Tales from Earthsea (earthsea)

by Ursula K LeGuin

  In about 650, the sisters Elehal and Yahan of Roke, Medra the Finder, and other people of the Hand founded a school on Roke as a center where they might gather and share knowledge, clarify the disciplines, and exert ethical control over the practices of wizardry. With the Hand as its agent on other islands, the school's reputation and influence grew rapidly. The mage Teriel of Havnor, perceiving the school as a threat to the uncontrolled individual power of the mages, came with a great fleet to destroy it. He was destroyed, and his fleet scattered.

  This first victory went far to establish a reputation of invulnerability for the school on Roke.

  Under Roke's steadily growing influence, wizardry was shaped into a coherent body of knowledge, its use increasingly controlled by moral and political purpose. Wizards trained at the school went to other islands of the Archipelago to work against warlords, pirates, and feuding nobles, preventing raids and forays, imposing penalties and settlements, enforcing boundaries, and protecting individuals, farms, towns, cities, and shipping, until social order was re-established. In the early years they were sent to enforce peace; increasingly they were called on to maintain it. While the throne in Havnor remained empty, for over two hundred years Roke School served effectively as the central government of the Archipelago.

  The power of the Archmage of Roke was in many respects that of a king. Ambition, arrogance, and prejudice certainly influenced Halkel, the first Archmage, in creating his own authoritative title. Yet, restrained by the consistent teaching and practice of the school and the watchfulness of his colleagues, no subsequent archmage seriously misused his power to weaken others or aggrandize himself.

  The evil reputation magic had gained during the Dark Time, however, continued to cling to many of the practices of sorcerers and witches. Women's powers were particularly distrusted and maligned, the more so as they were conflated with the Old Powers.

  Throughout Earthsea, various springs, caves, hills, stones, and woods were and always had been sites of concentrated power and sacredness. All were locally feared or venerated; some were known far and wide.

  Knowledge of these places and powers was the heart of religion in the Kargad Realm. In the Archipelago, the lore of the Old Powers was still part of the profound, common basis of thought and reverence. On all the islands, the arts mostly practiced by witches, such as midwifery, healing, animal husbandry, dousing, mining and metallurgy, planting and growing spells, love spells, and so on, often invoked or drew upon the Old Powers. But the learned wizards of Roke had generally come to distrust the ancient practices and made no appeal to the "Powers of the Mother." Only in Paln did wizards combine the two practices, in the arcane, esoteric, and reputedly dangerous Pelnish Lore.

  Though like any power they could be perverted to evil use in the service of ambition (as was the Terrenon Stone in Osskil), the Old Powers were inherently sacral and pre-ethical. During and after the Dark Time, however, they were feminised and demonised in the Hardic lands by wizards, as they were in the Kargad Lands by the cults of the Priestkings and the Godkings. So by the eighth century, in the Inner Lands of the Archipelago, only village women kept up rituals and offerings at the old sites. They were despised or abused for doing so. Wizards kept clear of such places. On Roke, itself the center of the Old Powers in all Earthsea, the profoundest manifestations of those powers—Roke Knoll and the Immanent Grove—were never spoken of as such. Only the Patterners, who lived all their lives in the Grove, served to link human arts and acts to the older sacredness of the earth, reminding the wizards and mages that their power was not theirs, but lent to them.

  HISTORY OF THE KARGAD LANDS

  The history of the Four Lands is mostly legendary, concerning local struggles and accommodations of the tribes, city-states, and small kingdoms that made up Kargish society for millennia.

  Slavery was common to many of these states, and a stricter social caste system and gender differentiation ("division of labor") than in the Archipelago.

  Religion was a unifying element even among the most warlike tribes. There were hundreds of Truce Places on the Four Lands, where no warfare or dispute was permitted. Kargish religion was a domestic and community worship of the Old Powers, the chthonic or gaean forces manifest as spirits of place. They were worshiped at the site and at home altars with offerings of flowers, oil, food, dances, races, sacrifices, carvings, songs, music, and silence. Worship was both casual and ritual, private and communal. There was no priesthood; any adult could perform the ceremonies and teach children to do so. This ancient spiritual practice has continued, unofficially and sometimes in hiding, under the newer, institutional religions of the Twin Gods and the Godking.

  Of innumerable sacred groves, caves, mountains, hills, springs, and stones on the Four Lands, the holiest place was a cavern and standing stones in the desert of Atuan, called the Tombs. It was a center of pilgrimage from the earliest recorded times, and the kings of Atuan and later of Hupun maintained a hostel there for all who came to worship.

  Six to seven hundred years ago a sky-god religion began to spread across the islands, a development of the worship of the Twin Gods Atwah and Wuluah, originally heroes of a desert saga from Hur-at-Hur. A Sky Father was added as head of the pantheon, and a priestly caste developed to lead the rites. Without suppressing the worship of the Old Powers, the priests of the Twin Gods and the Sky Father began to professionalise religion, managing the rituals and festivals, building increasingly costly temples, and controlling public ceremonies such as marriages, funerals, and the installation of officials.

  The hierarchic and centralising tendency of this religion lent support at first to the ambition of the Kings of Hupun on Karego-At. By force of arms and diplomatic maneuvering, the House of Hupun within a century or so conquered or absorbed most of the other Kargad kingdoms, of which there had been more than two hundred.

  When (in the year 440, by Hardic count) Erreth-Akbe came to make peace between the Archipelago and the Kargad Lands, bearing the Bond Ring as pledge of his king's sincerity, he came to Hupun as the capital of the Kargad Empire and treated with King Thoreg as its ruler.

  But for some decades the kings of Hupun had been in conflict with the high priest and his followers in Awabath, the Holy City, fifty miles from Hupun. The priests of the Twin Gods were in the process of wresting power from the kings and making Awabath not only the religious but the political center of the country. Erreth-Akbe's visit seems to have coincided with the final shift of power from the kings to the priests. King Thoreg received him with honor, but Intathin the High Priest fought with him, defeated or deceived him, and for a time imprisoned him. The Ring that was to bond the two kingdoms was broken.

  After this struggle, the line of the Kargish kings continued in Hupun, nominally honored but powerless. The Four Lands were governed from Awabath. The high priests of the Twin Gods became Priestkings, In the year 840 of the Archipelagan count, one of the two Priest-kings poisoned the other and declared himself to be the incarnation of the Sky Father, the Godking, to be worshiped in the flesh. Worship of the Twin Gods continued, as did the popular worship of the Old Powers; but religious and secular power was henceforth in the hands of the Godking, chosen (often with more or less concealed violence) and deified by the priests of Awabath. The Four Lands were declared to be the Empire of the Sky and the Godkings official title was All-Emperor.

  The last heirs of the House of Hupun were a boy and girl, Ensar and Anthil. Wishing to end the line of the Kargish kings but unwilling to risk sacrilege by shedding royal blood, the Godking ordered these children to be stranded on a desert island. Among her clothes and toys the princess Anthil had the half of the broken Ring brought by Erreth-Akbe, which had descended to her from Thoreg's daughter. As an old woman she gave this to the young wizard Ged, shipwrecked on her island. Later, with the help of the high priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, Arha-Tenar, Ged was able to rejoin the broken halves of the Ring and so remake the Rune of Peace. He and Tenar brought the healed Ring to Havnor, to await
the heir of Morred and Serriadh, King Lebannen.

  Magic

  Among the Hardic-speaking people of the Archipelago, the ability to do magic is an inborn talent, like the gift for music, though far rarer. Most people lack it entirely. In a few people, perhaps one in a hundred, it is a latent, cultivable talent. In a very few people it is manifest without training.

  The gift for magic is empowered mainly by the use of the True Speech, the Language of the Making, in which the name of a thing is the thing.

  This speech, innate to dragons, can be learned by human beings. Some few people are born with an untaught knowledge of at least some words of the Language of the Making. The teaching of it is the heart of the teaching of magic.

  The true name of a person is a word in the True Speech. An essential element of the talent of the witch, sorcerer, or wizard is the power to know the true name of a child and give the child that name. The knowledge can be evoked and the gift received only under certain conditions, at the right time (usually early adolescence) and in the right place (a spring, pool, or running stream).

  Since the name of the person is the person, in the most literal and absolute sense, anyone who knows it has real power, power of life and death, over the person. Often a true name is never known to anybody but the giver and to the owner, who both keep it secret all their life. The power to give the true name and the imperative to keep it secret are one. True names have been betrayed, but never by the name giver.

  Some people of great innate and trained power are able to find out the true name of another, or even to have it come to them unsought. Since such knowledge can be betrayed or misused, it is immensely dangerous. Ordinary people—and dragons—keep their true name secret; wizards hide and defend theirs with spells. Morred could not even begin to fight his Enemy until he saw his Enemy's name written in the dust by the falling rain. Ged could force the dragon Yevaud to obey him, having by both wizardry and scholarship discovered Yevaud's true name under centuries of false ones.

  Magic was a wild talent before the time of Morred, who as both king and mage established intellectual and moral discipline for the art magic, gathering wizards to work together at the court for the general good and to study the ethical bases and constraints of their practice.

  This harmony generally prevailed through the reign of Maharion. In the Dark Time, with no control over wizardly powers and widespread misuse of them, magic came into general disrepute.

  THE SCHOOL ON ROKE

  The school was founded in about 650, as described above. The Nine Masters or master-teachers of Roke were originally:

  Windkey, master of the spells controlling weather

  Hand, master of all illusions

  Herbal, master of the arts of healing

  Changer, master of the spells that transform matter and bodies

  Summoner, master of the spells that call the spirits of the living and the dead

  Namer, master of the knowledge of the True Speech

  Patterner, dweller in the Immanent Grove, master of meaning and intent

  Finder, master of the spells of finding, binding, and returning

  Doorkeeper, master of the entering and leaving of the Great House

  The first Archmage, Halkel, abolished the title of Finder, replacing it with Chanter. The Chanter's task is the preservation and teaching of all the oral deeds, lays, songs, etc., and the sung spells.

  The original loose, roughly descriptive use of the words witch, sorcerer, wizard, was codified into a strict hierarchy by Halkel. Under his rules:

  Witchery was restricted to women. All magic practiced by women was called "base craft," even when it included practices otherwise called "high arts," such as healing, chanting, changing, etc. Witches were to learn only from one another or from sorcerers. They were forbidden to enter Roke School, and Halkel discouraged wizards from teaching women anything at all. He specifically forbade the teaching of any word of the True Speech to women, and though this proscription was widely ignored, it led in the long run to a profound, long-lasting loss of knowledge and power among the women who practiced magic.

  Sorcery was practiced by men—its only real distinction from witchery. Sorcerers trained one another, and had some knowledge of the True Speech. Sorcery included both base crafts as defined by Halkel (finding, mending, dowsing, animal healing, etc.) and some high arts (human healing, chanting, weatherworking). A student who showed a gift for sorcery and was sent to Roke for training would first study the high arts of sorcery, and if successful in them might pursue his training in the art magic, especially in naming, summoning, and patterning, and so become a wizard.

  A wizard, as Halkel defined the term, was a man who received his staff from a teacher, himself a wizard, who had taken special responsibility for his training. It was usually the Archmage who gave a student his staff and made him wizard. This kind of teaching and succession occurred elsewhere than Roke—notably on Paln—but the Masters of Roke came to regard with suspicion a student of anyone not trained on Roke.

  Mage remained an essentially undefined term: a wizard of great power.

  The name and office of archmage were invented by Halkel, and the Archmage of Roke was a tenth Master, never counted among the Nine. A vital ethical and intellectual force, the archmage also exerted considerable political power. On the whole this power was used benevolently. Maintaining Roke as a strong centralising, normalising, pacific element in Archipelagan society, the archmages sent out sorcerers and wizards trained to understand the ethical practice of magic and to protect communities from drought, plague, invaders, dragons, and the unscrupulous use of their art.

  Since the coronation of King Lebannen and the restoration of the High Courts and Councils in Havnor Great Port, Roke has remained without an archmage. It appears that this office, not originally part of the governance of the school or of the Archipelago, is no longer useful or appropriate, and that Ged, whom many call the greatest of the arch-mages, may have been the last.

  CELIBACY AND WIZARDRY

  Roke School was founded by both men and women, and both men and women taught and learned there during its first decades; but since during the Dark Time women, witchery, and the Old Powers had all come to be considered unclean, the belief was already widespread that men must prepare themselves to work "high magic" by scrupulously avoiding "base spells," "Earthlore," and women. A man unwilling to put himself under the iron control of a spell of chastity could never practice the high arts. He could be no more than a common sorcerer. Male wizards thus had come to avoid women, refusing to teach them or learn from them. Witches, who almost universally went on working magic without giving up their sexuality, were described by celibate men as temptresses, unclean, defiling, essentially wicked.

  When in 730 the first Archmage of Roke, Halkel of Way, excluded women from the school, among his Nine Masters only the Patterner and the Doorkeeper protested; they were overruled. For more than three centuries, no woman taught or studied at the school on Roke. During those centuries, wizardry was an honored art, conferring status and power, while witchery was an unclean and ignorant superstition, practiced by women, paid for by peasants.

  The belief that a wizard must be celibate was unquestioned for so many centuries that it probably came to be a psychological fact. Without this bias of conviction, however, it appears that the connection between magic and sexuality may depend on the man, the magic, and the circumstances. There is no doubt that so great a mage as Morred was a husband and father.

  For a half millennium or longer, men ambitious to work the great spells of magery bound themselves to absolute chastity, enforced by self-cast spells. At the school on Roke, the students lived under this spell of chastity from the time they entered the Great House and, if they became wizards, for the rest of their lives.

  Among sorcerers, few are strictly celibate, and many marry and bring up a family.

  Women who work magic may practice periods of celibacy as well as fasting and other disciplines believed to pur
ify and concentrate power; but most witches lead active sexual lives, having more freedom than most village women and less need to fear abuse. Many pledge «witch-troth» with another witch or an ordinary woman. They do not often marry men, and if they do, they are likely to choose a sorcerer.

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