Tehanu (9 page)

“I was watching Sippy,” Therru whispered, “but she got out of the broom-pasture. I can’t find her.”

It was as long a speech as she had ever made. She was trembling from running and from trying not to cry. We can’t all be weeping at once, Tenar said to herself—this is stupid, we can’t have this!—“Sparrowhawk!” she said, turning, “there’s a goat got out.”

He stood up at once and came to the gate.

“Try the springhouse,” he said.

He looked at Therru as if he did not see her hideous scars, as if he scarcely saw her at all: a child who had lost a goat, who needed to find a goat. It was the goat he saw. “Or she’s off to join the village flock,” he said.

Therru was already running to the springhouse.

“Is she your daughter?” he asked Tenar. He had never before said a word about the child, and all Tenar could think for a moment was how very strange men were.

“No, nor my granddaughter. But my child,” she said. What was it that made her jeer at him, jibe at him, again?

He let himself out the gate, just as Sippy dashed toward them, a brown-and-white flash, followed far behind by Therru.

“Hi!” Ged shouted suddenly, and with a leap he blocked the goat’s way, heading her directly to the open gate and Tenar’s arms. She managed to grab Sippy’s loose leather collar. The goat at once stood still, mild as any lamb, looking at Tenar with one yellow eye and at the onion-rows with the other.

“Out,” said Tenar, leading her out of goat heaven and over to the stonier pasture where she was supposed to be.

Ged had sat down on the ground, as out of breath as Therru, or more so, for he gasped, and was evidently dizzy; but at least he was not in tears. Trust a goat to spoil anything.

“Heather shouldn’t have told you to watch Sippy,” Tenar said to Therru. “Nobody can watch Sippy. If she gets out again, tell Heather, and don’t worry. All right?”

Therru nodded. She was looking at Ged. She seldom looked at people, and very seldom at men, for longer than a glance; but she was gazing at him steadily, her head cocked like a sparrow. Was a hero being born?

IT WAS WELL OVER A MONTH SINCE the solstice, but the evenings were still long up on the west-facing Overfell. Therru had come in late from an all-day herbal expedition with Aunty Moss, too tired to eat. Tenar put her to bed and sat with her, singing to her. When the child was overtired she could not sleep, but would crouch in the bed like a paralyzed animal, staring at hallucinations till she was in a nightmare state, neither sleeping nor waking, and unreachable. Tenar had found she could prevent this by holding her and singing her to sleep. When she ran out of the songs she had learned as a farmers wife in Middle Valley, she sang interminable Kargish chants she had learned as a child priestess at the Tombs of Atuan, lulling Therru with the drone and sweet whine of offerings to the
Nameless Powers and the Empty Throne that was now filled with the dust and ruin of earthquake. She felt no power in those songs but that of song itself; and she liked to sing in her own language, though she did not know the songs a mother would sing to a child in Atuan, the songs her mother had sung to her.

Therru was fast asleep at last. Tenar slipped her from her lap to the bed and waited a moment to be sure she slept on. Then, after a glance round to be sure she was alone, with an almost guilty quickness, yet with the ceremony of enjoyment, of great pleasure, she laid her narrow, light-skinned hand along the side of the child’s face where eye and cheek had been eaten away by fire, leaving slabbed, bald scar. Under her touch all that was gone. The flesh was whole, a child’s round, soft, sleeping face. It was as if her touch restored the truth.

Lightly, reluctantly, she lifted her palm, and saw the irremediable loss, the healing that would never be whole.

She bent down and kissed the scar, got up quietly, and went out of the house.

The sun was setting in a vast, pearly haze. No one was about. Sparrowhawk was probably off in the forest. He had begun to visit Ogion’s grave, spending hours in that quiet place under the beech tree, and as he got more strength he took to wandering on up the forest paths that Ogion had loved. Food evidently had no savor to him; Tenar had to ask
him to eat. Companionship he shunned, seeking only to be alone. Therru would have followed him anywhere, and being as silent as he was she did not trouble him, but he was restless, and presently would send the child home and go on by himself, farther, to what ends Tenar did not know. He would come in late, cast himself down to sleep, and often be gone again before she and the child woke. She would leave him bread and meat to take with him.

She saw him now coming along the meadow path that had been so long and hard when she had helped Ogion walk it for the last time. He came through the luminous air, the wind-bowed grasses, walking steadily, locked in his obstinate misery, hard as stone.

“Will you be about the house?” she asked him, across some distance. “Therru’s asleep. I want to walk a little.”

“Yes. Go on,” he said, and she went on, pondering the indifference of a man towards the exigencies that ruled a woman: that someone must be not far from a sleeping child, that one’s freedom meant another’s unfreedom, unless some ever-changing, moving balance were reached, like the balance of a body moving forward, as she did now, on two legs, first one then the other, in the practice of that remarkable art, walking.... Then the deepening colors of the sky and the soft insistence of the wind replaced her thoughts. She went
on walking, without metaphors, until she came to the sandstone cliffs. There she stopped and watched the sun be lost in the serene, rosy haze.

She knelt and found with her eyes and then with her fingertips a long, shallow, blurred groove in the rock, scored right out to the edge of the cliff: the track of Kalessin’s tail. She followed it again and again with her fingers, gazing out into the gulfs of twilight, dreaming. She spoke once. The name was not fire in her mouth this time, but hissed and dragged softly out of her lips, “Kalessin....”

She looked up to the east. The summits of Gont Mountain above the forests were red, catching the light that was gone here below. The color dimmed as she watched. She looked away and when she looked back the summit was grey, obscure, the forested slopes dark.

She waited for the evening star. When it shone above the haze, she walked slowly home.

Home, not home. Why was she here in Ogion’s house not in her own farmhouse, looking after Ogion’s goats and onions not her own orchards and flocks? “Wait,” he had said, and she had waited; and the dragon had come; and Ged was well now—was well enough. She had done her part. She had kept the house. She was no longer needed. It was time she left.

Yet she could not think of leaving this high ledge, this hawk’s nest, and going down into the lowlands again, the easy farmlands, the windless inlands, she
could not think of that without her heart sinking and darkening. What of the dream she had here, under the small window looking west? What of the dragon who had come to her here?

The door of the house stood open as usual for light and air. Sparrowhawk was sitting without lamp or firelight on a low seat by the swept hearth. He often sat there. She thought it had been his place when he was a boy here, in his brief apprenticeship with Ogion. It had been her place, winter days, when she had been Ogion’s pupil.

He looked at her entering, but his eyes had not been on the doorway but beside it to the right, the dark corner behind the door. Ogion’s staff stood there, an oaken stick, heavy, worn smooth at the grip, the height of the man himself. Beside it Therru had set the hazel switch and the alder stick Tenar had cut for them when they were walking to Re Albi.

Tenar thought—His staff, his wizards staff, yew-wood, Ogion gave it to him—Where is it?—And at the same time, Why have I not thought of that till now?

It was dark in the house, and seemed stuffy. She was oppressed. She had wished he would stay to talk with her, but now that he sat there she had nothing to say to him, nor he to her.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said at last, setting straight the four dishes on the oaken sideboard, “that it’s time I was getting back to my farm.”

He said nothing. Possibly he nodded, but her back was turned.

She was tired all at once, wanting to go to bed; but he sat there in the front part of the house, and it was not yet entirely dark; she could not undress in front of him. Shame made her angry. She was about to ask him to go out for while when he spoke, clearing his throat, hesitant.

“The books. Ogion’s books. The Runes and the two Lore-books. Would you be taking them with you?

“With me?”

“You were his last student.”

She came over to the hearth and sat down across from him on Ogion’s three-legged chair.

“I learned to write the runes of Hardic, but I’ve forgotten most of that, no doubt. He taught me some of the language the dragons speak. Some of that I remember. But nothing else. I didn’t become an adept, a wizard. I got married, you know. Would Ogion have left his books of wisdom to a farmer’s wife?”

After a pause he said without expression, “Did he not leave them to someone, then?”

“To you, surely.”

Sparrowhawk said nothing.

“You were his last prentice, and his pride, and friend. He never said it, but of course they go to you.

“What am I to do with them?”

She stared at him through the dusk. The western window gleamed faint across the room. The dour, relentless, unexplaining rage in his voice roused her own anger.

“You the Archmage ask me? Why do you make a worse fool of me than I am, Ged?”

He got up then. His voice shook. “But don’t you—can’t you see—all that is over—is gone!”

She sat staring, trying to see his face.

“I have no power, nothing. I gave it—spent it—all I had. To close—So that—So it’s done, done with.”

She tried to deny what he said, but could not.

“Like pouring out a little water,” he said, “a cup of water onto the sand. In the dry land. I had to do that. But now I have nothing to drink. And what difference, what difference did it make, does it make, one cup of water in all the desert? Is the desert gone?—Ah! Listen!—It used to whisper that to me from behind the door there: Listen, listen! And I went into the dry land when I was young. And I met it there, I became it, I married my death. It gave me life. Water, the water of life. I was a fountain, a spring, flowing, giving. But the springs don’t run, there. All I had in the end was one cup of water, and I had to pour it out on the sand, in the bed of the dry river, on the rocks in the dark. So it’s gone. Its over. Done.”

She knew enough, from Ogion and from Ged himself, to know what land he spoke of, and that
though he spoke in images they were not masks of the truth but the truth itself as he had known it. She knew also that she must deny what he said, no matter if it was true. “You don’t give yourself time, Ged,” she said. “Coming back from death must be a long journey—even on the dragons back. It will take time. Time and quiet, silence, stillness. You have been hurt. You will be healed.”

For a long while he was silent, standing there. She thought she had said the right thing, and given him some comfort. But he spoke at last.

“Like the child?”

It was like a knife so sharp she did not feel it come into her body.

“I don’t know,” he said in the same soft, dry voice, “why you took her, knowing that she cannot be healed. Knowing what her life must be. I suppose it’s a part of this time we have lived—a dark time, an age of ruin, an ending time. You took her, I suppose, as I went to meet my enemy, because it was all you could do. And so we must live on into the new age with the spoils of our victory over evil. You with your burned child, and I with nothing at all.”

Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.

Tenar turned to look at the mage’s staff in the dark place to the right of the door, but there was no light in it. It was all dark, inside and out. Through the open doorway a couple of stars were visible, high and faint. She looked at them. She wanted to
know what stars they were. She got up and went groping past the table to the door. The haze had risen and not many stars were visible. One of those she had seen from indoors was the white summer star that they called, in Atuan, in her own language, Tehanu. She did not know the other one. She did not know what they called Tehanu here, in Hardic, or what its true name was, what the dragons called it. She knew only what her mother would have called it, Tehanu, Tehanu. Tenar, Tenar...

“Ged,” she said from the doorway, not turning, “who brought you up, when you were a child?”

He came to stand near her, also looking out at the misty horizon of the sea, the stars, the dark bulk of the mountain above them.

“Nobody much,” he said. “My mother died when I was a baby. There were some older brothers. I don’t remember them. There was my father the smith. And my mother’s sister. She was the witch of Ten Alders.”

“Aunty Moss,” Tenar said.

“Younger. She had some power.”

“What was her name?”

He was silent.

“I cannot remember,” he said slowly.

After a while he said, “She taught me the names. Falcon, pilgrim falcon, eagle, osprey, goshawk, sparrowhawk....”