The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “But the story is about the accursed-sorcerers discovering the Vedurnan. That was a thing, I don’t know what it was, that told some people that if they’d agree never to die and never be reborn, they could learn how to do sorcery. So they chose that, they chose the Vedurnan. And they went off into the west with it. And it turned them dark. And they live here. All these people here—they’re the ones who chose the Vedurnan. They live, and they can do their accursed sorceries, but they can’t die. Only their bodies die. The rest of them stays in a dark place and never gets reborn. And they look like birds. But they can’t fly.”

  “Yes,” Tenar whispered.

  “You didn’t learn about that on Atuan?”

  “No,” Tenar said.

  Her mind was recalling the story the Woman of Kemay told Ogion: in the beginning of time, mankind and the dragons had been one, but the dragons chose wildness and freedom, and mankind chose wealth and power. A choice, a separation. Was it the same story?

  But the image in Tenar’s heart was of Ged squatting in a stone room, his head small, black, beaked . . .

  “The Vedurnan isn’t that ring, is it, that they kept talking about, that I’m going to have to wear?”

  Tenar tried to force her mind away from the Painted Room and from last night’s dream to Seserakh’s question.

  “Ring?”

  “Urthakby’s ring.”

  “Erreth-Akbe. No. That ring is the Ring of Peace. And you’ll wear it only if and when you’re King Lebannen’s queen. And you’ll be a lucky woman to be that.”

  Seserakh’s expression was curious. It was not sullen or cynical. It was hopeless, half humorous, patient, the expression of a woman decades older. “There is no luck about it, dear friend Tenar,” she said. “I have to marry him. And so I will be lost.”

  “Why are you lost if you marry him?”

  “If I marry him I have to give him my name. If he speaks my name, he steals my soul. That’s what the accursed-sorcerers do. So they always hide their names. But if he steals my soul, I won’t be able to die. I’ll have to live forever without my body, a bird that can’t fly, and never be reborn.”

  “That’s why you hid your name?”

  “I gave it to you, my friend.”

  “I honor the gift, my friend,” Tenar said energetically. “But you can say your name to anybody you want, here. They can’t steal your soul with it. Believe me, Seserakh. And you can trust him. He doesn’t—he won’t do you any harm.”

  The girl had caught her hesitation. “But he wishes he could,” she said. “Tenar my friend, I know what I am, here. In that big city Awabath where my father is, I was a stupid ignorant desert woman. A feyagat. The city women sniggered and poked each other whenever they saw me, the barefaced whores. And here it’s worse. I can’t understand anybody and they can’t understand me, and everything, everything is different! I don’t even know what the food is, it’s sorcerer food, it makes me dizzy. I don’t know what the taboos are, there aren’t any priests to ask, only sorcerer women, all black and barefaced. And I saw the way he looked at me. You can see out of the feyag, you know! I saw his face. He’s very handsome, he looks like a warrior, but he’s a black sorcerer and he hates me. Don’t say he doesn’t, because I know he does. And I think when he learns my name he’ll send my soul to that place forever.”

  After a while, gazing into the moving branches of the willows over the softly moving water, feeling sad and weary, Tenar said, “What you need to do, then, princess, is learn how to make him like you. What else can you do?”

  Seserakh shrugged mournfully.

  “It would help if you understood what he said.”

  “Bagabba-bagabba. They all sound like that.”

  “And we sound like that to them. Come on, princess, how can he like you if all you can say to him is bagabba-bagabba? Look,” and she held up her hand, pointed to it with the other, and said the word first in Kargish, then in Hardic.

  Seserakh repeated both words in a dutiful tone. After a few more body parts she suddenly grasped the potentialities of translation. She sat up straighter. “How do sorcerers say ‘king’?”

  “Agni. It’s a word of the Old Speech. My husband told me that.”

  She realised as she spoke that it was foolish to bring up the existence of yet a third language at this point; but that was not what caught the princess’s attention.

  “You have a husband?” Seserakh stared at her with luminous, leonine eyes, and laughed aloud. “Oh, how wonderful! I thought you were a priestess! Oh please, my friend, tell me about him! Is he a warrior? Is he handsome? Do you love him?”

  After the king went dragon hunting, Alder had no idea what to do; he felt utterly useless, unjustified in staying in the palace eating the king’s food, guilty for the trouble he had brought with him. He could not sit all day in his room, so he went out into the streets, but the splendor and activity of the city were daunting to him, and having no money or purpose all he could do was walk till he was tired. He would come back to the Palace of Maharion wondering if the stern-faced guards would readmit him. The nearest he came to peace was in the palace gardens. He hoped to meet Rody there again, but the child did not appear, and perhaps that was as well. Alder thought that he should not talk with people. The hands that reached to him from death would reach out to them.

  On the third day after the king’s departure he went down to walk among the garden pools. The day had been very hot; the evening was still and sultry. He brought Tug with him and let the little cat loose to stalk insects under the bushes, while he sat on a bench near the big willow and watched the silver-green glimmer of fat carp in the water. He felt lonely and discouraged; he felt his defense against the voices and the reaching hands was breaking down. What was the good of being here, after all? Why not go into the dream once and for all, go down that hill, be done with it? Nobody in the world would grieve for him, and his death would spare them this sickness he had brought with him. Surely they had enough to do fighting dragons. Maybe if he went there he would see Lily.

  If he was dead they could not touch each other. The wizards said they would not even want to. They said the dead forgot what it was to be alive. But Lily had reached to him. At first, for a little while, maybe they would remember life long enough to look at each other, to see each other, even if they did not touch.

  “Alder.”

  He looked up slowly at the woman who stood near him. The small grey woman, Tenar. He saw the concern in her face, but did not know why she was troubled. Then he remembered that her daughter, the burned girl, had gone with the king. Maybe there had been bad news. Maybe they were all dead.

  “Are you ill, Alder?” she asked.

  He shook his head. It was hard to talk. He understood now how easy it would be, in that other land, not to speak. Not to meet people’s eyes. Not to be troubled.

  She sat down on the bench beside him. “You look troubled,” she said.

  He made a vague gesture—it’s all right, it’s no matter.

  “You were on Gont. With my husband Sparrowhawk. How was he? Was he looking after himself?”

  “Yes,” Alder said. He tried to answer more adequately. “He was the kindest of hosts.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” she said. “I worry about him. He keeps house as well as I do, but still, I didn’t like leaving him alone . . . Please, would you tell me what he was doing while you were there?”

  He told her that Sparrowhawk had picked the plums and taken them to sell, that the two of them had mended the fence, that Sparrowhawk had helped him sleep.

  She listened intently, seriously, as if these small matters were as weighty as the strange events they had talked about here three days ago—the dead calling to a living man, a girl becoming a dragon, dragons setting fire to the islands of the west.

  Indeed he did not know what weighed more heavily after all, the great strange things or the small common ones.

  “I wish I could go home,” the woman said.

  “I
could wish the same thing, but it would be in vain. I think I’ll never go home again.” He did not know why he said it, but heard himself say it and thought it was true.

  She looked at him a minute with her quiet grey eyes and asked no question.

  “I could wish my daughter would go home with me,” she said, “but it would be in vain, too. I know she must go on. I don’t know where.”

  “Will you tell me what gift it is that she has, what woman she is, that the king sent for her, and took her with him to meet the dragons?”

  “Oh, if I knew what she is, I’d tell you,” Tenar said, her voice full of grief and love and bitterness. “She’s not my daughter born, as you may have guessed or known. She came to me a little child, saved from the fire, but only barely and not wholly saved . . . When Sparrowhawk came back to me she became his daughter too. And she kept both him and me from a cruel death, by summoning a dragon, Kalessin, called Eldest. And that dragon called her daughter. So she’s the child of many and none, spared no pain yet spared from the fire. Who she is in truth I may never know. But I wish she were here now, safe with me!”

  He wanted to reassure her, but his own heart was too low.

  “Tell me a little more about your wife, Alder,” she said.

  “I cannot,” he said at last into the silence that lay easily between them. “I would if I could, Lady Tenar. There’s such a heaviness in me, and a dread and fear, tonight. I try to think of Lily, but there’s only that dark desert going down and down, and I can’t see her in it. All the memories I had of her, that were like water and breath to me, have gone into that dry place. I have nothing left.”

  “I am sorry,” she whispered, and they sat again in silence. The dusk was deepening. It was windless, very warm. Lights in the palace shone through the carved window screens and the still, hanging foliage of the willows.

  “Something is happening,” Tenar said. “A great change in the world. Maybe nothing we knew will be left to us.”

  Alder looked up into the darkening sky. The towers of the palace stood clear against it, their pale marble and alabaster catching all the light left in the west. His eyes sought the sword blade mounted at the point of the highest tower and he saw it, faint silver. “Look,” he said. At the sword’s point, like a diamond or a drop of water, shone a star. As they watched the star moved free of the sword, rising straight above it.

  There was a commotion, in the palace or outside the walls; voices; a horn sounded, a sharp imperative call.

  “They’ve come back,” Tenar said, and stood up. Excitement had come into the air, and Alder too stood up. Tenar hurried into the palace, from which the harbor could be seen. But before he took Tug back inside, Alder looked up again at the sword, now only a faint glimmer, and the star riding bright above it.

  Dolphin came sailing up the harbor in that windless summer night, leaning forward, urgent, the magewind bellying out her sails. Nobody in the palace had looked for the king to return so soon, but nothing was out of order or unready when he came. The quay was instantly crowded with courtiers, off-duty soldiers, and townspeople ready to greet him, and song makers and harpers were waiting to hear how he had fought and defeated dragons so they could make ballads about it.

  They were disappointed: the king and his party made straight for the palace, and the guards and sailors from the ship said only, “They went up into the country above Onneva Sands, and in two days they came back. The wizard sent out a message bird to us, for we were down at the Gates of the Bay by then, since we were going to meet them in South Port. We came back and there they were awaiting us at the river mouth, all unharmed. But we saw the smoke of forests afire over the South Falierns.”

  Tenar was in the crowd on the quay, and Tehanu went straight to her. They embraced fiercely. But as they walked up the street among the lights and the rejoicing voices, Tenar was still thinking, “It has changed. She has changed. She’ll never come home.”

  Lebannen walked among his guards. Charged with tension and energy, he was regal, warlike, radiant. “Erreth-Akbe,” people called out, seeing him, and “Son of Morred!” On the steps of the palace he turned and faced them all. He had a strong voice to use when he wanted it, and it rang out now silencing the tumult. “Listen, people of Havnor! The Woman of Gont has spoken for us with a chief among the dragons. They have pledged a truce. One of them will come to us. A dragon will come here, to the City of Havnor, to the Palace of Maharion. Not to destroy, but to parley. The time has come when men and dragons must meet and talk. So I tell you: when the dragon comes, do not fear it, do not fight it, do not flee it, but welcome it in the Sign of Peace. Greet it as you would greet a great lord come in peace from afar. And have no fear. For we are well protected by the Sword of Erreth-Akbe, by the Ring of Elfarran, and by the Name of Morred. And by my own name I promise you, so long as I live I will defend this city and this realm!”

  They listened in a breathless hush. A burst of cheers and shouts followed on his words as he turned and strode into the palace. “I thought it best to give them some warning,” he said in his usual quiet voice to Tehanu, and she nodded. He spoke to her as to a comrade, and she behaved as such. Tenar and the courtiers nearby saw this.

  He ordered that his full Council meet in the morning at the fourth hour, and then they all dispersed, but he kept Tenar with him a minute while Tehanu went on. “It’s she who protects us,” he said.

  “Alone?”

  “Don’t fear for her. She is the dragon’s daughter, the dragon’s sister. She goes where we can’t go. Don’t fear for her, Tenar.”

  She bowed her head in acceptance. “I thank you for bringing her safe back to me,” she said. “For a while.”

  They were apart from other people, in the corridor that led to the western apartments of the palace. Tenar looked up at the king and said, “I’ve been talking about dragons with the princess.”

  “The princess,” he said blankly.

  “She has a name. I can’t tell it to you, since she believes you might use it to destroy her soul.”

  He scowled.

  “In Hur-at-Hur there are dragons. Small, she says, and wingless, and they don’t speak. But they’re sacred. The sacred sign and pledge of death and rebirth. She reminded me that my people don’t go where your people do when they die. That dry land Alder tells of, it’s not where we go. The princess, and I, and the dragons.”

  Lebannen’s face changed from wary reserve to intense attention. “Ged’s questions to Tehanu,” he said in a low voice. “Are these the answers?”

  “I know only what the princess told me, or reminded me. I’ll speak with Tehanu about these things tonight.”

  He frowned, pondering; then his face cleared. He stooped and kissed Tenar’s cheek, bidding her good night. He strode off and she watched him go. He melted her heart, he dazzled her, but she was not blinded. “He’s still afraid of the princess,” she thought.

  The throne room was the oldest room in the Palace of Maharion. It had been the hall of Gemal Sea-Born, Prince of Ilien, who became king in Havnor and of whose lineage came Queen Heru and her son Maharion. The Havnorian Lay says:

  A hundred warriors, a hundred women

  sat in the great hall of Gemal Sea-Born

  at the king’s table, courtly in talk,

  handsome and generous gentry of Havnor,

  no warriors braver, no women more beautiful.

  Around this hall for over a century Gemal’s heirs had built an ever larger palace, and lastly Heru and Maharion had raised above it the Tower of Alabaster, the Tower of the Queen, the Tower of the Sword.

  These still stood; but though the people of Havnor had stoutly called it the New Palace all through the long centuries since Maharion’s death, it was old and half in ruins when Lebannen came to the throne. He had rebuilt it almost entirely, and richly. The merchants of the Inner Isles, in their first joy at having a king and laws again to protect their trading, had set his revenue high and offered him yet more money for all such undertaking
s; for the first few years of his reign they had not even complained that taxation was destroying their business and would leave their children destitute. So he had been able to make the New Palace new again, and splendid. But the throne room, once the beamed ceiling was rebuilt, the stone walls replastered, the narrow, high-set windows reglazed, he left in its old starkness.

  Through the brief false dynasties and the Dark Years of tyrants and usurpers and pirate lords, through all the insults of time and ambition, the throne of the kingdom had stood at the end of the long room: a wooden chair, high-backed, on a plain dais. It had once been sheathed in gold. That was long gone; the small golden nails had left rents in the wood where they had been torn out. Its silken cushions and hangings had been stolen or destroyed by moth and mouse and mold. Nothing showed it to be what it was but the place where it stood and a shallow carving on the back, a heron flying with a twig of rowan in its beak. That was the crest of the House of Enlad.

  The kings of that house had come from Enlad to Havnor eight hundred years ago. Where Morred’s High Seat is, they said, the kingdom is.

  Lebannen had it cleaned, the decayed wood repaired and replaced, oiled and burnished back to dark satin, but left it unpainted, ungilt, bare. Some of the rich people who came to admire their expensive palace complained about the throne room and the throne. “It looks like a barn,” they said, and, “Is it Morred’s High Seat or an old farmer’s chair?”

  To which some said the king had replied, “What is a kingdom without the barns that feed it and the farmers to grow the grain?” Others said he had replied, “Is my kingdom gauds of gilt and velvet or does it stand by the strength of wood and stone?” Still others said he had said nothing except that he liked it the way it was. And it being his royal buttocks that sat on the uncushioned throne, his critics did not get the last word on the matter.

  Into that stern and high-beamed hall, on a cool morning of late summer sea fog, filed the King’s Council: ninety-one men and women, a hundred if all had been there. All had been chosen by the king, some to represent the great noble and princely houses of the Inner Isles, pledged vassals of the Crown; some to speak for the interests of other islands and parts of the Archipelago; some because the king had found them or hoped to find them useful and trustworthy counselors of state. There were merchants, shippers, and factors of Havnor and the other great port cities of the Sea of Éa and the Inmost Sea, splendid in their conscious gravity and their dark robes of heavy silk. There were masters from the workers’ guilds, flexible and canny bargainers, notable among them a pale-eyed, hard-handed woman, the chief of the miners of Osskil. There were Roke wizards like Onyx, with grey cloaks and wooden staffs. There was also a Pelnish wizard, called Master Seppel, who carried no staff and of whom people mostly steered clear, though he seemed mild enough. There were noblewomen, young and old, from the kingdom’s fiefs and principalities, some in silks of Lorbanery and pearls from the Isles of Sand, and two Islandwomen, stout, plain, and dignified, one from Iffish and one from Korp, to speak for the people of the East Reach. There were some poets, some learned people from the old colleges of Éa and the Enlades, and several captains of soldiery or of the king’s ships.