The Farthest Shore (Earthsea Cycle)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The image faded, and there was nothing but the blinding disk of the noon sun reflected in the water in the cask.

  “There,” Sparrowhawk said, looking at Arren with a strange, mocking look, “there, if I could ever go back there, not even you could follow me.”

  LAND LAY AHEAD, LOW AND blue in the afternoon like a bank of mist. “Is it Selidor?” Arren asked, and his heart beat fast, but the mage answered, “Obb, I think, or Jessage. We’re not halfway yet, lad.”

  That night they sailed the straits between those two islands. They saw no lights, but there was a reek of smoke in the air, so heavy that their lungs grew raw with breathing it. When day came and they looked back, the eastern isle, Jessage, looked burnt and black as far as they could see inland from the shore, and a haze hung blue and dull above it.

  “They have burnt the fields,” Arren said.

  “Aye. And the villages. I have smelled that smoke before.”

  “Are they savages, here in the West?”

  Sparrowhawk shook his head. “Farmers; townsmen.”

  Arren stared at the black ruin of the land, the withered trees of orchards against the sky; and his face was hard. “What harm have the trees done them?” he said. “Must they punish the grass for their own faults? Men are savages, who would set a land afire because they have a quarrel with other men.”

  “They have no guidance,” Sparrowhawk said. “No king; and the kingly men and the wizardly men, all turned aside and drawn into their minds, are hunting the door through death. So it was in the South, and so I guess it to be here.”

  “And this is one man’s doing—the one the dragon spoke of? It seems not possible.”

  “Why not? If there were a King of the Isles, he would be one man. And he would rule. One man may as easily destroy as govern: be King or Anti-King.”

  There was again that note in his voice of mockery or challenge which roused Arren’s temper.

  “A king has servants, soldiers, messengers, lieutenants. He governs through his servants. Where are the servants of this—Anti-King?”

  “In our minds, lad. In our minds. The traitor, the self; the self that cries I want to live; let the world burn so long as I can live! The little traitor soul in us, in the dark, like the worm in the apple. He talks to all of us. But only some understand him. The wizards and the sorcerers. The singers; the makers. And the heroes, the ones who seek to be themselves. To be one’s self is a rare thing and a great one. To be one’s self forever: is that not better still?”

  Arren looked straight at Sparrowhawk. “You would say to me that it is not better. But tell me why. I was a child when I began this voyage, a child who did not believe in death. You think me a child still, but I have learnt something, not much, maybe, but something: I have learnt that death exists and that I am to die. But I have not learnt to rejoice in the knowledge, to welcome my death or yours. If I love life, shall I not hate the end of it? Why should I not desire immortality?”

  Arren’s fencing-master in Berila had been a man of about sixty, short and bald and cold. Arren had disliked him for years, though he knew him to be an extraordinary swordsman. But one day in practice he had caught his master off guard and nearly disarmed him, and he had never forgotten the incredulous, incongruous happiness that had suddenly gleamed in the master’s cold face, the hope, the joy—an equal, at last an equal! From that moment on, the fencing-master had trained him mercilessly, and whenever they fenced, that same relentless smile would be on the old man’s face, brightening as Arren pressed him harder. And it was on Sparrowhawk’s face now, the flash of steel in sunlight.

  “Why should you not desire immortality? How should you not? Every soul desires it, and its health is in the strength of its desire. But be careful; you are one who might achieve your desire.”

  “And then?”

  “And then this: a false king ruling, the arts of man forgotten, the singer tongueless, the eye blind. This! This blight and plague on the lands, this sore we seek to heal. There are two, Arren, two that make one: the world and the shadow, the light and the dark. The two poles of the Balance. Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars. In life is death. In death is rebirth. What then is life without death? Life unchanging, everlasting, eternal? What is it but death—death without rebirth?”

  “If so much hinges on it, then, my lord, if one man’s life might wreck the Balance of the Whole, surely it is not possible—it would not be allowed—” He halted, confused.

  “Who allows? Who forbids?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Nor I. But I know how much evil one man, one life, can do. I know it all too well. I know it because I have done it. I have done the same evil, in the same folly of pride. I opened the door between the worlds just a crack, just a little crack, just to show that I was stronger than death itself. . . . I was young and had not met death—like you. . . . It took the strength of the Archmage Nemmerle, it took his mastery and his life, to shut that door. You can see the mark that night left on me, on my face; but him it killed. Oh, the door between the light and the darkness can be opened, Arren; it takes strength, but it can be done. But to shut it again, there’s a different story.”

  “But, my lord, what you speak of surely is different from this—”

  “Why? Because I am a good man?” That coldness of steel, of the falcon’s eye, was in Sparrowhawk’s look again. “What is a good man, Arren? Is a good man one who would not do evil, who would not open a door to the darkness, who has no darkness in him? Look again, lad. Look a little farther; you will need what you learn, to go where you must go. Look into yourself! Did you not hear a voice say Come? Did you not follow?”

  “I did. I—I have not forgotten. But I thought . . . I thought that voice was . . . his.”

  “Aye, it was his. And it was yours. How could he speak to you, across the seas, but in your own voice? How is it that he calls to those who know how to listen, the mages and the makers and the seekers, who heed the voice within them? How is it that he does not call to me? It is because I will not listen; I will not hear that voice again. You were born to power, Arren, as I was; power over men, over men’s souls; and what is that but power over life and death? You are young, you stand on the borders of possibility, on the shadowland, in the realm of dream, and you hear the voice saying Come. But I, who am old, who have done what I must do, who stand in the daylight facing my own death, the end of all possibility, I know that there is only one power that is real and worth the having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept.”

  Jessage was far behind them now, a blue smudge on the sea, a stain.

  “Then I am his servant,” Arren said.

  “You are. And I am yours.”

  “But who is he, then? What is he?”

  “A man, I think—even as you and I.”

  “That man you spoke of once—the wizard of Havnor, who summoned up the dead? Is it he?”

  “It may well be. He had great power, and it was all bent on denying death. And he knew the Great Spells of the Lore of Paln. I was young and a fool when I used that lore, and I brought ruin on myself. But if an old man and a strong one used it, careless of all consequence, he might bring ruin on us all.”

  “Were you not told that that man was dead?”

  “Aye,” said Sparrowhawk, “I was.”

  And they said no more.

  That night the sea was full of fire. The sharp waves thrown back by Lookfar’s prow and the movement of every fish through the surface water were all outlined and alive with light. Arren sat with his arm on the gunwale and his head on his arm, watching those curves and whorls of silver radiance. He put his hand in the water and raised it again, and light ran softly from his fingers. “Look,” he said, “I too am a wizard.”

  “That gift you have not,” said his companion.

  �
��Much good I shall be to you without it,” said Arren, gazing at the restless shimmer of the waves, “when we meet our enemy.”

  For he had hoped—from the very beginning he had hoped—that the reason the Archmage had chosen him and him alone for this voyage was that he had some inborn power, descended from his ancestor Morred, which would in the ultimate need and the blackest hour be revealed: and so he would save himself and his lord and all the world from the enemy. But lately he had looked once more at that hope, and it was as if he saw it from a great distance; it was like remembering that, when he was a very little boy, he had had a burning desire to try on his father’s crown, and had wept when he was forbidden to. This hope was as ill-timed, as childish. There was no magery in him. There never would be.

  The time might come, indeed, when he could, when he must, put on his father’s crown and rule as Prince of Enlad. But that seemed a small thing now, and his home a small place, and remote. There was no disloyalty in this. Only his loyalty had grown greater, being fixed upon a greater model and a broader hope. He had learned his own weakness also, and by it had learned to measure his strength; and he knew that he was strong. But what use was strength if he had no gift, nothing to offer, still, to his lord but his service and his steady love? Where they were going, would those be enough?

  Sparrowhawk said only, “To see a candle’s light, one must take it into a dark place.” With that Arren tried to comfort himself; but he did not find it very comforting.

  Next morning when they awoke, the air was grey and the water was grey. Over the mast the sky brightened to the blue of an opal, for the fog lay low. To Northern men such as Arren of Enlad and Sparrowhawk of Gont, the fog was welcome, like an old friend. Softly it enclosed the boat so that they could not see far, and it was to them like being in a familiar room after many weeks of bright and barren space and the wind blowing. They were coming back into their own climate, and were now perhaps at the latitude of Roke.

  SOME SEVEN HUNDRED MILES EAST of those fog-clad waters where Lookfar sailed, clear sunlight shone on the leaves of the trees of the Immanent Grove, on the green crown of Roke Knoll, and on the high slate roofs of the Great House.

  In a room in the south tower, a magician’s workroom cluttered with retorts and alembics and great-bellied, crook-necked bottles, thick-walled furnaces and tiny heating-lamps, tongs, bellows, stands, pliers, pipes, a thousand boxes and vials and stoppered jugs marked with Hardic or more secret runes, and all such paraphernalia of alchemy, glass-blowing, metal-refining, and the arts of healing, in that room among the much-encumbered tables and benches stood the Master Changer and the Master Summoner of Roke.

  In his hands the grey-haired Changer held a great stone like a diamond uncarved. It was a rock-crystal, colored faintly deep within with amethyst and rose, but clear as water. Yet as the eye looked into that clarity, it found unclarity, and neither reflection nor image of what was real round about, but only planes and depths ever farther, ever deeper, until it was led quite into dream and found no way out. This was the Stone of Shelieth. It had long been kept by the princes of Way, sometimes as a mere bauble of their treasury, sometimes as a charm for sleep, sometimes for a more baneful purpose: for those who looked too long and without understanding into that endless depth of crystal might go mad. The Archmage Gensher of Way, coming to Roke, had brought with him the Stone of Shelieth, for in the hands of a mage it held the truth.

  Yet the truth varies with the man.

  Therefore the Changer, holding the stone and looking through its bossed, uneven surface into the infinite, paler-colored, shimmering depths, spoke aloud to tell what he saw. “I see the earth, even as though I stood on Mount Onn in the center of the world and beheld all beneath my feet, even to the farthest isle of the farthest Reaches, and beyond. And all is clear. I see ships in the lanes of Ilien, and the hearthfires of Torheven, and the roofs of this tower where we stand now. But past Roke, nothing. In the south, no lands. In the west, no lands. I cannot see Wathort where it should be, nor any isle of the West Reach, even so close as Pendor. And Osskil and Ebosskil, where are they? There is a mist on Enlad, a greyness, like a spider’s web. Each time I look, more islands are gone, and the sea where they were is empty and unbroken, even as it was before the Making—” and his voice stumbled on the last word as if it came with difficulty to his lips.

  He set the stone down on its ivory stand and stood away from it. His kindly face looked drawn. He said, “Tell me what you see.”

  The Master Summoner took up the crystal in his hands and turned it slowly as if seeking on its rough, glassy surface an entrance of vision. A long time he handled it, his face intent. At last he set it down and said, “Changer, I see little. Fragments, glimpses, making no whole.”

  The grey-haired Master clenched his hands. “Is that not strange in itself?”

  “How so?”

  “Are your eyes often blind?” the Changer cried, as if enraged. “Do you not see that there is . . .”—and he stammered several times before he could speak—“Do you not see that there is a hand upon your eyes, even as there is a hand over my mouth?”

  The Summoner said, “You are overwrought, my lord.”

  “Summon the Presence of the Stone,” said the Changer, controlling himself, but speaking in a somewhat stifled voice.

  “Why?”

  “Why, because I ask you.”

  “Come, Changer, do you dare me—like boys before a bear’s den? Are we children?”

  “Yes! Before what I see in the Stone of Shelieth, I am a child—a frightened child. Summon the Presence of the Stone. Must I beg you, my lord?”

  “No,” said the tall Master, but he frowned, and turned from the older man. Then stretching wide his arms in the great gesture that begins the spells of his art, he raised his head and spoke the syllables of invocation. As he spoke, a light grew within the Stone of Shelieth. The room darkened about it; shadows gathered. When the shadows were deep and the stone was very bright, he brought his hands together, lifted the crystal before his face, and looked into its radiance.

  He was silent some while and then spoke. “I see the Fountains of Shelieth,” he said softly. “The pools and basins and the waterfalls, the silver-curtained dripping caves where ferns grow in banks of moss, the rippled sands, the leaping up of the waters and the running of them, the outwelling of deep springs from earth, the mystery and sweetness of the source, the spring.” He fell silent again, and stood so for a time, his face pale as silver in the light of the stone. Then he cried aloud wordlessly, and dropping the crystal with a crash, fell to his knees, his face hidden in his hands.

  There were no shadows. Summer sunlight filled the jumbled room. The great stone lay beneath a table in the dust and litter, unharmed.

  The Summoner reached out blindly, catching at the other man’s hand like a child. He drew a deep breath. At last he got up, leaning a little on the Changer, and said with unsteady lips and some attempt to smile, “I will not take your dares again, my lord.”

  “What saw you, Thorion?”

  “I saw the fountains. I saw them sink down, and the streams run dry, and the lips of the springs of water draw back. And underneath all was black and dry. You saw the sea before the Making, but I saw the . . . what comes after . . . I saw the Unmaking.” He wet his lips. “I wish that the Archmage were here,” he said.

  “I wish that we were there with him.”

  “Where? There is none that can find him now.” The Summoner looked up at the windows that showed the blue, untroubled sky. “No sending can come to him, no summoning reach him. He is there where you saw an empty sea. He is coming to the place where the springs run dry. He is where our arts do not avail. . . . Yet maybe even now there are spells that might reach to him, some of those in the Lore of Paln.”

  “But those are spells whereby the dead are brought among the living.”

  “Some bring the living among the dead.”

  “You do not think him dead?”

  “I think he go
es toward death and is drawn toward it. And so are we all. Our power is going from us, and our strength, and our hope and luck. The springs are running dry.”

  The Changer gazed at him awhile with a troubled face. “Do not seek to send to him, Thorion,” he said at last. “He knew what he sought long before we knew it. To him the world is even as this Stone of Shelieth: he looks and sees what is and what must be. . . . We cannot help him. The great spells have grown very perilous, and of all there is most danger in the Lore of which you spoke. We must stand fast as he bade us and look to the walls of Roke and the remembering of the Names.”

  “Aye,” said the Summoner. “But I must go and think on this.” And he left the tower room, walking somewhat stiffly and holding his noble, dark head high.