The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  So he came to feel that those hours were true meetings with her, and he lived for them, without knowing what he lived for until his feet were on the cobbles, and his eyes on the harbor and the far line of the sea. Then he remembered what was worth remembering.

  The winter passed by, and the cold early spring, and with the warm late spring came a letter from his mother, brought by a carter. Diamond read it and took it to Master Hemlock, saying, “My mother wonders if I might spend a month at home this summer.”

  “Probably not,” the wizard said, and then, appearing to notice Diamond, put down his pen and said, “Young man, I must ask you if you wish to continue studying with me.”

  Diamond had no idea what to say. The idea of its being up to him had not occurred to him. “Do you think I ought to?” he asked at last.

  “Probably not,” the wizard said.

  Diamond expected to feel relieved, released, but found he felt rejected, ashamed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, with enough dignity that Hemlock glanced up at him.

  “You could go to Roke,” the wizard said.

  “To Roke?”

  The boy’s drop-jawed stare irritated Hemlock, though he knew it shouldn’t. Wizards are used to overweening confidence in the young of their kind. They expect modesty to come later, if at all. “I said Roke.” Hemlock’s tone said he was unused to having to repeat himself. And then, because this boy, this soft-headed, spoiled, moony boy had endeared himself to Hemlock by his uncomplaining patience, he took pity on him and said, “You should either go to Roke or find a wizard to teach you what you need. Of course you need what I can teach you. You need the names. The art begins and ends in naming. But that’s not your gift. You have a poor memory for words. You must train it diligently. However, it’s clear that you do have capacities, and that they need cultivation and discipline, which another man can give you better than I can.” So does modesty breed modesty, sometimes, even in unlikely places. “If you were to go to Roke, I’d send a letter with you drawing you to the particular attention of the Master Summoner.”

  “Ah,” said Diamond, floored. The Summoner’s art is perhaps the most arcane and dangerous of all the arts of magic.

  “Perhaps I am wrong,” said Hemlock in his dry, flat voice. “Your gift may be for Pattern. Or perhaps it’s an ordinary gift for shaping and transformation. I’m not certain.”

  “But you are—I do actually—”

  “Oh yes. You are uncommonly slow, young man, to recognise your own capacities.” It was spoken harshly, and Diamond stiffened up a bit.

  “I thought my gift was for music,” he said.

  Hemlock dismissed that with a flick of his hand. “I am talking of the True Art,” he said. “Now I will be frank with you. I advise you to write your parents—I shall write them too—informing them of your decision to go to the school on Roke, if that is what you decide; or to the Great Port, if the Mage Restive will take you on, as I think he will, with my recommendation. But I advise against visiting home. The entanglement of family, friends, and so on is precisely what you need to be free of. Now, and henceforth.”

  “Do wizards have no family?”

  Hemlock was glad to see a bit of fire in the boy. “They are one another’s family,” he said.

  “And no friends?”

  “They may be friends. Did I say it was an easy life?” A pause. Hemlock looked directly at Diamond. “There was a girl,” he said.

  Diamond met his gaze for a moment, looked down, and said nothing.

  “Your father told me. A witch’s daughter, a childhood playmate. He believed that you had taught her spells.”

  “She taught me.”

  Hemlock nodded. “That is quite understandable, among children. And quite impossible now. Do you understand that?”

  “No,” Diamond said.

  “Sit down,” said Hemlock. After a moment Diamond took the stiff, high-backed chair facing him.

  “I can protect you here, and have done so. On Roke, of course, you’ll be perfectly safe. The very walls, there . . . But if you go home, you must be willing to protect yourself. It’s a difficult thing for a young man, very difficult—a test of a will that has not yet been steeled, a mind that has not yet seen its true goal. I very strongly advise that you not take that risk. Write your parents, and go to the Great Port, or to Roke. Half your year’s fee, which I’ll return to you, will see to your first expenses.”

  Diamond sat upright and still. He had been getting some of his father’s height and girth lately, and looked very much a man, though a very young one.

  “What did you mean, Master Hemlock, in saying that you had protected me here?”

  “Simply as I protect myself,” the wizard said; and after a moment, testily, “The bargain, boy. The power we give for our power. The lesser state of being we forgo. Surely you know that every true man of power is celibate.”

  There was a pause, and Diamond said, “So you saw to it . . . that I . . .”

  “Of course. It was my responsibility as your teacher.”

  Diamond nodded. He said, “Thank you.” Presently he stood up. “Excuse me, Master,” he said. “I have to think.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Down to the waterfront.”

  “Better stay here.”

  “I can’t think, here.”

  Hemlock might have known then what he was up against; but having told the boy he would not be his master any longer, he could not in conscience command him. “You have a true gift, Essiri,” he said, using the name he had given the boy in the springs of the Amia, a word that in the Old Speech means Willow. “I don’t entirely understand it. I think you don’t understand it at all. Take care! To misuse a gift, or to refuse to use it, may cause great loss, great harm.”

  Diamond nodded, suffering, contrite, unrebellious, unmovable.

  “Go on,” the wizard said, and Diamond went.

  Later Hemlock knew he should never have let the boy leave the house. He had underestimated Diamond’s willpower, or the strength of the spell the girl had laid on him. Their conversation was in the morning; Hemlock went back to the ancient cantrip he was annotating; it was not till supper time that he thought about his pupil, and not until he had eaten supper alone that he admitted that Diamond had run away.

  Hemlock was loath to practice any of the lesser arts of magic. He did not put out a finding-spell, as any sorcerer might have done. Nor did he call to Diamond in any way. He was angry; perhaps he was hurt. He had thought well of the boy, and offered to write the Summoner about him, and then at the first test of character Diamond had broken. “Glass,” the wizard muttered. At least this weakness proved he was not dangerous. Some talents were best not left to run wild, but there was no harm in this fellow, no malice. No ambition. “No spine,” said Hemlock to the silence of the house. “Let him crawl home to his mother.”

  Still it rankled him that Diamond had let him down flat, without a word of thanks or apology. So much for good manners, he thought.

  As she blew out the lamp and got into bed, the witch’s daughter heard an owl calling, the little, liquid hu-hu-hu-hu that made people call them laughing owls. She heard it with a mournful heart. That had been their signal, summer nights, when they sneaked out to meet in the willow grove down on the banks of the Amia, when everybody else was sleeping. She would not think of him at night. Back in the winter she had sent to him night after night. She had learned her mother’s spell of sending, and knew that it was a true spell. She had sent him her touch, her voice saying his name, again and again. She had met a wall of air and silence. She touched nothing. He had walled her out. He would not hear.

  Several times, all of a sudden, in the daytime, there had been a moment when she had known him close in mind and could touch him if she reached out. But at night she knew only his blank absence, his refusal of her. She had stopped trying to reach him months ago, but her heart was still very sore.

  “Hu-hu-hu,” said the owl, under her window, and
then it said, “Darkrose!” Startled from her misery, she leapt out of bed and opened the shutters.

  “Come on out,” whispered Diamond, a shadow in the starlight.

  “Mother’s not home. Come in!” She met him at the door.

  They held each other tight, hard, silent for a long time. To Diamond it was as if he held his future, his own life, his whole life, in his arms.

  At last she moved, and kissed his cheek, and whispered, “I missed you, I missed you, I missed you. How long can you stay?”

  “As long as I like.”

  She kept his hand and led him in. He was always a little reluctant to enter the witch’s house, a pungent, disorderly place thick with the mysteries of women and witchcraft, very different from his own clean comfortable home, even more different from the cold austerity of the wizard’s house. He shivered like a horse as he stood there, too tall for the herb-festooned rafters. He was very highly strung, and worn out, having walked forty miles in sixteen hours without food.

  “Where’s your mother?” he asked in a whisper.

  “Sitting with old Ferny. She died this afternoon, Mother will be there all night. But how did you get here?”

  “Walked.”

  “The wizard let you visit home?”

  “I ran away.”

  “Ran away! Why?”

  “To keep you.”

  He looked at her, that vivid, fierce, dark face in its rough cloud of hair. She wore only her shift, and he saw the infinitely delicate, tender rise of her breasts. He drew her to him again, but though she hugged him she drew away again, frowning.

  “Keep me?” she repeated. “You didn’t seem to worry about losing me all winter. What made you come back now?”

  “He wanted me to go to Roke.”

  “To Roke?” She stared. “To Roke, Di? Then you really do have the gift—you could be a sorcerer?”

  To find her on Hemlock’s side was a blow.

  “Sorcerers are nothing to him. He means I could be a wizard. Do magery. Not just witchcraft.”

  “Oh I see,” Rose said after a moment. “But I don’t see why you ran away.”

  They had let go of each other’s hands.

  “Don’t you understand?” he said, exasperated with her for not understanding, because he had not understood. “A wizard can’t have anything to do with women. With witches. With all that.”

  “Oh, I know. It’s beneath them.”

  “It’s not just beneath them—”

  “Oh, but it is. I’ll bet you had to unlearn every spell I taught you. Didn’t you?”

  “It isn’t the same kind of thing.”

  “No. It isn’t the High Art. It isn’t the True Speech. A wizard mustn’t soil his lips with common words. ‘Weak as women’s magic, wicked as women’s magic,’ you think I don’t know what they say? So, why did you come back here?”

  “To see you!”

  “What for?”

  “What do you think?”

  “You never sent to me, you never let me send to you, all the time you were gone. I was just supposed to wait until you got tired of playing wizard. Well, I got tired of waiting.” Her voice was nearly inaudible, a rough whisper.

  “Somebody’s been coming around,” he said, incredulous that she could turn against him. “Who’s been after you?”

  “None of your business if there is! You go off, you turn your back on me. Wizards can’t have anything to do with what I do, what my mother does. Well, I don’t want anything to do with what you do, either, ever. So go!”

  Starving, frustrated, misunderstood, Diamond reached out to hold her again, to make her body understand his body, repeating that first, deep embrace that had held all the years of their lives in it. He found himself standing two feet back, his hands stinging and his ears ringing and his eyes dazzled. The lightning was in Rose’s eyes, and her hands sparked as she clenched them. “Never do that again,” she whispered.

  “Never fear,” Diamond said, turned on his heel, and strode out. A string of dried sage caught on his head and trailed after him.

  He spent the night in their old place in the sallows. Maybe he hoped she would come, but she did not come, and he soon slept in sheer weariness. He woke in the first, cold light. He sat up and thought. He looked at life in that cold light. It was a different matter from what he had believed it. He went down to the stream in which he had been named. He drank, washed his hands and face, made himself look as decent as he could, and went up through the town to the fine house at the high end, his father’s house.

  After the first outcries and embraces, the servants and his mother sat him right down to breakfast. So it was with warm food in his belly and a certain chill courage in his heart that he faced his father, who had been out before breakfast seeing off a string of timber carts to the Great Port.

  “Well, son!” They touched cheeks. “So Master Hemlock gave you a vacation?”

  “No, sir. I left.”

  Golden stared, then filled his plate and sat down. “Left,” he said.

  “Yes, sir. I decided that I don’t want to be a wizard.”

  “Hmf,” said Golden, chewing. “Left of your own accord? Entirely? With the Master’s permission?”

  “Of my own accord entirely, without his permission.”

  Golden chewed very slowly, his eyes on the table. Diamond had seen his father look like this when a forester reported an infestation in the chestnut groves, and when he found a mule dealer had cheated him.

  “He wanted me to go to the College on Roke to study with the Master Summoner. He was going to send me there. I decided not to go.”

  After a while Golden asked, still looking at the table, “Why?”

  “It isn’t the life I want.”

  Another pause. Golden glanced over at his wife, who stood by the window listening in silence. Then he looked at his son. Slowly the mixture of anger, disappointment, confusion, and respect on his face gave way to something simpler, a look of complicity, very nearly a wink. “I see,” he said. “And what did you decide you want?”

  A pause. “This,” Diamond said. His voice was level. He looked neither at his father nor his mother.

  “Hah!” said Golden. “Well! I will say I’m glad of it, son.” He ate a small pork pie in one mouthful. “Being a wizard, going to Roke, all that, it never seemed real, not exactly. And with you off there, I didn’t know what all this was for, to tell you the truth. All my business. If you’re here, it adds up, you see. It adds up. Well! But listen here, did you just run off from the wizard? Did he know you were going?”

  “No. I’ll write him,” Diamond said, in his new, level voice.

  “He won’t be angry? They say wizards have short tempers. Full of pride.”

  “He’s angry,” Diamond said, “but he won’t do anything.”

  So it proved. Indeed, to Golden’s amazement, Master Hemlock sent back a scrupulous two-fifths of the prenticing fee. With the packet, which was delivered by one of Golden’s carters who had taken a load of spars down to South Port, was a note for Diamond. It said, “True art requires a single heart.” The direction on the outside was the Hardic rune for willow. The note was signed with Hemlock’s rune, which had two meanings: the hemlock tree, and suffering.

  Diamond sat in his own sunny room upstairs, on his comfortable bed, hearing his mother singing as she went about the house. He held the wizard’s letter and reread the message and the two runes many times. The cold and sluggish mind that had been born in him that morning down in the sallows accepted the lesson. No magic. Never again. He had never given his heart to it. It had been a game to him, a game to play with Darkrose. Even the names of the True Speech that he had learned in the wizard’s house, though he knew the beauty and the power that lay in them, he could let go, let slip, forget. That was not his language.

  He could speak his language only with her. And he had lost her, let her go. The double heart has no true speech. From now on he could talk only the language of duty: getting and spending, outl
ay and income, the profit and the loss.

  And beyond that, nothing. There had been illusions, little spells, pebbles that turned to butterflies, wooden birds that flew on living wings for a minute or two. There had never been a choice, really. There was only one way for him to go.

  Golden was immensely happy and quite unconscious of it. “Old man’s got his jewel back,” said the carter to the forester. “Sweet as new butter, he is.” Golden, unaware of being sweet, thought only how sweet life was. He had bought the Reche grove, at a very stiff price to be sure, but at least old Lowbough of Easthill hadn’t got it, and now he and Diamond could develop it as it ought to be developed. In among the chestnuts there were a lot of pines, which could be felled and sold for masts and spars and small lumber, and replanted with chestnut seedlings. It would in time be a pure stand like the Big Grove, the heart of his chestnut kingdom. In time, of course. Oak and chestnut don’t shoot up overnight like alder and willow. But there was time. There was time, now. The boy was barely seventeen, and he himself just forty-five. In his prime. He had been feeling old, but that was nonsense. He was in his prime. The oldest trees, past bearing, ought to come out with the pines. Some good wood for furniture could be salvaged from them.

  “Well, well, well,” he said to his wife, frequently, “all rosy again, eh? Got the apple of your eye back home, eh? No more moping, eh?”

  And Tuly smiled and stroked his hand.

  Once instead of smiling and agreeing, she said, “It’s lovely to have him back, but,” and Golden stopped hearing. Mothers were born to worry about their children, and women were born never to be content. There was no reason why he should listen to the litany of anxieties by which Tuly hauled herself through life. Of course she thought a merchant’s life wasn’t good enough for the boy. She’d have thought being King in Havnor wasn’t good enough for him.

  “When he gets himself a girl,” Golden said, in answer to whatever it was she had been saying, “he’ll be all squared away. Living with the wizards, you know, the way they are, it set him back a bit. Don’t worry about Diamond. He’ll know what he wants when he sees it!”