The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  She nodded, still sad. Then, brightening a little, she looked up with her head to one side and mewed.

  Sparrowhawk blinked, but Heather understood. “Oh! The kittens!” she shouted. “Little Grey had four, and Old Black he killed one before we could stop him, but there’s still two or three somewhere round here, they sleep with Aunty and Biddy most every night now the little dogs are gone. Kitty! kitty! kitty! where are you, kitty, kitty?” And after a good deal of commotion and scrambling and piercing mews in the dark interior, she reappeared with a grey kitten clutched squirming and squealing in her hand. “Here’s one!” she shouted, and threw it at Sparrowhawk. He caught it awkwardly. It instantly bit him.

  “There, there now,” he told it. “Calm down.” A tiny, rumbling growl emerged from it, and it tried to bite him again. Moss gestured, and he set the little creature down in her lap. She stroked it with her slow heavy hand. It flattened out at once, stretched, looked up at her, and purred.

  “May I borrow it for a while?”

  The old witch raised her hand from the kitten in a royal gesture that said clearly: It is yours and welcome.

  “Master Alder here is having troublesome dreams, you see, and I thought maybe having an animal with him nights might help to ease the trouble.”

  Moss nodded gravely and, looking up at Alder, slipped her hand under the kitten and lifted it towards him. Alder took it rather gingerly into his hands. It did not growl or bite. It scrambled up his arm and clung to his neck under his hair, which he wore loosely gathered at the nape.

  As they walked back to the Old Mage’s house, the kitten tucked inside Alder’s shirt, Sparrowhawk explained. “Once, when I was new to the art, I was asked to heal a child with the redfever. I knew the boy was dying, but I couldn’t bring myself to let him go. I tried to follow him. To bring him back. Across the wall of stones . . . And so, here in the body, I fell down by the bedside and lay like the dead myself. There was a witch there who guessed what the matter was, and she had me taken to my house and laid abed there. And in my house was an animal that had befriended me when I was a boy on Roke, a wild creature that came to me of its own will and stayed with me. An otak. Do you know them? I think there are none in the North.”

  Alder hesitated. He said, “I know of them only from the Deed that tells of how . . . how the mage came to the Court of the Terrenon in Osskil. And the otak tried to warn him of a gebbeth that walked with him. And he won free of the gebbeth, but the little animal was caught and slain.”

  Sparrowhawk walked on without speaking for twenty paces or so. “Yes,” he said. “So. Well, my otak also saved my life when I was caught by my own folly on the wrong side of the wall, my body lying here and my soul astray there. The otak came to me and washed me, the way they wash themselves and their young, the way cats do, with a dry tongue, patiently, touching me and bringing me back with its touch, bringing me back into my body. And the gift the animal gave me was not only life but a knowledge as great as I ever learned on Roke . . . But you see, I forget all my learning.

  “A knowledge, I say, but it’s rather a mystery. What’s the difference between us and the animals? Speech? All the animals have some way of speaking, saying come and beware and much else; but they can’t tell stories, and they can’t tell lies. While we can . . .

  “But the dragons speak: they speak the True Speech, the language of the Making, in which there are no lies, in which to tell the story is to make it be! Yet we call the dragons animals . . .

  “So maybe the difference isn’t language. Maybe it’s this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. The dragons are dangerous, yes. They can do harm, yes. But they’re not evil. They’re beneath our morality, if you will, like any animal. Or beyond it. They have nothing to do with it.

  “We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We’re yoked, and they’re free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom . . .

  “Last night, I was thinking of how witches often have a companion, a familiar. My aunt had an old dog that never barked. She called him Gobefore. And the Archmage Nemmerle, when I first came to Roke Island, had a raven that went with him everywhere. And I thought of a young woman I knew once who wore a little dragon-lizard, a harekki, for her bracelet. And so at last I thought of my otak. Then I thought, if what Alder needs to keep him on this side of the wall is the warmth of a touch, why not an animal? Since they see life, not death. Maybe a dog or cat is as good as a Master of Roke . . .”

  So it proved. The kitten, evidently happy to be away from the household of dogs and tomcats and roosters and the unpredictable Heather, tried hard to show that it was a reliable and diligent cat, patrolling the house for mice, riding on Alder’s shoulder under his hair when permitted, and settling right down to sleep purring under his chin as soon as he lay down. Alder slept all night without any dream he remembered, and woke to find the kitten sitting on his chest, washing its ears with an air of quiet virtue.

  When Sparrowhawk tried to determine its sex, however, it growled and struggled. “All right,” he said, getting his hand out of danger quickly. “Have it your way. It’s either a male or a female, Alder, I’m certain of that.”

  “I won’t name it, in any case,” Alder said. “They go out like candle flames, little cats. If you’ve named one you grieve more for it.”

  That day at Alder’s suggestion they went fence mending, walking the goat-pasture fence, Sparrowhawk on the inside and Alder on the outside. Whenever one of them found a place where the palings showed the beginning of rot or the tie laths had been weakened, Alder would run his hands along the wood, thumbing and tugging and smoothing and strengthening, a half-articulate chant almost inaudible in his throat and chest, his face relaxed and intent.

  Once Sparrowhawk, watching him, murmured, “And I used to take it all for granted!”

  Alder, lost in his work, did not ask him what he meant.

  “There,” he said, “that’ll hold.” And they moved on, followed closely by the two inquisitive goats, who butted and pushed at the repaired sections of fence as if to test them.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Sparrowhawk said, “that you might do well to go to Havnor.”

  Alder looked at him in alarm. “Ah,” he said. “I thought maybe, if I have a way now to keep away from . . . that place . . . I could go home to Taon.” He was losing faith in what he said as he said it.

  “You might, but I don’t think it would be wise.”

  Alder said reluctantly, “It is a great deal to ask of a kitten, to defend a man against the armies of the dead.”

  “It is.”

  “But I—what should I do in Havnor?” And, with sudden hope, “Would you go with me?”

  Sparrowhawk shook his head once. “I stay here.”

  “The Lord Patterner . . .”

  “Sent you to me. And I send you to those who should hear your tale and find out what it means . . . I tell you, Alder, I think in his heart the Patterner believes I am what I was. He believes I’m merely hiding here in the forests of Gont and will come forth when the need is greatest.” The old man looked down at his sweaty, patched clothes and dusty shoes, and laughed. “In all my glory,” he said.

  “Beh,” said the brown goat behind him.

  “But all the same, Alder, he was right to send you here, since she’d have been here, if she hadn’t gone to Havnor.”

  “The Lady Tenar?”

  “Hama Gondun. So the Patterner himself called her,” Sparrowhawk said, looking across the fence at Alder, his eyes unfathomable. “A woman on Gont. The Woman of Gont. Tehanu.”

  CHAPTER 2

  PALACES

  When Alder came down to the docks, Farflyer was still there, taking on a cargo of timbers; but he knew he had worn out his welcome on that ship. He went to a small shabby coaster tied up next to her, the Pretty Rose.

  Sparrowhawk had given him a le
tter of passage signed by the king and sealed with the Rune of Peace. “He sent it for me to use if I changed my mind,” the old man had said with a snort. “It’ll serve you.” The ship’s master, after getting his purser to read it for him, became quite deferential and apologised for the cramped quarters and the length of the voyage. Pretty Rose was going to Havnor, sure enough, but she was a coaster, trading small goods from port to port, and it might take her a month to work clear round the southeast coast of the Great Island to the King’s City.

  That was all right with him, Alder said. For if he dreaded the voyage, he feared its ending more.

  New moon to half moon, the sea voyage was a time of peace for him. The grey kitten was a hardy traveler, busy mousing the ship all day but faithfully curling up under his chin or within hand’s reach at night; and to his unceasing wonder, that little scrap of warm life kept him from the wall of stones and the voices calling him across it. Not wholly. Not so that he ever entirely forgot them. They were there, just through the veil of sleep in darkness, just through the brightness of the day. Sleeping out on deck those warm nights, he opened his eyes often to see that the stars moved, swinging to the rocking of the moored ship, following their courses through heaven to the west. He was still a haunted man. But for a half month of summer along the coasts of Kameber and Barnisk and the Great Island he could turn his back on his ghosts.

  For days the kitten hunted a young rat nearly as big as it was. Seeing it proudly and laboriously hauling the carcass across the deck, one of the sailors called it Tug. Alder accepted the name for it.

  They sailed down the Ebavnor Straits and in through the portals of Havnor Bay. Across the sunlit water little by little the white towers of the city at the center of the world resolved out of the haze of distance. Alder stood at the prow as they came in and looking up saw on the pinnacle of the highest tower a flash of silver light, the Sword of Erreth-Akbe.

  Now he wished he could stay aboard and sail on and not go ashore into the great city among great people with a letter for the king. He knew he was no fit messenger. Why had such a burden been laid on him? How could it be that a village sorcerer who knew nothing of high matters and deep arts was called on to make these journeys from land to land, from mage to monarch, from the living to the dead?

  He had said something like that to Sparrowhawk. “It’s all beyond me,” he had said. The old man looked at him a while and then, calling him by his true name, said, “The world’s vast and strange, Hara, but no vaster and no stranger than our minds are. Think of that sometimes.”

  Behind the city the sky darkened with a thunderstorm inland. The towers burned white against purple-black, and gulls soared like drifting sparks of fire above them.

  Pretty Rose was moored, the gangplank run out. This time the sailors wished him well as he shouldered his pack. He picked up the covered poultry basket in which Tug crouched patiently, and went ashore.

  The streets were many and crowded, but the way to the palace was plain, and he had no idea what to do except go there and say that he carried a letter for the king from the Archmage Sparrowhawk.

  And that he did, many times.

  From guard to guard, from official to official, from the broad outer steps of the palace to high anterooms, staircases with gilded banisters, inner offices with tapestried walls, across floors of tile and marble and oak, under ceilings coffered, beamed, vaulted, painted, he went repeating his talisman: “I come from Sparrowhawk who was the Archmage with a letter for the king.” He would not give his letter up. A retinue, a crowd of suspicious, semi-civil, patronising, temporising, obstructive guards and ushers and officials kept gathering and thickening around him and followed and impeded his slow way into the palace.

  Suddenly they were all gone. A door had opened. It closed behind him.

  He stood alone in a quiet room. A wide window looked out over the roofs northwest-ward. The thundercloud had cleared and the broad grey summit of Mount Onn hovered above far hills.

  Another door opened. A man came in, dressed in black, about Alder’s age, quick moving, with a fine, strong face as smooth as bronze. He came straight to Alder: “Master Alder, I am Lebannen.”

  He put out his right hand to touch Alder’s hand, palm against palm, as the custom was in Éa and the Enlades. Alder responded automatically to the familiar gesture. Then he thought he ought to kneel, or bow at least, but the moment to do so seemed to have passed. He stood dumb.

  “You came from my Lord Sparrowhawk? How is he? Is he well?”

  “Yes, lord. He sends you—” Alder hurriedly groped inside his jacket for the letter, which he had intended to offer to the king kneeling, when they finally showed him to the throne room where the king would be sitting on his throne—“this letter, my lord.”

  The eyes watching him were alert, urbane, as implacably keen as Sparrowhawk’s, but withholding even more of the mind within. As the king took the letter Alder offered him, his courtesy was perfect. “The bearer of any word from him has my heart’s thanks and welcome. Will you forgive me?”

  Alder finally managed a bow. The king walked over to the window to read the letter.

  He read it twice at least, then refolded it. His face was as impassive as before. He went to the door and spoke to someone outside it, then turned back to Alder. “Please,” he said, “sit down with me. They’ll bring us something to eat. You’ve been all afternoon in the palace, I know. If the gate captain had had the wits to send me word, I could have spared you hours of climbing the walls and swimming the moats they set around me . . . Did you stay with my Lord Sparrowhawk? In his house on the cliff’s edge?”

  “Yes.”

  “I envy you. I’ve never been there. I haven’t seen him since we parted on Roke, half my lifetime ago. He wouldn’t let me come to him on Gont. He wouldn’t come to my crowning.” Lebannen smiled as if nothing he said was of any moment. “He gave me my kingdom,” he said.

  Sitting down, he nodded to Alder to take the chair facing him across a little table. Alder looked at the tabletop, inlaid with curling patterns of ivory and silver, leaves and blossoms of the rowan tree twined about slender swords.

  “Did you have a good voyage?” the king asked, and made other small talk while they were served plates of cold meat and smoked trout and lettuces and cheese. He set Alder a welcome example by eating with a good appetite; and he poured them wine, the palest topaz, in goblets of crystal. He raised his glass. “To my lord and dear friend,” he said.

  Alder murmured, “To him,” and drank.

  The king spoke about Taon, which he had visited a few years before—Alder remembered the excitement of the island when the king was in Meoni. And he spoke of some musicians from Taon who were in the city now, harpers and singers come to make music for the court; it might be Alder knew some of them; and indeed the names he said were familiar. He was very skilled at putting his guest at ease, and food and wine were a considerable help too.

  When they were done eating, the king poured them another half glass of wine and said, “The letter concerns you, mostly. Did you know that?” His tone had not changed much from the small talk, and Alder was fuddled for a moment.

  “No,” he said.

  “Do you have an idea what it deals with?”

  “What I dream, maybe,” Alder said, speaking low, looking down.

  The king studied him for a moment. There was nothing offensive in his gaze, but he was more open in that scrutiny than most men would have been. Then he took up the letter and held it out to Alder.

  “My lord, I read very little.”

  Lebannen was not surprised—some sorcerers could read, some could not—but he clearly and sharply regretted putting his guest at a disadvantage. The gold-bronze skin of his face went dusky red. He said, “I’m sorry, Alder. May I read you what he says?”

  “Please, my lord,” Alder said. The king’s embarrassment made him, for a moment, feel the king’s equal, and he spoke for the first time naturally and with warmth.

  Leba
nnen scanned the salutation and some lines of the letter and then read aloud:

  “‘Alder of Taon who bears this to you is one called in dream and not by his own will to that land you and I crossed once together. He will tell you of suffering where suffering is past and change where no thing changes. We closed the door Cob opened. Now the wall itself maybe is to fall. He has been to Roke. Only Azver heard him. My Lord the King will hear and will act as wisdom instructs and need requires. Alder bears my lifelong honor and obedience to my Lord the King. Also my lifelong honor and regard to my lady Tenar. Also to my beloved daughter Tehanu a spoken message from me.’ And he signs it with the rune of the Talon.” Lebannen looked up from the letter into Alder’s eyes and held his gaze. “Tell me what it is you dream,” he said.

  So once more Alder told his story.

  He told it briefly and not very well. Though he had been in awe of Sparrowhawk, the ex-Archmage looked and dressed and lived like an old villager or farmer, a man of Alder’s own kind and standing, and that simplicity had defeated all superficial timidity. But however kind and courteous the king might be, he looked like the king, he behaved like the king, he was the king, and to Alder the distance was insuperable. He hurried through as best he could and stopped with relief.

  Lebannen asked a few questions. Lily and then Gannet had each touched Alder once: never since? And Gannet’s touch had burned?

  Alder held out his hand. The marks were almost invisible under a month’s tan.

  “I think the people at the wall would touch me if I came close to them,” he said.

  “But you keep away from them?”

  “I have done so.”

  “And they are not people you knew in life?”

  “Sometimes I think I know one or another.”

  “But never your wife?”

  “There are so many of them, my lord. Sometimes I think she’s there. But I can’t see her.”

  To talk about it brought it near, too near. He felt the fear welling up in him again. He thought the walls of the room might melt away and the evening sky and the floating mountain-crown vanish like a curtain brushed aside, to leave him standing where he was always standing, on a dark hill by a wall of stones.