The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “No,” Azver said, but could say nothing else. He held his staff of willow, but it was only wood in his hand.

  Of the four of them, only the Doorkeeper moved and spoke. He took a step forward, looking from one young man to the next and the next. He said, “You trusted me, giving me your names. Will you trust me now?”

  “My lord,” said one of them with a fine, dark face and a wizard’s oaken staff, “we do trust you, and therefore ask you to let the witch go, and peace return.”

  Irian stepped forward before the Doorkeeper could answer.

  “I am not a witch,” she said. Her voice sounded high, metallic, after the men’s deep voices. “I have no art. No knowledge. I came to learn.”

  “We do not teach women here,” said the Windkey. “You know that.”

  “I know nothing,” Irian said. She took another step forward, facing the mage directly. “Tell me who I am.”

  “Learn your place, woman,” the mage said with cold passion.

  “My place,” she said, slowly, the words dragging—“my place is on the hill. Where things are what they are. Tell the dead man I will meet him there.”

  The Windkey stood silent. The group of men muttered, angry, and some of them moved forward. Azver came between her and them, her words releasing him from the paralysis of mind and body that had held him. “Tell Thorion we will meet him on Roke Knoll,” he said. “When he comes, we will be there. Now come with me,” he said to Irian.

  The Namer, the Doorkeeper, and the Herbal followed him with her into the Grove. There was a path for them. But when some of the young men started after them, there was no path.

  “Come back,” the Windkey said to the young men.

  They turned back, uncertain. The low sun was still bright on the fields and the roofs of the Great House, but inside the wood it was all shadows.

  “Witchery,” they said, “sacrilege, defilement.”

  “Best come away,” said the Master Windkey, his face set and somber, his keen eyes troubled. He set off back to the school, and they straggled after him, arguing and debating in frustration and anger.

  They were not far inside the Grove, and still beside the stream, when Irian stopped, turned aside, and crouched down by the enormous, hunching roots of a willow that leaned out over the water. The four mages stood on the path.

  “She spoke with the other breath,” Azver said.

  The Namer nodded.

  “So we must follow her?” the Herbal asked.

  This time the Doorkeeper nodded. He smiled faintly and said, “So it would seem.”

  “Very well,” said the Herbal, with his patient, troubled look; and he went aside a little, and knelt to look at some small plant or fungus on the forest floor.

  Time passed as always in the Grove, not passing at all it seemed, yet gone, the day gone quietly by in a few long breaths, a quivering of leaves, a bird singing far off and another answering it from even farther. Irian stood up slowly. She did not speak, but looked down the path, and then walked down it. The four men followed her.

  They came out into the calm, open evening air. The west still held some brightness as they crossed the Thwilburn and walked across the fields to Roke Knoll, which stood up before them in a high dark curve against the sky.

  “They’re coming,” the Doorkeeper said. Men were coming through the gardens and up the path from the Great House, the five mages, many students. Leading them was Thorion the Summoner, tall in his grey cloak, carrying his tall staff of bone-white wood, about which a faint gleam of werelight hovered.

  Where the two paths met and joined to wind up to the heights of the Knoll, Thorion stopped and stood waiting for them. Irian strode forward to face him.

  “Irian of Way,” the Summoner said in his deep, clear voice, “that there may be peace and order, and for the sake of the balance of all things, I bid you now leave this island. We cannot give you what you ask, and for that we ask your forgiveness. But if you seek to stay here you forfeit forgiveness, and must learn what follows on transgression.”

  She stood up, almost as tall as he, and as straight. She said nothing for a minute and then spoke out in a high, harsh voice. “Come up onto the hill, Thorion,” she said.

  She left him standing at the waymeet, on level ground, and walked up the hill path for a little way, a few strides. She turned and looked back down at him. “What keeps you from the hill?” she said.

  The air was darkening around them. The west was only a dull red line, the eastern sky was shadowy above the sea.

  The Summoner looked up at Irian. Slowly he raised his arms and the white staff in the invocation of a spell, speaking in the tongue that all the wizards and mages of Roke had learned, the language of their art, the Language of the Making: “Irian, by your name I summon you and bind you to obey me!”

  She hesitated, seeming for a moment to yield, to come to him, and then cried out, “I am not only Irian!”

  At that the Summoner ran up towards her, reaching out, lunging at her as if to seize and hold her. They were both on the hill now. She towered above him impossibly, fire breaking forth between them, a flare of red flame in the dusk air, a gleam of red-gold scales, of vast wings—then that was gone, and there was nothing there but the woman standing on the hill path and the tall man bowing down before her, bowing slowly down to earth, and lying on it.

  Of them all it was the Herbal, the healer, who was the first to move. He went up the path and knelt down by Thorion. “My lord,” he said, “my friend.”

  Under the huddle of the grey cloak his hands found only a huddle of clothes and dry bones and a broken staff.

  “This is better, Thorion,” he said, but he was weeping.

  The old Namer came forward and said to the woman on the hill, “Who are you?”

  “I do not know my other name,” she said. She spoke as he had spoken, as she had spoken to the Summoner, in the Language of the Making, the tongue the dragons speak.

  She turned away and began to walk on up the hill.

  “Irian,” said Azver the Patterner, “will you come back to us?”

  She halted and let him come up to her. “I will, if you call me,” she said.

  She reached out and touched his hand. He drew his breath sharply.

  “Where will you go?” he said.

  “To those who will give me my name. In fire, not water. My people.”

  “In the west,” he said.

  She said, “Beyond the west.”

  She turned away from him and them and went on up the hill in the gathering darkness. As she went farther from them they saw her, all of them, the great gold-mailed flanks, the spiked, coiling tail, the talons, the breath that was bright fire. On the crest of the knoll she paused a while, her long head turning to look slowly round the Isle of Roke, gazing longest at the Grove, only a blur of darkness in darkness now. Then with a rattle like the shaking of sheets of brass the wide, vaned wings opened and the dragon sprang up into the air, circled Roke Knoll once, and flew.

  A curl of fire, a wisp of smoke drifted down through the dark air.

  Azver the Patterner stood with his left hand holding his right hand, which her touch had burnt. He looked down at the men, who stood silent at the foot of the hill, staring after the dragon. “Well, my friends,” he said, “what now?”

  Only the Doorkeeper answered. He said, “I think we should go to our house, and open its doors.”

  AFTERWORD

  It would have simplified things for my publishers and me if the fifth book of Earthsea had been a novel, but it wasn’t. Sometimes the elements of a book won’t come together into a single story, being by nature disparate. They have to go different places, different ways—one back through the centuries, another to Havnor, maybe, another to Semel . . . I couldn’t write the last Earthsea novel until I’d been to islands and times that I hadn’t yet explored. Storytellers’ stories, like scientific theories, are explorations, excursions into the tremendous gap between almost knowing and knowing. Bridges thr
own out, as a spider throws herself on her first long anchoring thread, not certain where it will land her yet trusting it to do so.

  I love no music better than the uncertain beginning of the last movement of Beethoven’s last symphony, when he starts a theme and drops it, repeats a phrase and breaks off, leaves gaps, gropes, explores, till he bursts out with his frustration in words—“Oh, friends, this isn’t right yet!”† And then it all begins to come together, and the bridge has crossed the void.

  I wrote an introduction for Tales from Earthsea when it was published in 2001, which began this way:

  At the end of the fourth book of Earthsea, Tehanu, the story had arrived at what I felt to be now. And, just as in the now of the so-called real world, I didn’t know what would happen next. I could guess, foretell, fear, hope, but I didn’t know.

  Unable to continue Tehanu’s story (because it hadn’t happened yet) and foolishly assuming that the story of Ged and Tenar had reached its happily-ever-after, I gave the book a subtitle: “The Last Book of Earthsea.”

  O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a time, now isn’t then.

  Seven or eight years after Tehanu was published, I was asked to write a story set in Earthsea. A mere glimpse at the place told me that things had been happening there while I wasn’t looking. It was high time to go back and find out what was going on now.

  For the whole story of Earthsea to have weight and make sense in my own mind so that I could take it to its end, so that I could build the bridge to true closure, not only did I have to find out what was going on now, but I had to go back in time to find out what had gone wrong, and when, and how. Why had the wise teaching of the Balance been getting increasingly out of balance?

  People who live immersed in the ceaseless present tense of electronic media may have no interest in the past, letting mythology replace history, as pre-literate peoples did. But as I grew up with the un-rearrangeable, implacable durability of print, my education gave me the sense of the past that perceives the present as only the bright restless surface of an ocean. So, paradoxical as it may seem, I didn’t want a mythology of my mythical world, but the history of it—the facts of the fiction, its time depths. Which of course meant, yet more paradoxically, that I had to make it up. To grope, blunder, see if it worked. Oh, friends, this isn’t right yet!

  The “Description of Earthsea” at the end of the Tales is a summary sketch of that history as I worked it out while writing the stories.

  The first novella, “The Finder,” is the “prequel,” the story behind the story of the first four books of Earthsea. Writing it really was like swinging out on a spider thread into the unknown. I had no clear idea where young Otter was going when he set out into his dark, misgoverned world. I knew only that he would come to Roke, and find, or found, the School there. By following him, I hoped to learn, for one thing, how it came to be that the wizards of Roke, as I first knew them, had renounced their sexuality and how much of their humanity they had renounced with it.

  All the stories are explorations of such matters—unclarities, balances and imbalances, moral choices. “Darkrose and Diamond” again has to do with the question of wizardly celibacy, and also asks the question: If you could either do magic or make songs but not both, which might you choose, and why? In “The Bones of the Earth” I found out who Ogion was, who his teacher was, and how far magic could and could not go. “On the High Marsh” let me deal with what gets left out when magic is understood purely as power. Power over whom, and to do what? Save the world from your enemies? Is that all? Is it enough? If power is responsibility, for whom are you responsible? In this story (as in T. H. White’s Sword in the Stone and many other fantasies) the presence of animals disallows wholly human-centered conventions, hinting at a different, larger order of things.

  The last novella, “Dragonfly,” is the direct bridge between Tehanu and the final novel. Its final events follow after the end of Tehanu and come before The Other Wind. Everything I’d been learning about the relationship of people and dragons begins to come clear in this story, along with the understanding of what had gone wrong on Roke. I was beginning to hear the great final themes of the whole story of Earthsea. It was beginning to come right.

  In the original foreword, I said,

  In the years since I began to write about Earthsea I’ve changed, of course, and so have the people who read the books. All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.

  It’s unsettling. For all our delight in the impermanent, the entrancing flicker of electronics, we also long for the unalterable. We cherish the old stories for their changelessness. Arthur dreams eternally in Avalon. Bilbo can go “there and back again,” and “there” is always the beloved familiar Shire. Don Quixote sets out forever to kill a windmill . . .

  We may, I said, turn to fantasy seeking stability, ancient truths, immutable simplicities; but the realms of Once-upon-a-time are unstable, mutable, complex, and as much a part of human history and thought as the nations in our ever-changing atlases. And in daily life or in imagination, we don’t live as our parents or ancestors did. “Enchantment alters with age, and with the age. We know a dozen different Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbo’s lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there.”

  To this I add: As the virtual world of electronic communication becomes the world many of us inhabit all the time, in turning to imaginative literature we may not be seeking mere reassurance nor be impelled by mere nostalgia. To enter with heart and mind into the world of the imagination may be to head deliberately and directly toward, or back toward, engagement with the real world. In one of T. S. Eliot’s poems a bird sings, “Mankind cannot bear very much reality.” I’ve always thought that bird was mistaken, or was talking only about some people. I find it amazing how much of the real world most of us can endure. Not only endure, but need, desire, crave. Reality is life. Where we suffocate is in the half-life of unreality, untruth, imitation, fakery, the almost-true that is not true. To be human is to live both within and beyond the narrow band of what-happens-now, in the vast regions of the past and the possible, the known and the imagined: our real world, our true Now.

  † “O Freunde! nicht diese Töne!” means “Oh, friends, not these notes” or “not this music.” “This isn’t right yet” is free translation, from the heart.

  1. MENDING THE GREEN PITCHER

  2. PALACES

  3. THE DRAGON COUNCIL

  4. DOLPHIN

  5. REJOINING

  AFTERWORD

  Farther west than west

  beyond the land

  my people are dancing

  on the other wind

  —The Song of the Woman of Kemay

  CHAPTER 1

  MENDING THE GREEN PITCHER

  Sails long and white as swan’s wings carried the ship Farflyer through summer air down the bay from the Armed Cliffs toward Gont Port. She glided into the still water landward of the jetty, so sure and graceful a creature of the wind that a couple of townsmen fishing off the old quay cheered her in, waving to the crewmen and the one passenger standing in the prow.

  He was a thin man with a thin pack and an old black cloak, probably a sorcerer or small tradesman, nobody important. The two fishermen watched the bustle on the dock and the ship’s deck as she made ready to unload her cargo, and only glanced at the passenger with a bit of curiosity when as he left the ship one of the sailors made a gesture behind his back, thumb and first and last finger of the left hand all pointed at him: May you never come back!

  He hesitated on the pier, shouldered his pack, and set off into the streets of Gont Port. They were busy streets, and he got at once into the Fish Market, abrawl with hawkers and hagglers, paving sto
nes glittering with fish scales and brine. If he had a way, he soon lost it among the carts and stalls and crowds and the cold stares of dead fish.

  A tall old woman turned from the stall where she had been insulting the freshness of the herring and the veracity of the fishwife. Seeing her glaring at him, the stranger said unwisely, “Would you have the kindness to tell me the way I should go for Re Albi?”

  “Why, go drown yourself in pig slop for a start,” said the tall woman and strode off, leaving the stranger wilted and dismayed. But the fishwife, seeing a chance to seize the high moral ground, blared out, “Re Albi is it? Re Albi you want, man? Speak up then! The Old Mage’s house, that would be what you’d want at Re Albi. Yes it would. So you go out by the corner there, and up Elvers Lane there, see, till you reach the tower . . .”

  Once he was out of the market, broad streets led him uphill and past the massive watchtower to a town gate. Two stone dragons large as life guarded it, teeth the length of his forearm, stone eyes glaring blindly out over the town and the bay. A lounging guard told him just turn left at the top of the road and he’d be in Re Albi. “And keep on through the village for the Old Mage’s house,” the guard said.

  So he went trudging up the road, which was pretty steep, looking up as he went to the steeper slopes and far peak of Gont Mountain that overhung its island like a cloud.

  It was a long road and a hot day. He soon had his black cloak off and went on bareheaded in his shirtsleeves, but he had not thought to find water or buy food in the town, or had been too shy to, maybe, for he was not a man familiar with cities or at ease with strangers.

  After several long miles he caught up to a cart which he had seen far up the dusty way for a long time as a dark blot in a white blot of dust. It creaked and screaked along at the pace of a pair of small oxen that looked as old, wrinkled, and unhopeful as tortoises. He greeted the carter, who resembled the oxen. The carter said nothing, but blinked.