The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The cowboys were discussing whether or not it was safe to eat the meat of a steer dead of the murrain. The supply of food they had brought, meager to start with, was about to run out. Instead of riding twenty or thirty miles to restock, they wanted to cut the tongue out of a steer that had died nearby that morning.

  He had forced them to boil any water they used. Now he said, “If you eat that meat, in a year you’ll begin to get dizzy. You’ll end with the blind staggers and die as they do.”

  They cursed and sneered, but believed him. He had no idea if what he said was true. It had seemed true as he said it. Perhaps he wanted to spite them. Perhaps he wanted to get rid of them.

  “Ride back,” he said. “Leave me here. There’s enough food for one man for three or four days more. The hinny will bring me back.”

  They needed no persuasion. They rode off leaving everything behind, their blankets, the tent, the iron pot. “How do we get all that back to the village?” he asked the hinny. She looked after the two ponies and said what hinnies say. “Aaawww!” she said. She would miss the ponies.

  “We have to finish the work here,” he told her, and she looked at him mildly. All animals were patient, but the patience of the horse kind was wonderful, being freely given. Dogs were loyal, but there was more of obedience in it. Dogs were hierarchs, dividing the world into lords and commoners. Horses were all lords. They agreed to collude. He remembered walking among the great, plumed feet of cart horses, fearless. The comfort of their breath on his head. A long time ago. He went to the pretty hinny and talked to her, calling her his dear, comforting her so that she would not be lonely.

  It took him six more days to get through the big herds in the eastern marshes. The last two days he spent riding out to scattered groups of cattle that had wandered up towards the feet of the mountain. Many of them were not infected yet, and he could protect them. The hinny carried him bareback and made the going easy. But there was nothing left for him to eat. When he rode back to the village he was light-headed and weak-kneed. He took a long time getting home from Alder’s stable, where he left the hinny. Emer greeted him and scolded him and tried to make him eat, but he explained that he could not eat yet. “As I stayed there in the sickness, in the sick fields, I felt sick. After a while I’ll be able to eat again,” he explained.

  “You’re crazy,” she said, very angry. It was a sweet anger. Why could not more anger be sweet?

  “At least have a bath!” she said.

  He knew what he smelled like, and thanked her.

  “What’s Alder paying you for all this?” she demanded while the water was heating. She was still indignant, speaking more bluntly even than usual.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  She stopped and stared at him.

  “You didn’t set a price?”

  “Set a price?” he flashed out. Then he remembered who he was not, and spoke humbly. “No. I didn’t.”

  “Of all the innocence,” Gift said, hissing the word. “He’ll skin you.” She dumped a kettleful of steaming water into the bath. “He has ivory,” she said. “Tell him ivory it has to be. Out there ten days starving in the cold to cure his beasts! San’s got nothing but copper, but Alder can pay you in ivory. I’m sorry if I’m meddling in your business. Sir.” She flung out the door with two buckets, going to the pump. She would not use the stream water for anything at all, these days. She was wise, and kind. Why had he lived so long among those who were not kind?

  “We’ll have to see,” said Alder, the next day, “if my beasts are cured. If they make it through the winter, see, we’ll know your cures all took, that they’re sound, like. Not that I doubt it, but fair’s fair, right? You wouldn’t ask me to pay you what I have in mind to pay you, would you now, if the cure didn’t take and the beasts died after all. Avert the chance! But I wouldn’t ask you to wait all that time unpaid, neither. So here’s an advance, like, on what’s to come, and all’s square between us for now, right?”

  The coppers weren’t decently in a bag, even. Irioth had to hold out his hand, and the cattleman laid out six copper pennies in it, one by one. “Now then! That’s fair and square!” he said, expansive. “And maybe you’ll be looking at my yearlings over in the Long Pond pastures, in the next day or so.”

  “No,” Irioth said. “San’s herd was going down fast when I left. I’m needed there.”

  “Oh, no, you’re not, Master Otak. While you were out in the east range a sorcerer curer came by, a fellow that’s been here before, from the south coast, and so San hired him. You work for me and you’ll be paid well. Better than copper, maybe, if the beasts fare well!”

  Irioth did not say yes, or no, or thanks, but went off unspeaking. The cattleman looked after him and spat. “Avert,” he said.

  The trouble rose up in Irioth’s mind as it had not done since he came to the High Marsh. He struggled against it. A man of power had come to heal the cattle, another man of power. But a sorcerer, Alder had said. Not a wizard, not a mage. Only a curer, a cattle healer. I do not need to fear him. I do not need to fear his power. I do not need his power. I must see him, to be sure, to be certain. If he does what I do here there is no harm. We can work together. If I do what he does here. If he uses only sorcery and means no harm. As I do.

  He walked down the straggling street of Purewells to San’s house, which was about midway, opposite the tavern. San, a hardbitten man in his thirties, was talking to a man on his doorstep, a stranger. When they saw Irioth they looked uneasy. San went into his house and the stranger followed.

  Irioth came up onto the doorstep. He did not go in, but spoke in the open door. “Master San, it’s about the cattle you have there between the rivers. I can go to them today.” He did not know why he said this. It was not what he had meant to say.

  “Ah,” San said, coming to the door, and hemmed a bit. “No need, Master Otak. This here is Master Sunbright, come up to deal with the murrain. He’s cured beasts for me before, the hoof rot and all. Being as how you have all one man can do with Alder’s beeves, you see . . .”

  The sorcerer came out from behind San. His name was Ayeth. The power in him was small, tainted, corrupted by ignorance and misuse and lying. But the jealousy in him was like a stinging fire. “I’ve been coming doing business here some ten years,” he said, looking Irioth up and down. “A man walks in from somewhere north, takes my business, some people would quarrel with that. A quarrel of sorcerers is a bad thing. If you’re a sorcerer, a man of power, that is. I am. As the good people here well know.”

  Irioth tried to say he did not want a quarrel. He tried to say that there was work for two. He tried to say he would not take the man’s work from him. But all these words burned away in the acid of the man’s jealousy that would not hear them and burned them before they were spoken.

  Ayeth’s stare grew more insolent as he watched Irioth stammer. He began to say something to San, but Irioth spoke.

  “You have—” he said—“you have to go. Back.” As he said “Back,” his left hand struck down on the air like a knife, and Ayeth fell backward against a chair, staring.

  He was only a little sorcerer, a cheating healer with a few sorry spells. Or so he seemed. What if he was cheating, hiding his power, a rival hiding his power? A jealous rival. He must be stopped, he must be bound, named, called. Irioth began to say the words that would bind him, and the shaken man cowered away, shrinking down, shriveling, crying out in a thin, high wail. It is wrong, wrong, I am doing the wrong, I am the ill, Irioth thought. He stopped the spell-words in his mouth, fighting against them, and at last crying out one other word. Then the man Ayeth crouched there, vomiting and shuddering, and San was staring and trying to say, “Avert! Avert!” And no harm was done. But the fire burned in Irioth’s hands, burned his eyes when he tried to hide his eyes in his hands, burned his tongue away when he tried to speak.

  For a long time nobody would touch him. He had fallen down in a fit in San’s doorway. He lay there now like a dead man. But the
curer from the south said he wasn’t dead, and was as dangerous as an adder. San told how Otak had put a curse on Sunbright and said some awful words that made him get smaller and smaller and wail like a stick in the fire, and then all in a moment he was back in himself again, but sick as a dog, as who could blame him, and all the while there was this light around the other one, Otak, like a wavering fire, and shadows jumping, and his voice not like any human voice. A terrible thing.

  Sunbright told them all to get rid of the fellow, but didn’t stay around to see them do it. He went back down the south road as soon as he’d gulped a pint of beer at the tavern, telling them there was no room for two sorcerers in one village and he’d be back, maybe, when that man, or whatever he was, had gone.

  Nobody would touch him. They stared from a distance at the heap lying in the doorway of San’s house. San’s wife wept aloud up and down the street. “Bad cess! Bad cess!” she cried. “Oh, my babe will be born dead, I know it!”

  Berry went and fetched his sister, after he had heard Sunbright’s tale at the tavern, and San’s version of it, and several other versions already current. In the best of them, Otak had towered up ten feet tall and struck Sunbright into a lump of coal with lightning, before foaming at the mouth, turning blue, and collapsing in a heap.

  Gift hurried to the village. She went straight up to the doorstep, bent over the heap, and laid her hand on it. Everybody gasped and muttered, “Avert! Avert!” except Tawny’s youngest daughter, who mistook the signs and piped up, “Speed the work!”

  The heap moved, and roused up slowly. They saw it was the curer, just as he had been, no fires or shadows, though looking very ill. “Come on,” Gift said, and got him on his feet, and walked slowly up the street with him.

  The villagers shook their heads. Gift was a brave woman, but there was such a thing as being too brave. Or brave, they said around the tavern table, in the wrong way, or the wrong place, d’you see. Nobody should ought to meddle with sorcery that ain’t born to it. Nor with sorcerers. You forget that. They seem the same as other folk. But they ain’t like other folk. Seems there’s no harm in a curer. Heal the foot rot, clear a caked udder. That’s all fine. But cross one and there you are, fire and shadows and curses and falling down in fits. Uncanny. Always was uncanny, that one. Where’d he come from, anyhow? Answer me that.

  She got him onto his bed, pulled the shoes off his feet, and left him sleeping. Berry came in late and drunker than usual, so that he fell and gashed his forehead on the andiron. Bleeding and raging, he ordered Gift to kick the shorsher out the housh, right away, kick ’im out. Then he vomited into the ashes and fell asleep on the hearth. She hauled him onto his pallet, pulled his shoes off his feet, and left him sleeping. She went to look at the other one. He looked feverish, and she put her hand on his forehead. He opened his eyes, looking straight into hers without expression. “Emer,” he said, and closed his eyes again.

  She backed away from him, terrified.

  In her bed, in the dark, she lay and thought: He knew the wizard who named me. Or I said my name. Maybe I said it out loud in my sleep. Or somebody told him. But nobody knows it. Nobody ever knew my name but the wizard, and my mother. And they’re dead, they’re dead . . . I said it in my sleep . . .

  But she knew better.

  She stood with the little oil lamp in her hand, and the light of it shone red between her fingers and golden on her face. He said her name. She gave him sleep.

  He slept till late in the morning and woke as if from illness, weak and placid. She was unable to be afraid of him. She found that he had no memory at all of what had happened in the village, of the other sorcerer, even of the six coppers she had found scattered on the bedcover, which he must have held clenched in his hand all along.

  “No doubt that’s what Alder gave you,” she said. “The flint!”

  “I said I’d see to his beasts at . . . at the pasture between the rivers, was it?” he said, getting anxious, the hunted look coming back into him, and he got up from the settle.

  “Sit down,” she said. He sat down, but he sat fretting.

  “How can you cure when you’re sick?” she said.

  “How else?” he said.

  But he quieted down again presently, stroking the grey cat.

  Her brother came in. “Come on out,” he said to her as soon as he saw the curer dozing on the settle. She stepped outside with him.

  “Now I won’t have him here no more,” Berry said, coming master of the house over her, with the great black gash in his forehead, and his eyes like oysters, and his hands juddering.

  “Where’ll you go?” she said.

  “It’s him has to go.”

  “It’s my house. Bren’s house. He stays. Go or stay, it’s up to you.”

  “It’s up to me too if he stays or goes, and he goes. You haven’t got all the sayso. All the people say he ought to go. He’s not canny.”

  “Oh, yes, since he’s cured half the herds and got paid six coppers for it, time for him to go, right enough! I’ll have him here as long as I choose, and that’s the end of it.”

  “They won’t buy our milk and cheese,” Berry whined.

  “Who says that?”

  “San’s wife. All the women.”

  “Then I’ll carry the cheeses to Oraby,” she said, “and sell ’em there. In the name of honor, brother, go wash out that cut, and change your shirt. You stink of the pothouse.” And she went back into the house. “Oh, dear,” she said, and burst into tears.

  “What’s the matter, Emer?” said the curer, turning his thin face and strange eyes to her.

  “Oh, it’s no good, I know it’s no good. Nothing’s any good with a drunkard,” she said. She wiped her eyes with her apron. “Was that what broke you,” she said, “the drink?”

  “No,” he said, taking no offense, perhaps not understanding.

  “Of course it wasn’t. I beg your pardon,” she said.

  “Maybe he drinks to try to be another man,” he said. “To alter, to change . . .”

  “He drinks because he drinks,” she said. “With some, that’s all it is. I’ll be in the dairy, now. I’ll lock the house door. There’s . . . there’s been strangers about. You rest yourself. It’s bitter out.” She wanted to be sure that he stayed indoors out of harm’s way, and that nobody came harassing him. Later on she would go into the village, have a word with some of the sensible people, and put a stop to this rubbishy talk, if she could.

  When she did so, Alder’s wife Tawny and several other people agreed with her that a squabble between sorcerers over work was nothing new and nothing to take on about. But San and his wife and the tavern crew wouldn’t let it rest, it being the only thing of interest to talk about for the rest of the winter, except the cattle dying. “Besides,” Tawny said, “my man’s never averse to paying copper where he thought he might have to pay ivory.”

  “Are the cattle he touched keeping afoot, then?”

  “So far as we can see, they are. And no new sickenings.”

  “He’s a true sorcerer, Tawny,” Gift said, very earnest. “I know it.”

  “That’s the trouble, love,” said Tawny. “And you know it! This is no place for a man like that. Whoever he is is none of our business, but why did he come here, is what you have to ask.”

  “To cure the beasts,” Gift said.

  Sunbright had not been gone three days when a new stranger appeared in town: a man riding up the south road on a good horse and asking at the tavern for lodging. They sent him to San’s house, but San’s wife screeched when she heard there was a stranger at the door, crying that if San let another witch-man in the door her baby would be born dead twice over. Her screaming could be heard for several houses up and down the street, and a crowd, that is, ten or eleven people, gathered between San’s house and the tavern.

  “Well, that won’t do,” said the stranger pleasantly. “I can’t be bringing on a birth untimely. Is there maybe a room above the tavern?”

  “Send h
im on out to the dairy,” said one of Alder’s cowboys. “Gift’s taking whatever comes.” There was some sniggering and shushing.

  “Back that way,” said the taverner.

  “Thanks,” said the traveler, and led his horse along the way they pointed.

  “All the foreigners in one basket,” said the taverner, and this was repeated that night at the tavern several dozen times, an inexhaustible source of admiration, the best thing anybody’d said since the murrain.

  Gift was in the dairy, having finished the evening milking. She was straining the milk and setting out the pans. “Mistress,” said a voice at the door, and she thought it was the curer and said, “Just a minute while I finish this,” and then turning saw a stranger and nearly dropped the pan. “Oh, you startled me!” she said. “What can I do for you, then?”

  “I’m looking for a bed for the night.”

  “No, I’m sorry, there’s my lodger, and my brother, and me. Maybe San, in the village—”

  “They sent me here. They said, ‘All the foreigners in one basket.’” The stranger was in his thirties, with a blunt face and a pleasant look, dressed plain, though the cob that stood behind him was a good horse. “Put me up in the cow barn, mistress, it’ll do fine. It’s my horse needs a good bed; he’s tired. I’ll sleep in the barn and be off in the morning. Cows are a pleasure to sleep with on a cold night. I’ll be glad to pay you, mistress, if two coppers would suit, and my name’s Hawk.”

  “I’m Gift,” she said, a bit flustered, but liking the fellow. “All right, then, Master Hawk. Put your horse up and see to him. There’s the pump, there’s plenty of hay. Come on in the house after. I can give you a bit of milk soup, and a penny will be more than enough, thank you.” She didn’t feel like calling him sir, as she always did the curer. This one had nothing of that lordly way about him. She hadn’t seen a king when she first saw him, as with the other one.