Tehanu (8 page)

She slept. She dreamed that a voice called her, “Tenar! Tenar!” and that she replied, crying like a seabird, flying in the light above the sea; but she did not know what name she called.

Sparrowhawk disappointed Aunty Moss. He stayed alive. After a day or two she gave him up for saved. She came and fed him her broth of goat’s-meat and roots and herbs, propping him
against her, surrounding him with the powerful smell of her body, spooning life into him, and grumbling. Although he had recognized her and called her by her use-name, and she could not deny that he seemed to be the man called Sparrowhawk, she wanted to deny it. She did not like him. He was all wrong, she said. Tenar respected the witch’s sagacity enough that this troubled her, but she could not find any such suspicion in herself, only the pleasure of his being there and of his slow return to life. “When he’s himself again, you’ll see,” she said to Moss.

“Himself!” Moss said, and she made that gesture with her fingers of breaking and dropping a nutshell.

He asked, pretty soon, about Ogion. Tenar had dreaded that question. She had told herself and nearly convinced herself that he would not ask, that he would know as mages knew, as even the wizards of Gont Port and Re Albi had known when Ogion died. But on the fourth morning he was lying awake when she came to him, and looking up at her, he said, “This is Ogion’s house.”

“Aihal’s house,” she said, as easily as she could; it still was not easy for her to speak the mage’s true name. She did not know if Ged had known that name. Surely he had. Ogion would have told him, or had not needed to tell him.

For a while he did not react, and when he spoke it was without expression. “Then he is dead.”

“Ten days ago.”

He lay looking before him as if pondering, trying to think something out.

“When did I come here?”

She had to lean close to understand him.

“Four days ago, in the evening of the day.”

“There was no one else in the mountains,” he said. Then his body winced and shuddered as if in pain or the intolerable memory of pain. He shut his eyes, frowning, and took a deep breath.

As his strength returned little by little, that frown, the held breath and clenched hands, became familiar to Tenar. Strength returned to him but not ease, not health.

He sat on the doorstep of the house in the sunlight of the summer afternoon. It was the longest journey he had yet taken from the bed. He sat on the threshold, looking out into the day, and Tenar, coming around the house from the bean patch, looked at him. He still had an ashy, shadowy look to him. It was not the grey hair only, but some quality of skin and bone, and there was nothing much to him but that. There was no light in his eyes. Yet this shadow, this ashen man, was the same whose face she had seen first in the radiance of his own power, the strong face with hawk nose and fine mouth, a handsome man. He had always been a proud, handsome man.

She came on towards him.

“The sunlight’s what you need,” she said to him, and he nodded, but his hands were clenched
as he sat in the flood of summer warmth.

He was so silent with her that she thought maybe it was her presence that troubled him. Maybe he could not be at ease with her as he had used to be. He was Archmage now, after all—she kept forgetting that. And it was twenty-five years since they had walked in the mountains of Atuan and sailed together in
Lookfar
across the eastern sea.

“Where is
Lookfar?”
she asked, suddenly, surprised by the thought of it, and then thought, But how stupid of me! All those years ago, and he’s Archmage, he wouldn’t have that little boat now.

“In Selidor,” he answered, his face set in its steady and incomprehensible misery.

As long ago as forever, as far away as Selidor.…

“The farthest island,” she said; it was half a question.

“The farthest west,” he said.

They were sitting at table, having finished the evening meal. Therru had gone outside to play.

“It was from Selidor that you came, then, on Kalessin?”

When she spoke the dragon’s name again it spoke itself, shaping her mouth to its shape and sound, making her breath soft fire.

At the name, he looked up at her, one intense glance, which made her realize that he did not usually meet her eyes at all. He nodded. Then, with a laborious honesty, he corrected his assent: “From Selidor to Roke. And then from Roke to Gont.”

A thousand miles? Ten thousand miles? She had no idea. She had seen the great maps in the treasuries of Havnor, but no one had taught her numbers, distances.
As far away as Selidor
... And could the flight of a dragon be counted in miles?

“Ged,” she said, using his true name since they were alone, “I know you’ve been in great pain and peril. And if you don’t want, maybe you can’t, maybe you shouldn’t tell me—but if I knew, if I knew something of it, I’d be more help to you, maybe. I’d like to be. And they’ll be coming soon from Roke for you, sending a ship for the Archmage, what do I know, sending a dragon for you! And you’ll be gone again. And we’ll never have talked.” As she spoke she clenched her own hands at the falseness of her tone and words. To joke about the dragon—to whine like an accusing wife!

He was looking down at the table, sullen, enduring, like a farmer after a hard day in the fields faced with some domestic squall.

“Nobody will come from Roke, I think,” he said, and it cost him effort enough that it was a while before he went on. “Give me time.”

She thought it was all he was going to say, and replied, “Yes, of course. I’m sorry,” and was rising to clear the table when he said, still looking down, not clearly, “I have that, now.”

Then he too got up, and brought his dish to the sink, and finished clearing the table. He washed the dishes while Tenar put the food away. And that
interested her. She had been comparing him to Flint; but Flint had never washed a dish in his life. Women’s work. But Ged and Ogion had lived here, bachelors, without women; everywhere Ged had lived, it was without women; so he did the “women’s work” and thought nothing about it. It would be a pity, she thought, if he did think about it, if he started fearing that his dignity hung by a dishcloth.

Nobody came for him from Roke. When they spoke of it, there had scarcely been time for any ship but one with the magewind in her sails all the way; but the days went on, and still there was no message or sign to him. It seemed strange to her that they would let their archmage go untroubled so long. He must have forbidden them to send to him; or perhaps he had hidden himself here with his wizardry, so that they did not know where he was, and so that he could not be recognized. For the villagers paid curiously little attention to him still.

That no one had come down from the mansion of the Lord of Re Albi was less surprising. The lords of that house had never been on good terms with Ogion. Women of the house had been, so the village tales went, adepts of dark arts. One had married a northern lord, they said, who buried her alive under a stone; another had meddled with the unborn child in her womb, trying to make it a creature of power, and indeed it had spoken words as it was born, but it had no bones. “Like a little bag of
skin,” the midwife whispered in the village, “a little bag with eyes and a voice, and it never sucked, but it spoke in some strange tongue, and died....” Whatever the truth of such tales, the Lords of Re Albi had always held aloof. Companion of the mage Sparrowhawk, ward of the mage Ogion, bringer of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe to Havnor, Tenar might have been asked to stay, it would seem, at the mansion house when she first came to Re Albi; but she had not. She had lived instead, to her own delight, alone in a tiny cottage that belonged to the village weaver, Fan, and she saw the people of the great house seldom and at a distance. There was now no lady of the house at all, Moss told her, only the old lord, very old, and his grandson, and the young wizard, called Aspen, whom they had hired from the School on Roke.

Since Ogion was buried, with Aunty Moss’s talisman in his hand, under the beech tree by the mountain path, Tenar had not seen Aspen. Strange as it seemed, he did not know the Archmage of Earthsea was in his own village, or, if he knew it, for some reason kept away. And the wizard of Gont Port, who had also come to bury Ogion, had never come back either; Even if he did not know that Ged was here, surely he knew who she was, the White Lady, who had worn the Ring of Erreth-Akbe on her wrist, who had made whole the Rune of Peace—And how many years ago was that, old woman! she said to herself. Is your nose out of joint?

All the same, it was she who had told them Ogion’s true name. It seemed some courtesy was owing.

But wizards, as such, had nothing to do with courtesy. They were men of power. It was only power that they dealt with. And what power had she now? What had she ever had? As a girl, a priestess, she had been a vessel: the power of the dark places had run through her, used her, left her empty, untouched. As a young woman she had been taught a powerful knowledge by a powerful man and had laid it aside, turned away from it, not touched it. As a woman she had chosen and had the powers of a woman, in their time, and the time was past; her wiving and mothering was done. There was nothing in her, no power, for anybody to recognize.

But a dragon had spoken to her. “I am Kalessin,” it had said, and she had answered, “I am Tenar.”

“What is a dragonlord?” she had asked Ged, in the dark place, the Labyrinth, trying to deny his power, trying to make him admit hers; and he had answered with the plain honesty that forever disarmed her, “A man dragons will talk to.”

So she was a woman dragons would talk to. Was that the new thing, the folded knowledge, the light seed, that she felt in herself, waking beneath the small window that looked west?

A few days after that brief conversation at table, she was weeding Ogion’s garden patch, rescuing the onions he had set out in spring from the weeds of
summer. Ged let himself in the gate in the high fence that kept the goats out, and set to weeding at the other end of the row. He worked awhile and then sat back, looking down at his hands.

“Let them have time to heal,” Tenar said mildly.

He nodded.

The tall staked bean-plants in the next row were flowering. Their scent was very sweet. He sat with his thin arms on his knees, staring into the sunlit tangle of vines and flowers and hanging beanpods. She spoke as she worked: “When Aihal died, he said, ‘All changed.…’ And since his death, I’ve mourned him, I’ve grieved, but something lifts up my grief. Something is coming to be born—has been set free. I know in my sleep and my first waking, something is changed.”

“Yes,” he said. “An evil ended. And...”

After a long silence he began again. He did not look at her, but his voice sounded for the first time like the voice she remembered, easy, quiet, with the dry Gontish accent.

“Do you remember, Tenar, when we came first to Havnor?”

Would I forget? her heart said, but she was silent for fear of driving him back into silence.

“We brought
Lookfar
in and came up onto the quai—the steps are marble. And the people, all the people—and you held up your arm to show them the Ring. .. .”

“—And held your hand; I was terrified beyond terror: the faces, the voices, the colors, the towers and the flags and banners, the gold and silver and music, and all I knew was you—in the whole world all I knew was you, there by me as we walked....”

“The stewards of the King’s House brought us to the foot of the Tower of Erreth-Akbe, through the streets full of people. And we went up the high steps, the two of us alone. Do you remember?”

She nodded. She laid her hands on the earth she had been weeding, feeling its grainy coolness.

“I opened the door. It was heavy, it stuck at first. And we went in. Do you remember?”

It was as if he asked for reassurance—Did it happen? Do I remember?

“It was a great, high hall,” she said. “It made me think of my Hall, where I was eaten, but only because it was so high. The light came down from windows away up in the tower. Shafts of sunlight crossing like swords.”

“And the throne,” he said.

“The throne, yes, all gold and crimson. But empty. Like the throne in the Hall in Atuan.”

“Not now,” he said. He looked across the green shoots of onion at her. His face was strained, wistful, as if he named a joy he could not grasp. “There is a king in Havnor,” he said, “at the center of the world. What was foretold has been fulfilled. The Rune is healed, and the world is whole. The days of peace have come. He—”

He stopped and looked down, clenching his hands.

“He carried me from death to life. Arren of Enlad. Lebannen of the songs to be sung. He has taken his true name, Lebannen, King of Earthsea.”

“Is that it, then,” she asked, kneeling, watching him—“the joy, the coming into light?”

He did not answer.

A king in Havnor, she thought, and said aloud,

“A king in Havnor!”

The vision of the beautiful city was in her, the wide streets, the towers of marble, the tiled and bronze roofs, the white-sailed ships in harbor, the marvelous throne room where sunlight fell like swords, the wealth and dignity and harmony, the order that was kept there. From that bright center, she saw order going outward like the perfect rings on water, like the straightness of a paved street or a ship sailing before the wind: a going the way it should go, a bringing to peace.

“You did well, dear friend,” she said.

He made a little gesture as if to stop her words, and then turned away, pressing his hand to his mouth. She could not bear to see his tears. She bent to her work. She pulled a weed, and another, and the tough root broke. She dug with her hands, trying to find the root of the weed in the harsh soil, in the dark of the earth.

“Goha,” said Therru’s weak, cracked voice at the gate, and Tenar looked round. The child’s half-face looked straight at her from the seeing eye and the
blinded eye. Tenar thought, Shall I tell her that there is a king in Havnor?

She got up and went to the gate to spare Therru from trying to make herself heard. When she lay in the fire unconscious, Beech said, the child had breathed in fire. “Her voice is burned away,” he explained.