But in the island of Gont they tell the story otherwise, saying that it was the young king, Lebannen, who came seeking Ged to bring him to the coronation. But he did not find him at Gont Port or at Re Albi. No one could say where he was, only that he had gone afoot up into the forests of the mountain. Often he went so, they said, and did not return for many months, and no man knew the roads of his solitude. Some offered to seek for him, but the King forbade them, saying, “He rules a greater kingdom than I do.” And so he left the mountain, and took ship, and returned to Havnor to be crowned.
AFTERWORD
Before I wrote the first of these books, I’d written a couple of short stories set on islands where wizardry was practiced and dragons were feared. As I’ve said, when I began to conceive that first book of Earthsea, I realized those islands belonged to a great archipelago, a world of islands, and I drew the map.
All the islands were on it, but I knew nothing of them except their names, their shapes, the bays and mountains and rivers I had marked, the names of cities on some of them. They all remained to be discovered, one by one.
There are still many islands that I’ve never been to. I can look at the map and wonder about them, just as I wonder about Tenerife or Zanzibar. And even though I’ve been to the Outer Hebrides or the Windward Isles, to Roke or Havnor, I can still wonder about them; there’s always more to learn.
The poet Roethke said, “I learn by going where I have to go.” It is a sentence that has meant a great deal to me. Sometimes it tells me that by going where it is necessary for us to go, by following our own path, we learn our way through the world. Sometimes it tells me that we can only learn our way through the world by just starting out and going.
Understood either way, it describes how I learned Earthsea.
When I first arrived, I knew very little about wizardry and even less about dragons. Ogion and the Masters of Roke educated me about what wizards did. But I had a lot of pictures and notions about dragons in my head that I had to work through, get rid of, or borrow from, before I could see my own dragons clearly.
There are many kinds of dragon in the world, and growing up I’d learned something about a good many of them. There was the kind of dragon, in fairy tales and the Norse lore, who eats maidens and hoards jewelry. A close relative was St. George’s dragon, often a rather pathetic specimen, which I knew mostly from paintings where the saint is about to slay it, or has already slain it and is standing with one armored foot planted smugly on it. Then there were the far more impressive Chinese dragons, coiling imperially through the clouds with a fiery jewel in their claws. There were the lovable dragons of Pern. There was, barely hinted but unforgettable, the dragon whose tooth forms a great gateway in one of Lord Dunsany’s tales. There was, magnificently, Smaug.
All rich, all excellent. I plundered freely. Smaug, the great Worms of the North, and aerial Chinese dragons are certainly ancestors of the Dragons of Pendor in the first book of Earthsea.
But, by going with Ged where he had to go, I still had much to learn about the dragons of Earthsea, their history, their kinship with human beings. In The Farthest Shore, I began to see them clearly. Ged told me what to see, when he said to Arren, “And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet I would remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.”
The dragons are, perhaps above all, beautiful.
As tigers are beautiful. Could anyone regret having seen a tiger? Unless, of course, they had a little while to regret it while the tiger ate them.
The dragons are beautiful, and also mortal, as tigers are. Long-lived, but not indestructible. Terrible, but not monstrous. Fierce, fiery, careless of human life, sometimes careless of their own lives. Destructive when angry, very much to be feared, and untamably wild. Mysterious, as all great wild creatures are mysterious.
But not incomprehensible. Speech is natural to them, inborn: they don’t have to learn it, as we do. Their language, the only one they will speak, is the tongue the wizards must learn, the tongue that works magic, the True Speech, the language of the Making.
When I wrote The Farthest Shore, I saw the dragons as wildness itself, and thus as utterly other than human. And yet, looking back, I see that I already felt their otherness as not absolute. They share a language with us, or some of us, as no animal does. And when Cob’s desire for immortality leads him to make a breach in the human world from which life and light drain out like water through a breach in a dyke, the dragons are damaged by it just as human beings are, losing their reason, their power of speech, their magic.
I didn’t understand why that was so, when I wrote the book, but I knew it was so.
People like to believe that writers know exactly what they are doing and have their story under control, thought out, plotted from beginning to end. It makes sense of the whole strange enterprise of novel writing, makes it rational. Many academic critics believe this, so do many readers, so do some writers. But not all writers have this kind of control of their material, and I wouldn’t even want to have it.
There’s a difference between control and responsibility. Aesthetically and morally, I take full responsibility for what I write. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t feel free to let the material control itself to the extent I do. I’d have to manage it consciously and continuously, making everything happen as I planned it to happen. But I never wanted that kind of control. By “going where I have to go,” being willing to guess that there is such a place without knowing clearly how I am to get there, trusting to my story to take me there, I know I’ve gone farther than I could ever have gone if I’d fully known my goal and the way to it before I set out. I left room for luck and chance to come and aid me, room for my narrow plans and ideas to grow and include what I didn’t know when I set out.
What told me to do this—to leave room? I have no idea. Luck, chance. A kind of passive courage. A willingness to follow.
Follow what?
A dragon, maybe. A dragon flying on the wind.
It would be lovely if writing a story was like getting into a little boat that drifted off and took me to the promised land, or climbing on a dragon’s back and flying off to Selidor. But it’s only as a reader that I can do that. As a writer, to take full responsibility without claiming total control requires a lot of work, a lot of groping and testing, flexibility, caution, watchfulness. I have no chart to follow, so I have to be constantly alert. The boat needs steering. There have to be long conversations with the dragon I ride. But however watchful and aware I am, I know I can never be fully aware of the currents that carry the boat, of where the winds beneath the dragon’s wings are blowing.
A writer lives and works in the world she was born into, and no matter how firm her own purpose, or how seemingly far from the present day her subject, she and her work are subject to the changing winds and currents of that world.
I was a child during the Great Depression, and eleven years old when America entered the Second World War. I wrote this book soon after the Sixties—a time of high tides and high winds, of great hope and wild folly, when for a while it seemed a more generous vision might replace the sour dream of profiteering and consumerism that has been the bane of my country.
As I look back at the book now, I see how it reflects that time. Along with the active movement to free America from racist injustice and from militarism, there was a real vision of getting free from compulsive materialism, the confusion of goods with good. Yet already we were watching much of that vision blur off into wishful thinking or become drug-dependent.
Being an irreligious puritan and a rational mystic, I think it’s irresponsible to let a belief think for you or a chemical dream for you.
So the book’s dark themes of loss and betrayal took shape. So Ged and Arren had to come to Hort Town, and drug addiction and slavery are seen for the first time in the Archipelago. Evil, in this book, has an immediate, ugly, human shape, because I saw evil not as some hor
de of foreign demons with bad teeth and superweapons but as an insidious and ever-present enemy in my own daily life in my own country: the ruinous irresponsibility of greed.
We are frequently told that greed for endless increase of material goods is natural and universal—as is greed for endless life. We are all supposed to agree that you can’t be too rich or live too long.
The desire to live is certainly natural and universal, since it’s the basic directive of living creatures: once born, our job and our desire is to try to stay alive.
But is that the same as a desire to stay alive forever, to be immortal? Or is it just that we can’t imagine not being, so we invent an endless existence called immortality?
Knowing that everything on earth has an end, we know the afterlife can’t be on earth, so it has to be somewhere else—a totally other place where the living can’t come and where nothing can ever change. To me, the imagery of the various afterlives and underworlds, the heavens and hells, appears marvelous and powerful, but I can’t believe in any of them except as I “believe” in any imaginative creation as a hint, an indication, a sign of something more than can be said or shown. The idea of individual immortality, an endless ego-existence, is more dreadful to me than the idea of letting go the self in death to rejoin shared, eternal being. I see life as a shared gift, received from others and passed on to others, and living and dying as one process, in which lies both our suffering and our reward. Without mortality to purchase it, how can we have the consciousness of eternity? I think the price is worth paying.
So in this book Ged goes down into the dreary realm of the dead, knowing that he will not come back from it, and willing to pay that price.
But even wizards don’t know everything. He’s wrong. He does come back, saved by his young companion’s innocence and strength. Both of them are transformed by the terrible passage. The boy Arren returns as the man Lebannen, and Ged has lost, not his life, but his power to do magic. The Archmage is no mage now.
What may be implied about Ged’s future in that loss, that change, is just hinted at by the Doorkeeper when he says, “He has done with doing. He goes home.”
1. A BAD THING
2. GOING TO THE FALCON’S NEST
3. OGION
4. KALESSIN
5. BETTERING
6. WORSENING
7. MICE
8. HAWKS
9. FINDING WORDS
10. THE DOLPHIN
11. HOME
12. WINTER
13. THE MASTER
14. TEHANU
AFTERWORD
Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk’s flight
on the empty sky.
—The Creation of Éa
CHAPTER 1
A BAD THING
After Farmer Flint of the Middle Valley died, his widow stayed on at the farmhouse. Her son had gone to sea and her daughter had married a merchant of Valmouth, so she lived alone at Oak Farm. People said she had been some kind of great person in the foreign land she came from, and indeed the mage Ogion used to stop by Oak Farm to see her; but that didn’t count for much, since Ogion visited all sorts of nobodies.
She had a foreign name, but Flint had called her Goha, which is what they call a little white web-spinning spider on Gont. That name fit well enough, she being white-skinned and small and a good spinner of goat’s-wool and sheep-fleece. So now she was Flint’s widow, Goha, mistress of a flock of sheep and the land to pasture them, four fields, an orchard of pears, two tenants’ cottages, the old stone farmhouse under the oaks, and the family graveyard over the hill where Flint lay, earth in his earth.
“I’ve generally lived near tombstones,” she said to her daughter.
“Oh, Mother, come live in town with us!” said Apple, but the widow would not leave her solitude.
“Maybe later, when there are babies and you’ll need a hand,” she said, looking with pleasure at her grey-eyed daughter. “But not now. You don’t need me. And I like it here.”
When Apple had gone back to her young husband, the widow closed the door and stood on the stone-flagged floor of the kitchen of the farmhouse. It was dusk, but she did not light the lamp, thinking of her own husband lighting the lamp: the hands, the spark, the intent, dark face in the catching glow. The house was silent.
I used to live in a silent house, alone, she thought. I will do so again. She lighted the lamp.
In a late afternoon of the first hot weather, the widow’s old friend Lark came out from the village, hurrying along the dusty lane. “Goha,” she said, seeing her weeding in the bean patch, “Goha, it’s a bad thing. It’s a very bad thing. Can you come?”
“Yes,” the widow said. “What would the bad thing be?”
Lark caught her breath. She was a heavy, plain, middle-aged woman, whose name did not fit her body anymore. But once she had been a slight and pretty girl, and she had befriended Goha, paying no attention to the villagers who gossiped about that white-faced Kargish witch Flint had brought home; and friends they had been ever since.
“A burned child,” she said.
“Whose?”
“Tramps’.”
Goha went to shut the farmhouse door, and they set off along the lane, Lark talking as they went. She was short of breath and sweating. Tiny seeds of the heavy grasses that lined the lane stuck to her cheeks and forehead, and she brushed at them as she talked. “They’ve been camped in the river meadows all the month. A man, passed himself off as a tinker, but he’s a thief, and a woman with him. And another man, younger, hanging around with them most of the time. Not working, any of ’em. Filching and begging and living off the woman. Boys from downriver were bringing them farmstuff to get at her. You know how it is now, that kind of thing. And gangs on the roads and coming by farms. If I were you, I’d lock my door, these days. So this one, this younger fellow, comes into the village, and I was out in front of our house, and he says, ‘The child’s not well.’ I’d barely seen a child with them, a little ferret of a thing, slipped out of sight so quick I wasn’t sure it was there at all. So I said, ‘Not well? A fever?’ And the fellow says, ‘She hurt herself, lighting the fire,’ and then before I’d got myself ready to go with him he’d made off. Gone. And when I went out there by the river, the other pair was gone too. Cleared out. Nobody. All their traps and trash gone too. There was just their campfire, still smoldering, and just by it—partly in it—on the ground—”
Lark stopped talking for several steps. She looked straight ahead, not at Goha.
“They hadn’t even put a blanket over her,” she said.
She strode on.
“She’d been pushed into the fire while it was burning,” she said. She swallowed, and brushed at the sticking seeds on her hot face. “I’d say maybe she fell, but if she’d been awake she’d have tried to save herself. They beat her and thought they’d killed her, I guess, and wanted to hide what they’d done to her, so they—”
She stopped again, went on again.
“Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe he pulled her out. He came to get help for her, after all. It must have been the father. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Who’s to know? Who’s to care? Who’s to care for the child? Why do we do what we do?”
Goha asked in a low voice, “Will she live?”
“She might,” Lark said. “She might well live.”
After a while, as they neared the village, she said, “I don’t know why I had to come to you. Ivy’s there. There’s nothing to be done.”
“I could go to Valmouth, for Beech.”
“Nothing he could do. It’s beyond . . . beyond help. I got her warm. Ivy’s given her a potion and a sleeping charm. I carried her home. She must be six or seven but she didn’t weigh what a two-year-old would. She never really waked. But she makes a sort of gasping. . . . I know there isn’t anything you can do. But I wanted you.”
“I want to come,” Goha said.
But before they entered Lark’s house, she shut her eyes and held her breath a moment in dread.
Lark’s children had been sent outdoors, and the house was silent. The child lay unconscious on Lark’s bed. The village witch, Ivy, had smeared an ointment of witch hazel and heal-all on the lesser burns, but had not touched the right side of the face and head and the right hand, which had been charred to the bone. She had drawn the rune Pirr above the bed, and left it at that.
“Can you do anything?” Lark asked in a whisper.
Goha stood looking down at the burned child. Her hands were still. She shook her head.
“You learned healing, up on the mountain, didn’t you?” Pain and shame and rage spoke through Lark, begging for relief.
“Even Ogion couldn’t heal this,” the widow said.
Lark turned away, biting her lip, and wept. Goha held her, stroking her grey hair. They held each other.
The witch Ivy came in from the kitchen, scowling at the sight of Goha. Though the widow cast no charms and worked no spells, it was said that when she first came to Gont she had lived at Re Albi as a ward of the mage, and that she knew the Archmage of Roke, and no doubt had foreign and uncanny powers. Jealous of her prerogative, the witch went to the bed and busied herself beside it, making a mound of something in a dish and setting it afire so that it smoked and reeked while she muttered a curing charm over and over. The rank herbal smoke made the burned child cough and half rouse, flinching and shuddering. She began to make a gasping noise, quick, short, scraping breaths. Her one eye seemed to look up at Goha.
Goha stepped forward and took the child’s left hand in hers. She spoke in her own language. “I served them and I left them,” she said. “I will not let them have you.”
The child stared at her or at nothing, trying to breathe, and trying again to breathe, and trying again to breathe.
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