The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The making from the unmaking,

  The ending from the beginning,

  Who shall know surely?

  What we know is the doorway between

  them that we enter departing.

  Among all beings ever returning,

  the eldest, the Doorkeeper, Segoy . . .

  The child’s voice was like a metal brush drawn across metal, like dry leaves, like the hiss of fire burning. She spoke to the end of the first stanza:

  Then from the foam bright Eá broke.

  Ged nodded brief, firm approval. “Good,” he said.

  “Last night,” Tenar said. “Last night she learned it. It seems a year ago.”

  “I can learn more,” said Therru.

  “You will,” Ged told her.

  “Now finish cleaning the squash, please,” said Tenar, and the child obeyed.

  “What shall I do?” Ged asked. Tenar paused, looking at him.

  “I need that kettle filled and heated.”

  He nodded, and took the kettle to the pump.

  They made and ate their supper and cleared it away.

  “Say the Making again as far as you know it,” Ged said to Therru, at the hearth, “and we’ll go on from there.”

  She said the second stanza once with him, once with Tenar, once by herself.

  “Bed,” said Tenar.

  “You didn’t tell Sparrowhawk about the King.”

  “You tell him,” Tenar said, amused at this pretext for delay.

  Therru turned to Ged. Her face, scarred and whole, seeing and blind, was intent, fiery. “The King came in a ship. He had a sword. He gave me the bone dolphin. His ship was flying, but I was sick, because Handy touched me. But the King touched me there and the mark went away.” She showed her round, thin arm. Tenar stared. She had forgotten the mark.

  “Someday I want to fly to where he lives,” Therru told Ged. He nodded. “I will do that,” she said. “Do you know him?”

  “Yes. I know him. I went on a long journey with him.”

  “Where?”

  “To where the sun doesn’t rise and the stars don’t set. And back from that place.”

  “Did you fly?”

  He shook his head. “I can only walk,” he said

  The child pondered, and then as if satisfied said, “Good night,” and went off to her room. Tenar followed her; but Therru did not want to be sung to sleep. “I can say the Making in the dark,” she said. “Both stanzas.”

  Tenar came back to the kitchen and sat down again across the hearth from Ged.

  “How she’s changing!” she said. “I can’t keep up with her. I’m old to be bringing up a child. And she . . . She obeys me, but only because she wants to.”

  “It’s the only justification for obedience,” Ged observed.

  “But when she does take it into her head to disobey me, what can I do? There’s a wildness in her. Sometimes she’s my Therru, sometimes she’s something else, out of reach. I asked Ivy if she’d think of training her. Beech suggested it. Ivy said no. ‘Why not?’ I aid. ‘I’m afraid of her!’ she said. . . . But you’re not afraid of her. Nor she of you. You and Lebannen are the only men she’s let touch her. I let that—that Handy—I can’t talk about it. Oh, I’m tired! I don’t understand anything. . . .”

  Ged laid a knot on the fire to burn small and slow, and they both watched the leap and flutter of the flames.

  “I’d like you to stay here, Ged,” she said. “If you like.”

  He did not answer at once. She said, “Maybe you’re going on to Havnor—”

  “No, no. I have nowhere to go. I was looking for work.”

  “Well, there’s plenty to be done here. Clearbrook won’t admit it, but his arthritis has about finished him for anything but gardening. I’ve been wanting help ever since I came back. I could have told the old blockhead what I thought of him for sending you off up the mountain that way, but it’s no use. He wouldn’t listen.”

  “It was a good thing for me,” Ged said. “It was the time I needed.”

  “You were herding sheep?”

  “Goats. Right up at the top of the grazings. A boy they had took sick, and Serry took me on, sent me up there the first day. They keep ’em up there high and late, so the under-wool grows thick. This last month I had the mountain pretty much to myself. Serry sent me up that coat and some supplies, and said to keep the herd up as high as I could as long as I could. So I did. It was fine, up there.”

  “Lonely,” she said.

  He nodded, half smiling.

  “You always have been alone.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  She said nothing. He looked at her.

  “I’d like to work here,” he said.

  “That’s settled, then,” she said. After a while she added, “For the winter, anyway.”

  The frost was harder tonight. Their world was perfectly silent except for the whisper of the fire. The silence was like a presence between them. She lifted her head and looked at him.

  “Well,” she said, “which bed shall I sleep in, Ged? The child’s, or yours?”

  He drew breath. He spoke low. “Mine, if you will.”

  “I will.”

  The silence held him. She could see the effort he made to break from it. “If you’ll be patient with me,” he said.

  “I have been patient with you for twenty-five years,” she said. She looked at him and began to laugh. “Come—come on, my dear—better late than never! I’m only an old woman. . . . Nothing is wasted, nothing is ever wasted. You taught me that.” She stood up, and he stood; she put out her hands, and he took them. They embraced, and their embrace became close. They held each other so fiercely, so dearly, that they stopped knowing anything but each other. It did not matter which bed they meant to sleep in. They lay that night on the hearthstones, and there she taught Ged the mystery that the wisest man could not teach him.

  He built up the fire once, and fetched the good weaving off the bench. Tenar made no objection this time. Her cloak and his sheepskin coat were their blankets.

  They woke again at dawn. A faint silvery light lay on the dark, half-leafless branches of the oaks outside the window. Tenar stretched out full length to feel his warmth against her. After a while she murmured, “He was lying here. Hake. Right under us . . .”

  Ged made a small noise of protest.

  “Now you’re a man indeed,” she said. “Stuck another man full of holes, first, and lain with a woman, second. That’s the proper order, I suppose.”

  “Hush,” he murmured, turning to her, laying his head on her shoulder. “Don’t.”

  “I will, Ged. Poor man! There’s no mercy in me, only justice. I wasn’t trained to mercy. Love is the only grace I have. Oh, Ged, don’t fear me! You were a man when I first saw you! It’s not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.”

  They lay in warmth and sweet silence.

  “Tell me something.”

  He murmured assent sleepily.

  “How did you happen to hear what they were saying? Hake and Handy and the other one. How did you happen to be just there, just then?”

  He raised himself up on one elbow so he could look at her face. His own face was so open and vulnerable in its ease and fulfillment and tenderness that she had to reach up and touch his mouth, there where she had kissed it first, months ago, which led to his taking her into his arms again, and the conversation was not continued in words.

  There were formalities to be got through. The chief of them was to tell Clearbrook and the other tenants of Oak Farm that she had replaced “the old master” with a hired hand. She did so promptly and bluntly. They could not do anything about it, nor did it entail any threat to them. A widow’s tenure of her husband’s property was contingent on there being no male heir or claimant. Flint’s son the seaman was the heir, and Flint’s widow was merely holding the farm for him. If she died, it would go to Clearbrook to hold for the heir; if Spark never clai
med it, it would go to a distant cousin of Flint’s in Kahedanan. The two couples who did not own the land but held a life interest in the work and profit of the farming, as was common on Gont, could not be dislodged by any man the widow took up with, even if she married him; but she feared they might resent her lack of fidelity to Flint, whom they had after all known longer than she had. To her relief they made no objections at all. “Hawk” had won their approval with one jab of a pitchfork. Besides, it was only good sense in a woman to want a man in the house to protect her. If she took him into her bed, well, the appetites of widows were proverbial. And, after all, she was a foreigner.

  The attitude of the villagers was much the same. A bit of whispering and sniggering, but little more. It seemed that being respectable was easier than Moss thought; or perhaps it was that used goods had little value.

  She felt as soiled and diminished by their acceptance as she would have by their disapproval. Only Lark freed her from shame, by making no judgments at all, and using no words—man, woman, widow, foreigner—in place of what she saw, but simply looking, watching her and Hawk with interest, curiosity, envy, and generosity.

  Because Lark did not see Hawk through the words herdsman, hired hand, widow’s man, but looked at him himself, she saw a good deal that puzzled her. His dignity and simplicity were not greater than that of other men she had known, but were a little different in quality; there was a size to him, she thought, not height or girth, certainly, but soul and mind. She said to Ivy, “That man hasn’t lived among goats all his life. He knows more about the world than he does about a farm.”

  “I’d say he’s a sorcerer who’s been accursed or lost his power some way,” the witch said. “It happens.”

  “Ah,” said Lark.

  But the word “archmage” was too great and grand a word to bring from far-off pomps and palaces and fit to the dark-eyed, grey-haired man at Oak Farm, and she never did that. If she had, she could not have been as comfortable with him as she was. Even the idea of his having been a sorcerer made her a bit uneasy, the word getting in the way of the man, until she actually saw him again. He was up in one of the old apple trees in the orchard pruning out deadwood, and he called out a greeting to her as she came to the farm. His name fit him well, she thought, perched up there, and she waved at him, and smiled as she went on.

  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.

  “It’s 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 Eá. 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, “It’s 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 Eá 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, tolk, 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 sai
d 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 built 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?”