The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  All these councillors the king had chosen. At the end of two or three years he would ask them to serve again or send them home with thanks and in honor, and replace them. All laws and taxations, all judgments brought before the throne, he discussed with them, taking their counsel. They would then vote on his proposal, and only with the consent of the majority was it enacted. There were those who said the council was nothing but the king’s pets and puppets, and so indeed it might have been. He mostly got his way if he argued for it. Often he expressed no opinion and let the council make the decision. Many councillors had found that if they had enough facts to support their opposition and made a good argument, they might sway the others and even persuade the king. So debates within the various divisions and special bodies of the council were often hotly contested, and even in full session the king had several times been opposed, argued with, and voted down. He was a good diplomat, but an indifferent politician.

  He found his council served him well, and people of power had come to respect it. Common folk did not pay much attention to it. They centered their hopes and attention on the king’s person. There were a thousand lays and ballads about the son of Morred, the prince who rode the dragon back from death to the shores of day, the hero of Sorra, wielder of the Sword of Serriadh, the Rowan Tree, the Tall Ash of Enlad, the well-loved king who ruled in the Sign of Peace. But it was hard going to make songs about councillors debating shipping taxes.

  Unsung, then, they filed in and took their seats on the cushioned benches facing the uncushioned throne. They stood again as the king came in. With him came the Woman of Gont, whom most of them had seen before so that her appearance caused no stir, and a slight man in rusty black. “Looks like a village sorcerer,” a merchant from Kamery said to a shipwright from Way, who answered, “No doubt,” in a resigned, forgiving tone. The king was loved also by many of the councillors, or at least liked; he had after all put power in their hands, and even if they felt no obligation to be grateful to him, they respected his judgment.

  The elderly Lady of Ebéa hurried in late, and Prince Sege, who presided over protocol, told the council to be seated. They all sat down. “Hear the king,” Sege said, and they listened.

  He told them, and for many it was the first real news of these matters, about the dragons’ attacks on West Havnor, and how he had set out with the Woman of Gont, Tehanu, to parley with them.

  He kept them in suspense while he spoke of the earlier attacks by dragons on the islands of the west, and told them briefly Onyx’s tale of the girl who turned into a dragon on Roke Knoll, and reminded them that Tehanu was claimed as daughter by Tenar of the Ring, by the onetime Archmage of Roke, and by the dragon Kalessin, on whose back the king himself had been borne from Selidor.

  Then finally he told them what had happened at the pass in the Faliern Mountains at dawn three days ago.

  He ended by saying, “That dragon carried Tehanu’s message to Orm Irian in Paln, who then must make the long flight here, three hundred miles or more. But dragons are swifter than any ship even with the magewind. We may look for Orm Irian at any time.”

  Prince Sege asked the first question, knowing the king would welcome it: “What do you hope to gain, my lord, by parley with a dragon?”

  The answer was prompt: “More than we can ever gain by trying to fight it. It is a hard thing to say, but it is the truth: against the anger of these great creatures, if indeed they were to come against us in any number, we have no true defense. Our wise men tell us there is maybe one place that could stand against them, Roke Island. And on Roke there is maybe one man who could face the wrath of even a single dragon and not be destroyed. Therefore we must try to find out the cause of their anger and, by removing it, make peace with them.”

  “They are animals,” said the old Lord of Felkway. “Men cannot reason with animals, make peace with them.”

  “Have we not the Sword of Erreth-Akbe, who slew the Great Dragon?” cried a young councillor.

  He was answered at once by another: “And who slew Erreth-Akbe?”

  Debate in the council tended to be tumultuous, though Prince Sege kept strict rule, not letting anyone interrupt another or speak for more than one turn of the two-minute sand-glass. Babblers and droners were cut off by a crash of the prince’s silver-tripped staff and his call to the next speaker. So they talked and shouted back and forth at a fast pace, and all the things that had to be said and many things that did not need to be said were said, and refuted, and said again. Mostly they argued that they should go to war, fight the dragons, defeat them.

  “A band of archers on one of the king’s warships could bring them down like ducks,” cried a hot-blooded merchant from Wathort.

  “Are we to grovel before mindless beasts? Are there no heroes left among us?” demanded the imperious Lady of O-tokne.

  To that, Onyx made a sharp reply: “Mindless? They speak the Language of the Making, in the knowledge of which our art and power lies. They are beasts as we are beasts. Men are animals that speak.”

  A ship’s captain, an old, far-traveled man, said, “Then isn’t it you wizards who should be talking with them? Since you know their speech, and maybe share their powers? The king spoke of a young untaught girl who turned into a dragon. But mages can take that form at will. Couldn’t the Masters of Roke speak with the dragons or fight with them, if need be, evenly matched?”

  The wizard from Paln stood up. He was a short man with a soft voice. “To take the form is to be the being, captain,” he said politely. “A mage can look like a dragon. But true Change is a risky art. Especially now. A small change in the midst of great changes is like a breath against the wind . . . But we have here among us one who need use no art, and yet can speak for us to dragons better than any man could do. If she will speak for us.”

  At that, Tehanu stood up from her bench at the foot of the dais. “I will,” she said. And sat down again.

  That brought a pause to the discussion for a minute, but soon they were all at it again.

  The king listened and did not speak. He wanted to know the temper of his people.

  The sweet silver trumpets high on the Tower of the Sword played all their tune four times, telling the sixth hour, noon. The king stood, and Prince Sege declared a recess until the first hour of the afternoon.

  A lunch of fresh cheese and summer fruits and greens was set out in a room in Queen Heru’s Tower. There Lebannen invited Tehanu and Tenar, Alder, Sege, and Onyx; and Onyx, with the king’s permission, brought with him the Pelnish wizard Seppel. They sat and ate together, talking little and quietly. The windows looked over all the harbor and the north shoreline of the bay fading off into a bluish haze that might be either the remnants of the morning fog or smoke from the forest fires in the west of the island.

  Alder remained bewildered at being included among the king’s intimates and brought into his councils. What had he to do with dragons? He could neither fight with them nor talk with them. The idea of such mighty beings was great and strange to him. At moments the boasts and challenges of the councillors seemed to him like a yapping of dogs. He had seen a young dog once on a beach barking and barking at the ocean, rushing and snapping at the ebb wave, running back from the breaker with its wet tail between its legs.

  But he was glad to be with Tenar, who put him at ease, and whom he liked for her kindness and courage, and he found now that he was also at ease with Tehanu.

  Her disfigurement made it seem that she had two faces. He could not see them both at one time, only the one or the other. But he had got used to that and it did not disquiet him. His mother’s face had been half masked by its wine-red birthmark. Tehanu’s face reminded him of that.

  She seemed less restless and troubled than she had been. She sat quietly, and a couple of times she spoke to Alder, sitting next to her, with a shy comradeliness. He felt that, like him, she was there not by choice but because she had forgone choice, driven to follow a way she did not understand. Maybe her way and his went togethe
r, for a while at least. The idea gave him courage. Knowing only that there was something he had to do, something begun that must be finished, he felt that whatever it might be, it would be better done with her than without her. Perhaps she was drawn to him out of the same loneliness.

  But her conversation was not of such deep matters. “My father gave you a kitten,” she said to him as they left the table. “Was it one of Aunty Moss’s?”

  He nodded, and she asked, “The grey one?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was the best cat of the litter.”

  “She’s getting fat, here.”

  Tehanu hesitated and then said timidly, “I think it’s a he.”

  Alder found himself smiling. “He’s a good companion. A sailor named him Tug.”

  “Tug,” she said, and looked satisfied.

  “Tehanu,” the king said. He had sat down beside Tenar in the deep window seat. “I didn’t call on you in council today to speak of the questions Lord Sparrowhawk asked you. It was not the time. Is it the place?”

  Alder watched her. She considered before answering. She glanced once at her mother, who made no answering sign.

  “I’d rather speak to you here,” she said in her hoarse voice. “And maybe to the Princess of Hur-at-Hur.”

  After a brief pause the king said pleasantly, “Shall I send for her?”

  “No, I can go see her. Afterward. I haven’t much to say, really. My father asked, Who goes to the dry land when they die? And my mother and I talked about it. And we thought, people go there, but do the beasts? Do birds fly there? Are there trees, does the grass grow? Alder, you’ve seen it.”

  Taken by surprise, he could say only, “There . . . there’s grass, on the hither side of the wall, but it seems dead. Beyond that I don’t know.”

  Tehanu looked at the king. “You walked across that land, my lord.”

  “I saw no beast, or bird, or growing thing.”

  Alder spoke again: “Lord Sparrowhawk said: dust, rock.”

  “I think no beings go there at death but human beings,” Tehanu said. “But not all of them.” Again she looked at her mother, and did not look away.

  Tenar spoke. “The Kargish people are like the animals.” Her voice was dry and let no feeling be heard. “They die to be reborn.”

  “That is superstition,” Onyx said. “Forgive me, Lady Tenar, but you yourself—” He paused.

  “I no longer believe,” Tenar said, “that I am or was, as they told me, Arha forever reborn, a single soul reincarnated endlessly and so immortal. I do believe that when I die I will, like any mortal being, rejoin the greater being of the world. Like the grass, the trees, the animals. Men are only animals that speak, sir, as you said this morning.”

  “But we can speak the Language of the Making,” the wizard protested. “By learning the words by which Segoy made the world, the very speech of life, we teach our souls to conquer death.”

  “That place where nothing is but dust and shadows, is that your conquest?” Her voice was not dry now, and her eyes flashed.

  Onyx stood indignant but wordless.

  The king intervened. “Lord Sparrowhawk asked a second question,” he said. “Can a dragon cross the wall of stones?” He looked at Tehanu.

  “It’s answered in the first answer,” she said, “if dragons are only animals that speak, and animals don’t go there. Has a mage ever seen a dragon there? Or you, my lord?” She looked first at Onyx, then at Lebannen. Onyx pondered only a moment before he said, “No.”

  The king looked amazed. “How is it I never thought of that?” he said. “No, we saw none. I think there are no dragons there.”

  “My lord,” Alder said, louder than he had ever said anything in the palace, “there is a dragon here.” He was standing facing the window, and he pointed at it.

  They all turned. In the sky above the Bay of Havnor they saw a dragon flying from the west. Its long, slow-beating, vaned wings shone red-gold. A curl of smoke drifted behind it for a moment in the hazy summer air.

  “Now,” the king said, “what room do I make ready for this guest?”

  He spoke as if amused, bemused. But the instant he saw the dragon turn and come wheeling in towards the Tower of the Sword, he ran from the room and down the stairs, startling and outstripping the guards in the halls and at the doors, so that he came out first and alone on the terrace under the white tower.

  The terrace was the roof of a banquet hall, a wide expanse of marble with a low balustrade, the Sword Tower rising directly over it and the Queen’s Tower nearby. The dragon had alighted on the pavement and was furling its wings with a loud metallic rattle as the king came out. Where it came down its talons had scratched grooves in the marble.

  The long, gold-mailed head swung round. The dragon looked at the king.

  The king looked down and did not meet its eyes. But he stood straight and spoke clearly. “Orm Irian, welcome. I am Lebannen.”

  “Agni Lebannen,” said the great hissing voice, greeting him as Orm Embar had greeted him long ago, in the farthest west, before he was a king.

  Behind him, Onyx and Tehanu had run out onto the terrace along with several guards. One guard had his sword out, and Lebannen saw, in a window of the Queen’s Tower, another with drawn bow and notched arrow aimed at the dragon’s breast. “Put down your weapons!” he shouted in a voice that made the towers ring, and the guard obeyed in such haste that he nearly dropped his sword, but the archer lowered his bow reluctantly, finding it hard to leave his lord defenseless.

  “Medeu,” Tehanu whispered, coming up beside Lebannen, her gaze unwavering on the dragon. The great creature’s head swung round again and the immense amber eye in a socket of shining, wrinkled scales gazed back, unblinking.

  The dragon spoke.

  Onyx, understanding, murmured to the king what it said and what Tehanu replied. “Kalessin’s daughter, my sister,” it said. “You do not fly.”

  “I cannot change, sister,” Tehanu said.

  “Shall I?”

  “For a while, if you will.”

  Then those on the terrace and in the windows of the towers saw the strangest thing they might ever see however long they lived in a world of sorceries and wonders. They saw the dragon, the huge creature whose scaled belly and thorny tail dragged and stretched half across the breadth of the terrace, and whose red-horned head reared up twice the height of the king—they saw it lower that big head, and tremble so that its wings rattled like cymbals, and not smoke but a mist breathed out of its deep nostrils, clouding its shape, so that it became cloudy like thin fog or worn glass; and then it was gone. The midday sun beat down on the scored, scarred, white pavement. There was no dragon. There was a woman. She stood some ten paces from Tehanu and the king. She stood where the heart of the dragon might have been.

  She was young, tall, and strongly built, dark, dark-haired, wearing a farm woman’s shift and trousers, barefoot. She stood motionless, as if bewildered. She looked down at her body. She lifted up her hand and looked at it. “The little thing!” she said, in the common speech, and she laughed. She looked at Tehanu. “It’s like putting on the shoes I wore when I was five,” she said.

  The two women moved towards each other. With a certain stateliness, like that of armed warriors saluting or ships meeting at sea, they embraced. They held each other lightly, but for some moments. They drew apart, and both turned to face the king.

  “Lady Irian,” he said, and bowed.

  She looked a little nonplussed and made a kind of country curtsey. When she looked up he saw her eyes were the color of amber. He looked instantly away.

  “I’ll do you no harm in this guise,” she said, with a broad, white smile. “Your majesty,” she added uncomfortably, trying to be polite.

  He bowed again. It was he that was nonplussed now. He looked at Tehanu, and round at Tenar, who had come out onto the terrace with Alder. Nobody said anything.

  Irian’s eyes went to Onyx, standing in his grey cloak just behind th
e king, and her face lighted up again. “Sir,” she said, “are you from Roke Island? Do you know the Lord Patterner?”

  Onyx bowed or nodded. He too kept his eyes from hers.

  “Is he well? Does he walk among his trees?”

  Again the wizard bowed.

  “And the Doorkeeper, and the Herbal, and Kurremkarmerruk? They befriended me, they stood by me. If you go back there, greet them with my love and honor, if you please.”

  “I will,” the wizard said.

  “My mother is here,” Tehanu said softly to Irian. “Tenar of Atuan.”

  “Tenar of Gont,” Lebannen said, with a certain ring to his voice.

  Looking with open wonder at Tenar, Irian said, “It was you that brought the Rune Ring from the land of the Hoary Men, along with the Archmage?”