The Tombs of Atuan

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  She had curled up in the stern; Ged lay down in the prow, with the water cask for a pillow. The boat moved on steadily, the low swells slapping her sides a little, though the wind was only a faint breath from the south. Out here, away from the rocky shores, the sea too was silent; only as it touched the boat did it whisper a little.

  “If the wind is from the south,” Tenar said, whispering because the sea did, “doesn’t the boat sail north?”

  “Yes, unless we tack. But I’ve put the mage-wind in her sail, to the west. By tomorrow morning we should be out of Kargish waters. Then I’ll let her go by the world’s wind.”

  “Does it steer itself?”

  “Yes,” Ged replied with gravity, “given the proper instructions. She doesn’t need many. She’s been in the Open Sea, beyond the farthest isle of the East Reach; she’s been to Selidor where Erreth-Akbe died, in the farthest West. She’s a wise crafty boat, my Lookfar. You can trust her.”

  In the boat moved by magic over the great deep, the girl lay looking up into the dark. All her life she had looked into the dark; but this was a vaster darkness, this night on the ocean. There was no end to it. There was no roof. It went on out beyond the stars. No earthly Powers moved it. It had been before light, and would be after. It had been before life, and would be after. It went on beyond evil.

  In the dark, she spoke: “The little island, where the talisman was given you, is that in this sea?”

  “Yes,” his voice answered out of the dark. “Somewhere. To the south, perhaps. I could not find it again.”

  “I know who she was, the old woman who gave you the ring.”

  “You know?”

  “I was told the tale. It is part of the knowledge of the First Priestess. Thar told it to me, first when Kossil was there, then more fully when we were alone; it was the last time she talked to me before she died. There was a noble house in Hupun who fought against the rise of the High Priests in Awabath. The founder of the house was King Thoreg, and among the treasures he left his descendants was the half-ring, which Erreth-Akbe had given him.”

  “That indeed is told in the Deed of Erreth-Akbe. It says . . . in your tongue it says, ‘When the ring was broken, half remained in the hand of the High Priest Intathin, and half in the hero’s hand. And the High Priest sent the broken half to the Nameless, to the Ancient of the Earth in Atuan, and it went into the dark, into the lost places. But Erreth-Akbe gave the broken half into the hands of the maiden Tiarath, daughter of the wise king, saying: “Let it remain in the light, in the maiden’s dowry, let it remain in this land until it be rejoined.” So spoke the hero before he sailed to the west.’”

  “So it must have gone from daughter to daughter of that house, over all the years. It was not lost, as your people thought. But as the High Priests made themselves into the Priest-Kings, and then when the Priest-Kings made the Empire and began to call themselves Godkings, all this time the house of Thoreg grew poorer and weaker. And at last, so Thar told me, there were only two of the lineage of Thoreg left, little children, a boy and a girl. The Godking in Awabath then was the father of him who rules now. He had the children stolen from their palace in Hupun. There was a prophecy that one of the descendants of Thoreg of Hupun would bring about the fall of the Empire in the end, and that frightened him. He had the children stolen away, and taken to a lonely isle somewhere out in the middle of the sea, and left there with nothing but the clothes they wore and a little food. He feared to kill them by knife or strangling or poison; they were of kingly blood, and murder of kings brings a curse even on the gods. They were named Ensar and Anthil. It was Anthil who gave you the broken ring.”

  He was silent a long while. “So the story comes whole,” he said at last, “even as the ring is made whole. But it is a cruel story, Tenar. The little children, that isle, the old man and woman I saw. . . . They scarcely knew human speech.”

  “I would ask you something.”

  “Ask.”

  “I do not wish to go to the Inner Lands, to Havnor. I do not belong there, in the great cities among foreign men. I do not belong to any land. I betrayed my own people. I have no people. And I have done a very evil thing. Put me alone on an island, as the king’s children were left, on a lone isle where there are no people, where there is no one. Leave me, and take the ring to Havnor. It is yours, not mine. It has nothing to do with me. Nor have your people. Let me be by myself!”

  Slowly, gradually, yet startling her, a light dawned like a small moonrise in the blackness before her: the wizardly light that came at his command. It clung to the end of his staff, which he held upright as he sat facing her in the prow. It lit the bottom of the sail, and the gunwales, and the planking, and his face, with a silvery glow. He was looking straight at her.

  “What evil have you done, Tenar?”

  “I ordered that three men be shut into a room beneath the Throne, and starved to death. They died of hunger and thirst. They died, and are buried there in the Undertomb. The Tombstones fell on their graves.” She stopped.

  “Is there more?”

  “Manan.”

  “That death is on my soul.”

  “No. He died because he loved me, and was faithful. He thought he was protecting me. He held the sword above my neck. When I was little he was kind to me—when I cried—” She stopped again, for the tears rose hard in her, yet she would cry no more. Her hands were clenched on the black folds of her dress. “I was never kind to him,” she said. “I will not go to Havnor. I will not go with you. Find some isle where no one comes, and put me there, and leave me. The evil must be paid for. I am not free.”

  The soft light, greyed by sea mist, glimmered between them.

  “Listen, Tenar. Heed me. You were the vessel of evil. The evil is poured out. It is done. It is buried in its own tomb. You were never made for cruelty and darkness; you were made to hold light, as a lamp burning holds and gives its light. I found the lamp unlit; I won’t leave it on some desert island like a thing found and cast away. I’ll take you to Havnor and say to the princes of Earthsea, ‘Look! In the place of darkness I found the light, her spirit. By her an old evil was brought to nothing. By her I was brought out of the grave. By her the broken was made whole, and where there was hatred there will be peace.’”

  “I will not,” Tenar said in agony. “I cannot. It’s not true!”

  “And after that,” he went on quietly, “I’ll take you away from the princes and the rich lords; for it’s true that you have no place there. You are too young, and too wise. I’ll take you to my own land, to Gont where I was born, to my old master Ogion. He’s an old man now, a very great Mage, a man of quiet heart. They call him ‘the Silent.’ He lives in a small house on the great cliffs of Re Albi, high over the sea. He keeps some goats, and a garden patch. In autumn he goes wandering over the island, alone, in the forests, on the mountainsides, through the valleys of the rivers. I lived there once with him, when I was younger than you are now. I didn’t stay long, I hadn’t the sense to stay. I went off seeking evil, and sure enough I found it. . . . But you come escaping evil; seeking freedom; seeking silence for a while, until you find your own way. There you will find kindness and silence, Tenar. There the lamp will burn out of the wind awhile. Will you do that?”

  The sea mist drifted grey between their faces. The boat lifted lightly on the long waves. Around them was the night and under them the sea.

  “I will,” she said with a long sigh. And after a long time, “Oh, I wish it were sooner . . . that we could go there now. . . . ”

  “It won’t be long, little one.”

  “Will you come there, ever?”

  “When I can I will come.”

  The light had died away; it was all dark around them.

  THEY CAME, AFTER THE SUNRISES and sunsets, the still days and the icy winds of their winter voyage, to the Inmost Sea. They sailed the crowded lanes among great ships, up the Ebavnor Straits and into the bay that lies locked in the heart of Havnor, and across the bay to Havnor G
reat Port. They saw the white towers, and all the city white and radiant in snow. The roofs of the bridges and the red roofs of the houses were snow-covered, and the rigging of the hundred ships in the harbor glittered with ice in the winter sun. News of their coming had run ahead of them, for Lookfar’s patched red sail was known in those seas; a great crowd had gathered on the snowy quays, and colored pennants cracked above the people in the bright, cold wind.

  Tenar sat in the stern, erect, in her ragged cloak of black. She looked at the ring around her wrist, then at the crowded, many-colored shore and the palaces and the high towers. She lifted up her right hand, and sunlight flashed on the silver of the ring. A cheer went up, faint and joyous on the wind, over the restless water. Ged brought the boat in. A hundred hands reached to catch the rope he flung up to the mooring. He leapt up onto the pier and turned, holding out his hand to her. “Come!” he said smiling, and she rose, and came. Gravely she walked beside him up the white streets of Havnor, holding his hand, like a child coming home.

  AFTERWORD

  PEOPLE OFTEN DON’T BELIEVE ME when I say that when I wrote A Wizard of Earthsea I had no plans beyond that book. But it’s true. I know—it says on the first page of the first book that Ged is going to be a famous mage with songs and epics about him, a dragonlord, Archmage of Earthsea, which all seems to promise sequels; but I just put that there so the reader would know this was a world where magic was powerful, where there were dragons, the world of fantasy. It’s good to get that sort of thing clear at the start. I also put it there so the reader (and I) could be sure that this rather unpromising kid did have a future.

  I had no idea at all at that point what a dragonlord or an Archmage were. They sounded good. I could find out what they meant later, when I needed to.

  In that book, my job was to get young Ged and his Shadow back together. I could leave him, then, ready to set off on his brilliant career. That’s where many books about young people stop, after all. Most novels about falling in love don’t tell about the marriage, and most novels about growing up don’t tell about the grown-up.

  So when I wrote the last words of the book—“ . . . before ever he sailed the Dragons’ Run unscathed, or brought back the Ring of Erreth-Akbe from the Tombs of Atuan to Havnor, or came at last to Roke once more, as Archmage of all the islands of the world”—what was in my mind was not a teaser for a sequel, but only a resounding, echoing closure to a story told.

  However . . .

  A writer sometimes writes a message for herself, to be read when she begins to understand it.

  After A Wizard, I wrote the science fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness. When that was done, I thought What next? and looked around in my mind. There was Ged and his world, Earthsea, vivid and alive, ready to be explored further. And there was that interesting phrase about bringing a ring from the Tombs of Atuan. . . . Atuan was a Kargish island. I hadn’t thought much about the Kargs. Very different people from the Archipelagans. White-skinned barbarians, pirates, untrustworthy folk. But if you were a Karg, who might you be? Whom would you trust? Where would you live? What was Atuan like?

  Now came the great, improbable impetus to the book: a road trip to southeastern Oregon, our first visit to Harney County, a high and lonesome land of mountains and great sagebrush plains, of pure skies, far distances, and silence. Coming back from there, after a two-day, weary, dusty drive with our three kids, I knew my novel would be set in that desert. In the car, when we weren’t playing Signs Alphabet or singing “Forty-Nine Bottles,” I began to dream my story. That land had given it to me. I am forever grateful.

  THE REASON PEOPLE DON’T BELIEVE that I didn’t plan a trilogy from the start is that fantasy now suffers from endemic trilogitis (or the even more serious form of the disease, incurable seriesism). Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is largely responsible for this epidemic, since its six books were printed in three volumes, a trilogy. I expect Earthsea is also to blame, although it ended up as six volumes, too. . . . But when I started The Tombs of Atuan, I saw it, as well as I can recall, simply as a sequel.

  And a change of gender. Ged would play a part in it, but the person whose story it was would be a girl. A girl who lived far from the cities of the Archipelago, in a remote desert land. A girl who could not seek power, as young Ged could, or find training in the use of it as he did, but who had power forced upon her. A girl whose name was not given to her by a kind teacher, but taken from her by a masked executioner.

  The boy Ged, offered wisdom, refused it through his own pride and willfulness; the girl Tenar, given the arbitrary power of a goddess, was taught nothing about living her life as a human being.

  When I was writing the story in 1969, I knew of no women heroes of heroic fantasy since those in the works of Ariosto and Tasso in the Renaissance. These days there are plenty, though I wonder about some of them. The women warriors of current fantasy epics—ruthless swordswomen with no domestic or sexual responsibility who gallop about slaughtering baddies—to me they look less like women than like boys in women’s bodies in men’s armor.

  Be that as it may, when I wrote the book, it took more imagination than I had to create a girl character who, offered great power, could accept it as her right and due. Such a situation didn’t then seem plausible to me. But since I was writing about the people who in most societies have not been given much power—women—it seemed perfectly plausible to place my heroine in a situation that led her to question the nature and value of power itself.

  The word power has two different meanings. There is power to: strength, gift, skill, art, the mastery of a craft, the authority of knowledge. And there is power over: rule, dominion, supremacy, might, mastery of slaves, authority over others.

  Ged was offered both kinds of power. Tenar was offered only one.

  Heroic fantasy descends to us from an archaic world. I hadn’t yet thought much about that archaism. My story took place in the old hierarchy of society, the pyramidal power structure, probably military in origin, in which orders are given from above, with a single figure at the top. This is the world of power over, in which women have always been ranked low.

  In such a world, I could put a girl at the heart of my story, but I couldn’t give her a man’s freedom, or chances equal to a man’s chances. She couldn’t be a hero in the hero-tale sense. Not even in a fantasy? No. Because to me, fantasy isn’t wishful thinking, but a way of reflecting, and reflecting on reality. After all, even in a democracy, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, after forty years of feminist striving, the reality is that we live in a top-down power structure that was shaped by, and is still dominated by, men. Back in 1969, that reality seemed almost unshakable.

  So I gave Tenar power over—dominion, even godhead—but it was a gift of which little good could come. The dark side of the world was what she had to learn, as Ged had to learn the darkness in his own heart.

  IN A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA there are hints that the Kargs don’t practice magic, considering it evil, but that they are more closely in touch than Ged’s people are with the Old Powers of the Earth. In the Archipelago, strong, active magic belongs almost entirely to men, witches being untrained and mistrusted; and the Old Powers are commonly described as misogynists describe women: obscure, dark, weak, and treacherous.

  In The Tombs of Atuan, the Old Powers, the Nameless Ones, appear as mysterious, ominous, and yet inactive. Arha/Tenar is their priestess, the greatest of all priestesses, whom the Godking himself is supposed to obey: But what is her realm? A prison in the desert. Women guarded by eunuchs. Ancient tombstones, a half-ruined temple, an empty throne. A fearful underground labyrinth where prisoners are left to die of starvation and thirst, where only she can walk the maze, where light must never come. She rules a dark, empty, useless realm. Her power imprisons her.

  This isn’t the rosy reassurance many novels at the time offered adolescents. It’s a very bleak picture of what a girl may expect. Arha’s life is dreary, unchanging, with almost no experien
ce of kindness except from Manan the eunuch. The third chapter may be the cruelest, most hopeless passage in all the Earthsea books. By consenting to the death of “her” prisoners, Arha locks the prison door upon herself. Her whole life will be lived in a trap.

  She is only able to escape when Ged becomes her prisoner. She, for the first time, exerts her power to—her freedom of choice. She chooses to let him live. So she gives herself the chance to see that, if she can free him, she can free herself.

  Some people have read the story as supporting the idea that a woman needs a man in order to do anything at all (some nodded approvingly, others growled and hissed). Certainly Arha/Tenar would better satisfy feminist idealists if she did everything all by herself. But the truth as I saw it, and as I established it in the novel, was that she couldn’t. My imagination wouldn’t provide a scenario where she could, because my heart told me incontrovertibly that neither gender could go far without the other. So, in my story, neither the woman nor the man can get free without the other. Not in that trap. Each has to ask for the other’s help and learn to trust and depend on the other. A large lesson, a new knowledge for both these strong, willful, lonely souls.

  Rereading the book, more than forty years after I wrote it, I wonder about many of its elements. It was the first book I wrote with a woman as the true central character. Tenar’s character and the events of the story came from deep within me, so deep that the subterranean and labyrinthine imagery, and a certain volcanic quality, are hardly to be wondered at. But the darkness, the cruelty, the vengefulness . . . After all, I could have just let them go free—why did I destroy the whole Place of the Tombs with an earthquake? It’s a kind of huge suicide, the Nameless Ones annihilating their temple in a vast spasm of rage. Maybe it was the whole primitive, hateful idea of the feminine as dark, blind, weak, and evil that I saw shaking itself to pieces, imploding, crumbling into wreckage on a desert ground. And I rejoiced to see it fall. I still do.