“Were the flyers from Bellen, Metoy?” Esdan said.
“Came from the east.” Metoy’s harsh voice was weak and hoarse. “I guess they were.” After a while he said, “They want to cross the river.”
Esdan thought about this for a while. His mind still did not work well at all. “Who does?” he said finally.
“These people. The fieldhands. The assets of Yaramera. They want to go meet the Army.”
“The Invasion?”
“The Liberation.”
Esdan propped himself up on his elbows. Raising his head seemed to clear it, and he sat up. He looked over at Metoy. “Will they find them?” he asked.
“If the Lord so wills,” said the eunuch.
Presently Metoy tried to prop himself up like Esdan, but failed. “I got blown up,” he said, short of breath. “Something hit my head. I see two for one.”
“Probably a concussion. Lie still. Stay awake. Were you with Banarkamye, or observing?”
“I’m in your line of work.”
Esdan nodded, the backward nod.
“Factions will be the death of us,” Metoy said faintly.
Kamsa came and squatted down beside Esdan. “They say we must go cross the river,” she told him in her soft voice. “To where the people-army will keep us safe. I don’t know.”
“Nobody knows, Kamsa.”
“I can’t take Rekam cross a river,” she whispered. Her face clenched up, her lips drawing back, her brows down. She wept, without tears and in silence. “The water is cold.”
“They’ll have boats, Kamsa. They’ll look after you and Rekam. Don’t worry. It’ll be all right.” He knew his words were meaningless.
“I can’t go,” she whispered.
“Stay here then,” Metoy said.
“They said that other army will come here.”
“It might. More likely ours will.”
She looked at Metoy. “You are the cutfree,” she said. “With those others.” She looked back at Esdan. “Choyo got killed. All the kitchen is blown in pieces burning.” She hid her face in her arms.
Esdan sat up and reached out to her, stroking her shoulder and arm. He touched the baby’s fragile head with its thin, dry hair.
Gana came and stood over them. “All the fieldhands are going cross the river,” she said. “To be safe.”
“You’ll be safer here. Where there’s food and shelter.” Metoy spoke in short bursts, his eyes closed. “Than walking to meet an invasion.”
“I can’t take him, mama,” Kamsa whispered. “He has got to be warm. I can’t, I can’t take him.”
Gana stooped and looked into the baby’s face, touching it very softly with one finger. Her wrinkled face closed like a fist. She straightened up, but not erect as she used to stand. She stood bowed. “All right,” she said. “We’ll stay.”
She sat down on the grass beside Kamsa. People were on the move around them. The woman Esdan had seen on the terrace stopped by Gana and said, “Come on, grandmother. Time to go. The boats are ready waiting.”
“Staying,” Gana said.
“Why? Can’t leave that old house you worked in?” the woman said, jeering, humoring. “It’s all burned up, grandmother! Come on now. Bring that girl and her baby.” She looked at Esdan and Metoy, a flick-glance. They were not her concern. “Come on,” she repeated. “Get up now.”
“Staying,” Gana said.
“You crazy housefolk,” the woman said, turned away, turned back, gave it up with a shrug, and went on.
A few others stopped, but none for more than a question, a moment. They streamed on down the terraces, the sunlit paths beside the quiet pools, down towards the boathouses beyond the great tree. After a while they were all gone.
The sun had grown hot. It must be near noon. Metoy was whiter than ever, but he sat up, saying he could see single, most of the time.
“We should get into the shade, Gana,” Esdan said. “Metoy, can you get up?”
He staggered and shambled, but walked without help, and they got to the shade of a garden wall. Gana went off to look for water. Kamsa was carrying Rekam in her arms, close against her breast, sheltered from the sun. She had not spoken for a long time. When they had settled down she said, half questioning, looking around dully, “We are all alone here.”
“There’ll be others stayed. In the compounds,” Metoy said. “They’ll turn up.”
Gana came back; she had no vessel to carry water in, but had soaked her scarf, and laid the cold wet cloth on Metoy’s head. He shuddered. “You can walk better, then we can go to the house-compound, cutfree,” she said. “Places we can live in, there.”
“House-compound is where I grew up, grandmother,” he said.
And presently, when he said he could walk, they made their halt and lame way down a road which Esdan vaguely remembered, the road to the crouchcage. It seemed a long road. They came to the high compound wall and the gate standing open.
Esdan turned to look back at the ruins of the great house for a moment. Gana stopped beside him.
“Rekam died,” she said under her breath.
He caught his breath. “When?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. She wants to hold him. She’s done with holding him, then she will let him go.” She looked in the open gateway at the rows of huts and longhouses, the dried-up garden patches, the dusty ground. “Lotsalot little babies are in there,” she said. “In that ground. Two of my own. Her sisters.” She went in, following Kamsa. Esdan stood a while longer in the gateway, and then he went in to do what there was for him to do: dig a grave for the child, and wait with the others for the Liberation.
THE FINDER
I. In the Dark Time
THIS IS THE FIRST PAGE of the Book of the Dark, written some six hundred years ago in Berila, on Enlad:
“After Elfarran and Morred perished and the Isle of Soléa sank beneath the sea, the Council of the Wise governed for the child Serriadh until he took the throne. His reign was bright but brief. The kings who followed him in Enlad were seven, and their realm increased in peace and wealth. Then the dragons came to raid among the western lands, and wizards went out in vain against them. King Akambar moved the court from Berila in Enlad to the City of Havnor, whence he sent out his fleet against invaders from the Kargad Lands and drove them back into the East. But still they sent raiding ships even as far as the Inmost Sea. Of the fourteen Kings of Havnor the last was Maharion, who made peace both with the dragons and the Kargs, but at great cost. And after the Ring of the Runes was broken, and Erreth-Akbe died with the great dragon, and Maharion the Brave was killed by treachery, it seemed that no good thing happened in the Archipelago.
“Many claimed Maharion’s throne, but none could keep it, and the quarrels of the claimants divided all loyalties. No commonwealth was left and no justice, only the will of the wealthy. Men of noble houses, merchants, and pirates, any who could hire soldiers and wizards called himself a lord, claiming lands and cities as his property. The warlords made those they conquered slaves, and those they hired were in truth slaves, having only their masters to safeguard them from rival warlords seizing the lands, and sea-pirates raiding the ports, and bands and hordes of lawless, miserable men dispossessed of their living, driven by hunger to raid and rob.”
The Book of the Dark, written late in the time it tells of, is a compilation of self-contradictory histories, partial biographies, and garbled legends. But it’s the best of the records that survived the dark years. Wanting praise, not history, the warlords burnt the books in which the poor and powerless might learn what power is.
But when the lore-books of a wizard came into a warlord’s hands he was likely to treat them with caution, locking them away to keep them harmless or giving them to a wizard in his hire to do with as he wished. In the margins of the spells and word lists and in the endpapers of these books of lore a wizard or his prentice might record a plague, a famine, a raid, a change of masters, along with the spells worked in such events an
d their success or unsuccess. Such random records reveal a clear moment here and there, though all between those moments is darkness. They are like glimpses of a lighted ship far out at sea, in darkness, in the rain.
And there are songs, old lays and ballads from small islands and from the quiet uplands of Havnor, that tell the story of those years.
Havnor Great Port is the city at the heart of the world, white-towered above its bay; on the tallest tower the sword of Erreth-Akbe catches the first and last of daylight. Through that city passes all the trade and commerce and learning and craft of Earthsea, a wealth not hoarded. There the King sits, having returned after the healing of the Ring, in sign of healing. And in that city, in these latter days, men and women of the islands speak with dragons, in sign of change.
But Havnor is also the Great Isle, a broad, rich land; and in the villages inland from the port, the farmlands of the slopes of Mount Onn, nothing ever changes much. There a song worth singing is likely to be sung again. There old men at the tavern talk of Morred as if they had known him when they too were young and heroes. There girls walking out to fetch the cows home tell stories of the women of the Hand, who are forgotten everywhere else in the world, even on Roke, but remembered among those silent, sunlit roads and fields and in the kitchens by the hearths where housewives work and talk.
In the time of the kings, mages gathered in the court of Enlad and later in the court of Havnor to counsel the king and take counsel together, using their arts to pursue goals they agreed were good. But in the dark years, wizards sold their skills to the highest bidder, pitting their powers one against the other in duels and combats of sorcery, careless of the evils they did, or worse than careless. Plagues and famines, the failure of springs of water, summers with no rain and years with no summer, the birth of sickly and monstrous young to sheep and cattle, the birth of sickly and monstrous children to the people of the isles—all these things were charged to the practices of wizards and witches, and all too often rightly so.
So it became dangerous to practice sorcery, except under the protection of a strong warlord; and even then, if a wizard met up with one whose powers were greater than his own, he might be destroyed. And if a wizard let down his guard among the common folk, they too might destroy him if they could, seeing him as the source of the worst evils they suffered, a malign being. In those years, in the minds of most people, all magic was black.
It was then that village sorcery, and above all women’s witchery, came into the ill repute that has clung to it since. Witches paid dearly for practicing the arts they thought of as their own. The care of pregnant beasts and women, birthing, teaching the songs and rites, the fertility and order of field and garden, the building and care of the house and its furniture, the mining of ores and metals—these great things had always been in the charge of women. A rich lore of spells and charms to ensure the good outcome of such undertakings was shared among the witches. But when things went wrong at the birth, or in the field, that would be the witches’ fault. And things went wrong more often than right, with the wizards warring, using poisons and curses recklessly to gain immediate advantage without thought for what followed after. They brought drought and storm, blights and fires and sicknesses across the land, and the village witch was punished for them. She didn’t know why her charm of healing caused the wound to gangrene, why the child she brought into the world was imbecile, why her blessing seemed to burn the seed in the furrows and blight the apple on the tree. But for these ills, somebody had to be to blame: and the witch or sorcerer was there, right there in the village or the town, not off in the warlord’s castle or fort, not protected by armed men and spells of defense. Sorcerers and witches were drowned in the poisoned wells, burned in the withered fields, buried alive to make the dead earth rich again.
So the practice of their lore and the teaching of it had become perilous. Those who undertook it were often those already outcast, crippled, deranged, without family, old—women and men who had little to lose. The wise man and wise woman, trusted and held in reverence, gave way to the stock figures of the shuffling, impotent village sorcerer with his trickeries, the hag-witch with her potions used in aid of lust, jealousy, and malice. And a child’s gift for magic became a thing to dread and hide.
This is a tale of those times. Some of it is taken from the Book of the Dark, and some comes from Havnor, from the upland farms of Onn and the woodlands of Faliern. A story may be pieced together from such scraps and fragments, and though it will be an airy quilt, half made of hearsay and half of guesswork, yet it may be true enough. It’s a tale of the Founding of Roke, and if the Masters of Roke say it didn’t happen so, let them tell us how it happened otherwise. For a cloud hangs over the time when Roke first became the Isle of the Wise, and it may be that the wise men put it there.
II. Otter
There was an otter in our brook
That every mortal semblance took,
Could any spell of magic make,
And speak the tongues of man and drake.
So runs the water away, away,
So runs the water away.
OTTER WAS THE SON OF a boatwright who worked in the shipyards of Havnor Great Port. His mother gave him his country name; she was a farm woman from Endlane village, around northwest of Mount Onn. She had come to the city seeking work, as many came. Decent folk in a decent trade in troubled times, the boatwright and his family were anxious not to come to notice lest they come to grief. And so, when it became clear that the boy had a gift of magery, his father tried to beat it out of him.
“You might as well beat a cloud for raining,” said Otter’s mother.
“Take care you don’t beat evil into him,” said his aunt.
“Take care he doesn’t turn your belt on you with a spell!” said his uncle.
But the boy played no tricks against his father. He took his beatings in silence and learned to hide his gift.
It didn’t seem to him to amount to much. It was such an easy matter to him to make a silvery light shine in a dark room, or find a lost pin by thinking about it, or true up a warped joint by running his hands over the wood and talking to it, that he couldn’t see why they made a fuss over such things. But his father raged at him for his “shortcuts,” even struck him once on the mouth when he was talking to the work, and insisted that he do his carpentry with tools, in silence.
His mother tried to explain. “It’s as if you’d found some great jewel,” she said, “and what’s one of us to do with a diamond but hide it? Anybody rich enough to buy it from you is strong enough to kill you for it. Keep it hid. And keep away from great people and their crafty men!”
“Crafty men” is what they called wizards in those days.
One of the gifts of power is to know power. Wizard knows wizard, unless the concealment is very skillful. And the boy had no skills at all except in boat-building, of which he was a promising scholar by the age of twelve. About that time the midwife who had helped his mother at his birth came by and said to his parents, “Let Otter come to me in the evenings after work. He should learn the songs and be prepared for his naming day.”
That was all right, for she had done the same for Otter’s elder sister, and so his parents sent him to her in the evenings. But she taught Otter more than the song of the Creation. She knew his gift. She and some men and women like her, people of no fame and some of questionable reputation, had all in some degree that gift; and they shared, in secret, what lore and craft they had. “A gift untaught is a ship unguided,” they said to Otter, and they taught him all they knew. It wasn’t much, but there were some beginnings of the great arts in it; and though he felt uneasy at deceiving his parents, he couldn’t resist this knowledge, and the kindness and praise of his poor teachers. “It will do you no harm if you never use it for harm,” they told him, and that was easy for him to promise them.
At the stream Serrenen, where it runs within the north wall of the city, the midwife gave Otter his true name, by which he is remember
ed in islands far from Havnor.
Among these people was an old man whom they called, among themselves, the Changer. He showed Otter a few spells of illusion; and when the boy was fifteen or so, the old man took him out into the fields by Serrenen to show him the one spell of true change he knew. “First let’s see you turn that bush into the seeming of a tree,” he said, and promptly Otter did so. Illusion came so easy to the boy that the old man took alarm. Otter had to beg and wheedle him for any further teaching and finally to promise him, swearing on his own true and secret name, that if he learned the Changer’s great spell he would never use it but to save a life, his own or another’s.
Then the old man taught it to him. But it wasn’t much use, Otter thought, since he had to hide it.
What he learned working with his father and uncle in the shipyard he could use, at least; and he was becoming a good craftsman, even his father would admit that.
Losen, a sea-pirate who called himself King of the Inmost Sea, was then the chief warlord in the city and all the east and south of Havnor. Exacting tribute from that rich domain, he spent it to increase his soldiery and the fleets he sent out to take slaves and plunder from other lands. As Otter’s uncle said, he kept the shipwrights busy. They were grateful to have work in a time when men seeking work found only beggary, and rats ran in the courts of Maharion. They did an honest job, Otter’s father said, and what the work was used for was none of their concern.
But the other learning he had been given had made Otter touchy in these matters, delicate of conscience. The big galley they were building now would be rowed to war by Losen’s slaves and would bring back slaves as cargo. It galled him to think of the good ship in that vicious usage. “Why can’t we build fishing boats, the way we used to?” he asked, and his father said, “Because the fishermen can’t pay us.”
“Can’t pay us as well as Losen does. But we could live,” Otter argued.
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