The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  So he sat with the two wizards, thinking of himself as false coin to their gold, but listening to them with all his mind; for they trusted him and spoke freely, and their talk was an education he had never dreamed of as a sorcerer.

  Sitting there in the bright pale shade of the canvas awning, they talked of a bargain, a greater bargain than the one he had made to stop his dreams. Onyx said more than once the words of the Old Speech Seppel had spoken on the rooftop: Verw nadan. As they talked, little by little Alder gathered that the meaning of those words was something like a choice, a division, making two things of one. Far, far back in time, before the Kings of Enlad, before the writing of Hardic, maybe before there was a Hardic tongue, when there was only the Language of the Making, it seemed that people had made some kind of choice, given up one great power or possession to gain another.

  The wizards’ talk of this was hard to follow, not so much because they hid anything but because they themselves were groping after things lost in the cloudy past, the time before memory. Words of the Old Speech came into their talk of necessity, and sometimes Onyx spoke entirely in that tongue. But Seppel would answer him in Hardic. Seppel was sparing with the words of the Making. Once he held up his hand to stop Onyx from going on, and at the Roke wizard’s look of surprise and question, said mildly, “Spell-words act.”

  Alder’s teacher Gannet, too, had called the words of the Old Speech spell-words. “Each is a deed of power,” he had said. “True word makes truth be.” Gannet had been stingy with the spell-words he knew, speaking them only at need, and when he wrote any rune but the common ones that were used to write Hardic, he erased it almost as he finished it. Most sorcerers were similarly careful, either to guard their knowledge for themselves or because they respected the power of the Language of the Making. Even Seppel, wizard as he was, with a far wider knowledge and understanding of those words, preferred not to use them in conversation, but to keep to ordinary language which, if it allowed lies and errors, also permitted uncertainty and retraction.

  Perhaps that had been part of the great choice men made in ancient times: to give up the innate knowledge of the Old Speech, which they once shared with the dragons. Had they done so, Alder wondered, in order to have a language of their own, a language suited to mankind, in which they could lie, cheat, swindle, and invent wonders that never had been and would never be?

  The dragons spoke no speech but the Old Speech. Yet it was always said that dragons lied. Was it so? he wondered. If spell-words were true, how could even a dragon use them to lie?

  Seppel and Onyx had come to one of the long, easy, thoughtful pauses in their conversation. Seeing that Onyx was, in fact, at least half asleep, Alder asked the Pelnish wizard softly, “Is it true that dragons can tell untruth in the true words?”

  The Pelnishman smiled. “That—so we say on Paln—is the very question Ath asked Orm a thousand years ago, in the ruins of Ontuego. ‘Can a dragon lie?’ the mage asked. And Orm replied, ‘No,’ and then breathed on him, burning him to ashes . . . But are we to believe the story, since it was only Orm who could have told it?”

  Infinite are the arguments of mages, Alder said to himself, but not aloud.

  Onyx had gone definitely to sleep, his head tilted back against the bulkhead, his grave, tense face relaxed.

  Seppel spoke, his voice even quieter than usual. “Alder, I hope you do not regret what we did at Aurun. I know our friend thinks I did not warn you clearly enough.”

  Alder said without hesitation, “I am content.”

  Seppel inclined his dark head.

  Alder said presently, “I know that we try to keep the Equilibrium. But the Powers of the Earth keep their own account.”

  “And theirs is a justice that is hard for men to understand.”

  “That’s it. I try to see why it was just that, my craft, I mean, that I must give up to free myself from that dream. What has the one to do with the other?”

  Seppel did not answer for a while, and then it was with a question. “It was not by your craft that you came to the wall of stones?”

  “Never,” Alder said with certainty. “I had no more power to go there if I willed it than I had to prevent myself from going.”

  “So how did you come there?”

  “My wife called me, and my heart went to her.”

  A longer pause. The wizard said, “Other men have lost beloved wives.”

  “So I said to my Lord Sparrowhawk. And he said: that’s true, and yet the bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever.”

  “Across the wall of stones, no bond endures.”

  Alder looked at the wizard, the swarthy, soft, keen-eyed face. “Why is it so?” he said.

  “Death is the bond breaker.”

  “Then why do the dead not die?”

  Seppel stared at him, taken aback.

  “I’m sorry,” Alder said. “I misspeak in my ignorance. What I mean is this: death breaks the bond of soul with body, and the body dies. It goes back to the earth. But the spirit must go to that dark place, and wear a semblance of the body, and endure there—for how long? Forever? In the dust and dusk there, without light, or love, or cheer at all? I cannot bear to think of Lily in that place. Why must she be there? Why can she not be—” his voice stumbled—“be free?”

  “Because the wind does not blow there,” Seppel said. His look was very strange, his voice harsh. “It was stopped from blowing, by the art of man.”

  He continued to stare at Alder but only gradually did he begin to see him. The expression in his eyes and face changed. He looked away, up the beautiful white curve of the foresail, full of the breath of the northwest wind. He glanced back at Alder. “You know as much as I do of this matter, my friend,” he said with almost his usual softness. “But you know it in your body, your blood, in the pulse of your heart. And I know only words. Old words . . . So we had better get to Roke, where maybe the wise men will be able to tell us what we need to know. Or if they cannot, the dragons will, perhaps. Or maybe it will be you who shows us the way.”

  “That would be the blind man who led the seers to the cliff’s edge, indeed!” Alder said with a laugh.

  “Ah, but we’re at the cliff’s edge already, with our eyes shut,” said the wizard of Paln.

  Lebannen found the ship too small to contain the enormous restlessness that filled him. The women sat under their little awning and the wizards sat under theirs like ducks in a row, but he paced up and down, impatient with the narrow confines of the deck. He felt it was his impatience and not the wind that sent Dolphin running so fast to the south, but never fast enough. He wanted the journey over.

  “Remember the fleet on the way to Wathort?” Tosla said, joining him while he stood near the steersman, studying the chart and the clear sea before them. “That was a grand sight. Thirty ships aline!”

  “I wish it was Wathort we were bound for,” Lebannen said.

  “I never did like Roke,” Tosla agreed. “Not an honest wind or current for twenty miles off that shore, but only wizards’ brew. And the rocks north of it never in the same place twice. And the town full of cheats and shape-shifters.” He spat, competently, to leeward. “I’d rather meet old Gore and his slavers again!”

  Lebannen nodded, but said nothing. That was often the pleasure of Tosla’s company: he said what Lebannen felt it was better that he himself not say.

  “Who was the dumb man, the mute,” Tosla asked, “the one that killed Falcon on the wall?”

  “Egre. Pirate turned slave taker.”

  “That’s it. He knew you, there at Sorra. Went right for you. I always wondered how.”

  “Because he took me as a slave once.”

  It was not easy to surprise Tosla, but the seaman looked at him with his mouth open, evidently not believing him but not able to say so, and so with nothing to say. Lebannen enjoyed the effect for a minute and then took pity on him.

  “When the Archmage took me hunting after Cob, we went south, first
. A man in Hort Town betrayed us to the slave takers. They knocked the Archmage on the head, and I ran off thinking I could lead them away from him. But it was me they were after—I was salable. I woke up chained in a galley bound for Sowl. He rescued me before the next night passed. The irons fell off us all like bits of dead leaves. And he told Egre not to speak again until he found something worth saying . . . He came to that galley like a great light over the water . . . I never knew what he was till then.”

  Tosla mulled this over a while. “He unchained all the slaves? Why didn’t the others kill Egre?”

  “Maybe they took him on to Sowl and sold him,” Lebannen said.

  Tosla mulled a while longer. “So that’s why you were so keen to do away with the slave trade.”

  “One reason.”

  “Doesn’t improve the character, as a rule,” Tosla observed. He studied the chart of the Inmost Sea tacked on the board to the steersman’s left. “Island of Way,” he remarked. “Where the dragon woman’s from.”

  “You keep clear of her, I notice.”

  Tosla pursed his lips, though he did not whistle, being aboard ship. “You know that song I mentioned, about the Lass of Belilo? Well, I never thought of it as anything but a tale. Until I saw her.”

  “I doubt she’d eat you, Tosla.”

  “It would be a glorious death,” the sailor said, rather sourly.

  The king laughed.

  “Don’t push your own luck,” said Tosla.

  “No fear.”

  “You and she were talking there so free and easy. Like making yourself easy with a volcano, to my mind . . . But I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t mind seeing a bit more of that present the Kargs sent you. There’s a sight worth seeing in there, to judge by the feet. But how do you get it out of the tent? The feet are grand, but I’d like a bit more ankle, to begin with.”

  Lebannen felt his face turn grim, and turned aside to keep Tosla from seeing it.

  “If anybody gave me a package like that,” Tosla said, staring out over the sea, “I’d open it.”

  Lebannen could not restrain a slight movement of impatience. Tosla saw it; he was quick. He grinned his wry grin and said no more.

  The ship’s master had come out on deck, and Lebannen engaged him in talk. “Looks a bit thick ahead?” he said, and the master nodded: “Thunder squalls to the south and west there. We’ll be in them tonight.”

  The sea grew choppier as the afternoon drew on, the benign sunlight took on a brassy tinge, and gusts of wind blew from one quarter then another. Tenar had told Lebannen that the princess was afraid of the sea and of seasickness, and he glanced back once or twice at the aftercabin, expecting to see no red-veiled form among the ducks in a row. But it was Tenar and Tehanu who had gone in; the princess was still there, and Irian was sitting beside her. They were talking earnestly. What on earth did a dragon woman from Way have to talk about with a harem woman from Hur-at-Hur? What language had they in common? The question seemed so much in need of answering to Lebannen that he walked aft.

  When he got there Irian looked up at him and smiled. She had a strong, open face, a broad smile; she went barefoot by choice, was careless about her dress, let the wind tangle her hair; altogether she seemed no more than a handsome, hothearted, intelligent, untaught countrywoman, till you saw her eyes. They were the color of smoky amber, and when she looked straight at Lebannen, as she was doing now, he could not meet them. He looked down.

  He had made it clear that there was to be no courtly ceremony on the ship, no bows and courtesies, nobody was to leap up when he came near; but the princess had got to her feet. They were, as Tosla had observed, beautiful feet, not small, but high-arched, strong, and fine. He looked at them, the two slender feet on the white wood of the deck. He looked up from them and saw that the princess was doing as she had done the last time he faced her: parting her veils so that he, though no one else, could see her face. He was a little staggered by the stern, almost tragic beauty of the face in that red shadow.

  “Is—is everything all right, princess?” he asked, stammering, a thing he very seldom did.

  She said, “My friend Tenar said, breathe wind.”

  “Yes,” he said, rather at random.

  “Is there anything your wizards could do for her, do you think, maybe?” said Irian, unfolding her long limbs and standing up too. She and the princess were both tall women.

  Lebannen was trying to make out what color the princess’s eyes were, since he was able to look at them. They were blue, he thought, but like blue opals they held other colors in them, or maybe it was the sunlight coming through the red of her veils.—“Do for her?”

  “She wants very much not to be seasick. She had a terrible time of it coming from the Kargish places.”

  “I will not to fear,” the princess said. She gazed straight at him as if challenging him to—what?

  “Of course,” he said, “of course. I’ll ask Onyx. I’m sure there’s something he can do.” He made a sketchy bow to them both and went off hurriedly to find the wizard.

  Onyx and Seppel conferred and then consulted Alder. A spell against seasickness was more in the province of sorcerers, menders, healers, than of learned and powerful wizards. Alder could not do anything himself at present, of course, but he might remember a charm . . .? He did not, having never dreamed of going to sea until his troubles began. Seppel confessed that he himself always got seasick in small boats or rough weather. Onyx finally went to the aftercabin and begged the princess’s pardon: he himself had no skill to help her, and nothing to offer her but—apologetically—a charm or talisman one of the sailors hearing of her plight—the sailors heard everything—had pressed upon him to give her.

  The princess’s long-fingered hand emerged from the red and gold veils. The wizard placed in it a queer little black-and-white object: dried seaweed braided round a bird’s breastbone. “A petrel, because they ride the storm,” Onyx said, shamefaced.

  The princess bowed her unseen head and murmured thanks in Kargish. The fetish disappeared within her veils. She withdrew to the cabin. Onyx, meeting the king quite nearby, apologised to him. The ship was pitching energetically now in hard, erratic gusts on a choppy sea, and he said, “I could, you know, sire, say a word to the winds . . .”

  Lebannen knew well that there were two schools of thought concerning weather-working: the old-fashioned one, that of the Bagmen who ordered the winds to serve their ships as shepherds order their dogs to run here and there, and the newfangled notion—a few centuries old at most—of the Roke School, that the magewind might be raised at real need, but it was best to let the world’s winds blow. He knew that Onyx was a devout upholder of the way of Roke. “Use your own judgment, Onyx,” he said. “If it seems we’re in for a really bad night . . . But if it’s no more than a few squalls . . .”

  Onyx looked up at the masthead, where already a wisp or two of fallow fire had flickered in the cloud-darkened dusk. Thunder rumbled grandly in the blackness before them, all across the south. Behind them the last of the daylight fell wan, tremulous across the waves. “Very well,” he said, rather dismally, and went below to the small and crowded cabin.

  Lebannen stayed out of that cabin almost entirely, sleeping on deck when he slept at all. Tonight was not one for sleep for anybody on the Dolphin. It was not a single squall, but a chain of violent late-summer storms boiling up out of the southwest, and between the terrific commotion of the lightning-dazzled sea, the thunder crashes that seemed about to knock the ship apart, and the crazy storm gusts that kept her pitching and rolling and taking queer jumps, it was a long night and a loud one.

  Onyx consulted Lebannen once: Should he say a word to the wind? Lebannen looked to the master, who shrugged. He and his crew were busy enough, but unconcerned. The ship was in no trouble. As for the womenfolk, they were reported to be sitting up in their cabin, gambling. Irian and the princess had come out on deck earlier, but it was hard to stay afoot at times and they had seen they were in the crew’s
way, so they had retired. The report that they were gambling came from the cook’s boy, who had been sent to see if they wanted anything to eat. They had wanted whatever he could bring.

  Lebannen found himself possessed by the same intense curiosity he had felt in the afternoon. There was no doubt the lamps were all alight in the stern cabin, for the glow of them streamed out golden on the foam and race of the ship’s wake. About midnight, he went aft and knocked.

  Irian opened the door. After the dazzle and blackness of the storm the lamplight in the cabin seemed warm and steady, though the swinging lamps cast swinging shadows; and he was confusedly aware of colors, the soft, various colors of the women’s clothes, their skin, brown or pale or gold, their hair, black or grey or tawny, their eyes—the princess’s eyes staring at him, startled, as she snatched up a scarf or some cloth to hold before her face.

  “Oh! We thought it was the cook’s boy!” Irian said with a laugh.

  Tehanu looked at him and said in her shy, comradely way, “Is there trouble?”

  He realised that he was standing in the doorway staring at them like some speechless messenger of doom.

  “No—None at all—Are you getting on all right? I’m sorry it’s been so rough—”

  “We don’t hold you answerable for the weather,” Tenar said. “Nobody could sleep, so the princess and I have been teaching the others Kargish gambling.”

  He saw five-sided ivory dice-sticks scattered over the table, probably Tosla’s.

  “We’ve been betting islands,” Irian said. “But Tehanu and I are losing. The Kargs have already won Ark and Ilien.”

  The princess had lowered the scarf; she sat facing Lebannen resolutely, extremely tense, as a young swordsman might face him before a fencing match. In the warmth of the cabin they were all bare-armed and barefoot, but her consciousness of her uncovered face drew his consciousness as a magnet draws a pin.