Arren looked at a woman sitting with her back to a sun-warmed wall; she had raised her hand as if to brush away the flies from her face, but the hand made a jerky, circular motion in the air, as if she had quite forgotten about it and it was moved only by the repeated surging of a palsy or shaking in the muscles. The gesture was like an incantation emptied of all intention, a spell without meaning.
Hawk was looking at her too, expressionless. “Come on!” he said.
He led on across the marketplace to an awning-shaded booth. Stripes of sunlight colored green, orange, lemon, crimson, azure, fell across the cloths and shawls and woven belts displayed, and danced multitudinous in the tiny mirrors that bedecked the high, feathered headdress of the woman who sold the stuff. She was big and she chanted in a big voice, “Silks, satins, canvases, furs, felts, woolens, fleecefells of Gont, gauzes of Sowl, silks of Lorbanery! Hey, you Northern men, take off your duffle-coats; don’t you see the sun’s out? How’s this to take home to a girl in far Havnor? Look at it, silk of the South, fine as the mayfly’s wing!” She had flipped open with deft hands a bolt of gauzy silk, pink shot with threads of silver.
“Nay, mistress, we’re not wed to queens,” said Hawk, and the woman’s voice rose to a blare: “So what do you dress your womenfolk in, burlap? Sailcloth? Misers that won’t buy a bit of silk for a poor woman freezing in the everlasting Northern snow! How’s this then, a Gontish fleecefell, to help you keep her warm on winter nights!” She flung out over the counterboard a great cream and brown square, woven of the silky hair of the goats of the northeastern isles. The pretended trader put out his hand and felt it, and he smiled.
“Aye, you’re a Gontishman?” said the blaring voice, and the headdress nodding sent a thousand colored dots spinning over the canopy and the cloth.
“This is Andradean work; see? There’s but four warp-strings to the finger’s width. Gont uses six or more. But tell me why you’ve turned from working magic to selling fripperies. When I was here years since, I saw you pulling flames out of men’s ears, and then you made the flames turn into birds and golden bells, and that was a finer trade than this one.”
“It was no trade at all,” the big woman said, and for a moment Arren was aware of her eyes, hard and steady as agates, looking at him and Hawk from out of the glitter and restlessness of her nodding feathers and flashing mirrors.
“It was pretty, that pulling fire out of ears,” said Hawk in a dour but simple-minded tone. “I thought to show it to my nevvy.”
“Well now, look you,” said the woman less harshly, leaning her broad, brown arms and heavy bosom on the counter. “We don’t do those tricks anymore. People don’t want ’em. They’ve seen through ’em. These mirrors now, I see you remember my mirrors,” and she tossed her head so that the reflected dots of colored light whirled dizzily about them. “Well, you can puzzle a man’s mind with the flashing of the mirrors and with words and with other tricks I won’t tell you, till he thinks he sees what he don’t see, what isn’t there. Like the flames and golden bells, or the suits of clothes I used to deck sailormen in, cloth of gold with diamonds like apricots, and off they’d swagger like the King of All the Isles. . . . But it was tricks, fooleries. You can fool men. They’re like chickens charmed by a snake, by a finger held before ’em. Men are like chickens. But then in the end they know they’ve been fooled and fuddled and they get angry and lose their pleasure in such things. So I turned to this trade, and maybe all the silks aren’t silks nor all the fleeces Gontish, but all the same they’ll wear—they’ll wear! They’re real and not mere lies and air like the suits of cloth of gold.”
“Well, well,” said Hawk, “then there’s none left in all Hort Town to pull fire out of ears, or do any magic like they did?”
At his last words the woman frowned; she straightened up and began to fold the fleecefell carefully. “Those who want lies and visions chew hazia,” she said. “Talk to them if you like!” She nodded at the unmoving figures around the square.
“But there were sorcerers, they that charmed the winds for seamen and put spells of fortune on their cargoes. Are they all turned to other trades?”
But she in sudden fury came blaring in over his words, “There’s a sorcerer if you want one, a great one, a wizard with a staff and all—see him there? He sailed with Egre himself, making winds and finding fat galleys, so he said, but it was all lies, and Captain Egre gave him his just reward at last; he cut his right hand off. And there he sits now, see him, with his mouth full of hazia and his belly full of air. Air and lies! Air and lies! That’s all there is to your magic, Seacaptain Goat!”
“Well, well, mistress,” said Hawk with obdurate mildness, “I was only asking.” She turned her broad back with a great dazzle of whirling mirror-dots, and he ambled off, Arren beside him.
His amble was purposeful. It brought them near the man she had pointed out. He sat propped against a wall, staring at nothing; the dark, bearded face had been very handsome once. The wrinkled wrist-stump lay on the pavement stones in the hot, bright sunlight, shameful.
There was some commotion among the booths behind them, but Arren found it hard to look away from the man; a loathing fascination held him. “Was he really a wizard?” he asked very low.
“He may be the one called Hare, who was weather-worker for the pirate Egre. They were famous thieves—Here, stand clear, Arren!” A man running full-tilt out from among the booths nearly slammed into them both. Another came trotting by, struggling under the weight of a great folding tray loaded with cords and braids and laces. A booth collapsed with a crash; awnings were being pushed over or taken down hurriedly; knots of people shoved and wrestled through the marketplace; voices rose in shouts and screams. Above them all rang the blaring yell of the woman with the headdress of mirrors. Arren glimpsed her wielding some kind of pole or stick against a bunch of men, fending them off with great sweeps like a swordsman at bay. Whether it was a quarrel that had spread and become a riot, or an attack by a gang of thieves, or a fight between two rival lots of peddlers, there was no telling. People rushed by with armfuls of goods that could be loot or their own property saved from looting. There were knife-fights, fist-fights, and brawls all over the square. “That way,” said Arren, pointing to a side street that led out of the square near them. He started for the street, for it was clear that they had better get out at once, but his companion caught his arm. Arren looked back and saw that the man Hare was struggling to his feet. When he got himself erect, he stood swaying a moment, and then without a look around him set off around the edge of the square, trailing his single hand along the house walls as if to guide or support himself. “Keep him in sight,” Sparrowhawk said, and they set off following. No one molested them or the man they followed, and in a minute they were out of the market-square, going downhill in the silence of a narrow, twisting street.
Overhead the attics of the houses almost met across the street, cutting out light; underfoot the stones were slippery with water and refuse. Hare went along at a good pace, though he kept trailing his hand along the walls like a blind man. They had to keep pretty close behind him lest they lose him at a cross-street. The excitement of the chase came into Arren suddenly; his senses were all alert, as they were during a stag-hunt in the forests of Enlad; he saw vividly each face they passed, and breathed in the sweet stink of the city: a smell of garbage, incense, carrion, and flowers. As they threaded their way across a broad, crowded street he heard a drumbeat and caught a glimpse of a line of naked men and women, chained each to the next by wrist and waist, matted hair hanging over their faces: one glimpse and they were gone, as he dodged after Hare down a flight of steps and out into a narrow square, empty but for a few women gossiping at the fountain.
There Sparrowhawk caught up with Hare and set a hand on his shoulder, at which Hare cringed as if scalded, wincing away, and backed into the shelter of a massive doorway. There he stood shivering and stared at them with the unseeing eyes of the hunted.
“Are you cal
led Hare?” asked Sparrowhawk, and he spoke in his own voice, which was harsh in quality, but gentle in intonation. The man said nothing, seeming not to heed or not to hear. “I want something of you,” Sparrowhawk said. Again no response. “I’ll pay for it.”
A slow reaction: “Ivory or gold?”
“Gold.”
“How much?”
“The wizard knows the spell’s worth.”
Hare’s face flinched and changed, coming alive for an instant, so quickly that it seemed to flicker, then clouding again into blankness. “That’s all gone,” he said, “all gone.” A coughing fit bent him over; he spat black. When he straightened up he stood passive, shivering, seeming to have forgotten what they were talking about.
Again Arren watched him in fascination. The angle in which he stood was formed by two giant figures flanking a doorway, statues whose necks were bowed under the weight of a pediment and whose knot-muscled bodies emerged only partially from the wall, as if they had tried to struggle out of stone into life and had failed partway. The door they guarded was rotten on its hinges; the house, once a palace, was derelict. The gloomy, bulging faces of the giants were chipped and lichen-grown. Between these ponderous figures the man called Hare stood slack and fragile, his eyes as dark as the windows of the empty house. He lifted up his maimed arm between himself and Sparrowhawk and whined, “Spare a little for a poor cripple, master. . . .”
The mage scowled as if in pain or shame; Arren felt he had seen his true face for a moment under the disguise. He put his hand again on Hare’s shoulder and said a few words, softly, in the wizardly tongue that Arren did not understand.
But Hare understood. He clutched at Sparrowhawk with his one hand and stammered, “You can still speak—speak—Come with me, come—”
The mage glanced at Arren, then nodded.
They went down by steep streets into one of the valleys between Hort Town’s three hills. The ways became narrower, darker, quieter as they descended. The sky was a pale strip between the overhanging eaves, and the house walls to either hand were dank. At the bottom of the gorge a stream ran, stinking like an open sewer; between arched bridges, houses crowded along the banks. Into the dark doorway of one of these houses Hare turned aside, vanishing like a candle blown out. They followed him.
The unlit stairs creaked and swayed under their feet. At the head of the stairs Hare pushed open a door, and they could see where they were: an empty room with a straw-stuffed mattress in one corner and one unglazed, shuttered window that let in a little dusty light.
Hare turned to face Sparrowhawk and caught at his arm again. His lips worked. He said at last, stammering, “Dragon . . . dragon . . .”
Sparrowhawk returned his look steadily, saying nothing.
“I cannot speak,” Hare said, and he let go his hold on Sparrowhawk’s arm and crouched down on the empty floor, weeping.
The mage knelt by him and spoke to him softly in the Old Speech. Arren stood by the shut door, his hand on his knife-hilt. The grey light and the dusty room, the two kneeling figures, the soft, strange sound of the mage’s voice speaking the language of the dragons, all came together as does a dream, having no relation to what happens outside it or to time passing.
Slowly Hare stood up. He dusted his knees with his single hand and hid the maimed arm behind his back. He looked around him, looked at Arren; he was seeing what he looked at now. He turned away presently and sat down on his mattress. Arren remained standing, on guard; but, with the simplicity of one whose childhood had been totally without furnishings, Sparrowhawk sat down cross-legged on the bare floor. “Tell me how you lost your craft and the language of your craft,” he said.
Hare did not answer for a while. He began to beat his mutilated arm against his thigh in a restless, jerky way, and at last he said, forcing the words out in bursts, “They cut off my hand. I can’t weave the spells. They cut off my hand. The blood ran out, ran dry.”
“But that was after you’d lost your power, Hare, or else they could not have done it.”
“Power . . .”
“Power over the winds and the waves and men. You called them by their names and they obeyed you.”
“Yes. I remember being alive,” the man said in a soft, hoarse voice. “And I knew the words and the names . . .”
“Are you dead now?”
“No. Alive. Alive. Only once I was a dragon. . . . I’m not dead. I sleep sometimes. Sleep comes very close to death, everyone knows that. The dead walk in dreams, everyone knows that. They come to you alive, and they say things. They walk out of death into the dreams. There’s a way. And if you go on far enough there’s a way back all the way. All the way. You can find it if you know where to look. And if you’re willing to pay the price.”
“What price is that?” Sparrowhawk’s voice floated on the dim air like the shadow of a falling leaf.
“Life—what else? What can you buy life with, but life?” Hare rocked back and forth on his pallet, a cunning, uncanny brightness in his eyes. “You see,” he said, “they can cut off my hand. They can cut off my head. It doesn’t matter. I can find the way back. I know where to look. Only men of power can go there.”
“Wizards, you mean?”
“Yes.” Hare hesitated, seeming to attempt the word several times; he could not say it. “Men of power,” he repeated. “And they must—and they must give it up. Pay.”
Then he fell sullen, as if the word “pay” had at last roused associations, and he had realized that he was giving information away instead of selling it. Nothing more could be got from him, not even the hints and stammers about “a way back” which Sparrowhawk seemed to find meaningful, and soon enough the mage stood up. “Well, half-answers beat no answers,” he said, “and the same with payment,” and, deft as a conjuror, he flipped a gold piece onto the pallet in front of Hare.
Hare picked it up. He looked at it and Sparrowhawk and Arren, with jerky movements of his head. “Wait,” he stammered. As soon as the situation changed he lost his grip of it and now groped miserably after what he wanted to say. “Tonight,” he said at last. “Wait. Tonight. I have hazia.”
“I don’t need it.”
“To show you—To show you the way. Tonight. I’ll take you. I’ll show you. You can get there, because you . . . you’re . . .” He groped for the word until Sparrowhawk said, “I am a wizard.”
“Yes! So we can—we can get there. To the way. When I dream. In the dream. See? I’ll take you. You’ll go with me, to the . . . to the way.”
Sparrowhawk stood, solid and pondering, in the middle of the dim room. “Maybe,” he said at last. “If we come, we’ll be here by dark.” Then he turned to Arren, who opened the door at once, eager to be gone.
The dank, overshadowed street seemed bright as a garden after Hare’s room. They struck out for the upper city by the shortest way, a steep stairway of stone between ivy-grown house walls. Arren breathed in and out like a sea lion—“Ugh!—Are you going back there?”
“Well, I will, if I can’t get the same information from a less risky source. He’s likely to set an ambush for us.”
“But aren’t you defended against thieves and so on?”
“Defended?” said Sparrowhawk. “What do you mean? D’you think I go about wrapped up in spells like an old woman afraid of the rheumatism? I haven’t the time for it. I hide my face to hide our quest; that’s all. We can look out for each other. But the fact is we’re not going to be able to keep out of danger on this journey.”
“Of course not,” Arren said stiffly, angry, angered in his pride. “I did not seek to do so.”
“That’s just as well,” the mage said, inflexible, and yet with a kind of good humor that appeased Arren’s temper. Indeed he was startled by his own anger; he had never thought to speak thus to the Archmage. But then, this was and was not the Archmage, this Hawk with the snubbed nose and square, ill-shaven cheeks, whose voice was sometimes one man’s voice and sometimes another’s: a stranger, unreliable.
> “Does it make sense, what he told you?” Arren asked, for he did not look forward to going back to that dim room above the stinking river. “All that fiddle-faddle about being alive and dead and coming back with his head cut off?”
“I don’t know if it makes sense. I wanted to talk with a wizard who had lost his power. He says that he hasn’t lost it but given it—traded it. For what? Life for life, he said. Power for power. No, I don’t understand him, but he is worth listening to.”
Sparrowhawk’s steady reasonableness shamed Arren further. He felt himself petulant and nervous, like a child. Hare had fascinated him, but now that the fascination was broken he felt a sick disgust, as if he had eaten something vile. He resolved not to speak again until he had controlled his temper. Next moment he missed his step on the worn, slick stairs, slipped, and recovered himself, scraping his hands on the stones. “Oh curse this filthy town!” he broke out in rage. And the mage replied dryly, “No need to, I think.”
There was indeed something wrong about Hort Town, wrong in the very air, so that one might think seriously that it lay under a curse; and yet this was not a presence of any quality, but rather an absence, a weakening of all qualities, like a sickness that soon infected the spirit of any visitor. Even the warmth of the afternoon sun was sickly, too heavy a heat for March. The squares and streets bustled with activity and business, but there was neither order nor prosperity. Goods were poor, prices high, and the markets were unsafe for vendors and buyers alike, being full of thieves and roaming gangs. Not many women were on the streets, and the few there were appeared mostly in groups. It was a city without law or governance. Talking with people, Arren and Sparrowhawk soon learned that there was in fact no council or mayor or lord left in Hort Town. Some of those who had used to rule the city had died, and some had resigned, and some had been assassinated; various chiefs lorded it over various quarters of the city, the harbor guardsmen ran the port and lined their pockets, and so on.
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