The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “As my people did,” said Azver.

  “Yet your people remembered what the earth is, what life everlasting is,” said Seppel. “While we forgot.”

  There was another long silence among them.

  “I could reach my hand out to the wall,” Gamble said in a very low voice, and Seppel said, “They are near, they are very near.”

  “How are we to know what we should do?” Onyx said.

  Azver spoke into the silence that followed the question. “Once when my lord the Archmage was here with me in the Grove, he said to me he had spent his life learning how to choose to do what he had no choice but to do.”

  “I wish he were here now,” said Onyx.

  “He’s done with doing,” the Doorkeeper murmured, smiling.

  “But we’re not. We sit here talking on the edge of the precipice—we all know it.” Onyx looked round at their starlit faces. “What do the dead want of us?”

  “What do the dragons want of us?” said Gamble. “These women who are dragons, dragons who are women—why are they here? Can we trust them?”

  “Have we a choice?” said the Doorkeeper.

  “I think not,” said the Patterner. An edge of hardness, a sword’s edge, had come into his voice. “We can only follow.”

  “Follow the dragons?” Gamble asked.

  Azver shook his head. “Alder.”

  “But he’s no guide, Patterner!” said Gamble. “A village mender?”

  Onyx said, “Alder has wisdom, but in his hands, not in his head. He follows his heart. Certainly he doesn’t seek to lead us.”

  “Yet he was chosen from among us all.”

  “Who chose him?” Seppel asked softly.

  The Patterner answered him: “The dead.”

  They sat silent. The crickets’ trill had ceased. Two tall figures came towards them through the grass lit grey by starlight. “May Brand and I sit with you a while?” Lebannen said. “There is no sleep tonight.”

  On the doorstep of the house on the Overfell, Ged sat watching the stars above the sea. He had gone in to sleep an hour or more ago, but as he closed his eyes he saw the hillside and heard the voices rising like a wave. He got up at once and went outside, where he could see the stars move.

  He was tired. His eyes would close, and then he would be there by the wall of stones, his heart cold with dread that he would be there forever, not knowing the way back. At last, impatient and sick of fear, he got up again, fetched a lantern from the house and lit it, and set off on the path to Moss’s house. Moss might or might not be frightened; she lived pretty near the wall, these days. But Heather would be in a panic, and Moss would not be able to soothe her. And since whatever had to be done, it wasn’t he who could do it this time, he could at least go comfort the poor halfwit. He could tell her it was only dreams.

  It was hard going in the dark, the lantern throwing great shadows of small things across the path. He walked slower than he would have liked to walk, and stumbled sometimes.

  He saw a light in the widower’s house, late as it was. A child wailed, over in the village. Mother, mother, why are the people crying? Who are the people crying, mother? There was no sleep there, either. There was not much sleep anywhere in Earthsea, tonight, Ged thought. He grinned a little as he thought it; for he had always liked that pause, that fearful pause, the moment before things changed.

  Alder woke. He lay on earth and felt its depth beneath him. Above him the bright stars burned, the stars of summer, moving between leaf and leaf with the wind’s blowing, moving from east to west with the world’s turning. He watched them a while before he let them go.

  Tehanu was waiting for him on the hill.

  “What must we do, Hara?” she asked him.

  “We have to mend the world,” he said. He smiled, because his heart had grown light at last. “We have to break the wall.”

  “Can they help us?” she asked, for the dead were gathered waiting down in the darkness as countless as grass or sand or stars, silent now, a great, dim beach of souls.

  “No,” he said, “but maybe others can.” He walked down the hill to the wall. It was little more than waist-high here. He put his hands on one of the stones of the coping row and tried to move it. It was fixed fast, or was heavier than a stone should be; he could not lift it, could not make it move at all.

  Tehanu came beside him. “Help me,” he said. She put her hands on the stone, the human hand and the burnt claw, gripping it as well as she could, and gave a lifting tug as he did. The stone moved a little, then a little more. “Push it!” she said, and together they pushed it slowly out of place, grating hard on the rock beneath it, till it fell on the far side of the wall with a dull heavy thump.

  The next stone was smaller; together they could lift it up out of its place. They let it drop into the dust on the near side.

  A tremor ran through the ground under their feet then. Small chinking stones in the wall rattled. And with a long sigh, the multitudes of the dead came closer to the wall.

  The Patterner stood up suddenly and stood listening. Leaves stormed all about the glade, the trees of the Grove bowed and trembled as if under a great wind, but there was no wind.

  “Now it changes,” he said, and he walked away from them, into the darkness under the trees.

  The Summoner, the Doorkeeper, and Seppel rose and followed him, quick and silent. Gamble and Onyx followed more slowly after them.

  Lebannen stood up; he took a few steps after the others, hesitated, and hurried across the glade to the low house of stone and sod. “Irian,” he said, stooping to the dark doorway. “Irian, will you take me with you?”

  She came out of the house; she was smiling, and there was a kind of fiery brightness all about her. “Come then, come quick,” she said, and took his hand. Her hand burned like a coal of fire as she lifted him into the other wind.

  After a little time Seserakh came out of the house into the starlight, and after her came Tenar. They stood and looked about them. Nothing moved; the trees were still again.

  “They are all gone,” Seserakh whispered. “On the Dragons’ Way.”

  She took a step forward, gazing into the dark.

  “What are we to do, Tenar?”

  “We are to keep the house,” Tenar said.

  “Oh!” Seserakh whispered, dropping to her knees. She had seen Lebannen lying near the doorway, stretched facedown in the grass. “He isn’t dead—I think—Oh, my dear Lord King, don’t go, don’t die!”

  “He’s with them. Stay with him. Keep him warm. Keep the house, Seserakh,” Tenar said. She went to where Alder lay, his unseeing eyes turned to the stars. She sat down by him, her hand on his. She waited.

  Alder could scarcely move the great stone his hands were on, but the Summoner was beside him, stooping with his shoulder against it, and said, “Now!” Together they pushed it till it overbalanced and dropped down with that same heavy, final thump on the far side of the wall.

  Others were there now with him and Tehanu, wrenching at the stones, casting them down beside the wall. Alder saw his own hands cast shadows for an instant from a red gleam. Orm Irian, as he had seen her first, a great dragon shape, had let out her fiery breath as she struggled to move a boulder from the lowest rank of stones, deepset in the earth. Her talons struck sparks and her thorned back arched, and the rock rolled ponderously free, breaching the wall entirely in that place.

  There was a vast, soft cry among the shadows on the other side, like the sound of the sea on a hollow shore. Their darkness surged up against the wall. But Alder looked up and saw that it was no longer dark. Light moved in that sky where the stars had never moved, quick sparks of fire far in the dark west.

  “Kalessin!”

  That was Tehanu’s voice. He looked at her. She was gazing upward, westward. She had no eye for earth.

  She reached up her arms. Fire ran along her hands, her arms, into her hair, into her face and body, flamed up into great wings above her head, and lifted her into the air,
a creature all fire, blazing, beautiful.

  She cried out aloud, a clear, wordless cry. She flew high, headlong, fast, up into the sky where the light was growing and a white wind had erased the unmeaning stars.

  From among the hosts of the dead a few here and there, like her, rose up flickering into dragons, and mounted on the wind.

  Most came forward afoot. They were not pressing, not crying out now, but walking with unhurried certainty towards the fallen places in the wall: great multitudes of men and women, who as they came to the broken wall did not hesitate but stepped across it and were gone: a wisp of dust, a breath that shone an instant in the ever-brightening light.

  Alder watched them. He still held in his hands, forgotten, a chinking stone he had wrenched from the wall to loosen a larger rock. He watched the dead go free. At last he saw her among them. He tossed the stone aside then and stepped forward. “Lily,” he said. She saw him and smiled and held out her hand to him. He took her hand, and they crossed together into the sunlight.

  Lebannen stood by the ruined wall and watched the dawn brighten in the east. There was an east now, where there had been no direction, no way to go. There was east and west, and light and motion. The very ground moved, shook, shivering like a great animal, so that the wall of stones beyond where they had broken it shuddered and slid into rubble. Fire broke from the far, black peaks of the mountains called Pain, the fire that burns in the heart of the world, the fire that feeds dragons.

  He looked into the sky over those mountains and saw, as he and Ged had seen them once above the western sea, the dragons flying on the wind of morning.

  Three came wheeling towards him where he stood among the others near the crest of the hill, above the ruined wall. Two he knew, Orm Irian and Kalessin. The third had bright mail, gold, with wings of gold. That one flew highest and did not stoop down to them. Orm Irian played about her in the air and they flew together, one chasing the other higher and higher, till all at once the highest rays of the rising sun struck Tehanu and she burned like her name, a great bright star.

  Kalessin circled again, flew low, and alighted hugely amid the ruins of the wall.

  “Agni Lebannen,” said the dragon to the king.

  “Eldest,” the king said to the dragon.

  “Aissadan verw nadannan,” said the vast, hissing voice, like a sea of cymbals.

  Beside Lebannen, Brand the Summoner of Roke stood planted solidly. He repeated the dragon’s words in the Speech of the Making, and then said them in Hardic: “What was divided is divided.”

  The Patterner stood near them, his hair bright in the brightening light. He said, “What was built is broken. What was broken is made whole.”

  Then he looked up yearning into the sky, at the gold dragon and the red-bronze one; but they had flown almost out of sight, wheeling now in vast gyres over the long, falling land, where empty shadow cities faded to nothing in the light of day.

  “Eldest,” he said, and the long head swung slowly back to him.

  “Will she follow the way back through the forest, sometimes?” Azver asked in the speech of dragons.

  Kalessin’s long, fathomless, yellow eye regarded him. The enormous mouth seemed, like the mouths of lizards, closed upon a smile. It did not speak.

  Then ponderously dragging its length along the wall so that stones still standing slid and fell grating beneath its iron belly, Kalessin writhed away from them, and with a rush and rattle of upraised wings pushed off from the hillside and flew low over the land towards the mountains, whose peaks now were bright with smoke and white steam, fire and sunlight.

  “Come, friends,” said Seppel in his soft voice. “It’s not yet our time to go free.”

  Sunlight was in the sky above the crowns of the highest trees, but the glade still held the chill grey of dawn. Tenar sat with her hand on Alder’s hand, her face bowed down. She looked at the cold dew beading a grass blade, how it hung in tiny, delicate drops along the blade, each drop reflecting all the world.

  Someone spoke her name. She did not look up.

  “He’s gone,” she said.

  The Patterner knelt by her. He touched Alder’s face with a gentle hand.

  He knelt there silent a while. Then he said to Tenar in her language, “My lady, I saw Tehanu. She flies golden on the other wind.”

  Tenar glanced up at him. His face was white and worn, but there was a shadow of glory in his eyes.

  She struggled and then said, speaking roughly and almost inaudibly, “Whole?”

  He nodded.

  She stroked Alder’s hand, the mender’s hand, fine, skillful. Tears came into her eyes.

  “Let me be with him a while,” she said, and she began to cry. She put her hands to her face and cried hard, bitterly, silently.

  Azver went to the little group by the door of the house. Onyx and Gamble were near the Summoner, who stood, heavy and anxious, near the princess. She crouched beside Lebannen, her arms across him, protecting him, daring any wizard to touch him. Her eyes flashed. She held Lebannen’s short steel dagger naked in her hand.

  “I came back with him,” Brand said to Azver. “I tried to stay with him. I wasn’t sure of the way. She won’t let me near him.”

  “Ganaí,” Azver said, her title in Kargish, princess.

  Her eyes flashed up to him. “Oh may Atwah-Wuluah be thanked and the Mother praised for ever!” she cried. “Lord Azver! Make these accursed-sorcerers go away. Kill them! They have killed my king.” She held out the dagger to him by its slender steel blade.

  “No, princess. He went with the dragon Irian. But this sorcerer brought him back to us. Let me see him,” and he knelt and turned Lebannen’s face a little to see it better, and laid his hands on his chest. “He’s cold,” he said. “It was a hard way back. Take him in your arms, princess. Keep him warm.”

  “I have tried to,” she said, biting her lip. She flung down the dagger and bent to the unconscious man. “O poor king!” she said softly in Hardic, “dear king, poor king!”

  Azver got up and said to the Summoner, “I think he will be all right, Brand. She is much more use than we are, now.”

  The Summoner put out his big hand and took hold of Azver’s arm. “Steady now,” he said.

  “The Doorkeeper,” Azver said, going whiter than before and looking around the glade.

  “He came back with the Pelnishman,” Brand said. “Sit down, Azver.”

  Azver obeyed him, sitting down on the log seat the old Changer had sat on in their circle the afternoon before. A thousand years ago it seemed. The old men had gone back to the School in the evening . . . And then the long night had begun, the night that brought the wall of stones so close that to sleep was to be there, and to be there was terror, so no one had slept. No one, maybe, in all Roke, in all the isles . . . Only Alder, who went to guide them . . . Azver found he was dozing and shivering.

  Gamble tried to make him go inside the winter house, but Azver insisted that he should be near the princess to interpret for her. And near Tenar, he thought without saying it, to protect her. To let her grieve. But Alder was done with grieving. He had passed his grief to her. To them all. His joy . . .

  The Herbal came from the School and fussed about Azver, put a winter cloak over his shoulders. He sat on in a weary, feverish half doze, not heeding the others, dimly irritated by the presence of so many people in his sweet silent glade, watching the sunlight creep down among the leaves. His vigil was rewarded when the princess came to him, knelt before him looking with solicitous respect into his face, and said, “Lord Azver, the king would speak with you.”

  She helped him stand up, as if he were an old man. He did not mind. “Thank you, gaínha,” he said.

  “I am not queen,” she said with a laugh.

  “You will be,” said the Patterner.

  It was the strong tide of the full moon, and Dolphin had to wait for the slack to run between the Armed Cliffs. Tenar did not disembark in Gont Port till midmorning, and then there was the long wal
k uphill. It was near sunset when she came through Re Albi and took the cliff path to the house.

  Ged was watering the cabbages, well grown by now.

  He straightened up and looked at her coming to him, that hawk look, frowning. “Ah,” he said.

  “Oh my dear,” she said. She hurried, the last few steps, as he came to her.

  She was tired. She was very glad to sit with him with a glass of Spark’s good red wine and watch the evening of early autumn flare into gold over all the western sea.

  “How can I tell you everything?” she said.

  “Tell it backward,” he said.

  “All right. I will. They wanted me to stay, but I said I wanted to go home. But there was a council meeting, the King’s Council, you know, for the betrothal. There’ll be a grand wedding and all, of course, but I don’t think I have to go. Because that was truly when they married. With Elfarran’s Ring. Our ring.”

  He looked at her and smiled, the broad, sweet smile that she thought, perhaps wrongly, perhaps rightly, nobody but her had ever seen on his face.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Lebannen came and stood here, see, on my left, and then Seserakh came and stood here on my right. In front of Morred’s throne. And I held up the Ring. The way I did when we brought it to Havnor, remember? in Lookfar, in the sunlight? Lebannen took it in his hands and kissed it and gave it back to me. And I put it on her arm, it just went over her hand—she’s not a little woman, Seserakh—Oh, you should see her, Ged! What a beauty she is, what a lion! He’s met his match.—And everybody shouted. And there were festivals and so on. And so I could get away.”

  “Go on.”

  “Backward?”

  “Backward.”

  “Well. Before that was Roke.”

  “Roke’s never simple.”

  “No.”

  They drank their red wine in silence.