Birt nodded and said in a whisper, “Maidens.”
“Right,” said Blackbeard. “Well, that couldn’t be endured forever, nor the thought of him sitting on all that treasure. So after the League grew strong, and the Archipelago wasn’t so busy with wars and piracy, it was decided to attack Pendor, drive out the dragon, and get the gold and jewels for the treasury of the League. They’re forever wanting money, the League is. So a huge fleet gathered from fifty islands, and seven Mages stood in the prows of the seven strongest ships, and they sailed towards Pendor. . . . They got there. They landed. Nothing stirred. The houses all stood empty, the dishes on the tables full of a hundred years’ dust. The bones of the old Sealord and his men lay about in the castle courts and on the stairs. And the Tower rooms reeked of dragon. But there was no dragon. And no treasure, not a diamond the size of a poppyseed, not a single silver bead . . . Knowing that he couldn’t stand up to seven Mages, the dragon had skipped out. They tracked him, and found he’d flown to a deserted island up north called Udrath; they followed his trail there, and what did they find? Bones again. His bones—the dragon’s. But no treasure. A wizard, some unknown wizard from somewhere, must have met him singlehanded, and defeated him—and then made off with the treasure, right under the League’s nose!”
The fisherman listened, attentive and expressionless.
“Now that must have been a powerful wizard and a clever one, first to kill a dragon, and second to get off without leaving a trace. The lords and Mages of the Archipelago couldn’t track him at all, neither where he’d come from nor where he’d made off to. They were about to give up. That was last spring; I’d been off on a three-year voyage up in the North Reach, and got back about that time. And they asked me to help them find the unknown wizard. That was clever of them. Because I’m not only a wizard myself, as I think some of the oafs here have guessed, but I am also a descendant of the Lords of Pendor. That treasure is mine. It’s mine, and knows that it’s mine. Those fools of the League couldn’t find it, because it’s not theirs. It belongs to the House of Pendor, and the great emerald, the star of the hoard, Inalkil the Greenstone, knows its master. Behold!” Blackbeard raised his oaken staff and cried aloud, “Inalkil!” The tip of the staff began to glow green, a fiery green radiance, a dazzling haze the color of April grass, and at the same moment the staff tipped in the wizard’s hand, leaning, slanting till it pointed straight at the side of the hill above them.
“It wasn’t so bright a glow, far away in Havnor,” Blackbeard murmured, “but the staff pointed true. Inalkil answered when I called. The jewel knows its master. And I know the thief, and I shall conquer him. He’s a mighty wizard, who could overcome a dragon. But I am mightier. Do you want to know why, oaf? Because I know his name!”
As Blackbeard’s tone got more arrogant, Birt had looked duller and duller, blanker and blanker; but at this he gave a twitch, shut his mouth, and stared at the Archipelagan. “How did you . . . learn it?” he asked very slowly.
Blackbeard grinned, and did not answer.
“Black magic?”
“How else?”
Birt looked pale, and said nothing.
“I am the Sealord of Pendor, oaf, and I will have the gold my fathers won, and the jewels my mothers wore, and the Greenstone! For they are mine.—Now, you can tell your village boobies the whole story after I have defeated this wizard and gone. Wait here. Or you can come and watch, if you’re not afraid. You’ll never get the chance again to see a great wizard in all his power.” Blackbeard turned, and without a backward glance strode off up the hill towards the entrance to the cave.
Very slowly, Birt followed. A good distance from the cave he stopped, sat down under a hawthorn tree, and watched. The Archipelagan had stopped; a stiff, dark figure alone on the green swell of the hill before the gaping cavemouth, he stood perfectly still. All at once he swung his staff up over his head, and the emerald radiance shone about him as he shouted, “Thief, thief of the Hoard of Pendor, come forth!”
There was a crash, as of dropped crockery, from inside the cave, and a lot of dust came spewing out. Scared, Birt ducked. When he looked again he saw Blackbeard still standing motionless, and at the mouth of the cave, dusty and dishevelled, stood Mr. Underhill. He looked small and pitiful, with his toes turned in as usual, and his little bowlegs in black tights, and no staff—he never had had one, Birt suddenly thought. Mr. Underhill spoke. “Who are you?” he said in his husky little voice.
“I am the Sealord of Pendor, thief, come to claim my treasure!”
At that, Mr. Underhill slowly turned pink, as he always did when people were rude to him. But he then turned something else. He turned yellow. His hair bristled out, he gave a coughing roar—and was a yellow lion leaping down the hill at Blackbeard, white fangs gleaming.
But Blackbeard no longer stood there. A gigantic tiger, color of night and lightning, bounded to meet the lion. . . .
The lion was gone. Below the cave all of a sudden stood a high grove of trees, black in the winter sunshine. The tiger, checking himself in midleap just before he entered the shadow of the trees, caught fire in the air, became a tongue of flame lashing out at the dry black branches. . . .
But where the trees had stood a sudden cataract leaped from the hillside, an arch of silvery crashing water, thundering down upon the fire. But the fire was gone. . . .
For just a moment before the fisherman’s staring eyes two hills rose—the green one he knew, and a new one, a bare, brown hillock ready to drink up the rushing waterfall. That passed so quickly it made Birt blink, and after blinking he blinked again, and moaned, for what he saw now was a great deal worse. Where the cataract had been there hovered a dragon. Black wings darkened all the hill, steel claws reached groping, and from the dark, scaly, gaping lips fire and steam shot out.
Beneath the monstrous creature stood Blackbeard, laughing.
“Take any shape you please, little Mr. Underhill!” he taunted. “I can match you. But the game grows tiresome. I want to look upon my treasure, upon Inalkil. Now, big dragon, little wizard, take your true shape. I command you by the power of your true name—Yevaud!”
Birt could not move at all, not even to blink. He cowered, staring whether he would or not. He saw the black dragon hang there in the air above Blackbeard. He saw the fire lick like many tongues from the scaly mouth, the steam jet from the red nostrils. He saw Blackbeard’s face grow white, white as chalk, and the beard-fringed lips trembling.
“Your name is Yevaud!”
“Yes,” said a great, husky, hissing voice. “My truename is Yevaud, and my true shape is this shape.”
“But the dragon was killed—they found dragon bones on Udrath Island—”
“That was another dragon,” said the dragon, and then stooped like a hawk, talons outstretched. And Birt shut his eyes.
When he opened them the sky was clear, the hillside empty, except for a reddish-blackish trampled spot, and a few talon-marks in the grass.
Birt the fisherman got to his feet and ran. He ran across the common, scattering sheep to right and left, and straight down the village street to Palani’s father’s house. Palani was out in the garden weeding the nasturtiums. “Come with me!” Birt gasped. She stared. He grabbed her wrist and dragged her with him. She screeched a little, but did not resist. He ran with her straight to the pier, pushed her into his fishing-sloop the Queenie, untied the painter, took up the oars and set off rowing like a demon. The last that Sattins Island saw of him and Palani was the Queenie’s sail vanishing in the direction of the nearest island westward.
The villagers thought they would never stop talking about it, how Goody Guld’s nephew Birt had lost his mind and sailed off with the schoolmistress on the very same day that the peddlar Blackbeard disappeared without a trace, leaving all his feathers and beads behind. But they did stop talking about it, three days later. They had other things to talk about, when Mr. Underhill finally came out of his cave.
Mr. Underhill had decided th
at since his truename was no longer a secret, he might as well drop his disguise. Walking was a lot harder than flying, and besides, it was a long, long time since he had had a real meal.
Before daybreak in late summer and early autumn, fog gathers on the waters of the Closed Sea, drifting up over the steep eastern coast of the Island of O, blurring away the upland fields and pastures that run out to the cliffs. Every blade of grass and frond of fern bows to a burden of waterbeads. The fog smells of salt and seaweed and smoke from the early fires of farmhouse hearths.
In the darkness before dawn, a bobbing, glowing, pallid sphere moved through the fields: the light of a candle-lantern on the fog immediately around it. Beside it was a dark blur, the skirt of the woman who carried the lantern. She moved on steadily through the fog and dark, following a path deeply foot-worn and as deeply worn into her as into the earth. She did not hesitate and did not pause until the path brought her down into a shallow valley. There, something loomed ahead of her, a bulk that caught the lantern light, a dim mass taller than herself. She came up to it: a standing stone, its rough, pitted surface pale where the lantern-light shone on it, the rest of it dark in darkness. She set down the lantern near it and the shadows changed, running up the stone. She put down the basket she carried. She went to the standing stone, bowed to it, and embraced it. She stood for some time holding it stiffly in her arms, her forehead bowed against it.
After a while she drew back from it and spoke. “Remember me,” she said in a low voice. “Remember your life. Remember your children. Think of me. I’m here. I’ll never leave you. Think of yourself, what you were. You will be avenged. Be patient. Don’t sleep. Never sleep. Wait.” Then she embraced it in a harder, briefer hold, and turned away.
From the basket she took a jug and reached up to pour water over the uneven top of the stone. A clay bowl lay in the weedy grass at its base, with a trace of coarse meal in it. She emptied it, rinsed it from the jug, dried it on her apron, and refilled it with a handful of meal from her basket. She set it down and laid across it a spray of flowers, blue autumn daisies, short-stemmed, half dried-up though wet with fog and dew.
Laying her hand on the stone, she whispered: “Here’s food, food for your soul, for your strength. Eat, drink. Be strong. Wait. Don’t sleep, Father. Wake, and wait. You will be avenged. Then you can sleep.”
Looking around and seeing the mist pale with the first daylight, she stooped and blew out the candle in the lantern. She took up the lantern and basket and turned back the way she had come. The fog whitened and seemed to thicken as it imperceptibly filled with light. She could not see more than a few steps ahead on the foot-worn, narrow track up the slope out of the shallow valley and across rough pastures, but she walked with the same unhesitating stride. The steady sound of the sea at the foot of the cliffs was loud in the valley of the standing stone but died away soon in the inland pastures, muffled by fog and earth. Sheep a little darker than the fog stared at her from close to the path, heavy with wet, their wool all full of round fog-drops. She heard their movements, the clink of bells. An ewe made a hoarse roaring blat and a half-grown lamb bleated in reply.
It was a half mile or so across the pastures to Hill Farm. The farmer was leaving for the hayfield as his wife came into the farmyard. He greeted her, his voice subdued. “Good morning, mistress.”
“Good morning, master,” she said, also speaking low. “I’ll bring your lunch to the Low Meadow.”
Farmer Bay nodded. “Thanks,” he said, and trudged off into the thinning mist, a short man going grey, gnarled with muscle, shouldering his scythe. It had been a good summer for haygrass and they were cutting the Low Meadow for the second time.
After Bay’s wife had seen to the house and kitchen garden she took the smaller scythe and a basket of bread, cheese, and pickled onion and went to join her husband in the hay-meadow. The sun was hot and high in the eastern sky by then. The fog had burned off the land and withdrawn to lie in a low, dark-silver line along the east edge of the sea, hiding the islands.
As she topped the rise before she went down to the meadow the farmer’s wife turned to look back at the rise and fall of the land between her and the high sea-horizon. Bay’s farmhouse stood sheltered on a mild slope among old willow trees a quarter mile away. To the west of it were other farms, and south of it she could see the tallest chimney and some treetops of the village. Northward, on higher land, the groves and high slate roofs of the house of the Lords of Odren stood out clear. To her east, a fold of the hills hid the vale of the standing stone where she had been that morning and every morning for fourteen years. Her eyes knew that fold of land and what it hid, and all the lands and fields and the roads around it, and the half circle of the eastern sea beyond it all. It was a great, still scene, and she saw it all with a still heart. She was just turning to go down to the hay-meadow when her gaze became alert and fixed.
Two people were on the road that came north from the village, a whitish track meandering along among the pastures some way inland from the cliffs. At this distance the two figures were as small and black as insects. They stopped where a footpath crossed the road from inland and led out to the edge of the cliff. She watched them intently while they stood. They were apparently talking. She could see one of them making gestures, like the waving of an ant’s feelers. When they went on past the footpath up the road, she watched them a moment more, then turned away and went on down to the haying.
“No,” the young man said, stopping suddenly. “No, you’re wrong, Hovy. It was that path. The next path off this road would be to the orchards. It has to be that one.” He set off walking much faster back down the road to the barely marked track that crossed it. A shuffle of footprints where they had stood discussing their way was clear in the white dust there. He headed resolutely inland. His companion followed him silently.
The footpath, not much used and barely visible in places, wound about through hilly pastureland and ended in a long, dry vale under dry slopes. Bay trees, willows, and a single tall cedar stood among a scatter of old gravemounds and fallen, broken marker stones. An ancient cairn of boulders piled higher than a man and half overgrown with shrubs and weeds stood in the center of the burial ground. The young man walked toward it. He stopped and stood as if bewildered, staring at the red-orange flowers of a creeper growing among the stones of the cairn. He looked at the older man who followed him.
The older man shook his head.
“This is Evro’s Cairn,” the young man said, as if regaining the name, the memory. “But then where . . .”
The other man gestured northwestward, a short, small movement of his hand, as if inviting the other to precede him. He stood patiently waiting for the young man to go first, or to speak. The young man still looked bewildered and did not move, and after a minute the other set off. There was no path, but he walked as if he knew where he was going, starting up one of the slopes of short dry grass at a steady pace and crossing over it. The young man followed him, hurrying to catch up.
Both of them wore travel-dirty clothes and mended sandals. The younger man walked empty-handed; the older man had a stick in his hand, a pouch slung over his shoulder. He was in his fifties, or older, and had a worn, worried look. When they came through the fold of the hills into a narrow valley he stopped as soon as he saw the standing stone. He turned his anxious face to his companion. The young man hurried on past him, going straight to the stone.
A field mouse skittered out of the bowl of meal, scared from its daily breakfast, and vanished into the weeds at the base of the stone.
The young man stopped a few feet from the stone and straightened up to face its pale grey, blunt bulk. It stood about his own height and maybe twice his girth, a little wider than it was deep. A cleft ran up the lower part, dividing it in two, and the top of it narrowed in enough to give a faint suggestion of a head.
“The Standing Man,” Hovy whispered.
The young man nodded impatiently. He moved a little closer, reached out his ri
ght hand, and touched the stone. He drew in his breath.
“What’s this?” he said, looking down at the bowl of meal and the withering branch of flowers.
“I don’t know,” the other man said.
“Somebody’s made an offering here, Hovy.”
In the flood of sunlight in the silent valley they stood silent, the three of them, the young man, the older man, the stone.
“It’s kind of you to let me rest here,” said the stranger to the innkeeper. “‘If you want dried fish, go on down to the port,’ I said to ’em, ‘but I’m not taking an extra step today.’” She stuck out her worn shoes with patched soles.
“On your way north, eh?”
“Our nephew that’s been living with us is going back to his folk there. Might be we’ll settle there too if there’s work. There’s none where we’re from.” She gestured vaguely to the south.
“And where would they live then?” the innkeeper asked, looking up from the beans she was shelling, ready to chat. “In Riro, would it be?”
“Oh, let me give you a hand with those. I can’t sit and see work done and not lend a hand. No, it’s not Riro. The name of the village has just gone out of my head, but it’s a great long way up the coast, I believe. I’ll find out how long it is with my own feet, won’t I? Paro, would that be the name of the place?”
The innkeeper shook her head, indifferent. Riro was the north end of her world.
“It’s a long road is all I know! Now, these are lovely beans. Fat and sweet as little quail.”
“They’ll be supper. With a bit of rabbit, or a hen if you’d rather.”
“Oh, rabbit by all means. I love a bit of stewed rabbit with raily beans. D’you call ’em railies?”
“I’ve heard it. Mostly we call ’em trailers.”
The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition Page 124
