Tehanu The Last Book of Earthsea

by Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

  “To hang.”

  “It’s up to the King’s Courts of Law, now that they’re meeting again. Hanged or set to slave-labor.”

  She shook her head, frowning.

  “You wouldn’t just let him go, Tenar," ‘ he said gently, watching her.

  “No.”

  “They must be punished,” he said, still watching her.

  “Punished." That’s what he said. Punish the child. She’s bad. She must be punished. Punish me, for taking her. For being-’ ‘ She struggled to speak. “I don’t want punishment! - It should not have happened. - I wish you’d killed him!”

  “I did my best,” Ged said.

  After a good while she laughed, rather shakily. “You certainly did.”

  “Think how easy it would have been,” he said, looking into the coals again, “when I was a wizard. I could have set a binding spell on them, up there on the road, before they knew it. I could have marched them right down to Valmouth like a flock of sheep. Or last night, here, think of the fireworks I could have set off! They’d never have known what hit them.”

  “They still don’t,” she said.

  He glanced at her. There was in his eye the faintest, irrepressible gleam of triumph.

  “No,” he said. “They don’t.”

  “Useful with a pitchfork,” she murmured.

  He yawned enormously.

  “Why don’t you go in and get some sleep? The second room down the hall. Unless you want to entertain company. I see Lark and Daisy coming, and some of the children.” She had got up, hearing voices, to look out the window.

  “I’ll do that,” he said, and slipped away.

  Lark and her husband, Daisy the blacksmith’s wife, and other friends from the village came by all day long to tell and be told all, as Ged had said. She found that their company revived her, carried her away from the constant presence of last night’s terror, little by little, till she could begin to look back on it as something that had happened, not something that was happening, that must always be happening to her.

  That was also what Therru had to learn to do, she thought, but not with one night: with her life.

  She said to Lark when the others had gone, “What makes me rage at myself is how stupid I was.”

  “I did tell you you ought to keep the house locked.”

  “No-Maybe-That’s just it. ‘ ‘

  “I know,’ ‘ said Lark.

  “But I meant, when they were here-I could have run out and fetched Shandy and Clearbrook-maybe I could have taken Therru, Or I could have gone to the lean-to and got the pitchfork myself. Or the apple-pruner. It’s seven feet long with a blade like a razor; I keep it the way Flint kept it. Why didn’t I do that? Why didn’t I do something? Why did I just lock myself in-when it wasn’t any good trying to? If he- If Hawk hadn’t been here- All I did was trap myself and Therru. I did finally go to the door with the butcher knife, and I shouted at them. I was half crazy. But that wouldn’t have scared them off.”

  “I don’t know,” Lark said. “It was crazy, but maybe . . . I don’t know. What could you do but lock the doors? But it’s like we’re all our lives locking the doors. It’s the house we live in.”

  They looked around at the stone walls, the stone floors, the stone chimney, the sunny window of the kitchen of Oak Farm, Farmer Flint’s house.

  “That girl, that woman they murdered,” Lark said, looking shrewdly at Tenar. “She was the same one." Tenar nodded.

  “One of them told me she was pregnant. Four, five months along.”

  They were both silent.

  “Trapped,” Tenar said.

  Lark sat back, her hands on the skirt on her heavy thighs, her back straight, her handsome face set. “Fear,” she said. “What are we so afraid of? Why do we let ‘em tell us we’re afraid? What is it they’re afraid of? ‘ ‘ She picked up the stocking she had been darning, turned it in her hands, was silent awhile; finally she said, “What are they afraid of us for?”

  Tenar spun and did not answer.

  Therru came running in, and Lark greeted her: “There’s my honey! Come give me a hug, my honey girl!”

  Therru hugged her hastily. “Who are the men they caught?” she demanded in her hoarse, toneless voice, looking from Lark to Tenar.

  Tenar stopped her wheel. She spoke slowly.

  “One was Handy. One was a man called Shag. The one that was hurt is called Hake.” She kept her eyes on Therru’s face; she saw the fire, the scar reddening. “The woman they killed was called Senny, I think.”

  “Senini,’ ‘ the child whispered.

  Tenar nodded.

  “Did they kil lher dead?”

  She nodded again.

  “Tadpole says they were here.”

  She nodded again.

  The child looked around the room, as the women had done; but her look was utterly unacceptant, seeing no walls.

  “Will you kill them?”

  “They may be hanged.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes.”

  Therru nodded, half indifferently. She went out again, rejoining Lark’s children by the wellhouse.

  The two women said nothing. They spun and mended, silent, by the fire, in Flint’s house.

  After a long time Lark said, “What’s become of the fellow, the shepherd, that followed ‘em here? Hawk, you said he’s called?”

  “He’s asleep in there,’ ‘ said Tenar, nodding to the back of the house.

  “Ah,” said Lark.

  The wheel purred. “I knew him before last night.”

  “Ah. Up at Re Albi, did you?”

  Tenar nodded. The wheel purred.

  “To follow those three, and take ‘em on in the dark with a pitchfork, that took a bit of courage, now. Not a young man, is he?”

  “No.” After a while she went on, “He’d been ill, and needed work. So I sent him over the mountain to tell Clear-brook to take him on here. But Clearbrook thinks he can still do it all himself, so he sent him up above the Springs for the summer herding. He was coming back from that.”

  “Think you’ll keep him on here, then?" ‘“If he likes,” said Tenar.

  Another group came out to Oak Farm from the village, wanting to hear Goha’s story and tell her their part in the great capture of the murderers, and look at the pitchfork and compare its four long tines to the three bloody spots on the bandages of the man called Hake, and talk it all over again. Tenar was glad to see the evening come, and call Therru in, and shut the door.

  She raised her hand to latch it. She lowered her hand and forced herself to turn from it, leaving it unlocked.

  “Sparrowhawk’s in your room,” Therru informed her, coming back to the kitchen with eggs from the cool-room.

  “I meant to tell you he was here-I’m sorry.

  “I know him,” Therru said, washing her face and hands in the pantry. And when Ged came in, heavy-eyed and unkempt, she went straight to him and put up her arms.

  “Therru,” he said, and took her up and held her. She clung to him briefly, then broke free.

  “I know the beginning part of the Creation," she told him. “Will you sing it to me?” Again glancing at Tenar for permission, he sat down in his place at the hearth.

  “I can only say it.”

  He nodded and waited, his face rather stern. The child said:

  The making from the unmaking,

  The ending from the beginning,

  Who shall know surely?

  What we know is the doorway between them

  that we enter departing.

  Among all beings ever returning,

  the eldest, the Doorkeeper, Segoy.. . .

  The child’s voice was like a metal brush drawn across metal, like dry leaves, like the hiss of fire burning. She spoke to the end of the first stanza:

  Then from the foam bright E`a broke.

  Ged nodded brief, firm approval. “Good,” he said.

  “Last night, ” Tenar said. “Last night she learned it. It seems a
year ago."

  “I can learn more,” said Therru.

  “You will," Ged told her.

  “Now finish cleaning the squash, please,” said Tenar, and the child obeyed.

  “What shall I do?" ‘ Ged asked. Tenar paused, looking at him.

  “I need that kettle filled and heated.”

  He nodded, and took the kettle to the pump. They made and ate their supper and cleared it away. “Say the Making again as far as you know it,” Ged said to Therru, at the hearth, “and we’ll go on from there.”

  She said the second stanza once with him, once with Tenar, once by herself.

  “Bed,” said Tenar.

  “You didn’t tell Sparrowhawk about the king.”

  “You tell him," ‘ Tenar said, amused at this pretext for delay.

  Therru turned to Ged. Her face, scarred and whole, seeing and blind, was intent, fiery. “The king came in a ship. He had a sword. He gave me the bone dolphin. His ship was flying, but I was sick, because Handy touched me. But the king touched me there and the mark went away. She showed her round, thin arm. Tenar stared. She had forgotten the mark.

  “Some day I want to fly to where he lives,” Therru told Ged. He nodded. “I will do that,’ ‘ she said. “Do you know him?”

  “Yes. I know him. I went on a long journey with him.”

  “Where?”

  “To where the sun doesn’t rise and the stars don’t set. And back from that place.”

  “Did you fly?”

  He shook his head. “I can only walk,” he said.

  The child pondered, and then as if satisfied said, “Good night,” and went off to her room. Tenar followed her; but Therru did not want to be sung to sleep. “I can say the Making in the dark,” she said. “Both stanzas.”

  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.”