The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  He ended, “It seemed to us that night by night all these things draw together, always more certainly, to some event, some end. It seemed to us that here, on this ground, with your knowledge and power aiding us, we might foresee and meet that event, not letting it overwhelm our understanding. The wisest of our mages have foretold: a great change is upon us. We must join together to learn what that change is, its causes, its course, and how we may hope to turn it from conflict and ruin to harmony and peace, in whose sign I rule.”

  Brand the Summoner stood to answer him. After some stately politenesses, with a special welcome to the High Princess, he said, “That the dreams of men, and more than their dreams, forewarn us of dire changes, all the masters and wizards of Roke agree. That there is a disturbance of the deepset boundaries between death and life—transgression of those boundaries, and the threat of worse—we confirm. But that these disturbances can be understood or controlled by any but the masters of the art magic, we doubt. And very deeply do we doubt that dragons, whose lives and death are wholly different from that of man, can ever be trusted to submit their wild wrath and jealousy to serve human good.”

  “Summoner,” Lebannen said, before Irian could speak, “Orm Embar died for me on Selidor. Kalessin bore me to my throne.—Here in this circle are three peoples: the Kargish, the Hardic, and the People of the West.”

  “They were all one people, once,” said the Namer in his level, toneless voice.

  “But they are not now,” said the Summoner, each word heavy and separate. “Do not misunderstand me because I speak hard truth, my Lord King! I honor the truce you have sworn with the dragons. When the danger we are in is past, Roke will aid Havnor in seeking lasting peace with them. But the dragons have nothing to do with this crisis that is upon us. Nor have the eastern peoples, who foreswore their immortal souls when they forgot the Language of the Making.”

  “Es eyemra,” said a soft, hissing voice: Tehanu, standing.

  The Summoner stared at her.

  “Our language,” she repeated in Hardic, staring back at him.

  Irian laughed. “Es eyemra,” she said.

  “You are not immortal,” Tenar said to the Summoner. She had had no intention of speaking. She did not stand up. The words broke from her like fire from struck rock. “We are! We die to rejoin the undying world. It was you who foreswore immortality.”

  Then they were all still. The Patterner had made a small movement of his hands, a gentle movement.

  His face was preoccupied, untroubled, as he studied a design of a few twigs and leaves he had made on the grass where he sat, just in front of his crossed legs. He looked up, looked round at them all. “I think we will have to go there soon,” he said.

  After another silence, Lebannen asked, “Go where, my lord?”

  “Into the dark,” said the Patterner.

  As Alder sat listening to them speak, slowly the voices grew faint, fading, and the warm late sunlight of late summer dimmed into darkness. Nothing was left but the trees: tall blind presences between the blind earth and the sky. The oldest living children of the earth. O Segoy, he said in his heart: made and maker, let me come to you.

  The darkness went on and on, past the trees, past everything.

  Against that emptiness he saw the hill, the high hill that had been on their right as they walked up out of the town. He saw the dust of the road, the stones of the path, that led past that hill.

  He turned now aside from the path, leaving the others, and walked up the slope.

  The grasses were tall. The spent flower cases of sparkweed nodded among them. He came on a narrow path and followed it up the steep hillside. Now I am myself, he said in his heart. Segoy, the world is beautiful. Let me come through it to you.

  I can do again what I was meant to do, he thought as he walked. I can mend what was broken. I can rejoin.

  He reached the top of the hill. Standing there in the sun and wind among the nodding grasses he saw on his right the fields, the roofs of the little town and the big house, the bright bay and the sea beyond it. If he turned he would see behind him in the west the trees of the endless forest, fading on and on into blue distances. Before him the hill slope was dim and grey, going down to the wall of stones and the darkness beyond the wall, and the crowding, calling shadows at the wall. I will come, he said to them. I will come!

  Warmth fell across his shoulders and his hands. Wind stirred in the leaves above his head. Voices spoke, speaking, not calling, not crying out his name. The Patterner’s eyes were watching him across the circle of grass. The Summoner too was watching him. He looked down, bewildered. He tried to listen. He gathered his mind and listened.

  The king was speaking, using all his skill and strength to hold these fierce, willful men and women to one purpose. “Let me try to tell you, Masters of Roke, what I learned from the High Princess as we sailed here. Princess, may I speak for you?”

  Unveiled, she gazed across the circle at him, and bowed grave permission.

  “This is her tale, then: long ago, the human and the dragon peoples were one kind, speaking one language. But they sought different things, and so they agreed to part—to go different ways. That agreement was called the Vedurnan.”

  Onyx’s head went up, and Seppel’s bright dark eyes widened. “Verw nadan,” he whispered.

  “The human beings went east, the dragons west. The humans gave up their knowledge of the Language of the Making, and in exchange received all skill and craft of hand, and ownership of all that hands can make. The dragons let go all such things. But they kept the Old Speech.”

  “And their wings,” said Irian.

  “And their wings,” Lebannen said. He had caught Azver’s eye. “Patterner, perhaps you can continue the story better than I?”

  “The villagers of Gont and Hur-at-Hur remember what the wise men of Roke and the priests of Karego forget,” Azver said. “Yes, as a child I was told this tale, I think, or something like it. But the dragons had been forgotten in it. It told how the Dark Folk of the Archipelago broke their oath. We had all promised to forgo sorcery and the language of sorcery, speaking only our common tongue. We would name no names, and make no spells. We would trust to Segoy, to the powers of the Earth our mother, mother of the Warrior Gods. But the Dark Folk broke the covenant. They caught the Language of the Making in their craft, writing it in runes. They kept it, taught it, used it. They made spells with it, with the skill of their hands, with false tongues speaking the true words. So the Kargish people can never trust them. So says the tale.”

  Irian spoke: “Men fear death as dragons do not. Men want to own life, possess it, as if it were a jewel in a box. Those ancient mages craved everlasting life. They learned to use true names to keep men from dying. But those who cannot die can never be reborn.”

  “The name and the dragon are one,” said Kurremkarmerruk the Namer. “We men lost our names at the verw nadan, but we learned how to regain them. Name is self. Why should death change that?”

  He looked at the Summoner; but Brand sat heavy and grim, listening, not speaking.

  “Say more of this, Namer, if you will,” the king said.

  “I say what I have half learned, half guessed, not from village tales but from the most ancient records in the Isolate Tower. A thousand years before the first kings of Enlad, there were men in Éa and Soléa, the first and greatest of the mages, the Rune Makers. It was they who learned to write the Language of the Making. They made the runes, which the dragons never learned. They taught us to give each soul its true name: which is its truth, its self. And with their power they granted to those who bear their true name life beyond the body’s death.”

  “Life immortal,” Seppel’s soft voice took the word. He spoke smiling a little. “In a great land of rivers and mountains and beautiful cities, where there is no suffering or pain, and where the self endures, unchanged, unchanging, forever . . . That is the dream of the ancient Lore of Paln.”

  “Where,” the Summoner said, “where is
that land?”

  “On the other wind,” said Irian. “The west beyond the west.” She looked round at them all, scornful, irate. “Do you think we dragons fly only on the winds of this world? Do you think our freedom, for which we gave up all possessions, is no greater than that of the mindless seagulls? That our realm is a few rocks at the edge of your rich islands? You own the earth, you own the sea. But we are the fire of sunlight, we fly the wind! You wanted land to own. You wanted things to make and keep. And you have that. That was the division, the verw nadan. But you were not content with your share. You wanted not only your cares, but our freedom. You wanted the wind! And by the spells and wizardries of those oath-breakers, you stole half our realm from us, walled it away from life and light, so that you could live there forever. Thieves, traitors!”

  “Sister,” Tehanu said. “These are not the men who stole from us. They are those who pay the price.”

  A silence followed her harsh, whispering voice.

  “What was the price?” said the Namer.

  Tehanu looked at Irian. Irian hesitated, and then said in a much subdued voice, “Greed puts out the sun. These are Kalessin’s words.”

  Azver the Patterner spoke. As he spoke, he looked into the aisles of the trees across the clearing, as if following the slight movements of the leaves. “The ancients saw that the dragons’ realm was not of the body only. That they could fly . . . outside of time, it may be . . . And envying that freedom, they followed the dragons’ way into the west beyond the west. There they claimed part of that realm as their own. A timeless realm, where the self might be forever. But not in the body, as the dragons were. Only in spirit could men be there . . . So they made a wall which no living body could cross, neither man nor dragon. For they feared the anger of the dragons. And their arts of naming laid a great net of spells upon all the western lands, so that when the people of the islands die, they would come to the west beyond the west and live there in the spirit forever.

  “But as the wall was built and the spell laid, the wind ceased to blow, within the wall. The sea withdrew. The springs ceased to run. The mountains of sunrise became the mountains of the night. Those that died came to a dark land, a dry land.”

  “I have walked in that land,” Lebannen said, low and unwillingly. “I do not fear death, but I fear it.”

  There was a silence among them.

  “Cob, and Thorion,” the Summoner said in his rough, reluctant voice, “they tried to break down that wall. To bring the dead back into life.”

  “Not into life, master,” Seppel said. “Still, like the Rune Makers, they sought the bodiless, immortal self.”

  “Yet their spells disturbed that place,” the Summoner said, brooding. “So the dragons began to remember the ancient wrong . . . And so the souls of the dead come reaching now across the wall, yearning back to life.”

  Alder stood up. He said, “It is not life they yearn for. It is death. To be one with the earth again. To rejoin it.”

  They all looked at him, but he hardly knew it; his awareness was half with them, half in the dry land. The grass beneath his feet was green and sunlit, was dead and dim. The leaves of the trees trembled above him and the low stone wall lay only a little distance from him, down the dark hill. Of them all he saw only Tehanu; he could not see her clearly, but he knew her, standing between him and the wall. He spoke to her. “They built it, but they cannot unbuild it,” he said. “Will you help me, Tehanu?”

  “I will, Hara,” she said.

  A shadow rushed between them, a great dark bulky strength, hiding her, seizing him, holding him; he struggled, gasped for breath, could not draw breath, saw red fire in the darkness, and saw nothing more.

  They met in the starlight at the edge of the glade, the king of the western lands and the Master of Roke, the two powers of Earthsea.

  “Will he live?” the Summoner asked, and Lebannen answered, “The healer says he is in no danger now.”

  “I did wrong,” said the Summoner. “I am sorry for it.”

  “Why did you summon him back?” the king asked, not reproving but wanting an answer.

  After a long time the Summoner said, grimly, “Because I had the power to do it.”

  They paced along in silence down an open path among the great trees. It was very dark to either hand, but the starlight shone grey where they walked.

  “I was wrong. But it is not right to want to die,” the Summoner said. The burr of the East Reach was in his voice. He spoke low, almost pleadingly. “For the very old, the very ill, it may be. But life is given us. Surely it’s wrong not to hold and treasure that great gift!”

  “Death also is given us,” said the king.

  Alder lay on a pallet on the grass. He should lie out under the stars, the Patterner had said, and the old Master Herbal had agreed to that. He lay asleep, and Tehanu sat still beside him.

  Tenar sat in the doorway of the low stone house and watched her. The great stars of late summer shone above the clearing: highest of them the star called Tehanu, the Swan’s Heart, the linchpin of the sky.

  Seserakh came quietly out of the house and sat down on the threshold beside her. She had taken off the circlet that held her veil, leaving her mass of tawny hair unbound.

  “Oh my friend,” she murmured, “what will happen to us? The dead are coming here. Do you feel them? Like the tide rising. Across that wall. I think nobody can stop them. All the dead people, from the graves of all the islands of the west, all the centuries . . .”

  Tenar felt the beating, the calling, in her head and in her blood. She knew now, they all knew, what Alder had known. But she held to what she trusted, even if trust had become mere hope. She said, “They are only the dead, Seserakh. We built a false wall. It must be unbuilt. But there is a true one.”

  Tehanu got up and came softly over to them. She sat on the doorstep below them.

  “He’s all right, he’s sleeping,” she whispered.

  “Were you there with him?” Tenar asked.

  Tehanu nodded. “We were at the wall.”

  “What did the Summoner do?”

  “Summoned him—brought him back by force.”

  “Into life.”

  “Into life.”

  “I don’t know which I should fear more,” Tenar said, “death or life. I wish I could be done with fear.”

  Seserakh’s face, the wave of her warm hair, bent down to Tenar’s shoulder for a moment in a light caress. “You are brave, brave,” she murmured. “But oh! I fear the sea! and I fear death!”

  Tehanu sat quietly. In the faint soft light that hung among the trees, Tenar could see how her daughter’s slender hand lay crossed over her burnt and twisted hand.

  “I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.”

  She looked up at the stars and sighed. “Not for a long time yet,” she whispered. Then she looked round at Tenar.

  Seserakh stroked Tenar’s hair gently, rose, and went silently into the house.

  “Before long, I think, Mother . . .”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t want to leave you.”

  “You have to leave me.”

  “I know.”

  They sat on in the glimmering darkness of the Grove, silent.

  “Look,” Tehanu murmured. A shooting star crossed the sky, a quick, slow-fading trail of light.

  Five wizards sat in starlight. “Look,” one said, his hand following the trail of the shooting star.

  “The soul of a dragon dying,” said Azver the Patterner. “So they say in Karego-At.”

  “Do dragons die?” asked Onyx, musing. �
��Not as we do, I think.”

  “They don’t live as we do. They move between the worlds. So says Orm Irian. From the world’s wind to the other wind.”

  “As we sought to do,” said Seppel. “And failed.”

  Gamble looked at him curiously. “Have you on Paln always known this tale, this lore we have learned today—of the parting of dragon and mankind, and the making of the dry land?”

  “Not as we heard it today. I was taught that the verw nadan was the first great triumph of the art magic. And that the goal of wizardry was to triumph over time and live forever . . . Hence the evils the Pelnish Lore has done.”

  “At least you kept the Mother knowledge we despised,” Onyx said. “As your people did, Azver.”

  “Well, you had the sense to build your Great House here,” the Patterner said, smiling.

  “But we built it wrong,” Onyx said. “All we build, we build wrong.”

  “So we must knock it down,” said Seppel.

  “No,” said Gamble. “We’re not dragons. We do live in houses. We have to have some walls, at least.”

  “So long as the wind can blow through the windows,” said Azver.

  “And who will come in the doors?” asked the Doorkeeper in his mild voice.

  There was a pause. A cricket trilled industriously somewhere across the glade, fell silent, trilled again.

  “Dragons?” said Azver.

  The Doorkeeper shook his head. “I think maybe the division that was begun, and then betrayed, will be completed at last,” he said. “The dragons will go free, and leave us here to the choice we made.”

  “The knowledge of good and evil,” said Onyx.

  “The joy of making, shaping,” said Seppel. “Our mastery.”

  “And our greed, our weakness, our fear,” said Azver.

  The cricket was answered by another, closer to the stream. The two trills pulsed, crossed, in and out of rhythm.

  “What I fear,” said Gamble, “so much that I fear to say it—is this: that when the dragons go, our mastery will go with them. Our art. Our magic.”

  The silence of the others showed that they feared what he did. But the Doorkeeper spoke at last, gently, but with some certainty. “No, I think not. They are the Making, yes. But we learned the Making. We made it ours. It can’t be taken from us. To lose it we must forget it, throw it away.”