Tehanu (Earthsea Cycle)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Tenar had not forgotten the question she had asked him on the hearthstones under the sheepskin coat. She asked it again, a few days or months later—time went along very sweet and easy for them in the stone house, on the winterbound farm. “You never told me,” she said, “how you came to hear them talking on the road.”

  “I told you, I think. I’d gone aside, hidden, when I heard men coming behind me.”

  “Why?”

  “I was alone, and knew there were some gangs around.”

  “Yes, of course—But then just as they passed, Hake was talking about Therru?”

  “He said ‘Oak Farm,’ I think.”

  “It’s all perfectly possible. It just seems so convenient.”

  Knowing she did not disbelieve him, he lay back and waited.

  “Its the kind of thing that happens to a wizard,” she said.

  “And others.”

  “Maybe.”

  “My dear, you’re not trying to... reinstate me?”

  “No. No, not at all. Would that be a sensible thing to do? If you were a wizard, would you be here?”

  They were in the big oak-framed bed, well covered with sheepskins and feather-coverlets, for the room had no fireplace and the night was one of hard frost on fallen snow.

  “But what I want to know is this. Is there something besides what you call power—that comes before it, maybe? Or something that power is just one way of using? Like this. Ogion said of you once that before you’d had any learning or training as a wizard at all, you were a mage. Mage-born, he said. So I imagined that, to have power, one must first have room for the power. An emptiness to fill. And the greater the emptiness the more power can fill it. But if the power never was got, or was taken away, or was given away—still that would be there.”

  “That emptiness,” he said.

  “Emptiness is one word for it. Maybe not the right word.”

  “Potentiality?” he said, and shook his head. “What is able to be... to become.”

  “I think you were there on that road, just there just then, because of that—because that is what happens to you. You didn’t make it happen. You didn’t cause it. It wasn’t because of your ‘power.’ It happened to you. Because of your—emptiness.”

  After a while he said, “This isn’t far from what I was taught as a boy on Roke: that true magery lies in doing only what you must do. But this would go further. Not to do, but to be done to....”

  “I don’t think that’s quite it. It’s more like what true doing rises from. Didn’t you come and save my life—didn’t you run a fork into Hake? That was ‘doing,’ all right, doing what you must do....”

  He pondered again, and finally asked her, “Is this a wisdom taught you when you were Priestess of the Tombs?”

  “No.” She stretched a little, gazing into the darkness. “Arha was taught that to be powerful she must sacrifice. Sacrifice herself and others. A bargain: give, and so get. And I cannot say that that’s untrue. But my soul can’t live in that narrow place—this for that, tooth for tooth, death for life.... There is a freedom beyond that. Beyond payment, retribution, redemption—beyond all the bargains and the balances, there is freedom.”

  “The doorway between them,” he said softly.

  That night Tenar dreamed. She dreamed that she saw the doorway of the Creation of Éa. It was a little window of gnarled, clouded, heavy glass, set low in the west wall of an old house above the sea. The window was locked. It had been bolted shut. She wanted to open it, but there was a word or a key, something she had forgotten, a word, a key, a name, without which she could not open it. She sought for it in rooms of stone that grew smaller and darker till she found that Ged was holding her, trying to wake her and comfort her, saying, “Its all right, dear love, it will be all right!”

  “I can’t get free!” she cried, clinging to him.

  He soothed her, stroking her hair; they lay back together, and he whispered, “Look.”

  The old moon had risen. Its white brilliance on the fallen snow was reflected into the room, for cold as it was Tenar would not have the shutters closed. All the air above them was luminous. They lay in shadow, but it seemed as if the ceiling were a mere veil between them and endless, silver, tranquil depths of light.

  It was a winter of heavy snows on Gont, and a long winter. The harvest had been a good one. There was food for the animals and people, and not much to do but eat it and stay warm.

  Therru knew the Creation of Éa all through. She spoke the Winter Carol and the Deed of the Young King on the day of Sunreturn. She knew how to handle a piecrust, how to spin on the wheel, and how to make soap. She knew the name and use of every plant that showed above the snow, and a good deal of other lore, herbal and verbal, that Ged had stowed away in his head from his short apprenticeship with Ogion and his long years at the School on Roke. But he had not taken down the Runes or the Lore-books from the mantelpiece, nor had he taught the child any word of the Language of the Making.

  He and Tenar spoke of this. She told him how she had taught Therru the one word, talk, and then had stopped, for it had not seemed right, though she did not know why.

  “I thought perhaps it was because I’d never truly spoken that language, never used it in magery. I thought perhaps she should learn it from a true speaker of it.”

  “No man is that.”

  “No woman is half that.”

  “I meant that only the dragons speak it as their native tongue.”

  “Do they learn it?”

  Struck by the question, he was slow to answer, evidently calling to mind all he had been told and knew of the dragons. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “What do we know about them? Would they teach as we do, mother to child, elder to younger? Or are they like the animals, teaching some things, but born knowing most of what they know? Even that we don’t know. But my guess would be that the dragon and the speech of the dragon are one. One being.”

  “And they speak no other tongue.”

  He nodded. “They do not learn,” he said. “They are.

  Therru came through the kitchen. One of her tasks was to keep the kindling box filled, and she was busy at it, bundled up in a cut-down lambskin jacket and cap, trotting back and forth from the woodhouse to the kitchen. She dumped her load in the box by the chimney corner and set off again.

  “What is it she sings?” Ged asked.

  “Therru?”

  “When she’s alone.”

  “But she never sings. She can’t.”

  “Her way of singing. ‘Farther west than west

  “Ah!” said Tenar. “That story! Did Ogion never tell you about the Woman of Kemay?”

  “No,” he said, “tell me.”

  She told him the tale as she spun, and the purr and hush of the wheel went along with the words of the story. At the end of it she said, “When the Master Windkey told me how he’d come looking for ‘a woman on Gont,’ I thought of her. But she’d be dead by now, no doubt. And how would a fisherwoman who was a dragon be an archmage, anyhow!”

  “Well, the Patterner didn’t say that a woman on Gont was to be archmage,” said Ged. He was mending a badly torn pair of breeches, sitting up in the window ledge to get what light the dark day afforded. It was a half-month after Sunreturn and the coldest time yet.

  “What did he say, then?”

  “‘A woman on Gont.’ So you told me.”

  “But they were asking who was to be the next archmage.”

  “And got no answer to that question.”

  “Infinite are the arguments of mages,” said Tenar rather drily.

  Ged bit the thread off and rolled the unused length around two fingers.

  “I learned to quibble a bit, on Roke,” he admitted. “But this isn’t a quibble, I think. ‘A woman on Gont’ can’t become archmage. No woman can be archmage. She’d unmake what she became in becoming it. The Mages of Roke are men—their power is the power of men, their knowledge is the knowledge of men. Both manhood and magery are b
uilt on one rock: power belongs to men. If women had power, what would men be but women who can’t bear children? And what would women be but men who can?”

  “Hah!” went Tenar; and presently, with some cunning, she said, “Haven’t there been queens? Weren’t they women of power?”

  “A queen’s only a she-king,” said Ged.

  She snorted.

  “I mean, men give her power. They let her use their power. But it isn’t hers, is it? It isn’t because she’s a woman that she’s powerful, but despite it.”

  She nodded. She stretched, sitting back from the spinning wheel. “What is a woman’s power, then?” she asked.

  “I don’t think we know.”

  “When has a woman power because she’s a woman? With her children, I suppose. For a while ...”

  “In her house, maybe.”

  She looked around the kitchen. “But the doors are shut,” she said, “the doors are locked.”

  “Because you’re valuable.”

  “Oh, yes. We’re precious. So long as we’re powerless.... I remember when I first learned that! Kossil threatened me—me, the One Priestess of the Tombs. And I realized that I was helpless. I had the honor; but she had the power, from the God-king, the man. Oh, it made me angry! And frightened me.... Lark and I talked about this once. She said, ‘Why are men afraid of women?’”

  “If your strength is only the other’s weakness, you live in fear,” Ged said.

  “Yes; but women seem to fear their own strength, to be afraid of themselves.”

  “Are they ever taught to trust themselves?” Ged asked, and as he spoke Therru came in on her work again. His eyes and Tenar’s met.

  “No,” she said. “Trust is not what we’re taught.” She watched the child stack the wood in the box. “If power were trust,” she said. “I like that word. If it weren’t all these arrangements—one above the other—kings and masters and mages and owners—It all seems so unnecessary. Real power, real freedom, would lie in trust, not force.”

  “As children trust their parents,” he said.

  They were both silent.

  “As things are,” he said, “even trust corrupts. The men on Roke trust themselves and one another. Their power is pure, nothing taints its purity, and so they take that purity for wisdom. They cannot imagine doing wrong.”

  She looked up at him. He had never spoken about Roke thus before, from wholly outside it, free of it.

  “Maybe they need some women there to point that possibility out to them,” she said, and he laughed.

  She restarted the wheel. “I still don’t see why, if there can be she-kings, there can’t be she-archmages.” Therru was listening.

  “Hot snow, dry water” said Ged, a Gontish saying. “Kings are given power by other men. A mage’s power is his own—himself.”

  “And it’s a male power. Because we don’t even know what a woman’s power is. All right. I see. But all the same, why can’t they find an archmage—a he-archmage?”

  Ged studied the tattered inseam of the breeches. “Well,” he said, “if the Patterner wasn’t answering their question, he was answering one they didn’t ask. Maybe what they have to do is ask it.”

  “Is it a riddle?” Therru asked.

  “Yes,” said Tenar. “But we don’t know the riddle. We only know the answer to it. The answer is: A woman on Gont.”

  “There’s lots of them,” Therru said after pondering a bit. Apparently satisfied by this, she went out for the next load of kindling.

  Ged watched her go. “‘All changed,’” he said. “All... Sometimes I think, Tenar—I wonder if Lebannen’s kingship is only a beginning. A doorway... And he the doorkeeper. Not to pass through.”

  “He seems so young,” Tenar said, tenderly.

  “Young as Morred was when he met the Black Ships. Young as I was when I ...” He stopped, looking out the window at the grey, frozen fields through the leafless trees. “Or you, Tenar, in that dark place... What’s youth or age? I don’t know. Sometimes I feel as if I’d been alive for a thousand years; sometimes I feel my life’s been like a flying swallow seen through the chink of a wall. I have died and been reborn, both in the dry land and here under the sun, more than once. And the Making tells us that we have all returned and return forever to the source, and that the source is ceaseless. Only in dying, life. … I thought about that when I was up with the goats on the mountain, and a day went on forever and yet no time passed before the evening came, and morning again.... I learned goat wisdom. So I thought, What is this grief of mine for? What man am I mourning? Ged the archmage? Why is Hawk the goatherd sick with grief and shame for him? What have I done that I should be ashamed?”

  “Nothing,” Tenar said. “Nothing, ever!”

  “Oh, yes,” said Ged. “All the greatness of men is founded on shame, made out of it. So Hawk the goatherd wept for Ged the archmage. And looked after the goats, also, as well as a boy his age could be expected to do....”

  After a while Tenar smiled. She said, a little shyly, “Moss said you were about fifteen.”

  “That would be about right. Ogion named me in the autumn; and the next summer I was off to Roke.... Who was that boy? An emptiness... A freedom.”

  “Who is Therru, Ged?”

  He did not answer until she thought he was not going to answer, and then he said, “So made—what freedom is there for her?”

  “We are our freedom, then?”

  “I think so.”

  “You seemed, in your power, as free as man can be. But at what cost? What made you free? And I... I was made, molded like clay, by the will of the women serving the Old Powers, or serving the men who made all services and ways and places, I no longer know which. Then I went free, with you, for a moment, and with Ogion. But it was not my freedom. Only it gave me choice; and I chose. I chose to mold myself like clay to the use of a farm and a farmer and our children. I made myself a vessel. I know its shape. But not the clay. Life danced me. I know the dances. But I don’t know who the dancer is.”

  “And she,” Ged said after a long silence, “if she should ever dance—”

  “They will fear her,” Tenar whispered. Then the child came back in, and the conversation turned to the bread dough raising in the box by the stove. They talked so, quietly and long, passing from one thing to another and round and back, for half the brief day, often, spinning and sewing their lives together with words, the years and the deeds and the thoughts they had not shared. Then again they would be silent, working and thinking and dreaming, and the silent child was with them.

  So the winter passed, till lambing season was on them, and the work got very heavy for a while as the days lengthened and grew bright. Then the swallows came from the isles under the sun, from the South Reach, where the star Gobardon shines in the constellation of Ending; but all the swallows’ talk with one another was about beginning.

  LIKE THE SWALLOWS, THE SHIPS began to fly among the islands with the return of spring. In the villages there was talk, secondhand from Valmouth, of the king’s ships harrying the harriers, driving well-established pirates to ruin, confiscating their ships and fortunes. Lord Heno himself sent out his three finest, fastest ships, captained by the sorcerer-seawolf Tally, who was feared by every merchantman from Soléa to the Andrades; his fleet was to ambush the king’s ships off Oranéa and destroy them. But it was one of the king’s ships that came into Valmouth Bay with Tally in chains aboard, and under orders to escort Lord Heno to Gont Port to be tried for piracy and murder. Heno barricaded himself in his stone manor house in the hills behind Valmouth, but neglected to light a fire, it being warm spring weather; so five or six of the king’s young soldiers dropped in on him by way of the chimney, and the whole troop walked him chained through the streets of Valmouth and carried him off to justice.

  When he heard this, Ged said with love and pride, “All that a king can do, he will do well.”

  Handy and Shag had been taken promptly off on the north road to Gont Port, and when his
wounds healed enough Hake was carried there by ship, to be tried for murder at the king’s courts of law. The news of their sentence to the galleys caused much satisfaction and self-congratulation in Middle Valley, to which Tenar, and Therru beside her, listened in silence.

  There came other ships bearing other men sent by the king, not all of them popular among the townsfolk and villagers of rude Gont: royal sheriffs, sent to report on the system of bailiffs and officers of the peace and to hear complaints and grievances from the common people; tax reporters and tax collectors; noble visitors to the little lords of Gont, inquiring politely as to their fealty to the Crown in Havnor; and wizardly men, who went here and there, seeming to do little and say less.

  “I think they’re hunting for a new archmage after all,” said Tenar.

  “Or looking for abuses of the art,” Ged said—“sorcery gone wrong.”

  Tenar was going to say, “Then they should look in the manor house of Re Albi!” but her tongue stumbled on the words. What was I going to say? she thought. Did I ever tell Ged about—I’m getting forgetful. What was it I was going to tell Ged? Oh, that we’d better mend the lower pasture gate before the cows get out.

  There was always something, a dozen things, in the front of her mind, business of the farm. “Never one thing, for you,” Ogion had said. Even with Ged to help her, all her thoughts and days went into the business of the farm. He shared the housework with her as Flint had not; but Flint had been a farmer, and Ged was not. He learned fast, but there was a lot to learn. They worked. There was little time for talk, now. At the day’s end there was supper together, and bed together, and sleep, and wake at dawn and back to work, and so round and so round, like the wheel of a water mill, rising full and emptying, the days like the bright water falling.

  “Hello, mother,” said the thin fellow at the farmyard gate. She thought it was Lark’s eldest and said, “What brings you by, lad?” Then she looked back at him across the clucking chickens and the parading geese.