
one who will be greatest of the wizards of Gont, if the wind blow
true. This was signed, not with Ogion's true name which Ged had never
yet learned, but with Ogion's rune, the Closed Mouth.
        "He who holds the earthquake on a leash has sent you, for
which be doubly welcome. Young Ogion was dear to me, when he came here
from Gont. Now tell me of the seas and portents of your voyage, lad."
        "A fair passage, Lord, but for the storm yesterday."
        "What ship brought you here?"
        "Shadow, trading from the Andrades."
        "Whose will sent you here?"
        "My own."
        The Archmage looked at Ged and looked away, and began to speak
in a tongue that Ged did not understand, mumbling as will an old old
man whose wits go wandering among the years and islands. Yet in among
his mumbling there were words of what the bird had sung and what the
water had said falling. He was not laying a spell and yet there was a
power in his voice that moved Ged's mind so that the boy was
bewildered, and for an instant seemed to behold himself standing in a
strange vast desert place alone among shadows. Yet all along he was in
the sunlit court, hearing the fountain fall.
        A great black bird, a raven of Osskil, came walking over the
stone terrace and the grass. It came to the hem of the Archmage's robe
and stood there all black with its dagger beak and eyes like pebbles,
staring sidelong at Ged. It pecked three times on the white staff
Nemmerle leaned on, and the old wizard ceased his muttering, and
smiled. "Run and play, lad," he said at last as to a little child. Ged
knelt again on one knee to him. When he rose, the Archmage was gone.
Only the raven stood eyeing him, its beak outstretched as if to peck
the vanished staff.
        It spoke, in what Ged guessed might be the speech of Osskil.
"Terrenon ussbuk!" it said croaking. "Terrenon ussbuk orrek!" And it
strutted off as it had come.
        Ged turned to leave the courtyard, wondering where he should
go. Under the archway he was met by a tall youth who greeted him very
courteously, bowing his bead. "I am called Jasper, Enwit's son of the
Domain of Eolg on Havnor Isle. I am at your service today, to show you
about the Great House and answer your questions as I can. How shall I
call you, Sir?"
        Now it seemed to Ged, a mountain villager who had never been
among the sons of rich merchants and noblemen, that this fellow was
scoffing at him with his "service" and his "Sir" and his bowing and
scraping. He answered shortly, "Sparrowhawk, they call me."
        The other waited a moment as if expecting some more mannerly
response, and getting none straightened up and turned a little aside.
He was two or three years older than Ged, very tall, and he moved and
carried himself with stiff grace, posing (Ged thought) like a dancer.
He wore a grey cloak with hood thrown back. The first place he took
Ged was the wardrobe room, where as a student of the school Ged might
find himself another such cloak that fitted him, and any other
clothing he might need. He put on the darkgrey cloak he had chosen,
and Jasper said, "Now you are one of us."
        Jasper had a way of smiling faintly as he spoke which made Ged
look for a jeer hidden in his polite words. "Do clothes make the
mage?" he answered, sullen.
        "No," said the older boy. "Though I have heard that manners
make the man. -Where now?"
        "Where you will. I do not know the house."
        Jasper took him down the corridors of the Great House showing
him the open courts and the roofed halls, the Room of Shelves where
the books of lore and rune-tomes were kept, the great Hearth Hall
where all the school gathered on festival days, and upstairs, in the
towers and under the roofs, the small cells where the students and
Masters slept. Ged's was in the South Tower, with a window looking
down over the steep roofs of Thwil town to the sea. Like the other
sleeping-cells it had no furnishing but a strawfilled mattress in the
corner. "We live very plain here," said Jasper. "But I expect you
won't mind that."
        "I'm used to it." Presently, trying to show himself an equal
of this polite disdainful youth, he added, "I suppose you weren't,
when you first came."
        Jasper looked at him, and his look said without words, "What
could you possibly know about what I, son of the Lord of the Domain of
Eolg on the Isle of Havnor, am or am not used to?" What Jasper said
aloud was simply, "Come on this way."
        A gong had been rung while they were upstairs, and they came
down to eat the noon meal at the Long Table of the refectory, along
with a hundred or more boys and young men. Each waited on himself,
joking with the cooks through the window-hatches of the kitchen that
opened into the refectory, loading his plate from great bowls of food
that steamed on the sills, sitting where be pleased at the Long Table.
"They say," Jasper told Ged, "that no matter how many sit at this
table, there is always room." Certainly there was room both for many
noisy groups of boys talking and eating mightily, and for older
fellows, their grey cloaks clasped with silver at the neck, who sat
more quietly by pairs or alone, with grave, pondering faces, as if
they had much to think about. Jasper took Ged to sit with a heavyset
fellow called Vetch, who said nothing much but shovelled in his food
with a will. He had the accent of the East Reach, and was very dark of
skin, not red-brown like Ged and Jasper and most folk of the

Archipelago, but black-brown. He was plain, and his manners were not
polished. He grumbled about the dinner when he had finished it, but
then turning to Ged said, "At least it's not illusion, like so much
around here; it sticks to your ribs." Ged did not know what he meant,
but he felt a certain liking for him, and was glad when after the meal
he stayed with them.
        They went down into the town, that Ged might learn his way
about it. Few and short as were the streets of Thwil, they turned and
twisted curiously among the high-roofed houses, and the way was easy
to lose. It was a strange town, and strange also its people, fishermen
and workmen and artisans like any others, but so used to the sorcery
that is ever at play on the Isle of the Wise that they seemed half
sorcerers themselves. They talked (as Ged had learned) in riddles, and
not one of them would blink to see a boy turn into a fish or a house
fly up into the air, but knowing it for a schoolboy prank would go on
cobbling shoes or cutting up mutton, unconcerned.
        Coming up past the Back Door and around through the gardens of
the Great House, the three boys crossed the clear-running Thwilburn on
a wooden bridge and went on northward among woods and pastures. The
path climbed and wound. They passed oakgroves where shadows lay thick
for all the brightness of the sun. There was one grove not far away to
the left that Ged could never quite see plainly. The path never
reached it, though it always seemed to be about to. He could not even
make out what kind of trees they were. Vetch, seeing him gazing, said
softly, "That is the Immanent Grove. We can't come there, yet... "
        In the hot sunlit pastures yellow flowers bloomed.
"Sparkweed," .said Jasper. "They grow where the wind dropped the ashes
of burning Ilien, when Erreth-Akbe defended the Inward Isles from the
Firelord." He blew on a withered flowerhead, and the seeds shaken
loose went up on the wind like sparks of fire in the sun.
        The path led them up and around the base of a great green
hill, round and treeless, the hill that Ged had seen from the ship as
they entered the charmed waters of Roke Island. On the hillside Jasper
halted. "At home in Havnor I heard much about Gontish wizardry, and
always in praise, so that I've wanted for a long time to see the
manner of it. Here now we have a Gontishman; and we stand on the
slopes of Roke Knoll, whose roots go down to the center of the earth.
All spells are strong here. Play us a trick, Sparrowhawk. Show us your
style."
        Ged, confused and taken aback, said nothing.
        "Later on, Jasper," Vetch said in his plain way. "Let him be a
while."
        "He has either skill or power, or the doorkeeper wouldn't have
let him in. Why shouldn't he show it, now as well as later? Right,
Sparrowhawk?"
        "I have both skill and power," Ged said. "Show me what kind of
thing you're talking about."
        "Illusions, of course - tricks, games of seeming. Like this!"
        Pointing his finger Jasper spoke a few strange words, and
where he pointed on the hillside among the green grasses a little
thread of water trickled, and grew, and now a spring gushed out and
the water went running down the hill. Ged put his hand in the stream
and it felt wet, drank of it and it was cool. Yet for all that it
would quench no thirst, being but illusion. Jasper with another word
stopped the water, and the grasses waved dry in the sunlight. "Now
you, Vetch," he said with his cool smile.
        Vetch scratched his head and looked glum, but he took up a bit
of earth in his hand and began to sing tunelessly over it, molding it
with his dark fingers and shaping it, pressing it, stroking it: and
suddenly it was a small creature like a bumblebee or furry fly, that
flew humming off over Roke Knoll, and vanished.
        Ged stood staring, crestfallen. What did he know but mere
village witchery, spells to call goats, cure warts, move loads or mend
pots?
        "I do no such tricks as these," he said. That was enough for
Vetch, who was for going on; but Jasper said, "Why don't you?"
        "Sorcery is not a game. We Gontishmen do not play it for
pleasure or praise," Ged answered haughtily.
        "What do you play it for," Jasper inquired, "-money?"
        "No!-" But he could not think of anything more to say that
would hide his ignorance and save his pride. Jasper laughed, not
ill-humoredly, and went on, leading them on around Roke Knoll. And Ged
followed, sullen and sorehearted, knowing he had behaved like a fool,
and blaming Jasper for it.
        That night as he lay wrapped in his cloak on the mattress in
his cold unlit cell of stone, in the utter silence of the Great House
of Roke, the strangeness of the place and the thought of all the
spells and sorceries that had been worked there began to come over him
heavily. Darkness surrounded him, dread filled him. He wished he were
anywhere else but Roke. But Vetch came to the door, a little bluish
ball of werelight nodding over his head to light the way, and asked if
be could come in and talk a while. He asked Ged about Gont, and then
spoke fondly of his own home isles of the East Reach, telling how the
smoke of village hearthfires is blown across that quiet sea at evening
between the small islands with funny names: Korp, Kopp, and Holp,
Venway and Vemish, Ifiish, Koppish, and Sneg. When he sketched the
shapes of those lands on the stones of the floor with his finger to
show Ged how they lay, the lines he drew shone dim as if drawn with a
stick of silver for a while before they faded. Vetch had been three
years at the School, and soon would be made Sorcerer; he thought no
more of performing the lesser arts of magic than a bird thinks of
flying. Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art
of kindness. That night, and always from then on, he offered and gave
Ged friendship, a sure and open friendship which Ged could not help
but return.
        Yet Vetch was also friendly to Jasper, who had made Ged into a
fool that first day on Roke Knoll. Ged would not forget this, nor, it
seemed, would Jasper, who always spoke to him with a polite voice and
a mocking smile. Ged's pride would not be slighted or condescended to.
He swore to prove to Jasper, and to all the rest of them among whom
Jasper was something of a leader, how great his power really was -
some day. For none of them, for all their clever tricks, had saved a
village by wizardry. Of none of them had Ogion written that he would
be the greatest wizard of Gont.
        So bolstering up his pride, he set all his strong will on the
work they gave him, the lessons and crafts and histories and skills
taught by the grey-cloaked Masters of Roke, who were called the Nine.
        Part of each day he studied with the Master Chanter, learning
the Deeds of heroes and the Lays of wisdom, beginning with the oldest
of all songs, the Creation of Ea. Then with a dozen other lads he
would practice with the Master Windkey at arts of wind and weather.
Whole bright days of spring and early summer they spent out in Roke
Bay in light catboats, practising steering by word, and stilling
waves, and speaking to the world's wind, and raising up the magewind.
These are very intricate skills, and frequently Ged's head got whacked
by the swinging boom as the boat jibed under a wind suddenly blowing
backwards, or his boat and another collided though they had the whole
bay to navigate in, or all three boys in his boat went swimming
unexpectedly as the boat was swamped by a huge, unintended wave. There
were quieter expeditions ashore, other days, with the Master Herbal
who taught the ways and properties of things that grow; and the Master
Hand taught sleight and jugglery and the lesser arts of Changing.
        At all these studies Ged was apt, and within a month was
bettering lads who had been a year at Roke before him. Especially the
tricks of illusion came to him so easily that it seemed he had been
born knowing them and needed only to be reminded. The Master Hand was
a gentle and lighthearted old man, who had endless delight in the wit
and beauty of the crafts he taught; Ged soon felt no awe of him, but
asked him for this spell and that spell, and always the Master smiled
and showed him what he wanted. But one day, having it in mind to put
Jasper to shame at last, Ged said to the Master Hand in the Court of
Seeming, "Sir, all these charms are much the same; knowing one, you
know them all. And as soon as the spell-weaving ceases, the illusion
vanishes. Now if I make a pebble into a diamond-" and he did so with a
word and a flick of his wrist "what must I do to make that diamond
remain diamond? How is the changing-spell locked, and made to last?"
        The Master Hand looked at the jewel that glittered on Ged's
palm, bright as the prize of a dragon's hoard. The old Master murmured
one word, "Tolk," and there lay the pebble, no jewel but a rough grey
bit of rock. The Master took it and held it out on his own hand. "This
is a rock; tolk in the True Speech," he said, looking mildly up at Ged
now. "A bit of the stone of which Roke Isle is made, a little bit of
the dry land on which men live. It is itself. It is part of the world.
By the Illusion-Change you can make it look like a diamond -or a
flower or a fly or an eye or a flame-" The rock flickered from shape
to shape as he named them, and returned to rock. "But that is mere
seeming. Illusion fools the beholder's senses; it makes him see and
hear and feel that the thing is changed. But it does not change the
thing. To change this rock into a jewel, you must change its true
name. And to do that, my son, even to so small a scrap of the world,
is to change the world. It can be done. Indeed it can be done. It is
the art of the Master Changer, and you will learn it, when you are
ready to learn it. But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one
grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that
act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of
Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is
dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge,
and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow..."
        He looked down at the pebble again. "A rock is a good thing,
too, you know," he said, speaking less gravely. "If the Isles of
Eartbsea were all made of diamond, we'd lead a hard life here. Enjoy
illusions, lad, and let the rocks be rocks." He smiled, but Ged left
dissatisfied. Press a mage for his secrets and he would always talk,
like Ogion, about balance, and danger, and the dark. But surely a
wizard, one who had gone past these childish tricks of illusion to the
true arts of Summoning and Change, was powerful enough to do what he
pleased, and balance the world as seemed best to him, and drive back
darkness with his own light.
        In the corridor he met Jasper, who, since Ged's
accomplishments began to be praised about the School, spoke to him in
a way that seemed more friendly, but was more scoffing. "You look
gloomy, Sparrowhawk," he said now, "did your juggling-charms go
wrong?"
        Seeking as always to put himself on equal footing with Jasper,
Ged answered the question ignoring its ironic tone. "I'm sick of
juggling," he said, "sick of these illusion-tricks, fit only to amuse
idle lords in their castles and Domains. The only true magic they've
taught me yet on Roke is making werelight, and some weatherworking.
The rest is mere foolery."
        "Even foolery is dangerous," said Jasper, "in the hands of a
fool."
        At that Ged turned as if he had been slapped, and took a step
towards Jasper; but the older boy smiled as if he had not intended any
insult, nodded his head in his stiff, graceful way, and went on.
        Standing there with rage in his heart, looking after Jasper,
Ged swore to himself to outdo his rival, and not in some mere
illusion-match but in a test of power. He would prove himself, and
humiliate Jasper. He would not let the fellow stand there looking down
at him, graceful, disdainful, hateful.
        Ged did not stop to think why Jasper might hate him. He only
knew why he hated Jasper. The other prentices had soon learned they
could seldom match themselves against Ged either in sport or in
earnest, and they said of him, some in praise and some in spite, "He's
a wizard born, he'll never let you beat him." Jasper alone neither
praised him nor avoided him, but simply looked down at him, smiling
slightly. And therefore Jasper stood alone as his rival, who must be
put to shame.
        He did not see, or would not see, that in this rivalry, which
he clung to and fostered as part of his own pride, there was anything
of the danger, the darkness, of which the Master Hand had mildly
warned him.

        When he was not moved by pure rage, he knew very well that he
was as yet no match for Jasper, or any of the older boys, and so he
kept at his work and went on as usual. At the end of summer the work
was slackened somewhat, so there was more time for sport: spell-boat
races down in the harbor, feats of illusion in the courts of the Great
House, and in the long evenings, in the groves, wild games of
hide-and-seek where hiders and seeker were both invisible and only
voices moved laughing and calling among the trees, following and
dodging the quick, faint werelights. Then as autumn came they set to
their tasks afresh, practising new magic. So Ged's first months at
Roke went by fast, full of passions and wonders.
        In winter it was different. He was sent with seven other boys
across Roke Island to the farthest northmost cape, where stands the
Isolate Tower. There by himself lived the Master Namer, who was called
by a name that had no meaning in any language, Kurremkarmerruk. No
farm or dwelling lay within miles of the Tower. Grim it stood above
the northern cliffs, grey were the clouds over the seas of winter,
endless the lists and ranks and rounds of names that the Namer's eight
pupils must learn. Amongst them in the Tower's high room
Kurremkarmerruk sat on a high seat, writing down lists of names that
must be learned before the ink faded at midnight leaving the parchment
blank again. It was cold and half-dark and always silent there except
for the scratching of the Master's pen and the sighing, maybe, of a
student who must learn before midnight the name of every cape, point,
bay, sound, inlet, channel, harbor, shallows, reef and rock of the
shores of Lossow, a little islet of the Pelnish Sea. If the student
complained the Master might say nothing, but lengthen the list; or he
might say, "He who would be Seamaster must know the true name of every
drop of water in the sea."
        Ged sighed sometimes, but he did not complain. He saw that in
this dusty and fathomless matter of learning the true name of every
place, thing, and being, the power he wanted lay like a jewel at the
bottom of a dry well. For magic consists in this, the true naming of a
thing. So Kurremkarmerruk had said to them, once, their first night in
the Tower; he never repeated it, but Ged did not forget his words.
"Many a mage of great power," he had said, "has spent his whole life
to find out the name of one single thing - one single lost or hidden
name. And still the lists are not finished. Nor will they be, till
world's end. Listen, and you will see why. In the world under the sun,
and in the other world that has no sun, there is much that has nothing
to do with men and men's speech, and there are powers beyond our
power. But magic, true magic, is worked only by those beings who speak
the Hardic tongue of Earthsea, or the Old Speech from which it grew.
        "That is the language dragons speak, and the language Segoy
spoke who made the islands of the world, and the language of our lays
and songs, spells, enchantments, and invocations. Its words lie hidden
and changed among our Hardic words. We call the foam on waves sukien:
that word is made from two words of the Old Speech, suk, feather, and
inien, the sea. Feather of the sea, is foam. But you cannot charm the
foam calling it sukien; you must use its own true name in the Old
Speech, which is essa. Any witch knows a few of these words in the Old
Speech, and a mage knows many. But there are many more, and some have
been lost over the ages, and some have been hidden, and some are known
only to dragons and to the Old Powers of Earth, and some are known to
no living creature; and no man could learn them all. For there is no
end to that language.
        "Here is the reason. The sea's name is inien, well and good.
But what we call the Inmost Sea has its own name also in the Old
Speech. Since no thing can have two true names, inien can mean only
`all the sea except the Inmost Sea.' And of course it does not mean
even that, for there are seas and bays and straits beyond counting
that bear names of their own. So if some Mage-Seamaster were mad
enough to try to lay a spell of storm or calm over all the ocean, his
spell must say not only that word inien, but the name of every stretch
and bit and part of the sea through all the Archipelago and all the
Outer Reaches and beyond to where names cease. Thus, that which gives
us the power to work magic, sets the limits of that power. A mage can
control only what is near him, what he can name exactly and wholly.
And this is well. If it were not so, the wickedness of the powerful or
the folly of the wise would long ago have sought to change what cannot
be changed, and Equilibrium would fail. The unbalanced sea would
overwhelm the islands where we perilously dwell, and in the old
silence all voices and all names would be lost."
        Ged thought long on these words, and they went deep in his
understanding. Yet the majesty of the task could not make the work of
that long year in the Tower less hard and dry; and at the end of the
year Kurremkarmerruk said to him, "You have made a good beginning."
But no more. Wizards speak truth, and it was true that all the mastery
of Names that Ged had toiled to win that year was the mere start of
what he must go on learning all his life. He was let go from the
Isolate Tower sooner than those who had come with him, for he had
learned quicker; but that was all the praise he got.
        He walked south across the island alone in the early winter,
along townless empty roads. As night came on it rained. He said no
charm to keep the rain off him, for the weather of Roke was in the
hands of the Master Windkey and might not be tampered with. He took
shelter under a great pendick-tree, and lying there wrapped in his
cloak he thought of his old master Ogion, who might still be on his
autumn wanderings over the heights of Gont, sleeping out with leafless
branches for a roof and falling rain for housewalls. That made Ged
smile, for he found the thought of Ogion always a comfort to him. He
fell asleep with a peaceful heart, there in the cold darkness full of
the whisper of water. At dawn waking he lifted his head; the rain had
ceased; he saw, sheltered in the folds of his cloak, a little animal
curled up asleep which had crept there for warmth. He wondered, seeing
it, for it was a rare strange beast, an otak.
        These creatures are found only on four southern isles of the
Archipelago, Roke, Ensmer, Pody and Wathort. They are small and sleek,
with broad faces, and fur dark brown or brindle, and great bright
eyes. Their teeth are cruel and their temper fierce, so they are not
made pets of. They have no call or cry or any voice. Ged stroked this
one, and it woke and yawned, showing a small brown tongue and white
teeth, but it was not afraid. "Otak," he said, and then remembering
the thousand names of beasts he had learned in the Tower he called it
by its true name in the Old Speech, "Hoeg! Do you want to come with
me?"
        The otak sat itself down on his open hand, and began to wash
its fur.
        He put it up on his shoulder in the folds of his hood, and
there it rode. Sometimes during the day it jumped down and darted off
into the woods, but it always came back to him, once with a woodmouse
it had caught. He laughed and told it to eat the mouse, for he was
fasting, this night being the Festival of Sunreturn. So he came in the
wet dusk past Roke Knoll, and saw bright werelights playing in the
rain over the roofs of the Great House, and he entered there and was
welcomed by his Masters and companions in the firelit hall.
        It was like a homecoming to Ged, who had no home to which he
could ever return. He was happy to see so many faces he knew, and
happiest to see Vetch come forward to greet him with a wide smile on
his dark face. He had missed his friend this year more than he knew.
Vetch had been made sorcerer this fall and was a prentice no more, but
that set no barrier between them. They fell to talking at once, and it
seemed to Ged that he said more to Vetch in that first hour than he
had said during the whole long year at the Isolate Tower.
        The otak still rode his shoulder, nestling in the fold of his
hood as they sat at dinner at long tables set up for the festival in
the Hearth Hall. Vetch marvelled at the little creature, and once put
up his hand to stroke it, but the otak snapped its sharp teeth at him.
He laughed. "They say, Sparrowhawk, that a man favored by a wild beast
is a man to whom the Old Powers of stone and spring will speak in
human voice."
        "They say Gontish wizards often keep familiars," said Jasper,
who sat on the other side of Vetch. "Our Lord Nemmerle has his raven,
and songs say the Red Mage of Ark led a wild boar on a gold chain. But
I never heard of any sorcerer keeping a rat in his hood!"
        At that they all laughed, and Ged laughed with them. It was a
merry night and he was joyful to be there in the warmth and merriment,
keeping festival with his companions. But, like all Jasper ever said
to him, the jest set his teeth on edge.
        That night the Lord of O was a guest of the school, himself a
sorcerer of renown. He had been a pupil of the Archmage, and returned
sometimes to Roke for the Winter Festival or the Long Dance in summer.
With him was his lady, slender and young, bright as new copper, her
black hair crowned with opals. It was seldom that any woman sat in the
halls of the Great House, and some of the old Masters looked at her
sidelong, disapproving. But the young men looked at her with all their
eyes.
        "For such a one," said Vetch to Ged, "I could work vast
enchantments..." He sighed, and laughed.
        "She's only a woman," Ged replied.
        "The Princess Elfarran was only a woman," said Vetch, "and for
her sake all Enlad was laid waste, and the Hero-Mage of Havnor died,
and the island Solea sank beneath the sea."
        "Old tales," says Ged. But then he too began to look at the
Lady of O, wondering if indeed this was such mortal beauty as the old
tales told of.
        The Master Chanter had sung the Deed of the Young King, and
all together had sung the Winter Carol. Now when there was a little
pause before they all rose from the tables, Jasper got up and went to
the table nearest the hearth, where the Archmage and the guests and
Masters sat, and he spoke, to the Lady of O. Jasper was no longer a
boy but a young man, tall and comely, with his cloak clasped at the
neck with silver; for he also had been made sorcerer this year, and
the silver clasp was the token of it. The lady smiled at what he said
and the opals shone in her black hair, radiant. Then, the Masters
nodding benign consent, Jasper worked an illusion-charm for her. A
white tree he made spring up from the stone floor. Its branches
touched the high roofbeams of the hall, and on every twig of every
branch a golden apple shone, each a sun, for it was the Year-Tree. A
bird flew among the branches suddenly, all white with a tail like a
fall of snow, and the golden apples dimming turned to seeds, each one
a drop of crystal. These falling from the tree with a sound like rain,
all at once there came a sweet fragrance, while the tree, swaying, put
forth leaves of rosy fire and white flowers like stars. So the
illusion faded. The Lady of O cried out with pleasure, and bent her
shining head to the young sorcerer in praise of his mastery. "Come
with us, live with us in O-tokne - can he not come, my lord?" she
asked, childlike, of her stern husband. But Jasper said only, "When I
have learned skills worthy of my Masters here and worthy of your
praise, my lady, then I will gladly come, and serve you ever gladly."
        So. he pleased all there, except Ged. Ged joined his voice to
the praises, but not his heart. "I could have done better," he said to
himself, in bitter envy; and all the joy of the evening was darkened
for him, after that.


------
4 The Loosing of the Shadow
------

        That spring Ged saw little of either Vetch or Jasper, for they
being sorcerers studied now with the Master Patterner in the secrecy
of the Immanent Grove, where no prentice might set foot. Ged stayed in
the Great House, working with the Masters at all the skills practised
by sorcerers, those who work magic but carry no staff: windbringing,
weatherworking, finding and binding, and the arts of spellsmiths and
spellwrights, tellers, chanters, healalls and herbalists. At night
alone in his sleeping-cell, a little ball of werelight burning above
the book in place of lamp or candle, he studied the Further Runes and
the Runes of Ea, which are used in the Great Spells. All these crafts
came easy to him, and it was rumored among the students that this
Master or that had said that the Gontish lad was the quickest student
that had ever been at Roke, and tales grew up concerning the otak,
which was said to be a disguised spirit who whispered wisdom in Ged's
ear, and it was even said that the Archmage's raven had hailed Ged at
his arrival as "Archmage to be." Whether or not they believed such
stories, and whether or not they liked Ged, most of his companions
admired him, and were eager to follow him when the rare wild mood came
over him and he joined them to lead their games on the lengthening
evenings of spring. But for the most part he was all work and pride
and temper, and held himself apart. Among them all, Vetch being
absent, he had no friend, and never knew he wanted one.
        He was fifteen, very young to learn any of the High Arts of
wizard or mage, those who carry the staff; but he was so quick to
learn all the arts of illusion that the Master Changer, himself a
young man, soon began to teach him apart from the others, and to tell
him about the true Spells of Shaping. He explained how, if a thing is
really to be changed into another thing, it must be renamed for as
long as the spell lasts, and he told how this affects the names and
natures of things surrounding the transformed thing. He spoke of the
perils of changing, above all when the wizard transforms his own shape
and thus is liable to be caught in his own spell. Little by little,
drawn on by the boy's sureness of understanding, the young Master
began to do more than merely tell him of these mysteries. He taught
him first one and then another of the Great Spells of Change, and he
gave him the Book of Shaping to study. This he did without knowledge
of the Archmage, and unwisely, yet he meant no harm.
        Ged worked also with the Master Summoner now, but that Master
was a stern man, aged and hardened by the deep and somber wizardry he
taught. He dealt with no illusion, only true magic, the summoning of
such energies as light, and heat, and the force that draws the magnet,
and those forces men perceive as weight, form, color, sound: real
powers, drawn from the immense fathomless energies of the universe,
which no man's spells or uses could exhaust or unbalance. The
weatherworker's and seamaster's calling upon wind and water were
crafts already known to his pupils, but it was he who showed them why
the true wizard uses such spells only at need, since to summon up such
earthly forces is to change the earth of which they are a part. "Rain
on Roke may be drouth in Osskil," he said, "and a calm in the East
Reach may be storm and ruin in the West, unless you know what you are
about."
        As for the calling of real things and living people, and the
raising up of spirits of the dead, and the invocations of the Unseen,
those spells which are the height of the Summoner's art and the mage's
power, those he scarcely spoke of to them. Once or twice Ged tried to
lead him to talk a little of such mysteries, but the Master was
silent, looking at him long and grimly, till Ged grew uneasy and said
no more.
        Sometimes indeed he was uneasy working even such lesser spells
as the Summoner taught him. There were certain runes on certain pages
of the Lore-Book that seemed familiar to him, though he did not
remember in what book he had ever seen them before. There were certain
phrases that must be said in spells of Summoning that he did not like
to say. They made him think, for an instant, of shadows in a dark
room, of a shut door and shadows reaching out to him from the corner
by the door. Hastily he put such thoughts or memories aside and went
on. These moments of fear and darkness, he said to himself, were the
shadows merely of his ignorance. The more he learned, the less he
would have to fear, until finally in his full power as Wizard he
needed fear nothing in the world, nothing at all.
        In the second month of that summer all the school gathered
again at the Great House to celebrate the Moon's Night and the Long
Dance, which that year fell together as one festival of two nights,
which happens but once in fifty-two years. All the first night, the
shortest night of full moon of the year, flutes played out in the
fields, and the narrow streets of Thwil were full of drums and
torches, and the sound of singing went out over the moonlit waters of
Roke Bay. As the sun rose next morning the Chanters of Roke began to
sing the long Deed of Erreth-Akbe,which tells how the white towers of
Havnor were built, and of Erreth-Akbe's journeys from the Old Island,
Ea, through all the Archipelago and the Reaches, until at last in the
uttermost West Reach on the edge of the Open Sea he met the dragon
Orm; and his bones in shattered armor lie among the dragon's bones on
the shore of lonely Selidor, but his sword set atop the highest tower
of Havnor still burns red in the sunset above the Inmost Sea. When the
chant was finished the Long Dance began. Townsfolk and Masters and
students and farmers all together, men and women, danced in the warm
dust and dusk down all the roads of Roke to the sea-beaches, to the
beat of drums and drone of pipes and flutes. Straight out into the sea
they danced, under the moon one night past full, and the music was
lost in the breakers' sound. As the east grew light they came back up
the beaches and the roads, the drums silent and only the flutes
playing soft and shrill. So it was done on every island of the
Archipelago that night: one dance, one music binding together the
sea-divided lands.
        When the Long Dance was over most people slept the day away,
and gathered again at evening to eat and drink. There was a group of
young fellows, prentices and sorcerers, who had brought their supper
out from the refectory to hold private feast in a courtyard of the
Great House: Vetch, Jasper, and Ged were there, and six or seven
others, and some young lads released briefly from the Isolate Tower,
for this festival had brought even Kurremkarmerruk out. They were all
eating and laughing and playing such tricks out of pure frolic as
might be the marvel of a king's court. One boy had lighted the court
with a hundred stars of werelight, colored like jewels, that swung in
a slow netted procession between them and the real stars; and a pair
of boys were playing bowls with balls of green flame and bowling-pins
that leaped and hopped away as the ball came near; and all the while
Vetch sat crosslegged, eating roast chicken; up in mid-air. One of the
younger boys tried to pull him down to earth, but Vetch merely drifted
up a little higher, out of reach, and sat calmly smiling on the air.
Now and then he tossed away a chicken bone, which turned to an owl and
flew hooting among the netted star-lights. Ged shot breadcrumb arrows
after the owls and brought them down, and when they touched the ground
there they lay, bone and crumb, all illusion gone. Ged also tried to
join Vetch up in the middle of the air, but lacking the key of the
spell he had to flap his arms to keep aloft, and they were all
laughing at his flights and flaps and bumps. He kept up his
foolishness for the laughter's sake, laughing with them, for after
those two long nights of dance and moonlight and music and magery he
was in a fey and wild mood, ready for whatever might come.
        He came lightly down on his feet just beside Jasper at last,
and Jasper, who never laughed aloud, moved away saying, "The
Sparrowhawk that can't fly..."
        "Is Jasper a precious stone?" Ged returned, grinning. "O jewel
among sorcerers, O Gem of Havnor, sparkle for us!"
        The lad that had set the lights dancing sent one down to dance
and glitter about Jasper's head. Not quite as cool as usual, frowning,
Jasper brushed the light away and snuffed it out with one gesture. "I
am sick of boys and noise and foolishness," he said.
        "You're getting middle-aged, lad," Vetch remarked from above.
        "If silence and gloom is what you want," put in one of the
younger boys, "you could always try the Tower."
        Ged said to him, "What is it you want, then, Jasper?"
        "I want the company of my equals," Jasper said. "Come on,
Vetch. Leave the prentices to their toys."
        Ged turned to face Jasper. "What do sorcerers have that
prentices lack?" he inquired. His voice was quiet, but all the other
boys suddenly fell still, for in his tone as in Jasper's the spite
between them now sounded plain and clear as steel coming out of a
sheath.
        "Power," Jasper said.
        "I'll match your power act for act."
        "You challenge me?"
        "I challenge you."
        Vetch had dropped down to the ground, and now he came between
them, grim of face. "Duels in sorcery are forbidden to us, and well
you know it. Let this cease!"
        Both Ged and Jasper stood silent, for it was true they knew
the law of Roke, and they also knew that Vetch was moved by love, and
themselves by hate. Yet their anger was balked, not cooled. Presently,
moving a little aside as if to be heard by Vetch alone, Jasper spoke,
with his cool smile: "I think you'd better remind your goatherd friend
again of the law that protects him. He looks sulky. I wonder, did he
really think I'd accept a challenge from him? a fellow who smells of
goats, a prentice who doesn't know the First Change?"
        "Jasper," said Ged, "What do you know of what I know?"
        For an instant, with no word spoken that any heard, Ged
vanished from their sight, and where he had stood a great falcon
hovered, opening its hooked beak to scream: for one instant, and then
Ged stood again in the flickering torchlight, his dark gaze on Jasper.
        Jasper had taken a step backward, in astonishment; but now he
shrugged and said one word: "Illusion."
        The others muttered. Vetch said, "That was not illusion. It
was true change. And enough. Jasper, listen-"
        "Enough to prove that he sneaked a look in the Book of Shaping
behind the Master's back: what then? Go on, Goatherd. I like this trap
you're building for yourself. The more you try to prove yourself my
equal, the more you show yourself for what you are."
        At that, Vetch turned from Jasper, and said very softly to
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in the hills, I saw you. That is, I saw a presentment of you, or an
imitation of you, or maybe simply a man who looks like you. He was
ahead of me, going out of town, and he turned a bend in the road even
as I saw him. I called and got no answer, I followed and found no one;
nor any tracks; but the ground was frozen. It was a queer thing, and
now seeing you come up out of the shadows like that I thought I was
tricked again. I am sorry, Ged." He spoke Ged's true name softly, so
that the girl who stood waiting a little way behind him would not hear
it.
        Ged also spoke low, to use his friend's true name: "No matter,
Estarriol. But this is myself, and I am glad to see you ...."
        Vetch heard, perhaps, something more than simple gladness in
his voice. He had not yet let go of Ged's shoulder, and he said now,
in the True Speech, "In trouble and from darkness you come, Ged, yet
your coming is joy to me." Then he went on in his Reach-accented
Hardic, "Come on, come home with us, we're going home, it's time to
get in out of the dark! -This is my sister, the youngest of us,
prettier than I am as you see, but much less clever: Yarrow she's
called. Yarrow, this is the Sparrowhawk, the best of us and my
friend."
        "Lord Wizard," the girl greeted him, and decorously she bobbed
her head and hid her eyes with her hands to show respect, as women did
in the East Reach; her eyes when not hidden were clear, shy, and
curious. She was perhaps fourteen years old, dark like her brother,
but very slight and slender. On her sleeve there clung, winged and
taloned, a dragon no longer than her hand.
        They set off down the dusky street together, and Ged remarked
as they went along, "In Gont they say Gontish women are brave, but I
never saw a maiden there wear a dragon for a bracelet"
        This made Yarrow laugh, and she answered him straight, "This
is only a harrekki, have you no harrekki on Gont?" Then she got shy
for a moment and hid her eyes.
        "No, nor no dragons. Is not the creature a dragon?"
        "A little one, that lives in oak trees, and eats wasps and
worms and sparrows' eggs -it grows no greater than this. Oh, Sir, my
brother has told me often of the pet you had, the wild thing, the
otak- do you have it still?"
        "No. No longer."
        Vetch turned to him as if with a question, but he held his
tongue and asked nothing till much later, when the two of them sat
alone over the stone firepit of Vetch's house.
        Though he was the chief wizard in the whole island of Iffish,
Vetch made his home in Ismay, this small town where he had been born,
living with his youngest brother and sister. His father had been a
sea-trader of some means, and the house was spacious and
strong-beamed, with much homely wealth of pottery and fine weaving and
vessels of bronze and brass on carven shelves and chests. A great
Taonian harp stood in one corner of the main room, and Yarrow's
tapestry-loom in another, its tall frame inlaid with ivory. There
Vetch for all his plain quiet ways was both a powerful wizard and a
lord in his own house. There were a couple of old servants, prospering
along with the house, and the brother, a cheerful lad, and Yarrow,
quick and silent as a little fish, who served the two friends their
supper and ate with them, listening to their talk, and afterwards
slipped off to her own room. All things here were well-founded,
peaceful, and assured; and Ged looking about him at the firelit room
said, "This is how a man should live," and sighed.
        "Well, it's one good way," said Vetch. "There are others. Now,
lad, tell me if you can what things have come to you and gone from you
since we last spoke, two years ago. And tell me what journey you are
on, since I see well that you won't stay long with us this time."
        Ged told him, and when he was done Vetch sat pondering for a
long while. Then he said, "I'll go with you, Ged."
        "No."
        "I think I will."
        "No, Estarriol. This is no task or bane of yours. I began this
evil course alone, I will finish it alone, I do not want any other to
suffer from it - you least of all, you who tried to keep my hand from
the evil act in the very beginning, Estarriol-"
        "Pride was ever your mind's master," his friend said smiling,
as if they talked of a matter of small concern to either. "Now think:
it is your quest, assuredly, but if the quest fail, should there not
be another there who might bear warning to the Archipelago? For the
shadow would be a fearful power then. And if you defeat the thing,
should there not be another there who will tell of it in the

Archipelago, that the Deed may be known and sung? I know I can be of
no use to you; yet I think I should go with you."
        So entreated Ged could not deny his friend, but he said, "I
should not have stayed this day here. I knew it, but I stayed."
        "Wizards do not meet by chance, lad," said Vetch. "And after
all, as you said yourself, I was with you at the beginning of your
journey. It is right that I should follow you to its end." He put new
wood on the fire, and they sat gazing into the flames a while.
        "There is one I have not heard of since that night on Roke
Knoll, and I had no heart to ask any at the School of him: Jasper I
mean."
        "He never won his staff. He left Roke that same summer, and
went to the Island of O to be sorcerer in the Lord's household at
O-tokne. I know no more of him than that."
        Again they were silent, watching the fire and enjoying (since
it was a bitter night) the warmth on their legs and faces as they sat
on the broad coping of the firepit, their feet almost among the coals.
        Ged said at last, speaking low, "There is a thing that I fear,
Estarriol. I fear it more if you are with me when I go. There in the
Hands in the dead end of the inlet I turned upon the shadow, it was
within my hands' reach, and I seized it - I tried to seize it. And
there was nothing I could hold. I could not defeat it. It fled, I
followed. But that may happen again, and yet again. I have no power
over the thing. There may be neither death nor triumph to end this
quest; nothing to sing of; no end. It may be I must spend my life
running from sea to sea and land to land on an endless vain venture, a
shadow-quest."
        "Avert!" said Vetch, turning his left hand in the gesture that
turns aside the ill chance spoken of. For all his somber thoughts this
made Ged grin a little, for it is rather a child's charm than a
wizard's; there was always such village innocence in Vetch. Yet also
he was keen, shrewd, direct to the center of a thing. He said now,
"That is a grim thought and I trust a false one. I guess rather that
what I saw begin, I may see end. Somehow you will learn its nature,
its being, what it is, and so hold and bind and vanquish it. Though
that is a hard question: what is it... There is a thing that worries
me, I do not understand it. It seems the shadow now goes in your
shape, or a kind of likeness of you at least, as they saw it on Vemish
and as I saw it here in Iffish. How may that be, and why, and why did
it never do so in the Archipelago?"
        "They say, Rules change in the Reaches."
        "Aye, a true saying, I can tell you. There are good spells I
learned on Roke that have no power here, or go all awry; and also
there are spells worked here I never learned on Roke. Every land has
its own powers, and the farther one goes from the Inner Lands, the
less one can guess about those powers and their governance. But I do
not think it is only that which works this change in the shadow."
        "Nor do I. I think that, when I ceased to flee from it and
turned against it, that turning of my will upon it gave it shape and
form, even though the same act prevented it from taking my strength
from me. All my acts have their echo in it; it is my creature."
        "In Osskil it named you, and so stopped any wizardry you might
have used against it. Why did it not do so again, there in the Hands?"
        "I do not know. Perhaps it is only from my weakness that it
draws the strength to speak. Almost with my own tongue it speaks: for
how did it know my name? How did it know my name? I have racked my
brains on that over all the seas since I left Gont, and I cannot see
the answer. Maybe it cannot speak at all in its own form or
formlessness, but only with borrowed tongue, as a gebbeth. I do not
know."
        "Then you must beware meeting it in gebbeth-form a second
time."
        "I think," Ged replied, stretching out his hands to the red
coals as if he felt an inward chill, "I think I will not. It is bound
to me now as I am to it. It cannot get so far free of me as to seize
any other man and empty him of will and being, as it did Skiorh. It
can possess me. If ever I weaken again, and try to escape from it, to
break the bond, it will possess me. And yet, when I held it with all
the strength I had, it became mere vapor, and escaped from me... And
so it will again, and yet it cannot really escape, for I can always
find it. I am bound to the foul cruel thing, and will be forever,
unless I can learn the word that masters it: its name."
        Brooding his friend asked, "Are there names in the dark
realms?"
        "Gensher the Archmage said there are not. My master Ogion said
otherwise."
        "Infinite are the arguments of mages," Vetch quoted, with a
smile that was somewhat grim.
        "She who served the Old Power on Osskil swore that the Stone
would tell me the shadow's name, but that I count for little. However
there was also a dragon, who offered to trade that name for his own,
to be rid of me; and I have thought that, where mages argue, dragons
may be wise."
        "Wise, but unkind. But what dragon is this? You did not tell
me you had been talking with dragons since I saw you last"
        They talked together late that night, and though always they
came back to the bitter matter of what lay before Ged, yet their
pleasure in being together overrode all; for the love between them was
strong and steadfast, unshaken by time or chance. In the morning Ged
woke beneath his friend's roof, and while he was still drowsy he felt
such well-being as if he were in some place wholly defended from evil
and harm. All day long a little of this dream-peace clung to his
thoughts, and he took it, not as a good omen, but as a gift. It seemed
likely to him that leaving this house he would leave the last haven he
was to know, and so while the short dream lasted he would be happy in
it.
        Having affairs he must see to before he left Iffish, Vetch
went off to other villages of the island with the lad who served him
as prentice-sorcerer. Ged stayed with Yarrow and her brother, called
Murre, who was between her and Vetch in age. He seemed not much more
than a boy, for there was no gift or scourge of mage-power in him, and
he had never been anywhere but Iffish, Tok, and Holp, and his life was
easy and untroubled. Ged watched him with wonder and some envy, and
exactly so he watched Ged: to each it seemed very queer that the
other, so different, yet was his own age, nineteen years. Ged
marvelled how one who had lived nineteen years could be so carefree.
Admiring Murre's comely, cheerful face he felt himself to be all lank
and harsh, never guessing that Murre envied him even the scars that
scored his face, and thought them the track of a dragon's claws and
the very rune and sign of a hero.
        The two young men were thus somewhat shy with each other, but
as for Yarrow she soon lost her awe of Ged, being in her own house and
mistress of it. He was very gentle with her, and many were the
questions she asked of him, for Vetch, she said, would never tell her
anything. She kept busy those two days making dry wheatcakes for the
voyagers to carry, and wrapping up dried fish and meat and other such
provender to stock their boat, until Ged told her to stop, for he did
not plan to sail clear to Selidor without a halt.
        "Where is Selidor?"
        "Very far out in the Western Reach, where dragons are as
common as mice."
        "Best stay in the East then, our dragons are as small as mice.
There's your meat, then; you're sure that's enough? Listen, I don't
understand: you and my brother both are mighty wizards, you wave your
hand and mutter and the thing is done. Why do you get hungry, then?
When it comes suppertime at sea, why not say, Meat-pie! and the
meat-pie appears, and you eat it?"
        "Well, we could do so. But we don't much wish to eat our
words, as they say. Meat-pie! is only a word, after all... We can make
it odorous, and savorous, and even filling, but it remains a word. It
fools the stomach and gives no strength to the hungry man."
        "Wizards, then, are not cooks," said Murre, who was sitting
across the kitchen hearth from Ged, carving a box-lid of fine wood; he
was a woodworker by trade, though not a very zealous one.
        "Nor are cooks wizards, alas," said Yarrow on her knees to see
if the last batch of cakes baking on the hearthbricks was getting
brown. "But I still don't understand, Sparrowhawk. I have seen my
brother, and even his prentice, make light in a dark place only by
saying one word: and the light shines, it is bright, not a word but a
light you can see your way by!"
        "Aye," Ged answered. "Light is a power. A great power, by
which we exist, but which exists beyond our needs, in itself. Sunlight
and starlight are time, and time is light. In the sunlight, in the
days and years, life is. In a dark place life may call upon the light,
naming it. But usually when you see a wizard name or call upon some
thing, some object to appear, that is not the same, he calls upon no
power greater than himself, and what appears is an illusion only. To
summon a thing that is not there at all, to call it by speaking its
true name, that is a great mastery, not lightly used. Not for mere
hunger's sake. Yarrow, your little dragon has stolen a cake."
        Yarrow had listened so hard, gazing at Ged as he spoke, that
she had not seen the harrekki scuttle down from its warm perch on the
kettle-hook over the hearth and seize a wheatcake bigger than itself.
She took the small scaly creature on her knee and fed it bits and
crumbs, while she pondered what Ged had told her.
        "So then you would not summon up a real meat-pie lest you
disturb what my brother is always talking about- I forget its name-"
        "Equilibrium," Ged replied soberly, for she was very serious.
        "Yes. But, when you were shipwrecked, you sailed from the
place in a boat woven mostly of spells, and it didn't leak water. Was
it illusion?"
        "Well, partly it was illusion, because I am uneasy seeing the
sea through great holes in my boat, so I patched them for the looks of
the thing. But the strength of the boat was not illusion, nor
summoning, but made with another kind of art, a binding-spell. The
wood was bound as one whole, one entire thing, a boat. What is a boat
but a thing that doesn't leak water?"
        "I've bailed some that do," said Murre.
        "Well, mine leaked, too, unless I was constantly seeing to the
spell." He bent down from his corner seat and took a cake from the
bricks, and juggled it in his hands. "I too have stolen a cake."
        "You have burned fingers, then. And when you're starving on
the waste water between the far isles you'll think of that cake and
say, Ah! had I not stolen that cake I might eat it now, alas!- I shall
eat my brother's, so he can starve with you
        "Thus is Equilibrium maintained," Ged remarked, while she took
and munched a hot, half-toasted cake; and this made her giggle and
choke. But presently looking serious again she said, "I wish I could
truly understand what you tell me. I am too stupid."
        "Little sister," Ged said, "it is I that have no skill
explaining. If we had more time-"
        "We will have more time," Yarrow said. "When my brother comes
back home, you will come with him, for a while at least, won't you?"
        "If I can," he answered gently.
        There was a little pause; and Yarrow asked, watching the
harrekki climb back to its perch, "Tell me just this, if it is not a
secret: what other great powers are there beside the light?"
        "It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think.
Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry,
the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root: they all
arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a
spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great
word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is
no other power. No other name."
        Staying his knife on the carved wood, Murre asked, "What of
death?"
        The girl listened, her shining black head bent down.

        "For a word to be spoken," Ged answered slowly, "there must be
silence. Before, and after." Then all at once he got up, saying, "I
have no right to speak of these things. The word that was mine to say
I said wrong. It is better that I keep still; I will not speak again.
Maybe there is no true power but the dark." And he left the fireside
and the warm kitchen, taking up his cloak and going out alone into the
drizzling cold rain of winter in the streets.
        "He is under a curse," Murre said, gazing somewhat fearfully
after him.
        "I think this voyage he is on leads him to his death," the
girl said, "and he fears that, yet he goes on." She lifted her head as
if she watched, through the red flame of the fire, the course of a
boat that came through the seas of winter alone, and went on out into
empty seas. Then her eyes filled with tears a moment, but she said
nothing.
        Vetch came home the next day, and took his leave of the
notables of Ismay, who were most unwilling to let him go off to sea in
midwinter on a mortal quest not even his own; but though they might
reproach him, there was nothing at all they could do to stop him.
Growing weary of old men who nagged him, he said, "I am yours, by
parentage and custom and by duty undertaken towards you. I am your
wizard. But it, is time you recalled that, though I am a servant, I am
not your servant. When I am free to come back I will come back: till
then farewell."
        At daybreak, as grey light welled up in the east from the sea,
the two young men set forth in Lookfar from the harbor of Ismay,
raising a brown, strong-woven sail to the north wind. On the dock
Yarrow stood and watched them go, as sailor's wives and sisters stand
on all the shores of all Earthsea watching their men go out on the
sea, and they do not wave or call aloud, but stand still in hooded
cloak of grey or brown, there on the shore that dwindles smaller and
smaller from the boat while the water grows wide between.


------
10 The Open Sea
------

        The haven now was sunk from sight and Lookfar's painted eyes,
wave-drenched, looked ahead on seas ever wider and more desolate. In
two days and nights the companions made the crossing from Iffish to
Soders Island, a hundred miles of foul weather and contrary winds.
They stayed in port there only briefly, long enough to refill a
waterskin, and to buy a tarsmeared sailcloth to protect some of their
gear in the undecked boat from seawater and rain. They had not
provided this earlier, because ordinarily a wizard looks after such
small conveniences by way of spells, the very least and commonest kind
of spells, and indeed it takes little more magic to freshen seawater
and so save the bother of carrying fresh water. But Ged seemed most
unwilling to use his craft, or to let Vetch use his. He said only,
"It's better not," and his friend did not ask or argue. For as the
wind first filled their sail, both had felt a heavy foreboding, cold
as that winter wind. Haven, harbor, peace, safety, all that was
behind. They had turned away. They went now a way in which all events
were perilous, and no acts were meaningless. On the course on which
they were embarked, the saying of the least spell might change chance
and move the balance of power and of doom: for they went now toward
the very center of that balance, toward the place where light and
darkness meet. Those who travel thus say no word carelessly.
        Sailing out again and coasting round the shores of Soders,
where white snowfields faded up into foggy hills, Ged took the boat
southward again, and now they entered waters where the great traders
of the Archipelago never come, the outmost fringes of the Reach.
        Vetch asked no question about their course, knowing that Ged
did not choose it but went as he must go. As Soders Island grew small
and pale behind them, and the waves hissed and smacked under the prow,
and the great grey plain of water circled them all round clear to the
edge of the sky, Ged asked, "What lands lie ahead this course?"
        "Due south of Soders there are no lands at all. Southeast you
go a long way and find little: Pelimer, Kornay, Gosk, and Astowell
which is also called Lastland. Beyond it, the Open Sea."
        "What to the southwest?"
        "Rolameny, which is one of our East Reach isles, and some
small islets round about it; then nothing till you enter the South
Reach: Rood, and Toom, and the Isle of the Ear where men do not go."
        "We may," Ged said wryly.
        "I'd rather not," said Vetch- "that is a disagreeable part of
the world, they say, full of bones and portents. Sailors say that
there are stars to be seen from the waters by the Isle of the Ear and
Far Sorr that cannot be seen anywhere else, and that have never been
named."
        "Aye, there was a sailor on the ship that brought me first to
Roke who spoke of that. And he told tales of the RaftFolk in the far
South Reach, who never come to land but once a year, to cut the great
logs for their rafts, and the rest of the year, all the days and
months, they drift on the currents of ocean, out of sight of any land.
I'd like to see those raft-villages "
        "I would not," said Vetch grinning. "Give me land, and
land-folk; the sea in its bed and I in mine..."
        "I wish I could have seen all the cities of the Archipelago,"
Ged said as he held the sail-rope, watching the wide grey wastes
before them. "Havnor at the world's heart, and Ea where the myths were
born, and Shelleth of the Fountains on Way; all the cities and the
great lands. And the small lands, the strange lands of the Outer
Reaches, them too. To sail right down the Dragons' Run, away in the
west. Or to sail north into the ice-floes, clear to Hogen Land. Some
say that is a land greater than all the Archipelago, and others say it
is mere reefs and rocks with ice between. No one knows. I should like
to see the whales in the northern seas.... But I cannot. I must go
where I am bound to go, and turn my back on the bright shores. I was
in too much haste, and now have no time left. I traded all the
sunlight and the cities and the distant lands for a handful of power,
for a shadow, for the dark." So, as the mageborn will, Ged made his
fear and regret into a song, a brief lament, halfsung, that was not
for himself alone; and his friend replying spoke the hero's words from
the Deed of Erreth-Akbe, "O may I see the earth's bright hearth once
more, the white towers of Havnor..."
        So they sailed on their narrow course over the wide forsaken
waters. The most they saw that day was a school of silver pannies
swimming south, but never a dolphin leapt nor did the flight of gull
or murre or tern break the grey air. As the east darkened and the west
grew red, Vetch brought out food and divided it between them and said,
"Here's the last of the ale. I drink to the one who thought to put the
keg aboard for thirsty men in cold weather: my sister Yarrow."
        At that Ged left off his bleak thoughts and his gazing ahead
over the sea, and he saluted Yarrow more earnestly, perhaps, than
Vetch. The thought of her brought to his mind the sense of her wise
and childish sweetness. She was not like any person he had known.
(What young girl had he ever known at all? but he never thought of
that.) "She is like a little fish, a minnow, that swims in a clear
creek," he said, "-defenseless, yet you cannot catch her."
        At this Vetch looked straight at him, smiling. "You are a mage
born," he said. "Her true name is Kest" In the Old Speech, kest is
minnow, as Ged well knew; and this pleased him to the heart. But after
a while he said in a low voice, "You should not have told me her name,
maybe."
        But Vetch, who bad not done so lightly, said, "Her name is
safe with you as mine is. And, besides, you knew it without my telling
you..."
        Red sank to ashes in the west, and ash-grey sank to black. All
the sea and sky were wholly dark. Ged stretched out in the bottom of
the boat to sleep, wrapped in his cloak of wool and fur. Vetch,
holding the sail-rope, sang softly from the Deed of Enlad, where the
song tells how the mage Morred the White left Havnor in his oarless
longship, and coming to the island Solea saw Elfarran in the orchards
in the spring. Ged slept before the song came to the sorry end of
their love, Morred's death, the ruin of Enlad, the seawaves, vast and
bitter, whelming the orchards of Solea. Towards midnight he woke, and
watched again while Vetch slept. The little boat ran sharp over choppy
seas, fleeing the strong wind that leaned on her sail, running blind
through the night. But the overcast had broken, and before dawn the
thin moon shining between brown-edged clouds shed a weak light on the
sea.
        "The moon wanes to her dark," Vetch murmured, awake in the
dawn, when for a while the cold wind dropped. Ged looked up at the
white half-ring above the paling eastern waters, but said nothing. The
dark of the moon that follows first after Sunreturn is called the
Fallows, and is the contrary pole of the days of the Moon and the Long
Dance in summer. It is an unlucky time for travellers and for the
sick; children are not given their true name during the Fallows, and
no Deeds are sung, nor swords nor edge-tools sharpened, nor oaths
sworn. It is the dark axis of the year, when things done are ill done.
        Three days out from Soders they came, following seabirds and
shore-wrack, to Pelimer, a small isle humped high above the high grey
seas. Its people spoke Hardic, but in their own fashion, strange even
to Vetch's ears. The young men came ashore there for fresh water and a
respite from the sea, and at first were well received, with wonder and
commotion. There was a sorcerer in the main town of the island, but he
was mad. He would talk only of the great serpent that was eating at
the foundations of Pelimer so that soon the island must go adrift like
a boat cut from her moorings, and slide out over the edge of the
world. At first he greeted the young wizards courteously, but as he
talked about the serpent he began to look askance at Ged: and then he
fell to railing at them there in the street, calling them spies and
servants of the Sea-Snake. The Pelimerians looked dourly at them after
that, since though mad he was their sorcerer. So Ged and Vetch made no
long stay, but set forth again before nightfall, going always south
and east.
        In these days and nights of sailing Ged never spoke of the
shadow, nor directly of his quest; and the nearest Vetch came to
asking any question was (as they followed the same course farther and
farther out and away from the known lands of Earthsea ) -Are you
sure?-" To this Ged answered only, "Is the iron sure where the magnet
lies?" Vetch nodded and they went on, no more being said by either.
But from time to time they talked of the crafts and devices that mages
of old days had used to find out the hidden name of baneful powers and
beings: how Nereger of Paln had learned the Black Mage's name from
overhearing the conversation of dragons, and how Morred had seen his
enemy's name written by falling raindrops in the dust of the
battlefield of the Plains of Enlad. They spoke of finding-spells, and
invocations, and those Answerable Questions which only the Master
Patterner of Roke can ask. But often Ged would end by murmuring words
which Ogion had said to him on the shoulder of Gont Mountain in an
autumn long ago: "To hear, one must be silent..." And he would fall
silent, and ponder, hour by hour, always watching the sea ahead of the
boat's way. Sometimes it seemed to Vetch that his friend saw, across
the waves and miles and grey days yet to, come, the thing they
followed and the dark end of their voyage.
        They passed between Komay and Gosk in foul weather, seeing
neither isle in the fog and rain, and knowing they had passed them
only on the next day when they saw ahead of them an isle of pinnacled
cliffs above which sea-gulls wheeled in huge flocks whose mewing
clamor could be heard from far over the sea. Vetch said, 'That will be
Astowell, from the look of it. Lastland. East and south of it the
charts are empty."
        "Yet they who live there may know of farther lands," Ged
answered.
        "Why do you say so?" Vetch asked, for Ged had spoken uneasily;
and his answer to this again was halting and strange. "Not there," he
said, gazing at Astowell ahead, and past it, or through it "Not there.
Not on the sea. Not on the sea but on dry land: what land? Before the
springs of the open sea, beyond the sources, behind the gates of
daylight-"
        Then he fell silent, and when he spoke again it was in an
ordinary voice, as if he had been freed from a spell or a vision, and
had no clear memory of it.
        The port of Astowell, a creek-mouth between rocky heights, was
on the northern shore of the isle, and all the huts of the town faced
north and west; it was as if the island turned its face, though from
so far away, always towards Earthsea, towards mankind.
        Excitement and dismay attended the arrival of strangers, in a
season when no boat had ever braved the seas round Astowell. The women
all stayed in the wattle huts, peering out the door, hiding their
children behind their skirts, drawing back fearfully into the darkness
of the huts as the strangers came up from the beach. The men, lean
fellows ill-clothed against the cold, gathered in a solemn circle
about Vetch and Ged, and each one held a stone handaxe or a knife of
shell. But once their fear was past they made the strangers very
welcome, and there was no end to their questions. Seldom did any ship
come to them even from Soders or Rolameny, they having nothing to
trade for bronze or fine wares; they had not even any wood. Their
boats were coracles woven of reed, and it was a brave sailor who would
go as far as Gosk or Kornay in such a craft. They dwelt all alone here
at the edge of all the maps. They had no witch or sorcerer, and seemed
not to recognise the young wizards' staffs for what they were,
admiring them only for the precious stuff they were made of, wood.
Their chief or Isle-Man was very old, and he alone of his people had
ever before seen a man born in the Archipelago. Ged, therefore, was a
marvel to them; the men brought their little sons to look at the
Archipelagan, so they might remember him when they were old. They had
never heard of Gont, only of Havnor and Ea, and took him for a Lord of
Havnor. He did his best to answer their questions about the white city
he had never seen. But he was restless as the evening wore on, and at
last he asked the men of the village, as they sat crowded round the
firepit in the lodgehouse in the reeking warmth of the goatdung and
broom-faggots that were all their fuel, "What lies eastward of your
land?"
        They were silent, some grinning others grim.
        The old Isle-Man answered, "The sea."
        "There is no land beyond?"
        "This is Lastland. There is no land beyond. There is nothing
but water till world's edge."
        "These are wise men, father," said a younger man, "seafarers,
voyagers. Maybe they know of a land we do not know of."
        "There is no land east of this land," said the old man, and he
looked long at Ged, and spoke no more to him.
        The companions slept that night in the smoky warmth of the
lodge. Before daylight Ged roused his friend, whispering, "Estarriol,
wake. We cannot stay, we must go."
        "Why so soon?" Vetch asked, full of sleep.
        "Not soon- late. I have followed too slow. It has found the
way to escape me, and so doom me. It must not escape me, for I must
follow it however far it goes. If I lose it I am lost"
        "Where do we follow it?"
        "Eastward. Come. I filled the waterskins."
        So they left the lodge before any in the village was awake,
except a baby that cried a little in the darkness of some but, and
fell still again. By the vague starlight they found the way down to
the creekmouth, and untied Lookfar from the rock cairn where she had
been made fast, and pushed her out into the black water. So they set
out eastward from Astowell into the Open Sea, on the first day of the
Fallows, before sunrise.
        That day they had clear skies. The world's wind was cold and
gusty from the northeast, but Ged had raised the magewind: the first
act of magery he had done since he left the Isle of the Hands. They
sailed very fast due eastward. The boat shuddered with the great,
smoking, sunlit waves that hit her as she ran, but she went gallantly
as her builder had promised, answering the magewind as true as any
spellenwoven ship of Roke.
        Ged spoke not at all that morning, except to renew the power
of the wind-spell or to keep a charmed strength in the sail, and Vetch
finished his sleep, though uneasily, in the stern of the boat. At noon
they ate. Ged doled their food out sparingly, and the portent of this
was plain, but both of them chewed their bit of salt fish and wheaten
cake, and neither said anything.
        All afternoon they cleaved eastward never turning nor
slackening pace. Once Ged broke his silence, saying, "Do you hold with
those who think the world is all landless sea beyond the Outer
Reaches, or with those who imagine other Archipelagoes or vast
undiscovered lands on the other face of the world?"
        "At this time," said Vetch, "I hold with those who think the
world has but one face, and he who sails too far will fall off the
edge of it"
        Ged did not smile; there was no mirth left in him. "Who knows
what a man might meet, out there? Not we, who keep always to our
coasts and shores."
        "Some have sought to know, and have not returned. And no ship
has ever come to us from lands we do not know."
        Ged made no reply.
        All that day, all that night they went driven by the powerful
wind of magery over the great swells of ocean, eastward. Ged kept
watch from dusk till dawn, for in darkness the force that drew or
drove him grew stronger yet. Always he watched ahead, though his eyes
in the moonless night could see no more than the painted eyes aside
the boat's blind prow. By daybreak his dark face was grey with
weariness, and he was so cramped with cold that he could hardly
stretch out to rest. He said whispering, "Hold the magewind from the
west, Estarriol," and then he slept.
        There was no sunrise, and presently rain came beating across
the bow from the northeast. It was no storm, only the long, cold winds
and rains of winter. Soon all things in the open boat were wet
through, despite the sailcloth cover they had bought; and Vetch felt
as if he too were soaked clear to the bone; and Ged shivered in his
sleep. In pity for his friend, and perhaps for himself, Vetch tried to
turn aside for a little that rude ceaseless wind that bore the rain.
But though, following Ged's will, he could keep the magewind strong
and steady, his weatherworking had small power here so far from land,
and the wind of the Open Sea did not listen to his voice.
        And at this a certain fear came into Vetch, as he began to
wonder how much wizardly power would be left to him and Ged, if they
went on and on away from the lands where men were meant to live.
        Ged watched again that night, and all night held the boat
eastward. When day came the world's wind slackened somewhat, and the
sun shone fitfully; but the great swells ran so high that Lookfar must
tilt and climb up them as if they were hills, and hang at the
hillcrest and plunge suddenly, and climb up the next again, and the
next, and the next, unending.
        In the evening of that day Vetch spoke out of long silence.
"My friend," he said, "you spoke once as if sure we would come to land
at last. I would not question your vision but for this, that it might
be a trick, a deception made by that which you follow, to lure you on
farther than a man can go over ocean. For our power may change and
weaken on strange seas. And a shadow does not tire, or starve, or
drown."
        They sat side by side on the thwart, yet Ged looked at him now
as if from a distance, across a wide abyss. His eyes were troubled,
and he was slow to answer.
        At last he said, "Estarriol, we are coming near."
        Hearing his words, his friend knew them to be true. He was
afraid, then. But he put his hand on Ged's shoulder and said only,
"Well, then, good; that is good."
        Again that night Ged watched, for he could not sleep in the
dark. Nor would he sleep when the third day came. Still they ran with
that ceaseless, light, terrible swiftness over the sea, and Vetch
wondered at Ged's power that could hold so strong a magewind hour
after hour, here on the Open Sea where Vetch felt his own power all
weakened and astray. And they went on, until it seemed to Vetch that
what Ged had spoken would come true, and they were going beyond the
sources of the sea and eastward behind the gates of daylight. Ged
stayed forward in the boat, looking ahead as always. But he was not
watching the ocean now, or not the ocean that Vetch saw, a waste of
heaving water to the rim of the sky. In Ged's eyes there was a dark
vision that overlapped and veiled the grey sea and the grey sky, and
the darkness grew, and the veil thickened. None of this was visible to
Vetch, except when he looked at his friend's face; then he too saw the
darkness for a moment. They went on, and on. And it was as if, though
one wind drove them in one boat, Vetch went east over the world's sea,
while Ged went alone into a realm where there was no east or west, no
rising or setting of the sun, or of the stars.
        Ged stood up suddenly in the prow, and spoke aloud. The
magewind dropped. Lookfar lost headway, and rose and fell on the vast
surges like a chip of wood. Though the world's wind blew strong as
ever straight from the north now, the brown sail hung slack,
unstirred. And so the boat hung on the waves, swung by their great
slow swinging, but going no direction.
        Ged said, "Take down the sail," and Vetch did so quickly,
while Ged unlashed the oars and set them in the locks and bent his
back to rowing.
        Vetch, seeing only the waves heaving up and down clear to the
end of sight could not understand why they went now by oars; but he
waited, and presently he was aware that the world's wind was growing
faint and the swells diminishing. The climb and plunge of the boat
grew less and less, till at last she seemed to go forward under Ged's
strong oarstrokes over water that lay almost still, as in a
land-locked bay. And though Vetch could not see what Ged saw, when
between his strokes he looked ever and again over his shoulder at what
lay before the boat's way - though Vetch could not see the dark slopes
beneath unmoving stars, yet he began to see with his wizard's eye a
darkness that welled up in the hollows of the waves all around the
boat, and he saw the billows grow low and sluggish as they were choked
with sand.
        If this were an enchantment of illusion, it was powerful
beyond belief; to make the Open Sea seem land. Trying to collect his
wits and courage, Vetch spoke the Revelation-spell, watching between
each slow-syllabled word for change or tremor of illusion in this
strange drying and shallowing of the abyss of ocean. But there was
none. Perhaps the spell, though it should affect only his own vision
and not the magic at work about them, had no power here. Or perhaps
there was no illusion, and they had come to world's end.
        Unheeding, Ged rowed always slower, looking over his shoulder,
choosing a way among channels or shoals and shallows that he alone
could see. The boat shuddered as her keel dragged. Under that keel lay
the vast deeps of the sea, yet they were aground. Ged drew the oars up
rattling in their locks, and that noise was terrible, for there was no
other sound. All sounds of water, wind, wood, sail, were gone, lost in
a huge profound silence that might have been unbroken forever. The
boat lay motionless. No breath of wind moved. The sea had turned to
sand, shadowy, unstirred. Nothing moved in the dark sky or on that dry
unreal ground that went on and on into gathering darkness all around
the boat as far as eye could see.
        Ged stood up, and took his staff, and lightly stepped over the
side of the boat. Vetch thought to see him fall and sink down in the
sea, the sea that surely was there behind this dry, dim veil that hid
away water, sky, and light. But there was no sea any more. Ged walked
away from the boat. The dark sand showed his footprints where he went,
and whispered a little under his step.
        His staff began to shine, not with the werelight but with a
clear white glow, that soon grew so bright that it reddened his
fingers where they held the radiant wood.
        He strode forward, away from the boat, but in no direction.
There were no directions here, no north or south or east or west, only
towards and away.
        To Vetch, watching, the light he bore seemed like a great slow
star that moved through the darkness. And the darkness about it
thickened, blackened, drew together. This also Ged saw, watching
always ahead through the light. And after a while he saw at the faint
outermost edge of the light a shadow that came towards him over the
sand.
        At first it was shapeless, but as it drew nearer it took on
the look of a man. An old man it seemed, grey and grim, coming towards
Ged; but even as Ged saw his father the smith in that figure, he saw
that it was not an old man but a young one. It was Jasper: Jasper's
insolent handsome young face, and silver-clasped grey cloak, and stiff
stride. Hateful was the look he fixed on Ged across the dark
intervening air. Ged did not stop, but slowed his pace, and as he went
forward he raised his staff up a little higher. It brightened, and in
its light the look of Jasper fell from the figure that approached, and
it became Pechvarry. But Pechvarry's face was all bloated and pallid
like the face of a drowned man, and he reached out his hand strangely
as if beckoning. Still Ged did not stop, but went forward, though
there were only a few yards left between them now. Then the thing that
faced him changed utterly, spreading out to either side as if it
opened enormous thin wings, and it writhed, and swelled, and shrank
again. Ged saw in it for an instant Skiorh's white face, and then a
pair of clouded, staring eyes, and then suddenly a fearful face he did
not know, man or monster, with writhing lips and eyes that were like
pits going back into black emptiness.
        At that Ged lifted up the staff high, and the radiance of it
brightened intolerably, burning with so white and great a light that
it compelled and harrowed even that ancient darkness. In that light
all form of man sloughed off the thing that came towards Ged. It drew
together and shrank and blackened, crawling on four short taloned legs
upon the sand. But still it came forward, lifting up to him a blind
unformed snout without lips or ears or eyes. As they came right
together it became utterly black in the white mage-radiance that
burned about it, and it heaved itself upright. In silence, man and
shadow met face to face, and stopped.
        Aloud and clearly, breaking that old silence, Ged spoke the
shadow's name and in the same moment the shadow spoke without lips or
tongue, saying the same word: "Ged." And the two voices were one
voice.
        Ged reached out his hands, dropping his staff, and took hold
of his shadow, of the black self that reached out to him. Light and
darkness met, and joined, and were one.
        But to Vetch, watching in terror through the dark twilight
from far off over the sand, it seemed that Ged was overcome, for he
saw the clear radiance fail and grow dim. Rage and despair filled him,
and he sprang out on the sand to help his friend or die with him, and
ran towards that small fading glimmer of light in the empty dusk of
the dry land. But as he ran the sand sank under his feet, and he
struggled in it as in quicksand, as through a heavy flow of water:
until with a roar of noise and a glory of daylight, and the bitter
cold of winter, and the bitter taste of salt, the world was restored
to him and he floundered in the sudden, true, and living sea.
        Nearby the boat rocked on the grey waves, empty. Vetch could
see nothing else on the water; the battering wavetops filled his eyes
and blinded him. No strong swimmer, he struggled as best he could to
the boat, and pulled himself up into her. Coughing and trying to wipe
away the water that streamed from his hair, he looked about
desperately, not knowing now which way to look. And at last he made
out something dark among the waves, a long way off across what had
been sand and now was wild water. Then he leapt to the oars and rowed
mightily to his friend, and catching Ged's arms helped and hauled him
up over the side.
        Ged was dazed and his eyes stared as if they saw nothing, but
there was no hurt to be seen on him. His staff, black yew wood, all
radiance quenched, was grasped in his right hand, and he would not let
go of it. He said no word. Spent and soaked and shaking he lay huddled
up against the mast, never looking at Vetch who raised the sail and
turned the boat to catch the north-east wind. He saw nothing of the
world until, straight ahead of their course, in the sky that darkened
where the sun had set, between long clouds in a bay of clear blue
light, the new moon shone: a ring of ivory, a rim of horn, reflected
sunlight shining across the ocean of the dark.
        Ged lifted his face and gazed at that remote bright crescent
in the west.
        He gazed for a long time, and then he stood up erect, holding
his staff in his two hands as a warrior holds his long sword. He
looked about at the sky, the sea, the brown swelling sail above him,
his friend's face.
        "Estarriol," he said, "look, it is done. It is over." He
laughed. "The wound is healed," he said, "I am whole, I am free." Then
he bent over and hid his face in his arms, weeping like a boy.
        Until that moment Vetch had watched him with an anxious dread,
for he was not sure what had happened there in the dark land. He did
not know if this was Ged in the boat with him, and his hand had been
for hours ready to the anchor, to stave in the boat's planking and
sink her there in midsea, rather than carry back to the harbors of
Earthsea the evil thing that he feared might have taken Ged's look and
form. Now when he saw his friend and heard him speak, his doubt
vanished. And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor
won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made
himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used
or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore
is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or
hatred, or the dark. In the Creation of Ea, which is the oldest song,
it is said, "Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in
dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky." That song
Vetch sang aloud now as he held the boat westward, going before the
cold wind of the winter night that blew at their backs from the
vastness of the Open Sea.
        Eight days they sailed and eight again, before they came in
sight of land. Many times they had to refill their waterskin with
spell-sweetened water of the sea; and they fished, but even when they
called out fisherman's charms they caught very little, for the fish of
the Open Sea do not know their own names and pay no heed to magic.
When they had nothing left to eat but a few scraps of smoked meat Ged
remembered what Yarrow had said when he stole the cake from the
hearth, that he would regret his theft when he came to hunger on the
sea; but hungry as he was the remembrance pleased him. For she had
also said that he, with her brother, would come home again.
        The magewind had borne them for only three days eastward, yet
sixteen days they sailed westward to return. No men have ever returned
from so far out on the Open Sea as did the young wizards Estarriol and
Ged in the Fallows of winter in their open fishingboat. They met no
great Storms, and steered steadily enough by the compass and by the
star Tolbegren, taking a course somewhat northward of their outbound
way. Thus they did not come back to Astowell, but passing by Far Toly
and Sneg without sighting them, first raised land off the southernmost
cape of Koppish. Over the waves they saw cliffs of stone rise like a
great fortress. Seabirds cried wheeling over the breakers, and smoke
of the hearthfires of small villages drifted blue on the wind.
        From there the voyage to Iffish was not long. They came in to
Ismay harbor on a still, dark evening before snow. They tied up the
boat Lookfar that had borne them to the coasts of death's kingdom and
back, and went up through the narrow streets to the wizard's house.
Their hearts were very light as they entered into the firelight and
warmth under that roof; and Yarrow ran to meet them, crying with joy.

---

        If Estarriol of Iffish kept his promise and made a song of
that first great deed of Ged's, it has been lost. There is a tale told
in the East Reach of a boat that ran aground, days out from any shore,
over the abyss of ocean. In Iffish they say it was Estarriol who
sailed that boat, but in Tok they say it was two fishermen blown by a
storm far out on the Open Sea, and in Holp the tale is of a Holpish
fisherman, and tells that he could not move his boat from the unseen
sands it grounded on, and so wanders there yet. So of the song of the
Shadow there remain only a few scraps of legend, carried like
driftwood from isle to isle over the long years. But in the Deed of
Ged nothing is told of that voyage nor of Ged's meeting with the
shadow, before ever he sailed the Dragon's Run unscathed, or brought
back the Ring of Erreth-Akbe from the Tombs of Atuan to Havnor, or
came at last to Roke once more, as Archmage of all the islands of the
world.


--end--

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--

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