“I’m angry,” Goha said with a kind of laugh. “When I’m angry I turn red. Like you people, you red people, you barbarians of the western lands . . . Look, there’s a town there ahead, that’ll be Oak Springs. It’s the only village on this road. We’ll stop there and rest a little. Maybe we can get some milk. And then, if we can go on, if you think you can walk on up to the Falcon’s Nest, we’ll be there by nightfall, I hope.”
The child nodded. She opened her bag of raisins and walnuts and ate a few. They trudged on.
The sun had long set when they came through the village and to Ogion’s house on the cliff-top. The first stars glimmered above a dark mass of clouds in the west over the high horizon of the sea. The sea wind blew, bowing short grasses. A goat bleated in the pastures behind the low, small house. The one window shone dim yellow.
Goha stood her stick and Therru’s against the wall by the door, and held the child’s hand, and knocked once.
There was no answer.
She pushed the door open. The fire on the hearth was out, cinders and grey ashes, but an oil lamp on the table made a tiny seed of light, and from his mattress on the floor in the far corner of the room Ogion said, “Come in, Tenar.”
CHAPTER 3
OGION
She bedded down the child on the cot in the western alcove. She built up the fire. She went and sat down beside Ogion’s pallet, cross-legged on the floor.
“No one looking after you!”
“I sent ’em off,” he whispered.
His face was as dark and hard as ever, but his hair was thin and white, and the dim lamp made no spark of light in his eyes.
“You could have died alone,” she said, fierce.
“Help me do that,” the old man said.
“Not yet,” she pleaded, stooping, laying her forehead on his hand.
“Not tonight,” he agreed. “Tomorrow.”
He lifted his hand to stroke her hair once, having that much strength.
She sat up again. The fire had caught. Its light played on the walls and low ceiling and sent shadows to thicken in the corners of the long room.
“If Ged would come,” the old man murmured.
“Have you sent to him?”
“Lost,” Ogion said. “He’s lost. A cloud. A mist over the lands. He went into the west. Carrying the branch of the rowan tree. Into the dark mist. I’ve lost my hawk.”
“No, no, no,” she whispered. “He’ll come back.”
They were silent. The fire’s warmth began to penetrate them both, letting Ogion relax and drift in and out of sleep, letting Tenar find rest pleasant after the long day afoot. She rubbed her feet and her aching shoulders. She had carried Therru part of the last long climb, for the child had begun to gasp with weariness as she tried to keep up.
Tenar got up, heated water, and washed the dust of the road from her. She heated milk, and ate bread she found in Ogion’s larder, and came back to sit by him. While he slept, she sat thinking, watching his face and the firelight and the shadows.
She thought how a girl had sat silent, thinking, in the night, a long time ago and far away, a girl in a windowless room, brought up to know herself only as the one who had been eaten, priestess and servant of the powers of the darkness of the earth. And there had been a woman who would sit up in the peaceful silence of a farmhouse when husband and children slept, to think, to be alone an hour. And there was the widow who had carried a burned child here, who sat by the side of the dying, who waited for a man to return. Like all women, any woman, doing what women do. But it was not by the names of the servant or the wife or the widow that Ogion had called her. Nor had Ged, in the darkness of the Tombs. Nor—longer ago, farther away than all—had her mother, the mother she remembered only as the warmth and lion-color of firelight, the mother who had given her her name.
“I am Tenar,” she whispered. The fire, catching a dry branch of pine, leaped up in a bright yellow tongue of flame.
Ogion’s breathing became troubled and he struggled for air. She helped him as she could till he found some ease. They both slept for a while, she drowsing by his dazed and drifting silence, broken by strange words. Once in the deep night he said aloud, as if meeting a friend in the road, “Are you here, then? Have you seen him?” And again, when Tenar roused herself to build up the fire, he began to speak, but this time it seemed he spoke to someone in his memory of years long gone, for he said clearly as a child might, “I tried to help her, but the roof of the house fell down. It fell on them. It was the earthquake.” Tenar listened. She too had seen earthquake. “I tried to help!” said the boy in the old man’s voice, in pain. Then the gasping struggle to breathe began again.
At first light Tenar was wakened by a sound she thought at first was the sea. It was a great rushing of wings. A flock of birds was flying over, low, so many that their wings stormed and the window was darkened by their quick shadows. It seemed they circled the house once and then were gone. They made no call or cry, and she did not know what birds they were.
People came that morning from the village of Re Albi, which Ogion’s house stood apart from to the north. A goat-girl came, and a woman for the milk of Ogion’s goats, and others to ask what they might do for him. Moss, the village witch, fingered the alder stick and the hazel switch by the door and peered in hopefully, but not even she ventured to come in, and Ogion growled from his pallet, “Send ’em away! Send ’em all away!”
He seemed stronger and more comfortable. When little Therru woke, he spoke to her in the dry, kind, quiet way Tenar remembered. The child went out to play in the sun, and he said to Tenar, “What is the name you call her?”
He knew the True Language of the Making, but he had never learned any Kargish at all.
“Therru means burning, the flaming of fire,” she said.
“Ah, ah,” he said, and his eyes gleamed, and he frowned. He seemed to grope for words for a moment. “That one,” he said, “that one—they will fear her.”
“They fear her now,” Tenar said bitterly.
The mage shook his head.
“Teach her, Tenar,” he whispered. “Teach her all!—Not Roke. They are afraid—Why did I let you go? Why did you go? To bring her here—too late?”
“Be still, be still,” she told him tenderly, for he struggled with words and breath and could find neither. He shook his head, and gasped, “Teach her!” and lay still.
He would not eat, and only drank a little water. In the middle of the day he slept. Waking in the late afternoon, he said, “Now, daughter,” and sat up.
Tenar took his hand, smiling at him.
“Help me get up.”
“No, no.”
“Yes,” he said. “Outside. I can’t die indoors.”
“Where would you go?”
“Anywhere. But if I could, the forest path,” he said. “The beech above the meadow.”
When she saw he was able to get up and determined to get outdoors, she helped him.
Together they got to the door, where he stopped and looked around the one room of his house. In the dark corner to the right of the doorway his tall staff leaned against the wall, shining a little. Tenar reached out to give it to him, but he shook his head. “No,” he said, “not that.” He looked around again as if for something missing, forgotten. “Come on,” he said at last.
When the bright wind from the west blew on his face and he looked out at the high horizon, he said, “That’s good.”
“Let me get some people from the village to make a litter and carry you,” she said. “They’re all waiting to do something for you.”
“I want to walk,” the old man said.
Therru came around the house and watched solemnly as Ogion and Tenar went, step by step, and stopping every five or six steps for Ogion to gasp, across the tangled meadow toward the woods that climbed steep up the mountainside from the inner side of the cliff-top. The sun was hot and the wind cold. It took them a very long time to cross that meadow. Ogion’s face was grey and hi
s legs shook like the grass in the wind when they got at last to the foot of a big, young beech tree just inside the forest, a few yards up the beginning of the mountain path. There he sank down between the roots of the tree, his back against its trunk. For a long time he could not move or speak, and his heart, pounding and faltering, shook his body. He nodded finally and whispered, “All right.”
Therru had followed them at a distance. Tenar went to her and held her and talked to her a little. She came back to Ogion. “She’s bringing a rug,” she said.
“Not cold.”
“I’m cold.”
There was the flicker of a smile on her face.
The child came lugging a goat’s-wool blanket. She whispered to Tenar and ran off again.
“Heather will let her help milk the goats, and look after her,” Tenar said to Ogion. “So I can stay here with you.”
“Never one thing, for you,” he said in the hoarse whistling whisper that was all the voice he had left.
“No. Always at least two things, and usually more,” she said. “But I am here.”
He nodded.
For a long time he did not speak, but sat back against the tree trunk, his eyes closed. Watching his face, Tenar saw it change as slowly as the light changed in the west.
He opened his eyes and gazed through a gap in the thickets at the western sky. He seemed to watch something, some act or deed, in that far, clear, golden space of light. He whispered once, hesitant, as if unsure, “The dragon—”
The sun was down, the wind fallen.
Ogion looked at Tenar.
“Over,” he whispered with exultation. “All changed!—Changed, Tenar! Wait—wait here, for—” A shaking took his body, tossing him like the branch of a tree in a great wind. He gasped. His eyes closed and opened, gazing beyond her. He laid his hand on hers; she bent down to him; he spoke his name to her, so that after his death he might be truly known.
He gripped her hand and shut his eyes and began once more the struggle to breathe, until there was no more breath. He lay then like one of the roots of the tree, while the stars came out and shone through the leaves and branches of the forest.
Tenar sat with the dead man in the dusk and dark. A lantern gleamed like a firefly across the meadow. She had laid the woolen blanket across them both, but her hand that held his hand had grown cold, as if it held a stone. She touched her forehead to his hand once more. She stood up, stiff and dizzy, her body feeling strange to her, and went to meet and guide whoever was coming with the light.
That night his neighbors sat with Ogion, and he did not send them away.
The mansion house of the Lord of Re Albi stood on an outcrop of rocks on the mountainside above the Overfell. Early in the morning, long before the sun had cleared the mountain, the wizard in the service of that lord came down through the village; and very soon after, another wizard came toiling up the steep road from Gont Port, having set out in darkness. Word had come to them that Ogion was dying, or their power was such that they knew of the passing of a great mage.
The village of Re Albi had no sorcerer, only its mage, and a witchwoman to perform the lowly jobs of finding and mending and bonesetting, which people would not bother the mage with. Aunty Moss was a dour creature, unmarried, like most witches, and unwashed, with greying hair tied in curious charm-knots, and eyes red-rimmed from herb-smoke. It was she who had come across the meadow with the lantern, and with Tenar and the others she had watched the night by Ogion’s body. She had set a wax candle in a glass shade, there in the forest, and had burned sweet oils in a dish of clay; she had said the words that should be said, and done what should be done. When it came to touching the body to prepare it for burial, she had looked once at Tenar as if for permission, and then had gone on with her offices. Village witches usually saw to the homing, as they called it, of the dead, and often to the burial.
When the wizard came down from the mansion house, a tall young man with a silvery staff of pinewood, and the other one came up from Gont Port, a stout middle-aged man with a short yew staff, Aunty Moss did not look at them with her bloodshot eyes, but ducked and bowed and drew back, gathering up her poor charms and witcheries.
When she had laid out the corpse as it should lie to be buried, on the left side with the knees bent, she had put in the upturned left hand a tiny charm-bundle, something wrapped in soft goatskin and tied with colored cord. The wizard of Re Albi flicked it away with the tip of his staff.
“Is the grave dug?” asked the wizard of Gont Port.
“Yes,” said the wizard of Re Albi. “It is dug in the graveyard of my lord’s house,” and he pointed toward the mansion house up on the mountain.
“I see,” said Gont Port. “I had thought our mage would be buried in all honor in the city he saved from earthquake.”
“My lord desires the honor,” said Re Albi.
“But it would seem—” Gont Port began, and stopped, not liking to argue, but not ready to give in to the young man’s easy claim. He looked down at the dead man. “He must be buried nameless,” he said with regret and bitterness. “I walked all night, but came too late. A great loss made greater!”
The young wizard said nothing.
“His name was Aihal,” Tenar said. “His wish was to lie here, where he lies now.”
Both men looked at her. The young man, seeing a middle-aged village woman, simply turned away. The man from Gont Port stared a moment and said, “Who are you?”
“I’m called Flint’s widow, Goha,” she said. “Who I am is your business to know, I think. But not mine to say.”
At this, the wizard of Re Albi found her worthy of a brief stare. “Take care, woman, how you speak to men of power!”
“Wait, wait,” said Gont Port, with a patting gesture, trying to calm Re Albi’s indignation, and still gazing at Tenar. “You were—You were his ward, once?”
“And friend,” Tenar said. Then she turned away her head and stood silent. She had heard the anger in her voice as she said that word, “friend.” She looked down at her friend, a corpse ready for the ground, lost and still. They stood over him, alive and full of power, offering no friendship, only contempt, rivalry, anger.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It was a long night. I was with him when he died.”
“It is not—” the young wizard began, but unexpectedly old Aunty Moss interrupted him, saying loudly, “She was. Yes, she was. Nobody else but her. He sent for her. He sent young Townsend the sheep-dealer to tell her come, clear down round the mountain, and he waited his dying till she did come and was with him, and then he died, and he died where he would be buried, here.”
“And—” said the older man, “and he told you—?”
“His name.” Tenar looked at them, and do what she would, the incredulity on the older man’s face, the contempt on the other’s, brought out an answering disrespect in her. “I said that name,” she said. “Must I repeat it to you?”
To her consternation she saw from their expressions that in fact they had not heard the name, Ogion’s true name; they had not paid attention to her.
“Oh!” she said. “This is a bad time—a time when even such a name can go unheard, can fall like a stone! Is listening not power? Listen, then: his name was Aihal. His name in death is Aihal. In the songs he will be known as Aihal of Gont. If there are songs to be made anymore. He was a silent man. Now he’s very silent. Maybe there will be no songs, only silence. I don’t know. I’m very tired. I’ve lost my father and dear friend.” Her voice failed; her throat closed on a sob. She turned to go. She saw on the forest path the little charm-bundle Aunty Moss had made. She picked it up, knelt down by the corpse, kissed the open palm of the left hand, and laid the bundle on it. There on her knees she looked up once more at the two men. She spoke quietly.
“Will you see to it,” she said, “that his grave is dug here, where he desired it?”
First the older man, then the younger, nodded.
She got up, smoothing down her skirt, and
started back across the meadow in the morning light.
CHAPTER 4
KALESSIN
“Wait,” Ogion, who was Aihal now, had said to her, just before the wind of death had shaken him and torn him loose from living. “Over—all changed,” he had whispered, and then, “Tenar, wait—” But he had not said what she should wait for. The change he had seen or known, perhaps; but what change? Was it his own death he meant, his own life that was over? He had spoken with joy, exulting. He had charged her to wait.
“What else have I to do?” she said to herself, sweeping the floor of his house. “What else have I ever done?” And, speaking to her memory of him, “Shall I wait here, in your house?”
“Yes,” said Aihal the Silent, silently, smiling.
So she swept out the house and cleaned the hearth and aired the mattresses. She threw out some chipped crockery and a leaky pan, but she handled them gently. She even put her cheek against a cracked plate as she took it out to the midden, for it was evidence of the old mage’s illness this past year. Austere he had been, living as plain as a poor farmer, but when his eyes were clear and his strength in him, he would never have used a broken plate or let a pan go unmended. These signs of his weakness grieved her, making her wish she had been with him to look after him. “I would have liked that,” she said to her memory of him, but he said nothing. He never would have anybody to look after him but himself. Would he have said to her, “You have better things to do?” She did not know. He was silent. But that she did right to stay here in his house, now, she was certain.
Shandy and her old husband, Clearbrook, who had been at the farm in Middle Valley longer than she herself had, would look after the flocks and the orchard; the other couple on the farm, Tiff and Sis, would get the field crops in. The rest would have to take care of itself for a while. Her raspberry canes would be picked by the neighborhood children. That was too bad; she loved raspberries. Up here on the Overfell, with the sea wind always blowing, it was too cold to grow raspberries. But Ogion’s little old peach tree in the sheltered nook of the house wall facing south bore eighteen peaches, and Therru watched them like a mousing cat till the day she came in and said in her hoarse, unclear voice, “Two of the peaches are all red and yellow.”
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