The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “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.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE MASTER

  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 b
e 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.

  “Spark!” she cried, and scattered the poultry, running to him.

  “Well, well,” he said. “Don’t carry on.”

  He let her embrace him and stroke his face. He came in and sat down in the kitchen, at the table.

  “Have you eaten? Did you see Apple?”

  “I could eat.”

  She rummaged in the well-stocked larder. “What ship are you on? Still the Gull?”

  “No.” A pause. “My ship’s broke up.”

  She turned in horror—“Wrecked?”

  “No.” He smiled without humor. “Crew’s broke up. King’s men took her over.”

  “But—it wasn’t a pirate ship—”

  “No.”

  “Then why—?”

  “Said the captain was running some goods they wanted,” he said, unwillingly. He was as thin as ever, but looked older, tanned dark, lank-haired, with a long, narrow face like Flint’s but still narrower, harder.

  “Where’s Dad?” he said.

  Tenar stood still.

  “You didn’t stop by your sister’s.”

  “No,” he said, indifferent.

  “Flint died three years ago,” she said. “Of a stroke. In the fields—on the path up from the lambing pens. Clearbrook found him. It was three years ago.”

  There was a silence. He did not know what to say, or had nothing to say.

  She put food before him. He began to eat so hungrily that she set out more at once.

  “When did you eat last?”

  He shrugged, and ate.

  She sat down across the table from him. Late-spring sunshine poured in the low window across the table and shone on the brass fender in the hearth.

  He pushed the plate away at last.

  “So who’s been running the farm?” he asked.

  “What’s that to you, son?” she asked him, gently but dryly.

  “It’s mine,” he said, in a rather similar tone.

  After a minute Tenar got up and cleared his dishes away. “So it is.”

  “You can stay, o’ course,” he said, very awkwardly, perhaps attempting to joke; but he was not a joking man. “Old Clearbrook still around?”

  “They’re all still here. And a man called Hawk, and a child I keep. Here. In the house. You’ll have to sleep in the loft-room. I’ll put the ladder up.” She faced him again. “Are you here for a stay, then?”

  “I might be.”

  So Flint had answered her questions for twenty years, denying her right to ask them by never answering yes or no, maintaining a freedom based on her ignorance; a poor, narrow sort of freedom, she thought.

  “Poor lad,” she said, “your crew broken up, and your father dead, and strangers in your house, all in a day. You’ll want some time to get used to it all. I’m sorry, my son. But I’m glad you’re here. I thought of you often, on the seas, in the storms, in winter.”

  He said nothing. He had nothing to offer, and was unable to accept. He pushed back his chair and was about to get up when Therru came in. He stared, half-risen—“What happened to her?” he said.

  “She was burned. Here’s my son I told you about, Therru, the sailor, Spark. Therru’s your sister, Spark.”

  “Sister!”

  “By adoption.”

  “Sister!” he said again, and looked around the kitchen as if for witness, and stared at his mother.

  She stared back.

  He went out, going wide of Therru, who stood motionless. He slammed the door behind him.

  Tenar started to speak to Therru and could not.

  “Don’t cry,” said the child who did not cry, coming to her, touching her arm. “Did he hurt you?”

  “Oh Therru! Let me hold you!” She sat down at the table with Therru on her lap and in her arms, though the girl was getting big to be held, and had never learned how to do it easily. But Tenar held her and wept, and Therru bent her scarred face down against Tenar’s, till it was wet with tears.

  Ged and Spark came in at dusk from opposite ends of the farm. Spark had evidently talked with Clearbrook and thought the situation over, and Ged was evidently trying to size it up. Very little was said at supper, and that cautiously. Spark made no complaint about not having his own room back, but ran up the ladder to the storage-loft like the sailor he was, and was apparently satisfied with the bed his mother had made him there, for he did not come back down till late in the morning.

  He wanted breakfast then, and expected it to be served to him. His father had always been waited on by mother, wife, daughter. Was he less a man than his father? Was she to prove it to him? She served him his meal and cleared it away for him, and went back to the orchard where she and Therru and Shandy were burning off a plague of tent caterpillars that threatened to destroy the new-set fruit.

  Spark went off to join Clearbrook and Tiff. And he stayed mostly with them, as the days passed. The heavy work requiring muscle and the skilled work with crops and sheep was done by Ged, Shandy, and Tenar, while the two old men who had been there all their lives, his father’s men, took him about and told him how they managed it all, and truly believed they were managing it all, and shared their belief with him.

  Tenar became miserable in the house. Only outdoors, at the farmwork, did she have relief from the anger, the shame that Spark’s presence brought her.

  “My turn,” she said to Ged, bitterly, in the starlit darkness of their room. “My turn to lose what I was proudest of.”

  “What have you lost?”

  “My son. The son I did not bring up to be a man. I failed. I failed him.” She bit her lip, gazing dry-eyed into the dark.

  Ged did not try to argue with her or persuade her out of her grief. He asked, “Do you think he’ll stay?”

  “Yes. He’s afraid to try and go back to sea. He didn’t tell me the truth, or not all the truth, about his ship. He was second mate. I suppose he was involved in carrying stolen goods. Secondhand piracy. I don’t care. Gontish sailors are all half-pirate. But he lies about it. He lies. He is jealous of you. A dishonest, envious man.”

&n
bsp; “Frightened, I think,” Ged said. “Not wicked. And it is his farm.”

  “Then he can have it! And may it be as generous to him as—”

  “No, dear love,” Ged said, catching her with both voice and hands—“don’t speak—don’t say the evil word!” He was so urgent, so passionately earnest, that her anger turned right about into the love that was its source, and she cried, “I wouldn’t curse him, or this place! I didn’t mean it! Only it makes me so sorry, so ashamed! I am so sorry, Ged!”

  “No, no, no. My dear, I don’t care what the boy thinks of me. But he’s very hard on you.”

  “And Therru. He treats her like—He said, he said to me, ‘What did she do, to look like that?’ What did she do—!”

  Ged stroked her hair, as he often did, with a light, slow, repeated caress that would make them both sleepy with loving pleasure.

  “I could go off goat-herding again,” he said at last. “It would make things easier for you here. Except for the work . . .”

  “I’d rather come with you.”

  He stroked her hair, and seemed to be considering. “I suppose we might,” he said. “There were a couple of families up there sheep-herding, above Lissu. But then comes the winter. . . .”

  “Maybe some farmer would take us on. I know the work—and sheep—and you know goats—and you’re quick at everything—”

  “Useful with pitchforks,” he murmured, and got a little sob of a laugh from her.

  The next morning Spark was up early to breakfast with them, for he was going fishing with old Tiff. He got up from the table, saying with a better grace than usual, “I’ll bring a mess of fish for supper.”

  Tenar had made resolves overnight. She said, “Wait; you can clear off the table, Spark. Set the dishes in the sink and put water on ’em. They’ll be washed with the supper things.”