The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  He did not look strong, sitting hunched over his supper of bread and smoked fish, with hair greyed and fire-singed, and slight hands, and a tired face.

  Yet the dragon feared him.

  “What irks you, lad?”

  Only the truth would do, with him.

  “My lord, you spoke your name.”

  “Oh, aye. I forgot I had not done so earlier. You will need my true name, if we go where we must go.” He looked up, chewing, at Arren. “Did you think I grew senile and went about babbling my name, like old bleared men past sense and shame? Not yet, lad!”

  “No,” said Arren, so confused that he could say nothing else. He was very weary; the day had been long, and full of dragons. And the way ahead grew dark.

  “Arren,” said the mage. “No; Lebannen: where we go, there is no hiding. There all bear their own true names.”

  “The dead cannot be hurt,” said Arren somberly.

  “But it is not only there, not in death only, that men take their names. Those who can be most hurt, the most vulnerable: those who have given love and do not take it back, they speak each other’s names. The faithful-hearted, the givers of life. . . . You are worn out, lad. Lie down and sleep. There’s nothing to do now but keep the course all night. And by morning we shall see the last island of the world.”

  In his voice was an insuperable gentleness. Arren curled up in the prow, and sleep began to come into him at once. He heard the mage begin a soft, almost whispering chant, not in the Hardic tongue but in the words of the Making; and as he began to understand at last and to remember what the words meant, just before he understood them, he fell fast asleep.

  Silently the mage stowed away their bread and meat, looked to the lines, made all trim in the boat, and then, taking the guide-line of the sail in hand and sitting down on the after-thwart, he set the magewind strong in the sail. Tireless, Lookfar sped north, an arrow over the sea.

  He looked down at Arren. The boy’s sleeping face was lit red-gold by the long sunset, the rough hair was wind-stirred. The soft, easy, princely look of the boy who had sat by the fountain of the Great House a few months since was gone; this was a thinner face, harder, and much stronger. But it was not less beautiful.

  “I have found none to follow in my way,” Ged the Archmage said aloud to the sleeping boy or to the empty wind. “None but thee. And thou must go thy way, not mine. Yet will thy kingship be, in part, my own. For I knew thee first. I knew thee first! They will praise me more for that in after-days than for anything I did of magery. . . . If there will be after-days. For first we two must stand upon the balance point, the very fulcrum of the world. And if I fall, you fall, and all the rest. . . . For a while, for a while. No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars. . . . Oh, but I should like to see thee crowned in Havnor, and the sunlight shining on the Tower of the Sword and on the Ring we brought for thee from Atuan, from the dark tombs, Tenar and I, before ever thou wast born!”

  He laughed then, and turning to face the north, he said to himself in the common tongue, “A goatherd to set the heir of Morred on his throne! Will I never learn?”

  Presently, as he sat with the guide-rope in his hand and watched the full sail strain reddened in the last light of the west, he spoke again softly. “Not in Havnor would I be and not in Roke. It is time to be done with power. To drop the old toys and go on. It is time that I went home. I would see Tenar. I would see Ogion and speak with him before he dies, in the house on the cliffs of Re Albi. I crave to walk on the mountain, the mountain of Gont, in the forests, in the autumn when the leaves are bright. There is no kingdom like the forests. It is time I went there, went in silence, went alone. And maybe there I would learn at last what no act or art or power can teach me, what I have never learned.”

  The whole west blazed, up in a fury and glory of red, so that the sea was crimson and the sail above it bright as blood; and then the night came quietly on. All that night long the boy slept and the man waked, gazing forward steadily into the dark. There were no stars.

  CHAPTER 11

  SELIDOR

  Waking in the morning Arren saw before the boat, dim and low along the blue west, the shores of Selidor.

  In the Hall in Berila were old maps that had been made in the days of the Kings, when traders and explorers had sailed from the Inner Lands and the Reaches had been better known. A great map of the North and West was laid in mosaic on two walls of the Prince’s throne-room, with the isle of Enlad in gold and grey above the throne. Arren saw it in his mind’s eye as he had seen it a thousand times in boyhood. North of Enlad was Osskil, and west of it Ebosskil, and south of that Semel and Paln. There the Inner Lands ended, and there was nothing but the pale blue-green mosaic of the empty sea, set here and there with a tiny dolphin or a whale. Then at last, after the corner where the north wall met the west wall, there was Narveduen, and beyond it three lesser islands. And then the empty sea again, on and on; until the very edge of the wall and the end of the map, and there was Selidor, and beyond it, nothing.

  He could recall it vividly, the curving shape of it, with a great bay in the heart of it, opening narrowly to the east. They had not come so far north as that, but were steering now for a deep cove in the southernmost cape of the island, and there, while the sun was still low in the haze of morning, they came to land.

  So ended their great run from the Roads of Balatran to the Western Isle. The stillness of the earth was strange to them when they had beached Lookfar and walked after so long on solid ground.

  Ged climbed a low dune, grass-crowned, the crest of it leaning out over the steep slope, bound into cornices by the tough roots of the grass. When he reached the summit he stood still, looking west and north. Arren stopped at the boat to put on his shoes, which he had not worn for many days, and he took his sword out of the gear-box and buckled it on, this time with no questions in his mind as to whether or not he should do so. Then he climbed up beside Ged to look at the land.

  The dunes ran inland, low and grassy, for half a mile or so, and then there were lagoons, thick with sedge and salt-reeds, and beyond those, low hills lay yellow-brown and empty to the end of sight. Beautiful and desolate was Selidor. Nowhere on it was there any mark of man, his work or habitation. There were no beasts to be seen, and the reed-filled lakes bore no flocks of gulls or wild geese or any bird.

  They descended the inland side of the dune, and the slope of sand cut off the noise of the breakers and the sound of the wind, so that it became still.

  Between the outmost dune and the next was a dell of clean sand, sheltered, the morning sun shining warm on its western slope. “Lebannen,” the mage said, for he used Arren’s true name now, “I could not sleep last night, and now I must. Stay with me and keep watch.” He lay down in the sunlight, for the shade was cold; put his arm over his eyes; sighed, and slept. Arren sat down beside him. He could see nothing but the white slopes of the dell, and the dune-grass bowing at the top against the misty blue of the sky, and the yellow sun. There was no sound except the muted murmur of the surf, and sometimes the wind gusting moved the particles of sand a little with a faint whispering.

  Arren saw what might have been an eagle flying very high, but it was not an eagle. It circled and stooped, and down it came with that thunder and shrill whistle of outspread golden wings. It alighted on huge talons on the summit of the dune. Against the sun the great head was black, with fiery glints.

  The dragon crawled a little way down the slope and spoke. “Agni Lebannen,” it said.

  Standing between it and Ged, Arren answered: “Orm Embar.” And he held his bare sword in his hand.

  It did not feel heavy now. The smooth, worn hilt was comfortable in his hand; it fitted. The blade had come lightly, eagerly, from the sheath. The power of it, the age of it, were on his side, for he knew now what use to make of it. It was his sword.

  The dragon spoke again, but Arren could not understand. He glanced back at his sleeping companion, whom all the rush and thunder had
not awakened, and said to the dragon, “My lord is weary; he sleeps.”

  At that Orm Embar crawled and coiled on down to the bottom of the dell. He was heavy on the ground, not lithe and free as when he flew, but there was a sinister grace in the slow placing of his great, taloned feet and the curving of his thorny tail. Once there he drew his legs beneath him, lifted up his huge head, and was still: like a dragon carved on a warrior’s helm. Arren was aware of his yellow eye, not ten feet away, and of the faint reek of burning that hung about him. This was no carrion stink; dry and metallic, it accorded with the faint odors of the sea and the salt sand, a clean, wild smell.

  The sun rising higher struck the flanks of Orm Embar, and he burnt like a dragon made of iron and gold.

  Still Ged slept, relaxed, taking no more notice of the dragon than a sleeping farmer of his hound.

  So an hour passed, and Arren, starting, found the mage had sat up beside him.

  “Have you got so used to dragons that you fall asleep between their paws?” said Ged, and laughed, yawning.

  Then, rising, he spoke to Orm Embar in the dragons’ speech.

  Before Orm Embar answered, he, too, yawned—perhaps in sleepiness, perhaps in rivalry—and that was a sight that few have lived to remember: the rows of yellow-white teeth as long and sharp as swords, the forked, red, fiery tongue twice the length of a man’s body, the fuming cavern of the throat.

  Orm Embar spoke, and Ged was about to answer, when both turned to look at Arren. They had heard, clear in the silence, the hollow whisper of steel on sheath. Arren was looking up at the lip of the dune behind the mage’s head, and his sword was ready in his hand.

  There stood, bright lit by sunlight, the faint wind stirring his garments slightly, a man. He stood still as a carven figure except for that flutter of the hem and hood of his light cloak. His hair was long and black, falling in a mass of glossy curls; he was broad-shouldered and tall, a strong, comely man. His eyes seemed to look out over them, at the sea. He smiled.

  “Orm Embar I know,” he said. “And you also I know, though you have grown old since I last saw you, Sparrowhawk. You are archmage now, they tell me. You have grown great, as well as old. And you have a young servant with you: a prentice mage, no doubt, one of those who learn wisdom on the Isle of the Wise. What do you two here, so far from Roke and the invulnerable walls that protect the Masters from all harm?”

  “There is a breach in greater walls than those,” said Ged, clasping both hands on his staff and looking up at the man. “But will you not come to us in the flesh, so that we may greet one whom we have long sought?”

  “In the flesh?” said the man, and smiled again. “Is mere flesh, body, butcher’s meat, of such account between two mages? No, let us meet mind-to-mind, Archmage.”

  “That, I think, we cannot do. Lad, put up your sword. It is but a sending, an appearance, no true man. As well draw blade against the wind. In Havnor, when your hair was white, you were called Cob. But that was only a use-name. How shall we call you when we meet you?”

  “You will call me Lord,” said the tall figure on the dune’s edge.

  “Aye, and what else?”

  “King and Master.”

  At that Orm Embar hissed, a loud and hideous sound, and his great eyes gleamed; yet he turned his head away from the man, and sank crouching in his tracks, as if he could not move.

  “And where shall we come to you and when?”

  “In my domain and at my pleasure.”

  “Very well,” said Ged, and lifting up his staff moved it a little toward the tall man—and the man was gone, like a candle-flame blown out.

  Arren stared, and the dragon rose up mightily on his four crooked legs, his mail clanking and the lips writhing back from his teeth. But the mage leaned on his staff again.

  “It was only a sending. A presentment or image of the man. It can speak and hear, but there’s no power in it, save what our fear may lend it. Nor is it even true in seeming, unless the sender so wishes. We have not seen what he now looks like, I guess.”

  “Is he near, do you think?”

  “Sendings do not cross water. He is on Selidor. But Selidor is a great island: broader than Roke or Gont and near as long as Enlad. We may seek him long.”

  Then the dragon spoke. Ged listened and turned to Arren. “Thus says the Lord of Selidor: ‘I have come back to my own land, nor will I leave it. I will find the Unmaker and bring you to him, that together we may abolish him.’ And have I not said that what a dragon hunts, he finds?”

  Thereupon Ged went down on one knee before the great creature, as a liegeman kneels before a king, and thanked him in his own tongue. The breath of the dragon, so close, was hot on his bowed head.

  Orm Embar dragged his scaly weight up the dune once more, beat his wings, and took the air.

  Ged brushed the sand from his clothes and said to Arren, “Now you have seen me kneel. And maybe you’ll see me kneel once more, before the end.”

  Arren did not ask what he meant; in their long companionship he had learned that there was reason in the mage’s reserve. Yet it seemed to him that there was evil omen in the words.

  They crossed over the dune to the beach once more to make sure the boat lay high above the reach of tide or storm, and to take from her cloaks for the night and what food they had left. Ged paused a minute by the slender prow which had borne him over strange seas so long, so far; he laid his hand on it, but he set no spell and said no word. Then they struck inland, northward, once again, toward the hills.

  They walked all day, and at evening camped by a stream that wound down toward the reed-choked lakes and marshes. Though it was full summer the wind blew chill, coming from the west, from the endless, landless reaches of the open sea. A mist veiled the sky, and no stars shone above the hills on which no hearth-fire or window-light had ever gleamed.

  In the darkness Arren woke. Their small fire was dead, but a westering moon lit the land with a grey, misty light. In the stream-valley and on the hillside about it stood a great multitude of people, all still, all silent, their faces turned toward Ged and Arren. Their eyes caught no light of the moon.

  Arren dared not speak, but he put his hand on Ged’s arm. The mage stirred and sat up, saying, “What’s the matter?” He followed Arren’s gaze and saw the silent people.

  They were all clothed darkly, men and women alike. Their faces could not be clearly seen in the faint light, but it seemed to Arren that among those who stood nearest them in the valley, across the little stream, there were some whom he knew, though he could not say their names.

  Ged stood up, the cloak falling from him. His face and hair and shirt shone silvery pale, as if the moonlight gathered itself to him. He held out his arm in a wide gesture and said aloud, “O you who have lived, go free! I break the bond that holds you: Anvassa mane harw pennodathe!”

  For a moment they stood still, the multitude of silent people. They turned away slowly, seeming to walk into the grey darkness, and were gone.

  Ged sat down. He drew a deep breath. He looked at Arren and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, and his touch was warm and firm. “There’s nothing to fear, Lebannen,” he said gently, mockingly. “They were only the dead.”

  Arren nodded, though his teeth were chattering and he felt cold to his very bones. “How did,” he began, but his jaw and lips would not obey him yet.

  Ged understood him. “They came at his summoning. This is what he promises: eternal life. At his word they may return. At his bidding they must walk upon the hills of life, though they cannot stir a blade of grass.”

  “Is he—is he then dead, too?”

  Ged shook his head, brooding. “The dead cannot summon the dead back into the world. No, he has the powers of a living man, and more. . . . But if any thought to follow him, he tricked them. He keeps his power for himself. He plays King of the Dead; and not only of the dead. . . . But they were only shadows.”

  “I don’t know why I fear them,” Arren said with shame.r />
  “You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,” the mage said. He laid new wood on the fire and blew on the small coals under the ashes. A little flare of brightness bloomed on the twigs of brushwood, a grateful light to Arren. “And life also is a terrible thing,” Ged said, “and must be feared and praised.”

  They both sat back, wrapping their cloaks close about them. They were silent awhile. Then Ged spoke very gravely. “Lebannen, how long he may tease us here with sendings and with shadows, I do not know. But you know where he will go at last.”

  “Into the dark land.”

  “Aye. Among them.”

  “I have seen them now. I will go with you.”

  “Is it faith in me that moves you? You may trust my love, but do not trust my strength. For I think I have met my match.”

  “I will go with you.”

  “But if I am defeated, if my power or my life is spent, I cannot guide you back; you cannot return alone.”

  “I will return with you.”

  At that Ged said, “You enter your manhood at the gate of death.” And then he said that word or name by which the dragon had twice called Arren, speaking it very low: “Agni—Agni Lebannen.”

  After that they spoke no more, and presently sleep came back into them, and they lay down by their small and briefly burning fire.

  The next morning they walked on, going north and west; this was Arren’s decision, not Ged’s, who said, “Choose us our way, lad; the ways are all alike to me.” They made no haste, for they had no goal, waiting for some sign from Orm Embar. They followed the lowest, outmost range of hills, mostly within sight of the ocean. The grass was dry and short, blowing and blowing forever in the wind. The hills rose up golden and forlorn upon their right, and on their left lay the salt marshes and the western sea. Once they saw swans flying, far away in the south. No other breathing creature did they see all that day. A kind of weariness of dread, of waiting for the worst, grew in Arren all day long. Impatience and a dull anger rose in him. He said, after hours of silence, “This land is as dead as the land of death itself!”