He followed and caught up with the pair, coming up beside them in the late twilight lit only by distant lantern-gleams. The girl stepped back, but the man stared at him and then flung up the staff he carried, holding it between them as a barrier to ward off the threat or act of evil. And that was somewhat more than Ged could bear. His voice shook a little as he said, “I thought you would know me, Vetch.”
Even then Vetch hesitated for a moment.
“I do know you,” he said, and lowered the staff and took Ged’s hand and hugged him round the shoulders—“I do know you! Welcome, my friend, welcome! What a sorry greeting I gave you, as if you were a ghost coming up from behind—and I have waited for you to come, and looked for you—”
“So you are the wizard they boast of in Ismay? I wondered—”
“Oh, yes, I’m their wizard; but listen, let me tell you why I didn’t know you, lad. Maybe I’ve looked too hard for you. Three days ago—were you here three days ago, on Iffish?”
“I came yesterday.”
“Three days ago, in the street in Quor, the village up there in the hills, I saw you. That is, I saw a presentment of you, or an imitation of you, or maybe simply a man who looks like you. He was ahead of me, going out of town, and he turned a bend in the road even as I saw him. I called and got no answer, I followed and found no one; nor any tracks; but the ground was frozen. It was a queer thing, and now seeing you come up out of the shadows like that I thought I was tricked again. I am sorry, Ged!” He spoke Ged’s true name softly, so that the girl who stood waiting a little way behind him would not hear it.
Ged also spoke low, to use his friend’s true name: “No matter, Estarriol. But this is myself, and I am glad to see you . . .”
Vetch heard, perhaps, something more than simple gladness in his voice. He had not yet let go of Ged’s shoulder, and he said now, in the True Speech, “In trouble and from darkness you come, Ged, yet your coming is joy to me.” Then he went on in his Reach-accented Hardic, “Come on, come home with us, we’re going home, it’s time to get in out of the dark!—This is my sister, the youngest of us, prettier than I am as you see, but much less clever: Yarrow she’s called. Yarrow, this is the Sparrowhawk, the best of us and my friend.”
“Lord Wizard,” the girl greeted him, and decorously she bobbed her head and hid her eyes with her hands to show respect, as women did in the East Reach; her eyes when not hidden were clear, shy, and curious. She was perhaps fourteen years old, dark like her brother, but very slight and slender. On her sleeve there clung, winged and taloned, a dragon no longer than her hand.
They set off down the dusky street together, and Ged remarked as they went along, “In Gont they say Gontish women are brave, but I never saw a maiden there wear a dragon for a bracelet.”
This made Yarrow laugh, and she answered him straight, “This is only a harrekki, have you no harrekki on Gont?” Then she got shy for a moment and hid her eyes.
“No, nor no dragons. Is not the creature a dragon?”
“A little one, that lives in oak trees, and eats wasps and worms and sparrows’ eggs—it grows no greater than this. Oh, Sir, my brother has told me often of the pet you had, the wild thing, the otak—do you have it still?”
“No. No longer.”
Vetch turned to him as if with a question, but he held his tongue and asked nothing till much later, when the two of them sat alone over the stone firepit of Vetch’s house.
Though he was the chief wizard in the whole island of Iffish, Vetch made his home in Ismay, this small town where he had been born, living with his youngest brother and sister. His father had been a sea-trader of some means, and the house was spacious and strong-beamed, with much homely wealth of pottery and fine weaving and vessels of bronze and brass on carven shelves and chests. A great Taonian harp stood in one corner of the main room, and Yarrow’s tapestry-loom in another, its tall frame inlaid with ivory. There Vetch for all his plain quiet ways was both a powerful wizard and a lord in his own house. There were a couple of old servants, prospering along with the house, and the brother, a cheerful lad, and Yarrow, quick and silent as a little fish, who served the two friends their supper and ate with them, listening to their talk, and afterwards slipped off to her own room. All things here were well-founded, peaceful, and assured; and Ged looking about him at the firelit room said, “This is how a man should live,” and sighed.
“Well, it’s one good way,” said Vetch. “There are others. Now, lad, tell me if you can what things have come to you and gone from you since we last spoke, two years ago. And tell me what journey you are on, since I see well that you won’t stay long with us this time.”
Ged told him, and when he was done Vetch sat pondering for a long while. Then he said, “I’ll go with you, Ged.”
“No.”
“I think I will.”
“No, Estarriol. This is no task or bane of yours. I began this evil course alone, I will finish it alone, I do not want any other to suffer from it—you least of all, you who tried to keep my hand from the evil act in the very beginning, Estarriol—”
“Pride was ever your mind’s master,” his friend said smiling, as if they talked of a matter of small concern to either. “Now think: it is your quest, assuredly, but if the quest fails, should there not be another there who might bear warning to the Archipelago? For the shadow would be a fearful power then. And if you defeat the thing, should there not be another there who will tell of it in the Archipelago, that the Deed may be known and sung? I know I can be of no use to you; yet I think I should go with you.”
So entreated Ged could not deny his friend, but he said, “I should not have stayed this day here. I knew it, but I stayed.”
“Wizards do not meet by chance, lad,” said Vetch. “And after all, as you said yourself, I was with you at the beginning of your journey. It is right that I should follow you to its end.” He put new wood on the fire, and they sat gazing into the flames a while.
“There is one I have not heard of since that night on Roke Knoll, and I had no heart to ask any at the School of him: Jasper, I mean.”
“He never won his staff. He left Roke that same summer, and went to the Island of O to be sorcerer in the Lord’s household at O-tokne. I know no more of him than that.”
Again they were silent, watching the fire and enjoying (since it was a bitter night) the warmth on their legs and faces as they sat on the broad coping of the firepit, their feet almost among the coals.
Ged said at last, speaking low, “There is a thing that I fear, Estarriol. I fear it more if you are with me when I go. There in the Hands in the dead end of the inlet I turned upon the shadow, it was within my hands’ reach, and I seized it—I tried to seize it. And there was nothing I could hold. I could not defeat it. It fled, I followed. But that may happen again, and yet again. I have no power over the thing. There may be neither death nor triumph to end this quest; nothing to sing of; no end. It may be I must spend my life running from sea to sea and land to land on an endless vain venture, a shadow-quest.”
“Avert!” said Vetch, turning his left hand in the gesture that turns aside the ill chance spoken of. For all his somber thoughts this made Ged grin a little, for it is rather a child’s charm than a wizard’s; there was always such village innocence in Vetch. Yet also he was keen, shrewd, direct to the center of a thing. He said now, “That is a grim thought and I trust a false one. I guess rather that what I saw begin, I may see end. Somehow you will learn its nature, its being, what it is, and so hold and bind and vanquish it. Though that is a hard question: what is it . . . There is a thing that worries me, I do not understand it. It seems the shadow now goes in your shape, or a kind of likeness of you at least, as they saw it on Vemish and as I saw it here in Iffish. How may that be, and why, and why did it never do so in the Archipelago?”
“They say, Rules change in the Reaches.”
“Aye, a true saying, I can tell you. There are good spells I learned on Roke that have no power here, or go all awr
y; and also there are spells worked here I never learned on Roke. Every land has its own powers, and the farther one goes from the Inner Lands, the less one can guess about those powers and their governance. But I do not think it is only that which works this change in the shadow.”
“Nor do I. I think that, when I ceased to flee from it and turned against it, that turning of my will upon it gave it shape and form, even though the same act prevented it from taking my strength from me. All my acts have their echo in it; it is my creature.”
“In Osskil it named you, and so stopped any wizardry you might have used against it. Why did it not do so again, there in the Hands?”
“I do not know. Perhaps it is only from my weakness that it draws the strength to speak. Almost with my own tongue it speaks: for how did it know my name? How did it know my name? I have racked my brains on that over all the seas since I left Gont, and I cannot see the answer. Maybe it cannot speak at all in its own form or formlessness, but only with borrowed tongue, as a gebbeth. I do not know.”
“Then you must beware meeting it in gebbeth-form a second time.”
“I think,” Ged replied, stretching out his hands to the red coals as if he felt an inward chill, “I think I will not. It is bound to me now as I am to it. It cannot get so far free of me as to seize any other man and empty him of will and being, as it did Skiorh. It can possess me. If ever I weaken again, and try to escape from it, to break the bond, it will possess me. And yet, when I held it with all the strength I had, it became mere vapor, and escaped from me . . . And so it will again, and yet it cannot really escape, for I can always find it. I am bound to the foul cruel thing, and will be forever, unless I can learn the word that masters it: its name.”
Brooding his friend asked, “Are there names in the dark realms?”
“Gensher the Archmage said there are not. My master Ogion said otherwise.”
“Infinite are the arguments of mages,” Vetch quoted, with a smile that was somewhat grim.
“She who served the Old Power on Osskil swore that the Stone would tell me the shadow’s name, but that I count for little. However there was also a dragon, who offered to trade that name for his own, to be rid of me; and I have thought that, where mages argue, dragons may be wise.”
“Wise, but unkind. But what dragon is this? You did not tell me you had been talking with dragons since I saw you last.”
They talked together late that night, and though always they came back to the bitter matter of what lay before Ged, yet their pleasure in being together overrode all; for the love between them was strong and steadfast, unshaken by time or chance. In the morning Ged woke beneath his friend’s roof, and while he was still drowsy he felt such wellbeing as if he were in some place wholly defended from evil and harm. All day long a little of this dream-peace clung to his thoughts, and he took it, not as a good omen, but as a gift. It seemed likely to him that leaving this house he would leave the last haven he was to know, and so while the short dream lasted he would be happy in it.
Having affairs he must see to before he left Iffish, Vetch went off to other villages of the island with the lad who served him as prentice-sorcerer. Ged stayed with Yarrow and her brother, called Murre, who was between her and Vetch in age. He seemed not much more than a boy, for there was no gift or scourge of mage-power in him, and he had never been anywhere but Iffish, Tok, and Holp, and his life was easy and untroubled. Ged watched him with wonder and some envy, and exactly so he watched Ged: to each it seemed very queer that the other, so different, yet was his own age, nineteen years. Ged marveled how one who had lived nineteen years could be so carefree. Admiring Murre’s comely, cheerful face he felt himself to be all lank and harsh, never guessing that Murre envied him even the scars that scored his face, and thought them the track of a dragon’s claws and the very rune and sign of a hero.
The two young men were thus somewhat shy with each other, but as for Yarrow she soon lost her awe of Ged, being in her own house and mistress of it. He was very gentle with her, and many were the questions she asked of him, for Vetch, she said, would never tell her anything. She kept busy those two days making dry wheatcakes for the voyagers to carry, and wrapping up dried fish and meat and other such provender to stock their boat, until Ged told her to stop, for he did not plan to sail clear to Selidor without a halt.
“Where is Selidor?”
“Very far out in the Western Reach, where dragons are as common as mice.”
“Best stay in the East then, our dragons are as small as mice. There’s your meat, then; you’re sure that’s enough? Listen, I don’t understand: you and my brother both are mighty wizards, you wave your hand and mutter and the thing is done. Why do you get hungry, then? When it comes suppertime at sea, why not say, Meat-pie! and the meat-pie appears, and you eat it?”
“Well, we could do so. But we don’t much wish to eat our words, as they say. Meat-pie! is only a word, after all . . . We can make it odorous, and savorous, and even filling, but it remains a word. It fools the stomach and gives no strength to the hungry man.”
“Wizards, then, are not cooks,” said Murre, who was sitting across the kitchen hearth from Ged, carving a box-lid of fine wood; he was a woodworker by trade, though not a very zealous one.
“Nor are cooks wizards, alas,” said Yarrow on her knees to see if the last batch of cakes baking on the hearth-bricks was getting brown. “But I still don’t understand, Sparrowhawk. I have seen my brother, and even his prentice, make light in a dark place only by saying one word: and the light shines, it is bright, not a word but a light you can see your way by!”
“Aye,” Ged answered. “Light is a power. A great power, by which we exist, but which exists beyond our needs, in itself. Sunlight and starlight are time, and time is light. In the sunlight, in the days and years, life is. In a dark place life may call upon the light, naming it. But usually when you see a wizard name or call upon some thing, some object to appear, that is not the same, he calls upon no power greater than himself, and what appears is an illusion only. To summon a thing that is not there at all, to call it by speaking its true name, that is a great mastery, not lightly used. Not for mere hunger’s sake. Yarrow, your little dragon has stolen a cake.”
Yarrow had listened so hard, gazing at Ged as he spoke, that she had not seen the harrekki scuttle down from its warm perch on the kettle-hook over the hearth and seize a wheatcake bigger than itself. She took the small scaly creature on her knee and fed it bits and crumbs, while she pondered what Ged had told her.
“So then you would not summon up a real meat-pie lest you disturb what my brother is always talking about—I forget its name—”
“Equilibrium,” Ged replied soberly, for she was very serious.
“Yes. But, when you were shipwrecked, you sailed from the place in a boat woven mostly of spells, and it didn’t leak water. Was it illusion?”
“Well, partly it was illusion, because I am uneasy seeing the sea through great holes in my boat, so I patched them for the looks of the thing. But the strength of the boat was not illusion, nor summoning, but made with another kind of art, a binding-spell. The wood was bound as one whole, one entire thing, a boat. What is a boat but a thing that doesn’t leak water?”
“I’ve bailed some that do,” said Murre.
“Well, mine leaked, too, unless I was constantly seeing to the spell.” He bent down from his corner seat and took a cake from the bricks, and juggled it in his hands. “I too have stolen a cake.”
“You have burned fingers, then. And when you’re starving on the waste water between the far isles you’ll think of that cake and say, Ah! had I not stolen that cake I might eat it now, alas!—I shall eat my brother’s, so he can starve with you—”
“Thus is Equilibrium maintained,” Ged remarked, while she took and munched a hot, half-toasted cake; and this made her giggle and choke. But presently looking serious again she said, “I wish I could truly understand what you tell me. I am too stupid.”
“L
ittle sister,” Ged said, “it is I that have no skill explaining. If we had more time—”
“We will have more time,” Yarrow said. “When my brother comes back home, you will come with him, for a while at least, won’t you?”
“If I can,” he answered gently.
There was a little pause; and Yarrow asked, watching the harrekki climb back to its perch, “Tell me just this, if it is not a secret: what other great powers are there besides the light?”
“It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man’s hand and the wisdom in a tree’s root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.”
Staying his knife on the carved wood, Murre asked, “What of death?”
The girl listened, her shining black head bent down.
“For a word to be spoken,” Ged answered slowly, “there must be silence. Before, and after.” Then all at once he got up, saying, “I have no right to speak of these things. The word that was mine to say I said wrong. It is better that I keep still: I will not speak again. Maybe there is no true power but the dark.” And he left the fireside and the warm kitchen, taking up his cloak and going out alone into the drizzling cold rain of winter in the streets.
“He is under a curse,” Murre said, gazing somewhat fearfully after him.
“I think this voyage he is on leads him to his death,” the girl said, “and he fears that, yet he goes on.” She lifted her head as if she watched, through the red flame of the fire, the course of a boat that came through the seas of winter alone, and went on out into empty seas. Then her eyes filled with tears a moment, but she said nothing.
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