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seemed to Arren that the sun failed and dimmed, though it stood high
in a clear sky. A darkness came over the beach, as though one looked
through smoked glass; directly before Ged it grew very dark, and it
was hard to see what was there. It was as if nothing was there,
nothing the light could fall on, a formlessness.
Out of it came a man, suddenly. It was the same man they had
seen upon the dune, black-haired and long-armed, lithe and tall. He
held now a long rod or blade of steel, graven all down its length with
runes, and he tilted this toward Ged as he faced him. But there was
something strange in the look of his eyes, as if they were sun-dazzled
and could not see.
"I come," he said, "at my own choosing, in my own way. You
cannot summon me, Archmage. I am no shadow. I am alive. I only am
alive! You think you are, but you are dying, dying. Do you know what
this is I hold? It is the staff of the Grey Mage, he who silenced
Nereger; the Master of my art. But I am the Master now. And I have had
enough of playing games with you." With that he suddenly reached out
the steel blade to touch Ged, who stood as if he could not move and
could not speak. Arren stood a pace behind him, and all his will was
to move, but he could not stir, he could not even put his hand on his
sword-hilt, and his voice was stopped in his throat.
But over Ged and Arren, over their heads, vast and fiery, the
great body of the dragon came in one writhing leap and plunged down
full-force upon the other, so that the charmed steel blade entered
into the dragon's mailed breast to its full length: but the man was
borne down under his weight and crushed and burnt.
Rising up again from the sand, arching his back and beating
his vaned wings, Orm Embar vomited out gouts of fire and screamed. He
tried to fly, but he could not fly. Malign and cold, the metal lay in
his heart. He crouched, and the blood ran black and poisonous,
steaming, from his mouth, and the fire died in his nostrils till they
became like pits of ash. He laid down his great head on the sand.
So died Orm Embar where his forefather Orm died, on the bones
of Orm buried in the sand.
But where Orm had struck his enemy to earth, there lay
something ugly and shriveled, like the body of a big spider dried up
in its web. It had been burned by the dragon's breath and crushed by
his taloned feet. Yet, as Arren watched, it moved. It crawled away a
little from the dragon.
The face lifted up toward them. There was no comeliness left
in it, only ruin, old age that had outlived old age. The mouth was
withered. The sockets of the eyes were empty and had long been empty.
So Ged and Arren saw at last the living face of their enemy.
It turned away. The burnt, blackened arms reached out, and a
darkness gathered into them, that same shapeless darkness that swelled
and dimmed the sunlight. Between the arms of the Unmaker it was like
an archway or a gate, though dim and without outline; and through it
was neither pale sand nor ocean, but a long slope of darkness going
down into the dark.
There the crushed, crawling figure went, and when it came into
the darkness it seemed suddenly to rise up and move swiftly, and it
was gone.
"Come, Lebannen," said Ged, laying his right hand on the boy's
arm, and they went forward into the dry land.
------
The Dry Land
------
The yew-wood staff in the mage's hand shone in the dull,
lowering darkness with a silver gleam. Another slight glimmering
movement caught Arren's eye: a flicker of light along the blade of the
sword he held naked in his band. As the dragon's act and death had
broken the binding spell, he had drawn his sword, there on the beach
of Selidor. And here, though he was no more than a shadow, he was a
living shadow, and bore the shadow of his sword.
There was no other brightness anywhere. It was like a late
twilight under clouds at the end of November, a dour, chill, dull air
in which one could see, but not clearly and not far. Arren knew the
place, the moors and barrens of his hopeless dreams; but it seemed to
him that he was farther, immensely farther, than he had ever been in
dream. He could make out nothing distinctly, except that he and his
companion stood on the slope of a hill, and before them was a low wall
of stones, no higher than a man's knee.
Ged still kept his right hand on Arren's arm. He moved forward
now, and Arren went with him; they stepped over the wall of stones.
Formless, the long slope fell away before them, descending
into the dark.
But overhead, where Arren had thought to see a heavy overcast
of clouds, the sky was black, and there were stars. He looked at them,
and it seemed as if his heart shrank small and cold within him. They
were no stars that he had ever seen. Unmoving they shone, unwinking.
They were those stars that do not rise or set, nor are they ever
hidden by any cloud, nor does any sunrise dim them. Still and small
they shine on the dry land.
Ged set off walking down the far side of the hill of being,
and pace by pace Arren went with him. There was terror in him, and yet
so resolved was his heart and so intent his will that the fear did not
rule him, nor was he even very clearly aware of it. It was only as if
something deep within him grieved, like an animal shut up in a room
and chained.
It seemed that they walked down that hill-slope for a long
way, but perhaps it was a short way; for there was no passing of time
there, where no wind blew and the stars did not move. They came then
into the streets of one of the cities that are there, and Arren saw
the houses with windows that are never lit, and in certain doorways
standing, with quiet faces and empty hands, the dead.
The marketplaces were all empty. There was no buying and
selling there, no gaining and spending. Nothing was used; nothing was
made. Ged and Arren went through the narrow streets alone, though a
few times they saw a figure at the turning of another way, distant and
hardly to be seen in the gloom. At sight of the first of these, Arren
started and raised his sword to point, but Ged shook his head and went
on. Arren saw then that the figure was a woman who moved slowly, not
fleeing from them.
All those whom they saw -not many, for the dead are many, but
that land is large- stood still, or moved slowly and with no purpose.
None of them bore wounds, as had the semblance of Erreth-Akbe summoned
into daylight at the place of his death. No marks of illness were on
them. They were whole and healed. They were healed of pain and of
life. They were not loathesome as Arren had feared they would be, not
frightening in the way he had thought they would be. Quiet were their
faces, freed from anger and desire, and there was in their shadowed
eyes no hope.
Instead of fear, then, great pity rose up in Arren, and if
fear underlay it, it was not for himself, but for all people. For he
saw the mother and child who had died together, and they were in the
dark land together; but the child did not run, nor did it cry, and the
mother did not hold it or ever look at it. And those who had died for
love passed each other in the streets.
The potter's wheel was still, the loom empty, the stove cold.
No voice ever sang.
The dark streets between dark houses led on and on, and they
passed through them. The sound of their feet was the only sound. It
was cold. Arren had not noticed that cold at first, but it crept into
his spirit, which was, here, also his flesh. He felt very weary. They
must have come a long way. Why go on? he thought, and his steps lagged
a little.
Ged stopped suddenly, turning to face a man who stood at the
crossing of two streets. He was slender and tall, with a face that
Arren thought he had seen, though he could not remember where. Ged
spoke to him, and no other voice had broken the silence since they
stepped across the wall of stones: "O Thorion, my friend, how come you
here!"
And he put out his hands to the Summoner of Roke.
Thorion made no answering gesture. He stood still, and his
face was still; but the silvery light on Ged's staff struck deep in
his enshadowed eyes, making a little light there or meeting it. Ged
took the hand he did not offer and said again, "What do you here,
Thorion? You are not of this kingdom yet. Go back!"
"I followed the undying one. I lost my way." The Summoner's
voice was soft and dull, like that of a man who speaks in sleep.
"Upward: toward the wall," said Ged, pointing the way he and
Arren had come, the long, dark, descending street. At that there was a
tremor in Thorion's face, as if some hope had entered into him like a
sword, intolerable.
"I cannot find the way," he said. "My lord, I cannot find the
way."
"Maybe thou shalt," Ged said, and embraced him, and then went
forward. Thorion stood still at the crossroads, behind him.
As they went on, it seemed to Arren that in this timeless dusk
there was, in truth, neither forward nor backward, neither east nor
west, no way to go. Was there a way out? He thought how they had come
down the hill, always descending, no matter how they turned; and still
in the dark city the streets went downward, so that to return to the
wall of stones they need only climb, and at the hill's top they would
find it. But they did not turn. Side by side, they went on. Did he
follow Ged? Or did he lead him?
They came out of the city. The country of the innumerable dead
was empty. No tree or thorn or blade of grass grew in the stony earth
under the unsetting stars. There was no horizon, for the eye
could not see so far into the gloom; but ahead of them the small,
still stars were absent from the sky over a long space above the
ground, and this starless space was jagged and sloped like a chain of
mountains. As they went on, the shapes were more distinct: high peaks,
weathered by no wind or rain. There was no snow on them to gleam in
starlight. They were black. The sight of them struck desolation into
Arren's heart. He looked away from them. But he knew them; he
recognized them; his eyes were drawn back to them. Each time he looked
at those peaks he felt a cold weight in his breast, and his nerve came
near to failing. Still he walked on, always downward, for the land
fell away, descending toward the mountains' feet. At last he said, "My
lord, what are..." He pointed at the mountains, for he could not go on
speaking; his throat was dry.
"They border on the world of light," Ged answered, "even as
does the wall of stones. They have no name but Pain. There is a road
across them. It is forbidden to the dead. It is not long. But it is a
bitter road."
"I am thirsty," Arren said, and his companion answered, "Here
they drink dust."
They went on.
It seemed to Arren that his companion's gait had slowed
somewhat, and sometimes he hesitated. He himself felt no more
hesitation, though the weariness had not ceased to grow in him. They
must go down; they must go on. They went on.
Sometimes they passed through other towns of the dead, where
the dark roofs made angles against the stars, which stood forever in
the same place above them. After the towns was the empty land again,
where nothing grew. As soon as they had come out of a town, it was
lost in the darkness. Nothing could be seen, before or behind, except
the mountains that grew ever nearer, towering before them. To their
right the formless slope fell away as it had done, how long ago? when
they crossed the wall of stones. "What lies that way?" Arren murmured
to Ged, for he craved the sound of speech, but the mage shook his
head: "I do not know. It may be a way without an end."
In the direction they went, the slope seemed to be growing
less and always less. The ground under their feet gritted harshly,
like lava-dust. Still they went on, and now Arren never thought of
returning or of how they might return. Nor did he think of stopping,
though he was very weary. Once he tried to lighten the numb darkness
and weariness and horror within him by thinking of his home; but he
could not remember what sunlight looked like or his mother's face.
There was nothing to do but to go on. And he went on.
He felt the ground level under his feet; and beside him Ged
hesitated. Then he too stopped. The long descent was over; this was
the end; there was no way further, no need to go on.
They were in the valley directly under the Mountains of Pain.
There were rocks underfoot and boulders about them, rough to the touch
like scoria. It was as if this narrow valley might be the dry bed of a
river of water that had once run here or the course of a river of
fire, long since cold, from the volcanoes that reared their black,
unmerciful peaks above.
He stood still, there in the narrow valley in the dark, and
Ged stood still beside him. They stood like the aimless dead, gazing
at nothing, silent. Arren thought, with a little dread but not much,
"We have come too far."
It did not seem to matter much.
Speaking his thought, Ged said, "We have come too far to turn
back." His voice was soft, but the ring of it was not wholly muted by
the great, gloomy hollowness around them, and at the sound of it Arren
roused a little. Had they not come here to meet the one they sought?
A voice in the darkness said, "You have come too far."
Arren answered it, saying, "Only too far is far enough."
"You have come to the Dry River," said the voice. "You cannot
go back to the wall of stones. You cannot go back to life."
"Not that way," said Ged, speaking into the darkness. Arren
could hardly see him, though they stood side by side, for the
mountains under which they stood cut out half the starlight, and it
seemed as if the current of the Dry River were darkness itself. "But
we would learn your way."
There was no answer.
"We meet as equals here. If you are blind, Cob, yet we are in
the dark."
There was no answer.
"We cannot hurt you here; we cannot kill you. What is there to
fear?"
"I have no fear," said the voice in the darkness. Then slowly,
glimmering a little as with that light that sometimes clung to Ged's
staff, the man appeared, standing some way upstream from Ged and
Arren, among the great, dim masses of the boulders. He was tall,
broad-shouldered and longarmed, like that figure which had appeared to
them on the dune and on the beach of Selidor, but older; the hair was
white and thickly matted over the high forehead. So he appeared in the
spirit, in the kingdom of death, not burnt by the dragon's fire, not
maimed; but not whole. The sockets of his eyes were empty.
"I have no fear," he said. "What should a dead man fear?" He
laughed. The sound of laughter rang so false and uncanny, there in
that narrow, stony valley under the mountains, that Arren's breath
failed him for a moment. But he gripped his sword and listened.
"I do not know what a dead man should fear," Ged answered.
"Surely not death? Yet it seems you fear it. Even though you have
found a way to escape from it."
"I have. I live: my body lives."
"Not well," the mage said dryly. "Illusion might hide age; but
Orm Embar was not gentle with that body."
"I can mend it. I know secrets of healing and of youth, no
mere illusions. What do you take me for? Because you are called
Archmage, do you take me for a village sorcerer? I who alone among all
mages found the Way of Immortality, which no other ever found!"
"Maybe we did not seek it," said Ged.
"You sought it. All of you. You sought it and could not find
it, and so made wise words about acceptance and balance and the
equilibrium of life and death. But they were words -lies to cover your
failure- to cover your fear of death! What man would not live forever,
if he could? And I can. I am immortal. I did what you could not do and
therefore I am your master; and you know it. Would you know how I did
it, Archmage?"
"I would."
Cob came a step closer. Arren noticed that, though the man had
no eyes, his manner was not quite that of the stoneblind; he seemed to
know exactly where Ged and Arren stood and to be aware of both of
them, though he never turned his head to Arren. Some wizardly
second-sight he might have, such as that hearing and seeing that
sendings and presentments had: something that gave him an awareness,
though it might not be true sight.
"I was in Paln," he said to Ged, "after you, in your pride,
thought you had humbled me and taught me a lesson. Oh, a lesson you
taught me, indeed, but not the one you meant to teach! There I said to
myself: I have seen death now, and I will not accept it. Let all
stupid nature go its stupid course, but I am a man, better than
nature, above nature. I will not go that way, I will not cease to be
myself! And so determined, I took the Pelnish Lore again, but found
only hints and smatterings of what I needed. So I rewove it and remade
it, and made a spell- the greatest spell that has ever been made. The
greatest and the last!"
"In working that spell, you died."
"Yes! I died. I had the courage to die, to find what you
cowards could never find - the way back from death. I opened the door
that had been shut since the beginning of time. And now I come freely
to this place and freely return to the world of the living. Alone of
all men in all time I am Lord of the Two Lands. And the door I opened
is open not only here, but in the minds of the living, in the depths
and unknown places of their being, where we are all one in the
darkness. They know it, and they come to me. And the dead too must
come to me, all of them, for I have not lost the magery of the living:
they must climb over the wall of stones when I bid them, all the
souls, the lords, the mages, the proud women; back and forth from life
to death, at my command. All must come to me, the living and the dead,
I who died and live!"
"Where do they come to you, Cob? Where is it that you are?"
"Between the worlds."
"But that is neither life nor death. What is life, Cob?"
"Power."
"What is love?"
"Power," the blind man repeated heavily, hunching up his
shoulders.
"What is light?"
"Darkness!"
"What is your name?"
"I have none."
"All in this land bear their true name."
"Tell me yours, then!"
"I am named Ged. And you?"
The blind man hesitated, and said, "Cob."
"That was your use-name, not your name. Where is your name?
Where is the truth of you? Did you leave it in Paln where you died?
You have forgotten much, O Lord of the Two Lands. You have forgotten
light, and love, and your own name."
"I have your name now, and power over you, Ged the Archmage-
Ged who was Archmage when he was alive!"
"My name is no use to you," Ged said. "You have no power over
me at all. I am a living man; my body lies on the beach of Selidor,
under the sun, on the turning earth. And when that body dies, I will
be here: but only in name, in name alone, in shadow. Do you not
understand? Did you never understand, you who called up so many
shadows from the dead, who summoned all the hosts of the perished,
even my lord Erreth-Akbe, wisest of us all? Did you not understand
that he, even he, is but a shadow and a name? His death did not
diminish life. Nor did it diminish him. He is there - there, not here!
Here is nothing, dust and shadows. There, he is the earth and
sunlight, the leaves of trees, the eagle's flight. He is alive. And
all who ever died, live; they are reborn and have no end, nor will
there ever be an end. All, save you. For you would not have death. You
lost death, you lost life, in order to save yourself. Yourself! Your
immortal self! What is it? Who are you?"
"I am myself. My body will not decay and die-"
"A living body suffers pain, Cob; a living body grows old; it
dies. Death is the price we pay for our life and for all life."
"I do not pay it! I can die and in that moment live again! I
cannot be killed; I am immortal. I alone am myself forever!"
"Who are you, then?"
"The Immortal One."
"Say your name
"The King."
"Say my name. I told it to you but a minute since. Say my
name!"
"You are not real. You have no name. Only I exist "
"You exist: without name, without form. You cannot see the
light of day; you cannot see the dark. You sold the green earth and
the sun and stars to save yourself. But you have no self. All that
which you sold, that is yourself. You have given everything for
nothing. And so now you seek to draw the world to you, all that light
and life you lost, to fill up your nothingness. But it cannot be
filled. Not all the songs of earth, not all the stars of heaven, could
fill your emptiness."
Ged's voice rang like iron, there in the cold valley under the
mountains, and the blind man cringed away from him. He lifted up his
face, and the dim starlight shone on it; he looked as if he wept, but
he had no tears, having no eyes. His mouth opened and shut, full of
darkness, but no words came out of it, only a groaning. At last he
said one word, barely shaping it with his contorted lips, and the word
was "Life."
"I would give you life if I could, Cob. But I cannot. You are
dead. But I can give you death."
"No!" the blind man screamed aloud, and then he said, "No,
no," and crouched down sobbing, though his cheeks were as dry as the
stony rivercourse where only night, and no water, ran. "You cannot. No
one can ever set me free. I opened the door between the worlds and I
cannot shut it. No one can shut it. It will never be shut again. It
draws, it draws me. I must come back to it. I must go through it and
come back here, into the dust and cold and silence. It sucks at me and
sucks at me. I cannot leave it. I cannot close it. It will suck all
the light out of the world in the end. All the rivers will be like the
Dry River. There is no power anywhere that can close the door I
opened!"
Very strange was the mixture of despair and vindictiveness,
terror and vanity, in his words and voice.
Ged said only, "Where is it?"
"That way. Not far. You can go there. But you cannot do
anything there. You cannot shut it. If you spent all your power in
that one act, it would not be enough. Nothing is enough."
"Maybe," Ged answered. "Though you chose despair, remember we
have not yet done so. Take us there."
The blind man raised his face, in which fear and hatred
struggled visibly. Hatred triumphed. "I will not," he said.
At that Arren stepped forward, and he said, "You will."
The blind man held still. The cold silence and the darkness of
the realm of the dead surrounded them, surrounded their words.
"Who are you?"
"My name is Lebannen."
Ged spoke: "You who call yourself King, do you not know who
this is?"
Again Cob held utterly still. Then he said, gasping a little
as he spoke, "But he is dead - You are dead. You cannot go back. There
is no way out. You are caught here!" As he spoke, the glimmer of light
died away from him, and they heard him turn in the darkness and go
away from them into it, hastily. "Give me light, my lord!" Arren
cried, and Ged held up his staff above his head, letting the white
light break open that old darkness, full of rocks and shadows, among
which the tall, stooped figure of the blind man hurried and dodged,
going upstream from them with a strange, unseeing, unhesitating gait.
After him Arren came, sword in hand; and after him, Ged.
Soon Arren had outdistanced his companion, and the light was
very faint, much interrupted by the boulders and the turnings of the
riverbed; but the sound of Cob's going, the sense of his presence
ahead, was guide enough. Arren drew closer slowly, as the way became
steeper. They were climbing in a steep gorge choked with stones; the
Dry River, narrowing to its head, wound between sheer banks. Rocks
clattered under their feet and under their hands, for they had to
clamber. Arren sensed the final narrowing-in of the banks, and with a
lunge forward came up to Cob and caught his arm, halting him there: at
a kind of basin of rocks five or six feet wide, what might have been a
pool if ever water ran there; and above it a tumbled cliff of rock and
slag. In that cliff there was a black hole, the source of the Dry
River.
Cob did not try to pull away from him. He stood quite still,
while the light of Ged's approach brightened on his eyeless face. He
had turned that face to Arren. "This is the place," he said at last, a
kind of smile forming on his lips. "This is the place you seek. See
it? There you can be reborn. All you need do is follow me. You will
live immortally. We shall be kings together."
Arren looked at that dry, dark springhead, the mouth of dust,
the place where a dead soul, crawling into earth and darkness, was
born again dead: abominable it was to him, and he said in a harsh
voice, struggling with deadly sickness, "Let it be shut!"
"It will be shut," Ged said, coming beside them: and the light
blazed up now from his hands and face as if he were a star fallen on
earth in that endless night. Before him the dry spring, the door,
yawned open. It was wide and hollow, but whether deep or shallow there
was no telling. There was nothing in it for the light to fall on, for
the eye to see. It was void. Through it was neither light nor dark,
neither life nor death. It was nothing. It was a way that led nowhere.
Ged raised up his hands and spoke.
Arren still held Cob's arm; the blind man had laid his free
hand against the rocks of the cliff-wall. Both stood still, caught in
the power of the spell.
With all the skill of his life's training and with all the
strength of his fierce heart, Ged strove to shut that door, to make
the world whole once more. And under his voice and the command of his
shaping hands the rocks drew together, painfully, trying to be whole,
to meet. But at the same time the light weakened and weakened, dying
out from his hands and from his face, dying out from his yew staff,
until only a little glimmer of it clung there. By that faint light
Arren saw that the door was nearly closed.
Under his hand the blind man felt the rocks move, felt them
come together: and felt also the art and power giving itself up,
spending itself, spent- And all at once he shouted, "No!" and broke
from Arren's grasp, lunged forward, and caught Ged in his blind,
powerful grasp. Bearing Ged down under his weight, he closed his hands
on his throat to strangle him.
Arren raised up the sword of Serriadh and brought the blade
down straight and hard on the bowed neck beneath the matted hair.
The living spirit has weight in the world of the dead, and the
shadow of his sword has an edge. The blade made a great wound,
severing Cob's spine. Black blood leapt out, lit by the sword's own
light.
But there is no good in killing a dead man, and Cob was dead,
years dead. The wound closed, swallowing its blood. The blind man
stood up very tall, groping out with his long arms at Arren, his face
writhing with rage and hatred: as if he had just now perceived who his
true enemy and rival was.
So horrible to see was this recovery from a deathblow, this
inability to die, more horrible than any dying, that a rage of
loathing swelled up in Arren, a berserk fury, and swinging up the
sword he struck again with it, a full, terrible, downward blow. Cob
fell with skull split open and face masked with blood, yet Arren was
upon him at once, to strike again, before the wound could close, to
strike until he killed...
Beside him Ged, struggling to his knees, spoke one word.
At the sound of his voice Arren was stopped, as if a hand had
grasped his sword-arm. The blind man, who had begun to rise, also held
utterly still. Ged got to his feet; he swayed a little. When he could
hold himself erect, he faced the cliff.
"Be thou made whole!" he said in a clear voice, and with his
staff he drew in lines of fire across the gate of rocks a figure: the
rune Agnen, the Rune of Ending, which closes roads and is drawn on
coffin lids. And there was then no gap or void place among the
boulders. The door was shut.
The earth of the Dry Land trembled under their feet, and
across the unchanging, barren sky a long roll of thunder ran and died
away.
"By the word that will not be spoken until time's end I
summoned thee. By the word that was spoken at the making of things I
now release thee. Go free!" And bending over the blind man, who was
crouched on his knees, Ged whispered in his ear, under the white,
tangled hair.
Cob stood up. He looked about him slowly, with seeing eyes. He
looked at Arren and then at Ged. He spoke no word, but gazed at them
with dark eyes. There was no anger in his face, no hate, no grief.
Slowly he turned, went off down the course of the Dry River, and soon
was gone to sight.
There was no more light on Ged's yew staff or in his face. He
stood there in the darkness. When Arren came to him he caught at the
young man's arm to hold himself upright. For a moment a spasm of dry
sobbing shook him. "It is done," he said. "It is all gone."
"It is done, dear lord. We must go."
"Aye. We must go home."
Ged was like one bewildered or exhausted. He followed Arren
back down the river-course, stumbling along slowly and with difficulty
among the rocks and boulders. Arren stayed with him. When the banks of
the Dry River were low and the ground was less steep, he turned toward
the way they had come, the long, formless slope that led up into the
dark. Then he turned away.
Ged said nothing. As soon as they halted, he bad sunk down,
sitting on a lava-boulder, forspent, his head hanging.
Arren knew that the way they had come was closed to them. They
could only go on. They must go all the way. "Even too far is not far
enough," he thought. He looked up at the black peaks, cold and silent
against the unmoving stars, terrible; and once more that ironic,
mocking voice of his will spoke in him, unrelenting: "Will you stop
halfway, Lebannen?"
He went to Ged and said very gently, "We must go on, my lord."
Ged said nothing, but he stood up.
"We must go by the mountains, I think."
"Thy way, lad," Ged said in a hoarse whisper. "Help me."
So they set out up the slopes of dust and scoria into the
mountains, Arren helping his companion along as well as he could. It
was black dark in the combes and gorges, so that he had to feel the
way ahead, and it was hard for him to give Ged support at the same
time. Walking was hard, a stumbling matter; but when they had to climb
and clamber as the slopes grew steeper, that was harder still. The
rocks were rough, burning their hands like molten iron. Yet it was
cold and got colder as they went higher. There was a torment in the
touch of this earth. It seared like live coals: a fire burned within
the mountains. But the air was always cold and always dark. There was
no sound. No wind blew. The sharp rocks broke under their hands, and
gave way under their feet. Black and sheer, the spurs and chasms went
up in front of them and fell away beside them into blackness. Behind,
below, the kingdom of the dead was lost. Ahead, above, the peaks and
rocks stood out against the stars. And nothing moved in all the length
and breadth of those black mountains, except the two mortal souls.
Ged often stumbled or missed his footing, in weariness. His
breath came harder and harder, and when his hands came hard against
the rocks, he gasped in pain. To hear him cry out wrung Arren's heart.
He tried to keep him from falling. But often the way was too narrow
for them to go abreast, or Arren had to go in front to seek out
footing. And at last, on a high slope that ran up to the stars, Ged
slipped and fell forward, and did not get up.
"My lord," Arren said, kneeling by him, and then spoke his
name: "Ged."
He did not move or answer.
Arren lifted him in his arms and carried him up that high
slope. At the end of it there was level ground for some way ahead.
Arren laid his burden down and dropped down beside him, exhausted and
in pain, past hope. This was the summit of the pass between the two
black peaks, for which he had been struggling. This was the pass and
the end. There was no way farther. The end of the level ground was the
edge of a cliff: beyond it the darkness went on forever, and the small
stars hung unmoving in the black gulf of the sky.
Endurance may outlast hope. He crawled forward, when he was
able to do so, doggedly. He looked over the edge of darkness. And
below him, only a little way below, he saw the beach of ivory sand;
the white and amber waves were curling and breaking in foam on it, and
across the sea the sun was setting in a haze of gold.
Arren turned back to the dark. He went back. He lifted Ged up
as best he could and struggled forward with him until he could not go
any farther. There all things ceased to be: thirst, and pain, and the
dark, and the sun's light, and the sound of the breaking sea.
------
The Stone of Pain
------
When Arren woke, a grey fog hid the sea and the dunes and
hills of Selidor. The breakers came murmuring in a low thunder out of
the fog and withdrew murmuring into it again. The tide was in, and the
beach much narrower than when they had first come there; the last,
small foam-lines of the waves came and licked at Ged's outflung left
hand as he lay face down on the sand. His clothes and hair were wet,
and Arren's clothes clung icily to his body, as if once at least the
sea had broken over them. Of Cob's dead body there was no trace. Maybe
the waves had drawn it out to sea. But behind Arren, when he turned
his head, huge and dim in the mist the grey body of Orm Embar bulked
like a ruined tower.
Arren got up, shuddering with chill; he could barely stand,
for cold and stiffness and a dizzy weakness like that which comes of
lying a long time unmoving. He staggered like a drunken man. As soon
as he could control his limbs he went to Ged and managed to pull him a
little way up the sand above the waves' reach, but that was all he
could do. Very cold, very heavy, Ged seemed to him; he had borne him
over the boundary from death into life, but maybe in vain. He put his
ear to Ged's breast, but could not still the shaking in his own limbs
and the chattering of his teeth to listen for the heartbeat. He stood
up again and tried to stamp to bring some warmth back into his legs
and finally, trembling and dragging his legs like an old man, set off
to find their packs. They had dropped them beside a little stream
running down from the ridge of the hills, a long time ago, when they
came down to the house of bones. It was that stream he sought, for he
could not think of anything but water, fresh water.
Before he expected it, he came to the stream, as it descended
onto the beach and wandered mazy and branching like a tree of silver
to the seas edge. There he dropped down and drank, with his face in
the water and his hands in the water, sucking up the water into his
mouth and into his spirit.
At last he sat up, and as he did so he saw on the far side of
the stream, immense, a dragon.
Its head, the color of iron, stained as with red rust at
nostril and, eye-socket and jowl, hung facing him, almost over him.
The talons sank deep into the soft, wet sand on the edge of the
stream. The folded wings were partly visible, like sails, but the
length of the dark body was lost in the fog.
It did not move. It might have been crouching there for hours,
or for years, or for centuries. It was carven of iron, shaped from
rock- but the eyes, the eyes he dared not look into, the eyes like oil
coiling on water, like yellow smoke behind glass, the opaque,
profound, yellow eyes watched Arren.
There was nothing he could do; so he stood up. If the dragon
would kill him, it would; and if it did not, he would try to help Ged,
if there was any help for him. He stood up and started to walk up the
rivulet to find their packs.
The dragon did nothing. It crouched unmoving and watched.
Arren found the packs, filled both the skin bottles at the stream, and
went back across the sand to Ged. After he had taken only a few steps
away from the stream, the dragon was lost in the thick fog.
He gave Ged water, but could not rouse him.. He lay lax and
cold, his head heavy on Arren's arm. His dark face was greyish, the
nose and cheek-bones and the old scar standing out harshly. Even his
body looked thin and burnt, as if half-consumed.
Arren sat there on the damp sand, his companion's head on his
knees. The fog made a vague, soft sphere about them, lighter overhead.
Somewhere in the fog was the dead dragon Orm Embar, and the live
dragon waiting by the stream. And somewhere across Selidor the boat
Lookfar, with no provisions in her, lay on another beach. And then the
sea, eastward. Three hundred miles to any other land of the West
Reach, maybe; a thousand to the Inmost Sea. A long way. "As far as
Selidor," they used to say on Enlad. The old stories told to children,
the myths, began, "As long ago as forever and as far away as Selidor,
there lived a prince..."
He was the prince. But in the old stories, that was the
beginning; and this seemed to be the end.
He was not downcast. Though very tired, and grieving for his
companion, he felt not the least bitterness or regret. Only there was
no longer anything he could do. It had all been done.
When his strength came back into him, he thought, he would try
surf-fishing with the line from his pack; for once his thirst was
quenched he had begun to feel the gnawing of hunger, and their food
was gone, all but one packet of hard bread. He would save that, for if
he soaked and softened it in water he might be able to feed some of it
to Ged.
And that was all there was left to do. Beyond that he could
not see; the mist was all about him.
He felt about in his pockets as he sat there, huddled with Ged
in the fog, to see if he had anything useful. In his tunic pocket was
a hard, sharp-edged thing. He drew it forth and looked at it, puzzled.
It was a small stone, black, porous, hard. He almost tossed it away.
Then he felt the edges of it in his hand, rough and searing, and felt
the weight of it, and knew it for what it was, a bit of rock from the
Mountains of Pain. It had caught in his pocket as he climbed or when
he crawled to the edge of the pass with Ged. He held it in his hand"
the unchanging thing, the stone of pain. He closed his hand on it and
held it. And he smiled then, a smile both somber and joyous, knowing,
for the first time in his life, alone, unpraised, and at the end of
the world, victory.
The mists thinned and moved. Far out through them he saw
sunlight on the open sea. The dunes and hills came and went, colorless
and enlarged by the veils of fog: Sunlight struck bright on the body
of Orm Embar, magnificent in death.
The iron-black dragon crouched, never moving, on the far side
of the stream.
Past noon the sun grew clear and warm, burning the last blur
of mist out of the air. Arren threw off his wet clothes and let them
dry, and went naked save for his swordbelt and sword. He let the sun
dry Ged's clothing likewise, but though the great, healing,
comfortable flood of heat and light poured down on Ged, yet he lay
still.
There was a noise as of metal rubbing against metal, the
grating whisper of crossed swords. The ironcolored dragon had risen on
its crooked legs. It moved and crossed the rivulet, with a soft
hissing sound as it dragged its long body through the sand. Arren saw
the wrinkles at the shoulder joints, the mail of the flanks scored and
scarred like the armor of Erreth-Akbe, and the long teeth yellowed and
blunt. In all this, and in its sure, ponderous movements, and in a
deep and frightening calmness that it had, he saw the sign of age: of
great age, of years beyond remembering. So when the dragon stopped
some few feet from where Ged lay, and Arren stood up between the two,
he said, in Hardic for he did not know the Old Speech, "Art thou
Kalessin?"
The dragon said no word, but it seemed to smile. Then,
lowering its huge head and sticking out its neck, it looked down at
Ged, and spoke his name.
Its voice was huge, and soft, and smelt like a blacksmith's
forge.
Again it spoke, and once more; and at the third time, Ged
opened his eyes. After a while he tried to sit up, but could not.
Arren knelt by him and supported him. Then Ged spoke. "Kalessin," he
said, "senvanissai'n ar Roke!" He had no more strength after speaking;
he leaned his head on Arren's shoulder and shut his eyes.
The dragon made no reply. It crouched as before, not moving.
The fog was coming in again, dimming the sun as it went down to the
sea.
Arren dressed and wrapped Ged in his cloak. The tide which had
drawn far out was coming in again, and he thought to carry his
companion up to dryer ground on the dunes, for he felt his strength
coming back.
But as he bent to lift Ged up, the dragon put out a great,
mailed foot, almost touching him. The talons of that foot were four,
with a spur behind such as a cock's foot has, but these were spurs of
steel, and as long as scythe-blades.
"Sobriost," said the dragon, like a January wind through
frozen reeds.
"Let my lord be. He has saved us all, and doing so has spent
his strength and maybe his life with it. Let him be!"
So Arren spoke, fiercely and with command. He had been
overawed and frightened too much, he had been filled up with fear, and
had got sick of it and would not have it any more. He was angry with
the dragon for its brute strength and size, its unjust advantage. He
had seen death, he had tasted death, and no threat had power over him.
The old dragon Kalessin looked at him from one long, awful,
golden eye. There were ages beyond ages in the depths of that eye; the
morning of the world was deep in it. Though Arren did not look into
it, he knew that it looked upon him with profound and mild hilarity.
"Arw sobriost," said the dragon, and its rusty nostrils
widened so that the banked and stifled fire deep within them
glittered.
Arren had his arm under Ged's shoulders, having been in the
act of lifting him when Kalessin's movement stopped him, and now he
felt Ged's head turn a little and heard his voice: "It means, mount
here."
For a while Arren did not move. This was all folly. But there
was the great, taloned foot, set like a step in front of him; and
above it, the crook of the elbow joint; and above that, the jutting
shoulder and the musculature of the wing where it sprang from the
shoulder blade: four steps, a stairway. And there in front of the
wings and the first great iron thorn of the spine-armor, in the hollow
of the neck there was place for a man to sit astride, or two men. If
they were mad and past hope and given up to folly.
"Mount!" said Kalessin in the speech of the Making.
So Arren stood up and helped his companion to stand. Ged held
his head erect, and with Arren's arms to guide him, climbed up those
strange steps. Both sat down astride in the rough-mailed hollow of the
dragon's neck, Arren behind, ready to support Ged if he needed it.
Both felt a warmth come into them, a welcome heat like the sun's heat,
where they touched the dragon's hide: life burnt in fire beneath that
iron armor.
Arren saw that they had left the mage's staff of yew lying
half-buried in the sand; the sea was creeping in to take it. He made
to get down for it, but Ged stopped him. "Leave it. I spent all
wizardry at that dry spring, Lebannen. I am no mage now."
Kalessin turned and looked at them sidelong; the ancient
laughter was in its eye. Whether Kalessin was male or female, there
was no telling; what Kalessin thought, there was no knowing. Slowly
the wings lifted and unfurled. They were not gold like Orm Embar's
wings but red, dark red, dark as rust or blood or the crimson silk of
Lorbanery. The dragon raised its wings carefully, lest it unseat its
puny riders. Carefully it gathered in the spring of its great
haunches, and leapt like a cat up into the air, and the wings beat
down and bore them above the fog that drifted over Selidor.
Rowing with those crimson wings in the evening air, Kalessin
wheeled out over the open sea, turned to the east, and flew.
In the days of high summer on the island of Ully a great
dragon was seen flying low, and later in Usidero and in the north of
Ontuego. Though dragons are dreaded in the West Reach, where people
know them all too well, yet after this one had passed over and the
villagers had come out of their hiding places, those who had seen it
said, "The dragons are not all dead, as we thought. Maybe the wizards
are not all dead, either. Surely there was a great splendor in that
flight; maybe it was the Eldest."
Where Kalessin touched to land none saw. In those far islands
there are forests and wild hills to which few men ever come, and where
even the descent of a dragon may go unseen.
But in the Ninety Isles there was screaming and disarray. Men
rowed westward among the little islands crying, "Hide! Hide! The
Dragon of Pendor has broken his word! The Archmage has perished, and
the Dragon is come devouring!"
Without landing, without looking down, the great ironcolored
worm flew over the little islands and the little towns and farms, and
deigned not even a belch of fire for such small fry. So it passed over
Geath and over Serd, and crossed the straits of the Inmost Sea, and
came within sight of Roke.
Never in the memory of man, scarcely in the memory of legend,
had any dragon braved the walls visible and invisible of the
well-defended isle. Yet this one did not hesitate, but flew on
ponderous wings and heavily over the western shore of Roke, above the
villages and fields, to the green hill that rises over Thwil Town.
There at last it stooped softly to the earth, raised its red wings and
folded them, and crouched on the summit of Roke Knoll.
The boys came running out of the Great House. Nothing could
have stopped them. But for all their youth they were slower than their
Masters and came second to the Knoll. When they came, the Patterner
was there, come from his Grove, his fair hair bright in the sun. With
him was the Changer, who had returned two nights before in the shape
of a great seaosprey, lame-winged and weary; long he had been caught
by his own spells in that form and could not come into his own shape
again until he came into the Grove, on that night when the Balance was
restored and the broken was made whole. The Summoner, gaunt and frail,
only one day risen from his bed, had come; and beside him stood the
Doorkeeper. And the other Masters of the Isle of the Wise were there.
They saw the riders dismount, one aiding the other. They saw
them look about with a look of strange contentment, grimness, and
wonder. The dragon crouched like stone while they clambered down from
its back and stood beside it. It turned its head a little while the
Archmage spoke to it, and briefly answered him. Those who watched saw
the sidelong look of the yellow eye, cold and full of laughter. Those
who understood heard the dragon say, "I have brought the young king to
his kingdom, and the old man to his home."
"A little farther yet, Kalessin," Ged replied. "I have not
gone where I must go." He looked down at the roofs and towers of the
Great House in the sunlight, and he seemed to smile a little. Then he
turned to Arren, who stood tall and slight, in worn clothes, and not
wholly steady on his legs from the weariness of the long ride and the
bewilderment of all that had passed. In the sight of them all, Ged
knelt to him, down on both knees, and bowed his grey head.
Then he stood up and kissed the young man on the cheek,
saying, "When you come to your throne in Havnor, my lord and dear
companion, rule long and well."
He looked again at the Masters and the young wizards and the
boys and the towns-folk gathered on the slopes and at the foot of the
Knoll. His face was quiet, and in his eyes there was something like
that laughter in the eyes of Kalessin. Turning from them all, he
mounted up again by the dragon's foot and shoulder, and took his seat
reinless between the great peaks of the wings, on the neck of the
dragon. The red wings lifted with a drumming rattle, and Kalessin the
Eldest sprang into the air. Fire came from the dragon's jaws, and
smoke, and the sound of thunder and the stormwind was in the beating
of its wings. It circled the hill once and flew off, north and
eastward, toward that quarter of Earthsea where stands the mountain
isle of Gont.
The Doorkeeper, smiling, said, "He has done with doing. He
goes home."
And they watched the dragon fly between the sunlight and the
sea till it was out of sight.
--
The Deed of Ged tells that he who had been Archmage came to
the crowning of the King of All the Isles in the Tower of the Sword in
Havnor at the world's heart. The song tells that when the ceremony of
the crowning was over and the festival began, he left the company and
went down alone to the port of Havnor. There lay out on the water a
boat, worn and beaten by storm and the weather of years; she had no
sail up and was empty. Ged called the boat by name, Lookfar, and she
came to him. Entering the boat from the pier Ged turned his back on
land, and without wind or sail or oar the boat moved; it took him from
harbor and from haven, westward among the isles, westward over sea;
and no more is known of him.
But in the island of Gont they tell the story otherwise,
saying that it was the young King, Lebannen, who came seeking Ged to
bring him to the coronation. But he did not find him at Gont Port or
at Re Albi. No one could say where he was, only that he had gone afoot
up into the forests of the mountain. Often he went so, they said, and
did not return for many months, and no man knew the roads of his
solitude. Some offered to seek for him, but the King forbade them,
saying, "He rules a greater kingdom than I do." And so he left the
mountain, and took ship, and returned to Havnor to be crowned.
---End---
http://ebook99.myetang.com achong
--
──自由是位女神﹐她隻愛戰士。
※ 來源:‧BBS 水木清華站 bbs.edu.cn‧[FROM: 159.226.22.52]
作者: raiderho@smth.edu.cn
標題: Earthsea 3 The farthest shore silverharpe(轉寄)
時間: Fri May 7 08:09:03 2004
發信人: david (Make our Promising Future), 信區: Emprise
標 題: 地海傳說第三卷
發信站: BBS 水木清華站 (Sat Apr 27 17:39:33 2002)
THE FARTHEST SHORE
URSULA K. LEGUIN
1972
------
The Rowan Tree
------
In the Court of the Fountain the sun of March shone through
young leaves of ash and elm, and water leapt and fell through shadow
and clear light. About that roofless court stood four high walls of
stone. Behind those were rooms and courts, passages, corridors,
towers, and at last the heavy outmost walls of the Great House of
Roke, which would stand any assault of war or earthquake or the sea
itself, being built not only of stone, but of incontestable magic. For
Roke is the Isle of the Wise, where the art magic is taught; and the
Great House is the school and central place of wizardry; and the
central place of the House is that small court far within the walls,
where the fountain plays and the trees stand in rain or sun or
starlight.
The tree nearest the fountain, a well-grown rowan, had humped
and cracked the marble pavement with its roots. Veins of bright green
moss filled the cracks, spreading up from the grassy plot around the
basin. A boy sat there on the low hump of marble and moss, his gaze
following the fall of the fountain's central jet. He was nearly a man,
but still a boy; slender, dressed richly. His face might have been
cast in golden bronze, it was so finely molded and so still.
Behind him, fifteen feet away perhaps, under the trees at the
other end of the small central lawn, a man stood, or seemed to stand.
It was hard to be certain in that flickering shift of shadow and warm
light. Surely he was there, a man in white, standing motionless. As
the boy watched the fountain, the man watched the boy. There was no
sound or movement but the play of leaves and the play of the water and
its continual song.
The man walked forward. A wind stirred the rowan tree and
moved its newly opened leaves. The boy leapt to his feet, lithe and
startled. He faced the man and bowed to him. "My Lord Archmage," he
said.
The man stopped before him, a short, straight, vigorous figure
in a hooded cloak of white wool. Above the folds of the laid-down hood
his face was reddish-dark, hawk-nosed, seamed on one cheek with old
scars. The eyes were bright and fierce. Yet he spoke gently. "It's a
pleasant pace to sit, the Court of the Fountain," he said, and,
forestalling the boy's apology, "You have traveled far and have not
rested. Sit down again."
He knelt on the white rim of the basin and held out his hand
to the ring of glittering drops that fell from the higher bowl of the
fountain, letting the water run through his fingers. The boy sat down
again on the humped tiles, and for a minute neither spoke.
"You are the son of the Prince of Enlad and the Enlades," the
Archmage said, "heir of the Principality of Morred. There is no older
heritage in all Earthsea, and none fairer. I have seen the orchards of
Enlad in the spring, and the golden roofs of Berila... How are you
called?"
"I am called Arren."
"That would be a word in the dialect of your land. What is it
in our common speech?"
The boy said, "Sword."
The Archmage nodded. There was silence again, and then the boy
said, not boldly, but without timidity, "I had thought the Archmage
knew all languages"
The man shook his head, watching the fountain.
"And all names..."
"All names? Only Segoy who spoke the First Word, raising up
the isles from the deep sea, knew all names. To be sure," and the
bright, fierce gaze was on Arren's face, "if I needed to know your
true name, I would know it. But there's no need. Arren I will call
you; and I am Sparrowhawk. Tell me, how was your voyage here?"
"Too long."
"The winds blew ill?"
"The winds blew fair, but the news I bear is ill, Lord
Sparrowhawk."
"Tell it, then," the Archmage said gravely, but like one
yielding to a child's impatience; and while Arren spoke, he looked
again at the crystal curtain of water drops falling from the upper
basin into the lower, not as if he did not listen, but as if he
listened to more than the boy's words.
"You know, my lord, that the prince my father is a wizardly
man, being of the lineage of Morred, and having spent a year here on
Roke in his youth. Some power he has and knowledge, though he seldom
uses his arts, being concerned with the ruling and ordering of his
realm, the governance of cities and matters of trade. The fleets of
our island go out westward, even into the West Reach, trading for
sapphires and Ox hides and tin, and early this winter a sea captain
returned to our city Berila with a tale that came to my father's ears,
so that he had the man sent for and heard him tell it" The boy spoke
quickly, with assurance. He had been trained by civil, courtly people,
and did not have the self-consciousness of the young.
"The sea captain said that on the isle of Narveduen, which is
some five hundred miles west of us by the ship lanes, there was no
more magic. Spells had no power there, he said, and the words of
wizardry were forgotten. My father asked him if it was that all the
sorcerers and witches had left that isle, and he answered, No: there
were some there who had been sorcerers, but they cast no more spells,
not even so much as a charm for kettle-mending or the finding of a
lost needle. And my father asked, Were not the folk of Narveduen
dismayed? And the sea captain said again, No, they seemed uncaring.
And indeed, he said, there was sickness among them, and their autumn
harvest had been poor, and still they seemed careless. He said -I was
there, when he spoke to the prince- he said, `They were like sick men,
like a man who has been told he must die within the year, and tells
himself it is not true, and he will live forever. They go about,' he
said, `without looking at the world.' When other traders returned,
they repeated the tale that Narveduen had become a poor land and had
lost the arts of wizardry. But all this was mere tales of the Reach,
which are always strange, and only my father gave it much thought.
"Then in the New Year, in the Festival of the Lambs that we
hold in Enlad, when the shepherds' wives come into the city bringing
the firstlings of the flocks, my father named the wizard Root to say
the spells of increase over the lambs. But Root came back to our hall
distressed and laid his staff down and said, `My lord, I cannot say
the spells.' My father questioned him, but he could say only, `I have
forgotten the words and the patterning.' So my father went to the
marketplace and said the spells himself, and the festival was
completed. But I saw him come home to the palace that evening, and he
looked grim and weary, and he said to me, `I said the words, but I do
not know if they had meaning.' And indeed there's trouble among the
flocks this spring, the ewes dying in birth, and many lambs born dead,
and some are... deformed." The boy's easy, eager voice dropped; he
winced as he said the word and swallowed. "I saw some of them," he
said. There was a pause.
"My father believes that this matter, and the tale of
Narveduen, show some evil at work in our part of the world. He desires
the counsel of the Wise."
"That he sent you proves that his desire is urgent," said the
Archmage. "You are his only son, and the voyage from Enlad to Roke is
not short. Is there more to tell?"
"Only some old wives' tales from the hills."
"What do the old wives say?"
"That all the fortunes witches read in smoke and water pools
tell of ill, and that their love-potions go amiss. But these are
people without true wizardry."
"Fortune-telling and love-potions are not of much account, but
old women are worth listening to. Well, your message will indeed be
discussed by the Masters of Roke. But I do not know, Arren, what
counsel they may give your father. For Enlad is not the first land
from which such tidings have come."
Arren's trip from the north, down past the great isle Havnor
and through the Inmost Sea to Roke, was his first voyage. Only in
these last few weeks had he seen lands that were not his own homeland,
become aware of distance and diversity, and recognized that there was
a great world beyond the pleasant hills of Enlad, and many people in
it. He was not yet used to thinking widely, and so it was a while
before he understood. "Where else?" he asked then, a little dismayed.
For he had hoped to bring a prompt cure home to Enlad.
"In the South Reach, first. Latterly even in the south of the
Archipelago, in Wathort. There is no more magic done in Wathort, men
say. It is hard to be sure. That land has long been rebellious and
piratical, and to hear a Southern trader is to hear a liar, as they
say. Yet the story is always the same: The springs of wizardry have
run dry."
"But here on Roke-"
"Here on Roke we have felt nothing of this. We are defended
here from storm and change and all ill chance. Too well defended,
perhaps. Prince, what will you do now?"
"I shall go back to Enlad when I can bring my father some
clear word of the nature of this evil and of its remedy."
Once more the Archmage looked at him, and this time, for all
his training, Arren looked away. He did not know why, for there was
nothing unkind in the gaze of those dark eyes. They were impartial,
calm, compassionate.
All in Enlad looked up to his father, and he was his father's
son. No man had ever looked at him thus, not as Arren, Prince of
Enlad, son of the Ruling Prince, but as Arren alone. He did not like
to think that he feared the Archmage's gaze, but he could not meet it.
It seemed to enlarge the world yet again around him, and now not only
Enlad sank to insignificance, but he himself, so that in the eyes of
the Archmage he was only a small figure, very small, in a vast scene
of sea-girt lands over which hung darkness.
He sat picking at the vivid moss that grew in the cracks of
the marble flagstones, and presently he said, hearing his voice, which
had deepened only in the last couple of years, sound thin and husky:
"And I shall do as you bid me."
"Your duty is to your father, not to me," the Archmage said.
His eyes were still on Arren, and now the boy looked up. As he
had made his act of submission he had forgotten himself, and now he
saw the Archmage: the greatest wizard of all Earthsea, the man who had
capped the Black Well of Fundaur and won the Ring of Erreth-Akbe from
the Tombs of Atuan and built the deep-founded sea wall of Nepp; the
sailor who knew the seas from Astowell to Selidor; the only living
Dragonlord. There he knelt beside a fountain, a short man and not
young, a quiet-voiced man, with eyes as deep as evening.
Arren scrambled up from sitting and knelt down formally on
both knees, all in haste. "My lord," he said stammering, "let me serve
you!"
His self-assurance was gone, his face was flushed, his voice
shook.
At his hip he wore a sword in a sheath of new leather figured
with inlay of red and gold; but the sword itself was plain, with a
worn cross-hilt of silvered bronze. This he drew forth, all in haste,
and offered the hilt to the Archmage, as a liegeman to his prince.
The Archmage did not put out his hand to touch the sword hilt.
He looked at it and at Arren. "That is yours, not mine," he said. "And
you are no man's servant."
"But my father said that I might stay on Roke until I learned
what this evil is and maybe some mastery -I have no skill, I don't
think I have any power, but there were mages among my forefathers- if
I might in some way learn to be of use to you-"
"Before your ancestors were mages," the Archmage said, "they
were kings."
He stood up and came with silent, vigorous step to Arren, and
taking the boy's hand made him rise. "I thank you for your offer of
service, and though I do not accept it now, yet I may, when we have
taken counsel on these matters. The offer of a generous spirit is not
one to refuse lightly. Nor is the sword of the son of Morred to be
lightly turned aside!... Now go. The lad who brought you here will see
that you eat and bathe and rest. Go on," and he pushed Arren lightly
between the shoulder blades, a familiarity no one had ever taken
before, and which the young prince would have resented from anyone
else; but he felt the Archmage's touch as a thrill of glory. For Arren
had fallen in love.
He had been an active boy, delighting in games, taking pride
and pleasure in the skills of body and mind, apt at his duties of
ceremony and governing, which were neither light nor simple. Yet he
had never given himself entirely to anything. All had come easily to
him, and he had done all easily; it had all been a game, and he had
played at loving. But now the depths of him were wakened, not by a
game or dream, but by honor, danger, wisdom, by a scarred face and a
quiet voice and a dark hand holding, careless of its power, the staff
of yew that bore near the grip, in silver set in the black wood, the
Lost Rune of the Kings.
So the first step out of childhood is made all at once,
without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in
reserve.
Forgetting courtly farewells he hurried to the doorway,
awkward, radiant, obedient. And Ged the Archmage watched him go.
Ged stood a while by the fountain under the ash tree, then
raised his face to the sunwashed sky. "A gentle messenger for bad
news," he said half aloud, as if talking to the fountain. It did not
listen, but went on talking in its own silver tongue, and he listened
to it a while. Then, going to another doorway, which Arren had not
seen, and which indeed very few eyes would have seen no matter how
close they looked, he said, "Master Doorkeeper."
A little man of no age appeared. Young he was not, so that one
had to call him old, but the word did not suit him. His face was dry
and colored like ivory, and he had a pleasant smile that made long
curves in his cheeks. "What's the matter, Ged?" said he.
For they were alone, and he was one of the seven persons in
the world who knew the Archmage's name. The others were the Master
Namer of Roke; and Ogion the Silent, the wizard of Re Albi, who long
ago on the mountain of Gont had given Ged that name; and the White
Lady of Gont, Tenar of the Ring; and a village wizard in Iffish called
Vetch; and in Iffish again, a house-carpenter's wife, mother of three
girls, ignorant of all sorcery but wise in other things, who was
called Yarrow; and finally, on the other side of Earthsea, in the
farthest west, two dragons: Orm Embar and Kalessin.
"We should meet tonight," the Archmage said. "I'll go to the
Patterner. And I'll send to Kurremkarmerruk, so that he'll put his
lists away and let his students rest one evening and come to us, if
not in flesh. Will you see to the others?"
"Aye," said the Doorkeeper, smiling, and was gone; and the
Archmage also was gone; and the fountain talked to itself all serene
and never ceasing in the sunlight of early spring.
Somewhere to the west of the Great House of Roke, and often
somewhat south of it, the Immanent Grove is usually to be seen. There
is no place for it on maps, and there is no way to it except for those
who know the way to it. But even novices and townsfolk and farmers can
see it, always at a certain distance, a wood of high trees whose
leaves have a hint of gold in their greenness even in the spring. And
they consider -the novices, the townsfolk, the farmers- that the Grove
moves about in a mystifying manner. But in this they are mistaken, for
the Grove does not move. Its roots are the roots of being. It is all
the rest that moves.
Ged walked over the fields from the Great House. He took off
his white cloak, for the sun was at noon. A farmer ploughing a brown
hillside raised his hand in salute, and Ged replied the same way.
Small birds went up into the air and sang. The sparkweed was just
coming into flower in the fallows and beside the roads. Far up, a hawk
cut a wide arc on the sky. Ged glanced up, and raised his hand again.
Down shot the bird in a rush of windy feathers, and stooped straight
to the offered wrist, gripping with yellow claws. It was no
sparrowhawk but a big Ender-falcon of Roke, a white-and-brown-barred
fishing hawk. It looked sidelong at the Archmage with one round,
bright-gold eye, then clashed its hooked beak and stared at him
straight on with both round, bright gold eyes. "Fearless," the
Archmage said to it in the tongue of the Making.
The big hawk beat its wings and gripped with its talons,
gazing at him.
"Go then, brother, fearless one."
The farmer, away off on the hillside under the bright sky, had
stopped to watch. Once last autumn he had watched the Archmage take a
wild bird on his wrist, and then in the next moment had seen no man,
but two hawks mounting on the wind.
This time they parted as the farmer watched: the bird to the
high air, the man walking on across the muddy fields.
He came to the path that led to the Immanent Grove, a path
that led always straight and direct no matter how time and the world
bent awry about it, and following it came soon into the shadow of the
trees.
The trunks of some of these were vast. Seeing them one could
believe at last that the Grove never moved: they were like immemorial
towers grey with years; their roots were like the roots of mountains.
Yet these, the most ancient, were some of them thin of leaf, with
branches that had died. They were not immortal. Among the giants grew
sapling trees, tall and vigorous with bright crowns of foliage, and
seedlings, slight leafy wands no taller than a girl.
The ground beneath the trees was soft, rich with the rotten
leaves of all the years. Ferns and small woodland plants grew in it,
but there was no kind of tree but the one, which had no name in the
Hardic tongue of Earthsea. Under the branches the air smelled earthy
and fresh, and had a taste in the mouth like live spring-water.
In a glade which had been made years before by the falling of
an enormous tree, Ged met the Master Patterner, who lived within the
Grove and seldom or never came forth from it. His hair was
butter-yellow; he was no Archipelagan. Since the restoral of the Ring
of Erreth-Akbe, the barbarians of Kargad had ceased their forays and
had struck some bargains of trade and peace with the Inner Lands. They
were not friendly folk, and held aloof. But now and then a young
warrior or merchant's son came westward by himself, drawn by love of
adventure or craving to learn wizardry. Such had been the Master
Patterner ten years ago, a sword-begirt, red-plumed young savage from
Karego-At, arriving at Gont on a rainy morning and telling the
Doorkeeper in imperious and scanty Hardic, "I come to learn!" And now
he stood in the greengold light under the trees, a tall man and fair,
with long fair hair and strange green eyes, the Master Patterner of
Earthsea.
It may be that he too knew Ged's name, but if so he never
spoke it. They greeted each other in silence.
"What are you watching there?" the Archmage asked, and the
other answered, "A spider."
Between two tall grass blades in the clearing a spider had
spun a web, a circle delicately suspended. The silver threads caught
the sunlight. In the center the spinner waited, a grey-black thing no
larger than the pupil of an eye.
"She too is a patterner," Ged said, studying the artful web.
"What is evil?" asked the younger man.
The round web, with its black center, seemed to watch them
both.
"A web we men weave," Ged answered.
In this wood no birds sang. It was silent in the noon light
and hot. About them stood the trees and shadows.
"There is word from Narveduen and Enlad: the same."
"South and southwest. North and northwest," said the
Patterner, never looking from the round web.
"We shall come here this evening. This is the best place for
counsel."
"I have no counsel." The Patterner looked now at Ged, and his
greenish eyes were cold. "I am afraid," he said. "There is fear. There
is fear at the roots."
"Aye," said Ged. "We must look to the deep springs, I think.
We have enjoyed the sunlight too long, basking in that peace which the
healing of the Ring brought, accomplishing small things, fishing the
shallows. Tonight we must question the depths: And so he left the
Patterner alone, gazing still at the spider in the sunny grass.
At the edge of the Grove, where the leaves of the great trees
reached out over ordinary ground, he sat with his back against a
mighty root, his staff across his knees. He shut his eyes as if
resting, and sent a sending of his spirit over the hills and fields of
Roke, northward, to the sea-assaulted cape where the Isolate Tower
stands.
"Kurremkarmerruk," he said in spirit, and the Master Namer
looked up from the thick book of names of roots and herbs and leaves
and seeds and petals that he was reading to his pupils and said, "I am
here, my lord."
Then he listened, a big, thin old man, white-haired under his
dark hood; and the students at their writing-tables in the tower room
looked up at him and glanced at one another.
"I will come," Kurremkarmerruk said, and bent his head to his
book again, saying, "Now the petal of the flower of moly hath a name,
which is iebera, and so also the sepal, which is partonath; and stem
and leaf and root hath each his name..."
But under his tree the Archmage Ged, who knew all the names of
moly, withdrew his sending and, stretching out his legs more
comfortably and keeping his eyes shut, presently fell asleep in the
leafspotted sunlight.
------
The Masters of Roke
------
The School on Roke is where boys who show promise in sorcery
are sent from all the Inner Lands of Earthsea to learn the highest
arts of magic. There they become proficient in the various kinds of
sorcery, learning names, and runes, and skills, and spells, and what
should and what should not be done, and why. And there, after long
practice, and if hand and mind and spirit all keep pace together, they
may be named wizard, and receive the staff of power. True wizards are
made only on Roke.
Since there are sorcerers and witches on all the isles, and
the uses of magic are as needful to their people as bread and as
delightful as music, so the School of Wizardry is a place held in
reverence. The nine mages who are the Masters of the School are
considered the equals of the great princes of the Archipelago. Their
master, the warden of Roke, the Archmage, is held to be accountable to
no man at all, except the King of All the Isles; and that only by an
act of fealty, by heart's gift, for not even a king could constrain so
great a mage to serve the common law, if his will were otherwise. Yet
even in the kingless centuries, the Archmages of Roke kept fealty and
served that common law. All was done on Roke as it had been done for
many hundreds of years; a place safe from all trouble it seemed, and
the laughter of boys rang in the echoing courts and down the broad,
cold corridors of the Great House.
Arren's guide about the School was a stocky lad whose cloak
was clasped at the neck with silver, a token that he had passed his
novicehood and was a proven sorcerer, studying to gain his staff. He
was called Gamble, "because," said he, "my parents had six girls, and
the seventh child, my father said, was a gamble against Fate." He was
an agreeable companion, quick of mind and tongue. At another time
Arren would have enjoyed his humor, but today his mind was too full.
He did not pay him very much attention, in fact. And Gamble, with a
natural wish to be given credit for existence, began to take advantage
of the guest's absentmindedness. He told him strange facts about the
School, and then told him strange lies about the School, and to all of
them Arren said, "Oh, yes" or "I see," until Gamble thought him a
royal idiot.
"Of course they don't cook in here," he said, showing Arren
past the huge stone kitchens all alive with the glitter of copper
cauldrons and the clatter of chopping-knives and the eye-prickling
smell of onions. "It's just for show. We come to the refectory, and
everybody charms up whatever he wants to eat. Saves dishwashing too."
"Yes, I see," said Arren politely.
"Of course novices who haven't learnt the spells yet often
lose a good deal of weight, their first months here; but they learn.
There's one boy from Havnor who always tries for roast chicken, but
all he ever gets is millet mush. He can't seem to get his spells past
millet mush. He did get a dried haddock along with it, yesterday."
Gamble was getting hoarse with the effort to push his guest into
incredulity. He gave up and stopped talking.
"Where... what land does the Archmage come from?" said that
guest, not even looking at the mighty gallery through which they were
walking, all carven on wall and arched ceiling with the
Thousand-Leaved Tree.
"Gont," said Gamble. "He was a village goatherd there." ,
Now, at this plain and well-known fact, the boy from Enlad
turned and looked with disapproving unbelief at Gamble. "A goatherd?"
"That's what most Gontishmen are, unless they're pirates or
sorcerers. I didn't say he was a goatherd now, you know!"
"But how would a goatherd become Archmage?"
"The same way a prince would! By coming to Roke and outdoing
all the Masters, by stealing the Ring in Atuan, by sailing the
Dragons' Run, by being the greatest wizard since Erreth-Akbe - how
else?"
They came out of the gallery by the north door. Late afternoon
lay warm and bright on the furrowed hills and the roofs of Thwil Town
and the bay beyond. There they stood to talk. Gamble said, "Of course
that's all long ago, now. He hasn't done much since he was named
Archmage. They never do. They just sit on Roke and watch the
Equilibrium, I suppose. And he's quite old now."
"Old? How old?"
"Oh, forty or fifty."
"Have you seen him?"
"Of course I've seen him," Gamble said sharply. The royal
idiot seemed also to be a royal snob.
"Often?"
"No. He keeps to himself. But when I first came to Roke I saw
him, in the Fountain Court."
"I spoke with him there today," Arren said.
His tone made Gamble look at him and then answer him fully:
"It was three years ago. And I was so frightened I never really looked
at him. I was pretty young, of course. But its hard to see things
clearly in there. I remember his voice, mostly, and the fountain
running." After a moment he added, "He does have a Gontish accent."
"If I could speak to dragons in their own language," Arren
said, "I wouldn't care about my accent."
At that Gamble looked at him with a degree of approval, and
asked, "Did you come here to join the school, prince?"
"No. I carried a message from my father to the Archmage."
"Enlad is one of the Principalities of the Kingship, isn't
it?"
"Enlad, Ilien, and Way. Havnor and Ea, once, but the line of
descent from the kings has died out in those lands. Ilien traces the
descent from Gemal Seaborn through Maharion, who was King of all the
Isles. Way, from Akambar and the House of Shelieth. Enlad, the oldest,
from Morred through his son Serriadh and the House of Enlad"
Arren recited these genealogies with a dreamy air, like a
well-trained scholar whose mind is on another subject.
"Do you think we'll see a king in Havnor again in our
lifetime?"
"I never thought about it much."
"In Ark, where I come from, people think about it. We're part
of the Principality of Ilien now, you know, since peace was made. How
long has it been, seventeen years or eighteen, since the Ring of the
King's Rune was returned to the Tower of the Kings in Havnor? Things
were better for a while then, but now they're worse than ever. It's
time there was a king again on the throne of Earthsea, to wield the
Sign of Peace. People are tired of wars and raids and merchants who
overprice and princes who overtax and all the confusion of unruly
powers. Roke guides, but it can't rule. The Balance lies here, but the
Power should lie in the king's hands."
Gamble spoke with real interest, all foolery set aside, and
Arren's attention was finally caught. "Enlad is a rich and peaceful
land," he said slowly. "It has never entered into these rivalries. We
hear of the troubles in other lands. But there's been no king on the
throne in Havnor since Maharion died: eight hundred years. Would the
lands indeed accept a king?"
"If he came in peace and in strength; if Roke and Havnor
recognized his claim."
"And there is a prophecy that must be fulfilled, isn't there?
Maharion said that the next king must be a mage."
"The Master Chanter's a Havnorian and interested in the
matter, and he's been dinning the words into us for three years now.
Maharion said, He shall inherit my throne who has crossed the dark
land living and come to the far shores of the day."
"Therefore a mage."
"Yes, since only a wizard or mage can go among the dead in the
dark land and return. Though they do not cross it. At least, they
always speak of it as if it had only one boundary, and beyond that, no
end. What are the far shores of the day, then? But so runs the
prophecy of the Last King, and therefore someday one will be born to
fulfill it. And Roke will recognize him, and the fleets and armies and
nations will come together to him. Then there will be majesty again in
the center of the world, in the Tower of the Kings in Havnor. I would
come to such a one; I would serve a true king with all my heart and
all my art," said Gamble, and then laughed and shrugged, lest Arren
think he spoke with over-much emotion. But Arren looked at him with
friendliness, thinking, "He would feel toward the king as I do toward
the Archmage." Aloud he said, "A king would need such men as you about
him."
They stood, each thinking his own thoughts, yet companionable,
until a gong rang sonorous in the Great House behind them.
"There!" said Gamble. "Lentil and onion soup tonight. Come
on."
"I thought you said they didn't cook," said Arren, still
dreamy, following.
"Oh, sometimes -by mistake-"
No magic was involved in the dinner, though plenty of
substance was. After it they walked out over the fields in the soft
blue of the dusk. "This is Roke Knoll," Gamble said, as they began to
climb a rounded hill. The dewy grass brushed their legs, and down by
the marshy Thwilburn there was a chorus of little toads to welcome the
first warmth and the shortening, starry nights.
There was a mystery in that ground. Gamble said softly, "This
hill was the first that stood above the sea, when the First Word was
spoken."
"And it will be the last to sink, when all things are unmade,"
said Arren.
"Therefore a safe place to stand on," Gamble said, shaking off
awe; but then he cried, awestruck, "Look! The Grove!"
South of the Knoll a great light was revealed on the earth,
like moonrise, but the thin moon was already setting westward over the
hill's top; and there was a flickering in this radiance, like the
movement of leaves in the wind.
"What is it?"
"It comes from the Grove- the Masters must be there. They say
it burnt so, with a light like moonlight, all night, when they met to
choose the Archmage five years ago. But why are they meeting now? Is
it the news you brought?"
"It may be," said Arren.
Gamble, excited and uneasy, wanted to return to the Great
House to hear any rumor of what the Council of the Masters portended.
Arren went with him, but looked back often at that strange radiance
till the slope hid it, and there was only the new moon setting and the
stars of spring.
Alone in the dark in the stone cell that was his
sleeping-room, Arren lay with eyes open. He had slept on a bed all his
life, under soft furs; even in the twenty-oared galley in which he had
come from Enlad they had provided their young prince with more comfort
than this-a straw pallet on the stone floor and a ragged blanket of
felt. But he noticed none of it. "I am at the center of the world," he
thought. "The Masters are talking in the holy place. What will they
do? Will they weave a great magic to save magic? Can it be true that
wizardry is dying out of the world? Is there a danger that threatens
even Roke? I will stay here. I will not go home. I would rather sweep
his room than be a prince in Enlad. Would he let me stay as a novice?
But perhaps there will be no more teaching of the art-magic, no more
learning of the true names of things. My father has the gift of
wizardry, but I do not; perhaps it is indeed dying out of the world.
Yet I would stay near him, even if he lost his power and his art. Even
if I never saw him. Even if he never said another word to me." But his
ardent imagination swept him on past that, so that in a moment he saw
himself face to face with the Archmage once more in the court beneath
the rowan tree, and the sky was dark and the tree leafless and the
fountain silent; and he said, "My lord, the storm is on us, yet I will
stay by thee and serve thee," and the Archmage smiled at him... But
there imagination failed, for he had not seen that dark face smile.
In the morning he rose, feeling that yesterday he had been a
boy, today he was a man. He was ready for anything. But when it came,
he stood gaping. "The Archmage wishes to speak to you, Prince Arren,"
said a little novice-lad at his doorway, who waited a moment and ran
off before Arren could collect his wits to answer.
He made his way down the tower staircase and through stone
corridors toward the Fountain Court, not knowing where he should go.
An old man met him in the corridor, smiling so that deep furrows ran
down his cheeks from nose to chin: the same who had met him yesterday
at the door of the Great House when he first came up from the harbor,
and had required him to say his true name before he entered. "Come
this way," said the Master Doorkeeper.
The halls and passages in this part of the building were
silent, empty of the rush and racket of the boys that enlivened the
rest. Here one felt the great age of the walls. The enchantment with
which the ancient stones were laid and protected was here palpable.
Runes were graven on the walls at intervals, cut deep, some inlaid
with silver. Arren had learned the Runes of Hardie from his father,
but none of these did he know, though certain of them seemed to hold a
meaning that he almost knew, or had known and could not quite
remember.
"Here you are, lad," said the Doorkeeper, who made no account
of titles such as Lord or Prince. Arren followed him into a long,
low-beamed room, where on one side a fire burnt in a stone hearth, its
flames reflecting in the oaken floor, and on the other side pointed
windows let in the cold, soft light of fog. Before the hearth stood a
group of men. All looked at him as he entered, but among them he saw
only one, the Archmage. He stopped, and bowed, and stood dumb.
"These are the Masters of Roke, Arren," said the Archmage,
"seven of the nine. The Patterner will not leave his Grove, and the
Namer is in his tower, thirty miles to the north. All of them know
your errand here. My lords, this is the son of Morred."
No pride roused in Arren at that phrase, but only a kind of
dread. He was proud of his lineage, but thought of himself only as an
heir of princes, one of the House of Enlad. Morred, from whom that
house descended, had been dead two thousand years. His deeds were
matter of legends, not of this present world. It was as if the
Archmage had named him son of myth, inheritor of dreams.
He did not dare look up at the faces of the eight mages. He
stared at the iron-shod foot of the Archmage's staff, and felt the
blood ringing in his ears.
"Come, let us breakfast together," said the Archmage, and led
them to a table set beneath the windows. There was milk and sour beer,
bread, new butter, and cheese. Arren sat with them and ate.
He had been among noblemen, landholders, rich merchants, all
his life. His father's hall in Berila was full of them: men who owned
much, who bought and sold much, who were rich in the things of the
world. They ate meat and drank wine and talked loudly; many disputed,
many flattered, most sought something for themselves. Young as he was,
Arren had learned a good deal about the manners and disguises of
humanity. But he had never been among such men as these. They ate
bread and talked little, and their faces were quiet. If they sought
something, it was not for themselves. Yet they were men of great
power: that, too, Arren recognized.
Sparrowhawk the Archmage sat at the head of the table and
seemed to listen to what was said, and yet there was a silence about
him, and no one spoke to him. Arren was let alone also, so that he had
time to recover himself. On his left was the Doorkeeper, and on his
right a grey-haired man with a kindly look, who said to him at last,
"We are countrymen, Prince Arren. I was born in eastern Enlad, by the
Forest of Aol."
"I have hunted in that forest," Arren replied, and they spoke
together a little of the woods and towns of the Isle of the Myths, so
that Arren was comforted by the memory of his home.
When the meal was done, they drew together once more before
the hearth, some sitting and some standing, and there was a little
silence.
"Last night," the Archmage said, "we met in council. Long we
talked, yet resolved nothing. I would hear you say now, in the morning
light, whether you uphold or gainsay your judgment of the night."
"That we resolved nothing," said the Master Herbal, a stocky,
dark-skinned man with calm eyes, "is itself a judgment. In the Grove
are patterns found; but we found nothing there but argument."
"Only because we could not see the pattern plain," said the
grey-haired mage of Enlad, the Master Changer. "We do not know enough.
Rumors from Wathort; news from Enlad. Strange news, and should be
looked to. But to raise a great fear on so little a foundation is
unneedful. Our power is not threatened only because a few sorcerers
have forgotten their spells."
"So say I," said a lean, keen-eyed man, the Master Windkey.
"Have we not all our powers? Do not the trees of the Grove grow and
put forth leaves? Do not the storms of heaven obey our word? Who can
fear for the art of wizardry, which is the oldest of the arts of man?"
"No man," said the Master Summoner, deep-voiced and tall,
young, with a dark and noble face, "no man, no power, can bind the
action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very
words of the Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the
world."
"Aye, and one who could do that would not be on Wathort or
Narveduen," said the Changer. "He would be here at the gates of Roke,
and the end of the world would be at hand! We've not come to that pass
yet"
"Yet there is something wrong," said another, and they looked
at him: deep-chested, solid as an oaken cask, he sat by the fire, and
the voice came from him soft and true as the note of a great bell. He
was the Master Chanter. "Where is the king that should be in Havnor?
Roke is not the heart of the world. That tower is, on which the sword
of Erreth-Akbe is set, and in which stands the throne of Serriadh, of
Akambar, of Maharion. Eight hundred years has the heart of the world
been empty! We have the crown, but no king to wear it. We have the
Lost Rune, the King's Rune, the Rune of Peace, restored to us, but
have we peace? Let there be a king upon the throne, and we will have
peace, and even in the farthest Reaches the sorcerers will practice
their arts with untroubled mind, and there will be order and a due
season to all things."
"Aye," said the Master Hand, a slight, quick man, modest of
bearing but with clear and seeing eyes. "I am with you, Chanter. What
wonder that wizardry goes astray, when all else goes astray? If the
whole flock wander, will our black sheep stay by the fold?"
At that the Doorkeeper laughed, but he said nothing.
"Then to you all," said the Archmage, it seems that there is
nothing very wrong; or if, there is, it lies in this, that our lands
are ungoverned or ill-governed, so that all the arts and high skills
of men suffer from neglect. With that much I agree. Indeed it is
because the South is all but lost to peaceful commerce that we must
depend on rumor; and who has any safe word from the West Reach, save
this from Narveduen? If ships went forth and came back safely as of
old, if our lands of Earthsea were well-knit, we might know how things
stand in the remote places, and so could act. And I think we would
act! For, my lords, when the Prince of Enlad tells us that he spoke
the words of the Making in a spell and yet did not know their meaning
as he spoke them; when the Master Patterner says that there is fear at
the roots and will say no more: is this so little a foundation for
anxiety? When a storm begins, it is only a little cloud on the
horizon."
"You have a sense for the black things, Sparrowhawk," said the
Doorkeeper. "You ever did. Say what you think is wrong."
"I do not know. There is a weakening of power. There is a want
of resolution. There is a dimming of the sun. I feel, my lords- I feel
as if we who sit here talking, were all wounded mortally, and while we
talk and talk our blood runs softly from our veins..."
"And you would be up and doing."
"I would," said the Archmage.
"Well," said the Doorkeeper, "can the owls keep the hawk from
flying?"
"But where would you go?" the Changer asked, and the Chanter
answered him: "To seek our king and bring him to his throne!"
The Archmage looked keenly at the Chanter, but answered only,
"I would go where the trouble is."
"South or west," said the Master Windkey.
"And north and east if need be," said the Doorkeeper.
"But you are needed here, my lord," said the Changer. "Rather
than to go seeking blindly among unfriendly peoples on strange seas,
would it not be wiser to stay here, where all magic is strong, and
find out by your arts what this evil or disorder is?"
"My arts do not avail me," the Archmage said.
There was that in his voice which made them all look at him,
sober and with uneasy eyes. "I am the Warder of Roke. I do not leave
Roke lightly. I wish that your counsel and my own were the same; but
that is not to be hoped for now. The judgment must be mine: and I must
go."
"To that judgment we yield," said the Summoner.
"And I go alone. You are the Council of Roke, and the Council
must not be broken. Yet one I will take with me, if he will come." He
looked at Arren. "You offered me your service, yesterday. Last night
the Master Patterner said, `Not by chance does any man come to the
shores of Roke. Not by chance is a son of Morred the bearer of this
news' And no other word had he for us all the night. Therefore I ask
you, Arren, will you come with me?"
"Yes, my lord," said Arren, with a dry throat.
"The prince, your father, surely would not let you go into
this peril," said the Changer somewhat sharply, and to the Archmage,
"The lad is young and not trained in wizardry."
"I have years and spells enough for both of us," Sparrowhawk
said in a dry voice. "Arren, what of your father?"
"He would let me go."
"How can you know?" asked the Summoner.
Arren did not know where he was being required to go, nor
when, nor why. He was bewildered and abashed by these grave, honest,
terrible men. If he had had time to think he could not have said
anything at all. But he had no time to think; and the Archmage had
asked him, "Will you come with me?"
"When my father sent me here he said to me, `I fear a dark
time is coming on the world, a time of danger. So I send you rather
than any other messenger, for you can judge whether we should ask the
help of the Isle of the Wise in this matter, or offer the help of
Enlad to them.' So if I am needed, therefore I am here."
At that he saw the Archmage smile. There was great sweetness
in the smile, though it was brief. "Do you see?" he said to the seven
mages. "Could age or wizardry add anything to this?"
Arren felt that they looked on him approvingly then, but with
a kind of pondering or wondering look, still. The Summoner spoke, his
arched brows straightened to a frown: "I do not understand it, my
lord. That you are bent on going, yes. You have been caged here five
years. But always before you were alone; you have always gone alone.
Why, now, companioned?"
"I never needed help before," said Sparrowhawk, with an edge
of threat or irony in his voice. "And I have found a fit companion."
There was a dangerousness about him, and the tall Summoner asked him
no more questions, though he still frowned.
But the Master Herbal, calm-eyed and dark like a wise and
patient ox, rose from his seat and stood monumental. "Go, my lord," he
said, "and take the lad. And all our trust goes with you."
One by one the others gave assent quietly, and by ones and
twos withdrew, until only the Summoner was left of the seven.
"Sparrowhawk," he said, "I do not seek to question your judgment. Only
I say: If you are right, if there is imbalance and the peril of great
evil, then a voyage to Wathort, or into the West Reach, or to world's
end, will not be far enough. Where you may have to go, can you take
this companion, and is it fair to him?"
They stood apart from Arren, and the Summoner's voice was
lowered, but the Archmage spoke openly: "It is fair."
"You are not telling me all you know," the Summoner said.
"If I knew, I would speak. I know nothing. I guess much."
"Let me come with you:
"One must guard the gates."
"The Doorkeeper does that-"
"Not only the gates of Roke. Stay here. Stay here, and watch
the sunrise to see if it be bright, and watch at the wall of stones to
see who crosses it and where their faces are turned. There is a
breach, Thorion, there is a break, a wound, and it is this I go to
seek. If I am lost, then maybe you will find it. But wait. I bid you
wait for me." He was speaking now in the Old Speech, the language of
the Making, in which all true spells are cast and on which all the
great acts of magic depend; but very seldom is it spoken in
conversation, except among the dragons. The Summoner made no further
argument or protest, but bowed his tall head quietly both to the
Archmage and to Arren and departed.
The fire crackled in the hearth. There was no other sound.
Outside the windows the fog pressed formless and dim.
The Archmage stared into the flames, seeming to have forgotten
Arren's presence. The boy stood at some distance from the hearth, not
knowing if he should take his leave or wait to be dismissed,
irresolute and somewhat desolate, feeling again like a small figure in
a dark, illimitable, confusing space.
"We'll go first to Hort Town," said Sparrowhawk, turning his
back to the fire. "News gathers there from all the South Reach, and we
may find a lead. Your ship still waits in the bay. Speak to the
master; let him carry word to your father. I think we should leave as
soon as may be. At daybreak tomorrow. Come to the steps by the
boathouse."
"My lord, what-" His voice stuck a moment. "What is it you
seek?"
"I don't know, Arren."
"Then-"
"Then how shall I seek it? Neither do I know that. Maybe it
will seek me." He grinned a little at Arren, but his face was like
iron in the grey light of the windows.
"My lord," Arren said, and his voice was steady now, "it is
true I come of the lineage of Morred, if any tracing of lineage so old
be true. And if I can serve you I will account it the greatest chance
and honor of my life, and there is nothing I would rather do. But I
fear that you mistake me for something more than I am. "
"Maybe," said the Archmage.
"I have no great gifts or skills. I can fence with the short
sword and the noble sword. I can sail a boat. I know the court dances
and the country dances. I can mend a quarrel between courtiers. I can
wrestle. I am a poor archer, and I am skillful at the game of
net-ball. I can sing, and play the harp and lute. And that is all.
There is no more. What use will I be to you? The Master Summoner is
right-"
"Ah, you saw that, did you? He's jealous. He claims the
privilege of older loyalty."
"And greater skill, my lord."
"Then you'd rather he went with me, and you stayed behind?"
"No! But I fear-"
"Fear what?"
Tears sprang to the boy's eyes. "To fail you," he said.
The Archmage turned around again to the fire. "Sit down,
Arren," he said, and the boy came to the stone corner-seat of the
hearth. "I did not mistake you for a wizard or a warrior or any
finished thing. What you are I do not know, though I'm glad to know
that you can sail a boat... What you will be, no one knows. But this
much I do know: you are the son of Morred and of Serriadh."
Arren was silent. "That is true, my lord," he said at last.
"But..." The Archmage said nothing, and he had to finish his sentence:
"But I am not Morred. I am only myself."
"You take no pride in your lineage?"
"Yes, I take pride in it -because it makes me a prince; it is
a responsibility, a thing that must be lived up to-"
The Archmage nodded once, sharply. "That is what I meant. To
deny the past is to deny the future. A man does not make his destiny:
he accepts it or denies it. If the rowan's roots are shallow, it bears
no crown." At this Arren looked up startled, for his true name,
Lebannen, meant the rowan tree. But the Archmage had not said his
name. "Your roots are deep," he went on. "You have strength and you
must have room, room to grow. Thus I offer you, instead of a safe trip
home to Enlad, an unsafe voyage to an unknown end. You need not come.
The choice is yours. But I offer you the choice. For I am tired of
safe places, and roofs, and walls around me." He ended abruptly,
looking about him with piercing, unseeing eyes. Arren saw the deep
restlessness of the man, and it frightened him. Yet fear sharpens
exhilaration, and it was with a leap of the heart that he answered,
"My lord, I choose to go with you."
Arren left the Great House with his heart and mind full of
wonder. He told himself that he was happy, but the word did not seem
to suit. He told himself that the Archmage had called him strong, a
man of destiny, and that he was proud of such praise; but he was not
proud. Why not? The most powerful wizard in the world told him,
"Tomorrow we sail to the edge of doom," and he nodded his head and
came: should he not feel pride? But he did not. He felt only wonder.
He went down through the steep, wandering streets of Thwil
Town, found his ship's master on the Quays, and said to him, "I sail
tomorrow with the Archmage, to Wathort and the South Reach. Tell the
Prince my father that when I am released from this service I will come
home to Berila."
The ship's captain looked dour. He knew how the bringer of
such news might be received by the Prince of Enlad. "I must have
writing about it from your hand, prince," he said. Seeing the justice
in that, Arren hurried off -he felt that all must be done instantly-
and found a strange little shop where he purchased inkstone and brush
and a piece of soft paper, thick as felt; then he hurried back to the
quays and sat down on the wharfside to write his parents. When he
thought of his mother holding this piece of paper, reading the letter,
a distress came into him. She was a blithe, patient woman, but Arren
knew that he was the foundation of her contentment, that she longed
for his quick return. There was no way to comfort her for his long
absence. His letter was dry and brief. He signed with the sword-rune,
sealed the letter with a bit of pitch from a caulking-pot nearby, and
gave it to the ship's master. Then, "Wait!" he said, as if the ship
were ready to set sail that instant, and ran back up the cobbled
streets to the strange little shop. He had trouble finding it, for
there was something shifty about the streets of Thwil; it almost
seemed that the turnings were different every time. He came on the
right street at last and darted into the shop under the strings of red
clay beads that ornamented its doorway. When he was buying ink and
paper he had noticed, on a tray of clasps and brooches, a silver
brooch in the shape of a wild rose; and his mother was called Rose.
"I'll buy that," he said, in his hasty, princely way.
"Ancient silverwork of the Isle of O. I can see you are a
judge of the old crafts," said the shopkeeper, looking at the hilt
-not the handsome sheath- of Arren's sword. "That will be four in
ivory."
Arren paid the rather high price unquestioning; he had in his
purse plenty of the ivory counters that serve as money in the Inner
Lands. The idea of a gift for his mother pleased him; the act of
buying pleased him; as he left the shop he set his hand on the pommel
of his sword, with a touch of swagger.
His father had given him that sword on the eve of his
departure from Enlad. He had received it solemnly and had worn it, as
if it were a duty to wear it, even aboard ship. He was proud of the
weight of it at his hip, the weight of its great age on his spirit.
For it was the sword of Serriadh who was the son of Morred and
Elfarran; there was none older in the world except the sword of
Erreth-Akbe, which was set atop the Tower of the Kings in Havnor. The
sword of Serriadh had never been laid away or hoarded up, but worn;
yet was unworn by the centuries, unweakened, because it had been
forged with a great power of enchantment. Its history said that it
never had been drawn, nor ever could be drawn, except in the service
of life. For no purpose of bloodlust or revenge or greed, in no war
for gain, would it let itself be wielded. From it, the great treasure
of his family, Arren had received his use-name: Arrendek he had been
called as a child, 'the little Sword.'
He had not used the sword, nor had his father, nor his
grandfather. There had been peace in Enlad for a long time.
And now, in the street of the strange town of the Wizards'
Isle, the sword's handle felt strange to him when he touched it. It
was awkward to his hand and cold. Heavy, the sword hindered his walk,
dragged at him. And the wonder he had felt was still in him, but had
gone cold. He went back down to the quay, and gave the brooch to the
ship's master for his mother, and bade him farewell and a safe voyage
home. Turning away he pulled his cloak over the sheath that held the
old, unyielding weapon, the deadly thing he had inherited. He did not
feel like swaggering any more. "What am I doing?" he said to himself
as he climbed the narrow ways, not hurrying now, to the fortress-bulk
of the Great House above the town. "How is it that I'm not going home?
Why am I seeking something I don't understand, with a man I don't
know?"
And he had no answer to his questions.
------
Hort Town
------
In the darkness before dawn Arren dressed in clothing that had
been given him, seaman's garb, wellworn but clean, and hurried down
through the silent halls of the Great House to the eastern door,
carven of horn and dragon's tooth. There the Doorkeeper let him out
and pointed the way that he should take, smiling a little. He followed
the topmost street of the town and then a path that led down to the
boathouses of the School, south along the bay shore from the docks of
Thwil. He could just make out his way. Trees, roofs, hills bulked as
dim masses within dimness; the dark air was utterly still and very
cold; everything held still, held itself withdrawn and obscure. Only
over the dark sea eastward was there one faint, clear line: the
horizon, tipping momently toward the unseen sun.
He came to the boathouse steps. No one was there; nothing
moved. In his bulky sailor's coat and wool cap he was warm enough, but
he shivered, standing on the stone steps in the darkness, waiting.
The boathouses loomed black above black water, and suddenly
from them came a dull, hollow sound, a booming knock, repeated three
times. Arren's hair stirred on his scalp. A long shadow glided out
onto the water silently. It was a boat, and it slid softly toward the
pier. Arren ran down the steps onto the pier and leapt down into the
boat.
"Take the tiller," said the Archmage, a lithe, shadowy figure
in the prow, "and hold her steady while I get the sail up."
They were out on the water already, the sail opening like a
white wing from the mast, catching the growing light. "A west wind to
save us rowing out of the bay, that's a parting gift from the Master
Windkey, I don't doubt. Watch her, lad, she steers very light! So
then. A west wind and a clear dawn for the Balance-Day of spring."
"Is this boat Lookfar?" Arren had heard of the Archmage's boat
in songs and tales.
"Aye," said the other, busy with ropes. The boat bucked and
veered as the wind freshened; Arren set his teeth and tried to keep
her steady.
"She steers very light, but somewhat willful, lord."
The Archmage laughed. "Let her have her will; she is wise
also. Listen, Arren," and he paused, kneeling on the thwart to face
Arren, "I am no lord now, nor you a prince. I am a trader called Hawk,
and you're my nephew, learning the seas with me, called Arren; for we
hail from Enlad. From what town? A large one, lest we meet a
townsman."
"Temere, on the south coast? They trade to all the Reaches."
The Archmage nodded.
"But," said Arren cautiously, "you don't have quite the accent
of Enlad."
"I know. I have a Gontish accent," his companion said, and
laughed, looking up at the brightening east. "But I think I can borrow
what I need from you. So we come from Temere in our boat Dolphin, and
I am neither lord nor mage nor Sparrowhawk, but- how am I called?"
"Hawk, my lord."
Then Arren bit his tongue.
"Practice, nephew," said the Archmage. "It takes practice.
You've never been anything but a prince. While I have been many
things, and last of all, and maybe least, an Archmage... We go south
looking for emmelstone, that blue stuff they carve charms of. I know
they value it in Enlad. They make it into charms against rheums,
sprains, stiff necks, and slips of the tongue."
After a moment Arren laughed, and as he lifted his head, the
boat lifted on a long wave, and he saw the rim of the sun against the
edge of the ocean, a flare of sudden gold, before them.
Sparrowhawk stood with one hand on the mast, for the little
boat leapt on the choppy waves, and facing the sunrise of the equinox
of spring he chanted. Arren did not know the Old Speech, the tongue of
wizards and dragons, but he heard praise and rejoicing in the words,
and there was a great striding rhythm in them like the rise and fall
of tides or the balance of the day and night each succeeding each
forever. Gulls cried on the wind, and the shores of Thwil Bay slid
past to right and left, and they entered on the long waves, full of
light, of the Inmost Sea.
From Roke to Hort Town is no great voyage, but they spent
three nights at sea. The Archmage had been urgent to be gone, but once
gone, he was more than patient. The winds turned contrary as soon as
they were away from the charmed weather of Roke, but he did not call a
magewind into their sail, as any weatherworker could have done;
instead, he spent hours teaching Arren how to manage the boat in a
stiff headwind, in the rock-fanged sea east of Issel. The second night
out it rained, the rough, cold rain of March, but he said no spell to
keep it off them. On the next night, as they lay outside the entrance
to Hort Harbor in a calm, cold, foggy darkness, Arren thought about
this, and reflected that in the short time he had known him, the
Archmage had done no magic at all.
He was a peerless sailor, though. Arren had learned more in
three days' sailing with him than in ten years of boating and racing
on Berila Bay. And mage and sailor are not so far apart; both work
with the powers of sky and sea, and bend great winds to the uses of
their hands, bringing near what was remote. Archmage or Hawk the
sea-trader, it came to much the same thing.
He was a rather silent man, though perfectly goodhumored. No
clumsiness of Arren's fretted him; he was companionable; there could
be no better shipmate, Arren thought. But he would go into his own
thoughts and be silent for hours on end, and then when he spoke there
was a harshness in his voice, and he would look right through Arren.
This did not weaken the love the boy felt for him, but maybe it
lessened liking somewhat; it was a little awesome. Perhaps Sparrowhawk
felt this, for in that foggy night off the shores of Wathort he began
to talk to Arren, rather haltingly, about himself. "I do not want to
go among men again tomorrow," he said. "I've been pretending that I am
free... That nothing's wrong in the world. That I'm not Archmage, not
even sorcerer. That I'm Hawk of Temere, without responsibilities or
privileges, owing nothing to anyone..." He stopped and after a while
went on, "Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must
be made. When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being
and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a
fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its
consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom
do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when
you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are."
How could such a man, thought Arren, be in doubt as to who and
what he was? He had believed such doubts were reserved for the young,
who had not done anything yet.
The boat rocked in the great, cool darkness.
"That's why I like the sea," said Sparrowhawk's voice in that
darkness.
Arren understood him; but his own thoughts ran ahead, as they
had been doing all these three days and nights, to their quest, the
aim of their sailing. And since his companion was in a mood to talk at
last, he asked, "Do you think we will find what we seek in Hort Town?"
Sparrowhawk shook his head, perhaps meaning no, perhaps
meaning that he did not know.
"Can it be a kind of pestilence, a plague, that drifts from
land to land, blighting the crops and the flocks and men's spirits?"
"A pestilence is a motion of the great Balance, of the
Equilibrium itself; this is different. There is the stink of evil in
it. We may suffer for it when the balance of things rights itself, but
we do not lose hope and forego art and forget the words of the Making.
Nature is not unnatural. This is not a righting of the balance, but an
upsetting of it. There is only one creature who can do that."
"A man?" Arren said, tentative.
"We men."
"How?"
"By an unmeasured desire for life."
"For life? But it isn't wrong to want to live?"
"No. But when we crave power over life -endless wealth,
unassailable safety, immortality- then desire becomes greed. And if
knowledge allies itself to that greed, then comes evil. Then the
balance of the world is swayed, and ruin weighs heavy in the scale."
Arren brooded over this a while and said at last, "Then you
think it is a man we seek?"
"A man, and a mage. Aye, I think so."
"But I had thought, from what my father and teachers taught,
that the great arts of wizardry were dependent on the Balance, the
Equilibrium of things, and so could not be used for evil."
"That," said Sparrowhawk somewhat wryly, "is a debatable
point. Infinite are the arguments of mages... Every land of Earthsea
knows of witches who cast unclean spells, sorcerers who use their art
to win riches. But there is more. The Firelord, who sought to undo the
darkness and stop the sun at noon, was a great mage; even Erreth-Akbe
could scarcely defeat him. The Enemy of Morred was another such. Where
he came, whole cities knelt to him; armies fought for him. The spell
he wove against Morred was so mighty that even when he was slain it
could not be halted, and the island of Solea was overwhelmed by the
sea, and all on it perished. Those were men in whom great strength and
knowledge served the will to evil and fed upon it. Whether the
wizardry that serves a better end may always prove the stronger, we do
not know. We hope."
There is a certain bleakness in finding hope where one
expected certainty. Arren found himself unwilling to stay on these
cold summits. He said after a little while, "I see why you say that
only men do evil, I think. Even sharks are innocent; they kill because
they must."
"That is why nothing else can resist us. Only one thing in the
world can resist an evil-hearted man. And that is another man. In our
shame is our glory. Only our spirit, which is capable of evil, is
capable of overcoming it!,
"But the dragons," said Arren. "Do they not do great evil? Are
they innocent?"
"The dragons! The dragons are avaricious, insatiable,
treacherous; without pity, without remorse. But are they evil? Who am
I, to judge the acts of dragons?... They are wiser than men are. It is
with them as with dreams, Arren. We men dream dreams, we work magic,
we do good, we do evil. The dragons do not dream. They are dreams.
They do not work magic: it is their substance, their being. They do
not do; they are."
"In Serilune," said Arren, "is the skin of Bar Oth, killed by
Keor, Prince of Enlad, three hundred years ago. No dragons have ever
come to Enlad since that day. I saw the skin of Bar Oth. It is heavy
as iron and so large that if it were spread out it would cover all the
marketplace of Serilune, they said. The teeth are as long as my
forearm. Yet they said Bar Oth was a young dragon, not full-grown."
"There is a desire in you," said Sparrowhawk, "to see
dragons."
"Yes."
"Their blood is cold and venomous. You must not look into
their eyes. They are older than mankind..." He was silent a while and
then went on, "And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever
done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the
wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content."
Both were silent then, and there was no sound but the
whispering of the water with the boat, and no light. So at last, there
on the deep waters, they slept.
In the bright haze of morning they came into Hort Harbor,
where a hundred craft were moored or setting forth: fishermen's boats,
crabbers, trawlers, trading-ships, two galleys of twenty oars, one
great sixty-oared galley in bad repair, and some lean, long
sailing-ships with high triangular sails designed to catch the upper
airs in the hot calms of the South Reach. "Is that a ship of war?"
Arren asked as they passed one of the twenty-oared galleys, and his
companion answered, "A slaver, I judge from the chainbolts in her
hold. They sell men in the South Reach."
Arren pondered this a minute, then went to the gear-box and
took from it his sword, which he had wrapped well and stowed away on
the morning of their departure. He uncovered it; he stood indecisive,
the sheathed sword on his two hands, the belt dangling from it.
"It's no sea-trader's sword," he said "The scabbard is too
fine."
Sparrowhawk, busy at the tiller, shot him a look "Wear it if
you like."
"I thought it might be wise."
"As swords go, that one is wise," said his companion, his eyes
alert on their passage through the crowded bay. "Is it not a sword
reluctant to be used?"
Arren nodded. "So they say. Yet it has killed. It has killed
men." He looked down at the slender, handworn hilt. "It has, but I
have not. It makes me feel a fool. It is too much older than I... I
shall take my knife," he ended, and rewrapping the sword, shoved it
down deep in the gear-box. His face was perplexed and angry.
Sparrowhawk said nothing till he asked, "Will you take the oars now,
lad? We're heading for the pier there by the stairs."
Hort Town, one of the Seven Great Ports of the Archipelago,
rose from its noisy waterfront up the slopes of three steep hills in a
jumble of color. The houses were of clay plastered in red, orange,
yellow, and white; the roofs were of purplish-red tile; pendick-trees
in flower made masses of dark red along the upper streets. Gaudy,
striped awnings stretched from roof to roof, shading narrow
marketplaces. The quays were bright with sunlight; the streets running
back from the waterfront were like dark slots full of shadows and
people and noise.
When they had tied up the boat, Sparrowhawk stooped over
beside Arren as if to check the knot, and he said, "Arren, there are
people in Wathort who know me pretty well; so watch me, that you may
know me." When he straightened up there was no scar on his face. His
hair was quite grey; his nose was thick and somewhat snubbed; and
instead of a yewstaff his own height, he carried a wand of ivory,
which he tucked away inside his shirt. "Dost know me?" he said to
Arren with a broad smile, and he spoke with the accent of Enlad. "Hast
never seen thy nuncle before this?"
Arren had seen wizards at the court of Berila change their
faces when they mimed the Deed of Morred, and knew it was only
illusion; he kept his wits about him, and was able to say, "Oh aye,
nuncle Hawk!"
But, while the mage dickered with a harbor guardsman over the
fee for docking and guarding the boat, Arren kept looking at him to
make sure that he did know him. And as he looked, the transformation
troubled him more, not less. It was too complete; this was not the
Archmage at all, this was no wise guide and leader... The guardsman's
fee was high, and Sparrowhawk grumbled as he paid, and strode away
with Arren, still grumbling. "A test of my patience," he said. "Pay
that swag-bellied thief to guard my boat! When half a spell would do
twice the job! Well, this is the price of disguise... And I've forgot
my proper speech, have I not, nevvy?"
They were walking up a crowded, smelly, gaudy street lined
with shops, little more than booths, whose owners stood in the
doorways among heaps and festoons of wares, loudly proclaiming the
beauty and cheapness of their pots, hosiery, hats, spades, pins,
purses, kettles, baskets, firehooks, knives, ropes, bolts, bed-linens,
and every other kind of hardware and drygoods.
"Is it a fair?"
"Eh?" said the snub-nosed man, bending his grizzled head.
"Is it a fair, nuncle?"
"Fair? No, no. They keep it up all year round, here. Keep your
fishcakes, mistress, I have breakfasted!" And Arren tried to shake off
a man with a tray of little brass vases, who followed at his heels
whining, "Buy, try, handsome young master, they won't fail you, breath
as sweet as the roses of Numima, charming the women to you, try them,
young sealord, young prince..."
All at once Sparrowhawk was between Arren and the peddler,
saying, "What charms are these?"
"Not charms!" the man whined, shrinking away from him. "I sell
no charms, sea-master! Only syrups to sweeten the breath after drink
or hazia-root - only syrups, great prince!" He cowered right down onto
the pavement stones, his tray of vases clinking and clattering, some
of them tipping so that a drop of the sticky stuff inside oozed out,
pink or purple, over the lip.
Sparrowhawk turned away without speaking and went on with
Arren. Soon the crowds thinned and the shops grew wretchedly poor,
little kennels displaying as all their wares a handful of bent nails,
a broken pestle, and an old cardingcomb. This poverty disgusted Arren
less than the rest; in the rich end of the street he had felt choked,
suffocated, by the pressure of things to be sold and voices screaming
to him to buy, buy. And the peddler's abjectness had shocked him. He
thought of the cool, bright streets of his Northern town. No man in
Berila, he thought, would have grovelled to a stranger like that.
"These are a foul folk!" he said.
"This way, nevvy," was all his companion's answer. They turned
aside into a passage between high, red, windowless house walls, which
ran along the hillside and through an archway garlanded with decaying
banners, out again into the sunlight in a steep square, another
marketplace, crowded with booths and stalls and swarming with people
and flies.
Around the edges of the square, a number of men and women were
sitting or lying on their backs, motionless. Their mouths had a
curious blackish look, as if they had been bruised, and around their
lips flies swarmed and gathered in clusters like bunches of dried
currants.
"So many," said Sparrowhawk's voice, low and hasty as if he
too had gotten a shock; but when Arren looked at him there was the
blunt, bland face of the hearty trader Hawk, showing no concern.
"What's wrong with those people?"
"Hazia. It soothes and numbs, letting the body be free of the
mind. And the mind roams free. But when it returns to the body it
needs more hazia... And the craving grows and the life is short, for
the stuff is poison. First there is a trembling, and later paralysis,
and then death."
Arren looked at a woman sitting with her back to a sunwarmed
wall; she had raised her hand as if to brush away the flies from her
face, but the hand made a jerky, circular motion in the air, as if she
had quite forgotten about it and it was moved only by the repeated
surging of a palsy or shaking in the muscles. The gesture was like an
incantation emptied of all intention, a spell without meaning.
Hawk was looking at her too, expressionless. "Come on!" he
said.
He led on across the marketplace to an awning-shaded booth.
Stripes of sunlight colored green, orange, lemon, crimson, azure, fell
across the cloths and shawls and woven belts displayed, and danced
multitudinous in the tiny mirrors that bedecked the high, feathered
headdress of the woman who sold the stuff. She was big and she chanted
in a big voice, "Silks, satins, canvases, furs, felts, woollens,
fleecefells of Gont, gauzes of Sowl, silks of Lorbanery! Hey, you
Northern men, take off your duffle-coats; don't you see the sun's out?
How's this to take home to a girl in far Havnor? Look at it, silk of
the South, fine as the mayfly's wing!" She had flipped open with deft
hands a bolt of gauzy silk, pink shot with threads of silver.
"Nay, mistress, we're not wed to queens," said Hawk, and the
woman's voice rose to a blare: "So what do you dress your womenfolk
in, burlap? sailcloth? Misers that won't buy a bit of silk for a poor
woman freezing in the everlasting Northern snow! How's this then, a
Gontish fleecefell, to help you keep her warm on winter nights!" She
flung out over the counterboard a great cream and brown square, woven
of the silky hair of the goats of the northeastern isles. The
pretended trader put out his hand and felt it, and he smiled.
"Aye, you're a Gontishman?" said the blaring voice, and the
headdress nodding sent a thousand colored dots spinning over the
canopy and the cloth.
"This is Andradean work; see? There's but four warpstrings to
the finger's width. Gont uses six or more. But tell me why you've
turned from working magic to selling fripperies. When I was here years
since, I saw you pulling flames out of men's ears, and then you made
the flames turn into birds and golden bells, and that was a finer
trade than this one."
"It was no trade at all," the big woman said, and for a moment
Arren was aware of her eyes, hard and steady as agates, looking at him
and Hawk from out of the glitter and restlessness of her nodding
feathers and flashing mirrors.
"It was pretty, that pulling fire out of ears," said Hawk in a
dour but simple-minded tone. "I thought to show it to my nevvy."
"Well now, look you," said the woman less harshly, leaning her
broad, brown arms and heavy bosom on the counter. "We don't do those
tricks any more. People don't want 'em. They've seen through 'em.
These mirrors now, I see you remember my mirrors," and she tossed her
head so that the reflected dots of colored light whirled dizzily about
them. "Well, you can puzzle a man's mind with the flashing of the
Mirrors and with words and with other tricks I won't tell you, till he
thinks he sees what he don't see, what isn't there. Like the flames
and golden bells, or the S't of clothes I used to deck sailormen in,
cloth of
In s gold with diamonds like apricots, and off they'd swagger like the
King of All the Isles .... But it was tricks, fooleries. You can fool
men. They're like chickens charmed by a snake, by a finger held before
'em. Men are like chickens. But then in the end they know they've been
fooled and fuddled and they get angry and lose their pleasure in such
things. So I turned to this trade, and maybe all the silks aren't
silks nor all the fleeces Gontish, but all the same they'll
wearthey'll wearl They're real and not mere lies and air like the
suits of cloth of gold."
"Well, well," said Hawk, "then there's none left in all Hort
Town to pull fire out of ears, or do any magic like they did?"
At his last words the woman frowned; she straightened up and
began to fold the fleecefell carefully. "Those who want lies and
visions chew hazia," she said. "Talk to them if you like!" She nodded
at the unmoving figures around the square.
"But there were sorcerers, they that charmed the winds for
seamen and put spells of fortune on their cargoes. Are they all turned
to other trades?"
But she in sudden fury came blaring in over his words,
"There's a sorcerer if you want one, a great one, a wizard with a
staff and all-see him there? He sailed with Egre himself, making winds
and finding fat galleys, so he said, but it was all lies, and Captain
Egre gave him his just reward at last; he cut his right hand off. And
there he sits now, see him, with his mouth full of hazia and his belly
full of air. Air and liesl Air and liesl That's all there is to your
magic, Seacaptain Goad"
"Well, well, mistress," said Hawk with obdurate mildness, "I
was only asking." She turned her broad back with a great, dazzle of
whirling mirror-dots, and he ambled off, Arren beside him.
His amble was purposeful. It brought them near the man she had
pointed out. He sat propped against a wall, staring at nothing; the
dark, bearded face had been very handsome once. The wrinkled
wrist-stump lay on the pavement stones in the hot, bright sunlight,
shameful.
There was some commotion among the booths behind them, but
Arren found it hard to look away from the man; a loathing fascination
held him. "Was he really a wizard?" he asked very low.
"He may be the one called Hare, who was weatherworker for the
pirate Egre. They were famous thieves -Here, stand clear, Arrenl" A
man running full-tilt out from among the booths nearly slammed into
them both. Another came trotting by, struggling under the weight of a
great folding tray loaded with cords and braids and laces. A booth
collapsed with a crash; awnings were being pushed over or taken down
hurriedly; knots of people shoved and wrestled through the
marketplace; voices rose in shouts and screams. Above them all rang
the blaring yell of the woman with the headdress of mirrors. Arren
glimpsed her wielding some kind of pole or stick against a bunch of
men, fending them off with great sweeps like a swordsman at bay..
Whether it was a quarrel that had spread and become a riot, or an
attack by a gang of thieves, or a fight between two rival lots of
peddlers, there was no telling. People rushed by with armfuls of goods
that could be loot or their own property saved from looting. There
were knifefights, fist-fights, and brawls all over the square. "That
way," said Arren, pointing to a side street that led out of the square
near them. He started for the street, for it was clear that they had
better get out at once, but his companion caught his arm. Arren looked
back and saw that the man Hare was struggling to his feet. When he got
himself erect, he stood swaying a moment, and then without a look
around him set off around the edge of the square, trailing his single
hand along the house walls as if to guide or support himself. "Keep
him in sight," Sparrowhawk said, and they set off following. No one
molested them or the man they followed, and in a minute they were out
of the marketsquare, going downhill in the silence of a narrow,
twisting street.
Overhead the attics of the houses almost met across the
street, cutting out light; underfoot the stones were slippery with
water and refuse. Hare went along at a good pace, though he kept
trailing his hand along the walls like a blind man. They had to keep
pretty close behind him lest they lose him at a cross-street. The
excitement of the chase came into Arren suddenly; his senses were all
alert, as they were during a stag-hunt in the forests of Enlad; he saw
vividly each face they passed, and breathed in the sweet stink of the
city: a smell of garbage, incense, carrion, and flowers. As they
threaded their way across a broad, crowded street he heard a drum beat
and caught a glimpse of a line of naked men and women, chained each to
the next by wrist and waist, matted hair hanging over their faces: one
glimpse and they were gone, as he dodged after Hare down a flight of
steps and out into a narrow square, empty but for a few women
gossiping at the fountain.
There Sparrowhawk caught up with Hare and set a hand on his
shoulder, at which Hare cringed as if scalded, wincing away, and
backed into the shelter of a massive doorway. There he stood shivering
and stared at them with the unseeing eyes of the hunted.
"Are you called Hare?" asked Sparrowhawk, and he spoke in his
own voice, which was harsh in quality, but gentle in intonation. The
man said nothing, seeming not to heed or not to hear. "I want
something of you," Sparrowhawk said. Again no response. "I'll pay for
it."
A slow reaction: "Ivory or gold?"
"Gold."
"How much?"
"The wizard knows the spell's worth."
Hare's face flinched and changed, coming alive for an instant,
so quickly that it seemed to flicker, then clouding again into
blankness. "That's all gone," he said, "all gone." A coughing fit bent
him over; he spat black. When he straightened up he stood passive,
shivering, seeming to have forgotten what they were talking about.
Again Arren watched him in fascination. The angle in which he
stood was formed by two giant figures flanking a doorway, statues
whose necks were bowed under the weight of a pediment and whose
knotmuscled bodies emerged only partially from the wall, as if they
had tried to struggle out of stone into life and had failed part way.
The door they guarded was rotten on its hinges; the house, once a
palace, was derelict. The gloomy, bulging faces of the giants were
chipped and lichen-grown. Between these ponderous figures the man
called Hare stood slack and fragile, his eyes as dark as the windows
of the empty house. He lifted up his maimed arm between himself and
Sparrowhawk and whined, "Spare a little for a poor cripple, master..."
The mage scowled as if in pain or shame; Arren felt he had
seen his true face for a moment under the disguise. He put his hand
again on Hare's shoulder and said a few words, softly, in the wizardly
tongue that Arren did not understand.
But Hare understood. He clutched at Sparrowhawk with his one
hand and stammered, "You can still speak- speak- Come with me, come-"
The mage glanced at Arren, then nodded.
They went down by steep streets into one of the valleys
between Hort Town's three hills. The ways became narrower, darker,
quieter as they descended. The sky was a pale strip between the
overhanging eaves, and the house walls to either hand were dank. At
the bottom of the gorge a stream ran, stinking like an open sewer;
between arched bridges, houses crowded along the banks. Into the dark
doorway of one of these houses Hare turned aside, vanishing like a
candle blown out. They followed him.
The unlit stairs creaked and swayed under their feet. At the
head of the stairs Hare pushed open a door, and they could see where
they were: an empty room with a strawstuffed mattress in one corner
and one unglazed, shuttered window that let in a little dusty light.
Hare turned to face Sparrowhawk and caught at his arm again.
His lips worked. He said at last, stammering, "Dragon... dragon..."
Sparrowhawk returned his look steadily, saying nothing.
"I cannot speak," Hare said, and he let go his hold on
Sparrowhawk's arm and crouched down on the empty floor, weeping.
The mage knelt by him and spoke to him softly in the Old
Speech. Arren stood by the shut door, his hand on his knife-hilt. The
grey light and the dusty room, the two kneeling figures, the soft,
strange sound of the mage's voice speaking the language of the
dragons, all came together as does a dream, having no relation to what
happens outside it or to time passing.
Slowly Hare stood up. He dusted his knees with his single hand
and hid the maimed arm behind his back. He looked around him, looked
at Arren; he was seeing what he looked at now. He turned away
presently and sat down on his mattress. Arren remained standing, on
guard; but, with the simplicity of one whose childhood had been
totally without furnishings, Sparrowhawk sat down cross-legged on the
bare floor. "Tell me how you lost your craft and the language of your
craft," he said.
Hare did not answer for a while. He began to beat his
mutilated arm against his thigh in a restless, jerky way, and at last
he said, forcing the words out in bursts, "They cut off my hand. I
can't weave the spells. They cut off my hand. The blood ran out, ran
dry."
"But that was after you'd lost your power, Hare, or else they
could not have done it."
"Power..."
"Power over the winds and the waves and men. You called them
by their names and they obeyed you. "
"Yes. I remember being alive," the man said in a soft, hoarse
voice. "And I knew the words and the names..."
"Are you dead now?"
"No. Alive. Alive. Only once I was a dragon... I'm not dead. I
sleep sometimes. Sleep comes very close to death, everyone knows that.
The dead walk in dreams, everyone knows that. They come to you alive,
and they say things. They walk out of death into the dreams. There's a
way. And if you go on far enough there's a way back all the way. All
the way. You can find it if you know where to look. And if you're
willing to pay the price."
"What price is that?" Sparrowhawk's voice floated on the dim
air like the shadow of a falling leaf.
"Life- what else? What can you buy life with, but life?" Hare
rocked back and forth on his pallet, a cunning, uncanny brightness in
his eyes. "You see," he said, "they can cut off my hand. They can cut
off my head. It doesn't matter. I can find the way back. I know where
to look. Only men of power can go there."
"Wizards, you mean?"
"Yes." Hare hesitated, seeming to attempt the word several
times; he could not say it. "Men of power," he repeated. "And they
must- and they must give it up. Pay."
Then he fell sullen, as if the word "pay" had at last roused
associations, and he had realized that he was giving information away
instead of selling it. Nothing more could be got from him, not even
the hints and stammers about "a way back" which Sparrowhawk seemed to
find meaningful, and soon enough the mage stood up "Well, half-answers
beat no answers," he said, "and the same with payment," and, deft as a
conjuror, he flipped a gold piece onto the pallet in front of Hare.
Hare picked it up. He looked at it and Sparrowhawk and Arren,
with jerky movements of his head. "Wait," he stammered. As soon as the
situation changed he lost his grip of it and now groped miserably
after what he wanted to say. "Tonight," he said at last. "Wait.
Tonight. I have hazia."
"I don't need it."
"To show you- To show you the way. Tonight. I'll take you.
I'll show you. You can get there, because you... you're..." He groped
for the word until Sparrowhawk said, "I am a wizard."
"Yes! So we can- we can get there. To the way. When I dream.
In the dream. See? I'll take you. You'll go with me, to the... to the
way."
Sparrowhawk stood, solid and pondering, in the middle of the
dim room. "Maybe," he said at last. "If we come, we'll be here by
dark." Then he turned to Arren, who opened the door at once, eager to
be gone.
The dank, overshadowed street seemed bright as a garden after
Hare's room. They struck out for the upper city by the shortest way, a
steep stairway of stone between ivy-grown house walls. Arren breathed
in and out like a sea lion- "Ugh!- Are you going back there?"
"Well, I will, if I can't get the same information from a less
risky source. He's likely to set an ambush for us."
"But aren't you defended against thieves and so on?"
"Defended?" said Sparrowhawk. "What do you mean? D'you think I
go about wrapped up in spells like an old woman afraid of the
rheumatism? I haven't the time for it. I hide my face to hide our
quest; that's all. We can look out for each other. But the fact is
we're not going to be able to keep out of danger on this journey."
"Of course not," Arren said stiffly, angry, angered in his
pride. "I did not seek to do so."
"That's just as well," the mage said, inflexible, and yet with
a kind of good humor that appeased Arren's temper. Indeed he was
startled by his own anger; he had never thought to speak thus to the
Archmage. But then, this was and was not the Archmage, this Hawk with
the snubbed nose and square, ill-shaven cheeks, whose voice was
sometimes one man's voice and sometimes another's: a stranger,
unreliable.
"Does it make sense, what he told you?" Arren asked, for he
did not look forward to going back to that dim room above the stinking
river. "All that fiddle-faddle about being alive and dead and coming
back with his head cut off?"
"I don't know if it makes sense. I wanted to talk with a
wizard who had lost his power. He says that he hasn't lost it but
given it traded it. For what? Life for life, he said. Power for power.
No, I don't understand him, but he is worth listening to."
Sparrowhawk's steady reasonableness shamed Arren further. He
felt himself petulant and nervous, like a child. Hare had fascinated
him, but now that the fascination was broken he felt a sick disgust,
as if he had eaten something vile. He resolved not to speak again
until he had controlled his temper. Next moment he missed his step on
the worn, slick stairs, slipped, recovered himself scraping his hands
on the stones. "Oh curse this filthy town!" he broke out in rage. And
the mage replied dryly, "No need to, I think."
There was indeed something wrong about Hort Town, wrong in the
very air, so that one might think seriously that it lay under a curse;
and yet this was not a presence of any quality, but rather an absence,
a weakening of all qualities, like a sickness that soon infected the
spirit of any visitor. Even the warmth of the afternoon sun was
sickly, too heavy a heat for March. The squares and streets bustled
with activity and business, but there was neither order nor
prosperity. Goods were poor, prices high, and the markets were unsafe
for vendors and buyers alike, being full of thieves and roaming gangs.
Not many women were on the streets, and the few there were appeared
mostly in groups. It was a city without law or governance. Talking
with people, Arren and Sparrowhawk soon learned that there was in fact
no council or mayor or lord left in Hort Town. Some of those who had
used to rule the city had died, and some had resigned, and some had
been assassinated; various chiefs lorded it over various quarters of
the city, the harbor guardsmen ran the port and lined their pockets,
and so on.
There was no center left to the city. The people, for all
their restless activity, seemed purposeless. Craftsmen seemed to lack
the will to work well; even the robbers robbed because it was all they
knew how to do. All the brawl and brightness of a great port-city was
there, on the surface, but all about the edges of it sat the
hazia-eaters, motionless. And under the surface, things did not seem
entirely real, not even the faces, the sounds, the smells. They would
fade from time to time during that long, warm afternoon while
Sparrowhawk and Arren walked the streets and talked with this person
and that. They would fade quite away. The striped awnings, the dirty
cobbles, the colored walls, and all the vividness of being would be
gone, leaving the city a dream city, empty and dreary in the hazy
sunlight.
Only at the top of the town where they went to rest a while in
late afternoon did this sickly mood of daydream break for a while.
"This is not a town for luck," Sparrowhawk had said some hours ago,
and now after hours of aimless wandering and fruitless conversations
with strangers, he looked tired and grim. His disguise was wearing a
little thin; a certain hardness and darkness could be seen through the
bluff sea-trader's face. Arren had not been able to shake off the
morning's irritability. They sat down on the coarse turf of the
hilltop under the leaves of a grove of pendick trees, dark-leaved and
budded thickly with red buds, some open. From there they saw nothing
of the city but its tile roofs multitudinously scaling downward to the
sea. The bay opened its arms wide, slate blue beneath the spring haze,
reaching on to the edge of air. No lines were drawn, no boundaries.
They sat gazing at that immense blue space. Arren's mind cleared,
opening out to meet and celebrate the world.
When they went to drink from a little stream nearby, running
clear over brown rocks from its spring in some princely garden on the
hill behind them, he drank deep and doused his head right under the
cold water. Then he got up and declaimed the lines from the Deed of
Morred,
Praised are the Fountains of Shelieth, the silver harp of the
waters,
But blest in my name forever this stream that stanched my
thirst!
Sparrowhawk laughed at him, and he also laughed. He shook his head
like a dog, and the bright spray flew out fine in the last gold
sunlight.
They had to leave the grove and go down into the streets
again, and when they had made their supper at a stall that sold greasy
fishcakes, night was getting heavy in the air. Darkness came fast in
the narrow streets. "We'd better go, lad," said Sparrowhawk, and
Arren, said, "To the boat?" but knew it was not to the boat but to the
house above the river and the empty, dusty, terrible room.
Hare was waiting for them in the doorway.
He lighted an oil lamp to show them up the black stairs. Its
tiny flame trembled continually as he held it, throwing vast, quick
shadows up the walls.
He had got another sack of straw for his visitors to sit on,
but Arren took his place on the bare floor by the door. The door
opened outward, and to guard it he should have sat himself down
outside it: but that pitch-black hall was more than he could stand,
and he wanted to keep an eye on Hare. Sparrowhawk's attention and
perhaps his powers were going to be turned on what Hare had to tell
him or show him; it was up to Arren to keep alert for trickery.
Hare held himself straighter and trembled less, he had cleaned
his mouth and teeth; he spoke sanely enough at first, though with
excitement. His eyes in the lamplight were so dark that they seemed,
like the eyes of animals, to show no whites. He disputed earnestly
with Sparrowhawk, urging him to eat hazia. "I want to take you, take
you with me. We've got to go the same way. Before long I'll be going,
whether you're ready or not. You must have the hazia to follow me."
"I think I can follow you."
"Not where I'm going. This isn't... spell-casting." He seemed
unable to say the words "wizard" or "wizardry." "I know you can get to
the- the place, you know, the wall. But it isn't there. It's a
different way."
"If you go, I can follow."
Hare shook his head. His handsome, ruined face was flushed; he
glanced over at Arren often, including him, though he spoke only to
Sparrowhawk. "Look: there are two kinds of men, aren't there? Our kind
and the rest. The... the dragons and the others. People without power
are only half-alive. They don't count. They don't know what they
dream; they're afraid of the dark. But the others, the lords of men,
aren't afraid to go into the dark. We have strength."
"So long as we know the names of things."
"But names don't matter there- that's the point, that's the
point! It isn't what you do, what you know, that you need. Spells are
no good. You have to forget all that, to let it go. That's where
eating hazia helps; you forget the names, you let the forms of things
go, you go straight to the reality. I'm going to be going pretty soon
now; if you want to find out where, you ought to do as I say. I say as
he does. You must be a lord of men to be a lord of life. You have to
find the secret. I could tell you its name but what's a name? A name
isn't real, the real, the real forever. Dragons can't go there.
Dragons die. They all die. I took so much tonight you'll never catch
me. Not a patch on me. Where I get lost you can lead me. Remember what
the secret is? Remember? No death. No death -no! No sweaty bed and
rotting coffin, no more, never. The blood dries up like the dry river
and it's gone. No fear. No death. The names are gone and the words and
the fear, gone. Show me where I get lost, show me, lord... "
So he went on, in a choked rapture of words that was like the
chanting of a spell, and yet made no spell, no whole, no sense. Arren
listened, listened, striving to understand. If only he could
understand! Sparrowhawk should do as he said and take the drug, this
once, so that he could find out what Hare was talking about, the
mystery that he would not or could not speak. Why else were they here?
But then (Arren looked from Hare's ecstatic face to the other profile)
perhaps the mage understood already... Hard as rock, that profile.
Where was the snubbed nose, the bland look? Hawk the sea-trader was
gone, forgotten. It was the mage, the Archmage, who sat there.
Hare's voice now was a crooning mumble, and he rocked his body
as he sat cross-legged. His face had grown haggard and his mouth
slack. Facing him, in the tiny, steady light of the oil lamp set on
the floor between them, the other never spoke, but he had reached out
and taken Hare's hand, holding him. Arren had not seen him reach out.
There were gaps in the order of events, gaps of nonexistence-
drowsiness, it must be. Surely some hours had passed; it might be near
midnight. If he slept, would he too be able to follow Hare into his
dream and come to the place, the secret way? Perhaps he could. It
seemed quite possible now. But he was to guard the door. He and
Sparrowhawk had scarcely spoken of it, but both were aware that in
having them come back at night Hare might have planned some ambush; he
had been a pirate; he knew robbers. They had said nothing, but Arren
knew that he was to stand guard, for while the mage made this strange
journey of the spirit he would be defenseless. But like a fool he had
left his sword on board the boat, and how much good would his knife be
if that door swung suddenly open behind him? But that would not
happen: he could listen and hear. Hare was not speaking any more. Both
men were utterly silent; the whole house was silent. Nobody could come
up those swaying stairs without some noise. He could speak, if he
heard a noise: shout aloud, and the trance would break, and
Sparrowhawk would turn and defend himself and Arren with all the
vengeful lightning of a wizard's rage... When Arren had sat down at
the door, Sparrowhawk had looked at him, only a glance, approval:
approval and trust. He was the guard. There was no danger if he kept
on guard. But it was hard, hard to keep watching those two faces, the
little pearl of the lampflame between them on the floor, both silent
now, both still, their eyes open but not seeing the light or the dusty
room, not seeing the world, but some other world of dream or death...
to watch them and not to try to follow them...
There, in the vast, dry darkness, there one stood beckoning.
Come, he said, the tall lord of shadows. In his hand he held a tiny
flame no larger than a pearl, held it out to Arren, offering life.
Slowly Arren took one step toward him, following.
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Magelight
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