“This will be the house,” he said. “They said that that family of dyers and discredited magicians lives on this road.”
“Is it any use to talk to them?” said Arren, remembering Hare all too well.
“There is a center to this bad luck,” said the mage, harshly. “There is a place where the luck runs out. I need a guide to that place!” And he went on, and Arren must follow.
The house stood apart among its own orchards, a fine building of stone, but it and all its acreage had gone long uncared for. Cocoons of ungathered silkworms hung discolored among the ragged branches, and the ground beneath was thick with a papery litter of dead grubs and moths. All about the house under the close-set trees there hung an odor of decay, and as they came to it Arren suddenly remembered the horror that had been on him in the night.
Before they reached the door it was flung open. Out charged a grey-haired woman, glaring with reddened eyes and shouting, “Out, curse you, thieves, slanderers, lack-wits, liars, and misbegotten fools! Get out, out, go! The ill chance be on you forever!”
Sparrowhawk stopped, looking somewhat amazed, and quickly raised his hand in a curious gesture. He said one word, “Avert!”
At that the woman stopped yelling. She stared at him.
“Why did you do that?”
“To turn your Curse aside.”
She stared awhile longer and said at last, hoarsely, “Foreigners?”
“From the North.”
She came forward. At first Arren had been inclined to laugh at her, an old woman screeching on her doorstep, but close to her he felt only shame. She was foul and ill-clothed, and her breath stank, and her eyes had a terrible stare of pain.
“I have no power to curse,” she said. “No power.” She imitated Sparrowhawk’s gesture. “They still do that, where you come from?”
He nodded. He watched her steadily, and she returned his gaze. Presently her face began to work and change, and she said, “Where’s thy stick?”
“I do not show it here, sister.”
“No, you should not. It will keep you from life. Like my power: it kept me from life. So I lost it. I lost all the things I knew, all the words and names. They came by little strings like spiderwebs out of my eyes and mouth. There is a hole in the world, and the light is running out of it. And the words go with the light. Did you know that? My son sits staring all day at the dark, looking for the hole in the world. He says he would see better if he were blind. He has lost his hand as a dyer. We were the Dyers of Lorbanery. Look!” She shook before them her muscular, thin arms, stained to the shoulder with a faint, streaky mixture of ineradicable dyes. “It never comes off the skin,” she said, “but the mind washes clean. It won’t hold the colors. Who are you?”
Sparrowhawk said nothing. Again his eyes held the woman’s; and Arren, standing aside, watched uneasily.
All at once she trembled and said in a whisper, “I know thee—”
“Aye. Like knows like, sister.”
It was strange to see how she pulled away from the mage in terror, wanting to flee him, and yearned toward him as if to kneel at his feet.
He took her hand and held her. “Would you have your power back, the skills, the names? I can give you that.”
“You are the Great Man,” she whispered. “You are the King of the Shadows, the Lord of the Dark Place—”
“I am not. I am no king. I am a man, a mortal, your brother and your like.”
“But you will not die?”
“I will.”
“But you will come back and live forever.”
“Not I. Nor any man.”
“Then you are not—not the Great One in the darkness,” she said, frowning, and looking at him a little askance, with less fear. “But you are a Great One. Are there two? What is your name?”
Sparrowhawk’s stern face softened a moment. “I cannot tell you that,” he said gently.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” she said. She stood straighter now, facing him, and there was the echo of an old dignity in her voice and bearing. “I do not want to live and live and live forever. I would rather have back the names of things. But they are all gone. Names don’t matter now. There are no more secrets. Do you want to know my name?” Her eyes filled with light, her fists clenched, she leaned forward and whispered: “My name is Akaren.” Then she screamed aloud, “Akaren! Akaren! My name is Akaren! Now they all know my secret name, my true name, and there are no secrets, and there is no truth, and there is no death—death—death!” She screamed the word sobbing, and spittle flew from her lips.
“Be still, Akaren!”
She was still. Tears ran down her face, which was dirty, and streaked with locks of her uncombed, grey hair.
Sparrowhawk took that wrinkled, tear-blubbered face between his hands and very lightly, very tenderly, kissed her on the eyes. She stood motionless, her eyes closed. Then with his lips close to her ear he spoke a little in the Old Speech, once more kissed her, and let her go.
She opened clear eyes and looked at him awhile with a brooding, wondering gaze. So a newborn child looks at its mother; so a mother looks at her child. She turned slowly and went to her door, entered it, and closed it behind her: all in silence, with the still look of wonder on her face.
In silence the mage turned and started back toward the road. Arren followed him. He dared ask no question. Presently the mage stopped, there in the ruined orchard, and said, “I took her name from her and gave her a new one. And thus in some sense a rebirth. There was no other help or hope for her.”
His voice was strained and stifled.
“She was a woman of power,” he went on. “No mere witch or potion-maker, but a woman of art and skill, using her craft for the making of the beautiful, a proud woman and honorable. That was her life. And it is all wasted.” He turned abruptly away, walked off into the orchard aisles, and there stood beside a tree-trunk, his back turned.
Arren waited for him in the hot, leaf-speckled sunlight. He knew that Sparrowhawk was ashamed to burden Arren with his emotion; and indeed there was nothing the boy could do or say. But his heart went out utterly to his companion, not now with that first romantic ardor and adoration, but painfully, as if a link were drawn forth from the very inmost of it and forged into an unbreaking bond. For in this love he now felt there was compassion: without which love is untempered, and is not whole, and does not last.
Presently Sparrowhawk returned to him through the green shade of the orchard. Neither said anything, and they went on side by side. It was hot already; last night’s rain had dried, and dust rose under their feet on the road. Earlier the day had seemed dreary and insipid to Arren, as if infected by his dreams; now he took pleasure in the bite of the sunlight and the relief of shade, and enjoyed walking without brooding about their destination.
This was just as well, for they accomplished nothing. The afternoon was spent in talking with the men who mined the dye-ores, and bargaining for some bits of what was said to be emmelstone. As they trudged back to Sosara with the late sun pounding on their heads and necks, Sparrowhawk remarked, “It’s blue malachite; but I doubt they’ll know the difference in Sosara either.”
“They’re strange here,” Arren said. “It’s that way with everything; they don’t know the difference. Like what one of them said to the headman last night, ‘You wouldn’t know the true azure from blue mud. . . .’ They complain about bad times, but they don’t know when the bad times began; they say the work’s shoddy, but they don’t improve it; they don’t even know the difference between an artisan and a spell-worker, between handicraft and the Art Magic. It’s as if they had no lines and distinctions and colors clear in their heads. Everything’s the same to them; everything’s grey.”
“Aye,” said the mage, thoughtfully. He stalked along for a while, his head hunched between his shoulders, hawklike; though a short man, he walked with a long stride. “What is it they’re missing?”
Arren said without hesitation, “Joy in life.”
“Aye,” said Sparrowhawk again, accepting Arren’s statement and pondering it for some time. “I’m glad,” he said at last, “that you can think for me, lad. . . . I feel tired and stupid. I’ve been sick at heart since this morning, since we talked to her who was Akaren. I do not like waste and destruction. I do not want an enemy. If I must have an enemy, I do not want to seek him, and find him, and meet him. . . . If one must hunt, the prize should be a treasure, not a detestable thing.”
“An enemy, my lord?” said Arren.
Sparrowhawk nodded.
“When she talked about the Great Man, the King of Shadows—?”
Sparrowhawk nodded again. “I think so,” he said. “I think we must come not only to a place, but to a person. This is evil, evil, what passes on this island: this loss of craft and pride, this joylessness, this waste. This is the work of an evil will. But a will not even bent here, not even noticing Akaren or Lorbanery. The track we hunt is a track of wreckage, as if we followed a runaway cart down a mountainside and watched it set off an avalanche.”
“Could she—Akaren—tell you more about this enemy—who he is and where he is, or what he is?”
“Not now, lad,” the mage said in a soft but rather bleak voice. “No doubt she could have. In her madness there was still wizardry. Indeed her madness was her wizardry. But I could not hold her to answer me. She was in too much pain.”
And he walked on with his head somewhat hunched between his shoulders, as if himself enduring, and longing to avoid, some pain.
Arren turned, hearing a scuffle of feet behind them on the road. A man was running after them, a good way off but catching up fast. The dust of the road and his long, wiry hair made aureoles of red about him in the westering light, and his long shadow hopped fantastically along the trunks and aisles of the orchards by the road. “Listen!” he shouted. “Stop! I found it! I found it!”
He caught up with them in a rush. Arren’s hand went first to the air where his sword hilt might have been, then to the air where his lost knife had been, and then made itself into a fist, all in half a second. He scowled and moved forward. The man was a full head taller than Sparrowhawk, and broad-shouldered: a panting, raving, wild-eyed madman. “I found it!” he kept saying, while Arren, trying to dominate him by a stern, threatening voice and attitude, said, “What do you want?” The man tried to get around him, to Sparrowhawk; Arren stepped in front of him again.
“You are the Dyer of Lorbanery,” Sparrowhawk said.
Then Arren felt he had been a fool, trying to protect his companion; and he stepped aside, out of the way. For at six words from the mage, the madman stopped his panting and the clutching gesture of his big, stained hands; his eyes grew quieter; he nodded his head.
“I was the Dyer,” he said, “but now I can’t dye.” Then he looked askance at Sparrowhawk and grinned; he shook his head with its reddish, dusty bush of hair. “You took away my mother’s name,” he said. “Now I don’t know her, and she doesn’t know me. She loves me well enough still, but she’s left me. She’s dead.”
Arren’s heart contracted, but he saw that Sparrowhawk merely shook his head a little. “No, no,” he said, “she’s not dead.”
“But she will be. She’ll die.”
“Aye. That’s a consequence of being alive,” the mage said. The Dyer seemed to puzzle this over for a minute, and then came right up to Sparrowhawk, seized his shoulders, and bent over him. He moved so fast that Arren could not prevent him, but Arren did come up very close, and so heard his whisper, “I found the hole in the darkness. The King was standing there. He watches it; he rules it. He had a little flame, a little candle in his hand. He blew on it and it went out. Then he blew on it again and it burned! It burned!”
Sparrowhawk made no protest at being held and whispered at. He simply asked, “Where were you when you saw that?”
“In bed.”
“Dreaming?”
“No.”
“Across the wall?”
“No,” the Dyer said, in a suddenly sober tone, and as if uncomfortable. He let the mage go, and took a step back from him. “No, I—I don’t know where it is. I found it. But I don’t know where.”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” said Sparrowhawk.
“I can help you.”
“How?”
“You have a boat. You came here in it and you’re going on. Are you going on west? That’s the way. The way to the place where he comes out. There has to be a place, a place here, because he’s alive—not just the spirits, the ghosts, that come over the wall, not like that—you can’t bring anything but souls over the wall, but this is the body; this is the flesh immortal. I saw the flame rise in the darkness at his breath, the flame that was out. I saw that.” The man’s face was transfigured, a wild beauty in it in the long, red-gold light. “I know that he has overcome death. I know it. I gave my wizardry to know it. I was a wizard once! And you know it, and you are going there. Take me with you.”
The same light shone on Sparrowhawk’s face, but left it unmoved and harsh. “I am trying to go there,” he said.
“Let me go with you!”
Sparrowhawk nodded briefly. “If you’re ready when we sail,” he said, as coldly as before.
The Dyer backed away from him another step and stood watching him, the exaltation in his face clouding slowly over until it was replaced by a strange, heavy look; it was as if reasoning thought were laboring to break through the storm of words and feelings and visions that confused him. Finally he turned around without a word and began to run back down the road, into the haze of dust that had not yet settled on his tracks. Arren drew a long breath of relief.
Sparrowhawk also sighed, though not as if his heart were any easier. “Well,” he said. “Strange roads have strange guides. Let’s go on.”
Arren fell into step beside him. “You won’t take him with us?” he asked.
“That’s up to him.”
With a flash of anger Arren thought: It’s up to me, also. But he did not say anything, and they went on together in silence.
They were not well-received on their return to Sosara. Everything on a little island like Lorbanery is known as soon as it is done, and no doubt they had been seen turning aside to the Dyers’ House and talking to the madman on the road. The innkeeper served them uncivilly, and his wife acted scared to death of them. In the evening when the men of the village came to sit under the eaves of the inn, they made much display of not speaking to the foreigners and being very witty and merry among themselves. But they had not much wit to pass around and soon ran short of jollity. They all sat in silence for a long time, and at last the mayor said to Sparrowhawk, “Did you find your blue rocks?”
“I found some blue rocks,” Sparrowhawk replied politely.
“Sopli showed you where to find ’em, no doubt.”
“Ha, ha, ha,” went the other men, at this masterstroke of irony.
“Sopli would be the red-haired man?”
“The madman. You called on his mother in the morning.”
“I was looking for a wizard,” said the wizard.
The skinny man, who sat nearest him, spat into the darkness. “What for?”
“I thought I might find out about what I’m looking for.”
“People come to Lorbanery for silk,” the mayor said. “They don’t come for stones. They don’t come for charms. Or arm-wavings and jibber-jabber and sorcerers’ tricks. Honest folk live here and do honest work.”
“That’s right. He’s right,” said others.
“And we don’t want any other sort here, people from foreign parts snooping about and prying into our business.”
“That’s right. He’s right,” came the chorus.
“If there was any sorcerer around that wasn’t crazy, we’d give him an honest job in the sheds, but they don’t know how to do honest work.”
“They might, if there were any to do,” said Sparrowhawk. “Your sheds are empty, the orchards are untended, the s
ilk in your warehouses was all woven years ago. What do you do, here in Lorbanery?”
“We look after our own business,” the mayor snapped, but the skinny man broke in excitedly, “Why don’t the ships come, tell us that! What are they doing in Hort Town? Is it because our work’s been shoddy—?” He was interrupted by angry denials. They shouted at one another, jumped to their feet, the mayor shook his fist in Sparrowhawk’s face, another drew a knife. Their mood had gone wild. Arren was on his feet at once. He looked at Sparrowhawk, expecting to see him stand up in the sudden radiance of the magelight and strike them dumb with his revealed power. But he did not. He sat there and looked from one to another and listened to their menaces. And gradually they fell quiet, as if they could not keep up anger any more than they could keep up merriment. The knife was sheathed; the threats turned to sneers. They began to go off like dogs leaving a dog-fight, some strutting and some sneaking.
When the two were left alone Sparrowhawk got up, went inside the inn, and took a long draft of water from the jug beside the door. “Come, lad,” he said. “I’ve had enough of this.”
“To the boat?”
“Aye.” He put down two trade-counters of silver on the windowsill to pay for their lodging, and hoisted up their light pack of clothing. Arren was tired and sleepy, but he looked around the room of the inn, stuffy and bleak, and all a-flitter up in the rafters with the restless bats; he thought of last night in that room and followed Sparrowhawk willingly. He thought, too, as they went down Sosara’s one, dark street, that going now they would give the madman Sopli the slip. But when they came to the harbor he was waiting for them on the pier.
“There you are,” said the mage. “Get aboard, if you want to come.”
Without a word, Sopli got down into the boat and crouched beside the mast, like a big, unkempt dog. At this Arren rebelled. “My lord!” he said. Sparrowhawk turned; they stood face-to-face on the pier above the boat.
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