The Farthest Shore (Earthsea Cycle)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “I have thought,” the chief began, slowly and with a civil solemnity, “of the things you have told me. Of how men think to come back from death into their own bodies, and seeking to do this forget the worship of the gods and neglect their bodies and go mad. This is an evil matter and a great folly. Also I have thought, What has it to do with us? We have nothing to do with other men, their islands and their ways, their makings and unmakings. We live on the sea and our lives are the sea’s. We do not hope to save them; we do not seek to lose them. Madness does not come here. We do not come to land; nor do the landfolk come to us. When I was young, we spoke sometimes with men who came on boats to the Long Dune, when we were there to cut the raft logs and build the winter shelters. Often we saw sails from Ohol and Welwai (so he called Obehol and Wellogy) following the grey whales in the autumn. Often they followed our rafts from afar, for we know the roads and meeting places of the Great Ones in the sea. But that is all I ever saw of the landfolk, and now they come no longer. Maybe they have all gone mad and fought with one another. Two years ago on the Long Dune looking north to Welwai we saw for three days the smoke of a great burning. And if that were so, what is it to us? We are the Children of the Open Sea. We go the sea’s way.”

  “Yet seeing a landsman’s boat adrift you came to it,” said the mage.

  “Some among us said it was not wise to do so, and would have let the boat drift on to sea’s end,” the chief answered in his high, impassive voice.

  “You were not one of them.”

  “No. I said, though they be landfolk, yet we will help them, and so it was done. But with your undertakings we have nothing to do. If there is a madness among the landfolk, the landfolk must deal with it. We follow the road of the Great Ones. We cannot help you in your search. So long as you wish to stay with us, you are welcome. It is not many days till the Long Dance; after it we return northward, following the eastern current that by summer’s end will bring us round again to the seas by the Long Dune. If you will stay with us and be healed of your hurt, this will be well. Or if you will take your boat and go your way, this too will be well.”

  The mage thanked him, and the chief got up, slight and stiff as a heron, and left them alone together.

  “In innocence there is no strength against evil,” said Sparrowhawk, a little wryly. “But there is strength in it for good. . . . We shall stay with them awhile, I think, till I am cured of this weakness.”

  “That is wise,” said Arren. Sparrowhawk’s physical frailty had shocked and moved him; he had determined to protect the man from his own energy and urgency, to insist that they wait at least until he was free of pain before they went on.

  The mage looked at him, somewhat startled by the compliment.

  “They are kind here,” Arren pursued, not noticing. “They seem to be free of that sickness of soul they had in Hort Town and the other islands. Maybe there is no island where we would have been helped and welcomed, as these lost people have done.”

  “You may well be right.”

  “And they lead a pleasant life in summer. . . .”

  “They do. Though to eat cold fish one’s whole life long, and never to see a pear tree in blossom or taste of a running spring, would be wearisome at last!”

  So Arren returned to Star’s raft, worked and swam and basked with the other young people, talked with Sparrowhawk in the cool of the evening, and slept under the stars. And the days wore on toward the Long Dance of midsummer’s eve, and the great rafts drifted slowly southward on the currents of the open sea.

  CHAPTER 9

  ORM EMBAR

  ALL NIGHT LONG, THE SHORTEST night of the year, torches burned on the rafts, which lay gathered in a great circle under the thick-starred sky, so that a ring of fires flickered on the sea. The raft-folk danced, using no drum or flute or any music but the rhythm of bare feet on the great, rocking rafts, and the thin voices of their chanters ringing plaintive in the vastness of their dwelling place the sea. There was no moon that night, and the bodies of the dancers were dim in the starlight and torchlight. Now and again one flashed like a fish leaping, a youth vaulting from one raft to the next: long leaps and high, and they vied with one another, trying to circle all the ring of rafts and dance on each, and so come round before the break of day.

  Arren danced with them, for the Long Dance is held on every isle of the Archipelago, though the steps and songs may vary. But as the night drew on, and many dancers dropped out and settled down to watch or doze, and the voices of the chanters grew husky, he came with a group of high-leaping lads to the chief’s raft and there stopped, while they went on.

  Sparrowhawk sat with the chief and the chief’s three wives, near the temple. Between the carven whales that made its doorway sat a chanter whose high voice had not flagged all night long. Tireless he sang, tapping his hands on the wooden deck to keep the time.

  “What does he sing of?” Arren asked the mage, for he could not follow the words, which were all held long, with trills and strange catches on the notes.

  “Of the grey whales and the albatross and the storm. . . . They do not know the songs of the heroes and the kings. They do not know the name of Erreth-Akbe. Earlier he sang of Segoy, how he established the lands amid the sea; that much they remember of the lore of men. But the rest is all of the sea.”

  Arren listened: he heard the singer imitate the whistling cry of the dolphin, weaving his song about it. He watched Sparrowhawk’s profile against the torchlight, black and firm as rock, saw the liquid gleam of the chief’s wives’ eyes as they chatted softly, felt the long, slow dip of the raft on the quiet sea, and slipped gradually toward sleep.

  He roused all at once: the chanter had fallen silent. Not only the one near whom they sat, but all the others, on the rafts near and far. The thin voices had died away like a far-off piping of sea birds, and it was still.

  Arren looked over his shoulder to the east, expecting dawn. But only the old moon rode low, just rising, golden among the summer stars.

  Then looking southward he saw, high up, yellow Gobardon, and below it the eight companions, even to the last: the Rune of Ending clear and fiery above the sea. And turning to Sparrowhawk, he saw the dark face turned to those same stars.

  “Why do you cease?” the chief was asking the singer. “It is not daybreak, not even dawn.”

  The man stammered and said, “I do not know.”

  “Sing on! The Long Dance is not ended.”

  “I do not know the words,” the chanter said, and his voice rose high as if in terror. “I cannot sing. I have forgotten the song.”

  “Sing another, then!”

  “There are no more songs. It is ended,” the chanter cried, and bent forward till he crouched on the decking; and the chief stared at him in amazement.

  The rafts rocked beneath their sputtering torches, all silent. The silence of the ocean enclosed the small stir of life and light upon it and swallowed it. No dancer moved.

  It seemed to Arren then that the splendor of the stars dimmed, and yet no daylight was in the east. A horror came on him, and he thought, There will be no sunrise. There will be no day.

  The mage stood up. As he did so a faint light, white and quick, ran along his staff, burning clearest in the rune that was set in silver in the wood. “The dance is not ended,” he said, “nor the night. Arren, sing.”

  Arren would have said, “I cannot, lord!”—but instead he looked at the nine stars in the south, drew a deep breath, and sang. His voice was soft and husky at first, but it grew stronger as he sang, and the song was that oldest song, of the Creation of Eá, and the balancing of the dark and the light, and the making of green lands by Him who spoke the first word, the Eldest Lord, Segoy.

  Before the song was ended, the sky had paled to greyish-blue, and in it only the moon and Gobardon still burned faintly. The torches hissed in the wind of dawn. Then, the song done, Arren was silent; and the dancers who had gathered to listen returned quietly from raft to raft, as the light brightened i
n the east.

  “That is a good song,” the chief said. His voice was uncertain, though he strove to speak impassively. “It would not be well to end the Long Dance before it is completed. I will have the lazy chanters beaten with nilgu thongs.”

  “Comfort them, rather,” Sparrowhawk said. He was still afoot, and his tone was stern. “No singer chooses silence. Come with me, Arren.”

  He turned to go to the shelter, and Arren followed him. But the strangeness of that daybreak was not yet done, for even then, as the eastern rim of the sea grew white, there came from the north flying a great bird: so high up that its wings caught the sunlight that had not shone upon the world yet and beat in strokes of gold upon the air. Arren cried out, pointing. The mage looked up, startled. Then his face became fierce and exulting, and he shouted out aloud, “Nam hietha arw Ged arkvaissaf!”—which in the Speech of the Making is, If thou seekest Ged here find him.

  And like a golden plummet dropped, with wings held high outstretched, vast and thundering on the air, with talons which might seize an ox as if it were a mouse, with a curl of steamy flame streaming from long nostrils, the dragon stooped like a falcon on the rocking raft.

  The raft-folk cried out; some cowered down, some leapt into the sea, and some stood still, watching, in a wonder that surpassed fear.

  The dragon hovered above them. Ninety feet, maybe, was he from tip to tip of his vast membranous wings, that shone in the new sunlight like gold-shot smoke, and the length of his body was no less, but lean, arched like a greyhound, clawed like a lizard, and snake-scaled. Along the narrow spine went a row of jagged darts, like rose-thorns in shape, but at the hump of the back three feet in height, and so diminishing that the last at the tail-tip was no longer than the blade of a little knife. These thorns were grey, and the scales of the dragon were iron-grey, but there was a glitter of gold in them. His eyes were green and slitted.

  Moved by fear for his people to forget fear for himself, the chief of the raft-folk came from his shelter with a harpoon such as they used in the hunt of whales: it was longer than himself and pointed with a great, barbed point of ivory. Poising it on his small, sinewy arm, he ran forward to gain the impetus to hurl it up and strike the dragon’s narrow, light-mailed belly that hung above the raft. Arren waking from stupor saw him, and plunging forward caught his arm and came down in a heap with him and the harpoon. “Would you anger him with your silly pins?” he gasped. “Let the Dragonlord speak first!”

  The chief, half the wind knocked out of him, stared stupidly at Arren and at the mage and at the dragon. But he did not say anything. And then the dragon spoke.

  None there but Ged to whom it spoke could understand it, for dragons speak only in the Old Speech, which is their tongue. The voice was soft and hissing, almost like a cat’s when he cries out softly in rage, but huge, and there was a terrible music in it. Whoever heard that voice stopped still and listened.

  The mage answered briefly, and again the dragon spoke, poising above him on slight-shifting wings: even, thought Arren, like a dragonfly poised on the air.

  Then the mage answered one word, “Memeas,” I will come; and he lifted up his staff of yew-wood. The dragon’s jaws opened, and a coil of smoke escaped them in a long arabesque. The gold wings clapped like thunder, making a great wind that smelled of burning, and he wheeled and flew hugely to the north.

  It was quiet on the rafts, with a little thin piping and wailing of children, and women comforting them. Men climbed aboard out of the sea somewhat shamefaced; and the forgotten torches burned in the first rays of the sun.

  The mage turned to Arren. His face had a light in it that might have been joy or stark anger, but he spoke quietly. “Now we must go, lad. Say your farewells and come.” He turned to thank the chief of the raft-folk and bid him farewell, and then went from the great raft across three others, for they still lay close ingathered for the dancing, till he came to the one to which Lookfar was tied. So the boat had followed the raft-town in its long, slow drift into the south, rocking along empty behind; but the Children of the Open Sea had filled its empty cask with hoarded rainwater and made up its stock of provisions, wishing thus to honor their guests, for many of them believed Sparrowhawk to be one of the Great Ones, who had taken on the form of a man instead of the form of a whale. When Arren joined him, he had the sail up. Arren loosed the rope and leapt into the boat, and in that instant she veered from the raft and her sail stiffened as in a high wind, though only the breeze of sunrise blew. She heeled turning and sped off northward on the dragon’s track, light as a blown leaf on the wind.

  When Arren looked back, he saw the raft-town as a tiny scattering, little sticks and chips of wood afloat: the shelters and the torch-poles. Soon these were lost in the dazzle of early sunlight on the water. Lookfar fled forward. When her bow bit the waves, fine crystal spray flew, and the wind of her going flung back Arren’s hair and made him squint.

  Under no wind of earth could that small boat have sailed so fast, unless in storm, and then it might have foundered in the storm-waves. This was no wind of earth, but the mage’s word and power, that sent her forth so fleet.

  He stood a long time by the mast, with watchful eyes. At last he sat down in his old place by the tiller, laying one hand upon it, and looked at Arren.

  “That was Orm Embar,” he said, “the Dragon of Selidor, kin to that great Orm who slew Erreth-Akbe and was slain by him.”

  “Was he hunting, lord?” said Arren; for he was not certain whether the mage had spoken to the dragon in welcome or in threat.

  “Hunting me. What dragons hunt, they find. He came to ask my help.” He laughed shortly. “And that’s a thing I would not believe if any told me: that a dragon turned to a man for help. And of them all, that one! He is not the oldest, though he is very old, but he is the mightiest of his kind. He does not hide his name, as dragons and men must do. He has no fear that any can gain power over him. Nor does he deceive, in the way of his kind. Long ago, on Selidor, he let me live, and he told me a great truth: he told me how the Rune of the Kings might be refound. To him I owe the Ring of Erreth-Akbe. But never did I think to repay such a debt, to such a creditor!”

  “What does he ask?”

  “To show me the way I seek,” said the mage, more grimly. And after a pause, “He said, ‘In the west there is another Dragonlord; he works destruction on us, and his power is greater than ours.’ I said, ‘Even than thine, Orm Embar?’ and he said, ‘Even than mine. I need thee: follow in haste.’ And so bid, I obeyed.”

  “You know no more than that?”

  “I will know more.”

  Arren coiled up the mooring line, stowed it, and saw to other small matters about the boat, but all the while the tension of excitement sang in him like a tightened bowstring, and it sang in his voice when he spoke at last. “This is a better guide,” he said, “than the others!”

  Sparrowhawk looked at him and laughed. “Aye,” he said. “This time we will not go astray, I think.”

  So those two began their great race across the ocean. A thousand miles and more it was from the uncharted seas of the raft-folk to the island Selidor, which lies of all the lands of Earthsea the farthest west. Day after day rose shining from the clear horizon and sank into the red west, and under the gold arch of the sun and the silver wheeling of the stars the boat ran northward, all alone on the sea.

  Sometimes the thunderclouds of high summer massed far off, casting purple shadows down on the horizon; then Arren would watch the mage as he stood up and with voice and hand called those clouds to drift toward them and to loosen their rain down on the boat. The lightning would leap among the clouds, and the thunder would bellow. Still the mage stood with upraised hand, until the rain came pouring down on him and on Arren and into the vessels they had set out and into the boat and onto the sea, flattening the waves with its violence. He and Arren would grin with pleasure, for of food they had enough, if none to spare, but water they needed. And the furious splendor of the storm tha
t obeyed the mage’s word delighted them.

  Arren wondered at this power which his companion now used so lightly, and once he said, “When we began our voyage, you used to work no charms.”

  “The first lesson on Roke, and the last, is Do what is needful. And no more!”

  “The lessons in between, then, must consist in learning what is needful.”

  “They do. One must consider the Balance. But when the Balance itself is broken—then one considers other things. Above all, haste.”

  “But how is it that all the wizards of the South—and elsewhere by now, even the chanters of the rafts—all have lost their art, but you keep yours?”

  “Because I desire nothing beyond my art,” Sparrowhawk said.

  And after some time he added, more cheerfully, “And if I am soon to lose it, I shall make the best of it while it lasts.”

  There was indeed a kind of lightheartedness in him now, a pure pleasure in his skill, which Arren, seeing him always so careful, had not guessed. The mind of the magician takes delight in tricks; a mage is a trickster. Sparrowhawk’s disguise in Hort Town, which had so troubled Arren, had been a game to him; a very slight game, too, for one who could transform not just his face and voice at will, but his body and very being, becoming as he chose a fish, a dolphin, a hawk. And once he said, “Look, Arren: I’ll show you Gont,” and had him look at the surface of their water-cask, which he had opened, and which was full to the brim. Many simple sorcerers can cause an image to appear on the water-mirror, and so he had done: a great peak, cloud-wreathed, rising from a grey sea. Then the image changed, and Arren saw plainly a cliff on that mountain isle. It was as if he were a bird, a gull or a falcon, hanging on the wind offshore and looking across the wind at that cliff that towered from the breakers for two thousand feet. On the high shelf of it was a little house. “That is Re Albi,” said Sparrowhawk, “and there lives my master Ogion, he who stilled the earthquake long ago. He tends his goats, and gathers herbs, and keeps his silence. I wonder if he still walks on the mountain; he is very old now. But I would know, surely I would know, even now, if Ogion died. . . .” There was no certainty in his voice; for a moment the image wavered, as if the cliff itself were falling. It cleared, and his voice cleared: “He used to go up into the forests alone in late summer and in autumn. So he came first to me, when I was a brat in a mountain village, and gave me my name. And my life with it.” The image of the water-mirror now showed as if the watcher were a bird among the forest branches, looking out to steep, sunlit meadows beneath the rock and snow of the peak, looking inward along a steep road going down in a green, gold-shot darkness. “There is no silence like the silence of those forests,” Sparrowhawk said, yearning.