The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Lady Opal of the Old Demesne of Ilien, currently in charge of the princess’s ladies-in-waiting, appeared promptly, greeted him graciously, offered him refreshment, behaved quite as if his visit were no surprise at all. This suavity half placated, half irritated him. Endless hypocrisy! But what was Lady Opal to do—gawp like a stranded fish (as a very young lady-in-waiting was doing) because the king had finally and unexpectedly come to see the princess?

  “I’m so sorry Mistress Tenar isn’t here at present,” she said. “It’s so much easier to converse with the princess with her help. But the princess is making admirable progress in the language.”

  Lebannen had forgotten the problem of language. He accepted the cool drink offered him and said nothing. Lady Opal made small talk with the assistance of the other ladies, getting very little from the king. He had begun to realise that he would probably be expected to speak with the princess in the company of all her ladies, as was only proper. Whatever he had intended to say to her, it had become impossible to say anything. He was just about to get up and excuse himself, when a woman whose head and shoulders were hidden by a red circular veil appeared in the doorway, fell plop on her knees, and said, “Please? King? Princess? Please?”

  “The princess will receive you in her chambers, sire,” Lady Opal interpreted. She waved to a footman, who escorted him upstairs, along a hall, through an anteroom, through a large, dark room that seemed to be crammed absolutely full of women in red veils, and out onto a balcony over the river. There stood the figure he remembered: the immobile cylinder of red and gold.

  The breeze from the water made the veils tremble and shimmer, so that the figure did not appear solid but delicate, moving, shivering, like the willow foliage. It seemed to shrink, to shorten. She was making her courtesy to him. He bowed to her. They both straightened up and stood in silence.

  “Princess,” Lebannen said, with a feeling of unreality, hearing his own voice, “I am here to ask you to come with us to Roke Island.”

  She said nothing. He saw the fine red veils part in an oval as she spread them with her hands. Long-fingered, golden-skinned hands, held apart to reveal her face in the red shadow. He could not see her features clearly. She was nearly as tall as he, and her eyes looked straight at him.

  “My friend Tenar,” she said, “say: king to see king, face and face. I say: yes. I will.”

  Half understanding, Lebannen bowed again. “You honor me, my lady.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I honor you.”

  He hesitated. This was a different ground entirely. Her ground.

  She stood there straight and still, the gold edging of her veils shivering, her eyes looking at him out of the shadow.

  “Tenar, and Tehanu, and Orm Irian, agree that it would be well if the Princess of the Kargad Lands were with us on Roke Island. So I ask you to come with us.”

  “To come.”

  “To Roke Island.”

  “On ship,” she said, and suddenly made a little moaning plaintive noise. Then she said, “I will. I will to come.”

  He did not know what to say. He said, “Thank you, my lady.”

  She nodded once, equal to equal.

  He bowed. He left her as he had been taught to leave the presence of his father the prince at formal occasions in the court of Enlad, not turning his back but stepping backwards.

  She stood facing him, still holding her veil parted till he reached the doorway. Then she dropped her hands, and the veils closed, and he heard her gasp and breathe out hard as if in release from an act of will sustained almost past endurance.

  Courageous, Tenar had called her. He did not understand, but he knew that he had been in the presence of courage. All the anger that had filled him, brought him here, was gone, vanished. He had not been sucked down and suffocated, but brought up short in front of a rock, a high place in clear air, a truth.

  He went out through the room full of murmuring, perfumed, veiled women who shrank back from him into the darkness. Downstairs, he chatted a little with Lady Opal and the others, and had a kind word for the gawping twelve-year-old lady-in-waiting. He spoke pleasantly to the men of his retinue waiting for him in the courtyard. He quietly mounted his tall grey horse. He rode quietly, thoughtfully, back to the Palace of Maharion.

  Alder heard with fatalistic acceptance that he was to sail back to Roke. His waking life had become so strange to him, more dreamlike than his dreams, that he had little will to question or protest. If he was fated to sail from island to island the rest of his life, so be it; he knew there was no such thing as going home for him now. At least he would be in the company of the ladies Tenar and Tehanu, who put his heart at ease. And the wizard Onyx had also shown him kindness.

  Alder was a shy man and Onyx a deeply reserved one, and there was all the difference of their knowledge and status to be bridged; but Onyx had come to him several times simply to talk as one man of the art to another, showing a respect for Alder’s opinion that puzzled his modesty. But Alder could not withhold his trust; and so when the time to depart was near at hand, he took to Onyx the question that had been worrying him.

  “It’s the little cat,” he said with embarrassment. “I don’t feel right about taking him. Keeping him cooped up so long. It’s unnatural for a young creature. And I think, what would become of him . . .”

  Onyx did not ask what he meant. He asked only, “He still helps you keep from the wall of stones?”

  “Well, often he does.”

  Onyx pondered. “You need some protection, till we get to Roke. I have thought . . . Have you spoken with the wizard Seppel here?”

  “The man from Paln,” Alder said, with a slight unease in his voice.

  Paln, the greatest island west of Havnor, had the reputation of being an uncanny place. The Pelnish spoke Hardic with a peculiar accent, using many words of their own. Their lords had in ancient times refused fealty to the kings of Enlad and Havnor. Their wizards did not go to Roke for their training. The Pelnish Lore, which called upon the Old Powers of the Earth, was widely believed to be dangerous if not sinister. Long ago the Grey Mage of Paln had brought ruin on his island by summoning the souls of the dead to advise him and his lords, and that tale was part of the education of every sorcerer: “The living should not take counsel of the dead.” There had been more than one duel in wizardry between a man of Roke and a man of Paln; in one such combat two centuries ago a plague had been loosed on the people of Paln and Semel that had left half the towns and farmlands desolate. And fifteen years ago, when the wizard Cob had used the Pelnish Lore to cross between life and death, the Archmage Sparrowhawk had spent all his own power to defeat him and heal the evil he had done.

  Alder, like almost everyone else at court and in the King’s Council, had politely avoided the wizard Seppel.

  “I’ve asked the king to bring him with us to Roke,” said Onyx.

  Alder blinked.

  “They know more than we do about these matters,” Onyx said. “Most of our art of Summoning comes from the Pelnish Lore. Thorion was a master of it . . . The Summoner of Roke now, Brand of Venway, won’t use any part of his craft that draws from that lore. Misused, it has brought only harm. But it may be only our ignorance that’s led us to use it wrongly. It goes back to very ancient times; there may be knowledge in it we’ve lost. Seppel is a wise man and mage. I think he should be with us. And I think he might help you, if you can trust him.”

  “If he has your trust,” Alder said, “he has mine.”

  When Alder spoke with the silver tongue of Taon, Onyx was likely to smile a little drily. “Your judgment’s as good as mine, Alder, in this business,” he said. “Or better. I hope you use it. But I’ll take you to him.”

  So they went down into the city together. Seppel’s lodging was in an old part of town near the shipyards, just off Boatwright Street; there was a little colony of Pelnish folk there, brought in to work in the king’s yards, for they were great shipbuilders. The houses were ancient, crowded close, with the br
idges between roof and roof that gave Havnor Great Port a second, airy web of streets high above its paved ones.

  Seppel’s rooms, up three flights of stairs, were dark and close in the heat of this late summer. He took them up one more steep flight onto the roof. It was joined to other roofs by a bridge on each side, so that there was a regular crossroads and thoroughfare across it. Awnings were set up by the low parapets, and the breeze from the harbor cooled the shaded air. There they sat on striped canvas mats in the corner that was Seppel’s bit of the roof, and he gave them a cool, slightly bitter tea to drink.

  He was a short man of about fifty, round-bodied, with small hands and feet, hair that was a little curly and unruly, and what was rare among men of the Archipelago, a beard, clipped short, on his dark cheeks and jaw. His manners were pleasant. He spoke in a clipped, singing accent, softly.

  He and Onyx talked, and Alder listened for a good while to them. His mind drifted when they spoke about people and matters of which he knew nothing. He looked out over the roofs and awnings, the roof gardens and the arched and carven bridges, northward to Mount Onn, a great pale-grey dome above the hazy hills of summer. He came back to himself hearing the Pelnish wizard say, “It may be that even the Archmage could not wholly heal the wound in the world.”

  The wound in the world, Alder thought: yes. He looked more intently at Seppel, and Seppel glanced at him. For all the soft look of the man his eyes were sharp.

  “Maybe it’s not only our desire to live forever that has kept the wound open,” Seppel said, “but the desire of the dead to die.”

  Again Alder heard the strange words and felt that he recognised them without understanding them. Again Seppel glanced at him as if seeking a response.

  Alder said nothing, nor did Onyx speak. Seppel said at last, “When you stand at the bourne, Master Alder, what is it they ask of you?”

  “To be free,” Alder replied, his voice only a whisper.

  “Free,” Onyx murmured.

  Silence again. Two girls and a boy ran past across the roofway, laughing and calling, “Down at the next!”—playing one of the endless games of chase children made with their city’s maze of streets and canals and stairs and bridges.

  “Maybe it was a bad bargain from the beginning,” Seppel said, and when Onyx looked a question at him he said, “Verw nadan.”

  Alder knew the words were in the Old Speech, but he did not know their meaning.

  He looked at Onyx, whose face was very grave. Onyx said only, “Well, I hope we can come to the truth of these things, and soon.”

  “On the hill where truth is,” Seppel said.

  “I’m glad you’ll be with us there. Meanwhile, here is Alder summoned to the bourne night after night and seeking some reprieve. I said that you might know a way to help him.”

  “And you would accept the touch of the wizardry of Paln?” Seppel asked Alder. His tone was softly ironic. His eyes were bright and hard as jet.

  Alder’s lips were dry. “Master,” he said, “we say on my island, the man drowning doesn’t ask what the rope cost. If you can keep me from that place even for a night, you’ll have my heart’s thanks, little as that is worth in return for such a gift.”

  Onyx looked at him with a slight, amused, unreproving smile.

  Seppel did not smile at all. “Thanks are rare, in my trade,” he said. “I would do a good deal for them. I think I can help you, Master Alder. But I have to tell you the rope is a costly one.”

  Alder bowed his head.

  “You come to the bourne in dream, not by your own will, that is so?”

  “So I believe.”

  “Wisely said.” Seppel’s keen glance approved him. “Who knows his own will clearly? But if it is in dream you go there, I can keep you from that dream—for a while. And at a cost, as I said.”

  Alder looked his question.

  “Your power.”

  Alder did not understand him at first. Then he said, “My gift, you mean? My art?”

  Seppel nodded.

  “I’m only a mender,” Alder said after a little time. “It’s not a great power to give up.”

  Onyx made as if to protest, but looked at Alder’s face and said nothing.

  “It is your living,” Seppel said.

  “It was my life, once. But that’s gone.”

  “Maybe your gift will come back to you, when what must happen has happened. I cannot promise that. I will try to restore what I can of what I take from you. But we’re all walking in the night, now, on ground we don’t know. When the day comes we may know where we are, or we may not. Now, if I spare you your dream, at that price, will you thank me?”

  “I will,” Alder said. “What’s the little good of my gift, against the great evil my ignorance could do? If you spare me the fear I live in now, the fear that I may do that evil, I’ll thank you till the end of my life.”

  Seppel drew a deep breath. “I’ve always heard that the harps of Taon play true,” he said. He looked at Onyx. “And Roke has no objection?” he asked, with a return to his mild ironic tone.

  Onyx shook his head, but he now looked very grave.

  “Then we will go to the cave at Aurun. Tonight if you like.”

  “Why there?” Onyx asked.

  “Because it’s not I but the Earth that will help Alder. Aurun is a sacred place, full of power. Although the people of Havnor have forgotten that, and use it only to defile it.”

  Onyx managed to have a private word with Alder before they followed Seppel downstairs. “You need not go through with this, Alder,” he said. “I thought I trusted Seppel, but I don’t know, now.”

  “I’ll trust him,” Alder said. He understood Onyx’s doubts, but he had meant what he said, that he would do anything to be free of the fear of doing some dreadful wrong. Each time he had been drawn back in dream to that wall of stones, he felt that something was trying to come into the world through him, that it would do so if he listened to the dead calling to him, and each time he heard them, he was weaker and it was harder to resist their call.

  The three men went a long way through the city streets in the heat of the late afternoon. They came out into the countryside south of the city, where rough ridgy hills ran down to the bay, a poor bit of country for this rich island: swampy lowland between the ridges, a little arable land on their rocky backs. The wall of the city here was very old, built of great unmortared rocks taken from the hills, and beyond it were no suburbs and few farms.

  They walked along a rough road that zigzagged up the first ridge and followed its crest eastward towards the higher hills. Up there, where they could see all the city lying in a golden haze northward, to their left, the road widened out into a maze of footpaths. Going straight forward they came suddenly to a great crack in the ground, a black gap twenty feet wide or more, right across their way.

  It was as if the spine of rock had been cracked apart by a wrenching of the earth and had never healed again. The western sunlight streaming over the lips of the cave lighted the vertical rock faces a little way down, but below that was darkness.

  There was a tannery in the valley under the ridge, south of it. The tanners had brought their wastes up here and dumped them into the crack, carelessly, so that all around it was a litter of rancid scraps of half-cured leather and a stink of rot and urine. There was another smell from the depths of the cave as they approached the sheer edge: a cold, sharp, earthy air that made Alder draw back.

  “I grieve for this, I grieve for this!” the wizard of Paln said aloud, looking around at the rubbish and down at the roofs of the tannery with a strange expression. But he spoke to Alder after a while in his usual mild way: “This is the cave or cleft called Aurun, that we know from our most ancient maps in Paln, where it is also called the Lips of Paor. It used to speak to the people here, when they first came here from the west. A long time ago. Men have changed. But it is what it was then. Here you can lay down your burden, if that is what you want.”

  “What must I do?”
Alder said.

  Seppel led him to the south end of the great split in the ground, where it narrowed back together in fissured ridges of rock. He told him to lie facedown where he could gaze into the depth of darkness stretching down and down away from him. “Hold to the earth,” he said. “That is all you must do. Even if it moves, hold to it.”

  Alder lay there staring down between the walls of stone. He felt rocks jabbing his chest and hip as he lay on them; he heard Seppel begin to chant in a high voice in words he knew were the Language of the Making; he felt the warmth of the sun across his shoulders, and smelled the carrion stink of the tannery. Then the breath of the cave blew up out of the depths with a hollow sharpness that took his own breath away and made his head spin. The darkness moved up towards him. The ground moved under him, rocked and shook, and he held on to it, hearing the high voice sing, breathing the breath of the earth. The darkness rose up and took him. He lost the sun.

  When he came back, the sun was low in the west, a red ball in the haze over the western shores of the bay. He saw that. He saw Seppel sitting nearby on the ground, looking tired and forlorn, his black shadow long on the rocky ground among the long shadows of the rocks.

  “There you are,” Onyx said.

  Alder realised that he was lying on his back, his head on Onyx’s knees, a rock digging into his backbone. He sat up, dizzy, apologising.

  They set off as soon as he could walk, for they had some miles to go and it was clear that neither he nor Seppel would be able to keep a fast pace. Full night had fallen when they came by Boatwright Street. Seppel bade them farewell, looking searchingly at Alder as they stood in the light from a tavern door nearby. “I did as you asked me,” he said, with that same unhappy look.

  “I thank you for it,” Alder said, and put out his right hand to the wizard in the manner of the people of the Enlades. After a moment Seppel touched it with his hand; and so they parted.