The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Might there be a spring of water up the road?” the stranger asked.

  The carter slowly shook his head. After a long time he said, “No.” A while later he said, “There ain’t.”

  They all plodded along. Discouraged, the stranger found it hard to go any faster than the oxen, about a mile an hour, maybe.

  He became aware that the carter was wordlessly reaching something out to him: a big clay jug wrapped round with wicker. He took it, and finding it very heavy, drank his fill of the water, leaving it scarcely lighter when he passed it back with his thanks.

  “Climb on,” said the carter after a while.

  “Thanks. I’ll walk. How far might it be to Re Albi?”

  The wheels creaked. The oxen heaved deep sighs, first one, then the other. Their dusty hides smelled sweet in the hot sunlight.

  “Ten mile,” the carter said. He thought, and said, “Or twelve.” After a while he said, “No less.”

  “I’d better walk on, then,” said the stranger.

  Refreshed by the water, he was able to get ahead of the oxen, and they and the cart and the carter were a good way behind him when he heard the carter speak again. “Going to the Old Mage’s house,” he said. If it was a question, it seemed to need no answer. The traveler walked on.

  When he started up the road it had still lain in the vast shadow of the mountain, but when he turned left to the little village he took to be Re Albi, the sun was blazing in the western sky and under it the sea lay white as steel.

  There were scattered small houses, a small dusty square, a fountain with one thin stream of water falling. He made for that, drank from his hands again and again, put his head under the stream, rubbed cool water through his hair and let it run down his arms, and sat for a while on the stone rim of the fountain, observed in attentive silence by two dirty little boys and a dirty little girl.

  “He ain’t the farrier,” one of the boys said.

  The traveler combed his wet hair back with his fingers.

  “He’ll be going to the Old Mage’s house,” said the girl, “stupid.”

  “Yerraghh!” said the boy, drawing his face into a horrible lopsided grimace by pulling at it with one hand while he clawed the air with the other.

  “You watch it, Stony,” said the other boy.

  “Take you there,” said the girl to the traveler.

  “Thanks,” he said, and stood up wearily.

  “Got no staff, see,” said one boy, and the other said, “Never said he did.” Both watched with sullen eyes as the stranger followed the girl out of the village to a path that led north through rocky pastures that dropped down steep to the left.

  The sun glared on the sea. His eyes dazzled, and the high horizon and the blowing wind made him dizzy. The child was a little hopping shadow ahead of him. He stopped.

  “Come on,” she said, but she too stopped. He came up to her on the path. “There,” she said. He saw a wooden house near the cliff’s edge, still some way ahead.

  “I ain’t afraid,” the girl said. “I fetch their eggs lots of times for Stony’s dad to carry to market. Once she gave me peaches. The old lady. Stony says I stole ’em but I never. Go on. She ain’t there. Neither of ’em is.”

  She stood still, pointing to the house.

  “Nobody’s there?”

  “The old man is. Old Hawk, he is.”

  The traveler went on. The child stood watching him till he went round the corner of the house.

  Two goats stared down at the stranger from a steep fenced field. A scatter of hens and half-grown chicks pecked and conversed softly in long grass under peach and plum trees. A man was standing on a short ladder against the trunk of one of the trees; his head was in the leaves, and the traveler could see only his bare brown legs.

  “Hello,” the traveler said, and after a while said it again a bit louder.

  The leaves shook and the man came briskly down the ladder. He carried a handful of plums, and when he got off the ladder he batted away a couple of bees drawn by the juice. He came forward, a short, straight-backed man, grey hair tied back from a handsome, timeworn face. He looked to be seventy or so. Old scars, four white seams, ran from his left cheekbone down to the jaw. His gaze was clear, direct, intense. “They’re ripe,” he said, “though they’ll be even better tomorrow.” He held out his handful of little yellow plums.

  “Lord Sparrowhawk,” the stranger said huskily. “Archmage.”

  The old man gave a curt nod of acknowledgment. “Come into the shade,” he said.

  The stranger followed him, and did what he was told: he sat down on a wooden bench in the shade of the gnarled tree nearest the house; he accepted the plums, now rinsed and served in a wicker basket; he ate one, then another, then a third. Questioned, he admitted that he had eaten nothing that day. He sat while the master of the house went into it, coming out presently with bread and cheese and half an onion. The guest ate the bread and cheese and onion and drank the cup of cold water his host brought him. The host ate plums to keep him company.

  “You look tired. How far have you come?”

  “From Roke.”

  The old man’s expression was hard to read. He said only, “I wouldn’t have guessed that.”

  “I’m from Taon, lord. I went from Taon to Roke. And there the Lord Patterner told me I should come here. To you.”

  “Why?”

  It was a formidable gaze.

  “Because you walked across the dark land living . . .” The stranger’s husky voice died away.

  The old man picked up the words: “And came to the far shores of the day. Yes. But that was spoken in prophecy of the coming of our King, Lebannen.”

  “You were with him, lord.”

  “I was. And he gained his kingdom there. But I left mine there. So don’t call me by any title. Hawk, or Sparrowhawk, as you please. And how shall I call you?”

  The man murmured his use-name: “Alder.”

  Food and drink and shade and sitting down had clearly eased him, but he still looked exhausted. He had a weary sadness in him; his face was full of it.

  The old man had spoken to him with a hard edge in his voice, but that was gone when he said, “Let’s put off talking for a bit. You’ve sailed near a thousand miles and walked fifteen uphill. And I’ve got to water the beans and the lettuce and all, since my wife and daughter left the garden in my charge. So rest a while. We can talk in the cool of the evening. Or the cool of the morning. There’s seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was.”

  When he came back by half an hour later his guest was flat on his back asleep in the cool grass under the peach trees.

  The man who had been Archmage of Earthsea stopped with a bucket in one hand and a hoe in the other and looked down at the sleeping stranger.

  “Alder,” he said under his breath. “What’s the trouble you bring with you, Alder?”

  It seemed to him that if he wanted to know the man’s true name he would know it only by thinking, by putting his mind to it, as he might have done when he was a mage.

  But he did not know it, and thinking would not give it to him, and he was not a mage.

  He knew nothing about this Alder and must wait to be told. “Never trouble trouble,” he told himself, and went on to water the beans.

  As soon as the sun’s light was cut off by a low rock wall that ran along the top of the cliff near the house, the cool of the shadow roused the sleeper. He sat up with a shiver, then stood up, a bit stiff and bewildered, with grass seed in his hair. Seeing his host filling buckets at the well and lugging them to the garden, he went to help him.

  “Three or four more ought to do it,” said the ex-Archmage, doling out water to the roots of a row of young cabbages. The smell of wet dirt was pleasant in the dry, warm air. The westering light came golden and broken over the ground.

  They sat on a long bench beside the house door to see the sun go down. Sparrowhawk had brought out a bottle and two squat, thick cups of greenish glass. “My wife
’s son’s wine,” he said. “From Oak Farm, in Middle Valley. A good year, seven years back.” It was a flinty red wine that warmed Alder right through. The sun set in calm clarity. The wind was down. Birds in the orchard trees made a few closing remarks.

  Alder had been amazed when he learned from the Master Patterner of Roke that the Archmage Sparrowhawk, that man of legend, who had brought the king home from the realm of death and then flown off on a dragon’s back, was still alive. Alive, said the Patterner, and living on his home island, Gont. “I tell you what not many know,” the Patterner had said, “for I think you need to know it. And I think you will keep his secret.”

  “But then he is still Archmage!” Alder had said, with a kind of joy: for it had been a puzzle and concern to all men of the art that the wise men of Roke Island, the school and center of magery in the Archipelago, had not in all the years of King Lebannen’s rule named an Archmage to replace Sparrowhawk.

  “No,” the Patterner had said. “He is not a mage at all.”

  The Patterner had told him a little of how Sparrowhawk had lost his power, and why; and Alder had had time to ponder it all. But still, here, in the presence of this man who had spoken with dragons, and brought back the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, and crossed the kingdom of the dead, and ruled the Archipelago before the king, all those stories and songs were in his mind. Even as he saw him old, content with his garden, with no power in him or about him but that of a soul made by a long life of thought and action, he still saw a great mage. And so it troubled him considerably that Sparrowhawk had a wife.

  A wife, a daughter, a stepson . . . Mages had no family. A common sorcerer like Alder might marry or might not, but the men of true power were celibate. Alder could imagine this man riding a dragon, that was easy enough, but to think of him as a husband and father was another matter. He couldn’t manage it. He tried. He asked, “Your—wife—She’s with her son, then?”

  Sparrowhawk came back from far away. His eyes had been on the western gulfs. “No,” he said. “She’s in Havnor. With the king.”

  After a while, coming all the way back, he added, “She went there with our daughter just after the Long Dance. Lebannen sent for them, to take counsel. Maybe on the same matter that brings you here to me. We’ll see . . . But the truth is, I’m tired this evening, and not much disposed to weighing heavy matters. And you look tired too. So a bowl of soup, maybe, and another glass of wine, and sleep? And we’ll talk in the morning.”

  “All with pleasure, lord,” Alder said, “but for the sleep. That’s what I fear.”

  It took the old man a while to register this, but then he said, “You fear to sleep?”

  “Dreams.”

  “Ah.” A keen glance from the dark eyes under eyebrows grown tangled and half grey. “You had a good nap there in the grass, I think.”

  “The sweetest sleep I’ve had since I left Roke Island. I’m grateful to you for that boon, lord. Maybe it will return tonight. But if not, I struggle with my dream, and cry out, and wake, and am a burden to anyone near me. I’ll sleep outside, if you permit.”

  Sparrowhawk nodded. “It’ll be a pleasant night,” he said.

  It was a pleasant night, cool, the sea wind mild from the south, the stars of summer whitening all the sky except where the broad, dark summit of the mountain loomed. Alder put down the pallet and sheepskin his host gave him, in the grass where he had slept before.

  Sparrowhawk lay in the little western alcove of the house. He had slept there as a boy, when it was Ogion’s house and he was Ogion’s prentice in wizardry. Tehanu had slept there these last fifteen years, since she had been his daughter. With her and Tenar gone, when he lay in his and Tenar’s bed in the dark back corner of the single room he felt his solitude, so he had taken to sleeping in the alcove. He liked the narrow cot built out from the thick house wall of timbers, right under the window. He slept well there. But this night he did not.

  Before midnight, wakened by a cry, voices outside, he leapt up and went to the door. It was only Alder struggling with nightmare, amid sleepy protests from the henhouse. Alder shouted in the thick voice of dream and then woke, starting up in panic and distress. He begged his host’s pardon and said he would sit up a while under the stars. Sparrowhawk went back to bed. He was not wakened again by Alder, but he had a bad dream of his own.

  He was standing by a wall of stone near the top of a long hillside of dry grey grass that ran down from dimness into the dark. He knew he had been there before, had stood there before, but he did not know when, or what place it was. Someone was standing on the other side of the wall, the downhill side, not far away. He could not see the face, only that it was a tall man, cloaked. He knew that he knew him. The man spoke to him, using his true name. He said, “You will soon be here, Ged.”

  Cold to the bone, he sat up, staring to see the space of the house about him, to draw its reality around him like a blanket. He looked out the window at the stars. The cold came into his heart then. They were not the stars of summer, beloved, familiar, the Cart, the Falcon, the Dancers, the Heart of the Swan. They were other stars, the small, still stars of the dry land, that never rise or set. He had known their names, once, when he knew the names of things.

  “Avert!” he said aloud and made the gesture to turn away misfortune that he had learned when he was ten years old. His gaze went to the open doorway of the house, the corner behind the door, where he thought to see darkness taking shape, clotting together and rising up.

  But his gesture, though it had no power, woke him. The shadows behind the door were only shadows. The stars out the window were the stars of Earthsea, paling in the first reflection of the dawn.

  He sat holding his sheepskin up round his shoulders, watching those stars fade as they dropped west, watching the growing brightness, the colors of light, the play and change of coming day. There was a grief in him, he did not know why, a pain and yearning as for something dear and lost, forever lost. He was used to that; he had held much dear, and lost much; but this sadness was so great it did not seem to be his own. He felt a sadness at the very heart of things, a grief even in the coming of the light. It clung to him from his dream, and stayed with him when he got up.

  He lit a little fire in the big hearth and went to the peach trees and the henhouse to gather breakfast. Alder came in from the path that ran north along the cliff top; he had gone for a walk at first light, he said. He looked jaded, and Sparrowhawk was struck again by the sadness in his face, which echoed the deep aftermood of his own dream.

  They had a cup of the warmed barley gruel the country people of Gont drink, a boiled egg, a peach; they ate by the hearth, for the morning air in the shadow of the mountain was too cold for sitting outdoors. Sparrowhawk looked after his livestock: fed the chickens, scattered grain for doves, let the goats into the pasture. When he came back they sat again on the bench in the dooryard. The sun was not over the mountain yet, but the air had grown dry and warm.

  “Now tell me what brings you here, Alder. But since you came by Roke, tell me first if things are well in the Great House.”

  “I did not enter it, my lord.”

  “Ah.” A neutral tone but a sharp glance.

  “I was only in the Immanent Grove.”

  “Ah.” A neutral tone, a neutral glance. “Is the Patterner well?”

  “He told me, ‘Carry my love and honor to my lord and say to him: I wish we walked in the Grove together as we used to do.’”

  Sparrowhawk smiled a little sadly. After a while he said, “So. But he sent you to me with more to say than that, I think.”

  “I will try to be brief.”

  “Man, we have all day before us. And I like a story told from the beginning.”

  So Alder told him his story from the beginning.

  He was a witch’s son, born in the town of Elini on Taon, the Isle of the Harpers.

  Taon is at the southern end of the Sea of Éa, not far from where Soléa lay before the sea whelmed it. That was the ancient heart
of Earthsea. All those islands had states and cities, kings and wizards, when Havnor was a land of feuding tribesmen and Gont a wilderness ruled by bears. People born on Éa or Ebéa, Enlad or Taon, though they may be a ditchdigger’s daughter or a witch’s son, consider themselves to be descendants of the Elder Mages, sharing the lineage of the warriors who died in the dark years for Queen Elfarran. Therefore they often have a fine courtesy of manner, though sometimes an undue haughtiness, and a generous, uncalculating turn of mind and speech, a way of soaring above mere fact and prose, which those whose minds stay close to merchandise distrust. “Kites without strings,” say the rich men of Havnor of such people. But they do not say it in the hearing of the king, Lebannen of the House of Enlad.

  The best harps in Earthsea are made on Taon, and there are schools of music there, and many famous singers of the Lays and Deeds were born or learned their art there. Elini, however, is just a market town in the hills, with no music about it, Alder said; and his mother was a poor woman, though not, as he put it, hungry poor. She had a birthmark, a red stain from the right eyebrow and ear clear down over her shoulder. Many women and men with such a blemish or difference about them become witches or sorcerers perforce, “marked for it,” people say. Blackberry learned spells and could do the most ordinary kind of witchery; she had no real gift for it, but she had a way about her that was almost as good as the gift itself. She made a living, and trained her son as well as she could, and saved enough to prentice him to the sorcerer who gave him his true name.

  Of his father Alder said nothing. He knew nothing. Blackberry had never spoken of him. Though seldom celibate, witches seldom kept company more than a night or two with any man, and it was a rare thing for a witch to marry a man. Far more often two of them lived their lives together, and that was called witch marriage or she-troth. A witch’s child, then, had a mother or two mothers, but no father. That went without saying, and Sparrowhawk asked nothing on that score; but he asked about Alder’s training.

  The sorcerer Gannet had taught Alder the few words he knew of the True Speech, and some spells of finding and illusion, at which Alder had shown, he said, no talent at all. But Gannet took enough interest in the boy to discover his true gift. Alder was a mender. He could rejoin. He could make whole. A broken tool, a knife blade or an axle snapped, a pottery bowl shattered: he could bring the fragments back together without joint or seam or weakness. So his master sent him about seeking various spells of mending, which he found mostly among witches of the island, and he worked with them and by himself to learn to mend.