Legends: Stories By The Masters of Modern Fantasy

by Robert Silverberg

  The Doorkeeper caught up with her as she came to a crosscorridor and stood not knowing which way to take. “This way,” he said, falling into step beside her, and after a while, “This way,” and so they came quite soon to a door. It was not made of horn and ivory. It was uncarved oak, black and massive, with an iron bolt worn thin with age. “This is the back door,” the mage said, unbolting it. “Medra’s Gate, they used to call it. I keep both doors.” He opened it. The brightness of the day dazzled Irian’s eyes. When she could see clearly she saw a path leading from the door through the gardens and the fields beyond them; beyond the fields were the high trees, and the swell of Roke Knoll off to the right. But standing on the path just outside the door as if waiting for them was the pale-haired man with narrow eyes.

  “Patterner,” said the Doorkeeper, not at all surprised.

  “Where do you send this lady?” said the Patterner in his strange speech.

  “Nowhere,” said the Doorkeeper. “I let her out as I let her in, at her desire.”

  “Will you come with me?” the Patterner said to Irian.

  She looked at him and at the Doorkeeper and said nothing.

  “I don’t live in this House. In any house,” the Patterner said. “I live there. The Grove.—Ah,” he said, turning suddenly. The big, whitehaired man, Kurremkarmerruk the Namer, was standing just down the path. He had not been standing there until the other mage said “Ah.” Irian stared from one to the other in blank bewilderment.

  “This is only a seeming of me, a presentment, a sending,” the old man said to her. “I don’t live here either. Miles off.” He gestured northward. “You might come there when you’re done with the Patterner here. I’d like to learn more about your name.” He nodded to the other two mages and was not there. A bumblebee buzzed heavily through the air where he had been.

  Irian looked down at the ground. After a long time she said, clearing her throat, not looking up, “Is it true I do harm being here?”

  “I don’t know,” said the Doorkeeper.

  “In the Grove is no harm,” said the Patterner. “Come on. There is an old house, a hut. Old, dirty. You don’t care, eh? Stay awhile. You can see.” And he set off down the path between the parsley and the bush-beans. She looked at the Doorkeeper; he smiled a little. She followed the pale-haired man.

  They walked a half mile or so. The knoll rose up full in the western sun on their right. Behind them the School sprawled grey and manyroofed on its lower hill. The grove of trees towered before them now. She saw oak and willow, chestnut and ash, and tall evergreens. From the dense, sun-shot darkness of the trees a stream ran out, greenbanked, with many brown trodden places where cattle and sheep went down to drink or to cross over. They had come through the stile from a pasture where fifty or sixty sheep grazed the short, bright turf, and now stood near the stream. “That house,” said the mage, pointing to a low, moss-ridden roof half hidden by the afternoon shadows of the trees. “Stay tonight. You will?”

  He asked her to stay, he did not tell her to. All she could do was nod.

  “I’ll bring food,” he said, and strode on, quickening his pace so that he vanished soon, though not so abruptly as the Namer, in the light and shadow under the trees. Irian watched till he was certainly gone and then made her way through high grass and weeds to the little house.

  It looked very old. It had been rebuilt and rebuilt again, but not for a long time. Nor had anyone lived in it for a long time, from the feel of it. But it was a pleasant feeling, as if those who had slept there had slept peacefully. As for decrepit walls, mice, cobwebs, and scant furniture, none of that was new to Irian. She found a bald broom and swept out a bit. She unrolled her blanket on the plank bed. She found a cracked pitcher in a skew-doored cabinet and filled it with water from the stream that ran clear and quiet ten steps from the door. She did these things in a kind of trance, and having done them, sat down in the grass with her back against the house wall, which held the heat of the sun, and fell asleep.

  When she woke, the Master Patterner was sitting nearby, and a basket was on the grass between them.

  “Hungry? Eat,” he said.

  “I’ll eat later, sir. Thank you,” said Irian.

  “I am hungry now,” said the mage. He took a hardboiled egg from the basket, cracked, shelled, and ate it.

  “They call this the Otter’s House,” he said. “Very old. As old as the Great House. Everything is old, here. We are old—the Masters.”

  “You’re not,” Irian said. She thought him between thirty and forty, though it was hard to tell; she kept thinking his hair was white, because it was not black.

  “But I came far. Miles can be years. I am Kargish, from Karego. You know?”

  “The Hoary Men!” said Irian, staring openly at him. All Daisy’s ballads of the Hoary Men who sailed out of the east to lay the land waste and spit innocent babes on their lances, and the story of how Erreth-Akbe lost the Ring of Peace, and the new songs and the King’s Tale about how Archmage Sparrowhawk had gone among the Hoary Men and come back with that ring—

  “Hoary?” said the Patterner.

  “Frosty. White,” she said, looking away, embarrassed.

  “Ah.” Presently he said, “The Master Summoner is not old.” And she got a sidelong look from those narrow, ice-colored eyes.

  She said nothing.

  “I think you feared him.”

  She nodded.

  When she said nothing, and some time had passed, he said, “In the shadow of these trees is no harm. Only truth.”

  “When he passed me,” she said in a low voice, “I saw a grave.”

  “Ah,” said the Patterner.

  He had made a little heap of bits of eggshell on the ground by his knee. He arranged the white fragments into a curve, then closed it into a circle. “Yes,” he said, studying his eggshells, then, scratching up the earth a bit, he neatly and delicately buried them. He dusted off his hands. Again his glance flicked to Irian and away.

  “You have been a witch, Irian?”

  “No.”

  “But you have some knowledge.”

  “No. I don’t. Rose wouldn’t teach me. She said she didn’t dare. Because I had power but she didn’t know what it was.”

  “Your Rose is a wise flower,” said the mage, unsmiling.

  “But I know I have—I have something to do, to be. That’s why I wanted to come here. To find out. On the Isle of the Wise.”

  She was getting used to his strange face now and was able to read it. She thought that he looked sad. His way of speaking was harsh, quick, dry, peaceable. “The men of the Isle are not always wise, eh?” he said. “Maybe the Doorkeeper.” He looked at her now, not glancing but squarely, his eyes catching and holding hers. “But there. In the wood. Under the trees. There is the old wisdom. Never old. I can’t teach you. I can take you into the Grove.” After a minute he stood up. “Yes?”

  “Yes,” she said uncertainly.

  “The house is all right?”

  “Yes—”

  “Tomorrow,” he said, and strode off.

  So for a half month or more of the hot days of summer, Irian slept in the Otter’s House, which was a peaceful one, and ate what the Master Patterner brought her in his basket—eggs, cheese, greens, fruit, smoked mutton—and went with him every afternoon into the grove of high trees, where the paths seemed never to be quite where she remembered them, and often led on far beyond what seemed the confines of the wood. They walked there in silence, and spoke seldom when they rested. The mage was a quiet man. Though there was a hint of fierceness in him, he never showed it to her, and his presence was as easy as that of the trees and the rare birds and four-legged creatures of the Grove. As he had said, he did not try to teach her. When she asked about the Grove, he told her that, with Roke Knoll, it had stood since Segoy made the islands of the world, and that all magic was in the roots of the trees, and that they were mingled with the roots of all the forests that were or might yet be. “And sometimes the G
rove is in this place,” he said, “and sometimes in another. But it is always.”

  She had never seen where he lived. He slept wherever he chose to, she imagined, in these warm summer nights. She asked him where the food they ate came from; what the School did not supply for itself, he said, the farmers round about provided, considering themselves well recompensed by the protections the Masters set on their flocks and fields and orchards. That made sense to her. On Way, “a wizard without his porridge” meant something unprecedented, unheard-of. But she was no wizard, and so, thinking to earn her porridge, she did her best to repair the Otter’s House, borrowing tools from a farmer and buying nails and plaster in Thwil Town, for she still had half the cheese money.

  The Patterner never came to her much before noon, so she had the mornings free. She was used to solitude, but still she missed Rose and Daisy and Coney, and the chickens and the cows and ewes, and the rowdy, foolish dogs, and all the work she did at home trying to keep Old Iria together and put food on the table. So she worked away unhurriedly every morning till she saw the mage come out from the trees with his sunlight-colored hair shining in the sunlight.

  Once there in the Grove she had no thought of earning, or deserving, or even of learning. To be there was enough, was all.

  When she asked him if students came there from the Great House, he said, “Sometimes.” Another time he said, “My words are nothing. Hear the leaves.” That was all he said that could be called teaching. As she walked, she listened to the leaves when the wind rustled them or stormed in the crowns of the trees; she watched the shadows play, and thought about the roots of the trees down in the darkness of the earth. She was utterly content to be there. Yet always, without discontent or urgency, she felt that she was waiting. And that silent expectancy was deepest and clearest when she came out of the shelter of the woods and saw the open sky.

  Once, when they had gone a long way and the trees, dark evergreens she did not know, stood very high about them, she heard a call—a horn blowing, a cry?—remote, on the very edge of hearing. She stood still, listening toward the west. The mage walked on, turning only when he realized she had stopped.

  “I heard—” she said, and could not say what she had heard.

  He listened. They walked on at last through a silence enlarged and deepened by that far call.

  She never went into the Grove without him, and it was many days before he left her alone within it. But one hot afternoon when they came to a glade among a stand of oaks, he said, “I will come back here, eh?” and walked off with his quick, silent step, lost almost at once in the dappled, shifting depths of the forest.

  She had no wish to explore for herself. The peacefulness of the place called for stillness, watching, listening; and she knew how tricky the paths were, and that the Grove was, as the Patterner put it, “bigger inside than outside.” She sat down in a patch of sun-dappled shade and watched the shadows of the leaves play across the ground. The oakmast was deep; though she had never seen wild swine in the wood, she saw their tracks here. For a moment she caught the scent of a fox. Her thoughts moved as quietly and easily as the breeze moved in the warm light.

  Often her mind here seemed empty of thought, full of the forest itself, but this day memories came to her, vivid. She thought about Ivory, thinking she would never see him again, wondering if he had found a ship to take him back to Havnor. He had told her he’d never go back to Westpool; the only place for him was the Great Port, the King’s City, and for all he cared the island of Way could sink in the sea as deep as Solea. But she thought with love of the roads and fields of Way. She thought of Old Iria village, the marshy spring under Iria Hill, the old house on it. She thought about Daisy singing ballads in the kitchen, winter evenings, beating out the time with her wooden clogs; and old Coney in the vineyards with his razor-edge knife, showing her how to prune the vine “right down to the life in it”; and Rose, her Etaudis, whispering charms to ease the pain in a child’s broken arm. I have known wise people, she thought. Her mind flinched away from remembering her father, but the motion of the leaves and shadows drew it on. She saw him drunk, shouting. She felt his prying, tremulous hands on her. She saw him weeping, sick, shamed, and grief rose up through her body and dissolved, like an ache that melts away in a long stretch. He was less to her than the mother she had not known.

  She stretched, feeling the ease of her body in the warmth, and her mind drifted back to Ivory. She had had no one in her life to desire. When the young wizard first came riding by so slim and arrogant, she wished she could want him; but she didn’t and couldn’t, and so she had thought him spell-protected. Rose had explained to her how wizards’ spells worked “so that it never enters your head nor theirs, see, because it would take from their power, they say.” But Ivory, poor Ivory, had been all too unprotected. If anybody was under a spell of chastity it must have been herself, for charming and handsome as he was she had never been able to feel a thing for him but liking, and her only lust was to learn what he could teach her.

  She considered herself, sitting in the deep silence of the Grove. No bird sang; the breeze was down; the leaves hung still. Am I ensorcelled? Am I a sterile thing, not whole, not a woman? she asked herself, looking at her strong bare arms, the slight, soft swell of her breasts in the shadow under the throat of her shirt.

  She looked up and saw the Hoary Man come out of a dark aisle of great oaks and come toward her across the glade.

  He stopped in front of her. She felt herself blush, her face and throat burning, dizzy, her ears ringing. She sought words, anything to say, to turn his attention away from her, and could find nothing at all. He sat down near her. She looked down, as if studying the skeleton of a last year’s leaf by her hand.

  What do I want? she asked herself, and the answer came not in words but throughout her whole body and soul: the fire, a greater fire than that, the flight, the flight burning—

  She came back into herself, into the still air under the trees. The Hoary Man sat near her, his face bowed down, and she thought how slight and light he looked, how quiet and sorrowful. There was nothing to fear. There was no harm.

  He looked over at her.

  “Irian,” he said, “do you hear the leaves?”

  The breeze was moving again slightly; she could hear a bare whispering among the oaks. “A little,” she said.

  “Do you hear the words?”

  “No.”

  She asked nothing and he said no more. Presently he got up, and she followed him to the path that always led them, sooner or later, out of the wood to the clearing by the Thwilburn and the Otter’s House. When they came there, it was late afternoon. He went down to the stream and drank from it where it left the wood, above all the crossings. She did the same. Then sitting in the cool, long grass of the bank, he began to speak.

  “My people, the Kargs, they worship gods. Twin gods, brothers. And the king there is also a god. But before that and after are the streams. Caves, stones, hills. Trees. The earth. The darkness of the earth.”

  “The Old Powers,” Irian said.

  He nodded. “There, women know the Old Powers. Here too, witches. And the knowledge is bad—eh?”

  When he added that little questioning “eh?” or “neh?” to the end of what had seemed a statement it always took her by surprise. She said nothing.

  “Dark is bad,” said the Patterner. “Eh?”

  Irian drew a deep breath and looked at him eye to eye as they sat there. “‘Only in dark the light,’” she said.

  “Ah,” he said. He looked away so that she could not see his expression.

  “I should go,” she said. “I can walk in the Grove, but not live there. It isn’t my—my place. And the Master Chanter said I did harm by being here.”

  “We all do harm by being,” said the Patterner.

  He did as he often did, made a little design out of whatever lay to hand: on the bit of sand on the riverbank in front of him he set a leafsteam, a grassblade, and several pebbles. He st
udied them and rearranged them. “Now I must speak of harm,” he said.

  After a long pause he went on. “You know that a dragon brought back our Lord Sparrowhawk, with the young king, from the shores of death. Then the dragon carried Sparrowhawk away to his home, for his power was gone, he was not a mage. So presently the Masters of Roke met to choose a new Archmage, here, in the Grove, as always. But not as always.

  “Before the dragon came, the Summoner too had returned from death, where he can go, where his art can take him. He had seen our lord and the young king there, in that country across the wall of stones. He said they would not come back. He said Lord Sparrowhawk had told him to come back to us, to life, to bear that word. So we grieved for our lord.

  “But then came the dragon, Kalessin, bearing him living.

  “The Summoner was among us when we stood on Roke Knoll and saw the Archmage kneel to King Lebannen. Then, as the dragon bore our friend away, the Summoner fell down.

  “He lay as if dead, cold, his heart not beating, yet he breathed. The Herbal used all his art, but could not rouse him. ‘He is dead,’ he said. ‘The breath will not leave him, but he is dead.’ So we mourned him. Then, because there was dismay among us, and all my patterns spoke of change and danger, we met to choose a new Warden of Roke, an Archmage to guide us. And in our council we set the young king in the Summoner’s place. To us it seemed right that he should sit among us. Only the Changer spoke against it at first, and then agreed.

  “But we met, we sat, and we could not choose. We said this and said that, but no name was spoken. And then I …” He paused awhile. “There came on me what my people call the eduevanu, the other breath. Words came to me and I spoke them. I said, Hama Gondun!—And Kurremkarmerruk told them this in Hardic: ‘A woman on Gont.’ But when I came back to my own wits, I could not tell them what that meant. And so we parted with no Archmage chosen.

  “The king left soon after, and the Master Windkey went with him. Before the king was to be crowned, they went to Gont and sought our lord, to find what that meant, ‘a woman on Gont.’ Eh? But they did not see him, only my countrywoman Tenar of the Ring. She said she was not the woman they sought. And they found no one, nothing. So Lebannen judged it to be a prophecy yet to be fulfilled. And in Havnor he set his crown on his own head.