The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The gift for magic is empowered mainly by the use of the True Speech, the Language of the Making, in which the name of a thing is the thing.

  This speech, innate to dragons, can be learned by human beings. Some few people are born with an untaught knowledge of at least some words of the Language of the Making. The teaching of it is the heart of the teaching of magic.

  The true name of a person is a word in the True Speech. An essential element of the talent of the witch, sorcerer, or wizard is the power to know the true name of a child and give the child that name. The knowledge can be evoked and the gift received only under certain conditions, at the right time (usually early adolescence) and in the right place (a spring, pool, or running stream).

  Since the name of the person is the person, in the most literal and absolute sense, anyone who knows it has real power, power of life and death, over the person. Often a true name is never known to anybody but the giver and to the owner, who both keep it secret all their life. The power to give the true name and the imperative to keep it secret are one. True names have been betrayed, but never by the name giver.

  Some people of great innate and trained power are able to find out the true name of another, or even to have it come to them unsought. Since such knowledge can be betrayed or misused, it is immensely dangerous. Ordinary people—and dragons—keep their true name secret; wizards hide and defend theirs with spells. Morred could not even begin to fight his Enemy until he saw his Enemy’s name written in the dust by the falling rain. Ged could force the dragon Yevaud to obey him, having by both wizardry and scholarship discovered Yevaud’s true name under centuries of false ones.

  Magic was a wild talent before the time of Morred, who as both king and mage established intellectual and moral discipline for the art magic, gathering wizards to work together at the court for the general good and to study the ethical bases and constraints of their practice. This harmony generally prevailed through the reign of Maharion. In the Dark Time, with no control over wizardly powers and widespread misuse of them, magic came into general disrepute.

  The School on Roke

  The school was founded in about 650, as described above. The Nine Masters or master-teachers of Roke were originally:

  Windkey, master of the spells controlling weather

  Hand, master of all illusions

  Herbal, master of the arts of healing

  Changer, master of the spells that transform matter and bodies

  Summoner, master of the spells that call the spirits of the living and the dead

  Namer, master of the knowledge of the True Speech

  Patterner, dweller in the Immanent Grove, master of meaning and intent

  Finder, master of the spells of finding, binding, and returning

  Doorkeeper, master of the entering and leaving of the Great House

  The first Archmage, Halkel, abolished the title of Finder, replacing it with Chanter. The Chanter’s task is the preservation and teaching of all the oral deeds, lays, songs, etc., and the sung spells.

  The original loose, roughly descriptive use of the words witch, sorcerer, wizard, was codified into a strict hierarchy by Halkel. Under his rules:

  Witchery was restricted to women. All magic practiced by women was called “base craft,” even when it included practices otherwise called “high arts,” such as healing, chanting, changing, etc. Witches were to learn only from one another or from sorcerers. They were forbidden to enter Roke School, and Halkel discouraged wizards from teaching women anything at all. He specifically forbade the teaching of any word of the True Speech to women, and though this proscription was widely ignored, it led in the long run to a profound, long-lasting loss of knowledge and power among the women who practiced magic.

  Sorcery was practiced by men—its only real distinction from witchery. Sorcerers trained one another, and had some knowledge of the True Speech. Sorcery included both base crafts as defined by Halkel (finding, mending, dowsing, animal healing, etc.) and some high arts (human healing, chanting, weatherworking). A student who showed a gift for sorcery and was sent to Roke for training would first study the high arts of sorcery, and if successful in them might pursue his training in the art magic, especially in naming, summoning, and patterning, and so become a wizard.

  A wizard, as Halkel defined the term, was a man who received his staff from a teacher, himself a wizard, who had taken special responsibility for his training. It was usually the Archmage who gave a student his staff and made him wizard. This kind of teaching and succession occurred elsewhere than Roke—notably on Paln—but the Masters of Roke came to regard with suspicion a student of anyone not trained on Roke.

  Mage remained an essentially undefined term: a wizard of great power.

  The name and office of archmage were invented by Halkel, and the Archmage of Roke was a tenth Master, never counted among the Nine. A vital ethical and intellectual force, the archmage also exerted considerable political power. On the whole this power was used benevolently. Maintaining Roke as a strong centralising, normalising, pacific element in Archipelagan society, the archmages sent out sorcerers and wizards trained to understand the ethical practice of magic and to protect communities from drought, plague, invaders, dragons, and the unscrupulous use of their art.

  Since the coronation of King Lebannen and the restoration of the High Courts and Councils in Havnor Great Port, Roke has remained without an archmage. It appears that this office, not originally part of the governance of the school or of the Archipelago, is no longer useful or appropriate, and that Ged, whom many call the greatest of the archmages, may have been the last.

  Celibacy and Wizardry

  Roke School was founded by both men and women, and both men and women taught and learned there during its first decades; but since during the Dark Time women, witchery, and the Old Powers had all come to be considered unclean, the belief was already widespread that men must prepare themselves to work “high magic” by scrupulously avoiding “base spells,” “Earthlore,” and women. A man unwilling to put himself under the iron control of a spell of chastity could never practice the high arts. He could be no more than a common sorcerer. Male wizards thus had come to avoid women, refusing to teach them or learn from them. Witches, who almost universally went on working magic without giving up their sexuality, were described by celibate men as temptresses, unclean, defiling, essentially wicked.

  When in 730 the first Archmage of Roke, Halkel of Way, excluded women from the school, among his Nine Masters only the Patterner and the Doorkeeper protested; they were overruled. For more than three centuries, no woman taught or studied at the school on Roke. During those centuries, wizardry was an honored art, conferring status and power, while witchery was an unclean and ignorant superstition, practiced by women, paid for by peasants.

  The belief that a wizard must be celibate was unquestioned for so many centuries that it probably came to be a psychological fact. Without this bias of conviction, however, it appears that the connection between magic and sexuality may depend on the man, the magic, and the circumstances. There is no doubt that so great a mage as Morred was a husband and father.

  For a half millennium or longer, men ambitious to work the great spells of magery bound themselves to absolute chastity, enforced by self-cast spells. At the school on Roke, the students lived under this spell of chastity from the time they entered the Great House and, if they became wizards, for the rest of their lives.

  Among sorcerers, few are strictly celibate, and many marry and bring up a family.

  Women who work magic may practice periods of celibacy as well as fasting and other disciplines believed to purify and concentrate power; but most witches lead active sexual lives, having more freedom than most village women and less need to fear abuse. Many pledge “witch-troth” with another witch or an ordinary woman. They do not often marry men, and if they do, they are likely to choose a sorcerer.

  The two stories that follow were my first approach to and exploration of
the “secondary world” of Earthsea, about which I later wrote three novels. I didn’t know much about the place at first, and readers familiar with the trilogy will notice that trolls became extinct in Earthsea at some point, and that the history of the dragon Yevaud is somewhat obscure. (He must have been on Sattins Island some decades or centuries before Ged found him, and bound him, on the Isle of Pendor.) But this is only to be expected of dragons, who do not submit to the unidirectional, causal requirements of history, being myths, and neither timebinding nor timebound.

  “The Rule of Names” first explores an essential element of how magic works in Earthsea. “The Word of Unbinding” foreshadows the end of the last book of the trilogy, The Farthest Shore, in its imagery of the world of the dead. It also reveals a certain obsession with trees, which, once you notice them, keep cropping up throughout my work. I think I am definitely the most arboreal science fiction writer. It’s all right for the rest of you who climbed down, and developed opposable thumbs, and erect posture, and all that. There’s a few of us still up here swinging.

  Where was he? The floor was hard and slimy, the air black and stinking, and that was all there was. Except a headache. Lying flat on the clammy floor Festin moaned, and then said, “Staff!” When his alderwood wizard’s staff did not come to his hand, he knew he was in peril. He sat up, and not having his staff with which to make a proper light, he struck a spark between finger and thumb, muttering a certain Word. A blue will o’ the wisp sprang from the spark and rolled feebly through the air, sputtering. “Up,” said Festin, and the fireball wobbled upward till it lit a vaulted trapdoor very high above, so high that Festin projecting into the fireball momentarily saw his own face forty feet below as a pale dot in the darkness. The light struck no reflections in the damp walls; they had been woven out of night, by magic. He rejoined himself and said, “Out.” The ball expired. Festin sat in the dark, cracking his knuckles.

  He must have been overspelled from behind, by surprise; for the last memory he had was of walking through his own woods at evening talking with the trees. Lately, in these lone years in the middle of his life, he had been burdened with a sense of waste, of unspent strength; so, needing to learn patience, he had left the villages and gone to converse with trees, especially oaks, chestnuts, and the grey alders whose roots are in profound communication with running water. It had been six months since he had spoken to a human being. He had been busy with essentials, casting no spells and bothering no one. So who had spellbound him and shut him in this reeking well? “Who?” he demanded of the walls, and slowly a name gathered on them and ran down to him like a thick black drop sweated out from pores of stone and spores of fungus: “Voll.”

  For a moment Festin was in a cold sweat himself.

  He had heard first long ago of Voll the Fell, who was said to be more than wizard yet less than man; who passed from island to island of the Outer Reach, undoing the works of the Ancients, enslaving men, cutting forests and spoiling fields, and sealing in underground tombs any wizard or Mage who tried to combat him. Refugees from ruined islands told always the same tale, that he came at evening on a dark wind over the sea. His slaves followed in ships; these they had seen. But none of them had ever seen Voll. . . . There were many men and creatures of evil will among the Islands, and Festin, a young warlock intent on his training, had not paid much heed to these tales of Voll the Fell. “I can protect this island,” he had thought, knowing his untried power, and had returned to his oaks and alders, the sound of wind in their leaves, the rhythm of growth in their round trunks and limbs and twigs, the taste of sunlight on leaves or dark groundwater around roots.—Where were they now, the trees, his old companions? Had Voll destroyed the forest?

  Awake at last and up on his feet, Festin made two broad motions with rigid hands, shouting aloud a Name that would burst all locks and break open any man-made door. But these walls impregnated with night and the name of their builder did not heed, did not hear. The name re-echoed back, clapping in Festin’s ears so that he fell on his knees, hiding his head in his arms till the echoes died away in the vaults above him. Then, still shaken by the backfire, he sat brooding.

  They were right; Voll was strong. Here on his own ground, within this spell-built dungeon, his magic would withstand any direct attack; and Festin’s strength was halved by the loss of his staff. But not even his captor could take from him his powers, relative only to himself, of Projecting and Transforming. So, after rubbing his now doubly aching head, he transformed. Quietly his body melted away into a cloud of fine mist.

  Lazy, trailing, the mist rose off the floor, drifting up along the slimy walls until it found, where vault met wall, a hairline crack. Through this, droplet by droplet, it seeped. It was almost all through the crack when a hot wind, hot as a furnace-blast, struck at it, scattering the mist-drops, drying them. Hurriedly the mist sucked itself back into the vault, spiralled to the floor, took on Festin’s own form and lay there panting. Transformation is an emotional strain to introverted warlocks of Festin’s sort; when to that strain is added the shock of facing unhuman death in one’s assumed shape, the experience becomes horrible. Festin lay for a while merely breathing. He was also angry with himself. It had been a pretty simpler minded notion to escape as a mist, after all. Every fool knew that trick. Voll had probably just left a hot wind waiting. Festin gathered himself into a small black bat, flew up to the ceiling, retransformed into a thin stream of plain air, and seeped through the crack.

  This time he got clear out and was blowing softly down the hall in which he found himself towards a window, when a sharp sense of peril made him pull together, snapping himself into the first small, coherent shape that came to mind—a gold ring. It was just as well. The hurricane of arctic air that would have dispersed his air-form in unrecallable chaos merely chilled his ring-form slightly. As the storm passed he lay on the marble pavement, wondering which form might get out the window quickest.

  Too late, he began to roll away. An enormous blank-faced troll strode cataclysmically across the floor, stopped, caught the quick-rolling ring and picked it up in a huge limestone-like hand. The troll strode to the trapdoor, lifted it by an iron handle and a muttered charm, and dropped Festin down into the darkness. He fell straight for forty feet and landed on the stone floor—clink.

  Resuming his true form he sat up, ruefully rubbing a bruised elbow. Enough of this transformation on an empty stomach. He longed bitterly for his staff, with which he could have summoned up any amount of dinner. Without it, though he could change his own form and exert certain spells and powers, he could not transform or summon to him any material thing—neither lightning nor a lamb chop.

  “Patience,” Festin told himself, and when he had got his breath he dissolved his body into the infinite delicacy of volatile oils, becoming the aroma of a frying lamb chop. He drifted once more through the crack. The waiting troll sniffed suspiciously, but already Festin had regrouped himself into a falcon, winging straight for the window. The troll lunged after him, missed by yards, and bellowed in a vast stony voice, “The hawk, get the hawk!” Swooping over the enchanted castle towards his forest that lay dark to westward, sunlight and sea-glare dazzling his eyes, Festin rode the wind like an arrow. But a quicker arrow found him. Crying out, he fell. Sun and sea and towers spun around him and went out.

  He woke again on the dank floor of the dungeon, hands and hair and lips wet with his own blood. The arrow had struck his pinion as a falcon, his shoulder as a man. Lying still, he mumbled a spell to close the wound. Presently he was able to sit up, and recollect a longer, deeper spell of healing. But he had lost a good deal of blood, and with it, power. A chill had settled in the marrow of his bones which even the healing-spell could not warm. There was darkness in his eyes, even when he struck a will o’ the wisp and lit the reeking air: the same dark mist he had seen, as he flew, overhanging his forest and the little towns of his land.

  It was up to him to protect that land.

  He could not attempt dire
ct escape again. He was too weak and tired. Trusting his power too much, he had lost his strength. Now whatever shape he took would share his weakness, and be trapped.

  Shivering with cold, he crouched there, letting the fireball sputter out with a last whiff of methane—marsh gas. The smell brought to his mind’s eye the marshes stretching from the forest wall down to the sea, his beloved marshes where no men came, where in fall the swans flew long and level, where between still pools and reed-islands the quick, silent, seaward streamlets ran. Oh, to be a fish in one of those streams; or better yet to be farther upstream, near the springs, in the forest in the shadow of the trees, in the clear brown backwater under an alder’s roots, resting hidden . . .

  This was a great magic. Festin had no more performed it than has any man who in exile or danger longs for the earth and waters of his home, seeing and yearning over the doorsill of his house, the table where he has eaten, the branches outside the window of the room where he has slept. Only in dreams do any but the great Mages realize this magic of going home. But Festin, with the cold creeping out from his marrow into nerves and veins, stood up between the black walls, gathered his will together till it shone like a candle in the darkness of his flesh, and began to work the great and silent magic.

  The walls were gone. He was in the earth, rocks and veins of granite for bones, ground-water for blood, the roots of things for nerves. Like a blind worm he moved through the earth westward, slowly, darkness before and behind. Then all at once coolness flowed along his back and belly, a buoyant, unresisting, inexhaustible caress. With his sides he tasted the water, felt current-flow; and with lidless eyes he saw before him the deep brown pool between the great buttress-roots of an alder. He darted forward, silvery, into shadow. He had got free. He was home.