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Tenar came back to the kitchen and sat down again across the hearth from Ged.
“How she’s changing!” she said. “I can’t keep up with her. I’m old to be bringing up a child. And she . . . She obeys me, but only because she wants to.”
“It’s the only justification for obedience,” Ged observed. “But when she does take it into her head to disobey me, what can I do? There’s a wildness in her. Sometimes she’s my Therru, sometimes she’s something else, out of reach. I asked Ivy if she’d think of training her. Beech suggested it. Ivy said no. ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘I’m afraid of her!’ she said. . . . But you’re not afraid of her. Nor she of you. You and Lebannen are the only men she’s let touch her. I let that-that Handy-I can’t talk about it. Oh, I’m tired! I don’t understand anything
Ged laid a knot on the fire to burn small and slow, and they both watched the leap and flutter of the flames.
“I’d like you to stay here, Ged,” she said. “If you like.” He did not answer at once. She said, “Maybe you’re going on to Havnor-”
“No, no. I have nowhere to go. I was looking for work.”
“Well, there’s plenty to be done here. Clearbrook won’t admit it, but his arthritis has about finished him for anything but gardening. I’ve been wanting help ever since I came back. I could have told the old blockhead what I thought of him for sending you off up the mountain that way, but it’s no use. He wouldn’t listen.”
“It was a good thing for me,” Ged said. “It was the time I needed.”
“You were herding sheep?”
“Goats. Right up at the top of the grazings. A boy they had took sick, and Serry took me on, sent me up there the first day. They keep ‘em up there high and late, so the underwool grows thick. This last month I had the mountain pretty much to myself. Serry sent me up that coat and some supplies, and said to keep the herd up as high as I could as long as I could. So I did. It was fine, up there.”
“Lonely,” she said.
He nodded, half smiling.
“You always have been alone.”
“Yes, I have.”
She said nothing. He looked at her.
“I’d like to work here,” he said.
“That’s settled, then," ‘ she said. After a while she added, “For the winter, anyway."
The frost was harder tonight. Their world was perfectly silent except for the whisper of the fire. The silence was like a presence between them. She lifted her head and looked at him.
“Well,” she said, “which bed shall I sleep in, Ged? The child’s, or yours?”
He drew breath. He spoke low. “Mine, if you will.”
“I will.”
The silence held him. She could see the effort he made to break from it. “If you’ll be patient with me,” he said.
“I have been patient with you for twenty-five years,” she said. She looked at him and began to laugh. “Come-come on, my dear-Better late than never! I’m only an old woman. . . . Nothing is wasted, nothing is ever wasted. You taught me that.” She stood up, and he stood; she put out her hands, and he took them. They embraced, and their embrace became close. They held each other so fiercely, so dearly, that they stopped knowing anything but each other. It did not matter which bed they meant to sleep in. They lay that night on the hearthstones, and there she taught Ged the mystery that the wisest man could not teach him.
He built up the fire once, and fetched the good weaving off the bench. Tenar made no objection this time. Her cloak and his sheepskin coat were their blankets.
They woke again at dawn. A faint silvery light lay on the dark, half-leafless branches of the oaks outside the window. Tenar stretched out full length to feel his warmth against her. After a while she murmured, “He was lying here. Hake. Right under us." . . .
Ged made a small noise of protest.
“Now you’re a man indeed,” she said. “Stuck another man full of holes, first, and lain with a woman, second. That’s the proper order, I suppose.
“Hush,” he murmured, turning to her, laying his head on her shoulder. “Don’t.”
“I will, Ged. Poor man! There’s no mercy in me, only justice. I wasn’t trained to mercy. Love is the only grace I have. Oh, Ged, don’t fear me! You were a man when I first saw you! It’s not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.”
They lay in warmth and sweet silence.
“Tell me something.”
He murmured assent sleepily.
“How did you happen to hear what they were saying? Hake and Handy and the other one. How did you happen to be just there, just then?”
He raised himself up on one elbow so he could look at her face. His own face was so open and vulnerable in its ease and fulfillment and tenderness that she had to reach up and touch his mouth, there where she had kissed it first, months ago, which led to his taking her into his arms again, and the conversation was not continued in words.
There were formalities to be got through. The chief of them was to tell Clearbrook and the other tenants of Oak Farm that she had replaced “the old master” with a hired hand. She did so promptly and bluntly. They could not do anything about it, nor did it entail any threat to them. A widow’s tenure of her husband’s property was contingent on there being no male heir or claimant. Flint’s son the seaman was the heir, and Flint’s widow was merely holding the farm for him. If she died, it would go to Clearbrook to hold for the heir; if Spark never claimed it, it would go to a distant cousin of Flint’s in Kahedanan. The two couples who did not own the land but held a life interest in the work and profit of the farming, as was common on Gont, could not be dislodged by any man the widow took up with, even if she married him; but she feared they might resent her lack of fidelity to Flint, whom they had after all known longer than she had. To her relief they made no objections at all. “Hawk” had won their approval with one jab of a pitchfork. Besides, it was only good sense in a woman to want a man in the house to protect her. If she took him into her bed, well, the appetites of widows were proverbial. And, after all, she was a foreigner.
The attitude of the villagers was much the same. A bit of whispering and sniggering, but little more. It seemed that being respectable was easier than Moss thought; or perhaps it was that used goods had little value.
She felt as soiled and diminished by their acceptance as she would have by their disapproval. Only Lark freed her from shame, by making no judgments at all, and using no words-man, woman, widow, foreigner-in place of what she saw, but simply looking, watching her and Hawk with interest, curiosity, envy, and generosity.
Because Lark did not see Hawk through the words herdsman, hired hand, widow’s man, but looked at him himself, she saw a good deal that puzzled her. His dignity and simplicity were not greater than that of other men she had known, but were a little different in quality; there was a size to him, she thought, not height or girth, certainly, but soul and mind. She said to Ivy, “That man hasn’t lived among goats all his life. He knows more about the world than he does about a farm.”
“I’d say he’s a sorcerer who’s been accursed or lost his power some way,” the witch said. “It happens.”
“Ah,” said Lark.
But the word “archmage” was too great and grand a word to bring from far-off pomps and palaces and fit to the dark-eyed, grey-haired man at Oak Farm, and she never did that. If she had, she could not have been as comfortable with him as she was. Even the idea of his having been a sorcerer made her a bit uneasy, the word getting in the way of the man, until she actually saw him again. He was up in one of the old apple trees in the orchard pruning out deadwood, and he called out a greeting to her as she came to the farm. His name fit him well, she thought, perched up there, and she waved at him, and smiled as she went on.
Tenar had not forgotten the question she had asked him on the hearthstones under the sheepskin coat. She asked it again, a few days or months later-time went along very sweet and easy for them in the stone house, on the winterbound farm. “You never told me," ‘ she said, “how you came to hear them talking on the road.”
“I told you, I think. I’d gone aside, hidden, when I heard
“Why?”
“I was alone, and knew there were some gangs around.”
“Yes, of course— But then just as they passed, Hake was talking about Therru?”
“He said ‘Oak Farm,’ I think.”
“It’s all perfectly possible. It just seems so convenient.” Knowing she did not disbelieve him, he lay back and waited .
“It’s the kind of thing that happens to a wizard,” she said.
“And others.”
“Maybe.”
“My dear, you’re not trying to . . . reinstate me?”
“No. No, not at all. Would that be a sensible thing to do? If you were a wizard, would you be here?”
They were in the big oak-framed bed, well covered with sheepskins and feather-coverlets, for the room had no fireplace and the night was one of hard frost on fallen snow.
“But what I want to know is this. Is there something besides what you call power-that comes before it, maybe? Or something that power is just one way of using? Like this. Ogion said of you once that before you’d had any learning or training as a wizard at all, you were a mage. Mage-born, he said. So I imagined that, to have power, one must first have room for the power. An emptiness to fill. And the greater the emptiness the more power can fill it. But if the power never was got, or was taken away, or was given away-still that would be there.”
“That emptiness,” he said.
“Emptiness is one word for it. Maybe not the right word.”
“Potentiality?” he said, and shook his head. “What is able to be . . . to become.”
“I think you were there on that road, just there just then, because of that-because that is what happens to you. You didn’t make it happen. You didn’t cause it. It wasn’t because of your ‘power.’ It happened to you. Because of your emptiness.”
After a while he said, “This isn’t far from what I was taught as a boy on Roke: that true magery lies in doing only what you must do. But this would go further. Not to do, but to be done to. . . .
“I don’t think that’s quite it. It’s more like what true doing rises from. Didn’t you come and save my life-didn’t you run a fork into Hake? That was ‘doing,’ all right, doing what you must do. . . ."
He pondered again, and finally asked her, “Is this a wisdom taught you when you were Priestess of the Tombs?"
“No.” She stretched a little, gazing into the darkness. “Arha was taught that to be powerful she must sacrifice. Sacrifice herself and others. A bargain: give, and so get. And I cannot say that that’s untrue. But my soul can’t live in that narrow place-this for that, tooth for tooth, death for life. . . . There is a freedom beyond that. Beyond payment, retribution, redemption-beyond all the bargains and the balances, there is freedom.”
“The doorway between them," he said softly.
That night Tenar dreamed. She dreamed that she saw the doorway of the Creation of E`a, It was a little window of gnarled, clouded, heavy glass, set low in the west wall of an old house above the sea. The window was locked, It had been bolted shut. She wanted to open it, but there was a word or a key, something she had forgotten, a word, a key, a name, without which she could not open it. She sought for it in rooms of stone that grew smaller and darker till she found that Ged was holding her, trying to wake her and comfort her, saying, “It’s all right, dear love, it will be all right!" ‘ ‘
“I can’t get free!” she cried, clinging to him.
He soothed her, stroking her hair; they lay back together, and he whispered, “Look.”
The old moon had risen. Its white brilliance on the fallen snow was reflected into the room, for cold as it was Tenar would not have the shutters closed. All the air above them was luminous. They lay in shadow, but it seemed as if the ceiling were a mere veil between them and endless, silver, tranquil depths of light.
It was a winter of heavy snows on Gont, and a long winter. The harvest had been a good one. There was food for the animals and people, and not much to do but eat it and stay warm.
Therru knew the Creation of E`a all through. She spoke the Winter Carol and the Deed of the Young King on the day of Sunreturn. She knew how to handle a piecrust, how to spin on the wheel, and how to make soap. She knew the name and use of every plant that showed above the snow, and a good deal of other lore, herbal and verbal, that Ged had stowed away in his head from his short apprenticeship with Ogion and his long years at the School on Roke. But he had not taken down the Runes or the Lore-books from the mantelpiece, nor had he taught the child any word of the Language of the Making.
He and Tenar spoke of this. She told him how she had taught Therru the one word, tolk, and then had stopped, for it had not seemed right, though she did not know why.
“I thought perhaps it was because I’d never truly spoken that language, never used it in magery. I thought perhaps she should learn it from a true speaker of it." ‘ ‘
“No man is that.”
“No woman is half that.”
“I meant that only the dragons speak it as their native tongue.”
“Do they learn it?”
Struck by the question, he was slow to answer, evidently calling to mind all he had been told and knew of the dragons. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “What do we know about them? Would they teach as we do, mother to child, elder to younger? Or are they like the animals, teaching some things, but born knowing most of what they know? Even that we don’t know. But my guess would be that the dragon and the speech of the dragon are one. One being.”
“And they speak no other tongue.”
He nodded. “They do not learn," ‘ he said. “They are.
Therru came through the kitchen. One of her tasks was to keep the kindling box filled, and she was busy at it, bundled up in a cut-down lambskin jacket and cap, trotting back and forth from the woodhouse to the kitchen. She dumped her load in the box by the chimney corner and set off again.
“What is it she sings?” Ged asked.
“Therru?"
“When she’s alone.”
“But she never sings. She can’t.”
“Her way of singing. ‘Farther west than west.' " . . .
“Ah!” said Tenar. “That story! Did Ogion never tell you about the Woman of Kemay?”
“No,” he said, “tell me.
She told him the tale as she spun, and the purr and hush of the wheel went along with the words of the story. At the end of it she said, “When the Master Windkey told me how he’d come looking for ‘a woman on Gont,’ I thought of her. But she’d be dead by now, no doubt. And how would a fisherwoman who was a dragon be an archmage, anyhow!”
“Well, the Patterner didn’t say that a woman on Gont was to be archmage,’ ‘ said Ged. He was mending a badly torn pair of breeches, sitting up in the window ledge to get what light the dark day afforded. It was a half-month after Sunreturn and the coldest time yet.
“What did he say, then?”
“'A woman on Gont. ‘ So you told me."
“But they were asking who was to be the next archmage."
“And got no answer to that question.”
“Infinite are the arguments of mages," said Tenar rather drily.
Ged bit the thread off and rolled the unused length around two fingers.
“I learned to quibble a bit, on Roke,” he admitted. “But this isn’t a quibble, I think. ‘A woman on Gont’ can’t become archmage. No woman can be archmage. She’d unmake what she became in becoming it. The Mages of Roke are men-their power is the power of men, their knowledge is the knowledge of men. Both manhood and magery are built on one rock: power belongs to men. If women had power, what would men be but women who can’t bear children? And what would women be but men who can?”
“Hah!” went Tenar; and presently, with some cunning, she said, “Haven’t there been queens? Weren’t they women of power?”
“A queen’s only a she-king," ‘ said Ged.
She snorted.
“I mean, men give her power. They let her use their power. But it isn’t hers, is it? It isn’t because she’s a woman that she’s powerful, but despite it."
She nodded. She stretched, sitting back from the spinning wheel. “What is a woman’s power, then?” she asked.
“I don’t think we know.”
“When has a woman power because she’s a woman? With her children, I suppose. For a while." . . . ‘ ‘
“In her house, maybe.”
She looked around the kitchen. “But the doors are shut,” she said, “the doors are locked.”
“Because you’re valuable.”
“Oh, yes. We’re precious. So long as we’re powerless. . . . I remember when I first learned that! Kossil threatened me-me, the One Priestess of the Tombs. And I realized that I was helpless. I had the honor; but she had the power, from the God-king, the man. Oh, it made me angry! And frightened me. . . . Lark and I talked about this once. She said, ‘Why are men afraid of women?’
“If your strength is only the other’s weakness, you live in fear,” Ged said.
“Yes; but women seem to fear their own strength, to be afraid of themselves.”
“Are they ever taught to trust themselves?" ‘ Ged asked, and as he spoke Therru came in on her work again. His eyes and Tenar’s met.
“No,” she said. “Trust is not what we’re taught.” She watched the child stack the wood in the box. “If power were trust,” she said. “I like that word. If it weren’t all these arrangements-one above the other-kings and masters and mages and owners— It all seems so unnecessary. Real power, real freedom, would lie in trust, not force.”
“As children trust their parents,” he said.
They were both silent.
“As things are,” he said, “even trust corrupts. The men on Roke trust themselves and one another. Their power is pure, nothing taints its purity, and so they take that purity for wisdom. They cannot imagine doing wrong.
She looked up at him. He had never spoken about Roke thus before, from wholly outside it, free of it.
“Maybe they need some women there to point that possibility out to them,” she said, and he laughed.
She restarted the wheel. “I still don’t see why, if there can be she-kings, there can’t be she-archmages."
Therru was listening.
“Hot snow, dry water," said Ged, a Gontish saying. “Kings are given power by other men. A mage’s power is his own—himself. ‘ ‘
“And it’s a male power. Because we don’t even know what a woman’s power is. All right. I see. But all the same, why can’t they find an archmage-a he-archmage?”
Ged studied the tattered inseam of the breeches. “Well,” he said, “if the Patterner wasn’t answering their question, he was answering one they didn’t ask. Maybe what they have to do is ask it."
“Is it a riddle?” Therru asked.
“Yes,” said Tenar. “But we don’t know the riddle. We only know the answer to it. The answer is: A woman on Gont.”
“There’s lots of them,” Therru said after pondering a bit. Apparently satisfied by this, she went out for the next load of kindling.
Ged watched her go. “All changed," he said. “All . . . Sometimes I think, Tenar — I wonder if Lebannen’s kingship is only a beginning. A doorway . . . And he the doorkeeper. Not to pass through.”
“He seems so young," ‘ Tenar said, tenderly.
“Young as Morred was when he met the Black Ships. Young as I was when I . . . " He stopped, looking out the window at the grey, frozen fields through the leafless trees.
“Or you, Tenar, in that dark place . . . What’s youth or age?
"I don’t know. Sometimes I feel as if I’d been alive for a thousand years; sometimes I feel my life’s been like a flying swallow seen through the chink of a wall. I have died and been reborn, both in the dry land and here under the sun, more than once. And the Making tells us that we have all returned and return forever to the source, and that the source is ceaseless. Only in dying, life. . . . I thought about that when I was up with the goats on the mountain, and a day went on forever and yet no time passed before the evening came, and morning again. . . . I learned goat wisdom. So I thought, What is this grief of mine for? What man am I mourning? Ged the archmage? Why is Hawk the goatherd sick with grief and shame for him? What have I done that I should be ashamed?”
“Nothing,” Tenar said. “Nothing, ever!”
“Oh, yes,” said Ged. “All the greatness of men is founded on shame, made out of it. So Hawk the goatherd wept for Ged the archmage. And looked after the goats, also, as well as a boy his age could be expected to do. . . "
After a while Tenar smiled. She said, a little shyly, “Moss said you were about fifteen."
“That would be about right. Ogion named me in the autumn; and the next summer I was off to Roke. . . . Who was that boy? An emptiness . . . A freedom.”
“Who is Therru, Ged?”
He did not answer until she thought he was not going to answer, and then he said, “So made-what freedom is there for her?”
“We are our freedom, then?”
“I think so.”
“You seemed, in your power, as free as man can be. But at what cost? What made you free? And I . . . I was made, molded like clay, by the will of the women serving the Old Powers, or serving the men who made all services and ways and places, I no longer know which. Then I went free, with you, for a moment, and with Ogion, But it was not my freedom. Only it gave me choice; and I chose. I chose to mold myself like clay to the use of a farm and a farmer and our children. I made myself a vessel, I know its shape. But not the clay. Life danced me. I know the dances. But I don’t know who the dancer is.”
“And she,” Ged said after a long silence, “if she should ever dance. . ." ‘
“They will fear her,” Tenar whispered. Then the child came back in, and the conversation turned to the bread dough raising in the box by the stove. They talked so, quietly and long, passing from one thing to another and round and back, for half the brief day, often, spinning and sewing their lives together with words, the years and the deeds and the thoughts they had not shared. Then again they would be silent, working and thinking and dreaming, and the silent child was with them.
So the winter passed, till lambing season was on them, and the work got very heavy for a while as the days lengthened and grew bright. Then the swallows came from the isles under the sun, from the South Reach, where the star Gobardon shines in the constellation of Ending; but all the swallows’ talk with one another was about beginning.
The Master
Like the swallows, the ships began to fly among the islands with the return of spring, In the villages there was talk, secondhand from Valmouth, of the king’s ships harrying the harriers, driving well-established pirates to ruin, confiscating their ships and fortunes. Lord Heno himself sent out his three finest, fastest ships, captained by the sorcererseawolf Tally, who was feared by every merchantman from Solea to the Andrades; his fleet was to ambush the king’s ships off Oranea and destroy them. But it was one of the king’s ships that came into Valmouth Bay with Tally in chains aboard, and under orders to escort Lord Heno to Gont Port to be tried for piracy and murder. Heno barricaded himself in his stone manor house in the hills behind Valmouth, but neglected to light a fire, it being warm spring weather; so five or six of the king’s young soldiers dropped in on him by way of the chimney, and the whole troop walked him chained through the streets of Valmouth and carried him off to justice.
When he heard this, Ged said with love and pride, “All that a king can do, he will do well.”
Handy and Shag had been taken promptly off on the north road to Gont Port, and when his wounds healed enough Hake was carried there by ship, to be tried for murder at the king’s courts of law. The news of their sentence to the galleys caused much satisfaction and self-congratulation in Middle Valley, to which Tenar, and Therru beside her, listened in silence.
There came other ships bearing other men sent by the king, not all of them popular among the townsfolk and villagers of rude Gont: royal sheriffs, sent to report on the system of bailiffs and officers of the peace and to hear complaints and grievances from the common people; tax reporters and tax collectors; noble visitors to the little lords of Gont, inquiring politely as to their fealty to the Crown in Havnor; and wizardly men, who went here and there, seem-ing to do little and say less.
“I think they’re hunting for a new archmage after all,” said Tenar.
“Or looking for abuses of the art,” Ged said-’ "sorcery gone wrong."
Tenar was going to say, “Then they should look in the manor house of Re Albi!” but her tongue stumbled on the words. What was I going to say? she thought. Did I ever tell Ged about— I’m getting forgetful. What was it I was going to tell Ged? Oh, that we’d better mend the lower pasture gate before the cows get out.
There was always something, a dozen things, in the front of her mind, business of the farm. “Never one thing, for you,” Ogion had said. Even with Ged to help her, all her thoughts and days went into the business of the farm. He shared the housework with her as Flint had not; but Flint had been a farmer, and Ged was not. He learned fast, but there was a lot to learn. They worked. There was little time for talk, now. At the day’s end there was supper together, and bed together, and sleep, and wake at dawn and back to work, and so round and so round, like the wheel of a water mill, rising full and emptying, the days like the bright water falling.
“Hello, mother,” said the thin fellow at the farmyard gate. She thought it was Lark’s eldest and said, “What brings you by, lad?” Then she looked back at him across the clucking chickens and the parading geese.
“Spark!” she cried, and scattered the poultry, running to him.
“Well, well,” he said. “Don’t carry on."
He let her embrace him and stroke his face. He came in and sat down in the kitchen, at the table.
“Have you eaten? Did you see Apple?”
“I could eat.”
She rummaged in the well-stocked larder. “What ship are you on? Still the Gull?”
“No.” A pause. “My ship’s broke up."
She turned in horror-”Wrecked?”
“No.” He smiled without humor. “Crew’s broke up. King’s men took her over.”
“But-it wasn’t a pirate ship-”
“No.”
“Then why-?”
“Said the captain was running some goods they wanted,” he said, unwillingly. He was as thin as ever, but looked older, tanned dark, lank-haired, with a long, narrow face like Flint’s but still narrower, harder.
“Where’s dad?” he said.
Tenar stood still.
“You didn’t stop by your sister’s.”
“No,” he said, indifferent.
“Flint died three years ago,” she said. “Of a stroke. In the fields-on the path up from the lambing pens. Clear-brook found him. It was three years ago.
There was a silence. He did not know what to say, or had nothing to say.
She put food before him. He began to eat so hungrily that she set out more at once.
“When did you eat last?”
He shrugged, and ate.
She sat down across the table from him. Late-spring sunshine poured in the low window across the table and shone on the brass fender in the hearth.
He pushed the plate away at last.
“So who’s been running the farm?” he asked.
“What’s that to you, son?” she asked him, gently but drily.
“It’s mine,” he said, in a rather similar tone.
After a minute Tenar got up and cleared his dishes away. “So it is.”
“You can stay, o’ course,” he said, very awkwardly, perhaps attempting to joke; but he was not a joking man. “Old Clearbrook still around?”
“They’re all still here. And a man called Hawk, and a child I keep. Here. In the house. You’ll have to sleep in the loft-room. I’ll put the ladder up.” She faced him again. “Are you here for a stay, then?”
“I might be.”
So Flint had answered her questions for twenty years, denying her right to ask them by never answering yes or no, maintaining a freedom based on her ignorance; a poor, narrow sort of freedom, she thought.
“Poor lad,” she said, “your crew broken up, and your father dead, and strangers in your house, all in a day. You’ll want some time to get used to it all. I’m sorry, my son. But I’m glad you’re here. I thought of you often, on the seas, in the storms, in winter.”
He said nothing. He had nothing to offer, and was unable to accept. He pushed back his chair and was about to get up when Therru came in. He stared, half-risen, "What happened to her?” he said.
“She was burned. Here’s my son I told you about, Therru, the sailor, Spark. Therru’s your sister, Spark.”
“Sister!”
“By adoption.”
“Sister!” he said again, and looked around the kitchen as if for witness, and stared at his mother.
She stared back.
He went out, going wide of Therru, who stood motionless. He slammed the door behind him.
Tenar started to speak to Therru and could not.
“Don’t cry,” said the child who did not cry, coming to her, touching her arm. “Did he hurt you?”
“Oh Therru! Let me hold you!” She sat down at the table with Therru on her lap and in her arms, though the girl was getting big to be held, and had never learned how to do it easily. But Tenar held her and wept, and Therru bent her scarred face down against Tenar’s, till it was wet with tears.
Ged and Spark came in at dusk from opposite ends of the farm. Spark had evidently talked with Clearbrook and thought the situation over, and Ged was evidently trying to size it up. Very little was said at supper, and that cautiously. Spark made no complaint about not having his own room back, but ran up the ladder to the storage-loft like the sailor he was, and was apparently satisfied with the bed his mother had made him there, for he did not come back down till late in the morning.
He wanted breakfast then, and expected it to be served to him. His father had always been waited on by mother, wife, daughter. Was he less a man than his father? Was she to prove it to him? She served him his meal and cleared it away for him, and went back to the orchard where she and Therru and Shandy were burning off a plague of tent caterpillars that threatened to destroy the new-set fruit.
Spark went off to join Clearbrook and Tiff. And he stayed mostly with them, as the days passed. The heavy work requiring muscle and the skilled work with crops and sheep was done by Ged, Shandy, and Tenar, while the two old men who had been there all their lives, his father’s men, took him about and told him how they managed it all, and truly believed they were managing it all, and shared their belief with him.
Tenar became miserable in the house. Only outdoors, at the farmwork, did she have relief from the anger, the shame that Spark’s presence brought her.
“My turn,” she said to Ged, bitterly, in the starlit darkness of their room. “My turn to lose what I was proudest of.”
“What have you lost?”
“My son. The son I did not bring up to be a man. I failed. I failed him.” She bit her lip, gazing dry-eyed into the dark.
Ged did not try to argue with her or persuade her out of her grief. He asked, “Do you think he’ll stay?”
“Yes. He’s afraid to try and go back to sea. He didn’t tell me the truth, or not all the truth, about his ship. He was second mate. I suppose he was involved in carrying stolen goods. Secondhand piracy. I don’t care. Gontish sailors are all half-pirate. But he lies about it. He lies. He is jealous of you. A dishonest, envious man.”
“Frightened, I think,” Ged said. “Not wicked. And it is his farm.”
“Then he can have it! And may it be as generous to him as-”
“No, dear love,” Ged said, catching her with both voice and hands-”don’t speak-don’t say the evil word!” He was so urgent, so passionately earnest, that her anger turned right about into the love that was its source, and she cried, “I wouldn’t curse him, or this place! I didn’t mean it! Only it makes me so sorry, so ashamed! I am so sorry, Ged!”
“No, no, no. My dear, I don’t care what the boy thinks of me. But he’s very hard on you."
“And Therru. He treats her like— He said, he said to me, ‘What did she do, to look like that?’ What did she do-!”
Ged stroked her hair, as he often did, with a light, slow, repeated caress that would make them both sleepy with loving pleasure.
“I could go off goat-herding again,” he said at last. “It would make things easier for you here. Except for the work." “
“I’d rather come with you."
He stroked her hair, and seemed to be considering. “I suppose we might,” he said. “There were a couple of families up there sheep-herding, above Lissu. But then comes the winter... .
“Maybe some farmer would take us on. I know the work-and sheep-and you know goats-and you’re quick at everything-”
“Useful with pitchforks,” he murmured, and got a little sob of a laugh from her.
The next morning Spark was up early to breakfast with them, for he was going fishing with old Tiff. He got up from the table, saying with a better grace than usual, “I’ll bring a mess of fish for supper.
Tenar had made resolves overnight. She said, “Wait; you can clear off the table, Spark. Set the dishes in the sink and put water on ‘em. They’ll be washed with the supper things.”
He stared a moment and said, “That’s women’s work,” putting on his cap.
“It’s anybody’s work who eats in this kitchen.”
“Not mine,” he said flatly, and went out.
She followed him. She stood on the doorstep. “Hawk’s, but not yours?” she demanded.
He merely nodded, going on across the yard.
“It’s too late,” she said, turning back to the kitchen. “Failed, failed.” She could feel the lines in her face, stiff, beside the mouth, between the eyes. “You can water a stone,” she said, “but it won’t grow.”
“You have to start when they’re young and tender,” Ged said. “Like me.”
This time she couldn’t laugh.
They came back to the house from the day’s work and saw a man talking with Spark at the front gate.
“That’s the fellow from Re Albi, isn’t it?” said Ged, whose eyes were very good.
“Come along, Therru,” Tenar said, for the child had stopped short. “What fellow?” She was rather nearsighted, and squinted across the yard. “Oh, it’s what’s his name, the sheep-dealer. Townsend. What’s he back here for, the carrion crow!”
Her mood all day had been fierce, and Ged and Therru wisely said nothing.
She went to the men at the gate.
“Did you come about the ewe lambs, Townsend? You’re a year late; but there’s some of this year’s yet in the fold.”
“So the master’s been telling me,” said Townsend.
“Has he,” said Tenar.
Spark’s face went darker than ever at her tone.
“I won’t interrupt you and the master, then,” said she, and was turning away when Townsend spoke: “I’ve got a message for you, Goha.“
“Third time’s the charm.”
“The old witch, you know, old Moss, she’s in a bad way. She said, since I was coming down to Middle Valley, she said, ‘Tell Mistress Goha I’d like to see her before I die, if there’s a chance of her coming." “
Crow, carrion crow, Tenar thought, looking with hatred at the bearer of bad news.
“She’s ill?”
“Sick to death,” Townsend said, with a kind of smirk that might be intended for sympathy. “Took sick in the winter, and she’s failing fast, and so she said to tell you she wants bad to see you, before she dies.”
“Thank you for bringing the message,” Tenar said soberly, and turned to go to the house. Townsend went on with Spark to the sheepfolds.
As they prepared dinner, Tenar said to Ged and Therru, “I must go."
“Of course,” Ged said. “The three of us, if you like.”
“Would you?” For the first time that day her face lightened, the storm cloud lifted. “Oh,” she said, “that’s-that’s good-I didn’t want to ask, I thought maybe— Therru, would you like to go back to the little house, Ogion’s house, for a while?”
Therru stood still to think. “I could see my peach tree,” she said.
“Yes, and Heather-and Sippy-and Moss-poor Moss! Oh, I have longed, I have longed to go back up there, but it didn’t seem right, There was the farm to run-and all-”
It seemed to her that there was some other reason she had not gone back, had not let herself think of going back, had not even known till now that she yearned to go; but whatever the reason was it slipped away like a shadow, a word forgotten. “Has anyone looked after Moss, I wonder, did anyone send for a healer. She’s the only healer on the Oveffell, but there’s people down in Gont Port who could help her, surely. Oh, poor Moss! I want to go— It’s too late, but tomorrow, tomorrow early. And the master can make his own breakfast!”
“He’ll learn,” said Ged.
“No, he won’t. He’ll find some fool woman to do it for him. Ah!” She looked around the kitchen, her face bright and fierce. “I hate to leave her the twenty years I’ve scoured that table. I hope she appreciates it!”
Spark brought Townsend in for supper, but the sheep-dealer would not stay the night, though he was of course offered a bed in common hospitality. It would have been one of their beds, and Tenar did not like the thought. She was glad to see him go off to his hosts in the village in the blue twilight of the spring evening.
“We’ll be off to Re Albi first thing tomorrow, son,” she said to Spark. “Hawk and Therru and I.”
He looked a little frightened.
“Just go off like that?”
“So you went; so you came,” said his mother. “Now look here, Spark: this is your father’s money-box. There’s seven ivory pieces in it, and those credit counters from old Bridgeman, but he’ll never pay, he hasn’t got anything to pay with. These four Andradean pieces Flint got from selling sheepskins to the ship’s outfitter in Valmouth four years running, back when you were a boy. These three Haynorian ones are what Tholy paid us for the High Creek farm. I had your father buy that farm, and I helped him clear it and sell it. I’ll take those three pieces, for I’ve earned them. The rest, and the farm, is yours. You’re the master.”
The tall, thin young man stood there with his gaze on the money-box.
“Take it all. I don’t want it,” he said in a low voice.
“I don’t need it. But I thank you, my son. Keep the four pieces. When you marry, call them my gift to your wife.”
She put the box away in the place behind the big plate on the top shelf of the dresser, where Flint had always kept it. “Therru, get your things ready now, because we’ll go very early.”
“When are you coming back?” Spark asked, and the tone of his voice made Tenar think of the restless, frail child he had been. But she said only, “I don’t know, my dear. If you need me, I’ll come.
She busied herself getting out their travel shoes and packs. “Spark,” she said, “you can do something for me.”
He had sat down in the hearthseat, looking uncertain and morose. “What?”
“Go down to Valmouth, soon, and see your sister. And tell her that I’ve gone back to the Overfell. Tell her, if she wants me, just send word.”
He nodded. He watched Ged, who had already packed his few belongings with the neatness and dispatch of one who had traveled much, and was now putting up the dishes to leave the kitchen in good order. That done, he sat down opposite Spark to run a new cord through the eyelets of his pack to close it at the top.
“There’s a knot they use for that,” Spark said. “Sailor’s knot.”
Ged silently handed the pack across the hearth, and watched as Spark silently demonstrated the knot.
“Slips up, see,” he said, and Ged nodded.
They left the farm in the dark and cold of the morning. Sunlight comes late to the western side of Gont Mountain, and only walking kept them warm till at last the sun got round the great mass of the south peak and shone on their backs.
Therru was twice the walker she had been the summer before, but it was still a two days’ journey for them. Along in the afternoon, Tenar asked, “Shall we try to get on to Oak Springs today? There’s a sort of inn. We had a cup of milk there, remember, Therru?”
Ged was looking up the mountainside with a faraway expression. “There’s a place I know
“Fine,” said Tenar.
A little before they came to the high corner of the road from which Gont Port could first be seen, Ged turned aside from the road into the forest that covered the steep slopes above it. The westering sun sent slanting red-gold rays into the darkness between the trunks and under the branches. They climbed half a mile or so, on no path Tenar could see, and came out on a little step or shelf of the mountainside, a meadow sheltered from the wind by the cliffs behind it and the trees about it. From there one could see the heights of’the mountain to the north, and between the tops of great firs there was one clear view of the western sea. It was entirely silent there except when the wind breathed in the firs. One mountain lark sang long and sweet, away up in the sunlight, before dropping to her nest in the untrodden grass.
The three of them ate their bread and cheese. They watched darkness rise up the mountain from the sea. They made their bed of cloaks and slept, Therru next to Tenar next to Ged, In the deep night Tenar woke. An owl was calling nearby, a sweet repeated note like a bell, and far off up the mountain its mate replied like the ghost of a bell. Tenar thought, “I’ll watch the stars set in the sea,” but she fell asleep again at once in peace of heart.
She woke in the grey morning to see Ged sitting up beside her, his cloak pulled round his shoulders, looking out through the gap westward. His dark face was quite still, full of silence, as she had seen it once long ago on the beach of Atuan. His eyes were not downcast, as then; he looked into the illimitable west. Looking with him she saw the day coming, the glory of rose and gold reflected clear across the sky.
He turned to her, and she said to him, “I have loved you since I first saw you."
“Life-giver,” he said and leaned forward, kissing her breast and mouth. She held him a moment. They got up, and waked Therru, and went on their way; but as they entered the trees Tenar looked back once at the little meadow as if charging it to keep faith with her happiness there.
The first day of the journey their goal had been journeying. This day they would come to Re Albi. So Tenar’s mind was much on Aunty Moss, wondering what had befallen her and whether she was indeed dying. But as the day and the way went on her mind would not hold to the thought of Moss, or any thought. She was tired. She did not like walking this way again to death. They passed Oak Springs, and went down into the gorge, and started up again. By the last long uphill stretch to the Overfell, her legs were hard to lift, and her mind was stupid and confused, fastening upon one word or image until it became meaningless-the dish-cupboard in Ogion’s house, or the words bone dolphin, which came into her head from seeing Therru’s grass bag of toys, and repeated themselves endlessly.
“How she’s changing!” she said. “I can’t keep up with her. I’m old to be bringing up a child. And she . . . She obeys me, but only because she wants to.”
“It’s the only justification for obedience,” Ged observed. “But when she does take it into her head to disobey me, what can I do? There’s a wildness in her. Sometimes she’s my Therru, sometimes she’s something else, out of reach. I asked Ivy if she’d think of training her. Beech suggested it. Ivy said no. ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘I’m afraid of her!’ she said. . . . But you’re not afraid of her. Nor she of you. You and Lebannen are the only men she’s let touch her. I let that-that Handy-I can’t talk about it. Oh, I’m tired! I don’t understand anything
Ged laid a knot on the fire to burn small and slow, and they both watched the leap and flutter of the flames.
“I’d like you to stay here, Ged,” she said. “If you like.” He did not answer at once. She said, “Maybe you’re going on to Havnor-”
“No, no. I have nowhere to go. I was looking for work.”
“Well, there’s plenty to be done here. Clearbrook won’t admit it, but his arthritis has about finished him for anything but gardening. I’ve been wanting help ever since I came back. I could have told the old blockhead what I thought of him for sending you off up the mountain that way, but it’s no use. He wouldn’t listen.”
“It was a good thing for me,” Ged said. “It was the time I needed.”
“You were herding sheep?”
“Goats. Right up at the top of the grazings. A boy they had took sick, and Serry took me on, sent me up there the first day. They keep ‘em up there high and late, so the underwool grows thick. This last month I had the mountain pretty much to myself. Serry sent me up that coat and some supplies, and said to keep the herd up as high as I could as long as I could. So I did. It was fine, up there.”
“Lonely,” she said.
He nodded, half smiling.
“You always have been alone.”
“Yes, I have.”
She said nothing. He looked at her.
“I’d like to work here,” he said.
“That’s settled, then," ‘ she said. After a while she added, “For the winter, anyway."
The frost was harder tonight. Their world was perfectly silent except for the whisper of the fire. The silence was like a presence between them. She lifted her head and looked at him.
“Well,” she said, “which bed shall I sleep in, Ged? The child’s, or yours?”
He drew breath. He spoke low. “Mine, if you will.”
“I will.”
The silence held him. She could see the effort he made to break from it. “If you’ll be patient with me,” he said.
“I have been patient with you for twenty-five years,” she said. She looked at him and began to laugh. “Come-come on, my dear-Better late than never! I’m only an old woman. . . . Nothing is wasted, nothing is ever wasted. You taught me that.” She stood up, and he stood; she put out her hands, and he took them. They embraced, and their embrace became close. They held each other so fiercely, so dearly, that they stopped knowing anything but each other. It did not matter which bed they meant to sleep in. They lay that night on the hearthstones, and there she taught Ged the mystery that the wisest man could not teach him.
He built up the fire once, and fetched the good weaving off the bench. Tenar made no objection this time. Her cloak and his sheepskin coat were their blankets.
They woke again at dawn. A faint silvery light lay on the dark, half-leafless branches of the oaks outside the window. Tenar stretched out full length to feel his warmth against her. After a while she murmured, “He was lying here. Hake. Right under us." . . .
Ged made a small noise of protest.
“Now you’re a man indeed,” she said. “Stuck another man full of holes, first, and lain with a woman, second. That’s the proper order, I suppose.
“Hush,” he murmured, turning to her, laying his head on her shoulder. “Don’t.”
“I will, Ged. Poor man! There’s no mercy in me, only justice. I wasn’t trained to mercy. Love is the only grace I have. Oh, Ged, don’t fear me! You were a man when I first saw you! It’s not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.”
They lay in warmth and sweet silence.
“Tell me something.”
He murmured assent sleepily.
“How did you happen to hear what they were saying? Hake and Handy and the other one. How did you happen to be just there, just then?”
He raised himself up on one elbow so he could look at her face. His own face was so open and vulnerable in its ease and fulfillment and tenderness that she had to reach up and touch his mouth, there where she had kissed it first, months ago, which led to his taking her into his arms again, and the conversation was not continued in words.
There were formalities to be got through. The chief of them was to tell Clearbrook and the other tenants of Oak Farm that she had replaced “the old master” with a hired hand. She did so promptly and bluntly. They could not do anything about it, nor did it entail any threat to them. A widow’s tenure of her husband’s property was contingent on there being no male heir or claimant. Flint’s son the seaman was the heir, and Flint’s widow was merely holding the farm for him. If she died, it would go to Clearbrook to hold for the heir; if Spark never claimed it, it would go to a distant cousin of Flint’s in Kahedanan. The two couples who did not own the land but held a life interest in the work and profit of the farming, as was common on Gont, could not be dislodged by any man the widow took up with, even if she married him; but she feared they might resent her lack of fidelity to Flint, whom they had after all known longer than she had. To her relief they made no objections at all. “Hawk” had won their approval with one jab of a pitchfork. Besides, it was only good sense in a woman to want a man in the house to protect her. If she took him into her bed, well, the appetites of widows were proverbial. And, after all, she was a foreigner.
The attitude of the villagers was much the same. A bit of whispering and sniggering, but little more. It seemed that being respectable was easier than Moss thought; or perhaps it was that used goods had little value.
She felt as soiled and diminished by their acceptance as she would have by their disapproval. Only Lark freed her from shame, by making no judgments at all, and using no words-man, woman, widow, foreigner-in place of what she saw, but simply looking, watching her and Hawk with interest, curiosity, envy, and generosity.
Because Lark did not see Hawk through the words herdsman, hired hand, widow’s man, but looked at him himself, she saw a good deal that puzzled her. His dignity and simplicity were not greater than that of other men she had known, but were a little different in quality; there was a size to him, she thought, not height or girth, certainly, but soul and mind. She said to Ivy, “That man hasn’t lived among goats all his life. He knows more about the world than he does about a farm.”
“I’d say he’s a sorcerer who’s been accursed or lost his power some way,” the witch said. “It happens.”
“Ah,” said Lark.
But the word “archmage” was too great and grand a word to bring from far-off pomps and palaces and fit to the dark-eyed, grey-haired man at Oak Farm, and she never did that. If she had, she could not have been as comfortable with him as she was. Even the idea of his having been a sorcerer made her a bit uneasy, the word getting in the way of the man, until she actually saw him again. He was up in one of the old apple trees in the orchard pruning out deadwood, and he called out a greeting to her as she came to the farm. His name fit him well, she thought, perched up there, and she waved at him, and smiled as she went on.
Tenar had not forgotten the question she had asked him on the hearthstones under the sheepskin coat. She asked it again, a few days or months later-time went along very sweet and easy for them in the stone house, on the winterbound farm. “You never told me," ‘ she said, “how you came to hear them talking on the road.”
“I told you, I think. I’d gone aside, hidden, when I heard
“Why?”
“I was alone, and knew there were some gangs around.”
“Yes, of course— But then just as they passed, Hake was talking about Therru?”
“He said ‘Oak Farm,’ I think.”
“It’s all perfectly possible. It just seems so convenient.” Knowing she did not disbelieve him, he lay back and waited .
“It’s the kind of thing that happens to a wizard,” she said.
“And others.”
“Maybe.”
“My dear, you’re not trying to . . . reinstate me?”
“No. No, not at all. Would that be a sensible thing to do? If you were a wizard, would you be here?”
They were in the big oak-framed bed, well covered with sheepskins and feather-coverlets, for the room had no fireplace and the night was one of hard frost on fallen snow.
“But what I want to know is this. Is there something besides what you call power-that comes before it, maybe? Or something that power is just one way of using? Like this. Ogion said of you once that before you’d had any learning or training as a wizard at all, you were a mage. Mage-born, he said. So I imagined that, to have power, one must first have room for the power. An emptiness to fill. And the greater the emptiness the more power can fill it. But if the power never was got, or was taken away, or was given away-still that would be there.”
“That emptiness,” he said.
“Emptiness is one word for it. Maybe not the right word.”
“Potentiality?” he said, and shook his head. “What is able to be . . . to become.”
“I think you were there on that road, just there just then, because of that-because that is what happens to you. You didn’t make it happen. You didn’t cause it. It wasn’t because of your ‘power.’ It happened to you. Because of your emptiness.”
After a while he said, “This isn’t far from what I was taught as a boy on Roke: that true magery lies in doing only what you must do. But this would go further. Not to do, but to be done to. . . .
“I don’t think that’s quite it. It’s more like what true doing rises from. Didn’t you come and save my life-didn’t you run a fork into Hake? That was ‘doing,’ all right, doing what you must do. . . ."
He pondered again, and finally asked her, “Is this a wisdom taught you when you were Priestess of the Tombs?"
“No.” She stretched a little, gazing into the darkness. “Arha was taught that to be powerful she must sacrifice. Sacrifice herself and others. A bargain: give, and so get. And I cannot say that that’s untrue. But my soul can’t live in that narrow place-this for that, tooth for tooth, death for life. . . . There is a freedom beyond that. Beyond payment, retribution, redemption-beyond all the bargains and the balances, there is freedom.”
“The doorway between them," he said softly.
That night Tenar dreamed. She dreamed that she saw the doorway of the Creation of E`a, It was a little window of gnarled, clouded, heavy glass, set low in the west wall of an old house above the sea. The window was locked, It had been bolted shut. She wanted to open it, but there was a word or a key, something she had forgotten, a word, a key, a name, without which she could not open it. She sought for it in rooms of stone that grew smaller and darker till she found that Ged was holding her, trying to wake her and comfort her, saying, “It’s all right, dear love, it will be all right!" ‘ ‘
“I can’t get free!” she cried, clinging to him.
He soothed her, stroking her hair; they lay back together, and he whispered, “Look.”
The old moon had risen. Its white brilliance on the fallen snow was reflected into the room, for cold as it was Tenar would not have the shutters closed. All the air above them was luminous. They lay in shadow, but it seemed as if the ceiling were a mere veil between them and endless, silver, tranquil depths of light.
It was a winter of heavy snows on Gont, and a long winter. The harvest had been a good one. There was food for the animals and people, and not much to do but eat it and stay warm.
Therru knew the Creation of E`a all through. She spoke the Winter Carol and the Deed of the Young King on the day of Sunreturn. She knew how to handle a piecrust, how to spin on the wheel, and how to make soap. She knew the name and use of every plant that showed above the snow, and a good deal of other lore, herbal and verbal, that Ged had stowed away in his head from his short apprenticeship with Ogion and his long years at the School on Roke. But he had not taken down the Runes or the Lore-books from the mantelpiece, nor had he taught the child any word of the Language of the Making.
He and Tenar spoke of this. She told him how she had taught Therru the one word, tolk, and then had stopped, for it had not seemed right, though she did not know why.
“I thought perhaps it was because I’d never truly spoken that language, never used it in magery. I thought perhaps she should learn it from a true speaker of it." ‘ ‘
“No man is that.”
“No woman is half that.”
“I meant that only the dragons speak it as their native tongue.”
“Do they learn it?”
Struck by the question, he was slow to answer, evidently calling to mind all he had been told and knew of the dragons. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “What do we know about them? Would they teach as we do, mother to child, elder to younger? Or are they like the animals, teaching some things, but born knowing most of what they know? Even that we don’t know. But my guess would be that the dragon and the speech of the dragon are one. One being.”
“And they speak no other tongue.”
He nodded. “They do not learn," ‘ he said. “They are.
Therru came through the kitchen. One of her tasks was to keep the kindling box filled, and she was busy at it, bundled up in a cut-down lambskin jacket and cap, trotting back and forth from the woodhouse to the kitchen. She dumped her load in the box by the chimney corner and set off again.
“What is it she sings?” Ged asked.
“Therru?"
“When she’s alone.”
“But she never sings. She can’t.”
“Her way of singing. ‘Farther west than west.' " . . .
“Ah!” said Tenar. “That story! Did Ogion never tell you about the Woman of Kemay?”
“No,” he said, “tell me.
She told him the tale as she spun, and the purr and hush of the wheel went along with the words of the story. At the end of it she said, “When the Master Windkey told me how he’d come looking for ‘a woman on Gont,’ I thought of her. But she’d be dead by now, no doubt. And how would a fisherwoman who was a dragon be an archmage, anyhow!”
“Well, the Patterner didn’t say that a woman on Gont was to be archmage,’ ‘ said Ged. He was mending a badly torn pair of breeches, sitting up in the window ledge to get what light the dark day afforded. It was a half-month after Sunreturn and the coldest time yet.
“What did he say, then?”
“'A woman on Gont. ‘ So you told me."
“But they were asking who was to be the next archmage."
“And got no answer to that question.”
“Infinite are the arguments of mages," said Tenar rather drily.
Ged bit the thread off and rolled the unused length around two fingers.
“I learned to quibble a bit, on Roke,” he admitted. “But this isn’t a quibble, I think. ‘A woman on Gont’ can’t become archmage. No woman can be archmage. She’d unmake what she became in becoming it. The Mages of Roke are men-their power is the power of men, their knowledge is the knowledge of men. Both manhood and magery are built on one rock: power belongs to men. If women had power, what would men be but women who can’t bear children? And what would women be but men who can?”
“Hah!” went Tenar; and presently, with some cunning, she said, “Haven’t there been queens? Weren’t they women of power?”
“A queen’s only a she-king," ‘ said Ged.
She snorted.
“I mean, men give her power. They let her use their power. But it isn’t hers, is it? It isn’t because she’s a woman that she’s powerful, but despite it."
She nodded. She stretched, sitting back from the spinning wheel. “What is a woman’s power, then?” she asked.
“I don’t think we know.”
“When has a woman power because she’s a woman? With her children, I suppose. For a while." . . . ‘ ‘
“In her house, maybe.”
She looked around the kitchen. “But the doors are shut,” she said, “the doors are locked.”
“Because you’re valuable.”
“Oh, yes. We’re precious. So long as we’re powerless. . . . I remember when I first learned that! Kossil threatened me-me, the One Priestess of the Tombs. And I realized that I was helpless. I had the honor; but she had the power, from the God-king, the man. Oh, it made me angry! And frightened me. . . . Lark and I talked about this once. She said, ‘Why are men afraid of women?’
“If your strength is only the other’s weakness, you live in fear,” Ged said.
“Yes; but women seem to fear their own strength, to be afraid of themselves.”
“Are they ever taught to trust themselves?" ‘ Ged asked, and as he spoke Therru came in on her work again. His eyes and Tenar’s met.
“No,” she said. “Trust is not what we’re taught.” She watched the child stack the wood in the box. “If power were trust,” she said. “I like that word. If it weren’t all these arrangements-one above the other-kings and masters and mages and owners— It all seems so unnecessary. Real power, real freedom, would lie in trust, not force.”
“As children trust their parents,” he said.
They were both silent.
“As things are,” he said, “even trust corrupts. The men on Roke trust themselves and one another. Their power is pure, nothing taints its purity, and so they take that purity for wisdom. They cannot imagine doing wrong.
She looked up at him. He had never spoken about Roke thus before, from wholly outside it, free of it.
“Maybe they need some women there to point that possibility out to them,” she said, and he laughed.
She restarted the wheel. “I still don’t see why, if there can be she-kings, there can’t be she-archmages."
Therru was listening.
“Hot snow, dry water," said Ged, a Gontish saying. “Kings are given power by other men. A mage’s power is his own—himself. ‘ ‘
“And it’s a male power. Because we don’t even know what a woman’s power is. All right. I see. But all the same, why can’t they find an archmage-a he-archmage?”
Ged studied the tattered inseam of the breeches. “Well,” he said, “if the Patterner wasn’t answering their question, he was answering one they didn’t ask. Maybe what they have to do is ask it."
“Is it a riddle?” Therru asked.
“Yes,” said Tenar. “But we don’t know the riddle. We only know the answer to it. The answer is: A woman on Gont.”
“There’s lots of them,” Therru said after pondering a bit. Apparently satisfied by this, she went out for the next load of kindling.
Ged watched her go. “All changed," he said. “All . . . Sometimes I think, Tenar — I wonder if Lebannen’s kingship is only a beginning. A doorway . . . And he the doorkeeper. Not to pass through.”
“He seems so young," ‘ Tenar said, tenderly.
“Young as Morred was when he met the Black Ships. Young as I was when I . . . " He stopped, looking out the window at the grey, frozen fields through the leafless trees.
“Or you, Tenar, in that dark place . . . What’s youth or age?
"I don’t know. Sometimes I feel as if I’d been alive for a thousand years; sometimes I feel my life’s been like a flying swallow seen through the chink of a wall. I have died and been reborn, both in the dry land and here under the sun, more than once. And the Making tells us that we have all returned and return forever to the source, and that the source is ceaseless. Only in dying, life. . . . I thought about that when I was up with the goats on the mountain, and a day went on forever and yet no time passed before the evening came, and morning again. . . . I learned goat wisdom. So I thought, What is this grief of mine for? What man am I mourning? Ged the archmage? Why is Hawk the goatherd sick with grief and shame for him? What have I done that I should be ashamed?”
“Nothing,” Tenar said. “Nothing, ever!”
“Oh, yes,” said Ged. “All the greatness of men is founded on shame, made out of it. So Hawk the goatherd wept for Ged the archmage. And looked after the goats, also, as well as a boy his age could be expected to do. . . "
After a while Tenar smiled. She said, a little shyly, “Moss said you were about fifteen."
“That would be about right. Ogion named me in the autumn; and the next summer I was off to Roke. . . . Who was that boy? An emptiness . . . A freedom.”
“Who is Therru, Ged?”
He did not answer until she thought he was not going to answer, and then he said, “So made-what freedom is there for her?”
“We are our freedom, then?”
“I think so.”
“You seemed, in your power, as free as man can be. But at what cost? What made you free? And I . . . I was made, molded like clay, by the will of the women serving the Old Powers, or serving the men who made all services and ways and places, I no longer know which. Then I went free, with you, for a moment, and with Ogion, But it was not my freedom. Only it gave me choice; and I chose. I chose to mold myself like clay to the use of a farm and a farmer and our children. I made myself a vessel, I know its shape. But not the clay. Life danced me. I know the dances. But I don’t know who the dancer is.”
“And she,” Ged said after a long silence, “if she should ever dance. . ." ‘
“They will fear her,” Tenar whispered. Then the child came back in, and the conversation turned to the bread dough raising in the box by the stove. They talked so, quietly and long, passing from one thing to another and round and back, for half the brief day, often, spinning and sewing their lives together with words, the years and the deeds and the thoughts they had not shared. Then again they would be silent, working and thinking and dreaming, and the silent child was with them.
So the winter passed, till lambing season was on them, and the work got very heavy for a while as the days lengthened and grew bright. Then the swallows came from the isles under the sun, from the South Reach, where the star Gobardon shines in the constellation of Ending; but all the swallows’ talk with one another was about beginning.
The Master
Like the swallows, the ships began to fly among the islands with the return of spring, In the villages there was talk, secondhand from Valmouth, of the king’s ships harrying the harriers, driving well-established pirates to ruin, confiscating their ships and fortunes. Lord Heno himself sent out his three finest, fastest ships, captained by the sorcererseawolf Tally, who was feared by every merchantman from Solea to the Andrades; his fleet was to ambush the king’s ships off Oranea and destroy them. But it was one of the king’s ships that came into Valmouth Bay with Tally in chains aboard, and under orders to escort Lord Heno to Gont Port to be tried for piracy and murder. Heno barricaded himself in his stone manor house in the hills behind Valmouth, but neglected to light a fire, it being warm spring weather; so five or six of the king’s young soldiers dropped in on him by way of the chimney, and the whole troop walked him chained through the streets of Valmouth and carried him off to justice.
When he heard this, Ged said with love and pride, “All that a king can do, he will do well.”
Handy and Shag had been taken promptly off on the north road to Gont Port, and when his wounds healed enough Hake was carried there by ship, to be tried for murder at the king’s courts of law. The news of their sentence to the galleys caused much satisfaction and self-congratulation in Middle Valley, to which Tenar, and Therru beside her, listened in silence.
There came other ships bearing other men sent by the king, not all of them popular among the townsfolk and villagers of rude Gont: royal sheriffs, sent to report on the system of bailiffs and officers of the peace and to hear complaints and grievances from the common people; tax reporters and tax collectors; noble visitors to the little lords of Gont, inquiring politely as to their fealty to the Crown in Havnor; and wizardly men, who went here and there, seem-ing to do little and say less.
“I think they’re hunting for a new archmage after all,” said Tenar.
“Or looking for abuses of the art,” Ged said-’ "sorcery gone wrong."
Tenar was going to say, “Then they should look in the manor house of Re Albi!” but her tongue stumbled on the words. What was I going to say? she thought. Did I ever tell Ged about— I’m getting forgetful. What was it I was going to tell Ged? Oh, that we’d better mend the lower pasture gate before the cows get out.
There was always something, a dozen things, in the front of her mind, business of the farm. “Never one thing, for you,” Ogion had said. Even with Ged to help her, all her thoughts and days went into the business of the farm. He shared the housework with her as Flint had not; but Flint had been a farmer, and Ged was not. He learned fast, but there was a lot to learn. They worked. There was little time for talk, now. At the day’s end there was supper together, and bed together, and sleep, and wake at dawn and back to work, and so round and so round, like the wheel of a water mill, rising full and emptying, the days like the bright water falling.
“Hello, mother,” said the thin fellow at the farmyard gate. She thought it was Lark’s eldest and said, “What brings you by, lad?” Then she looked back at him across the clucking chickens and the parading geese.
“Spark!” she cried, and scattered the poultry, running to him.
“Well, well,” he said. “Don’t carry on."
He let her embrace him and stroke his face. He came in and sat down in the kitchen, at the table.
“Have you eaten? Did you see Apple?”
“I could eat.”
She rummaged in the well-stocked larder. “What ship are you on? Still the Gull?”
“No.” A pause. “My ship’s broke up."
She turned in horror-”Wrecked?”
“No.” He smiled without humor. “Crew’s broke up. King’s men took her over.”
“But-it wasn’t a pirate ship-”
“No.”
“Then why-?”
“Said the captain was running some goods they wanted,” he said, unwillingly. He was as thin as ever, but looked older, tanned dark, lank-haired, with a long, narrow face like Flint’s but still narrower, harder.
“Where’s dad?” he said.
Tenar stood still.
“You didn’t stop by your sister’s.”
“No,” he said, indifferent.
“Flint died three years ago,” she said. “Of a stroke. In the fields-on the path up from the lambing pens. Clear-brook found him. It was three years ago.
There was a silence. He did not know what to say, or had nothing to say.
She put food before him. He began to eat so hungrily that she set out more at once.
“When did you eat last?”
He shrugged, and ate.
She sat down across the table from him. Late-spring sunshine poured in the low window across the table and shone on the brass fender in the hearth.
He pushed the plate away at last.
“So who’s been running the farm?” he asked.
“What’s that to you, son?” she asked him, gently but drily.
“It’s mine,” he said, in a rather similar tone.
After a minute Tenar got up and cleared his dishes away. “So it is.”
“You can stay, o’ course,” he said, very awkwardly, perhaps attempting to joke; but he was not a joking man. “Old Clearbrook still around?”
“They’re all still here. And a man called Hawk, and a child I keep. Here. In the house. You’ll have to sleep in the loft-room. I’ll put the ladder up.” She faced him again. “Are you here for a stay, then?”
“I might be.”
So Flint had answered her questions for twenty years, denying her right to ask them by never answering yes or no, maintaining a freedom based on her ignorance; a poor, narrow sort of freedom, she thought.
“Poor lad,” she said, “your crew broken up, and your father dead, and strangers in your house, all in a day. You’ll want some time to get used to it all. I’m sorry, my son. But I’m glad you’re here. I thought of you often, on the seas, in the storms, in winter.”
He said nothing. He had nothing to offer, and was unable to accept. He pushed back his chair and was about to get up when Therru came in. He stared, half-risen, "What happened to her?” he said.
“She was burned. Here’s my son I told you about, Therru, the sailor, Spark. Therru’s your sister, Spark.”
“Sister!”
“By adoption.”
“Sister!” he said again, and looked around the kitchen as if for witness, and stared at his mother.
She stared back.
He went out, going wide of Therru, who stood motionless. He slammed the door behind him.
Tenar started to speak to Therru and could not.
“Don’t cry,” said the child who did not cry, coming to her, touching her arm. “Did he hurt you?”
“Oh Therru! Let me hold you!” She sat down at the table with Therru on her lap and in her arms, though the girl was getting big to be held, and had never learned how to do it easily. But Tenar held her and wept, and Therru bent her scarred face down against Tenar’s, till it was wet with tears.
Ged and Spark came in at dusk from opposite ends of the farm. Spark had evidently talked with Clearbrook and thought the situation over, and Ged was evidently trying to size it up. Very little was said at supper, and that cautiously. Spark made no complaint about not having his own room back, but ran up the ladder to the storage-loft like the sailor he was, and was apparently satisfied with the bed his mother had made him there, for he did not come back down till late in the morning.
He wanted breakfast then, and expected it to be served to him. His father had always been waited on by mother, wife, daughter. Was he less a man than his father? Was she to prove it to him? She served him his meal and cleared it away for him, and went back to the orchard where she and Therru and Shandy were burning off a plague of tent caterpillars that threatened to destroy the new-set fruit.
Spark went off to join Clearbrook and Tiff. And he stayed mostly with them, as the days passed. The heavy work requiring muscle and the skilled work with crops and sheep was done by Ged, Shandy, and Tenar, while the two old men who had been there all their lives, his father’s men, took him about and told him how they managed it all, and truly believed they were managing it all, and shared their belief with him.
Tenar became miserable in the house. Only outdoors, at the farmwork, did she have relief from the anger, the shame that Spark’s presence brought her.
“My turn,” she said to Ged, bitterly, in the starlit darkness of their room. “My turn to lose what I was proudest of.”
“What have you lost?”
“My son. The son I did not bring up to be a man. I failed. I failed him.” She bit her lip, gazing dry-eyed into the dark.
Ged did not try to argue with her or persuade her out of her grief. He asked, “Do you think he’ll stay?”
“Yes. He’s afraid to try and go back to sea. He didn’t tell me the truth, or not all the truth, about his ship. He was second mate. I suppose he was involved in carrying stolen goods. Secondhand piracy. I don’t care. Gontish sailors are all half-pirate. But he lies about it. He lies. He is jealous of you. A dishonest, envious man.”
“Frightened, I think,” Ged said. “Not wicked. And it is his farm.”
“Then he can have it! And may it be as generous to him as-”
“No, dear love,” Ged said, catching her with both voice and hands-”don’t speak-don’t say the evil word!” He was so urgent, so passionately earnest, that her anger turned right about into the love that was its source, and she cried, “I wouldn’t curse him, or this place! I didn’t mean it! Only it makes me so sorry, so ashamed! I am so sorry, Ged!”
“No, no, no. My dear, I don’t care what the boy thinks of me. But he’s very hard on you."
“And Therru. He treats her like— He said, he said to me, ‘What did she do, to look like that?’ What did she do-!”
Ged stroked her hair, as he often did, with a light, slow, repeated caress that would make them both sleepy with loving pleasure.
“I could go off goat-herding again,” he said at last. “It would make things easier for you here. Except for the work." “
“I’d rather come with you."
He stroked her hair, and seemed to be considering. “I suppose we might,” he said. “There were a couple of families up there sheep-herding, above Lissu. But then comes the winter... .
“Maybe some farmer would take us on. I know the work-and sheep-and you know goats-and you’re quick at everything-”
“Useful with pitchforks,” he murmured, and got a little sob of a laugh from her.
The next morning Spark was up early to breakfast with them, for he was going fishing with old Tiff. He got up from the table, saying with a better grace than usual, “I’ll bring a mess of fish for supper.
Tenar had made resolves overnight. She said, “Wait; you can clear off the table, Spark. Set the dishes in the sink and put water on ‘em. They’ll be washed with the supper things.”
He stared a moment and said, “That’s women’s work,” putting on his cap.
“It’s anybody’s work who eats in this kitchen.”
“Not mine,” he said flatly, and went out.
She followed him. She stood on the doorstep. “Hawk’s, but not yours?” she demanded.
He merely nodded, going on across the yard.
“It’s too late,” she said, turning back to the kitchen. “Failed, failed.” She could feel the lines in her face, stiff, beside the mouth, between the eyes. “You can water a stone,” she said, “but it won’t grow.”
“You have to start when they’re young and tender,” Ged said. “Like me.”
This time she couldn’t laugh.
They came back to the house from the day’s work and saw a man talking with Spark at the front gate.
“That’s the fellow from Re Albi, isn’t it?” said Ged, whose eyes were very good.
“Come along, Therru,” Tenar said, for the child had stopped short. “What fellow?” She was rather nearsighted, and squinted across the yard. “Oh, it’s what’s his name, the sheep-dealer. Townsend. What’s he back here for, the carrion crow!”
Her mood all day had been fierce, and Ged and Therru wisely said nothing.
She went to the men at the gate.
“Did you come about the ewe lambs, Townsend? You’re a year late; but there’s some of this year’s yet in the fold.”
“So the master’s been telling me,” said Townsend.
“Has he,” said Tenar.
Spark’s face went darker than ever at her tone.
“I won’t interrupt you and the master, then,” said she, and was turning away when Townsend spoke: “I’ve got a message for you, Goha.“
“Third time’s the charm.”
“The old witch, you know, old Moss, she’s in a bad way. She said, since I was coming down to Middle Valley, she said, ‘Tell Mistress Goha I’d like to see her before I die, if there’s a chance of her coming." “
Crow, carrion crow, Tenar thought, looking with hatred at the bearer of bad news.
“She’s ill?”
“Sick to death,” Townsend said, with a kind of smirk that might be intended for sympathy. “Took sick in the winter, and she’s failing fast, and so she said to tell you she wants bad to see you, before she dies.”
“Thank you for bringing the message,” Tenar said soberly, and turned to go to the house. Townsend went on with Spark to the sheepfolds.
As they prepared dinner, Tenar said to Ged and Therru, “I must go."
“Of course,” Ged said. “The three of us, if you like.”
“Would you?” For the first time that day her face lightened, the storm cloud lifted. “Oh,” she said, “that’s-that’s good-I didn’t want to ask, I thought maybe— Therru, would you like to go back to the little house, Ogion’s house, for a while?”
Therru stood still to think. “I could see my peach tree,” she said.
“Yes, and Heather-and Sippy-and Moss-poor Moss! Oh, I have longed, I have longed to go back up there, but it didn’t seem right, There was the farm to run-and all-”
It seemed to her that there was some other reason she had not gone back, had not let herself think of going back, had not even known till now that she yearned to go; but whatever the reason was it slipped away like a shadow, a word forgotten. “Has anyone looked after Moss, I wonder, did anyone send for a healer. She’s the only healer on the Oveffell, but there’s people down in Gont Port who could help her, surely. Oh, poor Moss! I want to go— It’s too late, but tomorrow, tomorrow early. And the master can make his own breakfast!”
“He’ll learn,” said Ged.
“No, he won’t. He’ll find some fool woman to do it for him. Ah!” She looked around the kitchen, her face bright and fierce. “I hate to leave her the twenty years I’ve scoured that table. I hope she appreciates it!”
Spark brought Townsend in for supper, but the sheep-dealer would not stay the night, though he was of course offered a bed in common hospitality. It would have been one of their beds, and Tenar did not like the thought. She was glad to see him go off to his hosts in the village in the blue twilight of the spring evening.
“We’ll be off to Re Albi first thing tomorrow, son,” she said to Spark. “Hawk and Therru and I.”
He looked a little frightened.
“Just go off like that?”
“So you went; so you came,” said his mother. “Now look here, Spark: this is your father’s money-box. There’s seven ivory pieces in it, and those credit counters from old Bridgeman, but he’ll never pay, he hasn’t got anything to pay with. These four Andradean pieces Flint got from selling sheepskins to the ship’s outfitter in Valmouth four years running, back when you were a boy. These three Haynorian ones are what Tholy paid us for the High Creek farm. I had your father buy that farm, and I helped him clear it and sell it. I’ll take those three pieces, for I’ve earned them. The rest, and the farm, is yours. You’re the master.”
The tall, thin young man stood there with his gaze on the money-box.
“Take it all. I don’t want it,” he said in a low voice.
“I don’t need it. But I thank you, my son. Keep the four pieces. When you marry, call them my gift to your wife.”
She put the box away in the place behind the big plate on the top shelf of the dresser, where Flint had always kept it. “Therru, get your things ready now, because we’ll go very early.”
“When are you coming back?” Spark asked, and the tone of his voice made Tenar think of the restless, frail child he had been. But she said only, “I don’t know, my dear. If you need me, I’ll come.
She busied herself getting out their travel shoes and packs. “Spark,” she said, “you can do something for me.”
He had sat down in the hearthseat, looking uncertain and morose. “What?”
“Go down to Valmouth, soon, and see your sister. And tell her that I’ve gone back to the Overfell. Tell her, if she wants me, just send word.”
He nodded. He watched Ged, who had already packed his few belongings with the neatness and dispatch of one who had traveled much, and was now putting up the dishes to leave the kitchen in good order. That done, he sat down opposite Spark to run a new cord through the eyelets of his pack to close it at the top.
“There’s a knot they use for that,” Spark said. “Sailor’s knot.”
Ged silently handed the pack across the hearth, and watched as Spark silently demonstrated the knot.
“Slips up, see,” he said, and Ged nodded.
They left the farm in the dark and cold of the morning. Sunlight comes late to the western side of Gont Mountain, and only walking kept them warm till at last the sun got round the great mass of the south peak and shone on their backs.
Therru was twice the walker she had been the summer before, but it was still a two days’ journey for them. Along in the afternoon, Tenar asked, “Shall we try to get on to Oak Springs today? There’s a sort of inn. We had a cup of milk there, remember, Therru?”
Ged was looking up the mountainside with a faraway expression. “There’s a place I know
“Fine,” said Tenar.
A little before they came to the high corner of the road from which Gont Port could first be seen, Ged turned aside from the road into the forest that covered the steep slopes above it. The westering sun sent slanting red-gold rays into the darkness between the trunks and under the branches. They climbed half a mile or so, on no path Tenar could see, and came out on a little step or shelf of the mountainside, a meadow sheltered from the wind by the cliffs behind it and the trees about it. From there one could see the heights of’the mountain to the north, and between the tops of great firs there was one clear view of the western sea. It was entirely silent there except when the wind breathed in the firs. One mountain lark sang long and sweet, away up in the sunlight, before dropping to her nest in the untrodden grass.
The three of them ate their bread and cheese. They watched darkness rise up the mountain from the sea. They made their bed of cloaks and slept, Therru next to Tenar next to Ged, In the deep night Tenar woke. An owl was calling nearby, a sweet repeated note like a bell, and far off up the mountain its mate replied like the ghost of a bell. Tenar thought, “I’ll watch the stars set in the sea,” but she fell asleep again at once in peace of heart.
She woke in the grey morning to see Ged sitting up beside her, his cloak pulled round his shoulders, looking out through the gap westward. His dark face was quite still, full of silence, as she had seen it once long ago on the beach of Atuan. His eyes were not downcast, as then; he looked into the illimitable west. Looking with him she saw the day coming, the glory of rose and gold reflected clear across the sky.
He turned to her, and she said to him, “I have loved you since I first saw you."
“Life-giver,” he said and leaned forward, kissing her breast and mouth. She held him a moment. They got up, and waked Therru, and went on their way; but as they entered the trees Tenar looked back once at the little meadow as if charging it to keep faith with her happiness there.
The first day of the journey their goal had been journeying. This day they would come to Re Albi. So Tenar’s mind was much on Aunty Moss, wondering what had befallen her and whether she was indeed dying. But as the day and the way went on her mind would not hold to the thought of Moss, or any thought. She was tired. She did not like walking this way again to death. They passed Oak Springs, and went down into the gorge, and started up again. By the last long uphill stretch to the Overfell, her legs were hard to lift, and her mind was stupid and confused, fastening upon one word or image until it became meaningless-the dish-cupboard in Ogion’s house, or the words bone dolphin, which came into her head from seeing Therru’s grass bag of toys, and repeated themselves endlessly.