URSULA K. Le GUIN
TEHANU
The Last Book of Earthsea
Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.
—The Creation of Ea
A Bad Thing
After Farmer Flint of the Middle Valley died, his widow stayed on at the farmhouse. Her son had gone to sea and her daughter had married a merchant of Valmouth, so she lived alone at Oak Farm. People said she had been some kind of great person in the foreign land she came from, and indeed the mage Ogion used to stop by Oak Farm to see her; but that didn’t count for much, since Ogion visited all sorts of nobodies.
She had a foreign name, but Flint had called her Goha, which is what they call a little white web-spinning spider on Gont. That name fit well enough, she being white-skinned and small and a good spinner of goat’s-wool and sheep-fleece. So now she was Flint’s widow, Goha, mistress of a flock of sheep and the land to pasture them, four fields, an orchard of pears, two tenants’ cottages, the old stone farmhouse under the oaks, and the family graveyard over the hill where Flint lay, earth in his earth.
“I’ve generally lived near tombstones,” she said to her daughter.
“Oh, mother, come live in town with us!” said Apple, but the widow would not leave her solitude.
“Maybe later, when there are babies and you’ll need a hand,” she said, looking with pleasure at her grey-eyed daughter. “But not now. You don’t need me, And I like it here.”
When Apple had gone back to her young husband, the widow closed the door and stood on the stone-flagged floor of the kitchen of the farmhouse. It was dusk, but she did not light the lamp, thinking of her own husband lighting the lamp: the hands, the spark, the intent, dark face in the catching glow. The house was silent.
“I used to live in a silent house, alone,” she thought. “I will do so again.” She lighted the lamp.
In a late afternoon of the first hot weather, the widow’s old friend Lark came out from the village, hurrying along the dusty lane. “Goha,” she said, seeing her weeding in the bean patch, “Goha, it’s a bad thing. It’s a very bad thing. Can you come?”
“Yes,” the widow said. “What would the bad thing be?” Lark caught her breath. She was a heavy, plain, middle-aged woman, whose name did not fit her body any more. But once she had been a slight and pretty girl, and she had befriended Goha, paying no attention to the villagers who gossiped about that white-faced Kargish witch Flint had brought home; and friends they had been ever since.
“A burned child,” she said.
“Whose?”
“Tramps’.”
Goha went to shut the farmhouse door, and they set off along the lane, Lark talking as they went. She was short of breath and sweating. Tiny seeds of the heavy grasses that lined the lane stuck to her cheeks and forehead, and she brushed at them as she talked. “They’ve been camped in the river meadows all the month. A man, passed himself off as a tinker, but he’s a thief, and a woman with him. And another man, younger, hanging around with them most of the time. Not working, any of ‘em. Filching and begging and living off the woman. Boys from downriver were bring— ing them farmstuff to get at her. You know how it is now, that kind of thing. And gangs on the roads and coming by farms. If I were you, I’d lock my door, these days. So this one, this younger fellow, comes into the village, and I was out in front of our house, and he says, ‘The child’s not well.’ I’d barely seen a child with them, a little ferret of a thing, slipped out of sight so quick I wasn’t sure it was there at all. So I said, ‘Not well? A fever?’ And the fellow says, ‘She hurt herself, lighting the fire,’ and then before I’d got myself ready to go with him he’d made off. Gone. And when I went out there by the river, the other pair was gone too. Cleared out. Nobody. All their traps and trash gone too. There was just their campfire, still smoldering, and just by it-partly in it-on the ground-”
Lark stopped talking for several steps. She looked straight ahead, not at Goha.
“They hadn’t even put a blanket over her,” she said.
She strode on.
“She’d been pushed into the fire while it was burning,” she said. She swallowed, and brushed at the sticking seeds on her hot face. “I’d say maybe she fell, but if she’d been awake she’d have tried to save herself. They beat her and thought they’d killed her, I guess, and wanted to hide what they’d done to her, so they-”
She stopped again, went on again.
“Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe he pulled her out. He came to get help for her, after all. It must have been the father. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Who’s to know? Who’s to care? Who’s to care for the child? Why do we do what we do?”
Goha asked in a low voice, “Will she live?”
“She might,” Lark said. “She might well live.”
After a while, as they neared the village, she said, “I don’t know why I had to come to you. Ivy’s there. There’s nothing to be done.”
“I could go to Valmouth, for Beech.”
“Nothing he could do. It’s beyond. . . beyond help. I got her warm. Ivy’s given her a potion and a sleeping charm. I carried her home. She must be six or seven but she didn’t weigh what a two-year-old would. She never really waked. But she makes a sort of gasping. . . . I know there isn’t anything you can do. But I wanted you.”
“I want to come,” Goha said. But before they entered Lark’s house, she shut her eyes and held her breath a moment in dread.
Lark’s children had been sent outdoors, and the house was silent. The child lay unconscious on Lark’s bed. The village witch, Ivy, had smeared an ointment of witch hazel and heal-all on the lesser burns, but had not touched the right side of the face and head and the right hand, which had been charred to the bone. She had drawn the rune Pirr above the bed, and left it at that.
“Can you do anything?” Lark asked in a whisper.
Goha stood looking down at the burned child. Her hands were still. She shook her head.
“You learned healing, up on the mountain, didn’t you?” Pain and shame and rage spoke through Lark, begging for relief.
“Even Ogion couldn’t heal this,” the widow said.
Lark turned away, biting her lip, and wept. Goha held her, stroking her grey hair. They held each other.
The witch Ivy came in from the kitchen, scowling at the sight of Goha. Though the widow cast no charms and worked no spells, it was said that when she first came to Gont she had lived at Re Albi as a ward of the mage, and that she knew the Archmage of Roke, and no doubt had foreign and uncanny powers. Jealous of her prerogative, the witch went to the bed and busied herself beside it, making a mound of something in a dish and setting it afire so that it smoked and reeked while she muttered a curing charm over and over. The rank herbal smoke made the burned child cough and half rouse, flinching and shuddering. She began to make a gasping noise, quick, short, scraping breaths. Her one eye seemed to look up at Goha.
Goha stepped forward and took the child’s left hand in hers. She spoke in her own language. “I served them and I left them,” she said. “I will not let them have you.
The child stared at her or at nothing, trying to breathe, and trying again to breathe, and trying again to breathe.
Going to the Falcon ‘s Nest
It was more than a year later, in the hot and spacious days after the Long Dance, that a messenger came down the road from the north to Middle Valley asking for the widow Goha. People in the village put him on the path, and he came to Oak Farm late in the afternoon. He was a sharp-faced, quick-eyed man. He looked at Goha and at the sheep in the fold beyond her and said, “Fine lambs. The Mage of Re Albi sends for you.”
“He sent you?” Goha inquired, disbelieving and amused. Ogion, when he wanted her, had quicker and finer messengers: an eagle calling, or only his own voice saying her name quietly— Will you come?
The man nodded. “He’s sick,” he said. “Will you be selling off any of the ewe lambs?”
“I might. You can talk to the shepherd if you like. Over by the fence there. Do you want supper? You can stay the night here if you want, but I’ll be on my way.
“Tonight?”
This time there was no amusement in her look of mild scorn. “I won’t be waiting about,” she said. She spoke for a minute with the old shepherd, Clearbrook, and then turned away, going up to the house built into the hillside by the oak grove. The messenger followed her.
In the stone-floored kitchen, a child whom he looked at once and quickly looked away from served him milk, bread, cheese, and green onions, and then went off, never saying a word. She reappeared beside the woman, both shod for travel and carrying light leather packs. The messenger followed them out, and the widow locked the farmhouse door. They all set off together, he on his business, for the message from Ogion had been a mere favor added to the serious matter of buying a breeding ram for the Lord of Re Albi; and the woman and the burned child bade him farewell where the lane turned off to the village. They went on up the road he had come down, northward and then west into the foothills of Gont Mountain.
They walked until the long summer twilight began to darken. They left the narrow road then and made camp in a dell down by a stream that ran quick and quiet, reflecting the pale evening sky between thickets of scrub willow. Goha made a bed of dry grass and willow leaves, hidden among the thickets like a hare’s form, and rolled the child up in a blanket on it. “Now,” she said, “you’re a cocoon. In the morning you’ll be a butterfly and hatch out.” She lighted no fire, but lay in her cloak beside the child and watched the stars shine one by one and listened to what the stream said quietly, until she slept.
When they woke in the cold before the dawn, she made a small fire and heated a pan of water to make oatmeal gruel for the child and herself. The little ruined butterfly came shivering from her cocoon, and Goha cooled the pan in the dewy grass so that the child could hold it and drink from it. The east was brightening above the high, dark shoulder of the mountain when they set off again.
They walked all day at the pace of a child who tired easily. The woman’s heart yearned to make haste, but she walked slowly. She was not able to carry the child any long distance, and so to make the way easier for her she told her stories.
“We’re going to see a man, an old man, called Ogion,” she told her as they trudged along the narrow road that wound upward through the forests. “He’s a wise man, and a wizard. Do you know what a wizard is, Therru?”
If the child had had a name, she did not know it or would not say it. Goha called her Therru.
She shook her head.
“Well, neither do I,” said the woman. “But I know what they can do. When I was young-older than you, but young—Ogion was my father, the way I’m your mother now. He looked after me and tried to teach me what I needed to know. He stayed with me when he’d rather have been wandering by himself. He liked to walk, all along these roads like we’re doing now, and in the forests, in the wild places. He went everywhere on the mountain, looking at things, listening. He always listened, so they called him the Silent. But he used to talk to me. He told me stories. Not only the great stories everybody learns, the heroes and the kings and the things that happened long ago and far away, but stories only he knew.” She walked on a way before she went on. “I’ll tell you one of those stories now.
“One of the things wizards can do is turn into something else-take another form. Shape-changing, they call it. An ordinary sorcerer can make himself look like somebody else, or like an animal, just so you don’t know for a minute what you’re seeing-as if he’d put on a mask. But the wizards and mages can do more than that. They can be the mask, they can truly change into another being. So a wizard, if he wanted to cross the sea and had no boat, might turn himself into a gull and fly across. But he has to be careful. If he stays a bird, he begins to think what a bird thinks and
forget what a man thinks, and he might fly off and be a gull and never a man again. So they say there was a great wizard once who liked to turn himself into a bear, and did it too often, and became a bear, and killed his own little son; and they had to hunt him down and kill him. But Ogion used to joke about it, too. Once when the mice got into his pantry and ruined the cheese, he caught one with a tiny mousetrap spell, and he held the mouse up like this and looked it in the eye and said, ‘I told you not to play mouse!’ And for a minute I thought he meant it. . .
“Well, this story is about something like shape-changing, but -Ogion said it was beyond all shape-changing he knew, because it was about being two things, two beings, at once, and in the same form, and he said that this is beyond the power of wizards. But he met with it in a little village around on the northwest coast of Gont, a place called Kemay, There was a woman there, an old fisherwoman, not a witch, not learned; but she made songs. That’s how -Ogion came to hear of her. He was wandering there, the way he did, going along the coast, listening; and he heard somebody singing, mending a net or caulking a boat and singing as they worked:
Farther west than west beyond the land
my people are dancing on the other wind.
“It was the tune and the words both that -Ogion heard, and he had never heard them before, so he asked where the song came from. And from one answer to another, he went along to where somebody said, ‘-Oh, that’s one of the songs of the Woman of Kemay.’ So he went on along to Kemay, the little fishing port where the woman lived, and he found her house down by the harbor. And he knocked on the door with his mage’s staff. And she came and opened the door.
“Now you know, you remember when we talked about names, how children have child-names, and everybody has a use-name, and maybe a nickname too. Different people may call you differently. You’re my Therru, but maybe you’ll have a Hardic use-name when you get older. But also, when you come into your womanhood, you will, if all be rightly done, be given your true name. It will be given you by one of true power, a wizard or a mage, because that is their power, their art-naming. And that’s the name you’ll maybe never tell another person, because your own self is in your true name. It is your strength, your power; but to another it is risk and burden, only to be given in utmost need and trust. But a great mage, knowing all names, may know it without your telling him.
“So Ogion, who is a great mage, stood at the door of the little house there by the seawall, and the old woman opened the door. Then Ogion stepped back, and he held up his oak staff, and put up his hand, too, like this, as if trying to protect himself from the heat of afire, and in his amazement and fear he said her true name aloud-’ Dragon!’
“In that first moment, he told me, it was no woman he saw at all in the doorway, but a blaze and glory of fire, and a glitter of gold scales and talons, and the great eyes of a dragon. They say you must not look into a dragon’s eyes.
“Then that was gone, and he saw no dragon, but an old woman standing there in the doorway, a bit stooped, a tall old fisherwoman with big hands. She looked at him as he did at her. And she said, ‘Come in, Lord Ogion.’
“So he went in. She served him fish soup, and they ate, and then they talked by her fire. He thought that she must
be a shape-changer, but he didn’t know, you see, whether she was a woman who could change herself into a dragon, or a dragon who could change itself into a woman. So he asked her at last, ‘Are you woman or dragon?’ And she didn’t say, but she said, ‘I’ll sing you a story I know.’ “
Therru had a little stone in her shoe. They stopped to get that out, and went on, very slowly, for the road was climbing steeply between cut banks of stone overhung by thickets where the cicadas sang in the summer heat.
“So this is the story she sang to him, to Ogion.
“When Segoy raised the islands of the world from the sea in the beginning of time, the dragons were the first born of the land and the wind blowing over the land. So the Song of the Creation tells. But her song told also that then, in the beginning, dragon and human were all one. They were all one people, one race, winged, and speaking the True Language.
“They were beautiful, and strong, and wise, and free.
“But in time nothing can be without becoming. So among the dragon-people some became more and more in love with flight and wildness, and would have less and less to do with the works of making, or with study and learning, or with houses and cities. They wanted only to fly farther and farther, hunting and eating their kill, ignorant and uncaring, seeking more freedom and more.
“Others of the dragon-people came to care little for flight, but gathered up treasure, wealth, things made, things learned. They built houses, strongholds to keep their treasures in, so they could pass all they gained to their children, ever seeking more increase and more. And they came to fear the wild ones, who might come flying and destroy all their dear hoard, burn it up in a blast of flame out of mere carelessness and ferocity.
“The wild ones feared nothing. They learned nothing. Because they were ignorant and fearless, they could not save themselves when the flightless ones trapped them as animals and killed them. But other wild ones would come flying and set the beautiful houses afire, and destroy, and kill. Those that were strongest, wild or wise, were those who killed each other first.
“Those who were most afraid, they hid from the fighting, and when there was no more hiding they ran from it. They used their skills of making and made boats and sailed east, away from the western isles where the great winged ones made war among the ruined towers.
“So those who had been both dragon and human changed, becoming two peoples-the dragons, always fewer and wilder, scattered by their endless, mindless greed and anger, in the far islands of the Western Reach; and the human folk, always more numerous in their rich towns and cities, filling up the Inner Isles and all the south and east. But among them there were some who saved the learning of the dragons-the True Language of the Making-and these are now the wizards.
“But also, the song.said, there are those among us who know they once were dragons, and among the dragons there are some who know their kinship with us. And these say that when the one people were becoming two, some of them, still both human and dragon, still winged, went not east but west, on over the Open Sea, till they came to the other side of the world. There they live in peace, great winged beings both wild and wise, with human mind and dragon heart. And so she sang,
Farther west than west beyond the land
my people are dancing on the other wind.
“So that was the story told in the song of the Woman of Kemay, and it ended with those words.
“Then -Ogion said to her, ‘When I first saw you I saw your true being. This woman who sits across the hearth from me is no more than the dress she wears.’
“But she shook her head and laughed, and all she would say was, ‘If only it were that simple!’
“So then after a while Ogion came back to Re Albi. And when he told me the story, he said to me, ‘Ever since that day, I have wondered if anyone, man or dragon, has been farther west than west; and who we are, and where our wholeness lies.’ . . . Are you getting hungry, Therru? There’s a good sitting place, it looks like, up there where the road turns. Maybe from there we’ll be able to see Gont Port, away down at the foot of the mountain. It’s a big city, even bigger than Valmouth. We’ll sit down when we get to the turn, and rest a bit.”
From the high corner of the road they could indeed look down the vast slopes of forest and rocky meadow to the town on its bay, and see the crags that guarded the entrance to the bay, and the boats on the dark water like wood-chips or water beetles. Far ahead on their road and still somewhat above it, a cliff jutted out from the mountainside: the Over-fell, on which was the village of Re Albi, the Falcon’s Nest.
Therru made no complaints, but when presently Goha said, “Well, shall we go on?” the child, sitting there between the road and the gulfs of sky and sea, shook her head. The sun was warm, and they had walked a long way since their breakfast in the dell.
Goha brought out their water bottle, and they drank again; then she brought out a bag of raisins and walnuts and gave it to the child.
“We’re in sight of where we’re going,” she said, “and I’d like to be there before dark, if we can. I’m anxious to see Ogion. You’ll be very tired, but we won’t walk fast. And we’ll be there safe and warm tonight. Keep the bag, tuck it in your belt. Raisins make your legs strong. Would you like a staff-like a wizard-to help you walk?”
Therru munched and nodded. Goha took out her knife and cut a strong shoot of hazel for the child, and then seeing an alder fallen above the road, broke off a branch of it and trimmed it to make herself a stout, light stick.
They set off again, and the child trudged along, beguiled by raisins. Goha sang to amuse them both, love songs and shepherd’s songs and ballads she had learned in the Middle Valley; but all at once her voice hushed in the middle of a tune. She stopped, putting out her hand in a warning gesture.
The four men ahead of them on the road had seen her. There was no use trying to hide in the woods till they went on or went by.
“Travelers,” she said quietly to Therru, and walked on. She took a good grip on her alder stick.
What Lark had said about gangs and thieves was not just the complaint each generation makes that things aren’t what they used to be and the world’s going to the dogs. In the last several years there had been a loss of peace and trust in the towns and countrysides of Gont. Young men behaved like strangers among their own people, abusing hospitality, stealing, selling what they stole. Beggary was common where it had been rare, and the unsatisfied beggar threatened violence. Women did not like to go alone in the streets and roads, nor did they like that loss of freedom. Some of the young women ran off to join the gangs of thieves and poachers. Often they came home within the year, sullen, bruised, and pregnant. And among village sorcerers and witches there was rumor of matters of their
profession going amiss: charms that had always cured did not cure; spells of finding found nothing, or the wrong thing; love potions drove men into frenzies not of desire but of murderous jealousy. And worse than this, they said, people who knew nothing of the art of magic, the laws and limits of it and the dangers of breaking them, were calling themselves people of power, promising wonders of wealth and health to their followers, promising even immortality.
Ivy, the witch of Goha’s village, had spoken darkly of this weakening of magic, and so had Beech, the sorcerer of Valmouth. He was a shrewd and modest man, who had come to help Ivy do what little could be done to lessen the pain and scarring of Therru’s burns. He had said to Goha, “I think a time in which such things as this occur must be a time of ruining, the end of an age. How many hundred years since there was a king in Havnor? It can’t go on so. We must turn to the center again or be lost, island against island, man against man, father against child He had glanced at her, somewhat timidly, yet with his clear, shrewd look. “The Ring of Erreth-Akbe is restored to the Tower in Havnor,” he said. “I know who brought it there That was the sign, surely, that was the sign of the new age to come! But we haven’t acted on it. We have no king. We have no center. We must find our heart, our strength. Maybe the Archmage will act at last.” And he added, with confidence “After all, he is from Gont.”
But no word of any deed of the Archmage, or any heir to the Throne in Havnor, had come; and things went badly on.
So it was with fear and a grim anger that Goha saw the four men on the road before her step two to each side, so that she and the child would have to pass between them.
As they went walking steadily forward, Therru kept very close beside her, holding her head bent down, but she did not take her hand.
One of the men, a big-chested fellow with coarse black hairs on his upper lip drooping over his mouth, began to speak, grinning a little. “Hey, there,” he said, but Goha spoke at the same time and louder. “Out of my way!” she said, raising her alder stick as if it were a wizard’s staff-” I have business with Ogion!” She strode between the men and straight on, Therru trotting beside her. The men, mistaking effrontery for witchery, stood still. Ogion’s name perhaps still held power. Or perhaps there was a power in Goha, or in the child. For when the two had gone by, one of the men said, “Did you see that?” and spat and made the sign to avert evil.
“Witch and her monster brat,” another said. “Let em go!”
Another, a man in a leather cap and jerkin, stood staring for a moment while the others slouched on their way. His face looked sick and stricken, yet he seemed to be turning to follow the woman and child, when the hairy-lipped man called to him, “Come on, Handy!” and he obeyed.
Out of sight around the turn of the road, Goha had picked up Therm and hurried on with her until she had to set her down and stand gasping. The child asked no questions and made no delays. As soon as Goha could go on again, the child walked as fast as she could beside her, holding her hand.
“You’re red,” she said. “Like fire.”
She spoke seldom, and not clearly, her voice being very hoarse; but Goha could understand her.
“I’m angry,” Goha said with a kind of laugh. “When I’m angry I turn red. Like you people, you red people, you barbarians of the western lands. . . . Look, there’s a town
there ahead, that’ll be Oak Springs. It’s the only village on this road. We’ll stop there and rest a little. Maybe we can get some milk. And then, if we can go on, if you think you can walk on up to the Falcon’s Nest, we’ll be there by nightfall, I hope.”
The child nodded. She opened her bag of raisins and walnuts and ate a few. They trudged on.
The sun had long set when they came through the village and to Ogion’s house on the cliff-top. The first stars glimmered above a dark mass of clouds in the west over the high horizon of the sea. The sea wind blew, bowing short grasses. A goat bleated in the pastures behind the low, small house. The one window shone dim yellow.
Goha stood her stick and Therm’s against the wall by the door, and held the child’s hand, and knocked once.
There was no answer.
She pushed the door open. The fire on the hearth was out, cinders and grey ashes, but an oil lamp on the table made a tiny seed of light, and from his mattress on the floor in the far corner of the room Ogion said, “Come in, Tenar.”
Ogion
She bedded down the child on the cot in the western alcove. She built up the fire. She went and sat down beside Ogion’s pallet, cross-legged on the floor.
“No one looking after you!”
“I sent ‘em off,” he whispered.
His face was as dark and hard as ever, but his hair was thin and white, and the dim lamp made no spark of light in his eyes.
“You could have died alone,” she said, fierce. “Help me do that,” the old man said. “Not yet,” she pleaded, stooping, laying her forehead on his hand.
“Not tonight,” he agreed. “Tomorrow.”
He lifted his hand to stroke her hair once, having that much strength.
She sat up again. The fire had caught. Its light played on the walls and low ceiling and sent shadows to thicken in the corners of the long room.
“If Ged would come,” the old man murmured.
“Have you sent to him?”
“Lost,” Ogion said. “He’s lost. A cloud. A mist over the lands. He went into the west. Carrying the branch of the rowan tree. Into the dark mist. I’ve lost my hawk.”
“No, no, no,” she whispered. “He’ll come back.”
They were silent. The fire’s warmth began to penetrate them both, letting Ogion relax and drift in and out of sleep, letting Tenar find rest pleasant after the long day afoot. She rubbed her feet and her aching shoulders. She had carried Therru part of the last long climb, for the child had begun to gasp with weariness as she tried to keep up.
Tenar got up, heated water, and washed the dust of the road from her. She heated milk, and ate bread she found in Ogion’s larder, and came back to sit by him. While he slept, she sat thinking, watching his face and the firelight and the shadows.
She thought how a girl had sat silent, thinking, in the night, a long time ago and far away, a girl in a windowless room, brought up to know herself only as the one who had been eaten, priestess and servant of the powers of the darkness of the earth. And there had been a woman who would sit up in the peaceful silence of a farmhouse when husband and children slept, to think, to be alone an hour. And there was the widow who had carried a burned child here, who sat by the side of the dying, who waited for a man to return. Like all women, any woman, doing what women do. But it was not by the names of the servant or the wife or the widow that Ogion had called her. Nor had Ged, in the darkness of the Tombs. Nor-longer ago, farther away than all-had her mother, the mother she remembered only as the warmth and lion-color of firelight, the mother who had given her her name.
“I am Tenar,” she whispered. The fire, catching a dry branch of pine, leaped up in a .bright yellow tongue of flame.
Ogion’s breathing became troubled and he struggled for air. She helped him as she could till he found some ease.
They both slept for a while, she drowsing by his dazed and drifting silence, broken by strange words. Once in the deep night he said aloud, as if meeting a friend in the road, “Are you here, then? Have you seen him?” And again, when Tenar roused herself to build up the fire, he began to speak, but this time it seemed he spoke to someone in his memory of years long gone, for he said clearly as a child might, “I tried to help her, but the roof of the house fell down. It fell on them. It was the earthquake.” Tenar listened. She too had seen earthquake. “I tried to help!” said the boy in the old man’s voice, in pain. Then the gasping struggle to breathe began again.
At first light Tenar was wakened by a sound she thought at first was the sea. It was a great rushing of wings. A flock of birds was flying over, low, so many that their wings stormed and the window was darkened by their quick shadows. It seemed they circled the house once and then were gone. They made no call or cry, and she did not know what birds they were.
People came that morning from the village of Re Albi, which Ogion’s house stood apart from to the north. A goatgirl came, and a woman for the milk of Ogion’s goats, and others to ask what they might do for him. Moss, the village witch, fingered the alder stick and the hazel switch by the door and peered in hopefully, but not even she ventured to come in, and Ogion growled from his pallet, “Send ‘em away! Send ‘em all away!”
He seemed stronger and more comfortable. When little Therru woke, he spoke to her in the dry, kind, quiet way Tenar remembered. The child went out to play in the sun, and he said to Tenar, “What is the name you call her?”
He knew the True Language of the Making, but he had never learned any Kargish at all.
“Therru means burning, the flaming of fire,” she said.
“Ah, ah,” he said, and his eyes gleamed, and he frowned. He seemed to grope for words for a moment. “That one,” he said, “That one-they will fear her.”
“They fear her now,” Tenar said bitterly. The mage shook his head.
“Teach her, Tenar,” he whispered. “Teach her all!-Not Roke. They are afraid— Why did I let you go? Why did you go? To bring her here-too late?”
“Be still, be still,” she told him tenderly, for he struggled with words and breath and could find neither. He shook his head, and gasped, “Teach her!” and lay still.
He would not eat, and only drank a little water. In the middle of the day he slept. Waking in the late afternoon, he said, “Now, daughter,” and sat up.
Tenar took his hand, smiling at him.
“Help me get up.
“No, no.
“Yes,” he said. “Outside. I can’t die indoors.”
“Where would you go?”
“Anywhere. But if I could, the forest path,” he said. “The beech above the meadow.”
When she saw he was able to get up and determined to get outdoors, she helped him. Together they got to the door, where he stopped and looked around the one room of his house. In the dark corner to the right of the doorway his tall staff leaned against the wall, shining a little. Tenar reached out to give it to him, but he shook his head. “No,” he said, “not that.” He looked around again as if for something missing, forgotten. “Come on,” he said at last.
When the bright wind from the west blew on his face and he looked out at the high horizon, he said, “That’s good.”
“Let me get some people from the village to make a litter and carry you,” she said. “They’re all waiting to do something for you.”
“I want to walk,” the old man said.
Therru came around the house and watched solemnly as Ogion and Tenar went, step by step, and stopping every five or six steps for Ogion to gasp, across the tangled meadow towards the woods that climbed steep up the mountainside from the inner side of the cliff-top. The sun was hot and the wind cold. It took them a very long time to cross that meadow. Ogion’s face was grey and his legs shook like the grass in the wind when they got at last to the foot of a big young beech tree just inside the forest, a few yards up the beginning of the mountain path. There he sank down between the roots of the tree, his back against its trunk. For a long time he could not move or speak, and his heart, pounding and faltering, shook his body. He nodded finally and whispered, “All right.”
Therru had followed them at a distance. Tenar went to her and held her and talked to her a little. She came back to Ogion. “She’s bringing a rug,” she said.
“Not cold.”
“I’m cold.”
There was the flicker of a smile on her face.
The child came lugging a goat’s-wool blanket. She whispered to Tenar and ran off again.
“Heather will let her help milk the goats, and look after her,” Tenar said to Ogion. “So I can stay here with you.
“Never one thing, for you,” he said in the hoarse whistling whisper that was all the voice he had left.
“No. Always at least two things, and usually more,” she said. “But I am here.”
He nodded.
For a long time he did not speak, but sat back against the
tree trunk, his eyes closed. Watching his face, Tenar saw it change as slowly as the light changed in the west.
He opened his eyes and gazed through a gap in the thickets at the western sky. He seemed to watch something, some act or deed, in that far, clear, golden space of light. He whispered once, hesitant, as if unsure, “The dragon-”
The sun was down, the wind fallen.
Ogion looked at Tenar.
“Over,” he whispered with exultation. “All changed!— Changed, Tenar! Wait-wait here, for-” A shaking took his body, tossing him like the branch of a tree in a great wind. He gasped. His eyes closed and opened, gazing beyond her. He laid his hand on hers; she bent down to him; he spoke his name to her, so that after his death he might be truly known.
He gripped her hand and shut his eyes and began once more the struggle to breathe, until there was no more breath. He lay then like one of the roots of the tree, while the stars came out and shone through the leaves and branches of the forest.
Tenar sat with the dead man in the dusk and dark. A lantern gleamed like a firefly across the meadow. She had laid the woollen blanket across them both, but her hand that held his hand had grown cold, as if it held a stone. She touched her forehead to his hand once more. She stood up, stiff and dizzy, her body feeling strange to her, and went to meet and guide whoever was coming with the light.
That night his neighbors sat with Ogion, and he did not send them away.
The mansion house of the Lord of Re Albi stood on an outcrop of rocks on the mountainside above the Overfell. Early in the morning, long before the sun had cleared the mountain, the wizard in the service of that lord came down through the village; and very soon after, another wizard came toiling up the steep road from Gont Port, having set out in darkness. Word had come to them that Ogion was dying, or their power was such that they knew of the passing of a great mage.
The village of Re Albi had no sorcerer, only its mage, and a witchwoman to perform the lowly jobs of finding and mending and bonesetting, which people would not bother the mage with. Aunty Moss was a dour creature, unmarried, like most witches, and unwashed, with greying hair tied in curious charm-knots, and eyes red-rimmed from herb-smoke, It was she who had come across the meadow with the lantern, and with Tenar and the others she had watched the night by Ogion’s body. She had set a wax candle in a glass shade, there in the forest, and had burned sweet oils in a dish of clay; she had said the words that should be said, and done what should be done. When it came to touching the body to prepare it for burial, she had looked once at Tenar as if for permission, and then had gone on with her offices. Village witches usually saw to the homing, as they called it, of the dead, and often to the burial.
When the wizard came down from the mansion house, a tall young man with a silvery staff of pinewood, and the other one came up from Gont Port, a stout middle-aged man with a short yew staff, Aunty Moss did not look at them with her bloodshot eyes, but ducked and bowed and drew back, gathering up her poor charms and witcheries.
When she had laid out the corpse as it should lie to be buried, on the left side with the knees bent, she had put in the upturned left hand a tiny charm-bundle, something wrapped in soft goatskin and tied with colored cord. The wizard of Re Albi flicked it away with the tip of his staff.
“Is the grave dug?” asked the wizard of Gont Port.
“Yes,” said the wizard of Re Albi. “It is dug in the graveyard of my lord’s house,” and he pointed towards the mansion house up on the mountain.
“I see,” said Gont Port. “I had thought our mage would be buried in all honor in the city he saved from earthquake.”
“My lord desires the honor,” said Re Albi. “But it would seem-” Gont Port began, and stopped, not liking to argue, but not ready to give in to the young man’s easy claim. He looked down at the dead man. “He must be buried nameless,” he said with regret and bitterness. ‘I walked all night, but came too late. A great loss made greater!”
The young wizard said nothing.
“His name was Aihal,” Tenar said. “His wish was to lie here, where he lies now.”
Both men looked at her. The young man, seeing a middle-aged village woman, simply turned away. The man from Gont Port stared a moment and said, “Who are you?”
“I’m called Flint’s widow, Goha,” she said. “Who I am is your business to know, I think. But not mine to say.
At this, the wizard of Re Albi found her worthy of a brief stare. “Take care, woman, how you speak to men of power!”
“Wait, wait,” said Gont Port, with a patting gesture, trying to calm Re Albi’s indignation, and still gazing at Tenar. “You were-You were his ward, once?”
“And friend,” Tenar said. Then she turned away her head and stood silent. She had heard the anger in her voice as she said that word, “friend.” She looked down at her friend, a corpse ready for the ground, lost and still. They stood over him, alive and full of power, offering no friendship, only contempt, rivalry, anger.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It was a long night. I was with him when he died.”
“It is not-” the young wizard began, but unexpectedly old Aunty Moss interrupted him, saying loudly, “She was. Yes, she was. Nobody else but her. He sent for her. He sent young Townsend the sheep-dealer to tell her come, clear down round the mountain, and he waited his dying till she did come and was with him, and then he died, and he died where he would be buried, here.”
“And” said the older man, “-and he told you-?”
“His name.” Tenar looked at them, and do what she would, the incredulity on the older man’s face, the contempt on the other’s, brought out an answering disrespect in her. “I said that name,” she said. “Must I repeat it to you?”
To her consternation she saw from their expressions that in fact they had not heard the name, Ogion’s true name; they had not paid attention to her.
“Oh!” she said. “This is a bad time-a time when even such a name can go unheard, can fall like a stone! Is listening not power? Listen, then: his name was Aihal. His name in death is Aihal, In the songs he will be known as Aihal of Gont. If there are songs to be made any more. He was a silent man. Now he’s very silent. Maybe there will be no songs, only silence. I don’t know. I’m very tired. I’ve lost my father and dear friend.” Her voice failed; her throat closed on a sob. She turned to go. She saw on the forest path the little charm-bundle Aunty Moss had made. She picked it up, knelt down by the corpse, kissed the open palm of the left hand, and laid the bundle on it. There on her knees she looked up once more at the two men. She spoke quietly.
“Will you see to it,” she said, “that his grave is dug here, where he desired it?”
First the older man, then the younger, nodded. She got up, smoothing down her skirt, and started back across the meadow in the morning light.
Kalessin
“Wait,” Ogion, who was Aihal now, had said to her, just before the wind of death had shaken him and torn him loose from living. “Over-all changed,” he had whispered, and then, “Tenar, wait-” But he had not said what she should wait for. The change he had seen or known, perhaps; but what change? Was it his own death he meant, his own life that was over? He had spoken with joy, exulting. He had charged her to wait.
“What else have I to do?” she said to herself, sweeping the floor of his house. “What else have I ever done?” And, speaking to her memory of him, “Shall I wait here, in your house?”
“Yes,” said Aihal the Silent, silently, smiling.
So she swept out the house and cleaned the hearth and aired the mattresses. She threw out some chipped crockery and a leaky pan, but she handled them gently. She even put her cheek against a cracked plate as she took it out to the midden, for it was evidence of the old mage’s illness this past year. Austere he had been, living as plain as a poor farmer, but when his eyes were clear and his strength in him, he would never have used a broken plate or let a pan go unmended. These signs of his weakness grieved her, making her wish she had been with him to look after him.