“My love, my heart, if I could spare you this fear I would, don’t you see I can’t? I’ve done what I could do for you, my flame of fire, my star. The king is right—only you, you alone, can do this.”
“But if you were just there, so I knew you were there—”
“I’m here, I’m always here. What could I do there but be a burden? You must travel fast, it will be a hard journey. I’d hold you back. And you might fear for me. You don’t need me. I’m no use to you. You must learn that. You must go, Tehanu.”
And she had turned away from her child and begun sorting out the clothing Tehanu should take, home clothes, not the fancy things they wore here in the palace: her stout shoes, her good cloak. If she wept while she did it, she did not let her daughter see it.
Tehanu stood as if bewildered, paralysed with fear. When Tenar gave her clothes to change into, she obeyed. When the king’s lieutenant, Yenay, knocked and asked if he might conduct Mistress Tehanu down to the wharf, she stared at him like a dumb animal.
“Go now,” Tenar said. She embraced her and laid her hand on the great scar that was half her face. “You are Kalessin’s daughter as well as mine.”
The girl held her very tightly for a long moment, let go, turned away without a word, and followed Yenay out the door.
Tenar stood feeling the chill of the night air where the heat of Tehanu’s body and arms had been.
She went over to the window. Lights down on the dock, the coming and going of men, the hoof clatter of horses being led down the steep streets above the water. A tall ship was at the pier, a ship she knew, the Dolphin. She watched from the window and saw Tehanu on the dock. She saw her go aboard at last, leading a horse that had been balking, and saw Lebannen follow her. She saw the mooring lines cast off, the docile movement of the ship following the oared tug that towed her clear, the sudden fall and flowering of the white sails in the darkness. The light of the stern lantern trembled on the dark water, shrank slowly to a tiny drop of brightness, and was gone.
Tenar went about the room folding up the clothes Tehanu had worn, the silken shift and overskirt; she picked up the light sandals and held them to her cheek a while before she put them away.
She lay awake in the wide bed and saw before her mind’s eye over and over again the same scene: a road, and Tehanu walking on it alone. And a knot, a net, a black writhing coiling mass descending from the sky, dragons swarming, fire licking and streaming from them at her, her hair burning, her clothes burning—No, Tenar said, no! it will not happen! She would force her mind away from that scene, until she saw it again, the road, and Tehanu walking on it alone, and the black, burning knot in the sky, coming closer.
When the first light began to turn the room grey she slept at last, exhausted. She dreamed that she was in the Old Mage’s house on the Overfell, her house, and she was glad beyond all words to be there. She took the broom from behind the door to sweep the shining oaken floor, for Ged had let it get dusty. But there was a door at the back of the house that had not been there before. When she opened it she found a small, low room with stone walls painted white. Ged was crouching in the room, squatting with his arms on his knees and his hands hanging limp. His head was not a man’s head but small, black, and beaked, a vulture’s head. He said in a faint, hoarse voice, “Tenar, I have no wings.” And when he said that, such anger and terror rose up in her that she woke, gasping, to see sunlight on the high wall of her palace room and hear the sweet clear trumpets telling the fourth hour of morning.
Breakfast was brought. She ate a little and talked with Berry, the elderly servant whom she had chosen from all the retinue of maids and ladies of honor Lebannen had offered her. Berry was an intelligent, competent woman, born in a village in inland Havnor, with whom Tenar got on better than with most of the ladies of the court. They were civil and respectful, but they didn’t know what to do with her, how to talk to a woman who was half Kargish priestess, half farmwife from Gont. She saw that it was easier for them to be kind to Tehanu in her fierce timidity. They could be sorry for her. They could not be sorry for Tenar.
Berry, however, could be and was, and she gave Tenar considerable comfort that morning. “The king will bring her back safe and sound,” she said. “Why, do you think he’d take the girl into a danger he couldn’t get her out of? Never! Not him!” It was false comfort, but Berry so passionately believed it to be true that Tenar had to agree with her, which was a little solace in itself.
She needed something to do, for Tehanu’s absence was everywhere. She resolved to go talk to the Kargish princess, to see if the girl was willing to learn a word of Hardic, or at least to tell Tenar her name.
In the Kargad Lands people did not have a true name that they kept secret, as the speakers of Hardic did. Like use-names here, Kargish names often had some meaning—Rose, Alder, Honor, Hope; or they were traditional, often the name of an ancestor. People spoke them openly and were proud of the antiquity of a name passed down from generation to generation. She had been taken too young from her parents to know why they had called her Tenar, but thought it might be for a grandmother or great-grandmother. That name had been taken from her when she was recognised as Arha, the Nameless One reborn, and she had forgotten it till Ged gave it back to her. To her, as to him, it was her true name; but it was not a word of the Old Speech; it gave no one any power over her, and she had never concealed it.
She was puzzled now why the princess did so. Her bondwomen called her only Princess, or Lady, or Mistress; the ambassadors had talked about her as the High Princess, Daughter of Thol, Lady of Hur-at-Hur, and so on. If all the poor girl had was titles, it was time she had a name.
Tenar knew it was not fitting for a guest of the king to go alone through the streets of Havnor, and she knew Berry had duties in the palace, so she asked for a servant to accompany her. She was provided with a charming footman, or footboy, for he was only about fifteen, who looked after her at the street crossings as if she were a doddering crone. She liked walking in the city. She had already found and admitted to herself, going to the River House, that it was easier without Tehanu beside her. People would look at Tehanu and look away, and Tehanu walked in stiff, suffering pride, hating their looks and their looking away, and Tenar suffered with her, maybe more than she herself did.
Now she was able to loiter and watch the street shows, the market booths, the various faces and clothing from all over the Archipelago, to go out of the direct way to let her foot-boy show her a street where the painted bridges from rooftop to rooftop made a kind of airy vaulted ceiling high above them, from which red-flowering vines looped down in festoons, and people put birdcages out the windows on gilt poles among the flowers, so that it all seemed a garden in the middle of the air. “Oh, I wish Tehanu could see this,” she thought. But she could not think of Tehanu, of where she might be.
The River House, like the New Palace, dated from the reign of Queen Heru, five centuries ago. It had been in ruins when Lebannen came to the throne; he had rebuilt it with much care, and it was a lovely, peaceful place, sparsely furnished, with dark, polished, uncarpeted floors. Ranks of narrow door-windows slid aside to open up the whole side of a room to a view of the willows and the river, and one could walk out onto deep wooden balconies built over the water. Court ladies had told Tenar that it had been the place the king liked best to slip away to for a night of solitude or a night with a lover, which lent even more significance, they hinted, to his housing the princess there. Her own suspicion was that he had not wanted the princess under the same roof with him and had simply named the only other possible place for her, but maybe the court ladies were right.
Guards in their fine harness recognised and let her pass, footmen announced her and went off with her footboy to crack nuts and gossip, which seemed to be the principal occupation of footmen, and ladies-in-waiting came to greet her, grateful for any new face and gasping for more news of the king’s expedition against the dragons. Having run the whole gamut she was admitted at last t
o the apartments of the princess.
On her two previous visits she had been kept waiting some while in an anteroom, and then the veiled bondwomen had brought her into an inner room, the only dim room in the whole airy house, where the princess had stood in her round-brimmed hat with the red veil hanging down all round it to the floor, looking permanently fixed there, built in, exactly as if she were a brick chimney, as Lady Iyesa had said.
This time it was different. As soon as she came into the anteroom there was shrieking within and the sound of people running in various directions. The princess burst through the door and with a wild cry flung her arms around Tenar. Tenar was small, and the princess, a tall, vigorous young woman full of emotion, knocked her right off her feet, but held her up in strong arms. “Oh Lady Arha, Lady Arha, save me, save me!” she was crying.
“Princess! What’s wrong?”
The princess was in tears of terror or relief or both at once, and all Tenar could understand of her laments and pleas was a babble of dragons and sacrifice.
“There are no dragons near Havnor,” she said sternly, disengaging herself from the girl, “and nobody is being sacrificed. What is all this about? What have you been told?”
“The women said the dragons were coming and they’d sacrifice a king’s daughter and not a goat because they’re sorcerers and I was afraid.” The princess wiped her face, clenched her hands, and began trying to master the panic she had been in. It had been real, ungovernable terror, and Tenar was sorry for her. She did not let her pity show. The girl needed to learn to hold on to her dignity.
“Your women are ignorant and don’t know enough Hardic to understand what people tell them. And you don’t know any Hardic at all. If you did you’d know there’s nothing to be afraid of. Do you see the people of the house here rushing about weeping and screaming?”
The princess stared at her. She wore no hat, no veils, and only a light shift-dress, for it was a hot day. It was the first time Tenar had seen her except as a dim form through the red veiling. Though the princess’s eyes were swollen with tears and her face blotched, she was magnificent: tawny-haired, tawny-eyed, with round arms and full breasts and slender waist, a woman in her first full beauty and strength.
“But none of those people is going to be sacrificed,” she said finally.
“Nobody is going to be sacrificed.”
“Then why are the dragons coming?”
Tenar drew a deep breath. “Princess,” she said, “there are a great many things we need to talk about. If you’ll look at me as your friend—”
“I do,” the princess said. She stepped forward and took Tenar’s right arm in a very strong grasp. “You are my friend, I have no other friend, I will shed my blood for you.”
Ridiculous as it was, Tenar knew it was true.
She returned the girl’s grip as well as she could and said, “You are my friend. Tell me your name.”
The princess’s eyes got big. There was a little snot and blubber still on her upper lip. Her lower lip trembled. She said, with a deep breath, “Seserakh.”
“Seserakh: my name is not Arha, but Tenar.”
“Tenar,” the girl said, and grasped her arm tighter.
“Now,” Tenar said, trying to regain control of the situation, “I have walked a long way and I’m thirsty. Please let’s sit down, and may I have some water to drink? And then we can talk.”
“Yes,” said the princess, and leapt out of the room like a hunting lioness. There were shouts and cries from the inner rooms, and more sounds of running. A bondwoman appeared, adjusting her veil shakily and gibbering something in such thick dialect Tenar could not understand her. “Speak in the accursed tongue!” shouted the princess from within, and the woman pitifully squeaked out in Hardic, “To sit? To drink? Lady?”
Two chairs had been set in the middle of the dark, stuffy room, facing each other. Seserakh stood beside one of them.
“I should like to sit outside, in the shade, over the water,” Tenar said. “If it please you, princess.”
The princess shouted, the women scuttled, the chairs were carried out onto the deep balcony. They sat down side by side.
“That’s better,” Tenar said. It was still strange to her to be speaking Kargish. She had no difficulty with it at all, but she felt as if she were not herself, were somebody else speaking, an actor enjoying her role.
“You like the water?” the princess asked. Her face had returned to its normal color, that of heavy cream, and her eyes, no longer swollen, were bluish gold, or blue with gold flecks.
“Yes. You don’t?”
“I hate it. There was no water where I lived.”
“A desert? I lived in a desert too. Until I was sixteen. Then I crossed the sea and came west. I love the water, the sea, the rivers.”
“Oh, the sea,” Seserakh said, shrinking and putting her head in her hands. “Oh I hate it, I hate it. I vomited my soul out. Over and over and over. Days and days and days. I never want to see the sea again.” She shot a quick glance through the willow boughs at the quiet, shallow stream below them. “This river is all right,” she said distrustfully.
A woman brought a tray with a pitcher and cups, and Tenar had a long drink of cool water.
“Princess,” she said, “we have a great deal to talk about. First: the dragons are still a long way away, in the west. The king and my daughter have gone to talk with them.”
“To talk with them?”
“Yes.” She had been going to say more, but she said, “Now please tell me about the dragons in Hur-at-Hur.”
Tenar had been told as a child in Atuan that there were dragons in Hur-at-Hur. Dragons in the mountains, brigands in the deserts. Hur-at-Hur was poor and far away and nothing good came from it but opals and turquoises and cedar logs.
Seserakh heaved a deep sigh. Tears came into her eyes. “It makes me cry to think about home,” she said, with such pure simplicity of feeling that tears came into Tenar’s eyes too. “Well, the dragons live up in the mountains. Two days, three days journey from Mesreth. It’s all rocks up there and nobody bothers the dragons and they don’t bother anybody. But once a year they come down, crawling down a certain way. It’s a path, all smooth dust, made by their bellies crawling along it every year since time began. It’s called the Dragons’ Way.” She saw that Tenar was listening with deep attention, and went on. “It’s taboo to cross the Dragons’ Way. You mustn’t set foot on it at all. You have to go clear round it, south of the Place of the Sacrifice. They start crawling down it late in spring. On the fourth day of the fifth month they’ve all arrived at the Place of the Sacrifice. None of them is ever late. And everybody from Mesreth and the villages is there waiting for them. And then, when they’ve all come down the Dragons’ Way, the priests begin the sacrifice. And that’s . . . Don’t you have the spring sacrifice, in Atuan?”
Tenar shook her head.
“Well, that’s why I got scared, you see, because it can be a human sacrifice. If things weren’t going well, they’d sacrifice a king’s daughter. Otherwise it would just be some ordinary girl. But they haven’t done even that for a long time. Not since I was little. Since my father defeated all the other kings. Since then, they’ve only sacrificed a she-goat and a ewe. And they catch the blood in bowls, and throw the fat into the sacred fire, and call to the dragons. And the dragons all come crawling up. They drink the blood and eat the fire.” She shut her eyes for a moment; so did Tenar. “Then they go back up into the mountains, and we go back to Mesreth.”
“How big are the dragons?”
Seserakh put her hands about a yard apart. “Sometimes bigger,” she said.
“And they can’t fly? Or speak?”
“Oh, no. Their wings are just little stubs. They make a kind of hissing. Animals can’t talk. But they’re sacred animals. They’re the sign of life, because fire is life, and they eat fire and spit out fire. And they’re sacred because they come to the spring sacrifice. Even if no people came, the dragons would come
and gather at that place. We come there because the dragons do. The priests always tell all about that before the sacrifice.”
Tenar absorbed this for a while. “The dragons here in the west,” she said, “are large. Huge. And they can fly. They’re animals, but they can speak. And they are sacred. And dangerous.”
“Well,” the princess said, “dragons may be animals, but they’re more like us than the accursed-sorcerers are.”
She said “accursed-sorcerers” all as one word and without any particular emphasis. Tenar remembered that phrase from her childhood. It meant the Dark Folk, the Hardic people of the Archipelago.
“Why is that?”
“Because the dragons are reborn! Like all the animals. Like us.” Seserakh looked at Tenar with frank curiosity. “I thought since you were a priestess at the Most Sacred Place of the Tombs you’d know a lot more about all that than I do.”
“But we had no dragons there,” Tenar said. “I didn’t learn anything about them at all. Please, my friend, tell me.”
“Well, let me see if I can tell the story about it. It’s a winter story. I guess it’s all right to tell it in summer here. Everything here is all wrong anyway.” She sighed. “Well, in the beginning, you know, in the first time, we were all the same, all the people and the animals, we did the same things. And then we learned how to die. And so we learned how to be reborn. Maybe as one kind of being, maybe another. But it doesn’t matter so much because anyhow you’ll die again and get reborn again and get to be everything sooner or later.”
Tenar nodded. So far, the story was familiar to her.
“But the best things to get reborn as are people and dragons, because those are the sacred beings. So you try not to break the taboos, and you try to observe the Precepts, so you have a better chance to be a person again, or anyhow a dragon . . . If dragons here can talk and are so big, I can see why that would be a reward. Being one of ours never seemed like much to look forward to.
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