She took the child with her now when she went into the village, or any distance at all from the house.
Therru did not find this bondage wearisome. She stayed close by Tenar as a much younger child would do, working with her or playing. Her play was with cat’s cradle, basket-making, and with a couple of bone figures that Tenar had found in a little grass bag on one of Ogion’s shelves. There was an animal that might be a dog or a sheep, a figure that might be a woman or a man. To Tenar they had no sense of power or danger about them, and Moss said, “Just toys.” To Therru they were a great magic. She moved them about in the patterns of some silent story for hours at a time; she did not speak as she played. Sometimes she built houses for the person and the animal, stone cairns, huts of mud and straw. They were always in her pocket in their grass bag. She was learning to spin; she could hold the distaff in the burned hand and twist the drop-spindle with the other. They had combed the goats regularly since they had been there, and by now had a good sackful of silky goathair to be spun.
But I should be teaching her, Tenar thought, distressed. “Teach her all,” Ogion said, and what am I teaching her? Cooking and spinning? Then another part of her mind said in Goha’s voice, “And are those not true arts, needful and noble? Is wisdom all words?”
Still she worried over the matter, and one afternoon while Therru was pulling the goathair to clean and loosen it and she was carding it, in the shade of the peach tree, she said, “Therru, maybe it’s time you began to learn the true names of things. There is a language in which all things bear their true names, and deed and word are one. By speaking that tongue Segoy raised the islands from the deeps. It is the language dragons speak.”
The child listened, silent.
Tenar laid down her carding combs and picked up a small stone from the ground. “In that tongue,” she said, “this is tolk.”
Therru watched what she did and repeated the word, tolk, but without voice, only forming it with her lips, which were drawn back a little on the right side by the scarring.
The stone lay on Tenar’s palm, a stone.
They were both silent.
“Not yet,” Tenar said. “That’s not what I have to teach you now.” She let the stone fall to the ground, and picked up her combs and a handful of cloudy, grey wool Therru had prepared for carding. “Maybe when you have your true name, maybe that will be the time. Not now. Now, listen. Now is the time for stories, for you to begin to learn the stories. I can tell you stories of the Archipelago and of the Kargad Lands. I told you a story I learned from my friend Aihal the Silent. Now I’ll tell you one I learned from my friend Lark when she told it to her children and mine. This is the story of Andaur and Avad. As long ago as forever, as far away as Selidor, there lived a man called Andaur, a woodcutter, who went up in the hills alone. One day, deep in the forest, he cut a great oak tree down. As it fell it cried out to him in a human voice. . . .”
It was a pleasant afternoon for them both.
But that night as she lay by the sleeping child, Tenar could not sleep. She was restless, concerned with one petty anxiety after another—did I fasten the pasture gate, does my hand ache from carding or is it arthritis beginning, and so on. Then she became very uneasy, thinking she heard noises outside the house. Why haven’t I got me a dog? she thought. Stupid, not to have a dog. A woman and child living alone ought to have a dog these days. But this is Ogion’s house! Nobody would come here to do evil. But Ogion is dead, dead, buried at the roots of the tree at the forest’s edge. And no one will come. Sparrowhawk’s gone, run away. Not even Sparrowhawk anymore, a shadow man, no good to anyone, a dead man forced to be alive. And I have no strength, there’s no good in me. I say the word of the Making and it dies in my mouth, it is meaningless. A stone. I am a woman, an old woman, weak, stupid. All I do is wrong. All I touch turns to ashes, shadow, stone. I am the creature of darkness, swollen with darkness. Only fire can cleanse me. Only fire can eat me, eat me away like—
She sat up and cried out aloud in her own language, “The curse be turned, and turn!”—and brought her right arm out and down, pointing straight to the closed door. Then, leaping out of bed, she went to the door, flung it open, and said into the cloudy night, “You come too late, Aspen. I was eaten long ago. Go clean your own house!”
There was no answer, no sound, but a faint, sour, vile smell of burning—singed cloth or hair.
She shut the door, set Ogion’s staff against it, and looked to see that Therru still slept. She did not sleep herself, that night.
In the morning she took Therru into the village to ask Fan if he would want the yarn they had been spinning. It was an excuse to get away from the house and to be for a little while among people. The old man said he would be glad to weave the yarn, and they talked for a few minutes, under the great painted fan, while the apprentice scowled and clacked away grimly at the loom. As Tenar and Therru left Fan’s house, somebody dodged around the corner of the little cottage where she had lived. Something, wasps or bees, were stinging Tenar’s neck and head, and there was a patter of rain all round, a thundershower, but there were no clouds—Stones. She saw the pebbles strike the ground. Therru had stopped, startled and puzzled, looking around. A couple of boys ran from behind the cottage, half hiding, half showing themselves, calling out to each other, laughing.
“Come along,” Tenar said steadily, and they walked to Ogion’s house.
Tenar was shaking, and the shaking got worse as they walked. She tried to conceal it from Therru, who looked troubled but not frightened, not having understood what had happened.
As soon as they entered the house, Tenar knew someone had been there while they were in the village. It smelled of burned meat and hair. The coverlet of their bed had been disarranged.
When she tried to think what to do, she knew there was a spell on her. It had been laid waiting for her. She could not stop shaking, and her mind was confused, slow, unable to decide. She could not think. She had said the word, the true name of the stone, and it had been flung at her, in her face—in the face of evil, the hideous face—She had dared speak—She could not speak—
She thought, in her own language, I cannot think in Hardic. I must not.
She could think, in Kargish. Not quickly. It was as if she had to ask the girl Arha, who she had been long ago, to come out of the darkness and think for her. To help her. As she had helped her last night, turning the wizard’s curse back on him. Arha had not known a great deal of what Tenar and Goha knew, but she had known how to curse, and how to live in the dark, and how to be silent.
It was hard to do that, to be silent. She wanted to cry out. She wanted to talk—to go to Moss and tell her what had happened, why she must go, to say good-bye at least. She tried to say to Heather, “The goats are yours now, Heather,” and she managed to say that in Hardic, so that Heather would understand, but Heather did not understand. She stared and laughed. “Oh, they’re Lord Ogion’s goats!” she said.
“Then—you—” Tenar tried to say “go on keeping them for him,” but a deadly sickness came into her and she heard her voice saying shrilly, “fool, halfwit, imbecile, woman!” Heather stared and stopped laughing. Tenar covered her own mouth with her hand. She took Heather and turned her to look at the cheeses ripening in the milking shed, and pointed to them and to Heather, back and forth, until Heather nodded vaguely and laughed again because she was acting so queer.
Tenar nodded to Therru—come!—and went into the house, where the foul smell was stronger, making Therru cower.
Tenar fetched out their packs and their travel shoes. In her pack she put her spare dress and shifts, Therru’s two old dresses and the half-made new one and the spare cloth; the spindle whorls she had carved for herself and Therru; and a little food and a clay bottle of water for the way. In Therru’s pack went Therru’s best baskets, the bone person and the bone animal in their grass bag, some feathers, a little maze-mat Moss had given her, and a bag of nuts and raisins.
She wanted to say, “
Go water the peach tree,” but dared not. She took the child out and showed her. Therru watered the tiny shoot carefully.
They swept and straightened up the house, working fast, in silence.
Tenar set a jug back on the shelf and saw on the other end of the shelf the three great books, Ogion’s books.
Arha saw them and they were nothing to her, big leather boxes full of paper.
But Tenar stared at them and bit her knuckle, frowning with the effort to decide, to know what to do, and to know how to carry them. She could not carry them. But she must. They could not stay here in the desecrated house, the house where hatred had come in. They were his. Ogion’s. Ged’s. Hers. The knowledge. Teach her all! She emptied their wool and yarn from the sack she had meant to carry it in and put the books in, one atop the other, and tied the neck of the bag with a leather strap with a loop to hold it by. Then she said, “We must go now, Therru.” She spoke in Kargish, but the child’s name was the same, it was a Kargish word, flame, flaming; and she came, asking no questions, carrying her little hoard in the pack on her back.
They took up their walking sticks, the hazel shoot and the alder branch. They left Ogion’s staff beside the door in the dark corner. They left the door of the house wide open to the wind from the sea.
An animal sense guided Tenar away from the fields and away from the hill road she had come by. She took a shortcut down the steep-falling pastures, holding Therru’s hand, to the wagon road that zigzagged down to Gont Port. She knew that if she met Aspen she was lost, and thought he might be waiting for her on the way. But not, maybe, on this way.
After a mile or so of the descent she began to be able to think. What she thought first was that she had taken the right road. For the Hardic words were coming back to her, and after a while, the true words, so that she stooped and picked up a stone and held it in her hand, saying in her mind, tolk; and she put that stone in her pocket. She looked out into the vast levels of air and cloud and said in her mind, once, Kalessin. And her mind cleared, as that air was clear.
They came into a long cutting shadowed by high, grassy banks and outcrops of rock, where she was a little uneasy. As they came out onto the turn they saw the dark-blue bay below them, and coming into it between the Armed Cliffs a beautiful ship under full sail. Tenar had feared the last such ship, but not this one. She wanted to run down the road to meet it.
That she could not do. They went at Therru’s pace. It was a better pace than it had been two months ago, and going downhill made it easy, too. But the ship ran to meet them. There was a magewind in her sails; she came across the bay like a flying swan. She was in port before Tenar and Therru were halfway down the next long turning of the road.
Towns of any size at all were very strange places to Tenar. She had not lived in them. She had seen the greatest city in Earthsea, Havnor, once, for a while; and she had sailed into Gont Port with Ged, years ago, but they had climbed on up the road to the Overfell without pausing in the streets. The only other town she knew was Valmouth, where her daughter lived, a sleepy, sunny little harbor town where a ship trading from the Andrades was a great event, and most of the conversation of the inhabitants concerned dried fish.
She and the child came into the streets of Gont Port when the sun was still well above the western sea. Therru had walked fifteen miles without complaint and without being worn out, though certainly she was very tired. Tenar was tired too, having not slept the night before, and having been much distressed; and also Ogion’s books had been a heavy burden. Halfway down the road she had put them into the backpack, and the food and clothing into the woolsack, which was better, but not all that much better. So they came trudging among outlying houses to the landgate of the city, where the road, coming between two carved stone dragons, turned into a street. There a man, the guard of the gate, eyed them. Therru bent her burned face down toward the shoulder and hid her burned hand under the apron of her dress.
“Will you be going to a house in town, mistress?” the guard asked, peering at the child.
Tenar did not know what to say. She did not know there were guards at city gates. She had nothing to pay a tollkeeper or an innkeeper. She did not know a soul in Gont Port—except, she thought now, the wizard, the one who had come up to bury Ogion, what was he called? But she did not know what he was called. She stood there with her mouth open, like Heather.
“Go on, go on,” the guard said, bored, and turned away.
She wanted to ask him where she would find the road south across the headlands, the coast road to Valmouth; but she dared not waken his interest again, lest he decide she was after all a vagrant or a witch or whatever he and the stone dragons were supposed to keep out of Gont Port. So they went on between the dragons—Therru looked up, a little, to see them—and tramped along on cobblestones, more and more amazed, bewildered, and abashed. It did not seem to Tenar that anybody or anything in the world had been kept out of Gont Port. It was all here. Tall houses of stone, wagons, drays, carts, cattle, donkeys, marketplaces, shops, crowds, people, people—the farther they went the more people there were. Therru clung to Tenar’s hand, sidling, hiding her face with her hair. Tenar clung to Therru’s hand.
She did not see how they could stay here, so the only thing to do was get started south and go till nightfall—all too soon now—hoping to camp in the woods. Tenar picked out a broad woman in a broad white apron who was closing the shutters of a shop, and crossed the street, resolved to ask her for the road south out of the city. The woman’s firm, red face looked pleasant enough, but as Tenar was getting up her courage to speak to her, Therru clutched her hard as if trying to hide herself against her, and looking up she saw coming down the street toward her the man with the leather cap. He saw her at the same instant. He stopped.
Tenar seized Therru’s arm and half dragged, half swung her round. “Come!” she said, and strode straight on past the man. Once she had put him behind her she walked faster, going downhill toward the flare and dark of the sunset water and the docks and quais at the foot of the steep street. Therru ran with her, gasping as she had gasped after she was burned.
Tall masts rocked against the red and yellow sky. The ship, sails furled, lay against the stone pier, beyond an oared galley.
Tenar looked back. The man was following them, close behind. He was not hurrying.
She ran out onto the pier, but after a way Therru stumbled and could not go on, unable to get her breath. Tenar picked her up, and the child held to her, hiding her face in Tenar’s shoulder. But Tenar could scarcely move, thus laden. Her legs shook under her. She took a step, and another, and another. She came to the little wooden bridge they had laid from the pier to the ship’s deck. She laid her hand on its rail.
A sailor on deck, a bald, wiry fellow, looked her over. “What’s wrong, miss’s?” he said.
“Is—Is the ship from Havnor?”
“From the King’s City, sure.”
“Let me aboard!”
“Well, I can’t do that,” the man said, grinning, but his eyes shifted; he was looking at the man who had come to stand beside Tenar.
“You don’t have to run away,” Handy said to her. “I don’t mean you any harm. I don’t want to hurt you. You don’t understand. I was the one got help for her, wasn’t I? I was really sorry, what happened. I want to help you with her.” He put out his hand as if drawn irresistibly to touch Therru. Tenar could not move. She had promised Therru that he would never touch her again. She saw the hand touch the child’s bare, flinching arm.
“What do you want with her?” said another voice. Another sailor had taken the place of the bald one: a young man. Tenar thought he was her son.
Handy was quick to speak. “She’s got—she took my kid. My niece. It’s mine. She witched it, she run off with it, see—”
She could not speak at all. The words were gone from her again, taken from her. The young sailor was not her son. His face was thin and stern, with clear eyes. Looking at him, she found the words: “Let
me come aboard. Please!”
The young man held out his hand. She took it, and he brought her across the gangway onto the deck of the ship.
“Wait there,” he said to Handy, and to her, “Come with me.”
But her legs would not hold her up. She sank down in a heap on the deck of the ship from Havnor, dropping the heavy sack but clinging to the child. “Don’t let him take her, oh, don’t let them have her, not again, not again, not again!”
CHAPTER 10
THE DOLPHIN
She would not let go the child, she would not give the child to them. They were all men aboard the ship. Only after a long time did she begin to be able to take into her mind what they said, what had been done, what was happening. When she understood who the young man was, the one she had thought was her son, it seemed as if she had understood it all along, only she had not been able to think it. She had not been able to think anything.
He had come back onto the ship from the docks and now stood talking to a grey-haired man, the ship’s master by the look of him, near the gangplank. He glanced over at Tenar, whom they had let stay crouching with Therru in a corner of the deck between the railing and a great windlass. The long day’s weariness had won out over Therru’s fear; she was fast asleep, close against Tenar, with her little pack for a pillow and her cloak for a blanket.
Tenar got up slowly, and the young man came to her at once. She straightened her skirts and tried to smooth her hair back. “I am Tenar of Atuan,” she said. He stood still. She said, “I think you are the King.”
He was very young, younger than her son, Spark. He could hardly be twenty yet. But there was a look to him that was not young at all, something in his eyes that made her think: he has been through the fire.
“My name is Lebannen of Enlad, my lady,” he said, and he was about to bow or even kneel to her. She caught his hands so that they stood there face-to-face. “Not to me,” she said, “nor I to you!”
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